As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful

whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on

conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in

South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in

this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more

impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were

delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades

and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile

the foundation shudders under foot, the bowels of the mountain growl,

and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and

tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young

people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably

reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that

respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a

bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary

life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so

close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could

hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a

defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits

dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in

a perpetual carouse.

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these

South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of

ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in

overcrowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and

swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would

set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically

looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of

petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the

ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe,

and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If

we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract

idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for

the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by

the hour and no one would follow them into battle--the blue-peter might

fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if

these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we

should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than

any battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our

ancestors have miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be

lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And

what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step

we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all

around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the

time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a

mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there

is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the

old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier;

they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear

of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if

it was a grisly warning, but with a simple child-like pleasure at having

outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a

guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass,

their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling

with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley

at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on

Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only)

whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the

gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and

clamber into bed.

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern

and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those

who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning

through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers

one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a

vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiae bay; and

when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the

Praetorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea.

This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory

race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while it

lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer,

God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the end!

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer

bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is

it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech,

incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and

regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear

of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more

we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense proportion

of boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their

hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of

a professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one

of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern

and brazen boldness in the face of death!

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into

daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death

is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others;

and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on

earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical

guess at the meaning of the word _life_. All literature, from Job and

Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look

upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to

rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our

sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say

that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with

dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work

for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem,

and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy

volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with

modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a

Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very

well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a

Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or

a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man;

but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in

its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms

of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true

throughout--that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly

preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking,

love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful there

will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely

on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good

health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval,

the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a

general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who

cherish them most vividly at all the most scrupulous of their personal

safety. To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to

enjoy keenly the mixed tenure of human experience, rather leads a man to

disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the

love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or

a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives

upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his

constitution.

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of

the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere

funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy

unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away.

Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and

again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and

a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question.

When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of

sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be

knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue; we have something

else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing-bells are ringing

all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is

parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also the trap

is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain

the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of

the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this

glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry

curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the

pride of our own nimble bodies.

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the

Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is generally very bald, and

his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as

a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's end, as the French say--or

whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our

turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we

thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its

vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and

vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the

hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one

conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing

terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No

one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the

thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how

little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in

what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he

ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass,

did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage

and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's

cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our

precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at

all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not

looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the

past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good

citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is

nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own

carcase has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took

his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had

all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own

digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a

dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous

acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for

parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the

principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or

soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin

to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature;

and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise

is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now

the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock

of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and

cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world,

keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he

runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he

may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his

health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of

the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim.

Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all

sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed

friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal

synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover

of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his

inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly

warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or

Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.

These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain

satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or

other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the

nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of

prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb

indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and

carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely

considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much

more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial

novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in midcourse? Who

would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the

consideration of death?

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego

all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature--as

if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a

stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without

even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be

the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent

Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's

length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is

better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the

sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not

give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push

and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished

undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of

the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending.

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good

work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every

heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse

behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even

if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying

out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with

hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once

tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in

such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,

foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an

end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those

whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort

of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the

man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much

as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the

highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The

noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are

hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this

happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.

VI

EL DORADO

It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are

so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain

hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of

victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And

it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as

possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards

the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when

we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we

dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring

beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are

inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the

term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of

how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a

joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which

we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of

pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.

Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some

interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science,

the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where

they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires

and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that

he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens

every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and

curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most

enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils

interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,

but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities

of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive

that he should never hunger any more; suppose him at a glance, to take

in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge;

suppose him to do the like in any province of experience--would not that

man be in a poor way for amusement ever after?

One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads

with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book

down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for

he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left

companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently

finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright,

with the ten notebooks upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young

fellow, in consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the

daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept

bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had

finished the "Decline and Fall," he had only a few moments of joy; and

it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are

set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below.

Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You

would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble;

and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have

seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its

marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering

sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's

children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when

you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop,

and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended

courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often

difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in

love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife

must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the

altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest

of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an

unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very

fact that they are two instead of one.

"Of making books there is no end," complained the Preacher; and did not

perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is

no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel or to

gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever,

and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a statue

worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or

crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or

another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite universe there is

room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works

of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a

private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather

and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for

a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and delight us.

There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can

be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we

have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.

A strange picture we make on our way to our Chimaeras, ceaselessly

marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable,

adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it

is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we live

for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find

ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of

mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon,

it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and

but a little way farther, against the setting sun, descry the spires of

El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel

hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to

labour.

