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The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

by George Gissing

September, 1998  [Etext #1463]


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This etext was prepared from the 1903 Archibald Constable and Co.
edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT




PREFACE



The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is called
the reading public.  A year ago obituary paragraphs in the literary
papers gave such account of him as was thought needful:  the date
and place of his birth, the names of certain books he had written,
an allusion to his work in the periodicals, the manner of his death.
At the time it sufficed.  Even those few who knew the man, and in a
measure understood him, must have felt that his name called for no
further celebration; like other mortals, he had lived and laboured;
like other mortals, he had entered into his rest.  To me, however,
fell the duty of examining Ryecroft's papers; and having, in the
exercise of my discretion, decided to print this little volume, I
feel that it requires a word or two of biographical complement, just
so much personal detail as may point the significance of the self-
revelation here made.

When first I knew him, Ryecroft had reached his fortieth year; for
twenty years he had lived by the pen.  He was a struggling man,
beset by poverty and other circumstances very unpropitious to mental
work.  Many forms of literature had he tried; in none had he been
conspicuously successful; yet now and then he had managed to earn a
little more money than his actual needs demanded, and thus was
enabled to see something of foreign countries.  Naturally a man of
independent and rather scornful outlook, he had suffered much from
defeated ambition, from disillusions of many kinds, from subjection
to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time of which I am
speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind and temper
so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with him, one
did not know but that he led a calm, contented life.  Only after
several years of friendship was I able to form a just idea of what
the man had gone through, or of his actual existence.  Little by
little Ryecroft had subdued himself to a modestly industrious
routine.  He did a great deal of mere hack-work; he reviewed, he
translated, he wrote articles; at long intervals a volume appeared
under his name.  There were times, I have no doubt, when bitterness
took hold upon him; not seldom he suffered in health, and probably
as much from moral as from physical over-strain; but, on the whole,
he earned his living very much as other men do, taking the day's
toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling over it.

Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious and
poor.  In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies,
and evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future.  The
thought of dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps
the only boast I at any time heard from his lips was that he had
never incurred debt.  It was a bitter thought that, after so long
and hard a struggle with unkindly circumstance, he might end his
life as one of the defeated.

A happier lot was in store for him.  At the age of fifty, just when
his health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement,
Ryecroft had the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly released
from toil, and to enter upon a period of such tranquillity of mind
and condition as he had never dared to hope.  On the death of an
acquaintance, more his friend than he imagined, the wayworn man of
letters learnt with astonishment that there was bequeathed to him a
life annuity of three hundred pounds.  Having only himself to
support (he had been a widower for several years, and his daughter,
an only child, was married), Ryecroft saw in this income something
more than a competency.  In a few weeks he quitted the London suburb
where of late he had been living, and, turning to the part of
England which he loved best, he presently established himself in a
cottage near Exeter, where, with a rustic housekeeper to look after
him, he was soon thoroughly at home.  Now and then some friend went
down into Devon to see him; those who had that pleasure will not
forget the plain little house amid its half-wild garden, the cosy
book-room with its fine view across the valley of the Exe to Haldon,
the host's cordial, gleeful hospitality, rambles with him in lanes
and meadows, long talks amid the stillness of the rural night.  We
hoped it would all last for many a year; it seemed, indeed, as
though Ryecroft had only need of rest and calm to become a hale man.
But already, though he did not know it, he was suffering from a
disease of the heart, which cut short his life after little more
than a lustrum of quiet contentment.  It had always been his wish to
die suddenly; he dreaded the thought of illness, chiefly because of
the trouble it gave to others.  On a summer evening, after a long
walk in very hot weather, he lay down upon the sofa in his study,
and there--as his calm face declared--passed from slumber into the
great silence.

When he left London, Ryecroft bade farewell to authorship.  He told
me that he hoped never to write another line for publication.  But,
among the papers which I looked through after his death, I came upon
three manuscript books which at first glance seemed to be a diary; a
date on the opening page of one of them showed that it had been
begun not very long after the writer's settling in Devon.  When I
had read a little in these pages, I saw that they were no mere
record of day-to-day life; evidently finding himself unable to
forego altogether the use of the pen, the veteran had set down, as
humour bade him, a thought, a reminiscence, a bit of reverie, a
description of his state of mind, and so on, dating such passage
merely with the month in which it was written.  Sitting in the room
where I had often been his companion, I turned page after page, and
at moments it was as though my friend's voice sounded to me once
more.  I saw his worn visage, grave or smiling; recalled his
familiar pose or gesture.  But in this written gossip he revealed
himself more intimately than in our conversation of the days gone
by.  Ryecroft had never erred by lack of reticence; as was natural
in a sensitive man who had suffered much, he inclined to gentle
acquiescence, shrank from argument, from self-assertion.  Here he
spoke to me without restraint, and, when I had read it all through,
I knew the man better than before.

Assuredly, this writing was not intended for the public, and yet, in
many a passage, I seemed to perceive the literary purpose--something
more than the turn of phrase, and so on, which results from long
habit of composition.  Certain of his reminiscences, in particular,
Ryecroft could hardly have troubled to write down had he not,
however vaguely, entertained the thought of putting them to some
use.  I suspect that, in his happy leisure, there grew upon him a
desire to write one more book, a book which should be written merely
for his own satisfaction.  Plainly, it would have been the best he
had it in him to do.  But he seems never to have attempted the
arrangement of these fragmentary pieces, and probably because he
could not decide upon the form they should take.  I imagine him
shrinking from the thought of a first-person volume; he would feel
it too pretentious; he would bid himself wait for the day of riper
wisdom.  And so the pen fell from his hand.

Conjecturing thus, I wondered whether the irregular diary might not
have wider interest than at first appeared.  To me, its personal
appeal was very strong; might it not be possible to cull from it the
substance of a small volume which, at least for its sincerity's
sake, would not be without value for those who read, not with the
eye alone, but with the mind?  I turned the pages again.  Here was a
man who, having his desire, and that a very modest one, not only
felt satisfied, but enjoyed great happiness.  He talked of many
different things, saying exactly what he thought; he spoke of
himself, and told the truth as far as mortal can tell it.  It seemed
to me that the thing had human interest.  I decided to print.

The question of arrangement had to be considered; I did not like to
offer a mere incondite miscellany.  To supply each of the
disconnected passages with a title, or even to group them under
subject headings, would have interfered with the spontaneity which,
above all, I wished to preserve.  In reading through the matter I
had selected, it struck me how often the aspects of nature were
referred to, and how suitable many of the reflections were to the
month with which they were dated.  Ryecroft, I knew, had ever been
much influenced by the mood of the sky, and by the procession of the
year.  So I hit upon the thought of dividing the little book into
four chapters, named after the seasons.  Like all classifications,
it is imperfect, but 'twill serve.

G. G.



SPRING



I


For more than a week my pen has lain untouched.  I have written
nothing for seven whole days, not even a letter.  Except during one
or two bouts of illness, such a thing never happened in my life
before.  In my life; the life, that is, which had to be supported by
anxious toil; the life which was not lived for living's sake, as all
life should be, but under the goad of fear.  The earning of money
should be a means to an end; for more than thirty years--I began to
support myself at sixteen--I had to regard it as the end itself.

I could imagine that my old penholder feels reproachfully towards
me.  Has it not served me well?  Why do I, in my happiness, let it
lie there neglected, gathering dust?  The same penholder that has
lain against my forefinger day after day, for--how many years?
Twenty, at least; I remember buying it at a shop in Tottenham Court
Road.  By the same token I bought that day a paper-weight, which
cost me a whole shilling--an extravagance which made me tremble.
The penholder shone with its new varnish, now it is plain brown wood
from end to end.  On my forefinger it has made a callosity.

Old companion, yet old enemy!  How many a time have I taken it up,
loathing the necessity, heavy in head and heart, my hand shaking, my
eyes sick-dazzled!  How I dreaded the white page I had to foul with
ink!  Above all, on days such as this, when the blue eyes of Spring
laughed from between rosy clouds, when the sunlight shimmered upon
my table and made me long, long all but to madness, for the scent of
the flowering earth, for the green of hillside larches, for the
singing of the skylark above the downs.  There was a time--it seems
further away than childhood--when I took up my pen with eagerness;
if my hand trembled it was with hope.  But a hope that fooled me,
for never a page of my writing deserved to live.  I can say that now
without bitterness.  It was youthful error, and only the force of
circumstance prolonged it.  The world has done me no injustice;
thank Heaven I have grown wise enough not to rail at it for this!
And why should any man who writes, even if he write things immortal,
nurse anger at the world's neglect?  Who asked him to publish?  Who
promised him a hearing?  Who has broken faith with him?  If my
shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some
mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the
man has just cause of complaint.  But your poem, your novel, who
bargained with you for it?  If it is honest journeywork, yet lacks
purchasers, at most you may call yourself a hapless tradesman.  If
it come from on high, with what decency do you fret and fume because
it is not paid for in heavy cash?  For the work of man's mind there
is one test, and one alone, the judgment of generations yet unborn.
If you have written a great book, the world to come will know of it.
But you don't care for posthumous glory.  You want to enjoy fame in
a comfortable armchair.  Ah, that is quite another thing.  Have the
courage of your desire.  Admit yourself a merchant, and protest to
gods and men that the merchandise you offer is of better quality
than much which sells for a high price.  You may be right, and
indeed it is hard upon you that Fashion does not turn to your stall.


II


The exquisite quiet of this room!  I have been sitting in utter
idleness, watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight
upon the carpet, which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye
wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my
beloved books.  Within the house nothing stirs.  In the garden I can
hear singing of birds, I can hear the rustle of their wings.  And
thus, if it please me, I may sit all day long, and into the
profounder quiet of the night.

My house is perfect.  By great good fortune I have found a
housekeeper no less to my mind, a low-voiced, light-footed woman of
discreet age, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I
require, and not afraid of solitude.  She rises very early.  By my
breakfast-time there remains little to be done under the roof save
dressing of meals.  Very rarely do I hear even a clink of crockery;
never the closing of a door or window.  Oh, blessed silence!

There is not the remotest possibility of any one's calling upon me,
and that I should call upon any one else is a thing undreamt of.  I
owe a letter to a friend; perhaps I shall write it before bedtime;
perhaps I shall leave it till to-morrow morning.  A letter of
friendship should never be written save when the spirit prompts.  I
have not yet looked at the newspaper.  Generally I leave it till I
come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the
noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered,
what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of
strife.  I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to
things so sad and foolish.

My house is perfect.  Just large enough to allow the grace of order
in domestic circumstance; just that superfluity of intramural space,
to lack which is to be less than at one's ease.  The fabric is
sound; the work in wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a
more honest age than ours.  The stairs do not creak under my step; I
am waylaid by no unkindly draught; I can open or close a window
without muscle-ache.  As to such trifles as the tint and device of
wall-paper, I confess my indifference; be the walls only
unobtrusive, and I am satisfied.  The first thing in one's home is
comfort; let beauty of detail be added if one has the means, the
patience, the eye.

To me, this little book-room is beautiful, and chiefly because it is
home.  Through the greater part of life I was homeless.  Many places
have I inhabited, some which my soul loathed, and some which pleased
me well; but never till now with that sense of security which makes
a home.  At any moment I might have been driven forth by evil hap,
by nagging necessity.  For all that time did I say within myself:
Some day, perchance, I shall have a home; yet the "perchance" had
more and more of emphasis as life went on, and at the moment when
fate was secretly smiling on me, I had all but abandoned hope.  I
have my home at last.  When I place a new volume on my shelves, I
say:  Stand there whilst I have eyes to see you; and a joyous tremor
thrills me.  This house is mine on a lease of a score of years.  So
long I certainly shall not live; but, if I did, even so long should
I have the wherewithal to pay my rent and buy my food.

I think with compassion of the unhappy mortals for whom no such sun
will ever rise.  I should like to add to the Litany a new petition:
"For all inhabitants of great towns, and especially for all such as
dwell in lodgings, boarding-houses, flats, or any other sordid
substitute for Home which need or foolishness may have contrived."

In vain I have pondered the Stoic virtues.  I know that it is folly
to fret about the spot of one's abode on this little earth.


All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.


But I have always worshipped wisdom afar off.  In the sonorous
period of the philosopher, in the golden measure of the poet, I find
it of all things lovely.  To its possession I shall never attain.
What will it serve me to pretend a virtue of which I am incapable?
To me the place and manner of my abode is of supreme import; let it
be confessed, and there an end of it.  I am no cosmopolite.  Were I
to think that I should die away from England, the thought would be
dreadful to me.  And in England, this is the dwelling of my choice;
this is my home.


III


I am no botanist, but I have long found pleasure in herb-gathering.
I love to come upon a plant which is unknown to me, to identify it
with the help of my book, to greet it by name when next it shines
beside my path.  If the plant be rare, its discovery gives me joy.
Nature, the great Artist, makes her common flowers in the common
view; no word in human language can express the marvel and the
loveliness even of what we call the vulgarest weed, but these are
fashioned under the gaze of every passer-by.  The rare flower is
shaped apart, in places secret, in the Artist's subtler mood; to
find it is to enjoy the sense of admission to a holier precinct.
Even in my gladness I am awed.

To-day I have walked far, and at the end of my walk I found the
little white-flowered wood-ruff.  It grew in a copse of young ash.
When I had looked long at the flower, I delighted myself with the
grace of the slim trees about it--their shining smoothness, their
olive hue.  Hard by stood a bush of wych elm; its tettered bark,
overlined as if with the character of some unknown tongue, made the
young ashes yet more beautiful.

It matters not how long I wander.  There is no task to bring me
back; no one will be vexed or uneasy, linger I ever so late.  Spring
is shining upon these lanes and meadows; I feel as if I must follow
every winding track that opens by my way.  Spring has restored to me
something of the long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without
weariness; I sing to myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew
in boyhood.

That reminds me of an incident.  Near a hamlet, in a lonely spot by
a woodside, I came upon a little lad of perhaps ten years old, who,
his head hidden in his arms against a tree trunk, was crying
bitterly.  I asked him what was the matter, and, after a little
trouble--he was better than a mere bumpkin--I learnt that, having
been sent with sixpence to pay a debt, he had lost the money.  The
poor little fellow was in a state of mind which in a grave man would
be called the anguish of despair; he must have been crying for a
long time; every muscle in his face quivered as if under torture,
his limbs shook; his eyes, his voice, uttered such misery as only
the vilest criminal should be made to suffer.  And it was because he
had lost sixpence!

I could have shed tears with him--tears of pity and of rage at all
this spectacle implied.  On a day of indescribable glory, when earth
and heaven shed benedictions upon the soul of man, a child, whose
nature would have bidden him rejoice as only childhood may, wept his
heart out because his hand had dropped a sixpenny piece!  The loss
was a very serious one, and he knew it; he was less afraid to face
his parents, than overcome by misery at the thought of the harm he
had done them.  Sixpence dropped by the wayside, and a whole family
made wretched!  What are the due descriptive terms for a state of
"civilization" in which such a thing as this is possible?

I put my hand into my pocket, and wrought sixpennyworth of miracle.

It took me half an hour to recover my quiet mind.  After all, it is
as idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever
be less a fool.  For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle.
Why, I have known the day when it would have been beyond my power
altogether, or else would have cost me a meal.  Wherefore, let me
again be glad and thankful.


IV


There was a time in my life when, if I had suddenly been set in the
position I now enjoy, conscience would have lain in ambush for me.
What!  An income sufficient to support three or four working-class
families--a house all to myself--things beautiful wherever I turn--
and absolutely nothing to do for it all!  I should have been hard
put to it to defend myself.  In those days I was feelingly reminded,
hour by hour, with what a struggle the obscure multitudes manage to
keep alive.  Nobody knows better than I do quam parvo liceat
producere vitam.  I have hungered in the streets; I have laid my
head in the poorest shelter; I know what it is to feel the heart
burn with wrath and envy of "the privileged classes."  Yes, but all
that time I was one of "the privileged" myself, and now I can accept
a recognized standing among them without shadow of self-reproach.

It does not mean that my larger sympathies are blunted.  By going to
certain places, looking upon certain scenes, I could most
effectually destroy all the calm that life has brought me.  If I
hold apart and purposely refuse to look that way, it is because I
believe that the world is better, not worse, for having one more
inhabitant who lives as becomes a civilized being.  Let him whose
soul prompts him to assail the iniquity of things, cry and spare
not; let him who has the vocation go forth and combat.  In me it
would be to err from Nature's guidance.  I know, if I know anything,
that I am made for the life of tranquillity and meditation.  I know
that only thus can such virtue as I possess find scope.  More than
half a century of existence has taught me that most of the wrong and
folly which darken earth is due to those who cannot possess their
souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from
destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness.
Every day the world grows noisier; I, for one, will have no part in
that increasing clamour, and, were it only by my silence, I confer a
boon on all.

How well would the revenues of a country be expended, if, by mere
pensioning, one-fifth of its population could be induced to live as
I do!


V


"Sir," said Johnson, "all the arguments which are brought to
represent poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil.
You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live
very happily upon a plentiful fortune."

He knew what he was talking of, that rugged old master of common
sense.  Poverty is of course a relative thing; the term has
reference, above all, to one's standing as an intellectual being.
If I am to believe the newspapers, there are title-bearing men and
women in England who, had they an assured income of five-and-twenty,
shillings per week, would have no right to call themselves poor, for
their intellectual needs are those of a stable-boy or scullery
wench.  Give me the same income and I can live, but I am poor
indeed.

You tell me that money cannot buy the things most precious.  Your
commonplace proves that you have never known the lack of it.  When I
think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in
my life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to
earn, I stand aghast at money's significance.  What kindly joys have
I lost, those simple forms of happiness to which every heart has
claim, because of poverty!  Meetings with those I loved made
impossible year after year; sadness, misunderstanding, nay, cruel
alienation, arising from inability to do the things I wished, and
which I might have done had a little money helped me; endless
instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed or forbidden
by narrow means.  I have lost friends merely through the constraints
of my position; friends I might have made have remained strangers to
me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is enforced at
times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often cursed my
life solely because I was poor.  I think it would scarce be an
exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be
paid for in coin of the realm.

"Poverty," said Johnson again, "is so great an evil, and pregnant
with so much temptation, so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly
enjoin you to avoid it."

For my own part, I needed no injunction to that effort of avoidance.
Many a London garret knows how I struggled with the unwelcome
chamber-fellow.  I marvel she did not abide with me to the end; it
is a sort of inconsequence in Nature, and sometimes makes me vaguely
uneasy through nights of broken sleep.


VI


How many more springs can I hope to see?  A sanguine temper would
say ten or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six.  That
is a great many.  Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously,
lovingly watched from the first celandine to the budding of the
rose; who shall dare to call it a stinted boon?  Five or six times
the miracle of earth reclad, the vision of splendour and loveliness
which tongue has never yet described, set before my gazing.  To
think of it is to fear that I ask too much.


VII


"Homo animal querulum cupide suis incumbens miseriis."  I wonder
where that comes from.  I found it once in Charron, quoted without
reference, and it has often been in my mind--a dreary truth, well
worded.  At least, it was a truth for me during many a long year.
Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury
of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves
from suicide.  For some there is great relief in talking about their
miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed
in silent brooding.  Happily, the trick with me has never been
retrospective; indeed, it was never, even with regard to instant
suffering, a habit so deeply rooted as to become a mastering vice.
I knew my own weakness when I yielded to it; I despised myself when
it brought me comfort; I could laugh scornfully, even "cupide meis
incumbens miseriis."  And now, thanks be to the unknown power which
rules us, my past has buried its dead.  More than that; I can accept
with sober cheerfulness the necessity of all I lived through.  So it
was to be; so it was.  For this did Nature shape me; with what
purpose, I shall never know; but, in the sequence of things eternal,
this was my place.

Could I have achieved so much philosophy if, as I ever feared, the
closing years of my life had passed in helpless indigence?  Should I
not have sunk into lowest depths of querulous self-pity, grovelling
there with eyes obstinately averted from the light above?


VIII


The early coming of spring in this happy Devon gladdens my heart.  I
think with chill discomfort of those parts of England where the
primrose shivers beneath a sky of threat rather than of solace.
Honest winter, snow-clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome
not uncordially; but that long deferment of the calendar's promise,
that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging
the honour of May--how often has it robbed me of heart and hope.
Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen,
scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the
evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation
of bud and bloom.  Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells
that February is still in rule:-


Mild winds shake the elder brake,
And the wandering herdsmen know
That the whitethorn soon will blow.


I have been thinking of those early years of mine in London, when
the seasons passed over me unobserved, when I seldom turned a glance
towards the heavens, and felt no hardship in the imprisonment of
boundless streets.  It is strange now to remember that for some six
or seven years I never looked upon a meadow, never travelled even so
far as to the tree-bordered suburbs.  I was battling for dear life;
on most days I could not feel certain that in a week's time I should
have food and shelter.  It would happen, to be sure, that in hot
noons of August my thoughts wandered to the sea; but so impossible
was the gratification of such desire that it never greatly troubled
me.  At times, indeed, I seem all but to have forgotten that people
went away for holiday.  In those poor parts of the town where I
dwelt, season made no perceptible difference; there were no luggage-
laden cabs to remind me of joyous journeys; the folk about me went
daily to their toil as usual, and so did I.  I remember afternoons
of languor, when books were a weariness, and no thought could be
squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake myself to one
of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable sense of
change.  Heavens, how I laboured in those days!  And how far I was
from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion!  That came
later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from
bad air, bad food and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire
for countryside and sea-beach--and for other things yet more remote.
But in the years when I toiled hardest and underwent what now appear
to me hideous privations, of a truth I could not be said to suffer
at all.  I did not suffer, for I had no sense of weakness.  My
health was proof against everything, and my energies defied all
malice of circumstance.  With however little encouragement, I had
infinite hope.  Sound sleep (often in places I now dread to think
of) sent me fresh to the battle each morning, my breakfast,
sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and a cup of water.  As
human happiness goes, I am not sure that I was not then happy.

Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by
companionship.  London has no pays latin, but hungry beginners in
literature have generally their suitable comrades, garreteers in the
Tottenham Court Road district, or in unredeemed Chelsea; they make
their little vie de Boheme, and are consciously proud of it.  Of my
position, the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster;
I shrank from casual acquaintance, and, through the grim years, had
but one friend with whom I held converse.  It was never my instinct
to look for help, to seek favour for advancement; whatever step I
gained was gained by my own strength.  Even as I disregarded favour
so did I scorn advice; no counsel would I ever take but that of my
own brain and heart.  More than once I was driven by necessity to
beg from strangers the means of earning bread, and this of all my
experiences was the bitterest; yet I think I should have found it
worse still to incur a debt to some friend or comrade.  The truth is
that I have never learnt to regard myself as a "member of society."
For me, there have always been two entities--myself and the world,
and the normal relation between these two has been hostile.  Am I
not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the
social order?

This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not
a calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.


IX


For more than six years I trod the pavement, never stepping once
upon mother earth--for the parks are but pavement disguised with a
growth of grass.  Then the worst was over.  Say I the worst?  No,
no; things far worse were to come; the struggle against starvation
has its cheery side when one is young and vigorous.  But at all
events I had begun to earn a living; I held assurance of food and
clothing for half a year at a time; granted health, I might hope to
draw my not insufficient wages for many a twelvemonth.  And they
were the wages of work done independently, when and where I would.
I thought with horror of lives spent in an office, with an employer
to obey.  The glory of the career of letters was its freedom, its
dignity!

The fact of the matter was, of course, that I served, not one
master, but a whole crowd of them.  Independence, forsooth!  If my
writing failed to please editor, publisher, public, where was my
daily bread?  The greater my success, the more numerous my
employers.  I was the slave of a multitude.  By heaven's grace I had
succeeded in pleasing (that is to say, in making myself a source of
profit to) certain persons who represented this vague throng; for
the time, they were gracious to me; but what justified me in the
faith that I should hold the ground I had gained?  Could the
position of any toiling man be more precarious than mine?  I tremble
now as I think of it, tremble as I should in watching some one who
walked carelessly on the edge of an abyss.  I marvel at the
recollection that for a good score of years this pen and a scrap of
paper clothed and fed me and my household, kept me in physical
comfort, held at bay all those hostile forces of the world ranged
against one who has no resource save in his own right hand.

But I was thinking of the year which saw my first exodus from
London.  On an irresistible impulse, I suddenly made up my mind to
go into Devon, a part of England I had never seen.  At the end of
March I escaped from my grim lodgings, and, before I had time to
reflect on the details of my undertaking, I found myself sitting in
sunshine at a spot very near to where I now dwell--before me the
green valley of the broadening Exe and the pine-clad ridge of
Haldon.  That was one of the moments of my life when I have tasted
exquisite joy.  My state of mind was very strange.  Though as boy
and youth I had been familiar with the country, had seen much of
England's beauties, it was as though I found myself for the first
time before a natural landscape.  Those years of London had obscured
all my earlier life; I was like a man town-born and bred, who scarce
knows anything but street vistas.  The light, the air, had for me
something of the supernatural--affected me, indeed, only less than
at a later time did the atmosphere of Italy.  It was glorious spring
weather; a few white clouds floated amid the blue, and the earth had
an intoxicating fragrance.  Then first did I know myself for a sun-
worshipper.  How had I lived so long without asking whether there
was a sun in the heavens or not?  Under that radiant firmament, I
could have thrown myself upon my knees in adoration.  As I walked, I
found myself avoiding every strip of shadow; were it but that of a
birch trunk, I felt as if it robbed me of the day's delight.  I went
bare-headed, that the golden beams might shed upon me their
unstinted blessing.  That day I must have walked some thirty miles,
yet I knew not fatigue.  Could I but have once more the strength
which then supported me!

I had stepped into a new life.  Between the man I had been and that
which I now became there was a very notable difference.  In a single
day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I
suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and
sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me.  To instance
only one point:  till then I had cared very little about plants and
flowers, but now I found myself eagerly interested in every blossom,
in every growth of the wayside.  As I walked I gathered a quantity
of plants, promising myself to buy a book on the morrow and identify
them all.  Nor was it a passing humour; never since have I lost my
pleasure in the flowers of the field, and my desire to know them
all.  My ignorance at the time of which I speak seems to me now very
shameful; but I was merely in the case of ordinary people, whether
living in town or country.  How many could give the familiar name of
half a dozen plants plucked at random from beneath the hedge in
springtime?  To me the flowers became symbolical of a great release,
of a wonderful awakening.  My eyes had all at once been opened; till
then I had walked in darkness, yet knew it not.

Well do I remember the rambles of that springtide.  I had a lodging
in one of those outer streets of Exeter which savour more of country
than of town, and every morning I set forth to make discoveries.
The weather could not have been more kindly; I felt the influences
of a climate I had never known; there was a balm in the air which
soothed no less than it exhilarated me.  Now inland, now seaward, I
followed the windings of the Exe.  One day I wandered in rich, warm
valleys, by orchards bursting into bloom, from farmhouse to
farmhouse, each more beautiful than the other, and from hamlet to
hamlet bowered amid dark evergreens; the next, I was on pine-clad
heights, gazing over moorland brown with last year's heather,
feeling upon my face a wind from the white-flecked Channel.  So
intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot
even myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist
in grain, forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or to trouble my
happiness by comparison with others' happier fortune.  It was a
healthful time; it gave me a new lease of life, and taught me--in so
far as I was teachable--how to make use of it.


X


Mentally and physically, I must be much older than my years.  At
three-and-fifty a man ought not to be brooding constantly on his
vanished youth.  These days of spring which I should be enjoying for
their own sake, do but turn me to reminiscence, and my memories are
of the springs that were lost.

Some day I will go to London and revisit all the places where I
housed in the time of my greatest poverty.  I have not seen them for
a quarter of a century or so.  Not long ago, had any one asked me
how I felt about these memories, I should have said that there were
certain street names, certain mental images of obscure London, which
made me wretched as often as they came before me; but, in truth, it
is a very long time since I was moved to any sort of bitterness by
that retrospect of things hard and squalid.  Now, owning all the
misery of it in comparison with what should have been, I find that
part of life interesting and pleasant to look back upon--greatly
more so than many subsequent times, when I lived amid decencies and
had enough to eat.  Some day I will go to London, and spend a day or
two amid the dear old horrors.  Some of the places, I know, have
disappeared.  I see the winding way by which I went from Oxford
Street, at the foot of Tottenham Court Road, to Leicester Square,
and, somewhere in the labyrinth (I think of it as always foggy and
gas-lit) was a shop which had pies and puddings in the window,
puddings and pies kept hot by steam rising through perforated metal.
How many a time have I stood there, raging with hunger, unable to
purchase even one pennyworth of food!  The shop and the street have
long since vanished; does any man remember them so feelingly as I?
But I think most of my haunts are still in existence:  to tread
again those pavements, to look at those grimy doorways and purblind
windows, would affect me strangely.

I see that alley hidden on the west side of Tottenham Court Road,
where, after living in a back bedroom on the top floor, I had to
exchange for the front cellar; there was a difference, if I remember
rightly, of sixpence a week, and sixpence, in those days, was a very
great consideration--why, it meant a couple of meals.  (I once FOUND
sixpence in the street, and had an exultation which is vivid in me
at this moment.)  The front cellar was stone-floored; its furniture
was a table, a chair, a wash-stand, and a bed; the window, which of
course had never been cleaned since it was put in, received light
through a flat grating in the alley above.  Here I lived; here I
WROTE.  Yes, "literary work" was done at that filthy deal table, on
which, by the bye, lay my Homer, my Shakespeare, and the few other
books I then possessed.  At night, as I lay in bed, I used to hear
the tramp, tramp of a posse of policemen who passed along the alley
on their way to relieve guard; their heavy feet sometimes sounded on
the grating above my window.

I recall a tragi-comical incident of life at the British Museum.
Once, on going down into the lavatory to wash my hands, I became
aware of a notice newly set up above the row of basins.  It ran
somehow thus:  "Readers are requested to bear in mind that these
basins are to be used only for casual ablutions."  Oh, the
significance of that inscription!  Had I not myself, more than once,
been glad to use this soap and water more largely than the sense of
the authorities contemplated?  And there were poor fellows working
under the great dome whose need, in this respect, was greater than
mine.  I laughed heartily at the notice, but it meant so much.

Some of my abodes I have utterly forgotten; for one reason or
another, I was always moving--an easy matter when all my possessions
lay in one small trunk.  Sometimes the people of the house were
intolerable.  In those days I was not fastidious, and I seldom had
any but the slightest intercourse with those who dwelt under the
same roof, yet it happened now and then that I was driven away by
human proximity which passed my endurance.  In other cases I had to
flee from pestilential conditions.  How I escaped mortal illness in
some of those places (miserably fed as I always was, and always
over-working myself) is a great mystery.  The worst that befell me
was a slight attack of diphtheria--traceable, I imagine, to the
existence of a dust-bin UNDER THE STAIRCASE.  When I spoke of the
matter to my landlady, she was at first astonished, then wrathful,
and my departure was expedited with many insults.

On the whole, however, I had nothing much to complain of except my
poverty.  You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-
sixpence a week--the most I ever could pay for a "furnished room
with attendance" in those days of pretty stern apprenticeship.  And
I was easily satisfied; I wanted only a little walled space in which
I could seclude myself, free from external annoyance.  Certain
comforts of civilized life I ceased even to regret; a stair-carpet I
regarded as rather extravagant, and a carpet on the floor of my room
was luxury undreamt of.  My sleep was sound; I have passed nights of
dreamless repose on beds which it would now make my bones ache only
to look at.  A door that locked, a fire in winter, a pipe of
tobacco--these were things essential; and, granted these, I have
been often richly contented in the squalidest garret.  One such
lodging is often in my memory; it was at Islington, not far from the
City Road; my window looked upon the Regent's Canal.  As often as I
think of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever
knew; for three successive days, at least, my lamp had to be kept
burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few
blurred lights in the street beyond the Canal, but for the most part
nothing but a yellowish darkness, which caused the glass to reflect
the firelight and my own face.  Did I feel miserable?  Not a bit of
it.  The enveloping gloom seemed to make my chimney-corner only the
more cosy.  I had coals, oil, tobacco in sufficient quantity; I had
a book to read; I had work which interested me; so I went forth only
to get my meals at a City Road coffee-shop, and hastened back to the
fireside.  Oh, my ambitions, my hopes!  How surprised and indignant
I should have felt had I known of any one who pitied me!

