ARTHUR MACHEN

_Chapter I_

One night a year or so ago I was the guest of a famous literary society.

This society, or club, it is well known, believes in celebrating

literature--and all sorts of other things--in a thoroughly agreeable and

human fashion. It meets not in any gloomy hall or lecture room, it has

no gritty apparatus of blackboard, chalk, and bleared water-bottle. It

summons its members and its guests to a well-known restaurant of the

West End, it gives them red and white roses for their button-holes, and

sets them down to an excellent dinner and good red wine at a gaily

decked table, flower garlanded, luminous with many starry lamps.

Well, as I say, I found myself on a certain night a partaker of all this

cheerfulness. I was one guest among many; there were explorers and

ambassadors and great scientific personages and judges, and the author

who has given the world the best laughter that it has enjoyed since

Dickens died: in a word, I was in much more distinguished company than

that to which I am accustomed. And after dinner the Persians (as I will

call them) have a kindly and courteous custom of praising their guests;

and to my astonishment and delight the speaker brought me into his

oration and said the kindest and most glowing things imaginable about a

translation I once made of the "Heptameron" of Margaret of Navarre. I

was heartily pleased; I hold with Foker in "Pendennis" that every fellow

likes a hand. Praise is grateful, especially when there has not been too

much of it; but it is not to record my self-complacence that I have told

this incident of the Persian banquet. As I sat at the board and heard

the speaker's kindly compliments, I was visited for a twinkling part of

a moment by a vision; by such a vision as they say comes to the

spiritual eyes of drowning men as they sink through the green water. The

scene about me was such as one will find nowhere else but in London. The

multitude of lights, the decoration of the great room and the tables,

above all the nature of the company and something in the very air of the

place; all these were metropolitan in the sense in which the word is

opposed to provincial. This is a subtlety which the provinces cannot

understand, and it is natural enough that they are unable to do so. The

big town in the Midlands or the North will tell you of its picture

galleries, of its classical concerts, and of the serious books taken out

in great numbers from its flourishing free libraries. It does not see,

and, probably, will never see, that none of these things is to the

point.

Well, from the heart of this London atmosphere I was suddenly

transported in my vision to a darkling, solitary country lane as the

dusk of a November evening closed upon it thirty long years before. And,

as I think that the pure provincial can never understand the quiddity or

essence of London, so I believe that for the born Londoner the country

ever remains an incredible mystery. He knows that it is

there--somewhere--but he has no true vision of it. In spite of himself

he Londonises it, suburbanises it; he sticks a gas lamp or two in the

lanes, dots some largish villas of red brick beside them, and extends

the District or the Metropolitan to within easy distance of the dark

wood. But here was I carried from luminous Oxford Street to the old deep

lane in Gwent, which is on the borders of Wales. Nothing that a Londoner

would call a town within eight miles, deep silence, deep stillness

everywhere; hills and dark wintry woods growing dim in the twilight, the

mountain to the west a vague, huge mass against a faint afterlight of

the dead day, grey and heavy clouds massed over all the sky. I saw

myself, a lad of twenty-one or thereabouts, strolling along this

solitary lane on a daily errand, bound for a point about a mile from the

rectory. Here a footpath over the fields crossed the road, and by the

stile I would wait for the postman. I would hear him coming from far

away, for he blew a horn as he walked, so that people in the scattered

farms might come out with their letters if they had any. I lounged on

the stile and waited, and when the postman came I would give him my

packet--the day's portion of "copy" of that Heptameron translation that

I was then making and sending to the publisher in York Street, Covent

Garden. The postman would put the parcel in his bag, cross the road, and

go striding off into the dim country beyond, finding his way on a track

that no townsman could see, by field and wood and marshy places,

crossing the Canthwr brook by a narrow plank, coming out somewhere on

the Llanfrechfa road, and so entering at last Caerleon-on-Usk, the

little silent, deserted village that was once the golden Isca of the

Roman legions, that is golden for ever and immortal in the romances of

King Arthur and the Graal and the Round Table.

So, in an instant's time, I journeyed from the lighted room in the big

Oxford Street restaurant to the darkening lane in far-away Gwent, in

far-away years. I gathered anew for that little while the savour of the

autumnal wood beside which the boy of thirty years before was walking,

and also the savour of his long-forgotten labours, of his old dreams of

life and of letters. The speech and the dream came to an end: and the

man on the other side of the table, who is probably the most skilful and

witty writer of musical comedy "lyrics" in England, was saying that once

on a time he had tried to write real poetry.

I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has

fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in

the heart of Gwent. My greatest fortune, I mean, from that point of view

which I now more especially have in mind, the career of letters. For the

older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may

have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes

were first opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision

of an enchanted land. As soon as I saw anything I saw Twyn Barlwm, that

mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in that region

before the Celts left the Land of Summer. This guarded the southern

limit of the great mountain wall in the west; a little northward was

Mynydd Maen--the Mountain of the Stone--a giant, rounded billow; and

still to the north mountains, and on fair, clear days one could see the

pointed summit of the Holy Mountain by Abergavenny. It would shine, I

remember, a pure blue in the far sunshine; it was a mountain peak in a

fairy tale. And then to eastward the bedroom window of Llanddewi Rectory

looked over hill and valley, over high woods, quivering with leafage

like the beloved Zacynthus of Ulysses, away to the forest of Wentwood,

to the church tower on the hill above Caerleon. Through a cleft one

might see now and again a bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the

cliffs of Somerset beyond. And hardly a house in sight in all the

landscape, look where you would. Here the gable of a barn, here a glint

of a whitewashed farm-house, here blue wood smoke rising from an orchard

grove, where an old cottage was snugly hidden; but only so much if you

knew where to look. And of nights, when the dusk fell and the farmer

went his rounds, you might chance to see his lantern glimmering a very

spark on the hillside. This was all that showed in a vague, dark world;

and the only sounds were the faint distant barking of the sheepdog and

the melancholy cry of the owls from the border of the brake.

* * * * *

I believe that I have seen at all events the main streets of London at

every hour of the day and night. I have viewed, for example, Leicester

Square between four and five of a summer morning, and have marvelled at

its dismal disarray and quite miserable shabbiness of aspect. With the

pure morning sun shining upon its gay places in clear splendour they are

infinitely more "shocking" than they can appear at night-time to the

narrowest of provincials. The Strand is a solemn street at two in the

morning, Holborn has a certain vastness and windiness about it as the

sky grows from black to grey, and at six the residential quarters seem

full of houses of mourning, their white blinds most strictly drawn.

And at one time I had almost as full a knowledge of my native country,

though not so much with respect to the category of time as to that of

place. I have, it is true, seen the sky above the dark stretch of

Wentwood Forest redden to the dawn, and I have lost my way and strayed

in a very maze of unknown brooks and hills and woods and wild lands in

the blackest hours after midnight. But the habits of the country, unlike

those of London, generally fail to give reason or excuse for night

wanderings. If you stayed in friendly and hospitable company much after

ten of the night, it was usually a case of the spare room, newly aired

sheets, one pipe more, and so to bed. This at all events on nights that

were very black or tempestuous with wind and rain; for on such nights it

is difficult to make out the faint footpath from stile to stile, and

only the surest sense of locality will enable one to strike the felled

tree or the narrow plank that, hidden by a dense growth of alders,

crosses the winding of the brook. But from very early years indeed I

became an enchanted student of the daylight country, which, I think, for

me never was illuminated by common daylight, but rather by suns that

rose from the holy seas of faery and sank down behind magic hills. I was

an only child, and as soon as I could walk beyond the limits of the

fields and orchards about the rectory, my father would take me with him

on such parish visitations as were fairly within the stretch and

strength of short legs. Indeed, I began my peregrinations at a still

earlier period, for I can remember a visit to the mill, that was paid

when I was a passenger in a perambulator, and aged, I suppose, about

three.

Later these travels became more frequent, and I have recollections,

still fresh and pleasant, of sitting still in old farm-house kitchens

while my father was about his ghostly business. Always, even in the full

blaze of summer, there would be a glint of fire on the cavernous hearth

and a faint blue spire of wood smoke mounting the huge hollow of the

chimney. The smell of this wood smoke scented and sweetened the air, in

which there was usually a hint of apples stored away in loft or cellar,

somewhere behind one or other of the black tarred doors that opened from

every wall in the long, low room, and here and there bevelled what

should have been an angle. By the hearth stood a big curving settle on

one side, on the other there was usually an armchair for the farmer's

wife. One small window, with square leaded panes, with solid oaken

mullions, looked out on the garden, and so thick were the walls--they

were always heavily "battered," or sloped outward towards the

ground--that there was a depth of at least three feet between the window

panes and the inner wall of the room. There was whitewash within and

without, renewed every spring, and it is one of the most beautiful

circumstances in Gwent that this custom of whitewash prevails. To look

up to a mountain side and to see the pure white of the walls of the

farms and cottages established there, fronting great winds, but nestling

too in a shelter of tossing trees, gives me even now the keenest

pleasure. And if on a summer day one climbs up amidst those brave winds

and looks down on all the rolling land of Gwent, it is dotted with these

white farms, that shine radiant in the sunlight.

And these farm-house kitchens were floored with stone, which was so

purely and exquisitely kept that people said "one could eat bread and

butter off Mrs. Morgan's kitchen floor." Such a place was, and still is,

my notion of comfort, of the material surroundings which are fit to

house a man. Now and then, in these later days, my business--never my

pleasure--calls me to our Hotel Glorieux or our Hotel Splendide; to the

places where the rooms are fifty feet high, where the walls are marble,

and mirrors and gilding, where there are flowery carpets and Louis

Quinze chairs and the true American heat. I think then of the kitchens

of Pantyreos and Penyrhaul, as Israel in exile remembered Syon.

But it is not in summer-time that it is best to remember these places,

excellent though the thought of their coolness and refreshment may be. I

like to think of them as set in a framework of late autumn or deep

mid-winter. I will be more curious than De Quincey: no mere bitter wind

or frost, not even snow will serve my turn, though each of these has its

admirable uses.

But let me have a night late in November, let us say. Every leaf has

long been down, save that the beech hedgerow in the sheltered forest

road will keep its tawny copper all through the winter. Rain has been

sweeping along the valleys for days past in giant misty pillars, the

brooks are bank high with red, foaming water; down every steep field

little hedgerow streams come pouring. In the farmyards the men go about

their work clad in sacks, and if they may will shelter under penthouses

and find work to do in the barns.

Give me a night in the midst of such weather, and then think of the farm

atop the hill, to which two good miles of deep, wandering lane go

climbing, and mix the rain with a great wind from the mountain: and then

think of entering the place which I have described, set now for the old

act of winter. The green shutters are close fastened without the window,

the settle is curved about the hearth, and that great cavern is ablaze

and glorious with heaped wood and coals, and the white walls golden with

the light of the leaping flames. And those within can hear the rain

dashing upon shutter and upon closed door, and the fire hisses now and

again as stray drops fall down the chimney; and the great wind shakes

the trees and goes roaring down the hillside to the valley and moans and

mutters about the housetop.