VII

THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS

"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure it is

so in States to honour them."--SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

There is one story of the wars of Rome which I have always very much

envied for England. Germanicus was going down at the head of the legions

into a dangerous river--on the opposite bank the woods were full of

Germans--when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal

the Romans on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared

into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. "Forward!" cried

Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, "Forward! and follow the

Roman birds." It would be a very heavy spirit that did not give a leap

at such a signal, and a very timorous one that continued to have any

doubt of success. To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to

make imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and its

military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of those

individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked

altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to

produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular

star, the holiday of some particular saint--anything, in short, to

remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old successes--may be

enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one

party a feeling that Right and the larger interests are with them.

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be about the

sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not been taken to the hearts of

the people, and naturalised as an English emblem. We know right well

that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman

or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of

battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene

of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical

strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of

foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to

English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one

end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among

such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose

yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you are the

countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson is perhaps just as unwarrantable

as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will

look well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond the

reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent

if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please

ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is

looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it

as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers

take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation

has lost as many ships or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.

There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying,

and picturesque conditions of some of our sea-fights. Hawke's battle in

the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew up,

reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval

annals owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful

appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and

everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at

the coast. Nay, and what we know of the misery between-decks enhances

the bravery of what was done by giving it something for contrast. We

like to know that these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and

to keep bold and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader

can forget the description of the _Thunder_ in "Roderick Random": the

disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; deck after

deck, each with some new object of offence; the hospital, where the

hammocks were huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each;

the cockpit, far under water, where "in an intolerable stench" the

spectacled steward kept the accounts of the different messes; and the

canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and

salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer

Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this business on board the

_Thunder_ over which the reader passes lightly and hurriedly, like a

traveller in a malarious country. It is easy enough to understand the

opinion of Dr. Johnson: "Why, sir," he said, "no man will be a sailor

who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail." You would fancy

anyone's spirit would die out under such an accumulation of darkness,

noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he had not come there of his

own free will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang.

But perhaps a watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle

again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and prize-money,

bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the doors of the prison

for a twinkling. Somehow or other, at least, this worst of possible

lives could not overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did

their duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of that

country which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns merrily

when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear for a bold,

honourable sentiment, of any class of men the world ever produced.

Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names. Pym and Habakkuk

may do pretty well, but they must not think to cope with the Cromwells

and Isaiahs. And you could not find a better case in point than that of

the English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men

of execution. Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, "Foul-Weather" Jack Byron are

all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history. Cloudesley

Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has a

bull-dog quality that suits the man's character, and it takes us back to

those English archers who were his true comrades for plainness,

tenacity, and pluck. Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an

act of bold conduct in the field. It is impossible to judge of Blake or

Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such heroes. But

still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in this connection, that

the latter was greatly taken with his Sicilian title. "The

signification, perhaps, pleased him," says Southey; "Duke of Thunder was

what in Dahomey would have been called a _strong name_; it was to a

sailor's taste, and certainly to no man could it be more applicable."

Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it

has a noble sound and a very proud history; and Columbus thought so

highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that

title as long as the house should last.

But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I wish to

speak about in this paper. That spirit is truly English; they, and not

Tennyson's cotton-spinners or Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are

the true and typical Englishmen. There may be more _head_ of bagmen in

the country, but human beings are reckoned by number only in political

constitutions. And the Admirals are typical in the full force of the

word. They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but of a virtue in

which most Englishmen can claim a moderate share; and what we admire in

their lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in

our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been

depressed by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand and

sympathise with an admiral or a prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket

Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically

bracketed for admiration in the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.

If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus going back

to Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep; but tell them about

Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put

down their pipes to listen. I have by me a copy of "Boxiana," on the

fly-leaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle of

remarkable events and an obituary of great men. Here we find piously

chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and pugilists--Johnny Moore,

of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; "Pierce Egan,

senior, writer of 'Boxiana' and other sporting works"--and among all

these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in the time of this

annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been added to the

glorious roll? In short, we do not all feel warmly towards Wesley or

Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in "Paradise Lost"; but there are

certain common sentiments and touches of nature by which the whole

nation is made to feel kinship. A little while ago everybody, from

Hazlitt and John Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his

register on the fly-leaves of "Boxiana," felt a more or less shamefaced

satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters. And the exploits of the

Admirals are popular to the same degree and tell in all ranks of

society. Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a

trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the

outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should

still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these

sayings and doings of the English Admirals.

Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the _Venerable_, and

only one other vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to

sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest

part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. "I have taken

the depth of the water," added he, "and when the _Venerable_ goes down

my flag will still fly." And you observe this is no naked Viking in a

pre-historic period; but a Scottish member of Parliament, with a

smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and

flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with

six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not

be imagined he had struck. He too must needs wear his four stars outside

his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. "In honour I gained

them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality, "in

honour I will die with them." Captain Douglas of the _Royal Oak_, when

the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was

burned along with her himself rather than desert his post without

orders. Just then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round

the supper-table with the ladies of his court. When Raleigh sailed into

Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on him at once, he

scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer with a flourish of insulting

trumpets. I like this bravado better than the wisest dispositions to

ensure victory; it comes from the heart and goes to it. God has made

nobler heroes, but He never made a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh.