Nature took revenge now and then.  In winter time I had fierce sore
throats, sometimes accompanied by long and savage headaches.
Doctoring, of course, never occurred to me; I just locked my door,
and, if I felt very bad indeed, went to bed--to lie there, without
food or drink, till I was able to look after myself again.  I could
never ask from a landlady anything which was not in our bond, and
only once or twice did I receive spontaneous offer of help.  Oh, it
is wonderful to think of all that youth can endure!  What a poor
feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I remember thirty years
ago!


XI


Would I live it over again, that life of the garret and the cellar?
Not with the assurance of fifty years' contentment such as I now
enjoy to follow upon it!  With man's infinitely pathetic power of
resignation, one sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the
worst of it, makes out a case for the resolute optimist.  Oh, but
the waste of energy, of zeal, of youth!  In another mood, I could
shed tears over that spectacle of rare vitality condemned to sordid
strife.  The pity of it!  And--if our conscience mean anything at
all--the bitter wrong!

Without seeking for Utopia, think what a man's youth might be.  I
suppose not one in every thousand uses half the possibilities of
natural joy and delightful effort which lie in those years between
seventeen and seven-and-twenty.  All but all men have to look back
upon beginnings of life deformed and discoloured by necessity,
accident, wantonness.  If a young man avoid the grosser pitfalls, if
he keep his eye fixed steadily on what is called the main chance,
if, without flagrant selfishness, he prudently subdue every interest
to his own (by "interest" understanding only material good), he is
putting his youth to profit, he is an exemplar and a subject of
pride.  I doubt whether, in our civilization, any other ideal is
easy of pursuit by the youngster face to face with life.  It is the
only course altogether safe.  Yet compare it with what might be, if
men respected manhood, if human reason were at the service of human
happiness.  Some few there are who can look back upon a boyhood of
natural delights, followed by a decade or so of fine energies
honourably put to use, blended therewith, perhaps, a memory of joy
so exquisite that it tunes all life unto the end; they are almost as
rare as poets.  The vast majority think not of their youth at all,
or, glancing backward, are unconscious of lost opportunity, unaware
of degradation suffered.  Only by contrast with this thick-witted
multitude can I pride myself upon my youth of endurance and of
combat.  I had a goal before me, and not the goal of the average
man.  Even when pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my purposes,
which were of the mind.  But contrast that starved lad in his slum
lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and zealous youth,
and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been the right
remedy for such squalid ills.


XII


As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged
veterans."  Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall;
many of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately
in fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands.  But so often
have I removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library
at each change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have
I given to its well-being at normal times (for in all practical
matters I am idle and inept), that even the comeliest of my books
show the results of unfair usage.  More than one has been foully
injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case--this but the
extreme instance of the wrongs they have undergone.  Now that I have
leisure and peace of mind, I find myself growing more careful--an
illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by
circumstance.  But I confess that, so long as a volume hold
together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy
as in one from their own shelf.  To me that is unintelligible.  For
one thing, I know every book of mine by its SCENT, and I have but to
put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition,
which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty
years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores
to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it
as a prize.  Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it
has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these
volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read
them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to
take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the
leaves.  The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and
what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in
hand.  For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this
edition.  My eyes being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which
I bought in days when such a purchase was something more than an
extravagance; wherefore I regard the book with that peculiar
affection which results from sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word.  Dozens of my books
were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what
are called the necessaries of life.  Many a time I have stood before
a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual
desire and bodily need.  At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach
clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long
coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I COULD not let
it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine.  My Heyne's Tibullus was
grasped at such a moment.  It lay on the stall of the old book-shop
in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent
thing among quantities of rubbish.  Sixpence was the price--
sixpence!  At that time I used to eat my midday meal (of course my
dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old
coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.  Sixpence
was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a
plate of meat and vegetables.  But I did not dare to hope that the
Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell
due to me.  I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my
pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me.  The
book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of
bread and butter I gloated over the pages.

In this Tibullus I found pencilled on the last page:  "Perlegi, Oct.
4, 1792."  Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred
years ago?  There was no other inscription.  I like to imagine some
poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with
drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.
How much THAT was I could not easily say.  Gentle-hearted Tibullus!-
-of whom there remains to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I
think, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.


An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?


So with many another book on the thronged shelves.  To take them
down is to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph.  In those
days money represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think
about, but the acquisition of books.  There were books of which I
had passionate need, books more necessary to me than bodily
nourishment.  I could see them, of course, at the British Museum,
but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them,
my own property, on my own shelf.  Now and then I have bought a
volume of the raggedest and wretchedest aspect, dishonoured with
foolish scribbling, torn, blotted--no matter, I liked better to read
out of that than out of a copy that was not mine.  But I was guilty
at times of mere self-indulgence; a book tempted me, a book which
was not one of those for which I really craved, a luxury which
prudence might bid me forego.  As, for instance, my Jung-Stilling.
It caught my eye in Holywell Street; the name was familiar to me in
Wahrheit und Dichtung, and curiosity grew as I glanced over the
pages.  But that day I resisted; in truth, I could not afford the
eighteen-pence, which means that just then I was poor indeed.  Twice
again did I pass, each time assuring myself that Jung-Stilling had
found no purchaser.  There came a day when I was in funds.  I see
myself hastening to Holywell Street (in those days my habitual pace
was five miles an hour), I see the little grey old man with whom I
transacted my business--what was his name?--the bookseller who had
been, I believe, a Catholic priest, and still had a certain priestly
dignity about him.  He took the volume, opened it, mused for a
moment, then, with a glance at me, said, as if thinking aloud:
"Yes, I wish I had time to read it."

Sometimes I added the labour of a porter to my fasting endured for
the sake of books.  At the little shop near Portland Road Station I
came upon a first edition of Gibbon, the price an absurdity--I think
it was a shilling a volume.  To possess those clean-paged quartos I
would have sold my coat.  As it happened, I had not money enough
with me, but sufficient at home.  I was living at Islington.  Having
spoken with the bookseller, I walked home, took the cash, walked
back again, and--carried the tomes from the west end of Euston Road
to a street in Islington far beyond the Angel.  I did it in two
journeys--this being the only time in my life when I thought of
Gibbon in avoirdupois.  Twice--three times, reckoning the walk for
the money--did I descend Euston Road and climb Pentonville on that
occasion.  Of the season and the weather I have no recollection; my
joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought.
Except, indeed, of the weight.  I had infinite energy, but not much
muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a
chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching--exultant!

The well-to-do person would hear this story with astonishment.  Why
did I not get the bookseller to send me the volumes?  Or, if I could
not wait, was there no omnibus along that London highway?  How could
I make the well-to-do person understand that I did not feel able to
afford, that day, one penny more than I had spent on the book?  No,
no, such labour-saving expenditure did not come within my scope;
whatever I enjoyed I earned it, literally, by the sweat of my brow.
In those days I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus.  I
have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together
without ever a thought of saving my legs, or my time, by paying for
waftage.  Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had
to renounce, and this was one of them.

Years after, I sold my first edition of Gibbon for even less than it
cost me; it went with a great many other fine books in folio and
quarto, which I could not drag about with me in my constant
removals; the man who bought them spoke of them as "tomb-stones."
Why has Gibbon no market value?  Often has my heart ached with
regret for those quartos.  The joy of reading the Decline and Fall
in that fine type!  The page was appropriate to the dignity of the
subject; the mere sight of it tuned one's mind.  I suppose I could
easily get another copy now; but it would not be to me what that
other was, with its memory of dust and toil.


XIII


There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who
remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station.  It
had a peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind--chiefly
theology and classics--and for the most part those old editions
which are called worthless, which have no bibliopolic value, and
have been supplanted for practical use by modern issues.  The
bookseller was very much a gentleman, and this singular fact,
together with the extremely low prices at which his volumes were
marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he kept the shop for
mere love of letters.  Things in my eyes inestimable I have
purchased there for a few pence, and I don't think I ever gave more
than a shilling for any volume.  As I once had the opportunity of
perceiving, a young man fresh from class-rooms could only look with
wondering contempt on the antiquated stuff which it rejoiced me to
gather from that kindly stall, or from the richer shelves within.
My Cicero's Letters for instance:  podgy volumes in parchment, with
all the notes of Graevius, Gronovius, and I know not how many other
old scholars.  Pooh!  Hopelessly out of date.  But I could never
feel that.  I have a deep affection for Graevius and Gronovius and
the rest, and if I knew as much as they did, I should be well
satisfied to rest under the young man's disdain.  The zeal of
learning is never out of date; the example--were there no more--
burns before one as a sacred fire, for ever unquenchable.  In what
modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in the
annotations of old scholars?

Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere
schoolbook; you feel so often that the man does not regard his
author as literature, but simply as text.  Pedant for pedant, the
old is better than the new.


XIV


To-day's newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a spring
horse-race.  The sight of it fills me with loathing.  It brings to
my mind that placard I saw at a station in Surrey a year or two ago,
advertising certain races in the neighbourhood.  Here is the poster,
as I copied it into my note-book:


"Engaged by the Executive to ensure order and comfort to the public
attending this meeting:-

14 detectives (racing),
15 detectives (Scotland Yard),
7 police inspectors,
9 police sergeants,
76 police, and a supernumerary contingent of specially selected men
from the Army Reserve and the Corps of Commissionaires.

The above force will be employed solely for the purpose of
maintaining order and excluding bad characters, etc.  They will have
the assistance also of a strong force of the Surrey Constabulary."


I remember, once, when I let fall a remark on the subject of horse-
racing among friends chatting together, I was voted "morose."  Is it
really morose to object to public gatherings which their own
promoters declare to be dangerous for all decent folk?  Every one
knows that horse-racing is carried on mainly for the delight and
profit of fools, ruffians, and thieves.  That intelligent men allow
themselves to take part in the affair, and defend their conduct by
declaring that their presence "maintains the character of a sport
essentially noble," merely shows that intelligence can easily enough
divest itself of sense and decency.


XV


Midway in my long walk yesterday, I lunched at a wayside inn.  On
the table lay a copy of a popular magazine.  Glancing over this
miscellany, I found an article, by a woman, on "Lion Hunting," and
in this article I came upon a passage which seemed worth copying.

"As I woke my husband, the lion--which was then about forty yards
off--charged straight towards us, and with my .303 I hit him full in
the chest, as we afterwards discovered, tearing his windpipe to
pieces and breaking his spine.  He charged a second time, and the
next shot hit him through the shoulder, tearing his heart to
ribbons."

It would interest me to look upon this heroine of gun and pen.  She
is presumably quite a young woman; probably, when at home, a
graceful figure in drawing-rooms.  I should like to hear her talk,
to exchange thoughts with her.  She would give one a very good idea
of the matron of old Rome who had her seat in the amphitheatre.
Many of those ladies, in private life, must have been bright and
gracious, high-bred and full of agreeable sentiment; they talked of
art and of letters; they could drop a tear over Lesbia's sparrow; at
the same time, they were connoisseurs in torn windpipes, shattered
spines and viscera rent open.  It is not likely that many of them
would have cared to turn their own hands to butchery, and, for the
matter of that, I must suppose that our Lion Huntress of the popular
magazine is rather an exceptional dame; but no doubt she and the
Roman ladies would get on very well together, finding only a few
superficial differences.  The fact that her gory reminiscences are
welcomed by an editor with the popular taste in view is perhaps more
significant than appears either to editor or public.  Were this lady
to write a novel (the chances are she will) it would have the true
note of modern vigour.  Of course her style has been formed by her
favourite reading; more than probably, her ways of thinking and
feeling owe much to the same source.  If not so already, this will
soon, I daresay, be the typical Englishwoman.  Certainly, there is
"no nonsense about her."  Such women should breed a remarkable race.

I left the inn in rather a turbid humour.  Moving homeward by a new
way, I presently found myself on the side of a little valley, in
which lay a farm and an orchard.  The apple trees were in full
bloom, and, as I stood gazing, the sun, which had all that day been
niggard of its beams, burst forth gloriously.  For what I then saw,
I have no words; I can but dream of the still loveliness of that
blossomed valley.  Near me, a bee was humming; not far away, a
cuckoo called; from the pasture of the farm below came a bleating of
lambs.


XVI


I am no friend of the people.  As a force, by which the tenor of the
time is conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as a
visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to
abhorrence.  For the greater part of my life, the people signified
to me the London crowd, and no phrase of temperate meaning would
utter my thoughts of them under that aspect.  The people as country-
folk are little known to me; such glimpses as I have had of them do
not invite to nearer acquaintance.  Every instinct of my being is
anti-democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become
when Demos rules irresistibly.

Right or wrong, this is my temper.  But he who should argue from it
that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank
than my own would go far astray.  Nothing is more rooted in my mind
than the vast distinction between the individual and the class.
Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be
found in him, some disposition for good; mass him with his fellows
in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant
creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which
contagion prompts him.  It is because nations tend to stupidity and
baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals
have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity
had made so little progress.  Now, looking at men in the multitude,
I marvel that they have advanced so far.

Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person
by his intellectual power and attainment.  I could see no good where
there was no logic, no charm where there was no learning.  Now I
think that one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence,
that of the brain, and that of the heart, and I have come to regard
the second as by far the more important.  I guard myself against
saying that intelligence does not matter; the fool is ever as
noxious as he is wearisome.  But assuredly the best people I have
known were saved from folly not by the intellect but by the heart.
They come before me, and I see them greatly ignorant, strongly
prejudiced, capable of the absurdest mis-reasoning; yet their faces
shine with the supreme virtues, kindness, sweetness, modesty,
generosity.  Possessing these qualities, they at the same time
understand how to use them; they have the intelligence of the heart.

This poor woman who labours for me in my house is even such a one.
From the first I thought her an unusually good servant; after three
years of acquaintance, I find her one of the few women I have known
who merit the term of excellent.  She can read and write--that is
all.  More instruction would, I am sure, have harmed her, for it
would have confused her natural motives, without supplying any clear
ray of mental guidance.  She is fulfilling the offices for which she
was born, and that with a grace of contentment, a joy of
conscientiousness, which puts her high among civilized beings.  Her
delight is in order and in peace; what greater praise can be given
to any of the children of men?

The other day she told me a story of the days gone by.  Her mother,
at the age of twelve, went into domestic service; but on what
conditions, think you?  The girl's father, an honest labouring man,
PAID the person whose house she entered one shilling a week for her
instruction in the duties she wished to undertake.  What a grinning
stare would come to the face of any labourer nowadays, who should be
asked to do the like!  I no longer wonder that my housekeeper so
little resembles the average of her kind.


XVII


A day of almost continuous rain, yet for me a day of delight.  I had
breakfasted, and was poring over the map of Devon (how I love a good
map!) to trace an expedition that I have in view, when a knock came
at my door, and Mrs. M. bore in a great brown-paper parcel, which I
saw at a glance must contain books.  The order was sent to London a
few days ago; I had not expected to have my books so soon.  With
throbbing heart I set the parcel on a clear table; eyed it whilst I
mended the fire; then took my pen-knife, and gravely, deliberately,
though with hand that trembled, began to unpack.

It is a joy to go through booksellers' catalogues, ticking here and
there a possible purchase.  Formerly, when I could seldom spare
money, I kept catalogues as much as possible out of sight; now I
savour them page by page, and make a pleasant virtue of the
discretion I must needs impose upon myself.  But greater still is
the happiness of unpacking volumes which one has bought without
seeing them.  I am no hunter of rarities; I care nothing for first
editions and for tall copies; what I buy is literature, food for the
soul of man.  The first glimpse of bindings when the inmost
protective wrapper has been folded back!  The first scent of BOOKS!
The first gleam of a gilded title!  Here is a work the name of which
has been known to me for half a lifetime, but which I never yet saw;
I take it reverently in my hand, gently I open it; my eyes are dim
with excitement as I glance over chapter-headings, and anticipate
the treat which awaits me.  Who, more than I, has taken to heart
that sentence of the Imitatio--"In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et
nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro"?

I had in me the making of a scholar.  With leisure and tranquillity
of mind, I should have amassed learning.  Within the walls of a
college, I should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my
imagination ever busy with the old world.  In the introduction to
his History of France, Michelet says:  "J'ai passe e cote du monde,
et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie."  That, as I can see now, was
my true ideal; through all my battlings and miseries I have always
lived more in the past than in the present.  At the time when I was
literally starving in London, when it seemed impossible that I
should ever gain a living by my pen, how many days have I spent at
the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if I had been
without a care!  It astounds me to remember that, having breakfasted
on dry bread, and carrying in my pocket another piece of bread to
serve for dinner, I settled myself at a desk in the great Reading-
Room with books before me which by no possibility could be a source
of immediate profit.  At such a time, I worked through German tomes
on Ancient Philosophy.  At such a time, I read Appuleius and Lucian,
Petronius and the Greek Anthology, Diogenes Laertius and--heaven
knows what!  My hunger was forgotten; the garret to which I must
return to pass the night never perturbed my thoughts.  On the whole,
it seems to me something to be rather proud of; I smile approvingly
at that thin, white-faced youth.  Me?  My very self?  No, no!  He
has been dead these thirty years.

Scholarship in the high sense was denied me, and now it is too late.
Yet here am I gloating over Pausanias, and promising myself to read
every word of him.  Who that has any tincture of old letters would
not like to read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and
references to him?  Here are the volumes of Dahn's Die Konige der
Germanen:  who would not like to know all he can about the Teutonic
conquerors of Rome?  And so on, and so on.  To the end I shall be
reading--and forgetting.  Ah, that's the worst of it!  Had I at
command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call
myself a learned man.  Nothing surely is so bad for the memory as
long-enduring worry, agitation, fear.  I cannot preserve more than a
few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently,
rejoicingly.  Would I gather erudition for a future life?  Indeed,
it no longer troubles me that I forget.  I have the happiness of the
passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?


XVIII


Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise
unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go
downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly
reading, all day long?  Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler
of so many a long year?

I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-
stained world.  It would make me miserable, and to what purpose?
Yet, having once looked that way, think of them I must.  Oh, you
heavy-laden, who at this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the
pen; writing, not because there is something in your mind, in your
heart, which must needs be uttered, but because the pen is the only
tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread!  Year after
year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of
publishers and editors, hustling, grappling, exchanging
maledictions.  Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and heart-breaking!

Innumerable are the men and women now writing for bread, who have
not the least chance of finding in such work a permanent livelihood.
They took to writing because they knew not what else to do, or
because the literary calling tempted them by its independence and
its dazzling prizes.  They will hang on to the squalid profession,
their earnings eked out by begging and borrowing, until it is too
late for them to do anything else--and then?  With a lifetime of
dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young
man or woman to look for his living to "literature," commits no less
than a crime.  If my voice had any authority, I would cry this truth
aloud wherever men could hear.  Hateful as is the struggle for life
in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to
me sordid and degrading beyond all others.  Oh, your prices per
thousand words!  Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings!  And
oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden in the fray.

Last midsummer I received a circular from a typewriting person,
soliciting my custom; some one who had somehow got hold of my name,
and fancied me to be still in purgatory.  This person wrote:  "If
you should be in need of any extra assistance in the pressure of
your Christmas work, I hope," etc.

How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper?  "The
pressure of your Christmas work"!  Nay, I am too sick to laugh.


XIX


Some one, I see, is lifting up his sweet voice in praise of
Conscription.  It is only at long intervals that one reads this kind
of thing in our reviews or newspapers, and I am happy in believing
that most English people are affected by it even as I am, with the
sickness of dread and of disgust.  That the thing is impossible in
England, who would venture to say?  Every one who can think at all
sees how slight are our safeguards against that barbaric force in
man which the privileged races have so slowly and painfully brought
into check.  Democracy is full of menace to all the finer hopes of
civilization, and the revival, in not unnatural companionship with
it, of monarchic power based on militarism, makes the prospect
dubious enough.  There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter, and
the nations will be tearing at each other's throats.  Let England be
imperilled, and Englishmen will fight; in such extremity there is no
choice.  But what a dreary change must come upon our islanders if,
without instant danger, they bend beneath the curse of universal
soldiering!  I like to think that they will guard the liberty of
their manhood even beyond the point of prudence.

A lettered German, speaking to me once of his year of military
service, told me that, had it lasted but a month or two longer, he
must have sought release in suicide.  I know very well that my own
courage would not have borne me to the end of the twelvemonth;
humiliation, resentment, loathing, would have goaded me to madness.
At school we used to be "drilled" in the playground once a week; I
have but to think of it, even after forty years, and there comes
back upon me that tremor of passionate misery which, at the time,
often made me ill.  The senseless routine of mechanic exercise was
in itself all but unendurable to me; I hated the standing in line,
the thrusting-out of arms and legs at a signal, the thud of feet
stamping in constrained unison.  The loss of individuality seemed to
me sheer disgrace.  And when, as often happened, the drill-sergeant
rebuked me for some inefficiency as I stood in line, when he
addressed me as "Number Seven!"  I burned with shame and rage.  I
was no longer a human being; I had become part of a machine, and my
name was "Number Seven."  It used to astonish me when I had a
neighbour who went through the drill with amusement, with zealous
energy; I would gaze at the boy, and ask myself how it was possible
that he and I should feel so differently.  To be sure, nearly all my
schoolfellows either enjoyed the thing, or at all events went
through it with indifference; they made friends with the sergeant,
and some were proud of walking with him "out of bounds."  Left,
right!  Left, right!  For my own part, I think I have never hated
man as I hated that broad-shouldered, hard-visaged, brassy-voiced
fellow.  Every word he spoke to me, I felt as an insult.  Seeing him
in the distance, I have turned and fled, to escape the necessity of
saluting, and, still more, a quiver of the nerves which affected me
so painfully.  If ever a man did me harm, it was he; harm physical
and moral.  In all seriousness I believe that something of the
nervous instability from which I have suffered since boyhood is
traceable to those accursed hours of drill, and I am very sure that
I can date from the same wretched moments a fierceness of personal
pride which has been one of my most troublesome characteristics.
The disposition, of course, was there; it should have been modified,
not exacerbated.

In younger manhood it would have flattered me to think that I alone
on the school drill-ground had sensibility enough to suffer acutely.
Now I had much rather feel assured that many of my schoolfellows
were in the same mind of subdued revolt.  Even of those who,
boylike, enjoyed their drill, scarce one or two, I trust, would have
welcomed in their prime of life the imposition of military servitude
upon them and their countrymen.  From a certain point of view, it
would be better far that England should bleed under conquest than
that she should be saved by eager, or careless, acceptance of
Conscription.  That view will not be held by the English people; but
it would be a sorry thing for England if the day came when no one of
those who love her harboured such a thought.


XX


It has occurred to me that one might define Art as:  an expression,
satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life.  This is applicable to
every form of Art devised by man, for, in his creative moment,
whether he produce a great drama or carve a piece of foliage in
wood, the artist is moved and inspired by supreme enjoyment of some
aspect of the world about him; an enjoyment in itself keener than
that experienced by another man, and intensified, prolonged, by the
power--which comes to him we know not how--of recording in visible
or audible form that emotion of rare vitality.  Art, in some degree,
is within the scope of every human being, were he but the ploughman
who utters a few would-be melodious notes, the mere outcome of
health and strength, in the field at sunrise; he sings, or tries to,
prompted by an unusual gusto in being, and the rude stave is all his
own.  Another was he, who also at the plough, sang of the daisy, of
the field-mouse, or shaped the rhythmic tale of Tam o' Shanter.  Not
only had life a zest for him incalculably stronger and subtler than
that which stirs the soul of Hodge, but he uttered it in word and
music such as go to the heart of mankind, and hold a magic power for
ages.

For some years there has been a great deal of talk about Art in our
country.  It began, I suspect, when the veritable artistic impulse
of the Victorian time had flagged, when the energy of a great time
was all but exhausted.  Principles always become a matter of
vehement discussion when practice is at ebb.  Not by taking thought
does one become an artist, or grow even an inch in that direction--
which is not at all the same as saying that he who IS an artist
cannot profit by conscious effort.  Goethe (the example so often
urged by imitators unlike him in every feature of humanity) took
thought enough about his Faust; but what of those youthtime lyrics,
not the least precious of his achievements, which were scribbled as
fast as pen could go, thwartwise on the paper, because he could not
stop to set it straight?  Dare I pen, even for my own eyes, the
venerable truth that an artist is born and not made?  It seems not
superfluous, in times which have heard disdainful criticism of
Scott, on the ground that he had no artistic conscience, that he
scribbled without a thought of style, that he never elaborated his
scheme before beginning--as Flaubert, of course you know, invariably
did.  Why, after all, has one not heard that a certain William
Shakespeare turned out his so-called works of art with something
like criminal carelessness?  Is it not a fact that a bungler named
Cervantes was so little in earnest about his Art that, having in one
chapter described the stealing of Sancho's donkey, he presently, in
mere forgetfulness, shows us Sancho riding on Dapple, as if nothing
had happened?  Does not one Thackeray shamelessly avow on the last
page of a grossly "subjective" novel that he had killed Lord
Farintosh's mother at one page and brought her to life again at
another?  These sinners against Art are none the less among the
world's supreme artists, for they LIVED, in a sense, in a degree,
unintelligible to these critics of theirs, and their work is an
expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life.

Some one, no doubt, hit upon this definition of mine long ago.  It
doesn't matter; is it the less original with me?  Not long since I
should have fretted over the possibility, for my living depended on
an avoidance of even seeming plagiarism.  Now I am at one with Lord
Foppington, and much disposed to take pleasure in the natural
sprouts of my own wit--without troubling whether the same idea has
occurred to others.  Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to
have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations,
shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book?
These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life;
it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world's
market.  One of my conscious efforts, in these days of freedom, is
to live intellectually for myself.  Formerly, when in reading I came
upon anything that impressed or delighted me, down it went in my
note-book, for "use."  I could not read a striking verse, or
sentence of prose, without thinking of it as an apt quotation in
something I might write--one of the evil results of a literary life.
Now that I strive to repel this habit of thought, I find myself
asking:  To what end, then, do I read and remember?  Surely as
foolish a question as ever man put to himself.  You read for your
own pleasure, for your solace and strengthening.  Pleasure, then,
purely selfish?  Solace which endures for an hour, and strengthening
for no combat?  Ay, but I know, I know.  With what heart should I
live here in my cottage, waiting for life's end, were it not for
those hours of seeming idle reading?

I think sometimes, how good it were had I some one by me to listen
when I am tempted to read a passage aloud.  Yes, but is there any
mortal in the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for
sympathetic understanding?--nay, who would even generally be at one
with me in my appreciation.  Such harmony of intelligences is the
rarest thing.  All through life we long for it:  the desire drives
us, like a demon, into waste places; too often ends by plunging us
into mud and morass.  And, after all, we learn that the vision was
illusory.  To every man is it decreed:  thou shalt live alone.
Happy they who imagine that they have escaped the common lot; happy,
whilst they imagine it.  Those to whom no such happiness has ever
been granted at least avoid the bitterest of disillusions.  And is
it not always good to face a truth, however discomfortable?  The
mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its
compensation in ever-growing calm.


XXI


All about my garden to-day the birds are loud.  To say that the air
is filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless piping,
whistling, trilling, which at moments rings to heaven in a
triumphant unison, a wild accord.  Now and then I notice one of the
smaller songsters who seems to strain his throat in a madly joyous
endeavour to out-carol all the rest.  It is a chorus of praise such
as none other of earth's children have the voice or the heart to
utter.  As I listen, I am carried away by its glorious rapture; my
being melts in the tenderness of an impassioned joy; my eyes are dim
with I know not what profound humility.


XXII


Were one to look at the literary journals only, and thereafter judge
of the time, it would be easy to persuade oneself that civilization
had indeed made great and solid progress, and that the world stood
at a very hopeful stage of enlightenment.  Week after week, I glance
over these pages of crowded advertisement; I see a great many
publishing-houses zealously active in putting forth every kind of
book, new and old; I see names innumerable of workers in every
branch of literature.  Much that is announced declares itself at
once of merely ephemeral import, or even of no import at all; but
what masses of print which invite the attention of thoughtful or
studious folk!  To the multitude is offered a long succession of
classic authors, in beautiful form, at a minimum cost; never were
such treasures so cheaply and so gracefully set before all who can
prize them.  For the wealthy, there are volumes magnificent; lordly
editions; works of art whereon have been lavished care and skill and
expense incalculable.  Here is exhibited the learning of the whole
world and of all the ages; be a man's study what it will, in these
columns, at one time or another he shall find that which appeals to
him.  Here are labours of the erudite, exercised on every subject
that falls within learning's scope.  Science brings forth its newest
discoveries in earth and heaven; it speaks to the philosopher in his
solitude, and to the crowd in the market-place.  Curious pursuits of
the mind at leisure are represented in publications numberless;
trifles and oddities of intellectual savour; gatherings from every
byway of human interest.  For other moods there are the fabulists;
to tell truth, they commonly hold the place of honour in these
varied lists.  Who shall count them?  Who shall calculate their
readers?  Builders of verse are many; yet the observer will note
that contemporary poets have but an inconspicuous standing in this
index of the public taste.  Travel, on the other hand, is largely
represented; the general appetite for information about lands remote
would appear to be only less keen than for the adventures of
romance.

With these pages before one's eyes, must one not needs believe that
things of the mind are a prime concern of our day?  Who are the
purchasers of these volumes ever pouring from the press?  How is it
possible for so great a commerce to flourish save as a consequence
of national eagerness in this intellectual domain?  Surely one must
take for granted that throughout the land, in town and country,
private libraries are growing apace; that by the people at large a
great deal of time is devoted to reading; that literary ambition is
one of the commonest spurs to effort?

It is the truth.  All this may be said of contemporary England.  But
is it enough to set one's mind at ease regarding the outlook of our
civilization?

Two things must be remembered.  However considerable this literary
traffic, regarded by itself, it is relatively of small extent.  And,
in the second place, literary activity is by no means an invariable
proof of that mental attitude which marks the truly civilized man.

Lay aside the "literary organ," which appears once a week, and take
up the newspaper, which comes forth every day, morning and evening.
Here you get the true proportion of things.  Read your daily news-
sheet--that which costs threepence or that which costs a halfpenny--
and muse upon the impression it leaves.  It may be that a few books
are "noticed"; granting that the "notice" is in any way noticeable,
compare the space it occupies with that devoted to the material
interests of life:  you have a gauge of the real importance of
intellectual endeavour to the people at large.  No, the public which
reads, in any sense of the word worth considering, is very, very
small; the public which would feel no lack if all book-printing
ceased to-morrow, is enormous.  These announcements of learned works
which strike one as so encouraging, are addressed, as a matter of
fact, to a few thousand persons, scattered all over the English-
speaking world.  Many of the most valuable books slowly achieve the
sale of a few hundred copies.  Gather from all the ends of the
British Empire the men and women who purchase grave literature as a
matter of course, who habitually seek it in public libraries, in
short who regard it as a necessity of life, and I am much mistaken
if they could not comfortably assemble in the Albert Hall.

But even granting this, is it not an obvious fact that our age tends
to the civilized habit of mind, as displayed in a love for
intellectual things?  Was there ever a time which saw the literature
of knowledge and of the emotions so widely distributed?  Does not
the minority of the truly intelligent exercise a vast and profound
influence?  Does it not in truth lead the way, however slowly and
irregularly the multitude may follow?

