THE SECOND DIALOGUE. 1905.

A few days ago--to be precise, on Saturday the 24th of this month--my

friend Verinder reminded me of the long-past conversation. We had met by

appointment at Paddington to travel down to Windsor for the second day of

the Eton and Winchester match, taking with us (or rather, being taken by)

a youngster whom we call The Infant. The Infant, who talks little save in

the bosom of his family, and even so preserves beneath his talk that fine

reticence of judgment which most adorns the age of fifteen, not

unfrequently surprises me by his experiments in the art of living.

On this occasion, while I was engaged in the booking-office and Verinder

in scanning the shelves of Messrs. Smith's bookstall, he had found our

train, chosen our compartment, and laid out twopence in four halfpenny

papers, which he spread on the cushions by way of reserving our seats.

"But why four," I asked, "seeing there are but three of us?"

"It will give us more room," he answered simply.

He had hoped, I doubt not, by this devise to retain the whole compartment;

but the hope was soon and abruptly frustrated by a tall, well-dressed and

pompous man who came striding down the platform while we idled by the

door, and thrusting past us almost before we could give way, entered the

compartment, dropped into a corner seat, tossed his copy of _The Times_ on

to the seat opposite, took off his top-hat, examined it, replaced it when

satisfied of its shine, drew out a spare handkerchief, opened it, flicked

a few specks of dust from his patent-leather boots, looked up while

reaching across for _The Times_, recognised me with a nod and a "Good

morning!" and buried himself in his paper.

I on my part, almost before glancing at his face, had recognised him by

his manner for a personage next to whom it has been my lot to sit at one

or two public banquets. I will call him Sir John Crang. He is a

K.C.M.G., a Colonial by birth and breeding, a Member of Parliament, and a

person of the sort we treat in these days with consideration. Since the

second year of Jubilee (in which he was knighted) he and his kind have

found themselves at ease in Sion, and of his kind he has been perhaps the

most fortunate. In his public speeches he alludes to himself humorously

as a hustler. He has married a wealthy lady, in every other respect too

good for him, entertains largely at dinners which should be private but

are reported in the press, and advocates conscription for the youth of

Great Britain. Upon conscription for his native colony, as upon any other

of its duties towards Imperial defence, if you question him, you will find

him sonorously evasive.

The Infant, accustomed to surprise at the extent of my acquaintance,

gazed at him politely for a moment as we took our seats and the train

moved out of the station. I noted a veiled disapproval in his eye as he

picked up a newspaper, and at that moment Verinder, who had picked up

another, emitted a noise not unlike the snort of the engine as it gathered

speed. I glanced at him in some apprehension. Verinder's bearing toward

strangers is apt to be brutal, and by an instinct acquired as his

companion on old reading-parties I was prepared to be apologetic.

His ill-humour, however, had nothing to do with Sir John Crang. He had

laid the newspaper across his knee, and was pointing to it with a scornful

forefinger.

"Look here," he said. "Do you remember a talk we had some years ago--you

and I and Grayson? It started in D--'s shop one afternoon after a Kent

and Middlesex match. You ought to remember, for I picked up the _Pall

Mall Magazine_ a month later and found you had made copy out of it."

"To be sure," said I. "We discussed cricket, and a number of reputations

then well known, about which the public troubles itself no longer.

Let us try their names upon The Infant here, and discover with how many of

them he is acquainted."

"We discussed," said Verinder, "the vulgarisation of cricket. You made

me say some hard things about it, but be hanged to me if anything I

prophesied then came near to _this_! Listen--

"'I suppose I may say that, after some luck at starting, I played a

pretty good innings: but a total of 240 is poor enough for first

knock on such a wicket as Hove, and, as things stand, the omens are

against us. However, as I write this wire the clouds are gathering,

and there's no denying that a downfall during the night may help our

chances.'"

"What on earth are you reading?" I asked.

"Stay a moment. Here's another--

"'With Jones's wicket down, the opposition declared, somewhat to the

annoyance of the crowd: and indeed, with Robinson set and playing the

prettiest strokes all around the wicket, I must admit that they

voiced a natural disappointment. They had paid their money, and,

after the long period of stonewalling which preceded the tea

interval, a crowded hour of glorious life would have been

exhilarating, and perhaps was no more than their due.

Dickson, however, took his barracking good-humouredly. Towards the

end Jones had twice appealed against the light.'"

"I suppose," said I, "that is how cricket strikes the Yellow Press.

Who are the reporters?"

"The reporters are the captains of two county teams--two first-class

county teams; and they are writing of a match actually in progress at this

moment. Observe A.'s fine sense of loyalty to a captain's duty in his

published opinion that his side is in a bad way. Remark his chivalrous

hope for a sodden wicket to-morrow."

"It is pretty dirty," I agreed.

Verinder snorted. "I once tried to kill a man at mid-on for wearing a

pink shirt. But these fellows! They ought to wear yellow flannels."

"What, by the way, is the tea interval?" I asked.

"It is an interval," answered Verinder seriously, "in which the opposing

captains adjourn to the post office and send telegrams about themselves

and one another."

"Excuse me," put in Sir John Crang, looking up from his _Times_ and

addressing me, "but I quite agree with what you and your friend are

saying. Interest in the Australian tour, for instance, I can understand;

it promotes good feeling, and anything that draws closer the bonds of

interest between ourselves and the colonies is an imperial asset."

"Good Lord!" murmured Verinder.

Sir John fortunately did not hear him. "But I agree with you," he

continued, "in condemning this popular craze for cricket _per se_, which

is after all but a game with a ball and some sticks. I will not go the

length of our imperial poet and dub its votaries 'flannelled fools.'

That was poetical license, eh? though pardonable under the circumstances.

But, as he has said elsewhere, 'How little they know of England who only

England know.'" (At this point I reached out a foot and trod hard on

Verinder's toe.) "And to the broader outlook--I speak as a pretty wide

traveller--this insular absorption in a mere game is bewildering."

"Infant!" said Verinder suddenly, still under repression of my foot,

"What are you reading?"

The Infant looked up sweetly, withdrawing himself from his paper, however,

by an effort.

"There's a Johnny here who tells you how Bosanquet bowls with what he

calls his 'over-spin.' He has a whole column about it with figures, just

like Euclid; and the funny thing is, Bosanquet writes just after to say

that the Johnny knows nothing about it."

"Abandoned child," commanded Verinder, "pass me the paper. You are within

measurable distance of studying cricket for its own sake, and will come to

a bad end."

Within twenty seconds he and The Infant were intently studying the

diagrams, which Verinder demonstrated to be absurd, while Sir John, a

little huffed by his manner, favoured me with a vision of England as she

should be, with her ploughshares beaten into Morris Tubes.

In the midst of this discourse Verinder looked up.

"Let us not despair of cricket," says he. "She has her victories, but as

yet no prizes to be presented with public speeches."

"Curious fellow that friend of yours," said Sir John, as he took leave of

me on Windsor platform. "Yes, yes, I saw how you humoured him: but why

should he object to a man's playing cricket in a pink shirt?"

He went on his way toward the Castle, while we turned our faces for Agar's

Plough and the best game in the world.

JULY.

Our Parliamentary Candidate--or Prospective Candidate, as we cautiously

call him--has been visiting us, and invited me to sit on the platform and

give the speeches my moral support. I like our candidate, who is young,

ardent, good-natured, and keeps his temper when he is heckled; seems,

indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his opponents by that

bright pugnacity which a true Briton loves better than anything else in

politics. I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. But I wish he

would not choose to put his ardour in competition with Sirius and the

dog-days; and I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. Blank, M.P.,

to address us in his support.

Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which pass, for convenience, under

a common label. Yet there are few men in England whose attitude of mind

towards his alleged principles I more cordially loathe. Not to put too

fine a point upon it, I think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side

which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a hundred things which I

believe.

We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester fellow than I am able to

think him. Still, and at the best, he is a sort of composite photograph

of your average Member of Parliament--the type of man to whom Great

Britain commits the direction of her affairs and, by consequence, her

well-doing and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or Conservative,

are not the features pretty much the same? a solid man, well past fifty,

who has spent the prime of his life in business and withdrawn from it with

a good reputation and a credit balance equally satisfactory to himself and

his bankers. Or it may be that he has not actually retired but has turned

to politics to fill up those leisure hours which are the reward or

vexation (as he chooses to look at them) of a prosperous man of business;

for, as Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business who employs his

own capital, and employs it nearly always in the same way, is by no means

fully employed. "If such a man is very busy, it is a sign of something

wrong. Either he is working at detail, which subordinates would do

better, or he is engaged in too many speculations." In consequence our

commerce abounds with men of great business ability and experience who,

being short of occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time with work

in Parliament, as well as proud to write M.P. after their names.

For my part I can think of nothing better calculated to reassure anyone

whose dreams are haunted by apprehensions of wild-cat legislative schemes,

or the imminence of a Radical millennium, than five minutes' contemplation

of our champions of progress as they recline together, dignified and

whiskered and bland, upon the benches of St. Stephen's.

But let us proceed with our portrait, which I vow is a most pleasing one.

Our typical legislator is of decent birth, or at least hopeful of

acquiring what he rightly protests to be but 'the guinea stamp' by

judiciously munificent contributions to his party's purse; honest and

scrupulous in dealing; neither so honest nor so scrupulous in thinking;

addicted to phrases and a trifle too impatient of their meaning, yet of

proved carefulness in drawing the line between phrase and practice; a

first-rate committeeman (and only those who have sat long in committee can

sound the depths of this praise); locally admired; with much _bonhomie_

of manner, backed by a reputation for standing no nonsense; good-tempered,

honestly anxious to reconcile conflicting interests and do the best for

the unconflicting ones of himself and his country; but above all a man who

knows where to stop. I vow (I repeat) he makes a dignified and amiable

figure. One can easily understand why people like to be represented by

such a man. It gives a feeling of security--a somewhat illusory one, I

believe; and security is the first instinct of a state. One can

understand, why the exhortations, dehortations, precepts, and instructions

of parents, preachers, schoolmasters tend explicitly and implicitly to the

reproduction of this admired bloom.

Yet one may whisper that it has--shall we say?--its failings; and its

failings are just those which are least to be commended to the emulation

of youth. It is, for instance, constitutionally timid. Violent action of

any kind will stampede it in a panic, and, like the Countess in _Evan

Harrington_, it "does not ruffle well." It betrays (I think) ill-breeding

in its disproportionate terror whenever an anarchist bomb explodes, and in

the ferocity of its terror it can be crueller than the assailant.

"My good people," it provokes one to say, "by all means stamp out these

dangers, but composedly, as becomes men conscious of their strength.

Even allowing for the unscrupulousness of your assailant, you have still

nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the odds in your favour;

and so long as you answer the explosions of weak anarchy by cries

suggestive of the rage of the sheep, you merely raise the uncomfortable

suspicion that, after all, there must be something amiss with a

civilisation which counts you among its most expensive products."

