CHAPTER I—NANCE AT THE ‘GREEN DRAGON’

Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price, email

ccx074@pglaf.org

LAY MORALS

And Other Papers

BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Picture: Graphic]

A NEW EDITION

WITH A PREFACE BY

MRS. STEVENSON

* * * * *

LONDON

CHATTO & WINDUS

1911

* * * * *

_All rights reserved._

PREFACE

BY MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON {0}

In our long voyage on the yacht _Casco_, we visited many islands; I

believe on every one we found the scourge of leprosy. In the Marquesas

there was a regular leper settlement, though the persons living there

seemed free to wander where they wished, fishing on the beach, or

visiting friends in the villages. I remember one afternoon, at Anaho,

when my husband and I, tired after a long quest for shells, sat down on

the sand to rest awhile, a native man stepped out from under some

cocoanut trees, regarding us hesitatingly as though fearful of intruding.

My husband waved an invitation to the stranger to join us, offering his

cigarette to the man in the island fashion. The cigarette was accepted

and, after a puff or two, courteously passed back again according to

native etiquette. The hand that held it was the maimed hand of a leper.

To my consternation my husband took the cigarette and smoked it out.

Afterwards when we were alone and I spoke of my horror he said, ‘I could

not mortify the man. And if you think I _liked_ doing it—that was

another reason; because I _didn’t_ want to.’

Another day, while we were still anchored in Anaho Bay, a messenger from

round a distant headland came in a whale-boat with an urgent request that

we go to see a young white girl who was ill with some mysterious malady.

We had supposed that, with the beach-comber ‘Charley the red,’ we were

the only white people on our side of the island. Though there was much

wind that day and the sea ran high, we started at once, impelled partly

by curiosity and partly by the pathetic nature of the message.

Fortunately we took our luncheon with us, eating it on the beach before

we went up to the house where the sick girl lay. Our hostess, the girl’s

mother, met us with regrets that we had already lunched, saying, ‘I have

a most excellent cook; here he is, now.’ She turned, as she spoke, to an

elderly Chinaman who was plainly in an advanced stage of leprosy. When

the man was gone, my husband asked if she had no fear of contagion. ‘I

don’t believe in contagion,’ was her reply. But there was little doubt

as to what ailed her daughter. She was certainly suffering from leprosy.

We could only advise that the girl be taken to the French post at Santa

Maria Bay where there was a doctor.

On our return to the _Casco_ we confessed to each other with what alarm

and repugnance we touched the miserable girl. We talked long that

evening of Father Damien, his sublime heroism, and his martyrdom which

was already nearing its sad end. Beyond all noble qualities my husband

placed courage. The more he saw of leprosy, and he saw much in the

islands, the higher rose his admiration for the simple priest of Molokai.

‘I must see Molokai,’ he said many times. ‘I must somehow manage to see

Molokai.’

In January 1889, we arrived in Honolulu, settling in a pleasant cottage

by the sea to rest until we were ready to return to England. The _Casco_

we sent back to San Francisco with the captain. But the knowledge that

every few days some vessel was leaving Honolulu to cruise among islands

we had not seen, and now should never see, was more than we could bear.

First we engaged passage on a missionary ship, but changed our minds—my

husband would not be allowed to smoke on board, for one reason—and

chartered the trading schooner _Equator_. This was thought too rough a

voyage for my mother-in-law, as indeed it would have been; so she was

sent, somewhat protesting, back to Scotland.

My husband was still intent on seeing Molokai. After the waste of much

time and red tape, he finally received an official permission to visit

the leper settlement. It did not occur to him it would be necessary to

get a separate official permission to _leave_ Molokai; hence he was

nearly left behind when the vessel sailed out. He only saved himself by

a prodigious leap which landed him on board the boat, whence nothing but

force could dislodge him. By the doctor’s orders he took gloves to wear

as a precautionary measure against contagion, but they were never worn.

At first he avoided shaking hands, but when he played croquet with the

young leper girls he would not listen to the Mother Superior’s warning

that he must wear gloves. He thought it might remind them of their

condition. ‘What will you do if you find you have contracted leprosy?’ I

asked. ‘Do?’ he replied; ‘why, you and I would spend the rest of our

lives in Molokai and become humble followers of Father Damien.’ As Mr.

Balfour says in the Life of Stevenson, he was as stern with his family as

he was with himself, and as exacting.

He talked very little to us of the tragedy of Molokai, though I could see

it lay heavy on his spirits; but of the great work begun by Father Damien

and carried on by his successors he spoke fully. He had followed the

life of the priest like a detective until there seemed nothing more to

learn. Mother Mary Ann, the Mother Superior, he could never mention

without deep emotion. One of the first things he did on his return to

Honolulu was to send her a grand piano for the use of her girls—the girls

with whom he had played croquet. He also sent toys, sewing materials,

small tools for the younger children, and other things that I have

forgotten. After his death a letter was found among his papers, of which

I have only the last few lines. ‘I cannot suppose you remember me, but I

won’t forget you, nor God won’t forget you for your kindness to the blind

white leper at Molokai.’

During my husband’s absence I had made every preparation for our voyage

on the _Equator_, so but little time was lost before we found ourselves

on board, our sails set for the south. The _Equator_, which had easily

lived through the great Samoan hurricane, made no such phenomenal runs as

the _Casco_, but we could trust her, and she had no ‘tricks and ways’

that we did not understand. We liked the sailors, we loved the ship and

her captain, so it was with heart-felt regret we said farewell in the

harbour of Apia after a long and perfect cruise.

After reading the letters that awaited us in Apia, we looked over the

newspapers. Our indignation may be imagined when we read in one item

that, owing to the publication of a letter by a well-known Honolulu

missionary, depicting Father Damien as a dirty old peasant who had

contracted leprosy through his immoral habits, the project to erect a

monument to his memory would be abandoned. ‘I’ll not believe it,’ said

my husband, ‘unless I see it with my own eyes; for it is too damnable for

belief!’

But see it he did, in spite of his incredulity, for in Sydney, a month or

two later, the very journal containing the letter condemnatory of Father

Damien was among the first we chanced to open. I shall never forget my

husband’s ferocity of indignation, his leaping stride as he paced the

room holding the offending paper at arm’s-length before his eyes that

burned and sparkled with a peculiar flashing light. His cousin Mr.

Balfour, in his _Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_, says: ‘his eyes . . .

when he was moved to anger or any fierce emotion seemed literally to

blaze and glow with a burning light.’ In another moment he disappeared

through the doorway, and I could hear him, in his own room, pulling his

chair to the table, and the sound of his inkstand being dragged towards

him.

That afternoon he called us together—my son, my daughter, and

myself—saying that he had something serious to lay before us. He went

over the circumstances succinctly, and then we three had the incomparable

experience of hearing its author read aloud the defence of Father Damien

while it was still red-hot from his indignant soul.

As we sat, dazed and overcome by emotion, he pointed out to us that the

subject-matter was libellous in the highest degree, and the publication

of the article might cause the loss of his entire substance. Without our

concurrence he would not take such a risk. There was no dissenting

voice; how could there be? The paper was published with almost no change

or revision, though afterwards my husband said he considered this a

mistake. He thought he should have waited for his anger to cool, when he

might have been more impersonal and less egotistic.

The next day he consulted an eminent lawyer, more from curiosity than

from any other reason. Mr. Moses—I think that was his name—was at first

inclined to be jocular. I remember his smiling question: ‘Have you

called him a hell-hound or an atheist? Otherwise there is no libel.’

But when he looked over the manuscript his countenance changed. ‘This is

a serious affair,’ he said; ‘however, no one will publish it for you.’

In that Mr. Moses was right; no one dared publish the pamphlet. But that

difficulty was soon overcome. My husband hired a printer by the day, and

the work was rushed through. We then, my daughter, my son, and myself,

were set to work helping address the pamphlets, which were scattered far

and wide.

Father Damien was vindicated by a stranger, a man of another country and

another religion from his own.

F. V. DE G. S.

Contents:

Preface by Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson

Lay Morals

Father Damien

The Pentland Rising

I. The Causes of the Revolt

II. The Beginning

III. The March of the Rebels

IV. Rullion Green

V. A Record of Blood

The Day After To-morrow

College Papers

I. Edinburgh Students in 1824

II. The Modern Student

III. Debating Societies

Criticisms

I. Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Song”

II. Salvini’s Macbeth

III. Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”

Sketches

I. The Satirist

II. Nuits Blanches

III. The Wreath of Immortelles

IV. Nurses

V. A Character

The Great North Road

I. Nance at the “Green Dragon”

II. In which Mr. Archer is Installed

III. Jonathan Holdaway

IV. Mingling Threads

V. Life in the Castle

IV. The Bad Half-Crown

VII. The Bleaching-Green

VIII. The Mail Guard

The Young Chevalier

Prologue: The Wine-Seller’s Wife

I. The Prince

Heathercat

I. Traqairs of Montroymont

II. Francie

III. The Hill-End of Drumlowe

LAY MORALS

_The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at

Edinburgh in the spring of_ 1879. _They are unrevised_, _and must not be

taken as representing_, _either as to matter or form_, _their author’s

final thoughts_; _but they contain much that is essentially

characteristic of his mind_.

* * * * *

_Copyright in the United States of America_.

CHAPTER I

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.

Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and

profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only

broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from

one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two

experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is

for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is

in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such,

moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details

in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of

education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so

poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions;

his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of

himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but

in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its

dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for

others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this

inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young,

must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already

retailed to them in their own youth. Every generation has to educate

another which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily accept

the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their

eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due. What are

they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they

have themselves so few and such confused opinions? Indeed, I do not

know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child

keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own

defence. Where does he find them? and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out

of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things:

the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain, the

desire of wealth and applause. Besides these, or what might be deduced

as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective

value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how

to walk through a quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians. It

may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive it.