I should like to believe it.  When gloomy evidence is thrust upon
me, I often say to myself:  Think of the frequency of the reasonable
man; think of him everywhere labouring to spread the light; how is
it possible that such efforts should be overborne by forces of blind
brutality, now that the human race has got so far?--Yes, yes; but
this mortal whom I caress as reasonable, as enlightened and
enlightening, this author, investigator, lecturer, or studious
gentleman, to whose coat-tails I cling, does he always represent
justice and peace, sweetness of manners, purity of life--all the
things which makes for true civilization?  Here is a fallacy of
bookish thought.  Experience offers proof on every hand that
vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which
the other is moral barbarism.  A man may be a fine archaeologist,
and yet have no sympathy with human ideals.  The historian, the
biographer, even the poet, may be a money-market gambler, a social
toady, a clamorous Chauvinist, or an unscrupulous wire-puller.  As
for "leaders of science," what optimist will dare to proclaim them
on the side of the gentle virtues?  And if one must needs think in
this way of those who stand forth, professed instructors and
inspirers, what of those who merely listen?  The reading-public--oh,
the reading-public!  Hardly will a prudent statistician venture to
declare that one in every score of those who actually read sterling
books do so with comprehension of their author.  These dainty series
of noble and delightful works, which have so seemingly wide an
acceptance, think you they vouch for true appreciation in all who
buy them?  Remember those who purchase to follow the fashion, to
impose upon their neighbour, or even to flatter themselves; think of
those who wish to make cheap presents, and those who are merely
pleased by the outer aspect of the volume.  Above all, bear in mind
that busy throng whose zeal is according neither to knowledge nor to
conviction, the host of the half-educated, characteristic and peril
of our time.  They, indeed, purchase and purchase largely.  Heaven
forbid that I should not recognize the few among them whose bent of
brain and of conscience justifies their fervour; to such--the ten in
ten thousand--be all aid and brotherly solace!  But the glib many,
the perky mispronouncers of titles and of authors' names, the
twanging murderers of rhythm, the maulers of the uncut edge at
sixpence extra, the ready-reckoners of bibliopolic discount--am I to
see in these a witness of my hope for the century to come?

I am told that their semi-education will be integrated.  We are in a
transition stage, between the bad old time when only a few had
academic privileges, and that happy future which will see all men
liberally instructed.  Unfortunately for this argument, education is
a thing of which only the few are capable; teach as you will, only a
small percentage will profit by your most zealous energy.  On an
ungenerous soil it is vain to look for rich crops.  Your average
mortal will be your average mortal still:  and if he grow conscious
of power, if he becomes vocal and self-assertive, if he get into his
hands all the material resources of the country, why, you have a
state of things such as at present looms menacingly before every
Englishman blessed--or cursed--with an unpopular spirit.


XXIII


Every morning when I awake, I thank heaven for silence.  This is my
orison.  I remember the London days when sleep was broken by clash
and clang, by roar and shriek, and when my first sense on returning
to consciousness was hatred of the life about me.  Noises of wood
and metal, clattering of wheels, banging of implements, jangling of
bells--all such things are bad enough, but worse still is the
clamorous human voice.  Nothing on earth is more irritating to me
than a bellow or scream of idiot mirth, nothing more hateful than a
shout or yell of brutal anger.  Were it possible, I would never
again hear the utterance of a human tongue, save from those few who
are dear to me.

Here, wake at what hour I may, early or late, I lie amid gracious
stillness.  Perchance a horse's hoof rings rhythmically upon the
road; perhaps a dog barks from a neighbour farm; it may be that
there comes the far, soft murmur of a train from the other side of
Exe; but these are almost the only sounds that could force
themselves upon my ear.  A voice, at any time of the day, is the
rarest thing.

But there is the rustle of branches in the morning breeze; there is
the music of a sunny shower against the window; there is the matin
song of birds.  Several times lately I have lain wakeful when there
sounded the first note of the earliest lark; it makes me almost glad
of my restless nights.  The only trouble that touches me in these
moments is the thought of my long life wasted amid the senseless
noises of man's world.  Year after year this spot has known the same
tranquillity; with ever so little of good fortune, with ever so
little wisdom, beyond what was granted me, I might have blessed my
manhood with calm, might have made for myself in later life a long
retrospect of bowered peace.  As it is, I enjoy with something of
sadness, remembering that this melodious silence is but the prelude
of that deeper stillness which waits to enfold us all.


XXIV


Morning after morning, of late, I have taken my walk in the same
direction, my purpose being to look at a plantation of young
larches.  There is no lovelier colour on earth than that in which
they are now clad; it seems to refresh as well as gladden my eyes,
and its influence sinks deep into my heart.  Too soon it will
change; already I think the first radiant verdure has begun to pass
into summer's soberness.  The larch has its moment of unmatched
beauty--and well for him whose chance permits him to enjoy it,
spring after spring.

Could anything be more wonderful than the fact that here am I, day
by day, not only at leisure to walk forth and gaze at the larches,
but blessed with the tranquillity of mind needful for such
enjoyment?  On any morning of spring sunshine, how many mortals find
themselves so much at peace that they are able to give themselves
wholly to delight in the glory of heaven and of earth?  Is it the
case with one man in every fifty thousand?  Consider what
extraordinary kindness of fate must tend upon one, that not a care,
not a preoccupation, should interfere with his contemplative thought
for five or six days successively!  So rooted in the human mind (and
so reasonably rooted) is the belief in an Envious Power, that I ask
myself whether I shall not have to pay, by some disaster, for this
period of sacred calm.  For a week or so I have been one of a small
number, chosen out of the whole human race by fate's supreme
benediction.  It may be that this comes to every one in turn; to
most, it can only be once in a lifetime, and so briefly.  That my
own lot seems so much better than that of ordinary men, sometimes
makes me fearful.


XXV


Walking in a favourite lane to-day, I found it covered with shed
blossoms of the hawthorn.  Creamy white, fragrant even in ruin, lay
scattered the glory of the May.  It told me that spring is over.

Have I enjoyed it as I should?  Since the day that brought me
freedom, four times have I seen the year's new birth, and always, as
the violet yielded to the rose, I have known a fear that I had not
sufficiently prized this boon of heaven whilst it was with me.  Many
hours I have spent shut up among my books, when I might have been in
the meadows.  Was the gain equivalent?  Doubtfully, diffidently, I
hearken what the mind can plead.

I recall my moments of delight, the recognition of each flower that
unfolded, the surprise of budding branches clothed in a night with
green.  The first snowy gleam upon the blackthorn did not escape me.
By its familiar bank, I watched for the earliest primrose, and in
its copse I found the anemone.  Meadows shining with buttercups,
hollows sunned with the marsh marigold held me long at gaze.  I saw
the sallow glistening with its cones of silvery fur, and splendid
with dust of gold.  These common things touch me with more of
admiration and of wonder each time I behold them.  They are once
more gone.  As I turn to summer, a misgiving mingles with my joy.



SUMMER



I


To-day, as I was reading in the garden, a waft of summer perfume--
some hidden link of association in what I read--I know not what it
may have been--took me back to schoolboy holidays; I recovered with
strange intensity that lightsome mood of long release from tasks, of
going away to the seaside, which is one of childhood's blessings.  I
was in the train; no rushing express, such as bears you great
distances; the sober train which goes to no place of importance,
which lets you see the white steam of the engine float and fall upon
a meadow ere you pass.  Thanks to a good and wise father, we
youngsters saw nothing of seaside places where crowds assemble; I am
speaking, too, of a time more than forty years ago, when it was
still possible to find on the coasts of northern England, east or
west, spots known only to those who loved the shore for its beauty
and its solitude.  At every station the train stopped; little
stations, decked with beds of flowers, smelling warm in the sunshine
where country-folk got in with baskets, and talked in an unfamiliar
dialect, an English which to us sounded almost like a foreign
tongue.  Then the first glimpse of the sea; the excitement of noting
whether tide was high or low--stretches of sand and weedy pools, or
halcyon wavelets frothing at their furthest reach, under the sea-
banks starred with convolvulus.  Of a sudden, OUR station!

Ah, that taste of the brine on a child's lips!  Nowadays, I can take
holiday when I will, and go whithersoever it pleases me; but that
salt kiss of the sea air I shall never know again.  My senses are
dulled; I cannot get so near to Nature; I have a sorry dread of her
clouds, her winds, and must walk with tedious circumspection where
once I ran and leapt exultingly.  Were it possible, but for one
half-hour, to plunge and bask in the sunny surf, to roll on the
silvery sand-hills, to leap from rock to rock on shining sea-ferns,
laughing if I slipped into the shallows among starfish and anemones!
I am much older in body than in mind; I can but look at what I once
enjoyed.


II


I have been spending a week in Somerset.  The right June weather put
me in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn
Sea.  I went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to
the shore of the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of
fifteen years ago, and too often losing myself in a contrast of the
man I was then and what I am now.  Beautiful beyond all words of
description that nook of oldest England; but that I feared the moist
and misty winter climate, I should have chosen some spot below the
Mendips for my home and resting-place.  Unspeakable the charm to my
ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet of those little towns,
lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by the fury of modern
life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were, by noble trees
and hedges overrun with flowers.  In all England there is no sweeter
and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy Thorn
at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place
than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells.  As I think of
the golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no
name takes hold upon me; my heart trembles with an indefinable
ecstasy.

There was a time of my life when I was consumed with a desire for
foreign travel; an impatience of everything familiar fretted me
through all the changing year.  If I had not at length found the
opportunity to escape, if I had not seen the landscapes for which my
soul longed, I think I must have moped to death.  Few men,
assuredly, have enjoyed such wanderings more than I, and few men
revive them in memory with a richer delight or deeper longing.  But-
-whatever temptation comes to me in mellow autumn, when I think of
the grape and of the olive--I do not believe I shall ever again
cross the sea.  What remains to me of life and of energy is far too
little for the enjoyment of all I know, and all I wish to know, of
this dear island.

As a child I used to sleep in a room hung round with prints after
English landscape painters--those steel engravings so common half a
century ago, which bore the legend, "From the picture in the Vernon
Gallery."  Far more than I knew at the time, these pictures
impressed me; I gazed and gazed at them, with that fixed attention
of a child which is half curiosity, half reverie, till every line of
them was fixed in my mind; at this moment I see the black-and-white
landscapes as if they were hanging on the wall before me, and I have
often thought that this early training of the imagination--for such
it was--has much to do with the passionate love of rural scenery
which lurked within me even when I did not recognize it, and which
now for many a year has been one of the emotions directing my life.
Perhaps, too, that early memory explains why I love a good black-
and-white print even more than a good painting.  And--to draw yet
another inference--here may be a reason for the fact that, through
my youth and early manhood, I found more pleasure in Nature as
represented by art than in Nature herself.  Even during that strange
time when hardships and passions held me captive far from any
glimpse of the flowering earth, I could be moved, and moved deeply,
by a picture of the simplest rustic scene.  At rare moments, when a
happy chance led me into the National Gallery, I used to stand long
before such pictures as "The Valley Farm," "The Cornfield,"
"Mousehold Heath."  In the murk confusion of my heart these visions
of the world of peace and beauty from which I was excluded--to
which, indeed, I hardly ever gave a thought--touched me to deep
emotion.  But it did not need--nor does it now--the magic of a
master to awake that mood in me.  Let me but come upon the poorest
little woodcut, the cheapest "process" illustration, representing a
thatched cottage, a lane, a field, and I hear that music begin to
murmur.  It is a passion--Heaven be thanked--that grows with my
advancing years.  The last thought of my brain as I lie dying will
be that of sunshine upon an English meadow.


III


Sitting in my garden amid the evening scent of roses, I have read
through Walton's Life of Hooker; could any place and time have been
more appropriate?  Almost within sight is the tower of Heavitree
church--Heavitree, which was Hooker's birthplace.  In other parts of
England he must often have thought of these meadows falling to the
green valley of the Exe, and of the sun setting behind the pines of
Haldon.  Hooker loved the country.  Delightful to me, and infinitely
touching, is that request of his to be transferred from London to a
rural living--"where I can see God's blessing spring out of the
earth."  And that glimpse of him where he was found tending sheep,
with a Horace in his hand.  It was in rural solitudes that he
conceived the rhythm of mighty prose.  What music of the spheres
sang to that poor, vixen-haunted, pimply-faced man!

The last few pages I read by the light of the full moon, that of
afterglow having till then sufficed me.  Oh, why has it not been
granted me in all my long years of pen-labour to write something
small and perfect, even as one of these lives of honest Izaak!  Here
is literature, look you--not "literary work."  Let me be thankful
that I have the mind to enjoy it; not only to understand, but to
savour, its great goodness.


IV


It is Sunday morning, and above earth's beauty shines the purest,
softest sky this summer has yet gladdened us withal.  My window is
thrown open; I see the sunny gleam upon garden leaves and flowers; I
hear the birds whose wont it is to sing to me; ever and anon the
martins that have their home beneath my eaves sweep past in silence.
Church bells have begun to chime; I know the music of their voices,
near and far.

There was a time when it delighted me to flash my satire on the
English Sunday; I could see nothing but antiquated foolishness and
modern hypocrisy in this weekly pause from labour and from bustle.
Now I prize it as an inestimable boon, and dread every encroachment
upon its restful stillness.  Scoff as I might at "Sabbatarianism,"
was I not always glad when Sunday came?  The bells of London
churches and chapels are not soothing to the ear, but when I
remember their sound--even that of the most aggressively pharisaic
conventicle, with its one dire clapper--I find it associated with a
sense of repose, of liberty.  This day of the seven I granted to my
better genius; work was put aside, and, when Heaven permitted,
trouble forgotten.

When out of England I have always missed this Sunday quietude, this
difference from ordinary days which seems to affect the very
atmosphere.  It is not enough that people should go to church, that
shops should be closed and workyards silent; these holiday notes do
not make a Sunday.  Think as one may of its significance, our Day of
Rest has a peculiar sanctity, felt, I imagine, in a more or less
vague way, even by those who wish to see the village lads at cricket
and theatres open in the town.  The idea is surely as good a one as
ever came to heavy-laden mortals; let one whole day in every week be
removed from the common life of the world, lifted above common
pleasures as above common cares.  With all the abuses of fanaticism,
this thought remained rich in blessings; Sunday has always brought
large good to the generality, and to a chosen number has been the
very life of the soul, however heretically some of them understood
the words.  If its ancient use perish from among us, so much the
worse for our country.  And perish no doubt it will; only here in
rustic solitude can one forget the changes that have already made
the day less sacred to multitudes.  With it will vanish that habit
of periodic calm, which, even when it has become so largely void of
conscious meaning, is, one may safely say, the best spiritual boon
ever bestowed upon a people.  The most difficult of all things to
attain, the most difficult of all to preserve, the supreme
benediction of the noblest mind, this calm was once breathed over
the whole land as often as sounded the last stroke of weekly toil;
on Saturday at even began the quiet and the solace.  With the
decline of old faith, Sunday cannot but lose its sanction, and no
loss among the innumerable that we are suffering will work so
effectually for popular vulgarization.  What hope is there of
guarding the moral beauty of the day when the authority which set it
apart is no longer recognized?--Imagine a bank-holiday once a week!


V


On Sunday I come down later than usual; I make a change of dress,
for it is fitting that the day of spiritual rest should lay aside
the livery of the laborious week.  For me, indeed, there is no
labour at any time, but nevertheless does Sunday bring me repose.  I
share in the common tranquillity; my thought escapes the workaday
world more completely than on other days.

It is not easy to see how this house of mine can make to itself a
Sunday quiet, for at all times it is well-nigh soundless; yet I find
a difference.  My housekeeper comes into the room with her Sunday
smile; she is happier for the day, and the sight of her happiness
gives me pleasure.  She speaks, if possible, in a softer voice; she
wears a garment which reminds me that there is only the lightest and
cleanest housework to be done.  She will go to church, morning and
evening, and I know that she is better for it.  During her absence I
sometimes look into rooms which on other days I never enter; it is
merely to gladden my eyes with the shining cleanliness, the perfect
order, I am sure to find in the good woman's domain.  But for that
spotless and sweet-smelling kitchen, what would it avail me to range
my books and hang my pictures?  All the tranquillity of my life
depends upon the honest care of this woman who lives and works
unseen.  And I am sure that the money I pay her is the least part of
her reward.  She is such an old-fashioned person that the mere
discharge of what she deems a duty is in itself an end to her, and
the work of her hands in itself a satisfaction, a pride.

When a child, I was permitted to handle on Sunday certain books
which could not be exposed to the more careless usage of common
days; volumes finely illustrated, or the more handsome editions of
familiar authors, or works which, merely by their bulk, demanded
special care.  Happily, these books were all of the higher rank in
literature, and so there came to be established in my mind an
association between the day of rest and names which are the greatest
in verse and prose.  Through my life this habit has remained with
me; I have always wished to spend some part of the Sunday quiet with
books which, at most times, it is fatally easy to leave aside, one's
very knowledge and love of them serving as an excuse for their
neglect in favour of print which has the attraction of newness.
Homer and Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare; not many Sundays have gone
by without my opening one or other of these.  Not many Sundays?
Nay, that is to exaggerate, as one has the habit of doing.  Let me
say rather that, on many a rest-day I have found mind and
opportunity for such reading.  Nowadays mind and opportunity fail me
never.  I may take down my Homer or my Shakespeare when I choose,
but it is still on Sunday that I feel it most becoming to seek the
privilege of their companionship.  For these great ones, crowned
with immortality, do not respond to him who approaches them as
though hurried by temporal care.  There befits the garment of solemn
leisure, the thought attuned to peace.  I open the volume somewhat
formally; is it not sacred, if the word have any meaning at all?
And, as I read, no interruption can befall me.  The note of a
linnet, the humming of a bee, these are the sounds about my
sanctuary.  The page scarce rustles as it turns.


VI


Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever
heard beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists
between the inmates?  Most men's experience would seem to justify
them in declaring that, throughout the inhabited world, no such
house exists.  I, knowing at all events of one, admit the
possibility that there may be more; yet I feel that it is to hazard
a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to any other instance,
nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has quitted the
world) could I have named a single example.

It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so
difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even
under the most favourable conditions, without some shadow of mutual
offence.  Consider the differences of task and of habit, the
conflict of prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is
probably the same thing), which quickly reveal themselves between
any two persons brought into more than casual contact, and think how
much self-subdual is implicit whenever, for more than an hour or
two, they co-exist in seeming harmony.  Man is not made for peaceful
intercourse with his fellows; he is by nature self-assertive,
commonly aggressive, always critical in a more or less hostile
spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to him.  That he is
capable of profound affections merely modifies here and there his
natural contentiousness, and subdues its expression.  Even love, in
the largest and purest sense of the word, is no safeguard against
perilous irritation and sensibilities inborn.  And what were the
durability of love without the powerful alliance of habit?

Suppose yourself endowed with such power of hearing that all the
talk going on at any moment beneath the domestic roofs of any town
became clearly audible to you; the dominant note would be that of
moods, tempers, opinions at jar.  Who but the most amiable dreamer
can doubt it?  This, mind you, is not the same thing as saying that
angry emotion is the ruling force in human life; the facts of our
civilization prove the contrary.  Just because, and only because,
the natural spirit of conflict finds such frequent scope, does human
society hold together, and, on the whole, present a pacific aspect.
In the course of ages (one would like to know how many) man has
attained a remarkable degree of self-control; dire experience has
forced upon him the necessity of compromise, and habit has inclined
him (the individual) to prefer a quiet, orderly life.  But by
instinct he is still a quarrelsome creature, and he gives vent to
the impulse as far as it is compatible with his reasoned interests--
often, to be sure, without regard for that limit.  The average man
or woman is always at open discord with some one; the great majority
could not live without oft-recurrent squabble.  Speak in confidence
with any one you like, and get him to tell you how many cases of
coldness, alienation, or downright enmity, between friends and
kinsfolk, his memory registers; the number will be considerable, and
what a vastly greater number of everyday "misunderstandings" may be
thence inferred!  Verbal contention is, of course, commoner among
the poor and the vulgar than in the class of well-bred people living
at their ease, but I doubt whether the lower ranks of society find
personal association much more difficult than the refined minority
above them.  High cultivation may help to self-command, but it
multiplies the chances of irritative contact.  In mansion, as in
hovel, the strain of life is perpetually felt--between the married,
between parents and children, between relatives of every degree,
between employers and employed.  They debate, they dispute, they
wrangle, they explode--then nerves are relieved, and they are ready
to begin over again.  Quit the home and quarrelling is less obvious,
but it goes on all about one.  What proportion of the letters
delivered any morning would be found to be written in displeasure,
in petulance, in wrath?  The postbag shrieks insults or bursts with
suppressed malice.  Is it not wonderful--nay, is it not the marvel
of marvels--that human life has reached such a high point of public
and private organization?

And gentle idealists utter their indignant wonder at the continuance
of war!  Why, it passes the wit of man to explain how it is that
nations are ever at peace!  For, if only by the rarest good fortune
do individuals associate harmoniously, there would seem to be much
less likelihood of mutual understanding and good-will between the
peoples of alien lands.  As a matter of fact, no two nations are
ever friendly, in the sense of truly liking each other; with the
reciprocal criticism of countries there always mingles a sentiment
of animosity.  The original meaning of hostis is merely stranger,
and a stranger who is likewise a foreigner will only by curious
exception fail to stir antipathy in the average human being.  Add to
this that a great number of persons in every country find their
delight and their business in exasperating international disrelish,
and with what vestige of common sense can one feel surprise that war
is ceaselessly talked of, often enough declared.  In days gone by,
distance and rarity of communication assured peace between many
realms.  Now that every country is in proximity to every other, what
need is there to elaborate explanations of the distrust, the fear,
the hatred, which are a perpetual theme of journalists and
statesmen?  By approximation, all countries have entered the sphere
of natural quarrel.  That they find plenty of things to quarrel
about is no cause for astonishment.  A hundred years hence there
will be some possibility of perceiving whether international
relations are likely to obey the law which has acted with such
beneficence in the life of each civilized people; whether this
country and that will be content to ease their tempers with
bloodless squabbling, subduing the more violent promptings for the
common good.  Yet I suspect that a century is a very short time to
allow for even justifiable surmise of such an outcome.  If by any
chance newspapers ceased to exist . . .

Talk of war, and one gets involved in such utopian musings!


VII


I have been reading one of those prognostic articles on
international politics which every now and then appear in the
reviews.  Why I should so waste my time it would be hard to say; I
suppose the fascination of disgust and fear gets the better of me in
a moment's idleness.  This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and
vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and
regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in
a certain order of mind.  His phrases about "dire calamity" and so
on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he
represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war
about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which
casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable."  Persistent
prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

But I will read no more such writing.  This resolution I make and
will keep.  Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the
calm of a whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it?  What
is it to me if nations fall a-slaughtering each other?  Let the
fools go to it!  Why should they not please themselves?  Peace,
after all, is the aspiration of the few; so it always; was, and ever
will be.  But have done with the nauseous cant about "dire
calamity."  The leaders and the multitude hold no such view; either
they see in war a direct and tangible profit, or they are driven to
it, with heads down, by the brute that is in them.  Let them rend
and be rent; let them paddle in blood and viscera till--if that
would ever happen--their stomachs turn.  Let them blast the
cornfield and the orchard, fire the home.  For all that, there will
yet be found some silent few, who go their way amid the still
meadows, who bend to the flower and watch the sunset; and these
alone are worth a thought.


VIII


In this hot weather I like to walk at times amid the full glow of
the sun.  Our island sun is never hot beyond endurance, and there is
a magnificence in the triumph of high summer which exalts one's
mind.  Among streets it is hard to bear, yet even there, for those
who have eyes to see it, the splendour of the sky lends beauty to
things in themselves mean or hideous.  I remember an August bank-
holiday, when, having for some reason to walk all across London, I
unexpectedly found myself enjoying the strange desertion of great
streets, and from that passed to surprise in the sense of something
beautiful, a charm in the vulgar vista, in the dull architecture,
which I had never known.  Deep and clear-marked shadows, such as one
only sees on a few days of summer, are in themselves very
impressive, and become more so when they fall upon highways devoid
of folk.  I remember observing, as something new, the shape of
familiar edifices, of spires, monuments.  And when at length I sat
down, somewhere on the Embankment, it was rather to gaze at leisure
than to rest, for I felt no weariness, and the sun, still pouring
upon me its noontide radiance, seemed to fill my veins with life.

That sense I shall never know again.  For me Nature has comforts,
raptures, but no more invigoration.  The sun keeps me alive, but
cannot, as in the old days, renew my being.  I would fain learn to
enjoy without reflecting.

My walk in the golden hours leads me to a great horse-chestnut,
whose root offers a convenient seat in the shadow of its foliage.
At that resting-place I have no wide view before me, but what I see
is enough--a corner of waste land, over-flowered with poppies and
charlock, on the edge of a field of corn.  The brilliant red and
yellow harmonize with the glory of the day.  Near by, too, is a
hedge covered with great white blooms of the bindweed.  My eyes do
not soon grow weary.

A little plant of which I am very fond is the rest-harrow.  When the
sun is hot upon it, the flower gives forth a strangely aromatic
scent, very delightful to me.  I know the cause of this peculiar
pleasure.  The rest-harrow sometimes grows in sandy ground above the
seashore.  In my childhood I have many a time lain in such a spot
under the glowing sky, and, though I scarce thought of it, perceived
the odour of the little rose-pink flower when it touched my face.
Now I have but to smell it, and those hours come back again.  I see
the shore of Cumberland, running north to St. Bee's Head; on the sea
horizon a faint shape which is the Isle of Man; inland, the
mountains, which for me at that time guarded a region of unknown
wonder.  Ah, how long ago!


IX


I read much less than I used to do; I think much more.  Yet what is
the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life?
Better, perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile
self in the activity of other minds.

This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my
acquaintance with several old ones which I had not opened for many a
year.  One or two have been books such as mature men rarely read at
all--books which it is one's habit to "take as read"; to presume
sufficiently known to speak of, but never to open.  Thus, one day my
hand fell upon the Anabasis, the little Oxford edition which I used
at school, with its boyish sign-manual on the fly-leaf, its blots
and underlinings and marginal scrawls.  To my shame I possess no
other edition; yet this is a book one would like to have in
beautiful form.  I opened it, I began to read--a ghost of boyhood
stirring in my heart--and from chapter to chapter was led on, until
after a few days I had read the whole.

I am glad this happened in the summer-time, I like to link childhood
with these latter days, and no better way could I have found than
this return to a school-book, which, even as a school-book, was my
great delight.

By some trick of memory I always associate school-boy work on the
classics with a sense of warm and sunny days; rain and gloom and a
chilly atmosphere must have been far the more frequent conditions,
but these things are forgotten.  My old Liddell and Scott still
serves me, and if, in opening it, I bend close enough to catch the
SCENT of the leaves, I am back again at that day of boyhood (noted
on the fly-leaf by the hand of one long dead) when the book was new
and I used it for the first time.  It was a day of summer, and
perhaps there fell upon the unfamiliar page, viewed with childish
tremor, half apprehension and half delight, a mellow sunshine, which
was to linger for ever in my mind.

But I am thinking of the Anabasis.  Were this the sole book existing
in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language
in order to read it.  The Anabasis is an admirable work of art,
unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour
and picturesqueness.  Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the
author's personality is ever before us.  Xenophon, with curiosity
and love of adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-
forgetful in the pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created the
historical romance.  What a world of wonders in this little book,
all aglow with ambitions and conflicts, with marvels of strange
lands; full of perils and rescues, fresh with the air of mountain
and of sea!  Think of it for a moment by the side of Caesar's
Commentaries; not to compare things incomparable, but in order to
appreciate the perfect art which shines through Xenophon's mastery
of language, his brevity achieving a result so different from that
of the like characteristic in the Roman writer.  Caesar's
conciseness comes of strength and pride; Xenophon's, of a vivid
imagination.  Many a single line of the Anabasis presents a picture
which deeply stirs the emotions.  A good instance occurs in the
fourth book, where a delightful passage of unsurpassable narrative
tells how the Greeks rewarded and dismissed a guide who had led them
through dangerous country.  The man himself was in peril of his
life; laden with valuable things which the soldiers had given him in
their gratitude, he turned to make his way through the hostile
region.  [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].  "When evening
came he took leave of us, and went his way by night."  To my mind,
words of wonderful suggestiveness.  You see the wild, eastern
landscape, upon which the sun has set.  There are the Hellenes, safe
for the moment on their long march, and there the mountain
tribesman, the serviceable barbarian, going away, alone, with his
tempting guerdon, into the hazards of the darkness.

Also in the fourth book, another picture moves one in another way.
Among the Carduchian Hills two men were seized, and information was
sought from them about the track to be followed.  "One of them would
say nothing, and kept silence in spite of every threat; so, in the
presence of his companion, he was slain.  Thereupon that other made
known the man's reason for refusing to point out the way; in the
direction the Greeks must take there dwelt a daughter of his, who
was married."

It would not be easy to express more pathos than is conveyed in
these few words.  Xenophon himself, one may be sure, did not feel it
quite as we do, but he preserved the incident for its own sake, and
there, in a line or two, shines something of human love and
sacrifice, significant for all time.


X


I sometimes think I will go and spend the sunny half of a
twelvemonth in wandering about the British Isles.  There is so much
of beauty and interest that I have not seen, and I grudge to close
my eyes on this beloved home of ours, leaving any corner of it
unvisited.  Often I wander in fancy over all the parts I know, and
grow restless with desire at familiar names which bring no picture
to memory.  My array of county guide-books (they have always been
irresistible to me on the stalls) sets me roaming; the only dull
pages in them are those that treat of manufacturing towns.  Yet I
shall never start on that pilgrimage.  I am too old, too fixed in
habits.  I dislike the railway; I dislike hotels.  I should grow
homesick for my library, my garden, the view from my windows.  And
then--I have such a fear of dying anywhere but under my own roof.

As a rule, it is better to re-visit only in imagination the places
which have greatly charmed us, or which, in the retrospect, seem to
have done so.  Seem to have charmed us, I say; for the memory we
form, after a certain lapse of time, of places where we lingered,
often bears but a faint resemblance to the impression received at
the time; what in truth may have been very moderate enjoyment, or
enjoyment greatly disturbed by inner or outer circumstances, shows
in the distance as a keen delight, or as deep, still happiness.  On
the other hand, if memory creates no illusion, and the name of a
certain place is associated with one of the golden moments of life,
it were rash to hope that another visit would repeat the experience
of a by-gone day.  For it was not merely the sights that one beheld
which were the cause of joy and peace; however lovely the spot,
however gracious the sky, these things external would not have
availed, but for contributory movements of mind and heart and blood,
the essentials of the man as then he was.

Whilst I was reading this afternoon my thoughts strayed, and I found
myself recalling a hillside in Suffolk, where, after a long walk I
rested drowsily one midsummer day twenty years ago.  A great longing
seized me; I was tempted to set off at once, and find again that
spot under the high elm trees, where, as I smoked a delicious pipe,
I heard about me the crack, crack, crack of broom-pods bursting in
the glorious heat of the noontide sun.  Had I acted upon the
impulse, what chance was there of my enjoying such another hour as
that which my memory cherished?  No, no; it is not the PLACE that I
remember; it is the time of life, the circumstances, the mood, which
at that moment fell so happily together.  Can I dream that a pipe
smoked on that same hillside, under the same glowing sky, would
taste as it then did, or bring me the same solace?  Would the turf
be so soft beneath me?  Would the great elm-branches temper so
delightfully the noontide rays beating upon them?  And, when the
hour of rest was over, should I spring to my feet as then I did,
eager to put forth my strength again?  No, no; what I remember is
just one moment of my earlier life, linked by accident with that
picture of the Suffolk landscape.  The place no longer exists; it
never existed save for me.  For it is the mind which creates the
world about us, and, even though we stand side by side in the same
meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart
will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.


XI


I awoke a little after four o'clock.  There was sunlight upon the
blind, that pure gold of the earliest beam which always makes me
think of Dante's angels.  I had slept unusually well, without a
dream, and felt the blessing of rest through all my frame; my head
was clear, my pulse beat temperately.  And, when I had lain thus for
a few minutes, asking myself what book I should reach from the shelf
that hangs near my pillow, there came upon me a desire to rise and
go forth into the early morning.  On the moment I bestirred myself.
The drawing up of the blind, the opening of the window, only
increased my zeal, and I was soon in the garden, then out in the
road, walking light-heartedly I cared not whither.

