.ICS tib 
 
• 
 
 ■ 
 
 '-m 
 
 University of California • Berkeley 
 
 Gift of 
 THE HEARST CORPORATION 
 
 A 
 
H»or$f Memorial Ubraiy 
 
 Ornnu No. -^ kmntoiy No. Z£T/^ / 
 
 "NOT TO K ttmoVtD «0M UttiT* ^A I 
 
 'MvnirePMMarcaaR, i / 
 
^ 
 
 
 ^fu^-l^ ii»* 
 

LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK . BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 UPON 
 
 THINGS AS THEY ARE 
 
 EXTRACTED FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF 
 MR. JOHN MAXWELL SENHOUSE 
 
 BY 
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 For of the soule the bodic forme doth take ; 
 For soulc is forme, and doth the bodie make. 
 
 An Hymne in Honour of Beautie. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1910 
 
ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 A DESIRE has been more than once expressed that 
 the Letters upon AfFairs at Large which my 
 friend Mr. Senhouse addressed to his friend Miss 
 Sanchia Percival should be published in a con- 
 venient form ; and as nobody can be more anxious 
 than myself that his opinions should be widely 
 known, I have prevailed upon my publishers to 
 allow me to extract them, together with the 
 necessary matter of explanation, from that true 
 tale, Open Country^ in which I was first allowed to 
 put them before the world. It is proper that I 
 should now explain that the Introduction and the 
 sections of the text within square brackets are only 
 varied from what appears in Open Country so far 
 as is rendered necessary by this present Edition of 
 the Letters. The Letters themselves are re- 
 printed verbatim. 
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT. 
 
 London, February 1910. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The pages which follow, and the tale which they 
 unfold, are the work of a man still living, and, in 
 a sense, the property of a lady in the same state 
 of grace. For these reasons the actual names are not 
 warrantable. The writer is content to be known 
 as John Maxwell Senhouse ; Sanchia Percival is as 
 near to the recipient's name as I need to go. 
 With this provision, I have the consent of both 
 parties to the publication of letters which do them 
 no discredit, and do not reveal an intimacy of which 
 they have any reason to be ashamed. It is hardly 
 necessary, perhaps, to add that while the writer has 
 my sympathy, I am not to be taken as sharing all 
 his opinions with him, and that I have allowed 
 myself the responsibility of selecting what I would 
 print. The correspondence as a whole is massive ; 
 some of it is occasional ; some relates to the cor- 
 respondent's private affairs, and some to the private 
 affairs of other people. There is a good deal of 
 freedom used in dealing with the names and deeds 
 of persons much in the world's eye. To publish 
 names and comments together might be scandalous ; 
 either without the other would be stupid. So 
 also with the tale — such tale as lay in the relations 
 
2 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 of the eloquent, profuse, and random writer of 
 these letters with Miss Sanchia Percival ; with that 
 again I have had to be very frugal here, contenting 
 myself for the most part with the briefest explana- 
 tion, introductory of each chosen document. It is 
 a good tale, as all true tales are, and has in fact 
 been told — part in a volume called Open Country^ 
 and part again in a sequel to that work which 
 bears the appropriate title of Rest Harrow. But 
 these matters do not concern me now. I have 
 found my present interest amply in the opinions of 
 the man, not in his emotions, except in so far as 
 they sway his opinions. 
 
 By way of introduction, however, to this little 
 volume, something must be said before the letters 
 can be left to speak for themselves. Their writer, 
 when I knew him first (red hot and sizzling 
 with theory), was the most cheerful revolutionary 
 you could conceive of. Anarchism — for he signed 
 himself Anarchist — on his showing, was the best 
 joke in the world. He would have dethroned 
 kings and obliterated their dynasties as Isaac 
 Walton would have had you impale worms on your 
 hooks, with the same tender nicety. ' My dear 
 old chap,' one might hear him say to a doomed 
 monarch, * we've had a splendid time ; but a 
 game's a game, and really yours is up. You 
 perish for the good of your so-called people, you 
 know ; upon my honour, it's all right. Now, this 
 bomb is beautifully timed. It'll be over before you 
 can say knife. Just you see.' 
 
 That was the sort of impression he made upon 
 one in those early days ; he was frightfully reason- 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 able, and perfectly ridiculous. He was then at 
 Cambridge, King's his college, embroiled for ever 
 with the dons — heading his examination papers 
 ^ Down with the bourgeois ! ' or ' Death to 
 tyrants ! ' ^ — and yet for ever in their houses. It 
 was the women who would have him there ; his 
 manner with women was perfect. He put them 
 on his own level, to begin with, and his level was 
 high. He neither flattered nor bullied, never told 
 fibs, nor paid compliments, nor posed for what he 
 was not ; nor, so far as I can learn, did he ever 
 make love. Flirtation and he were contradictories, 
 for, ridiculously as he would put things, and do 
 them, the most ridiculous part of his performance 
 always was that he was perfectly serious. But he 
 was all for liberty and equality, and very likely was 
 waiting for the ladies to begin. He would have 
 seen no reason whatever against that ; and I can 
 imagine him discussing a tender proposal from one 
 of them with the most devastating candour, lying 
 on the hearth-rug (his favourite place in the room) 
 with his face between his thin hands, and his dark 
 eyes glossy with mystery. He was extraordinarily 
 popular ; and when he was sent down for some 
 outrageous act or another — I forget exactly what 
 it was, but fancy it had something flagrant to do 
 with Lord Beaconsfield or the Athanasian Creed — 
 he spent the time of rustication actually in Cam- 
 bridge, in the house of a Fellow of his college, as 
 everybody knew perfectly well. They dug a canoe 
 out of a tree-trunk, the queer pair of them, and 
 navigated the Cam from Ashwell to Littleport. 
 
 1 This he used to call * sowing the seed.* 
 
4 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 He was a great reader, but a fitful, an excellent 
 Grecian, and left the University without attempting 
 his degree. He had come, he said, to consider 
 the course of study prescribed an absurdity, and 
 the reward held out to be a foppery unworthy ot 
 a serious man's time. Such a man, with that 
 persuasive, irresistible smile of his, he solemnly 
 proclaimed himself in a letter to the Vice-Chan- 
 cellor — or with what he fully intended to be 
 solemnity. But his manner of leaving Cambridge 
 was so characteristic that I cannot omit it, though 
 I study to be brief 
 
 It was simplicity itself On a certain May 
 morning in the year 1885 ^e rose as usual, dressed 
 as usual in grey flannel trousers, white sweater, 
 and pair of nailed boots ; breakfasted as usual 
 upon an egg and some cofi^ee, and walked out of 
 his rooms, out of his college, out of Cambridge, 
 never to return. 
 
 That was literally the manner of his going. 
 The only thing he took away with him, except the 
 clothes he stood in, was a holly stick. He never 
 wore a hat, and his bedmaker found all his loose 
 change — gold, silver, and copper — lying at random 
 on his dressing-table, and his cheque-book in a 
 drawer. The rest of his belongings, which were 
 ordinary, neither more necessary nor less various 
 than the common run — clothes, furniture, books, 
 pipes, correspondence, including the morning's 
 post, which, I am told, had not even been opened — 
 he left everything just where it was, dropped it just 
 then and there, and vanished. Nor was anything 
 heard of him in England for two years, after a 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 letter received by his father, which had the post- 
 mark * Cracow/ and the date * 14th July/ in which 
 he said that he had come to the sudden conviction 
 of waste of time, money, and opportunity, and must 
 be excused from indulging either the parental 
 partiality or his own proneness to luxury any 
 longer. He had chosen to come to Poland, he 
 said, because nobody could tell him anything 
 about it except that it was, on the whole, the most 
 oppressed country in Europe. He was uncertain 
 of his return, and begged to assure his corre- 
 spondent that he was well, happy, self-supporting, 
 and his affectionate Jack. 
 
 His adventures in Poland, which led him 
 certainly and expeditiously to Siberia, are no con- 
 cern of ours just now. He conspired, I believe, 
 in Latin, since he had not the tongue of the 
 country ; but, being overheard and more or less 
 understood, to Siberia he went, and was there lost 
 sight of for a year. How he escaped, whether by 
 intervention from home or his own address, doesn't 
 now matter. I know that he was in England in 
 1887, for I met him in the autumn of that year in 
 his father's house in the Eastern Midlands, irre- 
 deemably enthusiastic in the cause of absolute 
 liberty, in touch with Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Stepniak, 
 and half the idealists of Europe ; a confirmed 
 wanderer, a sojourner in tents ; as much artist, 
 scribbler, desultory scholar as ever, but with a new 
 taste, which he had acquired in his exile from a 
 fellow-conscript, a taste for botany, which became 
 later on the ruling passion of his life. He was 
 more charming and more ridiculous than ever, and, 
 
6 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 mentally, entirely naked and entirely unashamed. 
 To please his father — ^with whom he was on the 
 best of terms — he went into the counting-house at 
 Dingeley for six months ; but in the spring of 
 '88 he was off again, none knew whither, though 
 it was discovered afterwards to have been the 
 Atlas, and after that never settled down in the 
 haunts of civilised man for more than a few weeks 
 at a time. 
 
 What could be said or done to him ? He was 
 of full age, took nothing of his father's store, kept 
 himself entirely to his own satisfaction on his 
 painting and journalism. Of the former I am not 
 qualified to speak. It was very impressionistic, 
 highly poetical rendering of atmosphere and colour. 
 If Corot was not his master in the art, I am a dunce. 
 As to the other, he wrote pretty constantly for 
 wild newspapers of which you and I hear nothing 
 — DawHy The Fiery Cross, The Intranstgeant^ The 
 International — and now and then had a poem in 
 The Speaker^ and now and then an article in a 
 review. As for his wants, which were simple, he 
 lived in a tent of his own stitching, which he 
 carried about in a tilt-cart, drawn by a lean horse, 
 well called Rosinante. Everything he owned was 
 in this cart ; and he seldom stayed in one place 
 for more than a week. Periodically he would 
 vanish, as the mood took him, and perhaps be 
 heard of in California, Colorado, the Caucasus, or 
 Cashmere ; but as he grew older and his passion 
 for naturalising foreign plants grew with him, he 
 confined himself more within the limits of our 
 seas ; and his knowledge of England's recesses 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 must have equalled Cobbett's or Borrow's. He 
 was hail-fellow with all the gipsies, tinkers, horse- 
 stealers, and racaille on the road, and with most 
 of the tramps. They all liked him consumedly, 
 all trusted him, but all called him Mr. John, or 
 by his patronymic with the prefix of ceremony. 
 That was odd, because I am certain he did not 
 expect it of them. 
 
 Thus wandering, perpetually busy and inordi- 
 nately happy, one used to meet him in chance 
 angles and coigns of our islands, and more occa- 
 sionally still in or near the house of a friend : 
 seldom in it, for he nearly always begged leave to 
 pitch his tent in park or paddock, whence to come 
 and go as he pleased. It was during one of these 
 temporary returns to civilisation as we call it (and 
 how he used to declaim upon that !) that he became 
 acquainted with Sanchia Percival. It must have 
 been in or about 1894. 
 
 She was then in her twentieth year, the youngest 
 daughter of a gentleman whom I will call Thomas 
 Welbore Percival, a wealthy man with a business 
 in the City of London and house in Great Cum- 
 berland Place. There was a goodly tale of young 
 Percivals, high-spirited all of them, and all girls ; 
 four daughters besides Sanchia, of whom one was 
 married substantially, another betrothed to a county 
 gentleman, Sir George Pinwell, Baronet, an in- 
 sufferable blonde person. They all had romantic 
 names ; they were Philippa (Mrs. Tompsett- 
 King), Melusine, Hawise (the betrothed), Victoria, 
 and then this young Sanchia- Josepha, who, from a 
 romp with her hair all about her face, had developed 
 
8 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 into a thoughtful, slim girl with grey and dreamy 
 eyes and a sad mouth ; and later on, when I knew 
 her best, was a beautiful woman of the classic 
 type, having a profile exactly like one of the 
 maidens bearing baskets in the Panathenaic frieze. 
 Our friend's, the letter-writer's, first acquaintance 
 with her was in the middle period, that of her 
 dawn, when, as it were, her glory-to-be was palely 
 shadowed forth from her. It lay brooding in her 
 eyes, was to be discovered, like a halo, about her 
 broad brows. Her chin had already that round- 
 ness which is the type's, but her mouth was not 
 the lovely feature it afterwards became. It had a 
 pathetic droop ; it was tremulous, very expressive. 
 All this I learned afterwards from my friend on 
 one or other of the rare occasions when he could 
 be led on to talk about her. He showed me, in 
 fact, a photograph. She hit him hard, I know. 
 
 They met, as I say, in the country. She was 
 staying with an old Lady Mauleverer ; he was in 
 a neighbour's house, that of Roger Charnock, the 
 Liberal Member for Graseby ; that is to say, he 
 was in Charnock's park, encamped there, dining 
 at the house whenever it suited his whim, but 
 otherwise free as air. Charnock and he had been 
 at Rugby together, though the Member had been 
 in the Sixth and the tramp his fag. But Charnock 
 had been kind, and a friendship had arisen and 
 persisted. The rebel was allowed to do as he 
 liked up at Bill Hill. 
 
 There was much intercourse between Gorston 
 Park, the Mauleverer stronghold, and Bill Hill, 
 which was Charnock's. Our man, whose high 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 spirits were not to be denied by any one who 
 came within a mile of them (least of all by a 
 receptive young Sanchia Percival), had them all 
 under his spell in no time. Even Lady Mau- 
 leverer, I am told, called him a * ridiculous 
 creature,' which, for her, was a term of high 
 endearment. He was a noticeable fellow, unlike 
 anybody else, very thin, very dark, saturnine, 
 looking taller than he really was. There was 
 something elusive about him, which may have 
 been the effect of his piercing black eyes or of 
 his furtive smile. You could never tell whether 
 he was chuckling at you or with you ; he rarely 
 laughed outright. He had the look of a wild 
 animal, which seems friendly and assured, but is 
 ready at any instant to dart into hiding. They 
 used to call him the Faun, and tease to be shown 
 his ears. Charnock declared that he wore his 
 hair long and let it tumble about his brows to 
 hide a fine pair of horns. He was a wonderful 
 talker ; to see his shallow face light up under the 
 glow of his thought was to feel as if the sun had 
 burst through a great cloud. Like all good talkers, 
 he had fits of long and most eloquent speechless- 
 ness. He would sit then with his chin on his 
 knees, and bony hands clasped over his shins, and 
 look like a dead Viking crouched in his cairn, 
 vacant-eyed, fixed, astare — a silence, I assure you, 
 that could be felt. Add his strange nocturnal 
 prowlings, during which he was supposed to hold 
 mysterious communion with the creatures of dark- 
 ness — bats, owls, badgers, otters, foxes — and talk 
 secrets with the plants, and you may guess how 
 
lo LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 he might have struck the Imagination of young 
 Miss Sanchia-Josepha, a girl on the threshold of 
 womanhood, in the throes of her power to come. 
 At the end of a week, as I understand, they were 
 fast allies ; at the end of a fortnight inseparable 
 companions, sketching together every day, and he 
 teaching her to read Greek, out of the Anthology. 
 At the end of three weeks they were eternal 
 friends, and had sworn it to each other, no doubt 
 with the appropriate ritual. That is where the 
 correspondence begins, at the end of that third 
 week. I only have his side of it — he destroyed 
 her letters as they came — and can only give selec- 
 tions, of course. It lasted intensely for two years, 
 with occasional breaks when they saw each other, 
 and was most voluminous. Then it stopped, for 
 reasons which are to be made plain, and which, 
 I shall add on my own account, do the writers 
 credit. A relationship had developed which was 
 not, and could hardly be again, the old one. 
 The man broke it, the young woman accepted his 
 decision. 
 
 I will allow myself but one more word. Those 
 who know Sanchia Percival at this hour know not 
 only a beautiful, but an exquisite woman. Her 
 mind corresponds with her pure face, her moral 
 stature is of a piece with her physical perfection. 
 One indeed fulfils the other. She is the perfect 
 woman nobly planned of the poet, charitable, 
 tolerant, self-respecting, yet humble-minded. She 
 performs her duties exactly, is interested in every 
 humane thing, and a charming hostess. Her life is 
 her art, her art delicately expressive of herself. All 
 
INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 this she declares to be her friend's doing ; where- 
 upon he flames forth with the cry that every ideal 
 he ever had was lamped in her from her birth. 
 This generous debate shows you that their intimacy 
 has been renewed, and persists. And indeed it 
 does. 
 
