"'For him the woods were a home and gave him the key

Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and

flowers.

The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we

To earth he sought, and the link of their life with

ours. . . .'

"Here by another road we come to a teaching which is also the Gospels':

that to apprehend the highest truth one must have a mind of extreme

humility. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,'

'Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of

God is within you,' 'And He took a little child and set him in the midst

of them,' &c. Poetry cannot make these sayings any truer than they are,

but it can illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so (be it

humbly said) can help their acceptance by man. If they come down from

heaven, derived from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms them

by arguments taken from his own earth, instructing him the while to read

it as--

"'An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet

Buried, and breathing, and to be,'

"And teaching him, 'made lowly wise,' that the truth of the highest heavens

lies scattered about his feet.

"'Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage,

He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed,

Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage

Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.

He played on men, as his master Phoebus on strings

Melodious: as the God did he drive and check,

Through love exceeding a simple love of the things

That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.'

"I think, if we consider the essence of this teaching, we shall have no

difficulty now in understanding why Mr. Meredith's hopes harp so

persistently on the 'young generations,' why our duty to them is to him

'the cry of the conscience of life,' or why, as he studies Earth, he

maintains that--

"'Deepest at her springs,

Most filial, is an eye to love her young.'"

"But Meredith, if a true poet, is also and undeniably a hard one: and a

poet must not only preach but persuade. 'He dooth not only show the way,'

says Sidney, 'but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will intice

any man to enter into it.'

"Here, my dear X, I lay hands on you and drag you in as the Conscientious

Objector. 'How?' you will ask. 'Is not the plain truth good enough for

men? And if poetry must win acceptance for her by beautiful adornments,

alluring images, captivating music, is there not something deceptive in

the business, even if it be not downright dishonest?' Well, I think you

have a right to be answered."

"Thank you," said X.

"And I don't think you are convincingly answered by Keats'--

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

"With all respect to the poet, we don't know it; and if we did it would

come a long way short of all we need to know. The Conscientious Objector

will none the less maintain that truth and beauty have never been

recognised as identical, and that, in practice, to employ their names as

convertible terms would lead to no end of confusion. I like the man (you

will be glad to hear), because on an important subject he will be

satisfied with nothing less than clear thinking. My own suspicion is

that, when we have yielded him the inquiry which is his due into the

relations between truth and beauty, we shall discover that spiritual

truth--with which alone poetry concerns itself--is less a matter of

ascertained facts than of ascertained harmonies, and that these harmonies

are incapable of being expressed otherwise than in beautiful terms.

But pending our inquiry (which must be a long one) let us put to the

objector a practical question: 'What forbids a man, who has the truth to

tell, from putting it as persuasively as possible? Were not the truths of

the Gospel conveyed in parables? And is their truth diminished because

these parables are exquisite in form and in language? Will you only

commend persuasiveness in a sophist who engages to make the worst argument

appear the better, and condemn it in a teacher who employs it to enforce

truth?' The question, surely, is answered as soon as we have asked it.

"And the further particular question, Is Mr. Meredith a persuasive poet?

will be answered as promptly by us. He can be--let us grant--a plaguily

forbidding one. His philosophy is not easy; yet it seems to me a deal

easier than many of his single verses. I hope humbly, for instance, one

of these days, to discover what is meant by such a verse as this:--

"'Thou animatest ancient tales,

To prove our world of linear seed;

Thy very virtue now assails

A tempter to mislead.'

"Faint, yet pursuing, I hope; but I must admit that such writing does not

obviously allure, that it rather dejects the student by the difficulty of

finding a stool to sit down and be stoical on. 'Nay,' to parody Sidney,

'he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the

first give you a handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers.' He is, in

short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and at times to all

appearance so deliberately and yet so wantonly difficult, that you wonder

what on earth you came out to pursue and why you should be tearing your

flesh in these thickets.

"And then you remember the swinging cadences of 'Love in the Valley'

--the loveliest love-song of its century. Who can forget it?

"'Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping

Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star,

Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,

Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting;

So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.

Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,

Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.'

"And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but you will wrestle

through them in the hope of hearing that voice again, or even an echo of

it.

"'Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day of the Daughter of Hades,'

'The Empty Purse,' 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phoebus with

Admetus'--you come back to each again and again, compelled by the wizardry

of single lines and by a certain separate glamour which hangs about each

of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in its own way a superb

performance; lines here and there so haunt you with their beauty that you

must go back and read the whole poem over for the sake of them. Other

lines you boggle over, and yet cannot forget them; you hope to like them

better at the next reading; you re-read, and wish them away, yet find

them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your memory that you cannot do

without them. Take, for instance, the last stanza of 'Phoebus with

Admetus':--

"'You with shelly horns, rams! and promontory goats,

You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!

Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!

Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!

You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,

You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent;

He has been our fellow, the morning of our days;

Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.'

"The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable was the glorious

third line: almost as soon 'promontory goats' fastened itself on memory;

and almost as soon the last two lines were perceived to be excellent, and

the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them,

to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward

the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely

and almost fantastically expressed. Having once passed it in, I find 'You

that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate labial

pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating

lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to admit,

it has become one of the best liked, I am forced in fairness to ask myself

if hundreds of lines of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or fantastic

may not justify themselves after many readings.

"The greatest mistake, at all events, is to suppose him ignorant or

careless of the persuasiveness which lies in technical skill; though we

can hardly be surprised that he has not escaped a charge which was freely

brought against Browning, than whom, perhaps, no single poet was ever more

untiring in technical experiment. Every poem of Browning's is an

experiment--sometimes successful, sometimes not--in wedding sense with

metre; and so is every poem of Mr. Meredith's (he has even attempted

galliambics), though he cannot emulate Browning's range. But he, too, has

had his amazing successes--in the long, swooping lines of 'Love in the

Valley':--

"'Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,

Swift as the swallow along the river's light,

Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,

Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.'

"--In the 'Young Princess,' the stanzas of which are a din of

nightingales' voices; in 'The Woods of Westermain' and 'The Nuptials of

Attila,' where the ear awaits the burthen, as the sense awaits the horror,

of the song, and the poet holds back both, increasing the painful

expectancy; or in the hammered measure of 'Phoebus with Admetus'--a real

triumph. Of each of these metres you have to admit at once that it is

strange and arresting, and that you cannot conceive the poem written in

any other. And, as I have said, their very asperities tend, with

repetition, to pass into beauties.

"But, in the end, he is remembered best for his philosophy, as the poet

who tells us to have courage and trust in nature, that thereby we may

attain whatever heaven may be. 'Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or Lo,

there! for behold the kingdom of heaven is within you'--yes, and hell,

too, Mr. Meredith wants us:--

"'In tragic life, God wot,

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

We are betrayed by what is false within.'

"So, again, in 'The Woods of Westermain,' we are warned that the worst

betrayal for man lies in the cowardice of his own soul:--

"'But have care.

In yourself may lurk the trap.'

"Are you at heart a poltroon or a palterer, cruel, dull, envious, full of

hate? Then Nature, the mother of the strong and generous, will have no

pity, but will turn and rend you with claws. 'Trust her with your whole

heart,' says Mr. Meredith, 'and go forward courageously until you follow:"

"'Where never was track

On the path trod of all.'

"The fight is an ennobling one, when all is said: rejoice in it, because

our children shall use the victory.

"'Take stripes or chains;

Grip at thy standard reviled.

And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?

Our spoken in protest remains.

A younger generation reaps.'"

FROM A CORNISH WINDOW, _Thursday, Sept. 2nd_.

"Hoist up sail while gale doth last. . . ."

I do not call this very sound advice: but we followed it, and that is the

reason why I am able to send off my monthly packet from the old address.

Also it came very near to being a reason why I had no letter to send. The

wind blew as obstinately as ever on the Tuesday morning; but this time we

arranged our start more carefully, and beat out over the bar in

comparatively smooth water. The seas outside were not at all smooth, but

a Newlyn-built boat does not make much account of mere seas, and soon

after midday we dropped anchor in Plymouth Cattewater, and went ashore for

our letters.

