Across The Plains

 

 

Contents

 

I.    Across The Plains

II.   The Old Pacific Capital

III.  Fontainebleau

IV.   Epilogue to "An Inland Voyage"

V.    Random Memories

VI.   Random Memories Continued

VII.  The Lantern-bearers

VIII. A Chapter on Dreams

IX.   Beggars

X.    Letter to a Young Gentleman

XI.   Pulvis et Umbra

XII.  A Christmas Sermon

 

 

 

CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS

 

 

 

LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN

FRANCISCO

 

 

MONDAY. - It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were

all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.  An

emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night,

another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a

fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday

a great part of the passengers from these four ships was

concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.  There was a

babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched little

booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,

were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the

atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood

by the half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with

recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to

have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full

of brimstone, blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the

whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under

the strain of so many passengers.

 

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who

preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage

registered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he

should give me the word to move.  I had taken along with me a small

valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag

of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED

STATES, in six fat volumes.  It was as much as I could carry with

convenience even for short distances, but it insured me plenty of

clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and often after,

useful for a stool.  I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage-

room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was

passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was

only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

 

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West

Street to the river.  It was dark, the wind blew clean through it

from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and

baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other.  I feel I shall

have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene

must have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily

repetition.  It was a tight jam; there was no fair way through the

mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.  Into the upper

skirts of the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and overwork,

clove their way with shouts.  I may say that we stood like sheep,

and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep-

dogs; and I believe these men were no longer answerable for their

acts.  It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight

into the press, and when they could get no farther, blindly

discharged their barrowful.  With my own hand, for instance, I

saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she

sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose

that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the

evening.  It will give some idea of the state of mind to which we

were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother

of the child paid the least attention to my act.  It was not till

some time after that I understood what I had done myself, for to

ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of

human life.  Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to progress, such

as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the

spirits.  We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the

conditions of the world.  For my part, I shivered a little, and my

back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear,

and all the activities of my nature had become tributary to one

massive sensation of discomfort.

 

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the

crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself.  About the

same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over

the shed.  We were being filtered out into the river boat for

Jersey City.  You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,

through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages

or children, and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket

by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on

deck under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room to

stretch and breathe in.  This was on the starboard; for the bulk of

the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by which we had

entered.  In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on, and

threatened them with shipwreck.  These poor people were under a

spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot.  It rained as heavily as

ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not

without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept

over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water

like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated

steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by

strains of music.  The contrast between these pleasure embarkations

and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of

wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we

count too obvious for the purposes of art.

 

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.  I had a fixed

sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was

common to us all.  A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear,

presided over the disorder of our landing.  People pushed, and

elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could. 

Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow.  One

child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with

increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official

kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her

distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.  I was

so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in

the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station,

so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.  There

was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and

for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the

draughty, gaslit platform.  I sat on my valise, too crushed to

observe my neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and

weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we

had been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than

myself.  I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and

nuts were the only refection to be had.  As only two of them had

even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,

and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the

track after my leavings.

 

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far

from dry.  For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed

my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my

blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour

to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least precaution. 

As they were, they composed themselves to sleep.  I had seen the

lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages

and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their

example.

 

TUESDAY. - When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing

idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling

to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as

from a caravan by the wayside.  We were near no station, nor even,

as far as I could see, within reach of any signal.  A green, open,

undulating country stretched away upon all sides.  Locust trees and

a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;

but the contours of the land were soft and English.  It was not

quite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough either

to seem natural in my eyes.  And it was in the sky, and not upon

the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.  Explain it how

you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises

with a different splendour in America and Europe.  There is more

clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,

brown, and smoky orange in those of the new.  It may be from habit,

but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the

latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset;

it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as

though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from

the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.  I thought so then, by

the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen

times since in far distant parts of the continent.  If it be an

illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is

accomplice.

 

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its

passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the

engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were

summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our

way.  The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at

midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear.  We paid

for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.  Fruit we

could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at

some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale;

but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every

opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow

my way to the counter.

 

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.  There

was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river

valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a

sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.  It had an inland

sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,

rivers, and the delved earth.  These, though in so far a country,

were airs from home.  I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I

saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway

and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in

the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the

plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light

dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,

I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who

had come into a rich estate.  And when I had asked the name of a

river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the

Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of

the beauty of the land.  As when Adam with divine fitness named the

creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the

fancy.  That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining

river and desirable valley.

 

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special

pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world

where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque

as the United States of America.  All times, races, and languages

have brought their contribution.  Pekin is in the same State with

Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.  Chelsea, with its

London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's

Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they

have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi

runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the

continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation

of a plague.  Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead

under a steam factory, below anglified New York.  The names of the

States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most

romantic vocables:  Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa,

Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a

nobler music for the ear:  a songful, tuneful land; and if the new

Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be

enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states

and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

 

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. 

I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with

her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a

certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was

furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room

to seek a dinner for myself.  I mention this meal, not only because

it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours,

but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured

gentleman.  He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion,

while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched

me farther into the country of surprise.  He was indeed strikingly

unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels

of my youth.  Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of

a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd

foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with

manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their

parallel in England.  A butler perhaps rides as high over the

unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of

sighing patience which one is often moved to admire.  And again,

the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity.  But the coloured

gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an

upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with

Poins and Falstaff.  He makes himself at home and welcome.  Indeed,

I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper

much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting

master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid.  I had come

prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove

in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice

of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another

occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

 

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of

etiquette:  if one should offer to tip the American waiter? 

Certainly not, he told me.  Never.  It would not do.  They

considered themselves too highly to accept.  They would even resent

the offer.  As for him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant

conversation; he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my

society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare

conjunctures....  Without being very clear seeing, I can still

perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly

pocketed a quarter.

 

WEDNESDAY. - A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and

orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. 

This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have

played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport

there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.  My

preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY

PAPER, and was read aloud to me by my nurse.  It narrated the

doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter,

very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir

Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him.  The idea

of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a

baronet, was one which my mind rejected.  It offended

verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and

others to escape from uninhabited islands.

 

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.  We were now on those

great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains.  The

country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull.  All

through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw

of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and

various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself.  The tall

corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and

framed the plain into long, aerial vistas; and the clean, bright,

gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer

evenings on the stoop.  It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am

afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.  That morning dawned with

such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not

perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the

heart and seemed to travel with the blood.  Day came in with a

shudder.  White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as

we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon

dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat

and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still

been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing

damps and foul malaria.  The fences along the line bore but two

descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the

other to vaunt remedies against the ague.  At the point of day, and

while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the

state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a

doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

 

The Dutch widow was a person of some character.  She had conceived

at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she

was at no pains to conceal.  But being a woman of a practical

spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and

encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all

her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit

by my empty seat.  Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and, so

powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for

want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story

of her life.  I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have

made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. 

I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her

fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of

particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to

friends.  At one station, she shook up her children to look at a

man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me

she explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z.,

how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his

desistance that she was now travelling to the West.  Then, when I

was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgment on

that type of manly beauty.  I admired it to her heart's content. 

She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered

as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past;

yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these

confidences, steadily aware of her aversion.  Her parting words

were ingeniously honest.  "I am sure," said she, "we all OUGHT to

be very much obliged to you."  I cannot pretend that she put me at

my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike.  A

poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these

familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

 

We reached Chicago in the evening.  I was turned out of the cars,

bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the

station of a different railroad.  Chicago seemed a great and gloomy

city.  I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards

its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld

street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable

burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation

to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a

cheerful dinner.  But there was no word of restitution.  I was that

city's benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class waiting-

room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at

my own expense.

 

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in

Chicago.  When it was time to start, I descended the platform like

a man in a dream.  It was a long train, lighted from end to end;

and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but

overflowing.  My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six

ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot,

feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over

me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas.  When at last

I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the

world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness

dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a foggy

night.

 

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat

down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman,

somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the

dozen, as they say.  I did my best to keep up the conversation; for

it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that.  I heard

him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on

the train, who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a

return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I

properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I

replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.  What else he

talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words,

his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly

explanatory:  but no more.  And I suppose I must have shown my

confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me

like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German,

supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue;

and finally, in despair, he rose and left me.  I felt chagrined;

but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself

as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once

into a dreamless stupor.

 

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the

suburbs after a DINER FIN, and was bent on entertainment while the

journey lasted.  Having failed with me, he pitched next upon

another emigrant, who had come through from Canada, and was not one

jot less weary than myself.  Nay, even in a natural state, as I

found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy,

uncommunicative man.  After trying him on different topics, it

appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper,

swore an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest of

livelier society.  Poor little gentleman!  I suppose he thought an

emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask

of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments

of digestion.

 

THURSDAY. - I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of

travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed

in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk,

and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. 

Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of

remark.  At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in.  He was

aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not at

all unpresentable upon a train.  For one stage he eluded the notice

of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the

next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor.  There was a

word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the

shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car,

and sent him flying on to the track.  It was done in three motions,

as exact as a piece of drill.  The train was still moving slowly,

although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet

without a fall.  He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his

cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand,

while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.  It

was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I

observed it with some emotion.  The conductor stood on the steps

with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this

attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without further

ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell

followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.  They were speaking

English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.

 

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the

Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank

of the Missouri river.  Here we were to stay the night at a kind of

caravanserai, set apart for emigrants.  But I gave way to a thirst

for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with

my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel.  A white clerk and a

coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call

the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.  They

took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my

packages.  And here came the tug of war.  I wished to give up my

packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed.  And

this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.

 

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my

unfamiliarity with the language.  For although two nations use the

same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by

the dictionary.  The business of life is not carried on by words,

but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang

signification.  Some international obscurity prevailed between me

and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was

asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a

monstrous exigency.  He refused, and that with the plainness of the

West.  This American manner of conducting matters of business is,

at first, highly unpalatable to the European.  When we approach a

man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which he

earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired

servant.  But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have

a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they shall

agree to please.  I know not which is the more convenient, nor even

which is the more truly courteous.  The English stiffness

unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular

transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations.  But

on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open

field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.

 

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned

my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.  I knew

nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no

desire to give trouble.  If there was nothing for it but to get to

bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my

habit, I should cheerfully obey.

 

He burst into a shout of laughter.  "Ah!" said he, "you do not know

about America.  They are fine people in America.  Oh! you will like

them very well.  But you mustn't get mad.  I know what you want. 

You come along with me."

 

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like

an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

 

"There," said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, "go and have

a drink!"

 

 

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN

 

 

All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might

meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. 

I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once

more, and put apart with my fellows.  It was about two in the

afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant

House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for

the journey.  A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm,

and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and

called name after name in the tone of a command.  At each name you

would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the

hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon

concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. 

The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men

travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese.  The official was

easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were

both quick at answering their names, and speedy in getting

themselves and their effects on board.

 

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without

ceremony by simultaneous assault.  I suppose the reader has some

notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box,

like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one

at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches

upon either hand.  Those destined for emigrants on the Union

Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing

but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the

usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a

dying glimmer even while they burned.  The benches are too short

for anything but a young child.  Where there is scarce elbow-room

for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. 

Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills

about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived

a plan for the better accommodation of travellers.  They prevail on

every two to chum together.  To each of the chums they sell a board

and three square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin

cotton.  The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for

the backs are reversible.  On the approach of night the boards are

laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and

long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down

side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van

and the feet to the engine.  When the train is full, of course this

plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every

bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.  It

was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired

official now bestirred himself.  He made a most active master of

ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the

amiability and honesty of each.  The greater the number of happy

couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw

material of the beds.  His price for one board and three straw

cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train

left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it

had fallen to one dollar and a half.

 

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some

ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but

certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined

the honour without thanks.  He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man,

I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity,

and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases.  He didn't know

the young man, he said.  The young man might be very honest, but

how was he to know that?  There was another young man whom he had

met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would

prefer to chum with him upon the whole.  All this without any sort

of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent.  I began to

tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left

rejected.  But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed,

small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly

smartness in his manner.  To be exact, he had acquired it in the

navy.  But that was all one; he had at least been trained to

desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired

swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his

fees.

 

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.  I am

afraid to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine,

certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the

families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what, if

I have it rightly, is called his caboose.  The class to which I

belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to

speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the

Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.  But our own car

was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine

who had the whooping-cough.  At last, about six, the long train

crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri

river to Omaha, westward bound.

 

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.  There was

thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless.  A man played

many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to,

until he came to "Home, sweet home."  It was truly strange to note

how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.  I

have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or

bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best

described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.  Pathos must be

relieved by dignity of treatment.  If you wallow naked in the

pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your

hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are

moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their

weakness.  It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment

was interrupted.  An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard

and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from

a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop

that "damned thing."  "I've heard about enough of that," he added;

"give us something about the good country we're going to."  A

murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the

instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into

a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately

the emotion he had raised.

 

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who

got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern

platform, singing "The Sweet By-and-bye" with very tuneful voices;

the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the

business of the day were at an end.  But it was not so; for, the

train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged

with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of

them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and

all offering beds for sale.  Their charge began with twenty-five

cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to

fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what

I had paid for mine at the Transfer.  This is my contribution to

the economy of future emigrants.

 

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.  He sells

books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on

emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee

pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or

beans and bacon.  Early next morning the newsboy went around the

cars, and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of

the hour.  It requires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but

washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a

syndicate of three.  I myself entered a little after sunrise into

articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania,

Shakespeare, and Dubuque.  Shakespeare was my own nickname on the

cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a

place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going

west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly

chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together.  I

have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.  Shakespeare bought a

tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of

soap.  The partners used these instruments, one after another,

according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm

had finished there was no want of borrowers.  Each filled the tin

dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the

whole stock in trade to the platform of the car.  There he knelt

down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one

elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face

and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is

moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

 

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania,

Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar,

and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went

on through all the cars.  Before the sun was up the stove would be

brightly burning; at the first station the natives would come on

board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end

the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the

bed-boards.  It was the pleasantest hour of the day.

 

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside:  a breakfast

in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and

supper from five to eight or nine at night.  We had rarely less

than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another

twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a side track among

miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and

arrived at San Francisco up to time.  For haste is not the foible

of an emigrant train.  It gets through on sufferance, running the

gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a

block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in

consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so. 

Civility is the main comfort that you miss.  Equality, though

conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as

to an emigrant.  Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of  "All

aboard!" recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as

I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to

San Francisco, I found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train

stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep

an eye upon it even while you ate.  The annoyance is considerable,

and the disrespect both wanton and petty.

 

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an

emigrant.  I asked a conductor one day at what time the train would

stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question, with

a like result; a third time I returned to the charge, and then

Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and

turned ostentatiously away.  I believe he was half ashamed of his

brutality; for when another person made the same inquiry, although

he still refused the information, he condescended to answer, and

even to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for me to

hear.  It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they

were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as what

o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not

afford to be eternally worried.

 

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal

of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.  He has it

in his power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant's

lot.  The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a

dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us

like dogs.  Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. 

It happened thus:  he was going his rounds through the cars with

some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at SEVEN-

UP or CASCINO (our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down a

cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking one man's hand to

the floor.  It was the last straw.  In a moment the whole party

were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to

"get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned

for." The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off,

and was less openly insulting in the future.  On the other hand,

the lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento

made himself the friend of all, and helped us with information,

attention, assistance, and a kind countenance.  He told us where

and when we should have our meals, and how long the train would

stop; kept seats at table for those who were delayed, and watched

that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily

hurried.  You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the

greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.  When I think

of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright

face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the

benefactor of his kind.  Perhaps he is discontented with himself,

perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a

hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning

a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a

man's work, and bettering the world.

 

I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy.  I

tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil

kindness of the American, which is perhaps their most bewildering

character to one newly landed.  It was immediately after I had left

the emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death's

door, so much had this long journey shaken me.  I sat at the end of

a car, and the catch being broken, and myself feverish and sick, I

had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air.  In

this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of

merchandise.  I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he

was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he

came upon me unawares.  On these occasions he most rudely struck my

foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the

way, he answered me never a word.  I chafed furiously, and I fear

the next time it would have come to words.  But suddenly I felt a

touch upon my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my

hand.  It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill,

and so made me this present out of a tender heart.  For the rest of

the journey I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers,

thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, and

came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.

 

 

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

 

 

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday

without a cloud.  We were at sea - there is no other adequate

expression - on the plains of Nebraska.  I made my observatory on

the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to

spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new.  It was a world

almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and

back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a

cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran

till it touched the skirts of heaven.  Along the track innumerable

wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a

continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at

all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might

perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more

distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and

then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their

surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. 

The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one

thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to

assume in our regard.  It seemed miles in length, and either end of

it within but a step of the horizon.  Even my own body or my own

head seemed a great thing in that emptiness.  I note the feeling

the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in

the experience of others.  Day and night, above the roar of the

train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of

grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and

watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land.

 

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration

in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery

of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line

of the horizon.  Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness

of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of

oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that

unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily

fled them by an equal stride.  They had nothing, it would seem, to

overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for

repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead

green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon.  But the

eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the

worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. 

It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. 

Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of

variety.  Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?  What

livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge

sameness?  He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from

all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. 