FIRST LETTER 
 
 ON WORLDLY WISDOM 
 
 [TAe letter explains itself. He had just left her after three 
 weeks of constant and idyllic companionship. Signs of hurt are 
 visible to the experienced eye. The pleasure he takes^ for instance^ 
 in the use of her name — thafs one. Another is his plain anxiety 
 to prove to her his unconcern,'] 
 
 nth May, 
 
 I am thirty miles away from you, Sanchia, en- 
 camped upon the edge of a glimmering marsh, 
 awaiting dawn to take up my bearings. All 
 about me the shore birds are piping their wild, 
 sad music ; most melodious of them all, the 
 curlew : how I love that bird ! You never 
 heard the little owls, did you, at San Gimignano, 
 plaintive trebles fretting to each other in the 
 night? They are said to be the souls of two 
 murdered lads, Rossellino and Primerano by 
 name. I am sure Pythagoras was right con- 
 cerning wildfowl, and that the soul of my grand- 
 dam may fitly inhabit a bird. I forget whose 
 moan the Greeks heard in the curlew's cry : 
 some robbed young life's, no doubt. But I 
 wander. 
 
 I wish to report, Sanchia, please, that I have 
 
 12 
 
I ON WORLDLY WISDOM 13 
 
 travelled since I left you at daybreak (yesterday !), 
 with a long rest at noon, and am now going to 
 bed in my sack, for it's too dark yet and Tm too 
 sleepy to pitch a tent. Besides, it's close and 
 steamy. I think that I can smell the rain, as, 
 saving your presence (but I know you'll laugh), 
 I have the knack of doing. Perhaps you'll re- 
 member, please, that I did it on the day of the 
 Oulton picnic ; and who turned up a nose, and 
 left a cloak behind, and would have got a wet 
 skin if it hadn't been for a masterful Anarchist 
 and his jacket. Saint Martin was beat that time ; 
 for he divided his jacket ; whereas — so there's for 
 you, pert maid. 
 
 Percy and the Dowser came pelting after me, 
 and took me on to the second milestone. We 
 played Pioneers through the enemy's country. 
 Percy reported you as having been seen on the way 
 to church. Keen as mustard, they were, to the 
 very end. Did you meet either of them, I 
 wonder } No — of course you didn't. You went 
 home through the woods, like a respectable Dryad, 
 I know. 
 
 I meant to have told you, but had other things to 
 think about, that Charnock, after dinner, had drawn 
 me awfully aside, and, in a whisper which could 
 have been heard from Graseby to Colehampton, 
 as good as said what he thought about me and my 
 deplorable way of life. He's done that before 
 often enough. This was what he called a ' special 
 appeal.' He looked what an ass he thought me. 
 That I should renounce six hundred a year (to 
 begin with) and a certain share in the colliery for 
 
14 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 wandering by the hedgerows on what I can pick 
 up ! He had no words to voice his thoughts. 
 They lay too deep for tears — or jeers — or swears. 
 He said that Lady Badlesmere had spoken about 
 me ; she thought it such a pity Poor old chap, 
 with his Stake in the County, and Vested Interests, 
 and Seat in Parliament ; with his hounds and his 
 horses at break of day, men-servants (all touching 
 their hats), maid-servants (all bobbing), boys at 
 Eton, family pew — imagine how he chafes. I tell 
 you, I irritate him to madness ; he can't stand it. 
 He's fond of me, too, you know, which makes it 
 worse ; but he doesn't want to remember that I 
 live. It's a tarnish on his prosperity. It mildews 
 his roses, and blights the hops that make the beer 
 by which he lives and fares softly. If I argue 
 with him, he foams at the mouth. So I laughed 
 at him, and made him give me a cigarette. That 
 soothed him. It had a gold tip, and was very 
 spluttery. You know the kind. Bond Street. 
 He'll be better now I'm gone. 
 
 So will you, my lady, perhaps. I think that — 
 once or twice — I scared you ; indeed, I know that 
 I did. I've seen it in your eyebrows, and in your 
 eyes too. The grey goes lighter and the iris- 
 rings contract when you're really scared. I don't 
 say that you think me mad : I'll put it that, to 
 you, I'm unaccountable. You too think it all rather 
 a pity, and that it would really be more comfort- 
 able if you could be sure of me in a large stone 
 box, with a carriage-drive and entrance-lodge, and 
 a tidy old woman to bend her knees whenever 
 she opens my worship a gate. Hey ? Confess, 
 
, ON WORLDLY WISDOM 15 
 
 Sanchia, confess. And then my painting should 
 be a gentlemanly amusement, not a livelihood — 
 shouldn't it now? Why should I sell my wits 
 when I've got a rich father and a family coal-mine ? 
 Why not put on a black Melton coat and square- 
 topped felt hat and go to church of a Sunday, like 
 a Christian or an ordinary man ? My dear, shall 
 we reason together ? Shall we have it out ? I've 
 told you all of it before — by fits ; but I feel your 
 scare on me now, and can't stand it at a distance. 
 
 Every man must seek salvation his own way. 
 That's all I'm doing, upon my honour. 
 
 Let's clear the air. What precisely do I mean 
 by salvation, or, for that matter, what do you mean 
 by it ? (I'm talking of this world now, remember. 
 Perhaps I'll have a go at your reverence about the 
 other, some day.) Well, I'll tell you. According 
 to me, salvation in this world is the power of 
 using every faculty we have to the full — every 
 available muscle to the highest tension, every 
 ounce of brain to the last drop, every emotion 
 to the piercing and swooning point, every sense 
 to an acuteness so subtle that you are able to 
 feel the hairs on a moth's underwing, separate 
 the tones on a starling's neck, smell, like a hare, 
 the very breath of the corn, see like a sea-bird, 
 hear like a stag. Those, with respect to Charnock 
 and his fellow-pundits at Westminster, or to the 
 Able Editors of Fleet Street with their telephones 
 to their long ears, and their eyes on the latest 
 intelligence — those are the faculties which God 
 has given us to save ourselves withal. We are 
 to replenish the earth, I believe — but what for.? 
 
i6 LETTERS TO SANCHIA i 
 
 For the earth's advantage ? Not at all, but for 
 ours. (Personally, mind you, I don't subscribe 
 at all to the doctrine that we are lords of creation. 
 Why should we be ? The little that I know 
 about the beasts, and what I am learning about 
 the plants, suggest to me that they have their 
 salvation to work out by the side of us, and that 
 we can help each other a good deal more than we 
 do at present. I once saw a child playing horses 
 in a garden with a little dog. The dog was the 
 horse, and wore a halter of string over his muzzle ; 
 she held the reins. They had a great run, and 
 she brought him back to his loose-box, undid the 
 halter, and set him to a wisp or two of hay. If 
 you'll take it from me, he buried his nose in it, 
 and made believe to have his feed. Upon my 
 honour, that's true ! All right : then don't tell 
 me that we and the beasts can't help each other 
 any more. But you won't, I know. It's old 
 Charnock I'm doubtful about, who blows birds to 
 pieces with a gun.) 
 
 That was a digression. I was waiting for you 
 to admit that the full use of our faculties is our 
 way of temporal salvation : to think to the full, 
 reason and remember, to swell or uplift the heart, 
 to walk and run ; to learn how to do things, make 
 them, use them, delight in them ; to be alive in 
 every fibre, and at all times ; to be always alert, 
 always awake, always at the top of perfection, until 
 we are wholesomely and thankfully tired — and 
 then, dear God, to sleep like the dead ! If we 
 are things of body, mind, and motion, as you'll 
 allow, that must be salvation. Very well, we 
 
I ON WORLDLY WISDOM 17 
 
 agree so far — at least I hope we do ; for I give 
 you fair warning, my friend, that in that admission 
 you have placed in my hands a most powerful 
 weapon. And don't you forget it ! 
 
 Now then. If the use and perfecting of faculty 
 is salvation, liberty to learn is the only way of it. 
 We must be absolutely free, Sanchia. Salvation 
 demands it, our manhood expects it of us. We 
 started, mind you, free enough : all our hamper 
 is of our own making. But we've never been 
 free since we were turned out of Eden in the days 
 before the Flood. 
 
 Consider old Charnock, Squire of Graseby — is 
 he free ? God pity the poor ! he's the veriest 
 shackled slave in this land of slaves. You are all 
 slaves, you know : your sublime Lady Mauleverer 
 (who fancies herself a slave-owner, bless her!); 
 you, my poor dear child, qualifying for your 
 yoke ; your respected Parson Twisden (squire and 
 parson by shifts) — all the lot of you, Sanchia, 
 but with a difference. Some of you can't help 
 yourselves. My lady was bought by the late 
 Sir Giles, who was himself a descendant of slaves 
 from the time of the biggest slave of them all, the 
 late William Conqueror ; and she was sold by her 
 father to him for thirty (or thirty-two) pieces of 
 an escutcheon and a country-seat thrown in. And 
 she was a good girl in those days, and did as she 
 was bid — besides. Sir Giles was a fine figure of a 
 man, I hear. You arc a slave for the same reasons 
 — goodness and girlhood. Why, you've only just 
 been allowed to put up your hair ! And your 
 Reverend Twisden ? Well, he put his neck under 
 
 c 
 
1 8 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 the yoke of the Church with great intention. It was 
 deliberate ; he knew very well what he was doing ; 
 I admire him for it. He'd be the first to admit 
 the slavery. Service which is perfect freedom, 
 he'd say. I don't agree with him. According to 
 me, we are all priests for ever after the order of 
 Melchisedek ; but I'm a sort of Quaker, you know 
 — a pagan Quaker, or a quaking Pagan, whichever 
 you please. No ! I don't agree with him at all. 
 I disapprove of your reverend friend. But I 
 respect him mightily, all the same — and here's his 
 very good health ! 
 
 But old Roger Charnock, M.P., J.P., D.L.— 
 out upon the hobbled wretch ! He's done it 
 himself from the start, and has no one but himself 
 to thank for it. I've seen him at it all along, 
 watched him from the playground to the hulks — 
 the gilded hulks in which he now sweats. Rugby 
 doesn't count, though he was in the Sixth, and a 
 swell. At Cambridge he was a jolly chap (as he 
 is now, confound him !), quite an easy-going, God- 
 bless-you kind of a man, with a taste for pre- 
 historic remains which might easily have developed 
 into a passion. He took a second in history, and 
 was going ofF to Petersburg to study under Vino- 
 gradofF. But what did he do instead ? Articled 
 himself to a brewer ! and when his father died and 
 left him a thousand or two, what next but he 
 must buy the brewer out. It was a rotten con- 
 cern, I believe, and he got it for a song. Well, 
 that was the end of him ; he set to work to ' build 
 up his fortune.' You might put it that he set to 
 work to brick himself up in a great house. God 
 
I ON WORLDLY WISDOM 19 
 
 help him now ! he was at it from dawn to midnight, 
 slaving and driving slaves. He starved himself, 
 wouldn't look at the pretty girl he was fond of, 
 and who was fond of him, too ; took no days off, 
 forgot his barrows and tumuli ; thought of nothing 
 but beer-shops and how he could rope 'em in : a 
 foreclosure here, an advance there, here a little 
 and there a little ; nor did he rest until he had 
 every poor devil within a thirty mile of Graseby 
 under his arrogant old purple thumb. He 'got 
 on,' as they say ; bought land ; built little painty 
 villas for his dependents to rent of him ; was what 
 they call a just landlord, which means that he 
 abated a man a fiver a year if he saw that by doing 
 so he would get a tenner out of him later on. 
 ' Then he married into the house of Badlesmere 
 and became one of the Salt of the Earth. Salt ! 
 Yes, indeed, an irritant poison. 
 
 What did he get ? What was his price ? I'll 
 tell you. He got a country-house five times too 
 big for any reasonable man, with as many rooms 
 in it as there are days in the month. He could 
 have slept in a new bed every night for three 
 weeks if he had pleased. And that did please him 
 vastly. And he got all the rest of his glories after 
 that. J.P. came next — easily ; and they all fol- 
 lowed— M.P., D.L., M.F.H. They say he's to 
 be sheriff this year. There are the Privy Council 
 and a Peerage ahead of old Roger : he's got his 
 eye on 'em. Lord Graseby, eh ? Viscount, Earl, 
 
 Marquis of Graseby, Duke of I believe 
 
 there's only one county left to be duke of, and 
 that Flint. Duke of Flint — and well named, for 
 
20 LETTERS TO SANCHIA , 
 
 a party petrified to the heart. Wicked old Roger, 
 whom I protest I still love, for all I chasten him. 
 
 Now, do you see how the fellow's tied himself 
 up — like one of his own beer-shops ? He has tied 
 up his morals absolutely. I don't mean in the 
 cheap sense that he can't live in splendour and 
 ease unless people get drunk. That's true, but 
 refers to the vulgar notion of morals, as mean- 
 ing good morals. (Morality doesn't mean good 
 morals at all. It means customs. Very bad 
 customs may be very good morals to some nations, 
 and t'other way about. The only really good 
 morality, common to all people, consists in being 
 true to yourself.) But I mean that he can't follow 
 his own bent. He can't have a single motion oi 
 the mind unless public opinion backs him up. 
 Hopeless! Can he punch a man's head.'* Of 
 course not : he'd be liable to appear before his 
 own bench. And he's chairman ! Can he lie 
 down under a hedge on a starry night in summer 
 and sleep beneath the stars ? An excellent custom, 
 according to me, but bless you, the scandal ! Can 
 he walk down Bond Street on a July noon with 
 his coat off ? Not without a crowd at his heels, 
 and /'ve done it half-a-dozen times. Can he delve. ^ 
 There's forty stalwart gardening men to know the 
 reason why. Can he pass the time of day with 
 a railway-guard, bus-conductor, crossing-sweeper, 
 gipsy- woman, all first-rate authorities in their 
 own arts ? Not without an apparatus of curtsey- 
 ings, forelock-pullings, tip-expectations, moppings 
 and mowings which smother his manhood up in a 
 silly halo, pulled from the backs of the might-be 
 
, ON WORLDLY WISDOM 21 
 
 honest creatures he's with. Upon my soul, Sanchia, 
 did you ever dream of such wretchedness as this ? 
 Cribbed, cabined, confined — why, if the man plays 
 golf he must have another at his heels to carry his 
 toys about ! Why, if the man's hungry he must 
 wait until two others have put on plush breeches 
 and brass-buttoned coats, and spread the table, 
 and called in Tomkins (the flap-cheeked, elephant- 
 eared Tomkins) to approve, and to tell him heavily, 
 * Luncheon is served, sir.' And then he'll have 
 one tall fellow to fill his plate, and another to take 
 it away again ; and neither of them, for their lives, 
 will dare give him anything to drink when he's 
 a-thirst, because, if they did, Tomkins would be 
 drawing a hundred and fifty a year and nothing 
 to show for it. Oh, wretched, wretched, hobbled, 
 crippled, groping old Charnock ! Now do you see 
 why I have renounced my patrimony, and live at 
 my ease, as my wits choose ? Now do you think 
 me a madman ? I vow to you. Queen Mab, I 
 think myself the second wisest man on earth. 
 The first wisest has been dead some years. His 
 name was Epictetus ; and he was neither M.P., 
 J.P., nor D.L. Nor did he marry into the house 
 of Badlesmere. 
 
 But he's happy, the old sand-blind rascal, you'll 
 tell me. I reply, of course the fellow's snug ; and 
 as he has a superficies (the only thing left him 
 which he shares with me, I suppose), when you 
 stroke him he's pleased. His hunters and hounds 
 stroke him, no doubt ; caps off from the lads, 
 bobs from the lasses, stroke him. There's a lot 
 of pretty tickling done when a great policeman 
 
22 LETTERS TO SANCHIA i 
 
 holds up the traffic from Victoria to Westminster 
 Bridge, in order that Charnock, M.P., may walk 
 unhindered to the House. Oh, yes, if you tickle 
 him, he can still purr, I grant you. If that's 
 happiness, he's happy. 
 
