LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA ? SAN DIEGO i TH E V AN I S RED COUNTRY FOLK fcf OTHER STUDIES IN ARCADY By the Same Author David in Heaven, and Other Poems Studies in A ready. Series I Studies in Arcady, Series II A Posy oj Folk Songs THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK & OTHER STUDIES IN ARCADY BY R. L. GALES LONDON : S1MPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LTD. COPYRIGHT First Published 1914 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & Co. LTD. CONTENTS PAGE THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK i MORE VILLAGE FOLK 1 1 THE FARM LABOURER AND THE CHURCH 22 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? 30 ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM 40 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES 51 " UPROOTED AND DRIFTING " 59 AUTUMN IN ARCADY 69 A SANE LUNATIC 78 THE TRAMP'S LOT 86 LOBSTER CATCHERS AND LOBSTER EATERS 96 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA 106 CHRISTIANITY AND CLERICALISM 117 THE CHRISTIANITY OF CARDINAL NEWMAN 136 AN ORTHODOX REVOLT 146 THE PARADOX OF CHRISTMAS 157 THE Two SIMONS 165 Vox POPULI 172 v CONTENTS PAGE ON POPULAR ENGLISH 190 ON IMAGINATIVE PROSE 211 ON RHYMING 220 ON FOLK FANCIES 228 ON VAGROM MEN 237 ON THE RAINBOW 246 ON PLAYING CARDS 255 ON OLD-WORLD PLACES 264 THE SOULS OF PLACES 272 IN PRAISE OF HUMBUGS 281 THE LORE OF THE EARTHLY PARADISE 292 FAERIE 316 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE 326 FAIRYLAND 336 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG 347 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES 358 PAIN BENI 368 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND 378 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE 390 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO 404 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES 416 SPRING BY THE SEINE 428 VI TO W. F. ALEXANDER AND E. C. FIRTH The Author gratefuity acknowledges his in- debtedness to the Editors of the " Oration," the " National Review" the " British Review" the " Outlook " and the " Vineyard " for their kind permission to reprint the Essays which have appeared in their pages. THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK " THINGS be all changed now, it be all different to when I wer' young. I found it right enough wi' my own childern, what have all long got married and gone out ; and wi' some o' theirs married again, so as there's gran'childern and great-gran'- childern, and not one on 'em bided on the land, not one, though they be all good to I. Not one on 'em bided on the land, not one." * These words of old " Bithie " tell the story. " Not one on 'em bided on the land, not one " ; that is it, the old country folk have vanished. There is the fact ; the exodus reflects a change in the spirit of the people. I must myself confess that the spirit of the old folk fills me; with wonder and * " The Spirit of the Old Folk," by Major Gambier- Parry. A I THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK amazement and, if I am to be quite candid, with considerable perplexity and irresolu- tion. It was the spirit of gallant and cheerful endurance of incredible hardship. In describing their lives, the shamefully abused metaphor of the taking up of the Cross is not out of place. Yet it seems true to say that they often found it this Cross of working on the land, co-operating with the great forces of Nature, and serving her vast purposes a very Tree ot Life. The spirit of the old folk was one of a deep content and satisfaction in their work, a concentrated absorption in it, a pride in its efficient performance, which spared no pains and no trouble, which did not murmur, and looked for no reward beyond a bare subsistence, " the wages of going on " till they fell at their post. The constantly repeated answer of up- holders, or at any rate defenders, of the old state of things to my own animadver- sions has always been " they were happy." Incredible as it seems, I am inclined to think that this is true. The journey of the human race, it has been said, is from Fez to Chicago ; each stage of the pro- THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK gress is marked with new tribulations ; there succeed one another, as in Dante's circles, " nuovi tormenti e nuovi tor- mentati." Under these conditions, the advantage is evidently with those who are able to dree their allotted weird with con- tentment. But having made these admissions, I think the reader will not be long before he will feel that a point is reached where " Fiat Voluntas Tua " is a blasphemy ; where the one urgent duty and necessity is revolt. Here is the story ; the life of the old folk, and the spirit in which it was lived. Major Gambier-Parry, who writes with the most admirable sym- pathy and understanding, and out of a fullness of knowledge of country life and country people, seems to find this spirit altogether praiseworthy : "Joe's money came to eight shillun', and mine, tho' that weren't reg'lar, to some- times as much as three. There were no mistake about the work, or the want o' fittal either ; but it had got to be done and put up wi'. . . . Mother did use to 3 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK tell us it wer' worsser back along in her earlier days than it ever wer' in our'n, and she 'ould say it weren't no use a cryin' over it, but what us had got to do was to kep in good heart. And so us did, and wi'out a losin' by it, it's my belief; and what's more, us brought up the childern to do the very same. . . . Prices wer' most allus high, and when a bad season come along, and it wer' a'most beyond us to get flour for the bakin', the food as we had wer' maybe cutlins that's the oat- meal grits or kettle broth, that is, bread in the kettle, or a score an' score o' times, just the 'taters and greens from the garden and no more." (I see, by the way, that the Duke of Maryborough has lately de- scribed pheasants as a food of the people.) " I don't say anything agen it, mind, any more than us did then. We didn't take much account o' that. Us were happy, if some folks were allus mungerin', as 'em is yet. There's never wantin' for them. ... I say again, as so far as us went we wer' happy and content an' especial when things did look up a bit and food weren't quite so dear, when three of the 4 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK childern wer' earnin' wi' ourselves, and we got us a peg in the cot at the back to help pay the rent of a shillun' a week, and to give us a bit indoors. I tell ye that wer' famous, and as it ftll went nicely." " Bithie " was an old lady of eighty-five, who laid bare her inmost heart to Major Gambier-Parry. The reminiscences of her childish days include a recital more horrible than the story of Ugolino in Dante. As a little girl of eight she used to be left in charge of three younger children Sammy, a boy of seven, and two babies while her father and mother were at work. The children were locked in, and, for the sake of safety as well as of economy, there was never any fire. They were left with a piece of bread and a can of water on the table, and thus shut in they remained from early morning till the time their mother came back at night. If they were to live at all, it was absolutely necessary that she should work in the fields. They were very often " fammelled " that is, famished. One day it was bitterly cold " shrammelling cold " the bread was 5 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK finished, every crumb, the two little ones, "just clam o' hunger," were lying on the hearthrug crying for more. There was an end of gammon hanging high up on the wall now and again there was a bit of bacon for the Sunday dinner. The idea occurred to the adventurous Sammy, who the' next week was to begin life as a rook- scarer, that if the bit of raw pig-meat could be got down from the wall, the crying of the fammelled babes on the floor might be stilled. He mounted a rickety chair on the table, and then clambered up upon it, and stretching out to reach the meat, toppled over. He lay on the floor motionless. The children wailed, the little girl rattled the closed door in vain. It grew dark, and Sammy lay there, still as a dead thing. "Just then, as though the Almighty had heard us childern wailin', the key turned in the lock, and there was mother's voice right among us." Sammy woke and said, "I baint 'urted, mother, I baint 'urted." But he did not move. He " had no felth in either limb." His back was broken, and he died in two or three days. We suppose the Rector, at the 6 ' THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK funeral of this child, said, several times over, " Thy will be done" and " Give us this day our daily bread." Many reflections occur to us. The old folk were, and the dwindling poor still are, upheld by their faith in God. The faith of the country poor is faith in " the Almighty." I myself recently remarked to a labouring man of by no means too good a reputation, speaking of a house that had been struck by lightning, " It was a wonder that no one was killed." " It was a great mercy," he replied, in- stantly ; and I thought I detected a shade of reproof in his tone. The fact that no one in this particular house was struck was universally looked upon as an indisputable proof of the loving care of " that One above." This quite unecclesiastical trust in God was the staff of the old folks' pilgrimage ; it literally helped them to get through. But their real content and satisfaction in lives of incredible hardship arose no doubt from their being engaged in the work natural and proper to man. Country people still silently but indignantly resent 7 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK the assumption that book-learning is know- ledge, and that because they have little of this they are " ignorant." They have, or had, a whole world of knowledge of their own, of the most fascinating and absorbing interest, and, moreover, in the old days when the processes of agriculture were still carried out largely by hand, an often highly advanced technical craftsman's skill. " Things ain't done now as they used to be " is the regretful cry of the old folks you will so often hear. Take this bit of observation for instance, for which we are again indebted to Major Gambier-Parry : " The oxen was not so slow as you'd think for ; and kept on, they did. But where 'twas wi' they, they took a lot a' room a turnin', when us got to the head- land. And that be how it be, you can allus see where oxen been in use on a ground, for the lands do take a long curve, like, at th' ends." Well, the real interest of the old folk, now vanished or vanishing from the country-side, was in this world of real things, explored by their own experience 8 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK and observation, in which their lives were passed, where their heart and their treasure was. "Jimmy, Jimmy, we've threshed out ; I'm a comin' ; I can hear ye," calls the old thresher to his mates at his last moment, as San Carlo Borromeo cried " En Venio " to the Saints. In their leisure moments it is of their work that country people always talk. They care little for the games and amusements some- times thrust upon them. The golf and tennis of their betters seem to them daft child's play, fond things vainly invented. Their work is their play, or their play is to review their work through the kindly haze of a little beer. Warmth and quiescence is what they want not a fresh mental strain. Their labour taxes all their faculties, not only of body, but of mind. My sister and I recently entertained a party of old village ladies to tea. In the evening we endeavoured to teach them a simple card-game. " Oh ! Miss ! " said one old woman. " I'd rather do a hard day's work at the wash-tub." Country children, I have often observed, are more interested in things connected with country 9 THE VANISHED COUNTRY FOLK work and natural country sports than in the brilliant gymnastics of the most elaborate circus. I have long thought that it is not the dullness of the country, as is sometimes supposed, that drives the young folk away. To the old folk, amid all their hardships, the country was never dull. But the serpent, Joseph Arch, came into this Paradise and whispered, "Hath God said that you should not only toil, but suffer and starve as you do ? " Privations have no doubt deteriorated the fine old country stock ; but make it worth their while to remain on the land, and there will be yet no lack of tillers of the soil. It is, at any rate, worth trying. 10 MORE VILLAGE FOLK THE home counties are very familiar to the writer, who spent twelve years of life in a village not far from the Hog's Back, where Surrey passes into Hampshire. A modern writer, Mr. George Bourne, has given us in " Lucy Bettesworth " a very true and living picture of rural life in this same country.* Although I am unable to locate Lucy Bettesworth's village, the conditions described by the author closely resemble those of my own remem- brance. " The ancient Radical gibe at the influ- ence of squire and parson in our villages would have little meaning in this case. There is no squire, and the parson struggles on single-handed at his unap- preciated task. Consequently, the village * " Lucy Bettesworth," by G. Bourne. I I MORE VILLAGE FOLK is without those mellow traditions of ' respect for the gentry ' which are pre- served by the toothless old tea-drinkers in the books." " The books " here referred to are the Parish Magazines. "Odd as it may seem," Mr. Bourne remarks, " it is yet true that I have never met a living example of these charming old ladies ; and after a good many years in a rural neighbourhood, I should still be at a loss to put my hand on one if inquiry should be made." The old lady required is of the species that studies her Bible, drops low curtsies to her betters, and entertains the vicar's daughter to tea. If Mr. Bourne confines his researches to his present neighbourhood, I should think it extremely unlikely that he ever will dis- cover a specimen. For all my witness is worth, meanwhile, I can testify to the absolute fidelity of his portraits ; his village people are the village people whom I knew intimately, and lived with and talked to daily for twelve years. The old women whom I knew were certainly toothless enough ; they resembled 12 MORE VILLAGE FOLK the old ladies in the Parish Magazines in that. But they had all their lives been fighters with poverty and hardship. They, too, had carried on the human struggle with the forces of Nature ; they had worked all their lives in the fields ; they were not in any high degree living ex- emplifications of the Beatitudes. To hold their own was their chief aspiration ; not to live in amity with all men, rejoicing with them that rejoice, and weeping with them that weep. They were without effusive gratitude for chance benefits now and again descending on them from higher spheres. Intensely suspicious and reserved, they did not give themselves away. I was going to say that their religion was a Paganism without gods ; but this would not be true, because all country people believe in Almighty God. Mr. Bourne quotes a villager as saying, " 'Twas a beautiful rain. The Lord very soon answered the prayers. I suppose there was prayers put up all over the country for it Sunday, and 'twas sent o' Monday." This identical remark has also been made to me. Indeed, I suspect that the dislike 13 MORE VILLAGE FOLK so often felt to Ritualistic innovations may proceed in great part from the idea that they may have a prejudicial effect upon the crops. Mr. Bourne dislikes the namby-pamby virtues inculcated by the writers in Parish Magazines, who say : " Let us make the working classes in our own image." These qualities are very little in evidence in that country of his and ours. Speaking more particularly of the women, their chief characteristic seems a fierce independence, a determination to keep their heads up and not to go under. Women who work all day in the fields with men naturally brawl like men, swear like men, drink like men. In their intercourse with the distributors of Parish Magazines they are seldom simply and naturally themselves. There are a fluent few, naturally gifted with histrionic ability; but for the most part their speech is very guarded and cautious when dealing with members of the better classes. Gentlefolk do not understand their circumstances, and are apt to make impossible demands upon them. As they grow older they become enigmatic, sybilline, oracular. MORE VILLAGE FOLK Mr. Bourne indeed goes so far as to say : " But I am inclined to doubt the exist- ence of this particular kind (the Parish Magazine kind) of old woman in any parish whatever. I am sceptical of the whole species. They have a suspicious air of one of those curious types unre- lated to anything real which art occasion- ally originates for its own purposes, and perpetuates for purposes of art manufac- ture. One guesses where they originate. . . . You can tell by some elusive flabbi- ness in the make of them that they have not stood up to life and faced it as your real cottage woman must do, unless she will die." I do not altogether agree with this, although I admit that the Parish Maga- zine type of old woman is rarissima avis in West Surrey, and the assumption of the character occasionally made with the idea of impressing the listener is usually quite without verisimilitude. For instance, I re- member a cottage woman whose daughter had been dismissed from her place for some MORE VILLAGE FOLK sort of bad conduct, remarking: "Mrs. Grant said, ' Polly, I can't think what your mother will say. I know what a very Christ-like woman she is, and I am sure how this will upset her.' ' Polly, by the way, was in all respects a chip of the old block. But I have come across old village ladies not unlike those of the Monthly Packet in many parts of England. They have combined what one may call the " insipid virtues " with the strength and toughness of their class. Not many yards from my home an old lady, who has just celebrated her eighty- seventh birthday, lives alone in a tiny cottage on her old-age pension of five shillings a week. She is always cheerful, continually reads her Bible, and will dis- course by the hour about her " precious husband," taken from her many years ago. A kind neighbour drives her every Sunday to the Baptist Chapel two miles away. She is a great reader of the despised Parish Magazines, with specimens of which Ecc/esia, The Sign^ The Dawn of Day the writer often supplies her. " I shan't go to bed till I've finished 'em," she will 16 MORE VILLAGE FOLK say. She does not agree with all that they contain, but when she comes to any doubtful matter she skips it. But she always goes back from them to Spurgeon. So often, indeed, in the lives of the country poor the softening gleam is Methodist ; the light and truth that lead them come forth from Baptist chapels. In the English country-side there is no Angelus ; the larger rhythm is inaudible to the super- ficial listener ; but we should not too hastily assume that more lives than we think are not moving to it. But be the old village woman one of Villon's or of Wordsworth's, there is one quality she never fails to possess, and that is independence. Her one dread before the days of old-age pensions, in many in- stances still, is the workhouse. A young woman wrote to me the other day : " If mother should have to go into the work- house, I am sure it will kill her." Know- ing the old woman well, I knew that this statement was true. I keep writing " women," but it is equally the case with the men. Mr. Bourne's chapter entitled " In the Infirmary " is to be commended B I 7 MORE VILLAGE FOLK to the consideration of everybody who cares for the poor. By one little graphic touch he makes the horror of the work- house clearer to us than pages of declama- tion could do. He speaks of " the queer sentiment " that the poor old man " har- bours towards his poor household things." " He loves his kettle and fire-place, his clock and cat." Who does not see a cosy, intimate little room, with two old people in the cheerful warmth, with a ticking clock and a purring cat ? Why should not all poor old people have such a hearth- place as their very own ? Let us hope that Mr. Lloyd George may remain in power long enough to make all our work- houses as useless as ten-year-old Dread- noughts ! Talking of the working man's clocks and kettles, his poor Lares and Penates (what piety there is still felt towards them late in our era !) reminds one of his tools. Mr. Bourne, by the way, is full of curious lore about common things which he has learned in talking with his rustic neigh- bours. He tells us, for instance, that every scythe is stamped with the initial 18 MORE VILLAGE FOLK letter of the day of the week on which it was made. I am unable to explain why such quaint little odds-and-ends of know- ledge so delight me. For instance, I con- fess to feeling a curious interest in finding out what particular day of the week is market-day in any given town. At any rate, on reading this I at once set out to verify it for myself by going in search of a scythe, not in any village a very difficult or arduous quest. On the one I found, just as the book says, " where the crank broadens to the blade," was stamped a " T." This was either a Tuesday or a Thursday scythe. The scythes made towards the end of the week are said to be the best. Mr. Bourne writes charmingly of " the antiquarian sentiment," and of what the rustics vaguely call " Old Times." Of these " old times " the peasant has a very confused and contracted notion. He generally does not go farther back than his grandfather's time. I remember, thinking to please my interlocutors, quoting the old rhyme, in which I here change the name : " Master Andrews and his man John, They did cast the first cannon." '9 MORE VILLAGE FOLK adding, " that must have been some oi your people." " Nothing to do with our family," came the answer, in a tone of offended dignity, from the wife, while the husband said severely, " I've 'eerd tell of a William Andrewes, but I never 'eerd of his casting cannon." In fact, the peasant lives in the present of his own lifetime and the immediate past of his nearest fore- fathers, and shapes his work of art from that which lies near at hand. The image in his circle is his work in the fields, amidst living, natural things. To the old-fashioned country people, now dying out, this was a compensation for many hardships, an immense source of interest and pride and pleasure to them. With the younger generation I fear this is no longer the case. " Things are done too quick now," an old-school farmer an im- placable conservative indeed remarked to me this very day. " Everything is done to suit the men, and they don't care if the crops are ruined in fact, they laugh ir they are." I am inclined to think that this is true. However good the season is, the men's wages are no better. They are 20 MORE VILLAGE FOLK no longer dependent upon the land for employment, and therefore they will no longer work, rinding their reward largely in the work itself, for the benefit of others. There are still to be found bright lads with whom work on the land is a passion ; but they go to Canada. 21 THE FARM LABOURER AND THE CHURCH WE sat on the Squarson's lawn. I cannot pretend to a very breathless interest in tennis, and accordingly was not displeased to find a companionable cleric whom I soon discovered to inhabit a mental world not altogether dissimilar from my own. He talked of his reminiscences of the life of the Norfolk village in which he had been brought up, and something like this is what he said : " The labourers left off coming to church about 1870. It was the time of Joseph Arch. Before that they all came. My father was a Squarson, and I well re- member the state of things amid which I was born and grew up. He was a Whig at that time of day he was looked upon almost as a Radical but what was im- 22 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH pressed upon the labourers was that they were to do their duty in that state of life in which it ' had ' not the ' shall ' of the Catechism but c had ' pleased God to call them. ' Bless the Squire and his relations And keep us in our proper stations ' that was the way of it. The labourers and their families all came to church they would have got the sack if they hadn't. The big farmers had a man at the church door to tell them off one by one as they came in. Any absentee would be reported on Monday morning, and if a satisfactory explanation was not forth- coming he would have to go. The squire's party came up first to Com- munion generally about four. They knelt in the middle of the altar-rails, and received in both kinds first. After the Communion of the Oligarchy came that of the rest of the congregation, first the farmers, then the tradesmen, and so on, and last the labourers. "As I said, the revolt came in 1870. My father, in spite of his Liberal sym- 23 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH pathies he had appeared on Liberal plat- forms, and for one of his class at that time might be looked upon as a sympathizer with the aspirations of the poor received a continual stream of the most bitterly insulting anonymous letters and cari- catures. I remember one of the latter ; the whole effect of the composition was something like those figures of St. Michael weighing the souls that you sometimes see on church windows, but the Angel in this case was the Angel of Dark- ness. The picture was that of a parson, with the horns and hoofs and bat's-wings of the Devil, holding up a naked boy munching a stolen turnip, and lashing him with a horsewhip. " That turnip symbolized a great deal of English history Enclosures, French Wars, Corn Laws, Hungry 'Forties. In my own remembrance, the Norfolk labourers had to bring up their families on nine shillings a week. In winter, when there was not much for them to do, they were often summarily discharged. When I was a boy, a turnip field was never planted near the village it was put as far 24 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH away as possible to avoid the wholesale depredations of the starving poor. A labourer said to me the other day, survey- ing a field of turnips, ' They no business to be so near the town ; I don't suppose it matters so much now, though, as it used to.' ' Meat ' meant bacon. A beast was indeed slaughtered with sacrificial rites at the village feast, and again at Christmas, and everybody tried to get a little bit of it. A man went round from door to door with the announcement that a bullock was to be killed, to receive orders. Most people tasted meat then, but at no other time. " Yes, the misery of the labourers dates from the Enclosures. The land of these people here, for instance " (our hosts) " was all bagged. It is an old story about the number of geese that once were kept on the common lands. In 1870, the time of the revolt, the people looked back upon at least a century of wretchedness. After the Peace, when the War had to be paid for, things were probably at their worst. The idea arose that the cause of the evil was the Peace, and it became a common 25 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH saying I have often heard it c I should like to hear Bony crow again.' There were riots from time to time, and actual fighting between the soldiers and the people. 1 have talked to old men and women who had relatives hanged for taking part in these disturbances. " Those were times of great brutality. Everybody who could flog anybody else did so. The chief farmer in the village where I was brought up horse-whipped his farm lads continually, and on occasion laid his stick about the shoulders of the labourers. Needless to say, the Wise Man's maxims as to the rod were duly ob- served in what village schools there were. In a village known to me the parson went into the school twice a week, when the unhappy candidates for corporal chastise- ment were brought before him, girls as well as boys, and were laid across his knee, and thrashed with his walking-stick. An old woman told me the other day she remembered Mr. Dale very well he had often beaten her as a girl. " No cottage had more than two bed- rooms. A labourer and his wife and halt 26- FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH a dozen children sometimes nine children would sleep in two rooms. The grow- ing boys and girls all slept together. 4 There's been a very heavy fall of bastards this year,' an old woman once said to me. ' I do think no house shouldn't ever be built without three chambers.' The drift to the towns was as much as anything else a moral revolution." At this point we were interrupted by the hospitalities of tea ; but I had heard enough. People sometimes speculate as to why the labourers do not go to church. The above artless recital, put down just as it was told, may supply an answer to the question. In my opinion, the wonder is that after all they do still go to church, or that at least they like the church to be there, and they want what the church stands for. I noticed a sentence quoted from a book by a scientific lady the other day, which said that " the very word 4 Creator ' has passed into the catalogue of mythological terms." But the farm labourers working all day in the open air, amid growing things and living creatures, 27 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH are not evolutionists. If told that life could be produced by the experiments of chemists, they would simply not believe it. They have an undoubting faith in a Creator, a Heavenly Father. More than this, they, to say the least, do not dis- believe in sacramental mysteries. To think that the blessing of God is conveyed through ordered channels in old tradi- tional and sacred ways is an idea still congenial to their minds. Controversial religion has no kind of attraction for them. The Rev. A. H. Baverstock, the Vicar of Hinton Martel, writes in the current number of the Vineyard : " The priest has never been entirely lost sight of behind the figure of the country gentleman who has ministered as parson ; his ministrations will often be asked in the most unexpected quarters in time of sickness. To me this is a really astonishing thing. Were I a labourer struggling to bring up a wife and family on fourteen shillings a week, I must con- fess I should find it difficult to value the ministrations of those who, better fed and 28 FARM LABOURER AND CHURCH clothed and housed, have betrayed so little concern at the scandalously unfavourable conditions under which those entrusted to their spiritual care live and labour." In this astonishment I altogether share. It is an amazing thing that, in spite of the clerical magistrate sentencing poachers, in spite of Mr. Dale's walking-stick, and the churchwarden's horsewhip, after all the starving, turnip-stealing years, the angry memories of which are still alive, there should yet be deep down in rustic hearts a feeling for churchyard crosses and for wedding rings and the blessing of the ministers of Christ. 29 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? AN American Professor has recently pro- pounded the question, " Why is Chester sleepy ? " and answered it by a reference to the tablets placed in the Cathedral to the memory of the young men killed in the South African War. There is much food for reflection here. I remember being profoundly impressed by a passage in Michelet it occurs in a footnote on the effect of the Napoleonic Wars on the physique of the French people, and I believe I am right in saying that he states that they took a foot from the average Frenchman's stature. Michelet was a great romantic poet there is no romance known to me so enthralling as his " History of France " and, like most poets, also a hard-headed, practical man, poetry being nothing but the flower of common sense, 3 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? and the misfortunes of poets for the most part due to the collision of common sense with a foolish environment. At any rate, he clearly saw the absurdity of the heap- ing up of this pyramid of skulls. What is so appalling about it is the waste of human faculties and capabilities involved the mowing down of so many possible finders of new continents, conquerors of new elements, singers of new songs, the lads who in such countless ways might have extended and deepened the life of the world. These orgies of destruction dwarf and stunt mankind, and leave a legacy of stagnation behind them. 1 have lately myself been moved to ask a similar question : Why are the villages sleepy ? Why are they stagnant, lifeless places of at most an antiquarian interest, where the picturesque tourist wanders about looking, often in vain, for the church-key ? There can be no doubt of the answer. It is because the best young men all go away. There is no inducement for them to remain. The country-side is continually being drained of its best blood. The reason villages are sleepy is because 3 1 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? the farm labourers are wretchedly paid, miserably housed, and insufficiently fed. I confess to some impatience in reading in the daily press of a prize won by a farm labourer and his wife at the Lincoln Agri- cultural Show for bringing up a large family on low wages. People should not be encouraged to do this ; they should be incited to demand higher wages. It was not stated what the prize was ; possibly a sovereign. It was won by bringing up fifteen children on fifteen shillings a week. Eighteen children were born to the couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Newton, but three of them lie in the churchyard. Of the fifteen living, the youngest is twenty. " They have never been able to afford a holiday," says the Daily Mirror enthusias- tically, " but still are able to say, ' We have nothing to grumble at.' ' In my own humble opinion, they have a very great deal to grumble at indeed. The encouragement of acquiescence in this state of things by prizes and the publishing of laudatory accounts in illustrated news- papers appears to me deplorable. Mrs. Newton, the rosiere of the Lincoln Agri- 32 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY? cultural Show, relating her experiences to a Daily Mirror young man, told him that her husband had formerly worked as a horse-keeper from 4 A.M. to 7 P.M. that is, fifteen hours a day. Fifteen hours a day, fifteen shillings a week, fifteen chil- dren ! " We have had many hard times " one recognizes the tone of spurious contentment " but we have never had parish relief, and my husband has never been out of work for a day. Many is the time that things have been so bad with us that we have had bread only for our meals, and could not even afford dripping. At other times we have had to sit down to a basin of gruel for dinner. You see, with so many to feed, even bread alone took a lot out of fifteen shillings a week. A loaf costing fivepence ha'penny used to go at one meal." If the day ever comes when these people, fed on gruel and bread with or without dripping, are called on to defend their hearths and homes I ask our Imperialist friends to consider the point they will probably put up a very poor fight. I myself live in a particularly prosperous c 33 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? neighbourhood, but I daily see the effect of the bread and dripping regime on the people. A living skeleton of a poor little white-faced boy daily calls at my house for the last-named comestible. " What do you have for breakfast ? " I asked him recently. " Bread and drippin'." " And what for dinner ? " " Bread and dippin'." " And what for tea ? " " Bread and drippin'. Then we don't eat all the butter up so." " Do you ever have any meat ? " " Sundays, we do father and mother has a little bit Saturday night. And," here the distant glimpse of a beatific vision lighted up the wan, pinched face, " Sunday mornin', we has sausages." This boy is one of a family of five ; four children going to school, and a baby, all skeletons. One of the little girls told me lately with great pride either elated by the prospect of a speedy release from school, or inspired by the gloomy satisfac- tion so often felt by the poor in the possession of some mysterious ailment " Doctor says I shan't last six months." The mother of these children works in the fields, and consequently the baby a 34 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? winning little chap, with the same white face and a red birth-mark on his cheek- is left all day with a neighbour who keeps a kind of creche. She charges three shillings a week for looking after him. When he sees his brothers and sisters pass in the road, he falls into a rigid fit of homesick screaming. The crec/ie-kteper, herself a desperately driven woman, re- cently ran at a little girl, who had dropped the baby she was nursing, and almost severed one of her fingers with a knife. The school-going children, in their own mother's absence, eat their dinners in this cottage. "The Browns has hot pudden' and taters," they say, " and we has bread and drippin'." It is to be feared that the mother of these children will never be rose-queen of the Lincoln Agricultural Show. Unlike the Newtons, she sometimes takes a holiday. She recently went on a day's excursion to Scarborough, the fare alone costing five shillings. To people in her circumstances such indulgences are fatal. In my own opinion, much harm results from the practice of women working in the fields. 