better than this. There were times when I could not afford to
sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the
head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a
summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny
doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the
birds sang around, or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the
sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's
waggon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I
grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better
than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time
subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
I realised what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking
of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day
advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now
it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of
singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so
I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my
nest. My days were not days {158} of the week, bearing the stamp of
any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the
ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is
said that for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word,
and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for
yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day.
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the
birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have
been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is
true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his
indolence.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were
obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that
my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.
It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always
indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show
you a fresh prospect every hour. House-work was a pleasant pastime.
When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture
out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget,
dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on
it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time
the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house
sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were
almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole {159} household
effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and
my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen
and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to
get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was
sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat
there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,
and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most
familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on
the next bough; life everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry
vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry
leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms
came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and
bedsteads,--because they once stood in their midst.
(_Walden_.)
GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS) 1819-1880
A MISER
Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to a heap,
and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to solve the
problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen hours a day on
as small an outlay as possible. . . . He handled them, he counted
them, till their form and colour were like the {160} satisfaction of a
thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done,
that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship. He had taken up
some bricks in his floor underneath his loom, and here he made a hole
in which he set the iron pot that contained his guineas and silver
coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not
that the idea of being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his
mind: hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there
were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have
their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their
rustic neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors
in the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay a
plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their own
village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to "run
away"--a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.
So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his
guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening
itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction
that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself
to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of
an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process
has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off
from faith and love--only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas,
they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some
well-knit theory. Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent
themselves {161} into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of
his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle
or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent
eyes that used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had
been made to see only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny
grain, for which they hunted everywhere; and he was so withered and
yellow, that, though he was not yet forty, the children always called
him "Old Master Marner."
Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which
showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his
daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and
for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had a brown
earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the
very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his
companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always
lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an
expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its
handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the
fresh clear water. One day as he was returning from the well, he
stumbled against the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with
force against the stones that over-arched the ditch below him, was
broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them
home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to
him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in
its old place for a memorial.
{162} This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year
after he came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear
filled with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow growth
of sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such even
repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the
holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: at night he
closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew forth his gold.
Long ago the heap of coins had become too large for the iron pot to
hold them, and he had made for them two thick leather bags, which
wasted no room in their resting-place, but lent themselves flexibly to
every corner. How the guineas shone as they came pouring out of the
dark leather mouths! The silver bore no large proportion in amount to
the gold, because the long pieces of linen which formed his chief work
were always partly paid for in gold, and out of the silver he supplied
his own bodily wants, choosing always the shillings and sixpences to
spend in this way. He loved the guineas best, but he would not change
the silver--the crowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings,
begotten by his labour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps
and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in
regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and
fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half earned
by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children--thought
of the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years,
through all his life, which spread far away before him, the end quite
hidden by countless days of weaving.
(_Silas Marner_.)
{163}
JOHN RUSKIN 1819-1900
SHIPS
Down to Elizabeth's time chivalry lasted; and grace of dress and mien,
and all else that was connected with chivalry. Then came the ages
which, when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past,
will be, by a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well
comprehended under a common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of
general stiffening and bluish-whitening, with a prevailing
washerwoman's taste in everything; involving a change of steel armour
into cambric; of natural hair into peruke; of natural walking into that
which will disarrange no wristbands; of plain language into quips and
embroideries; and of human life in general, from a green race-course,
where to be defeated was at worst only to fall behind and recover
breath, into a slippery pole, to be climbed with toil and contortion,
and in clinging to which, each man's foot is on his neighbour's head.
But, meanwhile, the marine deities were incorruptible. It was not
possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened
upon men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with
rows of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and
with infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above,
gradually began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a
gloomy weight of guns, to draw back its spider-like feebleness of limb,
and open its bosom to the wind, and finally darkened down from all its
painted {164} vanities into the long low hull, familiar with the
over-flying foam; that has no other pride but in its daily duty and
victory; while, through all these changes, it gained continually in
grace, strength, audacity, and beauty, until at last it has reached
such a pitch of all these, that there is not, except the very loveliest
creatures of the living world, anything in nature so absolutely
notable, bewitching, and, according to its means and measure,
heart-occupying, as a well-handled ship under sail in a stormy day.