 He tickles himself too, or gets his haberdasher 
 to tickle him. I was watching him the other day 
 when we were all there. You remember how you 
 and I got sick of the golfing talk and went ofF 
 over the lake, and pretended we were lost ? Well, 
 before we broke loose, after luncheon, on the 
 terrace, I was watching the old chap, with his fat 
 cigar well alight, and his coffee and old brandy 
 (which are very bad for his liver, and he knows 
 it) at his elbow. I wonder if you saw it all : I 
 did — in a flash. There he sat, you know, quite 
 the prosperous, clean Englishman — a great buck 
 in his way — in his good clothes, neatest boots, 
 point device all over, absolutely nothing wrong. 
 His blue flannels ! His small black satin tie 
 under the flawless collar ; the pearl pin ; the brown 
 shoes ! Exquisite cut those shoes, brogued, and 
 with a surface like old lacquer. His valet, he 
 tells me, is worth his weight in paper. Superb, 
 prosperous creature ; tickling himself, and purring 
 hard. It was his silk sock which was the crown- 
 ing touch to his happiness : I saw that — in a flash. 
 Cornflower blue, you may have noticed, with little 
 gold threads meandering up his calf It fitted 
 like a skin, showed off^ his wicked old ankle to 
 a nicety. The high light came on the bone 
 and gleamed like a satiny rose-petal. Neatness, 
 daintiness itself ! Strokablc ! You couldn't help 
 
ON WORLDLY WISDOM 23 
 
 stroking It. I wanted to, myself. That was his 
 purring-point. 
 
 I saw him watch it, turn his foot about to 
 catch the light ; then he pulled deeply at his cigar, 
 sighed his contentment, crossed his leg and clasped 
 that jolly ankle — and purred and purred ! No 
 trace of snobbery, mind. He didn't want any 
 one else to admire or envy. He's not low — not a 
 bit. No. He liked it to be there, to be sure of 
 its perfectness, to feel that it was all of a piece with 
 the rest of him — with Bill Hill, with Grosvenor 
 Gardens, the House of Commons, with the horses 
 in the loose-boxes, and the great landau and silver- 
 harnessed pair of browns. It was a finishing touch, 
 a corner-stone, bless him ! So let us sing, Happy, 
 happy, happy Charnock ! He's got his reward — 
 worked hard and ta'en his wages. Now let him 
 order his tomb in St. Praxed's Church, and his 
 life's work's done. No, no ! I forgot the peerage. 
 
 Esau, being hungry as a hunter, sold his birth- 
 right for porridge. The thing was done in a 
 minute ; he yielded to the passion of hunger, and 
 was none the worse, because a full meal doesn't 
 root you for ever to the glebe. And his birthright 
 — flocks and herds and wives, mostly — was, if he 
 had only known it, a birth-wrong. But Roger, 
 if you'll forgive a vile pun, has bartered his man- 
 hood for purrage — for a landau and pair, and the 
 rest ; the girl he loved (such a nice girl, too) for a 
 daughter of the house of Badlesmere, and the 
 rest of that ; the teaching of his own sons for a 
 deer park and pack of hounds ; and his digestion 
 
24 LETTERS TO SANCHIA i 
 
 for a great table, three men-servants, and a French 
 cook with a temper. He had a brain, and has 
 condescended it to low cunning ; he had sinews, 
 and has coated them with lard. He might have 
 climbed the heights, and he gets carried up in a 
 landau. He might have made his boys his friends ; 
 but he sends 'em to Eton, and teaches 'em to look 
 on him as a paymaster. He can do nothing what- 
 ever that he has a mind to unless he can coax 
 his neighbours to admire him for doing it ; and 
 the moment they carry their admiration to the 
 point of copying him, he wants to do something 
 else, and must coax 'em again. And you think 
 I'm a madman for not copying that way of life ! 
 Yon don't, my dear ; I won't believe it. I'm an 
 angel of light compared to old Roger. Upon my 
 soul, I'm a superior person, though I've only got 
 three pairs of trousers to my name. 
 
 The dawn is here and shames my rage. I 
 ought to thank God that I'm alive and free as air, 
 instead of blaspheming Him for letting other 
 wretches live also. The sun has risen out of the 
 North Sea, and all the little eager waves of the 
 Wash are on fire at the edges. The air is wondrous 
 mild — as tremulous and close to tears as a con- 
 valescent child. I wish — I wish — I wish that one 
 dear child was here to watch the pearly wonder of 
 this dawn with me. No, I don't ; I swear I don't. 
 It's not going to last ; it will rain before eight 
 o*clock, and I shall be squelching through miry 
 Norfolk on my way to Ely. But while it lasts it's 
 too awfully beautiful for words. A filmy wonder : 
 
I ON WORLDLY WISDOM 25 
 
 Aurora, new out of bed, wistful after her dreams. 
 (That's rather pretty.) 
 
 I shan't go to bed at all : it's too good. I shall 
 swim in the gilded sea while the coffee is a-making, 
 then paint what I can remember of this astound- 
 ing glory ; and then shove along through the 
 soak to Ely. There ought to be a letter for 
 me there. Address me ' care of Mrs. Webster, 
 basket-maker.' She lives in a caravan, and smokes 
 a pipe ; but she's an honest woman. She shaves 
 twice a week. 
 
 Good-bye, Sanchia. Don't think me mad, and 
 remember me in your prayers. 
 
 Leagues of marsh cotton here — exquisite clouds 
 of burnt silver. And samphire — like wet emerald ! 
 
SECOND LETTER 
 
 ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 
 
 [This letter was written from Chanctonbury Ring — that beacon 
 of the Sussex Downs, a favourite haunt of the writer"* s — appar- 
 ently in the summer. It is by no means the immediate successor 
 of my first selection y but has been chosen as containing a more or 
 less reasoned statement of my friend's views upon a matter of 
 universal concern. Again, it explains itself and needs little more 
 preface from an editor than this. It is addressed to a young girl, 
 whose beliefs and opinions are necessarily derived from those who 
 have had the right to teach her, by one who has long been accustomed 
 to think for himself What I consider admirable in it is the way 
 in which respect for her faith is combined with independence of per- 
 sonal judgment. It is a fine plea for toleration, '\ 
 
 Chanctonbury, 
 A White Morning, 
 Your letter — oh ! 
 Thank you, Sanchia. 
 
 The postmistress at Steyning handed it me 
 yestere'en with a smile. ^'Tis from a leddy 
 simmingly,' quod she. But ^ Madam,' said I, ''tis 
 from the lady' — and made her perfectly happy. 
 The moon rose full and orange over the shoulder 
 of Wolstonbury as I broke the seal. Halfway up 
 the borstal road, through the wood, I lit a match 
 and read till I burnt my fingers. When I was at 
 
 26 
 
II ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 27 
 
 home, snug in the Ring, I read it all. A fair 
 script, Sanchia, guarded, temperate, extraordinarily 
 Greek (for you are Greek, you know ; your mean 
 is pure gold — whereas I, for all my lore, remain 
 an incurable Romantick. I prefer it with a k) : 
 I admire what I can never attain — and so we grow ; 
 there's no other way. 
 
 I shan't tell you how often I've read it, nor 
 what I've done with it. 
 
 Yes, I will, by George, lest you are tempted to 
 vanity. I've burned it with fire. I made one on 
 the lee side of the Ring, out of driftwood and 
 bracken. They might have seen it from Cissbury, 
 and perhaps They did — whoever They may be. 
 I put the document in a match-box, the match- 
 box in a crock, and when you were reduced to fine 
 silky black ash (such a pretty ash burned Sanchia 
 makes — glossy as a top hat, and her writing a 
 deeper black upon the black) I took you on to 
 the barrow of some dead Briton and scattered 
 you to the four airts. Subtilised essence of Queen 
 Mab now permeates the Weald. Sussex thrills. 
 
 Your news is good. I'm glad you are hard at 
 work with your paint-box, and, as you say, learn- 
 ing to do without me. There's a back-handed 
 compliment in that which I like from my only 
 correspondent. Also it shows that we can afford 
 to tell each other the truth, which is a full-faced 
 compliment indeed. When all's said, friendship 
 has nothing to do with greetings and partings — 
 and this island contains us both. You can always 
 find me — if you want to ; or I can i\x)Ayou^ which 
 is the same thing, I believe. 
 
28 LETTERS TO SANCHIA n 
 
 Now to the point, which I like and don't like. 
 I knew you'd be at me one day or another ; I've 
 been dreading it, and now it's come. Oh, but I 
 must dedicate myself 'to the Maiden of the 
 Country,' as Antipater of Sidon called the likes of 
 you once. And so it happens that a recent 
 encounter comes pat to the pen. Listen then, 
 Sanchia. . . . 
 
 I met a fool in the forest — or on the forest 
 fringes, as we may call Ditchling Heath. There, 
 upon the open heath as I lay, he came up and 
 accosted me, tract in hand. 
 
 I was frying a mid-day rasher, always a nice 
 business with me. After the customary allusions 
 to the weather, which was perfect, he offered me 
 his tract. The title was Clean your Dirty 
 IVindows, He called it ' my little book,' but 
 wasn't the author. He was a fool all the same. 
 
 The effect of his tract — for, being very busy, I 
 asked him to give me a digest — was, that you 
 could not see God unless you cleaned your soul's 
 windows. He told me that, and I said, *Ot 
 course you can't.' He said, ' There's more than 
 that in my little book ' ; and I replied, looking 
 warily up from my frying-pan, ' I'm sure there 
 must be, because that's a platitude.' I was rather 
 cropped with the man, and like him for not being 
 nettled. He said, ' Don't let me interrupt your 
 repast ' ; and I said that he wouldn't — and would 
 he share it .'^ He declined, but still stood his 
 ground. I had nothing to say — and said it. He 
 didn't seem to be put about. 
 
 All was going well, when I was thoughtless 
 
n ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 29 
 
 enough to pour some of my beer on the ground — 
 a trick of mine, as you know — and to explain it 
 as a libation to Pan and the Nymphs. Like all 
 dullards, incapable of laughter, he suspected 
 mockery where none assuredly was. He looked 
 at me, raising his eyebrows, and said sickly, * You 
 make a jest of these things? ' By Heaven, but 
 he angered me. I fell upon him tooth and claw, 
 spared neither age (he was no younger than me) 
 nor sex (and he was neuter). I asked him 
 roundly how he dared, as a gentleman and a 
 scholar, so talk of another religion, and that of 
 such a people ? Preposterous in me ! But I 
 didn't see why he should have the monopoly of 
 attack. Moreover, I hadn't talked to a living soul 
 for twenty-four hours, and I supposed that his lived. 
 He tried the high horse, but I pulled him off it, 
 and we fought on foot. ' Pray,' said he, ' do you 
 presume to declare yourself seriously an acceptor 
 of Greek mythology ? ' Ass that he was ! But 
 I had to answer him according to his asininity. 
 I observed that he was forsaking the point of 
 quarrel, which had concerned my challenge of his 
 temerity, not his of mine. His had asked. Did I 
 jest about religion ? I put it to him that he ought 
 to see the futility of his question by the way I 
 had framed mine. ' If you, good sir,' I said, * are 
 troubled with the possibility of my worship of 
 Pan and the Nymphs, why should you resent it if 
 I deplore yours of Whomsoever it may be .'^ ' I 
 went on to assure him that I didn't deplore it at 
 all, but hinted that there were many millions in 
 this world of thinking men who would and did ; and 
 
30 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 that some had gone to the bonfire and others had 
 drawn the sword solely because they deplored it. 
 I added that, as a matter of statistics, the majority 
 of his fellow-subjects in this empire deplored it 
 profoundly. We parted, I may tell you, better 
 friends. 
 
 I said too much and talked like a prig, I know 
 — your letter, Sanchia, and the holy influences of 
 this place reprove me ; but I loathe your glib 
 precisian like poison, and he angered me. For 
 that matter, the most intolerant man I ever knew, 
 without exception, was an uncle of mine, one 
 Simon Battersby, explicitly a Free Thinker. His 
 glory was in his freedom from dogma, and yet the 
 old man was bound and gagged by one. His 
 dogma was, that it was wicked to go to church ; 
 and if any one belonging to him did it, he was 
 morally shocked. The end of him was this. All 
 his children went High Church, and one became a 
 Roman Catholic priest. He cut them, one by one, 
 out of his will ; refused them, one by one, his hos- 
 pitality. Poor, horrible old galley-hand ! Another 
 yoked slave for you to add to your collection. 
 
 I don't go to church often myself, because I 
 can't be so aware of high God within four walls 
 as I can out of doors ; yet I am very capable of 
 believing that a common symbol of moral direction 
 and a common focussing-point for the emotions 
 are valuable things. Take the roof off your church 
 or knock a wall down and I'm with you directly. 
 The God for me is old Terminus, a Roman God. 
 He alone of many, when the whole Latin hierarchy 
 
,1 ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 31 
 
 were asked whether they would resign their altars 
 in favour of a new-comer, one Jove, said that he 
 would not. He was, you must know, a three- 
 cornered old post, who stood in the Forum and 
 served as a boundary. This made him extremely 
 important. So they had to give him an altar in 
 the Temple of Capitoline Jove, and as he insisted 
 that he could only be worshipped in the open air, 
 were forced to leave a hole in the roof for him. 
 That's why the Pantheon is open to the sky to 
 this day. Brave old Terminus ! But give me 
 the sky if I am to see God. Wasn't it Wendell 
 Holmes who said that he didn't approve of growing 
 oaks in flower-pots ? Wise man — making pro- 
 verbs, like Polonius. It's by no means that I 
 mind the people — unless they have their best 
 clothes on, which they don't on week-days, I 
 think that a crowd really awed by a Presence is a 
 moving experience — and the emotion is catching. 
 You get that abroad, in southern France (at the 
 Saintes-Maries, for instance), notably in Russia. 
 Once, in Moscow, I saw an ikon being exhibited 
 to the people : it's done once in a blue moon. 
 The square was packed, a sea of white faces (the 
 Russians are ghastly white, all like ghosts) — all 
 turned one way. Every eye fixed, every mouth 
 open. The priests came out, a gorgeous, absorbed 
 throng of them ; and we all quivered. Then 
 there was a hush like death, while certain juggleries, 
 bowings, and signings were doing among them. 
 We all had our eyes intent upon the Thing under 
 a gold veil. The Thing was lifted up, flashed 
 naked for a minute. Every soul there fell prone 
 
32 LETTERS TO SANCHIA n 
 
 to the earth, myself included, I can tell you ; and 
 the Spirit of God brooded over Moscow for a 
 space of time. Wonderful ! If you want that 
 kind of thing, or anything like it, in our country 
 you must go to the trooping of the colour on the 
 Queen's Birthday. It's all we have left of a 
 national religion — absolutely all. And a fine thing 
 it is. 
 
 My own particular, personal thrill, to be got 
 within four walls, comes to me in a Cathedral 
 (which must be Anglican for the purpose), when 
 they are singing evensong in a shut choir, and 
 there's a handful of people in the nave — a hushed 
 tourist or so, some faithful enthusiast whose day 
 is crowned by such ceremonial, and a sprinkling of 
 holy women — nurses, nuns, or whatever. You 
 hear a mumbled lesson, or guess at it ; then 
 there's a pause of preparation and suspense. Then, 
 out of the grey stillness, a boy's voice goes 
 spearing and trembling up ; and you forget all 
 about the shock-headed rogue in his tumbled 
 surplice, and believe for a few blessed moments 
 that he is quiring with the young-eyed cherubim. 
 So he is, and so may you be, while you can believe 
 it. And there's the secret out. 
 
 A poet said — 
 
 God first made man, and straightway man made God, 
 
 and spoke profound truth in his little chirpy 
 paradox. That's why, for me, all religion is 
 true, and each religion false. Each of them 
 will exclude all the others — like the jealous 
 Hebrews of old time, or Mahomet with a Koran 
 
n ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 33 
 
 in one hand and a scimitar in the other for nous 
 autres ; like our friend of Tarsus, who has much 
 to answer for ; yes, my dear, and like the Brad- 
 laughs and IngersoUs of our day, or my spluttering 
 old Uncle Simon, who used to gnash his wicked 
 gums at the church-going bell, and stoke the fires 
 of a Gehenna of his own for the likes of your 
 brave and reverend Parson Twisdcn, and your own 
 dear obsequious head, bowed in a fair place to a 
 fair emblem of God the Father in God the Son. 
 
 I don*t know that I ought to talk to you of 
 these things. I never have yet, you'll allow. 
 And yet Tm deadly serious over it, and in the 
 vein — and you know that I've too much respect 
 for my own store of Poesy ever to breathe a 
 tarnish on yours. One is so contrived, I think, 
 that one can't hurt a soul without hurting one's 
 own. Shall I go on } In all reverence, I shall. 
 