A man will leave his place, snug in shelter, in the deepest glow of the

fire, and go out for a moment and open but a little of the door in the

porch and see all the world black and wild and wet, and then come back

to the light and heat and thank God for his home, wondering whether any

are still abroad on such a night of tempest.

Looking back on my native country as I first remember it, I have often

regretted that I was not born say twenty or thirty years earlier. I

should then have seen more of a singular social process, which I can

only call the Passing of the Gentry. In my father's parish this had

taken place very long before my day, or his either. Indeed, I am not

quite sure that any armigerous families had ever inhabited Llanddewi;

though I have a dim notion that certain old farm-houses were pointed out

to me as having been "gentlemen's houses." But an adjoining parish had

once held three very ancient families of small gentry. One was still in

existence well within my recollection, another became extinct in the

legitimate line soon after I was born, and the third had been merged in

other and larger inheritances.

There were no Perrotts left, and their house had been "restored," and

was occupied as a farm. I often sat under their memorials in the little

church, and admired their arms, three golden pears, and their crest, a

parrot; altogether a pretty example of _heraldia cantans_, or punning

heraldry. Of the other two houses one was a pleasant, rambling,

mouldering place, yellow-washed, verandahed, and on the whole more like

a _petit manoir_ in Touraine than a country house in England. The third

mansion was a sixteenth-century house built in the L shape, and here

dwelt in my childhood the last of the ancient gentry of the place.

Even he was descended from the old family in the female line. The old

race had been named Meyrick, and they had given land in the thirteenth

century that a light might burn before the altar of a neighbouring

church for ever. The family affirmed that at one time they had owned all

the land that could be seen from a certain high place near their house,

and very possibly the tradition was a true one. They had remained

faithful to the Latin Church through all the troubles--up to the year of

Napoleon Buonaparte's sacring as Emperor by the Pope in Notre-Dame. And

when the reigning squire of Lansoar heard the news he raged with fury,

and saying, as the story goes, "Damn such a Pope as that!" left the

Roman Church for ever. His grandson, whom I knew, always read the Bible

in the Douay version and praised the Papists. Indeed, he used often to

end up, addressing my father, "In fact they tell me that you're more

than half a Roman Catholic yourself, and I like you none the worse for

it!"

He was an extraordinary old man. In his youth he had been busy one

morning packing up his portmanteau to go to Oxford. News came that his

father was ruined; it was probably in the wild smash of speculation that

brought down Sir Walter Scott. The young man quietly unpacked his

portmanteau and took possession of the mill, not many yards from his own

door. He ground corn for the farmers; he did well; he moved into

Newport, and became, I think, an importer of Irish butter. Probably,

also, he had his share in the industrial developments of Glamorganshire

and Monmouthshire, then at the height of their prosperity. At any rate

in twenty years or so the fortunes of the old house were redeemed. The

drawing-room of Lansoar had been used as a barn for storing corn; in my

day it was the most gracious and grave room that I have ever seen. The

old family portraits were back on the walls, the old tapestried chairs

were in their places, there was not a thing in the room less than a

hundred years old, and the squire sat beside his hearth, looking--as I

have found out since those days--exactly like Henry IV of France.

He had travelled a good deal in his time, and was supposed to have had

his fancy taken by the clothes he had seen worn by the Heidelberg

students. So he wore an odd sort of vestment striped with black and dull

red, and gathered in with a belt of the same stuff. We called it a

blouse, but it must have been something of the shape of a Norfolk

jacket. In the evening he would put on a black velvet coat which, as he

told me, he got from Poole's at the price of five guineas. Smoking he

abominated, and it was never allowed at Lansoar, save when Mr. Williams

of Llangibby was a guest.

The owner of Lansoar was in many ways a kindly and benevolent old

gentleman, but I think we in the country were chiefly proud of his

temper. It was said to be terrific, even in a land of furious,

quickly-raised rages. People told how they had seen the old man's white

moustache bristling up to his eyes; this was a sign that the fire was

kindled. And, as I once heard him say, "the Meyricks always get white

with love and hate." It was said that his sister was the only person who

met him on something like equal terms. She was an ancient gentlewoman

with a tremendous aquiline nose and was more like a marquise of 1793

going proudly to instant execution than can possibly be imagined. She

and her brother differed--it is much too mild a word, I am sure--so

fiercely as to what were the true armorial bearings of the family that

when these were to be emblazoned above the dining-room hearth a

compromise had to be arranged, and two shields were painted, one on each

side.

I am sorry that I was too young to observe Lansoar and its ways with

intelligent interest. The people that lived there were of a race and

sort that have now perished utterly out of the land; there never will be

such people again. But I was banished from Lansoar for the last year or

two of the old squire's life. I had left school and was at a loose end

at home, and I heard I had fallen under heavy displeasure. It seemed

that the descendant of the Meyricks had known a doctor who had lived in

Paris on five shillings a week at the beginning of the nineteenth

century; he wished to know why I was not living in London on five

shillings a week in 1880. The answer would have been that I had neither

five shillings nor five pence a week; but one did not answer Mr. James

of Lansoar.

I am heartily sorry that the class which he represented has perished. I

am sorry to think of all their houses scattered over Gwent; now mere

memorials of something that is done for ever and ended. One came upon

these houses in every other valley, on every other hillside, looking

pleasantly towards the setting sun. They are noble old places, even

though they are noble in a humble way; there are no Haddon Halls in

Gwent. But these old homes of the small gentry of the borderland--now

for the most part used as farm-houses--show their lineage in the dignity

of their proportions, in the carved armorial bearings of their porches.

The pride of race that belonged to the Morgans, Herberts, Meyricks that

once lived in them has passed into their stones, and still shines there.

* * * * *

There is a great book that I am hoping to write one of these fine days.

I have been hoping to write it, I may say, since 1898, or '99, and

somewhere about the latter year I did write as many as a dozen pages.

The _magnum opus_ so far conducted did not wholly displease me, and yet

it was not good enough to urge me forward in the task. And so it has

languished ever since then, and I am afraid I have lost the MSS. that

contained all that there was of it long ago. Seriously, of course, it

would not have been a great book if it had been ever so prosperously

continued and ended; but it would have been at least a curious book, and

even now I feel conscious of warm desire at the thought of writing

it--some day. For the idea of it came to me as follows:

I had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done

in the fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that

this work, pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the

expression of one formula, one endeavour. What I had been doing was

this: I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to

realise my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent. Say that I

had walked and wandered by unknown roads, and suddenly, after climbing a

gentle hill, had seen before me for the first time the valley of the

Usk, just above Newbridge. I think it was on one of those strange days

of summer when the sky is at once grey and luminous that I achieved this

adventure. There are no clouds in the upper air, the sky is simply

covered with a veil which is, as I say, both grey and luminous, and

there is no breath of wind, and every leaf is still.

But now and again as the day goes on the veil will brighten, and the sun

almost appear; and then here and there in the woods it is as if white

moons were descending. On such a day, then, I saw that wonderful and

most lovely valley; the Usk, here purged of its muddy tidal waters, now

like the sky, grey and silvery and luminous, winding in mystic esses,

and the dense forest bending down to it, and the grey stone bridge

crossing it. Down the valley in the distance was Caerleon-on-Usk; over

the hill, somewhere in the lower slopes of the forest, Caerwent, also a

Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange

relics--fragments of the temple of "Nodens, god of the depths." I saw

the lonely house between the dark forest and the silver river, and years

after I wrote "The Great God Pan," an endeavour to pass on the vague,

indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that I had received.

This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those

vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had

received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth;

and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility--or comparative

futility--of the plot, however ingenious, which did not exist to express

emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible

to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and

rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so

that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story

of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of

the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such

a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan

of the "great" book which is not yet written. I mention it here chiefly

because I would lay stress on my doctrine that in the world of

imagination the child is indeed father of the man, that the man is

nothing more than the child with an improved understanding certainly,

with all sorts of technical advantages in the way of information and in

the arts of expression, but, on the other hand, with the disadvantages

of a dimmed imaginative eye and a weakened vision. There have been a few

men who have kept the awe and the surmise of earlier years and have

added to those miraculous gifts the acquired accomplishments of age and

instruction; and these are the only men who are entitled to the name of

genius. I have said already that in my boyhood and youth I was a deep

and learned student of the country about my home, and that I always saw

it as a kind of fairyland. And, cross-examining my memory, I find that I

have in no way exaggerated or overcoloured these early and earliest

impressions. Fairyland is too precise a word; I would rather say that I

saw everything in something of the spirit in which the first explorers

gazed on the tropical luxuriance and strangeness of the South American

forests, on the rock cities of Peru, on the unconjectured seas that

burst upon them from that peak in Darien, on the wholly unimagined

splendours of the Mexican monarchy. So it was with me as a child. I came

into a strange country, and strange it ever remained to me, so that when

I left it for ever there were still hills within sight and yet

untrodden, lanes and paths of which I knew the beginning but not the

end. For it is to be understood that country folk are in this respect

like Londoners: that they have their customary tracks and ways which

lead more or less to some end or other; it is only occasionally that

either goes out determined not to find his way but to lose it, to stray

for the very sake of straying. Thus I walked many times in Wentwood and

became familiar with the Roman road that passes for some distance along

the summit of that ancient forest, but only once, I think, did I set out

from the yellow verge of the Severn and cross the level Moors--a belt of

fen country that might well lie between Ely and Brandon; really, no

doubt "y mor," the sea--and wonder for a while at the bastioned and

battlemented ruins of Caldicot Castle, and so mount up by the outer

hills and woods of the forest, through Caerwent, past the Foresters'

Oaks, a grove of trees that were almost awful in the magnificence of

their age and their decay, and so climb to the ridge and look down on

the Usk and the more familiar regions to the west.

And, as you may judge, it was only the knowledge that one must not

frighten one's family out of its wits and that camping out in forests

without food or drink is highly inconvenient that kept me on this

comparatively straight path. So all the while, as I paced an unknown

way, yet more unknowns were beckoning to me on right and left. Paths

full of promise allured me into green depths, the wildest heights urged

me to attempt them, cottages in orchard dells seemed so isolated from

all the world that they and theirs must be a part of enchantment. And so

I crossed Wentwood, and felt not that I knew it, but that it was hardly

to be known.

* * * * *

I have already mentioned, I think, that I was an only child. Add to this

statement that I had no little cousins available as play-fellows, some

of these being domiciled in Anglesea, others in London; that it was only

by the merest chance and on the rarest occasions that I ever saw any

children at all, and I have given some notion of the extreme solitude of

my upbringing. I grew up, therefore, all alone so far as other children

were concerned, and though I went to school, school did not seem to

make much difference to my habit of mind. I was eleven years old at the

time, and I suppose I was "set" to loneliness. I passed the term as a

sort of interlude amongst strangers, and came home to my friendly lanes,

to my deep and shadowy and secret valleys, as a man returns to his dear

ones and his dear native fields after exile amongst aliens and

outlanders.