A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope. 

He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he

had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same

great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within

view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance.  We are

full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise

people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative

surroundings.  But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? 

His is a wall-paper with a vengeance - one quarter of the universe

laid bare in all its gauntness.

 

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of

the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is

tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man

runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at

hand.  Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these

empty plains.

 

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle,

wife and family, the settler may create a full and various

existence.  One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in

every way superior to her lot.  This was a woman who boarded us at

a way station, selling milk.  She was largely formed; her features

were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine

complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and

steady.  She sold milk with patriarchal grace.  There was not a

line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,

but spoke of an entire contentment with her life.  It would have

been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman.  Yet the place where

she lived was to me almost ghastly.  Less than a dozen wooden

houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted

along the railway lines.  Each stood apart in its own lot.  Each

opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-

board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it

ready made.  Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very

empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.  This

extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a

strong impression of artificiality.  With none of the litter and

discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses

still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely

scenic.  The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and

it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or

the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

 

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at

least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely

civilised.  At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man

asked another to pass the milk-jug.  This other was well-dressed

and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man,

high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he

turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone

-

 

"There's a waiter here!" he cried.

 

"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first.

 

Here is the retort verbatim -

 

"Pass!  Hell!  I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid

for it.  You should use civility at table, and, by God, I'll show

you how!"

 

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on

with his supper as though nothing had occurred.  It pleases me to

think that some day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney;

and that perhaps both may fall.

 

 

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

 

 

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains.  I

longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to

enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring.  Alas! and it was a

worse country than the other.  All Sunday and Monday we travelled

through these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies,

which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect.  Hour after

hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward

path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of

monuments and fortifications - how drearily, how tamely, none can

tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not

one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-

brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring, grays

warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole

sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and

there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a canon. 

The plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing

but a contorted smallness.  Except for the air, which was light and

stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-

forsaken land.

 

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at

last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some

wayside eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick

outright.  That was a night which I shall not readily forget.  The

lamps did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own

neighbourhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the

long, hollow box of the car.  The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes;

here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk;

there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm;

there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench. 

The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the

movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out

their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and

murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping

across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a

half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest

in that unresting vehicle.  Although it was chill, I was obliged to

open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became

intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. 

Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills

shoot by unweariedly into our wake.  They that long for morning

have never longed for it more earnestly than I.

 

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and

unsightly quarter of the world.  Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a

bird, or a river.  Only down the long, sterile canons, the train

shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.  That train was the one

piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one

spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. 

And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this

unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear

an emigrant for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden

Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu

cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died

away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in

these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side

with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together

in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling

and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all

America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad

medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to

remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in

frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a

fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as

if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in

which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends

of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to

some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most

varied subject for an enduring literary work.  If it be romance, if

it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy

town to this?  But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary

- it is only Homer.

 

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts

us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. 

Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more

feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull,

who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.  Yet we

should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep

the balance true, since I have complained of the trifling

discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add

an original document.  It was not written by Homer, but by a boy of

eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago.  I

shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the

spelling.

 

"My dear Sister Mary, - I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when

you read my letter.  If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has

not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that

we are in California, and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of

fifteen) "is dead.  We started from - in July, with plenly of

provisions and too yoke oxen.  We went along very well till we got

within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians

attacked us.  We found places where they had killed the emigrants. 

We had one passenger with us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran

all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the

wagon so that we could get at them in a minit.  It was about two

o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a

prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon.

 

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the

oxen.  Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went

on.  Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and

the other man.  Jerry stopped Tom to come up; me and the man went

on and sit down by a little stream.  In a few minutes, we heard

some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose);

then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the redskins

came down upon us.  The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of

the road in the bushes.

 

"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man

that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape,

if possible.  I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I

would not put them on.  The man and me run down the road, but We

was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony.  We then turend the other

way, and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar

trees, and stayed there till dark.  The Indians hunted all over

after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there

tomyhawks Jingle.  At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my

toes against sticks and stones.  We traveld on all night; and next

morning, just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape

of a man.  It layed Down in the grass.  We went up to it, and it

was Jerry.  He thought we ware Indians.  You can imagine how glad

he was to see me.  He thought we was all dead but him, and we

thought him and Tom was dead.  He had the gun that he took out of

the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load

that was in it.

 

"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one

wagon with too men with it.  We had traveld with them before one

day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us,

unless they had been killed to.  My feet was so sore when we caught

up with them that I had to ride; I could not step.  We traveld on

for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would

(could) not drive them another inch.  We unyoked the oxen; we had

about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into

four packs.  Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a

blanket.  I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I

had in all about twelve pounds.  We had one pint of flour a day for

our alloyance.  Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made)

pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that

way.  We traveld twelve or fourteen days.  The time came at last

when we should have to reach some place or starve.  We saw fresh

horse and cattle tracks.  The morning come, we scraped all the

flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and

made some soup, and eat everything we had.  We traveld on all day

without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep

train of eight wagons.  We traveld with them till we arrived at the

settlements; and know I am safe in California, and got to good

home, and going to school.

 

"Jerry is working in - .  It is a good country.  You can get from

50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking.  Tell me all about the affairs

in the States, and how all the folks get along."

 

And so ends this artless narrative.  The little man was at school

again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the

deserts.

 

 

FELLOW-PASSENGERS

 

 

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central

Pacific line of railroad.  The change was doubly welcome; for,

first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in

which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to

stink abominably.  Several yards away, as we returned, let us say

from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air.  I have

stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the

dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure

menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys.  I

think we are human only in virtue of open windows.  Without fresh

air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the

Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of

leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of

offence.  I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for

the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of

the emigrant train.  But one thing I must say, the car of the

Chinese was notably the least offensive.

 

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so

proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us

all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew

out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for

bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be

closed by day and opened at night.

 

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was

among.  They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had

met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.  They were mostly

lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat

sad, I should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and

little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap

and merely external curiosity.  If they heard a man's name and

business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery;

but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent

to the rest.  Some of them were on nettles till they learned your

name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that,

whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or

friendly, was all one to them.  Others who were not so stupid,

gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly.  A favourite

witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of  "All aboard!"

while the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the

general discomfort.  Such a one was always much applauded for his

high spirits.  When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was

astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship - to meet

with little but laughter.  One of the young men even amused himself

by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-

nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me

to join the laugh.  I did so, but it was phantom merriment.  Later

on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though,

of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather

superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his

fellow-passengers.  "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a

woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!"  And there was a

very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station. 

This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

 

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,

little but silence.  In this society, more than any other that ever

I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the

narrative.  It was rarely that any one listened for the listening. 

If he lent an ear to another man's story, it was because he was in

immediate want of a hearer for one of his own.  Food and the

progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated;

many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their

tongues.  One small knot had no better occupation than to worm out

of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed

I grew to baffle them.  They assailed me with artful questions and

insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was

perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward

laughter.  I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for

the secret.  He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus

preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey.  I met one

of my fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car

in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him

my name without subterfuge.  You never saw a man more chapfallen. 

But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he

had still been disappointed.

 

There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family

and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one

reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles,

the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world,

mysterious race.  Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make

something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of

them at all.  A division of races, older and more original than

that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from

neighbouring Englishmen.  Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign

in my eyes.  This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of

the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

 

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every

quarter of that Continent.  All the States of the North had sent

out a fugitive to cross the plains with me.  From Virginia, from

Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from

Maime that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves

- some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better

wages.  The talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the

steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves

ever westward.  I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a

feeling of despair.  They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far

enough.  Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to

welcome them at Sandy Hook.  Where were they to go?  Pennsylvania,

Maine, Iowa, Kansas?  These were not places for immigration, but

for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who

had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country.  And

it was still westward that they ran.  Hunger, you would have

thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was

made of edible gold.  And, meantime, in the car in front of me,

were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? 

Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in

search of provender, had here come face to face.  The two waves had

met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been

prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till

one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently

at home.  Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more

picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam

westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other

emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as

our own.  Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the

mines?  Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? 

It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on

the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of

wailing chorus, to "come back."  On the plains of Nebraska, in the

mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my

heart, "Come back!"  That was what we heard by the way "about the

good country we were going to."  And at that very hour the Sand-lot

of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from

the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of

demagogues.

 

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate,

how many thousands would regret the bargain!  But wages, indeed,

are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of

gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.

 

 

DESPISED RACES

 

 

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians

towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and

the worst.  They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to

them, or thought of them, but hated them A PRIORI.  The Mongols

were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of

money.  They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred

industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the

Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe.  They declared them

hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when

they beheld them.  Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man

is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head

and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I

have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.  I do not say

it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many

a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured.  Again, my emigrants

declared that the Chinese were dirty.  I cannot say they were

clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their

efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame.  We all

pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a

minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed.  But the Chinese

never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their

feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as

decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.  I may remark by the

way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate

is their sense of modesty.  A clean man strips in a crowded

boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without

uncovering an inch of skin.  Lastly, these very foul and malodorous

Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the

Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank.  I have said already

that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.

 

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. 

The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly

acquainted with English.  They are held to be base, because their

dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious

Caucasian.  They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no

monopoly of that.  They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the

cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation. 

I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and

belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial

Empire.  But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here!

and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the

intelligence of their superiors at home!

 

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. 

Such is the cry.  It seems, after all, that no country is bound to

submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the

knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence.  Yet we may

regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict

herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates.  And certainly,

as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some

bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. 

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-

lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and

butchery.  "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, "ye

rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not

rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"

 

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on

the Chinese.  Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had

begun to keep pigs.  Gun-powder and printing, which the other day

we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the

delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-

past antiquity.  They walk the earth with us, but it seems they

must be of different clay.  They hear the clock strike the same

hour, yet surely of a different epoch.  They travel by steam

conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and

superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. 

Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the

wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round

Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy

alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find

things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for

thousands of miles over plain and mountain.  Heaven knows if we had

one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes,

which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world

out of the railway windows.  And when either of us turned his

thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must

there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld

that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with

the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over

all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks

and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same

affection, home.

 

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of

the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble

red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had

been steaming all these days.  I saw no wild or independent Indian;

indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but

now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few

children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of

civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants.  The silent

stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their

appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my

fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney

baseness.  I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation.  We

should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our

forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.

 

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the

hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back,

step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one

after another as the States extended westward, until at length they

are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and

even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by

ruffianly diggers?  The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an

instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the

wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such

poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter

of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base

if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.  These old, well-

founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the

independent.  That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the

Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the

thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man;

rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like

the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.

 

 

TO THE GOLDEN GATES

 

 

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular

impressions on the mind.  By an early hour on Wednesday morning we

stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-

lying plateau in Nevada.  The man who kept the station eating-house

was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very

friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now

entering.  "You see," said he, "I tell you this, because I come

from your country."  Hail, brither Scots!

 

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the

world.  There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage

which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small

affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a

spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five,

or even a hundred halfpence.  In the Pacific States they have made

a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin

that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT, or old Mexican

real.  The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents,

eight to the dollar.  When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar

stands for the required amount.  But how about an odd bit?  The

nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a fifth.  That,

then, is called a SHORT bit.  If you have one, you lay it

triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents.  But if you have

not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly

tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is

called a LONG BIT, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by

comparison with a short bit, five cents.  In country places all

over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or

taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass

of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case

may be.  You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as

broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it

broader, with which I here endow the public.  It is brief and

simple - radiantly simple.  There is one place where five cents are

recognised, and that is the post-office.  A quarter is only worth

two bits, a short and a long.  Whenever you have a quarter, go to

the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you

will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits.  The

purchasing power of your money is undiminished.  You can go and

have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made

yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps into the

bargain.  Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for

this discovery.

 

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,

horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little

kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko.  As we were standing,

after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly

from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country. 

They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams

since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-

passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke

our fast at Toano.  These land stowaways play a great part over

here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become

acquainted with them.

 

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.  I was coming out from

supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed

by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

 

"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"

 

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist

from that intention.  He had a situation to offer me, and if we

could come to terms, why, good and well.  "You see," he continued,

"I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the

orchestra.  You're a musician, I guess?"

 

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld

Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension

whatever to that style.  He seemed much put out of countenance; and

one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five

dollars.

 

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a

musician; I bet you weren't.  No offence, I hope?"

 

"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I

presume the debt was liquidated.

 

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,

who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-

begging.  But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. 

Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide

the bet.

 

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all

reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through

desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.  But some

time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of

my companions.  It was in vain that I resisted.  A fire of

enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were

in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see

with my own eyes.  The train was then, in its patient way, standing

halted in a by-track.  It was a clear, moonlit night; but the

valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a

diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness

of the pines.  A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the

continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the

mountains.  The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in

the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere.  I was dead

sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at

my heart.

 

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it

were day or night, for the illumination was unusual.  I sat up at

last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long

snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were

swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse

of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a

sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.  I am usually very

calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how

my heart leaped at this.  It was like meeting one's wife.  I had

come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and

habitable corners of the earth.  Every spire of pine along the

hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more

dear to me than a blood relation.  Few people have praised God more

happily than I did.  And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta,

Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain

forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we

went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their

sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys,

and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new

creatures within and without.  The sun no longer oppressed us with

heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we

were fain to laugh ourselves for glee.  At every turn we could see

farther into the land and our own happy futures.  At every town the

cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and

crowing for the new day and the new country.  For this was indeed

our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to

so long.

 

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain

of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the

Oakland side of San Francisco Bay.  The day was breaking as we

crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San

Francisco; the bay was perfect - not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon

its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. 

A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and

then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to

awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly

 

"The tall hills Titan discovered,"

 

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were

lit from end to end with summer daylight.

 

[1879.]

 

 

 

CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

 

 

 

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC

 

 

THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than

General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less

important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a

soldier for topography.  Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the

mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and

Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.  Thus the

ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the

Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her

left flank and rear with never-dying surf.  In front of the town,

the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and then

westward to enclose the bay.  The waves which lap so quietly about

the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you

can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the

outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the

moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet

weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the

coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

 

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.  It would be hard

to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to

the mind.  Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. 

Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,

trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song.  Strange sea-

tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes

a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the

wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands.  The waves come

in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst

with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down

the long key-board of the beach.  The foam of these great ruins

mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly

fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.  The

interest is perpetually fresh.  On no other coast that I know shall

you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's

greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of

thunder in the sound.  The very air is more than usually salt by

this Homeric deep.

 

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.  Here and

there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and

hunters.  A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand.  The

crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the

kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the

skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of

turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. 

Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey

from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other

things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had

the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white

windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first

fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

 

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of

the ocean.  A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up

into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean,

empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where

you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the

Pacific.  You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the

hill among pine-woods.  Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. 

You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.  You see a

deer; a multitude of quail arises.  But the sound of the sea still

follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only

harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the

summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that

same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you

are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only

mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but

from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and

from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river.  The whole

woodland is begirt with thundering surges.  The silence that

immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as

it is haunted by this distant, circling rumour.  It sets your

senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and

unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk

listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a

sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

 

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn

homeward.  All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of

Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my

walks.  I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to

be nearest.  Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not,

sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific.  The

emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in

these excursions.  I never in all my visits met but one man.  He

was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he

carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek

for straying cattle.  I asked him what o'clock it was, but he

seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me

for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent.  We

stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned

without a word and took our several ways across the forest.

 

One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was

new to me.  After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound

nearer hand.  I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile.  A

step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself

among trim houses.  I walked through street after street, parallel

and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but

still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the

corner, as in a real town.  Facing down the main thoroughfare -

"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,

with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra.  The

houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but

of the waves, no moving thing.  I have never been in any place that

seemed so dreamlike.  Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and

its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this

town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps

had been deserted overnight.  Indeed, it was not so much like a

deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with

no one on the boards.  The barking of a dog led me at last to the

only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass

the winter alone in this empty theatre.  The place was "The Pacific

Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort."  Thither, in the warm

season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and

flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable. 

The neighbourhood at least is well selected.  The Pacific booms in

front.  Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a

wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the

piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise

in amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits

and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals.  To the

east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a

hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-

gulls.  Such scenes are very similar in different climates; they

appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots

in Scotland.  And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of

strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you

will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are

unfamiliar to the memory.  The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is

smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper -

prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their destination -

and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the

sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

 

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this

seaboard region.  On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not

smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the

resinous tree-tops of the other.  For days together a hot, dry air

will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and

aromatic in the nostrils.  The cause is not far to seek, for the

woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.  These

fires are one of the great dangers of California.  I have seen from

Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of

smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.  A

little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they

gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.  The inhabitants

must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant

groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at

stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry

up perennial fountains.  California has been a land of promise in

its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to

perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

 

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange

piece of experience.  The fire passes through the underbrush at a

run.  Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from

root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it

seems, as quickly.  But this last is only in semblance.  For after

this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,

there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very

entrails of the tree.  The resin of the pitch-pine is principally

condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots. 

Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as

the match to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind

into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of

the woods.  You may approach the tree from one side, and see it

scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the

peril.  Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the

column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;

while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are

being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the

fissures to the surface.  A little while, and, without a nod of

warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and

falls prostrate with a crash.  Meanwhile the fire continues its

silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long

afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with

radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these

subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree

instead of the print of an old one.  These pitch-pines of Monterey

are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most

fantastic of forest trees.  No words can give an idea of the

contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a

circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at

which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop

through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when

there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their

nativity.  At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but

perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;

while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of

the nobler redwood.  Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills

of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

 

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so

near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have

retained a thrill from the experience.  I wished to be certain

whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of

Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame

first touched the tree.  I suppose I must have been under the

influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my

experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a

portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike

a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.  The

tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a

roaring pillar of fire.  Close by I could hear the shouts of those

who were at work combating the original conflagration.  I could see

the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of

open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through

the underwood into the sunlight.  Had any one observed the result

of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;

after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been

run up to convenient bough.

 

To die for faction is a common evil;

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

 

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day.  At night I

went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite

distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater

vigour.

 

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious

power upon the climate.  At sunset, for months together, vast, wet,

melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.  From the

hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is

always sad.  The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow

still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession

of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;

they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often

of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the

seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back

and spire up skyward like smoke.  Where their shadow touches,

colour dies out of the world.  The air grows chill and deadly as

they advance.  The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh,

and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and

filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands.  It

takes but a little while till the invasion is complete.  The sea,

in its lighter order, has submerged the earth.  Monterey is

curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds,

so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they

slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the

sea.  And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few

steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and

warm and full of inland perfume.

 

 

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

 

 

The history of Monterey has yet to be written.  Founded by Catholic

missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of

arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from

another, an American capital when the first House of

Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and

lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and

from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a

mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of

all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.

 

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with

which the soil has changed-hands.  The Mexicans, you may say, are

all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it

and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs

and something of their ancient air.

 

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,

economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which

were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent

up by fissures four or five feet deep.  There were no street

lights.  Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the

dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of

the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to

begin or end.  The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked

adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very

elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls

so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart.  At

the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard

smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the

chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either

sex.

 

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people

sat almost all day long playing cards.  The smallest excursion was

made on horseback.  You would scarcely ever see the main street

without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with

their Mexican housings.  It struck me oddly to come across some of

the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all

the characters astride on English saddles.  As a matter of fact, an

English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say,

a thing unknown in all the rest of California.  In a place so

exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles

but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and

down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with

cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them

dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square

yard.  The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly

un-American.  The first ranged from something like the pure

Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure

Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of

either race in all the country.  As for the second, it was a matter

of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely

mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly

courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum.  In dress

they ran to colour and bright sashes.  Not even the most

Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose

into his hat-band.  Not even the most Americanised would descend to

wear the vile dress hat of civilisation.  Spanish was the language

of the streets.  It was difficult to get along without a word or

two of that language for an occasion.  The only communications in

which the population joined were with a view to amusement.  A

weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to

the numerous fandangoes in private houses.  There was a really fair

amateur brass band.  Night after night serenaders would be going

about the street, sometimes in a company and with several

instruments and voice together, sometimes severally, each guitar

before a different window.  It was a strange thing to lie awake in

nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one

of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount into the

night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-

pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican

men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not

entirely human but altogether sad.

 

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost

all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was

from the same class, numerically so small, that the principal

officials were selected.  This Mexican and that Mexican would

describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which

remained to him.  You would ask him how that came about, and elicit

some tangled story back-foremost, from which you gathered that the

Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans

greedy like children, but no other certain fact.  Their merits and

their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former

landholders.  It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled

with the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides,

and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee

craft.  Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a

reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great

minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it

is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it.  I

know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case

occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has

signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.  To have spoken in the

matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that

he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word." 

The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought

up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and

honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but

not the creation of agreements.  This single unworldly trait will

account for much of that revolution of which we are speaking.  The

Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the

accusation cuts both ways.  In a contest of this sort, the entire

booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the more

scupulous race.

 

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely

seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered.  This is,

of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in

the course of being solved in the various States of the American

Union.  I am reminded of an anecdote.  Some years ago, at a great

sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a

small way in the old town of Edinburgh.  The agent had the

curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible

use he could have for such material.  He was shown, by way of

answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to

imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.  "And what," he asked,

"do you propose to call this?"  "I'm no very sure," replied the

grocer, "but I think it's going to turn out port."  In the older

Eastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races

in going to turn out English, or thereabout.  But the problem is

indefinitely varied in other zones.  The elements are differently

mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial belt and

in the group of States on the Pacific coast.  Above all, in these

last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or

evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own. 

In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day

after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and

a Scotchman:  we had for common visitors an American from Illinois,

a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and

from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country

ranches for the night.  No wonder that the Pacific coast is a

foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race

contributes something of its own.  Even the despised Chinese have

taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but

the debasing use of opium.  And chief among these influences is

that of the Mexicans.

 

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.  They still

preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their

affairs snug to themselves.  Only four or five years ago Vasquez,

the bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him

in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and

was seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man.  The

year that I was there, there occurred two reputed murders.  As the

Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of

every one behind his back, it is not possible for me to judge how

much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one

case every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that

there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an instant of

taking the authorities into their counsel.  Now this is, of course,

characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy

feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a

word in this inaction.  Even when I spoke to them upon the subject,

they seemed not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the

traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word,

wholly Mexicanised.

 

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost

entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless

paper.  Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally

penniless Miguel.  It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. 

Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition.  I have seen

a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and

getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper.  The very

storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more

surprised than pleased when they are offered.  They fear there must

be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom

from them.  I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer

begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my

purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case,

partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition

which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be

notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit

for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.  Now this

villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian

nature.  I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers

of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in

many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it

in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences.  Jew

storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from

this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and

keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the

mill.  So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except

that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans

bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly

bound the Mexican.  It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like

certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the

race that holds and tills it for the moment.

 

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. 

The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain

under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. 

The land is held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which

are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief

danger and disgrace of California; and the holders are mostly of

American or British birth.  We have here in England no idea of the

troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these

large landholders - land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers,

they are more commonly and plainly called.  Thus the townlands of

Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.  How they came there

is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man

is hated with a great hatred.  His life has been repeatedly in

danger.  Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and

examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen

thirsting for his blood.  A certain house on the Salinas road, they

say, he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter

sent him warning long ago.  But a year since he was publicly

pointed out for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. 

Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word of

explanation is required for English readers.  Originally an Irish

dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost

dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there for six months

or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was

first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San

Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own ruin

by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and

had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of

the hands of his rebellious followers.  It was while he was at the

top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-

cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-

thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to

"hang David Jacks."  Had the town been American, in my private

opinion, this would have been done years ago.  Land is a subject on

which there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend

the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles

with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-

Wesson convenient to his hand.

 

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old

friend, the truck system, in full operation.  Men live there, year

in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all

consumed in supplies.  The longer they remain in this desirable

service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice

in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those

typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the

success of the demagogue Kearney.

 

In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the

praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel.  The

valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley,

bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. 

The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river,

loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a

quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. 

From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean,

and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers

on the shore.  But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of

the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the

converted savage.  The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes

and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily

widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall.  As

an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary

architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim

to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse

have been its portion.  There is no sign of American interference,

save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for

pistol bullets.  So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. 

Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the

neighbouring American proprietor, and with that exception no man

troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel.  Only one day in the

year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the PADRE drives over the hill

from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered

portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the

service; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses

contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among

a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God

served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other

temple under heaven.  An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years

of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet

they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce

the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they

sang.  The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and

staccato.  "In saecula saeculoho-horum," they went, with a vigorous

aspirate to every additional syllable.  I have never seen faces

more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian

singers.  It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by

which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides

an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was

united and expressed.  And it made a man's heart sorry for the good

fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and

to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still

preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away

from all authority and influence in that land - to be succeeded by

greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots.  So ugly a thing

may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the

Society of Jesus.

 

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution.  All that I

say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense.  The Monterey of last

year exists no longer.  A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by

the railway.  Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. 

Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live

oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in

the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and

fashion.  Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to

resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor,

quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a

lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

 

[1880]

 

 

 

CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS

 

 

 

I

 

 

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart.  It is a place that

people love even more than they admire.  The vigorous forest air,

the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of

tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves -

these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. 

The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the

shapes of things concord in happy harmony.  The artist may be idle

and not fear the "blues."  He may dally with his life.  Mirth,

lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very

essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling

forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember.  Even on the

plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the

ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and

healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness

and hysteria.  There is no place where the young are more gladly

conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their

age.

 

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this

country to the artist.  The field was chosen by men in whose blood

there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great

art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose

modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients.  It was

chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art,

of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales

and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all

speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love

of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-

side primrose.  It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.  And

for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of

to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.  There is in France

scenery incomparable for romance and harmony.  Provence, and the

valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of

masterpieces waiting for the brush.  The beauty is not merely

beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises

while it charms.  Here you shall see castellated towns that would

befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like

cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers

of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.  All these, by

the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the

modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to

Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot

cascade in Cernay valley.  Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him;

even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. 

But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to

paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell

among graceful shapes.  Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery,

is classically graceful; and though the student may look for

different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate

his hand and eye.

 

But, before all its other advantages - charm, loveliness, or

proximity to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already

colonised.  The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time

and tact.  The population must be conquered.  The innkeeper has to

be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he

must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in

a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours

and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers

who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy

tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year.  A colour

merchant has next to be attracted.  A certain vogue must be given

to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should

find himself alone.  And no sooner are these first difficulties

overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the

bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate.  This is the

crucial moment for the colony.  If these intruders gain a footing,

they not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of

their long purses, they will have undone the education of the

innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor

painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet.  "Not here, O

Apollo!" will become his song.  Thus Trouville and, the other day,

St. Raphael were lost to the arts.  Curious and not always edifying

are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair;

like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his

chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs.

Grundy must allow him licence.  Where his own purse and credit are

not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously. 

Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek

expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as

he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at

home.  And when that essentially modern creature, the English or

American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns

as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself

defenceless; he submitted or he fled.  His French respectability,

quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of

life, recoiled aghast before the innovation.  But the girls were

painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last

saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair

invader.  Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the

holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he

hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

 

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. 

The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its

crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part,

when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the

necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman,

is excellent.  To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment,

to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least,

the king's highway of progress.  Here, in England, too many

painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the

intelligent bourgeois.  These, when they are not merely

indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence

of art.  And this is the lad's ruin.  For art is, first of all and

last of all, a trade.  The love of words and not a desire to

publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading

of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the

painter.  The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature,

is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material

as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second

stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of

representation.  In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully;

that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really

grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business

of real art - to give life to abstractions and significance and

charm to facts.  In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his

fellow-craftsmen.  They alone can take a serious interest in the

childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years.  They alone

can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard,

this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting

of dull and insignificant subjects.  Outsiders will spur him on. 

They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great

picture?"  If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade

him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his

style falsified for life.

 

And this brings me to a warning.  The life of the apprentice to any

art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small

successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported;

the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he

come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows

letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.  But the time comes when a

man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon

his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation. 

This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone:  above

all with painters.  They have made so many studies that it has

become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with

them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their

horn-book.  This class of man finds a congenial home in artist

villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to

call them "Snoozers."  Continual returns to the city, the society

of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of

humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or

philosophy, are the means of treatment.  It will be time enough to

think of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch

it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the

painters' village.  "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education;

and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being

forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.

 

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the

very air of France that communicates the love of style.  Precision,

clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in

the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be

acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least

the more appreciated.  The air of Paris is alive with this

technical inspiration.  And to leave that airy city and awake next

day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals.  The

same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys

and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty

in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be

decorative in its emptiness.

 

 

II

 

 

In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of

Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.  I know the whole western

side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well

enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without

some special character and charm.  Such quarters, for instance, as

the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a

hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the

silence of the birds.  The two last are really conterminous; and in

both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand

political vicissitudes.  But in the one the great oaks prosper

placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the

air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs.  In

the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock

lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper

slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the

great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a

grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos. 

Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of

the Paris road runs in an avenue:  a road conceived for pageantry

and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of

glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves,

and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen

far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep.  A little upon

one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a

little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and

heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine

trees.  So artfully are the ingredients mingled.  Nor must it be

forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a

hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an

unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing;

and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with

the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. 

There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the

lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the

glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant

darkness of the wood.

 

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive.  It is a

changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in.  As fast as

your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each

vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that

hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers

and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.

 

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.  The most savage

corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in

the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if

with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint,

has countersigned the picture.  After your farthest wandering, you

are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,

to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the

aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush.  It is not a

wilderness; it is rather a preserve.  And, fitly enough, the centre

of the maze is not a hermit's cavern.  In the midst, a little

mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure;

and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled by historic

names, stands smokeless among gardens.

 

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless

humbug who called himself the hermit.  In a great tree, close by

the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner

of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the

romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of

sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux.  I had the pleasure of

his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his perfect

wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a

great avidity.  In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-

stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he

was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,

theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only

stock-in-trade to beg withal.  The choice of his position would

seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places

still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten,

and that lie unvisited.  There, to be sure, are the blue arrows

waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the

corner of a rock.  But your security from interruption is complete;

you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul

suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have

committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could

still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and

chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed.  A confederate

landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he

would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;

and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get

gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of

junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

 

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and

although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated

quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the

immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests.  And

the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented

inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the

companionable silence of the trees.  The demands of the imagination

vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;

others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets

the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of

their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an

adjacent county.  To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem

but an extended tea-garden:  a Rosherville on a by-day.  But to the

plain man it offers solitude:  an excellent thing in itself, and a

good whet for company.

 

 

III

 

 

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; ET EGO IN ARCADIA

VIXI, it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying

close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many

others, a green spot in memory.  The great Millet was just dead,

the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters

were in mourning.  The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in

the history of art:  in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the

history of the Latin Quarter.  The PETIT CENACLE was dead and

buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest

from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly

lost; and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a

sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators.  But

if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still

farther expurgated; honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I

have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest

painter to depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his

bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English and

Americans alone.  At the same time, the great influx of Anglo-

Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious.  There had

been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and the

Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry.  It

would be well if nations and races could communicate their

qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they

have an eye to nothing but defects.  The Anglo-Saxon is essentially

dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we

call "Fair Play."  The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his

guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired over-seas and

left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil

were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a

shrug expressed his judgment upon both.

 

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts.  Palizzi

bore rule at Gretz - urbane, superior rule - his memory rich in

anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories;

sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath

these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye

scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way

on the appearance of a hunchback.  Cernay had Pelouse, the

admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a

full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples,

bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all

admired.  Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. 

Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless

commonwealth.  Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day

made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it.  The good

Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before

that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely

death.  He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would

never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance

still haunts the memory of all who knew him.  Another - whom I will

not name - has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of

his decadence.  His days of royal favour had departed even then;

but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain

stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room,

the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing

battle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy,

still waiting the return of fortune.  But these days also were too

good to last; and the former favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I

heard the truth, by night.  There was a time when he was counted a

great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of

time brings in his revenges!  To pity Millet is a piece of

arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it

is harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may

pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to

opulence and momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was

suffered step by step to sink again to nothing.  No misfortune can

exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost progress, even bravely

supported as it was; but to those also who were taken early from

the easel, a regret is due.  From all the young men of this period,

one stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of

fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.  "Il faut faire de la

peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience

had continued his education, if he had been granted health to

return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must

believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

 

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy

principles.  At any hour of the night, when you returned from

wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped

yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden

with beer or wine.  The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there

was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a

computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying

share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric:  ESTRATS. 

Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your

bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your

disposition.  At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your

coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest.  The doves had

perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the

threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. 

Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the

interminable field of forest shadow.  There you were free to dream

and wander.  And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal

awaited you on Siron's table.  The whole of your accommodation, set

aside that varying item of the ESTRALS, cost you five francs a day;

your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were

out of luck's way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave

it pending.

 

 

IV

 

 

Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it

was a kind of club.  The guests protected themselves, and, in so

doing, they protected Siron.  Formal manners being laid aside,

essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival

had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined

observances was promptly punished.  A man might be as plain, as

dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch

of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were

as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies.  I have seen people

driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words

what they had done, but they deserved their fate.  They had shown

themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had

pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they wanted tact to

appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette.  And once

they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its

cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of

our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose

exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from

the scene of his discomfiture.  These sentences of banishment were

never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I

believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this,

that they were never needed.  Painters, sculptors, writers,

singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky,

and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into

the spirit of the association.  This singular society is purely

French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French

defects.  It cannot be imitated by the English.  The roughness, the

impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent

friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a

commonwealth.  But this random gathering of young French painters,

with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life

of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their

etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their

edicts against the unwelcome.  To think of it is to wonder the more

at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.  This

inbred civility - to use the word in its completest meaning - this

natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all

that is required to make a governable nation and a just and

prosperous country.