35 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? The men should be paid enough to render it unnecessary. Under these conditions, the English villagers are quite visibly deteriorating. The prevalent anaemia is shown in nothing more clearly than in the kind of English they talk. There is, moreover, an utter want of blitheness in the tones of the rustic voice. Board-school teachers no doubt inculcate a very lifeless and colourless English. The other day I was interrogat- ing a class of children on the story of Joseph, and was told by them that the brothers told their father " a story," and said that Joseph had been " killed by an animal." To say "a lie" and "a wild beast " would be considered indelicate. But, apart from this, the bread-and-drip- ping diet must be as devitalizing to language as to everything else. The old- fashioned popular English ridiculed by novelists was a capital language. " Crow- ner's 'Quest," for instance, is quite as good as " Coroner's Inquest," just as " crown " is quite as good as " corona," and more English. In reading Mr. Eden Phill- potts's novel, " Widdicombe Fair," I was 36 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? lately impressed by the fact that many of the decaying inhabitants of these moribund villages come of excellent stock ; they are Drakes, Hookers, Jewels, and the like. I myself remember an old farm labourer and his wife named Pusey. They came from Berkshire. " My husband's is a very old Berkshire family," the wife told me, "one of them was a very high gentleman indeed." No doubt the same blood ran in the veins of this poor unlettered old man he was unable to read as in those of the great Saint and Doctor of the English Church. One can easily imagine the steps by which old-fashioned, home-keep- ing country people, conservative, unable to adapt themselves to changed times and conditions, fearful of trying their fortunes in the great outside world, might come to labour on the lands which had once been their own. There may be descendants of the Plantagenets behind the plough. But at the present day the bright boys all go away. A lad who has reached the mental level indicated by, say, the ability to play chess, is not going to work on the land for fifteen shillings a week. He goes to 37 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? Canada, he goes to the States. The pick of the young men go away that is why the villages are sleepy. Quite lately I went a railway journey with an enthusiastic Imperialist lady globe-trotter. She talked of Toronto and Johannesburg, of Adelaide and Melbourne. Inter alia^ she asked if my particular church was ever full. I innocently re- plied that it had been full on the occasion of the King's Coronation. " What a beautiful Imperialistic thought ! " she exclaimed. " What a wonderful Im- perialistic journey the King and Queen have been making in Lancashire !" she went on, and then proceeded to develop the theory that the King, when Prince of Wales, had been gifted with a species of Divine inspiration. She quoted largely from a letter which had appeared in the Times at the conclusion of the Boer War, on the theme of "Wake up, England ! ' : Well, England needs waking up, not to the need of more armaments or the virtues of conscription, but to the scandal and the danger of the fact that great masses of her people, engaged in the most vital of 38 WHY ARE VILLAGES SLEEPY ? all industries, should be miserably paid, miserably housed, miserably fed. Dr. Neale, in a beautiful ballad, looked for- ward to the time when England would wake to find her truest wealth in the prayers and holy deeds of her martyrs. A day may perhaps come when she will see her truest wealth in her men. The Daily Express^ in its facetious way, has lately taken to spelling " Liberalism " with the conventional initial of Libra =. I commend the suggestion to Mr. >Qoyd George. A Liberalism so spelt would hold out a golden hope to the half-starved tillers of the soil. They want and need more money, and more of all that money brings. This given, a time might come when the villages would no longer be sleepy, stagnant peep-holes into the past, but once more blithe little townships humming with activity and the joy of life. 39 " ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM ' CHARLES DICKENS has often been described as a " Social Reformer." I confess I do not like the term. It smacks of the philanthropists with anything from two thousand to four hundred a year lecturing and denouncing the muddlers with any- thing from eighteen to twelve shillings a week. The people Dickens was never weary of attacking, the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys, the political economists, the Malthusians, the enemies of the people's pleasures, the doctrinaires of all kinds con- stantly harping on abstract theories, and with no eyes for plain concrete facts, were all social reformers. They would have gloried in the title. For my own part, they are welcome to it. The Eugenists of our own day are the " social reformers " par excellence. Under the banner of social reform, too, fight all those organizers of 40 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM" charity summed up collectively by the London poor as " the Organation," and looked upon by them as a mysterious force whose function is that of preventing them ever getting anything. (At this moment a very communicative housemaid interrupts me with the quite unnecessary informa- tion : " There's a horgan outside what some people terms an 'urdy-gurdy, they do.") All the organizers and instructors of the poor may be looked upon as so many grinders of hurdy-gurdies. At the present time, unfortunately, all over the land the sound of the grinding is loud. One envies that blessed calm, spoken of in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes. There is, I believe, a great deal of resentment and rebellion on the part of the poor against the merciless noise. Mr. Ches- terton has recently assured us that if any word of his has ever darkened social workers' lives he counts such comfort more than amethysts. No, I should not for my own part describe Dickens as a social reformer. He was a seer a man of intense imagination, sympathy, and common sense, who strove to inform and "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM" imbue the social reform of his time with those most-needed qualities. When the social reformers were all crying " Inves- tigate," "Examine," "Report," Dickens cried " Stop." I should prefer to describe Dickens by a title drawn from the Litanies of the Saints " Advocatus Pauperum." So in Breton churches, after five centuries, they still invoke St. Yves of Treguier. " He pleaded the cause of the poor " the words come to one like an echo of the Psalms, " He shall be favourable unto the simple and needy " it is the burden of a great many of them. The saints, it is to be feared, were indiscriminate almsgivers. If their brother was hungry, they fed him, and if he was thirsty, they gave him drink. The reformer of the poor reforms them from the outside the farther removed he is from any actual experience of their lot the more fitted he is thought to be to lecture and instruct them, and decide things for them. The advocate of the poor, on the other hand, puts himself at least by an effort of imagination and sym- pathy in their place. It is a great advantage, 42 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' indeed, for anyone exercising the office of an advocate and mediator to have had some actual experience of the lot of those he seeks to represent. This, in his young days at least, Dickens had had. He remem- bered the surroundings of his childhood and his days in the blacking factory. He knew and saw and felt and expressed realities instead of pursuing and proclaim- ing shadows which have only a verbal existence. He put himself in the place of the poor completely by imagination and sympathy as he had been in it himself, at least in some degree, by actual experience ; he pierced through pretentious sophistries ; he knew where the shoe pinched, to quote the people's favourite proverb ; he spoke out their inmost thoughts and feelings ; he told their tale. Hear a specimen of Dickens's pleading for the poor against their professional and orthodox reformers : " But who eats tripe ? " said Mr. Filer, looking round. "Tripe is without ex- ception the least economical and the most wasteful article of consumption this country can by possibility produce. . . . 43 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' Tripe is more expensive, properly under- stood, than the hot-house pine-apple. Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within the bills of mortality alone, and- forming a low estimate of the quantity of the tripe which the carcases of those animals reasonably well butchered would yield, I find that the waste on that amount of tripe, if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each and a February over. The Waste ! the Waste ! " Trotty stood aghast and his legs shook under him. He seemed to have starved a garrison of five hundred men with his own hand. " Who eats tripe ? " said Mr. Filer, warmly. " Who eats tripe ? ' Trotty made a miserable bow. " You do, do you ? " said Mr. Filer. " Then I'll tell you something. You snatch your tripe, my friend, out of the mouths of widows and orphans." The reader will remember Mr. Filer's in- dignation when he discovers that Richard 44 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' and Meg are going to get married. I was reminded of it the other day in reading the newspaper accounts of a Conference of social reformers at which eugenics were discussed. A lady, named Miss Forty, if I remember, hazarded the opinion that men and women had a natural right to marry. Another lady worker, whose name escapes me, asked in amazement, " Did Miss Forty really mean to maintain that there was any such thing as an abstract natural right of human beings to become parents, and bring into the world children they could not maintain ? " Social reformers of a very hysterical variety have lately succeeded in getting the lash on the English Statute Book. One can imagine the " eloquent plea " as to its absolute necessity in dealing with certain offences that might have been put forth by the late Vicar of Christchurch, Hunslett. "Tom Jones" has lately been burned by the social reformers of Don- caster. Strenuous efforts are being made to suppress the whist-drive that most innocent and sociable of popular diversions. What has Dickens to do with all this reforming company ? 45 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' Much might be said upon Dickens's attitude to the pleasures of the people. He pleaded the cause of the poor against the social reformer as Puritan. I was recently delighted beyond words to find an old woman in a cottage, a shrewd and kindly old body, reading " Dombey and Son." She remarked, deprecatingly, that the book was " harmless." That any apology for being found reading a masterpiece or English fiction should have been thought necessary suggested to me some very de- pressing reflections. Light was thrown on the point by what I found in another cottage. Here I found a young woman suffering from quinsy and taking for it a decoction of vinegar and sage, which she described as " very searching." But my attention was principally occupied by an anasmic-looking little boy, who sat on a wooden stool by his mother's side, listlessly gazing out on a sea of mud, and conning a little blue paper-covered book. " He thinks a deal o' that little book, he do," said the mother ; " a lady give it to him." I wish it could have fallen into the hands of Dickens. It was composed of " Dialogues," "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM" intended to be recited by children at school treats and anniversaries. To quote a sen- tence or two from, a dialogue between three little girls, Annie, Patty, and Jane. Annie is introduced as reading a book of fairy tales. " It tells about a Prince and a Princess, and how happy they were, and how their path was strewn with roses wherever they went." Jane puts in a severe interrogation : " But you would not like the thorns to pierce through the leather of your boot and hurt you ? " Annie objects that " the book says nothing about thorns, and what the book says must be true, because it is all in print." The experienced Jane replies : " When you have lived as long as myself, you will know that you may often find big stories in little books." "Oh! dear; how shock- ing ! " exclaims Annie. " I thought people always spoke the truth ! How dare they print stories ? " " Wicked people dare do anything, Annie, dear," says Jane. " Then you don't care for fairy tales, Jane ? " asks Patty. Jane does not care for anything that misleads. It is grievous to think that generations of English children should have 47 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM" committed rubbish of this kind to memory, should have spouted it on platforms, and handed on its maxims to others. In Dickens's time the English people absorbed quantities of this stuff, just as at present they consume yearly tons of pills. The efforts of the Puritanical variety of social reformer destroyed a genuine folk-culture in England. Dickens sounded out the true voice of the unspoiled English people of the old jests and plays and folk-tales and ballads. Little space is left in which to tell the true tale of a case in which I would fain invoke the help of some such " Advocatus Pauperum " as Dickens was. It is briefly this : In the parish where I write there has existed for three hundred years a charity called " The Dole." The vicar and the churchwardens distribute it twice yearly, on Good Friday and St. Thomas's Day. All married people receive a shilling each, and a shilling for each child ; all men and women over sixty, two shillings each ; all over seventy, three shillings each. Thirty-three pounds are thus dis- tributed twice a year. People in London "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' wish to divert this charity into some different channel, applying it to some one object where they imagine it will serve a solidly useful purpose. At present, ac- cording to them, it is frittered away. A meeting of the whole of the inhabitants of the place simply roared out to the Commissioner who explained these princi- ples that a Christmas dinner was a useful purpose, and that money spent on a pair of boots was not frittered away. This is what the " Advocatus Pauperum " sees and the social reformer does not. To my knowledge, this gift often as much as ten shillings to people with large families makes all the difference to them at Christ- mas and Easter. To old people living alone on their old-age pensions, the extra three shillings is a perfect boon and god- send. The Commissioner also told us that the existence of "The Dole" tends to lower wages ; but we knew well that if it was taken away, they would be no higher. He said also that a self-respecting labourer must dislike to receive a charity of this kind. The word " dole " was objection- able ; it should be called " assistance." D 49 "ADVOCATUS PAUPERUM' Well, the word " dole " is a very good word it means the part or share of some common good which is dealt out to one. Besides, it rhymes with " soul." To my own feeling, this coming together of the whole people in the kindly and pleasurable way they do is most valuable, as binding together and preserving the continuous and corporate life of the place. There is no doubt of the local feeling ; but the gentle- men in London will no doubt do what they like. We need a Dickens to plead our cause. OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES " THE older I grow, the more do I believe in tradition. Old people never invent ; they do not much exaggerate, and the more ignorant they are the more accu- rately do they tell their stories." These words of the late Dr. Jessopp, from his essay "The Elders of Arcady,"* should be thought over by everybody. They are among those words of truth than which nothing can be truer " nihil verius." The Victorian contempt for " oral tradition " (I remember the scornful tone with which the phrase would be quoted) was founded on the preposterous delusion that the sole fount of authenticity and veracity is print. What they saw as children, what they heard as children, these are the things which old people remember most * " England's Peasantry, and other Essays," by A. Jessopp. 5 1 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES clearly, which are the most real and living to them. The older the things are, the more vividly and accurately they are remem- bered. These memories stretch through history, and link the generations. Byron, wandering in the Forest of Ravenna, say, in 1820, meets an old woman gathering firewood, who had known Alberoni, who was born in 1664. The late Rector of Seaming evidently possessed the art of making these old people talk. One should rather say, his native geniality and sym- pathy evoked their confidences. " The Elders of Arcady " is full of the most delightful glimpses of the past. I envy Dr. Jessopp his conversation with the old man who told him that as a boy in Fransham Church he had often " sot in they seats and watched the images" On hearing this I think he must almost have jumped out of his skin. The old man had been telling Dr. Jessopp of a Vandal parson, who in the first two decades of the nineteenth century had sawed off, first the angels from the roof of the church, on the ground that they were dangerous and might fall on the heads of 5 2 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES the worshippers, and then the backs of the old oak seats, on the plea that they disposed people to laziness, and afforded facilities for sleeping during the sermon. " Many's the time," said the old man, " I've sot in they seats and watched the images." He was indignant at his parish priest's suggestion that he meant the roof angels. " S'pose I don't know a angel from a image ? " said this rustic icono- grapher. His discrimination between the two is excellent, as of a village Didron. " Why, a angel's got wings, and a image has got his close on. And a angel ain't painted all manner of colours, and they images, they was dressed in red and green, and two on 'em was men, and two on 'em was women. D'ye s'pose I don't know what a image is ? " These images, it came out, were "a-top of the screen." It was not the Vandal who destroyed the backs of the seats and the angel-roof who cut them down, but an earlier parson still, scandalized by the assertion of one of the village lads that he had seen one of the images " move a goodish bit and nod his head." Akin to this phenomenon, no 53 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES doubt, was "the motion of the eyes" of which Father Faber speaks as having been " observed in pictures of the Madonna in certain of the Roman States." However, the good Protestant soul of Parson Swatman took the alarm. He said " he'd have no more o' that," and he sawed the images off. This was when the old man was quite a boy. Dr. Jessopp thought that the Rood had been suspended from the roof, and that when it was destroyed the images on the beam were left undisturbed. Be that as it may, it is pleasant to think that all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generations of small boys, as they sat in Fransham Church, say, during the reading of the Canons (which took place periodically) or, on the Sunday before Guy Fawkes' Day, of the Act of Parliament decreeing the special form of thanksgiving for the fifth of November (as was also customary) could not only comfort themselves with apples, but also had something to look at. They didn't know who they were, or why they were standing on the top of the screen ; but they could sit and " watch the images." 54 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES The sunshine 01 1810, as it fell through the windows of Fransham Church, lit up the blue robe of Mary and the gold hair of St. John, as it had done for four hundred years. By 1820 the screen was dead and blank, and the images had long been burned as firewood. What a field for their opera- tions, by the way, Will Dowsing and his company of church wreckers must have had in the Eastern Counties ! There are some glorious angel-roofs still existing, as at March, in Cambridgeshire. The whole essay is excellent reading. I like the story, of the " dissolute old roisterer, called Marshall," who was con- fined one night in the "cage " at Dereham. I admit that this implement of discipline is new to me, at least as being in use in English villages or small market towns in comparatively recent times. I know, of course, that it was employed by Louis Onze for bringing down the proud look and high stomach of Cardinal La Balue and other recalcitrants. At Loches, how- ever, the victim remained in the cage for eleven years or so ; at Dereham, for one night : 55 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES " He roared like a bull and called for beer, and said he was going to die of cold. So some of his mates brought him a quart of beer. But they couldn't get it thro' the bars of the cage ; so they brought him a long old tobacco pipe, and he sucked up his beer thro' that." All such stories, and the talk of the old people in villages, show a rough spon- taneousness, vitality, and joy of living. According to Dr. Jessopp, these qualities have decreased in the agricultural poor. I myself believe that they were starved out of them in the bad old hungry times. There has also been a great amount of meddlesome restriction and repression, tending to set up an insipid hypocrisy as their usual attitude. The really old people have some strange tales to tell anyone who will listen to them. I read recently an account in the newspapers of an interview with an old gentleman born in 1810, and still living at Hounslow at the age of a hundred and four. He was speaking of something which had happened in the year 1845. 56 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES " About this time," he added, "a trooper named John White was flogged to death in Hounslow Barracks." At the time this seemed to him a fitting theme for the grave and chastened meditations of the Tragic Muse. He was used to spend his leisure in composing poetry, and still re- membered, from the account it seemed with some pride, the quatrain he made on the occasion of this incident : He died by the laws of his country, His body all covered with scars, So people have cause to remember the death Of John White of the Seventh Hussars. It is odd to reflect that all through the agitation about the Oxford Tracts, the Gorham Judgment, the Papal Aggression, the thunders of Lord John Russell, the charges of the Bishops, the riots in defence of the black gown, British soldiers were being flogged, sometimes, as in this in- stance, literally to death. Flagellation, usque ad mortem, was part of the sacrifice demanded by the ruling classes from the populace for the sake of discipline, of patriotism, of the Union Jack, of the country under whose just and equal laws 57 OLD PEOPLE'S STORIES they enjoyed the inestimable benefits, unknown to foreigners, of the British Constitution and the Protestant religion, and by which, since 1688, their civil and religious liberties had been guaranteed. But Dr. Jessopp's pleasant book should not be made the occasion of a political diatribe. The venerable author expressed his doubt " whether before another cen- tury has ended there will be such a thing as an agricultural labourer." His own life was spent in the county of Joseph Arch. It is a gladdening thought that Agricul- tural Labourers' Unions are again coming into existence. The employers hate the idea of them as the Devil hates Our Lady. But they may be the first signs of a new spring-time, the hope of a new life, and prosperity for the decaying peasantry of England. "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING " I WHO write these lines ought to be doing penance. St. Gregory the Great was Bishop of Rome, and a man died of starvation in the city without his know- ing of it, and he did penance for forty days. I am a country parson, and a man has died this year of starvation in my parish, and I knew nothing about it till the day I buried him. The parish is a large and straggling one ; the man with his wife and two children lived four miles away from my house. I never received a hint from anybody that there was anything wrong. No message came to the vicarage, no request for help in any shape or form. Such requests and messages, indeed, come daily. Mrs. Sutterby is a frequent caller, though she resides outside the utmost border of those entitled to my ministra- 59 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" tions, with ever more lurid accounts of her poor husband's agonies and varying statements of the number of her children. Sometimes she has fourteen of these poor innocents and sometimes twenty-one. Last year, indeed, the unrestricted exercise of a too luxuriant imagination landed her in prison, she having drawn up a moving appeal to the charitable based on the loss of a wholly fictitious "sow and seven little piglets." But the more reputable of the starving poor very often will not beg more fools they ! and, as in this case, will sometimes literally starve to death rather than " go to the parish." The man in question, it seems, drifted here last October. Oh ! that dreary drift- ing of the more helpless of the agricultural poor that sad autumn Exodus laden with their few poor sticks to lands of no promise and no hope ! Shortly after arriving, it seems, he had fallen ill of pneumonia. He had been patched up by the doctor, but all the winter he had not been well enough to work. He and his wife and children had starved. Towards the end of January he had been taken suddenly ill, and the 60 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" doctor had been sent for. In an hour or two he was dead. " Died of sheer starva- tion " was the doctor's verdict. He certi- fied " heart failure " as the cause of death. There was literally no bread in the house, the doctor said. The cupboard was bare. He at once sent a load of groceries to the starving children. I think at Doomsday there is no one who will stand a better chance than the average country doctor. Sit anima mea cum illo ! After the death came the burial. The man's employer, a small farmer, had warned the undertaker " to be careful what he did about the coffin, as the man's club had run out." In these circumstances the undertaker ex- pended no particular thought or care upon the funeral. He did not come himself, and the wrong measurements had been sent for the grave. The man who had died of hunger had been six foot two, the measurement sent was five foot nine. A five-foot-nine grave had been dug, and when we came to commit the body of our dear brother here departed to the ground it was found that the coffin would not go into the hole. An icy rain fell, 61 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" drenching, pitiless. The minutes seemed interminable as the sexton and his helpers fumbled at the task of making the grave big enough. They seemed smitten with a sudden incapacity to perform their task, and angry recriminations went on between them in a hoarse mutter. The women endeavoured to quiet the wife, who broke inte hysterical weeping, crying, "Let me get in too throw me in too." At last it was over. I said the Easter Eve Collect that " through the grave and gate of death we may pass to our joyful resurrection." The party were taken into the house of a relative in the village, where the two children ate wolfishly, ravenously. The curious thing is that even these relatives had not guessed there had been anything seriously wrong. " A grievous thing to take place in a country like this where we have all things richly to enjoy," said that genial soul, the caretaker of the Parish Church, with rubicund unction. The point I wish to impress on any who may read these lines is that a meagre weekly pittance, itself insufficient to exist upon, is all that stands between multitudes 62 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" of our people and starvation. Such a case as I have narrated above in which actual death occurs seldom takes place ; it is itself a dreadful accident, whether due to pride or want of enterprise on the part of the sufferers, or from whatever cause. A bit of melodrama of this kind, indeed, causes the cry of the poor to enter into ears generally stuffed tight with economic or pharisaic and teetotal cotton-wool. But it is not really more dreadful than the whole system on which it casts a momentary vivid light. A day or two after this happened it was again my lot to take a funeral ; this time that of a child of three who had died of meningitis. The doctor said the illness had been caused entirely by neglect. A little boy belonging to the same family had lately been suffering from erysipelas in the eyes, also brought on by dirt. The mother of these children there were three of them was described by the village grocer as a very hard-working woman, and one who always somehow or other managed to pay for her grocery. Personally I know well the deadly struggle that that paying for the grocery is, and 63 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" the frantic honesty with which it is often waged. But in this case the woman worked hard at taking in lodgers, and altogether neglected her children. She took in and did for four lodgers. The whole party occupied two rooms, husband, wife, three children, four lodgers. The reader may imagine the atmosphere of those rooms, the smell, the dirt, the effect on babies requiring thought and care and mother- ing, and air and light and cleanliness. An overpowering smell of whelks and vinegar is the chief sensation one carries away from this cottage. The husband is one of that poorest class of labourers, the men who " go round with the steam thresher." All the winter this work is very irregular ; frost stops it, rain stops it, wind stops it. When spoken to about the lodgers the woman said what in such circumstances they always say that it was absolutely necessary to take them in if they were to live. The woman complained very much about the doctor : " Me and my oldest lodger reckoned 'im up proper last night at tea." The husband's earnings for the last nine weeks had not been nine shillings 64 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" a week. One could not point out that the doctor's bills more than swallowed up the profits of the lodgers. Besides, there is one thing that philanthropists who carry on a crusade against lodgers always seem to forget : What about the lodgers them- selves ? The lodgers must live somewhere ; their work is wanted, and they cannot lie out in the snow. These examples are, of course, taken from the lowest and most helpless class of day labourers, perhaps the most help- less and incompetent, perhaps only the most unfortunate, and at their hardest time, before the children begin to earn anything. A friend writes to me about Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's terrible book " The English Labourer." " I never realized before reading it the difference between the peasant rooted and the peasant uprooted and drifting." Yes, that is it, " uprooted and drifting." There are many handles by which one can take hold of the question of the condition of the people, many tests by which it may be estimated, and I personally am inclined to think that the language which the people habitually E 65 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" speak is as good a test as any. The dreari- ness and poverty of the language used by this class, especially the women, is some- thing indescribable. You may listen by the hour to two of them talking and never hear a single proverb or any vivacious ex- pression or happy phrase. " 'Course, she couldn't be off from knowin' it, 'cos she could see it out of her winder." "They got two children in the 'orspital both consumpted." So they go on. It is all quite anaemic. Murillo's vagabonds did not talk like this, nor Rembrandt's old women. If books are to be trusted there are countries where the peasants speak like our own robust Elizabethans. " Thou look'st like Antichrist in that lewd hat," says some one in Ben Jonson. So they talk in Russia. But listen to an alterca- tion between two English villagers, either men or women, you will hear nothing but the monotonous repetition (not anaemic this, however) of one all too-familiar ad- jective and another all too-familiar noun. I do not think such a joyless and colour- less language was ever spoken in the world before perhaps such joyless and 66 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" colourless lives were never lived in the world before. One of those kind people who take the trouble to let a writer know when any- thing he has to say interests them has recently taken me to task in an " Open Letter " of eleven pages for complaining of the decay of the English language. " The language is all alive," he says, " if only you will go to the right place for it not in your starving villages, but in the industrial life of our country." The speci- mens he gives are not very convincing, but I admit there is something in what my kind correspondent says. Here are some of his examples taken from the industrial life of the country: "No great shakes," "just spun on the chuck," " blackleg," " to mike," " to buzz one's work," " to take it lump work." " Therefore," he writes, " if you would hear the living language as it still grows and burgeons, you go where the people speak it and love it, not in list- lessness but in hope, not in decay but in life, not in dying, starving English villages, but in the workshop. . . . The industrial population of England is seventy per cent. 6 7 "UPROOTED AND DRIFTING" to the remainder. ... It is the seventy per cent, in England and all the world over where English is spoken who are doing the invention, creating the new life." Well, I have culled above some of the blossoms of speech which bud and burgeon from the tree of industrial England. This is the pity of it, that my correspondent should be able to speak with truth of the " decaying and starving villages " of, at any rate, a large part of rural England. This is the pity of it that seventy per cent, of those who speak the English language should be an " indus- trial population." I cannot see what good thing is to come, either in language or in xife, from, say, building iron sky-scrapers which are not even fire-proof. I am not a politician ; I have personally no panacea to recommend, no patent remedy to adver- tise ; but I think people at large ought to know what the life of the English agri- cultural labourer, as the history Mr. Hammond records as left him "uprooted, drifting," actually is, and that is why I have written these lines instead of spend- ing a really jolly evening reading the lucu- brations of Ezra Pound. 