How long is it since I went forth at the hour of summer sunrise?  It
is one of the greatest pleasures, physical and mental, that any man
in moderate health can grant himself; yet hardly once in a year do
mood and circumstance combine to put it within one's reach.  The
habit of lying in bed hours after broad daylight is strange enough,
if one thinks of it; a habit entirely evil; one of the most foolish
changes made by modern system in the healthier life of the old time.
But that my energies are not equal to such great innovation, I would
begin going to bed at sunset and rising with the beam of day; ten to
one, it would vastly improve my health, and undoubtedly it would add
to the pleasures of my existence.

When travelling, I have now and then watched the sunrise, and always
with an exultation unlike anything produced in me by other aspects
of nature.  I remember daybreak on the Mediterranean; the shapes of
islands growing in hue after hue of tenderest light, until they
floated amid a sea of glory.  And among the mountains--that crowning
height, one moment a cold pallor, the next soft-glowing under the
touch of the rosy-fingered goddess.  These are the things I shall
never see again; things, indeed, so perfect in memory that I should
dread to blur them by a newer experience.  My senses are so much
duller; they do not show me what once they did.

How far away is that school-boy time, when I found a pleasure in
getting up and escaping from the dormitory whilst all the others
were still asleep.  My purpose was innocent enough; I got up early
only to do my lessons.  I can see the long school-room, lighted by
the early sun; I can smell the school-room odour--a blend of books
and slates and wall-maps and I know not what.  It was a mental
peculiarity of mine that at five o'clock in the morning I could
apply myself with gusto to mathematics, a subject loathsome to me at
any other time of the day.  Opening the book at some section which
was wont to scare me, I used to say to myself:  "Come now, I'm going
to tackle this this morning!  If other boys can understand it, why
shouldn't I?"  And in a measure I succeeded.  In a measure only;
there was always a limit at which my powers failed me, strive as I
would.

In my garret-days it was seldom that I rose early:  with the
exception of one year--or the greater part of a twelvemonth--during
which I was regularly up at half-past five for a special reason.  I
had undertaken to "coach" a man for the London matriculation; he was
in business, and the only time he could conveniently give to his
studies was before breakfast.  I, just then, had my lodgings near
Hampstead Road; my pupil lived at Knightsbridge; I engaged to be
with him every morning at half-past six, and the walk, at a brisk
pace, took me just about an hour.  At that time I saw no severity in
the arrangement, and I was delighted to earn the modest fee which
enabled me to write all day long without fear of hunger; but one
inconvenience attached to it.  I had no watch, and my only means of
knowing the time was to hear the striking of a clock in the
neighbourhood.  As a rule, I awoke just when I should have done; the
clock struck five, and up I sprang.  But occasionally--and this when
the mornings had grown dark--my punctual habit failed me; I would
hear the clock chime some fraction of the hour, and could not know
whether I had awoke too soon or slept too long.  The horror of
unpunctuality, which has always been a craze with me, made it
impossible to lie waiting; more than once I dressed and went out
into the street to discover as best I could what time it was, and
one such expedition, I well remember, took place between two and
three o'clock on a morning of foggy rain.

It happened now and then that, on reaching the house at
Knightsbridge, I was informed that Mr.--felt too tired to rise.
This concerned me little, for it meant no deduction of fee; I had
the two hours' walk, and was all the better for it.  Then the
appetite with which I sat down to breakfast, whether I had done my
coaching or not!  Bread and butter and coffee--such coffee!--made
the meal, and I ate like a navvy.  I was in magnificent spirits.
All the way home I had been thinking of my day's work, and the
morning brain, clarified and whipped to vigour by that brisk
exercise, by that wholesome hunger, wrought its best.  The last
mouthful swallowed, I was seated at my writing-table; aye, and there
I sat for seven or eight hours, with a short munching interval,
working as only few men worked in all London, with pleasure, zeal,
hope. . . .

Yes, yes, those were the good days.  They did not last long; before
and after them were cares, miseries, endurance multiform.  I have
always felt grateful to Mr.--of Knightsbridge; he gave me a year of
health, and almost of peace.


XII


A whole day's walk yesterday with no plan; just a long ramble of
hour after hour, entirely enjoyable.  It ended at Topsham, where I
sat on the little churchyard terrace, and watched the evening tide
come up the broad estuary.  I have a great liking for Topsham, and
that churchyard, overlooking what is not quite sea, yet more than
river, is one of the most restful spots I know.  Of course the
association with old Chaucer, who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps
my mood.  I came home very tired; but I am not yet decrepit, and for
that I must be thankful.

The unspeakable blessedness of having a HOME!  Much as my
imagination has dwelt upon it for thirty years, I never knew how
deep and exquisite a joy could lie in the assurance that one is AT
HOME for ever.  Again and again I come back upon this thought;
nothing but Death can oust me from my abiding place.  And Death I
would fain learn to regard as a friend, who will but intensify the
peace I now relish.

When one is at home, how one's affections grow about everything in
the neighbourhood!  I always thought with fondness of this corner of
Devon, but what was that compared with the love which now
strengthens in me day by day!  Beginning with my house, every stick
and stone of it is dear to me as my heart's blood; I find myself
laying an affectionate hand on the door-post, giving a pat, as I go
by, to the garden gate.  Every tree and shrub in the garden is my
beloved friend; I touch them, when need is, very tenderly, as though
carelessness might pain, or roughness injure them.  If I pull up a
weed in the walk, I look at it with a certain sadness before
throwing it away; it belongs to my home.

And all the country round about.  These villages, how delightful are
their names to my ear!  I find myself reading with interest all the
local news in the Exeter paper.  Not that I care about the people;
with barely one or two exceptions, the people are nothing to me, and
the less I see of them the better I am pleased.  But the PLACES grow
ever more dear to me.  I like to know of anything that has happened
at Heavitree, or Brampford Speke, or Newton St. Cyres.  I begin to
pride myself on knowing every road and lane, every bridle path and
foot-way for miles about.  I like to learn the names of farms and of
fields.  And all this because here is my abiding place, because I am
home for ever.

It seems to me that the very clouds that pass above my house are
more interesting and beautiful than clouds elsewhere.

And to think that at one time I called myself a socialist,
communist, anything you like of the revolutionary kind!  Not for
long, to be sure, and I suspect that there was always something in
me that scoffed when my lips uttered such things.  Why, no man
living has a more profound sense of property than I; no man ever
lived, who was, in every fibre, more vehemently an individualist.


XIII


In this high summertide, I remember with a strange feeling that
there are people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in
cities, who throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in
public eating-houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre.  They call
it life; they call it enjoyment.  Why, so it is, for them; they are
so made.  The folly is mine, to wonder that they fulfil their
destiny.

But with what deep and quiet thanksgiving do I remind myself that
never shall I mingle with that well-millinered and tailored herd!
Happily, I never saw much of them.  Certain occasions I recall when
a supposed necessity took me into their dismal precincts; a sick
buzzing in the brain, a languor as of exhausted limbs, comes upon me
with the memory.  The relief with which I stepped out into the
street again, when all was over!  Dear to me then was poverty, which
for the moment seemed to make me a free man.  Dear to me was the
labour at my desk, which, by comparison, enabled me to respect
myself.

Never again shall I shake hands with man or woman who is not in
truth my friend.  Never again shall I go to see acquaintances with
whom I have no acquaintance.  All men my brothers?  Nay, thank
Heaven, that they are not!  I will do harm, if I can help it, to no
one; I will wish good to all; but I will make no pretence of
personal kindliness where, in the nature of things, it cannot be
felt.  I have grimaced a smile and pattered unmeaning words to many
a person whom I despised or from whom in heart I shrank; I did so
because I had not courage to do otherwise.  For a man conscious of
such weakness, the best is to live apart from the world.  Brave
Samuel Johnson!  One such truth-teller is worth all the moralists
and preachers who ever laboured to humanise mankind.  Had HE
withdrawn into solitude, it would have been a national loss.  Every
one of his blunt, fearless words had more value than a whole evangel
on the lips of a timidly good man.  It is thus that the commonalty,
however well clad, should be treated.  So seldom does the fool or
the ruffian in broadcloth hear his just designation; so seldom is
the man found who has a right to address him by it.  By the bandying
of insults we profit nothing; there can be no useful rebuke which is
exposed to a tu quoque.  But, as the world is, an honest and wise
man should have a rough tongue.  Let him speak and spare not!


XIV


Vituperation of the English climate is foolish.  A better climate
does not exist--for healthy people; and it is always as regards the
average native in sound health that a climate must be judged.
Invalids have no right whatever to talk petulantly of the natural
changes of the sky; Nature has not THEM in view; let them (if they
can) seek exceptional conditions for their exceptional state,
leaving behind them many a million of sound, hearty men and women
who take the seasons as they come, and profit by each in turn.  In
its freedom from extremes, in its common clemency, even in its
caprice, which at the worst time holds out hope, our island weather
compares well with that of other lands.  Who enjoys the fine day of
spring, summer, autumn, or winter so much as an Englishman?  His
perpetual talk of the weather is testimony to his keen relish for
most of what it offers him; in lands of blue monotony, even as where
climatic conditions are plainly evil, such talk does not go on.  So,
granting that we have bad days not a few, that the east wind takes
us by the throat, that the mists get at our joints, that the sun
hides his glory too often and too long, it is plain that the result
of all comes to good, that it engenders a mood of zest under the
most various aspects of heaven, keeps an edge on our appetite for
open-air life.

I, of course, am one of the weaklings who, in grumbling at the
weather, merely invite compassion.  July, this year, is clouded and
windy, very cheerless even here in Devon; I fret and shiver and
mutter to myself something about southern skies.  Pshaw!  Were I the
average man of my years, I should be striding over Haldon, caring
not a jot for the heavy sky, finding a score of compensations for
the lack of sun.  Can I not have patience?  Do I not know that, some
morning, the east will open like a bursting bud into warmth and
splendour, and the azure depths above will have only the more solace
for my starved anatomy because of this protracted disappointment?


XV


I have been at the seaside--enjoying it, yes, but in what a
doddering, senile sort of way!  Is it I who used to drink the strong
wind like wine, who ran exultingly along the wet sands and leapt
from rock to rock, barefoot, on the slippery seaweed, who breasted
the swelling breaker, and shouted with joy as it buried me in
gleaming foam?  At the seaside I knew no such thing as bad weather;
there were but changes of eager mood and full-blooded life.  Now, if
the breeze blow too roughly, if there come a pelting shower, I must
look for shelter, and sit with my cloak about me.  It is but a new
reminder that I do best to stay at home, travelling only in
reminiscence.

At Weymouth I enjoyed a hearty laugh, one of the good things not
easy to get after middle age.  There was a notice of steamboats
which ply along the coast, steamboats recommended to the public as
being "REPLETE WITH LAVATORIES AND A LADIES' SALOON."  Think how
many people read this without a chuckle!


XVI


In the last ten years I have seen a good deal of English inns in
many parts of the country, and it astonishes me to find how bad they
are.  Only once or twice have I chanced upon an inn (or, if you
like, hotel) where I enjoyed any sort of comfort.  More often than
not, even the beds are unsatisfactory--either pretentiously huge and
choked with drapery, or hard and thinly accoutred.  Furnishing is
uniformly hideous, and there is either no attempt at ornament (the
safest thing) or a villainous taste thrusts itself upon one at every
turn.  The meals, in general, are coarse and poor in quality, and
served with gross slovenliness.

I have often heard it said that the touring cyclist has caused the
revival of wayside inns.  It may be so, but the touring cyclist
seems to be very easily satisfied.  Unless we are greatly deceived
by the old writers, an English inn used to be a delightful resort,
abounding in comfort, and supplied with the best of food; a place,
too, where one was sure of welcome at once hearty and courteous.
The inns of to-day, in country towns and villages, are not in that
good old sense inns at all; they are merely public-houses.  The
landlord's chief interest is the sale of liquor.  Under his roof you
may, if you choose, eat and sleep, but what you are expected to do
is to drink.  Yet, even for drinking, there is no decent
accommodation.  You will find what is called a bar-parlour, a stuffy
and dirty room, with crazy chairs, where only the sodden dram-gulper
could imagine himself at ease.  Should you wish to write a letter,
only the worst pen and the vilest ink is forthcoming; this, even in
the "commercial room" of many an inn which seems to depend upon the
custom of travelling tradesmen.  Indeed, this whole business of
innkeeping is incredibly mismanaged.  Most of all does the common
ineptitude or brutality enrage one when it has possession of an old
and picturesque house, such as reminds you of the best tradition, a
house which might be made as comfortable as house can be, a place of
rest and mirth.

At a public-house you expect public-house manners, and nothing
better will meet you at most of the so-called inns or hotels.  It
surprises me to think in how few instances I have found even the
pretence of civility.  As a rule, the landlord and landlady are
either contemptuously superior or boorishly familiar; the waiters
and chambermaids do their work with an indifference which only
softens to a condescending interest at the moment of your departure,
when, if the tip be thought insufficient, a sneer or a muttered
insult speeds you on your way.  One inn I remember, where, having to
go in and out two or three times in a morning, I always found the
front door blocked by the portly forms of two women, the landlady
and the barmaid, who stood there chatting and surveying the street.
Coming from within the house, I had to call out a request for
passage; it was granted with all deliberation, and with not a
syllable of apology.  This was the best "hotel" in a Sussex market
town.

And the food.  Here, beyond doubt, there is grave degeneracy.  It is
impossible to suppose that the old travellers by coach were
contented with entertainment such as one gets nowadays at the table
of a country hotel.  The cooking is wont to be wretched; the quality
of the meat and vegetables worse than mediocre.  What!  Shall one
ask in vain at an English inn for an honest chop or steak?  Again
and again has my appetite been frustrated with an offer of mere
sinew and scrag.  At a hotel where the charge for lunch was five
shillings, I have been sickened with pulpy potatoes and stringy
cabbage.  The very joint--ribs or sirloin, leg or shoulder--is
commonly a poor, underfed, sapless thing, scorched in an oven; and
as for the round of beef, it has as good as disappeared--probably
because it asks too much skill in the salting.  Then again one's
breakfast bacon; what intolerable stuff, smelling of saltpetre, has
been set before me when I paid the price of the best smoked
Wiltshire!  It would be mere indulgence of the spirit of grumbling
to talk about poisonous tea and washy coffee; every one knows that
these drinks cannot be had at public tables; but what if there be
real reason for discontent with one's pint of ale?  Often, still,
that draught from the local brewery is sound and invigorating, but
there are grievous exceptions, and no doubt the tendency is here, as
in other things--a falling off, a carelessness, if not a calculating
dishonesty.  I foresee the day when Englishmen will have forgotten
how to brew beer; when one's only safety will lie in the draught
imported from Munich.


XVII


I was taking a meal once at a London restaurant--not one of the
great eating-places to which men most resort, but a small
establishment on the same model in a quiet neighbourhood--when there
entered, and sat down at the next table, a young man of the working
class, whose dress betokened holiday.  A glance told me that he felt
anything but at ease; his mind misgave him as he looked about the
long room and at the table before him; and when a waiter came to
offer him the card, he stared blankly in sheepish confusion.  Some
strange windfall, no doubt, had emboldened him to enter for the
first time such a place as this, and now that he was here, he
heartily wished himself out in the street again.  However, aided by
the waiter's suggestions, he gave an order for a beef-steak and
vegetables.  When the dish was served, the poor fellow simply could
not make a start upon it; he was embarrassed by the display of
knives and forks, by the arrangement of the dishes, by the sauce
bottles and the cruet-stand, above all, no doubt, by the assembly of
people not of his class, and the unwonted experience of being waited
upon by a man with a long shirt-front.  He grew red; he made the
clumsiest and most futile efforts to transport the meat to his
plate; food was there before him, but, like a very Tantalus, he was
forbidden to enjoy it.  Observing with all discretion, I at length
saw him pull out his pocket handkerchief, spread it on the table,
and, with a sudden effort, fork the meat off the dish into this
receptacle.  The waiter, aware by this time of the customer's
difficulty, came up and spoke a word to him.  Abashed into anger,
the young man roughly asked what he had to pay.  It ended in the
waiter's bringing a newspaper, wherein he helped to wrap up meat and
vegetables.  Money was flung down, and the victim of a mistaken
ambition hurriedly departed, to satisfy his hunger amid less
unfamiliar surroundings.

It was a striking and unpleasant illustration of social differences.
Could such a thing happen in any country but England?  I doubt it.
The sufferer was of decent appearance, and, with ordinary self-
command, might have taken his meal in the restaurant like any one
else, quite unnoticed.  But he belonged to a class which, among all
classes in the world, is distinguished by native clownishness and by
unpliability to novel circumstance.  The English lower ranks had
need be marked by certain peculiar virtues to atone for their
deficiencies in other respects.


XVIII


It is easy to understand that common judgment of foreigners
regarding the English people.  Go about in England as a stranger,
travel by rail, live at hotels, see nothing but the broadly public
aspect of things, and the impression left upon you will be one of
hard egoism, of gruffness and sullenness; in a word, of everything
that contrasts most strongly with the ideal of social and civic
life.  And yet, as a matter of fact, no nation possesses in so high
a degree the social and civic virtues.  The unsociable Englishman,
quotha?  Why, what country in the world can show such multifarious,
vigorous and cordial co-operation, in all ranks, but especially, of
course, among the intelligent, for ends which concern the common
good?  Unsociable!  Why, go where you will in England you can hardly
find a man--nowadays, indeed, scarce an educated woman--who does not
belong to some alliance, for study or sport, for municipal or
national benefit, and who will not be seen, in leisure time, doing
his best as a social being.  Take the so-called sleepy market-town;
it is bubbling with all manner of associated activities, and these
of the quite voluntary kind, forms of zealously united effort such
as are never dreamt of in the countries supposed to be eminently
"social."  Sociability does not consist in a readiness to talk at
large with the first comer.  It is not dependent upon natural grace
and suavity; it is compatible, indeed, with thoroughly awkward and
all but brutal manners.  The English have never (at all events, for
some two centuries past) inclined to the purely ceremonial or
mirthful forms of sociability; but as regards every prime interest
of the community--health and comfort, well-being of body and of
soul--their social instinct is supreme.

Yet it is so difficult to reconcile this indisputable fact with that
other fact, no less obvious, that your common Englishman seems to
have no geniality.  From the one point of view, I admire and laud my
fellow countryman; from the other, I heartily dislike him and wish
to see as little of him as possible.  One is wont to think of the
English as a genial folk.  Have they lost in this respect?  Has the
century of science and money-making sensibly affected the national
character?  I think always of my experience at the English inn,
where it is impossible not to feel a brutal indifference to the
humane features of life; where food is bolted without attention,
liquor swallowed out of mere habit, where even good-natured accost
is a thing so rare as to be remarkable.

Two things have to be borne in mind:  the extraordinary difference
of demeanour which exists between the refined and the vulgar
English, and the natural difficulty of an Englishman in revealing
his true self save under the most favourable circumstances.

So striking is the difference of manner between class and class that
the hasty observer might well imagine a corresponding and radical
difference of mind and character.  In Russia, I suppose, the social
extremities are seen to be pretty far apart, but, with that possible
exception, I should think no European country can show such a gap as
yawns to the eye between the English gentleman and the English boor.
The boor, of course, is the multitude; the boor impresses himself
upon the traveller.  When relieved from his presence, one can be
just to him; one can remember that his virtues--though elementary,
and strictly in need of direction--are the same, to a great extent,
as those of the well-bred man.  He does not represent--though
seeming to do so--a nation apart.  To understand this multitude, you
must get below its insufferable manners, and learn that very fine
civic qualities can consist with a personal bearing almost wholly
repellent.

Then, as to the dogged reserve of the educated man, why, I have only
to look into myself.  I, it is true, am not quite a representative
Englishman; my self-consciousness, my meditative habit of mind,
rather dim my national and social characteristics; but set me among
a few specimens of the multitude, and am I not at once aware of that
instinctive antipathy, that shrinking into myself, that something
like unto scorn, of which the Englishman is accused by foreigners
who casually meet him?  Peculiar to me is the effort to overcome
this first impulse--an effort which often enough succeeds.  If I
know myself at all, I am not an ungenial man; and yet I am quite
sure that many people who have known me casually would say that my
fault is a lack of geniality.  To show my true self, I must be in
the right mood and the right circumstances--which, after all, is
merely as much as saying that I am decidedly English.


XIX


On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey.  Not the manufactured
stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought
to me by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden.
It gives, I confess, more pleasure to my eye than to my palate; but
I like to taste of it, because it is honey.

There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an
unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it
was no extravagance.  Think merely how one's view of common things
is affected by literary association.  What were honey to me if I
knew nothing of Hymettus and Hybla?--if my mind had no stores of
poetry, no memories of romance?  Suppose me town-pent, the name
might bring with it some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what
poor significance even that, if the country were to me mere grass
and corn and vegetables, as to the man who has never read nor wished
to read.  For the Poet is indeed a Maker:  above the world of sense,
trodden by hidebound humanity, he builds that world of his own
whereto is summoned the unfettered spirit.  Why does it delight me
to see the bat flitting at dusk before my window, or to hear the
hoot of the owl when all the ways are dark?  I might regard the bat
with disgust, and the owl either with vague superstition or not heed
it at all.  But these have their place in the poet's world, and
carry me above this idle present.

I once passed a night in a little market-town where I had arrived
tired and went to bed early.  I slept forthwith, but was presently
awakened by I knew not what; in the darkness there sounded a sort of
music, and, as my brain cleared, I was aware of the soft chiming of
church bells.  Why, what hour could it be?  I struck a light and
looked at my watch.  Midnight.  Then a glow came over me.  "We have
heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow!"  Never till then had
I heard them.  And the town in which I slept was Evesham, but a few
miles from Stratford-on-Avon.  What if those midnight bells had been
to me but as any other, and I had reviled them for breaking my
sleep?--Johnson did not much exaggerate.


XX


It is the second Jubilee.  Bonfires blaze upon the hills, making one
think of the watchman on Agamemnon's citadel.  (It were more germane
to the matter to think of Queen Elizabeth and the Armada.)  Though
wishing the uproar happily over, I can see the good in it as well as
another man.  English monarchy, as we know it, is a triumph of
English common sense.  Grant that men cannot do without an overlord;
how to make that over-lordship consist with the largest practical
measure of national and individual liberty?  We, at all events, have
for a time solved the question.  For a time only, of course; but
consider the history of Europe, and our jubilation is perhaps
justified.

For sixty years has the British Republic held on its way under one
President.  It is wide of the mark to object that other Republics,
which change their President more frequently, support the semblance
of over-lordship at considerably less cost to the people.  Britons
are minded for the present that the Head of their State shall be
called King or Queen; the name is pleasant to them; it corresponds
to a popular sentiment, vaguely understood, but still operative,
which is called loyalty.  The majority thinking thus, and the system
being found to work more than tolerably well, what purpose could be
served by an attempt at novas res?  The nation is content to pay the
price; it is the nation's affair.  Moreover, who can feel the least
assurance that a change to one of the common forms of Republicanism
would be for the general advantage?  Do we find that countries which
have made the experiment are so very much better off than our own in
point of stable, quiet government and of national welfare?  The
theorist scoffs at forms which have survived their meaning, at
privilege which will bear no examination, at compromises which sound
ludicrous, at submissions which seem contemptible; but let him put
forward his practical scheme for making all men rational,
consistent, just.  Englishmen, I imagine, are not endowed with these
qualities in any extraordinary degree.  Their strength, politically
speaking, lies in a recognition of expediency, complemented by
respect for the established fact.  One of the facts particularly
clear to them is the suitability to their minds, their tempers,
their habits, of a system of polity which has been established by
the slow effort of generations within this sea-girt realm.  They
have nothing to do with ideals:  they never trouble themselves to
think about the Rights of Man.  If you talk to them (long enough)
about the rights of the shopman, or the ploughman, or the cat's-
meat-man, they will lend ear, and, when the facts of any such case
have been examined, they will find a way of dealing with them.  This
characteristic of theirs they call Common Sense.  To them, all
things considered, it has been of vast service; one may even say
that the rest of the world has profited by it not a little.  That
Uncommon Sense might now and then have stood them even in better
stead is nothing to the point.  The Englishman deals with things as
they are, and first and foremost accepts his own being.

This Jubilee declares a legitimate triumph of the average man.  Look
back for threescore years, and who shall affect to doubt that the
time has been marked by many improvements in the material life of
the English people?  Often have they been at loggerheads among
themselves, but they have never flown at each other's throats, and
from every grave dispute has resulted some substantial gain.  They
are a cleaner people and a more sober; in every class there is a
diminution of brutality; education--stand for what it may--has
notably extended; certain forms of tyranny have been abolished;
certain forms of suffering, due to heedlessness or ignorance, have
been abated.  True, these are mere details; whether they indicate a
solid advance in civilization cannot yet be determined.  But
assuredly the average Briton has cause to jubilate; for the
progressive features of the epoch are such as he can understand and
approve, whereas the doubt which may be cast upon its ethical
complexion is for him either non-existent or unintelligible.  So let
cressets flare into the night from all the hills!  It is no
purchased exultation, no servile flattery.  The People acclaims
itself, yet not without genuine gratitude and affection towards the
Representative of its glory and its power.  The Constitutional
Compact has been well preserved.  Review the record of kingdoms, and
say how often it has come to pass that sovereign and people rejoiced
together over bloodless victories.


XXI


At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their
breakfast on the question of diet.  They agreed that most people ate
too much meat, and one of them went so far as to declare that, for
his part, he rather preferred vegetables and fruit.  "Why," he said,
"will you believe me that I sometimes make a breakfast of apples?"
This announcement was received in silence; evidently the two
listeners didn't quite know what to think of it.  Thereupon the
speaker, in rather a blustering tone, cried out, "Yes, I can make a
very good breakfast on TWO OR THREE POUNDS OF APPLES."

Wasn't it amusing?  And wasn't it characteristic?  This honest
Briton had gone too far in frankness.  'Tis all very well to like
vegetables and fruits up to a certain point; but to breakfast on
apples!  His companions' silence proved that they were just a little
ashamed of him; his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to
right himself in their opinion, nothing better occurred to the man
than to protest that he ate apples, yes, but not merely one or two;
he ate them largely, BY THE POUND!  I laughed at the fellow, but I
thoroughly understood him; so would every Englishman; for at the
root of our being is a hatred of parsimony.  This manifests itself
in all sorts of ludicrous or contemptible forms, but no less is it
the source of our finest qualities.  An Englishman desires, above
all, to live largely; on that account he not only dreads, but hates
and despises, poverty.  His virtues are those of the free-handed and
warm-hearted opulent man; his weaknesses come of the sense of
inferiority (intensely painful and humiliating) which attaches in
his mind to one who cannot spend and give; his vices, for the most
part, originate in loss of self-respect due to loss of secure
position.


XXII


For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is
fraught with peculiar dangers.  Profoundly aristocratic in his
sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class
not merely a social, but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood
was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues
which made his ideal of the worthy life.  Very significant is the
cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free,
proud homage on one side answering to gallant championship on the
other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty.
However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance
of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly made; this was
the Englishman's religion, his inborn pietas; in the depths of the
dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to
lordship.  Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent
with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth
in act.  A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a person
existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as
though he were the victim of some freak of nature.  The Lord was
Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually
constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.

In a new world, beyond the ocean, there grew up a new race, a scion
of England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of
hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant Republic
began to shake the ideals of the Motherland.  Its civilization,
spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will
think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown
in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when
emancipated from the old cult.  Easy to understand that some there
are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast
commonwealth.  If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet
demonstrable.  In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our
traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems
hitherto a mere track of ruin.  In the very word is something from
which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national
apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory.  The
democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous
case; he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal,
domineering instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to
noble things, he has set up the mere Plebs, born, more likely than
not, for all manner of baseness.  And, amid all his show of loud
self-confidence, the man is haunted with misgiving.

The task before us is no light one.  Can we, whilst losing the
class, retain the idea it embodied?  Can we English, ever so subject
to the material, liberate ourselves from that old association, yet
guard its meaning in the sphere of spiritual life?  Can we, with
eyes which have ceased to look reverently on worn-out symbols, learn
to select from among the grey-coated multitude, and place in
reverence even higher him who "holds his patent of nobility straight
from Almighty God"?  Upon that depends the future of England.  In
days gone by, our very Snob bore testimony after his fashion to our
scorn of meanness; he at all events imagined himself to be imitating
those who were incapable of a sordid transaction, of a plebeian
compliance.  But the Snob, one notes, is in the way of degeneracy;
he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language.  Him, be sure, in
one form or another, we shall have always with us, and to observe
his habits is to note the tenor of the time.  If he have at the back
of his dim mind no living ideal which lends his foolishness a
generous significance, then indeed--videant consules.


XXIII


A visit from N-.  He stayed with me two days, and I wish he could
have stayed a third.  (Beyond the third day, I am not sure that any
man would be wholly welcome.  My strength will bear but a certain
amount of conversation, even the pleasantest, and before long I
desire solitude, which is rest.)

The mere sight of N-, to say nothing of his talk, did me good.  If
appearances can ever be trusted, there are few men who get more
enjoyment out of life.  His hardships were never excessive; they did
not affect his health or touch his spirits; probably he is in every
way a better man for having--as he says--"gone through the mill."
His recollection of the time when he had to work hard for a five-
pound note, and was not always sure of getting it, obviously lends
gusto to his present state of ease.  I persuaded him to talk about
his successes, and to give me a glimpse of their meaning in solid
cash.  Last Midsummer day, his receipts for the twelvemonth were
more than two thousand pounds.  Nothing wonderful, of course,
bearing in mind what some men are making by their pen; but very good
for a writer who does not address the baser throng.  Two thousand
pounds in a year!  I gazed at him with wonder and admiration.

I have known very few prosperous men of letters; N- represents for
me the best and brightest side of literary success.  Say what one
will after a lifetime of disillusion, the author who earns largely
by honest and capable work is among the few enviable mortals.  Think
of N-'s existence.  No other man could do what he is doing, and he
does it with ease.  Two, or at most three, hours' work a day--and
that by no means every day--suffices to him.  Like all who write, he
has his unfruitful times, his mental worries, his disappointments,
but these bear no proportion to the hours of happy and effective
labour.  Every time I see him he looks in better health, for of late
years he has taken much more exercise, and he is often travelling.
He is happy in his wife and children; the thought of all the
comforts and pleasures he is able to give them must be a constant
joy to him; were he to die, his family is safe from want.  He has
friends and acquaintances as many as he desires; congenial folk
gather at his table; he is welcome in pleasant houses near and far;
his praise is upon the lips of all whose praise is worth having.
With all this, he has the good sense to avoid manifest dangers; he
has not abandoned his privacy, and he seems to be in no danger of
being spoilt by good fortune.  His work is more to him than a means
of earning money; he talks about a book he has in hand almost as
freshly and keenly as in the old days, when his annual income was
barely a couple of hundred.  I note, too, that his leisure is not
swamped with the publications of the day; he reads as many old books
as new, and keeps many of his early enthusiasms.

He is one of the men I heartily like.  That he greatly cares for me
I do not suppose, but this has nothing to do with the matter; enough
that he likes my society well enough to make a special journey down
into Devon.  I represent to him, of course, the days gone by, and
for their sake he will always feel an interest in me.  Being ten
years my junior, he must naturally regard me as an old buffer; I
notice, indeed, that he is just a little too deferential at moments.
He feels a certain respect for some of my work, but thinks, I am
sure, that I ceased writing none too soon--which is very true.  If I
had not been such a lucky fellow--if at this moment I were still
toiling for bread--it is probable that he and I would see each other
very seldom; for N- has delicacy, and would shrink from bringing his
high-spirited affluence face to face with Grub Street squalor and
gloom; whilst I, on the other hand, should hate to think that he
kept up my acquaintance from a sense of decency.  As it is we are
very good friends, quite unembarrassed, and--for a couple of days--
really enjoy the sight and hearing of each other.  That I am able to
give him a comfortable bedroom, and set before him an eatable
dinner, flatters my pride.  If I chose at any time to accept his
hearty invitation, I can do so without moral twinges.