 The indisputable fact, as I take it to be, that 
 every man must make God in his own image 
 assures me that every man also makes Him aright. 
 I am prepared to accept the handiwork of any honest 
 man who goes a-God-making. Others, of whom 
 there aren't so many as you might think, don't 
 count. Every man is honest, and every woman 
 good, when in love ; and you can't make a God 
 unless you love him first. When you are in love, 
 Sanchia, as I hope you will be some day (and I 
 there to rejoice in the sight), all the loveliest 
 things you ever dreamed of or have distilled out 
 of the million things you have come up against 
 will go into what you love. For you won't love 
 a man so much as the image you make out of 
 
 D 
 
34 LETTERS TO SANCHIA n 
 
 him and yourself; and so surely as you have 
 made your own God, so surely (Heaven be with 
 you !) you will make your lover. All that he 
 will provide will be a peg for you to hang your 
 garlands and fair draperies upon. The fairer 
 your good thoughts, the happier your good ex- 
 periences, the nobler will he show up for your 
 bedecking of his pegship. He will be your fairest 
 work of art, Sanchia ; and unless I'm partial — 
 which is absurd, of course — he ought to be a 
 very goodly sight. I tell you, I want to see the 
 fellow. 
 
 If Religion is not that, then I am an ass. It's 
 pure Poetry, I believe; the best thing you can 
 make, made out of the best things you have 
 collected, and passed through your mind at its 
 best. There are such a lot of them too ! The 
 flush of dawn — there'll be a lot of that still wonder 
 in your God ; the wrath of a storm ; music ; the 
 rhythm (endless, world without end) of running 
 water ; children's voices ; an old man blessing 
 a young one ; a young man louting to an old one 
 (a beautiful thing) ; a windless evening in autumn, 
 when the sky is translucent violet, fainting to white, 
 and the moon rides out, colour of an old coin ; 
 the sun on a brown hill ; hares at play in young 
 corn ; a mother cat in lazy ease (all her troubles 
 over), gravely watching her kittens, and purring 
 entire contentment ; any mother of any baby, and 
 any father of any fine young man ready to go out 
 into the world ; any girl with her sweetheart, any 
 boy on his first adventure ; day and night ; rain ; 
 spring sounds — ^lambs in the pasture, the cuckoo 
 
II ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 35 
 
 over the copse ; the sea asleep and the sea in a 
 rage, — out of these wonders, O Sanchia, you have 
 made Him you worship, and will one day make 
 him you are to cherish. There's no need to 
 separate them, they are indistinguishable. And 
 well for us that it is so. Who, what poet, do you 
 suppose, first saw God in the Sacrament ? Why, 
 a Greek of course, who saw more in wine than a 
 fermented liquor, and more in wheaten bread than 
 flour and water. * The earth and its store ' went 
 into those emblems. They received, who did 
 receive, more than a breakfast who took that 
 morning meal. The Greek was a metaphysician 
 as well as a poet ; but he was more poet than 
 metaphysician. Plato used to deal with Goodness, 
 Temperance, and Justice as if they were crystal 
 forms, to be weighed and handled ; so did the rest 
 of his race. The Word of God incarnate, under 
 their conduct of the notion, was to be got, whole 
 and entire, in a flake of white bread. 
 
 And who showed us God in the Mother and 
 Child ? Why, the Romans, of course, who knew 
 by their need what a Mother was and what a Son 
 should be. They knew that there lay our tap-root 
 — for we are earthy of the earth : wife and child, 
 hearth and roof-tree, you know. You and I are 
 neither spouses nor parents, but I suppose we 
 learned the truth of that from our mothers' laps. 
 
 I don't think that we, as a race, have done 
 Christianity much but harm. We might have 
 been better left to our Wotan, Fricka, and Frey. 
 But Christ's religion started as a pure Anarchy, and 
 we've got it down to a rigid Oligarchy. It started 
 
36 LETTERS TO SANCHIA n 
 
 as pure Emotion, and we've turned it into a code 
 of Ethics. It was Poetry, weVe made it sticky 
 Prose. It was everything in this world and the 
 next ; it is now a negligible thing here ; and as to 
 elsewhere, we are beginning to be cautious how 
 we believe in that. Now, the moment you turn 
 poetry into prose you begin to tell lies. That's 
 odd, but perfectly true. 
 
 But we live in herds in these days ; we huddle 
 in fenced cities or round a great man's house ; 
 we build ships of war and train hosts of young 
 men how to shoot each other in order that we 
 may huddle the snugger, and be sure that Hans, 
 or Alphonse, or Wilbur K. don't come and huddle 
 here too. And so religion has got socialised and 
 become a national affair. Hence the Trooping of 
 the Colour and many honest tears. 
 
 Men will die for that sort of religion, too, 
 and kill their neighbours for not agreeing with 
 them. It becomes a question of patriotism, don't 
 you see — with this odd result, that if you want to 
 see any religion at its best nowadays, you must go 
 into a country where it isn't recognised. Those 
 who have it are on their mettle there. Look 
 at the Catholics with us in England, and try to 
 realise what they must have been like before the 
 Reformation. Sleek and stodgy and sly. Look 
 at the Protestants in Ireland. As for our blessed 
 fellow-countrymen, if you want to see them truly 
 religious, and meaning it from the bottom of their 
 hearts, go and see them at church on the verandah 
 of a Swiss hotel — in their black coats and pressed 
 trousers — all the women in gloves ; and the curate, 
 
II ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 37 
 
 who was in knickerbockers on Saturday and 
 will be in them on Monday, saying, * Dearly 
 beloved Brethren ' in a throaty voice which, 
 thank the Lord ! he will lose all the rest of the 
 week. That's us^ my dear, very nearly at our 
 absurd best, and how absurd it is I despair of 
 showing. If you want to see us at our very 
 best, you must go to the Trooping of the 
 Colour. 
 
 The Trooping of the Colour ! And that 
 silly ass who thought that Pan was a joke of 
 mine ! I hope I don't make such bad jokes as 
 that. 
 
 Now, with those Colours in his mind, who 
 dares to say that Pan and the Nymphs are not } 
 No countryman, I'll go bail. Who said. Pan is 
 dead } Some fawning rogue who wanted to pay 
 a compliment. Pan dead ! He is not dead, 
 and will never die. Wherever there's a noonday 
 hush over the Weald, wherever there's mystery 
 in the forest, there is Pan. Every far-sighted, 
 unblinking old shepherd up here afield with his 
 dog knows all about him, though he'll never 
 tell you anything of what he knows. He hasn't 
 got his name right, very likely ; but he has got 
 him. Every oak tree hides a Dryad ; the Oreads 
 foot it on the heath, and the Nereids cling to 
 the wet rocks where the green water lips their 
 backs and surges up over their slippery shoulders. 
 Surely, in a world of wonders, there's room and to 
 spare for the Souls of Things, seen only by poets, 
 but felt by all country people. And what of 
 Artemis ? Well, you know what I think about 
 
38 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 her. So long as youth is clean and quick and 
 eager, so long will Artemis the Bright fleet along 
 the hill-tops — and that will be for ever and ever, 
 the Lord be praised ! People with souls know 
 these things, and people without souls don't count. 
 They must be born again. 
 
 I sometimes think that the root of our disease 
 lies in our bloated bodies ; and then I think 
 that it's in our stifled minds. Really, I believe 
 it's much of a muchness. We deceive ourselves 
 because we want to. We prefer lies, on the 
 whole, to truth. We like luxury so much that 
 we are content to be bound hand and foot by 
 it ; we are such slaves to sentiment that we 
 would go to the stake for things which are 
 palpably false and absurd. In a sense, you can't 
 believe too much, and can't have a too receptive 
 mind. Who supposes that I decry belief in the 
 supernatural ? Why, I hardly believe in anything 
 else. The supernatural only means the soul of 
 the natural — absolutely no more than that. And 
 who's ashamed to say that he believes in miracles ? 
 Miracles ! Why, everything is a miracle. Life, 
 Death, sunrise, the opening rose, the wind in the 
 pines. Is Art no miracle ? Poetry ? Dear God ! 
 And if it be true, as your physic-monger says it 
 is, that Art and Poetry are the result of the 
 fermenting or not of certain alimentary juices, and 
 that the real question is one for the liver — then 
 the miracle is the more astounding. Pray, what 
 does it matter to the lover whether he cries out 
 that his heart or his liver is afire ? The abiding 
 
II ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS 39 
 
 glory, the triumph and splendour of the world is 
 that it is afire. My dear, he who writes to you 
 now knows what he is talking about. He says, 
 Believe all you can, but tell yourself no lies. 
 Never say that you believe what you don't believe 
 — or you'll come to grief. But he must write 
 no more. 
 
 Address me P.O., Petersfield. Farewell, 
 Sanchia, as the Anthology says, ' ten thousand 
 times.' 
 
 Is there no Religion in this } ' To bristly- 
 haired Pan and the Nymphs of the farmstead, 
 Theodotus the shepherd lays this gift under 
 the rock, because they stayed him when very 
 weary under the parching summer, holding out 
 to him honey-sweet water in their hands.' 
 
THIRD LETTER 
 
 THE SECRET OUT 
 
 [/ have now to make a jump of some months^ though every time 
 that I approach the brink I hesitate. There is ?nuch in the letters 
 to be omitted which would be pleasant readings a good deal which 
 it seems injurious to Sanchia*s candour to pass over. There's no 
 doubt but that she was interested in what he had been telling her oj 
 his scheme of life and conduct. It must be in reply to her urgings 
 that he promises to continue these discourses. Meantime he is deep in 
 a score of pleasurable things : he tells her of them. ' Painting the 
 impossible (of course !), conspiring with liberty-mongers in divers 
 tongues^ writing an article on Thoreau, mending the seat of my 
 third' best (or first-worst) pair of bags : there's for this ^rd of 
 fuly^ He sends her three packed sheets from the New Forest 
 about horticulture, which he is coming to consider as, '•next to 
 music, the most sensitive of the fine arts. * Properly allied to 
 architecture,^ says he, ''garden-making is as near as a man may 
 get to the divine function. Music always excepted, ?nind you, 
 Thafs our highest point of transcendency — and it^s very odd that 
 one has to be pretty near to what the base world calls a fool to be 
 any good at that. There's a sidelight on the man at the street 
 corner for you — or on the square-faced man in the market-place, 
 rather . . .' 
 
 When he finds himself in Vern ditch Bottom in October, he is 
 in another vein, Sanchia is in London — * ninety miles away, as 
 the machinists reckon spaces ' ,♦ but he would have her remember 
 that space is as much of a convention as time. * ^o you may be as 
 near me as you please. Queen Mab ; and the nearer the better, say 
 /.' But he contradicts himself in the next paragraph, which 
 shows that time and space have worked their witchery upon him, 
 
 40 
 
m THE SECRET OUT 41 
 
 He writes of ' a welter across Hants and Surrey — and 1 see your 
 eyes^ Before his next letter^ dated in November from Abbotsbury 
 in Dorset^ he has seen her in London, He now writes of *- our 
 blissful se*nnight^ and then breaks off with a ' No more of that / 
 / suffer^ you suffer^ thought suffers^ the Kingdom of God on Earth 
 suffers, There^s a conjugation of a most irregular verb^ and all 
 because the Apostle of Freedom-in-a- Ditch turns flaneur for the 
 sake of a pair of deep-blue eyes. No, Queen Mab, no ! Fm 
 happy to be over the hundred miles from the centre of my System, 
 Anything under that silly figure seems to me next door — and then 
 of course I run in to say " Good morning," ' ' JVhy on earth should 
 I want to see you ? ' he cries, ' Have I not the tongues of men 
 and of angels, pen in hand? Who gets such piercing answers as 
 I to my written catechisings ? I scorn the man who depends upon 
 lip-service, eye-service, or the touched hand for his souPs daily 
 bread. At least, I hope I do^ 
 
 Shortly after this I take up the tale with this, my third selec- 
 tion. She has invited him to be explicit, and he becomes so,"] 
 
 Land's End, Christmas Day, 
 
 A touch of frost In the air, enough to make it 
 brown at the edges ; a deathly calm over the sea. 
 The surging of the main is as faint as a sleeper's 
 breath, just a rhythm of rise and fall. Out on the 
 smooth water flocks of sea-birds float, their heads 
 under their wings. Not a breath of air. I heard 
 the church bell of Saint Ives this morning dis- 
 tinctly, calling the faithful to seven o'clock sacri- 
 fice. I could almost believe it was Saint Botolph's 
 calling you. Truly, I did think so, and grew 
 excited and fantastic. I bowed the knee to the 
 Great God Terminus, calculated the variation of 
 the clock between Marylebone and Marazion, and 
 followed your devotions faithfully from ' You that 
 do truly and earnestly ' to * The peace of God.' 
 I'm a fool, you know, exulting in his foolishness. 
 
42 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 III 
 
 And then I re-read your Christmas letter, which 
 I got yesterday, and perpended your questions — 
 such a string of them ! What's my secret ? Can 
 no one learn it ? Am I to be the Second Wisest 
 Man on Earth, and is nobody to be the Wisest 
 Woman ? Won't I tell you how I manage to be 
 happy ? What's my way of salvation ? Et cetera. 
 Ei cetera. Et cetera. 
 
 Oh, it's ridiculous that it should be a secret at 
 all ; it's humiliating that it should be hard to learn. 
 I'm ashamed of myself sometimes (when the old 
 time-serving Adam lifts up his bruised head and 
 gibbers at me) that I should be so happy and the 
 rest of the world so miserable ; but then I sit up 
 and shake my fist at my countrymen, and rail at 
 them. ' Blind, deaf, dumb brutes that ye are ! 
 (Hear me reprove this generation.) All my shame 
 is for you. Clogged by filthy things about the 
 feet — your money, sham honour, sloth, vanity, 
 gluttony ; clogged by sticky things about the 
 heart, and stodgy things about the head — your 
 respect for what is unvenerable in age, your fear 
 of immortal youth, your misdoubt of your neigh- 
 bour's worthless judgment — how can I be other 
 than ashamed of you, who have but to straighten 
 your backs and lift your hands, and say, We are 
 men, to find out that you are so } ' And reflecting 
 that that, simply, is the conclusion of the whole 
 matter, such heat becomes absurd. The thing has 
 but to be stated, you would say. No, no. They 
 don't know it, because they won't. They have 
 lived so long on lies that they'd starve on truth. 
 Well, well, let 'em wallow, tied by the leg in their 
 
THE SECRET OUT 43 
 
 styes. But if I were autocrat Fd make it penal 
 for any one to have more than a hundred and fifty 
 a year ; and to him who could do on a hundred 
 rd resign the throne as to the wisest of us. 
 
 The Many must change and pass as best they 
 can ; but to you, who are of the Elect, asking me 
 how one is to be free, 111 tell you — there's only 
 one way. Whether you desire to be free, to live 
 at large on this jolly green earth, or free to have 
 your conversation in heaven, there's only one way. 
 You are free, really. All right then : act as if you 
 were. Drop all the rest ; walk away from it into 
 the Open Country. Fields of England, Elysian 
 fields — there are no hedges. Forsake all and go 
 there. Take nothing with you — nothing, nothing. 
 Upon my solemn word of honour, that's all. 
 
 Why, take my own case. Here am I, ordinary 
 third son of ordinary English parents : father 
 an alderman ; mother a clergyman's daughter ; 
 brothers at the bar or the Stock Exchange (one 
 at Lloyd's) ; sisters flirting with curates or going 
 to mothers' meetings ; nothing more entirely of 
 the staple to be conceived ; different, in fact, from 
 my kindred only in this, that I lead a free life 
 while they are fast bound in misery and iron. And 
 I'll tell you the ins and outs of it now — on this 
 quiet morning, on this quiet cliff, looking over 
 that sleeping sea. You are entitled to them, 
 since you are become part of them ; you, Sanchia, 
 with your quiet ways and wondering, wonderful 
 eyes. . . . 
 
 It was at Cambridge that I found out what a 
 fool I was teaching myself to be. From 1881 to 
 
44 LETTERS TO SANCHIA m 
 
 1884 (which was my third year) it had been 
 gradually dawning upon me, I suppose, though 
 it came with a rush at the end. Before that I 
 had been the bird's-nesting schoolboy of common 
 acquaintance. True, I had always been fond of 
 Greek and couldn't help drawing — but that was 
 literally all I was to the good. 
 