68 AUTUMN IN ARCADY THE little Fenland town is usually dull and colourless enough, but on the pleasant autumn market-day it hummed and tinkled with the friendly life of all that quiet country-side. It might have been Amboise. The cheery people in the little street rejoiced in the gold of the year's last sunshine, precious as the last few drops in an almost empty flask. There were bright gold patches on the fast yellowing green of the great elms standing before the church in the middle of the street. Along the pavement by the wall beneath them were the stalls of the market people, some of them bright with the gaiety of autumn flowers. At the street corner the bellman, the town-crier, had collected a little leisurely crowd around him to listen to his robust announcement. A cart drove through the street loaded AUTUMN IN ARCADY with the felled trunks of fir trees, their green branches studded with dark cones. Above, the last swallows set the air quiver- ing with their ecstatic flight. From the whole scene one got the very essence and savour of autumn as from the taste of ripe blackberries or the smell of sweet sultans. Heine would have been happy in the dull little town that morning ; Charles Lamb would have been reconciled to exile from the Strand ; but, above all, the day seemed made for Hans Andersen. But who am I that I should cull the flower of the world ? I return from my morning saunter in a cheerful humour, and in the September afternoon walk to a labourer's cottage where the children have been ill. Here is no blessing of swallows, no scent of sweet sultans, no flower of the world. The late September sky has darkly clouded over in the afternoon. A foul smell assails me as I cross the plank over the dyke into the tiny patch of garden around the cottage. I know the scene so well that meets me inside. Here is the bare little room : the bare table with its poor crockery set out for tea. A worn, 70 AUTUMN IN ARCADY gentle, kind-faced woman is surrounded by three solemn little boys in various stages of convalescence. The eldest, aged six, is up for the first time to-day, the second, aged four, has been toddling about out of bed for a week, the baby is still very ill. The children are in queer garments, the eldest boy in a peculiarly funereal suit of black. The woman is classified by the local philanthropists as "a muddler." The designation is perfectly correct ; one has only to glance at her to see plainly traced upon her face the pathetic helplessness belonging to this very numerous class. The two elder little boys move solemnly about with pale faces ; the mother holds in her arms the three-year-old baby who had had two fits and had not spoken since his illness began, and who gazed at the visitor with big, grave, not unfriendly eyes. One thinks of the scene of which one always thinks. Talking of philanthropists and muddlers I cannot resist quoting the following lines from a letter received recently from a lady who is a district nurse : " I was nursing a woman at one time who is the mother of 7 1 AUTUMN IN ARCADY nine five being under eight years of age. They were fat and jolly and always clean and their clothes mended, but the room was always a pigsty, which shocked the district lady's sense of propriety, so that when I went to beg dinners for the poor soul, Miss W said she was glad to help for a little, but, of course, she thought it right that untidy, helpless people should feel the pinch sometimes." But to return to the cottage. The woman told me first about the children's illness. It was a sort of English cholera that this sunny fruitful autumn has raged among the children of the poor. The doctor said the cause of it was flies. They settle upon everything that children eat. The woman herself thought it was the bad water. " My aunt from Peterborough says she can't think how we can bide here with such water to drink. When she comes she brings a bottle o' water with her, and when she's finished it she goes back." It would seem that the aunt from Peterborough is either a very moderate drinker or makes a very short stay. They themselves were leaving the poor 72 AUTUMN IN ARCADY place at Michaelmas. (In the country that is the eleventh of October.) The note of autumn always seems a sense of change, of journeying. Tu vedrai lontane arene Nuovi monti, nuove mari, the poet said of the swallow. But there is a poor pathetic journeying of farm labourers and their wives and children that goes on all over England every Michaelmas, no finding summer beyond the Pyrenees, but a dreary little voyage with their few storm-tossed lares and penates from one poor haven to another of the troublesome sea. " We've been here just a year come Michaelmas, we liked the place, and seemed settled down nicely, but Mr. Allen told the foreman he must look out for another yardman. We don't know no reason for it the foreman says my hus- band knows his work but we think it's the old gentleman in the house. One Sunday my husband went to see his mother, and so there was nobody to get his trap ready for church, and he said if Mr. Allen had a yardman that couldn't be 73 AUTUMN IN ARCADY there on Sundays, it was nearly time he got one that could." This good mother herself attends church devotedly. Every Sunday evening she brings her three little boys, almost babies, wheeling the youngest in a pram. " We reckoned so much on going to the Harvest Festival my husband and me. This is two years we haven't been to one. Last year we were movin' in, and it was over before we got here, and this year, of course, the children couldn't be left." To very many of the burdened poor the festal church of the Harvest Thanksgiving is a precious glimpse of larger things. (Of course we are aware that from the employer's point of view a dangerous plausibility often accompanies much church-going and a taste for the melodeon. But we would ask the latter to remember the old words, "Blessed is the man that considereth the poor.") She went on with her recital. "We've been married fourteen years and have had nine children five of them are living. My husband's wages here are fourteen shillings a week with the cottage, but it's such a poor little patch of garden, we 74 AUTUMN IN ARCADY haven't even got any potatoes." (This, by the way, is the country of potato kings, where great fortunes are made out of potatoes.) "The children are all so fond of potatoes, and I never seem to have had a dinner without them. Baked potatoes with butter ? No, they never have any butter with them, it's too dear, but they're very fond of a baked potato. I know people go out to work in the fields and earn more money, but I'm not able to leave my little ones. I should have to pay a woman three shillings a week to look after them for me, and that wouldn't seem to leave much. Besides, I never care to go out into the fields after what happened with my little boy " here her eyes filled and she stopped. I knew the story that was coming. " He was ten weeks old, and I took him out into the fields for safety. I put him on a heap of straw where a lot of other children were playing round. His father had thrown down his jacket with his pipe and matches in the pocket by this straw. The children took the matches out of the pocket and began playing with them. 75 AUTUMN IN ARCADY Suddenly they all ran away screaming, but baby was too little to get away, and was burned before we could get to him. No, I shall never care to go to work in the fields any more." Here the eldest boy, the fourth child remaining at home, returned from the nearest town with the children's medicine. " It's so bitter they don't like to take it, but the doctor sends a little peppermint to put in it. He's been coming sometimes twice a day for three weeks. No, we aren't in any club. I think the bill will be about three pounds. My aunt from Peterborough thinks it'll be more." The aunt from Peterborough seems, by the way, to have been a perfect sibyl announcing doom. The goodness of the country doctor to the poor is often beyond all praise. I have known one of whom I have often heard poor children say, " Mother says Dr. Vance is the best doctor he don't charge you nothing." I heard the tale and said what I was able in reply. At any rate, one may set down that a big basket of potatoes was carried to them that same evening. AUTUMN IN ARCADY The potatoes would, at any rate, be enough to last till they started literally upon their next " adventure," going forth to meet what things will come. 77 A SANE LUNATIC THE recent talk of " segregating '' and "detaining" the "unfit" poor has re- minded me of a little experience I once had which I confess it gives me the greatest pleasure to remember. In the darkest hours it is cheering to look back on any single thing that one has done which has lessened the misery of the world, which has cured one real heartache, or turned one real trouble into peace. It is some- thing nay, much to have helped the poor out of misery in one solitary case. It was once my lot to visit frequently an old woman of eighty, who might be not unfairly described as a mystic, or at least as possessing the mystical tempera- ment in a high degree. She might have struck those meeting her for the first time as being rather dour and grim, but as one heard the recital of her life-history one 78 A SANE LUNATIC could only wonder that so much humanity and neighbourliness had survived in her. Her life had been for the most part a fight with literal starvation. Her husband had been a brute who drank and ill-treated her, and then had died leaving her with many little children. These she had some- how brought up by hook or by crook ; struggling, fighting, following, finding any honest means of turning a penny. She had insisted on church, and as far as possi- ble on school for all of them, and had her- self been all her life not only a regular worshipper, but a communicant. She held, and what among the poor is exceed- ingly unusual, she intelligently expressed in conversation, a doctrine that was de- finitely sacramental, but she looked upon this life-long habitual religion merely as an outer court, as something preparatory to an illumination which she believed she had received late in life. She had no doubt whatever of the objective reality of this experience. She had fallen one day, not asleep, but into a sort of trance. She found herself going on a journey on foot, to use her own language, " going thro' 79 A SANE LUNATIC fields where there were a lot of women working in bright-coloured clothes," and she had gone on and on till she came into the Presence of Our Lord. As I remember her narration, I do not think any words were spoken, but there was some sort of silent communication, as a result of which all fear and all uncertainty had left her for ever. " I'm a sinner, I know," she said, " but since then I've never been a miser- able sinner." She did not appear to think that to pass through such an experience was necessary, and in no way despised those who had not had it, nor did she con- sider herself as their superior. " It's a thing that generally comes to older people, I think," she would say, " to them that's getting on in life." She seemed to think, however, that something like it would at some time be granted to every really faith- ful soul. She lived alone in her cottage, sub- sisting on an incredibly small sum of money a week it was before the days of old-age pensions and for the most part doing her own housework, sometimes assisted by a grand-daughter, from a cot- 80 A SANE LUNATIC tage hard by. In this cottage dwelt a son-in-law, with many small children. The mother here was the trouble and tragedy that filled and darkened the old lady's days was detained in a lunatic asylum. She believed, as I very soon came to do myself, that the daughter was perfectly sane. The story of her segrega- tion and detention was as follows : She had been knocked down by a tramp, who had also stolen her watch, one dark autumn evening on a lonely common. By some means or other, she got home without further injury ; but this encounter had naturally "upset" her extremely, and, in- deed, made her ill. They put her to bed, and sent for the doctor. She " talked very rambling" for two or three days, her principal hallucination apparently being that " there were lions under the bed." The doctor and the relatives between them thereupon got her into the asylum. The poor have, indeed, a fatal readiness to resort to the asylum. They know it is very easy to get people in, and so a certain amount of immediate trouble and anxiety is spared them ; but apparently they do F 81 A SANE LUNATIC not know how very difficult it is to get them out again. In this case it seemed not so much difficult as impossible to do so. "She's as sane as you and me are sitting here," the old lady would say, " but she'll never come out. I shall never see her again outside that dreadful place. Whenever I go to see her, I don't sleep all night. The poor thing cries so when she says, * Good-bye,' I can't get it out o' my head night or day. ' Oh, mother, I shall never come out,' the says, ' they'll never let me out.' ! In the whole course of her life, she said, nothing had ever troubled her so much as this. The one thing on which she stayed her mind, and which gave her any comfort here the mystical vein came out again was the thought of the helpless Mother standing by the Cross. The son-in-law's cottage, hard by, bereft of the mother's presence, was a scene of hopeless confusion and discomfort. The eldest daughter took to bad courses, and the younger children fell oft-times into the water, and oft-times into the fire, Naturally, I did not hear this story many 82 A SANE LUNATIC times without thinking what I could do. I first went to the asylum and saw the patient. The impression I received was that she was perfectly sane. She had no hope of ever leaving the dreadful living tomb in which she had been buried, I believe, three years, and to which she had been consigned for a little feverish, light- headed talk about lions under the bed, in a restless night or two of an illness, follow- ing a violent assault. She complained bitterly of the unkindness of some of the nurses, of the dreadful language of the bond-fide lunatics amid whom she was con- fined, of the hard labour of the house of bondage. "I do have to work so blackin' grates and scrubbin' floors," she said, and then, again and again, " I shall never come out I shall never come out." I came away from the asylum myself extremely depressed. A steady November rain fell upon the funereal trees that sur- rounded it. An escaped lunatic had recently been captured and brought back to the Institution, to the general satisfac- tion of the philanthropic public. I specu- lated as to how long one might preserve 83 A SANE LUNATIC one's sanity if imprisoned in a mad- house. In answer to my pressing letters to the authorities as to the case, I received the answer that the patient was suffering from " melancholia," and that it was absolutely impossible that she should be liberated at present. I next interviewed the Com- mittee, and pressed them for any evidence of the insanity of the patient. The only answer I got was verbatim et literatim^ " she's melancholy she mopes." " Would you not be melancholy," I inquired, " if you were shut up in this place ? " I was told kindly but firmly that in the opinion of the medical advisers of the Institution it would not be safe to set her at liberty. Instances were quoted of patients who had feigned sanity so admirably and for so long a time that they had been at last discharged and who had celebrated their release by arson, murder, and suicide. To make a long story short, I did not let the matter drop, and at last received the assurance " you may rest satisfied that the patient will not be detained one moment longer than is necessary." Shortly A SANE LUNATIC after this, to my own great pleasure and the exceeding joy of the poor old mother, the moment of release came. The woman was sent back " glad and whole to her own." " If it hadn't been for you, sir, she'd have been there still," the old woman often told me. I am inclined to think so myself, and am not ashamed to say that I look back on the efforts I made for her release with unalloyed satisfaction. In the liberated prisoner no hint of insanity ever again appeared. " The matron was very much set against letting me out," the victim told us ; " she always said she could get so much work out of me of course, you can't trust the real lunatics to do anything." THE TRAMP'S LOT RETURNING recently from a brief holiday, I found myself in the county town not far from where I live, confronted with a choice of two alternatives either to walk three miles, carrying a bag, or to wait three hours for the next train. It did not take long to decide in favour of the former. The day was delightfully fine, and the bag not too heavy. Taking things easily, I got on for a mile or so comfortably enough. In fact, I had for- gotten the existence of the bag, when I was reminded of it by the appearance of something which is a familiar daily sight upon those level roads, a party of three or four men making their way to the shelter of the casual ward of the Union which stands just outside the town I had left. Some idea of asking one of the men to carry the bag began to form dimly at 86 THE TRAMP'S LOT the back of my mind, but before it had time to take shape, it was anticipated by one of them, a grey-haired and respect- able, very meek, and hungry-looking man, coming forward and asking, " Would you like some one to carry your bag, sir ? " I began to say that I was going in the opposite direction, and it would take him some distance out of his way, but before I could finish the sentence he had eagerly taken the bag from my not unwilling hands, and turned back with me on my homeward way. Falling into talk, he described the daily routine of the seeker after work in this fashion : " I have come from Wisbech to-day I have walked twenty miles. No ; I have eaten nothing since breakfast this morning. Breakfast at Wisbech is half a pound of dry bread. In some Unions, Holbeach, for instance, they give you half a pint of gruel as well, but these are the exceptions. Wis- bech gives dry bread, Lynn gives dry bread only. Breakfast is at seven o'clock after that you put in your three hours' work before you leave. The late start at ten o'clock is a great disadvantage to a man THE TRAMP'S LOT genuinely looking for work. That is no doubt why in some Unions you must stay two nights. You go in one night, do a whole day's work next day, and leave quite early the following morning. The work to be done varies in different places. I did my three hours this morning sawing wood with a circular saw. The usual task is either breaking granite or pounding stone. You are locked in a cell alone with your pile of stone or granite to break or crush ; as it is done it is shot out of an opening in the wall. Ten hundredweight of granite is the usual quantity which has to be broken in the day. The worst Union I have heard tell of is Barnsley there the task is fifteen hundredweight. The stone-breaking is a terrible punish- ment to a beginner. The first time I ever broke stone was at Doncaster. I said to the porter : * This is the first time I was ever in one of these places.' He laughed. ' They all tell us that,' he said. I tried to get on with the work, but found I could not do it. My hands were cut and blistered with burst blisters and bleed- ing. c I can't do it,' I told the porter. 88 THE TRAMP'S LOT ' You'll get used to it all right,' he said ; 4 get on with your work.' ' If I go to prison,' I thought, c it can't be a worse punishment than this,' so I put down the hammer. The porter came again, and I said, ' I suppose I shall go to prison.' ' You certainly will go to prison,' he said. I said, ' I can't help it prison can't be worse than this.' At dinner-time he came again and said, ' I find this is the first time you have been in a casual ward so, off you go.' I was bundled out without a bit of dinner. The usual dinner for the day's stone-breaking is half a pound of bread and an ounce and a half of cheese. The stone-pounding is done with an iron rammer. Yes, it is very common for men to be sent to prison who are really unable to complete their task. At Dorking, in the South of England, I knew a man get seven days' hard for not pounding his three hundredweight. The greatest quantity that can be required to be pounded is five hundredweight, but at Andover, when the new barracks were being built at Tedworth, so many men came hoping to find work there, that the quantity to be THE TRAMP'S LOT pounded in a day was raised to seven hundredweight to try to keep them out. In the course of three weeks as many as sixty or seventy men went to fourteen or twenty-one days' hard labour for not finishing their allotted task. Many men are really unable to do this work ; to spend years on the road in a constant state of starvation wears the inside away. The officials always suspect a man of shamming|; sometimes when leave is asked to see a doctor it is refused. I remember a man who said he was ill, and asked to see a doctor the porter said he was trying to shirk work. He did his three hours and at ten o'clock was sent off. Towards night of the same day he fell on the road very seriously ill. He had walked twenty- five miles on nothing. It is true that a fuss was made, and the porter got into trouble. But if you do see a doctor, it is a very humane man indeed who will certify that you are unfit for work. It is a great mistake to think the ratepayers keep the likes of us. We more than earn what we get. The fair wage for the three hours' sawing wood on a circular 90 THE TRAMP'S LOT saw, which I have done this morning, is eighteenpence. A man breaking stones on the road gets two and twopence a day. For breaking ten hundredweight of granite we get breakfast and dinner that is, a pound of bread and an ounce and a half of cheese, and two nights, not on a bed, but on three red rugs over the bare boards. Yes, if they would let you, I would rather sleep outdoors almost any night than in one of those places. But sleeping out may mean a month's hard. In some places you have to apply at the police station for a ticket before they will take you into the casual ward. The rule sometimes is you must apply before nine o'clock at night. That is the case at Gloucester. I had walked one day from Chippenham to Gloucester, thirty- two miles, with nothing inside me. I got to Gloucester Police Station at five minutes past nine. I asked the sergeant for a ticket. c After nine,' he said. ' No tickets here to-night ! ' * What am I to do, sir ? ' I asked. ' I have walked thirty- two miles I am exhausted. I am ready to drop.' c Nothing to me what you do,' THE TRAMP'S LOT he said. ' If you don't give me the ticket,' I said, ' I must go out and beg, and then I shall get into trouble.' ' You'll get into no trouble through me.' he said. 'Do what you like, but it's past nine o'clock, and you'll get no ticket here.' I went out, and stood in the street I could hardly stand and a gentleman came and spoke to me. After he had asked me a few questions, he gave me the price of a night's lodging. No, sir, nobody would take up tramping for the love of a lazy life. You go hungry on the road all day you durst not beg ; you are had up at once for begging. Many do beg, and get scraps of food of all sorts, but I never take the risk. I don't want to be locked up. I never have been yet. Nine out of every ten men on the road, in my experience, are genuinely looking for work, and un- able to find it. We're treated like dogs, sir like dogs ! " We had now come to our journey's end, and my companion received his recom- pense, and went on his way with gladness. His artless tale, which is set down here just as he told it, with no attempt at embel- 92 THE TRAMP'S LOT lishment, opened a wide field for reflection. I thought of that savagery toward the destitute poor which has been displayed by the English propertied classes ever since the Tudors. The mind goes back to the Reformation statute, which enacted that vagrants should be " whipped till their bodies were bloody by reason of said whipping." In churchwardens' books of accounts from the Reformation to the middle of the eighteenth century you may read such entries as : " To whipping a man and his wife with their children, vagrants " ; *' to whipping a female vagrant, a child, aged fifteen " ; " to examining the woman who was to be whipped, to see if she were pregnant " ; " to whipping them that had the small-pox." All these entries are quoted in " Chambers's Book of Days." In this tradition the English respectable classes have gone on, the Rector and the Churchwardens, the Squire, the farmer, the tradesman, the Guardians, the whole tribe of Bumble, to this day. "Them's what we've got to keep," the fine old rosy English farmer will exclaim from his dogcart, pointing his whip at 93 THE TRAMP'S LOT two wretched pallid figures slinking noise- lessly along the side of the road. Ardent aspirations after the cat as a means of dealing with them are again and again ejaculated by good-hearted young fellows, themselves kindness itself in all the ordinary relations of life. No one need beg, it is triumphantly said, and no one need starve, because there is always food and shelter at the Union. Where I live, one sees continually, literally every day, droves of captives, led off by the police, shackled together in threes. They are charged, mostly with begging, sometimes with sleeping out, or similar offences. The police scour the long roads on bicycles, securing these captives, for whose conviction they get a shilling a head. What one is always told is that they beg on purpose to be sent to prison, which is their true home and refuge. The truth is that they beg because they are hungry. Many of them, no doubt, will not work ; but let us in charity remember how often the reason is simply that they cannot. I myself recollect a hopeless loafer, whom we all loudly condemned. He at last deserted 94 THE TRAMP'S LOT his wife and young children and went off on tramp, to the general indignation. A few days later he was found dead on the road. The anger of the deserted wife was intense when she heard that the body had been crammed into a coffin too small for it. Well, I came from these thoughts into my own room, where I found a table covered with a week's letters, newspapers, and books. Among the latter was one called " Vagabonds in Perigord," by Mr. H. H. Bashford (Constable), which I spent the evening in reading. Here were adventures different from the listless, monotonous pac- ing of the long roads from Union to Union, hostelries of the South welcoming their pil- grims otherwise than the workhouse does, meals, with their trout and omelettes and what not, how different from the crust of bread, or the basin of gruel, or the ounce of cheese by which the English vagrant's body and soul are barely kept together. Will any who may read these lines, and who, from time to time themselves enjoy such wander- ings, remember that, at the outside, a florin will snatch one of these poor devils from this Purgatory for one night ? 95 LOBSTER-CATCHERS AND LOBSTER-EATERS I HAVE just read a book by Mr. Stephen Reynolds, who is, in fact, the one living English writer who shows us working- class life from the inside. This is a very different thing to the writing of those who are, indeed, in close touch with working- class life, but after all remain outside it. Anyone, so to speak at least anyone with some .power of observation and sympathy can get into close touch with working people, and then come away and, in an altogether different atmosphere, record his impressions ; but Mr. Reynolds appears to have merged himself in the life of the working classes. Hence, one looks upon him with the somewhat uncomfortable veneration with which one regards a mystic. Mr. Bourne comes nearest to him; but Mr. Bourne lives in a Surrey LOBSTER-CATCHERS village, and writes about the people with admirable discernment and sympathy, no doubt while Mr. Reynolds lives in a Devon village, amid fishermen, and lives the life of the people. He shares their work and food. With an artist's power of expression, and writing an English of ex- traordinary lucidity, he puts down a fisher- man's thoughts. Although I recognize to the full the admirable qualities of Mr. Reynolds's work, I shiver a little at the atmosphere in which I find myself enwrapped. We set out on the fisherman's holiday with a vague discomfort, knowing that we shall have not only to hear about it, but must ourselves eat the one-franc-fifty bouilla- baisse in the real fishermen's inns, and take our pleasure at the real fishermen's quayside cafes (we have all seen them at Marseilles or Havre), not as interested spectators from other spheres, but as one of themselves. This book may be commended to the careful perusal and consideration of all the so-called " upper classes," " better classes," to parsons and district visitors, magistrates G 97 LOBSTER-CATCHERS who sentence poachers, colonels who lecture the youth of the working classes on the blessedness of conscription and self-sacrifice for their country, the Primrose Dames and camellia-complexioned ladies and wicked counts, to all the idle rich lately animad- verted upon by Mr. Lloyd George, and in particular to all eaters of lobsters. How many of those who eat lobsters at Ascot, in London restaurants, at ball-suppers, ever give one thought to how the lobster came there the toil and endurance by which it has been caught for them. Let all such read the story with which Mr. Rey- nolds's book opens, "Benjie and the Bogey Man." Benjie is a fisherman who has no lobster- pots (they were broken up last October gales, and he cannot afford to replace them), but sometimes fishes up lobsters in his shrimping-nets. The Bogey Man is the inspector who comes from time to time to inspect the fishermen's catches. Benjie tells him : " ' I on'y hope your duty won't never bring 'ee to keeping a roof over your head LOBSTER-CATCHERS wi' shrimping an' measuring the crabs and lobsters what you catches wi' an inch rule in the dark.' " The Bogey Man carries away the under- sized shell-fish, and subsequently Benjie has to appear in court. "Vivian Maddicke was on the bench. He always is. He takes his duties as a gentleman and a magistrate almost as seri- ously as he takes himself. That is to say, he does try, at considerable personal incon- venience, to administer justice to hold the balance between an efficient and re- spectful police force and an unruly lower class. He spends, indeed, not a little of his abundant leisure in pointing out to the poor the advantages of hard work, and in impressing on them his own view of right and wrong." Well, by this magnate, Benjie is fined a pound. The magistrate remarks that this is not a large sum, amid murmurs of dis- sent from the fishermen at the back of the court. This is, however, more than Benjie 99 LOBSTER-CATCHERS can pay " wi'out selling up some of the gear what he's got to earn his living with." En revanche, he invites the magistrate to a night's fishing. " c An' I tell 'ee what. You come down 'long wi' me one night, and see what 'tis like for yourself. Then you'll know. Duty ain't never no excuse for not know- ing. . . . You come just for one night. That'll teach 'ee more'n any amount of chackle.' " To the other fishermen Benjie remarks: " c You bide a bit an' see. The likes o' they sort thinks they baint ignorant and us be.' ' Maddicke does come he shudders at the smell of fishmongers' putrid offal ; the stink of dead things takes the strength out of him. He sweats at the oars, and yet he is cold ; he does not gather the sense of what Benjie says ; he refuses the supper of cold tea and bread-and-butter ; he pulls his outside oar pulls inside, not outside ; 100 LOBSTER-CATCHERS backs outside, backs both he is " proper 'mazed." " ' Better take a rest,' Benjie tells him, 4 and while I counts the prawns you measure the lobsters like they says us ought to.' " Maddicke felt for a lobster in the dark, and after several gingerly attempts and several amiable warnings from Benjie to mind its claws he succeeded in holding it. He found also the nine-inch mark on the rule ; but while he was trying to spread the lobster out flat on a thwart and to feel where the tip of its beak was, according to regulations, the thing nipped him suddenly and savagely. " ' Ough ! ' he cried out like a child. < Ough ah-h-h ! ' " ' What's the matter there ? Can't 'ee do it ? * he heard from the shadow of Benjie aft. " c It's bitten me it's biting me now ! ' " ' Squeeze his eyes, then he'll leave go. Lord, they bites me every night, but I don't take no heed o' it.' 101 LOBSTER-CATCHERS Maddicke tore at the lobster. His other hand was nipped in the fleshy part of the thumb. He broke off one claw, and still the other held fast. He stood up and dashed his hand about. He trod on lobsters and crabs. . . ." Yes, dear friends, who first meet the lobster masked in mayonnaise, blushing amid his green lettuce-leaves, there has been a long struggle with him before that stage is reached. He is not even red when, alive and nipping, he comes out of the sea. We will not pursue this story to the cruelty of its climax in the thunderstorm and the abject state of panic-terror into which the J.P. falls, but we heartily commend it to all our readers. To the lobster-catchers themselves, the class to whom is continually preached, for instance, the sacrificial glory and beauty of conscription, I recommend the sketch called " To Save Life." The lifeboat in- spector and the Committee insist on the fishermen giving a "demonstration drill" in wild weather by way of practising. " Call a committee meeting at once," 102 LOBSTER-CATCHERS snapped the chairman. " Are the fisher- men here afraid of the sea ? " As a result, the men put out to sea and two lives arc lost. Miners and fishermen, indeed, are not likely to bow down to false gods to false gods of this sort ; they have no wish to be made the vicarious sacrifices offered by the high priests of militarism ; but in Mr. Reynolds they will find their view made articulate. One other story I will mention, " Twinses," because it recalls old experi- ences of my own of the way in which poor people live. The following sentence tells enough for our purpose : " ' Law, Mrs. Giles/ said the other woman cheerfully, ' you must try and bear up. P'raps 'twill please the Almighty to smile down and take one on 'em.' ' Well, I myself have lived quite close to the working poor ; have lived under the same roof with them ; all day long and every day have seen their life and work going on around me, though I have never shared it, as Mr. Reynolds does ; and I can bear witness and testify to the dread, 103 LOBSTER-CATCHERS the terror, and distress caused to the women of the labouring poor by the prospect of childbirth. I was alone in one part of a divided house one day, in the other half of which, also alone, was a poor woman on whom suddenly the pangs of labour came. The husband was at work; the children, except the smallest babies, at school ; there was neither doctor nor nurse (the parish nurse had gone off on the day before to see a friend at a distance, saying that if she didn't go then it would be at least two months before she could see her again) ; with the next-door neighbour the patient herself was not on speaking terms. " If that woman comes into the house I shall die it will kill me," she moaned. I ran distractedly hither and thither to the nearest cottages. " I ain't a bit o' good in them sort o' things," said Mrs. Newman ; " they allus turns me round and makes me feel that queer. Besides, I ain't got a bit o' moist sugar in the house, and I'm just goin' to pop into town by the four train to get some." Next I proceeded to the wife of a working farmer a dour Lancashire woman, with strong views on lighted 104 LOBSTER-CATCHERS candles and a pure gospel, with whom my own relations were somewhat difficult. "I'll come," she said doubtfully, "but I'm not a bit o' good. What I shall do is to fetch Mrs. Hebble, let her say what she likes." Mrs. Hebble was just in time. " Now, my gal," I heard her say, firmly and decisively. I spent the evening sitting on a gate out- side the cottage, in company with Hebble, divided between pride and indignation that his so long insulted spouse had been called in to save her enemy's life. " One half of the world doesn't know how the other half lives," says the proverb. But Mr. Reynolds does. 105 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA THE " Memories of a Spectator," by Mr. J. S. Fletcher, has set me thinking of many things, not least of the history of religion in England, or, rather, the