The Project Gutenberg eBook of Across the Plains, by Robert Louis Stevenson

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ACROSS THE PLAINS
WITH
OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS

BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1915

Printed by Ballantyne,rainy days gift ideas with army men toys Hanson & Co.
at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

TO PAUL BOURGET

Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will neverhave heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even that ofUpolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your ears. Tothese barbaric seats there came the other day a yellow book withyour name on the title, and filled in every page with theexquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change yourown words: J’ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mesforces, c’est avec vous que je me complais àvivre.

R. L. S.

Vailima,
     Upolu,
        Samoa.

LETTER TO THE AUTHOR

My dear Stevenson,

You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of thesepapers, written before you departed to the South Seas, and haveasked me to add a preface to the volume. But it is yourprose the public wish to read, not mine; and I am sure they willwillingly be spared the preface. Acknowledgements are duein your name to the publishers of the several magazines fromwhich the papers are collected, viz. Fraser’s,Longman’s, the Magazine of Art, andScribner’s. I will only add, lest any readershould find the tone of the concluding pieces less inspiritingthan your wont, that they were written under circumstances ofespecial gloom and sickness. “I agree with you thelights seem a little turned down,” so you write to me now;“the truth is I was far through, and came none too soon tothe South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body andmind. And however low the lights, the stuff is true . ..” Well, inasmuch as the South Seas sirens havebreathed new life into you, we are bound to be heartily gratefulto them, though as they keep you so far removed from us, it isdifficult not to bear them a grudge; and if they would reconcileus quite, they have but to do two things more—to teach younew tales that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you, atleast once in a while in summer, to climates within reach of uswho are task-bound for ten months in the year beside theThames.

Yours ever,

SIDNEY COLVIN.

February, 1892.

CONTENTS

I
ACROSS THE PLAINS

LEAVES FROM THENOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SANFRANCISCO

Monday.—It was, if I remember rightly, fiveo’clock when we were all signalled to be present at theFerry Depôt of the railroad. An emigrant ship hadarrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sundaymorning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday;and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of thepassengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train bywhich I was to travel. There was a babel of bewildered men,women, and children. The wretched little booking-office,and the baggage-room, which was not much larger, were crowdedthick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphereof dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood bythe half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each otherwith recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom Itake to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, hismouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It wasplain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterlybroken down under the strain of so many passengers.

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, whopreserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggageregistered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till heshould give me the word to move. I had taken along with mea small valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, andin the bag of my railway rug the whole of Bancroft’sHistory of the United States, in six fat volumes. Itwas as much as I could carry with convenience even for shortdistances, but it insured me plenty of clothing, and the valisewas at that moment, and often after, useful for a stool. Iam sure I sat for an hour in the baggage-room, and wretchedenough it was; yet, when at last the word was passed to me and Ipicked up my bundles and got under way, it was only to exchangediscomfort for downright misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill fromWest Street to the river. It was dark, the wind blew cleanthrough it from end to end; and here I found a great block ofpassengers and baggage, hundreds of one and tons of theother. I feel I shall have a difficulty to make myselfbelieved; and certainly the scene must have been exceptional, forit was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was a tightjam; there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute andliving obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowdporters, infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way withshouts. I may say that we stood like sheep, and that theporters charged among us like so many maddened sheep-dogs; and Ibelieve these men were no longer answerable for their acts.It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight intothe press, and when they could get no farther, blindly dischargedtheir barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I savedthe life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s knee, shesitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I mustsuppose that there were many similar interpositions in the courseof the evening. It will give some idea of the state of mindto which we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porternor the mother of the child paid the least attention to myact. It was not till some time after that I understood whatI had done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at themoment a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet,clamour, dead opposition to progress, such as one encounters inan evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits. We hadaccepted this purgatory as a child accepts the conditions of theworld. For my part, I shivered a little, and my back achedwearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and allthe activities of my nature had become tributary to one massivesensation of discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess,the crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself.About the same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a suddenflare over the shed. We were being filtered out into theriver boat for Jersey City. You may imagine how slowly thisfiltering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush, every oneoverladen with packages or children, and yet under the necessityof fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length forme, and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and with atrifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe in. This was onthe starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly onthe port side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamenshouted to them to move on, and threatened them withshipwreck. These poor people were under a spell of stupor,and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, butthe wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without dangerto a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the riverin the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a woundedduck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamersrunning many knots, and heralding their approach by strains ofmusic. The contrast between these pleasure embarkations andour own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of wetand silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which wecount too obvious for the purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I hada fixed sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the samepersuasion was common to us all. A panic selfishness, likethat produced by fear, presided over the disorder of ourlanding. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, theirfamilies following how they could. Children fell, and werepicked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had losther parents, screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness, asthough verging towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but noone else seemed so much as to remark her distress; and I amashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was so wearythat I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in thehundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, sothat I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.There was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars werelocked; and for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had tocamp upon the draughty, gaslit platform. I sat on myvalise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but as they wereall cold, and wet, and weary, and driven stupidly crazy by themismanagement to which we had been subjected, I believe they canhave been no happier than myself. I bought half-a-dozenoranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts were the only refectionto be had. As only two of them had even a pretence ofjuice, I threw the other four under the cars, and beheld, as in adream, grown people and children groping on the track after myleavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, andfar from dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush,and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried themand warmed my blood into the bargain; but no one else, except mynext neighbour to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take theleast precaution. As they were, they composed themselves tosleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and beentwice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, beforeI allowed myself to follow their example.

Tuesday.—When I awoke, it was already day; thetrain was standing idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeingsome others strolling to and fro about the lines, I opened thedoor and stepped forth, as from a caravan by the wayside.We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could see, withinreach of any signal. A green, open, undulating countrystretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a singlefield of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; butthe contours of the land were soft and English. It was notquite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enougheither to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in the sky,and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find achange. Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannotexplain it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour inAmerica and Europe. There is more clear gold and scarlet inour old country mornings; more purple, brown, and smoky orange inthose of the new. It may be from habit, but to me thecoming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it hasa duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems tofit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as thoughAmerica were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from theorient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought so then,by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so adozen times since in far distant parts of the continent. Ifit be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which myeyesight is accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying itspassage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon theengine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we weresummoned by the cry of “All aboard!” and went onagain upon our way. The whole line, it appeared, wastopsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all thetraffic hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh,for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we could buy uponthe cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at some stationwith a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we wereso many and so ravenous that, though I tried at everyopportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbowmy way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’sday. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet inthe woody river valleys among which we wound our way, theatmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in theafternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to onenewly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delvedearth. These, though in so far a country, were airs fromhome. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I saw,one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway andfishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices inthe distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly onthe plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and hislight dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form andsurface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life likea man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had askedthe name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it wascalled the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be partand parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam withdivine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna wasat once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as noother could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take aspecial pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part ofthe world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, andpicturesque as the United States of America. All times,races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekinis in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and withSandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of redbrick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own suburb tostately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat,translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs byTennessee and Arkansas; [8] and both, while I wascrossing the continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horrorand isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like anIndian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified NewYork. The names of the States and Territories themselvesform a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware,Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and theCarolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: asongful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from theWestern continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages singspontaneously, with the names of states and cities that wouldstrike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room atPittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and sprightlyDutch widow with her children; these I was to watch overprovidentially for a certain distance farther on the way; but asI found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I left herin the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself. I mentionthis meal, not only because it was the first of which I hadpartaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means ofmy first introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did methe honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while I was eating;and with every word, look, and gesture marched me farther intothe country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlikethe negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of myyouth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but ofa pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and ratherodd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed withmanners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to nametheir parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as highover the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserveand a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved toadmire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops tofamiliarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you awink at a time; he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag;he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff.He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say,this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as,with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting master mightbehave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had come preparedto pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in athousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice ofrace; but I assure you I put my patronage away for anotheroccasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon apoint of etiquette: if one should offer to tip the Americanwaiter? Certainly not, he told me. Never. Itwould not do. They considered themselves too highly toaccept. They would even resent the offer. As for himand me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, inparticular, had found much pleasure in my society; I was astranger; this was exactly one of those rareconjunctures.... Without being very clear seeing, I canstill perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentlemandeftly pocketed a quarter.

Wednesday.—A little after midnight I convoyed mywidow and orphans on board the train; and morning found us farinto Ohio. This had early been a favourite home of myimagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the week, andenjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my personbeing still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a workwhich appeared in Cassell’s Family Paper, and wasread aloud to me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of oneCustaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, veryobligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir ReginaldSomebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The idea ofa man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be abaronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offendedverisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe andothers to escape from uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We werenow on those great plains which stretch unbroken to the RockyMountains. The country was flat like Holland, but far frombeing dull. All through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa,or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my wakingmoments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegancepeculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; thetrees were graceful in themselves, and framed the plain intolong, aërial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardenedtownships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings onthe stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I amafraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawnedwith such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill thatwas not perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck homeupon the heart and seemed to travel with the blood. Daycame in with a shudder. White mists lay thinly over thesurface of the plain, as we see them more often on a lake; andthough the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving anatmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon tohorizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that thisparadise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. Thefences along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement;one to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remediesagainst the ague. At the point of day, and while we wereall in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the state, whohad got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a doctoralair, “a fever and ague morning.”

The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She hadconceived at first sight a great aversion for the present writer,which she was at no pains to conceal. But being a woman ofa practical spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting myattentions, and encouraged me to buy her children fruits andcandies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep upon thefloor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she wassuch a rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved toautobiographical talk, that she was forced, for want of a better,to take me into confidence and tell me the story of herlife. I heard about her late husband, who seemed to havemade his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring onSundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, theamount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week,and a variety of particular matters that are not usuallydisclosed except to friends. At one station, she shook upher children to look at a man on the platform and say if he werenot like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had beenkeeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded,and how it was because of his desistance that she was nowtravelling to the West. Then, when I was thus put inpossession of the facts, she asked my judgment on that type ofmanly beauty. I admired it to her heart’scontent. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious intalk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in theair out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keepme, in spite of all these confidences, steadily aware of heraversion. Her parting words were ingeniously honest.“I am sure,” said she, “we all oughttobe very much obliged to you.” I cannot pretend thatshe put me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such agenuine dislike. A poor nature would have slipped, in thecourse of these familiarities, into a sort of worthlesstoleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out ofthe cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through thestreets to the station of a different railroad. Chicagoseemed a great and gloomy city. I remember havingsubscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at theperiod of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street ofponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought itwould be a graceful act for the corporation to refund thatsixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerfuldinner. But there was no word of restitution. I wasthat city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a third-classwaiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of hamand eggs at my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that nightin Chicago. When it was time to start, I descended theplatform like a man in a dream. It was a long train,lighted from end to end; and car after car, as I came up with it,was not only filled but overflowing. My valise, myknapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; andthere was a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not tobe dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty bench, Isank into it like a bundle of rags, the world seemed to swim awayinto the distance, and my consciousness dwindled within me to amere pin’s head, like a taper on a foggy night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there hadsat down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman,somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen tothe dozen, as they say. I did my best to keep up theconversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if something dependedupon that. I heard him relate, among many other things,that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbeda man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caughtthe words, I do not think I properly understood the sense untilnext morning; and I believe I replied at the time that I was veryglad to hear it. What else he talked about I have no guess;I remember a gabbling sound of words, his profuse gesticulation,and his smile, which was highly explanatory: but no more.And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly; for,first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has conceiveda doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps that Iwas unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair,he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue wastoo crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as far as that waspossible upon the bench, I was received at once into a dreamlessstupor.

The little German gentleman was only going a little way intothe suburbs after a diner fin, and was bent onentertainment while the journey lasted. Having failed withme, he pitched next upon another emigrant, who had come throughfrom Canada, and was not one jot less weary than myself.Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when wescraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man.After trying him on different topics, it appears that the littleGerman gentleman flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two,and departed from that car in quest of livelier society.Poor little gentleman! I suppose he thought an emigrantshould be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask offoreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the momentsof digestion.

Thursday.—I suppose there must be a cycle in thefatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I wasentirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast ofporridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot cakes, atBurlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day’sride followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At aplace called Creston, a drunken man got in. He wasaggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not atall unpresentable upon a train. For one stage he eluded thenotice of the officials; but just as we were beginning to moveout of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came theconductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then theofficial had the man by the shoulders, twitched him from hisseat, marched him through the car, and sent him flying on to thetrack. It was done in three motions, as exact as a piece ofdrill. The train was still moving slowly, althoughbeginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet withouta fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as hischeeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand,while the other stole behind him to the region of thekidneys. It was the first indication that I had come amongrevolvers, and I observed it with some emotion. Theconductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip, lookingback at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering alongthe track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter fromthe cars. They were speaking English all about me, but Iknew I was in a foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited atthe Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the easternbank of the Missouri river. Here we were to stay the nightat a kind of caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But Igave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself from mycompanions, and marched with my effects into the Union PacificHotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in myplain European way, I should call the boots, were installedbehind a counter like bank tellers. They took my name,assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with mypackages. And here came the tug of war. I wished togive up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to goto bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in anAmerican hotel.

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprangfrom my unfamiliarity with the language. For although twonations use the same words and read the same books, intercourseis not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life isnot carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a specialand almost a slang signification. Some internationalobscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman atCouncil Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed verynatural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. Herefused, and that with the plainness of the West. ThisAmerican manner of conducting matters of business is, at first,highly unpalatable to the European. When we approach a manin the way of his calling, and for those services by which heearns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hiredservant. But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meetand have a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours ifthey shall agree to please. I know not which is the moreconvenient, nor even which is the more truly courteous. TheEnglish stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued after theparticular transaction is at an end, and thus favours classseparations. But on the other hand, these equalitarianplainnesses leave an open field for the insolence ofJack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, andunbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironicalsubmission. I knew nothing, I said, of the ways of Americanhotels; but I had no desire to give trouble. If there wasnothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say theword, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfullyobey.

He burst into a shout of laughter. “Ah!”said he, “you do not know about America. They arefine people in America. Oh! you will like them verywell. But you mustn’t get mad. I know what youwant. You come along with me.”

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the armlike an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

“There,” said he, pushing me from him by theshoulder, “go and have a drink!”

The Emigrant Train

All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where Imight meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh fromtable. I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to bebranded once more, and put apart with my fellows. It wasabout two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in frontof the Emigrant House, with more than a hundred others, to besorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official,with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stoodapart in front of us, and called name after name in the tone of acommand. At each name you would see a family gather up itsbrats and bundles and run for the hindmost of the three cars thatstood awaiting us, and I soon concluded that this was to be setapart for the women and children. The second or centralcar, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone, and thethird to the Chinese. The official was easily moved toanger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick atanswering their names, and speedy in getting themselves and theireffects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried the second carwithout ceremony by simultaneous assault. I suppose thereader has some notion of an American railroad-car, that long,narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah’s ark, with astove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage down themiddle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Thosedestined for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkablefor their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering in anypart into their constitution, and for the usual inefficacy of thelamps, which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer evenwhile they burned. The benches are too short for anythingbut a young child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for twoto sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie.Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain billsabout the Transfer Station, the company’s servants, haveconceived a plan for the better accommodation oftravellers. They prevail on every two to chumtogether. To each of the chums they sell a board and threesquare cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thincotton. The benches can be made to face each other inpairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach ofnight the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couchwide enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middleheight; and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushionswith the head to the conductor’s van and the feet to theengine. When the train is full, of course this plan isimpossible, for there must not be more than one to every bench,neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree. Itwas to bring about this last condition that our white-hairedofficial now bestirred himself. He made a most activemaster of ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and evenguaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each. Thegreater the number of happy couples the better for his pocket,for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. Hisprice for one board and three straw cushions began with twodollars and a half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry tosay, long after I had purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollarand a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like someladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; butcertainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow,declined the honour without thanks. He was an old, heavy,slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over withgreat timidity, and then began to excuse himself in brokenphrases. He didn’t know the young man, he said.The young man might be very honest, but how was he to knowthat? There was another young man whom he had met alreadyin the train; he guessed he was honest, and would prefer to chumwith him upon the whole. All this without any sort ofexcuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I beganto tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be leftrejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping,long-limbed, small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman,with a soldierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, hehad acquired it in the navy. But that was all one; he hadat least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted thematch, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubialbenediction, and pocketed his fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up thetrain. I am afraid to say how many baggage-waggons followedthe engine, certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we,then the families, and the rear was brought up by the conductorin what, if I have it rightly, is called his caboose. Theclass to which I belonged was of course far the largest, and weran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were someCaucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among thefamilies. But our own car was pure from admixture, save forone little boy of eight or nine who had the whooping-cough.At last, about six, the long train crawled out of the TransferStation and across the wide Missouri river to Omaha, westwardbound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.There was thunder in the air, which helped to keep usrestless. A man played many airs upon the cornet, and noneof them were much attended to, until he came to “Home,sweet home.” It was truly strange to note how thetalk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen. Ihave no idea whether musically this air is to be considered goodor bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be bestdescribed as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathosmust be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallownaked in the pathetic, like the author of “Home, sweethome,” you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion;and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves andhate the occasion of their weakness. It did not come totears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. Anelderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as muchappearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retiredslaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop that“damned thing.” “I’ve heard aboutenough of that,” he added; “give us something aboutthe good country we’re going to.” A murmur ofadhesion ran round the car; the performer took the instrumentfrom his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into a dancingmeasure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately theemotion he had raised.

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men,who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on thestern platform, singing “The Sweet By-and-bye” withvery tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and itseemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But itwas not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the carswere instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers,young men and maidens, some of them in little more thannightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds forsale. Their charge began with twenty-five cents a cushion,but fell, before the train went on again, to fifteen, with thebed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had paid formine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to theeconomy of future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, andcigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washingdishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinnedeatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early nextmorning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a moreextended principle became the order of the hour. Itrequires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing andeating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate ofthree. I myself entered a little after sunrise intoarticles of agreement, and became one of the firm ofPennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was myown nickname on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; andDubuque, the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of anamiable young fellow going west to cure an asthma, and retardinghis recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking, and sometimeschewing and smoking together. I have never seen tobacco sosillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. Thepartners used these instruments, one after another, according tothe order of their first awaking; and when the firm had finishedthere was no want of borrowers. Each filled the tin dish atthe water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the wholestock in trade to the platform of the car. There he kneltdown, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork orone elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash hisface and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if thetrain is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania,Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar,and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of whatwent on through all the cars. Before the sun was up thestove would be brightly burning; at the first station the nativeswould come on board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soonfrom end to end the car would be filled with little partiesbreakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantesthour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: abreakfast in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven andtwo, and supper from five to eight or nine at night. We hadrarely less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spentmany another twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a sidetrack among miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to eachrepast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For hasteis not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through onsufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerablebrethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatinglysacrificed; and they cannot, in consequence, predict the lengthof the passage within a day or so. Civility is the maincomfort that you miss. Equality, though conceived verylargely in America, does not extend so low down as to anemigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of“All aboard!” recalls the passengers to take theirseats; but as soon as I was alone with emigrants, and from theTransfer all the way to San Francisco, I found this ceremony waspretermitted; the train stole from the station without note ofwarning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while youate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect bothwanton and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with anemigrant. I asked a conductor one day at what time thetrain would stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated thequestion, with a like result; a third time I returned to thecharge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face forseveral seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I believehe was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another personmade the same inquiry, although he still refused the information,he condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in avoice loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, hisprinciple not to tell people where they were to dine; for oneanswer led to many other questions, as what o’clock it was?or, how soon should we be there? and he could not afford to beeternally worried.

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a greatdeal of your comfort depends on the character of thenewsboy. He has it in his power indefinitely to better andbrighten the emigrant’s lot. The newsboy with whom westarted from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contemptuous,insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed, inhis case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus:he was going his rounds through the cars with some commoditiesfor sale, and coming to a party who were at Seven-uporCascino(our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down acigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking one man’shand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a momentthe whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, andhe was ordered to “get out of that directly, or he wouldget more than he reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled andmuttered, but ended by making off, and was less openly insultingin the future. On the other hand, the lad who rode with usin this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made himself the friendof all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance,and a kind countenance. He told us where and when we shouldhave our meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats attable for those who were delayed, and watched that we shouldneither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried. You,who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the greatness ofthis service, even had it stood alone. When I think of thatlad coming and going, train after train, with his bright face andcivil words, I see how easily a good man may become thebenefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented withhimself, perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it,he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he isonly earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhapsexorbitant, he is doing a man’s work, and bettering theworld.