And as our Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a

strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered a

startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a mistress. When

the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had been decided, he

threw his hat into the sea. It is in this way that a schoolboy hears of

a half-holiday; but this was a bearded man of great possessions who had

just been allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not lie still in his

bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck in a basket to

direct and animate the fight. I said they loved war like a mistress; yet

I think there are not many mistresses we should continue to woo under

similar circumstances. Trowbridge went ashore with the _Culloden_, and

was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile. "The merits of that

ship and her gallant captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too

well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her misfortune was great

in getting aground, _while her more fortunate companions were in the

full tide of happiness_." This is a notable expression, and depicts the

whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair.

It was to be "in the full tide of happiness" for Nelson to destroy five

thousand five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have

his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at

Copenhagen: "A shot through the mainmast knocked the splinters about;

and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, 'It is warm work,

and this may be the last to any of us at any moment'; and then, stopping

short at the gangway, added, with emotion, '_But, mark you--I would not

be elsewhere for thousands._'"

I must tell one more story, which has lately been made familiar to us

all, and that in one of the noblest ballads of the English language. I

had written my tame prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe,

when I had no notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality for

Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas

Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was

a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it

is related of him that he would chew and swallow wine-glasses, by way of

convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish

fleet of fifty sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the

_Revenge_, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by

the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open--either to turn her

back upon the enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. The first

alternative Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his

country, and her Majesty's ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and

steered into the Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and

fall under his lee; until, about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great

ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and

immediately boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, the _Revenge_

held her own single-handed against the Spaniards. As one ship was beaten

off, another took its place. She endured, according to Raleigh's

computation, "eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many

assaults and entries." By morning the powder was spent, the pikes all

broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing left overhead either for

flight or defence"; six feet of water in the hold; almost all the men

hurt, and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this

pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the

_Admiral of the Hulks_ and the _Ascension_ of Seville had both gone down

alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in a sinking

state. In Hawke's words, "they had taken a great deal of drubbing." The

captain and crew thought they had done about enough; but Greenville was

not of this opinion; he gave orders to the master-gunner, whom he knew

to be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the _Revenge_ where she

lay. The others, who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral,

interfered with some decision, locked the master-gunner in his cabin,

after having deprived him of his sword, for he manifested an intention

to kill himself if he were not to sink the ship; and sent to the

Spaniards to demand terms. These were granted. The second or third day

after, Greenville died of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship,

leaving his contempt upon the "traitors and dogs" who had not chosen to

do as he did and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully manned, with

six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short of stores. He at

least, he said, had done his duty, as he was bound to do, and looked for

everlasting fame.

Some one said to me the other day that they considered this story to be

of a pestilent example. I am not inclined to imagine we shall ever be

put into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And

besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such actions is not a

thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous

common-sense. The man who wished to make the ballads of his country

coveted a small matter compared to what Richard Greenville accomplished.

I wonder how many people have been inspired by this mad story, and how

many battles have been actually won for England in the spirit thus

engendered. It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you

can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable

occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic fancies, will

not be led far by terror of the Provost-Marshal. Even German warfare, in

addition to maps and telegraphs, is not above employing the "Wacht am

Rhein." Nor is it only in the profession of arms that such stories may

do good to a man. In this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is

Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the

ship, we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we call

heroic feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club

smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and

that it costs them more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular,

than would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity.

It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in question. For

what I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face to face with

me in an inspiriting achievement. A man may talk smoothly over a cigar

in my club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment, without adding

anything to mankind's treasury of illustrious and encouraging examples.

It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people

are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are

crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory

with some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our

sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing

moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit

in all the books of political economy between Westminster and

Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very

pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are

viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his

finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not

only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back

merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by

double entry.

There is another question which seems bound up in this; and that is

Temple's problem: whether it was wise of Douglas to burn with the _Royal

Oak_? and by implication, what it was that made him do so. Many will

tell you it was the desire of fame.

"To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their

renown, but to fortune? How many men has she extinguished in the

beginning of their progress, of whom we have no knowledge; who brought

as much courage to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut

them off in the first sally of their arms? Amongst so many and so great

dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Caesar was ever

wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than the least of those

he went through. A great many brave actions must be expected to be

performed without witness, for one that comes to some notice. A man is

not always at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the

sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is often surprised between

the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a

hen-roost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he

must pick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and meet

adventures alone."

Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on "Glory." Where death is

certain, as in the cases of Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one from

a personal point of view. The man who lost his life against a hen-roost

is in the same pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified

place of the first order. Whether he has missed a peerage or only the

corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is quietly

in the grave. It was by a hazard that we learned the conduct of the four

marines of the _Wager_. There was no room for these brave fellows in the

boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a certain death. They

were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it was their business to

die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave

three cheers, and cried "God bless the king!" Now, one or two of those

who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story.