 I don't know just how or why I found out what 
 I had to do, if I was to justify myself to myself. 
 In spite of myself I suppose that I was discovering 
 that everything you bought with money tied you 
 up, more or less, to that thing ; and that the fun 
 you got out of the thing that you bought was as 
 nothing compared to the freedom you lost by 
 getting it. That must have been a cerebral pro- 
 cess unawares ; but one morning, anyhow, I woke 
 up outraged by the ceiling of my room, shocked 
 at the four walls of it. I seemed to be strangling ; 
 I thought that they were closing in upon me. 
 Shades of the prison-house, saith he ! Yes, old 
 Wordsworth, but the growing boy don't know 
 that they are there, and so they ain't ; but the 
 growing man does. From that hour 1 panted for 
 breathing - room, and found that every blessed 
 thing I touched, and called mine, was so much 
 clog-and-hamper. The four walls of the Nine- 
 and - Thirty Articles seemed more deadly than 
 brick and mortar ; and ahead of me I could see, 
 yawning like a grave, the black hull of Dingeley 
 Main Colliery, where I was to toil in order to 
 imprison myself yet more tightly ; whither I was 
 surely bound, one of a manacled file of convicts, 
 hounded on by the shocking necessity of being 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SECRET OUT 45 
 
 * settled down/ Settled down ! Devilish formula, 
 which condemns us, generation after generation, 
 to vegetate — and rot — and rot ! 
 
 I chucked everything, as you know. I walked 
 out, I disappeared. I walked, as a matter of fact, 
 to King's Lynn, and got there lateish. I found 
 a solemn-looking buster in an inn-yard ruminating 
 over an ostler at his horse, and jingling half-crowns 
 in his breeches pockets. That was the rhythm of 
 his life — ' Property, property, property ' ; but he 
 was better than he seemed — had a kink in him 
 somewhere which saved him. We got talking. 
 He was a good sort, with a humorous twist on his 
 long face, and a good twinkle in his heavy eye. 
 Presently I said, ' Fll tell you what. It's time for 
 dinner. I'll toss you who dines the other.' He 
 looked at the ground, then at me — heavily. Then 
 he said with tremendous solemnity, ^Done with 
 you, codger.' We tossed with one of his half- 
 crowns, three times, and I won. That was a 
 friendly turn (one of many) done me by Pan and 
 the Nymphs, or by Artemis Einodie, Our Lady of 
 the Ways ; for I give you my word I hadn't a 
 stiver nearer than Cambridge. ^I've lost, it 
 appears,' says the chap. I said, 'You've lost 
 more than appears, for I lunched off a turnip.' 
 He was a sportsman, though, and did the thing 
 as well as could be. We sat talking till long past 
 midnight ; and I was his guest for bed and break- 
 fast. 
 
 Next day I was on the North Sea in a trawler^ 
 working my way out — and infernally ill, by the 
 way. We were four days going over ; but they 
 
46 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 III 
 
 put me ashore In North Holland, and I tramped 
 to Alkmaar. 
 
 I nearly starved in that country — you see, I 
 didn't know the language ; but the weather was 
 superb, and I went through all right into Germany. 
 There I knew I could get on, because I had things 
 to give them which they wanted. Germany is 
 the best country in Europe in which to go to 
 market with your knowledge. They really want 
 it off you, you see. I stayed in a little town 
 called Wissening for three months or so, at 
 pedagogy. I gave lessons in English and Greek, 
 and earned nearly five pounds one way and 
 another. That gave me what I was- bound to 
 have (and what I had at Cambridge too ; only I 
 was on my mettle, don't you see, and wouldn't 
 send for anything. I wasn't going to communicate 
 with England until I could report that I was keep- 
 ing myself) — I mean colours, and boards, and 
 some brushes, and all that. I got these in Berlin, 
 and pen and ink too ; and then I set to work, 
 and never had to look back. I've kept myself 
 ever since, and will take credit for this, moreover, 
 that I've been wise enough never to earn more 
 than I want, or to save anything. Directly you 
 do either of those things, say I, you drive a peg 
 through your foot into the ground, and you root. 
 Sick ? Of course I've been sick, and mighty sorry 
 for myself. But I've skirmished through some- 
 how ; and people have been very good. They 
 are, you know ; nearly everybody is very good. 
 One of my maxims is that there are no such things 
 as nations ; and another that every man is worth 
 
in 
 
 THE SECRET OUT 47 
 
 shaking hands with for something or other. (IVe 
 proved 'em both.) My worst time was in Siberia, 
 where a woman of no character whatever, accord- 
 ing to the wiseacres of this world, proved to me 
 that she had a great deal. Anna was her name — 
 Anna Marievna. She would have nourished me 
 with her blood, good soul, if she'd had any. But 
 blood was at famine prices : the Russians took 
 care of that. 
 
 All that was in '84-5 ; and here we are ten 
 years on, and I've been as happy as the days are 
 long ever since, and as free as a bird of the air. 
 Looking back on it, I'm surprised at two things 
 only — the -deadliness of the disease and the sim- 
 plicity of the remedy. Why every mother's son 
 of us don't do it beats me altogether. Poverty, 
 Temperance, and Simplicity-— these three. But 
 the greatest of these is Poverty. That's what I 
 and the Socialists will have to fight about. They 
 want everybody to be rich, and I say that they 
 are aiming then at murder and suicide. 
 
 If you come to think out, really, how you 
 grow, mentally, morally, and physically, you'll 
 find that you do it by wanting things. They are 
 above you, out of reach ; you want them very 
 badly ; they won't come to you ; so you grow 
 until you can reach them. Then — strange thing ! 
 — when you have them, when they are under 
 your hand, you learn that (without knowing it) 
 you have been enjoying them all the time you 
 were growing after them — your growth, in fact, 
 consisting in that — and that consequently you 
 don't want them at all, but rather desire, and must 
 
48 LETTERS TO SANCHIA n 
 
 by all means have, those other things up there, 
 still higher up and just out of reach. So you go 
 on craving, and go on growing and reaching up ; 
 and up and up you grow until presently you find 
 yourself at the top of all your desires except one. 
 By that time you are too old to grow any more, 
 and only want to go to sleep. And behold ! 
 there at the top sits friendly Death, with a 
 warming-pan. 
 
 Broadly speaking, that's the process. And 
 take notice that there's no healthy condition, and 
 no happiness whatsoever, unless we do grow. No 
 happiness whatsoever, O Sanchia, unless we grow 
 every hour of our lives. That's as sure as Fate. 
 Think it out ; knit your brows over it, and 
 you'll see. 
 
 That's the first thing to keep in your mind, my 
 dear, when you're about considering what you 
 want and how you're to get it. What you really 
 want out of life is ability to develop — to grow. 
 Now, it's plain enough, I hope, that you can't 
 want things which you've got already, or can get 
 in exchange for money or privilege ; and that you 
 can't reach after things if some hireling is for ever 
 ready to put them in your lap. Consequently, if 
 you have money, or the privilege of class, being 
 born, as they profanely say, with a gold spoon in 
 your mouth, you can't be healthy, because you 
 can't grow. I hope that's a point in favour 
 of Destitution. It ought to be, to the candid 
 mind. 
 
 I don't want to write a treatise ; but I'm very 
 keen on all this — and anyhow it's your fault. The 
 
in 
 
 THE SECRET OUT 49 
 
 next thing you want — and it's the same thing — is 
 to be happy. I should like to know who doesn't 
 want to be happy? Now that, they say, is a 
 relative state. And yet it's not, you know. 
 There's really only one state of happiness, since 
 Process and not Rest is the law of this world, and 
 that's Acquisition. Possession isn't happiness at 
 all. Possession is static, Acquisition ecstatic. So 
 long as this world spins and wheels round the 
 sun, so long shall we be at our best when we con- 
 form, and spin on our own axis, and wheel round 
 the Sun of our Desire. To have a thing cannot 
 be blissful, but to have had it may be, and to be 
 about to have it exquisite joy. The past should 
 be lovely, and the future must be so. The pre- 
 sent (and there's no such thing really. Everything 
 flows, said the Sage, and even as he said it the 
 moment had gone) — the present is merely a 
 breath : time for a flash of reminiscence or pre- 
 paration, and then on you go. Present possession, 
 therefore, is a delusion ; and if it were a real 
 thing, as some fools try so hard to make it, con- 
 sciousness of it would only be contentment — not 
 happiness. Contentment is a swinish thing. The 
 man who is content has done growing, and will 
 immediately begin to rot — like a bulb — unless you 
 start him growing afresh. 
 
 Oh, take an illustration, which comes pat just 
 
 now, while K and Co. are bellowing about our 
 
 greatness, and all-red maps of Empire. Heaven 
 about us, here's a confusion of thought — muddy 
 brainwork ! Hear them befoul the ' Little Eng- 
 enders,' my dear soul ; by which term they are 
 
50 LETTERS TO SANCHIA m 
 
 pleased to refer to the Englander before the 
 Empire — the man, I'll trouble you, of the Armada 
 and the days before Waterloo. Drake a Little 
 Englander, Cromwell, Wolfe and Moore and 
 Wellington, Little Englanders all. The heroes, 
 according to these fellows, are the men who have 
 an Empire, not the men who made it. It's heroic 
 to possess a thing, eh ? Who will teach 'em to 
 think straight ? 
 
 To have an Empire is not heroic at all. To 
 have had one may be, to be getting one may 
 be. We were a race of heroes from Cr6cy 
 to Waterloo, but since then have been merely 
 swine, grunting our contentment and reple- 
 tion. We may be heroes again some day when 
 we've done wallowing ; but meantime persons 
 who believe themselves patriots are doing all they 
 know to stave off that day by heaping armaments 
 and bluffing Europe. Heroes, we ! Why, we've 
 got degeneration of the heart. We're like Fat 
 Women at a fair — at the best, curious, and rather 
 disgusting. But all this is neither here nor 
 there. 
 
 And now, if you'll tell me how we are to 
 grow, or be happy, or get our faculties free unless 
 we are poor, I shall be very much obliged to you, 
 and will go back to the Dingeley Main Colliery 
 to-morrow, and wear a black coat, and pay taxes. 
 But you can't — and nobody can. 
 
 Mind, Body, and Estate, Poverty is the only 
 hope. Have nothing. 
 
 Have nothing — and you're thrown back on 
 
THE SECRET OUT 51 
 
 what is inside you. That's your own, and all 
 that's worth having. 
 
 Have nothing — and the broad world is your fee. 
 
 Have nothing — and you're neither clogged 
 about the brain nor the feet. 
 
 Have nothing, and you have no looking-glass. 
 Without a looking-glass you don't know what you 
 look like ; and if you don't know that, you cease 
 to wonder whether your neighbour sees you as fine a 
 fellow as you see yourself. Almost all our troubles 
 in England come from that : we are awfully set up 
 by the appearance we make to ourselves, and 
 miserably apprehensive of the conclusions the 
 rest are drawing of us. We daren't be ourselves, 
 lest we be taken unawares, and Jones, or Jones's 
 man, see us with our armour off. Did I ever tell 
 you that I saw a Colonel of Light Horse walk 
 down the Tornabuoni in Florence carrying a fish 
 in newspaper under his arm ? I did it though. 
 Any country in Europe has more freedom than 
 ours. Why } Because it has fewer looking- 
 glasses. 
 
 *As having nothing, yet possessing all things.' 
 I'm not very fond of the Levantine, but by 
 George he was right there. And of course he 
 was a magnificent sophist. 
 
 So now abide for you, Queen Mab, Poverty, 
 Temperance, Simplicity — these three. But the 
 greatest of these is Poverty. For if you are poor 
 you will find Temperance repay you ; and since 
 you can't afford a looking-glass, you will remain 
 as simple as you are sweet. 
 
 By the bye, you mustn't take my short cut to 
 
52 LETTERS TO SANCHIA m 
 
 happiness, you know. Don't go off to King's 
 Lynn, there's a dear. It led me near to knavery, 
 I believe, when I tossed for a dinner. Keep you 
 to the high-road, dear one, and shed your baggage 
 by degrees. Ah, that broad high-road ! If we 
 two could share poverty, and hear the stars bid us 
 good-night ! If the great Open Country could be 
 seen for a goodly heritage by two pair of eyes, 
 and if two tongues could voice Nunc Dimittis at 
 the last milestone ! We live by growing, say 
 I .? And we are happy in aspiring } Yes, but to 
 have had is good too ; and I, poverello^ have had 
 something, Sanchia. Nay, nay, I have had good 
 measure. And so farewell. 
 
 Here's a text for you, not from the Anthologyy 
 but from Epictetus, an antick sage. ' Think you,' 
 says he, ' you can be a wise man, and continue 
 to eat and drink and be wrathful, and take 
 offences as you have been used ^. Nay, but you 
 must watch and labour, my man, and withdraw 
 yourself from your household, and be despised 
 by any serving-boy, and be quizzed by your 
 neighbours, and take the last place all the world 
 over. . . . Consider these things,' he saith, 
 ' whether you are willing at such a price to get 
 Peace, Freedom, and an Untroubled Spirit. And 
 if you are not, then attempt it not, nor, like a 
 child, play now the philosopher, then the tax- 
 collector, then the orator, then the Procurator of 
 Caesar. For these things agree not among them- 
 selves, and, good or bad, it behoves you to be 
 One Man. You should be perfecting your power 
 
Ill THE SECRET OUT 53 
 
 over yourself, or over your outward snugness ; 
 spending yourself on the life within you, or on 
 the life without. That is to say, you must take 
 your place either among Men or Swine.' 
 A wise man that. 
 
FOURTH LETTER 
 
 ON CIVILISATION 
 
 [The writer stayed out the winter at LancTs End, engaged in 
 the absorbing fur suit of naturalising Alpine plants upon the faces 
 of rock there. He had much to tell Sanchia of this work of his — 
 of his failure in past years and hopes for future. We read of 
 Androsace lanuginosa, Draba aeizoides, of Lithospermum 
 prostratum {a blue sheet of that)^ and of Ramondia pyrenaica, 
 ' that exquisite rosette of dark green and mauve, of which I can 
 never have enough. Rejoice with me, Queen of Flowers and 
 Faery, I have three — three! — self sozvn plants of it, which will 
 flower in April. I must be here to see ; and it would be well that 
 you were here also,^ His enthusiasm over this growing passion for 
 transforming England by means of flowers goes well in hand with 
 his social schemes. He had, in fact, discovered his lije-work, 
 ' England a garden ! ' he cries out in a letter to Sanchia, ' and 
 Englishmen the gardeners ! Fll die for that war-shout. Isn^t 
 
 it finer than your All-red map, K , Ch and Co. ? Oh, 
 
 men, throw down your big drums and concertinas ; forsake your 
 beanfeasts and city dinners; take up your spades and follow me! 
 What is your bombast about, if not to make this panting country 
 more fat and less able to move ; its workmen richer and so more 
 idle. Pah, you dullards, whafs worth having beside work ? ' He 
 turns to rend the opposite camp. ' And you, trades unionists, with 
 your eight hours^ day — do you know what you are about ? Tou 
 are slaying manhood, that*s what youWe doing. Every hour you 
 get docked oj^" your work-time will be spent gaping at a football 
 match, or goading whippets to kill wired-in rabbits. And whafs 
 the worth of a man glutted with dead rabbits, or hoarse with ravings 
 at the Oval? If he placed his football I might have less to say^ 
 
 54 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 55 
 
 But he don't. He pays hirelings to do it for him^ and eggs them 
 on by how ring and cursing. Agitate for the right to work longer 
 ho urs^ you blind bats ^ you ; agitate for leave to work the fiesh off 
 your fingers if you choose. Then at least you^ll have got freedom 
 though you die for it. Better die free, and leave free men to 
 follow you, than watch slaves play your games for you — hey F ' 
 
 He gets very wild over all this, and leads his young Sanchia 
 across a difficult country — with frequent apologies, however, ' Queen 
 Mab, forgive me, do, I take you trapesing through the market- 
 place and soil your white robe in public mire. Shame upon me! 
 I might as well draw you into a gin-palace and make you sit 
 scared among the sodden men and blue-nosed^ trembling women 
 there as lead you to ponder these awful things. But you have 
 a great soul, Sanchia, and can go where Beatrice went, I hope! 
 
 The letter which I print now is the outcome of his social con- 
 siderations. She must have asked him to account for mankind at 
 large. How, for instance, did he square up his individualist con- 
 victions with the needs of a complicated society ? If his was the 
 only sane life, how was a populace to lead it ? He must have given 
 some time to the answer, which breaks a spell of silence. It is more 
 carefully written, less incoherent, less rhapsodical than usual,'] 
 
 Land's End, Early March. 
 
 That was a wholesome inquiry of yours, O 
 Artemis of the Haven \XLfi€vlTL "'Kpre^iy says the 
 Anthology y and ' to whom, O blessed one, all 
 meshes have been given']. To thee, my Blessed 
 One, I give now the rudderings of my thought, 
 put through as fine a mesh as I could compass. 
 