I must tell here an experience of mine with anothernewsboy. I tell it because it gives so good an example ofthat uncivil kindness of the American, which is perhaps theirmost bewildering character to one newly landed. It wasimmediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am told Ilooked like a man at death’s door, so much had this longjourney shaken me. I sat at the end of a car, and the catchbeing broken, and myself feverish and sick, I had to hold thedoor open with my foot for the sake of air. In thisattitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box ofmerchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I observedthat he was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once ortwice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions he mostrudely struck my foot aside; and though I myself apologised, asif to show him the way, he answered me never a word. Ichafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have come towords. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and alarge juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy,who had observed that I was looking ill, and so made me thispresent out of a tender heart. For the rest of the journeyI was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, thusdepriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, andcame repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.

The Plains of Nebraska

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose onSaturday without a cloud. We were at sea—there is noother adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska.I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat bythe hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in vain forsomething new. It was a world almost without a feature; anempty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railwaystretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across abilliard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till ittouched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerablewild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in acontinuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairieat all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again wemight perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more andmore distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into woodencabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until theymelted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone uponthe billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinitylike a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderfulwhat huge proportions it began to assume in our regard. Itseemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a step ofthe horizon. Even my own body or my own head seemed a greatthing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the morereadily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in theexperience of others. Day and night, above the roar of thetrain, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp ofgrasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countlessclocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper tothat land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certainexhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air,this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight,unbroken, prison-line of the horizon. Yet one could not butreflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in olddays, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging theirteams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun forwhich they steered, and which daily fled them by an equalstride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake;nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose orfor encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead greenwaste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. Butthe eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and atthe worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of histoil. It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have aright to marvel. Our consciousness, by which we live, isitself but the creature of variety. Upon what food does itsubsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay a humancreature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cutoff from books, from news, from company, from all that canrelieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. A skyfull of stars is the most varied spectacle that he canhope. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and itis as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in themidst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer tothe one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pacewith his advance. We are full at home of the question ofagreeable wall-papers, and wise people are of opinion that thetemper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. But what isto be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall-paperwith a vengeance—one quarter of the universe laid bare inall its gauntness.

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concaveof the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it istortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till theman runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon thingsnear at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the visionpeculiar to these empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer andwinter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a fulland various existence. One person at least I saw upon theplains who seemed in every way superior to her lot. Thiswas a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; shehad that great rarity—a fine complexion which became her;and her eyes were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milkwith patriarchal grace. There was not a line in hercountenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spokeof an entire contentment with her life. It would have beenfatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place whereshe lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozenwooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stoodplanted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in itsown lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as ifit were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that hadbeen set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which Ilooked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike butthe burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in sonaked and flat a country, gives a strong impression ofartificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration ofhuman life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweatingfrom the axe, such a settlement as this seems purelyscenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece ofreality; and it seems incredible that life can go on with so fewproperties, or the great child, man, find entertainment in sobare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points;or at least it contained, as I passed through, one personincompletely civilised. At North Platte, where we suppedthat evening, one man asked another to pass the milk-jug.This other was well-dressed and of what we should call arespectable appearance; a darkish man, high spoken, eating asthough he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the firstspeaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone—

“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.

“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained thefirst.

Here is the retort verbatim—

“Pass! Hell! I’m not paid for thatbusiness; the waiter’s paid for it. You should usecivility at table, and, by God, I’ll show youhow!”

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully wenton with his supper as though nothing had occurred. Itpleases me to think that some day soon he will meet with one ofhis own kidney; and that perhaps both may fall.

The Desert of Wyoming

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for themountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which Iknew we were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for thespring. Alas! and it was a worse country than theother. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sadmountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fairmatch to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it wasthe same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path;tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape ofmonuments and fortifications—how drearily, how tamely, nonecan tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward,not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternalsage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring,grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and forsole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; hereand there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in acañon. The plains have a grandeur of their own; buthere there is nothing but a contorted smallness. Except forthe air, which was light and stimulating, there was not one goodcircumstance in that God-forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; andat last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned insome wayside eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fellsick outright. That was a night which I shall not readilyforget. The lamps did not go out; each made a faint shiningin its own neighbourhood, and the shadows were confoundedtogether in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleeperslay in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upontheir backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor,with his face upon his arm; there another half seated with hishead and shoulders on the bench. The most passive werecontinually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train;others stirred, turned, or stretched out their arms likechildren; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured intheir sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping across theprostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formedword, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in thatunresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged toopen my window, for the degradation of the air soon becameintolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply oflife. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black,amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. Theythat long for morning have never longed for it more earnestlythan I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same brokenand unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and nota tree, a bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterilecañons, the train shot hooting and awoke the restingecho. That train was the one piece of life in all thedeadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to beobserved in this paralysis of man and nature. And when Ithink how the railroad has been pushed through this unwateredwilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear anemigrant for some £12 from the Atlantic to the GoldenGates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptucities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then diedaway again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; howin these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side byside with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talkingtogether in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking,quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditarylord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream ofthe “bad medicine waggon” charioting his foes; andthen when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil wasconducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothingmore extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit toParis, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the onetypical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it broughttogether into one plot all the ends of the world and all thedegrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer thebusiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for anenduring literary work. If it be romance, if it becontrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town tothis? But, alas! it is not these things that arenecessary—it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god whoconducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hiddenperils. Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indiansare all no more feared, so lightly do we skim these horriblelands; as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane andpast the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful of thesehardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I havecomplained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhapsmore than was enough, let me add an original document. Itwas not written by Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long sincedead, and is dated only twenty years ago. I shallpunctuate, to make things clearer, but not change thespelling.

“My dear Sister Mary,—I amafraid you will go nearly crazy when you read myletter. If Jerry” (the writer’seldest brother) “has not written to you beforenow, you will be surprised to heare that we are inCalifornia, and that poor Thomas” (anotherbrother, of fifteen) “is dead.We started from— in July, with plenly ofprovisions and too yoke oxen. We went along verywell till we got within six or seven hundred miles ofCalifornia, when the Indians attacked us. Wefound places where they had killed the emigrants. Wehad one passenger with us, too guns, and onerevolver; so we ran all the lead We had into bullets(and) hung the guns up in the wagon so that we couldget at them in a minit. It was about twoo’clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a littleway; when a prairie chicken alited a little way from thewagon.

“Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it,and told Tom drive the oxen. Tom and I drove theoxen, and Jerry and the passenger went on.Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught upwith Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped Tom tocome up; me and the man went on and sit down by a littlestream. In a few minutes, we heard somenoise; then three shots(they all struck poorTom, I suppose); then they gave the war hoop,and as many as twenty of the redskins came down uponus. The three that shot Tom was hid by the side ofthe road in the bushes.

“I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so Itold the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and thatwe had better try to escape, if possible. Ihad no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought Iwould not put them on. The man and me run down theroad, but We was soon stopped by an Indian on apony. We then turend the other way, and runup the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedartrees, and stayed there till dark. TheIndians hunted all over after us, and verry close tous, so close that we could here there tomyhawksJingle. At dark the man and me started on, Istubing my toes against sticks and stones. Wetraveld on all night; and next morning, just as itwas getting gray, we saw something in the shape of aman. It layed Down in the grass. Wewent up to it, and it was Jerry. He thoughtwe ware Indians. You can imagine how glad he was tosee me. He thought we was all dead but him,and we thought him and Tom was dead. He had thegun that he took out of the wagon to shoot the prairieChicken; all he had was the load that was in it.

“We traveld on till about eight o’clock,We caught up with one wagon with too men with it.We had traveld with them before one day; we stopt andthey Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us,unless they had been killed to. My feet was sosore when we caught up with them that I had to ride; Icould not step. We traveld on for too days,when the men that owned the cattle said they would(could) not drive them another inch. Weunyoked the oxen; we had about seventy pounds offlour; we took it out and divided it into fourpacks. Each of the men took about 18 pounds apieceand a blanket. I carried a little bacon,dried meat, and little quilt; I had in all abouttwelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day forour alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it;sometimes we(made) pancakes; andsometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it thatway. We traveld twelve or fourteen days.The time came at last when we should have to reach some placeor starve. We saw fresh horse and cattletracks. The morning come, we scraped all theflour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked itinto bread, and made some soup, and eat everythingwe had. We traveld on all day without anything toeat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train ofeight wagons. We traveld with them till we arrivedat the settlements; and know I am safe in California,and got to good home, and going to school.

“Jerry is working in—. It is agood country. You can get from 50 to 60 and 75Dollars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairsin the States, and how all the folks getalong.”

And so ends this artless narrative. The little man wasat school again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalpedupon the deserts.

Fellow-Passengers

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the CentralPacific line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome;for, first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second,those in which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours hadbegun to stink abominably. Several yards away, as wereturned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils were assailed byrancid air. I have stood on a platform while the wholetrain was shunting; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, therewould come a whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, asfrom men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only invirtue of open windows. Without fresh air, you only requirea bad heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen’sEnglish, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering,human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains ofoffence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, andlook for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-likebusiness of the emigrant train. But one thing I must say,the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive.

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, andso proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gaveus all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seatsdrew out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more needfor bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which couldbe closed by day and opened at night.

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whomI was among. They were in rather marked contrast to theemigrants I had met on board ship while crossing theAtlantic. They were mostly lumpish fellows, silent andnoisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should say, with anextraordinary poor taste in humour, and little interest in theirfellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely externalcuriosity. If they heard a man’s name and business,they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery; but theywere as eager to know that much as they were indifferent to therest. Some of them were on nettles till they learned yourname was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that,whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce orfriendly, was all one to them. Others who were not sostupid, gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say,unkindly. A favourite witticism was for some lout to raisethe alarm of “All aboard!” while the rest of uswere dining, thus contributing his mite to the generaldiscomfort. Such a one was always much applauded for hishigh spirits. When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I wasastonished—fresh from the eager humanity on boardship—to meet with little but laughter. One of theyoung men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then veryeasy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacityto think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so,but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansashad three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, therewere not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitiousterror than sympathy that his case evoked among hisfellow-passengers. “Oh, I hope he’s not goingto die!” cried a woman; “it would be terrible to havea dead body!” And there was a very general movementto leave the man behind at the next station. This, by goodfortune, the conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; inothers, little but silence. In this society, more than anyother that ever I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed toenjoy the narrative. It was rarely that any one listenedfor the listening. If he lent an ear to another man’sstory, it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer forone of his own. Food and the progress of the train were thesubjects most generally treated; many joined to discuss these whootherwise would hold their tongues. One small knot had nobetter occupation than to worm out of me my name; and the morethey tried, the more obstinately fixed I grew to bafflethem. They assailed me with artful questions and insidiousoffers of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually onmy guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter.I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for thesecret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, forthus preserving him a lively interest throughout thejourney. I met one of my fellow-passengers months after,driving a street tramway car in San Francisco; and, as the jokewas now out of season, told him my name without subterfuge.You never saw a man more chapfallen. But had my name beenDemogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still beendisappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe—save oneGerman family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly bythemselves, one reading the New Testament all day long throughsteel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets oftheir old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhopebelieved she could make something great of the Cornish; for mypart, I can make nothing of them at all. A division ofraces, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps thisclose, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. Thisis one of the lessons of travel—that some of the strangestraces dwell next door to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they came from almostevery quarter of that Continent. All the States of theNorth had sent out a fugitive to cross the plains with me.From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New York, from far westernIowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the Canadas, and fromthe Canadas themselves—some one or two were fleeing inquest of a better land and better wages. The talk in thetrain, like the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times,short commons, and hope that moves ever westward. I thoughtof my shipful from Great Britain with a feeling of despair.They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far enough. Hardtimes bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome them atSandy Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania,Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for immigration,but for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew aman who had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungratefulcountry. And it was still westward that they ran.Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like thesun, and the evening was made of edible gold. And,meantime, in the car in front of me, were there not half ahundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry Europeand hungry China, each pouring from their gates in search ofprovender, had here come face to face. The two waves hadmet; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world hadbeen prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere;and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well tostay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign,at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for, as wecontinued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we werecontinually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east;and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these returnvoyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all boundfor Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not,for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on the platform andcried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to“come back.” On the plains of Nebraska, in themountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to myheart, “Come back!” That was what we heard bythe way “about the good country we were goingto.” And at that very hour the Sand-lot of SanFrancisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from theother side of Market Street was repeating the rant ofdemagogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that menemigrate, how many thousands would regret the bargain! Butwages, indeed, are only one consideration out of many; for we area race of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.

Despised Races

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellowCaucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the moststupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked atthem, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them apriori. The Mongols were their enemies in that crueland treacherous battle-field of money. They could workbetter and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence therewas no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even tobelieve. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected akind of choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now,as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a largeclass of European women, that on raising my head and suddenlycatching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for aninstant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say itis the most attractive class of our women, but for all that manya man’s wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, myemigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannotsay they were clean, for that was impossible upon the journey;but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us toshame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet ourhands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and wereunashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity, andyou would see them washing their feet—an act not dreamed ofamong ourselves—and going as far as decency permitted towash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way that thedirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is theirsense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowdedboathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bedwithout uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very fouland malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusionthat it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, whichstank. I have said already that it was the exceptions andnotably the freshest of the three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all WesternAmerica. The Chinese are considered stupid, because theyare imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held tobe base, because their dexterity and frugality enable them tounderbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to bethieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They arecalled cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may eachreflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again,that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to themost despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire.But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and whatmust be the virtues, the industry, the education, and theintelligence of their superiors at home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that mustgo. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that nocountry is bound to submit to immigration any more than toinvasion; each is war to the knife, and resistance to either butlegitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition ofthe republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man whobelieves that he loves freedom, I may be excused some bitternesswhen I find her sacred name misused in the contention. Itwas but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in theSand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for armsand butchery. “At the call of Abraham Lincoln,”said the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to setfree the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from afew dirty Mongolians?”

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respecton the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars beforemine had begun to keep pigs. Gun-powder and printing, whichthe other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we neverhad the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs ina long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but itseems they must be of different clay. They hear the clockstrike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. Theytravel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of oldAsiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotivein its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit ofthe Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmasterteaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that ourlanguage looks a halfing boy alongside; philosophy so wise thatour best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all thistravelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain andmountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought orfancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formedupon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railwaywindows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to homeand childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not havebeen in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old,gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flagof Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; andthe man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and apagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the sameaffection, home.

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in thedisfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary tosay, was the noble red man of old story—over whose ownhereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. Isaw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoidthe neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at waystations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefullydressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth andstared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of theirconduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, wouldhave touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengersdanced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness.I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We shouldcarry upon our consciences so much, at least, of ourforefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit byourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging inthe hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back andback, step after step, their promised reservations torn from themone after another as the States extended westward, until atlength they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts ofthe centre—and even there find themselves invaded,insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The evictionof the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion ofIndian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all,nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here withme upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignitysuch as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will sufferhim to pardon or forget. These old, well-founded,historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for theindependent. That the Jew should not love the Christian,nor the Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave toleratethe thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature ofman; rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongsancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes theindignation.

To the Golden Gates

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves noparticular impressions on the mind. By an early hour onWednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a littlestation on a bleak, high-lying plateau in Nevada. The manwho kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning that Iwas the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice onthe country I was now entering. “You see,” saidhe, “I tell you this, because I come from yourcountry.” Hail, brither Scots!

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of theworld. There is something in the simplicity of a decimalcoinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, insmall affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have tosolve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers asthirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In thePacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, andsettle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no longerexists—the bit, or old Mexican real. Thesupposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight tothe dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollarstands for the required amount. But how about an oddbit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by afifth. That, then, is called a shortbit. Ifyou have one, you lay it triumphantly down, and save two and ahalf cents. But if you have not, and lay down a quarter,the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way ofchange; and thus you have paid what is called a long bit,and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with ashort bit, five cents. In country places all over thePacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken,which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass ofbeer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the casemay be. You would say that this system of mutual robberywas as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to makeit broader, with which I here endow the public. It is briefand simple—radiantly simple. There is one place wherefive cents are recognised, and that is the post-office. Aquarter is only worth two bits, a short and a long.Whenever you have a quarter, go to the post-office and buy fivecents worth of postage-stamps; you will receive in change twodimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing power ofyour money is undiminished. You can go and have your twoglasses of beer all the same; and you have made yourself apresent of five cents worth of postage-stamps into thebargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the headfor this discovery.

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali andsand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemedlittle kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As wewere standing, after our manner, outside the station, I saw twomen whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to theirheels across country. They were tramps, it appeared, whohad been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before;and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen andconversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. Theseland stowaways play a great part over here in America, and Ishould have liked dearly to become acquainted with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming outfrom supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man,followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do youhappen to be going on?”

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me todesist from that intention. He had a situation to offer me,and if we could come to terms, why, good and well.“You see,” he continued, “I’m running atheatre here, and we’re a little short in theorchestra. You’re a musician, I guess?”

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with“Auld Lang Syne” and “The Wearing of theGreen,” I had no pretension whatever to that style.He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his tallercompanions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.

“You see, sir,” added the latter to me, “hebet you were a musician; I bet you weren’t. Nooffence, I hope?”

“None whatever,” I said, and the two withdrew tothe bar, where I presume the debt was liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in myfellow-travellers, who thought they had now come to a countrywhere situations went a-begging. But I am not so sure thatthe offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more than halfpersuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best ofall reasons, that I remember no more than that we continuedthrough desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadlyweary. But some time after I had fallen asleep that night,I was awakened by one of my companions. It was in vain thatI resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in hiseyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must comeforth upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The trainwas then, in its patient way, standing halted in aby-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the valley wastoo narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a diffusedglimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of thepines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was thecontinuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among themountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good andvigorous in the nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountainatmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned to roost witha grateful mountain feeling at my heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to knowif it were day or night, for the illumination was unusual.I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downwardthrough a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; andbefore we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, Ihad one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, afoaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires ofdawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature;but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. Itwas like meeting one’s wife. I had come homeagain—home from unsightly deserts to the green andhabitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine alongthe hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, wasmore dear to me than a blood relation. Few people havepraised God more happily than I did. And thenceforward,down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the oldmining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, droppingthousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not Ionly, but all the passengers on board, threw off their sense ofdirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, andthronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became newcreatures within and without. The sun no longer oppressedus with heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side,until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At everyturn we could see farther into the land and our own happyfutures. At every town the cocks were tossing their clearnotes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day and thenew country. For this was indeed our destination; this was“the good country” we had been going to so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in aplain of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying toupon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day wasbreaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over thecitied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect—not aripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything waswaiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold litfirst upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward onits shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began tosparkle; and suddenly

“The tall hills Titan discovered,”

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn,were lit from end to end with summer daylight.

[1879.]

II
THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

The Woods and the Pacific

The Bay of Monterey has beencompared by no less a person than General Sherman to a bentfishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important than themarch through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier fortopography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouthof the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Montereyitself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus theancient capital of California faces across the bay, while thePacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombardsher left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front ofthe town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west,and then westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lapso quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and largerin the distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and whiteby day; at night, the outline of the shore is traced intransparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam; and fromall round, even in quiet weather, the distant, thrilling roar ofthe Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country likesmoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. Itwould be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the same timemore exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gullshover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by troopsafter the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus ofinfinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to theEuropean eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a wholewhale’s carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning thewind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. Thewaves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucentnecks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing andwaning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. Thefoam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge ofthe sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buriedby the next breaker. The interest is perpetuallyfresh. On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, incalm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean’s greatness,such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in thesound. The very air is more than usually salt by thisHomeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts thebirds and hunters. A rough, undergrowth partially concealsthe sand. The crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly orin thickets—the kind of wood for murderers to crawlamong—and here and there the skirts of the forest extenddownward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles ofpine-trees hung with Spaniard’s Beard. Through thisquaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey from thejunction at Salinas City—though that and so many otherthings are now for ever altered—and it was from here thatyou had the first view of the old township lying in the sands,its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, andthe first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from thesea.

The one common note of all this country is the hauntingpresence of the ocean. A great faint sound of breakersfollows you high up into the inland cañons; the roar ofwater dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shellupon the chimney; go where you will, you have but to pause andlisten to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out ofthe town to the south-west, and mount the hill amongpine-woods. Glade, thicket, and grove surround you.You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. Yousee a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound ofthe sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind amongthe trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when atlength you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and withfreshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumbleof the ocean; for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula,and the noise no longer only mounts to you from behind along thebeach towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, round byChinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before you to themouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirtwith thundering surges. The silence that immediatelysurrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as it ishaunted by this distant, circling rumour. It sets yoursenses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly andunusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walklistening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific isa sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turnhomeward. All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those ofMonterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolongmy walks. I would push straight for the shore where Ithought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce adirection that would not, sooner or later, have brought me forthon the Pacific. The emptiness of the woods gave me a senseof freedom and discovery in these excursions. I never inall my visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very darkof hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried an axe, though histrue business at that moment was to seek for strayingcattle. I asked him what o’clock it was, but heseemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked mefor news of his cattle, I showed myself equallyindifferent. We stood and smiled upon each other for a fewseconds, and then turned without a word and took our several waysacross the forest.