history of the religion of the English people. The author tells us that he is the son of a Nonconformist minister, who died when he was eight months old. He was born in Halifax in 1863, and lived there till the age of seven, when he was transferred to the care of his maternal grandmother, in a village between Ferrybridge and Don- caster, on the Great North Road. The description he gives of this old lady, and her way of life, is most interesting. Here is his account of her religious profession : " She was known far and wide as a woman of great piety, and people who were anxious about their souls came to see 1 06 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA and talk to her from long distances. As for her particular profession of religion, she was a Methodist of a type which is, I believe, now quite extinct, for while she had been from girlhood a member of the Wesleyan Society, she also regarded herself as a strict member of the Church of England, and she had always attended her parish church with regularity, was a com- municant there, and would have thought it a strange thing if her children had not been baptized at church, married at church, and buried at church. She had known several people in her youth who had seen John Wesley, and she always held that that remarkable man never left the Church of England, nor intended his followers to leave it." The Methodists I knew in my own child- hood always declared that they were not Dissenters. The position in which they found themselves was one which they had not voluntarily adopted, but which had been forced by circumstances upon them. I hope I am not really digressing from the consideration of Mr. Fletcher's very in- 107 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA teresting book, which appears to me to cast great light upon the history of the English people the old-fashioned people of Eng- land, the old tradesmen and farmers if I sketch out in a few sentences what I believe the history of religious opinion in England to have been. Up to the Armada I believe the mass of the English people to have been Catholic. The result of the Armada was an enormous growth of national feeling. The Church must be national too. But the people had not yet become Puritan. The Elizabethan Pro- testantism is well represented by the robust declaration of that English sailor in the prison of the Inquisition at Seville : " Our Mass is as good as yours ! " But the cleavage of England and Europe once made, Pro- testant opinion grew apace, and by the time of the Civil War the English middle classes had become definitely Puritan in belief. There was a definite indeed, a passionate repudiation of the Mass. At the Restoration, the bulk of the people threw off the Puritan discipline forced upon them by the zealots ; they returned to plum-pudding and mince pies, to May- 108 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA poles and mistletoe ; but so far as they had any doctrine at all, their doctrine was still Protestant. It is an old story how, under the Hanoverian regime, as far as the Church of England is concerned, this doctrine grew ever dimmer and more indistinct, the con- troversial Christianity being kept alive by the Nonconformist sects. The whole people was doubtless united in a national hatred of Popery, brass money, wooden shoes, frog- eating, and all such deplorable ways and doings of foreigners. I have myself known Crimean colonels, veterans of Alma and of Inkerman, who declared that the religion of the Turks was " much purer " than that of the Russians. But the event of the most extreme import- ance in the religious history of England is, of course (at least since the Reformation), the Methodist revival. John Wesley is the first of the makers of modern England at least, on its spiritual side. His movement differed from the earlier Protestantism in being essentially devotional, not contro- versial. His converts adopted the current Puritanism of the existing Nonconformist sects as the setting and framework of their 109 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA spiritual life, because they found no other ready to hand. I have spoken at length on this, because Mr. Fletcher's book of reminiscences is greatly concerned with religious matters. It is the story of his conversion as much as Newman's " Apologia " is. In the preface, he says, contentedly, " For five-and-twenty years I have been a Papist." His account of the religious atmosphere of his North Riding village forty years or so ago, its " churchers " and " chapellers," rectors and curates and church restorations is most interesting and enlightening. Mr. Fletcher was one of those innumerable young men whom the Oxford move- ment little impression as it has made on the great mass profoundly impressed and attracted. He delighted in the beauty of his restored parish church. " With the sweeping away of the whitewash and the plaster, and all the rest of the Puritan filth, what a beautiful old church stood revealed," he says. " Incidentally, too, 1 was interested from the fact that I gave Mr. Wrangham, I 10 A JOURNALISTS APOLOGIA for the restoration fund, the very first money I ever earned by writing. It was a great sum a guinea. I hope it repre- sented the scraping off of a lot of plaster." Whatever one's " views," it is pleasant to think of the lad doing this. I cannot refrain from giving a few of Mr. Fletcher's good stories, illustrating the old-fashioned village atmosphere, and, of course, the history and especially the religious his- tory of the English people. For instance : "The fact is that what is understood by the terms 'religion,' and ' to be religious,' was something which was supposed to be the strict prerogative of the Methodists. 4 I'm a Churcher, always has been, and always shall be, 'cos I were brought up to it,' I once heard a woman say ; ' but there's no doubt that the Chappillers is on much better terms with Them Above nor what we are, they're more friendly with 'em, as it weer.' Mr. Maurice Hewlett, in one of his Italian novels, speaks of the familiarity of the people with all the Heavenly com- iii A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA pany. There is no doubt that the medieval populace was " more friendly with 'em, as it weer," " nor what we are." I have myself, again and again, in country villages, heard " religious " used as a synonym for "chapel-going." A house- maid of the writer, recently discoursing on the virtues of her " young man," re- marked, " he neither smokes nor drinks, and he goes to chapel twice every Sunday, and I don't see how anybody can be more perfect than that." It is undoubtedly the fact that, at any rate until quite recently, more " religion," in the literal sense, more things that were " binding," that were of " obligation," were laid upon " chappillers " than upon " churchers." Another story which appears to amuse Mr. Fletcher very much is that of a Ritualistic curate, who set up a crucifix in the bedroom of a dying woman, to the great indignation of her friends, who asserted that, but for this, she would have lasted a month longer. " It made her think o' things yere no right to think about on yer deathbed," they said. Speaking of funerals, those great festivals of the country poor, he has the following : I 12 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA " We buried three others with roast beef," said a woman who had just lost her daughter, " but as it's Michaelmas, we've concluded to bury 'Liza wi' roast goose it seems more suitable like." "Theer's a gold bird for t' parson to read on," said a woman about the new lectern. " Oh ! miss, why do they bow to the great brass eagle?" inquired a woman, of a friend of my own. " I had a beautiful place," said another in my ex- perience, " right up, just under the fowl." " There was four on 'em up by the candles," said an old farmer to a friend of mine, describing some function he had attended. But Mr. Fletcher's experiences and good stories are by no means all of an ecclesiastical cast. The book reveals an engaging, many-sided personality. He is a keen sportsman, and he tells us that, although a fiery Radical in his youth, he " has long been a Tory." I myself differ from Tories only in opinion, and have, in general, a great liking for them. I have all my life consistently followed the well- H 113 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA known advice, than which, in my opinion, no sounder can be given, to " dine with the Tories and vote with the Radicals." At any rate, the writer of this sentence has my warm heart : " It is not so many years since the late Mr. Batty-Wrightson showed me, in his gardens at Cusworth Hall, an out-of-door cock-pit, cunningly devised amid trees and flowers, where the Sir Geoffreys and Sir Tobys of another day used to sit of a Sunday afternoon, and sip their claret, and watch their favourites fight a main." Mr. Fletcher, as a young man, left his Yorkshire village, and went to London to follow the " simple trade " of an author. With this book in our hands, we do not wonder at his success. His articles in the Leeds Mercury, under the pseudonym, " Son of the Soil," found readers in every part of the world. It must have been a pleasure to him to have received a letter from "an old maid, who said that she had neither friend nor relation in the world, that she 114 A JOURNALISTS APOLOGIA earned a scanty living as a dressmaker in a big, dreary town, out of which she never escaped, and that her one weekly treat was to read my article over her Sunday cup of tea, ' because it made her remember the country.' 3 And in another sense, I may say that books like this help us to understand the country. How the life of old stay-at- home village England before the railway is brought before us by the story of the old lady, who " after she became a septuagenarian was induced to take a jaunt to the top of Went Hill, possibly two miles from her cottage. She came back with the remark that she had no idea there was so much land outside the parish." No space is left to quote the story of the old road-mender, whose father had seen a battle fought " in the days of the Romans," in reality a skirmish, in 1745, between the Hanoverian and the Jacobite troops. Under the dust of the present, the past of English history is indeed still "5 A JOURNALIST'S APOLOGIA there ; it is all about us. One lunches in a North-country roadside inn, and a month or two later reads in the newspaper that an authentic portrait of Shakespeare has been discovered in that very house. In an old chest in a Lincolnshire farm-house there is discovered a badge actually worn in the Pilgrimage of Grace. In ambitious moments one has sometimes dreamed of a great comprehension and reconciliation that might be brought about by a com- plete recovery of the past. The whole tribe of writers, and all we who dabble in scribbling, would help towards such a re- covery being sometimes made, if we would leave flight and fancies, and put down truly, as Mr. Fletcher does, the things that we see. 116 CHRISTIANITY AND CLERICALISM THERE would seem to be no question more fraught with interest in itself, or with which the future of mankind is more deeply concerned, than the inquiry whether Clericalism will strangle Christianity, or whether there is life and strength enough in Christendom to expel Clericalism while remaining Christian and orthodox. I who write these lines and there must be many such would wish to describe myself as an anti-Clerical Catholic. There must be many, one says, and yet in truth one never comes across them. They would appear to be, if they exist at all, indeed rari nantes in gurgite vasfo. People one knows become Catholics. Immediately they think it necessary to become the enthusiastic de- fenders of everything that in the long course of the ages has been done in the 117 CHRISTIANITY G? CLERICALISM cause of the Church. They are humane and kindly Christian men, honest and truth-loving Englishmen. They have a natural hatred of injustice and cruelty. But their religion is dearer to them than anything in the world. It is indeed the religion of the Beatitudes, and this is the character which they themselves strive after. But in accepting it they commit themselves to Clericalism. They com- pletely identify the two things. One of the ever-recurring crises of the European struggle with Clericalism arrives, and you find people who would not themselves wilfully hurt a worm shouting themselves hoarse with cries of " Dreyfus is guilty," or expending the utmost ingenuity in blackening the character of Ferrer. On the other hand, in the shock of their generous indignation against such scandals, many Christians cry out like the young girl in Browning when the old mild father brings her lover to the scaffold by break- ing the seal of the confessional in the interest of the Bourbons, " It is a lie . . . all, all they think or hope." But the choice cannot really be between 118 CHRISTIANITY Gf CLERICALISM humanity and justice on the one hand, and historic Christianity on the other. A loyal Christian man, who understands what Christianity really means, cannot be false to either of these things. Christianity is not truly represented by a system which asks him to do so. The unique value of historic Christianity, its power of satisfy- ing the human heart and mind and soul, is in nothing more clearly seen than in the fact that so many deliberately sacrifice not so much their intellect as their moral sense, all that is best and most human in them, to it. In controversies such as I have mentioned they vehemently take a side at which their natural inclination would be to shudder. They do this because they think religion is at stake, and that historic Christianity is inseparably bound up with the system which demands these victims from time to time. For European men, indeed, religion is Christianity. There is no other. To me for one, at least, this is quite obvious and self-evident. Criticism may make what it likes, for instance, of the Gospel of St. John, may assign it to this date or that, 119 CHRISTIANITY Gf CLERICALISM but when all has been said it is enough to compare it with other religious writings giving themselves out to be somewhat, Gnostic or Mormon, Cabalistic or Christian Scientist, Jew, Greek, or American, to see that there is something in it which is not in them. Consider the glorious audacity of its statements : " And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us " ; " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father " ; "I am the Resurrection and the Life." Think what you like of these assertions, but for Europe, for the future, it is this or nothing. Multitudes of minds, alike on the Christian and the anti-Christian side, say "A thousand times no!", to vague sentimentalism, to guesses erected into dogmas, to the assertion of the belief in the goodness of God and the value of man coupled with the denial of that which alone has revealed these things and rendered them credible to us. Again, much has been said of the beauty and happiness of the old Hellenic religion and its superiority to Christianity. But think of this one fact. When the last sacrifice of the Hellenic world was offered 120 CHRISTIANITY Gf CLERICALISM to the Olympian gods in the laurel groves of Daphne, when the Emperor Julian, one of the most attractive and touching figures in the whole history of the world, knelt beside some poor old, pathetic, world-wearied, drunken pagan priest before the glorious ivory statue of Apollo, which the years had coloured like pale gold, the sacrifice they offered was a goose. When the last Mass is said, as on any showing it must one day be, the sacrifice that in belief and in intention will be offered is that of a Human Life and Death of perfect holiness and goodness, the holiness and goodness of God Himself, and united with it the whole upward striving of humanity, all the charity and self-sacrifice, all that in man has been pure, all that has been lovely from the beginning of the world. The Galilean must have con- quered a religion which had nothing better to offer to God than geese. Religion lives in and by the people. It is a living tradition, the experience of countless individual lives, handed down through the generations. If the people become alienated from it, if they cease to 121 CHRISTIANITY Sf CLERICALISM experience it, it must die. The great strength of Christianity is that from the first it has been a popular religion. The experience of the eye-witnesses, of those who had themselves seen the great Christian facts in all their vivid reality, lived on in the minds of those who received their message and became part of them, and were by them in turn trans- mitted to those who came after them. The early Christians went everywhere bear- ing their witness. " That which was from the beginning," they declared, " which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of Life (for the Life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that Eternal Life, which was with the Father, and which was manifested unto us), that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you that your joy may be full." This is Christianity, the end of 122 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM all men's seeking, the glad tidings of great joy. They went everywhere eagerly telling the tale. " He that saw it bare record," writes St. John, " and his record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe." He would tell how he had lain on the Lord's breast at supper, how he ran first and entered the empty Tomb. St. Thomas would tell how he had put his fingers into the prints of the nails and thrust his hand into the Side. St. Mary Magdalene would tell how she had anointed the Sacred Feet and wiped them with her hair, and had heard the mysterious " Touch Me not " in the Garden. St. Ignatius of Antioch would tell how as a little child he had been blessed by the Saviour. These things became part of human language ; they gave rise to popular proverbs and phrases everywhere. There is, for instance, an exact Russian equivalent for Noli me tangere for a touchy, sensitive person. From them too came shrines, relics, pilgrimages. Christianity was a real fact which had actually happened in the world, and which in its mystical perpetuation in the Church 123 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM profoundly affected the mind of the people. It cannot be denied that this immense popular impression in Protestant countries was greatly weakened, though never en- tirely destroyed, by the divisions of the sixteenth century and the rise of Puri- tanism. A possible " interest in Christ " was substituted for an actual incorporation into Him. The sense of a personal relationship to Our Lord which had hitherto been diffused through the mass of the community was thereby destroyed. It is needless to labour this point ; it is sufficiently indicated by the change of the pronoun used in commonly speaking of Our Lord. He became " the Lord." He was no longer the Head of all Humanity, the Redeemer of the World. It goes without saying that in the new atmo- sphere the devotion to Our Lady altogether perished. This had its root in the sense of a personal relationship to her Son. It seems to have begun even before the birth of the Child. The words of St. Elizabeth : " And whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should come to me ? " 124 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM have this personal note, this sense of an actual tie. One may frankly admit that one does not practise this devotion oneself, having been brought up and lived in such a different atmosphere, and may at the same time confess that it appears to belong to normal and universal Christianity, and to be a living part of the true tradition. Again, the people of Catholic countries not only see the Crucifix everywhere, but many of them themselves make crucifixes. The Passion thus becomes part of the life of every village wood-carver. He spends his time, his thought, his skill upon it. In the Tyrol every child knows all its implements : the seamless coat, the dice, the column, the lantern, the very sun and moon. Dickens in Pictures from Italy appears to have had great difficulty, by the way, in making them out. With such things all around them, seeing them and making them, simple souls " see the Son and believe on Him." Personally I have a very strong convic- tion that the traditional popular Chris- tianity greatly increases the happiness of 125 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM those who practise it. It is strange to think that in the time of Bunyan, whose awful struggles reflect what a large part of the English people had come to mean by Christianity, the delightful noels of Saboly appeared the normal expression of the Christianity of Provence. The very irre- verences of Catholic countries which shock us so deeply show the hold which Chris- tianity has on the people. I remember playing a game of dominoes with an Italian workman. As he lost the game he exclaimed with light-hearted, innocent profanity, " Sia fatta la volonta del Divino Redentore." This was no doubt an echo of words often heard from the lips of good old people smitten by misfortune, from holy death-beds in villages of the Euganean Hills. As a small boy who had heard little good of Catholics, I was one day startled by the devout exclamation of an old Irish- woman, who asked how my whitlow was, and on being told that it was better, ejaculated fervently, " Now the good Jesus be praised ! " In my own belief the greatest danger to 126 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM this traditional popular Christianity is an unscrupulous intriguing Clericalism and the revulsion produced by its machinations in humane and honest minds. To the modern Clerical the triumph of religion means the temporal domination of the Church. In the interest of this ideal he perhaps unconsciously corrupts and per- verts the Faith. He unblushingly iden- tifies Christianity with religious persecu- tion. He makes no secret of the intention of the Church to recommence as soon as under the old conditions she gets the old chance. People indeed in the past have been burned and tortured for denying not only specifically " Catholic " but all Christian doctrines. ' Let us take at random a few of these hideous, these to us incredible cases. By the Act of the Six Articles, for instance, passed under that great Anglo-Catholic champion Henry VIII., " in order to overcome double- dealing heretics," as Professor Gairdner tells us in his latest volume, apparently with high approbation, no recantation availed to save the denier of the Real Presence from the death by fire. One of 127 CHRISTIANITY Gf CLERICALISM the sufferers under this Act was a boy named William Meakin, aged fifteen, who, before his death, recanted and bewailed with many tears his too great attention to the sermons of a certain Dr. Barnes. Professor Gairdner quotes this case, oddly enough, as a proof of the great kindness and humanity of Bonner, Bishop of Lon- don, who seems to have gone and argued with this wretched child in prison. He is very indignant with the Protestant writers for insinuating in their account of these proceedings that Meakin was unduly influenced to speak well of Bonner ! Under Edward VI. a woman named Joan Boucher was burned alive for denying the reality of Our Lord's Humanity. Dr. Scory, Bishop Ridley's chaplain, preached at her burning. George van Paris, a Dutchman, was burned for the same opinion in the same reign. In 1612 a Unitarian named Bartholomew Legate was burned alive at Lichfield. One of the bishops who handed him over to the secular arm was the saintly Andrewes. In 1696 a youth named Thomas Aikenhead, aged eighteen, was hanged at Edinburgh 128 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM for ridiculing the various books of the Bible. He recanted and begged in vain for a few days' respite in which to prepare for death. The Edinburgh ministers clamoured for his immediate execution. I have purposely selected cases of perse- cution occurring outside the Roman Communion, because outside of that com- munion no one probably contemplates a renewal of these practices. The Roman Clericalism, the Clericalism of the Con- tinent " 1'infame," " Tennemi," as its opponents call it is absolutely impenitent in the matter of religious persecution. Mgr. Benson in his recent novel, The Dawn of All, is at pains to make this quite clear to English readers, if there are any who doubt it. It may be objected that it is unfair to adduce a novel as evidence of such a statement. Mgr. Benson, however, evidently knows what he is talking about. Like the early Chris- tians, he writes what he has seen and heard in intimate Clerical circles. He describes the triumph of the Church in the coming Clerical reaction, the state of things which, according to the Clerical i 129 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM idea, would be the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. One of the normal incidents of that state of things, which gives no one even a moment's uneasiness, is the putting to death of a heretic. The protagonist of the book is disturbed by the milieu in which he finds himself. Here, for instance, is a sentence or two : " At first he could not believe what he read. He had turned more than once to the title-page of the great quarto, thinking that he must find it to be a reprint of some mediaeval work. But its title was unmistakable. The book was printed in Rome in the spring of the present year." One feels that Mgr. Benson has that book, dealing with the penalties of heresy, in his hands, in his own study. In the story the heretic is executed with the high approba- tion of everybody, and to the entire satis- faction of the heretic himself. He glories in the principle, but denies that he is a proper subject for its application. " ' Per- sonally, I believe that I myself am innocent, but if I am a heretic ' (he leaned forward again and spoke slowly) c if I am a heretic ' I must be put to death by 130 CHRISTIANITY & CLERICALISM society.' ' When the sentence is carried out we are told that the perplexed priest, whose experiences in this new world the book describes, " neither knew nor dared to ask in what form. It was enough that it was death." Mgr. Benson himself prob- ably knows very well what is the canoni- cal punishment of heretics according to the book printed at Rome in the spring of the present year. " Not burn heretics ! " Pio Nono is reported to have said, if we remember rightly, to Cardinal Manning. " Why, eleven Popes have burned them ! " In a very curious passage Mgr. Benson throws great light on the raison d'etre of modern Clerical and Ultramontane theo- logy, which is felt by some who are by no means Protestants to amount almost to a denial of traditional Christianity : " There stood imminent over the world a tremendous Figure that was already even more a Judge than a Saviour a Personality that already had the Power and reigned ; one to Whose feet all the world crept in silence, Who spoke ordinarily and normally through His Vicar on earth, who was CHRISTIANITY Gf CLERICALISM represented on this or that plane by this court or the other . . . one who was literally King of Kings ; to Whose final judgment every one might appeal if he would but face the death through which alone the appeal might be conveyed." The Christ of Clericalism then is a colossal Grand Inquisitor, an infinitely magnified Philip II. Mgr. Benson may well say that in this presentation the priest " failed to recognise the Christianity he seemed once to have known, long ago." To indicate the contrast it presents to the traditional popular Christianity of Catholic lands, it is only necessary to mention the common phrase, springing up, I suppose, among simple people to whom M. le Cure explained the Gospel at Mass on Sundays "/! she added contemptuously. When this frame of mind had been mellowed by tea and other refreshments, the Vicar placed four half-crowns on the table, suggesting that though, of course, this sum was in no sense a payment or compensation for her loss, it might be looked upon as a slight acknowledgment of its greatness. She indicated its nothing- ness with a truly magnificent gesture, then rising and curtseying low, silently pocketed the four coins and withdrew. The cat was one of four brindled starvelings that roamed about her premises. For my own part, I gladly recognize a certain rough and fundamental honesty in most humbugs, though there is no doubt a stage at which plausibility passes into crime. This point seems almost to have been reached by the daughter-in-law above mentioned. She was a woman of in- gratiating, even fascinating manners, with a pale face, and flattering, smiling eyes. Her flatteries were not always very logical, T 289 IN PRAISE OF HUMBUGS but they were always charming. For instance, on one occasion a lady, having, at great expense and trouble to herself, given a Christmas Tree and treat to all the children in the village, Mrs. Edward Stillman exclaimed enthusiastically, " Miss Wells is worthy of it." She had a boy with the same pleasing, smiling manners. The lad worked like a Trojan, and it did one good to hear him whistle as he worked. Village rumour said that at home he was taught to steal, and sent out at night with a bag to collect cabbages, lettuces, any- thing he could find. It was proposed to the mother that he should go into farm- service at a good place a few miles from home. " He's young yet," she replied, " he needs a mother's care." On one occasion a curtain was found to have suddenly disappeared from the Parish Church. Many theories were evolved to account for its disappea/ance, a great hue and cry was raised, but nothing could be heard of it. At last the donor of the curtain herself discovered it in Mrs. Edward Stillman's cottage, serving as a cover for the cradle of her baby. No 290 IN PRAISE OF HUMBUGS steps were taken except that in the Sun- day School lurid representations were given of the enormity of the sin of theft, and the extreme seriousness of the con- sequences which were likely to ensue. This seems to have alarmed the boy. Shortly afterwards he arrived at the Vicar- age with a message that the long-lost curtain had been found " in our people's yard." There lay the curtain sure enough. " Whoever's taken it," said Mrs. Stillman musingly, " they've kept it beautifully clean." Humbugs, at any rate, are not obdurate. Their minds are much too flexible for them not to be open to reason. 291 THE LORE OF THE EARTHLY PARADISE WALTER PATER speaks of " that other country with slenderer towers and more winding rivers, and trees like flowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefully proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of the exile and the pilgrim, and the schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly everywhere build up before and behind them." This is what Man, the exile, and the pilgrim, from the first, has done. It has been with the race as it is with the individual. As the world-weary man, heart-sick, remem- bers the house where he was born, with the little windows through which the morning sun came peeping, to his dreamy recollection it becomes ever more beau- tiful, wildly and fantastically fair, shining with a light that never was on land or sea. 292 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE He knows that he is " farther off from heaven than when he was a boy." " Heaven lies about us in our infancy." The poet tells us that " with trailing clouds of splendour do we come from God Who is our Home." The splendour vanishes, the vision fades, but our souls still dream of the immortal sea which brought us hither, and on calm, still days some few have even caught glimpses of it. Some recollection of the high Eastern uplands from which the Aryan peoples first migrated may have been the germ of the myth of the Earthly Paradise. The recollection would be ever more em- bellished as time went on. Fancy pictured in the far past a happy place and time not only the Garden of Paradise, but the Age of Gold. This was the " Saturnian reign " of the old Italians. Dante says of the Earthly Paradise : Quelli che anticamente poetaro L' eta del oro e suo stato felice Forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro. Qui fu innocente 1' umana radice ; Qui primavera e sempre, ed ogni frutto ; Nettare e questo di che ciascun dice. (Purg. xxviii. 139-44). 293 The men who fabled and who sang of old, Perchance upon Parnassus dreamed this place, Chanting the happy state, the age of gold. Here once was innocent the human root ; This is the nectar of which all men tell ; Here is eternal spring, and each sweet fruit. Man, the wanderer, carried the memory of this lost garden with him on his journey, as the Breton fisherman takes the little green bit of box blessed on Palm Sunday on his voyage in Polar seas. It is the thought of Home. It is an instinctive feeling to think of the cradle of the human race as being in the East towards the sunrise, the quarter where the star of life and light arises. The islands of Elysium, the abodes of the Blessed Dead, were placed westward, in the regions where the sun sinks and dis- appears. But Paradise is the place of Life its two great treasures are the Tree of Life and the Fountain of Life. " God planted a garden eastward in Eden " (Gen. xi. 8). The Fathers say that Christians pray towards the East as seeking their lost country. The Vulgate, however, instead of " ad orientem" says " a principio" Let us take the description of Paradise 294 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE from the Golden Legend^ that great store- house of mediaeval lore : " God had planted in the beginning Paradise, a place of desire and delights. And man was made in the field of Damascus ; he was made of the slime of the earth. Paradise was made the third day of creation, and was beset with herbs, plants, and trees, and is a place of most mirth and joy. In the midst thereof be set two trees, that is the tree of life, and that other, the tree of knowing good and evil. And there is a well which casteth out water to water the trees and herbs of Paradise. This well is the mother of all waters, which well is divided into four parts. One part is called Phison ; this goeth about Inde. The second is called Gijon, otherwise Nilus, and that runneth about Ethiopia ; the other two be called Tigris and Euphrates. Tigris runneth towards Assyria, and Euphrates is called fruitful, which runneth in Chaldea. These four floods come and spring out of the same well, and depart, and yet in some place spme of them meet again." From the earliest antiquity at least up to the Renaissance no Jew, Christian, or 2 95 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE Saracen doubted that the lost Garden veritably still existed on earth. The imaginations and conjectures as to its situation were endless. It was placed by some in the orr/x&N' of Aristotle, the region exactly opposite the inhabited earth, and separated from it by the un- navigable sea. By others it was thought of as an island infinitely remote, but still included in our hemisphere. The early cosmographers believed that the earth was oblong in shape and consisted of two parts, an interior and an exterior one divided by a sea which surrounded the interior part. The outward part rose up to heaven and joined the sky, which covered the whole as a dome. The Earthly Paradise was in the eastern part of this. In this outward part of the earth men were believed to have lived until the Flood. Noah, drifting on the waters of the Deluge, traversed this sea, and when the waters abated landed in Persia. The Four Rivers issuing from Eden ran underneath this sea into the interior part of the world. Dante places the ever green garden on the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, 296 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE which itself rises from the sea in that point of space exactly opposite to Jerusa- lem. Jerusalem itself was, of course, believed to be the centre of the earth, according to that saying, " This is Jerusa- lem ; I have set her in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her" (Ezek. v. 5). There would of course be, as has often been pointed out, a natural desire to make all the circum- stances of the story of the Fall correspond with that of the Redemption. But it was more generally believed to be an island of our own hemisphere. It was " a sweet country seated towards the East in the great sea that surrounds all the world." The old travellers, like Sir John Mande- ville, usually speak of it as being " beyond India." It was by many held to be in the island of Ceylon. It was, moreover, placed on the summit of a lofty mountain. The Apostle St. Matthew, who left all earthly goods without delay to seek the better portion, is said in the Golden Legend to have made in Ethiopia " a great sermon of the glory of Paradise terrestrial, saying that it ap- 297 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE peared above all the mountains and was nigh unto heaven, and that there were neither thorns nor rocks, and that the lilies and roses flourished always and waxed never old ; but the people were there always young, and the sound of angels sounded there always, and the birds came anon as they were called. And said that out of this Paradise was a man cast, but he was called to the Paradise of Heaven by the Nativity of Our Lord." The waters of the Deluge, which covered the tops of the loftiest mountains, only rose to the foot of the wall which surrounded the mysterious Garden, and then sank, powerless to rise higher. The traditional traits of the picture of the sacred Garden placed upon a holy mountain surrounded by a wall of fire, are all found in this passage of the Prophecy of Ezekiel : " Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God ; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the 298 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE carbuncle, and gold ; the workmanship of thy tabrets and thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that cover- eth ; and I have set thee so ; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God ; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire" (Ezek. xxviii. 