Any ship, from lowest to proudest, has due place in that architecture
of the sea; beautiful, not so much in this or that piece of it, as in
the unity of all, from cottage to cathedral, into their great buoyant
dynasty. Yet, among them, the fisher-boat, corresponding to the
cottage on the land (only far more sublime than a cottage ever can be),
is on the whole the thing most venerable. I doubt if ever academic
grove were half so fit for profitable meditation as the little strip of
shingle between two black, steep, overhanging sides of stranded
fishing-boats. The clear, heavy water-edge of ocean rising and falling
close to their bows, in that unaccountable way which the sea has always
in calm weather, turning the pebbles over and over as if with a rake,
to look for something, and then stopping a moment down at the bottom of
the bank, and coming up again with a little run and clash, throwing a
foot's depth of salt crystal in an instant between you and the round
stone you were going to take in your hand; sighing, all the while, as
if it would infinitely rather be doing something else. And the dark
flanks of the fishing-boats all aslope above, in their shining
quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty and seamed with square patches
of {165} plank nailed over their rents; just rough enough to let the
little flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist themselves up to the
gunwales, and drop back again along some stray rope; just round enough
to remind us, in their broad and gradual curves, of the sweep of the
green surges they know so well, and of the hours when those old sides
of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge and dip into the deep
green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully than a deer lies down
among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of foam opening
momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the breeze
where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,--the joy and beauty of it, all the
while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the human
effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves rolling
for ever, and winds moaning for ever, and faithful hearts trusting and
sickening for ever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling
beach like weeds for ever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat,
through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the
fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the
fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
Next after the fishing-boat--which, as I said, in the architecture of
the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or
agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or
arable, as the fishing-boat swims humbly in the midst of the broad
green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit
as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may
find,--next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me,
the small, over-wrought, {166} under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig
or schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin
masts over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate seaport;
and which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering
water, seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails.
Of the larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted,
and passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general
little sympathy with people who want to go anywhere; nor caring much
about anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to
other sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships,
that live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither
have I any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic
with spice islands, and porterage of painted tea-chests or carved
ivory; for all this seems to me to fall under the head of commerce of
the drawing-room; costly, but not venerable. I respect in the merchant
service only those ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber,
iron, and such other commodities, and that have disagreeable odour, and
unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than
one of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black
sea-fog, with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbour
slime. The noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and
strained unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a
little while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity;
still less honoured, least of all conscious of any claim to honour;
casting and craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the
pier, in quiet truth of time; spinning of wheel, and {167} slackening
of rope, and swinging of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz
music; one or two of its crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy
and yelping dog eagerly interested in something from which a blue dull
smoke rises out of pot or pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs
slack, like the ropes above them, entangled as they are in those
inextricable meshes about the patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed
sable sail. What a majestic sense of service in all that languor! the
rest of human limbs and hearts, at utter need, not in sweet meadows or
soft air, but in harbour slime and biting fog; so drawing their breath
once more, to go out again, without lament, from between the two
skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of under wave, into the grey
troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can, with slacked rope, and
patched sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and stagger far away amidst
the wind and salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, winning
day by day their daily bread; and for last reward, when their old
hands, on some winter night, lose feeling along the frozen ropes, and
their old eyes miss mark of the lighthouse quenched in foam, the
so-long impossible Rest, that shall hunger no more, neither thirst any
more,--their eyes and mouths filled with the brown sea-sand.
(_Harbours of England_.)
{168}
WALTER PATER 1839-1894
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE
As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the wayside
a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped him on
with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as the man
told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a little place in
the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed his
earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told,
went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward
for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did
for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to
mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,
raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true
aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had
lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows,
the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season;
only, with tints more musically blent on wall and floor, and some finer
light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles, and
with all its little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the
thought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place,
yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as
if it were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his
dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design
he {169} then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the
story of his spirit--in that process of brain-building by which we are,
each one of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear and
favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and how
his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house he
could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul
which had come to be there--of which indeed, through the law which
makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's
lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woven
through and through each other into one inextricable texture--half,
tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood
and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows
how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving,
and could divide the main streams at least of the winds that had played
on him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey.
The _old house_, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always
called it (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home, soon
enough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really was an
old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates--descent
from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant pieces still
hung in one of the rooms--might explain, together with some other
things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about everything
there--the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls with which the
light and shadow played so delicately; might explain also the tolerance
of the great poplar in the garden, a tree {170} most often despised by
English people, but which French people love, having observed a certain
fresh way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, making it sound, in
never so slight a stirring of the air, like running water.
The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the
staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way up
at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the
blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against
the blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit in
autumn was so fresh. At the next turning came the closet which held on
its deep shelves the best china. Little angel faces and reedy flutings
stood out round the fire-place of the children's room. And on the top
of the house, above the large attic, where the white mice ran in the
twilight--an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures,
glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrum of coloured silks,
among its lumber--a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of
the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said, stood near a great
city, which sent up heavenwards, over the twisting weather-vanes, not
seldom, its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or
sunshine. But the child of whom I am writing did not hate the fog
because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the
chimneys, and the whites which gleamed through its openings, on summer
mornings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose that a
child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special
fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this
indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in
{171} some degree, we see inwardly, and the child finds for itself, and
with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in those whites and
reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the
dandelions at the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a
handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack of better
ministries to its desire of beauty.
(_Miscellaneous Studies_.)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894
DIVING
Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished
breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of
churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers
toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the
assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between wind
and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a
mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the
ladder. . . . To go down in the diving-dress, that was my absorbing
fancy; and with the countenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver,
Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.
It was grey harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out
in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at last
on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my
{172} whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing.
One moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the
next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As
that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could have found it in my
heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But
it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the
air to whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of
the vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing
there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature
deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his
own. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a
catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the
weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust
into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the
ladder, I began ponderously to descend.