Two thousand pounds!  If, at N-'s age, I had achieved that income,
what would have been the result upon me?  Nothing but good, I know;
but what form would the good have taken?  Should I have become a
social man, a giver of dinners, a member of clubs?  Or should I
merely have begun, ten years sooner, the life I am living now?  That
is more likely.

In my twenties I used to say to myself:  what a splendid thing it
will be WHEN I am the possessor of a thousand pounds!  Well, I have
never possessed that sum--never anything like it--and now never
shall.  Yet it was not an extravagant ambition, methinks, however
primitive.

As we sat in the garden dusk, the scent of our pipes mingling with
that of roses, N- said to me in a laughing tone:  "Come now, tell me
how you felt when you first heard of your legacy?"  And I could not
tell him; I had nothing to say; no vivid recollection of the moment
would come back to me.  I am afraid N- thought he had been
indiscreet, for he passed quickly to another subject.  Thinking it
over now, I see, of course, that it would be impossible to put into
words the feeling of that supreme moment of life.  It was not joy
that possessed me; I did not exult; I did not lose control of myself
in any way.  But I remember drawing one or two deep sighs, as if all
at once relieved of some distressing burden or constraint.  Only
some hours after did I begin to feel any kind of agitation.  That
night I did not close my eyes; the night after I slept longer and
more soundly than I remember to have done for a score of years.
Once or twice in the first week I had a hysterical feeling; I scarce
kept myself from shedding tears.  And the strange thing is that it
seems to have happened so long ago; I seem to have been a free man
for many a twelvemonth, instead of only for two.  Indeed, that is
what I have often thought about forms of true happiness; the brief
are quite as satisfying as those that last long.  I wanted, before
my death, to enjoy liberty from care, and repose in a place I love.
That was granted me; and, had I known it only for one whole year,
the sum of my enjoyment would have been no whit less than if I live
to savour it for a decade.


XXIV


The honest fellow who comes to dig in my garden is puzzled to
account for my peculiarities; I often catch a look of wondering
speculation in his eye when it turns upon me.  It is all because I
will not let him lay out flower-beds in the usual way, and make the
bit of ground in front of the house really neat and ornamental.  At
first he put it down to meanness, but he knows by now that that
cannot be the explanation.  That I really prefer a garden so poor
and plain that every cottager would be ashamed of it, he cannot
bring himself to believe, and of course I have long since given up
trying to explain myself.  The good man probably concludes that too
many books and the habit of solitude have somewhat affected what he
would call my "reasons."

The only garden flowers I care for are the quite old-fashioned
roses, sunflowers, hollyhocks, lilies and so on, and these I like to
see growing as much as possible as if they were wild.  Trim and
symmetrical beds are my abhorrence, and most of the flowers which
are put into them--hybrids with some grotesque name--Jonesia,
Snooksia--hurt my eyes.  On the other hand, a garden is a garden,
and I would not try to introduce into it the flowers which are my
solace in lanes and fields.  Foxgloves, for instance--it would pain
me to see them thus transplanted.

I think of foxgloves, for it is the moment of their glory.
Yesterday I went to the lane which I visit every year at this time,
the deep, rutty cart-track, descending between banks covered with
giant fronds of the polypodium, and overhung with wych-elm and
hazel, to that cool, grassy nook where the noble flowers hang on
stems all but of my own height.  Nowhere have I seen finer
foxgloves.  I suppose they rejoice me so because of early memories--
to a child it is the most impressive of wild flowers; I would walk
miles any day to see a fine cluster, as I would to see the shining
of purple loosestrife by the water edge, or white lilies floating
upon the still depth.

But the gardener and I understand each other as soon as we go to the
back of the house, and get among the vegetables.  On that ground he
finds me perfectly sane.  And indeed I am not sure that the kitchen
garden does not give me more pleasure than the domain of flowers.
Every morning I step round before breakfast to see how things are
"coming on."  It is happiness to note the swelling of pods, the
healthy vigour of potato plants, aye, even the shooting up of
radishes and cress.  This year I have a grove of Jerusalem
artichokes; they are seven or eight feet high, and I seem to get
vigour as I look at the stems which are all but trunks, at the great
beautiful leaves.  Delightful, too, are the scarlet runners, which
have to be propped again and again, or they would break down under
the abundance of their yield.  It is a treat to me to go among them
with a basket, gathering; I feel as though Nature herself showed
kindness to me, in giving me such abundant food.  How fresh and
wholesome are the odours--especially if a shower has fallen not long
ago!

I have some magnificent carrots this year--straight, clean,
tapering, the colour a joy to look upon.


XXV


For two things do my thoughts turn now and then to London.  I should
like to hear the long note of a master's violin, or the faultless
cadence of an exquisite voice, and I should like to see pictures.
Music and painting have always meant much to me; here I can enjoy
them only in memory.

Of course there is the discomfort of concert-hall and exhibition-
rooms.  My pleasure in the finest music would be greatly spoilt by
having to sit amid a crowd, with some idiot audible on right hand or
left, and the show of pictures would give me a headache in the first
quarter of an hour.  Non sum qualis eram when I waited several hours
at the gallery door to hear Patti, and knew not a moment's fatigue
to the end of the concert; or when, at the Academy, I was astonished
to find that it was four o'clock, and I had forgotten food since
breakfast.  The truth is, I do not much enjoy anything nowadays
which I cannot enjoy ALONE.  It sounds morose; I imagine the comment
of good people if they overheard such a confession.  Ought I, in
truth, to be ashamed of it?

I always read the newspaper articles on exhibitions of pictures, and
with most pleasure when the pictures are landscapes.  The mere names
of paintings often gladden me for a whole day--those names which
bring before the mind a bit of seashore, a riverside, a glimpse of
moorland or of woods.  However feeble his criticism, the journalist
generally writes with appreciation of these subjects; his
descriptions carry me away to all sorts of places which I shall
never see again with the bodily eye, and I thank him for his
unconscious magic.  Much better this, after all, than really going
to London and seeing the pictures themselves.  They would not
disappoint me; I love and honour even the least of English landscape
painters; but I should try to see too many at once, and fall back
into my old mood of tired grumbling at the conditions of modern
life.  For a year or two I have grumbled little--all the better for
me.


XXVI


Of late, I have been wishing for music.  An odd chance gratified my
desire.

I had to go into Exeter yesterday.  I got there about sunset,
transacted my business, and turned to walk home again through the
warm twilight.  In Southernhay, as I was passing a house of which
the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a
piano--chords touched by a skilful hand.  I checked my step, hoping,
and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of
Chopin which I love best--I don't know how to name it.  My heart
leapt.  There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds
floating about me; and I trembled with very ecstasy of enjoyment.
When silence came, I waited in the hope of another piece, but
nothing followed, and so I went my way.

It is well for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I
should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by
haphazard.  As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and
reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude
to my unknown benefactor--a state of mind I have often experienced
in the days long gone by.  It happened at times--not in my barest
days, but in those of decent poverty--that some one in the house
where I lodged played the piano--and how it rejoiced me when this
came to pass!  I say "played the piano"--a phrase that covers much.
For my own part, I was very tolerant; anything that could by the
largest interpretation be called music, I welcomed and was thankful;
for even "five-finger exercises" I found, at moments, better than
nothing.  For it was when I was labouring at my desk that the notes
of the instrument were grateful and helpful to me.  Some men, I
believe, would have been driven frantic under the circumstances; to
me, anything like a musical sound always came as a godsend; it tuned
my thoughts; it made the words flow.  Even the street organs put me
in a happy mood; I owe many a page to them--written when I should
else have been sunk in bilious gloom.

More than once, too, when I was walking London streets by night,
penniless and miserable, music from an open window has stayed my
step, even as yesterday.  Very well can I remember such a moment in
Eaton Square, one night when I was going back to Chelsea, tired,
hungry, racked by frustrate passions.  I had tramped miles and
miles, in the hope of wearying myself so that I could sleep and
forget.  Then came the piano notes--I saw that there was festival in
the house--and for an hour or so I revelled as none of the bidden
guests could possibly be doing.  And when I reached my poor
lodgings, I was no longer envious nor mad with desires, but as I
fell asleep I thanked the unknown mortal who had played for me, and
given me peace.


XXVII


To-day I have read The Tempest.  It is perhaps the play that I love
best, and, because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly
pass it over in opening the book.  Yet, as always in regard to
Shakespeare, having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was
less complete than I supposed.  So it would be, live as long as one
might; so it would ever be, whilst one had strength to turn the
pages and a mind left to read them.

I like to believe that this was the poet's last work, that he wrote
it in his home at Stratford, walking day by day in the fields which
had taught his boyhood to love rural England.  It is ripe fruit of
the supreme imagination, perfect craft of the master hand.  For a
man whose life's business it has been to study the English tongue,
what joy can equal that of marking the happy ease wherewith
Shakespeare surpasses, in mere command of words, every achievement
of those even who, apart from him, are great?  I could fancy that,
in The Tempest, he wrought with a peculiar consciousness of this
power, smiling as the word of inimitable felicity, the phrase of
incomparable cadence, was whispered to him by the Ariel that was his
genius.  He seems to sport with language, to amuse himself with new
discovery of its resources.  From king to beggar, men of every rank
and every order of mind have spoken with his lips; he has uttered
the lore of fairyland; now it pleases him to create a being neither
man nor fairy, a something between brute and human nature, and to
endow its purposes with words.  These words, how they smack of the
moist and spawning earth, of the life of creatures that cannot rise
above the soil!  We do not think of it enough; we stint our wonder
because we fall short in appreciation.  A miracle is worked before
us, and we scarce give heed; it has become familiar to our minds as
any other of nature's marvels, which we rarely pause to reflect
upon.

The Tempest contains the noblest meditative passage in all the
plays; that which embodies Shakespeare's final view of life, and is
the inevitable quotation of all who would sum the teachings of
philosophy.  It contains his most exquisite lyrics, his tenderest
love passages, and one glimpse of fairyland which--I cannot but
think--outshines the utmost beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Prospero's farewell to the "elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes,
and groves."  Again a miracle; these are things which cannot be
staled by repetition.  Come to them often as you will, they are ever
fresh as though new minted from the brain of the poet.  Being
perfect, they can never droop under that satiety which arises from
the perception of fault; their virtue can never be so entirely
savoured as to leave no pungency of gusto for the next approach.

Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in
England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother
tongue.  If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face
to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents
which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living
soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill discouragement, of dreary
deprivation.  I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and,
assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I; but can I for a moment
dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his word is to me as
to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived?  I know
that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint
and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its
blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the
world's primeval glory.  Let every land have joy of its poet; for
the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness,
all that incommunicable heritage for which men live and die.  As I
close the book, love and reverence possess me.  Whether does my full
heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he
has laid his spell?  I know not.  I cannot think of them apart.  In
the love and reverence awakened by that voice of voices, Shakespeare
and England are but one.



AUTUMN



I


This has been a year of long sunshine.  Month has followed upon
month with little unkindness of the sky; I scarcely marked when July
passed into August, August into September.  I should think it summer
still, but that I see the lanes yellow-purfled with flowers of
autumn.

I am busy with the hawkweeds; that is to say, I am learning to
distinguish and to name as many as I can.  For scientific
classification I have little mind; it does not happen to fall in
with my habits of thought; but I like to be able to give its name
(the "trivial" by choice) to every flower I meet in my walks.  Why
should I be content to say, "Oh, it's a hawkweed"?  That is but one
degree less ungracious than if I dismissed all the yellow-rayed as
"dandelions."  I feel as if the flower were pleased by my
recognition of its personality.  Seeing how much I owe them, one and
all, the least I can do is to greet them severally.  For the same
reason I had rather say "hawkweed" than "hieracium"; the homelier
word has more of kindly friendship.


II


How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows
not why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling
suggestion.  Yesterday I was walking at dusk.  I came to an old
farmhouse; at the garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it
was our doctor's gig.  Having passed, I turned to look back.  There
was a faint afterglow in the sky beyond the chimneys; a light
twinkled at one of the upper windows.  I said to myself, "Tristram
Shandy," and hurried home to plunge into a book which I have not
opened for I dare say twenty years.

Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the
Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I
become to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual.  A
book worth rising for; much better worth than old Burton, who pulled
Johnson out of bed.  A book which helps one to forget the idle or
venomous chatter going on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish
hope for a world "which has such people in't."

These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves
at the moment when I hungered for them.  But it often happens that
the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with
trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought.
Ah! the books that one will never read again.  They gave delight,
perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but
life has passed them by for ever.  I have but to muse, and one after
another they rise before me.  Books gentle and quieting; books noble
and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but
many a time.  Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the
years fly too quickly, and are too few.  Perhaps when I lie waiting
for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering
thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a
kindness--friends passed upon the way.  What regret in that last
farewell!


III


Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often
puzzles me.  I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any
association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me
the vision of a place I know.  Impossible to explain why that
particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral
impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.  If I am
reading, doubtless a thought, a phrase, possibly a mere word, on the
page before me serves to awaken memory.  If I am otherwise occupied,
it must be an object seen, an odour, a touch; perhaps even a posture
of the body suffices to recall something in the past.  Sometimes the
vision passes, and there an end; sometimes, however, it has
successors, the memory working quite independently of my will, and
no link appearing between one scene and the next.

Ten minutes ago I was talking with my gardener.  Our topic was the
nature of the soil, whether or not it would suit a certain kind of
vegetable.  Of a sudden I found myself gazing at--the Bay of Avlona.
Quite certainly my thoughts had not strayed in that direction.  The
picture that came before me caused me a shock of surprise, and I am
still vainly trying to discover how I came to behold it.

A happy chance that I ever saw Avlona.  I was on my way from Corfu
to Brindisi.  The steamer sailed late in the afternoon; there was a
little wind, and as the December night became chilly, I soon turned
in.  With the first daylight I was on deck, expecting to find that
we were near the Italian port; to my surprise, I saw a mountainous
shore, towards which the ship was making at full speed.  On inquiry,
I learnt that this was the coast of Albania; our vessel not being
very seaworthy, and the wind still blowing a little (though not
enough to make any passenger uncomfortable), the captain had turned
back when nearly half across the Adriatic, and was seeking a haven
in the shelter of the snow-topped hills.  Presently we steamed into
a great bay, in the narrow mouth of which lay an island.  My map
showed me where we were, and with no small interest I discovered
that the long line of heights guarding the bay on its southern side
formed the Acroceraunian Promontory.  A little town visible high up
on the inner shore was the ancient Aulon.

Here we anchored, and lay all day long.  Provisions running short, a
boat had to be sent to land, and the sailors purchased, among other
things, some peculiarly detestable bread--according to them, cotto
al sole.  There was not a cloud in the sky; till evening, the wind
whistled above our heads, but the sea about us was blue and smooth.
I sat in hot sunshine, feasting my eyes on the beautiful cliffs and
valleys of the thickly-wooded shore.  Then came a noble sunset; then
night crept gently into the hollows of the hills, which now were
coloured the deepest, richest green.  A little lighthouse began to
shine.  In the perfect calm that had fallen, I heard breakers
murmuring softly upon the beach.

At sunrise we entered the port of Brindisi.


IV


The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature,
especially of nature as seen in the English rural landscape.  From
the "Cuckoo Song" of our language in its beginnings to the perfect
loveliness of Tennyson's best verse, this note is ever sounding.  It
is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama.  Take away from
Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual
allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss
were there!  The reign of the iambic couplet confined, but could not
suppress, this native music; Pope notwithstanding, there came the
"Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which, unsurpassed for beauty of
thought and nobility of utterance in all the treasury of our lyrics,
remains perhaps the most essentially English poem ever written.

This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an
English school of painting.  It came late; that it ever came at all
is remarkable enough.  A people apparently less apt for that kind of
achievement never existed.  So profound is the English joy in meadow
and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal
expression, it took up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and
created a new form of art.  The National Gallery represents only in
a very imperfect way the richness and variety of our landscape work.
Were it possible to collect, and suitably to display, the very best
of such work in every vehicle, I know not which would be the
stronger emotion in an English heart, pride or rapture.

One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact
that his genius does not seem to be truly English.  Turner's
landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them
in the familiar light.  Neither the artist nor the intelligent
layman is satisfied.  He gives us glorious visions; we admit the
glory--but we miss something which we deem essential.  I doubt
whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of
English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential
significance of the common things which we call beautiful was
revealed to his soul.  Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a
poet in colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been
the cause why England could not love him.  If any man whom I knew to
be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster,
I should smile--but I should understand.


V


A long time since I wrote in this book.  In September I caught a
cold, which meant three weeks' illness.

I have not been suffering; merely feverish and weak and unable to
use my mind for anything but a daily hour or two of the lightest
reading.  The weather has not favoured my recovery, wet winds often
blowing, and not much sun.  Lying in bed, I have watched the sky,
studied the clouds, which--so long as they are clouds indeed, and
not a mere waste of grey vapour--always have their beauty.
Inability to read has always been my horror; once, a trouble of the
eyes all but drove me mad with fear of blindness; but I find that in
my present circumstances, in my own still house, with no intrusion
to be dreaded, with no task or care to worry me, I can fleet the
time not unpleasantly even without help of books.  Reverie, unknown
to me in the days of bondage, has brought me solace; I hope it has a
little advanced me in wisdom.

For not, surely, by deliberate effort of thought does a man grow
wise.  The truths of life are not discovered by us.  At moments
unforeseen, some gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching
it to an emotion which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into
thought.  This can happen only in a calm of the senses, a surrender
of the whole being to passionless contemplation.  I understand, now,
the intellectual mood of the quietist.

Of course my good housekeeper has tended me perfectly, with the
minimum of needless talk.  Wonderful woman!

If the evidence of a well-spent life is necessarily seen in "honour,
love, obedience, troops of friends," mine, it is clear, has fallen
short of a moderate ideal.  Friends I have had, and have; but very
few.  Honour and obedience--why, by a stretch, Mrs. M- may perchance
represent these blessings.  As for love--?

Let me tell myself the truth.  Do I really believe that at any time
of my life I have been the kind of man who merits affection?  I
think not.  I have always been much too self-absorbed; too critical
of all about me; too unreasonably proud.  Such men as I live and die
alone, however much in appearance accompanied.  I do not repine at
it; nay, lying day after day in solitude and silence, I have felt
glad that it was so.  At least I give no one trouble, and that is
much.  Most solemnly do I hope that in the latter days no long
illness awaits me.  May I pass quickly from this life of quiet
enjoyment to the final peace.  So shall no one think of me with
pained sympathy or with weariness.  One--two--even three may
possibly feel regret, come the end how it may, but I do not flatter
myself that to them I am more than an object of kindly thought at
long intervals.  It is enough; it signifies that I have not erred
wholly.  And when I think that my daily life testifies to an act of
kindness such as I could never have dreamt of meriting from the man
who performed it, may I not be much more than content?


VI


How I envy those who become prudent without thwackings of
experience!  Such men seem to be not uncommon.  I don't mean cold-
blooded calculators of profit and loss in life's possibilities; nor
yet the plodding dull, who never have imagination enough to quit the
beaten track of security; but bright-witted and large-hearted
fellows who seem always to be led by common sense, who go steadily
from stage to stage of life, doing the right, the prudent things,
guilty of no vagaries, winning respect by natural progress, seldom
needing aid themselves, often helpful to others, and, through all,
good-tempered, deliberate, happy.  How I envy them!

For of myself it might be said that whatever folly is possible to a
moneyless man, that folly I have at one time or another committed.
Within my nature there seemed to be no faculty of rational self-
guidance.  Boy and man, I blundered into every ditch and bog which
lay within sight of my way.  Never did silly mortal reap such
harvest of experience; never had any one so many bruises to show for
it.  Thwack, thwack!  No sooner had I recovered from one sound
drubbing than I put myself in the way of another.  "Unpractical" I
was called by those who spoke mildly; "idiot"--I am sure--by many a
ruder tongue.  And idiot I see myself, whenever I glance back over
the long, devious road.  Something, obviously, I lacked from the
beginning, some balancing principle granted to most men in one or
another degree.  I had brains, but they were no help to me in the
common circumstances of life.  But for the good fortune which
plucked me out of my mazes and set me in paradise, I should no doubt
have blundered on to the end.  The last thwack of experience would
have laid me low just when I was becoming really a prudent man.


VII


This morning's sunshine faded amid slow-gathering clouds, but
something of its light seems still to linger in the air, and to
touch the rain which is falling softly.  I hear a pattering upon the
still leafage of the garden; it is a sound which lulls, and tunes
the mind to calm thoughtfulness.

I have a letter to-day from my old friend in Germany, E. B.  For
many and many a year these letters have made a pleasant incident in
my life; more than that, they have often brought me help and
comfort.  It must be a rare thing for friendly correspondence to go
on during the greater part of a lifetime between men of different
nationalities who see each other not twice in two decades.  We were
young men when we first met in London, poor, struggling, full of
hopes and ideals; now we look back upon those far memories from the
autumn of life.  B. writes to-day in a vein of quiet contentment,
which does me good.  He quotes Goethe:  "Was man in der Jugend
begehrt hat man im Alter die Fulle."

These words of Goethe's were once a hope to me; later, they made me
shake my head incredulously; now I smile to think how true they have
proved in my own case.  But what, exactly, do they mean?  Are they
merely an expression of the optimistic spirit?  If so, optimism has
to content itself with rather doubtful generalities.  Can it truly
be said that most men find the wishes of their youth satisfied in
later life?  Ten years ago, I should have utterly denied it, and
could have brought what seemed to me abundant evidence in its
disproof.  And as regards myself, is it not by mere happy accident
that I pass my latter years in such enjoyment of all I most desired?
Accident--but there is no such thing.  I might just as well have
called it an accident had I succeeded in earning the money on which
now I live.

From the beginning of my manhood, it is true, I longed for bookish
leisure; that, assuredly, is seldom even one of the desires in a
young man's heart, but perhaps it is one of those which may most
reasonably look for gratification later on.  What, however, of the
multitudes who aim only at wealth, for the power and the pride and
the material pleasures which it represents?  We know very well that
few indeed are successful in that aim; and, missing it, do they not
miss everything?  For them, are not Goethe's words mere mockery?

Apply them to mankind at large, and perhaps, after all, they are
true.  The fact of national prosperity and contentment implies,
necessarily, the prosperity and contentment of the greater number of
the individuals of which the nation consists.  In other words, the
average man who is past middle life has obtained what he strove for-
-success in his calling.  As a young man, he would not, perhaps,
have set forth his aspirations so moderately, but do they not, as a
fact, amount to this?  In defence of the optimistic view, one may
urge how rare it is to meet with an elderly man who harbours a
repining spirit.  True; but I have always regarded as a fact of
infinite pathos the ability men have to subdue themselves to the
conditions of life.  Contentment so often means resignation,
abandonment of the hope seen to be forbidden.

I cannot resolve this doubt.


VIII


I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal, a book I have often
thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that
period, always held me aloof.  Happily, chance and mood came
together, and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth
acquiring.  It is the kind of book which, one may reasonably say,
tends to edification.  One is better for having lived a while with
"Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best of them were, surely, not far
from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are
among theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine
hues of the early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool,
sweet air, which seems not to have blown across man's common world,
which bears no taint of mortality.

A gallery of impressive and touching portraits.  The great-souled M.
de Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre,
who, at the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to
meditation and penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs,
his conflicts of soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good
Lancelot, ideal schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical
books; the vigorous Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-
suffering for the faith that was in him; and all the smaller names--
Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole, Hamon--spirits of exquisite humility and
sweetness--a perfume rises from the page as one reads about them.
But best of all I like M. de Tillemont; I could have wished for
myself even such a life as his; wrapped in silence and calm, a life
of gentle devotion and zealous study.  From the age of fourteen, he
said, his intellect had occupied itself with but one subject, that
of ecclesiastical history.  Rising at four o'clock, he read and
wrote until half-past nine in the evening, interrupting his work
only to say the Offices of the Church, and for a couple of hours'
breathing at mid-day.  Few were his absences.  When he had to make a
journey, he set forth on foot, staff in hand, and lightened the way
by singing to himself a psalm or canticle.  This man of profound
erudition had as pure and simple a heart as ever dwelt in mortal.
He loved to stop by the road and talk with children, and knew how to
hold their attention whilst teaching them a lesson.  Seeing boy or
girl in charge of a cow, he would ask:  "How is it that you, a
little child, are able to control that animal, so much bigger and
stronger?"  And he would show the reason, speaking of the human
soul.  All this about Tillemont is new to me; well as I knew his
name (from the pages of Gibbon), I thought of him merely as the
laborious and accurate compiler of historical materials.  Admirable
as was his work, the spirit in which he performed it is the thing to
dwell upon; he studied for study's sake, and with no aim but truth;
to him it was a matter of indifference whether his learning ever
became known among men, and at any moment he would have given the
fruits of his labour to any one capable of making use of them.

Think of the world in which the Jansenists were living; the world of
the Fronde, of Richelieu and Mazarin, of his refulgent Majesty Louis
XIV.  Contrast Port-Royal with Versailles, and--whatever one's
judgment of their religious and ecclesiastical aims--one must needs
say that these men lived with dignity.  The Great Monarch is, in
comparison, a poor, sordid creature.  One thinks of Moliere refused
burial--the king's contemptuous indifference for one who could do no
more to amuse him being a true measure of the royal greatness.  Face
to face with even the least of these grave and pious men, how paltry
and unclean are all those courtly figures; not THERE was dignity, in
the palace chambers and the stately gardens, but in the poor rooms
where the solitaries of Port-Royal prayed and studied and taught.
Whether or not the ideal for mankind, their life was worthy of man.
And what is rarer than a life to which that praise can be given?


IX


It is amusing to note the superficial forms of reaction against
scientific positivism.  The triumph of Darwin was signalized by the
invention of that happy word Agnostic, which had great vogue.  But
agnosticism, as a fashion, was far too reasonable to endure.  There
came a rumour of Oriental magic, (how the world repeats itself!) and
presently every one who had nothing better to do gossipped about
"esoteric Buddhism"--the saving adjective sounded well in a drawing-
room.  It did not hold very long, even with the novelists; for the
English taste this esotericism was too exotic.  Somebody suggested
that the old table-turning and spirit-rapping, which had homely
associations, might be re-considered in a scientific light, and the
idea was seized upon.  Superstition pranked in the professor's
spectacles, it set up a laboratory, and printed grave reports.  Day
by day its sphere widened.  Hypnotism brought matter for the marvel-
mongers, and there followed a long procession of words in limping
Greek--a little difficult till practice had made perfect.  Another
fortunate terminologist hit upon the word "psychical"--the P might
be sounded or not, according to the taste and fancy of the
pronouncer--and the fashionable children of a scientific age were
thoroughly at ease.  "There MUST be something, you know; one always
felt that there MUST be something."  And now, if one may judge from
what one reads, psychical "science" is comfortably joining hands
with the sorcery of the Middle Ages.  It is said to be a lucrative
moment for wizards that peep and that mutter.  If the law against
fortune-telling were as strictly enforced in the polite world as it
occasionally is in slums and hamlets, we should have a merry time.
But it is difficult to prosecute a Professor of Telepathy--and how
he would welcome the advertisement!

Of course I know very well that all that make use of these words are
not in one and the same category.  There is a study of the human
mind, in health and in disease, which calls for as much respect as
any other study conscientiously and capably pursued; that it lends
occasion to fribbles and knaves is no argument against any honest
tendency of thought.  Men whom one cannot but esteem are deeply
engaged in psychical investigations, and have convinced themselves
that they are brought into touch with phenomena inexplicable by the
commonly accepted laws of life.  Be it so.  They may be on the point
of making discoveries in the world beyond sense.  For my own part,
everything of this kind not only does not interest me; I turn from
it with the strongest distaste.  If every wonder-story examined by
the Psychical Society were set before me with irresistible evidence
of its truth, my feeling (call it my prejudice) would undergo no
change whatever.  No whit the less should I yawn over the next
batch, and lay the narratives aside with--yes, with a sort of
disgust.  "An ounce of civet, good apothecary!"  Why it should be so
with me I cannot say.  I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies
of spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical
application of electricity.  Edisons and Marconis may thrill the
world with astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else,
but straightway I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect
the man I was before.  The thing has simply no concern for me, and I
care not a volt if to-morrow the proclaimed discovery be proved a
journalist's mistake or invention.

Am I, then, a hidebound materialist?  If I know myself, hardly that.
Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that
of the agnostic.  He corrected me.  "The agnostic grants that there
MAY be something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no
such admission.  For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the
non-existent.  We see what is, and we see all."  Now this gave me a
sort of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much
intelligence could hold such a view.  So far am I from feeling
satisfied with any explanation, scientific or other, of myself and
of the world about me, that not a day goes by but I fall a-
marvelling before the mystery of the universe.  To trumpet the
triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse than childishness;
now, as of old, we know but one thing--that we know nothing.  What!
Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel
that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so
on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings?  What
is all this but words, words, words?  Interesting, yes, as
observation; but, the more interesting, so much the more provocative
of wonder and of hopeless questioning.  One may gaze and think till
the brain whirls--till the little blossom in one's hand becomes as
overwhelming a miracle as the very sun in heaven.  Nothing to be
known?  The flower simply a flower, and there an end on't?  The man
simply a product of evolutionary law, his senses and his intellect
merely availing him to take account of the natural mechanism of
which he forms a part?  I find it very hard to believe that this is
the conviction of any human mind.  Rather I would think that despair
at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with those who
pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of everything
beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception which
seems obtuseness.


X


It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the
unknown.  In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words?  It
may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind,
from him who in the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an
image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of
the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and
never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his
being.  The prophets, the martyrs, their noble anguish vain and
meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but
an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a vision of the
living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a
world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge
Supreme--all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them
circling dead and cold through soundless space.  The most tragic
aspect of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable.  The soul
revolts, but dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher
destiny.  Viewing our life thus, is it not easier to believe that
the tragedy is played with no spectator?  And of a truth, of a
truth, what spectator can there be?  The day may come when, to all
who live, the Name of Names will be but an empty symbol, rejected by
reason and by faith.  Yet the tragedy will be played on.

It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to
declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human
intelligence.  The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition;
in my case, with impatience and scorn.  No theory of the world which
ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the
possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to
me inconceivable; no whit the less am I convinced that there is a
Reason of the All; one which transcends my understanding, one no
glimmer of which will ever touch my apprehension; a Reason which
must imply a creative power, and therefore, even whilst a necessity
of my thought, is by the same criticized into nothing.  A like
antinomy with that which affects our conception of the infinite in
time and space.  Whether the rational processes have reached their
final development, who shall say?  Perhaps what seem to us the
impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early
stage in the history of man.  Those who make them a proof of a
"future state" must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity;
does the savage, scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same
"new life" as the man of highest civilization?  Such gropings of the
mind certify our ignorance; the strange thing is that they can be
held by any one to demonstrate that our ignorance is final
knowledge.


XI


Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final
attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period
of self-satisfaction, assumed as finality.  We talk of the "ever
aspiring soul"; we take for granted that if one religion passes
away, another must arise.  But what if man presently find himself
without spiritual needs?  Such modification of his being cannot be
deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seem to point
towards it.  If the habits of thought favoured by physical science
do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind
in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism
may arise.  Then it will be the common privilege, "rerum cognoscere
causas"; the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will
be a dimly understood trait of the early race; and where now we
perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene
as a geometric demonstration.  Such an epoch of Reason might be the
happiest the world could know.  Indeed, it would either be that, or
it would never come about at all.  For suffering and sorrow are the
great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count
very surely upon the rationalist millennium.