We were sworn to reach home next day, and somehow we forgot to study the

barometer, which was doing its best to warn us. The weather was dirtier

than ever and the wind harder. But we had grown accustomed to this: and

persuaded ourselves that, once outside of the Rame, we could make a pretty

fetch of it for home and cover the distance at our best speed--which

indeed we did. But I confess that as we passed beyond the breakwater, and

met the Plymouth trawlers running back for shelter, I began to wonder

rather uneasily how the barometer might be behaving, and even dallied with

the resolution to go below and see. We were well dressed down, however--

double-reefed mainsail, reefed mizzen, foresail and storm jib--and after

our beating at Salcombe none of us felt inclined to raise the question of

putting back. There was nothing to hurt, as yet: the boat was shaking off

the water like a duck, and making capital weather of it; we told each

other that once beyond the Rame, with the sea on our quarter, we should do

handsomely. And the gale--the newspapers called it a hurricane, but it

was merely a gale--waited patiently until we were committed to it. Half

an hour later we took in the mizzen, and, soon after, the foresail: and

even so, and close-hauled, were abreast of Looe Island just forty-seven

minutes after passing the Rame--nine miles. For a 28-ton cruiser this

will be allowed to be fair going. For my own part I could have wished it

faster: not from any desire to break 'records,' but because, should

anything happen to our gear, we were uncomfortably close to a lee-shore,

and the best behaved of boats could not stand up against the incessant

shoreward thrust of the big seas crossing us. Also, to make matters

worse, the shore itself now and then vanished in the 'dirt.' On the

whole, therefore, it was not too soon for us that we opened the harbour

and:

"Saw on Palatinus

The white porch of our home,"

Though these were three or four times hidden from us by the seas over

which we toppled through the harbour's mouth and into quiet water.

While the sails were stowing I climbed down the ladder and sat in front of

the barometer, and wondered how I should like this sort of thing if I had

to go through it often, for my living.

OCTOBER.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. . . ."

I have been planting a perennial border in the garden and consulting,

with serious damage to the temper, a number of the garden-books now in

fashion. When a man drives at practice--when he desires to know precisely

at what season, in what soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon

lilies, to decide between _Ayrshire Ruga_ and _Fellenberg_ for the pillar

that requires a red rose, to fix the right proportion of sand and

leaf-mould to suit his carnations--when 'his only plot' is to plant the

bergamot--he resents being fobbed off with prattle:--

"My squills make a brave show this morning, and the little petticoated

Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower rock-garden (surely Narcissus

ought to have been a girl!) begins to 'take the winds of March with

beauty.' I am expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will

benefit the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower before

Billy comes home from school," etc.

But the other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellwanger,

I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable

pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, a great

American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a

minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our

language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the still air and sunshine

and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a

dank, sodden season, bleak or shivering. 'The sugar and scarlet maple,

the dogwood and sumac, are wanting to impart their warmth of colour; and

St. Martin's summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence' comparable

with that of the Indian summer over there. The Virginia creeper which

reddens our Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an importation of

no very long standing--old enough to be accepted as a feature of the

place, not yet old enough to be inseparably connected with it in song.

Yet--

"Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most universally

admired. This might almost answer to our own fall of the leaf,

and is far less sombre than many apostrophes to the season that occur

throughout English verse."

From this Mr. Ellwanger proceeds to compare Keats's with the wonderful

'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to

its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less

obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty

that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the magnificent

opening:--

"I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

Stand shadowless like Silence, listening

To silence, for no lonely bird would sing

Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,

Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . . ."

I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing the two odes until Mr.

Ellwanger invited me. He notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds

throughout Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, that the two

poets were contemplating two different stages of autumn. Keats, more

sensuous, dwells on the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late

October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close 'on the birth of trembling

winter': he sings more austerely of November's desolation:--

"Where is the pride of Summer--the green prime--

The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three

On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime

Trembling,--and one upon the old oak tree!

Where is the Dryad's immortality?

Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,

Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through

In the smooth holly's green eternity.

"The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished hoard,

The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain,

And honey bees have stored

The sweets of summer in their luscious cells;

The swallows all have wing'd across the main;

But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,

And sighs her tearful spells

Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.

Alone, alone

Upon a mossy stone

She sits and reckons up the dead and gone

With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . . ."

The last image involves a change of sex in personified Autumn: an

awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be

excused, Hood's lines excuse it:--

"O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded

Under the languid downfall of her hair;

She wears a coronal of flowers faded

Upon her forehead, and a face of care;

There is enough of wither'd everywhere

To make her bower,--and enough of gloom. . . ."

In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its irregular metre,

I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more force of poetry in Hood's ode than in

Keats's; and this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater

poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore to find that

Mr. Bridges, in his already famous Essay on Keats, ranks 'Autumn' as the

very best of all Keats's Odes.

Now whether one agrees with him or not, there is no loose talk in Mr.

Bridges's criticism. He tells us precisely why he prefers this poem to

that other: and such definiteness in critical writing is not only useful

in itself but perhaps the severest test of a critic's quality. No task

can well be harder than to take a poem, a stanza, or a line, to decide

"Just here lies the strength, the charm; or just here the looseness, the

defect." In any but the strongest hands these methods ensure mere

niggling ingenuity, in which all appreciation of the broader purposes of

the author--of Aristotle's 'universal'--disappears, while the critic

reveals himself as an industrious pick-thank person concerned with matters

of slight and secondary importance. But if well conducted such criticism

has a particular value. As Mr. Bridges says:--

"If my criticism should seem sometimes harsh, that is, I believe, due

to its being given in plain terms, a manner which I prefer, because

by obliging the writer to say definitely what he means, it makes his

mistakes easier to point out, and in this way the true business of

criticism may be advanced; nor do I know that, in a work of this

sort, criticism has any better function than to discriminate between

the faults and merits of the best art: for it commonly happens, when

any great artist comes to be generally admired, that his faults,

being graced by his excellences, are confounded with them in the

popular judgment, and being easy of imitation, are the points of his

work which are most liable to be copied."

Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he considers the Odes to

be in many respects the most important division of Keats's poetry.

"Had Keats," he says, "left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets

would be not lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at

least the six most famous of them."

These famous six are: (1) 'Psyche,' (2) 'Melancholy,' (3) 'Nightingale,'

(4) 'Grecian Urn,' (5) 'Indolence,' (6) 'Autumn'; and Mr. Bridges is not

content until he has them arranged in a hierarchy. He draws up a list in

order of merit, and in it gives first place--'for its perfection'--to

'Autumn':--

"This is always reckoned among the faultless masterpieces of English

poetry; and unless it be objected as a slight blemish that the words

'Think not of them' in the second line of the third stanza are

somewhat awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I do not

know that any sort of fault can be found in it."

But though 'Autumn' (1) is best as a whole, the 'Nightingale' (2)

altogether beats it in splendour and intensity of mood; and, after

pointing out its defects, Mr. Bridges confesses, "I could not name any

English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this

ode." Still, it takes second place, and next comes 'Melancholy' (3).

"The perception in this ode is profound, and no doubt experienced;" but in

spite of its great beauty "it does not hit so hard as one would expect.

I do not know whether this is due to a false note towards the end of the

second stanza, or to a disagreement between the second and third stanzas."

Next in order come 'Psyche' (4) and, disputing place with it, the

'Grecian Urn' (5). 'Indolence' (6) closes the procession; and I dare say

few will dispute her title to the last place.

But with these six odes we must rank (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,'

immortal on account of the famous passage of inimitable beauty descriptive

of the Greek poets--

"'Leaving great verse unto a little clan.'"--

And (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.' Of the

latter Mr. Sidney Colvin has written:--

"His later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the

faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind

at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and

musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit.

A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best

Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial

romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and

perhaps caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful

associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and

wild wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here

commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual."