12-14). Again, we are told that in the recovered Eden " they shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain " (Isa. xi. 9). The description of the animals dwelling at peace together is here especially noteworthy. Of the joys and glories of the happy garden who can tell ? A mediaeval rhymer says : " Eden digne pignere vanum est conari, Stillas paucas extraho de tarn magno mari." Heaven was known as the Celestial Paradise, but the imagery used in de- scribing it by the fathers and doctors and poets of the Church was all taken from the Earthly One. Thus Richard of Ham- pole, the Yorkshire hermit saint, says : " Of that dear City, the Scripture saith There is Life without any death ; 2 99 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE And there is youth without any age, All kind of wealth and no war to wage ; . . . And there is peace without any strife, All manner of pleasure, all fullness of life, And there without murkiness perfect light, Eternal day and no coming night ; And there is summer full bright to see, And never more winter in that Countree," The quaintly splendid sixteenth-century hymn, " Hierusalem, my happy home," exactly reproduces the descriptions of the Earthly Paradise in innumerable early and mediaeval legends : " But there they live in such delight, Such pleasure and such play As that to them a thousand years Doth seem as yesterday. Thy vineyards and thy orchards are Most beautiful and faire, Full furnished with trees and herbs Exceeding rich and rare. Thy gardens and thy gallant walkes Continually are greene ; There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers As noe where else are scene. There nectar and ambrosia flowe ; There musk and civet sweete ; There manie a faire and dainty drugge Are trodden under feete. 300 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE There cinnamon, there sugar growe, There narde and balme abound ; What tongue can telle or harte containe The joys that there are found ? Quyt thro' the streetes with silver sound The Flood of Life doth flowe ; Upon whose bankes on every side The Worde of Life doth growe." A chapter or comment might be written on each one of these verses, showing the source from which all this imagery comes. One has only to refer, for instance, to the legends which tell how those who entered Paradise became unconscious of the flight of time, so that three centuries would seem three hours, or " a thousand years " would pass like "yesterday." Again, in all legends Paradise is the place and home of spices. This was, no doubt, the reason of its being so often placed in Ceylon. Sir John Mandeville tells us that the aloe came from Paradise, borne down on the current of the Nile. We may well believe what another writer asserts, that carnations came from the Sacred Garden. The air of Arabia, indeed of the whole East, was supposed to be impregnated with odours 301 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE of spice through its neighbourhood to Paradise. An Arab legend, moreover, says that the tears of Adam on his journey of exile became spices, those of Eve pearls. " Nectar," "nettare" is mentioned by Dante in a passage already quoted. The " Wood of Life " and the " Flood of Life " would need a volume to themselves. We find the same imagery in the Psalms : " In Thy Presence is fulness of joy ; at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. xvi. 11), and "Thou shalt make them drink of the river of Thy pleasures" (Ps. xxxvi. 8). In the Liturgy of St. Basil the prayer is said for the departed, * c Bring them in and collect them in a place of greenness, by the water of comfort in the paradise of pleasure." The sacramental " Tree of Life " was "in the midst of the Garden" (Gen. xi. 9). But it was the tree of knowledge which seems to have been mysteriously bound up with the fortunes of mankind. After the Fall it stood in Paradise bare of leaves and bark, and the serpent wrapped round its roots ; but in its topmost branches, which reached to heaven, was a little 302 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE new-born Child. When Adam lay dying he sent his son Seth to the gates of Eden to ask the angel for the oil of mercy. He traced his way by the footsteps of the exiles, on which no grass had grown. The angel opened the gate and Seth saw the wonders of the garden, the fountain from which sprang the Four Rivers, and the mysterious tree enwrapped by the serpent but crowned with the Child. The angel gave him three seeds of the mystic apple, and told him to place them under Adam's tongue before they buried him, and that when those seeds had grown into a tree and it had borne its fruit the oil of mercy would be granted to Adam and his children. When he heard this, " Adam laughed and then died." They buried him in a cave, from which his body was taken by Noah into the ark and it was afterwards buried by Noah, Shem, and Melchizedek on Mount Calvary. His is the skull, of course, which is seen in countless pictures at the foot of the Cross and on which the Blood of the Redeemer falls. Then the promise was fulfilled, as it is said, " Awake that thou sleepest, and 33 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE arise from the dust, and Christ shall give thee light" (Eph. v. 14). Strange and marvellous, indeed, is the legend of the wood of the Holy Cross. Moses gathered from that tree the rod with which he smote the rock, the pole on which he set the serpent of brass. Under that tree David composed the Psalter and wept for his sin. The Queen of the South refused to pass over a torrent on a beam from its wood, and prophesied that it would cause the downfall of the Jews. Massimilla, a noble lady, stepping upon it, was moved long before His Birth to bear witness to Jesus Christ and was stoned to death by the Jews, thus becoming the first Christian martyr. Solomon, in anger, flung it into the pool of Bethesda, and its waters became waters of healing. Finally, the tree draws all men to it with its waters of cleansing and fruit of eternal life. With the two sacred trees was a divine and living forest, " una divina fores fa spessa e vtva " (Purg. xxviii. 2). Ezekiel, who, of all the Old Testament writers, seems to have been most impressed by the story of Paradise, has much to say of " the trees of 34 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE the Garden of God." He speaks of " a great cedar " as the very type of glory and beauty : " The cedars in the Garden of God could not hide him ; the fir trees were not like his boughs ; nor the chest- nut trees like his branches ; nor any tree in the Garden of God was like unto him in his beauty. I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches ; so that all the trees of Eden that were in the Garden of God envied him " (Ezek. xxxi. 8, 9). He speaks also much of the waters of Eden. All these trees are " by the waters"; they "drink water," "the waters make them great, the deep sets them up on high with her rivers running round about the plants, and sending out . her little rivers unto all the trees of the field" (Ezek. xxxi. 4). Ezekiel again saw " the brink of the river, where there were many trees on the one side and the other," and had the vision of the waters that issued from the temple, which saved and healed everything to which they came (Ezek. xlvii.). These words, by the way, are sung at the " Asperges," so that the holy water comes to dwellers in the hot u 305 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE and dusty world as something out of Eden. In Paradise, Dante wondered at " la gran variation deifreschi mai " (Par. xxviii. 36). This quite agrees with the popular legends of the beauty and variety of the trees and flowers of the garden. On the bough from Paradise which floated down the Ganges to Alexander the Great there were leaves of all colours, of gold, of silver, of azure, of vermilion, as well as of green. There was an "everlasting spring " and " never- withering flowers." The idea of the Fountain of Life and Youth is one that seems natural to man. This which so many longed for, dreamed of, fabled of, even went out to seek, which we find in popular stories everywhere, was the Fountain of Paradise. " With Thee is the Well of Life," says the most beauti- ful verse in the Psalms (Ps. xxxvi. 9), and it seems from the Bible to have been a proverbial expression of the Jews for any- thing that is a source of happiness and good. Thus we are told in the Proverbs of Solomon : " The mouth of a righteous man is a well of life " (Prov. x. 1 1), and 306 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE " The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life" (Prov. xiv. 27), and again, " Under- standing is a well-spring of life " (Prov. xvi. 22), and once more, "The law of the wise is a fountain of life " (Prov. xiii. 14). One need not mention "the river of water of life, clear as crystal," of St. John (Rev. xxii. i). From the life-giving well of Paradise came the Four Sacred Rivers. They were usually believed to be the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile, and the Ganges. The account given by Josephus is : " Now the garden was watered by one river which ran round about the whole earth, and was parted into four parts. And Phison which denotes a multitude, running into India, makes its exit into the sea, and is by the Greeks called Ganges. Euphrates also, as well as Tigris, goes down into the Red Sea. . . . And Geon runs through Egypt, and is by the Greeks called the Nile." It goes without saying that the animals, and above all the birds, of Paradise were of incomparable beauty. Many of them, indeed, may still well seem to us to belong to Paradise rather than to our 37 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE sad earth. The peacock must have found a fitting home amid those bowers. No doubt the squirrel played there. The kingfisher surely escaped from thence. One thinks of the giraffe as fitly inhabit- ing that temperate warmth and peace. The very name " bird of Paradise," ave del ParaisO) as it was called by Spanish sailors, tells its own story. The place name, Val paraiso, by the way, given by the Spaniards in the same manner, shows how living the legend was in the popular mind in the sixteenth century. But there were also fabulous and wonderful creatures, chief of which was the phoenix. All other birds and animals ate with Eve of the fruit and died, the phoenix alone refused to do so and remained immortal. It gathered in the aromatic garden the spices for the funeral pile which saw its ever-renewed resurrection. Sir John Mandeville, with his wonted good fortune on his travels, saw the phoenix twice. Moreover, all birds and animals in Eden possessed the power of speech. " All living creatures had one language," Josephus says. Even the fish in the rivers of Eden praised God LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE with the angels, some have said, at the canonical hours. The proverb, " dumb as a fish," was not made in Paradise. Indeed, the making of proverbs, with their bitter wisdom born of sad experi- ence, must have begun after the ex- pulsion. On the legendary tales of Adam and Eve after their banishment we will not dwell. Adam, " /' uom che non nacque " (Par. vii. 26), "the man who was never born," lived in penitence till the age of nine hundred years. His penitence began indeed before he had actually swallowed the forbidden morsel. It stuck as it went, and he put up his hand and touched his throat and repented, and said, " Woe is me." This is the origin of the " Adam's apple," and the reason why men have it and women not. I have already alluded to the legend of his death. According to the Arab legends Adam was banished to Ceylon, and buried on the mountain called afterwards by the Portuguese Pico de Adan. Eve died shortly after him. Henceforth to their descendants the earth was a place of exile hoc exilium, as the " Salve Regina " 39 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE calls it. A Tuscan mediaeval poet thus succinctly describes the effect of the Fall : Per quel trapassamento Mantenente fu miso Fora del Paradise, Dov' era ogni diletto Senza niuno eccetto Di freddo ne di calore, D'ira ne del dolore E per quel peccato Lo loco fue vietato Mai sempre a tutta gente. Man for the first trespass From Paradise banished was, Where was delight and joy Without any alloy, Wrath, sorrow, cold' or heat ; Now to that blissful seat Because of the first sin No man may enter in. Yet there were always two, and it was often thought three, still living human in- habitants of the Earthly Paradise. Enoch, who " was not, for God took him " (Gen. v. 24), and Elias, who had been carried up to heaven in the fiery chariot, the two who had not died the common death of all men had their calm seat of repose in the flowery bowers of the inaccessible 310 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE Garden. They, however, had still their debt to pay, and it was believed they were to do so in the last conflict with Antichrist at the end of the world. They were the "two witnesses" spoken of by St. John who were to prophesy and to be slain in the last tribulation (Rev. xi.). With these two was often placed the beloved disciple himself. From the first the " saying had gone out that that disciple should not die," because Our Lord had said of him, " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? " (St. John xxi. 23.) Some believed that he was only asleep in his tomb at Ephesus. According to one legend his empty tomb had been found filled with white manna, as the Virgin's was with lilies. The " Assumption of St. John" was often painted by the early Sienese painters. Again, as " Prester John," he kept his court in Asia. It was inevit- able that pious fancy should place him in the mystic Garden. With these three living men were placed various of the more illustrious of the departed souls. The first parents themselves were naturally often thought of as being there. In one 3 11 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE mediaeval vision Adam was seen "as a man most beautiful and of very great stature, almost a giant, robed in garments of divers colours down to the feet." Besides Adam and Eve, the souls most commonly placed there, at least by Christians, were Abel, " the righteous man " par excellence ', the first martyr and type of Our Lord ; Abraham, whose " bosom " was itself a common synonym for Paradise ; Lazarus, who was carried there by angels ; and the Good Thief, to whom a place of repose was promised. In old illuminations, by the way, the departed souls are sometimes represented as new-born children folded to the breast of an old white-bearded man. In spite or the place being forbidden for ever to all people, many attempted to find it, and some few even succeeded in gaining an entrance. It could not but be that men should seek for that country as long as it was believed to be part of the habitable earth. That it was " remote from human habitation and cognition " would but increase the desire for it. Neither the sweetness of his little son nor 312 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE his grave father's reverend years or the love which would make glad Penelope his spouse could hold back Ulysses from his folle vo/o, his mad flight across the seas inspired by the desire to become ex- perienced in the world and the vices and valour of men. This natural love of wandering was reinforced by the desire of the Garden of joy and the Fountain of youth. Alexander the Great said when he saw the bough from Paradise borne down the Ganges, " I reckon all my con- quests as nothing unless I taste of these joys." The story is that he came to the gate, and was given a precious stone, which outweighed all the riches of the world, but was lighter than a feather when covered with a little dust. This was a parable of death. The most remarkable of all stories of Paradise-seekers is the Irish legend of St. Brandan. It is full of the Celtic poetry. You may read in the Golden Legend how he and his monks sailed amid the islands of the fabulous seas, how they mistook the great fish Jasconye for an island and made a fire on his back, how they saw a great tree full of birds making 3*3 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE the most joyful melody man ever heard, the flickering of whose very wings made " a full merry noise like a fiddle," which were the angels who had " trespassed but little " in the Fall, how they met Judas, to whom " a place of refreshment " from the fires had been granted in the Polar Seas, and how at last they came to that blessed place they sought for, where " it was always day and never night," " the fairest country eastward that any man might see." The reader will not need to be reminded of the story of the monk Felix, as popularised by Longfellow, who, rapt by the singing of a snow-white bird, followed it by mystic ways to Paradise, and returning to earth, found that what had seemed an hour had been a hundred years. This is but one of many mediaeval stories of the kind. Such in the barest outline is the great sacred tradition of the happy Garden. How great is its charm and fragrance we can see not only by the old ballads and stories, but in the recovered romance of the poetry of our own Romantic Movement, To cast the eye over such a poem as Coleridge's " Kubhla Khan " is to 3'4 LORE OF EARTHLY PARADISE find images borrowed from it in every line "the sacred river, ""caverns measure- less," "incense-bearing tree," "honeydew," "the milk of Paradise." The Romantic Revival was itself the recovery of a lost inheritance. To delight in such thoughts and images, indeed, is natural to man. We associate innocence and happiness with green and quiet and sunny places, with the scents of flowers and the songs of birds. No amount of modern progress will probably altogether uproot from the human heart the nostalgia of its native Eden, the remembrance of its herbs and flowers. " II y avait beaucoup de verveine, Nous 6tions bien la." 3'5 FAERIE THE reader will remember how, in the vestibule of Hell, Dante saw the sad souls of those who had lived without infamy and without praise, together with that choir of angels who had been neither rebels nor faithful to God, but for them- selves, cast forth from Heaven lest they should dim its lustre by their presence, and not received by the profound Abyss, because the guilty prisoned there would have had some glory from them : " Quel cattivo coro Degli angeli, che non furon ribelli, Ne fur fedeli a Dio, ma per si foro. Cacci&rli i Ciel per non esser men belli ; Ne lo profondo inferno gli riceve Che alcuna gloria, ii rei avrebber d'elli.' (Inf. iii. 37-42.) Where did Dante derive this idea of a choir of neutral angels ? Not from the 316 FAERIE Bible certainly, nor from the orthodox tradition of the Church. St. Thomas knows nothing of it. The passage in Genesis, almost forgotten in Christendom since the early centuries, which says that " the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose . . . and they bare children to them . . . mighty men which were of old, men of renown" (Gen. vi. 1-4), affords the only hint in the Bible of what we may call a " middle kingdom," a kingdom of beings strong and beautiful with a strength and beauty not human or holy, exiles from heaven, and yet strange to earth. I believe that the existence of this strange kingdom, thought of almost or wholly without blame, regarded as some- thing to be on good terms with, looked on at once with kindness and with fear, yet felt to be heartless, alien, unbaptized, has always been a part of that popular tradition which has, so to speak, supple- mented the official teaching of the Church, and filled up what were instinctively felt to be gaps in her account of things. The 3 1 ? FAERIE Scriptures and the Fathers and the School- men know nothing of these neutral angels ; but we find them, for instance, in the Celtic Legend of the " Voyage of St. Brandon," so popular in the Middle Ages. Here, as we might expect, the view taken of them is a gentler one than that of the austere theologian Dante. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting at some length a beautiful passage from the " Golden Legend." It is full of the kindness of popular judgments on the erring, on men or spirits, who have "made a mistake." This is far from the dark vestibule of Hell. " And then, anon, they sailed west three days and three nights ere they saw any land . . . but soon after as God would, they saw a fair island full of trees, herbs, and flowers, whereof they thanked God of His good grace, and, anon, they went on land, and when they had gone long in this they saw a full fair well, and thereby stood a fair tree full of boughs, and on every bough sat a fair bird, and they sat so thick on t&e tree that scarce any leaf of the tree might be seen. The number of them was so great, and they sang so merrily, that it s'8 FAERIE was a full heavenly noise to hear, and St. Brandon knelt down on his knees and wept for joy, and made his prayers devoutly to Our Lord to know what these birds meant. " And then, anon, one of the birds flew from the tree to St. Brandon, and he with flickering of his wings made a full merry noise like a riddle, that to him seemed he heard never so joyful a melody. And then St. Brandon commanded the bird to tell him the cause why they sat so thick on the tree and sang so merrily ; and then the bird said, c Some time we were angels in heaven, but when our master, Lucifer, fell down into hell for his high pride, we fell with him for our offences, some lighter and some lower, after the quality of our trespass, and because our trespass is but little, therefore, Our Lord hath set us here out of all pain, and in full great joy and mirth after his pleasing, to serve him here in the best manner we may.' This Sunday is a day of rest from all worldly occupation, and, therefore, this day all we be rrade as white as any snow for to praise Our Lord in the best way we may." 3*9 FAERIE In this recital, the extreme limit of Celtic and popular tolerance seems to be reached. It at first sight looks as though these birds actually possessed the grace of God, like good spirits and Christian men. But on examining the story more closely, we see that they only serve Him " in the best way " possible to them. They enjoy a " purely natural happiness," like that of the " Limbus Infantium " of the School- men. Now the kingdom to which these birds belong is the realm of Faerie. It is a kingdom of beings banished from heaven, yet bringing with them, if not its super- natural grace, at least something of its beauty and power, its gifts, at any rate in an attenuated form, of agility, subtlety, impassibility, its freedom from decay and pain. They are exiles, dwelling on earth, 'and yet alien from humanity. They are not evil spirits ; they are not hostile to men as a matter of fact, they are gene- rally friendly but they are different. This is the point of a thousand stories. They may give strange gifts and powers, but the child who is taken by them becomes eerie, 320 FAERIE elfin, changeling. They steal hearts by their fairy pipings. They are full of capricious, whimsical good humour, but they can neither suffer nor love. The specific Gaelic account of the origin of the fairies is that when Lucifer, catching sight of himself in the glass, was lifted up to such a dizzy height of pride that he fell, a part of the angels who fell with him those who had sinned least fell, not into the Abyss, but on to our earth. In their fall they lost their supernatural gifts and their gigantic stature, but they did not become evil. They became known on earth as "the good people," "the little people." To these fallen but not evil spirits were added in the popular fancy the old gods. My grandmother was an old Methodist lady whose religious opinions had been derived by a sort of oral tradition from Mr. Wesley himself. I remember her speaking, to my childish bewilderment, of the ancient gods, Apollo, Venus, and the rest, as " the demons." The strictly orthodox view of the Church was, of course, that they were actually existing x 321 FAERIE devils. John Wesley was very familiar with the French theological writers of the seventeenth century, particularly the Jansenists, who on this point carried on the tradition of the Ancient Fathers. But here again the popular fancy mitigated the severity of the orthodox doctrine. The people kept on friendly terms with fauns and satyrs. Pan was never banished from their hearts. In the middle kingdom of their imagination these creatures, without suffering, beings of earth-born joy, occupied a place altogether different from that of man's dark enemies. Wood-gods and water-gods lived on as pixies, nixies, brownies, kelpies. The Byzantine icon makers introduced the creatures of the fading Greek mythology into their sacred pictures. In ancient Russian icons, painted according to the tradition brought from Byzantium, the River Jordan is sometimes personified as a jolly little river-god. All these fugitives took refuge in the invisible but actual realm of Fairyland. Where is this land, Faerie, the dwelling of Arthur's sister, Morgan It Fay ? She is the Queen of the Fairyland of old romances. 322 FAERIE In Avalon, the island valley, where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow, she tends Arthur's wounds till the day he returns to claim his kingdom. All through the Middle Ages the Celtic peoples constantly expected his return. This gave rise to the medieval proverb " Arturum expectare " " to wait for Arthur," to look for and hope for something that could never come. Even to-day all the scenes of the Arthurian legend seem to be fit abodes for fairies. Tintagel, in Cornwall, is surely one of their chief strongholds and master castles. The rocks and waters of Huelgoat in Finisterre must be still haunted by fays. At Landerneau, where Arthur kept his court with such state that for centuries the proverb ran, when some great thing happened, " II y aura de bruit a Lander- neau," the river is quietly fairylike. But where, indeed, is the enchanted garden, the great castle, "the high keep that faerie is " to which ^lorgan bore off the wounded king to heal and tend him ? By a strange chance her magical kingdom was transferred from Brittany to the interior of Mount Etna. The Norman adventurers 3 2 3 FAERIE brought the Breton myth to Sicily, and so the Island of Jove, of the Cyclops, of Empedocles, of Proserpine, became also the Island of Arthur and of Morgan. Here, by the work of her magical art, she enter- tains her assembled court, the wounded king, and all her courtiers and companions with dazzling mirages and unsubstantial pageants, outdoing the splendour of hoar- frost or autumn leaves. Hence the phan- tasmagoria, seen so often in the Straits of Messina, is still called by her name " the fairy Morgan," Fata Morgana. For my part, I find it difficult to believe that she is really an inhabitant of Sicily. Rather would I think of her as haunting some Celtic Paradise of wood and water, deep in trees, amid the kingfishers, by some emerald mere in Ireland, or by sapphire pools in Brittany, where a thousand king- fishers are flying and fishing together. The idea of this whole realm of Faerie, this great neutral kingdom, seems to spring from the popular apprehension of a whole side of things not accounted for by the rigid theological systems. It is thus a protest against the Puritanism of Chris- 3 2 4 FAERIE tianity. What is the whole kingdom of Art, considered in itself, that is, and for its own sake, but a realm of Faerie ? Art in herself may be looked upon as a true Fairy Morgan. The Puritans made war on beauty, because it seemed to them non-moral. In itself it belongs to the neutral kingdom. But the old myth- makers, one sees, plainly estimated the true value of all these things. The world of Faerie was a lower and lesser thing than the world of human life. Suffering and struggle were the signs of Man's nobility. Agility, subtlety, the power of gratifying without effort any momentary caprice, belong to the fairies in their dazzling, many-pinnacled castles. But on homely human figures, working in carpenters' shops or bending over cradles, good angels see the halo and the stigmata of saints. 3 2 5 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE THE following lines are a more or less literal rendering of a fragment of the Inferno. Virgil, discoursing on the punishment of misers and prodigals, those who have misused earthly goods, says to Dante : " See here, my son, for how short space there blows That wind the Lady Fortune doth control, For which the human race in turmoil goes ; Here to buy rest in vain would be the dole Of all the gold that is beneath the moon Or ever was, to one tormented soul. Master, said I, grant me this one more boon ; Who is she, with the world's good 'neath her sway, Tell me, this Lady whom thou call'st Fortune ? Said he : O ignorant creatures of a day ! How great the blindness that in you offends ! Hear well and mark the true words that I say. That One whose might and wisdom all transcends. Made all the heavens, and gave them such a guide So that their light should shine to the world's ends In equal distribution far and wide, 326 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE To the vain goods that time lays waste and spends A minister and ruler hath supplied, To change the things of earth from hour to hour ; Of worldly good she rules the total mass, By fates beyond the reach of human power ; She, hidden as a snake is in the grass, Bids one race wither, one break into flower ; According to her sentence all things pass. Against her power avails no force of thine, She guides and governs by her secret laws Her kingdom like the other spirits divine. Her permutations know no truce nor pause, Her suitors coming in an endless line Of this great swiftness are the needful cause. This is that Lady whom men chide and blame, Who to speak aught but praise of her should fear, And with loud voices spread her evil fame. But she serene and joyful doth not hear, She sits afar with each bright primal flame In their high blessedness and turns her sphere." (Inf. vii. 63-97.) This very interesting passage strikingly illustrates the mediaeval view of fate and chance and fortune, and is full of matter for curious speculation and comment. To the ancient world, the world of Greek tragedy, Fate, of course, existed per se ; it was a force to which the gods themselves were subject. We have recently been reminded of the ancient view by the revival of the tragedy of CEdipus. But in 3 2 7 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE the Christian teaching all things are subject to the Divine Will. With one voice the Fathers tell us that fate and chance and fortune are nothing else but the Will, the Power, and the Providence of Almighty God. But the mediaeval belief seems to have been that there were certain subordinate powers and forces which, by the Divine appointment, exer- cised a compelling influence over human life. What was free in man was the will, and in this principally consisted the Divine image in him. This power of the will was the great limitation placed on the belief in the irresistible influence of the stars. They ruled over the chances and changes of mortal things, over animals and plants, over the human body, but not over the human intelligence and the human will. However much the ancient fatalism impinged on the Christian doc- trine, here was the point which robbed it of its power and broke its spell. In the sixteenth century Jerome Cardan was burned for asserting, among other heresies, that the life of Christ Himself was subject to the stars. One need be no advocate of 328 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE religious persecution to see that here was an attack upon a dogma which the Church was bound to defend by every means in her power. What means were considered right in the sixteenth century we know. In the thing attacked lay the freedom of the fated world. Fate and chance and fortune, then, were real powers, but powers created and appointed by God. They were powers, however, utterly irresistible, secret, recondite, against which there was no appeal. There were means of dealing with the devil, for instance, abundantly supplied to the children of the Church. The whole Middle Ages derided the " inefficient baffled spirit." On the other hand, the Kingdom of Heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. The Divine Will was vanished by the love and Tiope of sinful mortal men, as Dante himself tells us : " Regnum coelorum violenza pate Da caldo amore, e da viva speranza, Che vince la divina volontate." (Par. xx. 94-97.) But of fortune, God's minister, he tells us in the passage quoted above : " Vostro saver non ha contrasto a lei." 3 2 9 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE " Those causes which are called for- tuitous," says St. Augustine, " we do not say to be non-existent, but rather consider them as hidden, and we ascribe them to the will either of the true God or of some spirits or other." Here, perhaps, is the origin of Dante's insistence on the hidden- ness of the workings of Fortune. The commentators, by the way, say that the " prime creature " among whom Fortune sits so serenely are the angels. This appears to us doubtful, using the word " angel " in the ordinary Christian sense of the nine choirs. We are inclined to think that they are identical with the spirits whom in the same passage he calls " gli altri Dei." These are certainly not the " Dei falsi e bugiardi " of Paganism, but probably the intelligences which direct the movements of the heavens. J The changes and chances of human life, then, proceed from these mysteriously hidden but actually existing causes, the good by God's benign appointment, the evil by His inscrutable permission. The casting of lots, as by the Apostles after the death of Judas, might thus be 33 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE looked upon as an invocation of this hidden minister of the Divine Will. After the Reformation there was a tendency to ascribe everything that could not be attri- buted immediately to God to diabolical agency. The reason why the Devil of Puritanism was so much more terrible than the mediaeval one was probably because he was invested with the old attributes of Fate. He seems, among other things, to have been supposed to rule over the whole realm of hazard and chance. Anyone committing himself to chance fell at once under Satan's dominion. Hence the horror of games of cards or dice, apart, of course, from the everyday experience of the evils caused by gambling. It is, per- haps, an attempt at the explanation of those evils. It is, for instance, part of what one may call the folk-lore of Puri- tanism still current all over England that cards are " the devil's books." There are numberless stories of the good luck of novices at games of chance illustrating the proverb that " the Devil helps beginners." In Italy, even at the present day, the popular feeling is altogether different. 