That was a great thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any possible

twisting of human speech, be construed into anything great for the

marines. You may suppose, if you like, that they died hoping their

behaviour would not be forgotten; or you may suppose they thought

nothing on the subject, which is much more likely. What can be the

signification of the word "fame" to a private of marines, who cannot

read and knows nothing of past history beyond the reminiscences of his

grandmother? But whichever supposition you make, the fact is unchanged.

They died while the question still hung in the balance; and I suppose

their bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and the

humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided whether they

were to be unknown and useless martyrs or honoured heroes. Indeed, I

believe this is the lesson: if it is for fame that men do brave actions,

they are only silly fellows after all.

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose

actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The

Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful

carping, but in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of the

personal motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be

true and wholesome. People usually do things, and suffer martyrdoms,

because they have an inclination that way. The best artist is not the

man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice

of his art. And instead of having a taste for being successful merchants

and retiring at thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we

call heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a

mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily out

of the forecastle,--it is because a fight is a period of multiplied and

intense experiences, and, by Nelson's computation, worth "thousands" to

any one who has a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the _Wager_

gave three cheers and cried "God bless the king," it was because they

liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction. They were giving

their lives, there was no help for that; and they made it a point of

self-respect to give them handsomely. And there were never four happier

marines in God's world than these four at that moment. If it was worth

thousands to be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would

calculate how much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or how

much their story is worth to each of us who read it. And mark you,

undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation. The finest action

is the better for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of the _Birkenhead_

had not gone down in line, or these marines of the _Wager_ had walked

away simply into the island, like plenty of other brave fellows in the

like circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far lower

value to the two stories. We have to desire a grand air in our heroes;

and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put the dots

on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to when they mean to be

heroic. And hence, we should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that

our Admirals were not only great-hearted but big-spoken.

The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is their object;

but I do not think that is much to the purpose. People generally say

what they have been taught to say; that was the catchword they were

given in youth to express the aims of their way of life; and men who are

gaining great battles are not likely to take much trouble in reviewing

their sentiments and the words in which they were told to express them.

Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite

different theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.

And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it

is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift and

momentous decision. It is from something more immediate, some

determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the

breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting

an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most

commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will,

is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is

difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so

formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect

that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent. of why Lord

Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of

Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why the

Admirals courted war like a mistress.

VIII

SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN

Through the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in

possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular

merit and interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scottish

Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual spring

exhibition with astonishment and a sense of incongruity. Instead of the

too common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances executed

in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls

of room after room, a whole army of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or

beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of genuine

instinct. It was a complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords

and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges and heretical divines,

a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; and the Scotsman of

to-day walked about among the Scotsman of two generations ago. The

moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too early. The people who

sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still relations.

They are not yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a

middle distance within cry of our affections. The little child who looks

wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture is now the veteran

Sheriff _emeritus_ of Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who returned

the other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of sixty years: "I could

see none of my old friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn

Gallery, and found them all there."

It would be difficult to say whether the collection was more interesting

on the score of unity or diversity. Where the portraits were all of the

same period, almost all of the same race, and all from the same brush,

there could not fail to be many points of similarity. And yet the

similarity of the handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief

those personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was

a born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes,

surprised their manners in their face, and had possessed himself of what

was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in

his studio. What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas

almost in the moment of conception. He had never any difficulty, he

said, about either hands or faces. About draperies or light or

composition, he might see room for hesitation or afterthought. But a

face or a hand was something plain and legible. There were no two ways

about it, any more than about the person's name. And so each of his

portraits is not only (in Doctor Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the

catalogue) "a piece of history," but a piece of biography into the

bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally

amusing, and carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These

portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a

volume of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger

and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's palette or

Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are

both signed and countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the

artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and manners of

men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who sits

looking out upon you with inimitable innocence, and apparently under the

impression that he is in a room by himself. For Raeburn could plunge at

once through all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and

present the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most

disengaged moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter is

represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor

Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all,

from this point of view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is

notable. A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of

the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits

with a drawing board upon his knees. He has just paused to render

himself account of some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of

line or compare neighbouring values. And there, without any perceptible

wrinkling, you have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes,

and the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an

effort of the kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely

direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it that Colonel

Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing

in the world besides his own occupation of the moment.

Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly the whole

of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to contain some that were

indifferent, whether as works of art or as portraits. Certainly the

standard was remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there

were one or two pictures that might have been almost as well away--one

or two that seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were

not successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott,

for instance, was very agreeable to look upon. You do not care to think

that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked

forehead which according to all written accounts and many portraits, was

the distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite of his

own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that

Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he

had taken the trouble to study it; but it was by no means always that

he gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about

with his portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces,

as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a room full of

living people. But it was not so with the hands. The portraits differed

from each other in face perhaps ten times as much as they differed by

the hand; whereas with living people the two go pretty much together;

and where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be

commonplace.