With this Mr. Bridges entirely agrees; but adds:--

"It unfortunately halts in the opening, and the first and fourth

stanzas especially are unequal to the rest, as is again the third

from the end, 'Young Stranger,' which for its matter would with more

propriety have been cast into the previous section; and these

impoverish the effect, and contain expressions which might put some

readers off. If they would begin at the fifth stanza and omit the

third from the end, they would find little that is not admirable."

Now, for my part, when in book or newspaper I come upon references to

Isaiah lxi. 1-3, or Shakespeare, K. Henry IV., Pt. ii., Act 4, Sc. 5, l.

163, or the like, I have to drop my reading at once and hunt them up.

So I hope that these references of Mr. Bridges will induce the reader to

take his Keats down from the shelf. And I hope further that, having his

Keats in hand, the reader will examine these odes again and make out an

order for himself, as I propose to do.

Mr. Bridges's order of merit was: (1) 'Autumn,' (2) the 'Nightingale,'

(3) 'Melancholy,' (4) 'Psyche,' (5) 'Grecian Urn,' (6) 'Indolence';

leaving us to rank with these (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' and

(b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.'

Now of 'Autumn,' to which he gives the first place 'for its perfection,'

one may remark that Keats did not entitle it an Ode, and the omission may

be something more than casual. Certainly its three stanzas seem to me to

exhibit very little of that _progression_ of thought and feeling which I

take to be one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from an

ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to draw: but I suppose that

in theory the lyric deals summarily with its theme, whereas the ode treats

it in a sustained progressive manner. But sustained treatment is hardly

possible within the limits of three stanzas, and I can discover no

progression. The first two stanzas elaborate a picture of Autumn; the

third suggests a reflection--

"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too--"

And promptly, with a few added strokes, all pictorial, the poet works that

reflection into decoration. A sonnet could not well be more summary.

In fact, the poem in structure of thought very closely resembles a sonnet;

its first two stanzas corresponding to the octave, and its last stanza to

the sestett.

This will perhaps be thought very trivial criticism of a poem which most

people admit to be, as a piece of writing, all but absolutely flawless.

But allowing that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express,

I yet doubt if it deserve the place assigned to it by Mr. Bridges.

Expression counts for a great deal: but ideas perhaps count for more.

And in the value of the ideas expressed I cannot see that 'Autumn' comes

near to rivalling the 'Nightingale' (for instance) or 'Melancholy.'

The thought that Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither the

rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the thought that:

"In the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

To test it in another way:--It is perfect, no doubt: but it has not the

one thing that now and then in poetry rises (if I may use the paradox)

above perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the Odes contain,

what I may call the Great Thrill. It nowhere compels that sudden

'silent, upon a peak in Darien' shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of

poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 'Nightingale' or

before the closing lines of 'Psyche.' Such verse as:

"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn--"

Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy.

Such verse links poetry to Love itself--

"Half angel and half bird,

And all a wonder and a wild desire."

The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine

thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very

near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not

quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of

'Psyche.'

Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height--the mere

feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves--gives a

poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to

'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it

takes two to produce this thrill--the reader as well as the poet.

And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as

poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of

the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in

answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will assert this of

themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this

point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,'

'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and

fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the

choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves

least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others

would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.

For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with

emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the

visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it

hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'--

"What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"

Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by

the three answering ones--

"And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

--Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought;

since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though

it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary

condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own

compensations."

But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first

place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its

emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the

consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and

finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.'

Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could

not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty

as this ode."

For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with

the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet

addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision 'of all Olympus's faded

hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:

"Too late for antique vows,

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"

She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some

untrodden region of his mind--

"And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,

Who breeding flowers will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in!"

The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy

of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of

perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there

is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or

something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the

mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche'

asserts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which

rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on

that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches

uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches

something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun

(as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair attitude!')

at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make

a forcible close.

(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place

go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with

the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first

stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed.

The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer

that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the

quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'--the

bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet

still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the

skull of bald Medusa'--in order to make the genuine Melancholy more

effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does

not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the

composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this.

Durer _did_ surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he _did_

evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive

but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too,

that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his

delicate figure of:

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu . . ."--

Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges,

too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:--

"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."

So prone was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges

had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the

poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true

insight into human passion. The worst trick this disability ever played

upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'--an

opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it

betrayed him also into occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost

rival Leigh Hunt's--

"The two divinest things the world has got--

A lovely woman in a rural spot."

This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which

(I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4).

And (6) _longo intervallo_ comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly

called an altogether inferior performance.

The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes

from _Endymion_ may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,'

in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.

But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant,

more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us

celebrate--

LAYING UP THE BOAT.

There arrives a day towards the end of October--or with luck we may tide

over into November--when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter

force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept

a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched

the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let

pass their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes

appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like

beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished,

and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with

steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our

pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell.

We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and

tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a

week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen,

our November visitors--bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green

deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the

Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with

us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long

delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long;

and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be

the next spring-tides.

This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to

summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence.

_Favete linguis!_ The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season

reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already

slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with

our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are

ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession.

She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and

all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and

beneath the shears--the abhorred shears--which lift this too out of its

step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus.

We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors

and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their

lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on

bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all

but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the

Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never

saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as

samite--those heavenly wings!--nor felt her gallant spirit straining to

beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her

form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.

For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the

shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld

the birth of a goddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the

conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under

the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt

his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the

language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how

cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to

compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as

to his critics, the ship was a framework only until the terrible moment

when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy

of creation, realise that she had passed from him? Ere the local

artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were

still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his

triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase

perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pass from

his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmanship, the

immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and

he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.

She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a

slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave

wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and

discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our gratitude,

since the delicate machine:

"Has like a woman given up its joy;"

And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of

her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance--land left

behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the

market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon,

swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean!

Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without

effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no

answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of

reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine--I think at

times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered

for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the

silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking

astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call?

The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the

voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of

the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely

speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd,

I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly

staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he

has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate? She, too, knows

the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her

confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together.

She is seated now on the lee side of the cockpit, her hands folded on the

coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail

and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured

glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia.

Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining

at the impassable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her

master, or else--Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds,

with mischievous harp?

"That was the chirp of Ariel

You heard, as overhead it flew,

The farther going more to dwell

And wing our green to wed our blue;

But whether note of joy or knell

Not his own Father-singer knew;

Nor yet can any mortal tell,

Save only how it shivers through;

The breast of us a sounded shell,

The blood of us a lighted dew."

Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my

belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind

them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in

figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say

idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they

kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly

adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true

personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a

sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your

open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling

through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is

yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god!

For indeed you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries

shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings--run out and drop from

you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a

moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page

as it rolls past to break on the shore towards which you revert no glance.

Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.

"Sails of silk and ropes of sendal,

Such as gleam in ancient lore,

And the singing of the sailor,

And the answer from the shore--"

These shall pass and leave you younger than romance--a child open-eyed and

curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch

the gannets diving--

"As Noah saw them dive

O'er sunken Ararat."

Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of a kingdom I must

pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my

description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part

of its charm.

Walter Pater, reading the _Odyssey_, was brought up (as we say) 'with a

round turn' by a passage wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy

how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, and stepped ashore.

It filled him with wonder that so simple an incident--nor to say ordinary

--could be made so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the

credit between the poet and his fortunate age--a time (said he) in which

one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors

pulled down their boat without making a picture 'in the great style'

against a sky charged with marvels.

You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which I am telling,

and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water--you will discover

(and with ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater was entirely mistaken, and the

credit belongs neither to Homer nor to his fortunate age. For here are

woods with woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with

fishermen hauling nets; and all these men, as they go about their work,

contrive to make pictures 'in the great style' against a sky charged with

marvels, obviously without any assistance from Homer, and quite as if

nothing had happened for, say, the last three thousand years. That the

immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially 'heroic age'--or that, if

it have, that age is yours--you will discover by watching your own

yachtsman as he moves about lowering foresail and preparing to drop

anchor.

