Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
YEAST: A PROBLEM
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
This book was written nearly twelve years ago; and so many things
have changed since then, that it is hardly fair to send it into the
world afresh, without some notice of the improvement--if such there
be--which has taken place meanwhile in those southern counties of
England, with which alone this book deals.
I believe that things are improved. Twelve years more of the new
Poor Law have taught the labouring men greater self-help and
independence; I hope that those virtues may not be destroyed in them
once more, by the boundless and indiscriminate almsgiving which has
become the fashion of the day, in most parishes where there are
resident gentry. If half the money which is now given away in
different forms to the agricultural poor could be spent in making
their dwellings fit for honest men to live in, then life, morals,
and poor-rates, would be saved to an immense amount. But as I do
not see how to carry out such a plan, I have no right to complain of
others for not seeing.
Meanwhile cottage improvement, and sanitary reform, throughout the
country districts, are going on at a fearfully slow rate. Here and
there high-hearted landlords, like the Duke of Bedford, are doing
their duty like men; but in general, the apathy of the educated
classes is most disgraceful.
But the labourers, during the last ten years, are altogether better
off. Free trade has increased their food, without lessening their
employment. The politician who wishes to know the effect on
agricultural life of that wise and just measure, may find it in Mr.
Grey of Dilston's answers to the queries of the French Government.
The country parson will not need to seek so far. He will see it (if
he be an observant man) in the faces and figures of his school-
children. He will see a rosier, fatter, bigger-boned race growing
up, which bids fair to surpass in bulk the puny and ill-fed
generation of 1815-45, and equal, perhaps, in thew and sinew, to the
men who saved Europe in the old French war.
If it should be so (as God grant it may), there is little fear but
that the labouring men of England will find their aristocracy able
to lead them in the battle-field, and to develop the agriculture of
the land at home, even better than did their grandfathers of the old
war time.
To a thoughtful man, no point of the social horizon is more full of
light, than the altered temper of the young gentlemen. They have
their faults and follies still--for when will young blood be other
than hot blood? But when one finds, more and more, swearing
banished from the hunting-field, foul songs from the universities,
drunkenness and gambling from the barracks; when one finds
everywhere, whether at college, in camp, or by the cover-side, more
and more, young men desirous to learn their duty as Englishmen, and
if possible to do it; when one hears their altered tone toward the
middle classes, and that word 'snob' (thanks very much to Mr.
Thackeray) used by them in its true sense, without regard of rank;
when one watches, as at Aldershott, the care and kindness of
officers toward their men; and over and above all this, when one
finds in every profession (in that of the soldier as much as any)
young men who are not only 'in the world,' but (in religious
phraseology) 'of the world,' living God-fearing, virtuous, and
useful lives, as Christian men should: then indeed one looks
forward with hope and confidence to the day when these men shall
settle down in life, and become, as holders of the land, the leaders
of agricultural progress, and the guides and guardians of the
labouring man.
I am bound to speak of the farmer, as I know him in the South of
England. In the North he is a man of altogether higher education
and breeding: but he is, even in the South, a much better man than
it is the fashion to believe him. No doubt, he has given heavy
cause of complaint. He was demoralised, as surely, if not as
deeply, as his own labourers, by the old Poor Law. He was
bewildered--to use the mildest term--by promises of Protection from
men who knew better. But his worst fault after all has been, that
young or old, he has copied his landlord too closely, and acted on
his maxims and example. And now that his landlord is growing wiser,
he is growing wiser too. Experience of the new Poor Law, and
experience of Free-trade, are helping him to show himself what he
always was at heart, an honest Englishman. All his brave
persistence and industry, his sturdy independence and self-help, and
last, but not least, his strong sense of justice, and his vast good-
nature, are coming out more and more, and working better and better
upon the land and the labourer; while among his sons I see many
growing up brave, manly, prudent young men, with a steadily
increasing knowledge of what is required of them, both as
manufacturers of food, and employers of human labour.