One day—I shall never forget it—I had taken atrail that was new to me. After a while the woods began toopen, the sea to sound nearer hand. I came upon a road,and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther, and,without leaving the woods, I found myself among trimhouses. I walked through street after street, parallel andat right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, butstill undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at thecorner, as in a real town. Facing down the mainthoroughfare—“Central Avenue,” as it wasticketed—I saw an open-air temple, with benches andsounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The houses wereall tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but of thewaves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place thatseemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle withvisitors, and its antiquity and strangeness deceive theimagination; but this town had plainly not been built above ayear or two, and perhaps had been deserted overnight.Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as like a sceneupon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards.The barking of a dog led me at last to the only house stilloccupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winteralone in this empty theatre. The place was “ThePacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort.”Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life ofteetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing tothink blameless and agreeable. The neighbourhood at leastis well selected. The Pacific booms in front.Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a wilderness ofsand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano,making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise inamateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits andinterests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals. To theeast, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down,a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screamingsea-gulls. Such scenes are very similar in differentclimates; they appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this waslike a dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats that ridein the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walkinto the hamlet, you will behold costumes and faces and hear atongue that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stickburns, the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slipsof coloured paper—prayers, you would say, that had somehowmissed their destination—and a man guiding his uprightpencil from right to left across the sheet, writes home the newsof Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate ofthis seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey, when theair does not smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumedfrom the resinous tree-tops of the other. For days togethera hot, dry air will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yethealthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is notfar to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowingfrom the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers ofCalifornia. I have seen from Monterey as many as three atthe same time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal ofconflagration in the distance. A little thing will startthem, and, if the wind be favourable, they gallop over miles ofcountry faster than a horse. The inhabitants must turn outand work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant groves thatare destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at stake, andthese fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry upperennial fountains. California has been a land of promisein its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftlyto perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land ofdesolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is astrange piece of experience. The fire passes through theunderbrush at a run. Every here and there a tree flares upinstantaneously from root to summit, scattering tufts of flame,and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But this last isonly in semblance. For after this first squib-likeconflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind adeep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of thetree. The resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensedat the base of the bole and in the spreading roots. Thus,after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as thematch to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind intothe distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant ofthe woods. You may approach the tree from one side, and seeit scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor ofthe peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other sideof the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like anulcer; while underground, to their most extended fibre, the rootsare being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through thefissures to the surface. A little while, and, without a nodof warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the groundand falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the firecontinues its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fineash; and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earthpierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the design ofall these subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for anew tree instead of the print of an old one. Thesepitch-pines of Monterey are, with the single exception of theMonterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest trees. Nowords can give an idea of the contortion of their growth; theymight figure without change in a circle of the nether hell asDante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees grow, and atwhich forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills ofCalifornia, we may look forward to a time when there will not beone of them left standing in that land of their nativity.At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but perishby what may be called a natural although a violent death; whileit is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of thenobler redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all thehills of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I cameso near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might haveretained a thrill from the experience. I wished to becertain whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament ofCalifornian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flamefirst touched the tree. I suppose I must have been underthe influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece formy experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-treein a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching,strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of thetassels. The tree went off simply like a rocket; in threeseconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I couldhear the shouts of those who were at work combating the originalconflagration. I could see the waggon that had brought themtied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch theflash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into thesunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experimentmy neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a fewminutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up toconvenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. Atnight I went out of town, and there was my own particular fire,quite distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with evengreater vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct andobvious power upon the climate. At sunset, for monthstogether, vast, wet, melancholy fogs arise and come shorewardfrom the ocean. From the hill-top above Monterey the sceneis often noble, although it is always sad. The upper air isstill bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the GabelanoPeak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; theycrawl in scarves among the sandhills; they float, a littlehigher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often of a wildconfiguration; to the south, where they have struck the seawardshoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back andspire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill anddeadly as they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the treesbegin to sigh, and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling andcreaking and filling their cisterns with the brackish water ofthe sands. It takes but a little while till the invasion iscomplete. The sea, in its lighter order, has submerged theearth. Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick,wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; andbefore the sun’s rays they slowly disperse and retreat inbroken squadrons to the bosom of the sea. And yet oftenwhen the fog is thickest and most chill, a few steps out of thetown and up the slope, the night will be dry and warm and full ofinland perfume.

Mexicans, Americans, andIndians

The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Foundedby Catholic missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians,a place of arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by onefaction from another, an American capital when the first House ofRepresentatives held its deliberations, and then falling lowerand lower from the capital of the State to the capital of acounty, and from that again, by the loss of its charter and townlands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline istypical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexicanfamilies in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapiditywith which the soil has changed-hands. The Mexicans, youmay say, are all poor and landless, like their former capital;and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve theirancient customs and something of their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or threestreets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or threelanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, atall times, rent up by fissures four or five feet deep.There were no street lights. Short sections of woodensidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for they wereoften high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tellwhere they would be likely to begin or end. The houseswere, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many ofthem old for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions,with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick that theheat of summer never dried them to the heart. At theapproach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyardsmell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of thechest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of eithersex.

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, wherepeople sat almost all day long playing cards. The smallestexcursion was made on horseback. You would scarcely eversee the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, andmaking a fine figure with their Mexican housings. It struckme oddly to come across some of the Cornhillillustrationsto Mr. Blackmore’s Erema, and see all the charactersastride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an Englishsaddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, athing unknown in all the rest of California. In a place soexclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddlesbut true Vaquero riding—men always at the hand-gallop uphill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging theirhorses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs,checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling themright-about-face in a square yard. The type of face andcharacter of bearing are surprisingly un-American. Thefirst ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something,in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do notsuppose there was one pure blood of either race in all thecountry. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetualsurprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerlessAmericans, a people full of deportment, solemnly courteous, anddoing all things with grace and decorum. In dress they ranto colour and bright sashes. Not even the most Americanisedcould always resist the temptation to stick a red rose into hishat-band. Not even the most Americanised would descend towear the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was thelanguage of the streets. It was difficult to get alongwithout a word or two of that language for an occasion. Theonly communications in which the population joined were with aview to amusement. A weekly public ball took place withgreat etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes inprivate houses. There was a really fair amateur brassband. Night after night serenaders would be going about thestreet, sometimes in a company and with several instruments andvoice together, sometimes severally, each guitar before adifferent window. It was a strange thing to lie awake innineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, andone of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount intothe night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in thathigh-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common amongMexican men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear assomething not entirely human but altogether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yetalmost all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans,and it was from the same class, numerically so small, that theprincipal officials were selected. This Mexican and thatMexican would describe to you his old family estates, not onerood of which remained to him. You would ask him how thatcame about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, fromwhich you gathered that the Americans had been greedy likedesigning men, and the Mexicans greedy like children, but noother certain fact. Their merits and their faultscontributed alike to the ruin of the former landholders. Itis true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with the sightof ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in away which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft.Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it areflection on the other party to examine the terms with any greatminuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, itis ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object toit. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seensuch a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of hislawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To havespoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the otherparty guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have “beenlike doubting his word.” The scruple sounds oddly toone of ourselves, who have been brought up to understand allbusiness as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to be avirtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation ofagreements. This single unworldly trait will account formuch of that revolution of which we are speaking. TheMexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainlythe accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this sort,the entire booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of themore scupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is notentirely seen how far they have themselves been morallyconquered. This is, of course, but a part of a part of anextraordinary problem now in the course of being solved in thevarious States of the American Union. I am reminded of ananecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all theodd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small way in the oldtown of Edinburgh. The agent had the curiosity to visit himsome time after and inquire what possible use he could have forsuch material. He was shown, by way of answer, a huge vatwhere all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to imperial Tokay,were fermenting together. “And what,” he asked,“do you propose to call this?” “I’mno very sure,” replied the grocer, “but I thinkit’s going to turn out port.” In the olderEastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of racesin going to turn out English, or thereabout. But theproblem is indefinitely varied in other zones. The elementsare differently mingled in the south, in what we may call theTerritorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacificcoast. Above all, in these last, we may look to see somemonstrous hybrid—Whether good or evil, who shall forecast?but certainly original and all their own. In my littlerestaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day after day,a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and aScotchman: we had for common visitors an American from Illinois,a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; andfrom time to time a Switzer and a German came down from countryranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast isa foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each racecontributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinesehave taught the youth of California, none indeed of theirvirtues, but the debasing use of opium. And chief amongthese influences is that of the Mexicans.

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. Theystill preserve a sort of international independence, and keeptheir affairs snug to themselves. Only four or five yearsago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunttoo hot for him in other parts of California, returned to hisnative Monterey, and was seen publicly in her streets andsaloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there, thereoccurred two reputed murders. As the Montereyans areexceptionally vile speakers of each other and of every one behindhis back, it is not possible for me to judge how much truth theremay have been in these reports; but in the one case every onebelieved, and in the other some suspected, that there had beenfoul play; and nobody dreamed for an instant of taking theauthorities into their counsel. Now this is, of course,characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthyfeature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without aword in this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon thesubject, they seemed not to understand my surprise; they hadforgotten the traditions of their own race and upbringing, andbecome, in a word, wholly Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, relyalmost entirely in their business transactions upon eachother’s worthless paper. Pedro the penniless pays youwith an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel. It is asort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in these partshas passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and gettingnothing but an exchange of waste paper. The verystorekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are moresurprised than pleased when they are offered. They fearthere must be something under it, and that you mean to withdrawyour custom from them. I have seen the enterprising chemistand stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from thecommonness of the case, partly from some remains of that generousold Mexican tradition which made all men welcome to their tables,a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, andstill find credit for the necessaries of life in the stores ofMonterey. Now this villainous habit of living upon“tick” has grown into Californian nature. I donot mean that the American and European storekeepers of Montereyare as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in manyparts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it inthe meanwhile, without a thought for consequences. Jewstorekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained fromthis; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness,and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grindingin the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in itsrevenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose,you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which theythemselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as ifcertain sorts of follies, like certain sorts of grain, werenatural to the soil rather than to the race that holds and tillsit for the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in MontereyCounty. The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald,corn-bearing plain under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purelyAmerican character. The land is held, for the most part, inthose enormous tracts which are another legacy of Mexican days,and form the present chief danger and disgrace of California; andthe holders are mostly of American or British birth. Wehave here in England no idea of the troubles and inconvenienceswhich flow from the existence of these largelandholders—land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers,they are more commonly and plainly called. Thus thetownlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.How they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and,rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred.His life has been repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago,I was told, the stage was stopped and examined three evenings insuccession by disguised horsemen thirsting for his blood. Acertain house on the Salinas road, they say, he always passes inhis buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him warning longago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for deathby no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a mantoo well known in California, but a word of explanation isrequired for English readers. Originally an Irish dray-man,he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost dictatorialauthority in the State; throned it there for six months or so,his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was firstsnuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his SanFrancisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his ownruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backerparty; and had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, thepolice, out of the hands of his rebellious followers. Itwas while he was at the top of his fortune that Kearney visitedMonterey with his battle-cry against Chinese labour, the railroadmonopolists, and the land-thieves; and his one articulate counselto the Montereyans was to “hang David Jacks.”Had the town been American, in my private opinion, this wouldhave been done years ago. Land is a subject on which thereis no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend the lawyerdrive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles with theface of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-Wessonconvenient to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find ourold friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men livethere, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, whichis all consumed in supplies. The longer they remain in thisdesirable service the deeper they will fall in debt—aburlesque injustice in a new country, where labour should beprecious, and one of those typical instances which explains theprevailing discontent and the success of the demagogueKearney.

In a comparison between what was and what is in California,the praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians ofCarmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a trueCalifornian valley, bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked byquaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasantfarms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and atlast, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission churchthe eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filledwith a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore.But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of the Yankee hassucceeded, and there is no one left to care for the convertedsavage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes andsea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, dailywidening the breaches and casting the crockets from thewall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimenof missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it hada triple claim to preservation from all thinking people; butneglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no signof American interference, save where a headboard has been tornfrom a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is withthe Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I wastold, are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouringAmerican proprietor, and with that exception no man troubles hishead for the Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the year,the day before our Guy Fawkes, the padredrives over thehill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the onlycovered portion of the church, is filled with seats and decoratedfor the service; the Indians troop together, their bright dressescontrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you mayhear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than inany other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind andabout eighty years of age, conducts the singing; other Indianscompose the choir; yet they have the Gregorian music at theirfinger ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I couldfollow the meaning as they sang. The pronunciation was oddand nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. “Insæcula sæculoho-horum,” they went, with avigorous aspirate to every additional syllable. I havenever seen faces more vividly lit up with joy than the faces ofthese Indian singers. It was to them not only the worshipof God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated betterdays, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knewof art and letters was united and expressed. And it made aman’s heart sorry for the good fathers of yore who hadtaught them to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who hadgiven them European mass-books which they still preserve andstudy in their cottages, and who had now passed away from allauthority and influence in that land—to be succeeded bygreedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So uglya thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside thedoings of the Society of Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. Allthat I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. TheMonterey of last year exists no longer. A huge hotel hassprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets ofdiners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettesfigure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey isadvertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms atrailway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alasfor the little town! it is not strong enough to resist theinfluence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint,penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lowerrace, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

[1880.]

III
FONTAINEBLEAU
Village Communities of Painters

I

The charm of Fontainebleau is athing apart. It is a place that people love even more thanthey admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence, themajestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders,the great age and dignity of certain groves—these are butingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. Theplace is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and theshapes of things concord in happy harmony. The artist maybe idle and not fear the “blues.” He may dallywith his life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivaciousclassical contentment are of the very essence of the better kindof art; and these, in that most smiling forest, he has the chanceto learn or to remember. Even on the plain of Biére,where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of fancy, alarger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in theface of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness andhysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladlyconscious of their youth, or the old better contented with theirage.

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommendsthis country to the artist. The field was chosen by men inwhose blood there still raced some of the gleeful or solemnexultation of great art—Millet who loved dignity likeMichelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in theglamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day ofthat strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceivethe culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures—thatvoluntary aversion of the eye from all speciously strong andbeautiful effects—that disinterested love of dulness whichhas set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-sideprimrose. It was then chosen for its proximity toParis. And for the same cause, and by the force oftradition, the painter of to-day continues to inhabit and topaint it. There is in France scenery incomparable forromance and harmony. Provence, and the valley of the Rhonefrom Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of masterpieceswaiting for the brush. The beauty is not merely beauty; ittells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises while itcharms. Here you shall see castellated towns that wouldbefit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colourlike cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions;flowers of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to thevery door of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them; heremains faithful to Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge ofGretz, to the watering-pot cascade in Cernay valley. EvenFontainebleau was chosen for him; even in Fontainebleau heshrinks from what is sharply charactered. But one thing, atleast, is certain, whatever he may choose to paint and inwhatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell amonggraceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery,is classically graceful; and though the student may look fordifferent qualities, this quality, silently present, will educatehis hand and eye.

But, before all its other advantages—charm, loveliness,or proximity to Paris—comes the great fact that it isalready colonised. The institution of a painters’colony is a work of time and tact. The population must beconquered. The innkeeper has to be taught, and he soonlearns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught towelcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in a very greasycoat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours and acanvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers whowill eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buytobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colourmerchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must begiven to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals,should find himself alone. And no sooner are these firstdifficulties overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the otherside; and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at thegate. This is the crucial moment for the colony. Ifthese intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom andamenity; pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they willhave undone the education of the innkeeper; prices will rise andcredit shorten; and the poor painter must fare farther on andfind another hamlet. “Not here, O Apollo!” willbecome his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St.Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not alwaysedifying are the shifts that the French student uses to defendhis lair; like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken thewaters of his chosen pool; but at such a time and for sopractical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence.Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do thehonours of his village generously. Any artist is madewelcome, through whatever medium he may seek expression; scienceis respected; even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does,a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at home. Andwhen that essentially modern creature, the English or Americangirl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as ifinto a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himselfdefenceless; he submitted or he fled. His Frenchrespectability, quite as precise as ours, though coveringdifferent provinces of life, recoiled aghast before theinnovation. But the girls were painters; there was nothingto be done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for the time atleast, was practically ceded to the fair invader.Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the holidayshopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he houndedfrom his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the youngartist. The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latestorthodoxy in its crudeness; they are at that stage of education,for the most part, when a man is too much occupied with style tobe aware of the necessity for any matter; and this, above all forthe Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at the trade,to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else,is, for awhile at least, the king’s highway ofprogress. Here, in England, too many painters and writersdwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligentbourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent,prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence ofart. And this is the lad’s ruin. For art is,first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of wordsand not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form andnot a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation ofthe writer and the painter. The arabesque, properlyspeaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of theartist; he first plays with his material as a child plays with akaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when he beginsto use his pretty counters for the end of representation.In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; that is hisapprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really growbeyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business ofreal art—to give life to abstractions and significance andcharm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much amonghis fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a seriousinterest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of theseyears. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingeringof the dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, thisdull and literal painting of dull and insignificantsubjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say,“Why do you not write a great book? paint a greatpicture?” If his guardian angel fail him, they mayeven persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand iscoarsened and his style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life of theapprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing; it isstrewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure,patiently supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of acertain progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to theart of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B,ab. But the time comes when a man should cease prelusorygymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon his will, and, forbetter or worse, begin the business of creation. This evilday there is a tendency continually to postpone: above all withpainters. They have made so many studies that it has becomea habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush withthem; and death finds these aged students still busy with theirhorn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home inartist villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizonwe used to call them “Snoozers.” Continualreturns to the city, the society of men farther advanced, thestudy of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing is tobe had, a little religion or philosophy, are the means oftreatment. It will be time enough to think of curing themalady after it has been caught; for to catch it is the verything for which you seek that dream-land of the painters’village. “Snoozing” is a part of the artisticeducation; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all elsebeing forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, inthe very air of France that communicates the love of style.Precision, clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment ofmaterial, a grace in the handling, apart from any value in thethought, seem to be acquired by the mere residence; or if notacquired, become at least the more appreciated. The air ofParis is alive with this technical inspiration. And toleave that airy city and awake next day upon the borders of theforest is but to change externals. The same spirit ofdexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys and the loftygroves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty in theirconfusion, and the great plain that contrives to be decorative inits emptiness.

II

In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest ofFontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the wholewestern side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness;well enough at least to testify that there is no square milewithout some special character and charm. Such quarters,for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Bréau, and theReine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce apoint in common beyond the silence of the birds. The twolast are really conterminous; and in both are tall and ancienttrees that have outlived a thousand political vicissitudes.But in the one the great oaks prosper placidly upon an evenfloor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and the light arevery free below their stretching boughs. In the other thetrees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbledone upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, themoss clings in the crevice; and above it all the great beech goesspiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a grace beyondchurch architecture, canopies this rugged chaos. Meanwhile,dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of the Parisroad runs in an avenue: a road conceived for pageantry and fortriumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of gloryover, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, andonly at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen faraway and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A littleupon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch andboulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, alljuniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into azone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredientsmingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part,you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold the plain,northward and westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all daylong the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red fires ofsunset, night succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full ofwhisper, gloom, and fragrance. There are few things morerenovating than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of theCarrousel, and the long alignment of the glittering streets, andto bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividlyalive. It is a changeful place to paint, a stirring placeto live in. As fast as your foot carries you, you pass fromscene to scene, each vigorously painted in the colours of thesun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of forests on themind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient refuge ofhis race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. Themost savage corners bear a name, and have been cherished likeantiquities; in the most remote, Nature has prepared and balancedher effects as if with conscious art; and man, with his guidingarrows of blue paint, has countersigned the picture. Afteryour farthest wandering, you are never surprised to come forthupon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the centre point ofbranching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing,thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness;it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre ofthe maze is not a hermit’s cavern. In the midst, alittle mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business ofpleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled byhistoric names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of theharmless humbug who called himself the hermit. In a greattree, close by the highroad, he had built himself a little cabinafter the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mountedat night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt beany proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux. Ihad the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid,not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but smallchange; for that he had a great avidity. In the course oftime he proved to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from hisperch; and perhaps from the first he was no true votary of forestfreedom, but an ingenious, theatrically-minded beggar, and hiscabin in the tree was only stock-in-trade to beg withal.The choice of his position would seem to indicate so much; for ifin the forest there are no places still to be discovered, thereare many that have been forgotten, and that lie unvisited.There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct you,now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock.But your security from interruption is complete; you might campfor weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul suspect yourpresence; and if I may suppose the reader to have committed somegreat crime and come to me for aid, I think I could still find myway to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and chimney, where hemight lie perfectly concealed. A confederatelandscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, hewould have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he mightget gently on the train at some side station, work round by aseries of junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but apleasure-ground, and although, in favourable weather, and in themore celebrated quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist,yet has some of the immunities and offers some of the repose ofnatural forests. And the solitary, although he must returnat night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with his ownthoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. Thedemands of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a backgarden looked upon by windows; others, like the ostrich, arecontent with a solitude that meets the eye; and others, again,expand in fancy to the very borders of their desert, and areirritably conscious of a hunter’s camp in an adjacentcounty. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seembut an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. Butto the plain man it offers solitude: an excellent thing initself, and a good whet for company.