It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as Wilson painted--a

broad-bosomed flood between deep and tranquil woods, the main banks

holding here and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, but

opening into creeks where the oaks dip their branches in the high tides,

where the stars are glassed all night long without a ripple, and where you

may spend whole days with no company but herons and sandpipers. Even by

the main river each separate figure--the fisherman on the shore, the

ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing between them--moves slowly

upon a large landscape, while, permeating all, 'the essential silence

cheers and blesses.' After a week at anchor in the heart of this silence

Cynthia and I compared notes, and set down the total population at fifty

souls; and even so she would have it that I had included the owls.

Lo! the next morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke us in our berths, and,

raising the flap of our dew-drenched awning, we 'descried at sunrise an

emerging prow' of a peculiarly hideous excursion steamboat. She blew no

whistle, and we were preparing to laugh at her grotesque temerity when we

became aware of a score of boats putting out towards her from the shadowy

banks. Like spectres they approached, reached her, and discharged their

complements, until at last a hundred and fifty passengers crowded her

deck. In silence--or in such silence as a paddle-boat can achieve--she

backed, turned, and bore them away: on what festal errand we never

discovered. We never saw them return. For aught I know they may never

have returned. They raised no cheer; no band accompanied them; they

passed without even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes at

most the apparition had vanished around the river-bend seawards and out of

sight. We stared at the gently heaving water, turned, and caught sight of

Euergetes, his head and red cap above the forecastle hatch. (I call our

yachtsman Euergetes because it is so unlike his real name that neither he

nor his family will recognise it.) "Why, Euergetes," exclaimed Cynthia,

"wherever did they all come from?" "I'm sure I can't tell you, ma'am," he

answered, "unless 'twas from the woods,"--giving us to picture these ardent

holiday-makers roosting all night in the trees while we slumbered.

But the odd thing was that the labourers manned the fields that day, the

fishermen the beach that evening, in un-diminished numbers. We landed,

and could detect no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent

days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, though easy, was

startling.

I suppose that 'in the great style' could hardly be predicated of our

housekeeping on these excursions; and yet it achieves, in our enthusiastic

opinion, a primitive elegance not often recaptured by mortals since the

passing of the Golden Age. We cook for ourselves, but bring a fine spirit

of emulation both to _cuisine_ and service. We dine frugally, but the

claret is sound. From the moment when Euergetes awakes us by washing down

the deck, and the sound of water rushing through the scuppers calls me

forth to discuss the weather with him, method rules the early hours, that

we may be free to use the later as we list. First the cockpit beneath the

awning must be prepared as a dressing-room for Cynthia; next Euergetes

summoned on deck to valet me with the simple bucket. And when I am

dressed and tingling from the _douche_, and sit me down on the cabin top,

barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and Euergetes has been sent

ashore for milk and eggs, bread and clotted cream, there follows a

peaceful half-hour until Cynthia flings back a corner of the awning and,

emerging, confirms the dawn. Then begins the business, orderly and

thorough, of redding up the cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the lower

deck, folding away the awning, and transforming the cockpit into a

breakfast-room, with table neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has

returned, and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red mullet cooking.

Cynthia clatters the cups and saucers, while in the well by the cabin door

I perform some acquired tricks with the new-laid eggs. There is plenty to

be done on board a small boat, but it is all simple enough. Only, you

must not let it overtake you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears!

By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, my pipe is lit, and a

free day lies before us--

"All the wood to ransack,

All the wave explore."

We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. The nearest railway lies

six miles off, and is likely to deposit no one in whom we have the least

concern. The woods are deep, we carry our lunch-basket and may roam

independent of taverns. If the wind invite, we can hoist our small sail;

if not, we can recline and drift and stare at the heavens, or land and

bathe, or search in vain for curlews' or kingfishers' nests, or in more

energetic moods seek out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine.

Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul out of those delectable

waters, remote and enchanted as the lake whence the fisherman at the

genie's orders drew fish for the young king of the Black Isles. But such

days as these require no filling, and why should I teach you how to fill

them?

Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, when the awning has been

spread once more, and after long hours in the open our world narrows to

the circle of the reading-lamp in the cockpit. Our cabin is prepared.

Through the open door we see its red curtain warm in the light of the

swinging lamp, the beds laid, the white sheets turned back. Still we

grudge these moments to sleep. Outside we hear the tide streaming

seawards, light airs play beneath the awning, above it rides the host of

heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, we have home--larder,

cellar, library, tables, and cupboards; life's small appliances with the

human comradeship they serve, chosen for their service after severely

practical discussion, yet ultimately by the heart's true nesting-instinct.

We are isolated, bound even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of

chain only. To-morrow we can lift anchor and spread wing; but we carry

home with us.

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight

Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night;

I will make a palace fit for you and me

Of green days in forests and blue days at sea."

"I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room

Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom;

And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white

In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night."

You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. Will you think it

ridiculous that after such royal days of summer, her inconspicuous

obsequies have before now put me in mind of Turner's '_Fighting

Temeraire_'? I declare, at any rate, that the fault lies not with me, but

with our country's painters and poets for providing no work of art nearer

to my mood. We English have a great seafaring and a great poetical past.

Yet the magic of the sea and shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and

for its finest expression we must still turn to an art in which as a race

we are less expert, and stand before that picture of Turner's in the

National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when

the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in

'great English national epic as grand as the _Odyssey_' It may be, but as

yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and

occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest

the excursionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language--not even

_The Ancient Mariner_--binds as that picture binds, the--

"Mystic spell,

Which none but sailors know or feel,

And none but they can tell--"

If indeed they _can_ tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together in one

triumphant moment the emotional effect of noble shipping and a sentiment

as ancient and profound as the sea itself--human regret for transitory

human glory. The great warship, glimmering in her Mediterranean

fighting-paint, moving like a queen to execution; the pert and ignoble

tug, itself an emblem of the new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and

impatient of the slow loveliness it supersedes; the sunset hour, closing

man's labour; the fading river-reach--you may call these things obvious,

but all art's greatest effects are obvious when once genius has discovered

them. I should know well enough by this time what is coming when I draw

near that picture, and yet my heart never fails to leap with the old wild

wonder. There are usually one or two men standing before it--I observe

that it affects women less--and I glance at them furtively to see how

_they_ take it. If ever I surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe

we shall shake hands. And why not? For the moment we are not strangers,

but men subdued by the wonder and sadness of our common destiny: "we feel

that we are greater than we know." We are two Englishmen, in one moment

realising the glories of our blood and state. We are alone together,

gazing upon a new Pacific, 'silent, upon a peak in Darien.'

For--and here lies his subtlety--in the very flush of amazement the

painter flatters you by whispering that for _you_ has his full meaning

been reserved. The _Temeraire_ goes to her doom unattended, twilit,

obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle of the river. You alone have

eyes for the passing of greatness, and a heart to feel it.

"There's a far bell ringing,"

But you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day, the end of

deeds.

So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud

exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jettymen and

stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains are shunting,

cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes amid clouds of dust.

We and we only assist at the passing of a goddess. Euergetes rests on his

oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep shadow of the shore,

and with a soft grating noise--ah, the eloquence of it!--takes ground.

Silently we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm; silently

we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern

moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over

cabintop and well; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due

rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November darkness has settled on the

river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell committing her--our

treasure 'locked up, not lost'--to a winter over which Jove shall reign

genially.

"Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera."

As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on

the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows

and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights.

She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves

to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library

door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over

against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been

awaiting me.

[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:--

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,

Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans

To fill it out blood-stained and aghast;

Although your rudder be a dragon's tail

Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony,

Your cordage large uprootings from the skull

Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail

To find the Melancholy--whether she

Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

NOVEMBER.

Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in

Devonshire, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of

the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a

day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I

had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and

used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the

powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun--an old muzzle-loader. Though

stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even

extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest

grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her

acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I

do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of

mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended--good

housewife that she was--down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in

the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But

in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to

public worship and acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my twelfth

year I lived on pretty close terms with Hell, and would wake up in the

night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no

very vivid fear for myself--or if vivid it was but occasional and rare.

Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but

I had a desperate assurance that both my parents were damned, and I loved

them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what

kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result

would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of

humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless

tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it

suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood

was tormented with visions of Hell derived from the pulpit and mixed up

with two terrible visions derived from my reading--the ghost of an evil

old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, _The

Tapestried Room_, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's

_Diary of a Late Physician_. I had happened on these horrors among the

dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions--the vision of Hell particularly

and my parents in it--murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason

that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never

been troubled at all by Hell or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to

last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one,

or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in

the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the

first . . . and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things

with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though--apart from the missing of

sociableness--if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical

friends from the analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a

future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without

resort to analogy. But there are good and bad analogies, and of all bad

ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear

thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the

flower.

"The flowers that we behold each year

In chequer'd meads their heads to rear,

New rising from the tomb;

The eglantines and honey daisies,

And all those pretty smiling faces

That still in age grow young--

Even those do cry

That though men die,

Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys

have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this

argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest

Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not _in

pari materia_; that all the true correspondence between man and the

flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant,

blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is

begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him--all in this

world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to

another after all its analogies have been met and satisfied on this side

of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is

possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are,

one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to

heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as

I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a

totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the

dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare

grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God will raise

the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that

since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different

things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that

bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form

hereafter. Objections may be urged against this illustration: I am only

concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different

from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far

less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment

dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain,

at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life

in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or

nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or

exaggerating and perpetuating ours--or some of them; but the attempt is

demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of

man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp

and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity

he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting

Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes

(say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are

one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may

call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily

and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is

an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as

consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of

such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would

become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable

pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual

dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the _Phaedo_--

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand

years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which

never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in

proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and

lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . To beings

constituted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as

great an affliction as the pains of hell, and might even be

pleasantly interrupted by them."

This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting

up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks--the fallacy of using

'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms.

He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless

time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does

not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of

time at all, but an absolute negation of it.

There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this

subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private

journal (1883):--

"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room

for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very

old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to

sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would

be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where

there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the

unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there

was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in

a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, God,

who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being."

It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview--these two, aged and

great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel

themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon

that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than

that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson

yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of

this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far

as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the

infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What

cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with

feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass

into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly

that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit

that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that

would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of

discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.

This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought

to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say

little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but

because--to quote Jowett again--"considering the 'feebleness of the human

faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe

that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is

not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing

more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which,

at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."

I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because

as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument,

and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in

sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are

all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts--and especially if we have

children, as at forty every man ought--our centre of gravity has

completely shifted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next

generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what

becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this

time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so

splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous

and charitable comprehension.

Of all the opening passages in Plato--master of beautiful openings--I like

best that of the _Laws_. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and

on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the

three persons of the dialogue--strangers to one another, but bound on a

common pilgrimage--join company and fall into converse together. One is

an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are elderly.

Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.

"It will pass the time pleasantly," he suggests; "for I am told that

the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is

considerable, and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty

trees which will protect us from the scorching sun. Being no longer

young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole

journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation."

"Yes, Stranger," answers Cleinias the Cretan, "and if we proceed

onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, which are of rare height

and beauty, and there are green meadows in which we may repose and

converse."

"Very good."

"Very good indeed; and still better when we see them. Let us move on

cheerily."

So, now walking, anon pausing in the shade to rest, the three strangers

beguile their journey, which (as the Athenian was made, by one of Plato's

cunning touches, to foresee) is a long one; and the dialogue, moving with

their deliberate progress, extends to a length which no doubt in the

course of some 2,300 years has frightened away many thousands of general

readers. Yet its slow amplitude, when you come to think of it, is

appropriate; for these elderly men are in no hurry, although they have

plenty to talk about, especially on the subjects of youth and religion.

"They have," says Jowett, "the feelings of old age about youth, about the

state, about human things in general. Nothing in life seems to be of much

importance to them: they are spectators rather than actors, and men in

general appear to the Athenian speaker to be the playthings of the gods

and of circumstances. Still they have a fatherly care of the young, and

are deeply impressed by sentiments of religion. . . ."

"Human affairs," says the Athenian, "are hardly worth considering in

earnest, and yet we must be in earnest about them--a sad necessity

constrains us. . . . And so I say that about serious matters a man

should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should

not be serious; and that God is the natural and worthy object of our

most serious and blessed endeavours. For man, as I said before, is

made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the

best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously

and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from

what they are at present."

But on the subject of youth, too, our Athenian is anxiously, albeit

calmly, serious: and especially on the right education of youth,

"for," says he, "many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the

victors; but education is never suicidal." By education he explains

himself to mean--

"That education in virtue from youth upwards which makes a man eagerly

pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how

rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which,

upon our view, deserves the name; and that other sort of training

which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere

cleverness apart from intelligence and justice is mean and illiberal,

and is not worthy to be called education at all."

Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years

(if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though

speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three

imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours

it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired

treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises

start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas

it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of

indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in his _De

Senectute_ get hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian

lets fall almost casually--that a man should honour an aged parent as he

would the image of a God treasured up and dwelling in his house.

The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at

all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the

September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer

called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in

Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is--I won't say

the right one, though this too I believe--the outlook a man _naturally_

takes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to

have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss

the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old

schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave--

"But when I think if we must part

And all this personal dream be fled--

O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart!

Would God that thou wert dead--

A clod insensible to joys or ills--

A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!"

I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself passes me by. 'All this

personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of

our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in

the children.

I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that

it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in

general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women

reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost passionately towards the young.

Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as

nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots--though of a state which

presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I

own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous

renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few

years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.

Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano more sedulously than

that instrument, in my opinion, deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in

talk with me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching multitudes of

poor children to play upon pianos provided by the rates. As a historical

fact, very few poor children play or have ever played on pianos provided

by the rates. But I prefer, passing this correction over, to point out to

my indignant friends that the upper and middle classes in England are

ceasing to breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon race is to

lose one of its most cherished accomplishments--unless we are content to

live and see our national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp and

penny whistle--we must endow the children of the poor with pianos--or

perhaps as 'labour certificates' abbreviate the years at our disposal for

instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American sculptor's grand

allegorical conception of 'Freedom presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and

the Fine Arts.'

To drop irony--and indeed I would expel it, if I could, once and for all

from these pages--I like recreation as much as most men, and have grown to

find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business of sitting on Education

Committees. Some fifteen years ago, in the first story in my first book

of short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a dreadful sound: 'the

footfall of a multitude more terrible than an army with banners, the

ceaseless pelting feet of children--of Whittingtons turning and turning

again.' Well, I still hear that footfall: but it has become less terrible

to me, though not one whit less insistent: and it began to grow less

terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain little book, _The

Invisible Playmate_, to the author of which (Mr. William Canton) I desire

here to tender my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book Mr.

Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by an imaginary Arm.

(Arminius?), Altegans, an elderly German cobbler of 'the village of

Wieheisstes, in the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland.' Its

name is the 'Erster Schulgang,' and I will own, and gratefully, that few

real poems by real 'classics' have so sung themselves into my ears, or so

shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have the passages which I here set

down for the mere pleasure of transcribing them:--

"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it

is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in

fact. All over the world--and all under it, too, when their time

comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings

round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning

somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light

the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot--shining companies and

groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to

have a soft heavenly light about them!

"He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely

moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of

green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain

ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by

the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the

woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along

the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the

railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in

ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in

small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only

as a strange tradition.

"The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their

pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep

'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and

as new nations with _their_ cities and villages, their fields, woods,

mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh

troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these

small school-going children of the dawn.' . . .