As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil, it is not

the doctrine of Christ. What he taught (and in this he is like all other

teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a ruling

spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views, but a view. What

he showed us was an attitude of mind. Towards the many considerations on

which conduct is built, each man stands in a certain relation. He takes

life on a certain principle. He has a compass in his spirit which points

in a certain direction. It is the attitude, the relation, the point of

the compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us;

in this, the details are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts

issue, and by this, and this only, can they be explained and applied.

And thus, to learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a

historical artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and,

in the technical phrase, create his character. A historian confronted

with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but

one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and

grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify the

most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma,

or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big

words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature

appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to

point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which will be gladly

taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror of eternal fire

can teach a business man to bend his imagination to such athletic

efforts. Yet without this, all is vain; until we understand the whole,

we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than

broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the

language in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in our

ears.

Take a few of Christ’s sayings and compare them with our current

doctrines.

‘Ye cannot,’ he says, ‘_serve God and Mammon_.’ Cannot? And our whole

system is to teach us how we can!

‘_The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the

children of light_.’ Are they? I had been led to understand the

reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly

in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of

repute had written a conclusive treatise ‘How to make the best of both

worlds.’ Of both worlds indeed! Which am I to believe then—Christ or

the author of repute?

‘_Take no thought for the morrow_.’ Ask the Successful Merchant;

interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not

only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe, all we hope, all

we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this

one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as

unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the ‘same mind that was in

Christ.’ We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else

he or we must be in the wrong. Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts

from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style which

the reader may recognise: ‘Let but one of these sentences be rightly read

from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of

that meeting-house upon another.’

It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’; and

that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although

it leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this is a very gross

delusion. Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and

agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be

done. The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain,

patent and staringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and

travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or,

let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which,

and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal

eyes. But what any man can say of it, even in his highest utterance,

must have relation to this little and plain corner, which is no less

visible to us than to him. We are looking on the same map; it will go

hard if we cannot follow the demonstration. The longest and most

abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash

of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his

intention. The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our

own finger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be

a new star or an old street-lamp. And briefly, if a saying is hard to

understand, it is because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,

and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same

mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not

to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated;

it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his

hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that whatever

he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that

whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept. You do

not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree with him

that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead

at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested. We are

all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of knowledge and

morality; even the most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon

trust. But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand upon

these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system looks towards those

extreme points where it steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with

some covert hint of things outside. Then only can you be certain that

the words are not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only

are you sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a star and

not a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart of the mystery, since

it was for these that the author wrote his book.

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds a

word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then he

quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a

pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of

thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions

to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle of

conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands

at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct

from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude—or, shortly,

to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy—every such saying should come home

with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he should feel each one below his

feet as another sure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each

should be another proof that in the torrent of the years and generations,

where doctrines and great armaments and empires are swept away and

swallowed, he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars. But alas!

at this juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each and every such

occasion our whole fellowship of Christians falls back in disapproving

wonder and implicitly denies the saying. Christians! the farce is

impudently broad. Let us stand up in the sight of heaven and confess.

The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin. _Honesty is the

best policy_, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which a

wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but I

think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed

intelligences; I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think,

without hyperbole, we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.

CHAPTER II

But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of

morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and

religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must

follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method. A

man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor

kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness; for

these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.

Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is case law

at the best which can be learned by precept. The letter is not only

dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered,

alone is true and helpful. This is trite to sickness; but familiarity

has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty

from the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead

upon the ear after several repetitions. If you see a thing too often,

you no longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear

it. Our attention requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by

assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are

feats of about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar

means. The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of

hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl

himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his

hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all

he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell

and it cannot startle their composure. And so with this byword about the

letter and the spirit. It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning

in the world to any man of us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and

neither more nor less: that while the spirit is true, the letter is

eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,

clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to mark out

the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never

so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of

the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made

the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be compared,

not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance

is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than

the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed;

the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves

is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time. Look now for your

shadows. O man of formulæ, is this a place for you? Have you fitted the

spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such

another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines and

the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of

shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole

carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and

although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step of

conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what

definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from

both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but the

shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you

yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and circumstances

change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly

hurricane affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the

best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your own Past truly

guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if this be

questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not

watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with

unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another

sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do you

offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions? For the

moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather with

matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, _Thou shalt not covet_,

stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere long. The Jews, to

whom they were first given, in the course of years began to find these

precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred

and fifty others! They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on

morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as Hoyle

stands in to the scientific game of whist. The comparison is just, and

condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be more than

tolerable players; and you and I would like to play our game in life to

the noblest and the most divine advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty

and huckstering view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who

callously leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of

spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded

by these five precepts?

_Honour thy father and thy mother_. Yes, but does that mean to obey? and

if so, how long and how far? _Thou shall not kill_. Yet the very

intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled by

killing. _Thou shall not commit adultery_. But some of the ugliest

adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under the sanction of

religion and law. _Thou shalt not bear false witness_. How? by speech

or by silence also? or even by a smile? _Thou shalt not steal_. Ah,

that indeed! But what is _to steal_?

To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our

guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the word only

that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall in pieces;

but surely we must take some higher sense than this; surely we hope more

than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to prosper

and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live rightly in the

eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman. The approval or

the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent to a man who

is both valorous and good. There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in

the condemnation of the law. The law represents that modicum of morality

which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what is that to me,

who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent judge? I observe

with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a rush for such

considerations. The Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling

for this social bond into which we all are born when we come into the

world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently share

throughout our lives:—but even to them, no more than to our Western

saints and heroes, does the law of the state supersede the higher law of

duty. Without hesitation and without remorse, they transgress the

stiffest enactments rather than abstain from doing right. But the

accidental superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in

allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce

themselves; and value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally

just submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience or a

thoughtful head. But to show you how one or the other may trouble a man,

and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this invaluable

eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man’s

life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as

variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on the

search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once that he

thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he got hold of some

unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his

views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was the son of a

man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the

first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a

sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air;

for all of which he was indebted to his father’s wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the

plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this

inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a

conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and he

spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and

woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many

intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him.

He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-sided

principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal race. He

began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw

all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many

of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle,

so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. There sat a youth

beside him on the college benches, who had only one shirt to his back,

and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it

washed. It was my friend’s principle to stay away as often as he dared;

for I fear he was no friend to learning. But there was something that

came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to give over study till

his shirt was washed, and the scores of others who had never an

opportunity at all. _If one of these could take his place_, he thought;

and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes. He was eaten by the

shame of his discoveries, and despised himself as an unworthy favourite

and a creature of the back-stairs of Fortune. He could no longer see

without confusion one of these brave young fellows battling up-hill

against adversity. Had he not filched that fellow’s birthright? At best

was he not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily

devouring stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who

had worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what

justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done

nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more

even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these

considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position

might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services

to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my

friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that

trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the first

blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in

their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all

this while he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on

his boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was

his best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself

from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle

equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great

expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities

were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular

promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home to

die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and

how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these

others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no

devotion of soul and body, that could repay and justify these

partialities. A religious lady, to whom he communicated these

reflections, could see no force in them whatever. ‘It was God’s will,’

said she. But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of Arc was burnt at

Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by

God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused

neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate. He knew,

moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now

enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his

own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest and sunshine.

And hence this allegation of God’s providence did little to relieve his

scruples. I promise you he had a very troubled mind. And I would not

laugh if I were you, though while he was thus making mountains out of

what you think molehills, he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly

practising many other things that to you seem black as hell. Every man

is his own judge and mountain-guide through life. There is an old story

of a mote and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some

consideration. I should, if I were you, give some consideration to these

scruples of his, and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it

is not unlikely that there may be something under both. In the meantime

you must hear how my friend acted. Like many invalids, he supposed that

he would die. Now, should he die, he saw no means of repaying this huge

loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced him for his

sickness. In that case it would be lost money. So he determined that

the advance should be as small as possible; and, so long as he continued

to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room, and grudged himself all

but necessaries. But so soon as he began to perceive a change for the

better, he felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and brighten

his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a help to

mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a help to him.

I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and partial in

his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little of his parents;

but I do say that here are some scruples which tormented my friend in his

youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the midst of

his enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in justice, and

point, in their confused way, to some more honourable honesty within the

reach of man. And at least, is not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth

commandment? And what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did

that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions? ‘Thou shalt

not steal.’ With all my heart! But _am_ I stealing?

The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from

pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that

his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it

is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to the

world. We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from seeing

anything but sovereigns. If one man agrees to give another so many

shillings for so many hours’ work, and then wilfully gives him a certain

proportion of the price in bad money and only the remainder in good, we

can see with half an eye that this man is a thief. But if the other

spends a certain proportion of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco,

and a certain other proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or

trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his own past adventures, and

only the remainder in downright work such as he is paid to do, is he,

because the theft is one of time and not of money,—is he any the less a

thief? The one gave a bad shilling, the other an imperfect hour; but

both broke the bargain, and each is a thief. In piecework, which is what

most of us do, the case is none the less plain for being even less

material. If you forge a bad knife, you have wasted some of mankind’s

iron, and then, with unrivalled cynicism, you pocket some of mankind’s

money for your trouble. Is there any man so blind who cannot see that

this is theft? Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been

playing fast and loose with mankind’s resources against hunger; there

will be less bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread somebody

will die next winter: a grim consideration. And you must not hope to

shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your less quantity of

bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it is none the less a

theft for that. You took the farm against competitors; there were others

ready to shoulder the responsibility and be answerable for the tale of

loaves; but it was you who took it. By the act you came under a tacit

bargain with mankind to cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you

were under no superintendence, you were on parole; and you have broke

your bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself among the rest if

you have moral eyesight, you are a thief. Or take the case of men of

letters. Every piece of work which is not as good as you can make it,

which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in

execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on parole and in a sense

your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue performance, should rise up

against you in the court of your own heart and condemn you for a thief.