33 1 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE The favourite numbers for lottery tickets, for instance, are thirty-three and sixty- three, and numbers of the years of Christ and the Madonna the " anni di Cristo" and the " anni della Madonna." The idea, no doubt, is that Fortune, the joyful creature and minister of God, to whom all these things are committed, will reverently incline before her Maker and honour those numbers which He has in any way asso- ciated with Himself. In many places of the " Divine Comedy " Dante appears to distinguish between the Divine Will and its minister, Fate, and again between Fate and Fortune them- selves. When the demons who kept the bridge in Malebolge rushed upon Virgil with fury and with tempest like a pack of dogs, he asks Malacoda whether she believes that he has come thither "Senza voler divino e fato destro" (Inf. xxi. 82), without the Divine Will as the first cause and the subordinate fate as the favourable minister of his journey. Again, when the foot of Dante, in passing, strikes the face of one of the wretches embedded 33 2 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE in the ice, he tells us that he does not know : "Se voler fu, o destine, o fortuha" (Inf. xxxii. 76), whether the cause of this was the Divine Will or its image in the free will of man, or the subordinate but fixed necessity of fate, or the apparently capricious change- fulness of fortune. Once more, Brunetto Latini asks Dante : u Qual fortuna o destine Anzi Tultimo di quaggiti ti mena ? " What destiny or fortune brings him there before the Last Day ? Sometimes the determination of the Divine Will is called "fate," as where Beatrice says that if Lethe were passed without tears "Alto fato di Dio sarebbe rotto " (Purg. xxx. 142), a high decree of God would be broken. Upon these hidden forces depend lucky and unlucky days for doing things. In mediaeval calendars the unlucky days in the year were marked sometimes to the number of forty-four. The unlucky days of the week, by the way, in Italy are still Tuesday and Friday. 333 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE " Di Venere e di Marte Non si sposa e non si parte." Fatalism is probably the instinctive belief of the people everywhere, as is shown by our own popular proverb, so often re- peated by the poor, that " if you are born to be hanged you will never be drowned." The mediaeval variations on this theme in the form of stories are, of course, endless. For good or evil fortune it is one of the leading motives of fairy tales. One has only to consider, for instance, the story of Judas, as told in the " Golden Legend," to see how large an element of fatalism entered into the Christian legend of the Middle Ages. For Dante, amid all this play of occult and mys- terious forces, in the fact of free will lay the salvation of man. I will con- clude by attempting to render another passage in which this is clearly set out. Dante asked of Marco Lombardo the reason why the world is deserted of all virtue, and pregnant and covered with malice, saying that some place the reason of this in the heavens and some in the earth itself. 334 FATE AND FORTUNE IN DANTE " A low, deep sigh which anguish wrung from him, He first put forth and : Brother, he began, Thou comest from the world where lights are dim ; You dream there that the movement of the spheres Moves with it all things, so that must be still All good or evil brought forth by the years. If this be so, no more your will is free, And to have joy for good and pain for sin, No more of justice is the high decree. The moving spheres your movements all begin. Not all, I say, but even if all, I say, For good or evil you have light within, And your freewill, if joyfully it wars In its first conflicts, and by grace is fed, Vanquishes every force of hostile stars, For you lie free beneath the Power that made The mind in you untrammelled by fate's bars." (Purg. xvi. 64 et seq.) Dante and all mediaeval Christians accepted Man's limitation and recognized the in- scrutable ; but they believed that all powers and forces, however inexplicable and mysterious, were moved by theWisdom that reaches from one end of heaven to the other and mightily and sweetly ordereth all things. NOTE. For much in this essay, as in that on the " Early Paradise " the author is indebted to a volume entitled "Miti e Leggende del Medio ./Evo," by Arturo Graf, published at Milan in 1889. 335 FAIRYLAND THOMAS THE RHYMER, was shown three roads " the narrow road, so thick beset wi' thorns and briers," and " the braid, braid road," of which we have all heard tell, and a third " And see ye not that bonny road That winds about the ferny brae ? That is the road to fair Elfland, Where thou and I this night maun gae ! " This is the road of escape from the harsh- ness and unsatisfactoriness, and unreason- ableness of what is too often taken for reality, from cut-and-dried valuations, ready-made views of the world a road, indeed, which leads to the heart of reality itself. This disinterested, non- utilitarian road all poets tread, and all children, and, we suppose, all child-like peoples, such as, for instance, the Maoris. The land it leads to (at any rate, when 336 FAIRYLAND trodden by a civilized poet) is a land of an admirable sanity, humour, common sense, considerateness, in a wise and right interpretation of the term, detachment. No one ever loitered on this primrose path to such good purpose as Hans Andersen, and the first sentence of his which comes to mind exhibits all these desirable qualities in a mellow ripeness and perfection. " The merman and his daughter must, of course, be invited first, though no doubt it will be very inconvenient for them to remain so long on dry land." This is an atmo- sphere as human and genial and kindly as Jane Austen's ; it is as sensible and reasonable as Mr. Woodhouse's fear of draughts. Let us consider for a moment that great detached, illuminated spirit. Hans An- dersen was the heir of all the fairy ages ; he had the key of Fairyland, and was its supreme interpreter. He was a great lover of the earth and man's life upon it. This is my point the humanity and sanity of Fairyland. The realm of Faerie is the real world, seen by the unspoiled eyes of poets and of children. To them Y 337 FAIRYLAND the world is living and wonderful ; any- thing may happen, nothing is too good to be true. Fairyland is a magical aspect of the real world, caught by the poet and the child. Heaven lies about us in our infancy, and so does Fairyland. Many in some degree, some few, like Andersen, supremely, are in this sense always chil- dren. The poets dwell in Fairyland, and in high moments of a happy mystical expansion they beckon us inside its gates. So Wordsworth says that " the cuckoo- bird " in spring-time breaks " The silence of the seas Amid the farthest Hebrides," and Keats that the song of the nightingale charms " Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." But these song-charmed islands are the real Hebrides ; these ancient faerylands are no mythical abode of unreal beings, but, say, the mediaeval North, lying stretched out like a map, with gallant ships faring forth on their perilous way to and from every port of the old king- 338 FAIRYLAND doms of Norway and Scotland, and Islands of Faroe and Orkney and Iceland. It is our earth that itself is Fairyland, with all its wonders and terrors. Sailing earthly faery seas, the Arab pilot took the turban from his shaven skull and flung it upon the deck, exclaiming " We are lost ! " as his ship approached the Mountain of Loadstone, which would draw out the nails and all the iron from her timbers. In happier, but still earthly waters, the Spanish sailors, as they drew near Gran Canary, first saw shoals of flying-fish soar up out of the blue sea. But, indeed, the great ocean of reality all about is every- where phosphorescent with magic. Fairy- land is constructed with materials taken from the real world. The only fairies I myself care about are the nursery fairies. Writing of these, Mr. S. R. Littlewood, in his little book, "The Fairies Here and Now," throws a very clear light on the point I have hinted at above. Let me quote him at some length : " One of the most important of these 339 FAIRYLAND characteristics was that the nursery fairies did not live in any realm or world of their own. They did not dance in secret groves or people some mystic or forlorn land of long ago or far away. They lived in this commonplace world of ours, and went in and out among living men and women in their own homes. In Perrau/f, as a matter offact^ there is really no such thing as a fairy ^ considered as a distinct race of beings. The fairies are all of them mortals^ without any- thing to distinguish them except their magic power. Thus Cinderella's godmother was no wonderful apparition in stars and spangles. Anyone who takes the trouble to turn to the original will find that she is never called ' fairy godmother ' at all. She is just Cinderella's godmother, who happens to be c fee.' So, too, even the most ordinary things might be ' fees,' just as the most ordinary people. In ' Blue- beard ' the only factor in the story that marks it out as a fairy-tale is the tell-tale key, which was ' fee.' This is true of practically all the nursery fairies. In the c Arabian Nights * there is no fairy or- ganization apart from the everyday world 34 FAIRYLAND of palace and cottage, pots and pans, tables and chairs. ... In the Grimms' Marchen the little men have nothing conventionally fairy-like about them except their size and their powers. Indeed, many of the Grimms' stories are just so much extra- vagant and fortunate adventure." Now, this is very interesting and, of course, quite true. Morgan-le-Fay, for instance, Arthur's sister, was no creature of a race apart, but an ordinary human being gifted with magic powers, mortal as Merlin and Vivian were. I do not deny the existence of fairies of other kinds ; but, personally, I do not care for them. There is a sonnet by an American poet named Riley, about a fairy whom he saw " peeling dewdrops with a blade of star- shine " ; but the poem seems to me quite uninspired, very uninteresting and uncon- vincing. The true fairy tales, if I may repeat myself once more, are born of the child's way of looking at the world as alive and wonderful. The fairy-tale animals, in particular, are animals as children see them. Children have a 341 FAIRYLAND great friendship and sympathy with animals they look upon them as being on an equality with themselves. I re- member a little girl, who always ex- claimed : " Naughty Beauty, silly Beauty, not to want to marry that nice Beast ! " Another, expatiating on the wonderful properties of her uncle's dog, said : " His bark's got an echo." This is quite the Hans Andersen touch " The Dog Whose Bark had an Echo." In the Maori fairy- tales the everyday fish of the sea are marvellous and magical. " The Cod had gazed upon the colours of the sunset, and asked for these upon his back. . . . One had seen a boy's kite, and wished to resemble it in shape ; that is why to-day the Skate is broad and flat. One wished to be red like blood, and to be able to groan like a wounded man ; and so you may always hear the Gurnet groan when it is caught." Mr. Walter de la Mare, for instance, is one of the grown-up people who sees things like a Maori or a child in the fairy-tale magical way. It is useless to talk about 342 FAIRYLAND it "there it is," as the poor people say. Why, indeed, should we talk about fairies or mystics or poets ? Commentators are often people of very confused minds, and the language in which they express them- selves is apt to be a perfect cloudland ; a poet is a very lucid and rapid and subtle mind, controlling an else unfettered spirit of language. Moreover, he can make the most common and unromantic people and things fairy-like. Mr. de la Mare says of the blackberry hedges : " They shone like William And Mary's bower." If William the Dutchman and his dull wife are romantic (and we see they are), why not George III. eating his apple dumpling in the sunshine of some old October day ? So Perrault's " Tales of Mother Goose " took the most ordinary figures and clothed them with romance. How I should like to possess a copy of the original edition of this volume ! Without any disrespect to the authors, I would gladly give some half a dozen books on the fairies now 343 FAIRYLAND lying on my table in exchange for one, and would throw in a few commentaries into the bargain. Who wants commentaries on the merchant seeking goodly pearls, for instance, or the woman lighting a candle and sweeping her house ? I am sure that these sane and happy little tales, repeated for generations by the hearths of cottage and chateau in France, while so many cruelties and confusions afflicted that fair land, expressed the people's unpartisan, unutilitarian view of things, their joy in the world and in life for its own sake. Mr. Littlewood says, speaking of these stories : " The structure, the characters, almost every detail, is necessary and perfect. The little dialogue between Red-Riding-Hood and her supposed grandmother, the figure of Sister Anne upon the tower of Blue- beard's house, ' looking out over the sun- parched fields ' they are enshrined for all time in Perrault's narrative." I have always thought, by the way, that it was from Sister Anne on the tower that the first suggestion came of Rossetti's entrancing ballad, " Sister Helen." 344 FAIRYLAND The Hungarian and Maori fairy-tales will always be delightful to all children and grown-up children who love such things. The Maori tales are chiefly in- spired by the spectacle of the natural world, of the magic of which, as it is felt by simple people, they are full, as, for instance, in the charming fancy, " On the Moon." With a deep, unconscious poetry, these primitive folk praise the earth they see and know. Here is the Maori story of the Creation : " Tane gazed on the red clay that lay exposed where earth had fallen from a cliff. c Red, the sacred colour,' he said, 4 and earth from which all things grow and flourish. Surely from this I can make something greater than anything I have yet attempted.' ' He then made man. The goodness of the earth and the greatness of man are at the bottom of all fairy-tales. Here, again, the earth itself is Fairyland. The Hungarian tales are nearer to us. They are stories, like the Grimms', of " extravagant and fortunate adventure " in 345 FAIRYLAND a world which is alive and wonderful, in which anything may happen, in which nothing is too good to be true. They pass through all ordeals, they surmount all obstacles, they come into their king- dom, and are happy ever after ; the gay, gallant boy, with his undaunted valour, and the maiden in the might and innocence of her unconscious and commanding beauty. 34 6 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG THE following quotation is from a recently published volume of folk-lore ; " When I was living in the East Riding my attention was occasionally arrested by a curious old song I used to hear sung at rent-dinners and other gatherings of a similar nature. The old song was popularly known as 'The Seven Stars.' Upon inquiry I found it was traditional, but I was unable to trace it back for more than a hundred years. It seemed to belong to a small district of the Wapentake of Dickering, namely, the district between Bridlington and Lowthorpe. I find no trace of it anywhere else." The words of the song are given as follows : " I sing the One, oh ! What is the One, oh ? Twelve's the Twelve Apostallers, Eleven's the Eleven Evangelists, Ten's the Ten Commandments, Nine's the cubit rangers and 347 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG Eight of them proved walkers, Seven's seven stars in the sky And six of them bright shiners, Five's the thimbles in a bowl and Four's the gospel-makers, and Three three's the hero ! Two two's the lily white bush Below the garden green, oh ! And when the One is left alone There's nothing to be seen, oh ! " The Editor's comment is : " c The Seven Stars ' is a great joy. It is the first cumulative song of its species I have come across in these latitudes, and is as corrupt a variety as heart of emendator could desire." The song appears indeed to have under- gone a secular corruption, and to have suffered a sea-change into something strange if not rich. Cumulative songs of the kind, evidently religious in origin, but corrupted almost out of recognition, are to be found all over the country. They are still sung at rustic gatherings, and are generally regarded as comic songs. There is a well-known west country example, also dealing with numbers, for instance, in which the Mater Dolorosa appears as 348 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG the " cheerful waiter." That the word " mater " should have occurred at all shows that bits of ecclesiastical Latin were used in the original English versions of these songs as they were in the old Christmas carols. I believe myself that these songs were originally a kind of sacred riddle, exercises by the composition of which the monks beguiled their hours of recreation and leisure, say, as they sat round the refectory fire on a winter night. " Who was the man that was never born ? " is a good specimen of a monastic riddle, the answer of course being " Adam." When the monks were turned adrift at the Dissolution these riddles and rhymes would be carried all over the land. An old homeless monk from Rievaulx or from Fountains tramping the Yorkshire roads and finding shelter in a hospitable farm-house would, perhaps, after supper in the big farm-house kitchen unpack his store of lore and legend for the amuse- ment of his hosts. We can imagine a child listening with open ears to the loud chanting of the sonorous Latin rhymes and the rough translation and explanation 349 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG of them which the guest would give. Such rough translations with many of the original Latin phrases left intact were probably the first versions of these songs which became current in the country. As the popular knowledge of the ecclesi- astical Latin died out, and the old exact knowledge of the Christian tradition was in great measure lost, these versions would become ever more and more corrupt. A child of six who heard the old monk sing the rhyme, " I sing the One, oh ! " in a Yorkshire farm-house kitchen, say, in 1 540, might well have been living, an old gaffer or gammer of eighty-five, at the accession of Charles I. During that period immense changes had taken place. The great Roods with the attendant figures of St. Mary and St. John had been thrown down from the Chancel screens and replaced by the Lion and the Uni- corn, the Altar stones marked with the five crosses had been broken and cast out of the Churches, the Ten Commandments had been set up and were read aloud in English in the service. This last point, I believe, is not without significance in our 35 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG inquiry into the meaning of this old song. The influence of this weekly repetition of the Ten Commandments has been very great in England. " If we live at all," an aged parishioner of my own remarked one day, " we live by the Ten Command- ments." Well, the point is that the old folks who handed on these songs would fill up gaps in their remembrance of them which would often obscure the sense or altogether destroy the motive of the composition. I believe the introduction of the Ten Commandments into the song quoted above is such an interpolation. The idea running through at least the first part of the song appears to be some sort of contrast between the unchangeable- ness of the One, and the division and change of the many. " The One remains ; the many change and pass." It will be noticed that three pairs of numbers appear to be bracketed together ; we are told there were twelve Apostles and- only eleven Evangelists, that there were nine " cubit rangers " and only eight " proved walkers," that there were " seven stars in the sky," and only six of them are " bright 35 1 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG shiners." The subtraction of one from each number is clearly not accidental. With regard to the twelve Apostles and the " eleven Evangelists " the explanation is obvious. The Twelve Apostles are the twelve who were at first sent forth, in- cluding Judas, the " eleven Evangelists " are the eleven of that company who re- mained faithful. Twelve were sent, eleven actually went out as heralds of the Glad Tidings. " Evangelizare " is of course the verb of the Vulgate for " to preach the Gospel." The original Latin might, per- haps, literally translated, have run thus : " Twelve were sent forth, eleven evan- gelized." " Nine's the cubit rangers, and eight of them true walkers " is the next couplet where there is a link between the two numbers. I have no doubt that " cubit rangers " is a distortion of " choirs of angels" or the Latin "chori angelorum," the nine choirs of the Heavenly Hier- archy. Of these nine choirs according to the song only eight are found to be " proved walkers." This is, probably, a corruption of " true workers " or, perhaps, " wor- shippers," faithful messengers and ministers 35 2 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG of the Most High. But how to account for the lapse and defection here suggested of one of the Nine Orders of the Heavenly Host ? It must be remembered that according to the scholastic and patristic tradition there were at first Ten Choirs of Angels, one of which fell and became the Host of Darkness. I suggest that the words of the song originally ran : " Ten's the Choir of Angels, And nine of them true workers," or, at least, that that was the sense. In this case, " Ten's the Ten Command- ments " would be an interpolation put in by some one endeavouring to remember the song, who, understanding only vaguely that it was concerned with sacred things, would naturally fill in the blank in this way. On this supposition a clear and definite meaning can be assigned to the following couplet, which would in this case run : " Eight stars in the sky And seven of them bright shiners." The "seven" would then refer to the seven Archangels, Michael, Gabriel and * 353 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG the rest. The eighth who no longer shines is he who was at first created the brightest of them all, the resplendent Light-bearer, Lucifer, son of the morning, Satanael. The missing line of the original would thus be the line dealing with the number six. The remaining numbers are not con- nected together in the same way ; " five thimbles in a bowl " is very enigmatical. It may possibly refer to the Five Crosses marked on the Altar-stone, which, of course, signify the Five Wounds of Our Lord, the object of so great a devotion in old England. "Five the signa on the stone," our imaginary monk may have told his hearers. The next line, " Four's the four Gospel-makers " requires no comment. The line, " Three three's the hero " appears to me to prove conclusively that the original was in ecclesiastical Latin, of which fragments were left in the vernacular version. My suggested reading is, " Three, Tres Sancti Pueri." It refers to the Three Holy Children of the Benedicite, Ananias, Azarias and Misael. This would account for the A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG repetition of the " three " in the line, which of course is nonsense as it stands. As the song was roared out at rent-dinners and harvest-suppers and the meaning of the word was no longer understood " pueri " would very easily become corrupted into " hero." It is difficult again to assign any meaning to the lines : "Two two's the lily white bush, Below the garden green, oh ! " Three is the Three Children and Four is the Four Evangelists, so no doubt " two" in the original referred to two persons or things not merely to one " lily white bush." The words may be thought to suggest some reference to Our Lady as both Mother and Maid, or to the Godhead and the Manhood of Our Lord. But in this case, what is the meaning of " below the garden green " ? I believe " garden " to be a corruption possibly due to the defective memory of the transmitter of the song, who substituted it for " Tree " or " Rood Tree." Trying to remember " Tree " the old man or woman thought of " garden." The Cross, of course, was 355 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG continually spoken of as " the Tree," and often so represented in Art. Didron, in his great book on Christian Iconography, says, " The historical Cross, that which Our Saviour bore to Calvary, and on which He was crucified, was a tree, and consequently its colour is green." I believe the lines refer to the two pure virginal Saints, St. Mary and St. John, standing beneath the Cross. The concluding lines : " And when the One is left alone, There's no one to be seen, oh ! " seem like some long-descended, much corrupted echo of a reflection akin to St. Paul's words about the time when " God shall be All in All." I would suggest that the following is an approximation to the sense of the original song : " I sing of that One Who is God Himself. Twelve were sent forth as Apostles, of whom Eleven faithfully evangelised. Ten were the choirs of Angels first created, of whom nine remain true ministers and servants. Eight were the Archangels, stars of Heaven, of whom 356 A NOTE ON AN OLD SONG seven still shine brightly. Six "... (this number is missing from the sequence). " Five were the wounds of Our Lord shown by the five signs on the Altar-stone. Four were the Four Evangelists. Three were the three Holy Children. Two were the two pure white lilies, Mary and John, that bloomed beneath the Tree of the Cross, and before and above and beyond all these numbers is that One Who is God Himself, Who at last and for ever will be All in All ! " Perhaps some one with skill and ability for the task may be moved to reconstruct the original monastic Latin rhymingversion of this sequence. P.S. Since writing the above the idea has occurred to me that the " five thimbles in a bowl " may refer to the five grains of incense fixed in the Paschal Candle. In this case, however, the symbolism would be the same. 357 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES WE are all familiar with the delectable tea-cakes known as " waffles " in the pages of American novels, if we have never had the happiness of coming across them in real life. In my own opinion, the crumpet is the king of all tea-cakes the crumpet of London, be it noted, redolent of memories of Dickens and Charles Lamb ; nay, which may have been eaten by Dick Whittington after he became Lord Mayor, fragrant with the warmth and cosiness of London firesides on afternoons of fog and frost, without the currants which differen- tiate it into the " pikelet " of the Midlands and the North. The crumpet of London is the king of all tea-cakes, but the waffle comes next. According to the books referred to above, the American girl revels in waffles ; she eats them with honey, 358 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES with sugar, with cream, with jam. They are as necessary a part of her daily fare as candies, cream crackers, or ice-water. They are the continual refection of all the " Katies " and " Pansies," of the " Little Women and Good Wives," and of Mr. W. D. Howell's heroines. I myself have only encountered the waffle at an actual tea- table twice and until the second time that is, until the other day I had always supposed that it was wholly and solely American. That, I imagine, is the general opinion. Mistaken as it is, it was certainly my own. The first occasion was, I suppose, some fifteen or sixteen years ago. We sat at tea, under an authentic portrait of George Washington, in the drawing-room of a charming novelist alas ! soon after, to be taken from us in his house on the Hog's Back. He was a member of a distin- guished American family, but had himself been educated and had always lived in England. His family name, by the way, which I do not here divulge, is one which, more than twenty years after first know- ing him, I now hear frequently in an 359 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES out-of-the-way part of Lincolnshire. The appearance of a new dish is to me some- thing not unlike the swimming of a new planet into the ken of a lonely watcher of the skies, and I exclaimed at the unusual tea-cakes. The gracious and gentle lady who presided at the tea-tables explained that they were waffles. I had supposed, I said, that they were only to be found on the other side of the Atlantic. " Yes, they are altogether American," she re- plied. " There is a special iron for making them, which can only be got in the States. We brought one home with us." The waffle itself is a thin cake, made of a batter, which is pressed between two irons, square, and stamped, honeycomb fashion, with a piping or fluting all over its surface. As soon as one hears the word " waffle," one suspects its connection with " wafer." Accordingly, on referring to Skeat, I was not surprised to find that the old English of " wafer " is " wafre," that the French is " gaufre," the Dutch "waeffel," and the German " waffel." The history of the little cake is at once lighted up by its name. 360 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES At that time I did not, however, take the trouble to make even these elementary researches, but forgot all about waffles till I again happened to read an American book. The next time I actually met with waffles it was, as I have said, quite recently they were introduced to me as " gaufres." This was in a most kind and hospitable Lincolnshire farmhouse, of which the master makes it his special pride and boast that he is the most conser- vative and old-fashioned of conservative and old-fashioned Englishmen. Amid the exuberant expression of his unyielding conservatism, not only in politics, but in manners, customs, cookery, games, morals, beliefs, one could sit for hours as in some luxuriant wood. I am in the most com- plete and heartfelt sympathy, for instance, with my old friend's lamentations over the passing of whist, or his laudations of meat roasted on a spit in front of the fire. " The old English way " is his continual refrain, " it was my father's custom, and so it shall be mine." Well, we sat down to tea needless to say, in this house one sits down to tea at a substantial table. " Why, 361 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES these are waffles," I exclaimed, in pleased surprise. " No ; they are gaufres," said the old gentleman, " they are a very old Lincolnshire dish there is a special iron for making them, which can only be got in Lincolnshire, or, at any rate, in the Eastern Counties." Alas ! not easily or readily even there at the present time. Next morning, like Old Mother Hubbard, I set out for the ironmonger's to get a gaufring iron. He had not one in stock, but he was good enough to make a sketch of one for me, and promised to try to get one. " A very few years ago," he said, " no iron- monger's stock would have been complete without one, but they are never asked for now. They are not to be found in the catalogues. Sometimes one sees them at sales, but I should hardly think of buying one." This is one of the very old local things which the dull grey flood of modernity has swept away, apparently within the last few years. Every one I spoke to, and I spoke to every one I met on the subject, was perfectly familiar with gaufres. They had been brought up on 362 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES them, but they never saw them now. The ironmonger himself was eloquent on his grandmother's pair of gaufring irons, and the superlative excellence of the cakes she made with them. "Jolly good, they were too ! You never see such cakes now." His sketch of the irons lies before me as I write the two irons between which the cake is pressed, a thick and a thin one, are set on a swivel, and held by two long handles like those of a toasting fork. By them the cook holds it over the fire, and turns it as need requires. The cake, when cooked, is stamped in squares like a draught-board. The " gaufring iron " is not to be confused with the " goffering iron," a laundress's implement for the piping, fluting, pleating I speak as a layman required in the getting-up of linen, the frilling of caps, aprons, ruffs, curtains, and pillow-cases. The iron- monger produced a pair of these, but I question whether even they are used as they once were. In the old days all these things were arts in which people took an artist's delight, even as they did in hand- writing. The art of getting-up linen in 3 6 3 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES perfection, I imagine, belonged to seven- teenth-century Spain and Holland. Our own age is one of machines and saving trouble. However, the "goffering iron" so the dictionaries spell it evidently took its name from the cake. The flutings made by it, say, on the edges of pillow- cases, resemble the flutings of the gaufre. This instrument consists of two irons, like curling tongs, with handles like those of a pair of scissors. The friend at whose table I enjoyed the gaufres chants unceasingly the praises of the old English geniality and hospitality, but he thinks, and I fear so too, that they tend to disappear. The hospitality of an old-fashioned Lincolnshire farmhouse is indeed unbounded the profusion shown, say at Christmas, or at a wedding, is like a page from an old book, like something out of Rabelais. It reminds one of Thomas Tusser's " Hundred Points of Good Husbandry." This is the old English spirit the spirit of Dickens. It coined the delightful phrase, " You're as welcome as the flowers in May," with which to greet a friend. That is a beauti- 3 6 4 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES ful piece of true, old genial English. In a meagre, care-worn, anxious world, all this withers and dies. But the beautiful plant was carried across the Atlantic by the men of the " Mayflower," and there it took root, and in the fullness of time blossomed and flourished abundantly. All travellers tell of the warmth and geniality of the American welcome. We know how our English lions are feted there. I believe that the " true, old-fashioned English hospitality," the open-handed, open- hearted geniality, is in reality to be found in America. I recently received from New York a request for a photograph of a certain Lincolnshire church. " My ancestor," said the writer, " went from Bilney in 1637, and, like all the Bilney men who went, he made good in America. And now," he added genially, " what can I do for you in New York ? " The Pilgrim Fathers had broken away no doubt from the religious tradition of the Middle Ages indeed, all England had, but how much of the Middle Ages they carried across the Atlantic with them ! Much is said of the oppressiveness of the 365 A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES regime they inaugurated in the New World ; but after all it seems that in a larger and freer air Puritanism soon lost its acerbity, and its children gained a large and genial tolerance of outlook, while never really losing the old characteristics of Catholic England. What, for instance, is the place of women in America ? Where is chivalry to be found if not in the United States ? And who are the modern pilgrims if not the Americans ? The love of shrines and sacred places, the desire to visit them, to possess memorials of them, the piety felt for them, as shown in my correspondent's letter asking for a picture of the Church from which his ancestor fled, is as strong in them as in any palmer of old. The Americans are the palmers and relic-seekers of the present day. True, the shrines of their worship are such places as Stratford-on- Avon and Chalfont St. Giles. There probably was never a finer English gen- tleman than that Laurence Washington who went out from his manor in North- amptonshire, and becames the ancestor of the great President. The perfection of A MEDITATION ON WAFFLES human manners is to be found in the returned American, if I may say so, who has brought back to England the wide, genial American tolerance, and has re- gained, or, indeed, never lost, the English aristocratic culture. Such a one was that never-to-be-forgotten personality genial, tolerant, gracious, wide-minded, sym- pathetic at whose tea-table I ate my first waffle. " He's a dear fellow," the neighbours would say, " but an awful Radical. The gardener's and the coach- man's children come in and have tea with his boys." They sat at a common table, and all ate the American " waffle," the old English " gaufre," together. 