But in the untroubled hour of prosperity this weakness of breeding is

scarcely less apparent. Our admired bloom is admired rather for not doing

certain things than for doing others. His precepts are cautious and

mainly negative. He does not get drunk (in public at any rate), and he

expends much time and energy in preventing men from getting drunk. But

he does not lead or heartily incite to noble actions, although at times--

when he has been badly frightened--he is ready to pay men handsomely to do

them. He wins and loses elections on questions of veto. He had rather

inculcate the passive than the active virtues. He prefers temperance and

restraint to energy and resolve. He thinks more of the organisation than

the practice of charity, esteems a penny saved as three halfpence gained,

had liefer detect an impostor than help a deserving man. He is apt to

label all generous emotions as hysterical, and in this he errs; for when a

man calls the generous emotions hysterical he usually means that he would

confuse them with hysterics if they happened to him.

Now the passive virtues--continence, frugality, and the like--are

desirable, but shade off into mere want of pluck; while the active

virtues--courage, charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness--are ever

those upon which the elect and noble souls in history have laid the

greater stress. I frankly detest Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be

a venal person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) imitation of

the type. But, supposing him to be the real thing, I still think that, if

you want a model for your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney.

If ever a man illustrated the beauty of the active virtues in his life and

in his death, that man was Sidney; but he also gave utterance in noble

speech to his belief in them. In the _Apologie for Poetrie_ you will find

none of your art-for-art's-sake chatter: Sidney boldly takes the line that

poetry helps men, and helps them not to well-being only, but to

well-doing, and again helps them to well-doing not merely by teaching

(as moral philosophy does) but by inciting. For an instance--

"Who readeth AEneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not

it were his fortune to perform so-excellent an act?"

There speaks, anticipating Zutphen, the most perfect knight in our

history. Again--

"Truly I have known men that even with reading _Amadis de Gaule_

(which, God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect poesy) have found

their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and

especially courage."--

All active virtues be it noted. "We are not damned for doing wrong,"

writes Stevenson, "but for not doing right. Christ will never hear of

negative morality: _Thou shalt_ was ever His word, with which He

superseded _Thou shalt not_. To make our morality centre on forbidden

acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of

our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. . . . In order that a man may be

kind and honest it may be needful that he should become a total abstainer:

let him become so then, and the next day let him forget the circumstance.

Trying to be kind and honest will require all his thoughts." Yet how many

times a day will we say 'don't' to our children for once that we say 'do'?

But here I seem to be within reasonable distance of discussing original

sin, and so I return to Mr. Blank.

I do not like Mr. Blank; and I disliked his speech the other night so

heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my

reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was

scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of

it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help the creature!

CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE.

Who lives in suit of armour pent,

And hides himself behind a wall,

For him is not the great event,

The garland, nor the Capitol.

And is God's guerdon less than they?

Nay, moral man, I tell thee Nay:

Nor shall the flaming forts be won

By sneaking negatives alone,

By Lenten fast or Ramazan,

But by the challenge proudly thrown--

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

God, in His Palace resident

Of Bliss, beheld our sinful ball,

And charged His own Son innocent

Us to redeem from Adam's fall.

--"Yet must it be that men Thee slay."

--"Yea, tho' it must must I obey,"

Said Christ,--and came, His royal Son,

To die, and dying to atone

For harlot and for publican.

Read on that rood He died upon--

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

And by that rood where He was bent

I saw the world's great captains all

Go riding to the tournament--

Cyrus the Great and Hannibal,

Caesar of Rome and Attila,

Lord Charlemagne with his array,

Lord Alisaundre of Macedon--

With flaming lance and habergeon

They passed, and to the rataplan

Of drums gave salutation--

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

Had tall Achilles lounged in tent

For aye, and Xanthus neigh'd in stall,

The towers of Troy had ne'er been shent,

Nor stay'd the dance in Priam's hall.

Bend o'er thy book till thou be grey,

Read, mark, perpend, digest, survey--

Instruct thee deep as Solomon--

One only chapter thou shalt con,

One lesson learn, one sentence scan,

One title and one colophon--

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

High Virtue's hest is eloquent

With spur and not with martingall:

Sufficeth not thou'rt continent:

BE COURTEOUS, BRAVE, AND LIBERAL.

God fashion'd thee of chosen clay

For service, nor did ever say

"Deny thee this," "Abstain from yon,"

Save to inure thee, thew and bone,

To be confirmed of the clan

That made immortal Marathon--

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

ENVOY.

Young Knight, the lists are set to-day:

Hereafter shall be long to pray

In sepulture with hands of stone.

Ride, then! outride the bugle blown

And gaily dinging down the van

Charge with a cheer--Set on! Set on!

_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_

A friend to whom I showed these verses remarked that Mr. Blank was indeed

a person who fed his soul upon negatives; but that I possibly did him some

injustice in charging so much of this to timidity, whereas the scent lay

rather in the gusto with which he judged his fellow-men.

"And, by the way," said he, "is there not some gusto in the scorn with

which you are judging Mr. Blank at this moment?" "Do you remember," I

answered, "how that man, after voting for war the other day, went straight

off to a meeting of the Peace Society and put up a florid appeal to the

Prince of Peace for a time when wars should be no more? Let him be,

however: I do wrong to lose my temper with him. But on this matter of

national timidity I have something to say. . . ."

I have been reading John Holland's two _Discourses of the Navy_, written

in 1638 and 1659, and published the other day by the Navy Records Society.

The object of Mr. Holland's discourses was to reform the Navy, purge it of

abuses, and strengthen it for the defence of this realm; and I have been

curious to compare his methods with those of our own Navy League, which

has been making such a noise for ten years or so. The first thing I

observe is the attitude of mind in which he approaches his subject:--

"If either the honour of a nation, commerce or trust with all nations,

peace at home, grounded upon our enemies' fear or love of us abroad,

and attended with plenty of all things necessary either for the

preservation of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things

worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal conceit) then

next to God and thy King give thy thanks for the same to the Navy.

As for honour, who knows not (that knows anything) that in all

records of late times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame

and renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread that

runs through the whole wooft, the burden of the song, the scope of

the text? . . ."

He proceeds to enumerate some particular commercial advantages due to our

mastery of the sea, and sums up in these words:--

"Suffice it thus far, nothing under God, who doth all, hath brought so

much, so great commerce to this Kingdom as the rightly noble

employments of our navy; a wheel, if truly turned, that sets to work

all Christendom by its motion; a mill, if well extended, that in a

sweet yet sovereign composure contracts the grist of all nations to

its own dominions, and requires only the tribute of its own people,

not for, but towards, its maintenance."

The eloquence may be turgid, but the attitude is dignified. The man does

not scold; does not terrify. He lays his stress on the benefits of a

strong navy--on the renown it has won for England in the past. He assumes

his readers to be intelligent men, amenable to advice which will help them

to perpetuate this renown and secure these benefits in time to come.

His exordium over, he settles down to an exposition of the abuses which

are impairing our naval efficiency, and suggests reforms, some wisely

conceived, others not so wisely, with the business-like, confident air of

one who knows what he is talking about.

Now I open the prospectus in which our Navy League started out to make

everyone's flesh creep, and come plump upon language of this sort:--

"It is the close, let us suppose, of our second month of war.

The fleet has been neglected, and has been overwhelmed, unready and

unprepared. We have been beaten twice at sea, and our enemies have

established no accidental superiority, but a permanent and

overwhelming one. The telegraph cables have been severed, one and

all; these islands are in darkness."--

For presumably the gas-mains, as well as the cables, have been 'severed'

(imposing word!)--

--"Under a heavy cloud of woe. Invasion is in the air, our armies

are mustering in the south. We are cut off from the world, and can

only fitfully perceive what is happening. Our liners have been

captured or sunk on the high seas; our ocean tramps are in our

enemies' hands; British trade is dead, killed by the wholesale

ravages of the hostile cruisers. Our ports are insulted or held up

to ransom, when news reaches us from India it is to the effect that

the enemy is before our troops, a native insurrection behind.

Malta has fallen, and our outlying positions are passing from our

hands. Food is contraband, and may not be imported. Amid the jeers

of Europe 'the nation of shopkeepers' is writhing in its death

agony."

Pretty, is it not? But let us have just a little more.

"COMMERCIAL COLLAPSE.

"And what of the internal, of the social position? Consols have

fallen to nearly 30; our vast investments in India have been lost;

trade no longer exists. . . . The railways have no traffic to carry.

. . . Banks and companies are failing daily. . . The East End of

London is clamouring for bread and peace at any price. If we fall,

we fall for ever. . . . The working man has to choose whether he will

have lighter taxation for the moment, starvation and irretrievable

ruin for the future . . ."

--And so on, till Z stands for Zero, or nothing at all. Or, as the late

Mr. Lear preferred to write:--

"Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc, Get in, my little master!

We'll shut you up; we'll nail you down: we will, my little master!

We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'"

To speak as seriously as may be, the language is no longer hortatory, like

Holland's, but minatory, even comminatory. It is (as its author would not

deny) the language of panic deliberately employed, a calculated attempt to

strengthen the _materiel_ of the navy at the cost of Englishmen's fears.

Now let me define my feeling towards the Navy League. As an ordinary

British citizen, I must heartily approve its aim of strengthening the navy

and keeping it efficient. As an ordinary reasonable man, I must admit

that its efforts, if rightly directed, may be of great national service.

But language such as I have quoted must (so far as it is not merely

contemptible) be merely demoralising, and anyone who works on the fears of

a nation--and especially of a nation which declines conscription and its

one undoubted advantage of teaching men what war means--does a harm which

is none the less wicked for being incalculable. These Navy Leaguers cry

incessantly for more _material_ strength. They tell us that in material

strength we should at least be equal to any two other countries.

A few months pass, and then, their appetite growing with the terror it

feeds upon, they insist that we must be equal to any three other

countries. Also "it does not appear," they sagely remark, "that Nelson

and his contemporaries left any record as to what the proportion of the

blockading should bear (_sic_) to one blockaded,"--a curious omission of

Nelson's, to be sure! He may perhaps have held that it depended on the

quality of the antagonists.

To this a few ordinary stupid Britons like myself have always answered

that no amount of _materiel_ can ever replace _morale_; and that all such

panic-making is a mischievous attempt to lower the breed, and the more

mischievous because its mischief may for a while be imperceptible.

We can see our warships growing: we cannot see the stamina decaying; yet

it is our stamina on which we must rely finally in the fatal hour of

trial. We said this, and we were laughed at; insulted as unpatriotic--a

word of which one may say in kindness that it would not so readily leap to

the lips of professional patriots if they were able to understand what it

means and, by consequence, how much it hurts.

Yes, and behold, along comes Admiral Togo, and at one stroke proves that

we were simply, absolutely and henceforward incontestably right!