Have you a salary? If you trifle with your health, and so render

yourself less capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily

pocket the emolument—what are you but a thief? Have you double accounts?

do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain

more from those who deal with you than it you were bargaining and dealing

face to face in front of God?—What are you but a thief? Lastly, if you

fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts,

you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary

and go through the sham manœuvres of this office, or still book your

profits and keep on flooding the world with these injurious goods?—though

you were old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are

you but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere curiosities of the

intellect, in an age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly

cultivated that all business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs

of the trade, that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or

honourableness of his pursuit. I would say less if I thought less. But

looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only avow that I

am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my neighbours of the

same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in

your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like

a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what

you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the

stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience. Even before the lowest of

all tribunals,—before a court of law, whose business it is, not to keep

men right, or within a thousand miles of right, but to withhold them from

going so tragically wrong that they will pull down the whole jointed

fabric of society by their misdeeds—even before a court of law, as we

begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following at each

other’s tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and

punished, and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling;

and simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet conscience may

learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade

may be a custom of the devil. You thought it was easy to be honest. Did

you think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful? Did you think

the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe? and you

could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no more concern

than it takes to go to church or to address a circular? And yet all this

time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you would

not have broken it for the world!

The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use in

private judgment. If compression is what you want, you have their whole

spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed with more

significance, since the law is there spiritually and not materially

stated. And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the sixth to

the ninth, are rather legal than ethical. The police-court is their

proper home. A magistrate cannot tell whether you love your neighbour as

yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you have murdered, or

stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand and testified to that

which was not; and these things, for rough practical tests, are as good

as can be found. And perhaps, therefore, the best condensation of the

Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests, ‘neminem lædere’ and

‘suum cuique tribuere.’ But all this granted, it becomes only the more

plain that they are inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that

while they tell the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can never

direct an anxious sinner what to do.

Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct

proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces. We

grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something

above and beyond that we desire. Christ was in general a great enemy to

such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any of these

plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers from the

letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal affair; in the war of

righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred

precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of

myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time

and case. The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who

pleads at my tribunal. He has to show not the law, but that the law

applies. Can he convince me? then he gains the cause. And thus you find

Christ giving various counsels to varying people, and often jealously

careful to avoid definite precept. Is he asked, for example, to divide a

heritage? He refuses: and the best advice that he will offer is but a

paraphrase of that tenth commandment which figures so strangely among the

rest. _Take heed, and beware of covetousness_. If you complain that

this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.

For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its

truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by

the voice of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that perhaps

not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that

nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.

CHAPTER III

Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our

experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers

within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to

rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first

surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a

few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the

blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several

million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived

by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green,

commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens

flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn. Far

off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in

the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that

the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance. Shipwrecked

seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are

safe and near at home compared with mankind on its bullet. Even to us

who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place

of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders

that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself. He

inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and

renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and

the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his

eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch

and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on

his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run, to perform

the strange and revolting round of physical functions. The sight of a

flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he looks

unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous bonfires of the

universe. He comprehends, he designs, he tames nature, rides the sea,

ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins

interminable labours, joins himself into federations and populous cities,

spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit unborn

posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility and

the creature of a few days. His sight, which conducts him, which takes

notice of the farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and a

thing defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly,

and can be extinguished with a touch. His heart, which all through life

so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but a capsule, and may be

stopped with a pin. His whole body, for all its savage energies, its

leaping and its winged desires, may yet be tamed and conquered by a

draught of air or a sprinkling of cold dew. What he calls death, which

is the seeming arrest of everything, and the ruin and hateful

transformation of the visible body, lies in wait for him outwardly in a

thousand accidents, and grows up in secret diseases from within. He is

still learning to be a man when his faculties are already beginning to

decline; he has not yet understood himself or his position before he

inevitably dies. And yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no

thought of his last end, lives as though he were eternal, plunges with

his vulnerable body into the shock of war, and daily affronts death with

unconcern. He cannot take a step without pain or pleasure. His life is

a tissue of sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more

directly from himself or his surroundings. He is conscious of himself as

a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves, chooses, and is satisfied;

conscious of his surroundings as it were of an inexhaustible purveyor,

the source of aspects, inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and

transporting caresses. Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights

and agonies.

Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root in man.

To him everything is important in the degree to which it moves him. The

telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding from clerk to clerk,

the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the message, and the paper on

which it is finally brought to him at home, are all equally facts, all

equally exist for man. A word or a thought can wound him as acutely as a

knife of steel. If he thinks he is loved, he will rise up and glory to

himself, although he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread.

Does he think he is not loved?—he may have the woman at his beck, and

there is not a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if we are to make

any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material

and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an

individual is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of

mankind as a race turn upon material conditions. The physical business

of each man’s body is transacted for him; like a sybarite, he has

attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he sweats, he digests

without an effort, or so much as a consenting volition; for the most part

he even eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were between

two thoughts. His life is centred among other and more important

considerations; touch him in his honour or his love, creatures of the

imagination which attach him to mankind or to an individual man or woman;

cross him in his piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns

from his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous emotion cuts

the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow from the web of

pains and pleasures.

It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and

autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other

powers tributary but independent. If I now behold one walking in a

garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting his food

with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing himself

by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand delicate

balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path, and all the

time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the dog-star, or

the attributes of God—what am I to say, or how am I to describe the thing

I see? Is that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is

it not a man and something else? What, then, are we to count the

centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded? It is a question

much debated. Some read his history in a certain intricacy of nerve and

the success of successive digestions; others find him an exiled piece of

heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools

of theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of doubt. Yet

either of these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either

may be right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a

more immediate point. What is the man? There is Something that was

before hunger and that remains behind after a meal. It may or may not be

engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes,

heightens, and sanctifies. Thus it is not engaged in lust, where

satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no

satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness,

or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the

sentiment. This something, which is the man, is a permanence which

abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now

triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of

appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all. So, to the man, his

own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of the

senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night. It is forgotten; it is

hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold

himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that

generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides of

man. This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and

shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his

conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race. His

joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as _this_ is interested or

indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in an imperial war or

in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains of the mind. He may

lose all, and _this_ not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle,

and _this_ leap in his bosom with a cruel pang. I do not speak of it to

hardened theorists: the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.

‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine

than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it were, pull

thee by the strings. What is that now in thy mind? is it fear, or

suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’ Thus far Marcus

Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any book. Here is a

question worthy to be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the

utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard

intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your thinking,

inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a higher spirit than you had

dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect above all base considerations? This

soul seems hardly touched with our infirmities; we can find in it

certainly no fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious—and that

as though we read it in the eyes of some one else—of a great and

unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond

the objects of desire and fear, for something else. And this something

else? this something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all

the kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike

indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct—by what

name are we to call it? It may be the love of God; or it may be an

inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and

propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory;

but it will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I intend no

subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,

to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery

of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word

righteousness. What is right is that for which a man’s central self is

ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is

what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed

design of righteousness.

To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition. That

which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each man by

himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and never,

above all, imposed upon another. The conscience has, then, a vision like

that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the most part

illuminates none but its possessor. When many people perceive the same

or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol; and hence we have

such words as _tree_, _star_, _love_, _honour_, or _death_; hence also we

have this word _right_, which, like the others, we all understand, most

of us understand differently, and none can express succinctly otherwise.

Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some steps towards

comprehension of our own superior thoughts. For it is an incredible and

most bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms with

himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at

times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy. As we

said before, his inner self or soul appears to him by successive

revelations, and is frequently obscured. It is from a study of these

alternations that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems

right and what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.

All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression as

well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we must

accept. It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or beautiful

surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is the food of the

mind. All these are craved; all these should be craved; to none of these

in itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable want, we

recognise a demand of nature. Yet we know that these natural demands may

be superseded; for the demands which are common to mankind make but a

shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands of the individual

soul. Food is almost the first prerequisite; and yet a high character

will go without food to the ruin and death of the body rather than gain

it in a manner which the spirit disavows. Pascal laid aside mathematics;

Origen doctored his body with a knife; every day some one is thus

mortifying his dearest interests and desires, and, in Christ’s words,

entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is to supersede the

lesser and less harmonious affections by renunciation; and though by this

ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get thither a whole and

perfect man. But there is another way, to supersede them by

reconciliation, in which the soul and all the faculties and senses pursue

a common route and share in one desire. Thus, man is tormented by a very

imperious physical desire; it spoils his rest, it is not to be denied;

the doctors will tell you, not I, how it is a physical need, like the

want of food or slumber. In the satisfaction of this desire, as it first

appears, the soul sparingly takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets

and disapproves the satisfaction. But let the man learn to love a woman

as far as he is capable of love; and for this random affection of the

body there is substituted a steady determination, a consent of all his

powers and faculties, which supersedes, adopts, and commands the other.

The desire survives, strengthened, perhaps, but taught obedience and

changed in scope and character. Life is no longer a tale of betrayals

and regrets; for the man now lives as a whole; his consciousness now

moves on uninterrupted like a river; through all the extremes and ups and

downs of passion, he remains approvingly conscious of himself.

Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul demands.

It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing

tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some

path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other

to a common end. It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but

great and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like

notes in a harmonious chord. That were indeed a way of peace and

pleasure, that were indeed a heaven upon earth. It does not demand,

however, or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should

starve my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose in

itself; or, in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet

learned to guide and enjoy with wisdom. The soul demands unity of

purpose, not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his

strength and sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of

him a perfect man exulting in perfection. To conclude ascetically is to

give up, and not to solve, the problem. The ascetic and the creeping

hog, although they are at different poles, have equally failed in life.