III

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; et ego inArcadia vixi, it was a pleasant season; and that noiselesshamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is for me, asfor so many others, a green spot in memory. The greatMillet was just dead, the green shutters of his modest house wereclosed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of myfirst visit was thus an epoch in the history of art: in a lesserway, it was an epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter.The Petit Cénaclewas dead and buried; Murger andhis crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from theirexpedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost; andthe petrified legend of the Vie de Bohémehadbecome a sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealousimitators. But if the book be written in rose-water, theimitation was still farther expurgated; honesty was the rule; theinnkeepers gave, as I have said, almost unlimited credit; theysuffered the seediest painter to depart, to take all hisbelongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they sometimeslost, it was by English and Americans alone. At the sametime, the great influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect thelife of the studious. There had been disputes; and, in oneinstance at least, the English and the Americans had made commoncause to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It would be well ifnations and races could communicate their qualities; but inpractice when they look upon each other, they have an eye tonothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentiallydishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle thatwe call “Fair Play.” The Frenchman marvelled atthe scruples of his guest, and, when that defender of innocenceretired over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled onceagain; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel ofthe same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his judgment uponboth.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts.Palizzi bore rule at Gretz—urbane, superior rule—hismemory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mindfertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and venerable to theeye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with Italiansuperstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole fabric ofhis manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback.Cernay had Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilinglycritical of youth, who, when a full-blown commercial traveller,suddenly threw down his samples, bought a colour-box, and becamethe master whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for acentral figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Barbizon,since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth.Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day made thestranger welcome, have since deserted it. The goodLachèvre has departed, carrying his household gods; andlong before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by anuntimely death. He died before he had deserved success; itmay be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely,modest countenance still haunts the memory of all who knewhim. Another—whom I will not name—has movedfarther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his decadence.His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he stillretained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp ofconscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, theoccupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losingbattle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy,still waiting the return of fortune. But these days alsowere too good to last; and the former favourite of two sovereignsfled, if I heard the truth, by night. There was a time whenhe was counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, howthe whirligig of time brings in his revenges! To pityMillet is a piece of arrogance; if life be hard for such resoluteand pious spirits, it is harder still for us, had we the wit tounderstand it; but we may pity his unhappier rival, who, for noapparent merit, was raised to opulence and momentary fame, and,through no apparent fault was suffered step by step to sink againto nothing. No misfortune can exceed the bitterness of suchback-foremost progress, even bravely supported as it was; but tothose also who were taken early from the easel, a regret isdue. From all the young men of this period, one stood outby the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of fermentation,enamoured of eccentricities. “Il faut faire de lapeinture nouvelle,” was his watchword; but if time andexperience had continued his education, if he had been grantedhealth to return from these excursions to the steady and thecentral, I must believe that the name of Hills had becomefamous.

Siron’s inn, that excellent artists’ barrack, wasmanaged upon easy principles. At any hour of the night,when you returned from wandering in the forest, you went to thebilliard-room and helped yourself to liquors, or descended to thecellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The Sironswere all locked in slumber; there was none to check your inroads;only at the week’s end a computation was made, the grosssum was divided, and a varying share set down to everylodger’s name under the rubric: estrats. Uponthe more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your billlengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of yourdisposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you couldget your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into theforest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering intoyour chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you were met by thearoma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, themossy boulders, the interminable field of forest shadow.There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, andagain at six o’clock, a good meal awaited you onSiron’s table. The whole of your accommodation, setaside that varying item of the estrals, cost you fivefrancs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked it;and if you were out of luck’s way, you might depart forwhere you pleased and leave it pending.

IV

Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically,it was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves,and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal mannersbeing laid aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidlyexacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society;and a breach of its undefined observances was promptlypunished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, asfree of speech as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or aword of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as atea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forthfrom Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words what theyhad done, but they deserved their fate. They had shownthemselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they hadpushed themselves; they had “made their head”; theywanted tact to appreciate the “fine shades” ofBarbizonian etiquette. And once they were condemned, theprocess of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty; after oneevening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of ourcommonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he roseexceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed himfrom the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences ofbanishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered against anartist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd andpleasant fact is this, that they were never needed.Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of thesein Barbizon; and some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; butone and all entered at once into the spirit of theassociation. This singular society is purely French, acreature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects.It cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, theimpatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the moreardent friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such acommonwealth. But this random gathering of young Frenchpainters, with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yetkept the life of the place upon a certain footing, insensiblyimposed their etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speechenforced their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of itis to wonder the more at the strange failure of their race uponthe larger theatre. This inbred civility—to use theword in its completest meaning—this natural and facileadjustment of contending liberties, seems all that is required tomake a governable nation and a just and prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of highspirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth. Thefew elder men who joined us were still young at heart, and tookthe key from their companions. We returned from longstations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by thesunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; theBabel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play likethe natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled withindifferent pictures and lit by candles guttering in the nightair, the talk and laughter sounded far into the night. Itwas a good place and a good life for any naturally-minded youth;better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps best of allfor the student of letters. He, too, was saturated in thisatmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing currentsof the world, he might forget that there existed other and morepressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place,it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug hisconscience, like the painter, by the production of listlessstudies; he saw himself idle among many who were apparently, andsome who were really, employed; and what with the impulse ofincreasing health and the continual provocation of romanticscenes, he became tormented with the desire to work. Heenjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long,sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and still floating likemusic through his brain, foresights of great works thatShakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics,glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive withimport. So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we havesights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall neverenter. They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of stylethat repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-throbsof that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before theartist can be born. But they come to us in such a rainbowof glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthlyin comparison. We were all artists; almost all in the ageof illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to thestrains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we werehappy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; andthough these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness,others succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change,the amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, theHouse Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

V

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river.It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge ofmany sterlings. And the bridge is a piece of publicproperty; anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettantefrom the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen it inthe Salon; I have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in thelast French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in ablack-and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay inthe pages of the Magazine of Art. Long-sufferingbridge! And if you visit Gretz to-morrow, you shall findanother generation, camped at the bottom of Chevillon’sgarden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly painting itagain.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring placethan Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. Thereis something ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay,with the inn tables standing in one corner, as though the stagewere set for rustic opera, and in the early morning all thepainters breaking their fast upon white wine under the windows ofthe villagers. It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, togo down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming throughthe bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplaredlevel. The meals are laid in the cool arbour, underfluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, thebathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty,tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is“something to do” at Gretz. Perhaps, for thatvery reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours, no suchglories of exhilaration, as among the solemn groves anduneventful hours of Barbizon. This “something todo” is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; youwreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, andbehold them gone! But Gretz is a merry place after itskind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of itspellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle attractionsfor the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the redberries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees,lilies, and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. Andof all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk,than the highroad to Nemours between its lines of talkingpoplar.

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long shored andtrussed and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight ofyears, and the place as it was is but a fading image in thememory of former guests. They, indeed, recall the ancientwooden stair; they recall the rainy evening, the wide hearth, theblaze of the twig fire, and the company that gathered round thepillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now dust;soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shallfollow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and,both in name and lineament, vanish from the world of men.“For remembrance of the old house’ sake,” asPepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story. When thetide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters wereleft stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the warwas over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. Itwas difficult to obtain supplies; but the two waifs were stillwelcome to the best, sat down daily with the family to table, andat the due intervals were supplied with clean napkins, which theyscrupled to employ. Madame Chevillon observed the fact andreprimanded them. But they stood firm; eat they must, buthaving no money they would soil no napkins.

VI

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have beenlittle visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous;they have manners of their own, and might resist the drasticprocess of colonisation. Montigny has been somewhatstrangely neglected, I never knew it inhabited but once, whenWill H. Low installed himself there with a barrel ofpiquette, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellisabove the weir, in sight of the green country and to the music ofthe falling water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasantplace of residence, just too rustic to be stagey; and from mymemories of the place in general, and that garden trellis inparticular—at morning, visited by birds, or at night, whenthe dew fell and the stars were of the party—I am inclinedto think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny.Chailly-en-Bière has outlived all things, and lies dustilyslumbering in the plain—the cemetery of itself. Thegreat road remains to testify of its former bustle of postilionsand carriage bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hangin the inn room the paintings of a former generation, dead ordecorated long ago. In my time, one man only, greatlydaring, dwelt there. From time to time he would walk overto Barbizon like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, andafter some communication with flesh and blood return to hisaustere hermitage. But even he, when I last revisited theforest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the roll ofChaillyites. It may revive—but I much doubt it.Achères and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is outof the question, being merely Gretz over again, without theriver, the bridge, or the beauty; and of all the possible placeson the western side, Marlotte alone remains to bediscussed. I scarcely know Marlotte, and, very likely forthat reason, am not much in love with it. It seems aglaring and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie isunattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortableenough, is commonplace. Marlotte has a name; it is famous;if I were the young painter I would leave it alone in itsglory.

VII

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is agood conservative in forest places, much may be untrueto-day. Many of us have passed Arcadian days there andmoved on, but yet left a portion of our souls behind us buried inthe woods. I would not dig for these reliquiæ; theyare incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the finder; andyet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered alongforest paths, stores of youth’s dynamite and dearremembrances. And as one generation passes on and renovatesthe field of tillage for the next, I entertain a fancy that whenthe young men of to-day go forth into the forest they shall findthe air still vitalised by the spirits of their predecessors,and, like those “unheard melodies” that are thesweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt thefield of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call thewanderer farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of thegroves, surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and mycompanions? We are not content to pass away entirely fromthe scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, apillar and a legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon thismemorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vitalmemories, and when the theft is consummated depart again intolife richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they havepossessed, from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, andthey will return to walk in it at night in the fondest of theirdreams, and use it for ever in their books and pictures.Yet when they made their packets, and put up their notes andsketches, something, it should seem, had been forgotten. Aprojection of themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended thesescenes of happiness, a natural child of fancy, begotten andforgotten unawares. Over the whole field of our wanderingssuch fetches are still travelling like indefatigable bagmen; butthe imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved spots, are very longof life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget theirorphanage. If anywhere about that wood you meet my airybantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a pleasant lad,though now abandoned. And when it comes to your own turn toquit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no Antonyor Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as becomesthis not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure, thechild of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble,that has not been mirthfully conceived.

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wetblanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copiousspirit of enjoyment. Whether as man or artist let the youthmake haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let him addresshimself to the spirit of the place; he will learn more fromexercise than from studies, although both are necessary; and ifhe can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woodshe will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches. Aspirit once well strung up to the concert-pitch of the primevalout-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a study andmagniloquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicablethrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test theflatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches andcondemns, and still spurs up to further effort and newfailure. Thus it is that she sets us blushing at ourignorant and tepid works; and the more we find of these inspiringshocks the less shall we be apt to love the literal in ourproductions. In all sciences and senses the letter kills;and to-day, when cackling human geese express their ignorantcondemnation of all studio pictures, it is a lesson most usefulto be learnt. Let the young painter go to Fontainebleau,and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach him themechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, andbe a servant of mirth, and not pick and botanise, but wait uponthe moods of nature. So he will learn—or learn not toforget—the poetry of life and earth, which, when he hasacquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

[1882.]

IV
EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE” [95]

The country where they journeyed,that green, breezy valley of the Loing, is one very attractive tocheerful and solitary people. The weather was superb; allnight it thundered and lightened, and the rain fell in sheets; byday, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the airvigorous and pure. They walked separate: the Cigaretteplodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa postingon ahead. Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the way;each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his comradeat the designated inn; and the pleasures of society and solitudecombined to fill the day. The Arethusa carried in hisknapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some ofthe hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.In this path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson,Mr. Henley, and all contemporary roundeleers; but for goodreasons, he will be the last to publish the result. TheCigarette walked burthened with a volume of Michelet. Andboth these books, it will be seen, played a part in thesubsequent adventure.

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian inattire; but by all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as onthat tramp; having set forth indeed, upon a moment’snotice, from the most unfashionable spot in Europe,Barbizon. On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian work,the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannelshirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black;a light tweed coat made by a good English tailor; ready-madecheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters completed hisarray. In person, he is exceptionally lean; and his face isnot, like those of happier mortals, a certificate. Foryears he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank withoutsuspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, lookedaskance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited)he is actually denied admittance to the casino of MonteCarlo. If you will imagine him, dressed as above, stoopingunder his knapsack, walking nearly five miles an hour with thefolds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his spindleshanks, and still looking eagerly round him as if in terror ofpursuit—the figure, when realised, is far fromreassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the samepleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he hadnot something of the same appearance. Something of the samepreoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must havetinkered verses as he walked, with more success than hissuccessor. And if he had anything like the same inspiringweather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling andresounding down the stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on thevillage streets, the wild bull’s-eye of the storm flashingall night long into the bare inn-chamber—the same sweetreturn of day, the same unfathomable blue of noon, the samehigh-coloured, halcyon eves—and above all, if he hadanything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relishfor what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathedin, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estatesto-day with the poor exile, and count myself a gainer.

But there was another point of similarity between the twojourneys, for which the Arethusa was to pay dear: both were goneupon in days of incomplete security. It was not long afterthe Franco-Prussian war. Swiftly as men forget, thatcountry-side was still alive with tales of uhlans, and outlyingsentries, and hairbreadth ’scapes from the ignominiouscord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader andinvaded. A year, at the most two years later, you mighthave tramped all that country over and not heard oneanecdote. And a year or two later, you would—if youwere a rather ill-looking young man in nondescriptarray—have gone your rounds in greater safety; for alongwith more interesting matter, the Prussian spy would havesomewhat faded from men’s imaginations.

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Château Renardbefore he was conscious of arousing wonder. On the roadbetween that place and Châtillon-sur-Loing, however, heencountered a rural postman; they fell together in talk, andspoke of a variety of subjects; but through one and all, thepostman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were faithfulto the Arethusa’s knapsack. At last, with mysteriousroguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on beinganswered, shook his head with kindly incredulity.“Non,” said he, “non, vousavez des portraits.” And then with a languishingappeal, “Voyons, show me the portraits!”It was some little while before the Arethusa, with a shout oflaughter, recognised his drift. By portraits he meantindecent photographs; and in the Arethusa, an austere and risingauthor, he thought to have identified a pornographiccolporteur. When countryfolk in France have made up theirminds as to a person’s calling, argument isfruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the postman pipedand fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now hewould upbraid, now he would reason—“Voyons, Iwill tell nobody”; then he tried corruption, and insistedon paying for a glass of wine; and, at last when their waysseparated—“Non,” said he, “cen’est pas bien de votre part. O non, cen’est pas bien.” And shaking his head withquite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa atChâtillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; anotherChâtillon, of grislier memory, looms too near athand. But the next day, in a certain hamlet called LaJussiére, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a verypoor, bare drinking shop. The hostess, a comely woman,suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and pityingeyes. “You are not of this department?” sheasked. The Arethusa told her he was English.“Ah!” she said, surprised. “We have noEnglish. We have many Italians, however, and they do verywell; they do not complain of the people of hereabouts. AnEnglishman may do very well also; it will be somethingnew.” Here was a dark saying, over which the Arethusapondered as he drank his grenadine; but when he rose and askedwhat was to pay, the light came upon him in a flash.“O, pour vous,” replied the landlady,“a halfpenny!” Pour vous? Byheaven, she took him for a beggar! He paid his halfpenny,feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But when hewas forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit.The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow; andhis conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day theypassed the river and set forth (severally, as their custom was)on a short stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, toChâtillon-sur-Loire. It was the first day of theshooting; and the air rang with the report of firearms and theadmiring cries of sportsmen. Overhead the birds were inconsternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising.And yet with all this bustle on either hand, the road itself laysolitary. The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone,and I remember he laid down very exactly all he was to do atChâtillon: how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to change hisshirt, and to await the Cigarette’s arrival, in sublimeinaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas,he pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in theafternoon and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of thatill-fated town. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.

“Monsieur est voyageur?” he asked.

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of hisvile attire, replied—I had almost said with gaiety:“So it would appear.”

“His papers are in order?” said thegendarme. And when the Arethusa, with a slight change ofvoice, admitted he had none, he was informed (politely enough)that he must appear before the Commissary.

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to theshirt and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when heturned upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, thatwas (like Bardolph’s) “all whelks andbubuckles,” the dullest might have been prepared forgrief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat andfretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal nor argumentcould reach.

The Commissary. You have nopapers?

The Arethusa. Not here.

The Commissary. Why?

The Arethusa. I have leftthem behind in my valise.

The Commissary. You know,however, that it is forbidden to circulate without papers?

The Arethusa. Pardon me: I amconvinced of the contrary. I am here on my rights as anEnglish subject by international treaty.

The Commissary (withscorn). You call yourself an Englishman?

The Arethusa. I do.

The Commissary.Humph.—What is your trade?

The Arethusa. I am a Scotchadvocate.

The Commissary (with singularannoyance). A Scotch advocate! Do you thenpretend to support yourself by that in this department?

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension. TheCommissary had scored a point.

The Commissary. Why, then, doyou travel?

The Arethusa. I travel forpleasure.

The Commissary (pointing to theknapsack, and with sublime incredulity). Avecça? Voyez-vous, je suis un hommeintelligent! (With that? Look here, I am a personof intelligence!)

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, theCommissary relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded(like the postman, but with what different expectations!) to seethe contents of the knapsack. And here the Arethusa, notyet sufficiently awake to his position, fell into a gravemistake. There was little or no furniture in the roomexcept the Commissary’s chair and table; and to facilitatematters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on earth) leant theknapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairlybounded from his seat; his face and neck flushed past purple,almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating objecton the floor.

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes,of socks, and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a pieceof soap in one of the shoes, two volumes of the CollectionJannetlettered Poésies de Charlesd’Orléans, a map, and a version book containingdivers notes in prose and the remarkable English roundels of thevoyager, still to this day unpublished: the Commissary ofChâtillon is the only living man who has clapped an eye onthese artistic trifles. He turned the assortment over witha contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that heregarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very templeof infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about themap, nothing really criminal except the roundels; as for Charlesof Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed asgood as a certificate; and it was supposed the farce was nearlyover.

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

The Commissary (after apause). Eh bien, je vais vous dire ce quevous êtes. Vous êtes allemand et vousvenez chanter à la foire. (Well, then, I willtell you what you are. You are a German and have come tosing at the fair.)

The Arethusa. Would you liketo hear me sing? I believe I could convince you of thecontrary.

The Commissary. Pas deplaisanterie, monsieur!

The Arethusa. Well, sir,oblige me at least by looking at this book. Here, I open itwith my eyes shut. Read one of these songs—read thisone—and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if itwould be possible to sing it at a fair?

The Commissary(critically). Mais oui. Trèsbien.

The Arethusa. Comment,monsieur! What! But do you not observe it isantique. It is difficult to understand, even for you andme; but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

The Commissary (taking apen). Enfin, il faui en finir. Whatis your name?

The Arethusa (speaking with theswallowing vivacity of the English).Robert-Louis-Stev’ns’n.

The Commissary(aghast). Hé! Quoi?

The Arethusa (perceiving andimproving his advantage).Rob’rt-Lou’s-Stev’ns’n.

The Commissary (after severalconflicts with his pen). Eh bien, il faut sepasser du nom. Ca ne s’écritpas. (Well, we must do without the name: it isunspellable.)