What were our little three-power experts doing on the morrow of Togo's

victory? They are making irrelevant noises in the halfpenny press,

explaining how Admiral Togo did it with an inferior force, and in a

fashion that belies all their axioms. But I turn to _The Times_ and I

read:--

"The event shows that mere material equality is but as dust in the

balance when weighed in the day of battle against superiority of

moral equipment."

--Which, when you come to think of it, is precisely what Bacon meant when

he wrote:--

"Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of Horse,

Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery and the like: all

this is but a Sheep in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition

of the People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) in Armies

importeth not much where the People is of weake Courage: For

(as _Virgil_ saith) _it never troubles a Wolfe how many the Sheepe

be_."

Do our friends of the Navy League seriously believe that a principle as

old as humankind can be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine or

of some novelty in guns? Even in their notions of what material strength

means I hold them to be mistaken. The last resource which a nation ought

to neglect is its financial credit. It was Walpole's long policy of peace

which made possible Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger

conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a nation's cowardice to

raise money for its protection. An old text, my masters! It seems a long

while that some of us were preaching it in vain until Admiral Togo came

along and proved it.

I observe that a Member of Parliament for a West of England constituency

(a better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments

with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes

write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs.

My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province

of a man of letters consider him worthy to pay income-tax.

I pass over some tempting reflections on the queer anomaly that this

prohibition should be addressed (as it so often is) by writers to writers,

by newspaper writers to men who write books, and (so far as a distinction

can be drawn) by men who write in a hurry to men who write deliberately.

I wish to look quietly into the belief on which it rests and to inquire

how that belief was come by.

There certainly was a time when such a belief would have been laughed at

as scarcely reasonable enough to be worth discussing. And that time,

oddly enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest era of the

world's literature, the greatest era of political discovery, and the

greatest era of Empire-making. The men who made Athens and the men

who made Rome would have disputed (I fear somewhat contemptuously) the

axiom on which my friend the West Country member builds his case.

They held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters ought

not to work in cloistral isolation, removed from public affairs, and

indifferent to them; that on the contrary they are direct servants of

their State, and have a peculiar call to express themselves on matters of

public moment. To convince you that I am not advancing any pet theory of

my own let me present it in the words of a grave and judicious student,

Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford:--

"The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek conception of

art and morals. For though, in the view of the philosopher, the

virtue of the good citizen was not always necessarily identical with

the virtue of the individual man, and though, in the city of Athens

at all events, a large amount of life was possible to the individual

apart from public interests, yet it is none the less true that the

life of the individual in every Greek city was in reality moulded by

the customary life, tradition and character, in one intranslatable

word, by the _ethos_ of the State. Out of this native soil grew

that recognised, though not necessarily public, system of education

(_politike paideia_ ), consisting of reading and writing, music

and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle themselves accepted as the

basis of the constitution of the State. But this preliminary

education was only the threshold to a subsequent system of political

training, of which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an

opportunity of availing himself by his right to participate in public

affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics themselves were

an instrument of individual refinement. 'The magistrates,' said he,

in his great funeral oration, 'who discharge public trusts, fulfil

their domestic duties also; the private citizen, while engaged in

professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs; for

we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter

not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and

pronounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps

strike out for ourselves correct reasonings upon them; far from

accounting discussion an impediment to action, we complain only if we

are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it.'

"The strenuous exertion of the faculties of the individual in the

service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects

itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is

the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect,

alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as

the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation.

It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of

Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in

such plays as the _Persae_ and _Eumeuides_ of AEschylus, the

_Antigone_ of Sophocles, the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, the History

of Thucydides and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment

being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the souls of those

who risked their lives at Marathon."--_History of English Poetry_,

vol. i., c 2.

In the most brilliant age of Greece, then, and of Greek art and letters,

the civic spirit was the inspiring spirit. But as the Greek cities sank

one by one before the Macedonian power and forfeited their liberties, this

civic spirit died for lack of nourishment and exercise, and literature was

driven to feed on itself--which is about the worst thing that can ever

happen to it, and one of the worst things that can happen to a nation.

The old political education gave place to an 'encyclopaedic' education.

The language fell into the hands of grammarians and teachers of rhetoric,

whose inventions may have a certain interest of their own, but--to quote

Mr. Courthope again--no longer reflect the feelings and energies of free

political life. Roman literature drives home the same, or a similar,

moral. "The greatness of Rome was as entirely civic in its origin as that

of any Greek city, and, like the Greek cities, Rome in the days of her

freedom, and while she was still fighting for the mastery, preserved a

system of political education, both in the hearth and the Senate, which

was suited to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to Plutarch,

'wrote histories for his son, with his own hand, in large characters; so

that without leaving his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the

illustrious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country':

and what is of importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even

after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt

to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who

adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once

the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as

its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's

Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such passages as

the famous eulogy--

"Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra,

Nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus

Laudibus Italiae certent. . . ."

It closes the last Georgic on a high political note. Avowedly it inspires

the _AEneid_. It permeates all that Horace wrote. These two poets never

tire of calling on their countrymen to venerate the Roman virtues, to hold

fast by the old Sabine simplicity and:

"Pure religion breathing household laws."

Again, when the mischief was done, and Rome had accepted the Alexandrine

model of education and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old spirit

in his denunciation of the hundred and more trivialities which the new

spirit engendered. It was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot expect

quite the same shout from a man who leads a forlorn sortie, and a man who

defends a proud citadel while yet it is merely threatened. But, allowing

for changed circumstances, you will find that Juvenal's is just the old

civic spirit turned to fierceness by despair. And he strikes out

unerringly enough at the ministers of Rome's decline--at the poets who

chatter and the rhetoricians who declaim on merely 'literary' topics; the

rich who fritter away life on private luxuries and the pursuit of trivial

aims; the debased Greek with his "smattering of encyclopaedic knowledge,"

but no devotion to the city in which he only hopes to make money.

Now is this civic spirit in literature (however humble its practitioners)

one which England can easily afford to despise? So far as I know, it has

been reserved for an age of newspapers to declare explicitly that such a

spirit is merely mischievous; that a poet ought to be a man of the study,

isolated amid the stir of passing events, serenely indifferent to his

country's fortunes, or at least withholding his gift (allowed, with

magnificent but unconscious irony, to be 'divine') from that general

contribution to the public wisdom in which journalists make so brave a

show. He may, if he have the singular luck to be a Laureate, be allowed

to strike his lyre and sing of an _accouchement_; this being about the

only event on which politicians and journalists have not yet claimed the

monopoly of offering practical advice. But farther he may hardly go: and

all because a silly assertion has been repeated until second-rate minds

confuse it with an axiom. People of a certain class of mind seem capable

of believing anything they see in print, provided they see it often.

For these, the announcement that somebody's lung tonic possesses a

peculiar virtue has only to be repeated at intervals along a railway line,

and with each repetition the assurance becomes more convincing, until

towards the journey's end it wears the imperativeness almost of a revealed

truth. And yet no reasonable inducement to belief has been added by any

one of these repetitions. The whole thing is a psychological trick.

The moral impressiveness of the first placard beyond Westbourne Park

Station depends entirely on whether you are travelling from London to

Birmingham, or from Birmingham to London. A mind which yields itself to

this illusion could probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale

pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were anyone interested in

enforcing such a harmless proposition: and I have no doubt that the Man in

the Street has long since accepted the reiterated axiom that a poet should

hold aloof from public affairs, having no more capacity than a child for

understanding their drift.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the cry is just a cant party trick, used by each

party in its turn. Mr. Kipling writes "Cleared," Mr. Alfred Austin hymns

"Jameson's Ride," and forthwith the Liberals lift hands and voices in

horror. Mr. Watson denounces the Armenian massacres or the Boer War, and

the Unionists can hardly find words to express their pained surprise.

Mr. Swinburne inveighed against Irishmen, and delighted a party; inveighed

against the Czar, and divided a whole Front Bench between shocked

displeasure and half-humorous astonishment that a poet should have any

opinions about Russia, or, having some, should find anybody to take them

seriously. It is all cant, my friends--nothing but cant; and at its base

lies the old dispute between principle and casuistry. If politics and

statecraft rest ultimately on principles of right and wrong, then a poet

has as clear a right as any man to speak upon them: as clear a right now

as when Tennyson lifted his voice on behalf of the Fleet, or Wordsworth

penned his 'Two Voices' sonnet, or Milton denounced the massacres at

Piedmont. While this nation retains a conscience, its poets have a clear

right and a clear call to be the voice of that conscience. They may err,

of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of

conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'--one or both--may

misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness

or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as

literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral

conviction that is in him.

If, on the other hand, politics be a mere affair of casuistry; or worse--a

mere game of opportunism in which he excels who hits on the cleverest

expedient for each several crisis as it occurs; then indeed you may bid

the poet hush the voice of principle, and listen only to the sufficiently

dissonant instruction of those specialists at the game who make play in

Parliament and the press. If politics be indeed that base thing connoted

by the term "_drift_ of public affairs," then the axiom rests on wisdom

after all. The poet cannot be expected to understand the "drift," and had

better leave it to these specialists in drifting.

But if you search, you will find that poetry--rare gift as it is, and

understood by so few--has really been exerting an immense influence on

public opinion all the while that we have been deluged with assertions of

this unhappy axiom. Why, I dare to say that one-half of the sense of

Empire which now dominates political thought in Great Britain has been the

creation of her poets. The public, if it will but clear its mind of cant,

is grateful enough for such poetry as Mr. Kipling's 'Flag of England' and

Mr. Henley's 'England, my England'; and gratefully recognises that the

spirit of these songs has passed on to thousands of men, women, and

children, who have never read a line of Mr. Henley's or Mr. Kipling's

composition.

As for the axiom, it is merely the complement of that 'Art for Art's sake'

chatter which died a dishonoured death but a short while ago, and which it

is still one of the joys of life to have outlived. You will remember how

loftily we were assured that Art had nothing to do with morality: that the

novelist, e.g. who composed tales of human conduct, had no concern with

ethics--that is to say with the principles of human conduct: that

"Art's only business was to satisfy Art," and so forth. Well, it is all

over now, and packed away in the rag-bag of out-worn paradoxes; and we are

left to enjoy the revived freshness of the simple truth that an artist

exists to serve his art, and his art to serve men and women.

AUGUST.

As it was reported to me, the story went that one Sunday morning in August

a family stood in a window not far from this window of mine--the window of

an hotel coffee-room--and debated where to go for divine worship.

They were three: father, mother, and daughter, arrived the night before

from the Midlands, to spend their holiday. "The fisher-folk down here are

very religious," said the father, contemplating the anchored craft--

yachts, trading-steamers, merchantmen of various rigs and nationalities--

in which he supposed the native population to go a-fishing on week-days:

for he had been told in the Midlands that we were fisher-folk.

"Plymouth Brethren mostly, I suppose," said the wife: "we changed at

Plymouth." "Bristol." "Was it Bristol? Well, Plymouth was the last big

town we stopped at: I am sure of _that_. And this is on the same coast,

isn't it?" "What _are_ Plymouth Brethren?" the daughter asked.