One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of Camperdown. He stands in

uniform beside a table, his feet slightly straddled with the balance of

an old sailor, his hand poised upon a chart by the finger-tips. The

mouth is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very

highly arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and have

the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea winds. From the

whole figure, attitude and countenance, there breathes something precise

and decisive, something alert, wiry, and strong. You can understand,

from the look of him, that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is

grimmest and driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the

fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under Admiral

de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter approaching; I

have only to advise you to keep up a good fire." Somewhat of this same

spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days of the

mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the

_Venerable_, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals as

though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate the Dutch.

Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye was the

half-length of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord Justice-Clerk. If I

know gusto in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted with rare

enjoyment. The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a

cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and

perpetuated with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly

subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like

that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has been

somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eye-lids of old age

the eyes look out with a half-youthful half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with

no pretence to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach. So

sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait-painter, that

it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of sympathy on the part of

the spectator. And sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from

humane considerations, because it supplies us with the materials for

wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness

for any unpopular person, and among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than

to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his

abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the

pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a

lively, rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority.

Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of

wine, and one who "shone perculiarly" at tavern meetings. He has left

behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel speech; and to

this day his name smacks of the gallows. It was he who presided at the

trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; and his appearance on

these occasions was scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day. His summing

up on Muir began thus--the reader must supply for himself "the growling

blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scots accent: "Now this is the

question for consideration--Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he

not? Now, before this can be answered, two things must be attended to

that require no proof: _First_, that the British constitution is the

best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not

possible to make it better." It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a

political trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the

relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French. "I never liked the

French all my days," said his Lordship, "but now I hate them." And yet a

little further on: "A government in any country should be like a

corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest,

which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble who have

nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They

may pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country in the

twinkling of an eye." After having made profession of sentiments so

cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials were at an end, which

was generally about midnight, Braxfield would walk home to his house in

George Square with no better escort than an easy conscience. I think I

see him getting his cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a

lantern in one hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk

January night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had defied

him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for your lordship to

menace me; for I have long learned to fear not the face of man"; and I

can fancy, as Braxfield reflected on the number of what he called

_Grumbletonians_ in Edinburgh, and of how many of them must bear special

malice against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that

very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile

intent--I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he reflected

that he also was not especially afraid of men's faces or men's fists,

and had hitherto found no occasion to embody this insensibility in

heroic words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid

it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You

may look into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will,

but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter in.

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to name half

of the portraits that were remarkable for their execution or interesting

by association. There was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill,

which you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by,

you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman

who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented

modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for

which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm

in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his

satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to

pop out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking

altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than

young ladies; full-blown John Robison, in hyperbolical red

dressing-gown, and every inch of him a fine old man of the world;

Constable the publisher, upright beside a table, and bearing a

corporation with commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if

ever anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord Newton just

awakened from clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President

Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his wig, of

some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and

yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, the fat lips curved

and compressed, the nose combining somehow the dignity of a beak with

the good-nature of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of

intelligence and insight. And all these portraits are so pat and

telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared

with the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as

bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated sixpences. Some

disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could hardly fail to

present themselves; but it is perhaps only the _sacer vates_ who is

wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look

in holiday immortality upon our children and grandchildren.

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of

merit. No one, of course, could be insensible to the presence of Miss

Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as

that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with

women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all

the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not

seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich

and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young

ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would

fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us

believe. In all these pretty faces you miss character, you miss fire,

you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in

the world; and, what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are

not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are

so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of

the male novelist.

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty sitters; or

he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or else (and here is

about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an

obstinate blindness in one direction, and know very little more about

women after all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. This is

all the more likely, because we are by no means so unintelligent in the

matter of old women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me,

in books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin

Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which

are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his

men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not

withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw

there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people

cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary

humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very

different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for intelligent

study nor much result in the shape of genuine comprehension. Even women,

who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well

enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male

creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he has an

equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the

back of his head. Of course, no woman will believe this, and many men

will be so very polite as to humour their incredulity.

IX

CHILD'S PLAY

The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much

a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we

shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold

advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse we more

than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity

to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at

soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see

the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go

to school no more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for

another (which is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the

daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us; and

although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our pleasure

differently. We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday's cold mutton

please our Friday's appetite; and I can remember the time when to call

it red venison, and tell myself a hunter's story, would have made it

more palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton

is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented

by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant

reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments.

But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment over

eatables; and if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be

heavenly manna to him for a week.

If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he is

not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and

should have some medicine; but children may be pure spirits, if they

will, and take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation does

not count for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the

swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear

through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough

to see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use

their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own;

and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly were not beautiful in

themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought they

might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch

so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn

over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you remember

will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general

sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of well-being in

bed. And here, of course, you will understand pleasurable sensations;

for overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in life,

and the true commander of man's soul and body--alas! pain has its own

way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden

where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon

the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his

father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this

sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated

sugar which delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical

asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and

hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices,

and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable

of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world

between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with

which a man listens to articulate music.