The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back his seamen in a

cock-boat, and has lost the ship. I believe there are not many

sea-captains who would plume themselves on either result as a success.

But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses

and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more

unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable

and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In

the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear,

strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy

communion with our soul. At the worst, we are so fallen and passive that

we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men.

Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they

develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes engrossed

among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the

will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This is ruin;

this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation

on the spot and without the form of judgment. ‘What shall it profit a

man if he gain the whole world and _lose himself_?’

It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its

fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and

religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but

the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till

we die. If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must

say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that soul’s

dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would have him

think of them. If, from some conformity between us and the pupil, or

perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express

such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring; beyond

question he will recognise the dialect as one that he himself has spoken

in his better hours; beyond question he will cry, ‘I had forgotten, but

now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use them! I too

have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will listen and

conform.’ In short, say to him anything that he has once thought, or

been upon the point of thinking, or show him any view of life that he has

once clearly seen, or been upon the point of clearly seeing; and you have

done your part and may leave him to complete the education for himself.

Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want greatness;

and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly uttered is not the

dialect of my soul. It is a sort of postponement of life; nothing quite

is, but something different is to be; we are to keep our eyes upon the

indirect from the cradle to the grave. We are to regulate our conduct

not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future; and to value acts as

they will bring us money or good opinion; as they will bring us, in one

word, _profit_. We must be what is called respectable, and offend no one

by our carriage; it will not do to make oneself conspicuous—who knows?

even in virtue? says the Christian parent! And we must be what is called

prudent and make money; not only because it is pleasant to have money,

but because that also is a part of respectability, and we cannot hope to

be received in society without decent possessions. Received in society!

as if that were the kingdom of heaven! There is dear Mr. So-and-so;—look

at him!—so much respected—so much looked up to—quite the Christian

merchant! And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible after the

pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make money and be

strictly decent. Besides these holy injunctions, which form by far the

greater part of a youth’s training in our Christian homes, there are at

least two other doctrines. We are to live just now as well as we can,

but scrape at last into heaven, where we shall be good. We are to worry

through the week in a lay, disreputable way, but, to make matters square,

live a different life on Sunday.

The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all these

positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their own ground.

It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with physical squalls,

and fifty times torn between conflicting impulses, that we teach people

this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote

consequences instead of the immediate face of things. The very desire to

act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic disbelief in

ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows?

they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number,

the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in concert with a

whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of chances that we

must be acting right. And again, how true it is that we can never behave

as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can only aspire to different and

more favourable circumstances, in order to stand out and be ourselves

wholly and rightly! And yet once more, if in the hurry and pressure of

affairs and passions you tend to nod and become drowsy, here are

twenty-four hours of Sunday set apart for you to hold counsel with your

soul and look around you on the possibilities of life.

This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said for

these doctrines. Only, in the course of this chapter, the reader and I

have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at morals on a

certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of testing the

catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well as by others,

current doctrines could show any probable justification. If the

doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have condemned

the system. Our sight of the world is very narrow; the mind but a

pedestrian instrument; there’s nothing new under the sun, as Solomon

says, except the man himself; and though that changes the aspect of

everything else, yet he must see the same things as other people, only

from a different side.

And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.

If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,

unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of

his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative

voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a

man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and

chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk

straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so,

before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that

knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a

man’s own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how

am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most imbecile, at

a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further

argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense of

right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame,

that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul. Be glad if you are

not tried by such extremities. But although all the world ranged

themselves in one line to tell you ‘This is wrong,’ be you your own

faithful vassal and the ambassador of God—throw down the glove and answer

‘This is right.’ Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps

in some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully

understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing

mankind for some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you

stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones

with your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the

guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn. It

is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect oneself

and utter the voice of God. God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a

new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts and habits of each fresh

generation and each new-coined spirit throw another light upon the

universe and contain another commentary on the printed Bibles; every

scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter

of God’s alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for all who

speak, is there none for those who unrighteously keep silence and

conform? Is not that also to conceal and cloak God’s counsel? And how

should we regard the man of science who suppressed all facts that would

not tally with the orthodoxy of the hour?

Wrong? You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round the

revolving shoulder of the world. Not truth, but truthfulness, is the

good of your endeavour. For when will men receive that first part and

prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things, by the greatness of

the universe, by the darkness and partiality of man’s experience, by the

inviolate secrecy of God, kept close in His most open revelations, every

man is, and to the end of the ages must be, wrong? Wrong to the

universe; wrong to mankind; wrong to God. And yet in another sense, and

that plainer and nearer, every man of men, who wishes truly, must be

right. He is right to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and

candour. That let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a

thought for contrary opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him

proclaim. Be not afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead,

stuffed Dagon he insults. For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not

that stammering, inept tradition which the people holds. These truths

survive in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and

confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in

their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.

So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call ‘rank

conformity’: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on men.

And now of Profit. And this doctrine is perhaps the more redoubtable,

because it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic and self-reliant,

but the obedient, cowlike squadrons. A man, by this doctrine, looks to

consequences at the second, or third, or fiftieth turn. He chooses his

end, and for that, with wily turns and through a great sea of tedium,

steers this mortal bark. There may be political wisdom in such a view;

but I am persuaded there can spring no great moral zeal. To look thus

obliquely upon life is the very recipe for moral slumber. Our intention

and endeavour should be directed, not on some vague end of money or

applause, which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or

twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but

on the rightness of that act. At every instant, at every step in life,

the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be

gained or lost. At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step we

must set down the foot and sound the trumpet. ‘This have I done,’ we

must say; ‘right or wrong, this have I done, in unfeigned honour of

intention, as to myself and God.’ The profit of every act should be

this, that it was right for us to do it. Any other profit than that, if

it involved a kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God’s upright

soldier, to leave me untempted.

It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made

directly and for its own sake. The whole man, mind and body, having come

to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct. There are two

dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that one thing

is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing any clear

distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences. The

truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought very

wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the

disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious

part of men inclining to think all things _rather wrong_, the more jovial

to suppose them _right enough for practical purposes_. I will engage my

head, they do not find that view in their own hearts; they have taken it

up in a dark despair; they are but troubled sleepers talking in their

sleep. The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many

points of right and wrong, and often differs flatly with what is held out

as the thought of corporate humanity in the code of society or the code

of law. Am I to suppose myself a monster? I have only to read books,

the Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster no longer;

and instead I think the mass of people are merely speaking in their

sleep.

It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school

copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame. I ask no other

admission; we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own conscience

every hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the far-off

reverberation of our footsteps. The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is

what concerns righteousness. Better disrespectable honour than

dishonourable fame. Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than

dishonour ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands. For the

man must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him

and taught him by the fortune of his life. You would not dishonour

yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,

for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person’s theory in

morals?

So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate the

bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him, how

much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations! To walk

by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require, not a

man, but God. All that we know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is

our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts

which commend themselves to that. The precepts are vague when we

endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of

string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to

what we know and walk by it. We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by

knowledge.

You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently

respectable: you love him because you love him; that is love, and any

other only a derision and grimace. It should be the same with all our

actions. If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was

never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent

of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life to

a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him love

one woman and be true to her till death. But we should not conceive him

as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other,

turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it

directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand sinister

compromises and considerations. The one man might be wily, might be

adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be gloriously useful;

it is the other man who would be good.

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;

to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly,

respectable. Does your soul ask profit? Does it ask money? Does it ask

the approval of the indifferent herd? I believe not. For my own part, I

want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be decent at all, but

to be good.

CHAPTER IV

We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from

hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and

circumstances. Now, for us, that is ultimate. It may be founded on some

reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can follow or

comprehend. And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not

continuous except in very lively and well-living natures; and

between-whiles we must brush along without it. Practice is a more

intricate and desperate business than the toughest theorising; life is an

affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone

possible and right. As a matter of fact, there is no one so upright but

he is influenced by the world’s chatter; and no one so headlong but he

requires to consider consequences and to keep an eye on profit. For the

soul adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and cares

only to combine them for some common purpose which shall interest all.

Now, respect for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and

the desire of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature

of man; and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current

doctrines, they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude

in themselves all the worthy parts of man. These, then, must also be

suffered to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little

according as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.

Now, a man’s view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised

society in which he lives. Other men and women are so much more grossly

and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions, that they stand

between him and all the rest; they are larger to his eye than the sun, he

hears them more plainly than thunder, with them, by them, and for them,

he must live and die. And hence the laws that affect his intercourse

with his fellow-men, although merely customary and the creatures of a

generation, are more clearly and continually before his mind than those

which bind him into the eternal system of things, support him in his

upright progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his bodily

life. And hence it is that money stands in the first rank of

considerations and so powerfully affects the choice. For our society is

built with money for mortar; money is present in every joint of

circumstance; it might be named the social atmosphere, since, in society,

it is by that alone that men continue to live, and only through that or

chance that they can reach or affect one another. Money gives us food,

shelter, and privacy; it permits us to be clean in person, opens for us

the doors of the theatre, gains us books for study or pleasure, enables

us to help the distresses of others, and puts us above necessity so that

we can choose the best in life. If we love, it enables us to meet and

live with the loved one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we

have scruples, it gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any

bright designs, here is what will smooth the way to their accomplishment.

Penury is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to death.