The country clergy, again, are steadily improving. I do not mean
merely in morality--for public opinion now demands that as a sine
qua non--but in actual efficiency. Every fresh appointment seems to
me, on the whole, a better one than the last. They are gaining more
and more the love and respect of their flocks; they are becoming
more and more centres of civilisation and morality to their
parishes; they are working, for the most part, very hard, each in
his own way; indeed their great danger is, that they should trust
too much in that outward 'business' work which they do so heartily;
that they should fancy that the administration of schools and
charities is their chief business, and literally leave the Word of
God to serve tables. Would that we clergymen could learn (some of
us are learning already) that influence over our people is not to be
gained by perpetual interference in their private affairs, too often
inquisitorial, irritating, and degrading to both parties, but by
showing ourselves their personal friends, of like passions with
them. Let a priest do that. Let us make our people feel that we
speak to them, and feel to them, as men to men, and then the more
cottages we enter the better. If we go into our neighbours' houses
only as judges, inquisitors, or at best gossips, we are best--as too
many are--at home in our studies. Would, too, that we would
recollect this--that our duty is, among other things, to preach the
Gospel; and consider firstly whether what we commonly preach be any
Gospel or good news at all, and not rather the worst possible news;
and secondly, whether we preach at all; whether our sermons are not
utterly unintelligible (being delivered in an unknown tongue), and
also of a dulness not to be surpassed; and whether, therefore, it
might not be worth our while to spend a little time in studying the
English tongue, and the art of touching human hearts and minds.
But to return: this improved tone (if the truth must be told) is
owing, far more than people themselves are aware, to the triumphs of
those liberal principles, for which the Whigs have fought for the
last forty years, and of that sounder natural philosophy of which
they have been the consistent patrons. England has become Whig; and
the death of the Whig party is the best proof of its victory. It
has ceased to exist, because it has done its work; because its
principles are accepted by its ancient enemies; because the
political economy and the physical science, which grew up under its
patronage, are leavening the thoughts and acts of Anglican and of
Evangelical alike, and supplying them with methods for carrying out
their own schemes. Lord Shaftesbury's truly noble speech on
Sanitary Reform at Liverpool is a striking proof of the extent to
which the Evangelical leaders have given in their adherence to those
scientific laws, the original preachers of which have been called by
his Lordship's party heretics and infidels, materialists and
rationalists. Be it so. Provided truth be preached, what matter
who preaches it? Provided the leaven of sound inductive science
leaven the whole lump, what matter who sets it working? Better,
perhaps, because more likely to produce practical success, that
these novel truths should be instilled into the minds of the
educated classes by men who share somewhat in their prejudices and
superstitions, and doled out to them in such measure as will not
terrify or disgust them. The child will take its medicine from the
nurse's hand trustfully enough, when it would scream itself into
convulsions at the sight of the doctor, and so do itself more harm
than the medicine would do it good. The doctor meanwhile (unless he
be one of Hesiod's 'fools, who know not how much more half is than
the whole') is content enough to see any part of his prescription
got down, by any hands whatsoever.
But there is another cause for the improved tone of the Landlord
class, and of the young men of what is commonly called the
aristocracy; and that is, a growing moral earnestness; which is in
great part owing (that justice may be done on all sides) to the
Anglican movement. How much soever Neo-Anglicanism may have failed
as an Ecclesiastical or Theological system; how much soever it may
have proved itself, both by the national dislike of it, and by the
defection of all its master-minds, to be radically un-English, it
has at least awakened hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cultivated men
and women to ask themselves whether God sent them into the world
merely to eat, drink, and be merry, and to have 'their souls saved'
upon the Spurgeon method, after they die; and has taught them an
answer to that question not unworthy of English Christians.
The Anglican movement, when it dies out, will leave behind at least
a legacy of grand old authors disinterred, of art, of music; of
churches too, schools, cottages, and charitable institutions, which
will form so many centres of future civilisation, and will entitle
it to the respect, if not to the allegiance, of the future
generation. And more than this; it has sown in the hearts of young
gentlemen and young ladies seed which will not perish; which, though
it may develop into forms little expected by those who sowed it,
will develop at least into a virtue more stately and reverent, more
chivalrous and self-sacrificing, more genial and human, than can be
learnt from that religion of the Stock Exchange, which reigned
triumphant--for a year and a day--in the popular pulpits.