 It's vastly well, upon my word, that I should 
 live at my ease, and sleep under the stars, and go 
 my ways, owing no man anything. But I have 
 asked myself pretty often, as you ask me now, 
 What of the other thirty million poor devils who 
 moil in cities for their wives and offspring ^, 
 What is to be done with them.^ Can they not 
 be helped to my tub and crust and cup of cold 
 
56 LETTERS TO SANCHIA iv 
 
 water ? Pertinent questions of yours, most wise 
 and holy lady — to which here's a sketchy kind of 
 an answer. They demand a pamphlet, you know ; 
 but I spare you that. 
 
 When you come to talk about people instead 
 of persons you are brought up against Society, 
 and are reminded of the fact, so conveniently 
 forgotten, that men have got now to be gregarious. 
 I'm afraid that condition is of too long standing to 
 be quarrelled with, even by me ; but I don't doubt 
 that the unit was originally the family, and not the 
 tribe. I suppose we first began to herd and huddle 
 to protect our naked bodies against furry beasts 
 like wolves, and that we then found out (having 
 scored off the wolves) that a state of defence was a 
 pretty jumping-ofF ground for being offensive. I 
 should like to know in whose bodies reside the 
 souls of the first palisadoed lot who raided a 
 neighbour's stake- fence. In this our rascally 
 island, I misdoubt. However, here we are a 
 society, and a nation : a Great Power, Queen, 
 Lords and Commons, and all the rest of it — a 
 vast and piebald congregation, every member of 
 which, they assure me, has a soul to be saved and 
 a body to be washed. 
 
 I accept that, and go on to observe that these 
 things being so — rebus se hahentihus ut nunc^ as the 
 Schoolman puts it — we must now talk, in the current 
 slang, about Civilisation. Civilisation is the hope 
 of the hour, so fixed a quantity that a chap wrote of 
 it the other day as if it was a disease. Civilisation^ 
 its Cause and Cure^ was the name of his treatise ; 
 and I believe he was perfectly serious. It used to 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 57 
 
 mean, in Bentham's day, ' the greatest happiness 
 of the greatest number,' which was modest of 
 Bentham. I think we have now screwed it up to 
 * greatest happiness of everybody,' which is pleon- 
 astic, because happiness is good enough for any- 
 body. You might as well talk of the ' greatest 
 whiteness' as of the 'greatest happiness.' But 
 sloppy phrases are characteristic of an age of news- 
 papers. Anyhow, what the newspapers call civilisa- 
 tion, you and I call salvation. 
 
 Are we civilised, by the way ? Are we getting 
 civilised ? Are we more civilised than the Greeks 
 were in Socrates' time ? Or the Romans in Cicero's ? 
 Or the Italians in Leonardo's ? Or the English 
 in Sir T. More's ? Are we more humane, you 
 might say ? We are told so, I know ; but between 
 you and me and the Atlantic I doubt it profoundly. 
 Individually, we certainly are not ; collectively, not 
 one atom. If we act individually like maniacs, as 
 I've been telling you we do, we act in the mass 
 like the hosts of Midian. Until war — to name but 
 one public vice — is spoken of in the terms we now 
 use to reprobate drunkenness, I decline to recog- 
 nise that we are civilised at all. But, so far from 
 that, we devastate the heathen ; we exhaust our- 
 selves in armaments ; we cause the flower of 
 our youth to perish for all-red maps ; we still teach 
 diplomats to lie and politicians to cadge for votes 
 like the street-boys for coppers ; we thieve at 
 large, brag the great year through, bluster, howl 
 at other people playing games for us ; lift pious 
 hands (to a heaven we don't believe in) at our 
 rival's enormities ; we cant and vapour — out 
 
58 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 upon us ! and what for ? For two things only, 
 Sanchia ; for two things which are fatal to real 
 civilisation — that money may be easy and that 
 labour may be saved. If you will mention to me 
 one public act of the last fifty years which has not 
 been directed to the acquisition of money, or one 
 mechanical invention which has not aimed at the 
 saving of labour, I'll throw up the sponge and 
 commence stockbroker. 
 
 Now, money, I say, is the one cause of slavery, 
 and work the one hope of salvation. Therefore 
 our civilisation, as they disastrously term it, is a 
 condition of acquiring slavery easily, and of obliter- 
 ating the hope of salvation. Pretty, isn't it, when 
 you take the clothes off? Happy state of things ! 
 Noble ideals, shared by the Great Unionist Party 
 and the Great Liberal Party, turn and turn about. 
 There'll be a Great Labour Party one of these 
 days, bickering with the others for a share in these 
 splendid endeavours. It really might seem to you 
 as if I was joking ; but I write with tears in my 
 eyes — that these things should be ! 
 
 I don't want to labour my argument, but I 
 must repeat myself. Civilisation is a condition 
 of freedom to use your faculties to their fullest 
 extent ; and your faculties are every power of 
 mind and heart and muscle and sense. Very 
 well. Now I say that every sovereign you put 
 into a man's pocket seduces him away from the 
 use of his faculties, and every machine you devise 
 directly deprives him of one of them — and then 
 where are we ? Why, here ; that what is true 
 of a man is true of a million of men, and that, 
 
ON CIVILISATION 59 
 
 so far from being more civilised than the Peri- 
 clean Athenian, we are actually less so than the 
 neolithic dweller on the South Downs, who 
 hacked up the earth with a red-deer's horn, and 
 drove his cattle to the dew-pond at sundown, and 
 back again into an enclosure banked against the 
 wolves. And that's very odd, because with art 
 and poetry behind us and before, we might by 
 this time be like the Sons of God. 
 
 I won't say any more about money, lest I be 
 a bore. I'll take Poverty for granted, as the only 
 hope of freedom and dignity, and have a shy at 
 machinery, which I am telling you decimates our 
 faculties. First we'll have a simple case. Suppose 
 that I, in the pursuit of my art, have learned how 
 exquisitely to point a lead-pencil ; and next conceive 
 of some ingenious rascal who invents a machine 
 and sells it for a penny, which sharpens them as 
 well as I can. What happens? I am tempted 
 immediately to say, ' Prodigal that I am ! What 
 hours of a short lifetime have I not wasted over 
 pencils ! What grime have I not collected in my 
 finger-nails ! What soap not consumed ! ' Thus 
 I fall into the pit digged for me by that ungodly 
 one, and then and there lose the mystery, art, and 
 craft of pointing pencils. Thereby, and to that 
 extent, I have crippled my faculties of eye and 
 hand and judgment ; thereby, and to that extent, 
 those faculties atrophy. Do you follow me ? Am 
 I not right ? Oh ! of course I am. Now let's 
 take a higher flight : paulo majora canamus. 
 
 Let's aim a shaft at the printing press — that 
 semi-divine institution. Before the devil inspired 
 
6o LETTERS TO SANCHIA iv 
 
 Gutenberg to scheme for a statue in Maintz, Litera- 
 ture was a sacred mystery, a kind of priesthood 
 to which a man came as through the fire, by the 
 clean grace of God. The poet or historian was 
 a hierophant. If poet, he sang his own song ; if 
 historian, spoke his own tale. Literature, then, 
 was twin- sister of Music, addressed the soul 
 through the ear. Words were phrases, letters 
 were notes. And more than that, oh, much more 
 than that ! The hearers of such literature, who 
 were a thousandfold more than the readers of it, 
 had to get it by rote. * By heart ' is a finer 
 phrase ; ah, they got it by heart, Sanchia, as I 
 have got you. That's to say, they were filled 
 with it ; they lived on it ; it was permanent pos- 
 session, not of2L great thing (oh no, no !), but by 
 a great thing. The fellows went their ways 
 carrying a divine tenant, inspired by him, driven 
 by him to a flight. Imagine the man who 
 absorbed the Odyssey by these means ! Or the 
 Purgatorto ! Or got * by heart ' the great choruses 
 from the Agamemnon or the CEdipus ! I can 
 picture him following the rhapsodist from deme 
 to deme, or working it afoot from Athens to 
 Corinth to get more of iEschylus into his head. 
 Is there no use of faculty in all that .^ Isn't that 
 the only way of enlarging faculty, to sharpen every 
 sense, exercise every fibre ^ It's so obvious that 
 it's barely worth while to ask the question. 
 
 Now, what has the printing press done to 
 advance the use of faculty ^ To begin with, it 
 has destroyed memory : a very useful performance. 
 Next, it has cheapened poetry. It is now within 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 6i 
 
 a man's power to buy Wordsworth for twopence — 
 and to value him accordingly. For when money 
 is your standard of value a colourless diamond is 
 worth more than a sea-blue sapphire, and a ten- 
 guinea Encyclopaedia than a Wordsworth out of a 
 twopenny box. That also is doing Literature a 
 friendly turn, I suppose. Next, it has destroyed 
 the charming art of caligraphy — very kindly. It 
 has given us rotten paper instead of fine parch- 
 ment. It has turned Literature into a kind of 
 pictorial art instead of a musical ; for to one 
 man whose poetry is addressed to the ear there 
 are now a thousand (from Keats to Browning, 
 and on and on) who endeavour to hit you in 
 the eye. That's how we get ' scarlet pains ' and 
 * purple noons ' into poetry ; and 
 
 Perturb 
 With drip acerb. 
 
 You don't get such freaks in Homer or Dante ; 
 and Shakespeare, thank God, lived too near the 
 great free days to consider readers before hearers. 
 Besides, the playhouse can never be infected 
 with Gutenberg's poison. Well, then, lastly, the 
 printing press has made the newspaper possible ; 
 and if it had never done anything else it should 
 have earned everlasting infamy for Gutenberg. 
 These things that shameless machine has done, 
 and not left a number of others undone, which it 
 would be tedious to mention. Enough of it, and 
 its brothers in iniquity, the railway and the steam- 
 plough and the automaton chess-player. 
 
 Now let us get on a bit. Imagine England as 
 
62 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 IV 
 
 a nation solving its problems as I solved my own, 
 dropping everything, walking to freedom vid 
 King's Lynn. How is that to be ? 
 
 Well, you know, I feel pretty hopeful that 
 something of the kind will come to pass. It 
 won't be in your time or mine. You will be a 
 saint and I a comic reminiscence long, long before. 
 But it's amusing to work it out ; and there's this 
 about it — that within quite a short space, at any 
 moment, a handful of the Elect may — walk to 
 King's Lynn. The rest will wait — and they 
 must. There's Socialism in their way : a power- 
 ful enemy to civilisation, because it accepts the 
 money standard and is sworn ally of machinery. 
 
 We are in for a spell of Socialism. I see that 
 clearly. It is coming quite fast. Two more 
 general elections and the Socialists will be a great 
 party. 
 
 It's so confoundedly plausible, you see. It 
 accepts such a lot of scurvy institutions as fixtures 
 — which really aren't fixtures at all. It's like a 
 new tenant coming into a house, saying to the old 
 one, * Oh, don't trouble to move that gas-stove, 
 pray. I can use it as a dressing-table.' It has 
 collared the trades unions easily by the prospects 
 of easy money and light work (why not say at 
 once. Easy drugs and cheap death-beds.^). It 
 will come by way of corporations, which will 
 absorb private enterprise; and the State, which 
 will absorb the corporations. Water, gas, old 
 Charnock's beer, my father's colliery, milk, trains, 
 telegraphs, and so on. The State will come to be 
 the Whiteley of England, the heads of Depart- 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 63 
 
 ments the shopwalkers. We shall be forced 
 by Act of Parliament to deal there. From that 
 to dispensing men's incomes, arranging their 
 marriages, allotting the number of their family — 
 these are easy steps. One sees all that. 
 
 This will be the most ghastly tyranny the world 
 has ever seen, for it will mean government by 
 experts in the art of governing ; government by 
 theorists who have left human nature out of the 
 reckoning. It will be awful — but I am sure it 
 must be faced, and believe that it will be tonic. 
 
 Tonic for this reason, that there will be a 
 revolt, since man is happily a choleric animal, and 
 a * panthier when roudged.' The old Adam will 
 come out of his new model-dwelling and wallow 
 in the gore of his brother man. Dismembered 
 Fabians will make miry the London streets ; the 
 President of the Local Government Board and 
 Chairman of the London County Council will 
 ride, roped together, in a tumbril to the Guillotine 
 in Hyde Park — and all will be well. 
 
 Then Anarchy, I hope ; then Poverty, Temper- 
 ance, and Sincerity : redeunt Saturnta regna. 
 There's my Cumgean prophecy. Time enough, 
 however, to work out that little programme. 
 We may safely leave it to our great-great-grand- 
 children. But to that, I do trust and believe, we 
 shall one day return — to the Golden Age once 
 more. But it doesn't seem to me possible that 
 we can ever drink Liberty at ease until we have 
 gnawed the bitter crusts of Tyranny. Socialism 
 will give us those and to spare : we shall never 
 know the meaning of Freedom until we've had it. 
 
64 LETTERS TO SANCHIA iv 
 
 That's to say — after Congregationalism, which 
 sees the world as a society where everybody is rich, 
 and as idle as possible, we shall be ripe, I believe, 
 for Segregationalism, which desires that everybody 
 shall be poor, and earn his right to poverty. The 
 indispensable things to be learned, the absolute 
 conditions of any such return, are in these 
 axiomata : 
 
 (a) The End of Life is the full use of our 
 powers. 
 
 (^) The use of Government is the securing of 
 that for every one. 
 
 (c) Education is the fitting of our children to 
 have it. 
 
 Once you get these things recognised as 
 fundamental definitions, the rest follows orderly. 
 
 The world will be extraordinarily simple 
 then. Geography will no longer be divided 
 into physical and political. There won't be any 
 politics, because there won't be any ttoXl^ — 
 neither domestic (so called), because the Family 
 will be the unit and not the Nation ; nor foreign, 
 because there won't be any foreigners. Wars 
 will cease, because there will be none with whom 
 to war ; strikes between Capital and Labour, 
 because the only Capital will i?e Labour. The 
 strife will be, rather, to be if possible poorer 
 than your neighbour. With nothing to tax, 
 there can be no taxes ; with no machinery, 
 nobody can be out of work. Such terms as 
 Peace, Progress, and Prosperity will resume 
 their meanings : Peace will again mean peace 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 65 
 
 of mind (since bodily peace will be a condition 
 of life itself), Progress the advance of human 
 faculty, Prosperity the security of the two first. 
 All this is self-evident. 
 
 Religion, morals may be left to themselves, 
 when the family is the unit. Tribal religion 
 becomes an absurdity when the tribe disappears ; 
 personal religion is all that counts — and we've 
 talked about that. So with morals. Dante and 
 the Schoolmen, who knew their long Italy broken 
 up into ten score of fenced nations, had to deal 
 with morality public and private ; and the poor 
 poet must needs fence off compartments in hell 
 to accommodate public or private sinners. Thus, 
 Thou shalt not steal, was a sin if you robbed 
 Vittorio ; but if you robbed yourself it might 
 be a virtue. We shan't say that in Saturn's 
 realm. To us insincerity will be the deadly sin : 
 the sins of to-day will be ignorances to-morrow. 
 
 But you tell me that there must always be 
 society where there are men, women, and children, 
 since the children will grow up and fall in love, 
 and the men and women will have been in love 
 already, and be very capable of being so again. 
 Family will stray into family, you think — and 
 of course it will. There'll be Love to regulate ; 
 and that is the one affair of our lives (so far as 
 I can see) which won't fall in line behind the 
 fundamentals. Love is (with great respect to 
 divines, monks, doctors, and other bigwigs) the 
 one real, abiding, sincere business of our lives ; 
 the root of Art, the principle of Poetry ; the 
 single human passion which has the least chance 
 
 F 
 
66 LETTERS TO SANCHIA iv 
 
 of interfering with money -making or idleness. 
 It used to be said that Religion and Ambition 
 were passions of equal force, but that no longer 
 holds. Religion (as it was then meant) has 
 nearly gone, Ambition has already gone, the 
 way of all flesh. But Love endures, and with 
 it the world still labours towards happiness ; 
 and Marriage (which is what it means) has got 
 to be faced. 
 
 But not by me, my dear, writing to you. 
 I don't think I can tell you what I think about 
 that just yet. I don't know that I can tell you 
 at all — or ever. If I find that I can, of course 
 I will ; or if I find that I must. It seems to 
 me that what my heart is full of must by all 
 means be poured into your lap, to receive the 
 benediction of your hands. I have to talk to 
 you, Sanchia, or die. 
 