XII


The free man, says Spinoza, thinks of nothing less often than of
death.  Free, in his sense of the word, I may not call myself.  I
think of death very often; the thought, indeed, is ever in the
background of my mind; yet free in another sense I assuredly am, for
death inspires me with no fear.  There was a time when I dreaded it;
but that, merely because it meant disaster to others who depended
upon my labour; the cessation of being has never in itself had power
to afflict me.  Pain I cannot well endure, and I do indeed think
with apprehension of being subjected to the trial of long deathbed
torments.  It is a sorry thing that the man who has fronted destiny
with something of manly calm throughout a life of stress and of
striving, may, when he nears the end, be dishonoured by a weakness
which is mere disease.  But happily I am not often troubled by that
dark anticipation.

I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard;
these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town
cemetery is repugnant.  I read the names upon the stones, and find a
deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of
life are over.  There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be
a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy
accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace,
what matter if it came late or soon?  There is no such gratulation
as Hic jacet.  There is no such dignity as that of death.  In the
path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that
which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have
achieved.  I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their
vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.  The dead, amid
this leafy silence, seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate
yet lingers:  As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!


XIII


Many a time, when life went hard with me, I have betaken myself to
the Stoics, and not all in vain.  Marcus Aurelius has often been one
of my bedside books; I have read him in the night watches, when I
could not sleep for misery, and when assuredly I could have read
nothing else.  He did not remove my burden; his proofs of the vanity
of earthly troubles availed me nothing; but there was a soothing
harmony in his thought which partly lulled my mind, and the mere
wish that I could find strength to emulate that high example (though
I knew that I never should) was in itself a safeguard against the
baser impulses of wretchedness.  I read him still, but with no
turbid emotion, thinking rather of the man than of the philosophy,
and holding his image dear in my heart of hearts.

Of course the intellectual assumption which makes his system
untenable by the thinker of our time is:  that we possess a
knowledge of the absolute.  Noble is the belief that by exercise of
his reason a man may enter into communion with that Rational Essence
which is the soul of the world; but precisely because of our
inability to find within ourselves any such sure and certain
guidance do we of to-day accept the barren doom of scepticism.
Otherwise, the Stoic's sense of man's subordination in the universal
scheme, and of the all-ruling destiny, brings him into touch with
our own philosophical views, and his doctrine concerning the
"sociable" nature of man, of the reciprocal obligations which exist
between all who live, are entirely congenial to the better spirit of
our day.  His fatalism is not mere resignation; one has not only to
accept one's lot, whatever it is, as inevitable, but to accept it
with joy, with praises.  Why are we here?  For the same reason that
has brought about the existence of a horse, or of a vine, to play
the part allotted to us by Nature.  As it is within our power to
understand the order of things, so are we capable of guiding
ourselves in accordance therewith; the will, powerless over
circumstance, is free to determine the habits of the soul.  The
first duty is self-discipline; its correspondent first privilege is
an inborn knowledge of the law of life.

But we are fronted by that persistent questioner who will accept no
a priori assumption, however noble in its character and beneficent
in its tendency.  How do we know that the reason of the Stoic is at
harmony with the world's law?  I, perhaps, may see life from a very
different point of view; to me reason may dictate, not self-subdual,
but self-indulgence; I may find in the free exercise of all my
passions an existence far more consonant with what seems to me the
dictate of Nature.  I am proud; Nature has made me so; let my pride
assert itself to justification.  I am strong; let me put forth my
strength, it is the destiny of the feeble to fall before me.  On the
other hand, I am weak and I suffer; what avails a mere assertion
that fate is just, to bring about my calm and glad acceptance of
this down-trodden doom?  Nay, for there is that within my soul which
bids me revolt, and cry against the iniquity of some power I know
not.  Granting that I am compelled to acknowledge a scheme of things
which constrains me to this or that, whether I will or no, how can I
be sure that wisdom or moral duty lies in acquiescence?  Thus the
unceasing questioner; to whom, indeed, there is no reply.  For our
philosophy sees no longer a supreme sanction, and no longer hears a
harmony of the universe.

"He that is unjust is also impious.  For the Nature of the Universe,
having made all reasonable creatures one for another, to the end
that they should do one another good; more or less, according to the
several persons and occasions; but in no wise hurt one another; it
is manifest that he that doth transgress against this her will, is
guilty of impiety towards the most ancient and venerable of all the
Deities."  How gladly would I believe this!  That injustice is
impiety, and indeed the supreme impiety, I will hold with my last
breath; but it were the merest affectation of a noble sentiment if I
supported my faith by such a reasoning.  I see no single piece of
strong testimony that justice is the law of the universe; I see
suggestions incalculable tending to prove that it is not.  Rather
must I apprehend that man, in some inconceivable way, may at his
best moments represent a Principle darkly at strife with that which
prevails throughout the world as known to us.  If the just man be in
truth a worshipper of the most ancient of Deities, he must needs
suppose, either that the object of his worship belongs to a fallen
dynasty, or--what from of old has been his refuge--that the sacred
fire which burns within him is an "evidence of things not seen."
What if I am incapable of either supposition?  There remains the
dignity of a hopeless cause--"sed victa Catoni."  But how can there
sound the hymn of praise?

"That is best for everyone, which the common Nature of all doth send
unto everyone, and then is it best, when she doth send it."  The
optimism of Necessity, and perhaps, the highest wisdom man can
attain unto.  "Remember that unto reasonable creatures only is it
granted that they may willingly and freely submit."  No one could be
more sensible than I of the persuasiveness of this high theme.  The
words sing to me, and life is illumined with soft glory, like that
of the autumn sunset yonder.  "Consider how man's life is but for a
very moment of time, and so depart meek and contented:  even as if a
ripe olive falling should praise the ground that bare her, and give
thanks to the tree that begat her."  So would I fain think, when the
moment comes.  It is the mood of strenuous endeavour, but also the
mood of rest.  Better than the calm of achieved indifference (if
that, indeed, is possible to man); better than the ecstasy which
contemns the travail of earth in contemplation of bliss to come.
But, by no effort attainable.  An influence of the unknown powers; a
peace that falleth upon the soul like dew at evening.


XIV


I have had one of my savage headaches.  For a day and a night I was
in blind torment.  Have at it, now, with the stoic remedy.  Sickness
of the body is no evil.  With a little resolution and considering it
as a natural issue of certain natural processes, pain may well be
borne.  One's solace is, to remember that it cannot affect the soul,
which partakes of the eternal nature.  This body is but as "the
clothing, or the cottage, of the mind."  Let flesh be racked; I, the
very I, will stand apart, lord of myself.

Meanwhile, memory, reason, every faculty of my intellectual part, is
being whelmed in muddy oblivion.  Is the soul something other than
the mind?  If so, I have lost all consciousness of its existence.
For me, mind and soul are one, and, as I am too feelingly reminded,
that element of my being is HERE, where the brain throbs and
anguishes.  A little more of such suffering, and I were myself no
longer; the body representing me would gesticulate and rave, but I
should know nothing of its motives, its fantasies.  The very I, it
is too plain, consists but with a certain balance of my physical
elements, which we call health.  Even in the light beginnings of my
headache, I was already not myself; my thoughts followed no normal
course, and I was aware of the abnormality.  A few hours later, I
was but a walking disease; my mind--if one could use the word--had
become a barrel-organ, grinding in endless repetition a bar or two
of idle music.

What trust shall I repose in the soul that serves me thus?  Just as
much, one would say, as in the senses, through which I know all that
I can know of the world in which I live, and which, for all I can
tell, may deceive me even more grossly in their common use than they
do on certain occasions where I have power to test them; just as
much, and no more--if I am right in concluding that mind and soul
are merely subtle functions of body.  If I chance to become deranged
in certain parts of my physical mechanism, I shall straightway be
deranged in my wits; and behold that Something in me which "partakes
of the eternal" prompting me to pranks which savour little of the
infinite wisdom.  Even in its normal condition (if I can determine
what that is) my mind is obviously the slave of trivial accidents; I
eat something that disagrees with me, and of a sudden the whole
aspect of life is changed; this impulse has lost its force, and
another which before I should not for a moment have entertained, is
all-powerful over me.  In short, I know just as little about myself
as I do about the Eternal Essence, and I have a haunting suspicion
that I may be a mere automaton, my every thought and act due to some
power which uses and deceives me.

Why am I meditating thus, instead of enjoying the life of the
natural man, at peace with himself and the world, as I was a day or
two ago?  Merely, it is evident, because my health has suffered a
temporary disorder.  It has passed; I have thought enough about the
unthinkable; I feel my quiet returning.  Is it any merit of mine
that I begin to be in health once more?  Could I, by any effort of
the will, have shunned this pitfall?


XV


Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory
something of long ago.  I had somehow escaped into the country, and
on a long walk began to feel mid-day hunger.  The wayside brambles
were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within
sight of an inn where I might have made a meal.  But my hunger was
satisfied; I had no need of anything more, and, as I thought of it,
a strange feeling of surprise, a sort of bewilderment, came upon me.
What!  Could it be that I had eaten, and eaten sufficiently, WITHOUT
PAYING?  It struck me as an extraordinary thing.  At that time, my
ceaseless preoccupation was how to obtain money to keep myself
alive.  Many a day I had suffered hunger because I durst not spend
the few coins I possessed; the food I could buy was in any case
unsatisfactory, unvaried.  But here Nature had given me a feast,
which seemed delicious, and I had eaten all I wanted.  The wonder
held me for a long time, and to this day I can recall it, understand
it.

I think there could be no better illustration of what it means to be
very poor in a great town.  And I am glad to have been through it.
To those days of misery I owe much of the contentment which I now
enjoy; not by mere force of contrast, but because I have been better
taught than most men the facts which condition our day to day
existence.  To the ordinary educated person, freedom from anxiety as
to how he shall merely be fed and clothed is a matter of course;
questioned, he would admit it to be an agreeable state of things,
but it is no more a source of conscious joy to him than physical
health to the thoroughly sound man.  For me, were I to live another
fifty years, this security would be a delightful surprise renewed
with every renewal of day.  I know, as only one with my experience
can, all that is involved in the possession of means to live.  The
average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad
and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting
his next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die.
There is no such school of political economy.  Go through that
course of lectures, and you will never again become confused as to
the meaning of elementary terms in that sorry science.

I understand, far better than most men, what I owe to the labour of
others.  This money which I "draw" at the four quarters of the year,
in a sense falls to me from heaven; but I know very well that every
drachm is sweated from human pores.  Not, thank goodness, with the
declared tyranny of basest capitalism; I mean only that it is the
product of human labour; perhaps wholesome, but none the less
compulsory.  Look far enough, and it means muscular toil, that
swinking of the ruder man which supports all the complex structure
of our life.  When I think of him thus, the man of the people earns
my gratitude.  That it is gratitude from afar, that I never was, and
never shall be, capable of democratic fervour, is a characteristic
of my mind which I long ago accepted as final.  I have known revolt
against the privilege of wealth (can I not remember spots in London
where I have stood, savage with misery, looking at the prosperous
folk who passed?), but I could never feel myself at one with the
native poor among whom I dwelt.  And for the simplest reason; I came
to know them too well.  He who cultivates his enthusiasm amid graces
and comforts may nourish an illusion with regard to the world below
him all his life long, and I do not deny that he may be the better
for it; for me, no illusion was possible.  I knew the poor, and I
knew that their aims were not mine.  I knew that the kind of life
(such a modest life!) which I should have accepted as little short
of the ideal, would have been to them--if they could have been made
to understand it--a weariness and a contempt.  To ally myself with
them against the "upper world" would have been mere dishonesty, or
sheer despair.  What they at heart desired, was to me barren; what I
coveted, was to them for ever incomprehensible.

That my own aim indicated an ideal which is the best for all to
pursue, I am far from maintaining.  It may be so, or not; I have
long known the idleness of advocating reform on a basis of personal
predilection.  Enough to set my own thoughts in order, without
seeking to devise a new economy for the world.  But it is much to
see clearly from one's point of view, and therein the evil days I
have treasured are of no little help to me.  If my knowledge be only
subjective, why, it only concerns myself; I preach to no one.  Upon
another man, of origin and education like to mine, a like experience
of hardship might have a totally different effect; he might identify
himself with the poor, burn to the end of his life with the noblest
humanitarianism.  I should no further criticize him than to say that
he saw with other eyes than mine.  A vision, perhaps, larger and
more just.  But in one respect he resembles me.  If ever such a man
arises, let him be questioned; it will be found that he once made a
meal of blackberries--and mused upon it.


XVI


I stood to-day watching harvesters at work, and a foolish envy took
hold upon me.  To be one of those brawny, brown-necked men, who can
string their muscles from dawn to sundown, and go home without an
ache to the sound slumber which will make them fresh again for to-
morrow's toil!  I am a man in the middle years, with limbs shaped as
those of another, and subject to no prostrating malady, yet I doubt
whether I could endure the lightest part of this field labour even
for half an hour.  Is that indeed to be a man?  Could I feel
surprised if one of these stalwart fellows turned upon me a look of
good-natured contempt?  Yet he would never dream that I envied him;
he would think it as probable, no doubt, that I should compare
myself unfavourably with one of the farm horses.

There comes the old idle dream:  balance of mind and body, perfect
physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour.
Why should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me,
yet none the less live for thought?  Many a theorist holds the thing
possible, and looks to its coming in a better time.  If so, two
changes must needs come before it; there will no longer exist a
profession of literature, and all but the whole of every library
will be destroyed, leaving only the few books which are universally
recognized as national treasures.  Thus, and thus only, can mental
and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.

It is idle to talk to us of "the Greeks."  The people we mean when
so naming them were a few little communities, living under very
peculiar conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional
characteristics.  The sporadic civilization which we are too much in
the habit of regarding as if it had been no less stable than
brilliant, was a succession of the briefest splendours, gleaming
here and there from the coasts of the Aegean to those of the western
Mediterranean.  Our heritage of Greek literature and art is
priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for us not the
slightest value.  The Greeks had nothing alien to study--not even a
foreign or a dead language.  They read hardly at all, preferring to
listen.  They were a slave-holding people, much given to social
amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry.  Their
ignorance was vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods.  Together with
their fair intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses.  If we
could see and speak with an average Athenian of the Periclean age,
he would cause no little disappointment--there would be so much more
of the barbarian in him, and at the same time of the decadent, than
we had anticipated.  More than possibly, even his physique would be
a disillusion.  Leave him in that old world, which is precious to
the imagination of a few, but to the business and bosoms of the
modern multitude irrelevant as Memphis or Babylon.

The man of thought, as we understand him, is all but necessarily the
man of impaired health.  The rare exception will be found to come of
a stock which may, indeed, have been distinguished by intelligence,
but represented in all its members the active rather than the
studious or contemplative life; whilst the children of such
fortunate thinkers are sure either to revert to the active type or
to exhibit the familiar sacrifice of body to mind.  I am not denying
the possibility of mens sana in corpore sano; that is another thing.
Nor do I speak of the healthy people (happily still numerous) who
are at the same time bright-witted and fond of books.  The man I
have in view is he who pursues the things of the mind with passion,
who turns impatiently from all common interests or cares which
encroach upon his sacred time, who is haunted by a sense of the
infinity of thought and learning, who, sadly aware of the conditions
on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the hourly
temptation to ignore them.  Add to these native characteristics the
frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his
attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution;
and what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that
his nerves will play as Nature bade them, that his sinews will bide
the strain of exceptional task?  Such a man may gaze with envy at
those who "sweat in the eye of Phoebus," but he knows that no choice
was offered him.  And if life has so far been benignant as to grant
him frequent tranquillity of studious hours, let him look from the
reapers to the golden harvest, and fare on in thankfulness.


XVII


That a labourer in the fields should stand very much on the level of
the beast that toils with him, can be neither desirable nor
necessary.  He does so, as a matter of fact, and one hears that only
the dullest-witted peasant will nowadays consent to the peasant
life; his children, taught to read the newspaper, make what haste
they can to the land of promise--where newspapers are printed.  That
here is something altogether wrong it needs no evangelist to tell
us; the remedy no prophet has as yet even indicated.  Husbandry has
in our time been glorified in eloquence which for the most part is
vain, endeavouring, as it does, to prove a falsity--that the
agricultural life is, in itself, favourable to gentle emotions, to
sweet thoughtfulness, and to all the human virtues.  Agriculture is
one of the most exhausting forms of toil, and, in itself, by no
means conducive to spiritual development; that it played a
civilizing part in the history of the world is merely due to the
fact that, by creating wealth, it freed a portion of mankind from
the labour of the plough.  Enthusiasts have tried the experiment of
turning husbandman; one of them writes of his experience in notable
phrase.

"Oh, labour is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it
without becoming proportionately brutified.  Is it a praiseworthy
matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for
cows and horses?  It is not so."

Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne, at Brook Farm.  In the bitterness of his
disillusion he went too far.  Labour may be, and very often is, an
accursed and a brutalizing thing, but assuredly, it is not the curse
of the world; nay, it is the world's supreme blessing.  Hawthorne
had committed a folly, and he paid for it in loss of mental balance.
For him, plainly, it was no suitable task to feed cows and horses;
yet many a man would perceive the nobler side of such occupation,
for it signifies, of course, providing food for mankind.  The
interest of this quotation lies in the fact that, all unconsciously,
so intelligent a man as Hawthorne had been reduced to the mental
state of our agricultural labourers in revolt against the country
life.  Not only is his intellect in abeyance, but his emotions have
ceased to be a true guide.  The worst feature of the rustic mind in
our day, is not its ignorance or grossness, but its rebellious
discontent.  Like all other evils, this is seen to be an inevitable
outcome of the condition of things; one understands it only too
well.  The bucolic wants to "better" himself.  He is sick of feeding
cows and horses; he imagines that, on the pavement of London, he
would walk with a manlier tread.

There is no help in visions of Arcadia; yet it is plain fact that in
days gone by the peasantry found life more than endurable, and yet
were more intelligent than our clod-hoppers who still hold by the
plough.  They had their folk-songs, now utterly forgotten.  They had
romances and fairy lore, which their descendants could no more
appreciate than an idyll of Theocritus.  Ah, but let it be
remembered that they had also a HOME, and this is the illumining
word.  If your peasant love the fields which give him bread, he will
not think it hard to labour in them; his toil will no longer be as
that of the beast, but upward-looking and touched with a light from
other than the visible heavens.  No use to blink the hard and dull
features of rustic existence; let them rather be insisted upon, that
those who own and derive profit from the land may be constant in
human care for the lives which make it fruitful.  Such care may
perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency
of the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to
wish to wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel.  Well-
meaning folk talk about reawakening love of the country by means of
deliberate instruction.  Lies any hope that way?  Does it seem to
promise a return of the time when the old English names of all our
flowers were common on rustic lips--by which, indeed, they were
first uttered?  The fact that flowers and birds are well-nigh
forgotten, together with the songs and the elves, shows how advanced
is the process of rural degeneration.  Most likely it is foolishness
to hope for the revival of any bygone social virtue.  The husbandman
of the future will be, I daresay, a well-paid mechanic, of the
engine-driver species; as he goes about his work he will sing the
last refrain of the music-hall, and his oft-recurring holidays will
be spent in the nearest great town.  For him, I fancy, there will be
little attraction in ever such melodious talk about "common objects
of the country."  Flowers, perhaps, at all events those of tilth and
pasture, will have been all but improved away.  And, as likely as
not, the word Home will have only a special significance, indicating
the common abode of retired labourers who are drawing old-age
pensions.


XVIII


I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some
record of it; yet the foolish insufficiency of words!  At sunrise I
looked forth; nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man's
hand; the leaves quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine
morning which glistened upon their dew.  At sunset I stood in the
meadow above my house, and watched the red orb sink into purple
mist, whilst in the violet heaven behind me rose the perfect moon.
All between, through the soft circling of the dial's shadow, was
loveliness and quiet unutterable.  Never, I could fancy, did autumn
clothe in such magnificence the elms and beeches; never, I should
think, did the leafage on my walls blaze in such royal crimson.  It
was no day for wandering; under a canopy of blue or gold, where the
eye could fall on nothing that was not beautiful, enough to be at
one with Nature in dreamy rest.  From stubble fields sounded the
long caw of rooks; a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the
neighbour farm; my doves cooed above their cot.  Was it for five
minutes, or was it for an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly
wafted as by an insensible tremor of the air amid the garden
glintings?  In every autumn there comes one such flawless day.  None
that I have known brought me a mind so touched to the fitting mood
of welcome, and so fulfilled the promise of its peace.


XIX


I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance,
there sounded the voice of a countryman--strange to say--singing.
The notes were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment's
musical sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory
so keen that I knew not whether it was pain or delight.  For the
sound seemed to me that of a peasant's song which I once heard
whilst sitting among the ruins of Paestum.  The English landscape
faded before my eyes.  I saw great Doric columns of honey-golden
travertine; between them, as I looked one way, a deep strip of sea;
when I turned, the purple gorges of the Apennine; and all about the
temple, where I sat in solitude, a wilderness dead and still but for
that long note of wailing melody.  I had not thought it possible
that here, in my beloved home, where regret and desire are all but
unknown to me, I could have been so deeply troubled by a thought of
things far off.  I returned with head bent, that voice singing in my
memory.  All the delight I have known in Italian travel burned again
within my heart.  The old spell has not lost its power.  Never, I
know, will it again draw me away from England; but the Southern
sunlight cannot fade from my imagination, and to dream of its glow
upon the ruins of old time wakes in me the voiceless desire which
once was anguish.

In his Italienische Reise, Goethe tells that at one moment of his
life the desire for Italy became to him a scarce endurable
suffering; at length he could not bear to hear or to read of things
Italian, even the sight of a Latin book so tortured him that he
turned away from it; and the day arrived when, in spite of every
obstacle, he yielded to the sickness of longing, and in secret stole
away southward.  When first I read that passage, it represented
exactly the state of my own mind; to think of Italy was to feel
myself goaded by a longing which, at times, made me literally ill;
I, too, had put aside my Latin books, simply because I could not
endure the torment of imagination they caused me.  And I had so
little hope (nay, for years no shadow of reasonable hope) that I
should ever be able to appease my desire.  I taught myself to read
Italian; that was something.  I worked (half-heartedly) at a
colloquial phrase-book.  But my sickness only grew towards despair.

Then came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for
a book I had written.  It was early autumn.  I chanced to hear some
one speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.


XX


Truly, I grow aged.  I have no longer much delight in wine.

But then, no wine ever much rejoiced me save that of Italy.  Wine-
drinking in England is, after all, only make-believe, a mere playing
with an exotic inspiration.  Tennyson had his port, whereto clings a
good old tradition; sherris sack belongs to a nobler age; these
drinks are not for us.  Let him who will, toy with dubious Bordeaux
or Burgundy; to get good of them, soul's good, you must be on the
green side of thirty.  Once or twice they have plucked me from
despair; I would not speak unkindly of anything in cask or bottle
which bears the great name of wine.  But for me it is a thing of
days gone by.  Never again shall I know the mellow hour cum regnat
rosa, cum madent capilli.  Yet how it lives in memory!

"What call you this wine?" I asked of the temple-guardian at
Paestum, when he ministered to my thirst.  "Vino di Calabria," he
answered, and what a glow in the name!  There I drank it, seated
against the column of Poseidon's temple.  There I drank it, my feet
resting on acanthus, my eyes wandering from sea to mountain, or
peering at little shells niched in the crumbling surface of the
sacred stone.  The autumn day declined; a breeze of evening
whispered about the forsaken shore; on the far summit lay a long,
still cloud, and its hue was that of my Calabrian wine.

How many such moments come back to me as my thoughts wander!  Dim
little trattorie in city byways, inns smelling of the sun in
forgotten valleys, on the mountain side, or by the tideless shore,
where the grape has given me of its blood, and made life a rapture.
Who but the veriest fanatic of teetotalism would grudge me those
hours so gloriously redeemed?  No draught of wine amid the old tombs
under the violet sky but made me for the time a better man, larger
of brain, more courageous, more gentle.  'Twas a revelry whereon
came no repentance.  Could I but live for ever in thoughts and
feelings such as those born to me in the shadow of the Italian vine!
There I listened to the sacred poets; there I walked with the wise
of old; there did the gods reveal to me the secret of their eternal
calm.  I hear the red rillet as it flows into the rustic glass; I
see the purple light upon the hills.  Fill to me again, thou of the
Roman visage and all but Roman speech!  Is not yonder the long
gleaming of the Appian Way?  Chant in the old measure, the song
imperishable


"dum Capitolium
Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex--"


aye, and for how many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the
eternal silence.  Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he
will; for him flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile,
no melody.  Ere the sun set, and the darkness fall about us, fill
again!


XXI


Is there, at this moment, any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but
without means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain
and steadfast courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret, and
writes for dear life?  There must be, I suppose; yet all that I have
read and heard of late years about young writers, shows them in a
very different aspect.  No garretteers, these novelists and
journalists awaiting their promotion.  They eat--and entertain their
critics--at fashionable restaurants; they are seen in expensive
seats at the theatre; they inhabit handsome flats--photographed for
an illustrated paper on the first excuse.  At the worst, they belong
to a reputable club, and have garments which permit them to attend a
garden party or an evening "at home" without attracting unpleasant
notice.  Many biographical sketches have I read, during the last
decade, making personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss
That, whose book was--as the sweet language of the day will have it-
-"booming"; but never one in which there was a hint of stern
struggle, of the pinched stomach and frozen fingers.  I surmise that
the path of "literature" is being made too easy.  Doubtless it is a
rare thing nowadays for a lad whose education ranks him with the
upper middle class to find himself utterly without resources, should
he wish to devote himself to the profession of letters.  And there
is the root of the matter; writing has come to be recognized as a
profession, almost as cut-and-dried as church or law; a lad may go
into it with full parental approval, with ready avuncular support.
I heard not long ago of an eminent lawyer, who had paid a couple of
hundred per annum for his son's instruction in the art of fiction--
yea, the art of fiction--by a not very brilliant professor of that
art.  Really, when one comes to think of it, an astonishing fact, a
fact vastly significant.  Starvation, it is true, does not
necessarily produce fine literature; but one feels uneasy about
these carpet-authors.  To the two or three who have a measure of
conscience and vision, I could wish, as the best thing, some
calamity which would leave them friendless in the streets.  They
would perish, perhaps.  But set that possibility against the all but
certainty of their present prospect--fatty degeneration of the soul;
and is it not acceptable?

I thought of this as I stood yesterday watching a noble sunset,
which brought back to my memory the sunsets of a London autumn,
thirty years ago; more glorious, it seems to me, than any I have
since beheld.  It happened that, on one such evening, I was by the
river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except to feel that I was
hungry, and to reflect that, before morning, I should be hungrier
still.  I loitered upon Battersea Bridge--the old picturesque wooden
bridge, and there the western sky took hold upon me.  Half an hour
later, I was speeding home.  I sat down, and wrote a description of
what I had seen, and straightway sent it to an evening newspaper,
which, to my astonishment, published the thing next day--"On
Battersea Bridge."  How proud I was of that little bit of writing!
I should not much like to see it again, for I thought it then so
good that I am sure it would give me an unpleasant sensation now.
Still, I wrote it because I enjoyed doing so, quite as much as
because I was hungry; and the couple of guineas it brought me had as
pleasant a ring as any money I ever earned.


XXII


I wonder whether it be really true, as I have more than once seen
suggested, that the publication of Anthony Trollope's autobiography
in some degree accounts for the neglect into which he and his works
fell so soon after his death.  I should like to believe it, for such
a fact would be, from one point of view, a credit to "the great big
stupid public."  Only, of course, from one point of view; the
notable merits of Trollope's work are unaffected by one's knowledge
of how that work was produced; at his best he is an admirable writer
of the pedestrian school, and this disappearance of his name does
not mean final oblivion.  Like every other novelist of note, he had
two classes of admirers--those who read him for the sake of that
excellence which here and there he achieved, and the
undistinguishing crowd which found in him a level entertainment.
But it would be a satisfaction to think that "the great big stupid"
was really, somewhere in its secret economy, offended by that
revelation of mechanical methods which made the autobiography either
a disgusting or an amusing book to those who read it more
intelligently.  A man with a watch before his eyes, penning exactly
so many words every quarter of an hour--one imagines that this
picture might haunt disagreeably the thoughts even of Mudie's
steadiest subscriber, that it might come between him or her and any
Trollopean work that lay upon the counter.

The surprise was so cynically sprung upon a yet innocent public.  At
that happy time (already it seems so long ago) the literary news set
before ordinary readers mostly had reference to literary work, in a
reputable sense of the term, and not, as now, to the processes of
"literary" manufacture and the ups and downs of the "literary"
market.  Trollope himself tells how he surprised the editor of a
periodical, who wanted a serial from him, by asking how many
thousand words it should run to; an anecdote savouring indeed of
good old days.  Since then, readers have grown accustomed to
revelations of "literary" method, and nothing in that kind can shock
them.  There has come into existence a school of journalism which
would seem to have deliberately set itself the task of degrading
authorship and everything connected with it; and these pernicious
scribblers (or typists, to be more accurate) have found the authors
of a fretful age only too receptive of their mercantile suggestions.
Yes, yes; I know as well as any man that reforms were needed in the
relations between author and publisher.  Who knows better than I
that your representative author face to face with your
representative publisher was, is, and ever will be, at a ludicrous
disadvantage?  And there is no reason in the nature and the decency
of things why this wrong should not by some contrivance be remedied.
A big, blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold
his own, and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits
of his work.  A shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens,
aided by a lawyer who was his devoted friend, could do even better,
and, in reaping sometimes more than his publisher, redress the
ancient injustice.  But pray, what of Charlotte Bronte?  Think of
that grey, pinched life, the latter years of which would have been
so brightened had Charlotte Bronte received but, let us say, one
third of what, in the same space of time, the publisher gained by
her books.  I know all about this; alas! no man better.  None the
less do I loathe and sicken at the manifold baseness, the vulgarity
unutterable, which, as a result of the new order, is blighting our
literary life.  It is not easy to see how, in such an atmosphere,
great and noble books can ever again come into being.  May it,
perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow
touched with disgust?--that the market for "literary" news of this
costermonger sort will some day fail?

Dickens.  Why, there too was a disclosure of literary methods.  Did
not Forster make known to all and sundry exactly how Dickens' work
was done, and how the bargains for its production were made?  The
multitudinous public saw him at his desk, learnt how long he sat
there, were told that he could not get on without having certain
little ornaments before his eyes, and that blue ink and a quill pen
were indispensable to his writing; and did all this information ever
chill the loyalty of a single reader?  There was a difference, in
truth, between the picture of Charles Dickens sitting down to a
chapter of his current novel, and that of the broad-based Trollope
doing his so many words to the fifteen minutes.  Trollope, we know,
wronged himself by the tone and manner of his reminiscences; but
that tone and manner indicated an inferiority of mind, of nature.
Dickens--though he died in the endeavour to increase (not for
himself) an already ample fortune, disastrous influence of his time
and class--wrought with an artistic ingenuousness and fervour such
as Trollope could not even conceive.  Methodical, of course, he was;
no long work of prose fiction was ever brought into existence save
by methodical labour; but we know that there was no measuring of so
many words to the hour.  The picture of him at work which is seen in
his own letters is one of the most bracing and inspiring in the
history of literature.  It has had, and will always have, a great
part in maintaining Dickens' place in the love and reverence of
those who understand.


XXIII


As I walked to-day in the golden sunlight--this warm, still day on
the far verge of autumn--there suddenly came to me a thought which
checked my step, and for the moment half bewildered me.  I said to
myself:  My life is over.  Surely I ought to have been aware of that
simple fact; certainly it has made part of my meditation, has often
coloured my mood; but the thing had never definitely shaped itself,
ready in words for the tongue.  My life is over.  I uttered the
sentence once or twice, that my ear might test its truth.  Truth
undeniable, however strange; undeniable as the figure of my age last
birthday.

My age?  At this time of life, many a man is bracing himself for new
efforts, is calculating on a decade or two of pursuit and
attainment.  I, too, may perhaps live for some years; but for me
there is no more activity, no ambition.  I have had my chance--and I
see what I made of it.