But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich can

go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a

library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to

read nor intelligence to see. The table may be loaded and the appetite

wanting; the purse may be full, and the heart empty. He may have gained

the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him, in a

great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he may live as blank a

life as any tattered ditcher. Without an appetite, without an

aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in

his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers. It is perhaps a

more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be

born a millionaire. Although neither is to be despised, it is always

better policy to learn an interest than to make a thousand pounds; for

the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel no joy in spending

it; but the interest remains imperishable and ever new. To become a

botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher, an antiquary, or an artist,

is to enlarge one’s possessions in the universe by an incalculably higher

degree, and by a far surer sort of property, than to purchase a farm of

many acres. You had perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction;

perhaps you have two thousand five hundred after it. That represents

your gain in the one case. But in the other, you have thrown down a

barrier which concealed significance and beauty. The blind man has

learned to see. The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and

beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as he

was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the river,

travellers on the road, and the stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes

have broken jail! And again he who has learned to love an art or science

has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come,

he will not enter poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and

forget himself in the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle

treasures, but be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic

touch, which is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into

living delight and satisfaction. _Être et pas avoir_—to be, not to

possess—that is the problem of life. To be wealthy, a rich nature is the

first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy

blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration

and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love

with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession

in absence or unkindness—these are the gifts of fortune which money

cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing. For what can a man

possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself? If he enlarge his nature,

it is then that he enlarges his estates. If his nature be happy and

valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if it were his park and orchard.

But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned. It is not

merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is the coin in

which mankind pays his wages to the individual man. And from this side,

the question of money has a very different scope and application. For no

man can be honest who does not work. Service for service. If the farmer

buys corn, and the labourer ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in

his hot bakery, plainly you who eat must do something in your turn. It

is not enough to take off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for

the admirable constitution of society and your own convenient situation

in its upper and more ornamental stories. Neither is it enough to buy

the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only changing the point of the

inquiry; and you must first have _bought the sixpence_. Service for

service: how have you bought your sixpences? A man of spirit desires

certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is

some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in

service; that he has not a lion’s share in profit and a drone’s in

labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the

great mercantile concern of mankind.

Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so

inappreciable to external tests, that this is not only a matter for the

private conscience, but one which even there must be leniently and

trustfully considered. For remember how many serve mankind who do no

more than meditate; and how many are precious to their friends for no

more than a sweet and joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of

letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a

living book. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by

others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is

useless while he has a friend. The true services of life are inestimable

in money, and are never paid. Kind words and caresses, high and wise

thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering, and

all the charities of man’s existence, are neither bought nor sold.

Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a man’s

services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what he earns.

There at least there can be no ambiguity. St. Paul is fully and freely

entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and freely

entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true business of

each was not only something different, but something which remained

unpaid. A man cannot forget that he is not superintended, and serves

mankind on parole. He would like, when challenged by his own conscience,

to reply: ‘I have done so much work, and no less, with my own hands and

brain, and taken so much profit, and no more, for my own personal

delight.’ And though St. Paul, if he had possessed a private fortune,

would probably have scorned to waste his time in making tents, yet of all

sacrifices to public opinion none can be more easily pardoned than that

by which a man, already spiritually useful to the world, should restrict

the field of his chief usefulness to perform services more apparent, and

possess a livelihood that neither stupidity nor malice could call in

question. Like all sacrifices to public opinion and mere external

decency, this would certainly be wrong; for the soul should rest

contented with its own approval and indissuadably pursue its own calling.

Yet, so grave and delicate is the question, that a man may well hesitate

before he decides it for himself; he may well fear that he sets too high

a valuation on his own endeavours after good; he may well condescend upon

a humbler duty, where others than himself shall judge the service and

proportion the wage.

And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born. They

can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters on

parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For I suppose

that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war and

invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design than to

set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach of

needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and defended with so

much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two or three

millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and position. It

is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all these

generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for

themselves and their descendants; that if they supported law and order,

it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in the

present, they must have had some designs upon the future. Now, a great

hereditary fortune is a miracle of man’s wisdom and mankind’s

forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has been

suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a

consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to

activity and honour, that with all this power of service he should not

prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should return in

benefits upon the race. If he had twenty, or thirty, or a hundred

thousand at his banker’s, or if all Yorkshire or all California were his

to manage or to sell, he would still be morally penniless, and have the

world to begin like Whittington, until he had found some way of serving

mankind. His wage is physically in his own hand; but, in honour, that

wage must still be earned. He is only steward on parole of what is

called his fortune. He must honourably perform his stewardship. He must

estimate his own services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for

that will be one among his functions. And while he will then be free to

spend that salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the

rest of his fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it

is not his, because he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his

services have already been paid; but year by year it is his to

distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright and outfit have

been swallowed up in his, or to further public works and institutions.

At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both

rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous

temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for

despicable toils. Are you surprised? It is even so. And you repeat it

every Sunday in your churches. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through

the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ I

have heard this and similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed

from the path of the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the

parish. One excellent clergyman told us that the ‘eye of a needle’ meant

a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till they

were unloaded—which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely

confounding the ‘kingdom of God’ with heaven, the future paradise, to

show that of course no rich person could expect to carry his riches

beyond the grave—which, of course, he could not and never did. Various

greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable doctrine with

relief. It was worth the while having come to church that Sunday

morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual, meant nothing in

particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative school-copybook; and

if a man were only respectable, he was a man after God’s own heart.

Alas! I fear not. And though this matter of a man’s services is one for

his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult to

restrain the mind from judging. Thus I shall be very easily persuaded

that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a friend or two

to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more than persuaded at

once. But it will be very hard to persuade me that any one has earned an

income of a hundred thousand. What he is to his friends, he still would

be if he were made penniless to-morrow; for as to the courtiers of luxury

and power, I will neither consider them friends, nor indeed consider them

at all. What he does for mankind there are most likely hundreds who

would do the same, as effectually for the race and as pleasurably to

themselves, for the merest fraction of this monstrous wage. Why it is

paid, I am, therefore, unable to conceive, and as the man pays it

himself, out of funds in his detention, I have a certain backwardness to

think him honest.

At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that _what a man spends

upon himself_, _he shall have earned by services to the race_. Thence

flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little different

from that taught in the present day. I am addressing the middle and the

upper classes; those who have already been fostered and prepared for life

at some expense; those who have some choice before them, and can pick

professions; and above all, those who are what is called independent, and

need do nothing unless pushed by honour or ambition. In this particular

the poor are happy; among them, when a lad comes to his strength, he must

take the work that offers, and can take it with an easy conscience. But

in the richer classes the question is complicated by the number of

opportunities and a variety of considerations. Here, then, this

principle of ours comes in helpfully. The young man has to seek, not a

road to wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money, but honest

work. If he has some strong propensity, some calling of nature, some

over-weening interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or art,

he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two reasons: the first

external, because there he will render the best services; the second

personal, because a demand of his own nature is to him without appeal

whenever it can be satisfied with the consent of his other faculties and

appetites. If he has no such elective taste, by the very principle on

which he chooses any pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and

serviceable, and not the most highly remunerated. We have here an

external problem, not from or to ourself, but flowing from the

constitution of society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design

of righteousness. All that can be done is to present the problem in

proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the individual. Now, the

problem to the poor is one of necessity: to earn wherewithal to live,

they must find remunerative labour. But the problem to the rich is one

of honour: having the wherewithal, they must find serviceable labour.

Each has to earn his daily bread: the one, because he has not yet got it

to eat; the other, who has already eaten it, because he has not yet

earned it.

Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts,

whether for the body or the mind. But the consideration of luxuries

leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second

proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.

At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit

and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference; and

we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual

opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the

saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment, because our

fathers squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy, but from

brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a

luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence. And not only do we squander

money from habit, but still more pitifully waste it in ostentation. I

can think of no more melancholy disgrace for a creature who professes

either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend the smallest

fraction of his income upon that which he does not desire; and to keep a

carriage in which you do not wish to drive, or a butler of whom you are

afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly. Money, being a means of happiness,

should make both parties happy when it changes hands; rightly disposed,

it should be twice blessed in its employment; and buyer and seller should

alike have their twenty shillings worth of profit out of every pound.

Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid

too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper

source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one. I

find I regret this, or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not

only on personal but on moral and philanthropical considerations. For,

first, in a world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students

and food and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are

starved in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and

cruel to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no

return of genuine satisfaction. My philanthropy is wide enough in scope

to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least one

good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so, and I

have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive that I

have robbed the poor. And, second, anything I buy or use which I do not

sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the balance of supply

and demand, and contributes to remove industrious hands from the

production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon

ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the flesh. That

extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot, in which we

impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another question for each man’s

heart. He knows if he can enjoy what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he

is a dog in the manger; nay, it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for

nothing really belongs to a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is

connected with propriety; and that only is the man’s which is proper to

his wants and faculties.

A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty. Want is a

sore thing, but poverty does not imply want. It remains to be seen

whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot, in the most

generous sense, live as fully as at present. He is a fool who objects to

luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest against the waste of

luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot enjoy them. It remains to

be seen, by each man who would live a true life to himself and not a

merely specious life to society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to

how many he merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last

he will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he will be surprised

to find how little money it requires to keep him in complete contentment

and activity of mind and senses. Life at any level among the easy

classes is conceived upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each

household must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others. One is

delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art

or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am

perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel

shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other

tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own. It may be

cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will spend my

money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification, and

should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of a

halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty. I shall not wear gloves

unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight in them.

Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the world; that, in fact

and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in love

with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind. If I do not ask society to

live with me, they must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further

right but to refuse the invitation! There is a kind of idea abroad that

a man must live up to his station, that his house, his table, and his

toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence, and equally imposing to the

world. If this is in the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries. If

it is not in the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool.

Throw aside this fancy. See what you want, and spend upon that;

distinguish what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that.