3 6 7 PAIN BENI ONE of the pleasantest things about writing in the newspapers is the correspondence which often ensues with kind people who are good enough to write and say that they have been interested in something one has written. The preceding article on the old English cake known as the " gauffre," carried across the Atlantic by the Pilgrim Fathers under that name, and by the Dutch settlers under the name of the " waffle," was recently contributed by me to the Nation. Both words, as other correspondents have shown, are identical with " wafer." This article was the occasion of a letter from an unknown correspondent at a village near Stock- bridge, in Hampshire, that is so inter- esting that I venture to quote it in full : " We have been much interested in your article and the ensuing correspondence on PAIN BENI ' waffles.' I have, therefore, thought you might be interested in what is, I imagine, the local form of this cake, and enclose you a few. The recipe for the batter used in making them is a family secret handed down in the female line. The woman who makes them in our village is the possessor of the only set of c irons ' to be found in this neighbourhood, although there was another local set which was purchased by a well-known antiquarian a few years ago, at the death of the old woman who had been accustomed to use them. The cakes are known locally as * Mothering Cakes,' and are prepared for ' Mothering,' or Mid-Lent Sunday. But the ' Mothering Sunday ' visits seem to be quite a thing of the past, and local people take little or no interest in the cakes. When I came to this village to live a few years ago it took me quite a time to get upon the track of these irons and their owner. In fact, I suppose I should never have heard about them, but an old farmer who lived here sent me a box of the cakes some twenty years ago, and so, when Fate sent us here to live, I began to inquire 2 A 369 about them. At last I found them in the possession of ' Granny Stock,' who had made my first specimen. Since then the good woman makes us a supply for each recurring ' Mothering Sunday.' There is no family tradition as to where the irons came from, or how long they had been in the family. On such matters the rural mind is a blank. But the design of the pattern on the cakes and the initials seem to be quite ecclesiastical." My kind correspondent enclosed a box of cakes. I have received no present which pleased me so much for a very long time. Let it be said at once that they have no connection with " waffles." These last are thick, like a crumpet or pikelet, and are eaten, soaked in butter, piping hot. The " mothering cakes " arc the same shape and size as what is known as "the priest's wafer," the Host elevated at Mass, and from which the priest com- municates. They arc, however, a shade thicker. On either side they bear a lovely design, a twining, budding plant surround- ing a circle which encloses a sort of sun- 370 PAI NBENI flower on the reverse side, on the front the letters I and S, with, between them, instead of the H one would naturally expect, a fioritura of seven small circles. The fragrance of the cakes is most appe- tizing, but they are far too beautiful to eat. Now, it is well known that the original signification of the term " Mothering Sunday " was the visit paid on that day by people at a distance to their mother Church. There are more popular names for Mid-Lent Sunday than for any other Sunday in the year. It is Laetare Sunday, Refreshment Sunday, Mothering Sunday. At the Mi-Careme, the joyful break in the gloom of Lent, rose-coloured vestments were worn. The custom of visiting the Mother Church, perhaps some Minster or great Abbey, seems alluded to in the Mass for the day : " Laetare, Jerusalem," runs the Introit, " conventum facite, omnesque diligitis earn, gaudcte cum lastitia, qui in tristitia fuistis . . . Lsetatus sum in his quas dicta sunt mihi : In domum Domini ibimus." This is repeated at the Gradual with " Fiat pax in virtute tua, et abun- dantia in turribus tuis." The Tract is : 37 1 PAIN BENI " Qui confidunt in Domine sicut mons Sion ; non commovebitur in asternum, qui habitct in Jerusalem." The Communion is : "Jerusalem, qua? aedificatur ut civitas cujus participatio ejus in idipsum ; illuc enim ascenderunt tribus Domini, ad con- fitendum nomini tuo, Domine." This going up of the tribes to that Jerusalem which is the mother of us all, of which the Epistle for the day speaks, was naturally accompanied in numberless instances by a going home of people to see their own mother. Heaven and home on that joyful feast day were no doubt kindred points. The beautiful custom has never wholly died out, but the emphasis tended more and more to be laid on the visit to the human mother and the earthly home. There is a West Country saying : " He who goes a-mothering finds violets in the lane." The custom is associated with all sweet, tender, homely, fragrant things. Now these " mothering cakes " were, no doubt, given by the monks, as a kind of pain beni, to mark the special solemnity and sacrcdness of the occasion, to the wor- 37 2 PAIN BENI shippers who came up to their Mother Church upon that day. The giving of " holy bread " at Mass was an old English custom, as the pain beni is given to-day in Northern France. These cakes, exactly resembling the sacramental wafer, beauti- fully ornamented, and morsels delicate to the taste, would be a peculiarly memorable kind of pain beni. To mark their dis- tinction from the consecrated Host, the letter H would, perhaps, be omitted from the sacred monogram. The secret of their making would, no doubt, have come from some monastery. They would probably be made with the same irons as the Host. The " mothering cakes " of certain Churches would be talked about, boasted of, perhaps saved and treasured up. They would be meant by the monks as a sort of parable of " Gustate et videtc quo- niam suavis est Dominus." The feeding of the people with the five loaves in the wilderness is the Gospel for that day. At the Dissolution of the monasteries the secret of their making would be carried out into the world by some old lay- brother or convent cook, and would be 373 PAIN BENI handed on, so that though the cakes were no longer given away in Church, and by degrees lost their sacred import, they were still made and eaten by the people in their homes at the joyful reunions of Mothering Sunday. These cakes from a Hampshire village, of which the significance has long been lost, and the very use is now fast dying out, have a long history behind them. They go back to the very beginnings of Christianity. They represent the Agape, the feast of love and peace of the first Christians. They are the " Antidoron " of the unchanging East. I take up a Russian manual of the Services of the Orthodox Church and roughly translate a sentence or two : " Thanksgiving after the Communion." " During the reading of this Psalm the Priest gives the Anti- doron. The remnants of the wafers, from which a part has been taken out for the Remembrance of Christ, are called the Antidoron, which signifies ' instead of the gifts.' The Antidoron is given for this reason, that those who do not communi- cate except spiritually, may have their 374 PAIN BENI part in the Mystery of the Communion, and may not feel themselves separated from the community of the faithful, but may find themselves in union with them. The giving of the Antidoron remains to us as a memorial of those feasts of love which in the first Christian ages took place after the Liturgy from the remainder of the offerings. " I remember a picture by a Russian painter whose name I have forgotten, of an old Russian peasant woman, her white head tied up in a barbarically-coloured shawl, her old wrinkled face, shrewd, kindly, humorous, all a-twinkle with delight at the apronful of the Antidoron, the sacred bread, in place of the celestial gifts which with a holy covetousness she was carrying away from Church. Such an old woman gossips with the Saints ; she carries home their heaped-up merits in her apron. The pain beni is the manna in the wilderness, the bread in the desert place, the cake broken at Emmaus. The Eastern custom of giving the Anti- doron at the time of the priest's com- munion or immediately after it seems 375 PAIN BENI more logical than the Western use of giving it after the Creed, and before the beginning of the Canon, but the meaning is, of course, the same. Who has not seen the white-capped old ladies in a French cathedral take great handfuls of the fine white bread, make the sign of the Cross with one fragment of it, and wrap the rest in a spotless handkerchief to carry it to the absent, or perhaps the sick ? This is what the early Christians did with the consecrated Element itself. " C'est pain beni," by the way, is a delightfully ironical phrase for " It serves him right." The " giving of the Pax " in the West was another of these signs of spiritual com- munion, of the union and the peace of men with one another, and with God, which has come down from St. Paul's "kiss of peace." Why is there such a fragrance and charm about all these things ? What would one not give, for instance, for a tessera of the early Chris- tians, or one of their sacred symbolical fishes ? When ideas so profound and tender are conveyed by such insignificant vehicles as the frail little " mothering 37 6 PAIN BENI cake " all things are redeemed from banality and dullness. The sacred things, as they are used by men, become familiar and homely. What violets, what moss and maiden-hair will spring from and cover the ruined walls of modern systems ? 377 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND AN enthusiast, writing in a recent Daily Mail in support of Mr. Kipling's claim to the Laureate's bays, asserted that "he more than any other man has impressed upon ' England ' the fact that she is not a nation but an Empire." The word "England" was scornfully put in inverted commas. When I read this sentence my thoughts turned to some lines of an old- time English poet, a patriot too, in his parochial Warwickshire way : " This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war. This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands. A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, . . . Renowned for their deeds as far from home As is the Sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world's Ransom, Blessed Mary's Son, . . . This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land . . . England bound in with the triumphant sea." Such was the lyric ecstasy that the thought of England awoke in this old-time Little Englander. England " not a nation," for- sooth ! Mr. Kipling, by the way, has in snatches written excellently of Sussex and of England. But it is " this blessed plot," " this little world," that is the fountain of his truest inspiration, not the thought that we are fellow-citizens with the Sepoys. One is glad to quote this Shakespearean passage, because in it one catches a glimpse of the mystical background which is behind all the poet's work, as it was behind the life of all the England of his time, and of which one still feels the presence amid the works which it created and inspired, abbey and college and cathedral, all over the land, of course, and not least in Southern and Western England. I went lately on a little tour in that 379 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND same English country, in the south and in the west, to Oxford and Fairford, and Glastonbury and Wells. Going southward and westward from the Fens, and going about south-west England in the bright June weather, the country everywhere seemed " another Eden, demi-Paradise." We set out, the writer and a companion, first for Oxford, which was to be our start- ing-point. For my own part I am accus- tomed to think of Oxford as the city of the dreaming gardens. I had not been there for some fourteen years, and it was renewing an old delight to wander from Wadham to Merton, and from Worcester to St. John's. I can never decide which of all these gardens is the most beauti- ful. The Brasenose window-boxes were dazzling as of old in the June sunshine, and the view of dome and spire seen from the Quad as noble. A very happy tortoise basked in the sun, and briskly nibbled the green grass. The deer at Magdalen still came to be fed. These green and still and sunny places were for the most part solitary, though here and there we came on little groups in flannels and white frocks, toying A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND with strawberries and iced coffee beneath the trees. In the entrancing garden of New College a pastoral play was proceed- ing the play scene from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." We were glad to begin our tour in England with Shakespeare. It is very fitting that he should be acted at Oxford. Shakespeare was himself what Oxford is the humanist child of the Christian tradition, which made it and him. The delightful Cotswold rustics playing at Athens, true creatures of Shakespeare's brain, or rather true Cots- wold rustics seen with Shakespeare's eyes, were represented by a party of working men. Wall and Moonshine played their quaint parts, the Lion roared, and Thisbe wailed " I be only actin'," the last inter- polated reassuringly. It all went charm- ingly, played to a gay company in that green sunny setting, "a marvellous con- venient place for that rehearsal." Oxford is very humanist, but there one never can forget for long the tradition that gave it birth. At All Souls, for instance, one of the Fellows was acting as cicerone to a party whom he had evidently just been 38' A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND entertaining at luncheon. He explained that the College had been founded in aid of the souls of the faithful departed who had died in the French Wars. " I thought so," exclaimed a lady, enthusiastically ; " I thought it had something to do with the beautiful old thoughts about the souls wandering around." The beautiful old thoughts had certainly much to do with producing Oxford, and ghosts of the past still wander there. The next day we sat in Fairford Church, and thought of the world. I wondered, as so often, at the magnificence and complete- ness of the mediaeval presentation of the scheme of things imaged in the Fair- ford walls of glass. The mediasvals like St. Thomas, like Dante, had a certain all- embracing totality in their rendering of their thought. The west window of which, by the way, the upper light is a mere modern copy, the original glass having been stolen in Birmingham, where it was sent to be repaired depicts the Last Judgment. In the old glass, in the lower part of the window, there is a particularly wonderful St. Michael, with 382 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND diaphanous butterfly wings. As one looked at these things some characteristically me- diaeval lines ran in one's head ; they express the point of view as well as any : " Liber scriptus proferetur In quo totutn continetur De quo mundus judicetur." It is to be questioned whether the familiar rendering about " all has been recorded," in which the idea of accusa- tion is the only one suggested, exhausts the meaning of " totum continetur." A " liber scriptus " of some sort there must be, if there is a moral government of the world, a record permanent and available ; but that record contains everything. Part of the " totum " which really belongs to humanity, by which its destiny is deter- mined, what is it, what it is worth, is the Story depicted on the Fairford glass. " Liber scriptus liber pictus." In the volume of the book that Story is written think of it how you will. In a lesser sense we may also say, " in quo totum continetur " of this glass. That the perse- cutors, for instance, all in lovely blues and greens, should have a line of windows to 383 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND themselves on the north side of the church is perhaps a unique distinction. This series only reaches from Herod to Nero ; but there are two or three whose identity the modern experts are hard put to to deter- mine. A mediaeval child would probably have had no difficulty with them. In Fairford the mystical Past almost eclipses the humanist Present ; but this also is here very delightful. The picture postcards in the shops show not only old glass, but big trout caught in its stream, and huge catches of crayfish taken by the villagers on warm autumn evenings. Fario and the river-lobster, those pleasant denizens of clear, fresh waters, have not yet been poisoned or driven away. But we were most pleased in Fairford by two children of a rare and elfin beauty, a boy and a girl, whom on the evening we were there we found playing in the village street. The little girl was a sort of spirit of delightful motion ; as she spoke, she danced ; the boy, a year or two older, had a grave and noble face beneath his mass of curls. They told us much of the wonders of their native place, 384 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND the new buildings, the sports shortly to be held in the park ; finally, they lighted candles and conducted us to inspect the police cells. " I've seen those windows tons o' times," said the little girl, still dancing. " There's the Brazen Serpent and the Twelve Disciples," said the boy. " In the west window," went on the little girl, " there's a man standing with his feet on a ball. I seen a man in Fairford with his feet on a ball. He rolled it along standing on it, and he went all down the street." From Fairford, where the railway stops, we drove to Cirencester. "The year's just in its plumage," the friendly driver re- marked, the pleasant Cotswold accent audible in his speech. Nothing had pre- pared us for the magnificence of the church we found at Cirencester, but we did not delay as we wished to press on to Wells. About Wells volumes might be written. George Gissing, in the "Private Papers of Henry Rycroft," if I remember right, speaks of the unequalled beauty of the walk by the moat round the Palace 2B 385 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND grounds. He speaks of it as a kind of type and climax of all the beauty of England. If our whole little journey was a revelation of the beauty of England, Wells was a revelation of the beauty of an English cathedral ; I mean, not merely architecturally, but as existing to-day, and living its own proper life. So much is said of the deadness of English cathedrals; it is contrasted with the life and fervour and activity of foreign shrines ; the English Morning Prayer is compared with the Mass it superseded. I have before now said such things myself, but we found something very illuminating and reconciling in the Matins of Wells. We heard the service under the great clock, with its cavalier marking the quarters and its whole tourna- ment clashing out at the hour. We thought of Bishop Ken, and of the Morning and Evening Hymns sung such countless times by old-fashioned English Churchpeople at their quiet worship. Wells stands in the west of the world, a peaceful, holy city, almost a village ; it has green fields about it. As to the cathedral, there is no pile of such majesty in England; no church, I A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND think, so serene. It is more moving to the mind than York or Lincoln. Unlike so many foreign cathedrals one sees all about it ; one walks round it amid the gardens in which it is embowered. I cannot speak of details ; the cloisters, the steps which rise like a tumultuous sea to the Chapter House. These Palace Gardens can compare with the garden of an Oxford college. We walked round the moat inside the grounds and pilfered the wild straw- berries. In such places, in England or abroad, one thinks of Paul and the Twelve. To them, no doubt, the hot June night in Nero's gardens, with its flare of living torches, was but a passing show ; from beyond such transitory scenes invisible but real hands were stretched to receive them into an eternal world ; but did they in any way foresee the magnificence with which their memories would be perpetuated among men ? One likes to think so. On cross or block as they lay down They heard innumerable bells ; Paul saw his Dome in London town, And Andrew his great church at Wells. 37 A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND No space is left to speak of Glastonbury. It is a place we all our lives had dreamed of, the cradle of the Faith in England. As to Les Aliscamps, at Aries, the great and noble were brought hither to be laid near the Saints, and to rise up hard by those who at any rate were sure of Heaven. It thrilled one to hear of Henry Plantagenet being told by a bard in Ireland of the spot where Arthur and Guinevere were laid, and of the finding of Arthur's bones and a long yellow tress of the hair of Guinevere, which on being touched fell into dust. Such things give one a sense of the fleeting passage of the centuries, and bring the long past near to us. We were pleased with the spectacle of the Abbot's Kitchen, with its substantial air of comfort, and, most of all, with the Abbot's barn, a big cruciform building like a cathedral, with the symbols of the Evangelists still on its four sides. A labourer working in it told us that St. Matthew's Angel had been worn away by the eastern storms. We saw this on our way to the Tor, the green hill outside the city, up which, in the A LITTLE TOUR IN ENGLAND year 1539, the last Abbot of Glaston- bury, Richard Whiting, was dragged to execution, on a charge of robbing the Abbey. 389 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE IN a recent number of the Nineteenth Cen- tury^ Mr. Frederic Harrison wrote of a vanished Europe in a way that made one's mouth water. . He described his travels in the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century : " In things visible, France was much as it had been at the Restoration of Louis the Eighteenth in 1815. . . . Each de- partment, almost each village, had its local costumes and manners ; the old pro- vincial life, as described by Balzac, Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, was in full career, with its markets, fairs, ducasses, and pil- grimages. The churches and cathedrals were still undefiled by the hand of the restorer, and were full of honest wor- shippers. Sixty years ago, every village was a new picture, a fresh romance. Ah ! 39 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE the dear, picturesque fisherfolk of Calais, Dieppe, Boulogne, Havre, Honfleur, and all the ports along the coast of Nor- mandy and Picardy. . . . The markets of Boulogne and Caen, Bayeux, or Rouen, were glowing and moving panoramas of quaint costumes, manners, and appliances such as Prout and Turner loved to paint, and Beranger to sing of. We, of those unsophisticated days, saw foreign parts as Byron saw them, or Heine, or young Ruskin, as Sterne, Goldsmith, Thackeray, and Hawthorne, and Landor once knew them, in their warm glow and infinite variety of colour and form. The glow, the variety, the local colour, are all gone." I must be pardoned this long quotation. I first knew foreign parts, not sixty, but thirty years ago, and still remember my first sight of Rouen as a boy. In com- parison with what it is to-day it was still Turner's Rouen. In my own experience I have seen enough to be able to appreciate the greatness of the change which Mr. Harrison describes, to understand some- thing of the incredible happiness of those 39 1 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE " old travellers " " the young Ruskin," or Hans Andersen coming down -from the north through Switzerland and Germany into Italy, or, most delightful of all, Gold- smith going about old France, and in that happy country paying his way with his flute. Something, no doubt, must be put down to middle age in Mr. Harrison's case, old age. They are irrecoverable, those holidays of youth in some fantastic country of Cockayne, which is neither Cornwall, nor France, nor England ; those ancient roomy inns, the savour of the dishes cooked by Mrs. Goldencombe at the sign of Roland and the Artichoke. Still there is much truth in Mr. Harrison's lament : " Europe has become standardized brought to one dull conventional pattern and that although each nation is watch- ing the others as showmen watch their performing lions and tigers." His article is so interesting that we cannot resist one more brief quotation. He describes the Europe of 1851 : " There had been no European war for thirty-six years, and there was a vague 39 2 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE sense that war between nations was a thing of the past. . . . There was no sense of bitterness between nations that was ap- parent to a traveller." A Christian man, a good European, in- deed could get from between the lines of Mr. Harrison's paper everything which he could desire. Oh ! happy Europe of the little States, before the coming of the evil day of Empires and machines. But such regrets are vain. Even Mr. Chester- ton sorrowfully admits that we cannot restore the Heptarchy. " We shall not wake with ballad strings The good time of the smaller things, We shall not see the holy kings Ride down by Severn side." With an old companion of many wander- ings, a friend of more than five-and-twenty years, I set forth, a little time ago, on a little tour in France. We went from north to south, in third-class carriages, by easy stages of journeys of five francs. We went first to Rouen. " Rouen," said a gentleman from Bradford, obligingly, " the centre of the French cotton trade." 393 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE It is indeed ; the old beautiful town is gone. But the churches remain the three great churches, Notre Dame de Rouen, St. Ouen, St. Maclou. There are no churches like Gothic churches, and there is no Gothic like Rouen Gothic, so at least I think. They give me an impres- sion which I seize or which seizes me nowhere else. The Church of St. Ouen in particular, it always seems, should have been dedicated to the Holy Spirit. It seems an expression of that third dis- pensation, that transcendent and perfect illumination dreamed of by the Abbot Joachim of Flora, and so many mediaeval mystics. There is, so to speak, a tran- quillity, a great serenity in its Gothic aspiration. Our next stage was to another old love, Chartres. I can only write very simply of these things I love so much, I have no power of discussing details, no technical in- formation to give ; but how surprising, how miraculous, the mediaeval Church was, as we see it in its works at Rouen or Chartres ! Ah ! that mingling of earth and heaven, those Trees of Jesse, those Jacob's ladders, 394 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE those signs of the zodiac, those forests of stone, those walls of glass ! These churches were built by and for the whole people, to reflect and express the whole life of man. The Latin Church, after the six- teenth century division, no doubt became less free and vital, less large and imagina- tive ; it became military, rigid, mechani- cal. At present one fears for the sepa- rated Church in France, and that the worshippers in these glorious fanes may still more dwindle into a narrow sect. The carved Gospel in stone around the choir is a stupendous work. The faith of those ages seems to have secured the value of the present and of work done in it, the importance of which was not dwarfed by the contemplation of an earthly future. The town of Chartres itself was very pleasant in the October days. There is a charming stroll by the river with its many bridges. The street bears the sinister name " Rue de Massacre." The inn- keeper was vague in his answer to in- quiries as to the meaning of the name. " Du Temps des Revolutions," he re- 395 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE plied. There are here and there old figures of the Saints on the quaint houses. We noticed, in particular, a little coloured St. Bartholomew with a very businesslike knife. Vendome was our next halting-place. This was a great pilgrimage place in the old days. It possessed the relic of " the Holy Tear " shed at the grave of Lazarus. This was destroyed at the time of the Revolution. The front of the church here was a new possession. In all Gothic there can be nothing more lovely than it is. The hawthorn branches live and grow, the sap rises in them and breaks into flowers. Here and there among the living, twisting boughs are the real creatures of God, not dreadful Romanesque monsters, but " every beast and bird that in his jargon sings and cries," as Charles of Orleans heard them in the spring. The men who carved this front were sculptors, as Charles of Orleans was a poet. How they loved the real world and actual living things ! You may see here the owl, the kingfisher, the squirrel. There is, above all, a snail, the daintiest of snails, the 39 6 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE entire and perfect chrysolite of snails. Afterwards, down in the south, at Roca- madour, we found his living prototype. Walking out along the valley in the hot sun, we found on a tall flower-spike the pink, delicately-chiselled shell of just such a snail. Doubtless, in the old days, an ancestor of his travelled the long journey from Rocamadour to Vendome, and climbed up among the flowers and leaves of the portal, where he has remained until this day. It was Saturday morning when we left Vendome, and a dark-eyed little girl with a red rose, carrying a great round ring of fresh-baked bread or cake, with a gilded crust, wandered up and down the church, asking for the sacristan. She had brought the pain beni for to-morrow's mass. The pain beni^ like so many pleasant things, seems to belong to the north, to Normandy, and to the Isle of France. At least we did not see it farther south. At Vendome one bids farewell to Gothic churches. For the Romanesque I confess I do not care. From Vendome, we went, rather mistakenly, to Angouleme. The 397 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE larger French towns, as Mr. Harrison laments, are ruined by "railroads, factories, steam, electricity." They should only be visited if they contain great treasures of art like Rouen. The places printed in smaller type on the maps, such asCaudebec, Riberac, Rocamadour, out of which one can wander immediately into lovely country, are still delightful. In these short journeys one had the pleasant sense of getting always further south, of more luxuriant vines, of southern trees. One found, too, still going on, under the sur- face, " that old provincial life " described by Mr. Harrison's novelists. This came out in turns of speech caught here and there, and (the reader will pardon me) in old-world oaths. " Sacre-Bon-Dieu-de- Bon-Dieu," said a country station-master good-humouredly as he rectified a mistake about a ticket. On our way to Perigueux we halted at Riberac, a joyful little southern town, quite smothered in vines. The country about it is fruitful, and happy, and lovely. The peasant farmers here must be happier than Lincolnshire potato kings. As we 398 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE walked back into the town from a ramble in the country, a peasant joined us who seemed the very spirit of content and blitheness. He went with us by the vines and walnuts, under the great green solemn walls of poplars. He was highly amused at our having come so far, to wander about these country roads. He chirruped like a cricket. He talked about the fruit trees, about " la semence des bles," the sowing of the wheat that was beginning. He had never been at Perigueux. As he left us in the twilight a bell tinkled in the distance. " C'est 1'Angelus de St. Martin," he said, cheerfully. About the " Grand-Saint-Front," the edifice at Perigueux which restored Mr. Belloc's faith, silence is perhaps best. It greatly depressed me, and had an altogether evil effect on my companion. (This perhaps in his case was partly to be attri- buted to the final severance from English tobacco and other creature comforts still not altogether unattainable in the north.) Still, we shall always think kindly of Perigueux. One day when we were there was market day, a southern market with 399 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE stalls of strange fruits and fungi, pome- granates and capsicums and cepes. Amid the throng a woman was playing a con- certina while a man sang a ballad of the loss of " La Liberte," to that touching air of Breton pardons, the indescribable " Paimpolaise." We could have listened for ever. To such an air in old-time market towns, wandering ballad singers may have sung in the last years of the six- teenth century a " Lament for the Duke of Guise." Walking out from Perigueux, too, we saw a flight of cranes moving southward. They would come back in February, a peasant told us. He asked if we came from Spain. He had seen many English. " Us sont des hommes, comme les autres," he added, philosophically. It was by a happy chance we saw Rocamadour. It had always been a shrine desired, but we had not thought of it this time. As we were leaving the hotel at Perigueux for Limoges a friendly waiter said, " Messieurs ont vu Rocamadour ? ' and we laid down our bags. It proved to be quite accessible. We arrived at midnight at Brive, and partook at the 400 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE buffet of a truly Meridional meal of hare, pheasant, mushrooms, and sweet cakes. In the morning the rain poured down, but again it was market day, and the southern character of the place and popu- lation nothing could disguise. People were going about with strange carts of fruit, with awnings over them, and cages of birds hanging beneath. Mules had replaced horses. Everybody was most anxious to direct us to the chapel of St. Anthony, the only pilgrimage place of this great Saint in France. He is very illustrious. Every one knows, for instance, that while preaching at Padua, by an astonishing prodigy, he was also present at Lisbon. We found the chapel closed. A very sympathetic baker's boy, who had expatiated on its wonders, sighed at our disappointment. " Eh ! mon Dieu, mais c'est interessant, eh ! mon Dieu, mais c'est joli," he said. I will not speak of Rocamadour. This was really a very great experience. It was here, in this village in the rock, that in the year 1166 the body of Zaccheus " L'ami de Notre Seigneur " was found, 2C 401 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE perfectly preserved. The name means " the Rock of the Lover." It is the oldest pilgrimage place in France. I will not attempt to describe the towering shrine, with its many chapels, nor the great flight of steps up which so many pilgrim feet have passed. Nor will I name the delight- ful inn, which, to our own great advantage, we shared with another pair of travellers, of whom the landlady told us in a whisper, " Us sont des gourmets. Us ne pensent qu'a leur bouche." Immediately beyond the village street was the southern nature the lizards, the cicadas, the butterflies, the snail of Vendome. I will say good-bye to the reader at Poitiers. This is the pilgrimage place of Ste. Radegonde. All this region is filled with memories of old English kings. Henry Courtmantel and Eleanor of Guienne and Thomas of Canterbury are names immeasurably old ; but when they came as pilgrims to her tomb, Ste. Rade- gonde had been dead six hundred years. There is in her church a little shrine called " Le Pas de Dieu," enclosing a stone marked with a footprint of Our 402 A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE Lord, ieft upon it as the Sacred Figure vanished from her sight. One knows not, indeed, upon what to rest the mind, if