At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition

and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our growing age, another

change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are

transformed and seen through theories and associations as through

coloured windows. We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and

gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in

which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows

with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always to

admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories about

life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier that arrests our

attention; but perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a

countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an

adventurous story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is

passed away; sugar loaves and water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter;

and we walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor must we

deny that a good many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit

or in the interest of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back

with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a better

case; they know more than when they were children, they understand

better, their desires and sympathies answer more nimbly to the

provocation of the senses, and their minds are brimming with interest as

they go about the world.

According to my contention, this is a flight to which children cannot

rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or dragged about by nurses in a

pleasing stupor. A vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses them. Here

and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart

or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought, and calls

them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see them, still

towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort of destiny,

but still staring at the bright object in their wake. It may be some

minutes before another such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world

in which they dwell. For other children, they almost invariably show

some intelligent sympathy. "There is a fine fellow making mud pies,"

they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some sense in mud

pies." But the doings of their elders, unless where they are speakingly

picturesque or recommend themselves by the quality of being easily

imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say) without the

least regard. If it were not for this perpetual imitation, we should be

tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the

light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among whom they

condescended to dwell in obedience like a philosopher at a barbarous

court. At times, indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard that is

truly staggering. Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a

young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I had

seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he

accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the

inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he

would waste no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little

for rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of rational enjoyment

for others, he had accepted without understanding and without complaint,

as the rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until

the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the

while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly

what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find

anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When

his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of

a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of

breath. When he comes to ride with the king's pardon, he must bestride a

chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so

furiously demean himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody

with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an

accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of

drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is

satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same

category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith;

he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring

incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or

valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the

accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can

skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the

enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener

soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make abstraction

of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his

pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is,

that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a

hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as

lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line

of the highroad, or so might a landscape painter and a bagman visit the

same country, and yet move in different worlds.

People, struck with these spectacles, cry aloud about the power of

imagination in the young. Indeed, there may be two words to that. It is,

in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the

grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do is

jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why "Robinson

Crusoe" should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in

this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts, and had, in so

many words, to _play_ at a great variety of professions; and then the

book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so

much. Hammers and saws belong to a province of life that positively

calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most

ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively

simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and frosty morning," gives a

good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need for overt

action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child's imagination

which prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of his

own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His

experience is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we

call the memory is so ill-provided, that he can overtake few

combinations and body out few stories, to his own content, without some

external aid. He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one

would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near

trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism with a

wooden sword, and mothers practise their kind vocation over a bit of

jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just now; but it is these same

people and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on

the theatre of life, will make you weep and tremble. For children think

very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams as bearded men and

marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour, the love

of young men and the love of mothers, the business man's pleasure in

method, all these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play

hours. Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the

threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint

for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at soldiers are

far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom

both are busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all.

"Art for art" is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only

interesting as the raw material for play. Not Theophile Gautier, not

Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the reproduction

more highly over the reality; and they will parody an execution, a

deathbed, or the funeral of the young man of Nain, with all the

cheerfulness in the world.

The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious

art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract,

impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests

beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and

personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to

the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the

spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit

this personal element into our divagations we are apt to stir up

uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of

old wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a story

in the "Arabian Nights"; they read to us rather like the history of a

period in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many

unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded. And

then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not merely repeat them

to himself; he leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his

body. And so his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion

than he gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our

intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in

bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no outlet.

Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the

thing itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one's

enemy, although it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still

left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to

lead to a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of triumphant

after all.

In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making

believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a

walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some

suitable _mise-en-scene_, and had to act a business man in an office

before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your

memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith

and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some

invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of

spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of

mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are

even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow

to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together,

they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy

because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how

even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and

led by the nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper than

this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption

in the business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction,

and tell themselves some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to

render entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What

wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon

tea-cups!--from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world

of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game. When my

cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven

the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a

country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and

explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can

imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still

unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions

were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled

on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew

furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and

grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether

secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we

seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I

ever had over a meal were in the case of calves'-feet jelly. It was

hardly possible not to believe--and you may be sure, so far from trying,

I did all I could to favour the illusion--that some part of it was

hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret

tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature _Red Beard_

await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the _Forty

Thieves_, and bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And so I

quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe

me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the

taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the

cream dimmed the transparent fractures.

Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded

children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a

sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, and the actions and

the excitement to which it gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort

of fable. And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity,

palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile

craving. It is a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot

tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can

be justified on no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably

simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented

difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I

knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the

presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to

play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a

sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.

To think of such a frame of mind is to become disquieted about the

bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and

are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of

them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look

down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown

designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest

solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of

their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes

the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever

such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know

what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. A

sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very

feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried

residue of mankind; go to make up the attraction that he feels. No

wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him,

if he clings to the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole

affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to

forget. "Oh, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can we not

all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And when children do

philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these considerations:

that whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not

be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain

show, and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and

unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly

learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach

them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is

inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge

him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And why not extend the

same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid

about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we

excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched,

human entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified

town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes

three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open

self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as

a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less

than decent. You do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift

he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he

cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread

dragoon.