I have said, that Neo-Anglicanism has proved a failure, as
seventeenth-century Anglicanism did. The causes of that failure
this book has tried to point out: and not one word which is spoken
of it therein, but has been drawn from personal and too-intimate
experience. But now--peace to its ashes. Is it so great a sin, to
have been dazzled by the splendour of an impossible ideal? Is it so
great a sin, to have had courage and conduct enough to attempt the
enforcing of that ideal, in the face of the prejudices of a whole
nation? And if that ideal was too narrow for the English nation,
and for the modern needs of mankind, is that either so great a sin?
Are other extant ideals, then, so very comprehensive? Does Mr.
Spurgeon, then, take so much broader or nobler views of the
capacities and destinies of his race, than that great genius, John
Henry Newman? If the world cannot answer that question now, it will
answer it promptly enough in another five-and-twenty years. And
meanwhile let not the party and the system which has conquered boast
itself too loudly. Let it take warning by the Whigs; and suspect
(as many a looker-on more than suspects) that its triumph may be, as
with the Whigs, its ruin; and that, having done the work for which
it was sent into the world, there may only remain for it, to decay
and die.
And die it surely will, if (as seems too probable) there succeeds to
this late thirty years of peace a thirty years of storm.
For it has lost all hold upon the young, the active, the daring. It
has sunk into a compromise between originally opposite dogmas. It
has become a religion for Jacob the smooth man; adapted to the
maxims of the market, and leaving him full liberty to supplant his
brother by all methods lawful in that market. No longer can it
embrace and explain all known facts of God and man, in heaven and
earth, and satisfy utterly such minds and hearts as those of
Cromwell's Ironsides, or the Scotch Covenanters, or even of a Newton
and a Colonel Gardiner. Let it make the most of its Hedley Vicars
and its Havelock, and sound its own trumpet as loudly as it can, in
sounding theirs; for they are the last specimens of heroism which it
is likely to beget--if indeed it did in any true sense beget them,
and if their gallantry was really owing to their creed, and not to
the simple fact of their being--like others--English gentlemen.
Well may Jacob's chaplains cackle in delighted surprise over their
noble memories, like geese who have unwittingly hatched a swan!
But on Esau in general:--on poor rough Esau, who sails Jacob's
ships, digs Jacob's mines, founds Jacob's colonies, pours out his
blood for him in those wars which Jacob himself has stirred up--
while his sleek brother sits at home in his counting-house, enjoying
at once 'the means of grace' and the produce of Esau's labour--on
him Jacob's chaplains have less and less influence; for him they
have less and less good news. He is afraid of them, and they of
him; the two do not comprehend one another, sympathise with one
another; they do not even understand one another's speech. The same
social and moral gulf has opened between them, as parted the
cultivated and wealthy Pharisee of Jerusalem from the rough fishers
of the Galilaean Lake: and yet the Galilaean fishers (if we are to
trust Josephus and the Gospels) were trusty, generous, affectionate-
-and it was not from among the Pharisees, it is said, that the
Apostles were chosen.
Be that as it may, Esau has a birthright; and this book, like all
books which I have ever written, is written to tell him so; and, I
trust, has not been written in vain. But it is not this book, or
any man's book, or any man at all, who can tell Esau the whole truth
about himself, his powers, his duty, and his God. Woman must do it,
and not man. His mother, his sister, the maid whom he may love; and
failing all these (as they often will fail him, in the wild
wandering life which he must live), those human angels of whom it is
written--'The barren hath many more children than she who has an
husband.' And such will not be wanting. As long as England can
produce at once two such women as Florence Nightingale and Catherine
Marsh, there is good hope that Esau will not be defrauded of his
birthright; and that by the time that Jacob comes crouching to him,
to defend him against the enemies who are near at hand, Esau,
instead of borrowing Jacob's religion, may be able to teach Jacob
his; and the two brothers face together the superstition and anarchy
of Europe, in the strength of a lofty and enlightened Christianity,
which shall be thoroughly human, and therefore thoroughly divine.
C. K.
February 17th, 1859.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
This little tale was written between two and three years ago, in the
hope that it might help to call the attention of wiser and better
men than I am, to the questions which are now agitating the minds of
the rising generation, and to the absolute necessity of solving them
at once and earnestly, unless we would see the faith of our
forefathers crumble away beneath the combined influence of new
truths which are fancied to be incompatible with it, and new
mistakes as to its real essence. That this can be done I believe
and know: if I had not believed it, I would never have put pen to
paper on the subject.