There are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and

that not at all a high price. Are you sure you are one of these? Are

you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of

a farthing? Are you sure you wish to keep a gig? Do you care about

where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a cheap lodging

as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you enjoy fine clothes? It is not

possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is nothing

more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups

and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his father’s

house, has still his education to begin. Let the experiment be made, and

he will find to his surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite

up to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough

country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his

spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the

dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous

and somnambulous submission to wealth.

The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians

of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life. The

Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers

anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a

respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living for the

outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly to himself,

does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants

for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he

can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You may be

the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian. And the test is

this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed to his

friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can do without it,

a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to

live in some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares

his sovereign or his shilling with a friend. The poor, if they are

generous, are Bohemian in virtue of their birth. Do you know where

beggars go? Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their

thousands, but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it

was the widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the

treasury.

But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in any

way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his level in

society, falls out of society altogether. I suppose the young man to

have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds his talents and

instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit; in a certain

industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a healthy and

becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing so, or doing

so equally well, in any other industry within his reach. Then that is

his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born to his father,

but the one which is proper to his talents and instincts. And suppose he

does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow? Is your heart so

dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the love of a few? Do

you think society loves you? Put it to the proof. Decline in material

expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you than for the

Khan of Tartary. You will lose no friends. If you had any, you will

keep them. Only those who were friends to your coat and equipage will

disappear; the smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the

kind hearts will remain steadfastly kind. Are you so lost, are you so

dead, are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon

solid fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance

of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who

will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you

and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn

neither know nor care to know in a more human manner? Is it not the

principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere

with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration

of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this

cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and

will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I

would go as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would

not put on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites

and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall

take me as I choose to be, or go without me. Neither they nor I will

lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable

to associate.

But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money on

that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies with

equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed many

thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life. And it

may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not the best

of company? But the principle was this: that which a man has not fairly

earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong

to him, but is a part of mankind’s treasure which he holds as steward on

parole. To mankind, then, it must be made profitable; and how this

should be done is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for

himself, and about which none has a right to judge him. Yet there are a

few considerations which are very obvious and may here be stated.

Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in particular.

Every man or woman is one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her

just brain, and kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of

its hopes for the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good

acts and source of blessings to the race. This money which you do not

need, which, in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned

not only in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.

Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should

be helped the first. There at least there can be little imposture, for

you know their necessities of your own knowledge. And consider, if all

the world did as you did, and according to their means extended help in

the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying want in

times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with a doubt

and received with confusion. Would not this simple rule make a new world

out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?

* * * * *

[_After two more sentences the fragment breaks off_.]

FATHER DAMIEN

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU

SYDNEY,

_February_ 25, 1890.

Sir,—It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and

conversed; on my side, with interest. You may remember that you have

done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful. But

there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which justly

divide friends, far more acquaintances. Your letter to the Reverend H.

B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with bread

when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he lay

a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude. You know

enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation to be aware that, a

hundred years after the death of Damien, there will appear a man charged

with the painful office of the _devil’s advocate_. After that noble

brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at

rest, one shall accuse, one defend him. The circumstance is unusual that

the devil’s advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect

immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly

office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall

leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring. If I

have at all learned the trade of using words to convey truth and to

arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me with a subject. For it is

in the interest of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every

quarter of the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that

you and your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours,

to the public eye.

To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then

proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine

and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and with

more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has pleased

you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you for ever.

‘HONOLULU,

‘_August_ 2, 1889.

‘Rev. H. B. GAGE.

‘Dear Brother,—In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I can

only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant

newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.

The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and

bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders;

did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself),

but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the

island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He

had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were

the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were

provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the

leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and

carelessness. Others have done much for the lepers, our own

ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with

the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.—Yours, etc.,

‘C. M. HYDE.’ {65}

To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset

on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect. It may offend

others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold to

publish, gossip on your rivals. And this is perhaps the moment when I

may best explain to you the character of what you are to read: I conceive

you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what

measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at

last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home. And

if in aught that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues,

whom I respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my

regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests

far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me

must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read

your letter. It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that brings

dishonour on the house.

You belong, sir, to a sect—I believe my sect, and that in which my

ancestors laboured—which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise, an

exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries

came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody

faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm; what

troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;

and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.

This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their

failure, such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, and must here be

plainly dealt with. In the course of their evangelical calling, they—or

too many of them—grew rich. It may be news to you that the houses of

missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu. It will

at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil visit, the

driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and the comfort of

your home. It would have been news certainly to myself, had any one told

me that afternoon that I should live to drag such matter into print. But

you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your own level; and it is

needful that those who are to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien

and the devil’s advocate, should understand your letter to have been

penned in a house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and

the comments of the passers-by. I think (to employ a phrase of yours

which I admire) it ‘should be attributed’ to you that you have never

visited the scene of Damien’s life and death. If you had, and had

recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps

would have been stayed.

Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has not

done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When calamity

befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took root

in the Eight Islands, a _quid pro quo_ was to be looked for. To that

prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent at

last an opportunity. I know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely

sensitive. I know that others of your colleagues look back on the

inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien,

with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with

yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not

essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that

performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that

which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not

rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room,

as you sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond

parallel, the rage, I am happy to repeat—it is the only compliment I

shall pay you—the rage was almost virtuous. But, sir, when we have

failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has

stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a

plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and

succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted

in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be

retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle,

and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat—some rags of

common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.

Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the

honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the

inert: that was what remained to you. We are not all expected to be

Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his

comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that. But will a

gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example from the fields

of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a lady, and

the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will sometimes

happen) matter damaging to the successful rival’s credit reaches the ear

of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth

is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily closed. Your Church and

Damien’s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to

set divine examples. You having (in one huge instance) failed, and

Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that you

were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in that high

rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your wellbeing, in your

pleasant room—and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and

rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of Kalawao—you, the elect

who would not, were the last man on earth to collect and propagate gossip

on the volunteer who would and did.

I think I see you—for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these

sentences—I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical

expression at the best. ‘He had no hand in the reforms,’ he was ‘a

coarse, dirty man’; these were your own words; and you may think it

possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence. In a sense,

it is even so. Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional

halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not the

eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were

only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy

for myself—such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your

bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of portraiture

that it makes the path easy for the devil’s advocate, and leaves for the

misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth. For the truth

that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. The

world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter be

the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a wax

abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you, on the day when

Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work:

your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.

You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to

become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited

the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave. But such

information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those

who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but

others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no

halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose

unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features

of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I

possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely

and sensitively understood—Kalawao, which you have never visited, about

which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for,

brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that

confession. ‘_Less than one-half_ of the island,’ you say, ‘is devoted

to the lepers.’ Molokai—‘_Molokai ahina_,’ the ‘grey,’ lofty, and most

desolate island—along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice

into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to

west, the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there

projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,

stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the

whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation

as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be able to pick out

the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai

is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less than a half,

or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth—or, say, a twentieth; and

the next time you burst into print you will be in a position to share

with us the issue of your calculations.

I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of

that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold. You,

who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce

sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your

pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore there one

early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding

farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human

life. One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from

joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have

triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you

beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common

manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as

only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare—what a

haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards

the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every

fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and

seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but

still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have

understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves

of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of

the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to

visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection.

That seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the

disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,

disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes. I do not think I am

a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I

spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without

heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else. I find in my diary that

I speak of my stay as a ‘grinding experience’: I have once jotted in the

margin, ‘_Harrowing_ is the word’; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at last

towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new

conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song—

‘’Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.’

And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,

bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the

Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the

missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different

place when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept

that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with

pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful

sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and

stumps.

You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound

in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses. I

have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses. But

there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and

Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of

length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for

what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by

which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to

enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,

they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time

to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to

recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors

of his own sepulchre.

I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.

_A_. ‘Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the

field of his labours and sufferings. “He was a good man, but very

officious,” says one. Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests

so easily do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of a

Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to

laugh at’ [over] ‘it. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was

a popular.’

_B_. ‘After Ragsdale’s death’ [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,

of the unruly settlement] ‘there followed a brief term of office by

Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble

man. He was rough in his ways, and he had no control. Authority was

relaxed; Damien’s life was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.’

_C_. ‘Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems to have been a man of

the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type: shrewd, ignorant and

bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a

reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least

thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt

(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his

life; essentially indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome

colleague; domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably

unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that

his boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means of

bribes. He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas

against the remedies of his regular rivals: perhaps (if anything matter

at all in the treatment of such a disease) the worst thing that he did,

and certainly the easiest. The best and worst of the man appear very

plainly in his dealings with Mr. Chapman’s money; he had originally laid

it out’ [intended to lay it out] ‘entirely for the benefit of Catholics,

and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his

error fully and revised the list. The sad state of the boys’ home is in

part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly ways

and false ideas of hygiene. Brother officials used to call it “Damien’s

Chinatown.” “Well,” they would say, “your China-town keeps growing.”

And he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors

with perfect obstinacy. So much I have gathered of truth about this

plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are the

traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom

and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here on

the spot can properly appreciate their greatness.’

I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without

correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness. They

are almost a list of the man’s faults, for it is rather these that I was

seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life, I and the

world were already sufficiently acquainted. I was besides a little

suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely because

Damien’s admirers and disciples were the least likely to be critical. I

know you will be more suspicious still; and the facts set down above were

one and all collected from the lips of Protestants who had opposed the

father in his life. Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the

image of a man, with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive

with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.

Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of

Damien’s character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured

with and (in your own phrase) ‘knew the man’;—though I question whether

Damien would have said that he knew you. Take it, and observe with

wonder how well you were served by your gossips, how ill by your

intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and

how widely our appreciations vary. There is something wrong here; either

with you or me. It is possible, for instance, that you, who seem to have

so many ears in Kalawao, had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman’s money,

and were singly struck by Damien’s intended wrong-doing. I was struck

with that also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the

fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here tell

you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him

late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the

father listened as usual with ‘perfect good-nature and perfect

obstinacy’; but at the last, when he was persuaded—‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I am

very much obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have been

a theft.’ There are many (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes

and saints to be infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to

the true lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.

And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those

who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find

and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget

the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced

them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind. That you may

understand how dangerous, and into what a situation it has already

brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the

different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each from the

point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.

Damien was _coarse_.

It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a

coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were so

refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of

culture? Or may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt if John

the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career you

doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a

‘coarse, headstrong’ fisherman! Yet even in our Protestant Bibles Peter

is called Saint.

Damien was _dirty_.

He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade! But

the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.

Damien was _headstrong_.

I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and

heart.

Damien was _bigoted_.

I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me. But

what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish in a

priest? Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a

peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do. For this, I

wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should

have avoided him in life. But the point of interest in Damien, which has

caused him to be so much talked about and made him at last the subject of

your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow

faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened him to be one of the

world’s heroes and exemplars.

Damien _was not sent to Molokai_, _but went there without orders_.

Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame? I have

heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation on the

ground that His sacrifice was voluntary. Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise?

Damien _did not stay at the settlement_, _etc._

It is true he was allowed many indulgences. Am I to understand that you

blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for granting

them? In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard to issue from the

house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you will find yourself with

few supporters.

Damien _had no hand in the reforms_, _etc._

I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my

description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon this

head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in the

world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than when he

passes from Damien’s ‘Chinatown’ at Kalawao to the beautiful Bishop-Home

at Kalaupapa. At this point, in my desire to make all fair for you, I

will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony. Here is a passage from

my diary about my visit to the Chinatown, from which you will see how it

is (even now) regarded by its own officials: ‘We went round all the

dormitories, refectories, etc.—dark and dingy enough, with a superficial

cleanliness, which he’ [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] ‘did not seek to

defend. “It is almost decent,” said he; “the sisters will make that all

right when we get them here.”’ And yet I gathered it was already better

since Damien was dead, and far better than when he was there alone and

had his own (not always excellent) way. I have now come far enough to

meet you on a common ground of fact; and I tell you that, to a mind not

prejudiced by jealousy, all the reforms of the lazaretto, and even those

which he most vigorously opposed, are properly the work of Damien. They

are the evidence of his success; they are what his heroism provoked from

the reluctant and the careless. Many were before him in the field; Mr.

Meyer, for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little: there

have been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had

more devotion, than our saint. Before his day, even you will confess,

they had effected little. It was his part, by one striking act of

martyrdom, to direct all men’s eyes on that distressful country. At a

blow, and with the price of his life, he made the place illustrious and

public. And that, if you will consider largely, was the one reform

needful; pregnant of all that should succeed. It brought money; it

brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters; it brought

supervision, for public opinion and public interest landed with the man

at Kalawao. If ever any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it

was he. There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty

Damien washed it.

Damien _was not a pure man in his relations with women_, _etc._

How do you know that? Is this the nature of the conversation in that

house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?—racy

details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling under the

cliffs of Molokai?

Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard the

rumour. When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for my informants

were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and I heard plenty of

complaints of Damien. Why was this never mentioned? and how came it to

you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?

But I must not even seem to deceive you. This scandal, when I read it in

your letter, was not new to me. I had heard it once before; and I must

tell you how. There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu; he, in a

public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement that Damien had

‘contracted the disease from having connection with the female lepers’;

and I find a joy in telling you how the report was welcomed in a

public-house. A man sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty to give his

name, but from what I heard I doubt if you would care to have him to

dinner in Beretania Street. ‘You miserable little—’ (here is a word I

dare not print, it would so shock your ears). ‘You miserable little—,’

he cried, ‘if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you see you are

a million times a lower—for daring to repeat it?’ I wish it could be

told of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps after

family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive

it with the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not

print; it would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle Toby’s

oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it would have been counted to

you for your brightest righteousness. But you have deliberately chosen

the part of the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with

improvements of your own. The man from Honolulu—miserable, leering

creature—communicated the tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers

in a public-house, where (I will so far agree with your temperance

opinions) man is not always at his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had

himself been drinking—drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess. It

was to your ‘Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,’ that you chose to

communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your

portly bosom forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were

drunk when it was done. Your ‘dear brother’—a brother indeed—made haste

to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps) to the religious

papers; where, after many months, I found and read and wondered at it;

and whence I have now reproduced it for the wonder of others. And you

and your dear brother have, by this cycle of operations, built up a

contrast very edifying to examine in detail. The man whom you would not

care to have to dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr.

Hyde and the Reverend H. B. Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.

But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and

to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true. I will

suppose—and God forgive me for supposing it—that Damien faltered and

stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror

of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was

doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his

priestly oath—he, who was so much a better man than either you or me, who

did what we have never dreamed of daring—he too tasted of our common

frailty. ‘O, Iago, the pity of it!’ The least tender should be moved to

tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to

pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!

Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your

own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a

father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it

to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your

emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that

you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the

author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to

publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what

Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and

the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God

had given you grace to see it.

THE PENTLAND RISING

A PAGE OF HISTORY

1666

‘A cloud of witnesses lyes here,

Who for Christ’s interest did appear.’

_Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green_.

CHAPTER I—THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT

‘Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,

This tomb doth show for what some men did die.’

_Monument_, _Greyfriars’ Churchyard_,_ Edinburgh_,

1661–1668. {85}

Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory

whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies

which followed it. It is, as it were, the evening of the night of

persecution—a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the

noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed. This fact,

of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however, an

additional interest.

The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were ‘out of measure

increased,’ says Bishop Burnet, ‘by the new incumbents who were put in

the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally very mean and

despicable in all respects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard;

they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of them were openly vicious.

They . . . were indeed the dreg and refuse of the northern parts. Those

of them who arose above contempt or scandal were men of such violent

tempers that they were as much hated as the others were despised.’ {86}

It was little to be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk

refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed

ministers in the fields. But this was not to be allowed, and their

persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the

parishioners’ names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty shillings

Scots to the name of each absenter. In this way very large debts were

incurred by persons altogether unable to pay. Besides this, landlords

were fined for their tenants’ absences, tenants for their landlords’,

masters for their servants’, servants for their masters’, even though

they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance. And as the

curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common soldier, it

may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor

well proven.

When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household

utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to his

wealth, were quartered on the offender. The coarse and drunken privates

filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed

their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed

the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to

destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was

consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home. For all this attention

each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain sum

of money per day—three shillings sterling, according to _Naphtali_. And

frequently they were forced to pay quartering money for more men than

were in reality ‘cessed on them.’ At that time it was no strange thing

to behold a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and many

others who were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some

other way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from

arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. {87a}

One example in particular we may cite:

John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately for

himself, a Nonconformist. First he was fined in four hundred pounds

Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and ninety-three

pounds Scots. He was next obliged to leave his house and flee from place

to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse. His wife and

children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants were fined till

they too were almost ruined. As a final stroke, they drove away all his

cattle to Glasgow and sold them. {87b} Surely it was time that something

were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such tyranny.

About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself

Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt. He displayed

some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and

stating that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by

their southern brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James

Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter. ‘He

was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that was very

often,’ said Bishop Burnet. ‘He was a learned man, but had always been

in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey orders. He told me he had

no regard to any law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military way.’

{88}

This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave

spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame of

insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who

perpetrated it with redoubled force.

CHAPTER II—THE BEGINNING

I love no warres,

I love no jarres,

Nor strife’s fire.

May discord cease,

Let’s live in peace:

This I desire.

If it must be

Warre we must see

(So fates conspire),

May we not feel

The force of steel:

This I desire.

T. JACKSON, 1651 {89}

Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three other

soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and demanded the

payment of his fines. On the old man’s refusing to pay, they forced a

large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh his corn. The

field was a certain distance out of the clachan, and four persons,

disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all night, met

this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers to work for

the ruin of their friend. However, chided to the bone by their night on

the hills, and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the village

inn to refresh themselves. Suddenly some people rushed into the room

where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about to

roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle. This was too much for them

to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of this gross

outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive should be

released. On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in the front room,

high words were given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed

forth from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn

swords. One of the latter, John M‘Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and

shot the corporal in the body. The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it

was loaded, to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so

much disturbed that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long

afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.

The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,

and the rebellion was commenced. {90}

And now we must turn to Sir James Turner’s memoirs of himself; for,

strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary

composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own adventures

just mentioned, a large number of essays and short biographies, and a

work on war, entitled _Pallas Armata_. The following are some of the

shorter pieces ‘Magick,’ ‘Friendship,’ ‘Imprisonment,’ ‘Anger,’

‘Revenge,’ ‘Duells,’ ‘Cruelty,’ ‘A Defence of some of the Ceremonies of

the English Liturgie—to wit—Bowing at the Name of Jesus, The frequent

repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and Good Lord deliver us, Of the

Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Canonnicall Coats,’ etc. From what

we know of his character we should expect ‘Anger’ and ‘Cruelty’ to be

very full and instructive. But what earthly right he had to meddle with

ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.

Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning

Gray’s proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its

character, he paid no attention to it. On the evening of the 14th,

Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he

had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant—a story rendered

singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James

instantly dispatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to

Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dalry, and commanded the thirteen or

fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to his

lodging for supplies.

On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse

and 150 foot. Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with a

considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner’s

lodging. Though it was between eight and nine o’clock, that worthy,

being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window.

Neilson and some others cried, ‘You may have fair quarter.’