"Oh, well, my dear, I expect they are very decent, earnest people.

It won't do us any harm to attend their service, if they have one.

What I say is, when you're away on holiday, do as the Romans do."

The father had been listening with an unprejudiced air, as who should say,

"I am here by the seaside for rest and enjoyment." He called to the

waiter, "What places of worship have you?" The waiter with professional

readiness hinted that he had some to suit all tastes, "Church of England,

Wesleyan, Congregational, Bible Christian--" "Plymouth Brethren?"

The waiter had never heard of them: they had not, at any rate, been asked

for within his recollection. He retired crestfallen. "That's the worst

of these waiters," the father explained: "they get 'em down for the season

from Lord knows where, Germany perhaps, and they can tell you nothing of

the place." "But this one is not a German, and he told me last night he'd

been here for years." "Well, the question is, Where we are to go?

Here, Ethel,"--as a second daughter entered, buttoning her gloves--"your

mother can't make up her mind what place of worship to try."

"Why, father, how can you _ask?_ We must go to the Church, of course--I

saw it from the 'bus--and hear the service in the fine old Cornish

language."

Now, I suspect that the friend to whom I am indebted for this story

introduced a few grace-notes into his report. But it is a moral story in

many respects, and I give it for the sake of the one or two morals which

may be drawn from it. In the first place, absurd as these people appear,

their ignorance but differs by a shade or two from the knowledge of

certain very learned people of my acquaintance. That is to say, they know

about as much concerning the religion of this corner of England to-day as

the archaeologists, for all their industry, know concerning the religion of

Cornwall before it became subject to the See of Canterbury in the reign of

Athelstan, A.D. 925-40; and their hypotheses were constructed on much the

same lines. Nay, the resemblance in method and in the general muddle of

conclusions obtained would have been even more striking had these good

persons mixed up Plymouth Brethren (founded in 1830) with the Pilgrim

Fathers who sailed out of Plymouth in 1620, and are already undergoing the

process of mythopoeic conversion into Deucalions and Pyrrhas of the United

States of America. Add a slight confusion of their tenets with those of

Mormonism, or at least a disposition to lay stress on all discoverable

points of similarity between Puritans and Mormons, and really you have a

not unfair picture of the hopeless mess into which our researchers in the

ancient religions of Cornwall have honestly contrived to plunge themselves

and us. It was better in the happy old days when we all believed in the

Druids; when the Druids explained everything, and my excellent father

grafted mistletoe upon his apple-trees--in vain, because nothing will

persuade the mistletoe to grow down here. But nobody believes in the

Druids just now: and the old question of the Cassiterides has never been

solved to general satisfaction: and the Indian cowrie found in a barrow at

Land's End, the tiny shell which raised such a host of romantic

conjectures and inspired Mr. Canton to write his touching verses:--

"What year was it that blew

The Aryan's wicker-work canoe

Which brought the shell to English land?

What prehistoric man or woman's hand,

With what intent, consigned it to this grave--

This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's last wave?"

"Beside it in the mound

A charmed bead of flint was found.

Some woman surely in this place

Covered with flowers a little baby-face,

And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;

And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?"

"No man shall ever know.

It happened all so long ago

That this same childless woman may

Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay

And watched for tin-ships that no longer came,

Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame."

This cowrie--are we even certain that it was Indian?--that it differed so

unmistakably from the cowries discoverable by twos and threes at times on

a little beach off which I cast anchor half a dozen times every summer?

I speak as a man anxious to get at a little plain knowledge concerning the

land of his birth, and the researchers seem honestly unable to give me any

that does not tumble to pieces even in their own hands. For--and this

seems the one advance made--the researchers themselves are honest

nowadays. Their results may be disappointing, but at least they no longer

bemuse themselves and us with the fanciful and even mystical speculations

their predecessors indulged in. Take the case of our inscribed stones and

wayside crosses. Cornwall is peculiarly rich in these: of crosses alone

it possesses more than three hundred. But when we make inquiry into their

age we find ourselves in almost complete fog. The merit of the modern

inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he acknowledges the fog,

and does not pretend to guide us out of it by haphazard hypotheses

propounded with pontifical gravity and assurance--which was the way of

that erratic genius, the Rev. R. S. Hawker:--

"Wheel-tracks in old Cornwall there were none, but there were strange

and narrow paths across the moorlands, which, the forefathers said, in

their simplicity, were first traced by Angels' feet. These, in truth,

were trodden and worn by religious men: by the Pilgrim as he paced his

way towards his chosen and votive bourne; or by the Palmer, whose

listless footsteps had neither a fixed Kebla nor future abode.

Dimly visible, by the darker hue of the crushed grass, these strait

and narrow roads led the traveller along from one Hermitage to another

Chapelry, or distant and inhabited cave; or the byeways turned aside

to reach some legendary spring, until at last, far, far away, the

winding track stood still upon the shore, where St. Michael of the

Mount rebuked the dragon from his throne of rock above the seething

sea. But what was the wanderer's guide along the bleak unpeopled

surface of the Cornish moor? The Wayside Cross! . . ."

Very pretty, no doubt! but, unlike the Wayside Cross, this kind of writing

leads nowhere. We want Mr. Hawker's authority for what 'the forefathers

said, in their simplicity'; without that, what the forefathers said

resembles what the soldier said in being inadmissible as evidence.

We want Mr. Hawker's authority for saying that these paths '_in truth_,

were trodden, and worn by religious men.' Nay we want his authority for

saying that there were any paths at all! The hypotheses of symbolism are

even worse; for these may lead to anything. Mr. Langdon was seriously

told on one occasion that the four holes of a cross represented the four

evangelists. "This," says he plaintively, "it will be admitted, is going

a little too far, as nothing else but four holes could be the result of a

ring and cross combined." At Phillack, in the west of Cornwall, there is

_part_ of a coped stone having a rude cable mounting along the top of the

ridge. Two sapient young archaeologists counted the remaining notches of

this cable, and, finding they came to _thirty-two_, decided at once that

they represented our Lord's age! They were quite certain, having counted

them twice. In fact, there seems to be nothing that symbolism will not

prove. Do you meet with a pentacle? Its five points are the fingers of

Omnipotence. With a six-pointed star? Then Omnipotence has taken an

extra finger, to include the human nature of the Messiah: and so on.

It reminds one of the Dilly Song:--

"I will sing you Five, O!"

"What is your Five, O?"

"Five it is the Dilly Bird that's never seen but heard, O!"

"I will sing you Six, O! . . ."

And six is 'The Cherubim Watchers,' or 'The Crucifix,' or 'The Cheerful

Waiters,' or 'The Ploughboys under the Bowl,' or whatever local fancy may

have hit on and made traditional.

The modern researcher is honest and sticks to facts; but there are next to

no facts. And when he comes to a tentative conclusion, he must hedge it

about with so many 'ifs,' that practically he leaves us in total

indecision. Nothing, for instance, can exceed the patient industry

displayed in the late Mr. William Copeland Borlase's _Age of the Saints_

--a monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall: but, in a way, no more

hopeless book was ever penned. The author confessed it, indeed, on his

last page. "There seems to be little ground for hope that we shall be

ever able to gain a perfectly true insight into the history of the epoch

with which we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes of so

tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put it, to be not unlike that of

gathering up the broken pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the

hope of fitting them together so as to make one large and perfect vase,

but finding during the process that they belong to several vessels, not

one of which is capable of restoration as a whole, though some faint

notion of the pristine shape of each may be gained from the general

pattern and contour of its shards. All that can be gained from the

materials at hand is a reasonable probability that Cornwall, before it

bent its neck to the See of Canterbury, had been invaded by three distinct

streams of missionary effort--from Ireland, from Wales, and from Brittany.

But even in what order they came no man can say for certain.

The young lady in my friend's story wished to hear the service of the

Church of England in 'the fine old Cornish language.' Alas! if Edward VI.

and his advisers had been as wise, the religious history of Cornwall,

during two centuries at least, had been a happier one. It was liberal to

give Englishmen a Liturgy in their own tongue; but it was neither liberal

nor conspicuously intelligent to impose the same upon the Cornishmen, who

neither knew nor cared about the English language. It may be easy to lay

too much stress upon this grievance; since Cornishmen of this period had a

knack of being 'agin the government, anyway,' and had contrived two

considerable rebellions less than sixty years before, one because they did

not see their way to subscribing 2,500 pounds towards fighting King James

IV. of Scotland for protecting Perkin Warbeck, and the other under

Perkin's own leadership. But it was at least a serious grievance; and the

trouble began in the first year of Edward VI.'s reign. The King began by

issuing several Injunctions about religion; and among them, this one:

That all images found in churches, for divine worship or otherwise, should

be pulled down and cast forth out of those churches; and that all

preachers should persuade the people from praying to saints, or for the

dead, and from the use of beads, ashes, processions, masses, dirges, and

praying to God publicly in an unknown tongue. A Mr. Body, one of the

commissioners appointed to carry out this Injunction, was pulling down

images in Helston church, near the Lizard, when a priest stabbed him with

a knife: "of which wound he instantly fell dead in that place. And though

the murderer was taken and sent up to London, tried, found guilty of

murder in Westminster Hall, and executed in Smithfield, yet the Cornish

people flocked together in a tumultuous and rebellious manner, by the

instigation of their priests in divers parts of the shire or county, and

committed many barbarities and outrages in the same." These disturbances

ended in Arundel's rebellion, the purpose of which was to demand the

restoration of the old Liturgy; and, in truth, the Seven Articles under

which they formulated this demand must have seemed very moderate indeed to

their conservative minds. The rebellion failed, of course, after a five

weeks' siege of Exeter; and was bloodily revenged, with something of the

savage humour displayed by Jeffreys in punishing a later Western

rebellion. This part of the business was committed to Sir Anthony

(_alias_ William) Kingston, Knight, a Gloucestershire man, as Provost

Marshal; and "it is memorable what sport he made, by virtue of his office,

upon men in misery." Here are one or two of his merry conceits, which

read strangely like the jests reported by Herodotus:--

(1) "One Boyer, Mayor of Bodmin in Cornwall, had been amongst the

rebels, not willingly, but enforced: to him the Provost sent word he

would come and dine with him: for whom the Mayor made great

provision. A little before dinner, the Provost took the Mayor aside,

and whispered him in the ear, that an execution must that day be done

in the town, and therefore required to have a pair of gallows set up

against dinner should be done. The Mayor failed not of the charge.

Presently after dinner the Provost, taking the Mayor by the hand,

intreated him to lead him where the gallows was, which, when he

beheld, he asked the Mayor if he thought them to be strong enough.

'Yes' (said the Mayor),'doubtless they are.' 'Well, then'(said the

Provost), 'get you up speedily, for they are provided for you.'

'I hope' (answered the Mayor), 'you mean not as you speak.'