 

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of

laughter, and of the initiative of youth.  The few elder men who

joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their

companions.  We returned from long stations in the fortifying air,

our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the

silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we

fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn

chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles

guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into

the night.  It was a good place and a good life for any naturally-

minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps

best of all for the student of letters.  He, too, was saturated in

this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing

currents of the world, he might forget that there existed other and

more pressing interests than that of art.  But, in such a place, it

was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience,

like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw

himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were

really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health

and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became

tormented with the desire to work.  He enjoyed a strenuous idleness

full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among

companions; and still floating like music through his brain,

foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have

conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words

that were alive with import.  So in youth, like Moses from the

mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we

shall never enter.  They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of

style that repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-

throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before

the artist can be born.  But they come to us in such a rainbow of

glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in

comparison.  We were all artists; almost all in the age of

illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the

strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were

happy!  But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though

these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others

succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the

amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House

Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

 

 

V

 

 

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river.  It boasts

a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many

sterlings.  And the bridge is a piece of public property;

anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettante from the

walls of a hundred exhibitions.  I have seen it in the Salon; I

have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in the last French

Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white by

Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the

MAGAZINE OF ART.  Long-suffering bridge!  And if you visit Gretz

to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom

of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly

painting it again.

 

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than

Barbizon.  I give it the palm over Cernay.  There is something

ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn

tables standing in one corner, as though the stage were set for

rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking

their fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers.  It

is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down the green inn-

garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see

the dawn begin across the poplared level.  The meals are laid in

the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves.  The splash of oars and

bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside

the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.  There is

"something to do" at Gretz.  Perhaps, for that very reason, I can

recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration,

as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.  This

"something to do" is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it;

you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and

behold them gone!  But Gretz is a merry place after its kind: 

pretty to see, merry to inhabit.  The course of its pellucid river,

whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the

navigator:  islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the red berries

cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies, and

mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs.  And of all noble sweeps

of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to

Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.

 

But even Gretz is changed.  The old inn, long shored and trussed

and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and

the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former

guests.  They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall

the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and

the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.  But the

material fabric is now dust; soon, with the last of its

inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn,

shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish

from the world of men.  "For remembrance of the old house' sake,"

as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story.  When the

tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left

stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over,

the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.  It was difficult to

obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best,

sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals

were supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ. 

Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.  But they

stood firm; eat they must, but having no money they would soil no

napkins.

 

 

VI

 

 

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been

little visited by painters.  They are, indeed, too populous; they

have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of

colonisation.  Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I

never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed

himself there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his

friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green

country and to the music of the falling water.  It was a most airy,

quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just too rustic to be

stagey; and from my memories of the place in general, and that

garden trellis in particular - at morning, visited by birds, or at

night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party - I am

inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny. 

Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily

slumbering in the plain - the cemetery of itself.  The great road

remains to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage

bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room

the paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago. 

In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there.  From time

to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the

glimpses of the moon, and after some communication with flesh and

blood return to his austere hermitage.  But even he, when I last

revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the

roll of Chaillyites.  It may revive - but I much doubt it.  Acheres

and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question,

being merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or

the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side,

Marlotte alone remains to be discussed.  I scarcely know Marlotte,

and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it.  It

seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet.  The inn of Mother Antonie is

unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable

enough, is commonplace.  Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I

were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

 

 

VII

 

 

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good

conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day.  Many of

us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a

portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods.  I would not

dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that

will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below

great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of youth's

dynamite and dear remembrances.  And as one generation passes on

and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I entertain a

fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth into the forest

they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their

predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are the

sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the

field of trees.  Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer

farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves,

surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions? 

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our

delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a

legend.

 

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this

memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital

memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life

richer, but poorer also.  The forest, indeed, they have possessed,

from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will

return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and

use it for ever in their books and pictures.  Yet when they made

their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it

should seem, had been forgotten.  A projection of themselves shall

appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural

child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares.  Over the whole

field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like

indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all

beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously

unwilling to forget their orphanage.  If anywhere about that wood

you meet my airy bantling, greet him with tenderness.  He was a

pleasant lad, though now abandoned.  And when it comes to your own

turn to quit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no

Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as

becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure,

the child of happy hours.

 

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that

has not been mirthfully conceived.

 

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket

and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of

enjoyment.  Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to

Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit

of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from studies,

although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the

gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo

the evil of his sketches.  A spirit once well strung up to the

concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to

finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.  The

incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which

we test the flatness of our art.  Here it is that Nature teaches

and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. 

Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid

works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less

shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions.  In all

sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling

human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio

pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt.  Let the young

painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with

studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him

walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and

botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature.  So he will learn - or

learn not to forget - the poetry of life and earth, which, when he

has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

 

[1882.]

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV - EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE"

 

 

 

THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the

Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people.  The

weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the

rain fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun

fervent, the air vigorous and pure.  They walked separate:  the

Cigarette plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa

posting on ahead.  Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the

way; each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his

comrade at the designated inn; and the pleasures of society and

solitude combined to fill the day.  The Arethusa carried in his

knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the

hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.  In this

path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley,

and all contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be

the last to publish the result.  The Cigarette walked burthened

with a volume of Michelet.  And both these books, it will be seen,

played a part in the subsequent adventure.

 

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed.  He is no precisian in attire;

but by all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp;

having set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most

unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon.  On his head he wore a

smoking-cap of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and

tarnished.  A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the

satirical called black; a light tweed coat made by a good English

tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters

completed his array.  In person, he is exceptionally lean; and his

face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.  For

years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without

suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked

askance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he

is actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo.  If you

will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack,

walking nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made

trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking

eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit - the figure, when

realised, is far from reassuring.  When Villon journeyed (perhaps

by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder

if he had not something of the same appearance.  Something of the

same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must have

tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor. 

And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the same

nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the

stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild

bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare inn-

chamber - the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue

of noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves - and above all, if

he had anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a

relish for what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he

bathed in, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates

to-day with the poor exile, and count myself a gainer.

 

But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys,

for which the Arethusa was to pay dear:  both were gone upon in

days of incomplete security.  It was not long after the Franco-

Prussian war.  Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still

alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth

'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary

friendships between invader and invaded.  A year, at the most two

years later, you might have tramped all that country over and not

heard one anecdote.  And a year or two later, you would - if you

were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript array - have

gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more interesting

matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men's

imaginations.

 

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he

was conscious of arousing wonder.  On the road between that place

and Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman;

they fell together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but

through one and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and

his eyes were faithful to the Arethusa's knapsack.  At last, with

mysterious roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being

answered, shook his head with kindly incredulity.  "NON," said he,

"NON, VOUS AVEZ DES PORTRAITS."  And then with a languishing

appeal, "VOYONS, show me the portraits!"  It was some little while

before the Arethusa, with a shout of laughter, recognised his

drift.  By portraits he meant indecent photographs; and in the

Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he thought to have

identified a pornographic colporteur.  When countryfolk in France

have made up their minds as to a person's calling, argument is

fruitless.  Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and

fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now he would

upbraid, now he would reason - "VOYONS, I will tell nobody"; then

he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine;

and, at last when their ways separated - "NON," said he, "CE N'EST

PAS BIEN DE VOTRE PART.  O NON, CE N'EST PAS BIEN."  And shaking

his head with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed

unrefreshed.

 

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at

Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Chatillon,

of grislier memory, looms too near at hand.  But the next day, in a

certain hamlet called La Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of

syrup in a very poor, bare drinking shop.  The hostess, a comely

woman, suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and

pitying eyes.  "You are not of this department?" she asked.  The

Arethusa told her he was English.  "Ah!" she said, surprised.  "We

have no English.  We have many Italians, however, and they do very

well; they do not complain of the people of hereabouts.  An

Englishman may do very well also; it will be something new."  Here

was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his

grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the light

came upon him in a flash.  "O, POUR VOUS," replied the landlady, 

"a halfpenny!"  POUR VOUS?  By heaven, she took him for a beggar! 

He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct

her.  But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in

spirit.  The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow;

and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.

 

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed

the river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short

stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon-

sur-Loire.  It was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang

with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. 

Overhead the birds were in consternation, wheeling in clouds,

settling and re-arising.  And yet with all this bustle on either

hand, the road itself lay solitary.  The Arethusa smoked a pipe

beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down very exactly all he

was to do at Chatillon:  how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to

change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime

inaction, by the margin of the Loire.  Fired by these ideas, he

pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon

and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. 

Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

 

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.

 

"MONSIEUR EST VOYAGEUR?" he asked.

 

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile

attire, replied - I had almost said with gaiety:  "So it would

appear."

 

 "His papers are in order?" said the gendarme.  And when the

Arethusa, with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he

was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the

Commissary.

 

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt

and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned

upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like

Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been

prepared for grief.  Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat

and fretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument

could reach.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  You have no papers?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Not here.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Why?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I have left them behind in my valise.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  You know, however, that it is forbidden to

circulate without papers?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Pardon me:  I am convinced of the contrary.  I am

here on my rights as an English subject by international treaty.

 

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SCORN).  You call yourself an Englishman?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I do.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Humph. - What is your trade?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I am a Scotch advocate.

 

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SINGULAR ANNOYANCE).  A Scotch advocate!  Do

you then pretend to support yourself by that in this department?

 

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension.  The Commissary

had scored a point.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Why, then, do you travel?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I travel for pleasure.

 

THE COMMISSARY (POINTING TO THE KNAPSACK, AND WITH SUBLIME

INCREDULITY).  AVEC CA?  VOYEZ-VOUS, JE SUIS UN HOMME INTELLIGENT! 

(With that?  Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)

 

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary

relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the

postman, but with what different expectations!) to see the contents

of the knapsack.  And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake

to his position, fell into a grave mistake.  There was little or no

furniture in the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and

to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on

earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed.  The Commissary

fairly bounded from his seat; his face and neck flushed past

purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating

object on the floor.

 

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of

socks, and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of

soap in one of the shoes, two volumes of the COLLECTION JANNET

lettered POESIES DE CHARLES D'ORLEANS, a map, and a version book

containing divers notes in prose and the remarkable English

roundels of the voyager, still to this day unpublished:  the

Commissary of Chatillon is the only living man who has clapped an

eye on these artistic trifles.  He turned the assortment over with

a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he

regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of

infection.  Still there was nothing suspicious about the map,

nothing really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of

Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as

a certificate; and it was supposed the farce was nearly over.

 

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER A PAUSE).  EH BIEN, JE VAIS VOUS DIRE CE QUE

VOUS ETES.  VOUS ETES ALLEMAND ET VOUS VENEZ CHANTER A LA FOIRE. 

(Well, then, I will tell you what you are.  You are a German and

have come to sing at the fair.)

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Would you like to hear me sing?  I believe I could

convince you of the contrary.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  PAS DE PLAISANTERIE, MONSIEUR!

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this

book.  Here, I open it with my eyes shut.  Read one of these songs

- read this one - and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence,

if it would be possible to sing it at a fair?

 

THE COMMISSARY (CRITICALLY).  MAIS OUI.  TRES BIEN.

 

THE ARETHUSA.  COMMENT, MONSIEUR!  What!  But do you not observe it

is antique.  It is difficult to understand, even for you and me;

but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

 

THE COMMISSARY (TAKING A PEN).  ENFIN, IL FAUI EN FINIR.  What is

your name?

 

THE ARETHUSA (SPEAKING WITH THE SWALLOWING VIVACITY OF THE

ENGLISH).  Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AGHAST).  HE!  QUOI?

 

THE ARETHUSA (PERCEIVING AND IMPROVING HIS ADVANTAGE).  Rob'rt-

Lou's-Stev'ns'n.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER SEVERAL CONFLICTS WITH HIS PEN).  EH BIEN, IL

FAUT SE PASSER DU NOM.  CA NE S'ECRIT PAS.  (Well, we must do

without the name:  it is unspellable.)

 

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in

which I have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the

Commissary; but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his

rising anger, has left but little definite in the memory of the

Arethusa.  The Commissary was not, I think, a practised literary

man; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and embarked on

the composition of the PROCES-VERBAL, than he became distinctly

more uncivil and began to show a predilection for that simplest of

all forms of repartee:  "You lie!"  Several times the Arethusa let

it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more

insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do

his worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly

repent it.  Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first,

instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going

on to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise; for even at

this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered.  But it

was too late; he had been challenged the PROCES-VERBAL was begun;

and he again squared his elbows over his writing, and the Arethusa

was led forth a prisoner.

 

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.  Thither was

our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth

the contents of his pockets.  A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a

pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change:  that was

all.  Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to

identify or to condemn.  The very gendarme was appalled before such

destitution.

 

"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are

no VOYOU."  And he promised him every indulgence.

 

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe.  That he was

told was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. 

He did not chew, however, and asked instead to have his

handkerchief.

 

"NON," said the gendarme.  "NOUS AVONS EU DES HISTOIRES DE GENS QUI

SE SONT PENDUS."  (No, we have had histories of people who hanged

themselves.)

 

"What," cried the Arethusa.  "And is it for that you refuse me my

handkerchief?  But see how much more easily I could hang myself in

my trousers!"

 

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his

colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.

 

"At least," said the Arethusa, "be sure that you arrest my comrade;

he will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him

by the sack upon his shoulders."

 

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of

the building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the

stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending

person.

 

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to

suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident.  Prison, among

other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted

Arethusa.  Even as he went down the stairs, he was telling himself

that here was a famous occasion for a roundel, and that like the

committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would make his

prison musical.  I will tell the truth at once:  the roundel was

never written, or it should be printed in this place, to raise a

smile.  Two reasons interfered:  the first moral, the second

physical.

 

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men

are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. 

To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the

stoic; and the Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult,

was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath.  But the

physical had also its part.  The cellar in which he was confined

was some feet underground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed,

narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of

a green vine.  The walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare

earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a water-

jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray cloak for bedding.  To

be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon, the

reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and

plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds,

struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood.  Now see in how

small a matter a hardship may consist:  the floor was exceedingly

uneven underfoot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the

labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack; and what with the

poor twilight and the irregular surface, walking was impossible. 

The caged author resisted for a good while; but the chill of the

place struck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance

as you may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wrap

himself in the public covering.  There, then, he lay upon the verge

of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a garment whose

touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far removed from

resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received. 

These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.

 

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still

shining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the

tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more

philosophic pace.  In those days of liberty and health he was the

constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ample opportunity to

share in that gentleman's disfavour with the police.  Many a bitter

bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade.  He was

himself a man born to float easily through life, his face and

manner artfully recommending him to all.  There was but one

suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his

companion.  He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is

ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main ; nor the

Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not

least, he is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire.

 

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower;

and a moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were

confronted in the Commissary's office.  For if the Cigarette was

surprised to be arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by

the appearance and appointments of his captive.  Here was a man

about whom there could be no mistake:  a man of an unquestionable

and unassailable manner, in apple-pie order, dressed not with

neatness merely but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word,

and well supplied with money:  a man the Commissary would have

doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and this BEAU

CAVALIER unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade!  The

conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I

remember only one.  "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up

from the passport.  "ALORS, MONSIEUR, VOUS ETES LE FIRS D'UN

BARON?"  And when the Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the

interview) denied the soft impeachment, "ALORS," from the

Commissary, "CE N'EST PAS VOTRE PASSEPORT!"  But these were

ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands upon the

Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrained

admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack, commanding

our friend's tailor.  Ah, what an honoured guest was the Commissary

entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm weather!

what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he carried

in his knapsack!  You are to understand there was now but one point

of difference between them:  what was to be done with the Arethusa?

the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming

him as the dungeon's own.  Now it chanced that the Cigarette had

passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made

acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas;

and in the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of

Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. 

I pass over this lightly; it is highly possible there was some

misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary (charmed with

his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took for an

act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a

bribe.  And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than

an odd volume of Michelet's history?  The work was promised him for

the morrow, before our departure; and presently after, either

because he had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be

behind in friendly offices - "EH BIEN," he said, "JE SUPPOSE QU'IL

FAUT LAHER VOIRE CAMARADE."  And he tore up that feast of humour,

the unfinished PROCES-VERBAL.  Ah, if he had only torn up instead

the Arethusa's roundels!  There were many works burnt at

Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I

could better spare than the PROCES-VERBAL of Chatillon.  Poor

bubuckled Commissary!  I begin to be sorry that he never had his

Michelet:  perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based

stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste for

letters, a ready admiration for the admirable.  And if he did not

admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.

 

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there

came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.  He sprang to his feet,

ready to welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the

door was flung wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the

strong daylight, and with a magnificent gesture (being probably a

student of the drama) - "VOUS ETES LIBRE!" he said.  None too soon

for the Arethusa.  I doubt if he had been half-an-hour imprisoned;

but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he

carried) he should have been eight times longer; and he passed

forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the healing warmth of

the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a

cow's into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have laughed

for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum

of life.

 

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so,

this was an act-drop and not the curtain.  Upon what followed in

front of the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple

to expatiate.  The wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome

woman, and yet the Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her

society.  Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot

afternoon, still lingers in his memory:  yet more of her

conversation.  "You have there a very fine parlour," said the poor

gentleman. - "Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis), "you are

very well acquainted with such parlours!"  And you should have seen

with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before

her!  I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but before that

interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale.  His passion

(as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed

in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame

meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with barbed

words and staring him coldly down.

 

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still

to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn.  Here, too, the

despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour,

a gentleman of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had

the good taste to find pleasure in their society.  The dinner at an

end, the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in

the cafe.