I believe that the ancient Creed, the Eternal Gospel, will stand,
and conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every
other for eighteen hundred years, by claiming, and subduing, and
organising those young anarchic forces, which now, unconscious of
their parentage, rebel against Him to whom they owe their being.
But for the time being, the young men and women of our day are fast
parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are
wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards
an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism. Epicurism which, in
my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it
looks at first sight most like an angel of light. The mass, again,
are fancying that they are still adhering to the old creeds, the old
church, to the honoured patriarchs of English Protestantism. I wish
I could agree with them in their belief about themselves. To me
they seem--with a small sprinkling of those noble and cheering
exceptions to popular error which are to be found in every age of
Christ's church--to be losing most fearfully and rapidly the living
spirit of Christianity, and to be, for that very reason, clinging
all the more convulsively--and who can blame them?--to the outward
letter of it, whether High Church or Evangelical; unconscious, all
the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into
that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always
heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most
blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.
In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least
of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling. I know
well that my sketch is inadequate and partial: I have every reason
to believe, from the criticisms which I have received since its
first publication, that it is, as far as it goes, correct. I put it
as a problem. It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more
than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be
found. I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no
right to start doubts without answering them. I can only answer,--
Would that I had started them! would that I was not seeing them
daily around me, under some form or other, in just the very hearts
for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed and
healthy faith. To the young, this book can do no harm; for it will
put into their minds little but what is there already. To the
elder, it may do good; for it may teach some of them, as I earnestly
hope, something of the real, but too often utterly unsuspected,
state of their own children's minds; something of the reasons of
that calamitous estrangement between themselves and those who will
succeed them, which is often too painful and oppressive to be
confessed to their own hearts! Whatever amount of obloquy this book
may bring upon me, I shall think that a light price to pay, if by it
I shall have helped, even in a single case, to 'turn the hearts of
the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the
parents, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come,'--as
come it surely will, if we persist much longer in substituting
denunciation for sympathy, instruction for education, and Pharisaism
for the Good News of the Kingdom of God.
1851.
CHAPTER I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING
As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion
of the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those
fashions wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a
scrap of description.
The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless
oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour
red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a
straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen
leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs;
some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young-
farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab
stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the
union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with
trousers strapped down to bursting point, like a penny steamer's
safety-valve; a midshipman, the only merry one in the field, bumping
about on a fretting, sweating hack, with its nose a foot above its
ears; and Lancelot Smith, who then kept two good horses, and 'rode
forward' as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford
it, and 'has nothing else to do,' has a very good right to ride.
But what is a description, without a sketch of the weather?--In
these Pantheist days especially, when a hero or heroine's moral
state must entirely depend on the barometer, and authors talk as if
Christians were cabbages, and a man's soul as well as his lungs
might be saved by sea-breezes and sunshine; or his character
developed by wearing guano in his shoes, and training himself
against a south wall--we must have a weather description, though, as
I shall presently show, one in flat contradiction of the popular
theory. Luckily for our information, Lancelot was very much given
to watch both the weather and himself, and had indeed, while in his
teens, combined the two in a sort of a soul-almanack on the
principles just mentioned--somewhat in this style:--
'Monday, 21st.--Wind S.W., bright sun, mercury at 30.5 inches. Felt
my heart expanded towards the universe. Organs of veneration and
benevolence pleasingly excited; and gave a shilling to a tramp. An
inexpressible joy bounded through every vein, and the soft air
breathed purity and self-sacrifice through my soul. As I watched
the beetles, those children of the sun, who, as divine Shelley says,
"laden with light and odour, pass over the gleam of the living
grass," I gained an Eden-glimpse of the pleasures of virtue.
'N.B. Found the tramp drunk in a ditch. I could not have degraded
myself on such a day--ah! how could he?
'Tuesday, 22d.--Barometer rapidly falling. Heavy clouds in the
south-east. My heart sank into gloomy forebodings. Read Manfred,
and doubted whether I should live long. The laden weight of destiny
seemed to crush down my aching forehead, till the thunderstorm
burst, and peace was restored to my troubled soul.'