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as to the

precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a very different matter,

and one bound up with the subject of play, and the precise amount of

playfulness, or playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such

burning questions must arise in the course of nursery education. Among

the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and

the terrifying Irish beggar-man, is, or is not, the child to expect a

Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians,

kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast

away upon a desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that

he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in

his own toy-schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a

neophyte entering upon life with a view to play. Precision upon such a

point, the child can understand. But if you merely ask him of his past

behaviour, as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such

and such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone by a

forbidden path,--why, he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is ten

to one he has already half forgotten and half bemused himself with

subsequent imaginings.

It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they

figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They

will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices

and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let

them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a

rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?

X

WALKING TOURS

It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us

fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are

many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in

spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape

on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the

brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain

jolly humours--of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at

morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest. He

cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more

delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the

arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be

further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in

an endless chain. It is this that so few can understand; they will

either be always lounging or always at five miles an hour; they do not

play off the one against the other, prepare all day for the evening, and

all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is here that your

over-walker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against those who

drink their curacoa in liqueur-glasses, when he himself can swill it in

a brown John. He will not believe that the flavour is more delicate in

the smaller dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable

distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to his

inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless

night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening

of the temperate walker! He has nothing left of man but a physical need

for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker,

will be savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate of such an one to

take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss

the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in short, who

goes farther and fares worse.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.

If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour

in anything but name; it is something else, and more in the nature of a

picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of

the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow

this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your

own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in

time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let

your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for

any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking

and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to

vegetate like the country,"--which is the gist of all that can be said

upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to

jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is

reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that

comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of a dazzle

and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes

comprehension.

During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness,

when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he

is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge, and, like Christian

on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it

soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of

the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps

over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull

yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into your stride. And

surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is

the best. Of course, if he _will_ keep thinking of his anxieties, if he

_will_ open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with the

hag--why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances

are that he will not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself!

There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and I

would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.

It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after

another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the first few miles

upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes,

is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and

weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he

goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the

dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look

enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking,

laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to

time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead.

He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most

impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and it is as

like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be

no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a

corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more

troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your

troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary

population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of

the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these

passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic,

because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as

he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you

all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on

walking tours, they sang--and sang very ill--and had a pair of red ears

when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their

arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am

exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay "On Going a

Journey," which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who

have not read it:--

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf

beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to

dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on

these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."

BRAVO! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would

not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person? But we

have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be as

dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And

notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the

theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple

stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his

ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure.

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in

the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not

approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the

respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air

confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so

agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas,

when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no

conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from

thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a

copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious

activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and

laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can

make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with

words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to

gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as

loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally

to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his

own fire, and brooding on his own private thought!

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the

mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the

arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the

traveller moves from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes

more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air

drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the

road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first

is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A man

does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud;

but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the

delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the

thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his

destination still content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on

a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the

knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into

yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke

dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun

lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns

aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil

conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is

almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our

clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no

more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live

for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long

is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an

end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly

any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a

sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can

tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people

were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of

spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise

inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London,

Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose

their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as

though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would

each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be

noticed there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before

the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and

punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous

man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye

cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern

man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give

him the elixir of life--he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his

business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more

mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say,

you will feel almost free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There

are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march;

the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and

aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you

will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity

spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a

book--and you will never do so save by fits and starts--you find the

language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single

sentences possess the ear for half-an-hour together; and the writer

endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of

sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a

dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special

favour. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous

precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new 'Heloise,' at the Inn

at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should

wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we

cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's

essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a

volume of Heine's songs; and for "Tristram Shandy" I can pledge a fair

experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to

lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of

the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if

ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that

audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean

and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever

you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in

talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a

hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and

pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a

man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial

humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now

grave and beautiful like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly

weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering

past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking."

It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every

side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming

dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects

to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable

mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips

into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times,

indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands;

and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours

without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be

doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a

moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one

thing, of which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in

love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened

sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would

not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.

To sit still and contemplate,--to remember the faces of women without

desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be

everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where

and what you are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to

dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but

they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the

procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all

social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If

you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer

is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations,

which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth,

and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of

the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split

differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a

tobacco-pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's

end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the

darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the

seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the

weather-cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more:

whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the

most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply;

but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the

kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's

travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the

infinite.