"What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood?

The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade

down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or

the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most

beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late

moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy

dawn."

My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we

are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly,

stringent in our cheerful ritual;--and this has been my birthday sermon!

DECEMBER.

Hard by the edge of the sand-hills, and close beside the high road on the

last rise before it dips to the coast, stands a turfed embankment

surrounded by a shallow fosse. This is none of our ancient camps

('castles' we call them in Cornwall), as you perceive upon stepping within

the enclosure, which rises in a complete circle save for two entrances cut

through the bank and facing one another. You are standing in a perfectly

level area a hundred and thirty feet in diameter; the surrounding rampart

rises to a height of eight or nine feet, narrowing towards the top, where

it is seven feet wide; and around its inner side you may trace seven or

eight rows of seats cut in the turf, but now almost obliterated by the

grass.

This Round (as we call it) was once an open-air theatre or planguary

(_plain-an-guare_, place of the play). It has possibly a still older

history, and may have been used by the old Cornish for their councils and

rustic sports; but we know that it was used as a theatre, perhaps as early

as the fourteenth century, certainly as late as the late sixteenth: and,

what is more, we have preserved for us some of the plays performed in it.

They are sacred or miracle plays, of course. If you draw a line from

entrance to entrance, then at right angles to it there runs from the

circumference towards the centre of the area a straight shallow trench,

terminating in a spoon-shaped pit. The trench is now a mere depression

not more than a foot deep, the pit three feet: but doubtless time has

levelled them up, and there is every reason to suppose that the pit served

to represent Hell (or, in the drama of The Resurrection, the Grave), and

the trench allowed the performers, after being thrust down into perdition,

to regain the green-room unobserved--either actually unobserved, the

trench being covered, or by a polite fiction, the audience pretending not

to see. My private belief is that, the stage being erected above and

along the trench, they were actually hidden while they made their exit.

Where the trench meets the rampart a semi-circular hollow, about ten feet

in diameter, makes a breach in the rows of seats. Here, no doubt, stood

the green-room.

The first notice of the performance of these plays occurs in Carew's

_Survey of Cornwall_, published in 1602:--

"Pastimes to delight the mind, the Cornishmen have guary miracles and

three-men's songs: and for exercise of the body hunting, hawking,

shooting, wrestling, hurling, and such other games.

"The guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude

compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness

which accompanied the Romans' _vetus comedia_. For representing it

they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the

diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot.

The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and

see it; for they have therein devils and devices to delight as well

the eye as the ear; the players con not their parts without book, but

are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back

with the book in his hand and telleth them softly what they must

pronounce aloud."

Our Round, you observe, greatly exceeds the dimensions given by Carew.

But there were several in the west: one for instance, traceable fifty

years ago, at the northern end of the town of Redruth, which still keeps

the name of Planguary; and another magnificent one, of stone, near the

church-town of St. Just by the Land's End. Carew may have seen only the

smaller specimens.

As for the plays--well, they are by no means masterpieces of literature,

yet they reveal here and there perceptions of beauty such as go with

sincerity even though it be artless. Beautiful for instance is the idea,

if primitive the writing, of a scene in one, _Origo Mundi_, where Adam,

bowed with years, sends his son Seth to the gate of Paradise to beg

his release from the weariness of living (I quote from Norris's

translation):--

"O dear God, I am weary,

Gladly would I see once

The time to depart.

Strong are the roots of the briars,

That my arms are broken

Tearing up many of them.

"Seth my son I will send

To the gate of Paradise forthwith,

To the Cherub, the guardian.

Ask him if there will be for me

Oil of mercy at the last

From the Father, the God of Grace."

Seth answers that he does not know the road to Paradise. "Follow," says

Adam--

"Follow the prints of my feet, burnt;

No grass or flower in the world grows

In that same road where I went--

I and thy Mother surely also--

Thou wilt see the tokens."

Fine too is the story, in the _Passio Domini Nostri_, of the blind soldier

Longius, who is led forward and given a lance, to pierce Christ's body on

the Cross. He thrusts and the holy blood heals him of his blindness.

Local colour is sparingly imported. One of the executioners, as he bores

the Cross, says boastfully:--

"I will bore a hole for the one hand,

There is not a fellow west of Hayle

Who can bore better."

--And in the _Resurrectio_ Pilate rewards the gaoler for his trustiness

with the Cornish manors of 'Fekenal, Carvenow and Merthyn,' and promises

the soldiers by the Sepulchre 'the plain of Dansotha and Barrow Heath.'

A simplicity scarcely less refreshing is exhibited in _The Life of St.

Meriasec_ (a play recently recovered) by a scholar whom a pompous

pedagogue is showing off. He says:--

"God help A, B, and C!

The end of the song is D:

No more is known to me,"

But promises to learn more after dinner.

Enthusiasts beg us to make the experiment of 'reviving' these old plays in

their old surroundings. But here I pause, while admitting the temptation.

One would like to give life again, if only for a day, to the picture which

Mr. Norris conjures up:--

"The bare granite plain of St. Just, in view of Cape Cornwall

and of the transparent sea which beats against that magnificent

headland. . . . The mighty gathering of people from many miles around

hardly showing like a crowd in that extended region, where nothing

ever grows to limit the view on any side, with their booths and

tents, absolutely necessary where so many people had to remain three

days on the spot, would give a character to the assembly probably

more like what we hear of the so-called religious revivals in America

than of anything witnessed in more sober Europe."

But alas! I foresee the terrible unreality which would infect the whole

business. Very pretty, no doubt, and suggestive would be the picture of

the audience arrayed around the turf benches--

"In gradibus sedit populus de cespite factis--"

But one does not want an audience to be acting; and this audience would be

making-believe even more heroically than the actors--that is, if it took

the trouble to be in earnest at all. For the success of the experiment

would depend on our reconstructing the whole scene--the ring of entranced

spectators as well as the primitive show; and the country-people would

probably, and not entirely without reason, regard the business as

'a stupid old May game.' The only spectators properly impressed would be

a handful of visitors and solemn antiquarians. I can see those visitors.

If it has ever been your lot to witness the performance of a 'literary'

play in London and cast an eye over the audience it attracts, you too will

know them and their stigmata--their ineffable attire, their strange

hirsuteness, their air of combining instruction with amusement, their soft

felt hats indented along the crown. No! We may, perhaps, produce new

religious dramas in these ancient Rounds: decidedly we cannot revive the

old ones.

While I ponder these things, standing in the deserted Round, there comes

to me--across the sky where the plovers wheel and flash in the wintry

sunshine--the sound of men's voices carolling at an unseen farm. They are

singing _The First Nowell_; but the fourth Nowell--the fourth of the

refrain--is the _clou_ of that most common, most excellent carol, and

gloriously the tenors and basses rise to it. No, we cannot revive the old

Miracle Plays: but here in the Christmas Carols we have something as

artlessly beautiful which we can still preserve, for with them we have not

to revive, but merely to preserve, the conditions.

In a preface to a little book of carols chosen (and with good judgment)

some years ago by the Rev. H. R. Bramley, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and

well edited in the matter of music by Sir John Stainer, I read that--

"The time-honoured and delightful custom of thus celebrating the

Birthday of the Holy Child seems, with some change of form, to be

steadily and rapidly gaining ground. Instead of the itinerant

ballad-singer, or the little bands of wandering children, the

practice of singing carols in Divine Service, or by a full choir at

some fixed meeting, is becoming prevalent."

Since Mr. Bramley wrote these words the practice has grown more prevalent,

and the shepherds of Bethlehem are in process of becoming thoroughly

sophisticated and self-conscious. For that is what it means. You may

(as harassed bishops will admit) do a number of irrelevant things in

church, but you cannot sing the best carols there. You cannot toll in

your congregation, seat your organist at the organ, array your full choir

in surplices, and tune up to sing, for example--

"Rise up, rise up, brother Dives,

And come along with me;

There's a place in Hell prepared for you

To sit on the serpent's knee."