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation,in which I have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of theCommissary; but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because ofhis rising anger, has left but little definite in the memory ofthe Arethusa. The Commissary was not, I think, a practisedliterary man; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand andembarked on the composition of the procès-verbal,than he became distinctly more uncivil and began to show apredilection for that simplest of all forms of repartee:“You lie!” Several times the Arethusa let itpass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more insultsor to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do hisworst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterlyrepent it. Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from thefirst, instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment andthen going on to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise;for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visiblystaggered. But it was too late; he had been challenged theprocès-verbalwas begun; and he again squared hiselbows over his writing, and the Arethusa was led forth aprisoner.

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.Thither was our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden toempty forth the contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, apen, a pencil, a pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francsof change: that was all. Not a file, not a cipher, not ascrap of writing whether to identify or to condemn. Thevery gendarme was appalled before such destitution.

“I regret,” he said, “that I arrested you,for I see that you are no voyou.” And hepromised him every indulgence.

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. Thathe was told was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have sometobacco. He did not chew, however, and asked instead tohave his handkerchief.

“Non,” said the gendarme.“Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se sontpendus.” (No, we have had histories of people whohanged themselves.)

“What,” cried the Arethusa. “And is itfor that you refuse me my handkerchief? But see how muchmore easily I could hang myself in my trousers!”

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck tohis colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers ofservice.

“At least,” said the Arethusa, “be sure thatyou arrest my comrade; he will follow me ere long on the sameroad, and you can tell him by the sack upon hisshoulders.”

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back courtof the building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned downthe stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind hisdescending person.

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt tosuppose itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison,among other ills, was one that had been often faced by theundaunted Arethusa. Even as he went down the stairs, he wastelling himself that here was a famous occasion for a roundel,and that like the committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier, hetoo would make his prison musical. I will tell the truth atonce: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed inthis place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered: thefirst moral, the second physical.

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that althoughall men are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so ofthemselves. To get and take the lie with equanimity is astretch beyond the stoic; and the Arethusa, who had beensurfeited upon that insult, was blazing inwardly with a whiteheat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also itspart. The cellar in which he was confined was some feetunderground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrowaperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of agreen vine. The walls were of naked masonry, the floor ofbare earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, awater-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray cloak forbedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer’safternoon, the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapidexercise, and plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptaclefor vagabonds, struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa’sblood. Now see in how small a matter a hardship mayconsist: the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with thevery spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug thefoundations of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight andthe irregular surface, walking was impossible. The cagedauthor resisted for a good while; but the chill of the placestruck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance asyou may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wraphimself in the public covering. There, then, he lay uponthe verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in agarment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spiritfar removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults hehad just received. These are not circumstances favourableto the muse.

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was stillshining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through thetufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his morephilosophic pace. In those days of liberty and health hewas the constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ampleopportunity to share in that gentleman’s disfavour with thepolice. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with thatdisastrous comrade. He was himself a man born to floateasily through life, his face and manner artfully recommendinghim to all. There was but one suspicious circumstance hecould not carry off, and that was his companion. He willnot readily forget the Commissary in what is ironically calledthe free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the Franco-Belgianfrontier; nor the inn at La Fère; last, but not least, heis pretty certain to remember Châtillon-sur-Loire.

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a waysideflower; and a moment later, two persons, in a high state ofsurprise, were confronted in the Commissary’s office.For if the Cigarette was surprised to be arrested, the Commissarywas no less taken aback by the appearance and appointments of hiscaptive. Here was a man about whom there could be nomistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, inapple-pie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance,ready with his passport, at a word, and well supplied with money:a man the Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance uponthe highway; and this beau cavalierunblushingly claimedthe Arethusa for his comrade! The conclusion of theinterview was foregone; of its humours, I remember onlyone. “Baronet?” demanded the magistrate,glancing up from the passport. “Alors,monsieur, vous êtes le firs d’unbaron?” And when the Cigarette (his one mistakethroughout the interview) denied the soft impeachment,“Alors,” from the Commissary, “cen’est pas votre passeport!” But these wereineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands upon theCigarette; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrainedadmiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,commanding our friend’s tailor. Ah, what an honouredguest was the Commissary entertaining! what suitable clothes hewore for the warm weather! what beautiful maps, what anattractive work of history he carried in his knapsack! Youare to understand there was now but one point of differencebetween them: what was to be done with the Arethusa? theCigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiminghim as the dungeon’s own. Now it chanced that theCigarette had passed some years of his life in Egypt, where hehad made acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbusand pashas; and in the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered thevolume of Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there wassomething Turkish. I pass over this lightly; it is highlypossible there was some misunderstanding, highly possible thatthe Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the attractionto be mutual and took for an act of growing friendship what theCigarette himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, wasthere ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume ofMichelet’s history? The work was promised him for themorrow, before our departure; and presently after, either becausehe had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be behindin friendly offices—“Eh bien,” he said,“je suppose qu’il faut lâher voirecamarade.” And he tore up that feast of humour,the unfinished procès-verbal. Ah, if he hadonly torn up instead the Arethusa’s roundels! Therewere many works burnt at Alexandria, there are many treasured inthe British Museum, that I could better spare than theprocès-verbalof Châtillon. Poorbubuckled Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never hadhis Michelet: perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-basedstupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste forletters, a ready admiration for the admirable. And if hedid not admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering,there came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprangto his feet, ready to welcome a companion in calamity; andinstead of that, the door was flung wide, the friendly gendarmeappeared above in the strong daylight, and with a magnificentgesture (being probably a student of thedrama)—“Vous êtes libre!” hesaid. None too soon for the Arethusa. I doubt if hehad been half-an-hour imprisoned; but by the watch in aman’s brain (which was the only watch he carried) he shouldhave been eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy upthe cellar stairs into the healing warmth of the afternoon sun;and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a cow’s intohis nostril; and he heard again (and could have laughed forpleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum oflife.

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but notso, this was an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon whatfollowed in front of the barrack, since there was a lady in thecase, I scruple to expatiate. The wife of theMaréchal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet theArethusa was not sorry to be gone from her society.Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon,still lingers in his memory: yet more of her conversation.“You have there a very fine parlour,” said the poorgentleman.—“Ah,” said Madame laMaréchale (des-logis), “you are very well acquaintedwith such parlours!” And you should have seen withwhat a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond beforeher! I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; butbefore that interview was at an end, he hated Madame laMaréchale. His passion (as I am led to understand byone who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a palecheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame meanwhile tasting thejoys of the matador, goading him with barbed words and staringhim coldly down.

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and betterstill to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here,too, the despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their nextneighbour, a gentleman of these parts, returned from theday’s sport, who had the good taste to find pleasure intheir society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman proposedthe acquaintance should be ripened in the café.

The café was crowded with sportsmen conclamantlyexplaining to each other and the world the smallness of theirbags. About the centre of the room, the Cigarette and theArethusa sat with their new acquaintance; a trio very wellpleased, for the travellers (after their late experience) weregreedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced in a pairof patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew openwith a crash; the Maréchal-des-logis appeared in theinterval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered withoutsalutation, strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons,and disappeared through a door at the far end. Close at hisheels followed the Arethusa’s gendarme of the afternoon,imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearingof his chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his openhand on the shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing,dramatic utterance of which he had thesecret—“Suivez!” said he.

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, thesigning of the declaration of independence, Mark Antony’soration, all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as havingbeen not unlike that evening in the café atChâtillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. Amoment later, when the Arethusa had followed his recaptors intothe farther part of the house, the Cigarette found himself alonewith his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables, all thelusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous voiceshushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting at him furtively asat a leper.

And the Arethusa? Well, he had a long, sometimes atrying, interview in the back kitchen. TheMaréchal-des-logis, who was a very handsome man, and Ibelieve both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on thecase. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he didnot wish to get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposedthis, that, and the other, to all of which the Arethusa (with agrowing sense of his position) demurred.

“In short,” suggested the Arethusa, “youwant to wash your hands of further responsibility? Well,then, let me go to Paris.”

The Maréchal-des-logis looked at his watch.

“You may leave,” said he, “by the teno’clock train for Paris.”

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling theirmisadventure in the dining-room at Siron’s.

V
RANDOM MEMORIES

I.—The Coast of Fife

Many writers have vigorouslydescribed the pains of the first day or the first night atschool; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are moreoften agreeably exciting. Misery—or at least miseryunrelieved—is confined to another period, to the days ofsuspense and the “dreadful looking-for” of departure;when the old life is running to an end, and the new life, withits new interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of an imminentparting, there is added the unrest of a state of consciouspre-existence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window,the smell of semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church bellsupon a Sunday, the thin, high voices of compatriot children in aplaying-field—what a sudden, what an overpowering pathosbreathes to him from each familiar circumstance! Theassaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems to him, butfrom without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had Ibeen let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but therewas around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy oflamentation: “Poor little boy, he is goingaway—unkind little boy, he is going to leave us”; sothe unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning andreproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in theearly autumn, and at a place where it seems to me, looking back,it must be always autumn and generally Sunday, there camesuddenly upon the face of all I saw—the long empty road,the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the woodyhillside garden—a look of such a piercing sadness that myheart died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears ofmiserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the whilewith consolations—we two were alone in all that was visibleof the London Road: two poor waifs who had each tastedsorrow—and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled forhis entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherlyeyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed athome the story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I oweda certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to acat in the London Road. It was judged, if I had thusbrimmed over on the public highway, some change of scene was (inthe medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was visitingthe harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should takeme along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; myfirst professional tour, my first journey in the completecharacter of man, without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed bythe curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between thefirths of Forth and Tay. It may be continually seen frommany parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of myfather’s house) dying away into the distance and theeasterly haarwith one smoky seaside town beyond another,or in winter printing on the gray heaven some glitteringhill-tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a low,sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, except (ascommon on the east coast) along the dens of rivers; the fieldswell cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the eye.It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden ofEden. History broods over that part of the world like theeasterly haar. Even on the map, its long row ofGaelic place-names bear testimony to an old and settledrace. Of these little towns, posted along the shore asclose as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its oldweather-beaten church or public building, its flavour of decayedprosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaintor tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may bestill observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine;somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour,hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle wherethe “bonny face was spoiled”; Burntisland where, whenPaul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a tablecarried between tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the roverat the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect;Kinghorn, where Alexander “brak’s neckbane” andleft Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witchesonce prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest marinersin the North Sea; Dysart, famous—well famous at least to mefor the Dutch ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toysand with pots of flowers and cages of song-birds in the cabinwindows, and for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit allday in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a long Germanpipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted caves, wherethe Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed anight of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modernplace, sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone butyesterday the tall figure and the white locks of the lastEnglishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was still walkinghis hospital rounds, while the troopers from Meerut clattered andcried “Deen Deen” along the streets of the imperialcity, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at themagazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office wasperhaps already fingering his last despatch; and just a littlebeyond Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mountingabout its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better known underthe name of Robinson Crusoe. So on, the list might bepursued (only for private reasons, which the reader will shortlyhave an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, andthe two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where PrimateSharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to theheel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood ofmatted elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itselfoverlooking but the breach or the quiescence of thedeep—the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front, and asnight draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on theone hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, andfarther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland ofSt. Abb’s. And but a little way round the corner ofthe land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of theprovince and the light of mediæval Scotland, St. Andrews,where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read inKnox’s jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blueProtestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) thecurrent voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on ableak easterly morning. There was a crashing run of seaupon the shore, I recollect, and my father and the man of theharbour light must sometimes raise their voices to beaudible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance, that Ialways imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning,and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger inits drowsy classrooms and confound the utterance of theprofessor, until teacher and taught are alike drowned inoblivion, and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and thedraught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the openlecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrewsin general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang;who has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose andwith his incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his bestpoems, with grace, and local truth, and a note of unaffectedpathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the romance, I say, andthe educational advantages, but I doubt if he had turned hisattention to the harbour lights; and it may be news even to him,that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hangingabout with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (Imake no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time uponthat tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen sooften re-enacted on a more important stage. Eighty yearsago, I find my grandfather writing: “It is the most painfulthing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of this kindwith any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House,instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbationand welcome their Family, it is distressing when one-is obligedto put on a most angry countenance and demeanour.”This painful obligation has been hereditary in my race. Ihave myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspectionof Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the questionof storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach, when wewent down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for hisinfant child; and then regained my equanimity with the thoughtthat I had done the man a service, and when the proper inspectorcame, he would be readier with his panes. The human race isperhaps credited with more duplicity than it deserves. Thevisitation of a lighthouse at least is a business of the mosttransparent nature. As soon as the boat grates on theshore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, thevery slouch of the fellows’ shoulders tells their story,and the engineer may begin at once to assume his “angrycountenance.” Certainly the brass of the handrailwill be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainlyall will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the sparelamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a lightis not rather more than middling good, it will be radicallybad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to beunattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St.Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had nouniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood(in the mediæval phrase) quite out of the danger of myfather; but he had a painful interview for all that, andperspired extremely.

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My fatherhad announced we were “to post,” and the phrasecalled up in my hopeful mind visions of top-boots and thepictures in Rowlandson’s Dance of Death; but it wasonly a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I haddriven in a thousand times at the low price of one shilling onthe streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, Iremember nothing of that drive. It is a road I have oftentravelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember anysingle trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach onthe truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir twohundred years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in themidst, the primate’s carriage fleeing at the gallop; theassassins loose-reined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol inhand, among the first. No scene of history has ever writtenitself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, thatquestionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; notbecause of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not evenbecause of the live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe’s’bacco-box, thus clearly indicating his complicity withSatan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a finereligious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded agrateful relief from Ministering Childrenor theMemoirs of Mrs. Kathatine Winslowe. The figure thatalways fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet,sitting in the saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and throughall that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly, revolvingprivately a case of conscience. He would take no hand inthe deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and“that action” must be sullied with no suggestion of aworldly motive; on the other hand, “that action,” initself, was highly justified, he had cast in his lot with“the actors,” and he must stay there, inactive butpublicly sharing the responsibility. “You are agentleman—you will protect me!” cried the wounded oldman, crawling towards him. “I will never lay a handon you,” said Hackston, and put his cloak about hismouth. It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away thatcloak and see the face—to open that bosom and to read theheart. With incomplete romances about Hackston, the drawersof my youth were lumbered. I read him up in every printedbook that I could lay my hands on. I even dug among theWodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room where myhero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly consciousof my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) moregifted students. All was vain: that he had passed a riotousnonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (comparedwith his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierlyresolution and even of military common sense, and that he figuredmemorably in the scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could Imake out. But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is tosee him like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting withhis cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How small a thingcreates an immortality! I do not think he can have been aman entirely commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak abouthis mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action,he would not thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, andto-day he would scarce delay me for a paragraph. Anincident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once awakes thejudgment and makes a picture for the eye, how little do werealise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does so butthe author, just as none but he appreciates the influence ofjingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with something ofa covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy to bethoughts and what are really the accustomed artifices of his owntrade, or roused by what they take to be principles and arereally picturesque effects. In a pleasant book about aschool-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a littleanecdote. A “Philosophical Society” was formedby some Academy boys—among them, Colonel Fergusson himself,Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew Wilson, the Christian Buddhist andauthor of The Abode of Snow. Before these learnedpundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem:“What would be the result of putting a pound of potassiumin a pot of porter?” “I should think therewould be a number of interesting bi-products,” said asmatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has abi-product, and stands as a type of much that is mosthuman. For this inquirer who conceived himself to burn witha zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of aquite different nature; unconsciously to his own recentlybreeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediantt—that was his idea, poor little boy! So withpolitics and that which excites men in the present, so withhistory and that which rouses them in the past: there lie at theroot of what appears, most serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, andCellardyke, all three Royal Burghs—or two Royal Burghs anda less distinguished suburb, I forget which—liescontinuously along the seaside, and boasts of either two or threeseparate parish churches, and either two or three separateharbours. These ambiguities are painful; but the fact is(although it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted uponCellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. Atricklet of a stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and overthe bridge at the time of my knowledge, the celebrated ShellHouse stood outpost on the west. This had been theresidence of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond tenancy, hehad illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember rightly)as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatchesof verse in the vein of exegi monumentum; shells andpebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium;and I like to think of him standing back upon the bridge, whenall was finished, drinking in the general effect and (likeGibbon) already lamenting his employment.

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenthcentury. Mr. Thomson, the “curat” of AnstrutherEaster, was a man highly obnoxious to the devout: in the firstplace, because he was a “curat”; in the second place,because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and inthe third place, because he was generally suspected of dealingswith the Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, inthe popular literature of the time, go hand in hand; but the endof Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself, and in the properphrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at afriend’s house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere,I suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put thething in our cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on thebrink of delirium tremens. It was a dark night, itseems; a little lassie came carrying a lantern to fetch thecurate home; and away they went down the street of AnstrutherWester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child’s hand, thebarred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumberinghouses, and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (toall appearance) easy in his mind. The pair had reached themiddle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poortippler started in some baseless fear and looked behind him; thechild, already shaken by the minister’s strange behaviour,started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and forthe space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be allconfounded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper and thetwittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep down,to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and tovanish on the farther side in the general darkness of thenight. “Plainly the devil come for Mr.Thomson!” thought the child. What Mr. Thomson thoughthimself, we have no ground of knowledge; but he fell upon hisknees in the midst of the bridge like a man praying. On therest of the journey to the manse, history is silent; but whenthey came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern fromthe child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that herlittle courage died within her, and she fled home screaming toher parents. Not a soul would venture out; all that night,the minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and whenthe day dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, theyfound the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson.

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a morecheerful association. It was early in the morning, about acentury before the days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor wascalled out of bed to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke ofMedina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour underneath. Butsure there was never seen a more decayed grandee; sure there wasnever a duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile.Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a certain isle;on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombardits pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers andtheir families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces ofwreck-wood stand for monuments; there is nowhere a moreinhospitable spot.Belle-Isle-en-Mer—Fair-Isle-at-Sea—that is aname that has always rung in my mind’s ear like music; butthe only “Fair Isle” on which I ever set my foot, wasthis unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore;here for long months he and certain of his men were harboured;and it was from this durance that he landed at last to bewelcomed (as well as such a papist deserved, no doubt) by thegodly incumbent of Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle,what a fine city must that have appeared! and after the islanddiet, what a hospitable spot the minister’s table!And yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his outlandishhosts. For to this day there still survives a relic of thelong winter evenings when the sailors of the great Armadacrouched about the hearths of the Fair-Islanders, the planks oftheir own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, and thegale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing theirmelancholy voices. All the folk of the north isles aregreat artificers of knitting: the Fair-Islanders alone dye theirfabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day, gloves andnightcaps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in theShetland warehouse at Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself inthe catechist’s house; and to this day, they tell the storyof the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s adventure.

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for“persons of quality.” When I landed theremyself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved, poorly attired, hisshoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to and fro, with abook in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to ourarrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; but when oneof the officers of the Pharos, passing narrowly by him,observed his book to be a Greek Testament, our wonder andinterest took a higher flight. The catechist wascross-examined; he said the gentleman had been put across sometime before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh’s schooner, the onlylink between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that heheld services and was doing “good.” So muchcame glibly enough; but when pressed a little farther, thecatechist displayed embarrassment. A singular diffidenceappeared upon his face: “They tell me,” said he, inlow tones, “that he’s a lord.” And a lordhe was; a peer of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach withhis Greek Testament, and his plaid about his shoulders, set upondoing good, as he understood it, worthy man! And hisgrandson, a good-looking little boy, much better dressed than thelordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent veryforeign to the scene, accompanied me for a while in myexploration of the island. I suppose this little fellow isnow my lord, and wonder how much he remembers of the FairIsle. Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept veryquietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it is likethat this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.