 

The cafe was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each

other and the world the smallness of their bags.  About the centre

of the room, the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new

acquaintance; a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after

their late experience) were greedy of consideration, and their

sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners.  Suddenly the

glass door flew open with a crash; the Marechal-des-logis appeared

in the interval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without

salutation, strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons,

and disappeared through a door at the far end.  Close at his heels

followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, imitating, with

a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his chief;

only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the

shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic

utterance of which he had the secret - "SUIVEZ!" said he.

 

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the

signing of the declaration of independence, Mark Antony's oration,

all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as having been not

unlike that evening in the cafe at Chatillon.  Terror breathed upon

the assembly.  A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed his

recaptors into the farther part of the house, the Cigarette found

himself alone with his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables,

all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous

voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting at him

furtively as at a leper.

 

And the Arethusa?  Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying,

interview in the back kitchen.  The Marechal-des-logis, who was a

very handsome man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had

no clear opinion on the case.  He thought the Commissary had done

wrong, but he did not wish to get his subordinates into trouble;

and he proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which the

Arethusa (with a growing sense of his position) demurred.

 

"In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you want to wash your hands of

further responsibility?  Well, then, let me go to Paris."

 

The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch.

 

"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."

 

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their

misadventure in the dining-room at Siron's.

 

 

 

CHAPTER V - RANDOM MEMORIES

 

 

 

I. - THE COAST OF FIFE

 

 

MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day

or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I

believe, they are more often agreeably exciting.  Misery - or at

least misery unrelieved - is confined to another period, to the

days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of departure; when

the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new

interests, not yet begun:  and to the pain of an imminent parting,

there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence. 

The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-

suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the

thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field - what

a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each

familiar circumstance!  The assaults of sorrow come not from

within, as it seems to him, but from without.  I was proud and glad

to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like

any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a

conspiracy of lamentation:  "Poor little boy, he is going away -

unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the unspoken

burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach.  And at

length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a

place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn

and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I

saw - the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church

upon the hill, the woody hillside garden - a look of such a

piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-

step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy.  A benevolent cat

cumbered me the while with consolations - we two were alone in all

that was visible of the London Road:  two poor waifs who had each

tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for

his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly

eyes.

 

For the sake of the cat, God bless her!  I confessed at home the

story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain

journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the

London Road.  It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the

public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense)

indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of

Scotland; and it was decided he should take me along with him

around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first professional tour,

my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help

of petticoats.

 

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the

curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths

of Forth and Tay.  It may be continually seen from many parts of

Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of my father's house)

dying away into the distance and the easterly HAAR with one smoky

seaside town beyond another, or in winter printing on the gray

heaven some glittering hill-tops.  It has no beauty to recommend

it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very

rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of

rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to

the eye.  It is of the coast I speak:  the interior may be the

garden of Eden.  History broods over that part of the world like

the easterly HAAR.  Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-

names bear testimony to an old and settled race.  Of these little

towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit

of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its

flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has

its legend, quaint or tragic:  Dunfermline, in whose royal towers

the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-

red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;

Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by

Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled"; Burntisland where,

when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a

table carried between tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the

rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect;

Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland to

the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed

extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea;

Dysart, famous - well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships

that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers

and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one

particular Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the

break of the poop, smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce

Weems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone,

on his flight from Culloden, passed a night of superstitious

terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer

visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall figure and

the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.

Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the

troopers from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the

streets of the imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful

of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless brave one in the

telegraph office was perhaps already fingering his last despatch;

and just a little beyond Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo

town mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better

known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.  So on, the list might be

pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader will shortly

have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, and

the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where Primate

Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister:  on to the

heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted

elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking

but the breach or the quiescence of the deep - the Carr Rock beacon

rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the

Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May

Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on

the craggy foreland of St. Abb's.  And but a little way round the

corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem

of the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews,

where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,

and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in

Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue

Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current

voice of the professor is not hushed.

 

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a

bleak easterly morning.  There was a crashing run of sea upon the

shore, I recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light

must sometimes raise their voices to be audible.  Perhaps it is

from this circumstance, that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an

ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of the east wind and

the bursting surf to linger in its drowsy classrooms and confound

the utterance of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike

drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and

the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the open

lecture.  But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in

general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who

has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with

his incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems,

with grace, and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos.  Mr.

Lang knows all about the romance, I say, and the educational

advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the

harbour lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year

1863 their case was pitiable.  Hanging about with the east wind

humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets,

I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting

engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important

stage.  Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing:  "It is

the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a

correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I

come to the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet

them with approbation and welcome their Family, it is distressing

when one-is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and

demeanour."  This painful obligation has been hereditary in my

race.  I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised

inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the

question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach,

when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin

for his infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the

thought that I had done the man a service, and when the proper

inspector came, he would be readier with his panes.  The human race

is perhaps credited with more duplicity than it deserves.  The

visitation of a lighthouse at least is a business of the most

transparent nature.  As soon as the boat grates on the shore, and

the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the very slouch

of the fellows' shoulders tells their story, and the engineer may

begin at once to assume his "angry countenance."  Certainly the

brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not

immaculate, certainly all will be to match - the reflectors

scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the

storehouse.  If a light is not rather more than middling good, it

will be radically bad.  Mediocrity (except in literature) appears

to be unattainable by man.  But of course the unfortunate of St.

Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no

uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood

(in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but

he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired extremely.

 

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir.  My father had

announced we were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful

mind visions of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's DANCE OF

DEATH; but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door,

such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one

shilling on the streets of Edinburgh.  Beyond this disappointment,

I remember nothing of that drive.  It is a road I have often

travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any

single trait.  The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the

truth of the imagination.  I still see Magus Muir two hundred years

ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's

carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in

pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first.  No scene

of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not

because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin

of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his

daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of

Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly indicating his complicity with

Satan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine

religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a

grateful relief from MINISTERING CHILDREN or the MEMOIRS OF MRS.

KATHATINE WINSLOWE.  The figure that always fixed my attention is

that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak

about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous

hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience.  He would

take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against

the victim, and "that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of

a worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action," in itself, was

highly justified, he had cast in his lot with "the actors," and he

must stay there, inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility. 

"You are a gentleman - you will protect me!" cried the wounded old

man, crawling towards him.  "I will never lay a hand on you," said

Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth.  It is an old

temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see the face - to

open that bosom and to read the heart.  With incomplete romances

about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered.  I read him

up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on.  I even dug

among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room

where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly

conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly

thought) more gifted students.  All was vain:  that he had passed a

riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed

(compared with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly

resolution and even of military common sense, and that he figured

memorably in the scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I

make out.  But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him

like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting with his cloak

about his mouth, inscrutable.  How small a thing creates an

immortality!  I do not think he can have been a man entirely

commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or

had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus

have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would

scarce delay me for a paragraph.  An incident, at once romantic and

dramatic, which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture for

the eye, how little do we realise its perdurable power!  Perhaps no

one does so but the author, just as none but he appreciates the

influence of jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with

something of a covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy

to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed artifices of his

own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles and are

really picturesque effects.  In a pleasant book about a school-

class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote. 

A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some Academy boys - among

them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew

Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of THE ABODE OF SNOW. 

Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following

ingenious problem:  "What would be the result of putting a pound of

potassium in a pot of porter?"  "I should think there would be a

number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow;

but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type

of much that is most human.  For this inquirer who conceived

himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed

in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his own

recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature. 

Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t - that

was his idea, poor little boy!  So with politics and that which

excites men in the present, so with history and that which rouses

them in the past:  there lie at the root of what appears, most

serious unsuspected elements.

 

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and

Cellardyke, all three Royal Burghs - or two Royal Burghs and a less

distinguished suburb, I forget which - lies continuously along the

seaside, and boasts of either two or three separate parish

churches, and either two or three separate harbours.  These

ambiguities are painful; but the fact is (although it argue me

uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon Cellardyke.  My business

lay in the two Anstruthers.  A tricklet of a stream divides them,

spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the time of my

knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west. 

This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his

fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I

remember rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and

pictures, and snatches of verse in the vein of EXEGI MONUMENTUM;

shells and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his

medium; and I like to think of him standing back upon the bridge,

when all was finished, drinking in the general effect and (like

Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.

 

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century.  Mr.

Thomson, the "curat" of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly

obnoxious to the devout:  in the first place, because he was a

"curat"; in the second place, because he was a person of irregular

and scandalous life; and in the third place, because he was

generally suspected of dealings with the Enemy of Man.  These three

disqualifications, in the popular literature of the time, go hand

in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself,

and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment.  He had been at a

friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I

suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in

our cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of

DELIRIUM TREMENS.  It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie

came carrying a lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they

went down the street of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a

bit in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up and down

along the front of slumbering houses, and Mr. Thomson not

altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his

mind.  The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I

conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear

and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's

strange behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the

lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows

would be all confounded.  Then it was that to the unhinged toper

and the twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep

down, to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and to

vanish on the farther side in the general darkness of the night. 

"Plainly the devil come for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child.  What

Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of knowledge; but he

fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a man praying. 

On the rest of the journey to the manse, history is silent; but

when they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern

from the child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that her

little courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her

parents.  Not a soul would venture out; all that night, the

minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and when the

day dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, they found

the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson.

 

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful

association.  It was early in the morning, about a century before

the days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed

to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just

landed in the harbour underneath.  But sure there was never seen a

more decayed grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a

stranger place of exile.  Half-way between Orkney and Shetland,

there lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the

other the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-

living, inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts; in

the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; there is

nowhere a more inhospitable spot.  BELLE-ISLE-EN-MER - Fair-Isle-

at-Sea - that is a name that has always rung in my mind's ear like

music; but the only "Fair Isle" on which I ever set my foot, was

this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.  Here, when

his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for

long months he and certain of his men were harboured; and it was

from this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as well as

such a papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of

Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must

that have appeared! and after the island diet, what a hospitable

spot the minister's table!  And yet he must have lived on friendly

terms with his outlandish hosts.  For to this day there still

survives a relic of the long winter evenings when the sailors of

the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the Fair-Islanders,

the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene,

and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing

their melancholy voices.  All the folk of the north isles are great

artificers of knitting:  the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics

in the Spanish manner.  To this day, gloves and nightcaps,

innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland

warehouse at Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the

catechist's house; and to this day, they tell the story of the Duke

of Medina Sidonia's adventure.

 

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for "persons

of quality."  When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman,

unshaved, poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was

seen walking to and fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach. 

He paid no heed to our arrival, which we thought a strange thing in

itself; but when one of the officers of the PHAROS, passing

narrowly by him, observed his book to be a Greek Testament, our

wonder and interest took a higher flight.  The catechist was cross-

examined; he said the gentleman had been put across some time

before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the only link between

the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held services

and was doing "good."  So much came glibly enough; but when pressed

a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment.  A

singular diffidence appeared upon his face:  "They tell me," said

he, in low tones, "that he's a lord."  And a lord he was; a peer of

the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament,

and his plaid about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he

understood it, worthy man!  And his grandson, a good-looking little

boy, much better dressed than the lordly evangelist, and speaking

with a silken English accent very foreign to the scene, accompanied

me for a while in my exploration of the island.  I suppose this

little fellow is now my lord, and wonder how much he remembers of

the Fair Isle.  Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept very

quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it is like

that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI - RANDOM MEMORIES

 

 

 

II. - THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER

 

 

ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a

considerable extent) Tennant's vernacular poem ANST'ER FAIR; and I

have there waited upon her myself with much devotion.  This was

when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the

building of the breakwater.  What I gleaned, I am sure I do not

know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be

an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life;

and TRAVELLERS, and HEADERS, and RUBBLE, and POLISHED ASHLAR, and

PIERRES PERDUES, and even the thrilling question of the STRING-

COURSE, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as

properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my

vocabulary.  To grow a little catholic is the compensation of

years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I haunted the

breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the

sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-

face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the

musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay

elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on

duty.  I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade;

and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented

with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table and proceeded

to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such

intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon

with wonder.  Then it was that I wrote VOCES FIDELIUM, a series of

dramatic monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a

covenanting novel - like so many others, never finished.  Late I

sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of

death, toiling to leave a memory behind me.  I feel moved to thrust

aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot,

to bid him go to bed and clap VOCES FIDELIUM on the fire before he

goes; so clear does he appear before me, sitting there between his

candles in the rose-scented room and the late night; so ridiculous

a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present!  But he was

driven to his bed at last without miraculous intervention; and the

manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently

youthful business.  The weather was then so warm that I must keep

the windows open; the night without was populous with moths.  As

the late darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more

brightly; thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to

gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in

agonies upon my paper.  Flesh and blood could not endure the

spectacle; to capture immortality was doubtless a noble enterprise,

but not to capture it at such a cost of suffering; and out would go

the candles, and off would I go to bed in the darkness raging to

think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and there was VOCES

FIDELIUM still incomplete.  Well, the moths are - all gone, and

VOCES FIDELIUM along with them; only the fool is still on hand and

practises new follies.

 

Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that

was the diving, an experience I burned to taste of.  But this was

not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a

change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick.  You can never have

dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the

land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow,

the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, the

wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led

nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.  Only as you approached

the coast was there anything to stir the heart.  The plateau broke

down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks

rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-

brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang

in the thyme on the cliff's edge; here and there, small ancient

castles toppled on the brim; here and there, it was possible to dip

into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you

were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting

in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent

sea.  As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man's towns,

and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays.  It lives for

herring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the

heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a

city crowds to a review - or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground

is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a

beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon,

the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one

after another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk.  This

mass of fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all

proportion to the town itself; and the oars are manned and the nets

hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the outer

Hebrides), who come for that season only, and depart again, if "the

take" be poor, leaving debts behind them.  In a bad year, the end

of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are

common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a child's hand

was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was

there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities.  To

contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is

here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers.  Caithness has

adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must

be largely Norsemen by descent.  I remember seeing one of the

strongest instances of this division:  a thing like a Punch-and-

Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard; from

the hutch or proscenium - I know not what to call it - an eldritch-

looking preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some one of

the name of POWL, whom I at last divined to be the apostle to the

Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly

listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's

children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely

playing tigg.  The same descent, the same country, the same narrow

sect of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely

nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!

 

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished

breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like

frames of churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end,

the divers toiling unseen on the foundation.  On a platform of

loose planks, the assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might

be swinging between wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily;

and from time to time, a mailed dragon with a window-glass snout

came dripping up the ladder.  Youth is a blessed season after all;

my stay at Wick was in the year of VOCES FIDELIUM and the rose-leaf

room at Bailie Brown's; and already I did not care two straws for

literary glory.  Posthumous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere

of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made

another boy of me.  To go down in the diving-dress, that was my

absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain handsome

scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.

 

It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high,

and out in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found

myself at last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon

each foot and my whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen

underclothing.  One moment, the salt wind was whistling round my

night-capped head; the next, I was crushed almost double under the

weight of the helmet.  As that intolerable burthern was laid upon

me, I could have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake) to

cry off from the whole enterprise.  But it was too late.  The

attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to whistle

through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of the

vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing

there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse:  a

creature deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a

climate of his own.  Except that I could move and feel, I was like

a man fallen in a catalepsy.  But time was scarce given me to

realise my isolation; the weights were hung upon my back and

breast, the signal rope was thrust into my unresisting hand; and

setting a twenty-pound foot upon the ladder, I began ponderously to

descend.

 

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell.  Looking up,

I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white;

looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the

ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very

restful and delicious.  Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the

PIERRES PERDUES of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me

by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement;

and looking in at the creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain. 

There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye;

and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a

whisper come to his companion's hearing.  Each, in his own little

world of air, stood incommunicably separate.

 

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at

the bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my

mind.  He was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. 

They had it well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were

slipped, the stone set home; and it was time to turn to something

else.  But still his companion remained bowed over the block like a

mourner on a tomb, or only raised himself to make absurd

contortions and mysterious signs unknown to the vocabulary of the

diver.  There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the dead and

the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into Bob's mind,

and he stooped, peered through the window of that other world, and

beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears.  Ah!

the man was in pain!  And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was the

trouble:  the block had been lowered on the foot of that

unfortunate - he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under

fifteen tons of rock.

 

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the

scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert.  These must bear in

mind the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising

results of transplantation to that medium.  To understand a little

what these are, and how a man's weight, so far from being an

encumbrance, is the very ground of his agility, was the chief

lesson of my submarine experience.  The knowledge came upon me by

degrees.  As I began to go forward with the hand of my estranged

companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible, pillared with the

weedy uprights of the staging:  overhead, a flat roof of green:  a

little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart.  And

presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a

stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only

signed to me the more imperiously.  Now the block stood six feet

high; it would have been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the

breast and back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and

the staggering load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason.  I

laughed aloud in my tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was

astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes.  Up I soared like a

bird, my companion soaring at my side.  As high as to the stone,

and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight.  Even when

the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued

their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and

must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of

a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow. 

Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected

by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze of

wind.  Or so I must suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was

conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now

borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly - and yet with dream-like

gentleness - impelled against my guide.  So does a child's balloon

divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch, and slide off

again from every obstacle.  So must have ineffectually swung, so

resented their inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the

Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond

Cocytus.