not upon the thought that the foot- steps of the Eternal have been set in the great space and wilderness of time, and that the passing and the mortal has been taken into God. 403 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO WE went to Brittany, my friend and I, in the last days of July, and we had to be back in England, my friend before, and myself immediately after, the Feast of the Assumption. Now Brittany is the land of Feasts, but the early days of August are perhaps among the least festal days of the whole year. Easter is long past, Pente- cost, the Fete-Dieu, the Mois de Marie. The month of the Sacre-Cceur is past. Many Pardons are held at the Trinity, but that, too, is long over and done. In the procession of the year, the great Breton saints, St. Yves, St. John, St. Anne, have all passed by. The fairest feast of all, the blue and gold Nativity of our Lady, the halcyon eighth of September, is still weeks ahead. We had to be content with colourless days and I to wait for the fifteenth of August. Even this I could 404 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO not spend in Basse Bretagne, at Rumengol or Le Folgoet, being obliged to cross to England, at latest on the following day. To lovers of feasts, these were hardly en- couraging circumstances. But we resolved to make the best of them, and I at least looked forward to spending the Assump- tion, if not where one would choose, at any rate amid a fervent and faithful people. This was to make amends for sunless days, and for whatever contrarieties or decep- tions we might be fated to meet with in the course of our tour. In the event I was not disappointed. Let me here confess to being a lover of feasts a " songe-fete," not so much in the usual acceptation of the phrase (though not too rigidly excluding even that mean- ing), as in the sense of being a lover of those great days which still give to the divided multitude one heart and one soul, and in which the people, as they crowd the streets and throng the churches, rejoice and worship as one man. Except in some degree Christmas, we have no feasts in England. France is losing her feasts. The greater part of France, indeed, is visibly 405 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO becoming a frightful country, but one can still go about Brittany from May till October, and see white-robed throngs, as of the New Jerusalem, moving everywhere through the streets. In that fortunate province, at any rate, one can still see a feast one can go up to the house of the Lord with the multitude of them that keep holy day. The nearest approach to a feast we came on in the course of our journey was the Pardon of St. Nicodeme. We had seen the stones of Carnac (I had been there two years before, and with a pleasing amiability, slightly tinctured with humbug, a large section of the population had greeted me as a long-lost friend), and from Carnac we had come to Pontivy. All these days the rain descended in pitiless floods, and when, on the Saturday before the Pardon (on which day a fair is said to be held at St. Nicodeme), we took the train to St. Nicolas and from thence walked to the little chapel, we found the lonely shrine surrounded by impassable swamps. We struggled to it through a narrow flooded lane, and knelt as the sole worshippers at 406 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO a Mass which a priest had begun to say as we arrived. The chapel already looked festal, and its two Saints, Nicodeme and Comely, stood inside the altar-rails sur- rounded with candles and flowers. We saw no fair, but drank cider with a few peasants hanging about in the wet, and afterwards a more potent beverage, specially uncorked for us by two hospitable priests who had come to perform the offices of the fete. They made the usual perplexed inquiries as to our insular mysteries, and somewhat scandalized us by asking my friend (who is a ripe scholar and happens to be a canon of an English cathedral) if he knew Latin. They handed him a missal to see whether he were thus entitled to benefit of clergy, and he read out the text about the Three Witnesses to their satisfaction, though perhaps in a Latin rather of Winchester than of St. Nicodeme. These experiences were hardly en- couraging, but we threaded the same pathway to St. Nicodeme's chapel on the following day, the Sunday, the day of the Pardon. The High Mass was most devo- tional and fervent. Nowhere in the world 407 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO is the Latin of the Mass sung as it is by these Breton peasants, many of them unable to speak or understand French. They use the Missal at Mass rather than the Rosary. The little chapel was a scene of spotless coiffes, from under many of which looked faces of Perugino's Madonnas. After the Mass many of the women remained in church, fervidly repeating Breton devo- tions. We bought three pennyworth of bread and a fourpenny bottle of cider, and enjoyed a Biblical meal in one of the pilgrims' booths. A great feature of this feast is the descent of an angel from the spire to light the bonfire after Vespers. The weather was so bad that it was feared this would have to be abandoned. We waited on, however, in the hope of seeing it, and at last a toy angel glided down the rope, holding a flag, vexillum Resurrec- tionis, to a great pile of brushwood, which the priests lighted. Then the bells clanged and the procession went round the church, the Priests, the Crucifix, St. Nicodeme, St. Comely, the crowd of the faithful, singing Te Deum through the thick black mud. It was a sight to see the priests 408 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO tucking up their cassocks and skipping from side to side as they lustily chanted " Te confitetur Ecclesia." This spectacle, by the way, caused us to lose our train. The next train to Pontivy was at nine o'clock the distance was fifteen kilo- metres. They told us the boulanger of St. Nicolas possessed a voiture, but he could nowhere be found, and while the sympathetic population of the village were still looking for him, we hailed a chance passer-by and climbed into his cart. I will not pursue our itinerary in great detail. We went to Huelgoat by a crawling cross-country train, the same diluvium fall- ing still upon us. When we arrived at the town, which is nine kilometres from the station, we found the inhabitants stolidly enjoying the third day of the Pardon as the rain fell upon them. Wild beasts were roaring behind their bars, brightly-lighted roundabouts revolving in the wet. Cas- cades and cataracts seemed pouring through the streets. At the inn at which we alighted we were told there was no inch of room available, so wet and tired and hungry we set off with what cheerfulness we could 409 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO to seek for other lodging. We had not gone far, when a breathless small hoy came after us with the glad tidings that there were rooms in the Annexe. It seemed a mile away. An incident which amused us in the Annexe was our being summoned by two Parisian ladies with many screams, to slaughter " une grosse bete," " une grosse araignee." They ap- appeared to regard us afterwards with grateful veneration, as valiant dragon- slayers. From Huelgoat we went to Landivisian, from thence to Landerneau, and there my friend left me. The question now was, " Where to spend the Assumption ? " In all the towns through which I passed I heard of the processions and rejoicings that were to take place on the great day. There was to be a procession at Landerneau two processions, in fact, as Bostock's " Grand Cirque Anglais " was that day visiting the town. There was to be a procession at Morlaix there was to be a procession even at St. Brieuc. Reluctantly all these places were left behind. I did not expect much from St. Malo, but I decided that 410 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO it was there after all that the feast day must be spent. It is a mistake to assume that a place is more charming and interesting in propor- tion to its greater distance from London. St. Malo, for instance, is a town of singu- lar fascination. It was for this delightful spot that M. Dumollet set out in the old French nursery rhyme " Bon voyage, cher Dumollet A Saint Malo debarquez." It is full of interests, full of memories. It rises, a grey island from the sea, crowned with its cathedral and ringed round with its walls, a worthy key and gateway of all Brittany. But it was an astonishment on the day of the Assumption. From the earliest morning of that day the cathedral was thronged with worshippers from end to end. From five till nine all the altars were surrounded by crowds of communi- cants. As a piece of architecture it is but a third-rate cathedral, doubtless, but I spent the greater part of that day in it, and I found it became living as I have known few cathedrals do ; it was no 411 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO longer a dead shell and show place, but something throbbing and palpitating with its own proper life. It was fervent with faces, peopled with all sorts and conditions of men. It was like what Notre Dame must have been in mediaeval Paris. There were old market women, young soldiers, little children, beggars, fishermen, all at ease, all at home, many of them visibly lost in praying, going and coming, coming and going. Passing out into the street there was the unmistakable festal air. A portly old woman with an elaborate white headdress moved about among the throng with an immense basket of all sorts of delicious looking cakes, dainty confections of cream and sugar babas, madelemes, eclairs, tourtes aux abricots, aux mirabelles true gateaux de 1'Assomption. She was a figure of old France, of the days of Henri Quatre or Louis Treize. She seemed to incarnate the spirit of the festival. Her wares were for the holiday delight of children at home. I passed the market and mar- velled at the French housewife's skill in bargaining. She was selecting the fete-day 412 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO dinner with the most eager carefulness. The Marche aux Poissons was a wonder- ful sight. There had apparently been a huge catch of all sorts of shell-fish, lan- goustes, lobsters, crabs, prawns, spiders of the sea. (Why langoustes, are never seen in England, by the way, is a mystery to me. It seems incredible that they should be found in such numbers in the waters of St. Malo, and never by any chance in those of Southampton.) The richer marketer would weigh a langouste in her hand, hold it up by its back, feel its eyes, pull its claws, and then reject it and pass on. Her poorer sister would beat down the price of a sea-spider from seven sous to four, and then say she could not pay so dear. The patience and courtesy of the sellers seemed inexhaustible. By twelve o'clock there was not a fish left in the market. For the High Mass the cathedral was packed to the doors. There was the same popular singing that we noticed at St. Nicodeme. The preacher spoke, it seemed to me, with something of astonishment of the " veritable demonstration " the faith- 413 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO ful of St. Malo had made that day. The whole effect was very different from that produced by functions in the secularist parts of France it was not sectarian, but, as in la vieille France, popular, national, universal. The streets were decorated for the pro- cession, and the statues of Our Lady and St. Christopher at the Grande Porte (which date from 1605) were surrounded by candles and green boughs. In the afternoon the town was alive with people, and the church again was thronged for Vespers. After Vespers came the pro- cession, in which a ship was carried, pre- sumably the emblem of the good port of St. Malo. What better device for the Assumption Day can after all be thought of than a ship with spotless sails and flying flags happily entering the haven ? There were Children of Mary, boys in red caps, little sailor boys in blue and white, some blowing trumpets and banging drums, and all enjoying themselves im- mensely. At six was the last Benediction. The children had all brought their holiday toys 414 A FEAST DAY AT ST. MALO into church. A small boy complacently flew a huge balloon over the heads of the surrounding faithful. With one voice they sang, all that vast throng " Genitori Genitoque Laus et jubilatio Salus, honor, virtus quoque Sit, et Benedictio Procedenti ab utroque Compar sit laudatio," as they bent in worship of the " Filius " of all Glories, the Carpenter of Nazareth, the little Syrian Boy who twenty centuries ago played in the narrow, crooked streets with other children. 415 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES I HAVE never seen one of the " pageants " of late years so popular in England. Neither, if the truth must be told, have I ever experienced any very keen desire to do so. There has always seemed to me something very unspontaneous and self- conscious about these revivals. Moreover, many of these spectacles come very near to a falsification of history. It is, of course, extremely difficult to give a triumphant and satisfactory representation of a compromise. Many of the most salient facts of English history are anathema to numbers of the most enthu- siastic and intelligent advocates of pageantry. In depicting the sixteenth century, for instance, the English pageant- maker, if he wishes to avoid giving offence to any of the spectators, must either pre- tend that the Reformation never happened 416 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES at all (which seems to be the course generally adopted) or by some marvel of ingenuity suggest that both the contending parties were on the same side, and that both were right. All such representations have only a sectarian, or, at best, a national interest ; they have no background of a large and informing idea behind them. How different was the religious pageantry of the Middle Ages ! It was universal in its appeal, it was intelligible to all, under- stood at once by all. It was catholic, not national ; still less sectional. It dealt not with the triumph of Englishmen over Spaniards, but with the redemption of Man. Everybody knew the story ; nobody ever tired or it. Divine, eternal things were presented in lowly human guise. The whole of it revolved cease- lessly around two points, a Mother with a little Child, a lowly Sufferer dying in pain. There was nothing doubtful or disputatious about this. Everybody re- sponded. There is one corner of Europe where the old religious pageantry is still alive. The making of pageants has always been 2D 417 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES the peculiar gift of the Flemings. In Belgium, at this day, better even than in the Tyrol, one may still see all these things. The most marvellous sacred spectacle in Europe takes place every year on the Monday after the Invention of the Cross, at Bruges. This is the Procession of the relic of the Sacred Blood, which every year on that day is carried through the town. I had often heard of this Procession, and this year it was my good fortune to see it. Circumstances being propitious, I had the, for me, unwonted experience of crossing the Channel on a Saturday, and was in Bruges the same night. Who does not know the contented little town, with its quaint old houses, its canals with their shimmering reflections in the water, its solemn churches on the quay sides and in the narrow streets, always alive with the busy, contented fervour of coming and going worshippers, lively rosy children, and rheumaticky, gossiping old alms- women with faces out of Van Eyck, its restful, soothing chimes, its homely, friendly Flemish, which one hears spoken 418 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES everywhere ? It is refreshing to find so many people who cling to the kindly tongue of their own little country, and who know no French. There is some- thing peculiarly touching in the speech of little countries. Little languages are the servants of the people, not their imperious masters forcing them to attempt difficult, indeed impossible, feats. Flemish, like the spoken Italian, appears to vary from place to place. For example, on one church door in Bruges, I saw the Feast of Pentecost called by the quaint, delightful name of " Pinksten," on another it ap- peared as " Sinxen." Both words, of course, are versions of the German " Pfingsten." The great artistic treasure of Bruges is the collection of Memlings in the Hopital de Saint-Jean. Here is the great chasse painted with the story of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. Here is the Nativity with Hans Memling's own face looking through the stable- window at the scene. Here is the Pieta, where after four hundred years tears like pearls still fall down the cheeks of the 419 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES Madonna and St. John. Here are, indeed, infinite riches in a little room. But to the immense majority of the thousands of Flemish peasants who pour into the city for the fete, its chief pride and glory is in none of these things, but in the little phial of the Sacred Blood shed on Mount Calvary, brought to Bruges from the Holy Land in the year 1149, and preserved there ever since. Benediction is given with it as with the Host, by a priest in cope and humeral veil. As it passes, a bell rings and the people kneel. There is a relic of the kind at Mantua, brought there from Calvary by Longinus himself. Before the Reformation there existed in England a similar relic at Ashbridge, and there was, again, the famed " Holy Blood of Hailes." The procession which escorts the Bruges relic through the kneeling multitude of the faithful takes three- quarters of an hour in passing, and ex- hibits, not only pageants in honour or their patron saints from every parish in Bruges, but a scenic representation of the whole Gospel story, and its prefiguration in the Old Testament. 420 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES On the sunny Sunday afternoon I had a foretaste of the great Monday procession, in the procession of St. Walburga, which left the quay-side church of that name, and passed solemnly through the whole parish. The representation here was the life of St. Walburga, followed by the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary. The Host was carried, as it is not in the great procession, and the whole scene was most impressive and dignified. St. Walburga came first in the splendour of her worldly state, her sumptuous train borne by handmaids, and followed by quaint little page-boys in velvet hats and white feathers and old Court dress. She was then seen bearing a ship, possibly the ship in which, with her brother, she sailed down the Rhine from Mainz to the Low Countries, then with a church, no doubt some abbey of her foundation ; and, after various stages, as the Lady Abbess, with her veil and crook. The fifteen little girls of the Mysteries of the Rosary, five in blue for the joyful, five in red for the sorrowful, five in gold for the glorious, each held aloft the gleaming 421 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES banner of her Mystery. Every one of the fifteen dresses was embroidered down its whole length with the Mystic Rose. The Flemings of old were skilled makers or sumptuous vestments. There are no vestments in the world like the dalmatics and stoles in Hans Memling's pictures. The grouping and arrangement of this splendid little bit of pageantry was truly admirable. On the great day, from the earliest dawn the streets were thronged by crowds of pilgrims on their way to venerate the relic in its chapel of the Saint Sang. From thence it was solemnly carried by the clergy with lights and incense, and the pathetic cadence of the " Veni, Sancte Spiritus," to the Cathedral of St. Sauveur. Candles were lighted in every window as it passed. After the High Mass it was taken out of the church, escorted by three bishops in copes and mitres. It was there met by the various corteges sent from every parish in Bruges. First came lancers on horseback, and military music. Then the procession opened with the Life of St. Mary Mag- 422 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES dalene. We saw her, first, in her butterfly robes, then with her precious ointment, then as the penitent in the cave of La Baume. The parish of St. Anne sent the tree of Jesse, crowned with the Mother and Child. Jesse himself, a tall stripling, had his name blazoned on his breast. But one cannot speak of all the Saints with their quaint Flemish legends. Here was St. Anthony, the scourge of heretics, and St. Barbara, the fast friend of the Holy Trinity, and St. Anne, our certain succour in the hour of death. Here was the life of St. Giles, the life of St. Barbara, the life of St. James. The last Saint, as a fisher- man, was attended by a cohort ot fisher boys with nets (" I will make you fishers of men "), and as a pilgrim by a throng ot tiny pilgrims in red, with staves and gourds and scallop shells. From the Cathedral of St. Sauveur white-clad children carried the May-pole of the Holy Name. There came, first, a company of little boys re- presenting its glorification by all nations, Great Britain, oddly enough, leading the way, and, more oddly still, being repre- sented by a boy in a kilt. The young 423 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES girls followed, Belgium the fair queen of all. They carried scrolls bearing, in the homely Flemish tongue, all the caressing titles of the Litany of the Holy Name " Minnelijke Jesus," " Wondelijke Jesus," "Jesus, onze Toevlucht." Then came the Seven Sorrows of our Lady. If I remem- ber rightly, it was in connexion with this group there appeared a little St. John Baptist in charge of a very little Jesus, whom he had great difficulty in keeping in due order and in his place. The little fellow betrayed a constant tendency to wander away. Indeed, when we saw the procession on its return journey these two figures had disappeared. They had, no doubt, dropped out. After the groups from the Parish Churches came the Biblical cortege. First, the Patriarchs, then the stories of the pre-figuring types Abraham with the knife and the beloved son Isaac laden with the wood, Joseph sold by his brethren (the carrying off of the captive lad by the Ishmaelites, by the way, was described by an English illustrated newspaper as the " Arrest of a Christian "), then the Pro- 424 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES phets, the central figure, of course, being royal David with his harp and crown. Before the Crib of the Nativity came a white-robed throng of angels, chanting " Gloria in excelsis Deo." The Crib was followed by the men and women of Beth- lehem, singing " Adeste Fideles." The gestures and acting of this group were most admirable. The " Presentation in the Temple " followed, and then came what was, perhaps, the finest thing in the whole procession the Boy in the Temple, a strikingly handsome lad, with great dignity, disputing with the puzzled doc- tors of the law, opening their scrolls to verify his words and shaking their wise old heads as they found that what he said was true. Then a burst of loud Ho- sannas and the triumphal waving of palm branches, then the Garden of Olives (the figure of Judas a triumph of art), then the carrying of the Cross. Then the Holy Relic itself, and all fell on their knees. Some English people staying in the hotel were greatly troubled and perplexed, not so much at the procession itself, as at the subsequent fair. " I cannot see how 425 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES they reconcile the two things," they said. This is a very common English attitude. " Are you aware what I heard one of your chief communicants say to me as she came out of church on Sunday night ? " inquired a woman of a clerical friend of my own ; " she said, i Have you seen my new bonnet ? ' The chier attraction of the fair at Bruges was " la roue joyeuse," a circular revolving board, in the middle of which the patients sat, until, amid shouts of laughter, they were whirled off, on this side and on that. Well, they are of Bruges and of the country round, these simple folk ; they pass their moment in the little space beneath the carillon that always keeps the hours. Amid the surging crowd around the joyous wheel, I saw a baby in his mother's arms make with freedom and royalty the very gesture of the Holy Child. Then, as so often, a change and a trans- figuration passed over the whole scene, a new value and dignity were given to every unit of that crowd of Flemish peasants, born at all adventure (there are those who say), and hereafter to be as though they had never been. Every sufferer was the 426 A PAGEANT AT BRUGES Saving Victim, every mother was the Mother Immaculate, every child was the Divine Child. And one saw, once more, how unique is the value to mankind of all these things ! 427 SPRING BY THE SEINE MR. CHESTERTON, in a stirring ballad, has told us how on one memorable night he " went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier." It was recently the lot of the writer and a companion to go to Rouen and Les Andelys by that same route. We live too far from London to be able to cross from Newhaven to Dieppe by the day-boat at least, if the whole journey has to be performed in a single day. This has its disadvantages, when, as was lately our case, the time at our disposal is a bare six days. In these circumstances, the question may be asked, " Why go out of England at all ? " Sir Frederick Banbury, for whom, for my own part, I confess to a particular liking for his plain speaking on such things as the Akbar atrocities and his firm opposition to the vivisection of dogs, has not been out of England since 1874. 428 SPRING BY THE SEINE But such fine old English gentlemen have always appeared to me to be admirable rather than imitable. I have long held that the essence of a holiday, however brief, lies in the sensation of being out of England. The Dieppe boat started that Monday evening somewhere near midnight, and hence our journey began, like Mr. Ches- terton's, with an hour or two amid the glittering lights of Brighton Pier. The early morning of the next day found us moving through the apple trees of the pleasant Norman country. To get any- where else, we had, of course, to go to Rouen, where we had so often been before. We had visions of Beauvais, Gisors, Caudebec, none of which were destined to be realized. But when is not Rouen delightful ? I have known it for thirty years, and it still seems to me the most romantic of all places. It is the fashion to mourn over the destruction of the old- world city, but, outwardly at least, where is not the old world destroyed ? But in Rouen, not only do its great outstanding monuments remain, but under the thin 429 SPRING BY THE SEINE surface of the present, how much of it is still there ! In our day at Rouen, we kept coming across it, at least that was the sensation that one had. Let me here confess to being an impenitent lover of the world which was shattered in the tempest of the Revolution. I do not mean the political order, but the mental world, the conception of things people had, the way they lived. As one looks at the fragments of the great shipwreck strewn through a thousand old curiosity shops, one wonders at its order, its unity, its completeness, its decoration, the sufficingness of it, the apparent content- ment and cheerfulness which it inspired. Who does not know the tapestries, the crucifixes, the benitiers blown all about the world by the Revolution storm, like leaves of some great wood by autumn winds ? As truly as these things are frag- ments of the old order, so are the ballads, songs, customs, turns of manner and speech, which anyone with eyes and ears comes across constantly among the people of France. The first old-world thing we noticed at 43 SPRING BY THE SEINE Rouen were the street cries. For instance, the women crying mackerel, of which whole shoals were going in barrows about the streets, were charming to hear. The cry has a peculiar cadence and intona- tion, intensely rhythmical, centuries old no doubt, traditional, bridging the chasm of the Revolution between the old world and the present. The merits and virtues of the fish were set forth doubtless in certain brief, liturgical phrases, the words of which we did not catch, and the word "maquereau" came like a refrain again and again. The boys with trays of refresh- ments, too, cakes, sweets, oranges, execute a most musical phrase, a long, cadenced enumeration of their wares, ending like this : " ds oranges, Que voulez-vous ? " It is like some delightful nursery rhyme. So again is the cry of the girls who sell newspapers : " Ds journaux, des journaux." These things are the minor arts of the Past. They represent a long, exact tradi- 43 ' SPRING BY THE SEINE tion, a beautiful perfecting of language for the simplest uses of life. They indicate a priestly dignity in the performance of the humblest services. Compare these cries of the Past with the Futurist shrieks of our own newsboys, the hideous dis- tortions of the word " Paper," only by their damnable iteration to be recognized as a symbol. In the street cries of Rouen we divine the essential spirit of the popular life of the old world, the spirit in which in spite of all injustices and abuses, so many generations of human beings lived happily and contentedly. It was a spirit of contentment with and satisfaction in the present, the concrete, the matter in hand, the doing it as beautifully as pos- sible. This had all along been the spirit of the mediaeval craftsmen, and right up to the Revolution it was still the popular spirit. The cult of abstractions, of ima- ginary times and states, golden ages, states of nature, was aristocratic. The eighteenth- century philosophers were much patronised by the noblesse^ who did not know they were playing with fire. The modern heresy, the secret of the modern unhappi- 43 2 ' SPRING BY THE SEINE ness, is the despising of the concrete, the traditional, the homely, the local, the familiar, the ascribing of importance to abstractions and theories, the thinking that any wild shriek is good enough with which to herald the selling of newspapers. It was a bright May-Day that morning in Rouen, though the month was still April, and we strolled from the hot streets into the shady green quadrangle of some old building, of which the rooms seemed now let to various tenants. We sat down under a tree, the inhabitants of the place being apparently by no means disturbed by our apparition. A mother sat at her knitting, with her baby in his cradle on the grass in the sun. Here we came upon a perfectly entrancing fragment of the old world. In one of the rooms some one was singing a ballad to a simple and lovely melody. Never have we heard music so haunting, so touching, and yet at bottom, so happy. The song was the farewell of " a poor traveller," " un pauvre passager " to his home and country. It was not something sung to an audience, it was just spontaneous, unconscious music. We 2 433 SPRING BY THE SEINE listened long, and then succumbed to the temptation of walking round the quad- rangle to look for the singer. This was no doubt a wrong and foolish thing to do, a spreading abroad of the disease of self- consciousness. We found in one of the rooms a blithe little woman doing some sort of needlework on a frame, and singing, so she said, " pour se distraire." All through the Past, men and women sang at their work. Very few do so now, and we are sure the Futurists will not do so. To the world of these ballads and street cries the great churches of Rouen belong. For my own part, I never weary of them ; they are always new to me. The Cathedral was still in its festal Easter dress, the great pillars being decked with tapestries, setting forth the stories respectively of Judith, the Prodigal Son, and St. Gregory the Great. The choice of subjects seems somewhat incongruous, but they added a great sense of richness to the interior. But St. Ouen is still the Church of Churches. As we went round the Chapels of the Choir, we caught changing effects of splendour, as going along some winding mountain path, 434 SPRING BY THE SEINE one sees at every turn new groupings and new peaks. We climbed the C6te-Ste.-Catharine,and looked down on Rouen with its churches and houses, and the many-islanded Seine. As we returned from this excursion, we found the cafes on the Quai a gay scene in the brilliant sunshine. Moving everywhere among the throng were the sellers of little bunches of lilies of the valley. The air was full of their fragrance. These do not grow in gardens, but come from the great woods. Where exactly are the magic woods in which they are to be found ? We would give much to know. In Paris, on May-Day, every one wears a bouquet of these flowers. A dark-eyed little boy, whose office was to set footstools for the ladies, assured us that they came from the Isle of France. He had travelled there himself; he knew well Chantilly. They came from the great woods round Paris ; " comme les violettes, comme les fraises." I have never seen a lily of the valley wood. I know well a Sussex prim- rose wood, who does not ? Also a wood of bluebells and a cowslip meadow ; but a 435 SPRING BY THE SEINE lily of the valley wood must be the sweetest of them all. I saw, by the way, in the newspapers that the authorities of the City of Paris are waging stern war on the little street sellers of muguets. At Les Andelys, where we went next day, and where everybody still wore bunches of them, we were told that the lilies of the valley came from Vernon. But the journey from Rouen was a journey through a land of flowers to Les Andelys, itself a town of flowers. Everywhere was the rose-flushed snow of the apple trees. There were woods of wild laburnum. We had not supposed there had been so much lilac in the world as we saw in these three or four days by the Seine. Lilac is indeed the flower of all this country. By every cottage, in every garden, over every wall are the great green leaves and the white and purple plumes. Every man, woman, and child we saw seemed carrying great branches and armfuls of them, as for some religious feast in which lilac should take the place of olive or palm. The two towns of Les Andelys, the great and the little, moreover, were smothered in 43 6 SPRING BY THE SEINE wistaria. The lion of Les Andelys, is, of course, Chateau-Gaillard, the castle built by Richard Cceur-de-Lion. I have often intended to get a clear mental conception of a mediaeval castle with the various parts thereof mapped out, and named and numbered clearly in my mind, just as I have sometimes dreamed of setting about the acquisition a much greater under- taking of a clear mental map and image of the threefold world of Dante. But at Chateau-Gaillard the day was too hot for the pursuit of such ambitions, and we chose rather to gaze at. the Seine, and take our fill of the lilacs and laburnums. The church at Les Andelys is of that Gothic of Normandy and the Isle of France which is like nothing else in the world, the Gothic of Le Mans or the churches around Caudebec, all sculptured stone and painted glass. The oak-leaves gar- landing its walls are like leaves of a young wood. There is a wonderful history of St. Peter in sixteenth-century glass. The inn, too, is a piece of the his- tory of Old France. Antoine de Navarre, the father of Henri Quatre, died there. 437 SPRING BY THE SEINE It became an inn in the middle of the seventeenth century. As I sit in my room and write, I remember that we went on an excursion to Lyon-la-Foret, a place we had never before heard of, a little country town lost in the great woods. It is far from rail- ways, and has woods and woods and woods all about it. I suspect, but I do not know, that it was while hunting in these very woods that St. Hubert saw the miraculous stag. I thought they might even be the woods of the lilies of the valley, but this the inhabitants denied. Everybody wore bouquets of the blooms, but they grew, they said, " loin d'ici," far from here. All the way from Les Andelys to Lyon-la-Foret we heard nightingales singing. The road-side everywhere was carpeted with wild strawberries, cowslips, and violets. The picture which we took away from our four days by the Seine was that of a land of flowers. SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & Co. LTD. LIBRARY FACILITY