VI
RANDOM MEMORIES

II.—The Education of anEngineer

Anstruther is a place sacred to theMuse; she inspired (really to a considerable extent)Tennant’s vernacular poem Anst’er Fair; and Ihave there waited upon her myself with much devotion. Thiswas when I came as a young man to glean engineering experiencefrom the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I amsure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own privatedetermination to be an author; I loved the art of words and theappearances of life; and travellers, and headers,and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierresperdues, and even the thrilling question of thestring-course, interested me only (if they interested meat all) as properties for some possible romance or as words toadd to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is thecompensation of years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days,though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the placefor the sake of the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the washof waves on the sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers’helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the masons, my onegenuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry was inthe hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a certainBailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, as soon as dinnerwas despatched, in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drewin my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature,at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death andimmortality, as I now look back upon with wonder. Then itwas that I wrote Voces Fidelium, a series of dramaticmonologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of acovenanting novel—like so many others, neverfinished. Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought)under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a memory behindme. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years,to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clapVoces Fideliumon the fire before he goes; so clear doeshe appear before me, sitting there between his candles in therose-scented room and the late night; so ridiculous a picture (tomy elderly wisdom) does the fool present! But he was drivento his bed at last without miraculous intervention; and themanner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminentlyyouthful business. The weather was then so warm that I mustkeep the windows open; the night without was populous withmoths. As the late darkness deepened, my literary tapersbeaconed forth more brightly; thicker and thicker came the dustynight-fliers, to gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flameand fall in agonies upon my paper. Flesh and blood couldnot endure the spectacle; to capture immortality was doubtless anoble enterprise, but not to capture it at such a cost ofsuffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go tobed in the darkness raging to think that the blow might fall onthe morrow, and there was Voces Fideliumstillincomplete. Well, the moths are—all gone, andVoces Fideliumalong with them; only the fool is still onhand and practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, andthat was the diving, an experience I burned to taste of.But this was not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subjectinvolves a change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick.You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than thatpart of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly falling,not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slatestones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your earsand (down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in thetelegraph wires. Only as you approached the coast was thereanything to stir the heart. The plateau broke down to theNorth Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose likepillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-brimmed withclamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang in thethyme on the cliff’s edge; here and there, small ancientcastles toppled on the brim; here and there, it was possible todip into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourselfyou were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin-podsbursting in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour ofthe turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of themeanest of man’s towns, and situate certainly on thebaldest of God’s bays. It lives for herring, and astrange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights ofPulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a citycrowds to a review—or, as when bees have swarmed, theground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight,and a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against arising moon, the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and everand again and one after another, a boat flitting swiftly by thesilver disk. This mass of fishers, this great fleet ofboats, is out of all proportion to the town itself; and the oarsare manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island(as we call the outer Hebrides), who come for that season only,and depart again, if “the take” be poor, leavingdebts behind them. In a bad year, the end of the herringfishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are common, riotsoften possible; an apple knocked from a child’s hand wasonce the signal for something like a war; and even when I wasthere, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities.To contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babelis here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithnesshas adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect thatboth must be largely Norsemen by descent. I remember seeingone of the strongest instances of this division: a thing like aPunch-and-Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of thechurchyard; from the hutch or proscenium—I know not what tocall it—an eldritch-looking preacher laying down the law inGaelic about some one of the name of Powl, whom I at lastdivined to be the apostle to the Gentiles; a large congregationof the Lews men very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts ofthe crowd, some of the town’s children (to whom the wholeaffair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely playing tigg. Thesame descent, the same country, the same narrow sect of the samereligion, and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by anaccidental difference of dialect!

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of theunfinished breakwater, in its cage of open staging; thetravellers (like frames of churches) over-plumbing all; and awayat the extreme end, the divers toiling unseen on thefoundation. On a platform of loose planks, the assistantsturned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between windand water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time,a mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up theladder. Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay atWick was in the year of Voces Fideliumand the rose-leafroom at Bailie Brown’s; and already I did not care twostraws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhapsrequires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant ofWick east winds had made another boy of me. To go down inthe diving-dress, that was my absorbing fancy; and with thecountenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain byname, I gratified the whim.

It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran prettyhigh, and out in the open there were “skipper’sdaughters,” when I found myself at last on thediver’s platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot andmy whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollenunderclothing. One moment, the salt wind was whistlinground my night-capped head; the next, I was crushed almost doubleunder the weight of the helmet. As that intolerableburthern was laid upon me, I could have found it in my heart(only for shame’s sake) to cry off from the wholeenterprise. But it was too late. The attendants beganto turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to whistle through the tube;some one screwed in the barred window of the vizor; and I was cutoff in a moment from my fellow-men; standing there in theirmidst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature deaf anddumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of hisown. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a manfallen in a catalepsy. But time was scarce given me torealise my isolation; the weights were hung upon my back andbreast, the signal rope was thrust into my unresisting hand; andsetting a twenty-pound foot upon the ladder, I began ponderouslyto descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell.Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bellsof white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shaftsof the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque butvery restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I steppedoff on the pierres perduesof the foundation; a dumbhelmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as Iread it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature’swindow, I beheld the face of Bain. There we were, hand tohand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; and either might haveburst himself with shouting, and not a whisper come to hiscompanion’s hearing. Each, in his own little world ofair, stood incommunicably separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes’drama at the bottom of the sea, which at that moment possiblyshot across my mind. He was down with another, settling astone of the sea-wall. They had it well adjusted, Bob gavethe signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set home; and itwas time to turn to something else. But still his companionremained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or onlyraised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signsunknown to the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, thesetwo stood for awhile, like the dead and the living; till thereflashed a fortunate thought into Bob’s mind, and hestooped, peered through the window of that other world, andbeheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears.Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward, sawwhat was the trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot ofthat unfortunate—he was caught alive at the bottom of thesea under fifteen tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging inthe scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. Thesemust bear in mind the great density of the water of the sea, andthe surprising results of transplantation to that medium.To understand a little what these are, and how a man’sweight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very ground ofhis agility, was the chief lesson of my submarineexperience. The knowledge came upon me by degrees. AsI began to go forward with the hand of my estranged companion, aworld of tumbled stones was visible, pillared with the weedyuprights of the staging: overhead, a flat roof of green: a littlein front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. Andpresently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon astone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and heonly signed to me the more imperiously. Now the block stoodsix feet high; it would have been quite a leap to meunencumbered; with the breast and back weights, and the twentypounds upon each foot, and the staggering load of the helmet, thething was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb; and toprove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse frommy toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring atmy side. As high as to the stone, and then higher, Ipursued my impotent and empty flight. Even when the strongarm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued theirascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and mustbe hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of asail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicatedsparrow. Yet a little higher on the foundation, and webegan to be affected by the bottom of the swell, running therelike a strong breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose; for,safe in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no impact; onlyswayed idly like a weed, and was now borne helplessly abroad, andnow swiftly—and yet with dream-likegentleness—impelled against my guide. So does achild’s balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, andtouch, and slide off again from every obstacle. So musthave ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, thoselight crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and utteredexiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating, as well asstrangely wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It isbitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, andperpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of some oneelse. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busymillers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keepsthe neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown sodry that he can swallow no longer. And for all thesereasons-although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in mysurroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to layhands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift ashumming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather relieved thanotherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed tome to mount. And there was one more experience before meeven then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into thetrough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into aglory of rosy, almost of sanguine light—the multitudinousseas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. Andthen the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithnessautumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind.

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had donewhat I desired. It was one of the best things I got from myeducation as an engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, Iwish to speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the openair; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is therichest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it giveshim a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies himwith dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon hisingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever hehad one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it hasdone so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office!From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat,he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships,and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he mustapply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, ormeasure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutivefigures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balanceone part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery betweenfour walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept theother.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how muchbetter it was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go downwith Bob Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in aboat coiling a wet rope and shouting orders—not always verywise—than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, inthe most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in thosedays a note of originality. It may have still, but Imisdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would notpreach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half uponthe clock. The gipsies must be gone from their cavern;where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending theirfire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarsepotations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would beleaguerthem closely, bursting in their very door. A travellerto-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloudof smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, itmarked a private still. He would not indeed make thatjourney, for there is now no Thurso coach. And even if hecould, one little thing that happened to me could never happen tohim, or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top wascrowded with Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelichad sounded in my ears; and our way had lain throughout over amoorish country very northern to behold. Latish at night,though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we camedown upon the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave ofmariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; infront was the little bare, white town of Castleton, its streetsfull of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, thegreat deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. Andhere, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up youngoutlandish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and Isaw, pursuing the coach with its load of Hebrideanfishers—as they had pursued vetturiniup the passesof the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil’stomb—two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds,of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, theother with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, andtheir small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was leftto marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how theyfared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) theyshould see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, andthe stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident issomewhat lost. For as far back as he goes in his own land,he will find some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, theFrench or Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these aredeep in the woods and far among the mountains. But in anold, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the days ofimmigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was atthat time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hardupon the shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a landof moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsmanto shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the presenceof these small pedestrians struck the mind as though abird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross comefishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to theirsurroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandeeon the Fair Isle.

VII
THE LANTERN-BEARERS

I

These boys congregated every autumnabout a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in ahigh degree the glory of existence. The place was createdseemingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlemen.A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of, them tiled; anumber of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard,and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many littlegardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, andfisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, agenial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at thestreet-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops;another shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and theLondon Journal, dear to me for its startling pictures, anda few novels, dear for their suggestive names: such, as well asmemory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These,you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, andsparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to lodge in withtheir subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknifythe scene: a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, afile of gray islets: to the left, endless links and sand wreaths,a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits andsoaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one ruggedbrow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortresson the brink of one; coves between—now charmed intosunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous withbursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thymeand southernwood, the air at the cliff’s edge brisk andclean and pungent of the sea—in front of all, the BassRock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing itwith white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a greatand glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard wassacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye offancy, still flew the colours of King James; and in the ear offancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron,and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boysummering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure.You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been betteremployed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady’sWalk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by thedamp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by thestream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes ofanchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a specialeye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for theboys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single pennypickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrewthe glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join ourfishing parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, acovey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling over eachother’s heads, to the to the much entanglement of lines andloss of podleys and consequent shrill recrimination—shrillas the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all, youmight have done this often; but though fishing be a fine pastime,the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table;and it was a point of honour that a boy should eat all that hehad taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where thewhale’s jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, andbehold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires ofmany towns, and the sails of distant ships. You mightbathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we patheticallycall our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourgingyour bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneaththeir guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting youheadlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you mightexplore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, whenthe very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered;following my leader from one group to another, groping inslippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after theabominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye castbackward on the march off the tide and the menaced line of yourretreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word thatcovers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps ahouse under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of thesea-ware, and cooking apples there—if they were trulyapples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played usoff with some inferior and quite local fruit capable ofresolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smokeand iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch onsandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummedin the crumbling turrets; or clambering along the coast, eatgeans [141] (the worst, I must suppose, inChristendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken rootunder a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, andsilvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among itsbleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure initself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that werejoyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut herthroat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children tothe top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent peopleescorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throatbandaged, and the bandage all bloody—horror!—thefisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride mythoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkensdaylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in thechief street; but whether or no she died there, with a wiseterror of the worst, I never inquired. She had beentippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange andhard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should bestill pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.Nor shall I readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant wherea visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alonewith the dead body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred tomyself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk,as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window inthat house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and witha marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of verycolourless urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkableexperience! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment,compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctialtempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the boatswith their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, wheredanger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east init; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head,where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husbandand sons—their whole wealth and their wholefamily—engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once)a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, andshe squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcelyhuman, a tragic Mænad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what mymemory dwells upon the most, I have been all this whilewithholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, andindeed to a week or so of our two months’ holidaythere. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; forboys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutableto man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season,regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art ofknucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the riseof the United States. It may still flourish in its nativespot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself tointroduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charmbeing quite local, like a country wine that cannot beexported.

The idle manner of it was this:—

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing nearand the nights were already black, we would begin to sally fromour-respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eyelantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rutin the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the duetime, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand ofluminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricketbelt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttonedtop-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; theynever burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers;their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; andyet a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked fornothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about theirboats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint;but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play atbeing fishermen. The police carried them at their belts,and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend tobe policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had somehaunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ageswhen lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books inwhich we had found them to figure very largely. But take itfor all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and tobe a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was goodenough for us.

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious“Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified“Yes!” That was the shibboleth, and very needful too;for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none couldrecognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by thesmell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly ofa ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts abovethem—for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out somehollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead.There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s-eyesdiscovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windyhall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toastingtinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together inthe cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of thefishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriatetalk. Woe is me that I may not give somespecimens—some of their foresights of life, or deepinquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were sofiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romanticallyyoung. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; andthese gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of thelantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk byyourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coatbuttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footstepsor to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in thedark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of yourfool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at yourbelt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

II

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of themost stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is thespice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to theversatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’simagination. His life from without may seem but a rudemound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart ofit, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathwayseems to the observer, he will have some kind of abull’s-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than thatof Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the “Old BaileyReports,” a prey to the most sordid persecutions, the buttof his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his housebeleaguered by the impish schoolboy, and he himself grinding andfuming and impotently fleeing to the law against thesepin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one shouldwillingly prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity; andthen you call to memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be amiser, he could have been freed at once from these trials, andmight have built himself a castle and gone escorted by asquadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which wecannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man hadwillingly forgone both comfort and consideration.“His mind to him a kingdom was”; and sure enough,digging into that mind, which seems at first a dust-heap, weunearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had thelove of power and the disdain of using it, a noble character initself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what iscommonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, thatfinest trait of mankind; scorn of men’s opinions, anotherelement of virtue; and at the back of all, a conscience just likeyours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like athimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or there-about) to someconventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait towhich Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorneeither, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to createfor us that throb of the miser’s pulse, his fretful energyof gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows notwhat: insatiable, insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus, atleast, looking in the bosom of the miser, consideration detectsthe poet in the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of thepoetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that mean manabout his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortablehouse, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. Andso with others, who do not live by bread alone, but by somecherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmento the external eye, and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares,Napoleons, or Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub againstanother in the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the lifeof contemplation, sit with the saints. We see them on thestreet, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in whatthey pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set theirtreasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a birdbreak into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himselfon his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had beenabsent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived butone to recognise him. It is not only in the woods that thisenchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. Hesings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him andchuckles, and the days are moments. With no more apparatusthan an ill-smelling lantern I have evoked him on the nakedlinks. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun outof two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him. Andit is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delightof each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this,and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird hassung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pagesof the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture oflife in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheapdesires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to rememberand that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the noteof that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure.They have been boys and youths; they have lingered outside thewindow of the beloved, who was then most probably writing to someone else; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and feltthemselves mere continents of congested poetry, not one line ofwhich would flow; they have walked alone in the woods, they havewalked in cities under the countless lamps; they have been tosea, they have hated, they have feared, they have longed to knifea man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life has stung theirpalate. Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure atleast they have tasted to the full—their books are there toprove it—the keen pleasure of successful literarycomposition. And yet they fill the globe with volumes,whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, andwhose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, withdespairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to continueto revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be movedby the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround andanimate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But therehas never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it werespent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scatteringthoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to whichthe whole of one of these romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that thiswas very true; that it was the same with themselves and otherpersons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that inthis we were exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed ofourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (whatthey call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, andquite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. Iaccept the issue. We can only know others byourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on theexpression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen, or itwould make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (amurrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not beaverage. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birminghamsacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well,and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys andfull of a poetry of his own. And this harping onlife’s dulness and man’s meanness is a loudprofession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry ofthe blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the dumbtongue, I cannot utter. To draw a life withoutdelights is to prove I have not realised it. To picture aman without some sort of poetry—well, it goes near to provemy case, for it shows an author may have little enough. Tosee Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fumingman, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probablybeset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observeras . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with amore becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by thecoat-tails; they did not suppose they had surprised his secret orcould put him living in a book: and it is there my error wouldhave lain. Or say that in the same romance—I continueto call these books romances, in the hope of givingpain—say that in the same romance, which now begins reallyto take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and followinstead the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some suchbusiness as that of my lantern-bearers on the links; anddescribed the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain,and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talkas silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might uponthese lines, and had I Zola’s genius, turn out, in a pageor so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with thetouches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudginghand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph would mypicture be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missedthe point! how it would have belied the boys! To the ear ofthe stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but askthe boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highlyproper they should) the possibilities of existence. To theeye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearilysurrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of arecondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smellinglantern.

III

For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hardto hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, likethe lantern; it may reside, like Dancer’s, in themysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist withperpetual failure, and find exercise in the continuedchase. It has so little bond with externals (such as theobserver scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch themnot; and the man’s true life, for which he consents tolive, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman,in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailingships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leadinganother life, plying another trade from that they chose; like thepoet’s housebuilder, who, after all, is cased in stone,

“By his fireside, as impotent fancyprompts.
Rebuilds it to his liking.”

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer(poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to lookat the man is but to court deception. We shall see thetrunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself isabove and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through bywinds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realismwere that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel,and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives.

And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of thepoets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice farbeyond singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of theactors lies the sense of any action. That is theexplanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secretof the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless.And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realisticbooks. Hence, when we read the English realists, theincredulous wonder with which we observe the hero’sconstancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bearsup with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiotgirls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of anexistence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreigntravel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market ofmiddle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we seethe hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, intoevery description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, wemiss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbowwork of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoblewhat is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead ofsoaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; eachis true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the externaltruth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoricchamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storiedwalls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man whoknows far better—Tolstoi’s Powers ofDarkness. Here is a piece full of force and truth, yetquite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire asituation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at leastin part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime andgives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, sins againstthe modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks tomelodrama. The peasants are not understood; they saw theirlife in fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetryfor Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again,even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetryand lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and rankswith fairy tales.

IV

In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotionsof life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. Weare so moved when Levine labours in the field, when Andrésinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desboroughmeet beside the river, when Antony, “not cowardly, puts offhis helmet,” when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear,when, in Dostoieffky’s Despised and Rejected, theuncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue.These are notes that please the great heart of man. Notonly love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, butsacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported,touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think ofthem, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we mayprove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Hereis the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquamsilvam.

VIII
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

The past is all of onetexture—whether feigned or suffered—whether acted outin three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre ofthe brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, afterthe jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed inthe remainder of the body. There is no distinction on theface of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull, andone pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which ofthem is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not onehair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing;another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold usrobbed of it. There is scarce a family that can count fourgenerations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castleand estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, butflattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idlehours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet lessvalid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion)in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore yourfamily to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certainWest Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt’s, as belovedtradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and isnow unjustly some one else’s, and for that matter (in thestate of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody.I do not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man candeny that they are possible; and the past, on the other baud, is,lost for ever: our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, andthe very world in which these scenes were acted, all brought downto the same faint residuum as a last night’s dream, to someincontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers of thebrain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye,can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yetconceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memorythat we trail behind us broken at the pocket’s edge; and inwhat naked nullity should we be left! for we only guideourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted picturesof the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to havelived longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they layasleep they claim they were still active; and among the treasuresof memory that all men review for their amusement, these count inno second place the harvests of their dreams. There is oneof this kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhapsunusual enough to be described. He was from a child anardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch offever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes,hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of achurch, and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance andinfinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of whatmust follow, and struggled hard against the approaches of thatslumber which was the beginning of sorrows.

But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the night-hagwould have him by the throat, and pluck him strangling andscreaming, from his sleep. His dreams were at timescommonplace enough, at times very strange, at times they werealmost formless: he would be haunted, for instance, by nothingmore definite than a certain hue of brown, which he did not mindin the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed while hewas dreaming; at times, again, they took on every detail ofcircumstance, as when once he supposed he must swallow thepopulous world, and awoke screaming with the horror of thethought. The two chief troubles of his very narrowexistence—the practical and everyday trouble of schooltasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell andjudgment—were often confounded together into one appallingnightmare. He seemed to himself to stand before the GreatWhite Throne; he was called on, poor little devil, to recite someform of words, on which his destiny depended; his tongue stuck,his memory was blank, hell gaped for him; and he would awake,clinging to the curtain-rod with his knees to his chin.

These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and atthat time of life my dreamer would have very willingly partedwith his power of dreams. But presently, in the course ofhis growth, the cries and physical contortions passed away,seemingly for ever; his visions were still for the most partmiserable, but they were more constantly supported; and he wouldawake with no more extreme symptom than a flying heart, afreezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnightfear. His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stockedwith particulars, became more circumstantial, and had more theair and continuity of life. The look of the world beginningto take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a part in hissleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so that he would takelong, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and beautifulplaces as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, anodd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for storieslaid in that period of English history, began to rule thefeatures of his dreams; so that he masqueraded there in athree-cornered hat and was much engaged with Jacobite conspiracybetween the hour for bed and that for breakfast. About thesame time, he began to read in his dreams—tales, for themost part, and for the most part after the manner of G. P. R.James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any printedbook, that he has ever since been malcontent with literature.