Or this--

"In a manger laid and wrapped I was--

So very poor, this was my chance--

Between an ox and a silly poor ass,

To call my true love to the dance."

Or this--

"Joseph did whistle and Mary did sing,

And all the bells on earth did ring

On Christmas Day in the morning."

These are verses from carols, and from excellent carols: but I protest

that with 'choirs and places where they sing' they will be found

incongruous. Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection "some," he

says, "from their legendary, festive or otherwise less serious character,

are unfit for use within the church."

Now since, as we know, these old carols were written to be sung in the

open air, or in the halls and kitchens of private houses, I prefer to put

Mr. Bramley's proposition conversely, and say that the church is an

unsuitable place for carol singing. If the clergy persist in so confining

it, they will no doubt in process of time evolve a number of new

compositions which differ from ordinary hymns sufficiently to be called

carols, but from which the peculiar charm of the carol has evaporated.

This charm (let me add) by no means consists in mere primitiveness or mere

archaism. Genuine carols (if we could only get rid of affectation and be

honest authors in our own century without straining to age ourselves back

into the fifteenth) might be written to-day as appropriately as ever.

'Joseph did whistle,' &c., was no less unsuited at the date of its

composition to performance by a full choir in a chancel than it is to-day.

But whatever the precise nature of the charm may be, you can prove by a

very simple experiment that such a performance tends to impair it.

Assemble a number of carollers about your doorstep or within your hall,

and listen to their rendering of 'The first good joy,' or 'The angel

Gabriel;' then take them off to church and let them sing these same

ditties to an organ accompaniment. You will find that, strive against it

as they may, the tune drags slower and slower; the poem has become a

spiritless jingle, at once dismal and trivial. Take the poor thing out

into the fresh air again and revive it with a fife and drum; stay it with

flagons and comfort it with apples, for it is sick of improper feeding.

No, no: such a carol as 'God rest you, merry gentlemen,' has a note which

neither is suited by, nor can be suited to, what people call 'the sacred

edifice': while 'Joseph was an old man,' 'I saw three ships' and 'The

first good joy' are plainly impossible. Associate them with organ and

surpliced choir, and you are mixing up things that differ. Omit them, at

the same time banning the house-to-house caroller, and you tyrannically

limit men's devotional impulses. I am told that the clergy frown upon

house-to-house carolling, because they believe it encourages drunkenness.

Why then, let them take the business in hand and see that too much drink

is neither taken nor offered. This ought not to be very difficult.

But, as with the old plays, so with carol-singing, it is easier and more

consonant with the Puritan temper to abolish a practice than to elevate it

and clear away abuses: and the half-instructed mind is taught with fatal

facility to condemn use and abuse in a lump, to believe carol-singing a

wile of the Evil One because Bill once went around carol-singing and came

home drunk.

In parishes where a more tolerant spirit prevails I am glad to note that

the old custom, and even a taste for the finer ditties, seem to be

reviving. Certainly the carollers visit us in greater numbers and sing

with more evidence of careful practice than they did eight or ten years

ago: and friends in various parts of England have a like story to tell.

In this corner the rigour of winter does not usually begin before January,

and it is no unusual thing to be able to sit out of doors in sunshine for

an hour or so in the afternoon of Christmas Day. The vessels in sight fly

their flags and carry bunches of holly at their topmast-heads: and I

confess the day is made cheerfuller for us if they are answered by the

voices of carollers on the waterside, or if, walking inland, I hear the

note of the clarionet in some 'town-place' or meet a singing-party

tramping between farm and farm.

That the fresh bloom of the carol was evanescent and all too easily

destroyed I always knew; but never realised its extreme fugacity until,

some five years ago, it fell to me to prepare an anthology, which, under

the title of _The Oxford Book of English Verse_, has since achieved some

popularity. I believed that previous English anthologists had unjustly,

even unaccountably, neglected our English carols, and promised myself to

redress the balance. I hunted through many collections, and brought

together a score or so of pieces which, considered merely as carols, were

gems of the first water. But no sooner did I set them among our finer

lyrics than, to my dismay, their colours vanished; the juxtaposition

became an opposition which killed them, and all but half a dozen had to be

withdrawn. There are few gems more beautiful than the amethyst: but an

amethyst will not live in the company of rubies. A few held their own--

the exquisite 'I sing of a Maiden' for instance--

"I sing of a Maiden

That is makeles;[1]

King of all kings

To her son she ches.[2]

"He came al so still

There his mother was,

As dew in April

That falleth on the grass.

"He came al so still

To his mother's bour,

As dew in April

That falleth on the flour.

"He came al so still

There his mother lay

As dew in April

That falleth on the spray.

"Mother and maiden

Was never none but she;

Well may such a lady

Goddes mother be."

[1] Without a mate.

[2] Chose.

Or 'Lestenyt, lordings,' or 'Of one that is so fair and bright;' and my

favourite, 'The Seven Virgins,' set among the ballads lost none of its

lovely candour. But on the whole, and sorely against my will, it had to

be allowed that our most typical carols will not bear an ordeal through

which many of the rudest ballads pass safely enough. So it will be found,

I suspect, with the carols of other nations. I take a typical English

one, exhumed not long ago by Professor Flugel from a sixteenth century MS.

at Balliol College, Oxford, and pounced upon as a gem by two such

excellent judges of poetry as Mr. Alfred W. Pollard and Mr. F. Sidgwick:--

"_Can I not sing but Hoy!

The jolly shepherd made so much joy!_

The shepherd upon a hill he sat,

He had on him his tabard[1] and his hat,

His tar-box, his pipe and his flagat;[2]

And his name was called jolly, jolly Wat,

For he was a good herd's-boy,

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy."

"The shepherd upon a hill was laid

His dog to his girdle was tayd,

He had not slept but a little braid

But _Gloria in excelsis_ was to him said

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

"The shepherd on a hill he stood,

Round about him his sheep they yode,[3]

He put his hand under his hood,

He saw a star as red as blood.

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy."

The shepherd of course follows the star, and it guides him to the inn and

the Holy Family, whom he worships:--

"'Now farewell, mine own herdsman Wat!'

'Yea, 'fore God, Lady, even so I hat:[4]

Lull well Jesu in thy lap,

And farewell Joseph, with thy round cap!'

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy."

[1] Short coat.

[2] Flagon.

[3] Went.

[4] Am hight, called.

Set beside this the following Burgundian carol (of which, by the way, you

will find a charming translation in Lady Lindsay's _A Christmas Posy_):--

"Giullo, pran ton tamborin;

Toi, pran tai fleute, Robin.

Au son de ces instruman--

Turelurelu, patapatapan--

Au son de ces instruman

Je diron Noel gaiman.

"C'eto lai mode autrefoi

De loue le Roi de Roi;

Au son de ces instruman--

Turelurelu, patapatapan--

Au son de ces instruman

Ai nos an fau faire autan.

"Ce jor le Diale at ai cu,

Randons an graice ai Jesu;

Au son de ces instruman--

Turelurelu, patapatapar--

Au son de ces instruman

Fezon lai nique ai Satan.

"L'homme et Dei son pu d'aicor

Que lai fleute et le tambor.

Au son de ces instruman--

Turelurelu, patapatapan--

Au son de ces instruman

Chanton, danson, santons-an!"

To set either of these delightful ditties alongside of the richly-jewelled

lyrics of Keats or of Swinburne, of Victor Hugo or of Gautier would be to

sin against congruity, even as to sing them in church would be to sin

against congruity.

There was one carol, however, which I was fain to set alongside of 'The

Seven Virgins,' and omitted only through a scruple in tampering with two

or three stanzas, necessary to the sense, but in all discoverable versions

so barbarously uncouth as to be quite inadmissible. And yet 'The Holy

Well' is one of the loveliest carols in the language, and I cannot give up

hope of including it some day: for the peccant verses as they stand are

quite evidently corrupt, and if their originals could be found I have no

doubt that the result would be flawless beauty. Can any of my readers

help to restore them?