 Oh, how are you going to read all this ? And 
 how I should love to see you at it — your ponder- 
 ing, grey -blue eyes, your wise, considering, 
 doubtful smile ! Shall I ever again see you 
 at anything with my bodily eyes ? Perhaps 
 not — and Amen, anyhow. I live upon what 
 I can remember of you, and grow by what I 
 hope to remember. Good-bye, good-bye, Sanchia. 
 The day is drawing in. I must light a fire. 
 
 It has just struck me. Perhaps I'm quite 
 wrong in all this. Perhaps I ought to join a 
 trades union and agitate for a two hours' day. 
 Or perhaps I ought to be a Liberal member of 
 
IV ON CIVILISATION 67 
 
 Parliament and have a country-house. Or 
 would you say, an Imperialist, working for an 
 all-red map of Africa and a Cape-to-Cairo 
 railway ? Perhaps the end of all Englishmen 
 should be the preservation intact of this great 
 Empire, on which the sun never sets — or never 
 rises. Which is it ? If so, be so good as to 
 tell me by return of post, and I withdraw all 
 that I have ever written to you. 
 
FIFTH LETTER 
 
 ON THE WOMAN S ART 
 
 [After the turn of the year^ changes had taken place in the 
 Per civ al household. Sanchia^s sister Hazuise had become Lady Pin- 
 well, and was living in the country ; her sister Melusine became 
 engaged to a Mr, Gerald Scales, who was brother to a baronet, and 
 her sister Victoria showed some signs of following her example. It 
 was considered time for Sanchia herself to take her station in the 
 world. In March she was presented, as she told her friend. She 
 sent him her photograph, which showed her stiff in her glories of 
 feathers and lace; and he acknowledged it with pleasant irony, ' My 
 frozen dear^ he called her, "- my saint in a feretory^ and Nuestra 
 Sefiora del Paso, Our Lady of the Procession, ' / wonder very 
 much at this moment,^ he says, * about the Braur onion of Athens, 
 That was a great day, you know, for Artemis the Bright, There 
 were processions of unwedded girls in crocus-coloured tunics ; the 
 tallest of them carried Artemis herself; all the others — what do you 
 think ? Little bears. Why little bears ? Why, in the name of 
 Glory, little bears P I can answer that. Don^t you know about 
 Callisto, who is now the Great Bear in the sky ? Some day V II tell 
 you. She had a lot to do with it. But what led me on to this was the 
 consideration whether they decked the goddess for the procession in 
 feathers and fal-lals, and made her look as stiff and startled at 
 once as you look here. Tour eyes, my dear one, are quite round — 
 like the O of Giotto ; you look as if you hadn^t winked them for an 
 hour. When they fixed in the final feather and turned you to the 
 looking-glass, you said " Oh ! *' and at that moment the frost came 
 down and stuck you at Oh ! for ever, Ifs charming, as the 
 showman said, but ifs not Emily, . . . All the same, I wish I 
 had been in the Mall among the loafers to see you sedate beside 
 
 6S 
 
ON THE WOMAN'S ART 69 
 
 mamma, your plumed head nodding at the window ; all the crowd 
 jostling to behold you, nudging each other and saying, " Theris a 
 little beauty.^'' Shrewd judges, those crowds of the Mall, I fancy. 
 They have had a great deal of experience, you see, being descendants 
 of the fellows who saw your great-grandmother go up to kiss the hand 
 oj Queen Charlotte or Queen Adelaide, as the case may have been,^ 
 
 He receives her accounts of gaieties with relish, and asks after 
 her *' swains^ as he calls them — her ^ young Mr, Dartrey,^ or a 
 musical acquaintance, a M, Sergius Polschkin, With this gentle- 
 man, who swims vigorously for a while in the correspondence, he 
 makes great play. He dubs him variously Apollo, Apolloschkin, 
 ApoWs kin, A follows skin, and by a sequence of ideas, Marsyas, 
 He sends him Russian greetings, affects to believe him a spy of the 
 autocracy come to inveigle him back to Liberia, ' Assure him that 
 he shall have me^ he tells her, ' upon condition that he puts me south 
 of Lake Balkash, Thafs where I want to look for irises. It will 
 be handy, between you and me, for Turkestan also — and Thibet, 
 whither I shall certainly escape. I have long wanted to cross 
 Thibet, But don't tell Marsyas this, there's a dear,* 
 
 He left Cornwall in April, having gloried in the blooming oj 
 his Ramondias, and pushed his leisurely and random way north- 
 eastward. In May he spent a few days in Sanchia^s company, she 
 being, as before, at Gorston, he in or near Bill Hill, on his friend 
 Char nock's property. What passed between them can only be 
 gathered from what I have. He thought to have discovered her, I 
 know, nearer to him than mere sympathy with his opinions could ever 
 have brought her. His letters alter from that moment, subtly but 
 unmistakably. It is not, now, that he loves her — that must have 
 been obvious to her from the beginning. Nor is it, on the other hand, 
 that she loves him. He never assumes that, nor seems greatly 
 concerned whether she does or not. It is that she knows of his 
 love for her, and that he knows of her knowledge of it. He exults 
 in that, dallies with the wild prospects it opens to him, and {as will 
 be seen) is tempted, and {for a moment) yields. He recovers him- 
 self almost at once, and by a fine effort takes over the command 
 again. But I anticipate, in saying so much, what I have now to 
 cite. The following letter is dated ' Mosedale, ^th June' Mosedale 
 is the ''green valley in Wast dale ' which was one of his chosen 
 camping-grounds. It is the first he sends her after leaving her at 
 Gorston; but she is now in London again, pursuing the season, 
 and pur sued. 'I 
 
70 LETTERS TO SANCHIA v 
 
 MosEDALE, $tA June, 
 
 The land laughs, but not so loud as I — nor so 
 long. All about Black Sail the white mist-wreaths 
 stream and fly ; but not so fast, driven by the 
 west wind, as my thoughts, which my heart-beats 
 urge. Mosedale Beck is in foaming fettle, and 
 some Primula japonica^ which I sowed there last 
 year, are a cloud of crimson, coral, and salmon-pink, 
 floating (as meseemeth) over a bed of lettuce- 
 green. There's a palette ! The sun strikes all 
 this blaze of colour, and you think of Van Eyck*s 
 * Adoration of the Lamb ' — or you would if you 
 were here. And you are here, my Blessed One, 
 as you are everywhere with me. A pillar of fire 
 by night, of white cloud by day, in the glow of 
 the fire, in the gleam of the cloud I see your holy 
 face ; and as the brook murmurs its content with 
 things as they are I hear your low clear tones call 
 me by my names of friend, brother — ah, no more 
 of that ! Let me remember how good it is to be 
 alive on such a golden morning. 
 
 Now bloom white violets, now daiFodils, 
 And on the windy uplands lilies blow ; 
 Now breaks to flower my Flower, and fulfils 
 Valley and hillside with her rosy glow. 
 Meadows, in vain you laugh your idle grace ! 
 What have ye that she hath not in her face ? 
 
 A long way after Meleager ; but he never sang 
 his riht} XevKOLov OdWec more stoutly than I my 
 jingle. 
 
 Why do lovers howl and rend their garments 
 when they are parted ? There's that same 
 
ON THE WOMAN'S ART 71 
 
 Meleager, almost in the same breath, wailing 
 apTraaracl * She's been taken from me,' he 
 raves ; ' what beast could be so cruel ? ' All 
 because poor dear Heliodora went back to town, 
 to be taken out to parties by her mamma, to have 
 gilded youths about her in Hyde Park, and quite 
 a swarm of them buzzing over her dance-card, 
 and scribbling their initials all over it, with little 
 white pencils held most uncomfortably in little 
 white kids. You see, I know all about it, and 
 ain't jealous. No, no ; I leave that to the God of 
 Moses and other uneasy despots — potentates who 
 have such a high opinion of themselves that they 
 are forced to have low ones of their ladies. I 
 protest, by the light I have, that it isn't at all 
 necessary for me to see you, though extremely so 
 that I should love you, and have what I have. 
 Why, what should I do with you that I have not 
 done better already ! Watch you, touch your 
 hand in a crowd, edge up with Apollo and brisk 
 Mr. Dartrey to take you out a-dancing ? No, by 
 Hercules, but I do better with you here. I see 
 you, feel your nearness, know you thrilling in the 
 dusk. ^Thou and I, sphered in solitude' — thou 
 and I ! And that's better than to spy after you 
 in the Park ; and as for dancing — why, you are 
 dancing with the daffodils here in Mosedale, and 
 I play the tune on my pipe, like Daphnis or some 
 other son of Pan. Let Apollo caper in Grosvenor 
 Square and steer you in and out of the throng ; 
 your soul, my soul, is here with me, treading the 
 Galaxy in a dance to no mortal music. How am 
 I to condescend to trivial intercourse with you 
 
72 LETTERS TO SANCHIA v 
 
 who have given me of your heart's communion ? 
 Never, never, never. You and I have done im- 
 perishably. I surrender to your Dartreys and 
 Polschkins your temporary dwelling-place, much 
 too good for them though it be. 
 
 That's the kind of lover you have. Queen Mab, 
 for so you have made him. He is very well con- 
 tent that you should let your light shine on herded 
 London ; though the light shine in darkness and 
 the darkness comprehend it not. Here and there 
 will be one who will be able to walk in your beam. 
 Dia Artemis, I praise the gods of the country for 
 what I have of you. 
 
 I am very well content, I say, to plod my country 
 ways and know you wielding your spells in town. 
 A great power is in your thin sweet hands, my 
 sweet ; you are in the way of being a great artist. 
 If I take a professional view of your life and con- 
 versation you mustn't blame me ; for, botcher that 
 I may be, I'm an artist myself, or no lover. And 
 perhaps you remember how we talked about Art 
 in the park, under the golden oaks, and how you 
 repined at having to give up your hopes of a 
 studio ; and how I told you that painting wasn't 
 the woman's art, nor sculpture neither, nor poetry 
 neither. Do you ? 
 
 Well, I stick to that. Rosa Bonheur wore 
 trousers, but couldn't paint any the better. Good 
 soul, she was no Rubens. George Eliot played 
 the Tenth Muse in St. John's Wood Road, or 
 somewhere of the sort, and had a humour of her 
 own for which she had to pay — as none knew 
 better than she. Aurora Leigh wrote verses, and 
 
ON THE WOMAN'S ART 73 
 
 her great old burning poet smothered her with 
 incense, but didn't make a poet of her for all 
 that. He simply proved what an artist she was in 
 her own art — which no man can touch. There's 
 man's art, you must know, and woman's art ; and 
 though I love every stroke of your brush, and 
 know how sensitive it is, and how patient, yet I 
 see you an immortal artist without any brushes at 
 all, in a stuff more subtle than paint, more shining 
 than Pheidias's ivory and gold ; and I see the 
 crowd before your masterpiece hushed and still. 
 Some of them cover their eyes and others say 
 their prayers, and others laugh for mere joy of 
 great work. What do you say to that, little 
 artist ? Isn't that an art worth your pains ? 
 
 It's an art so difficult, to be worked at under 
 conditions so confusing, that it's only one woman 
 in a thousand can succeed in it. Charm, as with 
 all arts, is at the bottom of it ; I fear it must be 
 owned, too, that persuasion is an essential. But, 
 like every great form of Art, yours is didactic. 
 It teaches involuntarily virtue, temperance, and 
 holiness. Men and women come and behold it, 
 and go their ways the better for having seen it, 
 and the richer for the experience, and the cleaner 
 for purged emotions, or, it may be, fired by its 
 excellence to a generous rivalry, themselves to 
 work for such high ends. What can be better ? 
 If you can so work upon your delicate surface as 
 to mould it close to your noble soul, and impress 
 it with your own quality ; if in the gallery of the 
 world you can unveil yourself for the thousand 
 pair of eyes to see, and praise God for the grace 
 
74 LETTERS TO SANCHIA v 
 
 to see — why, what an artist you are, and what an 
 audience you have ! No painter since this world 
 began to spin had such a one, no musician, no 
 church -builder. Christopher Wren, you may 
 think, had a greater, thronging his great dome on 
 the hill ; but I tell you, no. For you, as you go 
 your ways about the city, will every day pass more 
 people than Paul's would hold, and need not pass 
 one but will go on his road, unknowingly, the 
 better for the moment's nearness to you. Like a 
 whifF of thyme on a grassy down, like a breath of 
 violets from a bank, or of bean-flower blown across 
 a dusty hedge, some gentle exhalation of your soul 
 sighed through your body will hint to the passion- 
 driven wretch things innocent and quiet. The 
 blue beam of your steadfast eyes may turn his 
 own to heaven ; a chance-caught, low, sweet tone 
 of your voice may check clamour ; an answer may 
 turn his wrath ; the mere hang of your clothes, so 
 nearly will they express your nature, may send 
 him on his way hopeful and renewed. You can't 
 know — it's none of your affair — how or to what 
 end your art will tell. All your business as artist 
 is to work perfectly, to have the vision and to get 
 it down. 
 
 And what a material to work with — fine, moving, 
 breathing, quick-fluttering flesh ! Infinitely more 
 elastic than painter's stuff ; warm, tinged with life, 
 instinct with it ; rhythmic, eloquent. You can be 
 picture, form, poem, symphony in one. You 
 address the mind through every sense. Every 
 gesture is charged, every throb can express, every 
 word be a phrase, every look a tone ! Think of 
 
V ON THE WOMAN'S ART 75 
 
 it, Sanchia, before you turn away. Think well 
 whether upon that exquisite medium you cannot 
 impress your best. 
 
 As I write, I fire from within, and see a vision 
 of a Woman to whom a whole world might bow 
 down. It's not for most women ; I think it's for 
 very few ; but there's no doubt about its possi- 
 bility. It's no harder for a woman to make herself 
 a work of supreme art than for a man to paint a 
 ' Las Menifias ' or write a Pere Goriot. But she 
 must have a genius for self-expression — and you 
 have it. 
 
 The Ideal, since men first looked up to the 
 heights, has always been in the shape of a woman. 
 Sex has much to do with that, I don't doubt, for 
 man has always been the maker, and has always 
 dreamed of what he can never be. Athene of the 
 men of Attica, Artemis of the Arcadians, Mary of 
 the Christians — it has always been so. The 
 holiest thing of all, the most mysterious, inac- 
 cessible, has worn the bounty of a beautiful 
 woman, and God has spoken through her eyes. 
 Grey-blue eyes, ringed with dark, for me. A slim 
 and pliant form. A face of pure oval faintly 
 tinged with rose. A round and firm chin, where 
 character strikes sharply yet gently. Pale lips 
 drooping at the corners ever so little — for sym- 
 pathy, you know. That proud Greek bow is too 
 remote from our labour and sorrow. Broad brows 
 speaking candour and charity to the wise and the 
 wayward alike. An ardent mind, eager for light ; 
 a habit so strong to purpose and action that 
 
76 LETTERS TO SANCHIA y 
 
 chastity is involved ; and withal a glowing heart 
 which love will one day blow into a flame, and 
 thus fulfil the woman from the maid.^ Some day, 
 Sanchia, some day the woman will be fulfilled and 
 the work done. Then, like a priest who has 
 conversed with mystery and been face to face with 
 the holiest, I shall stand up before the people on 
 their knees. Ite^ missa est, I shall say — and bid 
 the boy blow out the altar candles. 
 
 A vision of life indeed rises up, and lifts me 
 after it. The shifts I am at to make my own 
 little world a simple, cleanly, wholesome place 
 drop suddenly off me like superfluous clothes. 
 One is only driven to wear them, mark you well, 
 as screens against the mire and bad smells of 
 modern ways. Where the treasure is there will 
 the heart be also. Nothing need vex him who 
 has the treasure in his heart. Life turns inwards, 
 and keeps out the cold — as gipsies turn their 
 backs to the weather and spread their hands to 
 the crackling logs. 
 
 Mine is a lonely life, you know, and often I 
 am forced to bawl my song, ' The jolly life I lead,' 
 for fear I should hear the undercurrent of mis- 
 giving, and listen for nothing else. So, like 
 Figaro, I make haste to laugh, and thus continue 
 to delude myself till, by and by, the mood passes, 
 and I can look up at the stars or the open sky, 
 and know that I am in tune with them. That's 
 a great business of ours, I assure you, to make a 
 harmony. Listen to the music of the spheres, 
 
 * All that forms a portrait, happy and exact, of Sanchia Percival 
 as she was in 1894. 
 