'In faith' (said the Provost), 'there is no remedy, for you have been

a busie rebel.' And so without respite or defence he was hanged to

death; a most uncourteous part for a guest to offer his host."

--Sir Rich. Baker, 1641.

(2) "Near the same place dwelt a Miller, who had been a busie actor

in that rebellion; who, fearing the approach of the Marshal, told a

sturdy fellow, his servant, that he had occasion to go from home, and

therefore bid him, that if any man came to inquire after the miller,

he should not speak of him, but say that himself was the miller, and

had been so for three years before. So the Provost came and called

for the miller, when out comes the servant and saith he was the man.

The Provost demanded how long he had kept the mill? 'These three

years' (answered the servant). Then the Provost commanded his men to

lay hold on him and hang him on the next tree. At this the fellow

cried out that he was not the miller, but the miller's man.

'Nay, sir' (said the Provost), 'I will take you at your word, and if

thou beest the miller, thou art a busie knave; if thou beest not,

thou art a false lying knave; and howsoever, thou canst never do thy

master better service than to hang for him'; and so, without more

ado, he was dispatched."--_Ibid_.

The story of one Mayow, whom Kingston hanged at a tavern signpost in the

town of St. Columb, has a human touch. "Tradition saith that his crime

was not capital; and therefore his wife was advised by her friends to

hasten to the town after the Marshal and his men, who had him in custody,

and beg his life. Which accordingly she prepared to do; and to render

herself the more amiable petitioner before the Marshal's eyes, this dame

spent so much time in attiring herself and putting on her French hood,

then in fashion, that her husband was put to death before her arrival."

Such was the revenge wreaked on a population which the English of the day

took so little pains to understand that (as I am informed) in an old

geography book of the days of Elizabeth, Cornwall is described as

'a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain.'

And now that the holiday season is upon us, and the visitor stalks our

narrow streets, perhaps he will not resent a word or two of counsel in

exchange for the unreserved criticism he lavishes upon us. We are

flattered by his frequent announcement that on the whole he finds us clean

and civil and fairly honest; and respond with the assurance that we are

always pleased to see him so long as he behaves himself. We, too, have

found him clean and fairly honest; and if we have anything left to desire,

it is only that he will realise, a little more constantly, the extent of

his knowledge of us, and the extent to which his position as a visitor

should qualify his bearing towards us. I address this hint particularly

to those who make copy out of their wanderings in our midst; and I believe

it has only to be suggested, and it will be at once recognised for true,

that the proper attitude for a visitor in a strange land is one of

modesty. He may be a person of quite considerable importance in his own

home, even if that home be London; but when he finds himself on strange

soil he may still have a deal to learn from the people who have lived on

that soil for generations, adapted themselves to its conditions and sown

it with memories in which he cannot have a share.

In truth, many of our visitors would seem to suffer from a confusion of

thought. Possibly the Visitors' Books at hotels and places of public

resort may have fostered this. Our guest makes a stay of a few weeks in

some spot to which he has been attracted by its natural beauty: he idles

and watches the inhabitants as they go about their daily business; and at

the end he deems it not unbecoming to record his opinion that they are

intelligent, civil, honest, and sober--or the reverse. He mistakes.

It is _he_ who has been on probation during these weeks--_his_

intelligence, _his_ civility, _his_ honesty, _his_ sobriety. For my

part, I look forward to a time when Visitors' Books shall record the

impressions which visitors leave behind them, rather than those which they

bear away. For an instance or two:--

(1) "The Rev. and Mrs. '--', of '--', arrived here in August, 1897,

and spent six weeks. We found them clean, and invariably sober and

polite. We hope they will come often."

(2) "Mr. X and his friend Y, from Z, came over here, attired in

flannels and the well-known blazer of the Tooting Bec Cricket Club.

They shot gulls in the harbour, and made themselves a public

nuisance by constant repetition of a tag from a music-hall song,

with an indecent sub-intention. Their behaviour towards the young

women of this town was offensive. Seen in juxtaposition with the

natural beauties of this coast, they helped one to realise how small

a thing (under certain conditions) is man."

(3) "Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so and family spent a fortnight here.

The lady complained that the town was dull, which we (who would have

the best reason to complain of such a defect) do not admit.

She announced her opinion in the street, at the top of her voice; and

expressed annoyance that there should be no band to play of an

evening. She should have brought one. Her husband carried about a

note-book and asked us questions about our private concerns.

He brought no letters of introduction, and we do not know his

business. The children behaved better."

(4) "Mr. Blank arrived here on a bicycle, and charmed us with the

geniality of his address. We hope to see him again, as he left

without discharging a number of small debts."

It is, I take it, because the Briton has grown accustomed to invading

other people's countries, that he expects, when travelling, to find a

polite consideration which he does not import. But the tourist pushes the

expectation altogether too far. When he arrives at a town which lays

itself out to attract visitors for the sake of the custom they bring, he

has a right to criticise, _if he feel quite sure he is a visitor of the

sort which the town desires_. This is important: for a town may seek to

attract visitors, and yet be exceedingly unwilling to attract some kinds

of visitors. But should he choose to plant himself upon a spot where the

inhabitants ask only to go about the ordinary occupations of life in

quietness, it is the height of impertinence to proclaim that the life of

the place does not satisfy his needs. Most intolerable of all is the

conduct of the uninvited stranger who settles for a year or two in some

quiet town--we suffer a deal from such persons along the south-western

littoral--and starts with the intention of "putting a little 'go' into

it," or, in another of his favourite phrases, of "putting the place to

rights." Men of this mind are not to be reasoned with; nor is it

necessary that they should be reasoned with. Only, when the inevitable

reaction is felt, and they begin to lose their temper, I would beg them

not to assume too hastily that the 'natives' have no sense of humour.

All localities have a sense of humour, but it works diversely with them.

A man may even go on for twenty years, despising his neighbours for the

lack of it. But when the discovery comes, he will be lucky if the

remembrance of it do not wake him up of nights, and keep him writhing in

his bed--that is, if we suppose _him_ to have a sense of humour too.

An aeronaut who had lost his bearings, descending upon some farm labourers

in Suffolk, demanded anxiously where he was. "Why, don't you know?

You be up in a balloon, bo." A pedestrian in Cornwall stopped a labourer

returning from work, and asked the way to St.--'. "And where might

you come from?" the labourer demanded. "I don't see what affair that is

of yours. I asked you the way to St. '--'." "Well then, if you don't

tell us where you be come from, we bain't goin' to tell you the way to

St. '--'" It seems to me that both of these replies contain humour, and

the second a deal of practical wisdom.

The foregoing remarks apply, with very little modification, to those

strangers who take up their residence in Cornwall and, having sojourned

among us for a while without ever penetrating to the confidence of the

people, pass judgment on matters of which, because they were above

learning, knowledge has been denied to them. A clergyman, dwelling in a

country parish where perhaps he finds himself the one man of education

(as he understands it), is prone enough to make the mistake; yet not more

fatally prone than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees his

unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they are, but as a clever

novelist would present them to amuse an upper or middle class reader.

Stevenson (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that he could

make nothing of us:--

"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family

and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one

reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the

rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious

race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great

of the Cornish: for my part, I can make nothing of them at all.

A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel,

keeps this close esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.

Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of

the lessons of travel--that some of the strangest races dwell next

door to you at home."

This straightforward admission is worth (to my mind) any half-dozen of

novels written about us by 'foreigners' who, starting with the

Mudie-convention and a general sense that we are picturesque, write

commentaries upon what is a sealed book and deal out judgments which are

not only wrong, but wrong with a thoroughness only possible to entire

self-complacency.

And yet . . . It seems to a Cornishman so easy to get at Cornish hearts--

so easy even for a stranger if he will approach them, as they will at once

respond, with that modesty which is the first secret of fine manners.

Some years ago I was privileged to edit a periodical--though short-lived

not wholly unsuccessful--the _Cornish Magazine_. At the end of each

number we printed a page of 'Cornish Diamonds,' as we called them--scraps

of humour picked up here and there in the Duchy by Cornish correspondents;

and in almost all of them the Cornishman was found gently laughing at

himself; in not one of them (so far as I remember) at the stranger.

Over and over again the jest depended on our small difficulties in making

our own distinctions of thought understood in English. Here are a few

examples:--

(1) "Please God," said Aunt Mary Bunny, "if I live till this evenin'

and all's well I'll send for the doctor."

(2) "I don't name no names," said Uncle Billy "but Jack Tremenheere's

the man."

(3) "I shan't go there nor nowhere else," said old Jane Caddy,

"I shall go 'long up Redruth."

(4) "I thought 'twere she, an' she thought 'twere I," said Gracey

Temby, "but when we come close 'twadn't narry wan o' us."

(5) A crowd stood on the cliff watching a stranded vessel and the

lifeboat going out to her.

"What vessel is it?" asked a late arrival.

"The _Dennis Lane_."

"How many be they aboord?"

"Aw, love and bless 'ee, there's three poor dear sawls and wan old

Irishman."

(6) Complainant (cross-examining defendant's witness): "What colour

was the horse?"

"Black."

"Well, I'm not allowed to contradict you, and I wouldn' for worlds:

but I say he wasn't."

(7) A covey of partridges rose out of shot, flew over the hedge, and was

lost to view. "Where do you think they've gone?" said the sportsman

to his keeper. "There's a man digging potatoes in the next field.

Ask if he saw them."

"Aw, that's old Sam Petherick: he hasna seed 'em, he's hard o'

hearin'."

(8) _Schoolmaster_: "I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. Minards, that your son

Zebedee is little better than a fool."

_Parent_: "Naw, naw, schoolmaster; my Zebedee's no fule; only a bit

easy to teach."

[I myself know a farmer who approached the head master of a Grammar School

and begged for a reduction in terms: "because," he pleaded, "I know my

son: he's that thick you can get very little into en, and I believe in

payment by results."]

Here we pass from confusion of language into mere confusion of thought,

the classical instance of which is the Mevagissey man who, having been

asked the old question, "If a herring and a half cost three-halfpence, how

many can you buy for a shilling?'" and having given it up and been told

the answer, responded brightly, "Why, o' course! Darn me, if I wasn'

thinkin' of pilchards!" I met with a fair Devon rival to this story the

other day in the reported conversation of two farmers discussing the

electric light at Chagford (run by Chagford's lavish water-power).

"It do seem out of reason," said the one, "to make vire out o' watter."

"No," agreed the other, "it don't seem possible: but there,"--after a slow

pause--"'tis butiful water to Chaggyford!"

It was pleasant, while the Magazine lasted, to record these and like

simplicities: and though the voyage was not long, one may recall without

regret its send-off, brave enough in its way:--

"'WISH 'EE WELL!'

"The ensign's dipped; the captain takes the wheel.

'So long!' the pilot waves, and 'Wish 'ee well!'

Go little craft, and with a home-made keel

'Mid loftier ships, but with a heart as leal,

Learn of blue waters and the long sea swell!