This was very bad; but to do justice to Lancelot, he had grown out
of it at the time when my story begins. He was now in the fifth act
of his 'Werterean' stage; that sentimental measles, which all clever
men must catch once in their lives, and which, generally, like the
physical measles, if taken early, settles their constitution for
good or evil; if taken late, goes far towards killing them.
Lancelot had found Byron and Shelley pall on his taste and commenced
devouring Bulwer and worshipping Ernest Maltravers. He had left
Bulwer for old ballads and romances, and Mr. Carlyle's reviews; was
next alternately chivalry-mad; and Germany-mad; was now reading hard
at physical science; and on the whole, trying to become a great man,
without any very clear notion of what a great man ought to be. Real
education he never had had. Bred up at home under his father, a
rich merchant, he had gone to college with a large stock of general
information, and a particular mania for dried plants, fossils,
butterflies, and sketching, and some such creed as this:--
That he was very clever.
That he ought to make his fortune.
That a great many things were very pleasant--beautiful things among
the rest.
That it was a fine thing to be 'superior,' gentleman-like, generous,
and courageous.
That a man ought to be religious.
And left college with a good smattering of classics and mathematics,
picked up in the intervals of boat-racing and hunting, and much the
same creed as he brought with him, except in regard to the last
article. The scenery-and-natural-history mania was now somewhat at
a discount. He had discovered a new natural object, including in
itself all--more than all--yet found beauties and wonders--woman!
Draw, draw the veil and weep, guardian angel! if such there be.
What was to be expected? Pleasant things were pleasant--there was
no doubt of that, whatever else might be doubtful. He had read
Byron by stealth; he had been flogged into reading Ovid and
Tibullus; and commanded by his private tutor to read Martial and
Juvenal 'for the improvement of his style.' All conversation on the
subject of love had been prudishly avoided, as usual, by his parents
and teacher. The parts of the Bible which spoke of it had been
always kept out of his sight. Love had been to him, practically,
ground tabooed and 'carnal.' What was to be expected? Just what
happened--if woman's beauty had nothing holy in it, why should his
fondness for it? Just what happens every day--that he had to sow
his wild oats for himself, and eat the fruit thereof, and the dirt
thereof also.
O fathers! fathers! and you, clergymen, who monopolise education!
either tell boys the truth about love, or do not put into their
hands, without note or comment, the foul devil's lies about it,
which make up the mass of the Latin poets--and then go, fresh from
teaching Juvenal and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor
Peter Dens's well-meaning prurience! Had we not better take the
beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the
Jesuit's?
But where is my description of the weather all this time?
I cannot, I am sorry to say, give any very cheerful account of the
weather that day. But what matter? Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who
only take their sport when the sun shines? Is it not, on the
contrary, symbolical of our national character, that almost all our
field amusements are wintry ones? Our fowling, our hunting, our
punt-shooting (pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants)--our
golf and skating,--our very cricket, and boat-racing, and jack and
grayling fishing, carried on till we are fairly frozen out. We are
a stern people, and winter suits us. Nature then retires modestly
into the background, and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer,
leaving us to think and work; and therefore it happens that in
England, it may be taken as a general rule, that whenever all the
rest of the world is in-doors, we are out and busy, and on the
whole, the worse the day, the better the deed.
The weather that day, the first day Lancelot ever saw his beloved,
was truly national. A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting
day in March. The last brown oak-leaf which had stood out the
winter's frost, spun and quivered plump down, and then lay; as if
ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like an
awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind
just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all
faces. The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before,
had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-
cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester
cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no
demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the
flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy
paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless,
catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth--what
with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and
dinner-giving in autumn--was fairly worn out, and put to bed with
the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water cure.