XI

PAN'S PIPES

The world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most

ingenious poets and philosophers: these reducing it to formulae and

chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures

for the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled

tissue, and the choosing mind has much to regret before it can get

together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Attila

and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order of contrasts which no

repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish strain

throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house

of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the

consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself

awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into

indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the

urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the

kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass,

is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of the

universe--the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs,

tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to

disgust a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you would not

fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully

lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which

the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold

domestic tea-parties at the arbour door.

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his

foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer

noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland

ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of

human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and

elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled

professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and

congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone

survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the

type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit

properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt

and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and

lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel.

What is it the birds sing among the trees in pairing time? What means

the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest? To

what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning,

and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? These are all airs upon

Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the exultation of his

heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow with his lips and fingers.

The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and

striking out high echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the

lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many

horses, beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers;

the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of hands; and

the voice of things, and their significant look, and the renovating

influence they breathe forth--these are his joyful measures, to which

the whole earth treads in choral harmony. To this music the young lambs

bound as to a tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the

dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on

the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created

things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing whenever

they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a child who,

looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with

unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance. And some,

like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts

with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general

rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but

has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets

the world a-singing.

Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed; and in the

screech of the night wind, chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and

the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly levin or the fury of

headlong floods, we recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the

anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages open war against her children, and

under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite

us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in the hour of sleep, and

makes an end of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly not in

itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in England the

hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous

ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the path of

dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into

a minor, and death makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of

marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are

fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child

too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse. It is no wonder,

with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who created

for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the

most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we preserve the phrase:

a panic terror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently

for the threat that runs through all the winning music of the world, to

hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life

because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable

citizens who flee life's pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with

upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the

left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they

could hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves

as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the

hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the banker

instantly concealed in the bank parlour! For to distrust one's impulses

is to be recreant to Pan.

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution,

and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience.

Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of

life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people

plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet

all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their

hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space.

Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit

of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put

off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead

some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled

and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means

of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a

starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of

which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes,

and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the

objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance

herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old

myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself

the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting

footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or,

when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves

that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.

XII

A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS

Cities given, the problem was to light them. How to conduct individual

citizens about the burgess-warren, when once heaven had withdrawn its

leading luminary? or--since we live in a scientific age--when once our

spinning planet has turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from time to

time, was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among the

chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or citadel,

produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places where the ground lay

unevenly, held out the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But, sun,

moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had

to fall back--we speak on the authority of old prints--upon stable

lanthorns two storeys in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical

turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into

the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness,

carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to

and fro and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path;

he was beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he

found no light but that he travelled in throughout the township.

Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a world of

extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to

extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. Rudely

puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly clomb up the all-destructive

urchin; and lo! in a moment night re-established her void empire, and

the cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from

guidance, and sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and

gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to swing these

feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway. There, on

invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose some crane-necked general

to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of nations,

red-hot in expedition, there would indubitably be some effusion of

military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the

chieftain rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left

to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the desert

night.

The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each

contemplation the matter for content. Out of the age of gas lamps he

glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors

wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips

refrain from a stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding progress

and the golden mean. When gas first spread along a city, mapping it

forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun

for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper

circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had

advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties were no

longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied

the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The

city-folk had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their

originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that of the best

wax candles. But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were more

practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that

they did not unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the

planets, coming out along the firmament, one after another, as the need

arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran

with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the

punctuality of heaven's orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely

reached, and now and then an individual may have been knocked on the

head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people commended his

zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the

lamplighter!" And since his passage was a piece of the day's programme,

the children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of

course, in so many words, which would have been improper, but in some

chaste circumlocution, suitable for infant lips.

God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight diligence is near at

hand; and for not much longer shall we watch him speeding up the street

and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the

dusk. The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he

distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected

it; and the little bull's eye, which was his instrument, and held enough

fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the

legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis,

and in the light of victory he himself shall disappear. For another

advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not

one by one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician

somewhere in a back office touches a spring--and behold! from one end to

another of the city, from east to west, from the Alexandra to the

Crystal Palace, there is light! _Fiat Lux_, says the sedate electrician.

What a spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of

Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design

of the monstrous city flashes into vision--a glittering hieroglyph many

square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the

evening street-lamps burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of

the future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.

Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the

compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories and bankers'

clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a

crumb of consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look out

upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where

it comes.

But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever timid of

innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; his is the signal

advising slow advance. The word _electricity_ now sounds the note of

danger. In Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des Princes, in the place

before the Opera portico, and in the Rue Drouot at the _Figaro_ office,

a new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly,

obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this

should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of

lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is

to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to

eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content

with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound

heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.

Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors, and it is proposed that

we should henceforward take our walks abroad in the glare of permanent

lightning. A man need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow

his pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very epicurean

if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed. That

ugly blinding glare may not improperly advertise the home of slanderous

_Figaro_, which is a back-shop to the infernal regions; but where soft

joys prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher

looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and deifying wine

abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre shine upon the ways of

man.

END OF VOL. II

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