I came back, then, again and again to solitude. There were no children's

parties for me, no cricket, no football, and I was heartily glad of it,

for I should have abhorred all these diversions with shudderings of body

and spirit. My father and mother apart, I loved to be by myself, with

unlimited leisure for mooning and loafing and roaming and wandering from

lane to lane, from wood to wood. Constantly I seemed to be finding new,

hitherto unsuspected tracks, to be emerging from deep lanes and climbing

hills so far but seen from the distance, matters of surmise, and now

trodden and found to be Darien peaks giving an outlook upon strange

worlds of river and forest and bracken-covered slope. Wondering at these

things, I never ceased to wonder; and even when I knew a certain path

and became familiar with it I never lost my sense of its marvels, as

they appeared to me.

I have read curious and perplexed commentaries on that place in Sir

Thomas Browne in which he declares his life up to the period of the

"Religio Medici" to have been "a miracle of thirty years, which to

relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry." Dr. Johnson, summing

up the known events of Browne's early life, finds therein nothing in

the least miraculous; Southey says the miracle was the great writer's

preservation from atheism; Leslie Stephen considers that the strangeness

"consists rather in Browne's view of his own history than in any unusual

phenomena." "View of his own history" seems a little vague; but however

critical sagacity may determine the sense of the passage, I would very

willingly adopt it to describe these early years of mine, spent in that

rectory amongst the wild hills of Gwent. Of my private opinion, I think

there can be little doubt that when Sir Thomas Browne used the word

"miraculous" he was thinking not of miracles in the accepted sense as

things done contrary to the generally observed laws of nature, but

rather of his vision of the world, of his sense of a constant wonder

latent in all things. Stevenson, I believe, had some sense of this

doctrine as applied to landscape, at least, when he said that there were

certain scenes--I forget how he particularised them--which demanded

their stories, which cried out, as it were, to have tales indited to fit

their singular aspects. This, I think I have shown, is a crude analysis.

I should put it thus: this group of pines, this lonely shore, or

whatever the scene may be, has made the soul thrill with an emotion

intense but vague in the sense in which music is vague; and the man of

letters does his best to realise--rather, perhaps, to actualise--this

emotion by inventing a tale about the pines or the sands. Such at all

events was my state through all the years of boyhood and of youth:

everything to me was wonderful, everything visible was the veil of an

invisible secret. Before an oddly shaped stone I was ready to fall into

a sort of reverie or meditation, as if it had been a fragment of

paradise or fairyland. There was a certain herb of the fields that grew

plentifully in Gwent, that even now I cannot regard without a kind of

reverence; it bears a spire of small yellow blossoms, and its leaves

when crushed give out a very pungent, aromatic odour. This odour was to

me a separate revelation or mystery, as if no one in the world had smelt

it but myself, and I ceased not to admire even when a countryman told me

that it was good for stone, if you gathered it "under the planet

Juniper."

And here, may I say in passing, that in my opinion the country parson,

with all the black-coated class, knows next to nothing of the true minds

of the country folk. I feel certain that my father, if asked by a Royal

Commission or some such valuable body, "What influence has astrology on

your parishioners?" would have answered: "They have never heard of such

a thing." In later years I have wondered as to the possible fields which

extended beyond the bounds of our ignorance. I have wondered, for

example, whether, by any possibility, there were waxen men, with pins in

them, hidden in very secret nooks in any of the Llanddewi cottages.

But this is a mere side-issue. To return to my topic, to that attitude

of the child-mind which almost says in its heart, "things are because

they are wonderful," I am reminded of one of the secret societies with

which I have had the pleasure of being connected. This particular

society issued a little MS. volume of instructions to those who were to

be initiated, and amongst these instructions was the note: "remember

that nothing exists which is not God." "How can I possibly realise

that?" I said to one of the members of the society. "When I read it I

was looking at the tiles on each side of my fireplace in Gray's Inn, and

they are of the beastliest design it is possible to imagine. I really

cannot see anything of Divinity in those tiles." I do not remember how

my objection was met; I don't think it was met. But, looking back, I

believe that, as a child, I realised something of the spirit of the

mystic injunction. Everywhere, through the darkness and the mists of the

childish understanding, and yet by the light of the child's

illumination, I saw _latens deitas_; the whole earth, down to the very

pebbles, was but the veil of a quickening and adorable mystery. Hazlitt

said that the man of genius spent his whole life in telling the world

what he had known himself when he was eighteen. Waiving utterly--I am

sorry to say--the title of man of genius, I would reaffirm Hazlitt's

proposition on lower grounds. I would say that he who has any traffic

with the affairs of the imagination has found out all the wisdom that he

will ever know, in this life at all events, by the age of eighteen or

thereabouts. And it is probable that Hazlitt, though he never dreamed of

it, was but re-expressing those sentences in the Holy Gospels which deal

with the intimate relationship between children and "the Kingdom of

Heaven." In the popular conception, of course, both amongst priests and

people, these texts are understood to refer to the innocence of

childhood. But a little reflection will satisfy anyone that in the true

sense of the word children are only innocent as a stone is innocent, as

a stick is innocent; that is, they are incapable of committing the

special offences which to our modern and utterly degraded system of

popular ethics constitute the whole matter of morality and immorality. I

remember a few years ago reading how an illustrious Primitive Methodist

testified on the sacred mount of Primitive Methodism at some anniversary

of the society. He said that his old grandmother had implored him when

he was a boy never to drink, never to gamble, never to break the

Sabbath, and, he concluded triumphantly, "I have never done any of these

things."

"Therefore I am a good Christian" is the conclusion evidently suggested.

This poor man, it may be said, knew no better, but I am much mistaken if

the majority of our Anglican clergy would not accept his statement as a

good confession of the faith. The New Testament for all these people has

been written in vain; they will still believe that a good Christian is

one who drinks a cup of cocoa at 9.30 and is in bed by ten sharp. And to

such persons, of course, the texts which assert the necessity of

becoming like little children if we would enter the Kingdom of Heaven

are clear enough; it is a mere matter of early hours and plenty of

cocoa--or, perhaps, of warm bread and milk. But, personally, I cannot at

all symbolise with them. I look back to the time when the mountain and

the tiny shining stone, the flower, and the brook were all alike signs

and evidences of an ineffable mystery and beauty. I see myself all alone

in the valley, under hanging woods, of a still summer evening,

entranced, wondering what the secret was that was here almost told, and

then, I am persuaded, I came near to the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas:

_Adoro te devote latens Deitas_.

* * * * *

There comes to me from very long ago the memory of a burning afternoon

in the hot heart of July. I am not sure whether it was in the dry

summer. This was in '68 or '69--I am not certain which--and it was

notable for many things in my recollection. Firstly, the mountain caught

fire. This sounds a terrific and unlikely statement, considered with

relation to the temperate and reasonable geology of this land, which has

known nothing for many aeons of volcanoes or burning mountains. What had

happened, of course, was that the heather and wild growth on the

mountain had somehow been fired, and so all through that hot August I

remember looking westward to the great mountain wall, and watching the

dun fume that drifted along its highest places; looking with a certain

dread, for there was something apocalyptic in the sight.

Another notable event was the failure of the water supply. The rectory

stood almost on top of a long hill that mounted up from the valley of

the Soar, there were no ponds or tanks in its curtilage and the drought

of this year exhausted the water in the great butt that stood in the

yard and received the streams from the roof in rainy weather. This, of

course, was not drinking water; that we obtained always from a well deep

in the brake, about a quarter of a mile from the house; and without

contempt for other and more elaborate beverages, I may say that there

are few draughts more delicious than cold well-water, dripping from the

rock, and shaded in its hollow basin by the overhanging trees. Our

London water is, I believe, perfectly wholesome, but it is absolutely

tasteless, no doubt through the manifold purifications and purgations

which it has undergone. But well-water has a savour and a character of

its own, and the product of one well will often differ in a very marked

degree from that of another. Before my day, oddly enough, we had in the

county a connoisseur or gourmet of wells. He was a clergyman, and he had

been heard to boast that he had tasted the water of every well in the

forest of Wentwood. Our own well in the rectory brake was thought

excellently of by good judges of clear cold water.

I think it was in this year of the burning mountain that the rectory

paid a call on Mr. and Mrs. Roger Gibbon, of the Wern, on a blazing

afternoon. They were very old people, and the stock of the Gibbons--I am

not using their real name--was one of the most ancient and honoured in

the land of Gwent. I suppose, indeed, that they would look on many dukes

as parvenus of yesterday. Furthermore, this branch of the race was quite

comfortable and well-to-do in money matters.

They received my father and my mother and myself with the heartiest

kindness--they had known my father from his boyhood--and insisted on the

necessity of some refreshment. So presently the maid came in with a tray

and old Roger solemnly mixed for my father and mother, for his wife and

himself, four reeking glasses of hot gin. I think that, all things

considered, this was the very strangest refreshment ever offered. The

old people swallowed their boiling spirit with relish, my parents took

their dose with shuddering politeness, and the thermometer rose

steadily. Roger and Caroline had been quarrelling about a carpet before

we came, and after a decent interval the quarrel was resumed. Roger

addressed himself to my mother.

"She would buy it too small. I told her it would be too small, and there

it is, with three or four feet of the floor showing. And what do you

think she says, Mrs. Machen? She says she will have the bare boards

painted green to match the carpet. I say that's ridiculous, don't you

think so? [Without waiting for an answer, and bellowing to deaf old

Caroline.] There, Caroline, I told you what everyone would say. Mrs.

Machen says it's ridiculous. The idea of painting the boards green!"

And the old man, turning to my father, told him in a lower voice and

with considerable enjoyment of some home-made wine that his wife had

concocted. She had stored it in a cupboard in their bedroom, and Roger

told how he used to lie awake at night laughing as he listened to the

bottles bursting, the old lady being much too deaf to hear the reports.

Old Gibbon was an expert shot, but he could never be persuaded to use

the new-fangled percussion caps. He brought down his birds to the last

by means of flint and steel. He was an enthusiastic fox hunter also, but

he never hunted on horseback. Up to something past the middle of his

life the Llangibby Hounds had been hunted afoot, the Rector of Llangibby

being the master, and afoot Roger Gibbon followed them up to his old

age. And so cunning had he become in matter of wind and scent and lie of

the country that he rarely failed to be in at the death. I doubt whether

he knew much of the world outside of a twenty-mile radius, Caerleon

being taken as the centre of the circle. But when Roger Gibbon was quite

an old man people told him that he ought to see London. So he went to

London. He walked out of Paddington Station and saw London, as he

thought; and, filled with a great horror and disgust and terror at what

he had seen, he trotted back into the station, and paced the platform

till the next train for the west started. He got into that train, and

returned to the Wern and to the shelter and companionship of his hills

and woods, and there abode till the ending of his long days.