'The Holy Well,' according to Mr. Bramley, is traditional in Derbyshire.

'Joshua Sylvester,' in _A Garland of Christmas Carols_, published in 1861,

took his version from an eighteenth-century broadsheet printed at

Gravesend, and in broadsheet form it seems to have been fairly common.

I choose the version given by Mr. A. H. Bullen in his _Carols and Poems_,

published by Nimmo in 1886:--

"As it fell out one May morning,

And upon one bright holiday,

Sweet Jesus asked of His dear mother

If He might go to play.

"To play, to play, sweet Jesus shall go,

And to play pray get you gone;

And let me hear of no complaint

At night when you come home.

"Sweet Jesus went down to yonder town,

As far as the Holy Well,

And there did see as fine children,

As any tongue can tell.

"He said, God bless you every one,

And your bodies Christ save and see:

Little children shall I play with you,

And you shall play with Me?"

So far we have plain sailing; but now, with the children's answer, comes

the trouble:--

"But they made answer to Him, No:

They were lords' and ladies sons;

And He, the meanest of them all,

Was but a maiden's child, born in an ox's stall.

"Sweet Jesus turn'd Him around,

And He neither laughed nor smiled,

But the tears came trickling from His eyes

Like water from the skies."

A glance, as I contend, shows these lines to be corrupt: they were not

written, that is to say, in the above form, which violates metre and

rhyme-arrangement, and is both uncouth and redundant. The carol now picks

up its pace again and proceeds--

"Sweet Jesus turned Him round about,

To His mother's dear home went He,

And said, I have been in yonder town

As far as you can see."

Some versions give 'As after you can see.' Jesus repeats the story

precisely as it has been told, with His request to the children and their

rude answer. Whereupon Mary says:--

"Though You are but a maiden's child,

Born in an ox's stall,

Though art the Christ, the King of Heaven,

And the Saviour of them all.

"Sweet Jesus, go down to yonder town

As far as the Holy Well,

And take away those sinful souls

And dip them deep in Hell.

"Nay, nay, sweet Jesus said,

Nay, nay, that may not be;

There are too many sinful souls

Crying out for the help of Me."

On this exquisite close the carol might well end, as Mr. Bullen with his

usual fine judgment makes it end. But the old copies give an additional

stanza, and a very silly one:--

"O then spoke the angel Gabriel,

Upon one good St. Stephen,

Although you're but a maiden's child,

You are the King of Heaven."

'One good St. Stephen' is obviously an ignorant misprint for 'one good set

steven,' _i.e._ 'appointed time,' and so it appears in Mr. Bramley's book,

and in Mr. W. H. Husk's _Songs of the Nativity_. But the stanza is

foolish, and may be dismissed. To amend the text of the children's answer

is less legitimate. Yet one feels sorely tempted; and I cannot help

suggesting that the original ran something like this:--

"But they made answer to Him, No:

They were lords and ladies all;

And He was but a maiden's child,

Born in an ox's stall.

"Sweet Jesus turned Him round about,

And He neither laughed nor smiled,

But the tears came trickling from His eyes

To be but a maiden's child. . . ."

I plead for this suggestion: (1) that it adds nothing to the text and

changes but one word; (2) that it removes nothing but the weak and

unrhyming 'Like water from the skies'; and (3) that it leads directly to

Mary's answer:--

"Though you are but a maiden's child,

Born in an ox's stall," &c.

But it were better to hunt out the original than to accept any emendation;

and I hope you will agree that the original of this little poem, so

childlike and delicately true, is worth hunting for. "The carol," says

Mr. Husk, "has a widely-spread popularity. On a broadside copy printed at

Gravesend,"--presumably the one from which 'Joshua Sylvester' took his

version--"there is placed immediately under the title a woodcut purporting

to be a representation of the site of the Holy Well, Palestine; but the

admiration excited thereby for the excellent good taste of the printer is

too soon alas! dispelled, for between the second and third stanzas we see

another woodcut representing a feather-clad-and-crowned negro seated on a

barrel, smoking--a veritable ornament of a tobacconists' paper."

One of the finest carols written of late years is Miss Louise Imogen

Guiney's _Tryste Noel_. It is deliberately archaic, and (for reasons

hinted at above) I take deliberate archaism to be about the worst fault a

modern carol-writer can commit. Also it lacks the fine simplicity of

Christina Rossetti's _In the bleak midwinter_. I ought to dislike it,

too, for its sophisticated close. Yet its curious rhythm and curious

words haunt me in spite of all prejudice:--

"The Ox he openeth wide the Doore

And from the Snowe he calls her inne;

And he hath seen her smile therefore,

Our Ladye without sinne.

Now soone from Sleepe

A Starre shall leap,

And soone arrive both King and Hinde:

_Amen, Amen_;

But O the Place cou'd I but finde!

"The Ox hath husht his Voyce and bent

Trewe eye of Pity ore the Mow;

And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,

The Blessed lays her Browe.

Around her feet

Full Warme and Sweete

His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;

_Amen, Amen_;

But sore am I with vaine Travel!

"The Ox is Host in Juda's stall,

And Host of more than onely one,

For close she gathereth withal

Our Lorde, her little Sonne.

Glad Hinde and King

Their Gyfte may bring,

But wou'd to-night my Teares were there;

_Amen, Amen_;

Between her Bosom and His hayre!"

The days are short. I return from this Christmas ramble and find it high

time to light the lamp and pull the curtains over my Cornish Window.

"The days are sad--it is the Holy tide:

The Winter morn is short, the Night is long;

So let the lifeless Hours be glorified

With deathless thoughts and echo'd in sweet song:

And through the sunset of this purple cup

They will resume the roses of their prime,

And the old Dead will hear us and wake up,

Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime!"

Friends dead and friends afar--I remember you at this season, here with

the log on the hearth, the holly around the picture frames and the wine at

my elbow. One glass in especial to you, my old friend in the far north!--

CHRISTMAS EVE

"Friend, old friend in the manse by the fireside sitting,

Hour by hour while the grey ash drips from the log.

You with a book on your knee, your wife with her knitting,

Silent both, and between you, silent, the dog--

"Silent here in the south sit I, and, leaning,

One sits watching the fire, with chin upon hand,

Gazes deep in its heart--but ah! its meaning

Rather I read in the shadows and understand.

"Dear, kind, she is; and daily dearer, kinder,

Love shuts the door on the lamp and our two selves:

Not my stirring awakened the flame that behind her

Lit up a name in the leathern dusk of the shelves.

"Veterans are my books, with tarnished gilding:

Yet there is one gives back to the winter grate

Gold of a sunset flooding a college building,

Gold of an hour I waited--as now I wait--

"For a light step on the stair, a girl's low laughter,

Rustle of silks, shy knuckles tapping the oak,

Dinner and mirth upsetting my rooms, and, after,

Music, waltz upon waltz, till the June day broke.

"Where is her laughter now? Old tarnished covers--

You that reflect her with fresh young face unchanged--

Tell that we met, that we parted, not as lovers:

Time, chance, brought us together, and these estranged.

"Loyal we were to the mood of the moment granted,

Bruised not its bloom, but danced on the wave of its joy;

Passion, wisdom, fell back like a wall enchanted

Ringing a floor for us both--Heaven for the boy!

"Where is she now? Regretted not, though departed,

Blessings attend and follow her all her days!

--Look to your hound: he dreams of the hares he started,

Whines, and awakes, and stretches his limbs to the blaze.

"Far old friend in the manse, by the grey ash peeling

Flake by flake from the heat in the Yule log's core,

Look past the woman you love--On wall and ceiling

Climbs not a trellis of roses--and ghosts--o' yore?

"Thoughts, thoughts! Whistle them back like hounds returning--

Mark how her needles pause at a sound upstairs.

Time for bed, and to leave the log's heart burning!

Give ye good-night, but first thank God in your prayers!"