 

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely

wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions.  It is bitter to return

to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon

your feet, by the hand of some one else.  The air besides, as it is

supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the

eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing,

till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer.  And

for all these reasons-although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed

joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed,

to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift

as humming-birds - yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise

when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount. 

And there was one more experience before me even then.  Of a

sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell.  Out

of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of

sanguine light - the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven

above a vault of crimson.  And then the glory faded into the hard,

ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea,

and a whistling wind.

 

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I

desired.  It was one of the best things I got from my education as

an engineer:  of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak

with sympathy.  It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him

hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling;

it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial

dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise;

it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of

any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities. 

And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an

office!  From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing

boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of

ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he

must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing,

or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive

figures.  He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part

of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls,

and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

 

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay.  But how much better it

was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob

Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat

coiling a wet rope and shouting orders - not always very wise -

than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most

comfortable office.  And Wick itself had in those days a note of

originality.  It may have still, but I misdoubt it much.  The old

minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for

an hour and a half upon the clock.  The gipsies must be gone from

their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women

tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off

their coarse potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would

beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door.  A traveller

to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of

smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a

private still.  He would not indeed make that journey, for there is

now no Thurso coach.  And even if he could, one little thing that

happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same

trenchancy of contrast.

 

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded

with Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had

sounded in my ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish

country very northern to behold.  Latish at night, though it was

still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the

shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on

one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the

little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing

sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great deep, and

the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.  And here, in the last

imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a

chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with

its load of Hebridean fishers - as they had pursued VETTURINI up

the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under

Virgil's tomb - two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian

vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-

gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice.  The coach passed on,

and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was

left to marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how

they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever)

they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives,

and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.

 

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat

lost.  For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find

some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican

half-blood, the negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and

far among the mountains.  But in an old, cold, and rugged country

such as mine, the days of immigration are long at an end; and away

up there, which was at that time far beyond the northernmost

extreme of railways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait

of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it

should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher

runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as

though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an

albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick.  They were as strange to

their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish

grandee on the Fair Isle.

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS

 

 

 

I

 

 

THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly

fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of

existence.  The place was created seemingly on purpose for the

diversion of young gentlemen.  A street or two of houses, mostly

red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about

the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a

shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with

flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward

parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of

blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and

bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that

remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL, dear to me for its

startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive

names:  such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of

the town.  These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two

sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to

lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough)

to cocknify the scene:  a haven in the rocks in front:  in front of

that, a file of gray islets:  to the left, endless links and sand

wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits

and soaring gulls:  to the right, a range of seaward crags, one

rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient

fortress on the brink of one; coves between - now charmed into

sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting

surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and

southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and

pungent of the sea - in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward

like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-

geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke. 

This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker;

and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King

James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang

with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

 

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in

that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure.  You might golf if

you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed.  You might

secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of

elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted

here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold

homes of anchorites.  To fit themselves for life, and with a

special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for

the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny

pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew

the glen with these apprentices.  Again, you might join our fishing

parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of

little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to

the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and

consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves. 

Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but

though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be

regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour

that a boy should eat all that he had taken.  Or again, you might

climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the

buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke

and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships.  You

might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically

call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging

your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their

guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you

headlong ere it had drowned your knees.  Or you might explore the

tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots

of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader

from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck

of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the

sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide

and the menaced line of your retreat.  And then you might go

Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: 

digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a

fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there - if they were truly

apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us

off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving,

in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine;

or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and

visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling

turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I

must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that

had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of

east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign

among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an

adventure in itself.

 

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were

joyous.  Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat

at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top

of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a

cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and

the bandage all bloody - horror! - the fisher-wife herself, who

continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as

I recall the scene) darkens daylight.  She was lodged in the little

old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there,

with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired.  She had been

tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard

that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still

pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.  Nor shall I

readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor

died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead

body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one

of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were

clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of

mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice

of language.  It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled

down the lane from this remarkable experience!  But I recall with a

more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the

coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of

rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour

mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had

any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the

pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and

husband and sons - their whole wealth and their whole family -

engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of

neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling

and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic

Maenad.

 

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory

dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding.  It

was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of

our two months' holiday there.  Maybe it still flourishes in its

native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic

forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in

their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless

art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the

rise of the United States.  It may still flourish in its native

spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to

introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm

being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

 

The idle manner of it was this:-

 

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and

the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our-

respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. 

The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce

of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to

garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary.  We

wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them,

such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat.  They smelled

noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they

would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure

of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his

top-coat asked for nothing more.  The fishermen used lanterns about

their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the

hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at

being fishermen.  The police carried them at their belts, and we

had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be

policemen.  Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting

thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns

were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found

them to figure very largely.  But take it for all in all, the

pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a

bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

 

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you

got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth,

and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory

contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the

polecat) by the smell.  Four or five would sometimes climb into the

belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them

- for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of

the links where the wind might whistle overhead.  There the coats

would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the

chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and

cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young

gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on

the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with

inappropriate talk.  Woe is me that I may not give some specimens -

some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the

rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent,

they were so richly silly, so romantically young.  But the talk, at

any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only

accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer.  The essence of this

bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut,

the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your

footsteps or to make your glory public:  a mere pillar of darkness

in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your

fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to

exult and sing over the knowledge.

 

 

II

 

 

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most

stolid.  It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor)

bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his

possessor.  Justice is not done to the versatility and the

unplumbed childishness of man's imagination.  His life from without

may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber

at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark

as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a

bull's-eye at his belt.

 

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of

Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a

prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his

neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his house beleaguered by

the impish schoolboy, and he himself grinding and fuming and

impotently fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks.  You marvel

at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so destitute

of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that had he

chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at

once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and

gone escorted by a squadron.  For the love of more recondite joys,

which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man

had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration.  "His mind to

him a kingdom was"; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which

seems at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels.  For

Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it,

a noble character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief

part of what is commonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable

end, that finest trait of mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another

element of virtue; and at the back of all, a conscience just like

yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like a thimble-

rigger, but still pointing (there or there-about) to some

conventional standard.  Here were a cabinet portrait to which

Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne either,

for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us

that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his

vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what:  insatiable,

insane, a god with a muck-rake.  Thus, at least, looking in the

bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the full tide

of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to

epics; and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth, and to and

fro in his discomfortable house, spies within him a blazing bonfire

of delight.  And so with others, who do not live by bread alone,

but by some cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat

salesmen to the external eye, and possibly to themselves are

Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who have not one virtue to

rub against another in the field of active life, and yet perhaps,

in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints.  We see them on

the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in

what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their

treasure!

 

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:  the

fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break

into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his

return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent

fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to

recognise him.  It is not only in the woods that this enchanter

carols, though perhaps he is native there.  He sings in the most

doleful places.  The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are

moments.  With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I

have evoked him on the naked links.  All life that is not merely

mechanical is spun out of two strands:  seeking for that bird and

hearing him.  And it is just this that makes life so hard to value,

and the delight of each so incommunicable.  And just a knowledge of

this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird

has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the

pages of the realist.  There, to be sure, we find a picture of life

in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and

cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which

we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-

devouring nightingale we hear no news.

 

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure.  They have

been boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the

beloved, who was then most probably writing to some one else; they

have sat before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere

continents of congested poetry, not one line of which would flow;

they have walked alone in the woods, they have walked in cities

under the countless lamps; they have been to sea, they have hated,

they have feared, they have longed to knife a man, and maybe done

it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate.  Or, if you deny

them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to the

full - their books are there to prove it - the keen pleasure of

successful literary composition.  And yet they fill the globe with

volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration,

and whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with

despairing wrath.  If I had no better hope than to continue to

revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by

the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate

their heroes, I declare I would die now.  But there has never an

hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a

railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could

count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of

these romances seems but dross.

 

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was

very true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons

of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were

exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but

that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the

average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to

all but the paltriest considerations.  I accept the issue.  We can

only know others by ourselves.  The artistic temperament (a plague

on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen,

or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average

man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would

not be average.  It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham

sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and

showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full

of a poetry of his own.  And this harping on life's dulness and

man's meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of

two things:  the cry of the blind eye, I CANNOT SEE, or the

complaint of the dumb tongue, I CANNOT UTTER.  To draw a life

without delights is to prove I have not realised it.  To picture a

man without some sort of poetry - well, it goes near to prove my

case, for it shows an author may have little enough.  To see Dancer

only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fuming man, in a

dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small

attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the

Harrow boys.  But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming

modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they did

not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living

in a book:  and it is there my error would have lain.  Or say that

in the same romance - I continue to call these books romances, in

the hope of giving pain - say that in the same romance, which now

begins really to take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and

follow instead the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some such

business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links; and described

the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily

surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and

indecent, which it certainly was.  I might upon these lines, and

had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary

art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay

on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was

done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and

dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have

belied the boys!  To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is

merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they

are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the

possibilities of existence.  To the eye of the observer they are

wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they

are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is

an ill-smelling lantern.

 

 

III

 

 

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit.  It

may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may

reside, like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology.  It

may consist with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the

continued chase.  It has so little bond with externals (such as the

observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch them

not; and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie

altogether in the field of fancy.  The clergyman, in his spare

hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker

reaping triumph in the arts:  all leading another life, plying

another trade from that they chose; like the poet's housebuilder,

who, after all, is cased in stone,

 

"By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts.

Rebuilds it to his liking."

 

In such a case the poetry runs underground.  The observer (poor

soul, with his documents!) is all abroad.  For to look at the man

is but to court deception.  We shall see the trunk from which he

draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the

green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by

nightingales.  And the true realism were that of the poets, to

climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the

heaven for which he lives.

 

And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: 

to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond

singing.

 

For to miss the joy is to miss all.  In the joy of the actors lies

the sense of any action.  That is the explanation, that the excuse. 

To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the

links is meaningless.  And hence the haunting and truly spectral

unreality of realistic books.  Hence, when we read the English

realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's

constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up

with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot

girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an

existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. 

Hence in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality,

the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong,

and practically quite untempted, into every description of

misconduct and dishonour.  In each, we miss the personal poetry,

the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes

what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life

falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into

the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no

man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the

warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows

and the storied walls.

 

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows

far better - Tolstoi's POWERS OF DARKNESS.  Here is a piece full of

force and truth, yet quite untrue.  For before Mikita was led into

so dire a situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful

at least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime

and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against

the modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to

melodrama.  The peasants are not understood; they saw their life in

fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for

Mikita, or he had never fallen.  And so, once again, even an Old

Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetry and lustre of

existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales.

 

 

IV

 

 

In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of

life; and this emotion is very variously provoked.  We are so moved

when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion,

when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river,

when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has

infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffky's DESPISED

AND REJECTED, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering

and virtue.  These are notes that please the great heart of man. 

Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but

sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch

in us the vein of the poetic.  We love to think of them, we long to

try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.

 

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters.  Here is the

door, here is the open air.  ITUR IN ANTIQUAM SILVAM.

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII - A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

 

 

 

THE past is all of one texture - whether feigned or suffered -

whether acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that

small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night

long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign

undisturbed in the remainder of the body.  There is no distinction

on the face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull,

and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of

them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair

to prove.  The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw

split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. 

There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a

claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate:  a claim not

prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a

great alleviation of idle hours.  A man's claim to his own past is

yet less valid.  A paper might turn up (in proper story-book

fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and

restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a

certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved

tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now

unjustly some one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the

sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody.  I do not say that

these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that they are

possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever:  our

old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in

which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint

residuum as a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and

an echo in the chambers of the brain.  Not an hour, not a mood, not

a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. 

And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of

memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in

what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves,

and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures of the past.

 

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived

longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep

they claim they were still active; and among the treasures of

memory that all men review for their amusement, these count in no

second place the harvests of their dreams.  There is one of this

kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual

enough to be described.  He was from a child an ardent and

uncomfortable dreamer.  When he had a touch of fever at night, and

the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail,

now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away

into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the

poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled

hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning

of sorrows.

 

But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would

have him by the throat, and pluck him strangling and screaming,

from his sleep.  His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at

times very strange, at times they were almost formless:  he would

be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than a certain

hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was

awake, but feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at times,

again, they took on every detail of circumstance, as when once he

supposed he must swallow the populous world, and awoke screaming

with the horror of the thought.  The two chief troubles of his very

narrow existence - the practical and everyday trouble of school

tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment - were

often confounded together into one appalling nightmare.  He seemed

to himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called

on, poor little devil, to recite some form of words, on which his

destiny depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell

gaped for him; and he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with

his knees to his chin.

 

These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that

time of life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his

power of dreams.  But presently, in the course of his growth, the

cries and physical contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his

visions were still for the most part miserable, but they were more

constantly supported; and he would awake with no more extreme

symptom than a flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the

speechless midnight fear.  His dreams, too, as befitted a mind

better stocked with particulars, became more circumstantial, and

had more the air and continuity of life.  The look of the world

beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a

part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so that he

would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and

beautiful places as he lay in bed.  And, what is more significant,

an odd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories

laid in that period of English history, began to rule the features

of his dreams; so that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat

and was much engaged with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for

bed and that for breakfast.  About the same time, he began to read

in his dreams - tales, for the most part, and for the most part

after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid

and moving than any printed book, that he has ever since been

malcontent with literature.

 

And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-

adventure which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to

say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life - one of

the day, one of the night - one that he had every reason to believe

was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be

false.  I should have said he studied, or was by way of studying,

at Edinburgh College, which (it may be supposed) was how I came to

know him.  Well, in his dream-life, he passed a long day in the

surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing

monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons.  In

a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge,

turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall LAND, at

the top of which he supposed himself to lodge.  All night long, in

his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in

endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a

reflector.  All night long, he brushed by single persons passing

downward - beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy

labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women - but all

drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing

against him as they passed.  In the end, out of a northern window,

he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the

ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the

streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to

another day of monstrosities and operations.  Time went quicker in

the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can guess) to

one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom of

these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken

off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them.  I

cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it

was long enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long

enough to send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a

certain doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to

the common lot of man.

 

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;

indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank,

now chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes

appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no

extraordinary kind.  I will just note one of these occasions, ere I

pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting.  It seemed to

him that he was in the first floor of a rough hill-farm.  The room

showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a

piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements,

there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside

people, and set in miles of heather.  He looked down from the

window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused. 

A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world.  There was no sign of

the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly

dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall of

the house and seemed to be dozing.  Something about this dog

disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for the

beast looked right enough - indeed, he was so old and dull and

dusty and broken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity;

and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was

no proper dog at all, but something hellish.  A great many dozing

summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dog thrust

forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his

mouth like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the

window, winked to him with one eye.  The dream went on, it matters

not how it went; it was a good dream as dreams go; but there was

nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish brown dog.  And the

point of interest for me lies partly in that very fact:  that

having found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should

prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on

indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors.  It would be

different now; he knows his business better!

 

For, to approach at last the point:  This honest fellow had long

been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so

had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions,

told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or

the thwart reviewer:  tales where a thread might be dropped, or one

adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion.  So

that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as

yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage

like children who should have slipped into the house and found it

empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a

huge hall of faces.  But presently my dreamer began to turn his

former amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account; by

which I mean that he began to write and sell his tales.  Here was

he, and here were the little people who did that part of his

business, in quite new conditions.  The stories must now be trimmed

and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to

an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the

pleasure, in one word, had become a business; and that not only for

the dreamer, but for the little people of his theatre.  These

understood the change as well as he.  When he lay down to prepare

himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and

profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his

little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile

designs.  All other forms of dream deserted him but two:  he still

occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at

times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note

that to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at

intervals of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting

new neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects of

noon and dawn and sunset.  But all the rest of the family of

visions is quite lost to him:  the common, mangled version of

yesterday's affairs, the raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare,

rumoured to be the child of toasted cheese - these and their like

are gone; and, for the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is

simply occupied - he or his little people - in consciously making

stories for the market.  This dreamer (like many other persons) has

encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune.  When the bank

begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate,

he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his

readiest money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin

to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long,

and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their

lighted theatre.  No fear of his being frightened now; the flying

heart and the frozen scalp are things by-gone; applause, growing

applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own

cleverness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant

leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, that'll do!" upon

his lips:  with such and similar emotions he sits at these

nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play,

he scatters the performance in the midst.  Often enough the waking

is a disappointment:  he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the

thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone

stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the

awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities.  And yet how

often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and

given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better

tales than he could fashion for himself.

 

Here is one, exactly as it came to him.  It seemed he was the son

of a very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most

damnable temper.  The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much

abroad, on purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he

returned to England, it was to find him married again to a young

wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. 

Because of this marriage (as the dreamer indistinctly understood)

it was desirable for father and son to have a meeting; and yet both

being proud and both angry, neither would condescend upon a visit. 

Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the sea;

and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some intolerable

insult, struck down the father dead.  No suspicion was aroused; the

dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the

broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with

his father's widow, for whom no provision had been made.  These two

lived very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down

to table together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better

friends; until it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying

about dangerous matters, that she had conceived a notion of his

guilt, that she watched him and tried him with questions.  He drew

back from her company as men draw back from a precipice suddenly

discovered; and yet so strong was the attraction that he would

drift again and again into the old intimacy, and again and again be

startled back by some suggestive question or some inexplicable

meaning in her eye.  So they lived at cross purposes, a life full

of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion;

until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil,

followed her to the station, followed her in the train to the

seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where

the murder was done.  There she began to grope among the bents, he

watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something

in her hand - I cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly

evidence against the dreamer - and as she held it up to look at it,

perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she

hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand-wreaths.  He had

no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and there they stood

face to face, she with that deadly matter openly in her hand - his

very presence on the spot another link of proof.  It was plain she

was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear - he could

bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he

cut her short with trivial conversation.  Arm in arm, they returned

together to the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey

back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the

evening in the drawing-room as in the past.  But suspense and fear

drummed in the dreamer's bosom.  "She has not denounced me yet" -

so his thoughts ran - "when will she denounce me?  Will it be to-

morrow?"  And it was not to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next;

and their life settled back on the old terms, only that she seemed

kinder than before, and that, as for him, the burthen of his

suspense and wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he wasted

away like a man with a disease.  Once, indeed, he broke all bounds

of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her

room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning

evidence.  There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life,

in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent

behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and

then the door opened, and behold herself.  So, once more, they

stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them; and once more

she raised to him a face brimming with some communication; and once

more he shied away from speech and cut her off.  But before he left

the room, which he had turned upside down, he laid back his death-

warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face lighted up. 

The next thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid, with some

ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things.  Flesh and blood

could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next

morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the

mind) that he burst from his reserve.  They had been breakfasting

together in one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished

room of many windows; all the time of the meal she had tortured him

with sly allusions; and no sooner were the servants gone, and these

two protagonists alone together, than he leaped to his feet.  She

too sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face, she heard him as

he raved out his complaint:  Why did she torture him so? she knew

all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not denounce him

at once? what signified her whole behaviour? why did she torture

him? and yet again, why did she torture him?  And when he had done,

she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands:   "Do you not

understand?" she cried.  "I love you!"

 

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer

awoke.  His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it

soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were

unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it

here so briefly told.  But his wonder has still kept growing; and I

think the reader's will also, if he consider it ripely.  For now he

sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive inventors

and performers.  To the end they had kept their secret.  I will go

bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his

candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman -

the hinge of the whole well-invented plot - until the instant of

that highly dramatic declaration.  It was not his tale; it was the

little people's!  And observe:  not only was the secret kept, the

story was told with really guileful craftsmanship.  The conduct of

both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and

the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax.  I am

awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it.  I am

awake, and I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo -

could not perhaps equal - that crafty artifice (as of some old,

experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which

the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice

brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her

hand, once in his - and these in their due order, the least

dramatic first.  The more I think of it, the more I am moved to

press upon the world my question:  Who are the Little People?  They

are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in

his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share

plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to

build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in

progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one

thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece,

like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where

they aim.  Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

 

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less

a person than myself; - as I might have told you from the

beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;

- and as I am positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance

but little farther with my story.  And for the Little People, what

shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do

one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human

likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and

fondly suppose I do it for myself.  That part which is done while I

am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which

is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine,

since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. 

Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience.  For myself -

what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland

unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with

the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat

and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his

candidate at the general elections - I am sometimes tempted to

suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of

fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to

the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my

published fiction should be the single-handed product of some

Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep

locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a

share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding.  I am an

excellent adviser, something like Moliere's servant; I pull back

and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and

sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do

the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when

all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration;

so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so

largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.

 

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and

what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there

are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do

this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been

polite enough to read, the STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. 

I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a

body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which

must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking

creature.  I had even written one, THE TRAVELLING COMPANION, which

was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius

and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that

it was not a work of genius, and that JEKYLL had supplanted it. 

Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an

elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person.  For

two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and

on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene

afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took

the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his

pursuers.  All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I

think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.  The

meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in

my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain;

indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have

not a rudiment of what we call a conscience.  Mine, too, is the

setting, mine the characters.  All that was given me was the matter

of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change

becoming involuntary.  Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have

been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if

I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the arena of the

critics?  For the business of the powders, which so many have

censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the

Brownies'.  Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced

at it, I may say a word:  the not very defensible story of OLALLA. 

Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's

chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly

scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk and detail as I have

tried to write them; to this I added only the external scenery (for

in my dream I never was beyond the court), the portrait, the

characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and

the last pages, such as, alas! they are.  And I may even say that

in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose

immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and

from the hideous trick of atavism in the first.  Sometimes a

parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream;

sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan,

and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a

tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead

of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem

to perceive in the arabesque of time and space.

 

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat

fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the

picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no

prejudice against the supernatural.  But the other day they gave me

a surprise, entertaining me with a love-story, a little April

comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the author of A

CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE, for he could write it as it should be written,

and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I cannot. - But who

would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for

Mr. Howells?

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX - BEGGARS

 

 

 

IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune when I was

young to make the acquaintance of a certain beggar.  I call him

beggar, though he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which

were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg for him.  He was the wreck of an

athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption,

with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on his face;

but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the

ready military salute.  Three ways led through this piece of

country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must

often have awaited me in vain.  But often enough, he caught me;

often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he would

spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at

once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my

farther course.  "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle

inclining to rain.  I hope I see you well, sir.  Why, no, sir, I

don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about

my ordinary.  I am pleased to meet you on the road, sir.  I assure

you I quite look forward to one of our little conversations."  He

loved the sound of his own voice inordinately, and though (with

something too off-hand to call servility) he would always hasten to

agree with anything you said, yet he could never suffer you to say

it to an end.  By what transition he slid to his favourite subject

I have no memory; but we had never been long together on the way

before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the English

poets.  "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle atheistical

in his opinions.  His Queen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical work. 

Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer.  With the works of

Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet. 

Keats - John Keats, sir - he was a very fine poet."  With such

references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own

knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward uphill, his

staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now

swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private

soldier; and all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and

his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of his

smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.

 

He would often go the whole way home with me:  often to borrow a

book, and that book always a poet.  Off he would march, to continue

his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of

his ragged coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a

while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the worse

for its travels into beggardom.  And in this way, doubtless, his

knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism took a wider range. 

But my library was not the first he had drawn upon:  at our first

encounter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical

Queen Mab, and "Keats - John Keats, sir."  And I have often

wondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I often

wondered how he fell to be a beggar.  He had served through the

Mutiny - of which (like so many people) he could tell practically

nothing beyond the names of places, and that it was "difficult

work, sir," and very hot, or that so-and-so was "a very fine

commander, sir."  He was far too smart a man to have remained a

private; in the nature of things, he must have won his stripes. 

And yet here he was without a pension.  When I touched on this

problem, he would content himself with diffidently offering me

advice.  "A man should be very careful when he is young, sir.  If

you'll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentleman like

yourself, sir, should be very careful.  I was perhaps a trifle

inclined to atheistical opinions myself."  For (perhaps with a

deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these days to admit) he

plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer and skittles.

 

Keats - John Keats, sir - and Shelley were his favourite bards.  I

cannot remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste

to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. 

What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic,

the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense

of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: 

the romance of language.  His honest head was very nearly empty,

his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite

authors, he can almost never have understood what he was reading. 

Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I tried in

vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for

nothing but romantic language that he could not understand.  The

case may be commoner than we suppose.  I am reminded of a lad who

was laid in the next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital

and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his

last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare.  My friend pricked up his

ears; fell at once in talk with his new neighbour, and was ready,

when the book arrived, to make a singular discovery.  For this

lover of great literature understood not one sentence out of

twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he understood the

least - the inimitable, mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in

HAMLET.  It was a bright day in hospital when my friend expounded

the sense of this beloved jargon:  a task for which I am willing to

believe my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it as an

easy one.  I know indeed a point or two, on which I would gladly

question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit

the glimpses of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to the

spacious days of Elizabeth.  But in the second case, I should most

likely pretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in

the pit at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite

part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out - as I seem to

hear him - with a ponderous gusto-

 

"Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd."

 

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party I and what

a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received the honours of

the evening!

 

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is

long since dead; and now lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and

quite forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. - But not for me, you

brave heart, have you been buried!  For me, you are still afoot,

tasting the sun and air, and striding southward.  By the groves of

Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters' Tryst,

and where the curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see

and hear you, stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully

discoursing of uncomprehended poets.

 

 

II

 

 

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his

counterpart.  This was a little, lean, and fiery man, with the eyes

of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped

with his wife and children and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn

of Kinnaird.  To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and

daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued

pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones,

and smoked, and plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown

water.  His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among

the fern like vermin.  His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather

brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her

lord while I was present.  The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a

sty for pigs.  But the grinder himself had the fine self-

sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he

did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the day

before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am

proud to remember) as a friend.

 

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint. 

Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; scarce flying higher

than the story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly

seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts,

whether of poetry or music, adequately embodied in that somewhat

obvious ditty,

 

"Will ye gang, lassie, gang

To the braes o' Balquidder."

 

- which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and

to him, in view of his experience, must have found a special

directness of address.  But if he had no fine sense of poetry in

letters, he felt with a deep joy the poetry of life.  You should

have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched beside

the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest

return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking

birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in

cities; and with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once

more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors.  But we were a

pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a

consistent first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have laid

himself so open; - to you, he might have been content to tell his

story of a ghost - that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived

- whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and

that would have been enough, for that would have shown you the

mettle of the man.  Here was a piece of experience solidly and

livingly built up in words, here was a story created, TERES ATQUE

ROTUNDUS.

 

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literary bards! 

He had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave; encountered

men more terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in

that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War; played his part

with the field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared

in that enduring, savage anger and contempt of death and decency

that, for long months together, bedevil'd and inspired the army;

was hurled to and fro in the battle-smoke of the assault; was

there, perhaps, where Nicholson fell; was there when the attacking

column, with hell upon every side, found the soldier's enemy -

strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the

scale, and the fate of the flag of England staggered.  And of all

this he had no more to say than "hot work, sir," or "the army

suffered a great deal, sir," or "I believe General Wilson, sir, was

not very highly thought of in the papers."  His life was naught to

him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank:  in words his

pleasure lay - melodious, agitated words - printed words, about

that which he had never seen and was connatally incapable of

comprehending.  We have here two temperaments face to face; both

untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in the egg; both

boldly charactered:  - that of the artist, the lover and artificer

of words; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover and forger of

experience.  If the one had a daughter and the other had a son, and

these married, might not some illustrious writer count descent from

the beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder?

 

 

III

 

 

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. 

The burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my

silver plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew

receiver.  The bandit sells the traveller an article of prime

necessity:  that traveller's life.  And as for the old soldier, who

stands for central mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt

in a specially; for he was the only beggar in the world who ever

gave me pleasure for my money.  He had learned a school of manners

in the barracks and had the sense to cling to it, accosting

strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking patrons with a merely

regimental difference, sparing you at once the tragedy of his

position and the embarrassment of yours.  There was not one hint

about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting

gratitude, the rant and cant, the "God bless you, Kind, Kind

gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by

disproportionate vehemence, which is so notably false, which would

be so unbearable if it were true.  I am sometimes tempted to

suppose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the old

days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and mourners

keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept

these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of

life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. 

They wound us, I am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of

keening (as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a

buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a

shudder of disgust.  But the fact disproves these amateur opinions. 

The beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man.  He knows

what he is about when he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a

babe, and poisons life with POOR MARY ANN or LONG, LONG AGO; he

knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens

the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know what they

are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of cities,

ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.  This

trade can scarce be called an imposition; it has been so blown upon

with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly.  We pay them

as we pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of

our drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. 

We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and

hurry on.  And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience

like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations

can be purchased for a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

 

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars?  And the

answer is, Not one.  My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his

ragged boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots

were given him again and again, and always gladly accepted; and the

next day, there he was on the road as usual, with toes exposed. 

His boots were his method; they were the man's trade; without his

boots he would have starved; he did not live by charity, but by

appealing to a gross taste in the public, which loves the limelight

on the actor's face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots.  There

is a true poverty, which no one sees:  a false and merely mimetic

poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above all

drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation.  The true poverty does not

go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put

a penny in its hand.  The self-respecting poor beg from each other;

never from the rich.  To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to

hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man

might suppose that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it

goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise.  In

the houses of the working class, all day long there will be a foot

upon the stair; all day long there will be a knocking at the doors;

beggars come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with intermission,

from morning till night; and meanwhile, in the same city and but a

few streets off, the castles of the rich stand unsummoned.  Get the

tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was always the poor who

helped him; get the truth from any workman who has met misfortunes,

it was always next door that he would go for help, or only with

such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of

the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails

his passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even to

the attics with his nasal song.  Here is a remarkable state of

things in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be

asked to give.

 

 

IV

 

 

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who

was taxed with ingratitude:  "IL FAUT SAVOIR GARDER L'INDEPENDANCE

DU COEUR," cried he.  I own I feel with him.  Gratitude without

familarity, gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a

friendship, is a thing so near to hatred that I do not care to

split the difference.  Until I find a man who is pleased to receive

obligations, I shall continue to question the tact of those who are

eager to confer them.  What an art it is, to give, even to our

nearest friends! and what a test of manners, to receive!  How, upon

either side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for each

other; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, how falsely

cheerful, the receiver!  And yet an act of such difficulty and

distress between near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a

total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions. 

The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an

obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with!  But let us

not be deceived:  unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger

jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.

 

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary:  gratitude and

charity.  In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is

not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is

resented.  We are all too proud to take a naked gift:  we must seem

to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our

society.  Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is

that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ,

and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:  that he

has the money and lacks the love which should make his money

acceptable.  Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the

rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: 

and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a

recipient.  His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor

are not his friends, they will not take.  To whom is he to give? 

Where to find - note this phase - the Deserving Poor?  Charity is

(what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded,

with secretaries paid or unpaid:  the hunt of the Deserving Poor

goes merrily forward.  I think it will take more than a merely

human secretary to disinter that character.  What! a class that is

to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to

receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the

same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate

part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of

man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:  -

and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a

needle's eye!  O, let him stick, by all means:  and let his polity

tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of

which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be

abolished even from the history of man!  For a fool of this

monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation:  and the fool

who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the

fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!

 

 

V

 

 

And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may

take.  He may subscribe to pay the taxes.  There were the true

charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation,

helping all.  There were a destination for loveless gifts; there

were the way to reach the pocket of the deserving poor, and yet

save the time of secretaries!  But, alas! there is no colour of

romance in such a course; and people nowhere demand the picturesque

so much as in their virtues.

 

 

 

CHAPTER X - LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE

CAREER OF ART

 

 

 

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of

some practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable)

of some gravity to the world:  Should you or should you not become

an artist?  It is one which you must decide entirely for yourself;

all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the

materials of that decision; and I will begin, as I shall probably

conclude also, by assuring you that all depends on the vocation.

 

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. 

Youth is wholly experimental.  The essence and charm of that

unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as

ignorance of life.  These two unknowns the young man brings

together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a

bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but

never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never

with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment.  If he be a

youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest of

this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion to

the pleasure he receives.  It is not beauty that he loves, nor

pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his

sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the

variety of human fate.  To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity

is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of

experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall

in later days; or if there be any exception - and here destiny

steps in - it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of the

primary activity of the senses, he calls up before memory the image

of transacted pains and pleasures.  Thus it is that such an one

shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines insensibly

toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and

recording of experience.

 

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of

all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing,

it will pass gently away in the course of years.  Emphatically, it

is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and

when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so

properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably

some similar passage in his own experience.  For the temptation is

perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare.  But again we

have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are

bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ARS ARTIUM and

common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting,

and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: 

all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge. 

And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to

speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in

literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may

be found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun,

and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the

necessary tools.  Lastly we come to those vocations which are at

once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of

pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse

to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are

born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the

turning-lathe.  These are predestined; if a man love the labour of

any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods

have called him.  He may have the general vocation too:  he may

have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the

mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this

inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps

above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling

enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and

to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any

expense of time and industry.  The book, the statue, the sonata,

must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the

unflagging spirit of children at their play.  IS IT WORTH DOING? -

when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that

question, it is implicitly answered in the negative.  It does not

occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room

sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour

of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the

bosom of the artist.

 

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no

room for hesitation:  follow your bent.  And observe (lest I should

too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn

so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly.  Habit and

practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less

disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small

taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an

exclusive passion.  Enough, just now, if you can look back over a

fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than

held its own among the thronging interests of youth.  Time will do

the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be

engrossed in that beloved occupation.

 

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering

and delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if

the result be regarded, utterly in vain:  a thousand artists, and

never one work of art.  But the vast mass of mankind are incapable

of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest.  The

worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent

baker.  And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public,

amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier

for his vigils.  This is the practical side of art:  its

inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner.  The direct

returns - the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect - the

wages of the life - are incalculably great.  No other business

offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms.  The soldier

and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they

are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar

language.  In the life of the artist there need be no hour without

its pleasure.  I take the author, with whose career I am best

acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and

that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and

the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon

him and words are not wanting - in what a continual series of small

successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one

moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what

pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure

growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the

whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to

all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so

that what he writes is only what he longed to utter.  He may have

enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world;

but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of

successful work?  Suppose it ill paid:  the wonder is it should be

paid at all.  Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less

desirable.

 

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords

besides an admirable training.  For the artist works entirely upon

honour.  The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the

quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your

endeavours.  Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the

merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic

temper easily acquires - these they can recognise, and these they

value.  But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and

finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels,

for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a

miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts

and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be ever

blind.  To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch

of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so

probable, you fall by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest

certain they shall never be observed.  Under the shadow of this

cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from

day to day his constancy to the ideal.  It is this which makes his

life noble; it is by this that the practice of his craft

strengthens and matures his character; it is for this that even the

serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if

only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly

gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.

 

And here there fall two warnings to be made.  First, if you are to

continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first

signs of laziness.  This idealism in honesty can only be supported

by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who

says "IT WILL DO," is on the downward path; three or four pot-

boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a

talent, and by the practice of journalism a man runs the risk of

becoming wedded to cheap finish.  This is the danger on the one

side; there is not less upon the other.  The consciousness of how

much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the

small heads.  Perceiving recondite merits very hard to attain,

making or swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love

with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget

the end of all art:  to please.  It is doubtless tempting to

exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be

forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face

of it) for services that he shall desire to have performed.  Here

also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcendental

honesty.  To give the public what they do not want, and yet expect

to be supported:  we have there a strange pretension, and yet not

uncommon, above all with painters.  The first duty in this world is

for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he may

plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till

then.  Till then, he must pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who

carries the purse.  And if in the course of these capitulations he

shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and

he will have preserved a better thing than talent - character.  Or

if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this

necessity, one course is yet open:  he can desist from art, and

follow some more manly way of life.

 

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must

be frank.  To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves

patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however

ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiard markers.  The

French have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its

practitioners the Daughters of Joy.  The artist is of the same

family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please

himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted

with something of the sterner dignity of man.  Journals but a

little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this

Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the

example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde.  The poet

was more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the

honour; and anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe

them) recovered the vicarious disgrace to their profession.  When

it comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do themselves more

justice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarian

eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that

assembly.  There should be no honours for the artist; he has

already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the

rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less

agreeable and perhaps more useful.

 

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please.  In

ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to

produce a certain article with a merely conventional

accomplishment, a design in which (we may almost say) it is

difficult to fail.  But the artist steps forth out of the crowd and

proposes to delight:  an impudent design, in which it is impossible

to fail without odious circumstances.  The poor Daughter of Joy,

carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd,

makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a wounding

pity.  She is the type of the unsuccessful artist.  The actor, the

dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain

publicly the cup of failure.  But though the rest of us escape this

crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the

same humiliation.  We all profess to be able to delight.  And how

few of us are!  We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to

delight.  And the day will come to each, and even to the most

admired, when the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall

be lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed.  Then

shall he see himself condemned to do work for which he blushes to

take payment.  Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) he must

lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press, who earn a

little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have

not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot

understand.

 

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of

writers.  LES BLANCS ET LES BLEUS (for instance) is of an order of

merit very different from LE VICOMTE DE BRAGLONNE; and if any

gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of CASTLE DANGEROUS,

his name I think is Ham:  let it be enough for the rest of us to

read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart.  Thus in

old age, when occupation and comfort are most needful, the writer

must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner.  The

painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of

the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a

great age without dishonourable failure.  The writer has the double

misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable of

working when he is old.  It is thus a way of life which conducts

directly to a false position.

 

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary)

must look to be ill-paid.  Tennyson and Montepin make handsome

livelihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not

all perhaps desire to be Montepin.  If you adopt an art to be your

trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money.  What

you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry,

is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a

twentieth of your nervous output.  Nor have you the right to look

for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade,

lies your reward; the work is here the wages.  It will be seen I

have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist

class.  Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field

labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie?  Perhaps they have

never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer;

or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more

important than the services of a colonel?  Perhaps they forget on

how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because

they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal

virtues?  But upon one point there should be no dubiety:  if a man

be not frugal, he has no business in the arts.  If he be not

frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX

SALTIMBANQUE; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue

to be honest.  Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door,

he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a

slovenly piece of work.  If the obligation shall have arisen

through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commanded; for

words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man

should support his family, than that he should attain to - or

preserve - distinction in the arts.  But if the pressure comes,

through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and

stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can

reach him.

 

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debutant artist is to have

no thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no

honours from the State, he may not at least look forward to the

delights of popularity?  Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury

dish.  And in so far as you may mean the countenance of other

artists you would put your finger on one of the most essential and

enduring pleasures of the career of art.  But in so far as you

should have an eye to the commendations of the public or the notice

of the newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing a dream.  It

is true that in certain esoteric journals the author (for instance)

is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more

than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided himself

on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied

themselves the privilege of reading his work.  But if a man be

sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to

that which often accompanies and always follows it - wild ridicule. 

A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will

hear of his failure.  Or he may have done well for years, and still

do well, but the critics may have tired of praising him, or there

may have sprung up some new idol of the instant, some "dust a

little gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice.  Here is

the obverse and the reverse of that empty and ugly thing called

popularity.  Will any man suppose it worth the gaining?

 

 

 

CHAPTER XI - PULVIS ET UMBRA

 

 

 

We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not

success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our

ineffectual efforts to do well.  Our frailties are invincible, our

virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down

of the sun.  The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and

we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them

change with every climate, and no country where some action is not

honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice;

and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the

wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness.  It is not

strange if we are tempted to despair of good.  We ask too much. 

Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till

they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and

weaken.  Truth is of a rougher strain.  In the harsh face of life,

faith can read a bracing gospel.  The human race is a thing more

ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of

the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more

ancient still.

 

 

I

 

 

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful

things and all of them appalling.  There seems no substance to this

solid globe on which we stamp:  nothing but symbols and ratios. 

Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down;

gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through

space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of

distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures

of abstraction, NH3, and H2O.  Consideration dares not dwell upon

this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of

speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

 

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. 

We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the

shards and wrecks of systems:  some, like the sun, still blazing;

some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in

desolation.  All of these we take to be made of something we call

matter:  a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to

whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. 

This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots

uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms

with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become

independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory;

one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the

malady proceeds through varying stages.  This vital putrescence of

the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional

disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or

the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our

breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places.  But none is clean: 

the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it

bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the

hard rock the crystal is forming.

 

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the

earth:  the animal and the vegetable:  one in some degree the

inversion of the other:  the second rooted to the spot; the first

coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the

myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of

birds:  a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered,

the heart stops.  To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have

little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their

delights and killing agonies:  it appears not how.  But of the

locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more.  These

share with us a thousand miracles:  the miracles of sight, of

hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the

miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,

and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and

brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and

staggering consequences.  And to put the last touch upon this

mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these

prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming

them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: 

the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion

of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

 

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more

drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied

ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns

alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety

million miles away.

 

 

II

 

 

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the

agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with

slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of

himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that

move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; -

and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how

surprising are his attributes!  Poor soul, here for so little, cast

among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and

so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,

irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives:  who should

have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being

merely barbarous?  And we look and behold him instead filled with

imperfect virtues:  infinitely childish, often admirably valiant,

often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to

debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising

up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his

friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in

pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young.  To touch

the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to

the point of lunacy:  the thought of duty; the thought of something

owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God:  an ideal of

decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of

shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.  The

design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked

natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming

martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a

bosom thought:  - Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and

cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of

honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we

know so little:  - But in man, at least, it sways with so complete

an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the

selfish:  that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains

supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a

glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cowardly

stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly

conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. 

Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted

practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: 

stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think

this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for

eternity.  I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and

misconduct man at large presents:  of organised injustice, cowardly

violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of

the best.  They cannot be too darkly drawn.  Man is indeed marked

for failure in his efforts to do right.  But where the best

consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should

continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and

inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our

race should not cease to labour.

 

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle,

be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer

sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder.  It matters not

where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of

society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous

morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his

shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the

ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman

senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile

pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened

trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple,

innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to

drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent

millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the

future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his

virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted

perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering

with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time)

kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her

child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society,

living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief,

the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour

and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with

service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,

rejecting riches:  - everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,

everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the

ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:  - ah! if I could show you

this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over,

in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every

circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without

thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still

clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour,

the poor jewel of their souls!  They may seek to escape, and yet

they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their

doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long,

the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.

 

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and

consoling:  that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of

the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet

deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and

live for an ideal, however misconceived.  Nor can we stop with man. 

A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting

moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our

thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but

noble universe.  For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his

kinship with the original dust.  He stands no longer like a thing

apart.  Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: 

and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an

unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure.  Does it stop

with the dog?  We look at our feet where the ground is blackened

with the swarming ant:  a creature so small, so far from us in the

hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend

his doings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorous

justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of

individual sin.  Does it stop, then, with the ant?  Rather this

desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the

grades of life:  rather is this earth, from the frosty top of

Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of

ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. 

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together.  It is the

common and the god-like law of life.  The browsers, the biters, the

barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the

oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us

the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal:  strive like

us - like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle - to do

well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of

support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be

crucified between that double law of the members and the will.  Are

they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some

sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded

virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we

take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness,

we call wicked?  It may be, and yet God knows what they should look

for.  Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man

treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon

their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den

of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a

day is blotted out.  For these are creatures, compared with whom

our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span

eternity.

 

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under

the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the

erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes - God forbid it

should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of

unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint.  Let it be

enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty,

strives with unconquerable constancy:  Surely not all in vain.

 

 

 

CHAPTER XII - A CHRISTMAS SERMON

 

 

 

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for

twelve months; and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal

and seasonable manner.  Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-

bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion.  Charles

Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson

in human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king -

remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more

than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I

am an unconscionable time a-dying."

 

 

I

 

 

An unconscionable time a-dying - there is the picture ("I am

afraid, gentlemen,") of your life and of mine.  The sands run out,

and the hours are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by; and

when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying,

and what else?  The very length is something, if we reach that hour

of separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless

(in the soldierly expression) to have served.

 

There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in the

German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing go

home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, these old, war-worn

exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums.  SUNT LACRYMAE

RERUM:  this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.  And

when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service. 

He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the

army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.

 

The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble

character.  It never seems to them that they have served enough;

they have a fine impatience of their virtues.  It were perhaps more

modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse.  It is not only

our enemies, those desperate characters - it is we ourselves who

know not what we do, - thence springs the glimmering hope that

perhaps we do better than we think:  that to scramble through this

random business with hands reasonably clean to have played the part

of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often

resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is

for the poor human soldier to have done right well.  To ask to see

some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving

for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed

of hire.

 

And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require

much of others?  If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies,

is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of

others?  And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no

more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not

be tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting

hanged?  It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at

all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of

sin.  We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right;

Christ would never hear of negative morality; THOU SHALT was ever

his word, with which he superseded THOU SHALT NOT.  To make our

idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the

imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a

secret element of gusto.  If a thing is wrong for us, we should not

dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with

inverted pleasure.  If we cannot drive it from our minds - one

thing of two:  either our creed is in the wrong and we must more

indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right,

we are criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint. 

A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for

interference with others:  the Fox without the Tail was of this

breed, but had (if his biographer is to be trusted) a certain

antique civility now out of date.  A man may have a flaw, a

weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his

temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into

cruelty.  It has to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to

engross his thoughts.  The true duties lie all upon the farther

side, and must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as this

preliminary clearing of the decks has been effected.  In order that

he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a

total abstainer; let him become so then, and the next day let him

forget the circumstance.  Trying to be kind and honest will require

all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise companion;

in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be

the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will

be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in

judging others.

 

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's

endeavour springs in some degree from dulness.  We require higher

tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have. 

Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too

inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather

set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had

rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or

mortify an appetite.  But the task before us, which is to co-endure

with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the

heroism required is that of patience.  There is no cutting of the

Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

 

To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little

less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to

renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to

keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on

the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a

task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.  He has an

ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who

should look in such an enterprise to be successful.  There is

indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can

controvert:  whatever else we are intended to do, we are not

intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.  It is so in

every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of

living well.  Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for

the end of life.  Only self-deception will be satisfied, and there

need be no despair for the despairer.

 

 

II

 

 

But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us

to thoughts of self-examination:  it is a season, from all its

associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of

joy.  A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to

sadness.  And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest

and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well

he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face.  Noble

disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even

to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.  It is one thing to enter

the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay

without.  And the kingdom of heaven is of the child-like, of those

who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.  Mighty men

of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have

lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely

character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,

the shame were indelible if WE should lose it.  Gentleness and

cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect

duties.  And it is the trouble with moral men that they have

neither one nor other.  It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom

Christ could not away with.  If your morals make you dreary, depend

upon it they are wrong.  I do not say "give them up," for they may

be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should

spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

 

A strange temptation attends upon man:  to keep his eye on

pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his

morals against them.  This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!)

proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against

lust is a feature of the age.  I venture to call such moralists

insincere.  At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite,

their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for

all displays of the truly diabolic - envy, malice, the mean lie,

the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back-biter, the petty

tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life - their standard is

quite different.  These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not

so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret

element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in

themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation.  A

man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr.

Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls; for these are gross

and naked instances.  And yet in each of us some similar element

resides.  The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will

not share moves us to a particular impatience.  It may be because

we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we dislike noise

and romping - being so refined, or because - being so philosophic -

we have an over-weighing sense of life's gravity:  at least, as we

go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbour's

pleasures.  People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations;

here is one to be resisted.  They are fond of self-denial; here is

a propensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied.  There is an

idea abroad among moral people that they should make their

neighbours good.  One person I have to make good:  myself.  But my

duty to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I

have to make him happy - if I may.

 

 

III

 

 

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in

the relation of effect and cause.  There was never anything less

proved or less probable:  our happiness is never in our own hands;

we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and

enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with

unusual keenness, and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed

to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be

afflicted with a disease very painful.  Virtue will not help us,

and it is not meant to help us.  It is not even its own reward,

except for the self-centred and - I had almost said - the

unamiable.  No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he

want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse.  And

to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor CAPITIS DIMINUTIO

of social ostracism, is an affair of wisdom - of cunning, if you

will - and not of virtue.

 

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to

profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he

knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for

what hire, and must not ask.  Somehow or other, though he does not

know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other,

though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give

happiness to others.  And no doubt there comes in here a frequent

clash of duties.  How far is he to make his neighbour happy?  How

far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to

brighten again?  And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be

his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality?  How far

must he resent evil?

 

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on

the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of

them) hard to accept.  But the truth of his teaching would seem to

be this:  in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to

accept and to pardon all; it is OUR cheek we are to turn, OUR coat

that we are to give away to the man who has taken OUR cloak.  But

when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will

become us best.  That we are to suffer others to be injured, and

stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.  Revenge,

says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice; its judgments at least are

delivered by an insane judge; and in our own quarrel we can see

nothing truly and do nothing wisely.  But in the quarrel of our

neighbour, let us be more bold.  One person's happiness is as

sacred as another's; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one

with a stout heart.  It is only in so far as we are doing this,

that we have any right to interfere:  the defence of B is our only

ground of action against A.  A has as good a right to go to the

devil, as we to go to glory; and neither knows what he does.

 

The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and

militant mongerings of moral half-truths, though they be sometimes

needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an

inferior grade of duties.  Ill-temper and envy and revenge find

here an arsenal of pious disguises; this is the playground of

inverted lusts.  With a little more patience and a little less

temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every

case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in

private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act

against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices, might

yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

 

 

IV

 

 

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven

and to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and

hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day

and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; - it may

seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a

certain consolation resides.  Life is not designed to minister to a

man's vanity.  He goes upon his long business most of the time with

a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child.  Full of

rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or

the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when

he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet

for him no abiding city.  Friendships fall through, health fails,

weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly

varying record of his own weakness and folly.  It is a friendly

process of detachment.  When the time comes that he should go,

there need be few illusions left about himself.  HERE LIES ONE WHO

MEANT WELL, TRIED A LITTLE, FAILED MUCH:  - surely that may be his

epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.  Nor will he complain at

the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: 

defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! - but if there is

still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured.  The

faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long

disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality

of laying down his arms.  Give him a march with his old bones;

there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and

the dust and the ecstasy - there goes another Faithful Failure!

 

From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such

beautiful and manly poem, I take this memorial piece:  it says

better than I can, what I love to think; let it be our parting

word.

 

 

"A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;

And from the west,

Where the sun, his day's work ended,

Lingers as in content,

There falls on the old, gray city

An influence luminous and serene,

A shining peace.

 

"The smoke ascends

In a rosy-and-golden haze.  The spires

Shine, and are changed.  In the valley

Shadows rise.  The lark sings on.  The sun,

Closing his benediction,

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night -

Night, with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

 

"So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gathered to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death."

 

[1888.]

 

Scanned and proofed by David Price

ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Second proof by Margaret Price.

 

 

İProject Gutenberg

 

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