And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him adream-adventure which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, thatis to say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a doublelife—one of the day, one of the night—one that he hadevery reason to believe was the true one, another that he had nomeans of proving to be false. I should have said hestudied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which(it may be supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, inhis dream-life, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, hisheart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrousmalformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In aheavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge,turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tallland, at the top of which he supposed himself tolodge. All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed thestairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every secondflight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, hebrushed by single persons passing downward—beggarly womenof the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows ofmen, pale parodies of women—but all drowsy and weary likehimself, and all single, and all brushing against him as theypassed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would seeday beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turnto descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, inhis wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to anotherday of monstrosities and operations. Time went quicker inthe life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can guess) toone; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom ofthese fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shakenoff their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renewthem. I cannot tell how long it was that he endured thisdiscipline; but it was long enough to leave a great black blotupon his memory, long enough to send him, trembling for hisreason, to the doors of a certain doctor; whereupon with a simpledraught he was restored to the common lot of man.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of thesort; indeed, his nights were for some while like othermen’s, now blank, now chequered with dreams, and thesesometimes charming, sometimes appalling, but except for anoccasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will justnote one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes mydreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was inthe first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed somepoor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, Ithink, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, therewas no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillsidepeople, and set in miles of heather. He looked down fromthe window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been longdisused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon theworld. There was no sign of the farm-folk or of any livestock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed,who sat close in against the wall of the house and seemed to bedozing. Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer; itwas quite a nameless feeling, for the beast looked rightenough—indeed, he was so old and dull and dusty andbroken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity; and yetthe conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was noproper dog at all, but something hellish. A great manydozing summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dogthrust forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried itto his mouth like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamerin the window, winked to him with one eye. The dream wenton, it matters not how it went; it was a good dream as dreams go;but there was nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish browndog. And the point of interest for me lies partly in thatvery fact: that having found so singular an incident, myimperfect dreamer should prove unable to carry the tale to a fitend and fall back on indescribable noises and indiscriminatehorrors. It would be different now; he knows his businessbetter!

For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow hadlong been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales,and so had his father before him; but these were irresponsibleinventions, told for the teller’s pleasure, with no eye tothe crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a threadmight be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, onfancy’s least suggestion. So that the little peoplewho manage man’s internal theatre had not as yet received avery rigorous training; and played upon their stage like childrenwho should have slipped into the house and found it empty, ratherthan like drilled actors performing a set piece to a huge hall offaces. But presently my dreamer began to turn his formeramusement of story-telling to (what is called) account; by whichI mean that he began to write and sell his tales. Here washe, and here were the little people who did that part of hisbusiness, in quite new conditions. The stories must now betrimmed and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from abeginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws oflife; the pleasure, in one word, had become a business; and thatnot only for the dreamer, but for the little people of histheatre. These understood the change as well as he.When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longersought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and afterhe had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continuedtheir evolutions with the same mercantile designs. Allother forms of dream deserted him but two: he still occasionallyreads the most delightful books, he still visits at times themost delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note that tothese same places, and to one in particular, he returns atintervals of months and years, finding new field-paths, visitingnew neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects ofnoon and dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family ofvisions is quite lost to him: the common, mangled version ofyesterday’s affairs, the raw-head-and-bloody-bonesnightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted cheese—theseand their like are gone; and, for the most part, whether awake orasleep, he is simply occupied—he or his littlepeople—in consciously making stories for the market.This dreamer (like many other persons) has encountered sometrifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins tosend letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, he setsto belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his readiestmoney-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin tobestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long,and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon theirlighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; theflying heart and the frozen scalp are things by-gone; applause,growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his owncleverness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilantleap to wakefulness, with the cry, “I have it,that’ll do!” upon his lips: with such and similaremotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks,like Claudius in the play, he scatters the performance in themidst. Often enough the waking is a disappointment: he hasbeen too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness hasgained his little people, they have gone stumbling and maunderingthrough their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is seento be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have thesesleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as hesat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than hecould fashion for himself.

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he wasthe son of a very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acresand a most damnable temper. The dreamer (and that was theson) had lived much abroad, on purpose to avoid his parent; andwhen at length he returned to England, it was to find him marriedagain to a young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and toloathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the dreamerindistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son tohave a meeting; and yet both being proud and both angry, neitherwould condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly,in a desolate, sandy country by the sea; and there theyquarrelled, and the son, stung by some intolerable insult, struckdown the father dead. No suspicion was aroused; the deadman was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the broadestates, and found himself installed under the same roof with hisfather’s widow, for whom no provision had been made.These two lived very much alone, as people may after abereavement, sat down to table together, shared the longevenings, and grew daily better friends; until it seemed to himof a sudden that she was prying about dangerous matters, that shehad conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched him andtried him with questions. He drew back from her company asmen draw back from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet sostrong was the attraction that he would drift again and againinto the old intimacy, and again and again be startled back bysome suggestive question or some inexplicable meaning in hereye. So they lived at cross purposes, a life full of brokendialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion; until, oneday, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil, followedher to the station, followed her in the train to the seasidecountry, and out over the sandhills to the very place where themurder was done. There she began to grope among the bents,he watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she hadsomething in her hand—I cannot remember what it was, but itwas deadly evidence against the dreamer—and as she held itup to look at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, herfoot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the brink of the tallsand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and rescueher; and there they stood face to face, she with that deadlymatter openly in her hand—his very presence on the spotanother link of proof. It was plain she was about to speak,but this was more than he could bear—he could bear to belost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut hershort with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they returnedtogether to the train, talking he knew not what, made the journeyback in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed theevening in the drawing-room as in the past. But suspenseand fear drummed in the dreamer’s bosom. “Shehas not denounced me yet”—so his thoughtsran—“when will she denounce me? Will it beto-morrow?” And it was not to-morrow, nor the nextday, nor the next; and their life settled back on the old terms,only that she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him,the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily moreunbearable, so that he wasted away like a man with adisease. Once, indeed, he broke all bounds of decency,seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room, andat last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damningevidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which was hislife, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at herinconsequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yetnot use it; and then the door opened, and behold herself.So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence betweenthem; and once more she raised to him a face brimming with somecommunication; and once more he shied away from speech and cuther off. But before he left the room, which he had turnedupside down, he laid back his death-warrant where he had foundit; and at that, her face lighted up. The next thing heheard, she was explaining to her maid, with some ingeniousfalsehood, the disorder of her things. Flesh and bloodcould bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the nextmorning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of themind) that he burst from his reserve. They had beenbreakfasting together in one corner of a great, parqueted,sparely-furnished room of many windows; all the time of the mealshe had tortured him with sly allusions; and no sooner were theservants gone, and these two protagonists alone together, than heleaped to his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face;with a pale face, she heard him as he raved out his complaint:Why did she torture him so? she knew all, she knew he was noenemy to her; why did she not denounce him at once? whatsignified her whole behaviour? why did she torture him? and yetagain, why did she torture him? And when he had done, shefell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands: “Doyou not understand?” she cried. “I loveyou!”

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, thedreamer awoke. His mercantile delight was not of longendurance; for it soon became plain that in this spirited talethere were unmarketable elements; which is just the reason whyyou have it here so briefly told. But his wonder has stillkept growing; and I think the reader’s will also, if heconsider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of thelittle people as of substantive inventors and performers.To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail forthe dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his candour)that he had no guess whatever at the motive of thewoman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—untilthe instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was nothis tale; it was the little people’s! And observe:not only was the secret kept, the story was told with reallyguileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (inthe cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptlygraduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, andI know this trade; and yet I cannot better it. I am awake,and I live by this business; and yet I could notoutdo—could not perhaps equal—that crafty artifice(as of some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery orSardou) by which the same situation is twice presented and thetwo actors twice brought face to face over the evidence, onlyonce it is in her hand, once in his—and these in their dueorder, the least dramatic first. The more I think of it,the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: Who arethe Little People? They are near connections of thedreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his financialworries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly inhis training; they have plainly learned like him to build thescheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion inprogressive order; only I think they have more talent; and onething is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece,like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of wherethey aim. Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is noless a person than myself;—as I might have told you fromthe beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistentegotism;—and as I am positively forced to tell you now, orI could advance but little farther with my story. And forthe Little People, what shall I say they are but just myBrownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while Iam fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for meas well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it formyself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is theBrownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is donewhen I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since allgoes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Hereis a doubt that much concerns my conscience. Formyself—what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of thepineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes,the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, theman with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting andnot carrying his candidate at the general elections—I amsometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but acreature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, anda realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by thataccount, the whole of my published fiction should be thesingle-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseencollaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I getall the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent himgetting) of the pudding. I am an excellent adviser,something like Molière’s servant; I pull back and Icut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentencesthat I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do thesitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and whenall is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for theregistration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share,though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our commonenterprise.

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleepingand what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurelsthere are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators;and to do this I will first take a book that a number of personshave been polite enough to read, the Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I had long been trying to write astory on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strongsense of man’s double being which must at times come inupon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. Ihad even written one, The Travelling Companion, which wasreturned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of geniusand indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground thatit was not a work of genius, and that Jekyllhadsupplanted it. Then came one of those financialfluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hithertoreferred in the third person. For two days I went aboutracking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second nightI dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split intwo, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder andunderwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. Allthe rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I cantrace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaningof the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in mygarden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain;indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownieshave not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine,too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that wasgiven me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea ofa voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thoughtungenerous, after I have been so liberally ladling out praise tomy unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand andfoot, into the arena of the critics? For the business ofthe powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved tosay, not mine at all but the Brownies’. Of anothertale, in case the reader should have glanced at it, I may say aword: the not very defensible story of Olalla. Herethe court, the mother, the mother’s niche, Olalla,Olalla’s chamber, the meetings on the stair, the brokenwindow, the ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk anddetail as I have tried to write them; to this I added only theexternal scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the court),the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral,such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas! they are.And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was givenme; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother andthe daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in thefirst. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniablypresent in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownieshave been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what wouldpossibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethicalnarrowness; conveying hints instead of life’s largerlimitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive inthe arabesque of time and space.

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhatfantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion andthe picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have noprejudice against the supernatural. But the other day theygave me a surprise, entertaining me with a love-story, a littleApril comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the authorof A Chance Acquaintance, for he could write it as itshould be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that Icannot.—But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mineshould invent a tale for Mr. Howells?

IX
BEGGARS

I

In a pleasant, airy, up-hillcountry, it was my fortune when I was young to make theacquaintance of a certain beggar. I call him beggar, thoughhe usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which wereopen-mouthed, indeed) to beg for him. He was the wreck ofan athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone inconsumption, with that disquieting smile of the mortally strickenon his face; but still active afoot, still with the briskmilitary carriage, the ready military salute. Three waysled through this piece of country; and as I was inconstant in mychoice, I believe he must often have awaited me in vain.But often enough, he caught me; often enough, from some place ofambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly forth in theregulation attitude, and launching at once into hisinconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my farthercourse. “A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifleinclining to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why,no, sir, I don’t feel as hearty myself as I could wish, butI am keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased to meet you onthe road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward to one ofour little conversations.” He loved the sound of hisown voice inordinately, and though (with something too off-handto call servility) he would always hasten to agree with anythingyou said, yet he could never suffer you to say it to anend. By what transition he slid to his favourite subject Ihave no memory; but we had never been long together on the waybefore he was dealing, in a very military manner, with theEnglish poets. “Shelley was a fine poet, sir, thougha trifle atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, sir,is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not sopoetical a writer. With the works of Shakespeare I am notso well acquainted, but he was a fine poet.Keats—John Keats, sir—he was a very finepoet.” With such references, such trivial criticism,such loving parade of his own knowledge, he would beguile theroad, striding forward uphill, his staff now clapped to the ribsof his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with theremembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all the whilehis toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out ofhis elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big,crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.

He would often go the whole way home with me: often to borrowa book, and that book always a poet. Off he would march, tocontinue his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into thepocket of his ragged coat; and although he would sometimes keepit quite a while, yet it came always back again at last, not muchthe worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way,doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism tooka wider range. But my library was not the first he haddrawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful ofShelley and the atheistical Queen Mab, and“Keats—John Keats, sir.” And I have oftenwondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I oftenwondered how he fell to be a beggar. He had served throughthe Mutiny—of which (like so many people) he could tellpractically nothing beyond the names of places, and that it was“difficult work, sir,” and very hot, or thatso-and-so was “a very fine commander, sir.” Hewas far too smart a man to have remained a private; in the natureof things, he must have won his stripes. And yet here hewas without a pension. When I touched on this problem, hewould content himself with diffidently offering me advice.“A man should be very careful when he is young, sir.If you’ll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentlemanlike yourself, sir, should be very careful. I was perhaps atrifle inclined to atheistical opinions myself.” For(perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these daysto admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer andskittles.

Keats—John Keats, sir—and Shelley were hisfavourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried him withRossetti; but I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, hemust have doted on that author. What took him was arichness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word;the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (aboutnothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance oflanguage. His honest head was very nearly empty, hisintellect like a child’s; and when he read his favouriteauthors, he can almost never have understood what he wasreading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it wasexclusive; I tried in vain to offer him novels; he would none ofthem, he cared for nothing but romantic language that he couldnot understand. The case may be commoner than wesuppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the nextcot to a friend of mine in a public hospital and who was nosooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence)for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears;fell at once in talk with his new neighbour, and was ready, whenthe book arrived, to make a singular discovery. For thislover of great literature understood not one sentence out oftwelve, and his favourite part was that of which he understoodthe least—the inimitable, mouth-filling rodomontade of theghost in Hamlet. It was a bright day in hospitalwhen my friend expounded the sense of this beloved jargon: a taskfor which I am willing to believe my friend was very fit, thoughI can never regard it as an easy one. I know indeed a pointor two, on which I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, thatlover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses of the moon, orcould I myself climb backward to the spacious days ofElizabeth. But in the second case, I should most likelypretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in thepit at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite part,playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out—as I seem tohear him—with a ponderous gusto—

“Unhousel’d, disappointed,unanel’d.”

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party I andwhat a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received thehonours of the evening!

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare,he is long since dead; and now lies buried, I suppose, andnameless and quite forgotten, in some poor citygraveyard.—But not for me, you brave heart, have you beenburied! For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun andair, and striding southward. By the groves of Comiston andbeside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters’ Tryst, andwhere the curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see andhear you, stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfullydiscoursing of uncomprehended poets.

II

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp,his counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery man,with the eyes of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found onemorning encamped with his wife and children and hisgrinder’s wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To thisbeloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and daily theknife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantlyto interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked,and plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brownwater. His children were mere whelps, they fought and bitamong the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw; Isaw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never venturedto address her lord while I was present. The tent was amere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinderhimself had the fine self-sufficiency and grave politeness of thehunter and the savage; he did me the honours of this dell, whichhad been mine but the day before, took me far into the secrets ofhis life, and used me (I am proud to remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the nationalcomplaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters;scarce flying higher than the story papers; probably finding nodifference, certainly seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns;his noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or music, adequatelyembodied in that somewhat obvious ditty,

“Will ye gang, lassie, gang
To the braes o’ Balquidder.”

—which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottishchildren, and to him, in view of his experience, must have founda special directness of address. But if he had no finesense of poetry in letters, he felt with a deep joy the poetry oflife. You should have heard him speak of what he loved; ofthe tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars overheadat night; of the blest return of morning, the peep of day overthe moors, the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorredthe long winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at thereturn of the spring, he once more pitched his camp in the livingout-of-doors. But we were a pair of tramps; and to you, whoare doubtless sedentary and a consistent first-class passenger inlife, he would scarce have laid himself so open;—to you, hemight have been content to tell his story of a ghost—thatof a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived—whom he hadonce encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and that wouldhave been enough, for that would have shown you the mettle of theman. Here was a piece of experience solidly and livinglybuilt up in words, here was a story created, teres atquerotundus.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literarybards! He had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave;encountered men more terrible than any spirit; done and dared andsuffered in that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War;played his part with the field force of Delhi, beleaguering andbeleaguered; shared in that enduring, savage anger and contemptof death and decency that, for long months together,bedevil’d and inspired the army; was hurled to and fro inthe battle-smoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, whereNicholson fell; was there when the attacking column, with hellupon every side, found the soldier’s enemy—strongdrink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the scale,and the fate of the flag of England staggered. And of allthis he had no more to say than “hot work, sir,” or“the army suffered a great deal, sir,” or “Ibelieve General Wilson, sir, was not very highly thought of inthe papers.” His life was naught to him, the vividpages of experience quite blank: in words his pleasurelay—melodious, agitated words—printed words, aboutthat which he had never seen and was connatally incapable ofcomprehending. We have here two temperaments face to face;both untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in theegg; both boldly charactered:—that of the artist, the loverand artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeër, thelover and forger of experience. If the one had a daughterand the other had a son, and these married, might not someillustrious writer count descent from the beggar-soldier and theneedy knife-grinder?

III

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right toit. The burglar sells at the same time his own skill andcourage and my silver plate (the whole at the most moderatefigure) to a Jew receiver. The bandit sells the travelleran article of prime necessity: that traveller’s life.And as for the old soldier, who stands for central mark to mycapricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specially; for he wasthe only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure for mymoney. He had learned a school of manners in the barracksand had the sense to cling to it, accosting strangers with aregimental freedom, thanking patrons with a merely regimentaldifference, sparing you at once the tragedy of his position andthe embarrassment of yours. There was not one hint abouthim of the beggar’s emphasis, the outburst of revoltinggratitude, the rant and cant, the “God bless you, Kind,Kind gentleman,” which insults the smallness of your almsby disproportionate vehemence, which is so notably false, whichwould be so unbearable if it were true. I am sometimestempted to suppose this reading of the beggar’s part, asurvival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon thestage and mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think that wecannot now accept these strong emotions unless they be uttered inthe just note of life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure thesegross conventions. They wound us, I am tempted to say, likemockery; the high voice of keening (as it yet lingers on) strikesin the face of sorrow like a buffet; and the rant and cant of thestaled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But thefact disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar lives byhis knowledge of the average man. He knows what he is aboutwhen he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a babe, andpoisons life with Poor Mary Annor Long, longago; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical earand sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; theyknow what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade theslums of cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodiesof gratitude. This trade can scarce be called animposition; it has been so blown upon with exposures; it flauntsits fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we pay those whoshow us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of ourdrinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall ofBritain. We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them,and wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing thatcan shake the conscience like a beggar’s thanks; and thatpolity in which such protestations can be purchased for ashilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars?And the answer is, Not one. My old soldier was a humbuglike the rest; his ragged boots were, in the stage phrase,properties; whole boots were given him again and again, andalways gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on theroad as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were hismethod; they were the man’s trade; without his boots hewould have starved; he did not live by charity, but by appealingto a gross taste in the public, which loves the limelight on theactor’s face, and the toes out of the beggar’sboots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a falseand merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, andlives and above all drinks, on the fruits of theusurpation. The true poverty does not go into the streets;the banker may rest assured, he has never put a penny in itshand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; neverfrom the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks of life,to hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a manmight suppose that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet itgoes forward on a scale so great as to fill me withsurprise. In the houses of the working class, all day longthere will be a foot upon the stair; all day long there will be aknocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without stint,hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of therich stand unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp,you will find it was always the poor who helped him; get thetruth from any workman who has met misfortunes, it was alwaysnext door that he would go for help, or only with such exceptionsas are said to prove a rule; look at the course of the mimeticbeggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails hispassage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even tothe attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable stateof things in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor onlyshould be asked to give.

IV

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasingFrenchman, who was taxed with ingratitude: “Il fautsavoir garder l’indépendance ducœur,” cried he. I own I feel withhim. Gratitude without familarity, gratitude otherwise thanas a nameless element in a friendship, is a thing so near tohatred that I do not care to split the difference. Until Ifind a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shallcontinue to question the tact of those who are eager to conferthem. What an art it is, to give, even to our nearestfriends! and what a test of manners, to receive! How, uponeither side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for eachother; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, howfalsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an act of suchdifficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed wecan perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed withgrateful emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is toburthen him with an obligation, and it is what we propose tobegin with! But let us not be deceived: unless he istotally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his inside, and hegrates his teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude andcharity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, orit is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, orit is resented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift:we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with thedelights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix ofthe rich man; here is that needle’s eye in which he stuckalready in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer,if possible, than ever: that he has the money and lacks the lovewhich should make his money acceptable. Here and now, justas of old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with therich that he takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to becharitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His friendsare not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends,they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where tofind—note this phase—the Deserving Poor?Charity is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired;societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt ofthe Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it willtake more than a merely human secretary to disinter thatcharacter. What! a class that is to be in want from nofault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive fromstrangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same timequite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part offriendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, andyet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:—andall this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through aneedle’s eye! O, let him stick, by all means: and lethis polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all hisliterature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderablepart) be abolished even from the history of man! For a foolof this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: andthe fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reasonto the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!

V

And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentlemanmay take. He may subscribe to pay the taxes. Therewere the true charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering nonewith obligation, helping all. There were a destination forloveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket of thedeserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But,alas! there is no colour of romance in such a course; and peoplenowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues.