It was strange how in those times people were fixed in the soil, so that

for many miles round everybody knew everybody, or at least knew of

everybody. It is all over, I suppose, and again I think it is a pity

that it is over. It was a part of the old life of the friendly fires,

and the friendly faces, and when, rarely enough, in this great desert

of London, I meet a friend of those old days, I think we both feel as if

we were surviving tribesmen of some sept that has been "literally

annihilated" or "almost decimated"--to use our modern English.

One says: "Do you remember that walk over Mynydd Fawr to the Holy Well?"

The other replies: "How good the beer at the Three Salmons tasted that

day we walked all the way from Caerleon on the Old Usk Road." "Let me

see; when was that?" "April, '83." And we look on one another and, lo,

our heads have whitened and our eyes are beginning to grow dim.

But, as an instance of the fellowship and brotherhood that there was in

the land of Gwent in the old days, here is a true story. I have told of

fierce old Mr. James, of Lansoar, the ancient squire. Well, there had

been a raging and tremendous quarrel between Mr. James and a

neighbouring farmer called Williams, and as Williams was an honest and

excellent and placable old man, there was not much doubt as to who was

the aggressor. After years of hate, on one side at all events, a false

rumour went about the county that Mr. James had lost all his money, in

"Turkish Bonds," I think. Then did old Mr. Williams, the farmer, go up

one night secretly to old Mr. James, the squire, and altogether heedless

of the white face and the furious glance and the bristling moustache

that greeted him, he offered all he had to his enemy.

May he remember me from his happy place.

_Chapter II_

By this time I hope that I have made a sort of picture of my conditions

as they were up to the time that I left school at the age of seventeen.

Solitude and woods and deep lanes and wonder; these were the chief

elements of my life. One thing, however, I have so far omitted, that is

the matter of books, which I will now consider.

And, firstly, I must record with deep thankfulness the circumstance that

as soon as I could read I had the run of a thoroughly ill-selected

library; or, rather, of a library that had not been selected at all. My

father's collection, if that serious word may be applied to a

hugger-mugger of books, had grown up anyhow and nohow, and in it the

most revered stocks had mingled with the most frivolous. There were the

Fathers, in the English version made by the Tractarians, and there was

also no end of "yellowbacks" bought at Smith's bookstalls on railway

journeys. There was a row of little Elzevir classics, "with the Sphere,"

bound in parchment that had grown golden with its two hundred and odd

years; there was also Mr. Verdant Green in his tattered paper wrapper as

my father had bought him at Oxford. Next to Verdant Green you might very

likely find the Dialogues of Erasmus in seventeenth-century leather, and

Borrow in his original boards--we read Borrow at Llanddewi long before

there were any Borrovians--might hide an odd volume of "Martin

Chuzzlewit" (in a "Railway Edition") which had tumbled to the back of

the shelf. Hard by stood Copleston's "Praelectiones Academicae," and close

to it a complete set of Bronte books, including Mrs. Gaskell's "Life,"

all these in yellowish linen covers, being, I imagine, the first

one-volume edition issued by the publishers. And here again Llanddewi in

the woods may claim to have been in advance of its age, for we were

devoted to the name of Bronte.

Suppose the weather did not beckon me, I would begin to go about the

house on the search of books. I might have "Wuthering Heights" in my

mind and be chasing that amazing volume very closely, and be, in fact,

hot on the scent, when I would be brought up sharply by my grandfather's

Hebrew grammar. I always loved the shape and show of the Hebrew

character, and have meant to learn the language from 1877 onwards, but

have not yet thoroughly mastered the alphabet. I once, indeed, got so

advanced as to be able to spell out the Yiddish posters which cover the

walls in the East End of London, and I remember being much amused when I

had deciphered a most mystic, reverend-looking word and found that it

read "Bishopsgyte." But I believe that in Yiddish the two "yods"

represent the "a" sound.

Well, this Hebrew grammar would distract me from the hunt of Emily

Bronte's masterpiece, and by the time I had decided that Monday would

be soon enough for a serious beginning in Hebrew, while I meditated in

the meanwhile on the beauty of the names of the four classes of

accents--Emperors, Kings, Princes, and Dukes, I think--it was likely

enough that I had got hold of Alison's "History of Europe," or "The

Bible in Spain," or a book on Brasses. And by the time I had gloated

over the horrors of the French Revolution as described in Alison, or had

marvelled at Borrow in the character of a Protestant colporteur, or had

admired the pictured brasses of Sir Robert de Septvans, Sir Roger de

Trumpington--winnowing fans on the coat-armour of the one, trumpets on

the shield of the other--and Abbot Delamere of St. Albans it was

tea-time, and I probably spent the rest of the evening with a bound

volume of "Chambers's Journal," "All the Year Round," "Cornhill," or

"The Welcome Guest." These were always a great resource; and I

particularly wish that I still possessed "The Welcome Guest," a popular

weekly dating from the late 'fifties of last century. It was full of

work by people who afterwards became famous, and now, again, are fading

into forgetfulness. John Hollingshead we still remember, though it is

only the elderly who can tell much now of "the sacred lamp of

burlesque," which was kept burning at the Gaiety. Hollingshead was a

contributor to "The Welcome Guest," so also were the Brothers Mayhew and

the Brothers Brough, so on a great scale was George Augustus Sala, who

wrote in it "Twice Round the Clock" and something that was called, I

fancy, "Make Your Game or, the Adventures of the Stout Gentleman, the

Thin Gentleman, and the Man with the Iron Chest." This was a "lively"

account of a visit to the gaming tables then existing in Germany. The

Stout Gentleman was one of the Mayhews, the Man with the Iron Chest was

Sala himself; and I met the Thin Gentleman many years afterwards in a

cock-loft in Catherine Street, where I was cataloguing books on magic

and alchemy and the secret arts in general. The cock-loft was over the

Vizetellys' publishing office, and the Thin Gentleman was old Mr.

Vizetelly. We "larned" him to publish a translation of "La Terre" by

sending him, an old man past seventy, to gaol for three months. He died

soon afterwards; I forget whether his death took place before or after

the very handsome and official and "respectable" reception and

entertainment that were given to Zola on his visiting England.

I must say that I should like to see the old "Welcome Guest" volume

again. I am afraid I should not admire its literature very much, for

Sala, the chief contributor, had already acquired those vicious

mannerisms which pleased the injudicious. He would speak of Billingsgate

as a "piscatorial bourse," for instance. I am afraid I should find it

all terribly old-fashioned. But I should like to hold the fat volume

again and glance through its pages, for they would bring back to me the

long winter evenings, and the rectory fire burning cheerfully, and the

heavy red curtains drawn close over the windows, shutting out the night.

I must say that I found a great joy and resource in these old

magazines. If one were in a mood averse from reading in the solid block,

if the hour did not seem propitious for beginning once more "Pickwick"

from the beginning, it was a delight to think of those bound volumes all

in a row, and of the inexhaustible supply of mixed literature which they

contained. For just as there was always the chance, and indeed the

likelihood, of making new discoveries in the happy confusion of the

Llanddewi library, so it was with these rows of "Household Words,"

"Chambers's," "All the Year Round," "Welcome Guest," and "Cornhill";

there was always the possibility of a find; some tale or essay hitherto

overlooked or neglected might turn out to be full of matter and

entertainment. And so the most unlikely events happened. You would

expect to find good things of all sorts in a magazine edited by Charles

Dickens, but you would hardly expect to find there the curious thing or

the out-of-the-way thing. Still, it was in a volume of "Household Words"

that I first read about alchemy in a short series of papers which (I

have since recognised) were singularly well-informed and enlightened. I

do not wish it to be understood that I myself have any strong

convictions on the matter of turning inferior metals into superior,

though I believe the later trend of science is certainly in favour of

the theoretical possibility of such a process. Nor do I hold any

distinct brief for the very fascinating doctrine which maintains, or

would like to maintain, that the great alchemical books are really

symbolical books; that while seeming to relate to lead and gold, to

mercury and silver, they hide under these figures intimations as to a

profound and ineffable transmutation of the spirit; that the experiment

to which they relate is the Great Experiment of the mystics, which is

the experiment of God. This, I say, is a fascinating theory; whether it

have any truth in it I know not, and perhaps it is one of those

questions of which Sir Thomas Browne speaks; questions difficult,

indeed, and perplexed, but not beyond all conjecture. But, however this

may be, I recollect that those articles in that old, half-calf bound

volume of "Household Words," while not affirming this, that, or the

other doctrine as to alchemy in so many distinct words, did suggest that

a few of the old alchemists, at all events, were something more than

blundering simpletons engaged on a quest which was a patent absurdity,

which could only have been entertained by the besotted superstition of

"the dark ages," which had this one claim to our attention inasmuch as

the modern science of chemistry rose from the ashes of its foolish

fires.

This is not the place for a discussion of the art of Thrice Great

Hermes; the matter is cited here as an example of the odd and unexpected

way in which my attention, I being some eight or nine years old, was

directed to a singular and perplexing subject which has engaged my

curiosity at intervals ever since. I see myself sitting on a stool by

the rectory hearth, propping up "Household Words" against the fender,

quite ravished by the story of Nicholas Flamel, who found by chance "The

Book of Abraham the Jew," who journeyed all over Europe in search of one

who would interpret its figures to him, who succeeded at last in the

Operation of the Great Work, and was discovered by the King's

Chamberlain living in great simplicity, eating cabbage soup with

Pernelle, his wife. These fireside studies of mine must have been made

forty-three or forty-four years ago, but I still think the story of

Nicholas Flamel and Pernelle, his wife, an enchanting one. But then I

re-read the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp only the other day,

and I am still thrilled and perplexed by that most singular and

important fact; that the genie declared himself to be the servant of the

Roc's Egg.

I am sorry to have to confess that the rectory shelves held no copy of

"The Arabian Nights." I made up this deficiency soon after I went to

school by buying an excellent edition, issued, I think, by Routledge for

a shilling. This edition is now, the booksellers tell me, out of print,

and it is a pity, for now if you want the book there is nothing between

an edition obviously meant for the nursery, with gaudy plates, and

Lane's version for thirty shillings. I speak not of Burton, for I found

myself unable to read a couple of pages of his detestable English, made

more terrible by the imitations of the rhymed prose of the original. I

came upon something which went very much as follows:--

Then followed the dawn of day, and the Princess finished her

allotted say,

Praise be to the Lord of Light alway, who faileth not to send the

appointed ray----

and so on, at much greater length; highly ingenious, no doubt, and also

infinitely foolish.

I remember once wasting hours--nay, days--in the effort to render

Rabelais' "Verses written over the Great Gate of the Abbey of Theleme"

into English, following as far as I could the rhyme system. Now,

according to the French notion, "don" is a perfect rhyme to "pardon,"

and so Rabelais wrote:--

Or donne par don,

Ordonne pardon

A cil qui le donne;

Et bien guerdonne

Tout mortel preudhom

Or donne par don.

That is, the final sound of each line is almost identical with the final

sound of every other line; and of this I made:--

For given relief,

Forgiven and lief

The giver believe;

And all men that live

May gain the palm leaf

For given relief.

Soon afterwards, while I was resting from this mighty effort, I read in

Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" a quotation from Martial: Turpe

est difficiles habere nugas--'Tis folly to sweat o'er a difficult

trifle.' I was convinced of my sin. I suppose that the real translator

when confronted by such puzzles contrives to think of an indirect rather

than a direct solution. For example, the right way of getting the effect

of the Arabic jingle into English might be sought by the path of

alliteration; or possibly blank verse might give to the English reader

something of the same kind of pleasure as that enjoyed by the Oriental

in reading a prose which infringes on the region of poetry. And it may

be that the queer music of Rabelais could be echoed, at least, in

English by the use of assonance.

Here is, indeed, a diversion, but it has arisen, legitimately enough,

from that shilling, paper wrapper volume of "The Arabian Nights" bought

in 1875 or '76 or thereabouts. And another event of like importance was

my seeing De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" at

Pontypool Road Station. This also I instantly bought and as instantly

loved, and still love very heartily. It always vexes me to detect, as I

constantly do detect in modern critics, the subtle desire to run down De

Quincey. The critic is afraid to make a frontal attack--the stress of

these times will win pardon for the phrase--since he knows that he will

be opposed by such splendours and such terrors--"an army with

banners"--as the English language can scarce show elsewhere. He is quite

aware, since he is, ex hypothesi, an able critic, that De Quincey

deliberately used our tongue as if it had been a mighty organ in

mightier cathedral, so that the very stones and the far-lifted vault and

the hollow spaces of the towers re-echo and reverberate and thrill with

tremendous fugal harmonies. And our critics are advised also that De

Quincey was no mere player of clever tricks with the language; his was

not the amusing Stevensonian method of counting the "l's" and

estimating the value of medial "s's" and the terrifying effect of the

final reiterated "r." There was none of this; he wrote in the great

manner because he thought in the great manner. The critic cannot deny

this; he must admit the beauty and pathos of the Ann episode and of the

vision of Jerusalem; but still he will hint a fault and hesitate his

dislike of this greater master. The reason is not far to seek. All

realism is unpopular, and De Quincey was eminently a realist.

Now I know that I am touching here on a great question. I hope to debate

it at length later on; for the moment I would merely say that I define

realism as the depicting of eternal, inner realities--the "things that

really are" of Plato--as opposed to the description of transitory,

external surfaces; the delusory masks and dominoes with which the human

heart drapes and hides itself. But, all this apart, I cannot help

dwelling on the manner in which I associate these early literary

discoveries of mine with the places where they were made.

You may hear friends and lovers discussing after many years the manner

of their first meeting; Daphnis as Darby will remind Chloe--now

Joan--how they saw one another for the first time at the Smiths'

garden-party, and one plate of their bread and butter tasted slightly of

onions, and the curate achieved six faults running at lawn-tennis, and

it came on to rain. So I can never take up De Quincey without thinking

of the dismal platform at Pontypool Road, and the joy of coming home

for the holidays, and the mountains all about me as I stood and waited

for my father and the trap and read the first pages of the magic book.

Those great mountains, and the drive home by the green arched lanes,

abounding in flowers, and the very dear look of home amidst its

orchards; all these are part and parcel of my joy in the "Confessions"

for ever. And so again with another noble book; with one of the noblest

of all books, as I have ever esteemed it. I am a very small boy; about

seven or eight years old, I conceive, and my mother takes me with her to

pay a call on Mrs. Gwyn, of Llanfrechfa Rectory. The ladies talk, and I,

seeking quietly for something to entertain me, light in a low bookcase

on a fat, dumpy little book. I suspect it was the oddity of the shape,

the extreme squabness of the volume, that first took my fancy, and then

I open the pages--and I have never really closed them. For the dumpy

book was a translation of "The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la

Mancha"; and those are words that will thrill a lettered man as the

opening notes of certain fugues of Bach will thrill a musician. I heard

nothing of the amiable talk of the ladies. I was deep in the small

print--alas! it would now blind my tired eyes--and when my mother rose

to go I clung so desperately and piteously to the fat little book that

the kind Mrs. Gwyn said she would lend it to me, and I might take it

home. For which benevolence I am ever bound to pray for her good estate,

or for her soul; as it may chance to be.

So, as Hereford Station spells for me, principally, "The Arabian

Nights," as De Quincey is linked with domed mountains and green lanes

and the return home: the Ingenious Gentleman advanced to greet me,

mysteriously enough, in the drawing-room of the rectory of Llanfrechfa,

and I shall always reckon Frechfa--the "freckled"--as among the most

venerated of the Celtic saints.

* * * * *

For a long time, as it seems to me, I have been talking of discoveries

of books; discoveries in our own Llanddewi shelves, in the shelves of

neighbours, on railway bookstalls. We shall hear more of books by and

by, of books found in very different places--Clare Market and the Strand

of 1880 and back streets by Notting Hill Gate are even now looming

before us--so for the present we may hear more of the conditions of that

Gwent where I was a boy and a young man.

I have said that I was born just a little too late to witness the

Passing of the Gentry. Few of them survived into my day, and I was too

young to see with intelligence that which still remained to be seen of

the old order. But one thing I do remember, that the gentry of those

times, even when they were wealthy, lived with a simplicity that would

astonish the people of to-day. Those who know "Martin Chuzzlewit" will

remember how Tigg Montague, who was Montague Tigg, lunched luxuriously

in the board room of his city office. The meal was brought in on a tray

and consisted of "a pair of cold roast fowls, flanked by some potted

meats and a cool salad." There was a bottle of champagne and a bottle of

Madeira. This was the luncheon of vulgar and ostentatious luxury in the

'forties; compare it with the kind of midday meal that the modern

Montague would eat at the Hotel Splendide or the Hotel Glorieux; the

meal of the man who eats and drinks as much to impress others with his

wealth as to gratify his own appetite.

Well, I have often seen "the old Lord Tredegar" eating his luncheon. My

father and I would be in the coffee-room of the King's Head, Newport,

waiting for the ostler to put in the pony. And there in one of the boxes

sat the old lord--a very wealthy man--eating his luncheon; which was

bread and cheese and a tankard of ale. And, oddly enough, on the one

occasion on which I visited the Ham, the magnate thereof, Mr. Iltyd

Nicholl, was enjoying a meal similar in every respect to that of Lord

Tredegar--though I believe he had a little cold apple tart after his

cheese. We, of the middle people, always dined at one on meat, pudding,

and cheese; tea followed at five, an affair of bread and butter and jam,

with, possibly, a caraway loaf. Hot buttered toast was distinctly

festal. The day closed so far as meals were concerned with bread and

cheese and beer at nine o'clock. On rare occasions, once in three years

or so, a number of clergy who called themselves collectively the

Ruridecanal Chapter came to hear a paper read and also to a dinner. This

would probably consist of a salmon of Severn or Usk--which muddy waters

breed incomparably the finest salmon in the world--of a saddle of Welsh

mutton from the mountains, and of a rich sweet called, very lightly and

unworthily, a trifle. There would be a dessert of almonds and raisins

and, according to the season, home-grown apples and pears or greengages.

These delicates would be displayed on a service which showed green

vine-leaves in relief against a buff ground, bordered with deep purple

and gold. It was hideous, and, I should think, Spode.

In the autumn my mother used to concoct a singular dish which she called

fermety. It is more generally known as frumenty; you will find it

mentioned in Washington Irving's "Christmas," where the squire makes his

supper off it on Christmas Eve--no doubt because it was the traditional

fasting dish for the Vigil of the Nativity. It was made, so far as I can

remember, of the new wheat of the year, of milk, of eggs, of currants,

of raisins, of sugar, and of spices, "all working up together in one

delicious gravy." No doubt a very honourable dish and a most ancient and

Christian pottage; but I am not quite sure that I should like it, if it

were proffered to me now. Among the farmers a few of the elder people

still breakfasted on _cawl_, a broth made of fat bacon and vegetables,

and decorated, oddly enough, with marigold blossoms. And a fine old man

whom I once met in a lane spoke violently against tea, as a corrupting

thing and a very vain novelty. For women, he said, it might serve, but

the breakfast for a man was a quart of cider with a toast. But most of

the farming people breakfasted on rashers of bacon, cooked by being hung

on hooks before the fire in a Dutch oven. With the bacon they ate

potatoes, which were done in a very savoury manner. Take cold boiled

potatoes, break into small pieces, fry (or rather, _faites sauter_) in

bacon fat, then press into a shallow dish, pat to a smooth surface, and

brown before the fire. This is a breakfast that goes very well with a

keen mountain breath of a morning.

And I believe that cheese always formed part of the farmers' breakfast,

as a kind of second or cold course. This was of their own making, and

was of the kind called after Caerphilly, a little town with a huge

ruinous castle in a hollow of giant hills. It is a white cheese of a

creamy consistency and delicate flavour, and is to be commended for the

making of Welsh rarebit. The farmers, as I say, ate it at breakfast,

again at twelve o'clock dinner, after hot boiled fat bacon and beans or

cabbage, and again at tea, where, to their tastes, it seemed to go very

well with bread and butter--I find it hard to realise in London that

bread and butter can be a choice delicacy--and a sweet, such as an

open-work raspberry tart. And, of course, the Caerphilly cheese appeared

again at supper, and with bread and onions it was always the hedgerow

snack of the man in the fields.

And the cider of that land was good. It was a greenish yellow in colour,

with a glint of gold in it if held up to the light, as it were a

remembrance of the August and September suns that had shone mellow on

the deep orchards of Gwent. It was of full body and flavour and

strength, smooth on the palate, neither sweet nor sharp; and I do not

think there was anyone in Llanddewi parish so poor as not to have a

barrel or two in his cellar against Christmastide and snowy nights,

though to be sure in years wherein apples were a scanty crop some of

the smaller folk increased the bulk of their cider by strange

expedients. Pears went to the mill always, and as a matter of course. In

most of the orchards there were one or two big pear trees, and possibly

the wisdom of the Gwentian ancients had concluded that a slight

admixture of pears with the apples improved and mellowed the cider. But

in scanty years, when the man with but a few trees saw bare boughs in

autumn, he went to his garden, dug up a barrow load or two of parsnips

and added them to his apples. I cannot say anything as to the resultant

juice, since I never tasted it.

There was no wretched poverty in Llanddewi, because almost everybody had

a little land of his own. Tenant farmers there were, of course, who held

of Mr. John Hanbury, of Pontypool Park, lord of the manor of Edlogan; a

manor named after a certain Edlogion who was a prince of the sixth

century and the protector of Cybi Sant. But besides his tenants and

those of other landlords there was a numerous race of small freeholders,

who owned eighty, fifty, ten acres of land, and so down till you came to

a holding of a house and a garden and a mere patch by the roadside. But

with a garden and a patch of land a clever cottager of the old school

could do a great deal. I remember an old man named Timothy who lived in

a house very small and very ancient in the midst of the fields, far,

even, from a by-road; and he thought in greengages as a Stock Exchange

man thinks in shares. For about his old cottage there were three or

four, or maybe half a dozen, greengage trees that had been planted so

long ago that they had grown almost to the dignity of timber, and spread

wild branches high and low and far and wide, so that one might say that

old Timothy lived in a grove or wood of greengage trees. So you may

conceive how deeply the poor old man thought of these gages, beside

which his little orchard of damsons and bullaces was of small account. A

really plentiful crop, when the big boughs were heavy and drooping with

rich green, sun-speckled fruit, meant to him abundance and luxury; and

bare trees spelt on the other hand a bare winter and some pinching of

poverty, though nothing beyond endurance. Timothy was a smallholder on

the smallest scale, but there were many people of two, six, or twelve

acres who did very well in their humble way--which I have always thought

is the happy way, if one can attain to it. The man would work for a

farmer in the day-time, and often be sturdy enough to do many things on

his own estate on summer evenings; and all the day long his wife was

busy with her pigs and bees and fowls, and perhaps with two or three

cows. There was a good market for their produce at Pontypool, a town on

the verge of the industrial district, for the colliers and the tinplate

workers love to feed richly. I once saw a woman putting the last touches

to a flat apple tart in a little tavern called Castell-y-bwch (Bucks'

Castle) on the mountain side. She drew out the tart from the oven,

prised open the lid of pastry, and inserted some half-pound of butter

and half pound of moist Demerara sugar, and then put back the lid and

replaced the pastry in the oven; so that apple juice, sugar, butter

should fuse all together. That is a fair sample of hill cookery; other

people of the hills would buy fresh butter at a high price, and give

what they were asked for "green" Caerphilly cheese, still melting from

the press; and they loved to plaster butter heavily on hot new bread and

then crown all with an equal depth of golden honey. And they had a

goodly appetite also for great fat salmon, caught in the yellow Usk

water; and so the fishermen of Caerleon and the little farmers of such

parishes as Llanddewi profited hugely by these mountain tastes.

Many years afterwards I lived for a short while on the Chiltern Hills.

Here was a different tale. In a whole parish there was, I think, barely

a single small holder; the little properties had all been bought up by

the great landlords. There was no comfort about the tumbledown, leaky

cottages which, in many cases, depended for their drinking water supply

on dirty water-butts. None of the farm labourers had fowls or pigs or

bees; the farmers, their employers, did not allow the men to keep pigs

or fowls lest they should be tempted to steal corn and meal.

So the poorer folk were divided into two classes--the good-humoured

wastrels, who "went on the parish" at the slightest provocation and

without the slightest shame, and a few more prosperous, sour,

ill-mannered boors, who were consumed with an acrid "Liberalism" and

with a rancorous envy of anyone better off than themselves.

But at Llanddewi the small holder of land, so far from envying or hating

the great landlord, took, as it were, a pride in him. I remember Mrs.

Owen Tudor, owner of nine or ten rough acres of wild land in Llanddewi,

being both grieved and angry when she heard that a great and ancient

Gwentian house might be forced to sell a certain portion of their

estates through the pressure of bad times in the early 'eighties.

She, too, was a landowner--of rushes chiefly and alder copses and

bracken--and of ancient, though unblazoned, family, and if the great

Morgans suffered, so also did she suffer.

* * * * *

It comes to my mind that I must by no means forget Sir Walter Scott and

all that he did for me. And to get at him it is necessary that we enter

the drawing-room at Llanddewi. I was amused the other day to see in an

old curiosity shop near Lincoln's Inn Fields amongst the rarities

displayed small china jars or pots with a picture of two salmon against

a background of leafage on the lid. I remember eating potted salmon out

of just such jars as these, and now even in my lifetime they appear to

have become curious. So, perhaps, if I describe a room which was

furnished in 1864 that also may be found to be curious. I may note, by

the way, that we always applied the word "parlour"--which properly means

drawing-room, and is still, I think, used in that sense in the United

States of America--to the dining-room, which was also our living room

for general, everyday use. So Sir Walter Scott speaks of a

"dining-parlour," and Mr. Pecksniff, entering Todgers's, of the

"eating-parlour." And now the word only occurs in public-houses, in the

phrase "parlour prices," and even that use is becoming obsolete.

But as for the Llanddewi drawing-room: the walls were covered with a

white paper, on which was repeated at regular intervals a diamond-shaped

design in pale, yellowish buff. The carpet was also white; on it, also

at regular intervals, were bunches of very red roses and very green

leaves. In the exact centre of the room was a round rosewood table

standing on one leg, and consequently shaky. This was covered with a

vivid green cloth, trimmed with a bright yellow border. In the centre of

the cloth was a round mat, apparently made of scarlet and white tags or

lengths of wool; this supported the lamp of state. It was of white china

and of alabastrous appearance, and it burned colza oil. One had to wind

it up at intervals as if it had been a clock. In the sitting-room,

before the coming of paraffin, we usually burned "composite" candles;

two when we were by ourselves, four when there was company.

Over the drawing-room mantelpiece stood a large, high mirror in a florid

gilt frame. Before it were two vases of cut-glass, with alternate facets

of dull white and opaque green, of a green so evil and so bilious and so

hideous that I marvel how the human mind can have conceived it. And yet

my heart aches, too, when, as rarely happens, I see in rubbish shops in

London back streets vases of like design and colour. Somewhere in the

room was a smaller vase of Bohemian glass; its designs in "ground" glass

against translucent ruby. This vase, I think, must have stood on the

whatnot, a triangular pyramidal piece of furniture that occupied one

corner and consisted of shelves getting smaller and smaller as they got

higher.

Against one wall stood a cabinet, of inlaid wood, velvet lined, with

glass doors. On the shelves were kept certain pieces of Nantgarw china,

some old wine-glasses with high stems, and a collection of silver

shoe-buckles and knee-buckles, and two stoneware jugs. The

pictures--white mounts and gilt frames--were water-colours and

chromo-lithographs. Against one of the window-panes hung a painting on

glass, depicting a bouquet of flowers in an alabaster jar. There was a

plaster cast in a round black frame, which I connect in my mind with the

Crystal Palace and the Prince Consort, and an "Art Union," whatever that

may be: it displayed a very fat little girl curled up apparently amidst

wheat sheaves. A long stool in bead-work stood on the hearthrug before

the fire; and a fire-screen, also in bead work, shaped like a banner,

was suspended on a brass stand. On a bracket in one corner was the

marble bust of Lesbia and her Sparrow; beneath it in a hanging bookcase

the Waverley Novels, a brown row of golden books.

I can see myself now curled up in all odd corners of the rectory reading

"Waverley," "Ivanhoe," "Rob Roy," "Guy Mannering," "Old Mortality," and

the rest of them, curled up and entranced so that I was deaf and gave no

answer when they called to me, and had to be roused to life--which

meant tea--with a loud and repeated summons. But what can they say who

have been in fairyland? Notoriously, it is impossible to give any true

report of its ineffable marvels and delights. Happiness, said De

Quincey, on his discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found

in opium, could be sent down by the mail-coach; more truly I could

announce my discovery that delight could be contained in small octavos

and small type, in a bookshelf three feet long. I took Sir Walter to my

heart with great joy, and roamed, enraptured, through his library of

adventures and marvels as I roamed through the lanes and hollows,

continually confronted by new enchantments and fresh pleasures. Perhaps

I remember most acutely my first reading of "The Heart of Midlothian,"

and this for a good but external reason. I was suffering from the

toothache of my life while I was reading it; from a toothache that

lasted for a week and left me in a sort of low fever--as we called it

then. And I remember very well as I sat, wretched and yet rapturous, by

the fire, with a warm shawl about my face, my father saying with a grim

chuckle that I would never forget my first reading of "The Heart of

Midlothian." I never have forgotten it, and I have never forgotten that

Sir Walter Scott's tales, with every deduction for their numerous and

sometimes glaring faults, have the root of the matter in them. They are

vital literature, they are of the heart of true romance. What is vital

literature, what is true romance? Those are difficult questions which I

once tried to answer, according to my lights, in a book called

"Hieroglyphics"; here I will merely say that vital literature is

something as remote as you can possibly imagine from the short stories

of the late Guy de Maupassant.

The hanging bookcase in the drawing-room under the marble bust of Lesbia

and her Sparrow is not only rich and golden in my memory from its being

the habitation of the Waverley Novels. This had been treasure enough,

indeed, to make the shelves for ever dear; but there was more than this.

The bookcase held, besides Sir Walter's romances, my father's school and

college prizes, dignified books in whole calf and in pigskin, adorned

with the arms of Cowbridge School and Jesus College, Oxford, in rich

gold. Here was the Judicious Hooker, whose judiciousness, I regret to

say, I could never abide nor stomach; here that noble book, Parker's

"Glossary of Gothic Architecture," in three volumes, one of text and two

of beautifully executed plates; and here was an early volume of

Tennyson.

Of these two last-named books I can scarcely say which is the more

precious and eminent in my recollection. The one stands for my

initiation into the spirit of Gothic, and I think that is one of the

most magical of all initiations. More furious and frantic nonsense has

been talked about "paganism" than about almost any other subject; it

will only be necessary to think of Swinburne with his "world has grown

grey" phrase to indicate what manner of nonsense I have in mind. But the

fact is that the heart of paganism was not exactly contrite or broken,

but certainly resigned, with an austere and stoical acceptance of fate,

which is not without its beauty and its majesty. The nearest modern

equivalent to the classic or pagan spirit is Calvinism--the Oedipus

Tyrannus is nothing but the doctrine of predestination set to solemn

music--and this austere spirit stamped itself on all the finest Greek

art. It is somewhat softened in Plato, for Plato drew from the East by

way of Pythagoras, but the beauty of Greek tragedy, architecture,

sculpture, is essentially austere and severe. It is Calvinism in marble;

and judgment and inexorable vengeance on guilty sinners are sung in

choral odes.

Now winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we welcome the

yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult together as

though we had been delivered from prison, the hedgerows and the fields

are glad, and the woods are filled with singing; and men's hearts are

filled with an ineffable rapture. Israel once more has come out of

Egypt, from the house of bondage. And all this is expressed in the

Gothic, and much more than this. It is the art of the supreme

exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit of man.

It is not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level

plains of this earthly life, since its joy is in this, that it has

stormed the battlements of heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its

spires rush upward, and its pinnacles are like a wood of springing

trees. And its hard stones, its strong-based pillars break out as it

were into song, they blossom as the rose; all the secrets of the garden

and the field and the wood have been delivered unto them. And not only

is all this true of building. Take a common iron nail that is to be

driven into a door. The Gothic smith would so deal with that nail that

its head should become a little piece of joy and fantasy, a little

portion of paradise. Nay, take the letter A, as the Romans gave it to

us; a plain, well-built, business-like letter, admirably fulfilling its

purpose, with no nonsense about it. Now look at a thirteenth-century

illuminated manuscript and seek out this A. It has every kind of

"nonsense" about it; of that nonsense that makes earth into heaven. It

is not only that it glows with rich raised gold, that it is most

imperially vested in blue and in scarlet, but its frigid form has

relaxed into beauty; it is no longer a mere letter, it is as a wild

rose-tree in a hedge. From it spring curves of infinite grace, which

enclose the page of text, and hair-line branches break from the main

stem and blossom out into flowers of paradise: so the wild roses,

delicate, enchanting, sway and quiver over the green field in the month

of June.

So much for the "Glossary"; now for the other volume, the little early

Tennyson. My attention was directed to this in an odd manner. One of the

masters at school had called me a "lotus-eater," and I was much pleased

with the sound of the phrase, though the master did not mean to be

complimentary, and I had no notion as to what a lotus-eater really was.

But in the course of the next holidays, rummaging at random among the

books at the rectory, as my custom was, I opened the Tennyson and found

the poem of "The Lotos-Eaters" with the "Choric Song" annexed. I began

to read that I might be instructed as to the exact nature of my crime. I

read on, enchanted, and it was then, in my twelfth or thirteenth year,

that I first delighted in poetry as poetry, for its own sake, apart from

any story it might tell.

And here I find an extraordinary difficulty in "making a distinction,"

as the casuists say, between two very different kinds of literary

pleasure. For some time I had enjoyed great literature in such books as

"Don Quixote" and Sir Walter Scott's romances; but "The

Lotos-Eaters"--which is also, I think, great literature--gave me a quite

new and peculiar delight. Hitherto it had been the story which had

charmed me; but now I found myself delighting in the music and melody of

verse, in the "atmosphere" of the poem, in the "colour" of the words--to

use terms of which I disapprove, but for which I can find no efficient

substitutes. I suspect, indeed, that I found in Tennyson's poem the

transmuted and golden image of my own solitary and meditative habit of

mind; and this may have counted for something in the sum of my delight.

The master, a cheery, excellent young man as I remember him, may have

made a correct diagnosis; I had been a lotus-eater for years without

knowing it, and so recognised Ulysses' entranced companions as my true

comrades in dreams. It may have been so; but in any case I have always

dated my inoculation with the specific virus of literature from my

reading of those verses in the little calf-bound volume.

_Chapter III_

Some years ago I was asked by the editor of a well-known paper to write

a short series of articles about London. The subject seems ambitious

enough, and indeed London considered either physically or intellectually

is so vast and mighty a world, that the study of any one--of even the

smallest and least considerable--of its aspects may well be the task of

a lifetime. But, so far as I can remember, my instructions were of the

liberal and catholic kind. I mean, I was not required to write of the

great city as the goal of the timber merchant or of the dealer in

precious stones, or of the makers of chasubles, or of the fashioner of

wigs, but rather to depict it as the end sought by all these, and by

myriads more. And so I set about the task in my usual spirit, firmly

convinced, that is, that better men had said all that there was to say

on the matter brought before me, and yet resolved to do my best and to

try to make something of the job in one way or another. So I set to

work, and found, strangely enough, that though I was writing about

London, I was also writing a mystical treatise, on a text which I will

not divulge in this place. But for the beginning of my series I remember

that I went back a good many years to the time when London began to call

to me. I often speculate now in these later days as to how it would

have been with me if this call had never come. For I have certain

friends--very few of them--still living in Gwent and on its borders who

have not heard the summons. The special family that I have in mind has

lived in those regions for more centuries than I can tell. It would be a

bold and learned Welsh herald who would trace them to their beginnings

on the Celtic side, but on the Norman they go back to Sir Payne

Turberville, the companion of Fitzhamon, and even in Wales a story of

nine hundred years is a long story.

Well, coming down a little through the ages, the Rowlands that I

knew--of course, their grandfather knew my grandfather--are still on the

soil. Certainly a younger son has crossed the Severn, but the two others

have not moved their habitations more than ten or twelve miles in the

last fifty years. From half-way between Newport and Cardiff to Newport,

from Newport to a mile east of Newport, then to four miles east of

Newport, at last to three miles west of Cardiff: they will surely be

laid in the land of their fathers at the end. So it might have been with

me, perhaps, if it had not been for the blood of certain Scottish

sailors intermingled with the stay-at-home stock of Gwent. But I often

wonder, as I say, how it would have happened to me if I had found a home

under the shadow of Twyn Barlwm instead of becoming a dweller in the

tents of London. Tents, I say advisedly, for, with the rarest

exceptions, Londoners have no homes. This was true in a great measure

nearly two hundred years ago, when Dr. Johnson first came to London from

Lichfield; it is now all but universally true.

But, anyhow, the call of London, partly external and partly internal,

came to me, and for some months before I left the old land for the first

time I was imagining London and making a picture of it in my mind, and

longing for it. I turned up the old magazines and re-read Sala's "Twice

Round the Clock." I came upon the strange phrase, "the City," in

stories, and wondered what the City signified. And I began to have an

appetite for London papers. For it should be understood that at

Llanddewi Rectory a London paper was a thing of the rarest appearance. I

think I can remember that when the Prince of Wales--afterwards King

Edward VII, of happy memory--was dangerously ill, my father made some

kind of arrangement--I cannot think what it could have been--by which he

got the "Echo" of those days, not only on week days, but on Sunday

afternoons. And in ordinary times, when we went into Newport on market

days, we might possibly bring back a "Standard" or a "Telegraph," but

likely enough not. We saw the "Western Mail" occasionally, the "Hereford

Times" once a week; weekly also came the "Guardian," an excellent paper,

but with more of Oxford, Pater, and Freeman, and Deans, and Dignitaries

in it than of London or Londoners. Indeed, I remember how the news of

the fall of Khartoum came to the rectory. I had been spending the

evening with some friends across a few miles of midnight and black

copse, and ragged field and wild, broken, and wandering brook land, and

I remember that not a star was to be seen as I came home, wondering all

the while if I ever should find my way. One of my friends had been in

Newport that day, and had seen a paper, and so when I got back at last

and found my father smoking his pipe by the fire, I announced the news

in a tag of Apocalyptic Greek: Khartoum he polis he megale peptoke,

peptoke; Khartoum the mighty city, has fallen, has fallen. And sometimes

I wonder now in these days, when I am nearer to the heart of newspapers,

whether our work in Fleet Street, with its anxious, flurried yell over

the telephone, its tic-tac of tapes, its slither and rattle and clatter

of linotypes, its frantic haste of men, its final roar and thunder of

machinery ever gets itself delivered at last on a midnight hillside so

queerly as the tragic news of Khartoum was delivered in the "parlour" of

Llanddewi Rectory.

But the days came when above the clear voice of the brook in the hidden

valley, above the murmur of the trees in the heart of the greenwood

there sounded from beyond the hills to my heart a clearer voice, a

mightier murmur. London called me, and all documents relating to this

new unknown world became matters of the highest consequence and

significance, and so London papers must by all means be obtained.

Far and long ago that spring and summer of 1880 now seem to me. It was

then that London began to summon, and I was filled with an eager

curiosity to know all about the new world which I was to visit.

As I have explained, the London paper made a very rare and occasional

appearance at Llanddewi-among-the-Hills, and I don't think that any of

us felt any aching need of it. But now for me "Standard" and

"Telegraph" became mystic documents of the highest interest and most

vital consequence; these were the charts to the Nova Terra Incognita;

every line in them came from the heart of the mystery and was written by

men who were learned in all the wisdom of London. London papers I must

have; that was certain; so I set out to get them.

The nearest point at which these precious rarities were obtainable was

Pontypool Road Station, about four miles distant from Llanddewi Rectory.

It was the place where I had bought my copy of "De Quincey" some years

earlier, and is now sacred to me on that account. But in this month of

April thirty-five years ago I thought little of De Quincey or of his

visions. Columbus, I suspect, while he watched the fitting of his

caravel forgot any mere literary enthusiasms that he might have once

possessed; for him there was but one object and that was the tremendous,

marvellous, terrible venture into the unknown that he was soon to make.

So it was with me; London loomed up before me, wonderful, mystical as

Assyrian Babylon, as full of unheard-of things and great unveilings as

any magic city in an Eastern tale. It loomed up with incredible

pinnacles--to quote Tennyson on another city--and in its mighty shadow

all lesser objects disappeared. De Quincey? After all he was not without

value, since he spoke of Oxford Street; still, I wanted later news of

the City of the Enchanters. So three or four times a week I walked the

four miles to Pontypool Road, taking the short cut across the fields

which leaves the by-way at Croeswen and brings one out on the high road

from Newport to Abergavenny, somewhere about a mile from the station,

near the lane which wanders through a very solitary country into Usk.

Pontypool Road Station lies, as I have said, under mountains, or rather

under the huge domed hills which we in Gwent call mountains. It is one

of the many meeting-points between the fields and the "works," and is

always associated in my mind with a noise of clanking machinery and a

reek of black oily smoke of rich flavour, which this generation would

not recognise, since it is only to be imitated by blowing out a tallow

candle that has long wanted snuffing; and now there are neither tallow

candles nor snuffers. Here, then, of a "celestial" agent of W. H. Smith

I bought my papers; usually the "Standard" and the "Daily Telegraph."

The "Morning Post" was, I think, twopence in those days, and twopence

was too much to give for a daily paper, and, moreover, we had a vague

belief that the "Morning Post" was almost exclusively concerned with the

social doings of the aristocracy, splendid matters, doubtless, but no

affairs of mine. With these two papers, then, and once a week with a

copy of "Truth," I would make my way out of the station, and along the

high road till I came to the stile and the lonely path across the

fields, and alone under a tree or in the shelter of a friendly hedge I

would open my papers, cut their pages, and plunge into their garden of

delights. One of my chief interests in these journals--perhaps my

chiefest interest--was the theatre; and I am sure I cannot say why this

was so. As far as I can remember I had up to this time witnessed three

performances of stage plays, and of these three one was certainly not

"legitimate," being a drama of the circus called "Dick Turpin's Ride to

York." Its chief incidents were firing pistols and leaping over

five-barred gates, and I must have been about seven when I saw it at

Cardiff. Then in '76 I was at Dublin, and saw "Our Boys," and was very

heartily bored, and finally in '78 or '79 I went with a school-fellow to

the skating-rink at Hereford--I remember the former as well as the

latter rinking mania--and enjoyed a touring company's rendering of

"Pinafore." And, looking back, I believe that it was then that the

delightful poison began to work; then when in that ramshackle barn of a

place in the Hereford backstreet the curtain went up on the Saturday

afternoon, and eight men dressed as sailors began to sing:--

We sail the ocean blue,

And our saucy ship's a beauty;

We're gallant men and true,

And attentive to our duty.