"Through the spring days we built and tackled thee,

Tested thy timbers, saw thy rigging sound,

Bent sail, and now put forth unto the sea

Where those leviathans, the critics, be,

And other monsters diversely profound.

"Some bronzed Phoenician with his pigmy freight

Haply thy herald was, who drave of yore

Deep-laden from Bolerium by the Strait

Of Gades, and beside his city's gate

Chaffered in ingots cast of Cornish ore.

"So be thou fortunate as thou art bold;

Fare, little craft, and make the world thy friend:

And, it may be--when all thy journey's told

With anchor dropped and tattered canvas rolled,

And some good won for Cornwall in the end--

"Thou wilt recall, as best, a lonely beach,

And a few exiles, to the barter come,

Who recognised the old West-country speech,

And touched thee, reverent, whispering each to each--

'She comes from far--from very far--from home.'"

I have a special reason for remembering _The Cornish Magazine_, because it

so happened that the first number (containing these hopeful verses) was

put into my hands with the morning's letters as I paced the garden below

this Cornish Window, careless of it or of anything but a doctor's verdict

of life or death in the house above. The verdict was for life. . . .

Years ago as a child I used to devour in that wonderful book _Good Words

for the Young_, the _Lilliput Levee_ and _Lilliput Lyrics_ of the late

William Brighty Rands: and among Rands' lyrics was one upon "The Girl that

Garibaldi kissed." Of late years Rands has been coming to something like

his own. His verses have been republished, and that excellent artist Mr.

Charles Robinson has illustrated them. But I must tell Mr. Robinson that

his portrait of the Girl that Garibaldi kissed does not in the least

resemble her. I speak with knowledge--I the child who have lived to meet

and know the child whom Garibaldi kissed and blessed as the sailors were

weighing anchor to carry him out of this harbour and away from England.

Wild horses shall not drag from me the name of that young person; because

it happened--well, at an easily discoverable date--and she may not care

for me to proclaim her age (as certainly she does not look it).

"He bowed to my own daughter,

And Polly is her name;

She wore a shirt of slaughter,

Of Garibaldi flame--

"Of course I mean of scarlet;

But the girl he kissed--who knows?--

May be named Selina Charlotte,

And dressed in yellow clothes!"

But she isn't; and she wasn't; for she wore a scarlet pelisse as they

handed her up the yacht's side, and the hero took her in his arms.

"It would be a happy plan

For everything that's human,

If the pet of such a man

Should grow to such a woman!

"If she does as much in her way

As he has done in his--

Turns bad things topsy-turvy,

And sad things into bliss--

"O we shall not need a survey

To find that little miss,

Grown to a woman worthy

Of Garibaldi's kiss!"

Doggrel? Yes, doggrel no doubt! Let us pass on.

In the early numbers of our _Cornish Magazine_ a host of contributors

(some of them highly distinguished) discussed the question,

'How to develop Cornwall as a holiday resort.' 'How to bedevil it' was, I

fear, our name in the editorial office for this correspondence. More and

more as the debate went on I found myself out of sympathy with it, and

more and more in sympathy with a lady who raised an indignant protest--

"Unless Cornishmen look to it, their country will be spoilt before

they know it. Already there are signs of it--pitiable signs;

Not many months ago I visited Tintagel, which is justly one of the

prides of the Duchy. The 'swinging seas' are breaking against the

great cliffs as they broke there centuries ago when Arthur and

Launcelot and the Knights of the Round Table peopled the place.

The castle is mostly crumbled away now, but some fraction of its old

strength still stands to face the Atlantic gales, and to show us how

walls were built in the grand old days. In the valley the grass is

green and the gorse is yellow, and overhead the skies are blue and

delightful: but facing Arthur's Castle--grinning down, as it were,

in derision--there is being erected a modern hotel--'built in

imitation of Arthur's Castle,' as one is told! . . . There is not yet

a rubbish shoot over the edge of the cliff, but I do not think I am

wrong in stating that the drainage is brought down into that cove

where long ago (the story runs) the naked baby Arthur came ashore on

the great wave!"

In summing up the discussion I confess with shame that I temporised.

It was hard to see one's native country impoverished by the evil days in

which mining (and to a lesser degree, agriculture) had fallen; to see

her population diminishing and her able-bodied sons emigrating by the

thousand. It is all very pretty for a visitor to tell us that the charm

of Cornwall is its primaeval calm, that it seems to sleep an enchanted

sleep, and so on; but we who inhabit her wish (and not altogether from

mercenary motives) to see her something better than a museum of a dead

past. I temporised therefore with those who suggested that Cornwall might

yet enrich herself by turning her natural beauty to account: yet even so I

had the sense to add that--

"Jealous as I am for the beauty of our Duchy, and delighted when

strangers admire her, I am, if possible, more jealous for the

character of her sons, and more eager that strangers should respect

_them_. And I do see (and hope to be forgiven for seeing it) that a

people which lays itself out to exploit the stranger and the tourist

runs an appreciable risk of deterioration in manliness and

independence. It may seem a brutal thing to say, but as I had rather

be poor myself than subservient, so would I liefer see my countrymen

poor than subservient. It is not our own boast--we have it on the

fairly unanimous evidence of all who have visited us--that hitherto

Cornishmen have been able to combine independence with good manners.

For Heaven's sake, I say, let us keep that reputation, though at

great cost! But let us at the same time face the certainty that,

when we begin to take pay for entertaining strangers it will be a

hard reputation to keep. Were it within human capacity to decide

between a revival of our ancient industries, fishing and mining, and

the development of this new business, our decision would be prompt

enough. But it is not."

I despaired too soon. Our industries seem in a fair way to revive, and

with that promise I recognise that even in despair my willingness to

temporise was foolish. For my punishment--though I helped not to erect

them,--hideous hotels thrust themselves insistently on my sight as I walk

our magnificent northern cliffs, and with the thought of that drain

leading down to Arthur's cove I am haunted by the vision of Merlin erect

above it, and by the memory of Hawker's canorous lines:--

"He ceased; and all around was dreamy night:

There stood Dundagel, throned; and the great sea

Lay, like a strong vassal at his master's gate,

And, like a drunken giant, sobbed in sleep!"

SEPTEMBER.

IN THE BAG, _August 30th_.

At the village shop you may procure milk, butter, eggs, peppermints,

trowsers, sun-bonnets, marbles, coloured handkerchiefs, and a number of

other necessaries, including the London papers. But if you wish to pick

and choose, you had better buy trowsers than the London papers; for this

is less likely to bring you into conflict with the lady who owns the shop

and asserts a prior claim on its conveniences. One of us (I will call him

X) went ashore and asked for a London 'daily.' "Here's _Lloyd's Weekly

News_ for you," said the lady; "but you can't have the daily, for I

haven't finished reading it myself." "Very well," said I, when this was

reported; "if I cannot read the news I want, I will turn to and write it."

So I descended to the shop, and asked for a bottle of ink; since, oddly

enough, there was none to be found on board. The lady produced a bottle

and a pen. "But I don't want the pen," I objected. "They go together,"

said she: "Whatever use is a bottle of ink without a pen?" For the life

of me I could discover no answer to this. I paid my penny, and on

returning with my purchases to the boat, I propounded the following

questions:--

(1) _Quaere_. If, as the lady argued, a bottle of ink be

useless without a pen, by what process of reasoning did she omit

a sheet of paper from her pennyworth?

(2) Suppose that I damage or wear out this pen before exhausting

the bottle of ink, can she reasonably insist on my taking a

second bottle as a condition of acquiring a second pen?

(3) Suppose, on the other hand, that (as I compute) one pen will

outlast two and a half bottles of ink; that one bottle will

distil thirty thousand words; and that the late James Anthony

Froude (who lived close by) drew his supply of writing materials

from this shop: how many unused pens (at a guess) must that

distinguished man have accumulated in the process of composing

his _History of England?_

We sailed into Salcombe on Saturday evening, in a hired yacht of

twenty-eight tons, after beating around the Start and Prawl against a

sou'westerly wind and a strong spring tide. Now the tide off the Start

has to be studied. To begin with, it does not coincide in point of time

with the tide inshore. The flood, or east stream, for instance, only

starts to run there some three hours before it is high water at Salcombe;

but, having started, runs with a vengeance, or, to be more precise, at

something like three knots an hour during the high springs; and the

consequence is a very lively race. Moreover, the bottom all the way from

Start Point to Bolt Tail is extremely rough and irregular, which means

that some ten or twelve miles of vicious seas can be set going on very

short notice. Altogether you may spend a few hours here as uncomfortably

as anywhere up or down Channel, with the single exception of Portland

Race. If you turn aside for Salcombe, there is the bar to be considered;

and Salcombe bar is a danger to be treated with grave respect. The

_Channel Pilot_ will tell us why:--

"There is 8 ft. water at L.W. springs on the bar at the entrance,

but there are patches of 6 feet. Vessels drawing 20 ft. can

cross it (_when the sea is smooth_) at H.W. springs, and those

of 16 ft. at H.W. neaps. In S. gales there is a breaking, heavy

sea, and no vessel should then attempt the bar; in moderate S.

winds vessels may take it at high water."

The bearing of these observations on the present narrative will appear

anon. For the present, entering Salcombe with plenty of water and a

moderate S.W. breeze, we had nothing to distract our attention from the

beauty of the spot. I suppose it to be the most imposing river-entrance

on the south coast; perhaps the most imposing on any of the coasts of

Britain. But being lazy and by habit a shirker of word-painting, I must

have recourse to the description given in Mr. Arthur Underhill's _Our

Silver Streak_, most useful and pleasant of handbooks for yachtsmen

cruising in the Channel:--

"As we approach Salcombe Head (part of Bolt Head), its

magnificent form becomes more apparent. It is said to be about

four hundred and thirty feet in height, but it looks very much

more. Its base is hollowed out into numerous caverns, into

which the sea dashes, while the profile of the head, often

rising some forty or fifty feet sheer from the water, slopes

back at an angle of about forty-five degrees in one long upward

sweep, broken in the most fantastic way into numerous pinnacles

and needles, which remind one forcibly of the _aiguilles_ of the

valley of Chamounix. I do not think that any headland in the

Channel is so impressive as this."

As we passed it, its needles stood out darkly against a rare amber sky--

such a glow as is only seen for a brief while before a sunset following

much rain; and it had been raining, off and on, for a week past.

I daresay that to the weatherwise this glow signified yet dirtier weather

in store; but we surrendered ourselves to the charm of the hour.

Unconscious of their doom the little victims played. We crossed the bar,

sailed past the beautiful house in which Froude spent so many years,

sailed past the little town, rounded a point, saw a long quiet stretch of

river before us, and cast anchor in deep water. The address at the head

of this paper is no sportive invention of mine. You may verify it by the

Ordnance Map. We were in the Bag.