The thought was for an instant all but dreadful.  What!  I, who only
yesterday was a young man, planning, hoping, looking forward to life
as to a practically endless career, I, who was so vigorous and
scornful, have come to this day of definite retrospect?  How is it
possible?  But, I have done nothing; I have had no time; I have only
been preparing myself--a mere apprentice to life.  My brain is at
some prank; I am suffering a momentary delusion; I shall shake
myself, and return to common sense--to my schemes and activities and
eager enjoyments.

Nevertheless, my life is over.

What a little thing!  I knew how the philosophers had spoken; I
repeated their musical phrases about the mortal span--yet never till
now believed them.  And this is all?  A man's life can be so brief
and so vain?  Idly would I persuade myself that life, in the true
sense, is only now beginning; that the time of sweat and fear was
not life at all, and that it now only depends upon my will to lead a
worthy existence.  That may be a sort of consolation, but it does
not obscure the truth that I shall never again see possibilities and
promises opening before me.  I have "retired," and for me as truly
as for the retired tradesman, life is over.  I can look back upon
its completed course, and what a little thing!  I am tempted to
laugh; I hold myself within the limit of a smile.

And that is best, to smile, not in scorn, but in all forbearance,
without too much self-compassion.  After all, that dreadful aspect
of the thing never really took hold of me; I could put it by without
much effort.  Life is done--and what matter?  Whether it has been,
in sum, painful or enjoyable, even now I cannot say--a fact which in
itself should prevent me from taking the loss too seriously.  What
does it matter?  Destiny with the hidden face decreed that I should
come into being, play my little part, and pass again into silence;
is it mine either to approve or to rebel?  Let me be grateful that I
have suffered no intolerable wrong, no terrible woe of flesh or
spirit, such as others--alas! alas!--have found in their lot.  Is it
not much to have accomplished so large a part of the mortal journey
with so much ease?  If I find myself astonished at its brevity and
small significance, why, that is my own fault; the voices of those
gone before had sufficiently warned me.  Better to see the truth
now, and accept it, than to fall into dread surprise on some day of
weakness, and foolishly to cry against fate.  I will be glad rather
than sorry, and think of the thing no more.


XXIV


Waking at early dawn used to be one of the things I most dreaded.
The night which made me capable of resuming labour had brought no
such calm as should follow upon repose; I woke to a vision of the
darkest miseries and lay through the hours of daybreak--too often--
in very anguish.  But that is past.  Sometimes, ere yet I know
myself, the mind struggles as with an evil spirit on the confines of
sleep; then the light at my window, the pictures on my walls,
restore me to happy consciousness, happier for the miserable dream.
Now, when I lie thinking, my worst trouble is wonder at the common
life of man.  I see it as a thing so incredible that it oppresses
the mind like a haunting illusion.  Is it the truth that men are
fretting, raving, killing each other, for matters so trivial that I,
even I, so far from saint or philosopher, must needs fall into
amazement when I consider them?  I could imagine a man who, by
living alone and at peace, came to regard the everyday world as not
really existent, but a creation of his own fancy in unsound moments.
What lunatic ever dreamt of things less consonant with the calm
reason than those which are thought and done every minute in every
community of men called sane?  But I put aside this reflection as
soon as may be; it perturbs me fruitlessly.  Then I listen to the
sounds about my cottage, always soft, soothing, such as lead the
mind to gentle thoughts.  Sometimes I can hear nothing; not the
rustle of a leaf, not the buzz of a fly, and then I think that utter
silence is best of all.

This morning I was awakened by a continuous sound which presently
shaped itself to my ear as a multitudinous shrilling of bird voices.
I knew what it meant.  For the last few days I have seen the
swallows gathering, now they were ranged upon my roof, perhaps in
the last council before their setting forth upon the great journey.
I know better than to talk about animal instinct, and to wonder in a
pitying way at its resemblance to reason.  I know that these birds
show to us a life far more reasonable, and infinitely more
beautiful, than that of the masses of mankind.  They talk with each
other, and in their talk is neither malice nor folly.  Could one but
interpret the converse in which they make their plans for the long
and perilous flight--and then compare it with that of numberless
respectable persons who even now are projecting their winter in the
South!


XXV


Yesterday I passed by an elm avenue, leading to a beautiful old
house.  The road between the trees was covered in all its length and
breadth with fallen leaves--a carpet of pale gold.  Further on, I
came to a plantation, mostly of larches; it shone in the richest
aureate hue, with here and there a splash of blood-red, which was a
young beech in its moment of autumnal glory.

I looked at an alder, laden with brown catkins, its blunt foliage
stained with innumerable shades of lovely colour.  Near it was a
horse-chestnut, with but a few leaves hanging on its branches, and
those a deep orange.  The limes, I see, are already bare.

To-night the wind is loud, and rain dashes against my casement; to-
morrow I shall awake to a sky of winter.



WINTER



I


Blasts from the Channel, with raining scud, and spume of mist
breaking upon the hills, have kept me indoors all day.  Yet not for
a moment have I been dull or idle, and now, by the latter end of a
sea-coal fire, I feel such enjoyment of my ease and tranquillity
that I must needs word it before going up to bed.

Of course one ought to be able to breast weather such as this of to-
day, and to find one's pleasure in the strife with it.  For the man
sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad
weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood
do but make it pulse more vigorously.  I remember the time when I
would have set out with gusto for a tramp along the wind-swept and
rain-beaten roads; nowadays, I should perhaps pay for the experiment
with my life.  All the more do I prize the shelter of these good
walls, the honest workmanship which makes my doors and windows proof
against the assailing blast.  In all England, the land of comfort,
there is no room more comfortable than this in which I sit.
Comfortable in the good old sense of the word, giving solace to the
mind no less than ease to the body.  And never does it look more
homely, more a refuge and a sanctuary, than on winter nights.

In my first winter here, I tried fires of wood, having had my hearth
arranged for the purpose; but that was a mistake.  One cannot burn
logs successfully in a small room; either the fire, being kept
moderate, needs constant attention, or its triumphant blaze makes
the room too hot.  A fire is a delightful thing, a companion and an
inspiration.  If my room were kept warm by some wretched modern
contrivance of water-pipes or heated air, would it be the same to me
as that beautiful core of glowing fuel, which, if I sit and gaze
into it, becomes a world of wonders?  Let science warm the heaven-
forsaken inhabitants of flats and hotels as effectually and
economically as it may; if the choice were forced upon me, I had
rather sit, like an Italian, wrapped in my mantle, softly stirring
with a key the silver-grey surface of the brasier's charcoal.  They
tell me we are burning all our coal, and with wicked wastefulness.
I am sorry for it, but I cannot on that account make cheerless
perhaps the last winter of my life.  There may be waste on domestic
hearths, but the wickedness is elsewhere--too blatant to call for
indication.  Use common sense, by all means, in the construction of
grates; that more than half the heat of the kindly coal should be
blown up the chimney is desired by no one; but hold by the open fire
as you hold by whatever else is best in England.  Because, in the
course of nature, it will be some day a thing of the past (like most
other things that are worth living for), is that a reason why it
should not be enjoyed as long as possible?  Human beings may ere
long take their nourishment in the form of pills; the prevision of
that happy economy causes me no reproach when I sit down to a joint
of meat.

See how friendly together are the fire and the shaded lamp; both
have their part alike in the illumining and warming of the room.  As
the fire purrs and softly crackles, so does my lamp at intervals
utter a little gurgling sound when the oil flows to the wick, and
custom has made this a pleasure to me.  Another sound, blending with
both, is the gentle ticking of the clock.  I could not endure one of
those bustling little clocks which tick like a fever pulse, and are
only fit for a stockbroker's office; mine hums very slowly, as
though it savoured the minutes no less than I do; and when it
strikes, the little voice is silver-sweet, telling me without
sadness that another hour of life is reckoned, another of the
priceless hours -


"Quae nobis pereunt et imputantur."


After extinguishing the lamp, and when I have reached the door, I
always turn to look back; my room is so cosily alluring in the light
of the last gleeds, that I do not easily move away.  The warm glow
is reflected on shining wood, on my chair, my writing-table, on the
bookcases, and from the gilt title of some stately volume; it
illumes this picture, it half disperses the gloom on that.  I could
imagine that, as in a fairy tale, the books do but await my
departure to begin talking among themselves.  A little tongue of
flame shoots up from a dying ember; shadows shift upon the ceiling
and the walls.  With a sigh of utter contentment, I go forth, and
shut the door softly.


II


I came home this afternoon just at twilight, and, feeling tired
after my walk, a little cold too, I first crouched before the fire,
then let myself drop lazily upon the hearthrug.  I had a book in my
hand, and began to read it by the firelight.  Rising in a few
minutes, I found the open page still legible by the pale glimmer of
day.  This sudden change of illumination had an odd effect upon me;
it was so unexpected, for I had forgotten that dark had not yet
fallen.  And I saw in the queer little experience an intellectual
symbol.  The book was verse.  Might not the warm rays from the fire
exhibit the page as it appears to an imaginative and kindred mind,
whilst that cold, dull light from the window showed it as it is
beheld by eyes to which poetry has but a poor, literal meaning, or
none at all?


III


It is a pleasant thing enough to be able to spend a little money
without fear when the desire for some indulgence is strong upon one;
but how much pleasanter the ability to give money away!  Greatly as
I relish the comforts of my wonderful new life, no joy it has
brought me equals that of coming in aid to another's necessity.  The
man for ever pinched in circumstances can live only for himself.  It
is all very well to talk about doing moral good; in practice, there
is little scope or hope for anything of that kind in a state of
material hardship.  To-day I have sent S- a cheque for fifty pounds;
it will come as a very boon of heaven, and assuredly blesseth him
that gives as much as him that takes.  A poor fifty pounds, which
the wealthy fool throws away upon some idle or base fantasy, and
never thinks of it; yet to S- it will mean life and light.  And I,
to whom this power of benefaction is such a new thing, sign the
cheque with a hand trembling, so glad and proud I am.  In the days
gone by, I have sometimes given money, but with trembling of another
kind; it was as likely as not that I myself, some black foggy
morning, might have to go begging for my own dire needs.  That is
one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be
generous.  Of my abundance--abundance to me, though starveling
pittance in the view of everyday prosperity--I can give with
happiest freedom; I feel myself a man, and no crouching slave with
his back ever ready for the lash of circumstance.  There are those,
I know, who thank the gods amiss, and most easily does this happen
in the matter of wealth.  But oh, how good it is to desire little,
and to have a little more than enough!


IV


After two or three days of unseasonable and depressing warmth, with
lowering but not rainy sky, I woke this morning to find the land
covered with a dense mist.  There was no daybreak, and, till long
after the due hour, no light save a pale, sad glimmer at the window;
now, at mid-day, I begin dimly to descry gaunt shapes of trees,
whilst a haunting drip, drip on the garden soil tells me that the
vapour has begun to condense, and will pass in rain.  But for my
fire, I should be in indifferent spirits on such a day as this; the
flame sings and leaps, and its red beauty is reflected in the
window-glass.  I cannot give my thoughts to reading; if I sat
unoccupied, they would brood with melancholy fixedness on I know not
what.  Better to betake myself to the old mechanic exercise of the
pen, which cheats my sense of time wasted.

I think of fogs in London, fogs of murky yellow or of sheer black,
such as have often made all work impossible to me, and held me, a
sort of dyspeptic owl, in moping and blinking idleness.  On such a
day, I remember, I once found myself at an end both of coal and of
lamp-oil, with no money to purchase either; all I could do was to go
to bed, meaning to lie there till the sky once more became visible.
But a second day found the fog dense as ever.  I rose in darkness; I
stood at the window of my garret, and saw that the street was
illumined as at night, lamps and shop-fronts perfectly visible, with
folk going about their business.  The fog, in fact, had risen, but
still hung above the house-tops, impermeable by any heavenly beam.
My solitude being no longer endurable, I went out, and walked the
town for hours.  When I returned, it was with a few coins which
permitted me to buy warmth and light.  I had sold to a second-hand
bookseller a volume which I prized, and was so much the poorer for
the money in my pocket.

Years after that, I recall another black morning.  As usual at such
times, I was suffering from a bad cold.  After a sleepless night, I
fell into a torpor, which held me unconscious for an hour or two.
Hideous cries aroused me; sitting up in the dark, I heard men going
along the street, roaring news of a hanging that had just taken
place.  "Execution of Mrs."--I forget the name of the murderess.
"Scene on the scaffold!"  It was a little after nine o'clock; the
enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition.  A
morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow
under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that
woman had been led out and hanged--hanged.  I thought with horror of
the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of
houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapours."  Overcome with dread, I rose and bestirred myself.  Blinds
drawn, lamp lit, and by a blazing fire, I tried to make believe that
it was kindly night.


V


Walking along the road after nightfall, I thought all at once of
London streets, and, by a freak of mind, wished I were there.  I saw
the shining of shop-fronts, the yellow glistening of a wet pavement,
the hurrying people, the cabs, the omnibuses--and I wished I were
amid it all.

What did it mean, but that I wished I were young again?  Not seldom
I have a sudden vision of a London street, perhaps the dreariest and
ugliest, which for a moment gives me a feeling of home-sickness.
Often it is the High Street of Islington, which I have not seen for
a quarter of a century, at least; no thoroughfare in all London less
attractive to the imagination, one would say; but I see myself
walking there--walking with the quick, light step of youth, and
there, of course, is the charm.  I see myself, after a long day of
work and loneliness, setting forth from my lodging.  For the weather
I care nothing; rain, wind, fog--what does it matter!  The fresh air
fills my lungs; my blood circles rapidly; I feel my muscles, and
have a pleasure in the hardness of the stone I tread upon.  Perhaps
I have money in my pocket; I am going to the theatre, and,
afterwards, I shall treat myself to supper--sausage and mashed
potatoes, with a pint of foaming ale.  The gusto with which I look
forward to each and every enjoyment!  At the pit-door, I shall roll
and hustle amid the throng, and find it amusing.  Nothing tires me.
Late at night, I shall walk all the way back to Islington, most
likely singing as I go.  Not because I am happy--nay, I am anything
but that; but my age is something and twenty; I am strong and well.

Put me in a London street this chill, damp night, and I should be
lost in barren discomfort.  But in those old days, if I am not
mistaken, I rather preferred the seasons of bad weather; I had, in
fact, the true instinct of townsfolk, which finds pleasure in the
triumph of artificial circumstance over natural conditions,
delighting in a glare and tumult of busy life under hostile heavens
which, elsewhere, would mean shivering ill-content.  The theatre, at
such a time, is doubly warm and bright; every shop is a happy
harbour of refuge--there, behind the counter, stand persons quite at
their ease, ready to chat as they serve you; the supper bars make
tempting display under their many gas-jets; the public houses are
full of people who all have money to spend.  Then clangs out the
piano-organ--and what could be cheerier!

I have much ado to believe that I really felt so.  But then, if life
had not somehow made itself tolerable to me, how should I have lived
through those many years?  Human creatures have a marvellous power
of adapting themselves to necessity.  Were I, even now, thrown back
into squalid London, with no choice but to abide and work there--
should I not abide and work?  Notwithstanding thoughts of the
chemist's shop, I suppose I should.


VI


One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a
little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers,
out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my
deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray.  Perhaps it is while
drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure.  In days
gone by, I could but gulp down the refreshment, hurried, often
harassed, by the thought of the work I had before me; often I was
quite insensible of the aroma, the flavour, of what I drank.  Now,
how delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my
study, with the appearance of the teapot!  What solace in the first
cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows!  What a glow
does it bring after a walk in chilly rain!  The while, I look around
at my books and pictures, tasting the happiness of their tranquil
possession.  I cast an eye towards my pipe; perhaps I prepare it,
with seeming thoughtfulness, for the reception of tobacco.  And
never, surely, is tobacco more soothing, more suggestive of humane
thoughts, than when it comes just after tea--itself a bland
inspirer.

In nothing is the English genius for domesticity more notably
declared than in the institution of this festival--almost one may
call it so--of afternoon tea.  Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea
has something in it of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work
and worry, the beginning of restful, sociable evening.  The mere
chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.  I care
nothing for your five o'clock tea of modish drawing-rooms, idle and
wearisome like all else in which that world has part; I speak of tea
where one is at home in quite another than the worldly sense.  To
admit mere strangers to your tea-table is profanation; on the other
hand, English hospitality has here its kindliest aspect; never is
friend more welcome than when he drops in for a cup of tea.  Where
tea is really a meal, with nothing between it and nine o'clock
supper, it is--again in the true sense--the homeliest meal of the
day.  Is it believable that the Chinese, in who knows how many
centuries, have derived from tea a millionth part of the pleasure or
the good which it has brought to England in the past one hundred
years?

I like to look at my housekeeper when she carries in the tray.  Her
mien is festal, yet in her smile there is a certain gravity, as
though she performed an office which honoured her.  She has dressed
for the evening; that is to say, her clean and seemly attire of
working hours is exchanged for garments suitable to fireside
leisure; her cheeks are warm, for she has been making fragrant
toast.  Quickly her eye glances about my room, but only to have the
pleasure of noting that all is in order; inconceivable that anything
serious should need doing at this hour of the day.  She brings the
little table within the glow of the hearth, so that I can help
myself without changing my easy position.  If she speaks, it will
only be a pleasant word or two; should she have anything important
to say, the moment will be AFTER tea, not before it; this she knows
by instinct.  Perchance she may just stoop to sweep back a cinder
which has fallen since, in my absence, she looked after the fire; it
is done quickly and silently.  Then, still smiling, she withdraws,
and I know that she is going to enjoy her own tea, her own toast, in
the warm, comfortable, sweet-smelling kitchen.


VII


One has heard much condemnation of the English kitchen.  Our typical
cook is spoken of as a gross, unimaginative creature, capable only
of roasting or seething.  Our table is said to be such as would
weary or revolt any but gobbet-bolting carnivores.  We are told that
our bread is the worst in Europe, an indigestible paste; that our
vegetables are diet rather for the hungry animal than for
discriminative man; that our warm beverages, called coffee and tea,
are so carelessly or ignorantly brewed that they preserve no simple
virtue of the drink as it is known in other lands.  To be sure,
there is no lack of evidence to explain such censure.  The class
which provides our servants is undeniably coarse and stupid, and its
handiwork of every kind too often bears the native stamp.  For all
that, English victuals are, in quality, the best in the world, and
English cookery is the wholesomest and the most appetizing known to
any temperate clime.

As in so many other of our good points, we have achieved this thing
unconsciously.  Your ordinary Englishwoman engaged in cooking
probably has no other thought than to make the food masticable; but
reflect on the results, when the thing is well done, and there
appears a culinary principle.  Nothing could be simpler, yet nothing
more right and reasonable.  The aim of English cooking is so to deal
with the raw material of man's nourishment as to bring out, for the
healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours.  And in this,
when the cook has any measure of natural or acquired skill, we most
notably succeed.  Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef
as can be eaten in no other country under the sun; our mutton is
mutton in its purest essence--think of a shoulder of Southdown at
the moment when the first jet of gravy starts under the carving
knife!  Each of our vegetables yields its separate and
characteristic sweetness.  It never occurs to us to disguise the
genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then
something is wrong with the food itself.  Some wiseacre scoffed at
us as the people with only one sauce.  The fact is, we have as many
sauces as we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery,
yields its native sap, and this is the best of all sauces
conceivable.  Only English folk know what is meant by GRAVY;
consequently, the English alone are competent to speak on the
question of sauce.

To be sure, this culinary principle presupposes food of the finest
quality.  If your beef and your mutton have flavours scarcely
distinguishable, whilst both this and that might conceivably be
veal, you will go to work in quite a different way; your object must
then be to disguise, to counterfeit, to add an alien relish--in
short, to do anything EXCEPT insist upon the natural quality of the
viand.  Happily, the English have never been driven to these
expedients.  Be it flesh, fowl, or fish, each comes to table so
distinctly and eminently itself that by no possibility could it be
confused with anything else.  Give your average cook a bit of cod,
and tell her to dress it in her own way.  The good creature will
carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter; and by no
exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make more
manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed
upon cod.  Think of our array of joints; how royal is each in its
own way, and how utterly unlike any of the others.  Picture a boiled
leg of mutton.  It is mutton, yes, and mutton of the best; nature
has bestowed upon man no sweeter morsel; but the same joint roasted
is mutton too, and how divinely different!  The point is that these
differences are natural; that, in eliciting them, we obey the
eternal law of things, and no human caprice.  Your artificial relish
is here not only needless, but offensive.

In the case of veal, we demand "stuffing."  Yes, for veal is a
somewhat insipid meat, and by experience we have discovered the best
method of throwing into relief such inherent goodness as it has.
The stuffing does not disguise, nor seek to disguise; it
accentuates.  Good veal stuffing--reflect!--is in itself a triumph
of culinary instinct; so bland it is, and yet so powerful upon the
gastric juices.

Did I call veal insipid?  I must add that it is only so in
comparison with English beef and mutton.  When I think of the
"brown" on the edge of a really fine cut of veal--!


VIII


As so often when my thought has gone forth in praise of things
English, I find myself tormented by an after-thought--the reflection
that I have praised a time gone by.  Now, in this matter of English
meat.  A newspaper tells me that English beef is non-existent; that
the best meat bearing that name has merely been fed up in England
for a short time before killing.  Well, well; we can only be
thankful that the quality is still so good.  Real English mutton
still exists, I suppose.  It would surprise me if any other country
could produce the shoulder I had yesterday.

Who knows?  Perhaps even our own cookery has seen its best days.  It
is a lamentable fact that the multitude of English people nowadays
never taste roasted meat; what they call by that name is baked in
the oven--a totally different thing, though it may, I admit, be
inferior only to the right roast.  Oh, the sirloin of old times, the
sirloin which I can remember, thirty or forty years ago!  That was
English, and no mistake, and all the history of civilization could
show nothing on the table of mankind to equal it.  To clap that
joint into a steamy oven would have been a crime unpardonable by
gods and man.  Have I not with my own eyes seen it turning, turning
on the spit?  The scent it diffused was in itself a cure for
dyspepsia.

It is very long since I tasted a slice of boiled beef; I have a
suspicion that the thing is becoming rare.  In a household such as
mine, the "round" is impracticable; of necessity it must be large,
altogether too large for our requirements.  But what exquisite
memories does my mind preserve!  The very colouring of a round, how
rich it is, yet how delicate, and how subtly varied!  The odour is
totally distinct from that of roast beef, and yet it is beef
incontestable.  Hot, of course with carrots, it is a dish for a
king; but cold it is nobler.  Oh, the thin broad slice, with just
its fringe of consistent fat!

We are sparing of condiments, but such as we use are the best that
man has invented.  And we know HOW to use them.  I have heard an
impatient innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of
mustard, and demand why, in the nature of things, mustard should not
be eaten with mutton.  The answer is very simple; this law has been
made by the English palate--which is impeccable.  I maintain it is
impeccable!  Your educated Englishman is an infallible guide in all
that relates to the table.  "The man of superior intellect," said
Tennyson--justifying his love of boiled beef and new potatoes--
"knows what is good to eat"; and I would extend it to all civilized
natives of our country.  We are content with nothing but the finest
savours, the truest combinations; our wealth, and happy natural
circumstances, have allowed us an education of the palate of which
our natural aptitude was worthy.  Think, by the bye, of those new
potatoes, just mentioned.  Our cook, when dressing them, puts into
the saucepan a sprig of mint.  This is genius.  No otherwise could
the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately,
emphasized.  The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows
only the young potato.


IX


There is to me an odd pathos in the literature of vegetarianism.  I
remember the day when I read these periodicals and pamphlets with
all the zest of hunger and poverty, vigorously seeking to persuade
myself that flesh was an altogether superfluous, and even a
repulsive, food.  If ever such things fall under my eyes nowadays, I
am touched with a half humorous compassion for the people whose
necessity, not their will, consents to this chemical view of diet.
There comes before me a vision of certain vegetarian restaurants,
where, at a minim outlay, I have often enough made believe to
satisfy my craving stomach; where I have swallowed "savoury cutlet,"
"vegetable steak," and I know not what windy insufficiencies tricked
up under specious names.  One place do I recall where you had a
complete dinner for sixpence--I dare not try to remember the items.
But well indeed do I see the faces of the guests--poor clerks and
shopboys, bloodless girls and women of many sorts--all endeavouring
to find a relish in lentil soup and haricot something-or-other.  It
was a grotesquely heart-breaking sight.

I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils and haricots--those
pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those
certificated aridities calling themselves human food!  An ounce of
either, we are told, is equivalent to--how many pounds?--of the best
rump-steak.  There are not many ounces of common sense in the brain
of him who proves it, or of him who believes it.  In some countries,
this stuff is eaten by choice; in England only dire need can compel
to its consumption.  Lentils and haricots are not merely insipid;
frequent use of them causes something like nausea.  Preach and
tabulate as you will, the English palate--which is the supreme
judge--rejects this farinaceous makeshift.  Even as it rejects
vegetables without the natural concomitant of meat; as it rejects
oatmeal-porridge and griddle-cakes for a mid-day meal; as it rejects
lemonade and ginger-ale offered as substitutes for honest beer.

What is the intellectual and moral state of that man who really
believes that chemical analysis can be an equivalent for natural
gusto?--I will get more nourishment out of an inch of right
Cambridge sausage; aye, out of a couple of ounces of honest tripe;
than can be yielded me by half a hundredweight of the best lentils
ever grown.


X


Talking of vegetables, can the inhabited globe offer anything to vie
with the English potato justly steamed?  I do not say that it is
always--or often--to be seen on our tables, for the steaming of a
potato is one of the great achievements of culinary art; but, when
it IS set before you, how flesh and spirit exult!  A modest palate
will find more than simple comfort in your boiled potato of every
day, as served in the decent household.  New or old, it is beyond
challenge delectable.  Try to think that civilized nations exist to
whom this food is unknown--nay, who speak of it, on hearsay, with
contempt!  Such critics, little as they suspect it, never ate a
potato in their lives.  What they have swallowed under that name was
the vegetable with all its exquisite characteristics vulgarized or
destroyed.  Picture the "ball of flour" (as old-fashioned housewives
call it) lying in the dish, diffusing the softest, subtlest aroma,
ready to crumble, all but to melt, as soon as it is touched; recall
its gust and its after-gust, blending so consummately with that of
the joint, hot or cold.  Then think of the same potato cooked in any
other way, and what sadness will come upon you!


XI


It angers me to pass a grocer's shop, and see in the window a
display of foreign butter.  This is the kind of thing that makes one
gloom over the prospects of England.  The deterioration of English
butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people.
Naturally, this article of food would at once betray a decline in
the virtues of its maker; butter must be a subject of the dairyman's
honest pride, or there is no hope of its goodness.  Begin to save
your labour, to aim at dishonest profits, to feel disgust or
contempt for your work--and the churn declares every one of these
vices.  They must be very prevalent, for it is getting to be a rare
thing to eat English butter which is even tolerable.  What!  England
dependent for dairy-produce upon France, Denmark, America?  Had we
but one true statesman--but one genuine leader of the people--the
ears of English landowners and farmers would ring and tingle with
this proof of their imbecility.

Nobody cares.  Who cares for anything but the show and bluster which
are threatening our ruin?  English food, not long ago the best in
the world, is falling off in quality, and even our national genius
for cooking shows a decline; to anyone who knows England, these are
facts significant enough.  Foolish persons have prated about "our
insular cuisine," demanding its reform on Continental models, and
they have found too many like unto themselves who were ready to
listen; the result will be, before long, that our excellence will be
forgotten, and paltry methods be universally introduced, together
with the indifferent viands to which they are suited.  Yet, if any
generality at all be true, it is a plain fact that English diet and
English virtue--in the largest sense of the word--are inseparably
bound together.

Our supremacy in this matter of the table came with little taking of
thought; what we should now do is to reflect upon the things which
used to be instinctive, perceive the reasons of our excellence, and
set to work to re-establish it.  Of course the vilest cooking in the
kingdom is found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of
London that many an ill has spread over the land?  London is the
antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even
glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small
towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested,
and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the
great centre of corruption.  I had far rather see England covered
with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the
issue would be infinitely more hopeful.  Little girls should be
taught cooking and baking more assiduously than they are taught to
read.  But with ever in view the great English principle--that food
is only cooked aright when it yields the utmost of its native and
characteristic savour.  Let sauces be utterly forbidden--save the
natural sauce made of gravy.  In the same way with sweets; keep in
view the insurpassable English ideals of baked tarts (or pies, if so
you call them), and boiled puddings; as they are the wholesomest, so
are they the most delicious of sweet cakes yet invented; it is
merely a question of having them well made and cooked.  Bread,
again; we are getting used to bread of poor quality, and ill-made,
but the English loaf at its best--such as you were once sure of
getting in every village--is the faultless form of the staff of
life.  Think of the glorious revolution that could be wrought in our
troubled England if it could be ordained that no maid, of whatever
rank, might become a wife unless she had proved her ability to make
and bake a perfect loaf of bread.


XII


The good S- writes me a kindly letter.  He is troubled by the
thought of my loneliness.  That I should choose to live in such a
place as this through the summer, he can understand; but surely I
should do better to come to town for the winter?  How on earth do I
spend the dark days and the long evenings?

I chuckle over the good S-'s sympathy.  Dark days are few in happy
Devon, and such as befall have never brought me a moment's tedium.
The long, wild winter of the north would try my spirits; but here,
the season that follows autumn is merely one of rest, Nature's
annual slumber.  And I share in the restful influence.  Often enough
I pass an hour in mere drowsing by the fireside; frequently I let my
book drop, satisfied to muse.  But more often than not the winter
day is blest with sunshine--the soft beam which is Nature's smile in
dreaming.  I go forth, and wander far.  It pleases me to note
changes of landscape when the leaves have fallen; I see streams and
ponds which during summer were hidden; my favourite lanes have an
unfamiliar aspect, and I become better acquainted with them.  Then,
there is a rare beauty in the structure of trees ungarmented; and if
perchance snow or frost have silvered their tracery against the
sober sky, it becomes a marvel which never tires.

Day by day I look at the coral buds on the lime-tree.  Something of
regret will mingle with my joy when they begin to break.

In the middle years of my life--those years that were the worst of
all--I used to dread the sound of a winter storm which woke me in
the night.  Wind and rain lashing the house filled me with miserable
memories and apprehensions; I lay thinking of the savage struggle of
man with man, and often saw before me no better fate than to be
trampled down into the mud of life.  The wind's wail seemed to me
the voice of a world in anguish; rain was the weeping of the feeble
and the oppressed.  But nowadays I can lie and listen to a night-
storm with no intolerable thoughts; at worst, I fall into a
compassionate sadness as I remember those I loved and whom I shall
see no more.  For myself, there is even comfort in the roaring dark;
for I feel the strength of the good walls about me, and my safety
from squalid peril such as pursued me through all my labouring life.
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind!"  Thou canst not blow away the modest
wealth which makes my security.  Nor can any "rain upon the roof"
put my soul to question; for life has given me all I ever asked--
infinitely more than I ever hoped--and in no corner of my mind does
there lurk a coward fear of death.


XIII


If some stranger from abroad asked me to point out to him the most
noteworthy things in England, I should first of all consider his
intellect.  Were he a man of everyday level, I might indicate for
his wonder and admiration Greater London, the Black Country, South
Lancashire, and other features of our civilization which, despite
eager rivalry, still maintain our modern pre-eminence in the
creation of ugliness.  If, on the other hand, he seemed a man of
brains, it would be my pleasure to take him to one of those old
villages, in the midlands or the west, which lie at some distance
from a railway station, and in aspect are still untouched by the
baser tendencies of the time.  Here, I would tell my traveller, he
saw something which England alone can show.  The simple beauty of
the architecture, its perfect adaptation to the natural
surroundings, the neatness of everything though without formality,
the general cleanness and good repair, the grace of cottage gardens,
that tranquillity and security which make a music in the mind of him
who gazes--these are what a man must see and feel if he would
appreciate the worth and the power of England.  The people which has
made for itself such homes as these is distinguished, above all
things, by its love of order; it has understood, as no other people,
the truth that "order is heaven's first law."  With order it is
natural to find stability, and the combination of these qualities,
as seen in domestic life, results in that peculiarly English
product, our name for which--though but a pale shadow of the thing
itself--has been borrowed by other countries:  comfort.