X
LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OFART

With the agreeable frankness ofyouth, you address me on a point of some practical importance toyourself and (it is even conceivable) of some gravity to theworld: Should you or should you not become an artist? It isone which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I cando is to bring under your notice some of the materials of thatdecision; and I will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, byassuring you that all depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of oldage. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence andcharm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of selfas well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the youngman brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch,now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now withcutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a totalstranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference,contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a braineasily heated, the interest of this series of experiments growsupon him out of all proportion to the pleasure he receives.It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks,though he may think so; his design and his sufficient reward isto verify his own existence and taste the variety of humanfate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled,all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experiencewears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in laterdays; or if there be any exception—and here destiny stepsin—it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of theprimary activity of the senses, he calls up before memory theimage of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus it is thatsuch an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclinesinsensibly toward that career of art which consists only in thetasting and recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatienceof all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and soexisting, it will pass gently away in the course of years.Emphatically, it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, buta temptation; and when your father the other day so fiercely and(in my view) so properly discouraged your ambition, he wasrecalling not improbably some similar passage in his ownexperience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as commonas the vocation is rare. But again we have vocations whichare imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not so muchin any art, as in the general ars artiumand common baseof all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and nowstudy counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all thesewith equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge. Andof this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult tospeak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, forin literature (which drags with so wide a net) all hisinformation may be found some day useful, and if he should go onas he has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will havelearned to use the necessary tools. Lastly we come to thosevocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men whoare born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, thegift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as otherand perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, orthe sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These arepredestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart fromany question of success or fame, the gods have called him.He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for allthe arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his callingis this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zestin its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certaincandour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with agravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think thesmallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of timeand industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must begone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflaggingspirit of children at their play. Is it worthdoing?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to askhimself that question, it is implicitly answered in thenegative. It does not occur to the child as he plays atbeing a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as hepursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour ofthe other should be united in the bosom of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, thereis no room for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe(lest I should too much discourage you) that the disposition doesnot usually burn so brightly at the first, or rather not soconstantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the necessityof toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the courseof years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes withindulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, ifyou can look back over a fair interval, and see that your chosenart has a little more than held its own among the thronginginterests of youth. Time will do the rest, if devotion helpit; and soon your every thought will be engrossed in that belovedoccupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even withunfaltering and delighted industry, many thousand artists spendtheir lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: athousand artists, and never one work of art. But the vastmass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well,art among the rest. The worthless artist would notimprobably have been a quite incompetent baker. And theartist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; sothat there will always be one man the happier for hisvigils. This is the practical side of art: its inexpugnablefortress for the true practitioner. The directreturns—the wages of the trade are small, but theindirect—the wages of the life—are incalculablygreat. No other business offers a man his daily bread uponsuch joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer havemoments of a worthier excitement, but they are purchased by cruelhardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. Inthe life of the artist there need be no hour without itspleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am bestacquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, andthat the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyesand the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowdsupon him and words are not wanting—in what a continualseries of small successes time flows by; with what a sense ofpower as of one moving mountains, he marshals his pettycharacters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he seeshis airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in acraft to which the whole material of his life is tributary, andwhich opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, andhis convictions, so that what he writes is only what he longed toutter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragicplayground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed morefully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it illpaid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other menpay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; itaffords besides an admirable training. For the artist worksentirely upon honour. The public knows little or nothing ofthose merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend thebulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit offirst-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishmentwhich a man of the artistic temper easily acquires—thesethey can recognise, and these they value. But to those moreexquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artistso ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in thevigorous words of Balzac) he must toil “like a miner buriedin a landslip,” for which, day after day, he recasts andrevises and rejects—the gross mass of the public must beever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain thehighest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice;suppose, as is so probable, you fall by even a hair’sbreadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never beobserved. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone inhis studio, the artist must preserve from day to day hisconstancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his lifenoble; it is by this that the practice of his craft strengthensand matures his character; it is for this that even the seriouscountenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if onlyfor a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentlevoice bade the artist cherish his art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, ifyou are to continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware ofthe first signs of laziness. This idealism in honesty canonly be supported by perpetual effort; the standard is easilylowered, the artist who says “It will do,” ison the downward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough attimes (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by thepractice of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded tocheap finish. This is the danger on the one side; there isnot less upon the other. The consciousness of how much theartist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the smallheads. Perceiving recondite merits very hard to attain,making or swallowing artistic formulæ, or perhaps fallingin love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artistsforget the end of all art: to please. It is doubtlesstempting to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it shouldnot be forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely onthe face of it) for services that he shall desire to haveperformed. Here also, if properly considered, there is aquestion of transcendental honesty. To give the public whatthey do not want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there astrange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all withpainters. The first duty in this world is for a man to payhis way; when that is quite accomplished, he may plunge into whateccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till then. Tillthen, he must pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carriesthe purse. And if in the course of these capitulations heshall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one,and he will have preserved a better thing thantalent—character. Or if he be of a mind soindependent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course isyet open: he can desist from art, and follow some more manly wayof life.

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which Imust be frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling;it involves patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist,however ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiardmarkers. The French have a romantic evasion for oneemployment, and call its practitioners the Daughters ofJoy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons ofJoy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood bypleasing others, and has parted with something of the sternerdignity of man. Journals but a little while ago declaimedagainst the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was blamed forcondescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence andLord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was more happilyinspired; with a better modesty he accepted the honour; andanonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them)recovered the vicarious disgrace to their profession. Whenit comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do themselves morejustice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarianeyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in thatassembly. There should be no honours for the artist; he hasalready, in the practice of his art, more than his share of therewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades,less agreeable and perhaps more useful.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail toplease. In ordinary occupations, a man offers to do acertain thing or to produce a certain article with a merelyconventional accomplishment, a design in which (we may almostsay) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps forthout of the crowd and proposes to delight: an impudent design, inwhich it is impossible to fail without odiouscircumstances. The poor Daughter of Joy, carrying hersmiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, makes afigure which it is impossible to recall without a woundingpity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. Theactor, the dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person,and drain publicly the cup of failure. But though the restof us escape this crowning bitterness of the pillory, we allcourt in essence the same humiliation. We all profess to beable to delight. And how few of us are! We all pledgeourselves to be able to continue to delight. And the daywill come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardourshall have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and he shallsit by his deserted booth ashamed. Then shall he seehimself condemned to do work for which he blushes to takepayment. Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) hemust lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press, whoearn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash whichthey have not read, and the praise of excellence which theycannot understand.

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at leastof writers. Les blancs et les Bleus(for instance)is of an order of merit very different from Le Vicomte deBraglonne; and if any gentleman can bear to spy upon thenakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I think is Ham:let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it (not withouttears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, whenoccupation and comfort are most needful, the writer must layaside at once his pastime and his breadwinner. The painterindeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of thepublic, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a greatage without dishonourable failure. The writer has thedouble misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to beincapable of working when he is old. It is thus a way oflife which conducts directly to a false position.

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to thecontrary) must look to be ill-paid. Tennyson andMontépin make handsome livelihoods; but we cannot all hopeto be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps desire to beMontépin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weedyour mind at the outset of all desire of money. What youmay decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry,is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps atwentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right tolook for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of thetrade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. Itwill be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamentationsof the artist class. Perhaps they do not remember the hireof the field labourer; or do they think no parallel willlie? Perhaps they have never observed what is the retiringallowance of a field officer; or do they suppose theircontributions to the arts of pleasing more important than theservices of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how littleMillet was content to live; or do they think, because they haveless genius, they stand excused from the display of equalvirtues? But upon one point there should be no dubiety: ifa man be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If hebe not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene ofle vieux saltimbanque; if he be not frugal, he will findit hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when thebutcher is knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he may beobliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. Ifthe obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of hisown, he is even to be commanded; for words cannot describe howfar more necessary it is that a man should support his family,than that he should attain to—or preserve—distinctionin the arts. But if the pressure comes, through his ownfault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen (whichis the worst of all) in such a way that no law can reach him.

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the débutant artistis to have no thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is toexpect no honours from the State, he may not at least lookforward to the delights of popularity? Praise, you willtell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you may meanthe countenance of other artists you would put your finger on oneof the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career ofart. But in so far as you should have an eye to thecommendations of the public or the notice of the newspapers, besure you would but be cherishing a dream. It is true thatin certain esoteric journals the author (for instance) is dulycriticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more thanhe deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided himself oneschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have deniedthemselves the privilege of reading his work. But if a manbe sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equallyalive to that which often accompanies and always followsit—wild ridicule. A man may have done well for years,and then he may fail; he will hear of his failure. Or hemay have done well for years, and still do well, but the criticsmay have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung up somenew idol of the instant, some “dust a little gilt,”to whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is theobverse and the reverse of that empty and ugly thing calledpopularity. Will any man suppose it worth the gaining?

XI
PULVIS ET UMBRA

We look for some reward of ourendeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, noteven peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to dowell. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; thebattle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we lookabroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them changewith every climate, and no country where some action is nothonoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for avice; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruityin the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness.It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. Weask too much. Our religions and moralities have beentrimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate andsentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of arougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read abracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient thanthe ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of theKosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancientstill.

I

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports manydoubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems nosubstance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing butsymbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bringus forth and beat us down; gravity that swings theincommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figmentvarying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns andworlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction,NH₃, and H₂O. Consideration dares notdwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries usinto zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city forthe mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses giveit us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns andworlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun,still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like themoon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be madeof something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can helpus to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity canreconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by thelustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life;seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swellingin tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by anabhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions,millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds throughvarying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used aswe are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and theprofusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of amarsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathingso that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where itbursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in thehard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of theearth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree theinversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the firstcoming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad withthe myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on thewings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be wellconsidered, the heart stops. To what passes with theanchored vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have theirjoys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it appearsnot how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselvesbelong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousandmiracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection ofsound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory andreason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone,its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracleof reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggeringconsequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountainmass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey uponeach other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming theminside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: thevegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lionof the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of thedumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, andmore drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than evermutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, andturns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world,ninety million miles away.

II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of theagglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged withslumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copiesof himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyesthat move and glitter in his face; a thing to set childrenscreaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellowsknow him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul,here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled withdesires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagelysurrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to preyupon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been ofa piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? Andwe look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues:infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchinglykind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of rightand wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battlefor an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and hismate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing withlong-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart ofhis mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to the point oflunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing tohimself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, towhich he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, belowwhich, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design inmost men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures,it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrswith independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosomthought:—Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and catswhom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point ofhonour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom weknow so little:—But in man, at least, it sways with socomplete an empire that merely selfish things come second, evenwith the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears areconquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks fromthe reproof of a glance, although it were a child’s; andall but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and themore noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to theirideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, withtheir singular origin and perverted practice, they think they areto be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they arepersuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which theysolicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shallbe reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man atlarge presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence andtreacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of thebest. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeedmarked for failure in his efforts to do right. But wherethe best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable thatall should continue to strive; and surely we should find it bothtouching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success isbanished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatoryisle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on thisnearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. Itmatters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, inwhat stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened withwhat erroneous morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snowpowdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as hesits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his graveopinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured tohardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in atavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and hefor all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child,constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; in the slums ofcities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanicalemployments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce apleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest upto his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain bythe bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunkenwife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling withbroken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in thesacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, livingmainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, thecomrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour andthe touch of pity, often repaying the world’s scorn withservice, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certaincost, rejecting riches:—everywhere some virtue cherished oraffected, everywhere some decency of thought and carriage,everywhere the ensign of man’s ineffectualgoodness:—ah! if I could show you this! if I could show youthese men and women, all the world over, in every stage ofhistory, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance offailure, without hope, without help, without thanks, stillobscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, inthe brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poorjewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet theycannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but theirdoom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long,the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth’s meteors, here at least is the moststrange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, thishair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few yearsand sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and addto his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, howevermisconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A newdoctrine, received with screams a little while ago by cantingmoralists, and still not properly worked into the body of ourthoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this roughbut noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies invain his kinship with the original dust. He stands nolonger like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see thedog, prince of another genus: and in him too, we see dumblytestified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the sameconstancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? Welook at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarmingant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy ofbrutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend hisdoings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorousjustice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact ofindividual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant?Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty runthrough all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from thefrosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire,one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tearsand perseverance. The whole creation groaneth andtravaileth together. It is the common and the god-like lawof life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairycoats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, thethousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us thegift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive likeus—like us are tempted to grow weary of thestruggle—to do well; like us receive at times unmeritedrefreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage; and arecondemned like us to be crucified between that double law of themembers and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in thetimid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they,too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings ofthose whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and theprosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? Itmay be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Evenwhile they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treadsthem by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upontheir trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the denof the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of aday is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared withwhom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our briefspan eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror andunder the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man theerected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes—God forbidit should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs ofunrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Letit be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortalfrailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all invain.

XII
A CHRISTMAS SERMON

By the time this paper appears, Ishall have been talking for twelve months; [202] and it is thought I should take myleave in a formal and seasonable manner. Valedictoryeloquence is rare, and death-bed sayings have not often hit themark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and sceptic, aman whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity, aneasy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king—remembered andembodied all his wit and scepticism along with more than hisusual good humour in the famous “I am afraid, gentlemen, Iam an unconscionable time a-dying.”

I

An unconscionable time a-dying—there is the picture(“I am afraid, gentlemen,”) of your life and ofmine. The sands run out, and the hours are “numberedand imputed,” and the days go by; and when the last ofthese finds us, we have been a long time dying, and whatelse? The very length is something, if we reach that hourof separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all isdoubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have served.There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in theGerman wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing gohome; and of how, seizing their general’s hand, these old,war-worn exiles passed his finger along their toothlessgums. Sunt lacrymæ rerum: this was the mosteloquent of the songs of Simeon. And when a man has livedto a fair age, he bears his marks of service. He may havenever been remarked upon the breach at the head of the army; atleast he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of anoble character. It never seems to them that they haveserved enough; they have a fine impatience of theirvirtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly thankfulthat we are no worse. It is not only our enemies, thosedesperate characters—it is we ourselves who know not whatwe do,—thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps wedo better than we think: that to scramble through this randombusiness with hands reasonably clean to have played the part of aman or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resistedthe diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for thepoor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to seesome fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way ofserving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self isonly greed of hire.

And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we notrequire much of others? If we do not genially judge our owndeficiencies, is it not to be feared we shall be even stern tothe trespasses of others? And he who (looking back upon hisown life) can see no more than that he has been unconscionablylong a-dying, will he not be tempted to think his neighbourunconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable thatnearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; itis certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damnedfor doing wrong, but for not doing right; Christ would never hearof negative morality; thou shaltwas ever his word, withwhich he superseded thou shalt not. To make our ideaof morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imaginationand to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secretelement of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should notdwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it withinverted pleasure. If we cannot drive it from ourminds—one thing of two: either our creed is in the wrongand we must more indulgently remodel it; or else, if our moralitybe in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should place ourpersons in restraint. A mark of such unwholesomely dividedminds is the passion for interference with others: the Foxwithout the Tail was of this breed, but had (if his biographer isto be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date.A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that unfits him for the dutiesof life, that spoils his temper, that threatens his integrity, orthat betrays him into cruelty. It has to be conquered; butit must never he suffered to engross his thoughts. The trueduties lie all upon the farther side, and must be attended towith a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of thedecks has been effected. In order that he may be kind andhonest, it may be needful he should become a total abstainer; lethim become so then, and the next day let him forget thecircumstance. Trying to be kind and honest will require allhis thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise companion; inso far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be theworse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness willbe required in judging life, and a great deal of humility injudging others.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with ourlife’s endeavour springs in some degree from dulness.We require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the heightof those we have. Trying to be kind and honest seems anaffair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of ourheroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold,arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppressa heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But thetask before us, which is to co-endure with our existence, israther one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required isthat of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian knotsof life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend alittle less, to make upon the whole a family happier for hispresence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not beembittered, to keep a few friends, but these withoutcapitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keepfriends with himself—here is a task for all that a man hasof fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul whowould ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in suchan enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one elementin human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert:whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended tosucceed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in everyart and study; it is so above all in the continent art of livingwell. Here is a pleasant thought for the year’s endor for the end of life. Only self-deception will besatisfied, and there need be no despair for the despairer.

II

But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year,moving us to thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, fromall its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggestingthoughts of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours isa man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter,when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairsof his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashionof the smiling face. Noble disappointment, nobleself-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, ifthey bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdomof heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without.And the kingdom of heaven is of the child-like, of those who areeasy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty menof their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, havelived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovelycharacter; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,the shame were indelible if weshould lose it.Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; theyare the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moralmen that they have neither one nor other. It was the moralman, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If yourmorals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I donot say “give them up,” for they may be all you have;but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives ofbetter and simpler people.

A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye onpleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all hismorals against them. This very year a lady (singulariconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racysermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture tocall such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversionof a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishingdenunciations; but for all displays of the trulydiabolic—envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, thecalumnious truth, the back-biter, the petty tyrant, the peevishpoisoner of family life—their standard is quitedifferent. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehownot so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, nosecret element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things notwrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest of theirindignation. A man may naturally disclaim all moral kinshipwith the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of thedolls; for these are gross and naked instances. And yet ineach of us some similar element resides. The sight of apleasure in which we cannot or else will not share moves us to aparticular impatience. It may be because we are envious, orbecause we are sad, or because we dislike noise andromping—being so refined, or because—being sophilosophic—we have an over-weighing sense of life’sgravity: at least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted tofrown upon our neighbour’s pleasures. People arenowadays so fond of resisting temptations; here is one to beresisted. They are fond of self-denial; here is apropensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied. There isan idea abroad among moral people that they should make theirneighbours good. One person I have to make good:myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much more nearlyexpressed by saying that I have to make him happy—if Imay.

III

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, standin the relation of effect and cause. There was neveranything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never inour own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet amongfriends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or anaspersion with unusual keenness, and so circumstanced as to beunusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive topain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtuewill not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is noteven its own reward, except for the self-centred and—I hadalmost said—the unamiable. No man can pacify hisconscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to letthat organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penaltiesof the law, and the minor capitis diminutioof socialostracism, is an affair of wisdom—of cunning, if youwill—and not of virtue.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, onlyto profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here;he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows notfor what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, thoughhe does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good;somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he musttry to give happiness to others. And no doubt there comesin here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he to makehis neighbour happy? How far must he respect that smilingface, so easy to cloud, so hard to brighten again? And howfar, on the other side, is he bound to be his brother’skeeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far must heresent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ’ssayings on the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and(the most of them) hard to accept. But the truth of histeaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, weshould be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is ourcheek we are to turn, ourcoat that we are to give away tothe man who has taken ourcloak. But whenanother’s face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lionwill become us best. That we are to suffer others to beinjured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely notdesirable. Revenge, says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice;its judgments at least are delivered by an insane judge; and inour own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothingwisely. But in the quarrel of our neighbour, let us be morebold. One person’s happiness is as sacred asanother’s; when we cannot defend both, let us defend onewith a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doingthis, that we have any right to interfere: the defence of B isour only ground of action against A. A has as good a rightto go to the devil, as we to go to glory; and neither knows whathe does.

The truth is that all these interventions and denunciationsand militant mongerings of moral half-truths, though they besometimes needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belongto an inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and envy andrevenge find here an arsenal of pious disguises; this is theplayground of inverted lusts. With a little more patienceand a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might befound in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fineheady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, bysome denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call ourneighbour’s vices, might yet have been unwoven by the handof sympathy.

IV

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we havestriven and to what small purpose; and how often we have beencowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in;and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the lawof kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitternessof these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Lifeis not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. Hegoes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head,and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards andpleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moonrise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he ishungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yetfor him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, healthfails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb thehardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It isa friendly process of detachment. When the time comes thathe should go, there need be few illusions left abouthimself. Here lies one who meant well, tried alittle, failed much:—surely that may be hisepitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will hecomplain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from thefield: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or MarcusAurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in hisold spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him inhis life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarceeven be required in this last formality of laying down hisarms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out ofthe glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust andthe ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!

From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one suchbeautiful and manly poem, I take this memorial piece: it saysbetter than I can, what I love to think; let it be our partingword.

“A late lark twitters from the quietskies;
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day’s work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

“The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine, and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—
Night, with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

“So be my passing!
My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.” [212]

[1888.]

FOOTNOTES

[8] Please pronounce Arkansaw, withthe accent on the first.

[95] See An Inland Voyage, byRobert Louis Stevenson, 1878.

[141] Wild cherries.

[202] i.e.in the pages ofScribner’s Magazine(1888).

[212] From A Book of VersesbyWilliam Ernest Henley. D. Nutt, 1888.

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