I awoke that night to the hum of wind in the rigging and the patter of

rain on deck. It blew and rained all the morning, and at noon took a

fresh breath and began to blow viciously. After luncheon we abandoned our

project of walking to Bolt Head, and chose such books from the cabin

library as might decently excuse an afternoon's siesta. A scamper of feet

fetched me out of my berth and up on deck. By this time a small gale was

blowing, and to our slight dismay the boat had dragged her anchors and

carried us up into sight of Kingsbridge. Luckily our foolish career was

arrested for the moment; and, still more luckily, within handy distance of

a buoy--laid there, I believe, for the use of vessels under quarantine.

We carried out a hawser to this buoy, and waited until the tide should

ease and allow us to warp down to it. Our next business was with the

peccant anchors. We had two down--the best anchor and kedge; and supposed

at first that the kedge must have parted. But a couple of minutes at the

capstan reassured us. It was the kedge which had been holding us, to the

extent of its small ability. And the Bag is an excellent anchorage after

all, but not if you happen to get your best anchor foul of its chain. We

hauled up, cleared, warped down to the buoy; and then, hoisting mizzen and

headsails, cast loose and worked back to our old quarters.

The afternoon's amusement, though exciting enough in its way, was not what

we had come to Salcombe to seek. And since the weather promised nothing

better, and already a heap of more or less urgent letters must be

gathering dust in the post office at Plymouth, we resolved to beat over

the bar at high water next morning (_this_ morning), and, as Mr. Lang puts

it, 'know the brine salt on our lips, and the large air again': for there

promised to be plenty of both between Bolt Head and the Mewstone.

'Shun delays, they breed remorse,' and 'Time wears all his locks before'

(or, as the Fourth-form boy translated it in pentameter,

"_Tempus habet nullat posteriori comas_"). The fault was mine for wasting

an invaluable hour among the 'shy traffickers' of Salcombe. By the time

we worked down to the bar the tide had been ebbing for an hour and a half.

The wind still blew strong from the south-west, and the seas on the bar

were not pleasant to contemplate. Let alone the remoter risk of scraping

on one of the two shallow patches which diversify the west (and only

practicable) side of the entrance, it one of those big fellows happened to

stagger us at the critical moment of 'staying' it would pretty certainly

mean disaster. Also the yacht (as I began by saying) was a hired one, and

the captain tender about his responsibility. Rather ignominiously,

therefore, we turned tail; and just as we did so, a handsome sea, arched

and green, the tallest of the lot, applauded our prudence. All the same,

our professional pride was wounded. To stay at anchor is one thing: to

weigh and stand for the attempt and then run home again 'hard up,' as a

sailor would say, is quite another. There was a Greek mariner, the other

day, put on his trial with one or two comrades for murder and mutiny on

the high seas. They had disapproved of their captain's altering the helm,

and had pitched him incontinently overboard. On being asked what he had

to say in his defence, the prisoner merely cast up his hands and sobbed,

"Oh, cursed hour in which we put about!" We recalled this simple but

apposite story.

Having seen to our anchor and helped to snug down the mainsail, I went

below in the very worst of tempers, to find the cabin floor littered with

the contents of a writing-case and a box of mixed biscuits, which had

broken loose in company. As I stooped to collect the _debris_, this

appeal (type-written) caught my eye:--

"Dear Sir,--Our paper is contemplating a Symposium of literary

and eminent men--"

(Observe the distinction.)

"--On the subject of 'What is your favourite Modern Lyric?' I need

not say how much interest would attach to the opinion of one

who," etc.

I put my head up the companion and addressed a friend who was lacing tight

the cover of the mainsail viciously, with the help of his teeth.

"Look here, X," I said. "What is your favourite Modern Lyric?"

"That one," he answered (still with the lace between his teeth), "which

begins--

"'Curse the people, blast the people,

Damn the lower orders!'"

X as a rule calls himself a Liberal-Conservative: but a certain acerbity

of temper may be forgiven in a man who has just assisted (against all his

instincts) in an act of poltroonery. He explained, too, that it was a

genuine, if loosely remembered, quotation from Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn

Law Rhymer. "Yet in circumstances of peril," he went on, "and in moments

of depression, you cannot think what sustenance I have derived from those

lines."

"Then you had best send them up," said I, "to the _Daily Post_.

It is conducting a Symposium."

"If two wrongs do not make a right," he answered tartly, "even less will

an assembly of deadly dry persons make something to drink."

That evening, in the cabin, we held a symposium on our own account and in

the proper sense of the term, while the rain drummed on the deck and the

sky-lights.

X said, "The greatest poem written on love during these fifty years--and

we agree to accept love as the highest theme of lyrical poetry--is George

Meredith's _Love in the Valley_. I say this and decline to argue about

it."

"Nor am I disposed to argue about it," I answered, "for York Powell--peace

to his soul for a great man gone--held that same belief. In his rooms in

Christ Church, one night while _The Oxford Book of Verse_ was preparing

and I had come to him, as everyone came, for counsel. . . . I take it,

though, that we are not searching for the absolute best but for our own

prime favourite. You remember what Swinburne says somewhere of Hugo's

_Gastibelza_:--

"'Gastibelza, l'homme a la carabine,

Chantait ainsi:

Quelqu'un a-t-il connu Dona Sabine?

Quelqu'un d'ici?

Dansez, chantez, villageois! la nuit gagne

Le mont Falou--

Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne

Me rendra fou!'

"'The song of songs which is Hugo's,' he calls it; and goes on to ask how

often one has chanted or shouted or otherwise declaimed it to himself, on

horseback at full gallop or when swimming at his best as a boy in holiday

time; and how often the matchless music, ardour, pathos of it have not

reduced his own ambition to a sort of rapturous and adoring despair--yes,

and requickened his old delight in it with a new delight in the sense that

he will always have this to rejoice in, to adore, and to recognise as

something beyond the reach of man. Well, that is the sense in which our

poem should be our favourite poem. Now, for my part, there's a page or so

of Browning's _Saul_--"

"What do you say to Meredith's _Phoebus with Admetus?_" interrupted X.

I looked up at him quickly, almost shamefacedly. "Now, how on earth did

you guess--"

X laid down his pipe, stared up at the sky-light, and quoted, almost under

his breath:--

"'Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!

Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!'"

Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith--whose total yield of verse

has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only

'dull fools' suppose--beside the great poets who have been his

contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was

the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later.

"Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have

hold of a man. You know--as surely, for example, as while you are

listening to Handel--that the stuff is masculine, and great at that."

"That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the

secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth

and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was

ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than

Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's,

which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why?

Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who

has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand

write _Christabel_ and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may,

on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as

the saying is) nobly to the last, and vex us all the while with his

asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet.

Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background

and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and

Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is,

They have philosophy."

"You are on the old tack again: the old 'to katholoy'!"

"Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch land, so you may e'en

fill another pipe and play the interlocutor. . . . You remember my once

asking why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for that their stuff

is rotten we agreed). The reason is, they are engaged in mistaking the

part for the whole, and that part a non-essential one; they are setting up

the present potency of Great Britain as a triumphant and insolent

exception to laws which (if we believe in any gods better than anarchy and

chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and may even regulate 'the

most ancient heavens.' You may remember my expressed contempt for a

recent poem which lauded Henry VIII because--"

"'He was lustful, he was vengeful, he was hot and hard and proud;

But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.'

"--A worse error, to my mind, than Froude's, who merely idolised him for

chastising the clergy. Well, after our discussion, I asked myself this

question: 'Why do we not as a great Empire-making people,

ruling the world for its good, assassinate the men who oppose us?'

We do not; the idea revolts us. But why does it revolt us?

"We send our armies to fight, with the certainty (if we think at all) that

we are sending a percentage to be killed. We recently sent out two

hundred thousand with the sure and certain knowledge that some thousands

must die; and these (we say) were men agonising for a righteous cause.

Why did it not afflict us to send them?--whereas it would have afflicted

us inexpressibly to send a man to end the difficulty by putting a bullet

or a knife into Mr. Kruger, who _ex hypothesi_ represented an unrighteous

cause, and who certainly was but one man.

"Why? Because a law above any that regulates the expansion of Great

Britain says, 'That shalt do no murder.' And that law, that Universal,

takes the knife or the pistol quietly, firmly, out of your hand. You

send a battalion, with Tom Smith in it, to fight Mr. Kruger's troops; you

know that some of them must in all likelihood perish; but, thank your

stars, you do not know their names. Tom Smith, as it happens, is killed;

but had you known with absolute certainty that Tom Smith would be killed,

you could not have sent him. You must have withdrawn him, and substituted

some other fellow concerning whom your prophetic vision was less

uncomfortably definite. You can kill Tom Smith if he has happened to kill

Bob Jones: you are safe enough then, being able to excuse yourself--how?

By Divine law again (as you understand it). Divine law says that whoso

sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed--that is to say, by

you: so you can run under cover and hang Tom Smith. But when Divine law

does not protect you, you are powerless. At the most you can send him off

to take his ten-to-one chance in a battalion, and when you read his name

in the returns, come mincing up to God and say: 'So poor old Tom's gone!

How the deuce was _I_ to know?'

"I say nothing of the cowardice of this, though it smells to Heaven. I

merely point out that this law 'Thou shalt do no murder'--this Universal--

must be a tremendous one, since even you, my fine swashbuckling,

Empire-making hero, are so much afraid of it that you cannot send even a

Reservist to death without throwing the responsibility on luck--_nos te,

nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_--and have not even the nerve, without its

sanction, to stick a knife into an old man whom you accuse as the wicked

cause of all this bloodshed. If you believed in your accusations, why

couldn't you do it? Because a universal law forbade you, and one you have

to believe in, truculent Jingo though you be. Why, consider this; your

poets are hymning King Edward the Seventh as the greatest man on earth,

and yet, if he might possess all Africa to-morrow at the expense of

signing the death-warrant of one innocent man who opposed that possession,

he could not write his name. His hand would fall numb. Such power above

kings has the Universal, though silly poets insult it who should be its

servants.

"Now of all the differences between men and women there is none more

radical than this: that a man naturally loves law, whereas a woman

naturally hates it and never sees a law without casting about for some way

of dodging it. Laws, universals, general propositions--her instinct with

all of them is to get off by wheedling the judge. So, if you want a test

for a masculine poet, examine first whether or no he understands the

Universe as a thing of law and order."

"Then, by your own test, Kipling--the Jingo Kipling--is a most masculine

poet, since he talks of little else."

"I will answer you, although I believe you are not serious. At present

Mr. Kipling's mind, in search of a philosophy, plays with the

contemplation of a world reduced to law and order; the law and order being

such as universal British rule would impose. There might be many worse

worlds than a world so ruled, and in verse the prospect can be made to

look fair enough:--"

"'Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.

Make ye sure to each his own

That he reap where he hath sown;

By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!'