Then Englishman's need of "comfort" is one of his best
characteristics; the possibility that he may change in this respect,
and become indifferent to his old ideal of physical and mental ease,
is the gravest danger manifest in our day.  For "comfort," mind you,
does not concern the body alone; the beauty and orderliness of an
Englishman's home derive their value, nay, their very existence,
from the spirit which directs his whole life.  Walk from the village
to the noble's mansion.  It, too, is perfect of its kind; it has the
dignity of age, its walls are beautiful, the gardens, the park about
it are such as can be found only in England, lovely beyond compare;
and all this represents the same moral characteristics as the
English cottage, but with greater activities and responsibilities.
If the noble grow tired of his mansion, and, letting it to some
crude owner of millions, go to live in hotels and hired villas; if
the cottager sicken of his village roof, and transport himself to
the sixth floor of a "block" in Shoreditch; one sees but too well
that the one and the other have lost the old English sense of
comfort, and, in losing it, have suffered degradation alike as men
and as citizens.  It is not a question of exchanging one form of
comfort for another; the instinct which made an Englishman has in
these cases perished.  Perhaps it is perishing from among us
altogether, killed by new social and political conditions; one who
looks at villages of the new type, at the working-class quarters of
towns, at the rising of "flats" among the dwellings of the wealthy,
has little choice but to think so.  There may soon come a day when,
though the word "comfort" continues to be used in many languages,
the thing it signifies will be discoverable nowhere at all.


XIV


If the ingenious foreigner found himself in some village of
manufacturing Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed.  Here
something of the power of England might be revealed to him, but of
England's worth, little enough.  Hard ugliness would everywhere
assail his eyes; the visages and voices of the people would seem to
him thoroughly akin to their surroundings.  Scarcely could one find,
in any civilized nation, a more notable contrast than that between
these two English villages and their inhabitants.

Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the
hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim
undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south.
But to understand how "comfort," and the virtues it implies, can
exist amid such conditions, one must penetrate to the hearthside;
the door must be shut, the curtain drawn; here "home" does not
extend beyond the threshold.  After all, this grimy row of houses,
ugliest that man ever conceived, is more representative of England
to-day than the lovely village among the trees and meadows.  More
than a hundred years ago, power passed from the south of England to
the north.  The vigorous race on the other side of Trent only found
its opportunity when the age of machinery began; its civilization,
long delayed, differs in obvious respects from that of older
England.  In Sussex or in Somerset, however dull and clownish the
typical inhabitant, he plainly belongs to an ancient order of
things, represents an immemorial subordination.  The rude man of the
north is--by comparison--but just emerged from barbarism, and under
any circumstances would show less smooth a front.  By great
misfortune, he has fallen under the harshest lordship the modern
world has known--that of scientific industrialism, and all his
vigorous qualities are subdued to a scheme of life based upon the
harsh, the ugly, the sordid.  His racial heritage, of course, marks
him to the eye; even as ploughman or shepherd, he differs notably
from him of the same calling in the weald or on the downs.  But the
frank brutality of the man in all externals has been encouraged,
rather than mitigated, by the course his civilization has taken, and
hence it is that, unless one knows him well enough to respect him,
he seems even yet stamped with the half-savagery of his folk as they
were a century and a half ago.  His fierce shyness, his arrogant
self-regard, are notes of a primitive state.  Naturally, he never
learnt to house himself as did the Southerner, for climate, as well
as social circumstance, was unfavourable to all the graces of life.
And now one can only watch the encroachment of his rule upon that
old, that true England whose strength and virtue were so differently
manifested.  This fair broad land of the lovely villages signifies
little save to the antiquary, the poet, the painter.  Vainly,
indeed, should I show its beauty and its peace to the observant
foreigner; he would but smile, and, with a glance at the traction-
engine just coming along the road, indicate the direction of his
thoughts.


XV


Nothing in all Homer pleases me more than the bedstead of Odysseus.
I have tried to turn the passage describing it into English verse,
thus:-


Here in my garth a goodly olive grew;
Thick was the noble leafage of its prime,
And like a carven column rose the trunk.
This tree about I built my chamber walls,
Laying great stone on stone, and roofed them well,
And in the portal set a comely door,
Stout-hinged and tightly closing.  Then with axe
I lopped the leafy olive's branching head,
And hewed the bole to four-square shapeliness,
And smoothed it, craftsmanlike, and grooved and pierced,
Making the rooted timber, where it grew,
A corner of my couch.  Labouring on,
I fashioned all the bed-frame; which complete,
The wood I overlaid with shining gear
Of gold, of silver, and of ivory.
And last, between the endlong beams I stretched
Stout thongs of ox-hide, dipped in purple dye.

Odyssey, xxiii. 190-201.


Did anyone ever imitate the admirable precedent?  Were I a young
man, and an owner of land, assuredly I would do so.  Choose some
goodly tree, straight-soaring; cut away head and branches; leave
just the clean trunk and build your house about it in such manner
that the top of the rooted timber rises a couple of feet above your
bedroom floor.  The trunk need not be manifest in the lower part of
the house, but I should prefer to have it so; I am a tree-
worshipper; it should be as the visible presence of a household god.
And how could one more nobly symbolize the sacredness of Home?
There can be no home without the sense of permanence, and without
home there is no civilization--as England will discover when the
greater part of her population have become flat-inhabiting nomads.
In some ideal commonwealth, one can imagine the Odyssean bed a
normal institution, every head of a household, cottager or lord (for
the commonwealth must have its lords, go to!), lying down to rest,
as did his fathers, in the Chamber of the Tree.  This, one fancies,
were a somewhat more fitting nuptial chamber than the chance bedroom
of a hotel.  Odysseus building his home is man performing a supreme
act of piety; through all the ages that picture must retain its
profound significance.  Note the tree he chose, the olive, sacred to
Athena, emblem of peace.  When he and the wise goddess meet together
to scheme destruction of the princes, they sit [Greek text].  Their
talk is of bloodshed, true; but in punishment of those who have
outraged the sanctity of the hearth, and to re-establish, after
purification, domestic calm and security.  It is one of the dreary
aspects of modern life that natural symbolism has all but perished.
We have no consecrated tree.  The oak once held a place in English
hearts, but who now reveres it?--our trust is in gods of iron.
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save
the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable?
One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of
metal.  And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin
first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to
the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's
contentment.


XVI


I have been dull to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is
that I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn.  The
scope of knowledge has become so vast.  I put aside nearly all
physical investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a
matter of idle curiosity.  This would seem to be a considerable
clearing of the field; but it leaves what is practically the
infinite.  To run over a list of only my favourite subjects, those
to which, all my life long, I have more or less applied myself,
studies which hold in my mind the place of hobbies, is to open
vistas of intellectual despair.  In an old note-book I jotted down
such a list--"things I hope to know, and to know well."  I was then
four and twenty.  Reading it with the eyes of fifty-four, I must
needs laugh.  There appear such modest items as "The history of the
Christian Church up to the Reformation"--"all Greek poetry"--"The
field of Mediaeval Romance"--"German literature from Lessing to
Heine"--"Dante!"  Not one of these shall I ever "know, and know
well"; not any one of them.  Yet here I am buying books which lead
me into endless paths of new temptation.  What have I to do with
Egypt?  Yet I have been beguiled by Flinders Petrie and by Maspero.
How can I pretend to meddle with the ancient geography of Asia
Minor?  Yet here have I bought Prof. Ramsay's astonishing book, and
have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a good many pages
of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment, and I see
that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the intellect
when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.

It all means, of course, that, owing to defective opportunity,
owing, still more perhaps, to lack of method and persistence, a
possibility that was in me has been wasted, lost.  My life has been
merely tentative, a broken series of false starts and hopeless new
beginnings.  If I allowed myself to indulge that mood, I could
revolt against the ordinance which allows me no second chance.  O
mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos!  If I could but start
again, with only the experience there gained!  I mean, make a new
beginning of my intellectual life; nothing else, O heaven! nothing
else.  Even amid poverty, I could do so much better; keeping before
my eyes some definite, some not unattainable, good; sternly
dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful.

And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would
be for ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in
these final years.  Who can say?  Perhaps the sole condition of my
progress to this state of mind and heart which make my happiness was
that very stumbling and erring which I so regret.


XVII


Why do I give so much of my time to the reading of history?  Is it
in any sense profitable to me?  What new light can I hope for on the
nature of man?  What new guidance for the direction of my own life
through the few years that may remain to me?  But it is with no such
purpose that I read these voluminous books; they gratify--or seem to
gratify--a mere curiosity; and scarcely have I closed a volume, when
the greater part of what I have read in it is forgotten.

Heaven forbid that I should remember all!  Many a time I have said
to myself that I would close the dreadful record of human life, lay
it for ever aside, and try to forget it.  Somebody declares that
history is a manifestation of the triumph of good over evil.  The
good prevails now and then, no doubt, but how local and transitory
is such triumph.  If historic tomes had a voice, it would sound as
one long moan of anguish.  Think steadfastly of the past, and one
sees that only by defect of imaginative power can any man endure to
dwell with it.  History is a nightmare of horrors; we relish it,
because we love pictures, and because all that man has suffered is
to man rich in interest.  But make real to yourself the vision of
every blood-stained page--stand in the presence of the ravening
conqueror, the savage tyrant--tread the stones of the dungeon and of
the torture-room--feel the fire of the stake--hear the cries of that
multitude which no man can number, the victims of calamity, of
oppression, of fierce injustice in its myriad forms, in every land,
in every age--and what joy have you of your historic reading?  One
would need to be a devil to understand it thus, and yet to delight
in it.

Injustice--there is the loathed crime which curses the memory of the
world.  The slave doomed by his lord's caprice to perish under
tortures--one feels it a dreadful and intolerable thing; but it is
merely the crude presentment of what has been done and endured a
million times in every stage of civilization.  Oh, the last thoughts
of those who have agonized unto death amid wrongs to which no man
would give ear!  That appeal of innocence in anguish to the hard,
mute heavens!  Were there only one such instance in all the
chronicles of time, it should doom the past to abhorred oblivion.
Yet injustice, the basest, the most ferocious, is inextricable from
warp and woof in the tissue of things gone by.  And if anyone
soothes himself with the reflection that such outrages can happen no
more, that mankind has passed beyond such hideous possibility, he is
better acquainted with books than with human nature.

It were wiser to spend my hours with the books which bring no
aftertaste of bitterness--with the great poets whom I love, with the
thinkers, with the gentle writers of pages that soothe and
tranquillize.  Many a volume regards me from the shelf as though
reproachfully; shall I never again take it in my hands?  Yet the
words are golden, and I would fain treasure them all in my heart's
memory.  Perhaps the last fault of which I shall cure myself is that
habit of mind which urges me to seek knowledge.  Was I not yesterday
on the point of ordering a huge work of erudition, which I should
certainly never have read through, and which would only have served
to waste precious days?  It is the Puritan in my blood, I suppose,
which forbids me to recognise frankly that all I have now to do is
to ENJOY.  This is wisdom.  The time for acquisition has gone by.  I
am not foolish enough to set myself learning a new language; why
should I try to store my memory with useless knowledge of the past?

Come, once more before I die I will read Don Quixote.


XVIII


Somebody has been making a speech, reported at a couple of columns'
length in the paper.  As I glance down the waste of print, one word
catches my eye again and again.  It's all about "science"--and
therefore doesn't concern me.

I wonder whether there are many men who have the same feeling with
regard to "science" as I have?  It is something more than a
prejudice; often it takes the form of a dread, almost a terror.
Even those branches of science which are concerned with things that
interest me--which deal with plants and animals and the heaven of
stars--even these I cannot contemplate without uneasiness, a
spiritual disaffection; new discoveries, new theories, however they
engage my intelligence, soon weary me, and in some way depress.
When it comes to other kinds of science--the sciences blatant and
ubiquitous--the science by which men become millionaires--I am
possessed with an angry hostility, a resentful apprehension.  This
was born in me, no doubt; I cannot trace it to circumstances of my
life, or to any particular moment of my mental growth.  My boyish
delight in Carlyle doubtless nourished the temper, but did not
Carlyle so delight me because of what was already in my mind?  I
remember, as a lad, looking at complicated machinery with a
shrinking uneasiness which, of course, I did not understand; I
remember the sort of disturbed contemptuousness with which, in my
time of "examinations," I dismissed "science papers."  It is
intelligible enough to me, now, that unformed fear:  the ground of
my antipathy has grown clear enough.  I hate and fear "science"
because of my conviction that, for long to come if not for ever, it
will be the remorseless enemy of mankind.  I see it destroying all
simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world; I
see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization; I see it
darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts; I see it bringing
a time of vast conflicts, which will pale into insignificance "the
thousand wars of old," and, as likely as not, will whelm all the
laborious advances of mankind in blood-drenched chaos.

Yet to rail against it is as idle as to quarrel with any other force
of nature.  For myself, I can hold apart, and see as little as
possible of the thing I deem accursed.  But I think of some who are
dear to me, whose life will be lived in the hard and fierce new age.
The roaring "Jubilee" of last summer was for me an occasion of
sadness; it meant that so much was over and gone--so much of good
and noble, the like of which the world will not see again, and that
a new time of which only the perils are clearly visible, is rushing
upon us.  Oh, the generous hopes and aspirations of forty years ago!
Science, then, was seen as the deliverer; only a few could prophesy
its tyranny, could foresee that it would revive old evils and
trample on the promises of its beginning.  This is the course of
things; we must accept it.  But it is some comfort to me that I--
poor little mortal--have had no part in bringing the tyrant to his
throne.


XIX


The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning.  With but half-
formed purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the
city, and came into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering
awhile, heard the first notes of the organ, and so entered.  I
believe it is more than thirty years since I was in an English
church on Christmas Day.  The old time and the old faces lived again
for me; I saw myself on the far side of the abyss of years--that
self which is not myself at all, though I mark points of kindred
between the beings of then and now.  He who in that other world sat
to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at all--rapt in
his own visions--or listened only as one in whose blood was heresy.
He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind,
distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive.  More
than that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from
their dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly
rejecting the other.  "On earth peace, goodwill to men"--already
that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no
doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority.  Life, to him, was a
half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech--and
through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning
to fight his way!

To-day, I listen with no heretical promptings.  The music, whether
of organ or of word, is more to me than ever; the literal meaning
causes me no restiveness.  I felt only glad that I had yielded to
the summons of the Christmas bells.  I sat among a congregation of
shadows, not in the great cathedral, but in a little parish church
far from here.  When I came forth, it astonished me to see the
softly radiant sky, and to tread on the moist earth; my dream
expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey, and all beneath it the
gleam of new-fallen snow.  It is a piety to turn awhile and live
with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose Christmas
is passed in no unhappy solitude?  I would not now, if I might, be
one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent
voices, and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember.
When I was scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the
fireside the Christmas stanzas of "In Memoriam."  To-night I have
taken down the volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me
once again--read as no other ever did, that voice which taught me to
know poetry, the voice which never spoke to me but of good and noble
things.  Would I have those accents overborne by a living tongue,
however welcome its sound at another time?  Jealously I guard my
Christmas solitude.


XX


Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of
hypocrisy?  The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the
Round-heads; before that, nothing in the national character could
have suggested it.  The England of Chaucer, the England of
Shakespeare, assuredly was not hypocrite.  The change wrought by
Puritanism introduced into the life of the people that new element
which ever since, more or less notably, has suggested to the
observer a habit of double-dealing in morality and religion.  The
scorn of the Cavalier is easily understood; it created a traditional
Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured before the world as our
arch-dissembler.  With the decline of genuine Puritanism came that
peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue which is
represented by Mr. Pecksniff--a being so utterly different from
Tartufe, and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen
themselves.  But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach
has been persistently levelled at us.  It often sounds upon the lips
of our emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in
the offices of Continental newspapers.  And for the reason one has
not far to look.  When Napoleon called us a "nation of shop-
keepers," we were nothing of the kind; since his day we have become
so, in the strictest sense of the word; and consider the spectacle
of a flourishing tradesman, anything but scrupulous in his methods
of business, who loses no opportunity of bidding all mankind to
regard him as a religious and moral exemplar.  This is the actual
show of things with us; this is the England seen by our bitterest
censors.  There is an excuse for those who charge us with
"hypocrisy."

But the word is ill-chosen, and indicates a misconception.  The
characteristic of your true hypocrite is the assumption of a virtue
which not only he has not, but which he is incapable of possessing,
and in which he does not believe.  The hypocrite may have, most
likely has, (for he is a man of brains,) a conscious rule of life,
but it is never that of the person to whom his hypocrisy is
directed.  Tartufe incarnates him once for all.  Tartufe is by
conviction an atheist and a sensualist; he despises all who regard
life from the contrasted point of view.  But among Englishmen such
an attitude of mind has always been extremely rare; to presume it in
our typical money-maker who has edifying sentiments on his lips is
to fall into a grotesque error of judgment.  No doubt that error is
committed by the ordinary foreign journalist, a man who knows less
than little of English civilization.  More enlightened critics, if
they use the word at all, do so carelessly; when speaking with more
precision, they call the English "pharisaic"--and come nearer the
truth.

Our vice is self-righteousness.  We are essentially an Old Testament
people; Christianity has never entered into our soul we see
ourselves as the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration
can attain unto humility.  In this there is nothing hypocritic.  The
blatant upstart who builds a church, lays out his money in that way
not merely to win social consideration; in his curious little soul
he believes (so far as he can believe anything) that what he has
done is pleasing to God and beneficial to mankind.  He may have lied
and cheated for every sovereign he possesses; he may have polluted
his life with uncleanness; he may have perpetrated many kinds of
cruelty and baseness--but all these things has he done against his
conscience, and, as soon as the opportunity comes, he will make
atonement for them in the way suggested by such faith as he has, the
way approved by public opinion.  His religion, strictly defined, is
AN INERADICABLE BELIEF IN HIS OWN RELIGIOUSNESS.  As an Englishman,
he holds as birthright the true Piety, the true Morals.  That he has
"gone wrong" is, alas, undeniable, but never--even when leering most
satirically--did he deny his creed.  When, at public dinners and
elsewhere, he tuned his voice to the note of edification, this man
did not utter the lie of the hypocrite he MEANT EVERY WORD HE SAID.
Uttering high sentiments, he spoke, not as an individual, but as an
Englishman, and most thoroughly did he believe that all who heard
him owed in their hearts allegiance to the same faith.  He is, if
you like, a Pharisee--but do not misunderstand; his Pharisaism has
nothing personal.  That would be quite another kind of man;
existing, to be sure, in England, but not as a national type.  No;
he is a Pharisee in the minor degree with regard to those of his
countrymen who differ from him in dogma; he is Pharisee absolute
with regard to the foreigner.  And there he stands, representing an
Empire.

The word hypocrisy is perhaps most of all applied to our behaviour
in matters of sexual morality, and here with specially flagrant
misuse.  Multitudes of Englishmen have thrown aside the national
religious dogma, but very few indeed have abandoned the conviction
that the rules of morality publicly upheld in England are the best
known in the world.  Any one interested in doing so can but too
easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of
most other countries.  Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long
intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer.  The streets of our
great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot
be seen elsewhere in the world.  Despite all this, your average
Englishman takes for granted his country's moral superiority, and
loses no chance of proclaiming it at the expense of other peoples.
To call him hypocrite, is simply not to know the man.  He may, for
his own part, be gross-minded and lax of life; that has nothing to
do with the matter; HE BELIEVES IN VIRTUE.  Tell him that English
morality is mere lip-service, and he will blaze with as honest anger
as man ever felt.  He is a monument of self-righteousness, again not
personal but national.


XXI


I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present
England?  Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during
the last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to
ascertain in what degree they have affected the national character,
thus far.  One notes the obvious:  decline of conventional religion,
free discussion of the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of
materialism which favours every anarchic tendency.  Is it to be
feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker
vice of true hypocrisy?  For the English to lose belief in
themselves--not merely in their potential goodness, but in their
pre-eminence as examples and agents of good--would mean as hopeless
a national corruption as any recorded in history.  To doubt their
genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course,
the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and bred
in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly
deemed "best" among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth
who are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in
a very true sense, "honest, sober, and godly" lives.  Such folk, one
knows, were never in a majority, but of old they had a power which
made them veritable representatives of the English ETHOS.  If they
thought highly of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they
spoke, at times, as Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which
carried with it no grave condemnation.  Hypocrisy was, of all forms
of baseness, that which they most abhorred.  So is it still with
their descendants.  Whether these continue to speak among us with
authority, no man can certainly say.  If their power is lost, and
those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer use the word amiss, we
shall soon know it.


XXII


It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism.  In the
heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was
natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that
saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque
phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having
the key turned upon it.  Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes
as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to
remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how
it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for the
civic freedom which is our highest national privilege.  An age of
intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of
that which follows.  Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no
faith but the Protestantism of the Tudor.  Imagine (not to think of
worse) English literature represented by Cowley, and the name of
Milton unknown.  The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his
tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally
have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality.  Regret, if
you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of
Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce
Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one
cannot help wishing that its piety had taken another form; later,
there had to come the "exodus from Houndsditch," with how much
conflict and misery!  Such, however, was the price of the soul's
health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better
meaning.  Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a
relative term.  From the point of view of a conceivable
civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must
always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much
worse.  Of all theological systems, the most convincing is
Manicheism, which, of course, under another name, was held by the
Puritans themselves.  What we call Restoration morality--the
morality, that is to say, of a king and court--might well have
become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from
religious revolution.

The political services of Puritanism were inestimable; they will be
more feelingly remembered when England has once more to face the
danger of political tyranny.  I am thinking now of its effects upon
social life.  To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other
countries, is expressed by the term English prudery, the accusation
implied being part of the general charge of hypocrisy.  It is said
by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying
out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of
healthy emancipation.  If by prude be meant a secretly vicious
person who affects an excessive decorum, by all means let the prude
disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness.  If, on the other
hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life, cultivates, either
by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of thought and
speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then I say
that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and I
have no desire to see its prevalence diminish.  On the whole, it is
the latter meaning which certain foreigners have in mind when they
speak of English prudery--at all events, as exhibited by women; it
being, not so much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of
conceited foolishness.  An English woman who typifies the begueule
may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow's other
quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and
intolerable creature.  Well, here is the point of difference.
Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism, as
our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of
civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all
the best things which Puritanism had to teach.  We who know English
women by the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their
careful choice of language betokens, far more often than not, a
corresponding delicacy of mind.  Landor saw it as a ridiculous trait
that English people were so mealy-mouthed in speaking of their
bodies; De Quincey, taking him to task for this remark, declared it
a proof of blunted sensibility due to long residence in Italy; and,
whether the particular explanation held good or not, as regards the
question at issue, De Quincey was perfectly right.  It is very good
to be mealy-mouthed with respect to everything that reminds us of
the animal in man.  Verbal delicacy in itself will not prove an
advanced civilization, but civilization, as it advances, assuredly
tends that way.


XXIII


All through the morning, the air was held in an ominous stillness.
Sitting over my books, I seemed to feel the silence; when I turned
my look to the window, I saw nothing but the broad, grey sky, a
featureless expanse, cold, melancholy.  Later, just as I was
bestirring myself to go out for an afternoon walk, something white
fell softly across my vision.  A few minutes more, and all was
hidden with a descending veil of silent snow.

It is a disappointment.  Yesterday I half believed that the winter
drew to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid
azure shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of
spring.  Idle by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to
long for the days of light and warmth.  My fancy wandered, leading
me far and wide in a dream of summer England. . . .

This is the valley of the Blythe.  The stream ripples and glances
over its brown bed warmed with sunbeams; by its bank the green flags
wave and rustle, and, all about, the meadows shine in pure gold of
buttercups.  The hawthorn hedges are a mass of gleaming blossom,
which scents the breeze.  There above rises the heath, yellow-
mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I walk for an hour or two, I
shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of Suffolk, and look over the
northern sea. . . .

I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid
broad pastures up to the rolling moor.  Up and up, till my feet
brush through heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me.  Under
a glowing sky of summer, this air of the uplands has still a life
which spurs to movement, which makes the heart bound.  The dale is
hidden; I see only the brown and purple wilderness, cutting against
the blue with great round shoulders, and, far away to the west, an
horizon of sombre heights. . . .

I ramble through a village in Gloucestershire, a village which seems
forsaken in this drowsy warmth of the afternoon.  The houses of grey
stone are old and beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew
how to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with
flowers, and the air is delicately sweet.  At the village end, I
come into a lane, which winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf
and bracken and woods of noble beech.  Here I am upon a spur of the
Cotswolds, and before me spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its
ripening crops, its fruiting orchards, watered by sacred Avon.
Beyond, softly blue, the hills of Malvern.  On the branch hard by
warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy solitude.  A rabbit jumps
through the fern.  There sounds the laugh of a woodpecker from the
copse in yonder hollow. . . .

In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater.  The sky is
still warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering
above the dark mountain line.  Below me spreads a long reach of the
lake, steel-grey between its dim colourless shores.  In the profound
stillness, the trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely
near; it serves only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in
this her sanctuary.  I feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin
to desolation; the heart of the land I love seems to beat in the
silent night gathering around me; amid things eternal, I touch the
familiar and the kindly earth.  Moving, I step softly, as though my
footfall were an irreverence.  A turn in the road, and there is
wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.  Then I see a
light glimmering in the farmhouse window--a little ray against the
blackness of the great hillside, below which the water sleeps. . . .

A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse.  Far on every
side stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and
clustered trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills.
Slow, silent, the river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-
green osier beds.  Yonder is the little town of St. Neots.  In all
England no simpler bit of rural scenery; in all the world nothing of
its kind more beautiful.  Cattle are lowing amid the rich meadows.
Here one may loiter and dream in utter restfulness, whilst the great
white clouds mirror themselves in the water as they pass above. . .
.

I am walking upon the South Downs.  In the valleys, the sun lies
hot, but here sings a breeze which freshens the forehead and fills
the heart with gladness.  My foot upon the short, soft turf has an
unwearied lightness; I feel capable of walking on and on, even to
that farthest horizon where the white cloud casts its floating
shadow.  Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent,
its ever-changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with
luminous noontide mist.  Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the
sheep-spotted downs, beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex
weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint.
Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an
old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see
the low church-tower, and the little graveyard about it.  Meanwhile,
high in the heaven, a lark is singing.  It descends; it drops to its
nest, and I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song
was love of England. . . .

It is all but dark.  For a quarter of an hour I must have been
writing by a glow of firelight reflected on to my desk; it seemed to
me the sun of summer.  Snow is still falling.  I see its ghostly
glimmer against the vanishing sky.  To-morrow it will be thick upon
my garden, and perchance for several days.  But when it melts, when
it melts, it will leave the snowdrop.  The crocus, too, is waiting,
down there under the white mantle which warms the earth.


XXIV


Time is money--says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people.
Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth--money is time.  I
think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to
find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study.  Suppose I
were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how
different the whole day would be!  Have I not lost many and many a
day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary
to put my mind in tune?  Money is time.  With money I buy for
cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be
mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.  Money is
time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this
sort of purchase.  He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in
regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough.  What are
we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time?
And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with
the other.


XXV


The dark days are drawing to an end.  Soon it will be spring once
more; I shall go out into the fields, and shake away these thoughts
of discouragement and fear which have lately too much haunted my
fireside.  For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much
better employed, from every point of view, when I live solely for my
own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world.  The
world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything.  I
know only one way in which I could have played a meritorious part as
an active citizen--by becoming a schoolmaster in some little country
town, and teaching half a dozen teachable boys to love study for its
own sake.  That I could have done, I daresay.  Yet, no; for I must
have had as a young man the same mind that I have in age, devoid of
idle ambitions, undisturbed by unattainable ideals.  Living as I do
now, I deserve better of my country than at any time in my working
life; better, I suspect, than most of those who are praised for busy
patriotism.

Not that I regard my life as an example for any one else; all I say
is, that it is good for me, and in so far an advantage to the world.
To live in quiet content is surely a piece of good citizenship.  If
you can do more, do it, and God-speed!  I know myself for an
exception.  And I ever find it a good antidote to gloomy thoughts to
bring before my imagination the lives of men, utterly unlike me in
their minds and circumstances, who give themselves with glad and
hopeful energy to the plain duties that lie before them.  However
one's heart may fail in thinking of the folly and baseness which
make so great a part of to-day's world, remember how many bright
souls are living courageously, seeing the good wherever it may be
discovered, undismayed by portents, doing what they have to do with
all their strength.  In every land there are such, no few of them, a
great brotherhood, without distinction of race or faith; for they,
indeed, constitute the race of man, rightly designated, and their
faith is one, the cult of reason and of justice.  Whether the future
is to them or to the talking anthropoid, no one can say.  But they
live and labour, guarding the fire of sacred hope.

In my own country, dare I think that they are fewer than of old?
Some I have known; they give me assurance of the many, near and far.
Hearts of noble strain, intrepid, generous; the clear head, the keen
eye; a spirit equal alike to good fortune and to ill.  I see the
true-born son of England, his vigour and his virtues yet unimpaired.
In his blood is the instinct of honour, the scorn of meanness; he
cannot suffer his word to be doubted, and his hand will give away
all he has rather than profit by a plebeian parsimony.  He is frugal
only of needless speech.  A friend staunch to the death; tender with
a grave sweetness to those who claim his love; passionate, beneath
stoic seeming, for the causes he holds sacred.  A hater of confusion
and of idle noise, his place is not where the mob presses; he makes
no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful promise of what he will
do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel of wisdom overborne,
he will hold apart, content with plain work that lies nearest to his
hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in destruction.
He was ever hopeful, and deems it a crime to despair of his country.
"Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit."  Fallen on whatever evil days
and evil tongues, he remembers that Englishman of old, who, under
every menace, bore right onwards; and like him, if so it must be,
can make it his duty and his service to stand and wait.


XXVI


Impatient for the light of spring, I have slept lately with my blind
drawn up, so that at waking, I have the sky in view.  This morning,
I awoke just before sunrise.  The air was still; a faint flush of
rose to westward told me that the east made fair promise.  I could
see no cloud, and there before me, dropping to the horizon,
glistened the horned moon.

The promise held good.  After breakfast, I could not sit down by the
fireside; indeed, a fire was scarce necessary; the sun drew me
forth, and I walked all the morning about the moist lanes,
delighting myself with the scent of earth.

On my way home, I saw the first celandine.

So, once more, the year has come full circle.  And how quickly;
alas, how quickly!  Can it be a whole twelvemonth since the last
spring?  Because I am so content with life, must life slip away, as
though it grudged me my happiness?  Time was when a year drew its
slow length of toil and anxiety and ever frustrate waiting.  Further
away, the year of childhood seemed endless.  It is familiarity with
life that makes time speed quickly.  When every day is a step in the
unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of
experience; the week gone by is already far in retrospect of things
learnt, and that to come, especially if it foretell some joy,
lingers in remoteness.  Past mid-life, one learns little and expects
little.  To-day is like unto yesterday, and to that which shall be
the morrow.  Only torment of mind or body serves to delay the
indistinguishable hours.  Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to
a moment.

I could wish for many another year; yet, if I knew that not one more
awaited me, I should not grumble.  When I was ill at ease in the
world, it would have been hard to die; I had lived to no purpose,
that I could discover; the end would have seemed abrupt and
meaningless.  Now, my life is rounded; it began with the natural
irreflective happiness of childhood, it will close in the reasoned
tranquillity of the mature mind.  How many a time, after long labour
on some piece of writing, brought at length to its conclusion, have
I laid down the pen with a sigh of thankfulness; the work was full
of faults, but I had wrought sincerely, had done what time and
circumstance and my own nature permitted.  Even so may it be with me
in my last hour.  May I look back on life as a long task duly
completed--a piece of biography; faulty enough, but good as I could
make it--and, with no thought but one of contentment, welcome the
repose to follow when I have breathed the word "Finis."





End of the Project Gutenberg eText The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft