is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand
years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of
Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge
of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic
fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost
intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost
as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South
America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year,
and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million.
Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty
thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and
fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible?
Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of
“towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of
that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh
considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England,
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more
inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals
Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in
Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together;
British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken
together contain more than the combined populations of the United States
of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash;
with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions,
and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except
England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!
These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This
is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in
the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past.
The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out.
Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is
wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires
bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as
indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and
choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived
and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a
great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They
tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and
that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any
folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or
Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come
again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished.
To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this
man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been
even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a
voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future
of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the
subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the
building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking
would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of
Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that
survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The
line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it
would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the
Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken
in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest
peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the
epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There
would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine
itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth
till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English
is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.
But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide
for ever by the way. Although I have _Whitaker’s Almanack_ before me
all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands
through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost
forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one
volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in
time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of
England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up
under Cleopatra’s Needle.
I turn over the last page of “British India” in my _Almanack_. We are
not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed
“Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement
towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is
matter to his hand. The places one may read of are--Aden, Socotra,
Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my
book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large
as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once
held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including
British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard
of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So
little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that
once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of
Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara
was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in
the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.
After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern
hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned
by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British
Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility
and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern
Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger
than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The
territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland
Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with
the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the
Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.
By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches
belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker
my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I
am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I
must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination
expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures!
How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea
in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when
it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into
the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping
sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious
language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest
realm over which man ever ruled. _Civis Romanus sum!_ I will sleep. I
will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this
imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the
peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber
himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the
uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities,
and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this
flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting
consciousness--_Civis Romanus sum!_
LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.
Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old
bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after
a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front
of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first,
was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains
and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a
frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship _Victory_, and certainly older. The
bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of
the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great
Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books,
none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my
being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these
books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty
and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms
as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word
children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not
mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more
than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and
outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable
memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult
children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when
we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in
friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and
son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.
Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost
children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the
recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child
means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of
age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of
the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the
child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child
we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom
we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again.
Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves
seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with
our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him
as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of
memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign
over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our
stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force
of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own?
how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one
dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost
and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs
to us?
With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have
suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and
find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall
excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with
not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow
them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the
old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came
earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s _Spelling-Book_, and by the
writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the
second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered
condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the
Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third
line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street
and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say,
ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At
that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning
to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of
about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar
compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew _rosa_ before I could read words
of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than
I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137,
Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the
atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is
no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all
what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of
chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are
pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless
way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those
appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of
never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing
those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of
tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality,
discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality,
impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary,
recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and
volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter
the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a
child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his
life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy
did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to
keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of
punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among
those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters
where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”
I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings
laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember
the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I
dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that
early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me
the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now
they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them
they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the
bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book,
and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was
not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness.
He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he
ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close
quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for
young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes
the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the
unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and
was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English
people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other
blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day,
and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous
intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and
chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces
in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the
Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with
evil dreams.
Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I
do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature
intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In
the vigour of all lives there must be _lacunæ_ of intense indolence,
backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and
take the things that come as though they were good things rather than
work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to
persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked
experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh
obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say
they like a book because other people say they like it. These good
people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much
more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than
those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their
life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy.
But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings
merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own
minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open
matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of
stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can
with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years
where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the
year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all
political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only
support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of
any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in
imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of
imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every
man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each
particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all.
It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of
age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.
The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and
the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that
adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as
an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to
select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that
comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad
specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the
choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.
A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by
a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on
the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it.
The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows,
and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.
The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called
she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting
sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow
was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed
by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not
dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the
swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous
to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was
telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the
sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion
to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had
not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken
into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the
expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead?
The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is
murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This
is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian.
I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious
vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?
But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with
the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust
are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and
starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher
believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no
doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too
much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the
“unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of
crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine,
sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist--in poetry.
Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably
from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of
ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is
at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not
quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he
only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The
crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is
intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his
brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is
abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know
the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable
but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like
Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary
everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It
is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give
themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order
that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system,
he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand
pounds!
Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I
gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living
on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the
stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the
studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the
contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to
his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of
grammar, as it deals only with the _noise_ made by words. Cobbett’s
treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and
a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:
“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
published such petty observations as were better omitted.
“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
number and person; as _Thou fliest from good; He runs to death_.
“Our adjectives are invariable.
“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as _His
father’s glory; the sun’s heat_.
“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as _He loves me; You
fear him_.
“All prepositions require an oblique case: _He gave this to me; He
took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me_.”
That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh,
Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that
Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy
and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray
could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards?
Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the
grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English
language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and
Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only
orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils
all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference
of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull
school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.