There sat Lancelot by the cover-side, his knees aching with cold and
wet, thanking his stars that he was not one of the whippers-in who
were lashing about in the dripping cover, laying up for themselves,
in catering for the amusement of their betters, a probable old age
of bed-ridden torture, in the form of rheumatic gout. Not that he
was at all happy--indeed, he had no reason to be so; for, first, the
hounds would not find; next, he had left half-finished at home a
review article on the Silurian System, which he had solemnly
promised an abject and beseeching editor to send to post that night;
next, he was on the windward side of the cover, and dare not light a
cigar; and lastly, his mucous membrane in general was not in the
happiest condition, seeing that he had been dining the evening
before with Mr. Vaurien of Rottenpalings, a young gentleman of a
convivial and melodious turn of mind, who sang--and played also--as
singing men are wont--in more senses than one, and had 'ladies and
gentlemen' down from town to stay with him; and they sang and played
too; and so somehow between vingt-un and champagne-punch, Lancelot
had not arrived at home till seven o'clock that morning, and was in
a fit state to appreciate the feelings of our grandfathers, when,
after the third bottle of port, they used to put the black silk
tights into their pockets, slip on the leathers and boots, and ride
the crop-tailed hack thirty miles on a winter's night, to meet the
hounds in the next county by ten in the morning. They are 'gone
down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,' with John Warde
of Squerries at their head--the fathers of the men who conquered at
Waterloo; and we their degenerate grandsons are left instead, with
puny arms, and polished leather boots, and a considerable taint of
hereditary disease, to sit in club-houses, and celebrate the
progress of the species.
Whether Lancelot or his horse, under these depressing circumstances,
fell asleep; or whether thoughts pertaining to such a life, and its
fitness for a clever and ardent young fellow in the nineteenth
century, became gradually too painful, and had to be peremptorily
shaken off, this deponent sayeth not; but certainly, after five-and-
thirty minutes of idleness and shivering, Lancelot opened his eyes
with a sudden start, and struck spurs into his hunter without due
cause shown; whereat Shiver-the-timbers, who was no Griselda in
temper--(Lancelot had bought him out of the Pytchley for half his
value, as unrideably vicious, when he had killed a groom, and fallen
backwards on a rough-rider, the first season after he came up from
Horncastle)--responded by a furious kick or two, threw his head up,
put his foot into a drain, and sprawled down all but on his nose,
pitching Lancelot unawares shamefully on the pommel of his saddle.
A certain fatality, by the bye, had lately attended all Lancelot's
efforts to shine; he never bought a new coat without tearing it
mysteriously next day, or tried to make a joke without bursting out
coughing in the middle . . . and now the whole field were looking on
at his mishap; between disgust and the start he turned almost sick,
and felt the blood rush into his cheeks and forehead as he heard a
shout of coarse jovial laughter burst out close to him, and the old
master of the hounds, Squire Lavington, roared aloud--
'A pretty sportsman you are, Mr. Smith, to fall asleep by the cover-
side and let your horse down--and your pockets, too! What's that
book on the ground? Sapping and studying still? I let nobody come
out with my hounds with their pocket full of learning. Hand it up
here, Tom; we'll see what it is. French, as I am no scholar!
Translate for us, Colonel Bracebridge!'
And, amid shouts of laughter, the gay Guardsman read out,--
'St. Francis de Sales: Introduction to a Devout Life.'
Poor Lancelot! Wishing himself fathoms under-ground, ashamed of his
book, still more ashamed of himself for his shame, he had to sit
there ten physical seconds, or spiritual years, while the colonel
solemnly returned him the book, complimenting him on the proofs of
its purifying influence which he had given the night before, in
helping to throw the turnpike-gate into the river.
But 'all things do end,' and so did this; and the silence of the
hounds also; and a faint but knowing whimper drove St. Francis out
of all heads, and Lancelot began to stalk slowly with a dozen
horsemen up the wood-ride, to a fitful accompaniment of wandering
hound-music, where the choristers were as invisible as nightingales
among the thick cover. And hark! just as the book was returned to
his pocket, the sweet hubbub suddenly crashed out into one jubilant
shriek, and then swept away fainter and fainter among the trees.
The walk became a trot--the trot a canter. Then a faint melancholy
shout at a distance, answered by a 'Stole away!' from the fields; a
doleful 'toot!' of the horn; the dull thunder of many horsehoofs
rolling along the farther woodside. Then red coats, flashing like
sparks of fire across the gray gap of mist at the ride's-mouth, then
a whipper-in, bringing up a belated hound, burst into the pathway,
smashing and plunging, with shut eyes, through ash-saplings and
hassock-grass; then a fat farmer, sedulously pounding through the
mud, was overtaken and bespattered in spite of all his struggles;--
until the line streamed out into the wide rushy pasture, startling
up pewits and curlews, as horsemen poured in from every side, and
cunning old farmers rode off at inexplicable angles to some well-
known haunts of pug: and right ahead, chiming and jangling sweet
madness, the dappled pack glanced and wavered through the veil of
soft grey mist. 'What's the use of this hurry?' growled Lancelot.