I remember that, young as I was, I could not help feeling that eight was

a very small number for the male chorus. This circumstance confirms me

in a belief which I have long entertained that Heaven meant me to be a

stage-manager. True, I could never master simple addition, and a

stage-manager has to keep accounts. Still, I should not have been the

first stage-manager whose ledgers were filled with "comptes

fantastiques."

But here I am under my tree or my hedge on a sunny morning of that

Gwentian spring of so many years ago, eagerly opening the paper and

turning to the theatrical advertisements in that part of the journal

which I have in later years learned to call the "leader page." I read

about Mr. Henry Irving at the Lyceum and Mr. Toole at the Folly--I do

not think the vanished theatre was known as Toole's in those days. Mme.

Modjeska and Mr. Forbes-Robertson were, I believe, at the Court, Dion

Boucicault's play, "The Shaughraun," was running at the Adelphi--or,

stay, was this old house of melodrama then the home of "The Danites"?

In Wych Street, at the Opera Comique, was "The Pirates of Penzance";

"Madame Favart" enchanted at the Strand; "Les Cloches de Corneville"

was at the Globe or the Olympic, I forget which. And, said each

advertisement, "for cast see under the clock."

* * * * *

I was vividly interested in that phrase, "For cast see under the clock,"

which I read in the sibylline leaves of my London papers. The real

meaning of the words never occurred to me; I conceived that somewhere,

in some dimly-imagined central place of London, there was a great clock

on a high square tower, and that this tower was so prominent an

architectural feature as to be known all over London as "the clock." And

at the base of this tower, so I proceeded in my fancy, there were

displayed bills or posters, containing the casts of all the plays of all

the theatres. I never found that mighty tower in London, but it was many

years before it dawned on me that "the clock" was merely the pictured

clock-face in the newspaper itself, under which the full casts were then

printed.

As I have said, I cannot quite make out the sources of this intense

interest of mine in the theatre. But I suspect that for the time I had

got into that strange frame of mind to which Thackeray alluded when he

asked a man if he were "fond of the play." Thackeray's friend replied, I

think, to the effect that it depended on the play, whereupon Thackeray

told him that he didn't understand in the least what the phrase "fond of

the play" implied. Thackeray was right; for this attitude of mind is

universal, not particular; and oddly enough, I believe it is very little

related to any serious interest in the drama as a form of art. There is

so vast a gulf between the theatre of to-day and that of thirty-five

years ago that I do not know whether it is now possible for anybody to

be "fond of the play" in the old sense; but if there be such people

left, I am sure that they have not the faintest interest in the

proposals to build and endow a national theatre. For to those in the

happy state to which Thackeray alluded, the theatre was loved not for

itself, but as a symbol of gaiety; I would almost say of metropolitanism

as opposed to provincialism. I have known countrymen relating their

adventures in London almost to wink as they included a visit to the

Globe or the Strand in the list of their pleasures; the theatre

represented to them the "chimes at midnight" mood.

Thackeray meant--do you like the mingled gas and orange odours of the

theatre, do you like the sound of the orchestra tuning, the sight of

the footlights suddenly lightening, can you project your self readily

into the fantastic world disclosed by the rising curtain, and

afterwards, do you like a midnight chop at Evans's, with Welsh rarebit

to follow, and foaming tankards of brown stout, and then "something

hot"; in fine, do you like to be out and about and in the midst of

gaiety at hours of the night when your uncles and aunts and all quiet

country people are abed and fast asleep? That is what Thackeray meant by

his question, and I suppose that our modern, serious lovers of the drama

would regard the man who was fond of the play in this sense as an utter

reprobate, a stumbling-block and a stone of offence. But it was in that

sense that I pored devoutly over everything relating to the theatre that

I found in my newspapers, as I delayed in my walks home from Pontypool

Road, not being able to refrain any longer.

Well, the day dawned at last for dreams to come true--or as true as they

ever come. My father and I set out one fine Monday morning for

Paddington, starting, I think, at about eleven o'clock from Newport, and

getting to London by five in the afternoon. This was then the best train

in the day; for the Severn Tunnel was not yet made, and we went all the

way round by Gloucester. It was a six hours' journey, and now one can

get from London to Newport in two hours and a half. At Westbourne Park

we changed and got into the Underground system, and so came to the

Temple Station on the Embankment. Thence it was a short walk to the

private hotel in Surrey Street where my father had always stayed on his

infrequent visits to town. I have forgotten the name of the

hotel;--Bradshaw's office is built on the site of it--it was Williams's,

or Smith's, or Evans's, or some such title, and as I believe was then

the way, it was understood to be more or less the preserve of people

from the west. I suppose there were other little hotels for parsons and

small squires of the east and north and south; for all the streets that

go down from the Strand to the river were then occupied by these private

hotels and by lodging-houses. Craven Street, by Charing Cross, is the

only one of these streets that has at all preserved the old manner,

which, let me say, was a dingy and dim but on the whole a comfortable

manner. Our hotel was just opposite the pit door of the old Strand

Theatre, and in a former visit my father and mother, sitting at their

window, had had the gratification of seeing Mrs. Swanborough sitting at

her window over the way knitting busily. Now all our ladies, however

smart, have become knitters, but if I had been writing these

reminiscences a few years ago I should have asked: "Can you imagine a

London manageress of these days sitting and knitting in her room at the

theatre?"

We went out for a short stroll before eating, and for the first time I

saw the Strand, and it instantly went to my head and to my heart, and I

have never loved another street in quite the same way. My Strand is gone

for ever; some of it is a wild rock-garden of purple flowers, some of it

is imposing new buildings; but one way or another, the spirit is wholly

departed. But on that June night in 1880 I walked up Surrey Street and

stood on the Strand pavement and looked before me and to right and to

left and gasped. No man has ever seen London; but at that moment I was

very near to the vision--the _theoria_--of London.

After the astounding glimpse at the Strand we went back to the private

hotel in Surrey Street and had something to eat. I am not sure, but I

think the meal consisted of tea and ham and eggs, the latter beautifully

poached. I know that my mind holds a recollection of this simple dish

very admirably done in connection with Smith's, or whatever the place

was called; and I believe it was eaten in the evening of our arrival.

And I may say in passing that the hotel had a pleasant, well-worn,

homely look about it; very plain, but extremely comfortable. I think

that my bedroom carpet was threadbare and that the bed was a feather

bed; at all events one slept sublimely there under the roof, under the

London stars.

Then for the Strand again, now sunset flushed, beginning to twinkle with

multitudinous lamps--I had hardly seen a lamp-lit street before--and so

to the Opera Comique, where they were playing "The Pirates of Penzance."

The Opera Comique was somewhere in Wych Street, which has gone the way

of the streets of Babylon and Troy; purple blossoms and big hotels and

other theatres that I know not grow now in the place where it once

stood. We went to the upper boxes of the Opera Comique and enjoyed

ourselves very well. I remember my father being especially pleased with

the Pirate King's defence of his profession: "Compared with

respectability it's almost honest," or words to that effect. But, oddly

enough, I was a little disappointed. There was not the sense of gaiety

that I had expected. For one thing the music reminded me of the classic

glees and madrigals which I had heard discoursed by the Philharmonic

Society at Hereford, where I was at school, and I did not want to be

reminded of Hereford. And the female chorus hardly looked as thoughtless

as I could have wished; it seemed to me that they might very well have

come fresh from the rectory like myself. Of course, it was all very well

to be ladylike, and so forth; but what I asked of the stage was careless

devilry, the suggestion, at all events, of naughtiness. In fact, my

attitude was perilously near to that of the Arkansas audiences as

analysed by the Duke in "Huckleberry Finn": "What they wanted was low

comedy--and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy." But I was not

really quite so bad as the "Arkansaw lunkheads." We went on another

night to "Les Cloches de Corneville," a most harmless production, I am

sure; and _that_ was what I wanted. I was enchanted from the rising of

the curtain; there was the sunlit scene in Normandy, charming, smiling,

and a whole row of pretty girls, evidently as thoughtless as the

lightest heart could wish, dancing down to the footlights and singing:--

Just look at that,

Just look at this,

Don't you think we're not amiss?

A glance give here,

A glance give there,

Tell us if you think we're dear.

And--not one of these girls looked as if she could have come from any

conceivable rectory. Decidedly, "Les Cloches de Corneville" was the

comic opera for my money. What a pleasing thrill the scene afforded when

the entire village, for some reason that I cannot well remember, dressed

up as Crusaders and Crusaderesses, and came suddenly into the room of

Gaspard, the miser, and the big bell began to toll and the gold was

poured out in a torrent on the ground. "When the heir returneth, then

shall ring the bell, so the legend runneth, so the old men tell"; in

some such words was this grand peripeteia announced in the text. So the

heir no doubt returned and married the extra pretty girl whose name I

have forgotten--she was not Serpolette, I know, for Serpolette was

comic, delightfully, impudently comic, but still comic, and so no mate

for the hero. Serpolette, I think, having regard to the Unities, ought

to have married the thin but amusing assistant of the Bailie; but I do

not know whether this were so. But I am sure everybody was happy ever

after, and of "Les Cloches" and other comic operas like it I say, in the

words of Coleridge's friend: "Them's the jockeys for me!"

I have never been able to make up my mind as to the respective merits of

"Les Cloches de Corneville" and "Madame Favart," which was running at

the Strand. "Les Cloches" had the more coherent plot of the two, and the

great scene of the miser and the crusaders was more effective in its

stagey way than anything in "Madame Favart," but, then, Florence St.

John was Madame Favart, and to old playgoers I need say no more. And

Marius, a delightful French comedian, was in the cast; and there were

those songs dear to memory: "Ave, my mother," "The Artless Thing," "To

Age's Dull December," and

Pair of lovers meet,

Stolen vows are sweet,

Sighs, etcetera.

Love is all in all,

On a garden wall,

Never heed papa.

This was sung by Marius, who had no voice in particular, but an infinite

Gallic relish and unction and finish in everything that he did. The

fourth piece that we went to in this wonderful week was "The Daughter of

the Drum Major," at the Alhambra, then a theatre, with an extremely

roomy, comfortable pit. This last piece made but little impression on

me. From my recollection, it seems to have been more in the modern mode,

that is, a mere excuse for showing off a "beauty chorus" without the

little touch of thin, theatrical but pleasant romance that delighted me

in the two other plays. But the poverty of the play was atoned for by

the happy circumstance that before going to it we dined at the Cavour.

And the Cavour in 1880 was exactly like the Cavour in 1915, save in this

one matter, that on the earlier date there was included in the price of

the dinner a bottle of violet wine.

* * * * *