V ON THE WOMAN'S ART 77 
 
 and screw up to the pitch they keep. There's 
 our art for the conversion of the world. For we 
 all aim at that — no less ; and I with the rest. 
 You know my gospel and won't take it amiss 
 for being somewhat musty. Poverty, poverty, 
 poverty ! That's the cry, if you would be rich, 
 
 son of man. But now, when I crave the trea- 
 sure of your golden heart, my saint, and sigh 
 sometimes that I may have to go without it, ain't 
 
 1 the very inconsistent poor devil I complain of 
 my next-door neighbour for being ? Of course I 
 am. Yet — oh, for the deep draught of your eyes 
 I lately had ! Oh, to read the great trust in your 
 long gaze ! Oh, for the assurance of your thrilled 
 voice, and oh, for the touch of your hand ! 
 
 I'm a recreant, I see. Farewell, Sanchia. 
 
 [// seems that he was fired indeed. He wrote again — very 
 shortly after — on his way to the South and to her.] 
 
 I am coming to see you. In two days I shall 
 see your eyes — and then, if you please, never again. 
 
SIXTH LETTER 
 
 THE TRAMP S TESTAMENT 
 
 [T/te writer, my friend, scared out of his philosophy, made 
 forced marches from Wast dale to London, arriving there in June, 
 the season at its height. What sort of appearance his lean figure, 
 clad in white sweater and grey fiannel trousers, with his swarthy, 
 darkly smiling face, and eyes ofgipsy-green, may have made there — 
 say, in Bond Street of a fine afternoon — one can but guess. It 
 may have been, and let us hope it was so, that he had already, in 
 those early, vehement years of his life, learned to accommodate 
 himself to the prejudices of society. Later on he had certainly 
 done so, for I met him frequently in London in i go 3-4-^, and 
 found nothing garish in his appearance. He had a dress-coat at 
 that time, and might have sat among his peers at the opera without 
 remark, though I believe he never did. He used, I think, to say 
 that you could only hear music properly alone or with musicians. 
 Very naturally, then, he chose the gallery. But these are trifles ; 
 what I am now concerned to say is that he came to London in that 
 summer of 'pj, and saw, not once but frequently, the lady of his 
 adoration. He was with her in picture-galleries, museums, and 
 other resorts of lovers and friends ; she went with him to Kew, to 
 Hampton Court, and elsewhere. There is no question in my mind 
 hut that the pair of them thoroughly understood one another. 
 
 Then, of the suddenest, he goes away, and Sanchia, we learn, 
 drifts into a position which her friend can never have foreseen, Oj 
 this and all that it meant to her and to him I can say nothing here, 
 but may refer the reader to Open Country, where it is set out 
 in full. The last letter I can publish here explains the curious 
 change in affairs only from the writer^ s side. Whether or no it 
 justifies him in the position he has taken up, to Sanchia Percival, 
 
 7S 
 
VI THE TRAMP'S TESTAMENT 79 
 
 to you^ or to me, are questions which I donU fee! able to answer, 
 1 hold 710 brief for him, arid prefer that he should speak for himself^ 
 
 Chanctonbury Ring, A Wild Night. 
 
 All the hounds of heaven and hell are loose about 
 me to-night. The South-west has opened wide 
 his gates, and the wind-pack is abroad. But their 
 howling and the gnashing of their teeth cannot 
 drown the shrill music of my heart. This is 
 the song it sings — I have loved, I have loved 
 — I have kissed her once and let her go. Now 
 I am alone in the dark, with no companion but 
 a dream. 
 
 She is not for me — she is too high. It were 
 as if one wooed a goddess. No, no, I have done 
 well to give her back her heart, to put away her 
 thin sweet hands, to look my last into her deep 
 eyes, to wait my last upon her sad lips. The 
 pain she has, alone with her heart, is as nothing 
 to the wrong I dared to dream against her. She, 
 Sanchia, the tramp's mate — hedgerow-comrade of 
 his disordered goings ! Madman, what were you 
 about ? 
 
 Now the dream is over. It has gone as this 
 great storm will go. When the last tatters of the 
 torn clouds have flown their way before the gale, 
 I shall look out seaward to a white-rimmed sky, 
 or over the weald of Sussex to the blue Surrey 
 hills ; see Hindhead like a broken knife-blade, 
 and the long ridge of Leith Hill shrouded in trees. 
 The truce of heaven will shine on all alike ; the 
 sun, rising over Wolstonbury, will touch the spire 
 of Cowfold, and warm the grey and russet of old 
 
8o LETTERS TO SANCHIA vi 
 
 Wiston into life. On me too will that peace 
 descend, and I shall tell myself that all is well. 
 For Sanchia lives her holy life, thou poor fool ; 
 and thou mayst love her all thy fill, and take joy 
 in her fair going, thanking God for all that she 
 hath been to thee. Thou hast had thy vision of 
 Artemis the Chaste. Courage, then ; do thy work 
 in the world. She is thy friend for ever — is not 
 this honour enough ? 
 I know well that it is. 
 
 Ask any woman you please which was the 
 happiest time of her life, she will tell you — the 
 year of her betrothal. Ask any man, he will tell 
 you — his bachelor days. What do these things 
 mean ? It is worth while finding out. That 
 which should be the perfecting of the nature of 
 either, when the two human hemispheres, as Plato 
 puts it, are one rounded whole again, does not in 
 either case result in happiness. Contentment, 
 possibly, but not happiness. Marriage, then, is 
 not the happy state. How then ? 
 
 It is not, and it cannot be, as it is now ordered ; 
 for the notion of possession, of property once 
 more, has entered in and vitiated it. It has 
 poisoned the nature of man and degraded the 
 conscience of woman. Women are not, it may 
 be, angels before marriage ; it is certain that they 
 should not be property afterwards. But since, by 
 virtue of a legal contract, they are technically so, 
 a man is so made by tradition and proneness to 
 possess that he will consider her so, even against 
 his own judgment, even despite his own honour ; 
 
vr THE TRAMP'S TESTAMENT 8i 
 
 and the moment he believes himself secure of her he 
 will cease to serve her. Now, to love a woman, in 
 my belief, is not only to desire her. Much more 
 it is to be allowed to serve her. The better part of 
 loving is the need to give, not the desire to receive. 
 In a perfect union of hearts and bodies the rivalry 
 is not who shall get, but who shall spend the more. 
 There should be no end to that noble strife — nor 
 will there be on the woman's part ; nor need 
 there be on the man's, if he is always to be blessed. 
 Poisoned man is the bane of marriage, not woman. 
 It is natural to a woman to mate, natural to a man 
 to master. But unless we curb that brute instinct 
 in the man there can be no real happiness for the 
 woman. 
 
 As for me, I will never marry as the law now 
 stands. I will not enslave any woman. To put 
 into my hands legal instruments whereby I am 
 secure in her so long as she is worth my while, 
 and free of her the moment she does what it 
 is my right, as a man, to do ; so to treat the 
 woman in whose eyes I have seen heaven, to 
 whose heart I go for peace, is to insult me by the 
 supposition that I can so insult her. I will never 
 do it, Sanchia. I'll become a monk first. 
 
 What's to be done then "i I have nothing heroic 
 to suggest. If I go maimed through life, an 
 unrounded hemisphere, I'll hobble along, my con- 
 science clear, at least. And perhaps * Patience and 
 shuffle the cards ' is as good a roadside saw as any 
 other. There are signs that the accursed old 
 system is breaking up — signs on all sides. Reason- 
 
 G 
 
82 LETTERS TO SANCHIA vi 
 
 able persons have long lifted their eyebrows, and 
 now are beginning to lift their voices. So the time 
 may be coming when they can lift up their hearts. 
 It won't be yet ; you and I may never see it. It 
 was expedient once, we read, that one man should 
 die for the people. It is doubtless necessary that 
 there should be frequent crucifixions. It seems 
 to be the way of the world. A man to whom the 
 truth is blazed as clear as noon goes out into the 
 streets filled to the lips with his revelation. Smug 
 citizens avoid him, put up their shutters, and lock 
 their doors ; dogs bark at his heels ; the ribald 
 gather ; one throws a stone. Then comes the 
 storm upon him, in the which he falls, battered, 
 bleeding, with glazed eyes. There's an end of 
 the blasphemer who dares to question established 
 order, who says that use and wont are not sacred 
 at all, but hoary in iniquity. 
 
 Having slain him, they learn that he was a god, 
 and his revelation a law of nature. Up goes a 
 statue, and his words are read as gospel. That's 
 how we get on in this quaint world, climbing to 
 the stars on the heaped bodies of our heroes and 
 sages. It's no use quarrelling with it. Whether 
 I'm to trample or be trampled, teach me, Sanchia, 
 not to complain. 
 
 If I had been less certain of what honour and 
 conscience had to tell me, I had made you mine 
 at Gorston the other day — not by that kiss you 
 gave me, but by others I had given you. My 
 beautiful, ardent, noble, thrilled young creature, 
 visible incarnation of all that is clean and quick, I 
 
VI THE TRAMP'S TESTAMENT 83 
 
 can thank God that you have kissed me once, and 
 that I have done no more than receive that bene- 
 diction. They say that holy Artemis bent over 
 Endymion as he lay on Latmos. 'Tis her only 
 stooping : she never graced Hippolytus so highly, 
 another devotee. And Dante lived to walk the 
 dusty ways of hell, and see the live silver of the 
 spheres, having received the salutation of Beatrice. 
 She bowed to him, once, in the street. He never 
 felt chilly after that, nor complained of short 
 rations. God knows that I shall not. 
 
 The life I lead seems to me reasonable, because 
 it shirks nothing, concedes nothing, is useful, brings 
 me back and keeps me close to the real Good 
 Things. Did I ever tell you of a man I knew 
 once, a man called Thursfield, who had what they 
 call misfortunes ? Such indeed they were. His 
 children grew up and went into the world ; his 
 wife tired of him and went her ways also. He 
 was left in middle life with nothing but some thou- 
 sands a year and a house or two. Odd as one 
 might think it, they didn't satisfy him. He let 
 them all go ; I believe that he endowed a charity 
 with them — an almshouse of sorts. I found him 
 some two years ago In a hollow of the Dorsetshire 
 Downs, inhabiting a shepherd's wooden hut, living 
 mostly on what he could coax out of the unthrifty 
 soil. He quoted George Borrow to me : 
 ' There's night and day, brother, both sweet things ; 
 there's likewise the wind on the heath ! ' He called 
 these the Good Things, and said that they were good 
 enough for him. The sun, the wind, the rain : I 
 
84 LETTERS TO SANCHIA 
 
 too find them excellent. And If I want another 
 stand-by or a stronghold to fly to, I can lift up my 
 eyes to the everlasting hills. Black Sail will always 
 shelter Mosedale, and in Chanctonbury Ring I can 
 still find Pan and the Nymphs. 
 
 The storm dies down, the wet stars behold me. 
 Over the bones of dead Briton and dead Roman 
 the leaf-mould lies quiet, and out of them spring 
 old Goring's beeches. Dim through the dark I 
 can guess at the great-breasted downs, and hear 
 afar off the tinkle of the sheep-bells. Courage 
 comes back after a night with Pan at his fiercest ; 
 the nymphs peer up from the borstal, or through 
 the holt ; and here gleams a white shoulder, and 
 there weave white arms. The God of Nature 
 is a kindly soul. He likes us to have courage, 
 and keep good hearts. 
 
 Farewell, Sanchia, too dear for my possessing ; 
 I leave you in the keeping of that benevolent one. 
 * For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to 
 keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee 
 up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against 
 a stone.' When next I write to you, or see your 
 face, lover or not, you shall never know it. And 
 rU come and pipe at your wedding when you bid 
 me. I have what I have, and am content. Lo, 
 the dawn is here ! Farewell. 
 
 [Here ends a phase in the life of the writer of these letters. 
 The correspondence^ vitally changed^ since it contains from this 
 point onwards no word or hint of love, continued intermittently 
 
VI THE TRAMP'S TESTAMENT 85 
 
 for another few years. In igoo Sanchia Per civ al, to her friend^ s 
 deep concern, accepted the proposals of a Mr. Nevile Ingram^ 
 a wealthy young gentleman with an estate in the North of 
 England. After that letters became rare, and to all appearance a 
 mere interchange of civilities. Four years later yet — in 1904 — the 
 writer himself wearied of single life. He found a lady to his liking, 
 and, I believe, went abroad.'] 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 
 
WORKS BY MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Crown Svo. 6s, each, 
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 A ROMANCE 
 
 ACADEMY, — "This is a remarkable book. . . . Tlte Forest Lovers has been a 
 fresh sensation. Mr. Hewlett can write ! What a sense of colour, of contrast ; what 
 vigour, what rapid movement !" 
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 OR, THE SIX YEARS' TRAGEDY 
 
 ATHENMUM. — "A fine book, fine not only for its extraordinary wealth of 
 incidental beauties, but also for the consistency of conception and the tolerant 
 humanity with which its main theme is put before you." 
 
 RICHARD YEA-AND-NAY 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison in THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW,—^ Such 
 historic imagination, such glowing colour, such crashing speed, set forth in such 
 pregnant form, carry me away spell-bound. . . . Richard Yea-and-Nay is a fine 
 and original romance." 
 
 OPEN COUNTRY 
 
 A COMEDY WITH A STING 
 
 pAIL Y TELEGRA PH.—'' Open Country is a beautiful bit of work, a work that 
 is inspired through and through with a genuine love for what is pure and beautiful. 
 Mr. Hewlett's main figures have not only a wonderful charm in themselves, but they 
 are noble, simple, and true-hearted creatures. Sanchia, the heroine, is a divine 
 creation." 
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH. — "A wondrously beautiful piece of fiction, gallant and 
 romantic, a high treat for lovers of good reading." 
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.— '"Ih^ most finished studies which have appeared 
 since some of the essays of Walter Pater," 
 
 FOND ADVENTURES 
 
 TALES OF THE YOUTH OF THE WORLD 
 
 EVENING STANDARD.—'' The present volume is a rich mine of beauty. It 
 contains four fine romantic tales." 
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 
WORKS BY MAURICE HEWLETT 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 With 1 6 Illustrations in Colour by A. S. Hartrick. 
 
 A T/ZEJVyE L/M.—" Mr. A. S. Hartrick 's colour-work in this charming edition 
 will be a joy to the admirer of Mr. Hewlett's delightful romance. The illustrations 
 are true to the spirit of the text, recalling alike the finer flavour of early mediaeval life 
 and its often barbaric crudity." 
 
 OUTLOOK. — "When Mr. Maurice Hewlett laid the foundation of his fame in 
 this unique romance, he could hardly have foreseen the popularity that it would achieve 
 in this prosaic age of ours. If anything were wanting to enhance that popularity, or 
 to commend The Forest Lovers to any one yet vacant of its glorious gams, here is 
 the culminating touch in Mr. Hartrick's drawings. They are amazingly spirited, 
 daring, and vigorous." 
 
 Extra Crcnvn Zvo. Zs. 6d. net. 
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 A COMMENTARY 
 Illustrated by Joseph Pennell. 
 
 ^ Mr. Frederic Harrison in the SPEAKER.— ^* P^f2i9,c\nz.x.\ng book. . . . The 
 distinctive and rare note of this book is its intensely personal point of view. No 
 writer, unless it be Ruskin, has ever taken us to a country so bent on making us see 
 what he sees, knowing what he knows, enjoying what he enjoys, scorning what he 
 scorns. The two volumes are saturated with personal tastes, fancies, dreams, loves, 
 and whimsies. That is what a book of travel ought to be, as were the Sentimental 
 Journey, Childe Harold, Corinne, Reisebilde, Praeterita. . . . It is this personal 
 note in every line of this book which makes it so delightful to read. . . . One must 
 not overlook the wonderful realism and vitality of the illustrations by Joseph Pennell 
 . . . they reproduce Tuscan sights with marvellous truth and force." 
 
 TIMES. — *' Its vividness is extraordinary ; there is no one quite like Mr. Hewlett 
 for seizing all the colour and character of a place in half-a-dozen words. . . . An 
 admirable book. . . . Mr. Pennell's profuse illustrations to this book are very 
 attractive." 
 
 Globe Svo. 4s. net, 
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 BEING IMPRESSIONS AND TRANSLATIONS OF 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 OBSERFER.—'' Thh re-issue of Mr. Hewlett's beautiful book comes to us as 
 one of the pleasant Eversley Series — a form in which it may be hoped, for the sake 
 of the reading world, that it is to make many new friends." 
 
 4 to, I OS. net. 
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 WHEREIN SOME OF DEATH'S CHOICEST PIECES, 
 
 AND THE GREAT GAME THAT HE PLAYED 
 
 THEREWITH, ARE FRUITFULLY 
 
 SET FORTH 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 

/^^.2-.e^^«S,iC^