'They will all be back again. I never have the luck to see a run.'
But no; on and on--down the wind and down the vale; and the canter
became a gallop, and the gallop a long straining stride; and a
hundred horsehoofs crackled like flame among the stubbles, and
thundered fetlock-deep along the heavy meadows; and every fence
thinned the cavalcade, till the madness began to stir all bloods,
and with grim earnest silent faces, the initiated few settled
themselves to their work, and with the colonel and Lancelot at their
head, 'took their pleasure sadly, after the manner of their nation,'
as old Froissart has it.
'Thorough bush, through brier,
Thorough park, through pale;'
till the rolling grass-lands spread out into flat black open
fallows, crossed with grassy baulks, and here and there a long
melancholy line of tall elms, while before them the high chalk
ranges gleamed above the mist like a vast wall of emerald enamelled
with snow, and the winding river glittering at their feet.
'A polite fox!' observed the colonel. 'He's leading the squire
straight home to Whitford, just in time for dinner.'
* * * * *
They were in the last meadow, with the stream before them. A line
of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the
hounds' opinion of Reynard's course. The sportsmen galloped off
towards the nearest bridge. Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot,
who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry, following him
successfully through all manner of desperate places, and more and
more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel, because he only
followed, while the colonel's quicker and unembarrassed wit, which
lived wholly in the present moment, saw long before Lancelot, 'how
to cut out his work,' in every field.
'I shan't go round,' quietly observed the colonel.
'Do you fancy I shall?' growled Lancelot, who took for granted--poor
thin-skinned soul! that the words were meant as a hit at himself.
'You're a brace of geese,' politely observed the old squire; 'and
you'll find it out in rheumatic fever. There--"one fool makes
many!" You'll kill Smith before you're done, colonel!' and the old
man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,--
'Oh, he'll make a fine rider--in time!'
'In time!' Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel
down for the word. It just expressed the contrast, which had
fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors
hounds. The colonel's long practice and consummate skill in all he
took in hand,--his experience of all society, from the prairie
Indian to Crockford's, from the prize-ring to the continental
courts,--his varied and ready store of information and anecdote,--
the harmony and completeness of the man,--his consistency with his
own small ideal, and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere
and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub, who, though
immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart, was still in
a state of convulsive dyspepsia, 'swallowing formulae,' and daily
well-nigh choked; diseased throughout with that morbid self-
consciousness and lust of praise, for which God prepares, with His
elect, a bitter cure. Alas! poor Lancelot! an unlicked bear, 'with
all his sorrows before him!'--
'Come along,' quoth Bracebridge, between snatches of a tune, his
coolness maddening Lancelot. 'Old Lavington will find us dry
clothes, a bottle of port, and a brace of charming daughters, at the
Priory. In with you, little Mustang of the prairie! Neck or
nothing!'--
And in an instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle-
bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream,
till they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low
place in the bank. They crossed the stream, passed the Priory
Shrubberies, leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward,
called by the unseen Ariel's music before them.--Up, into the hills;
past white crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and
tottering ashes, their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and
vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea of milk.--Up, between steep
ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech, and
here and there a huge yew standing out alone, the advanced sentry of
the forest, with its luscious fretwork of green velvet, like a
mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles, all glittering and steaming
as the sun drank up the dew-drops. The lark sprang upward into
song, and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams, while the
wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows,
and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.--Up
into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,--but who can describe
them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and
transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their
enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all
standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the
delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the
outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had
laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in
a thin veil of silvery green.
Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the
narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an
object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,--a
little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and
grassy graves. A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings
round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard
itself burst up one of those noble springs known as winter-bournes
in the chalk ranges, which, awakened in autumn from the abysses to
which it had shrunk during the summer's drought, was hurrying down
upon its six months' course, a broad sheet of oily silver over a
temporary channel of smooth greensward.
The hounds had checked in the woods behind; now they poured down the
hillside, so close together 'that you might have covered them with a
sheet,' straight for the little chapel.