"Clean and wholesome teaching it seems, persuading civilised men that, as

they are strong, so the obligation rests on them to set the world in

order, carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its bloodstained

corners. Yet as a political philosophy it lacks the first of all

essentials, and as Mr. Kipling develops it we begin to detect the flaw in

the system:--

"'The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone;

'E don't obey no orders unless they is his own;

'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,

An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.

Etc.'

"What is wrong with this? Why, simply that it leaves Justice altogether

out of account. The system has no room for it; even as it has no room for

clemency, mansuetude; forbearance towards the weak. My next-door

neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a

loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does

not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him

out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing

as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it--even

verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their

habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations are

obliged to put constraint upon uncivilised ones which shock their moral

sense beyond a certain point--as by cannibalism or human sacrifice. But

such interference should stand upon a nice sense of the offender's rights,

and in practice does so stand. The custom of polygamy, for instance (as

practised abroad), horribly offends quite a large majority of His

Majesty's lieges; yet Great Britain tolerates polygamy even in her own

subject races. Neither polygamy nor uncleanliness can be held any just

excuse for turning a nation out of its possessions.

"And another reason for insisting upon the strictest reading of justice in

these dealings between nations is the temptation which the least laxity

offers to the stronger--a temptation which Press and Pulpit made no

pretence of resisting during the late war. 'We are better than they,' was

the cry; 'we are cleanlier, less ignorant; we have arts and a literature,

whereas they have none; we make for progress and enlightenment, while they

are absurdly conservative, if not retrogressive. Therefore the world will

be the better by our annexing their land, and substituting our government

for theirs. Therefore our cause, too, is the juster.' But therefore it

is nothing of the sort. A dirty man may be in the right, and a clean man

in the wrong; an ungodly man in the right, and a godly man in the wrong;

and the most specious and well-intentioned system which allows justice to

be confused with something else will allow it to be stretched, even by

well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying and flat piracy.

"Are you trying to prove," demanded X, "that Mr. Kipling is a feminine

poet?"

"No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion that in his worse mood

he is a sham-masculine one. The 'Recessional' proves that, man of genius

that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. But too often he

is trying to dodge it with sham law. A woman would not appeal to law at

all: she would boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an

undoubted but misguided man, has to find some other way out; so he takes a

twopenny-halfpenny code as the mood seizes him--be it the code of a

barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew--and hymns it lustily against the

universal code: and the pity and the sin of it is that now and then by

flashes--as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat'--he sees the truth.

"You remember the figure of the Cave which Socrates invented and explained

to Glaucon in Plato's 'Republic'? He imagined men seated in a den which

has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are turned to the wall of

the den, and they sit with necks and legs chained so that they cannot

move. Behind them, and between them and the light, runs a raised way with

a low wall along it, 'like the screen over which marionette-players show

their puppets.' Along this wall pass men carrying all sorts of vessels

and statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, others silent; and

as the procession goes by the chained prisoners see only the shadows

passing across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the voices echoed

from it, suppose that the sound comes from the shadows.

"To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse one might take this

famous picture and make one fearsome addition to it. There sits (one

might go on to say) among the prisoners a young man different from them in

voice and terribly different to look upon, because he has two pairs of

eyes, the one turned towards the light and realities, the other towards

the rock-face and the shadows. Using, now one, now the other of these two

pairs of eyes, he never knows with which at the moment he is gazing,

whether on the realities or on the shadows, but always supposes what he

sees at the moment to be the realities, and calls them 'Things as They

Are.' Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of the greater

vision, and he speaks enchantingly when he discourses of the shadows on

the rock, thereby deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom his

genius has played the crimp to, enticing them into the den and hocussing

and chaining them there. For, seeing the shadows pass to the

interpretation of such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed behold

Things as They Are, and that these are the only things worth knowing.

"The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments

cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the

prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and

order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:--"

"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God,

I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three;

I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell,

And--ye--would--make--a Knight o' me!'"

"Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this

for his pains:--

"'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old--I am

seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in

heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye.

I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do--with a

palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as

anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other

times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.'

"He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his

work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his

philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole--his novels and poems

together--this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise

it--for it is far too multifarious and complex--but to say the first and

the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his

own into the warning, _ne tu pueri contempseris annos_. He has never

grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish,

for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not

worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come

after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':--"

"'Keep the young generations in hail,

And bequeath them no tumbled house.'

"To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment supreme,' and perhaps

the bitterest words this master of Comedy has written are for the seniors

of the race who--

"'On their last plank,

Pass mumbling it as nature's final page,'

"And cramp the young with their rules of 'wisdom,' lest, as he says

scornfully:--

"'Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay,

Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,

And ancients musical at close of day.'

"'Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet:--

"'Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads

The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.'

"But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges gall, is usually

cheerful with the cheerfulness of health. Sometimes he consciously

expounds it; oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always (I

believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at the base of everything

he writes.

"The next thing to be noted is that he does not hope in youth because it

is a period of license and waywardness, but because it is a period of

imagination--

"'Days, when the ball of our vision

Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,'

"And because it therefore has a better chance of grasping what is Universal

than has the prudential wisdom of age which contracts its eye to

particulars and keeps it alert for social pitfalls--the kind of wisdom

seen at its best (but its best never made a hero) in Bubb Doddington's

verses:--

"'Love thy country, wish it well,

_Not with too intense a care_;

'Tis enough that, when it fell,

Thou its ruin didst not share.'

"Admirable caution! Now contrast it for a moment with, let us say, the

silly quixotic figure of Horatius with the broken bridge behind him:--

"'Round turned he, as not deigning

Those craven ranks to see:

Nought spake he to Lars Porsena,

To Sextus nought spake he;

But he saw on Palatinus

The white porch of his home--'

"I protest I have no heart to go on with the quotation: so unpopular is

its author, just now, and so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the

boyish tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what Mr. Meredith

chooses to trust rather than Bubb Doddington's, and he trusts it as being

the likelier to apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius with

an army in front and a broken bridge behind him was a nobler figure than

Bubb Doddington wishing his country well but not with too intense a care;

and not only nobler but--this is the point--more obedient to divine law,

more expressive of that which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trusts

youth, it is as a time of imagination; and if he trusts imagination, it is

as a faculty for apprehending the Universal in life--that is to say, a

divine law behind its shows and simulacra.

"In 'The Empty Purse' you will find him instructing youth towards this

law; but that there may be no doubt of his own belief in it, as an order

not only controlling men but overriding angels and demons, first consider

his famous sonnet, 'Lucifer in Starlight'--to my thinking one of the

finest in our language:--

"'On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he leaned,

Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,

Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reached a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of Heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.'"

"Suppose my contention--that poetry should concern itself with

universals--to be admitted: suppose we all agreed that Poetry is an

expression of the universal element in human life, that (as Shelley puts

it) 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.'

There remains a question quite as important: and that is, How to recognise

the Universal when we see it? We may talk of a Divine law, or a Divine

order--call it what we will--which regulates the lives of us poor men no

less than the motions of the stars, and binds the whole universe, high and

low, into one system: and we may have arrived at the blessed wish to

conform with this law rather than to strive and kick against the pricks

and waste our short time in petulant rebellion. So far, so good: but how

are we to know the law? How, with the best will in the world, are we to

distinguish order from disorder? What assurance have we, after striving

to bring ourselves into obedience, that we have succeeded? We may agree,

for example, with Wordsworth that Duty is a stern daughter of the Voice of

God, and that through Duty 'the most ancient heavens,' no less than we

ourselves, are kept fresh and strong. But can we always discern this

Universal, this Duty? What is the criterion? And what, when we have

chosen, is the sanction of our choice?

"A number of honest people will promptly refer us to revealed religion.

'Take (they say) your revealed religion on faith, and there you have the

law and the prophets, and your universals set out for you, and your

principles of conduct laid down. What more do you want?'

"To this I answer, 'We are human, and we need also the testimony of

Poetry; and the priceless value of poetry for us lies in this, that it

does _not_ echo the Gospel like a parrot. If it did, it would be servile,

superfluous. It is ministerial and useful because it approaches truth by

another path. It does not say ditto to Mr. Burke--it corroborates. And

it corroborates precisely because it does not say ditto, but employs a

natural process of its own which it employed before ever Christianity was

revealed. You may decide that religion is enough for you, and that you

have no need of poetry; but if you have any intelligent need of poetry it

will be because poetry, though it end in the same conclusions, reaches

them by another and separate path.

"Now (as I understand him) Mr. Meredith connects man with the Universal,

and teaches him to arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding him

that he is a child of Earth. 'You are amenable,' he says in effect, 'to a

law which all the firmament obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied

to one planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would apprehend the

law, study your mother, Earth, which also obeys it. Search out her

operations; honour your mother as legitimate children, and let your honour

be the highest you can pay--that of making yourself docile to her

teaching. So will you stand the best chance, the only likely chance, of

living in harmony with that Will which over-arches Earth and us all.'

"In this doctrine Mr. Meredith believes passionately; so let there

be no mistake about the thoroughness with which he preaches it.

Even prayer, he tells us in one of his novels, is most useful when like a

fountain it falls back and draws refreshment from earth for a new spring

heavenward:--

"'And there vitality, there, there solely in song

Besides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs,

Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong,

The Master said: and the studious eye that reads,

(Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount),

In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound.

Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of the fount

To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground.'

"And it follows that to one who believes in the teaching of earth so

whole-heartedly earth is not a painted back-cloth for man to strut against

and attitudinise, but a birth-place from which he cannot escape, and in

relation with which he must be considered, and must consider himself, on

pain of becoming absurd. Even:

"'His cry to heaven is a cry to her

He would evade.'

"She is a stern mother, be it understood, no coddling one:--

"'He may entreat, aspire,

He may despair, and she has never heed,

She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need,

Not his desire.'

"When we neglect or misread her lessons, she punishes; at the best, she

offers no fat rewards to the senses, but--

"'The sense of large charity over the land;

Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,

And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal.'

"('Lean fare,' as the poet observes; and unpalatable, for instance, to our

Members of Parliament, to whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the

highest compliment within their range of apprehension by assuming that

quite a large number of them could write cheques for 69,000 pounds without

inconvenience.) At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things we

have desired, a serene fortitude to endure their loss:--

"'Love born of knowledge, love that gains

Vitality as Earth it mates,

The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains,

The Life, the Death, illuminates.

"'For love we Earth, then serve we all;

Her mystic secret then is ours:

We fall, or view our treasures fall,

Unclouded--as beholds her flowers

"'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,

Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,

When lowly, with a broken neck,

The crocus lays her cheek to mire.'

"But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils--

"'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould';

"The breast (to quote from another poem)--

"'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,

And fair to scan.'

"And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self--

our 'distempered devil of Self,' gluttonous of its own enjoyments and

therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and

self-control--walks among men like his own wise physician, Melampus, with

eyes that search the book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to

discover and extract her healing secrets.

"'With love exceeding a simple love of the things

That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;

Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings

From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;

Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;

Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;

The good physician Melampus, loving them all,

Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.