A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelot's heart.
There were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and
grown for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval
chalk ocean, in the milky youth of this great English land. And
here was he, the insect of a day, fox-hunting upon THEM! He felt
ashamed, and more ashamed when the inner voice whispered--'Fox-
hunting is not the shame--thou art the shame. If thou art the
insect of a day, it is thy sin that thou art one.'
And his sadness, foolish as it may seem, grew as he watched a brown
speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill, and heard a gay view-
halloo burst from the colonel at his side. The chase lost its charm
for him the moment the game was seen. Then vanished that mysterious
delight of pursuing an invisible object, which gives to hunting and
fishing their unutterable and almost spiritual charm; which made
Shakespeare a nightly poacher; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of
fly-fishing; by which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an
enchanter's wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world,
to 'call up spirits from the vasty deep,' which will really 'come if
you do call for them'--at least if the conjuration be orthodox--and
they there. That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug,
his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping, as he
toiled up the sheep-paths towards the open down above.
But Lancelot's sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just
outside the churchyard. Another moment--they had leaped the rails;
and there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling,
like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles
of the quiet dead.
Lancelot shuddered--the thing was not wrong--'it was no one's
fault,'--but there was a ghastly discord in it. Peace and strife,
time and eternity--the mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal
spirit,--the frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible
earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within
him. He pulled his horse up violently, and stood as if rooted to
the place, gazing at he knew not what.
The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of
joy--and then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and
breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at
every stride. The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of
rolling flints died away above. Lancelot looked up, startled at the
silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his
pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the
graves.
On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet
loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning
round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as
completely as Lancelot himself.
That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them,
entered his heart at once, never again to leave it. Her features
were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes
shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble
cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward
round the towering neck. With her perfect masque and queenly
figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model
from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine--the ideal
of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by
girlish devotion. She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a
glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well
as by the will of God.
They gazed one moment more at each other--but what is time to
spirits? With them, as with their Father, 'one day is as a thousand
years.' But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the
decided interference of the horse, who, thoroughly disgusted at his
master's whole conduct, gave a significant shake of his head, and
shamming frightened (as both women and horses will do when only
cross), commenced a war-dance, which drove Argemone Lavington into
the porch, and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing
madly up the hill after his companions.
'What a horrible ugly face!' said Argemone to herself, 'but so
clever, and so unhappy!'
Blest pity! true mother of that graceless scamp, young Love, who is
ashamed of his real pedigree, and swears to this day that he is the
child of Venus!--the coxcomb!
* * * * *
[Here, for the sake of the reader, we omit, or rather postpone a
long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of
Aristophanes's Birds, with illustrations taken from all earth and
heaven, from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boehmen and Saint
Theresa.]
'The dichotomy of Lancelot's personality,' as the Germans would call
it, returned as he dashed on. His understanding was trying to ride,
while his spirit was left behind with Argemone. Hence loose reins
and a looser seat. He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in
fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter
infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the
down like one of Mephistopheles's Demon-steeds. They had mounted
the hill--the deer fled before them in terror--they neared the park
palings. In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their
fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of
fur, a panting, steaming ring of horses round them. Half a dozen
voices hailed him as he came up.
'Where have you been?' 'He'll tumble off!' 'He's had a fall!' 'No
he hasn't!' ''Ware hounds, man alive!' 'He'll break his neck!'
'He has broken it, at last!' shouted the colonel, as Shiver-the-
timbers rushed at the high pales, out of breath, and blind with
rage. Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his
dream by the long heave of the huge brute's shoulder, and the
maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence. He
started, checked the curb, the horse threw up his head, fulfilling
his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the
pales--the top-bar bent like a withe, flew out into a hundred
splinters, and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard
flint-road.
For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between
his own knees. Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his face--a
horrible grind--a sheet of flame--and the blackness of night. Did
you ever feel it, reader?
When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington
sitting by him. There was real sorrow in the old man's face, 'Come
to himself!' and a great joyful oath rolled out. 'The boldest rider
of them all! I wouldn't have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick
and span Colonel Bracebridges!'
'Quite right, squire!' answered a laughing voice from behind the
curtain. 'Smith has a clear two thousand a year, and I live by my
wits!'