‘I need no quarter,’ replied Sir James; ‘nor can I be a prisoner, seeing

there is no war declared.’ On being told, however, that he must either

be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the street in his

night-shirt. Here Gray showed himself very desirous of killing him, but

he was overruled by Corsack. However, he was taken away a prisoner,

Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner naively

remarks, ‘there was good reason for it, for he mounted himself on a farre

better one of mine.’ A large coffer containing his clothes and money,

together with all his papers, were taken away by the rebels. They robbed

Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse,

drank the King’s health at the market cross, and then left Dumfries. {92}

CHAPTER III—THE MARCH OF THE REBELS

‘Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,

At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;

Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,

Because with them we signed the Covenant.’

_Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton_. {93}

On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at

Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this ‘horrid rebellion.’ In

the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided—much to the wrath of some members;

and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures were most

energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards round the

city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced to take the oath of

allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give in their names.

Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,

trembled—trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him from

his chariot on Magus Muir,—for he knew how he had sold his trust, how he

had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their chiefest

hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts be forged.

But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was unrelenting,

unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise of pardon, no

inducement to submission. He said, ‘If you submit not you must die,’ but

never added, ‘If you submit you may live!’ {94a}

Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At Carsphairn they were

deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected

to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James’s money. Who he was

is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently

forgeries—that, and his final flight, appear to indicate that he was an

agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was heard

to say, ‘That, if he might have his wish, he would have them all turn

rebels and go to arms.’ {94b}

Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.

Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at the

best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits were

paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force. In his

description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,

admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying souvenir

of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly,

which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He appears,

notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his

cruel ‘phanaticks,’ as the following extract sufficiently proves:

‘Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and order

given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached by Mr.

Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major M‘Cullough invited me to heare “that

phanatick sermon” (for soe they merrilie called it). They said that

preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne me, which they

heartilie wished. I answered to them that I was under guards, and that

if they intended to heare that sermon, it was probable I might likewise,

for it was not like my guards wold goe to church and leave me alone at my

lodgeings. Bot to what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be

hard to turne a Turner. Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I

said, if I did not come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine

me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had

exacted from the phanatics.’ {95}

This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The

following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and

certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with

wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this

movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with

impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:

‘Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a visite; I

called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse it. It fell

Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one of the most bombastick

graces that ever I heard in my life. He summoned God Allmightie very

imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for that was his language). “And

if,” said he, “thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for

thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not

fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight

for it. They say,” said he, “that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming

with the King’s General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot a

threshing to us.” This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly

and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my thirst.’ {96a}

Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in some

convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command,

would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either

into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him from

seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He was, at last, on the

25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold

their evolutions. ‘I found their horse did consist of four hundreth and

fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen

were armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.

The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and some

with suords great and long.’ He admired much the proficiency of their

cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so short a time.

{96b}

At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great

wapinshaw, they were charged—awful picture of depravity!—with the theft

of a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while the

whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare

opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues—that among a thousand

men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in

the camp? At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief

rebels. In it occurs the following:

‘The just sense whereof ’—the sufferings of the country—‘made us choose,

rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than to stay

at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and tortured with

the fears of our own approaching misery.’ {97}

The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph at

the head of this chapter seems to refer.

A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate,

where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped. But

at twelve o’clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of ‘Horse!

horse!’ and ‘Mount the prisoner!’ resounded through the night-shrouded

town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards

in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close,

thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long

fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to

destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to

sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the

wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in

gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole

troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the

ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but

the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels,

seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking

moss. Those who kept together—a miserable few—often halted to rest

themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then

onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and

supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the

darkness—onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at

Edinburgh. It was calculated that they lost one half of their army on

that disastrous night-march.

Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from

Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time. {98}

CHAPTER IV—RULLION GREEN

‘From Covenanters with uplifted hands,

From Remonstrators with associate bands,

Good Lord, deliver us!’

_Royalist Rhyme_, KIRKTON, p. 127.

Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before

Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,

beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some

object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, and within that

distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered

that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained

winding-sheet. {99} Many thought that this apparition was a portent of

the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising.

On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left

Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset.

The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of

the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of

flat marshy ground. On the highest of the two mounds—that nearest the

Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body—was the greater part of

the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Barscob and the Galloway

gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed

infantry. Their position was further strengthened by the depth of the

valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn.

The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue

shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain

before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled

trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south,

too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the

course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge;

the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue

indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In

sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that

peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their

defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head

from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening eyeballs to

behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his cause, the

shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening.

It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was raised:

‘The enemy! Here come the enemy!’

Unwilling to believe their own doom—for our insurgents still hoped for

success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on at

Colinton—they called out, ‘They are some of our own.’

‘They are too blacke’ (_i.e._ numerous), ‘fie! fie! for ground to draw up

on,’ cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for his men, and

proving that it was not till after this time that his forces were finally

arranged. {101a}

First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent

obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels. An

equal number of Learmont’s men met them, and, after a struggle, drove

them back. The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all pursuit,

and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot to occupy both

the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side.

Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the

hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then dispatched a mingled

body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace’s outpost, but they also

were driven back. A third charge produced a still more disastrous

effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men by a

reinforcement.

These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General’s ranks, for

several of his men flung down their arms. Urged by such fatal symptoms,

and by the approaching night, he deployed his men, and closed in

overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of the insurgent army.

In the increasing twilight the burning matches of the firelocks,

shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the approaching army

a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant breathing flame into

the darkness.

Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, ‘The God of

Jacob! The God of Jacob!’ and prayed with uplifted hands for victory.

{101b}

But still the Royalist troops closed in.

Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture him

with his own hands. Accordingly he charged forward, presenting his

pistols. Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell’s buff coat and

fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar to his age, the

Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by

enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket,

charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is

likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant,

who was killed. {102}

Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped

in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor—tightening, closing, crushing

every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils. The

flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though, as

even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight was

the result.

But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the

death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the

liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in

the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by

charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and

cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their

winding-sheets!

_Inscription on stone at Rullion Green_:

HERE

AND NEAR TO

THIS PLACE LYES THE

REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK

AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK

MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND

ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED

PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE

KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN

INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE

OF THE COVENANTED

WORK OF REFORMATION BY

THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS

UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER

1666. REV. 12. 11. ERECTED

SEPT. 28 1738.

_Back of stone_:

A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,

Who for Christ’s Interest did appear,

For to restore true Liberty,

O’erturnèd then by tyranny.

And by proud Prelats who did Rage

Against the Lord’s Own heritage.

They sacrificed were for the laws

Of Christ their king, his noble cause.

These heroes fought with great renown;

By falling got the Martyr’s crown. {103}

CHAPTER V—A RECORD OF BLOOD

‘They cut his hands ere he was dead,

And after that struck of his head.

His blood under the altar cries

For vengeance on Christ’s enemies.’

_Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont_. {104}

Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on

the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march

of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and

with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered Edinburgh. But his

banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners were marched within

his ranks. The old man knew it all. That martial and triumphant strain

was the death-knell of his friends and of their cause, the rust-hued

spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death,

and the prisoners were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle

to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he

lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he

would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than

midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim to

those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the

sea by many a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was spared to

him—he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since

Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to is fathers.

{105a}

When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander

Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. Disliking their

occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it. All the night

through they kept up a continuous series of ‘alarms and incursions,’

‘cries of “Stand!” “Give fire!”’ etc., which forced the prelate to flee

to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was

denied him at home. {105b} Now, however, when all danger to himself was

past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, and scant was the justice

likely to be shown to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate

was by. The prisoners were lodged in Haddo’s Hole, a part of St. Giles’

Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it

spoken, they were amply supplied with food. {105c}

Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which had

been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the

miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no

opinion—certainly a suggestive circumstance—but Lord Lee declared that

this would not interfere with their legal trial, ‘so to bloody executions

they went.’ {105d} To the number of thirty they were condemned and

executed; while two of them, Hugh M‘Kail, a young minister, and Neilson

of Corsack, were tortured with the boots.

The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were

dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; ‘the heads

of Major M‘Culloch and the two Gordons,’ it was resolved, says Kirkton,

‘should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and

Strong’s head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot’s sett on

the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. The armes of all the ten, because they

hade with uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the

people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing these arms on the

top of the prison.’ {106} Among these was John Neilson, the Laird of

Corsack, who saved Turner’s life at Dumfries; in return for which service

Sir James attempted, though without success, to get the poor man

reprieved. One of the condemned died of his wounds between the day of

condemnation and the day of execution. ‘None of them,’ says Kirkton,

‘would save their life by taking the declaration and renouncing the

Covenant, though it was offered to them. . . . But never men died in

Scotland so much lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those

in the country. When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they

clasped each other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.

When Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but

like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian experiences,

and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John

iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But most of all,

when Mr. M‘Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was never known in

Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street, or in all the

numberless windows in the mercate place.’ {107a}

The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:

‘Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the world’s

consolations. Farewell to all my friends, whose company hath been

refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have done with the light of the sun

and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life, everlasting love,

everlasting praise, everlasting glory. Praise to Him that sits upon the

throne, and to the Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul, that hath

pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and healed all my

diseases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that excel in strength, ye

ministers of His that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my soul!’

{107b}

After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the

following words of touching eloquence: ‘And now I leave off to speak any

more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which shall never

be broken off. Farewell father and mother, friends and relations!

Farewell the world and all delights! Farewell meat and drink! Farewell

sun, moon, and stars!—Welcome God and Father! Welcome sweet Jesus

Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant! Welcome blessed Spirit of

grace and God of all consolation! Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life!

Welcome Death!’ {107c}

At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers to

beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears. Hideous

refinement of revenge! Even the last words which drop from the lips of a

dying man—words surely the most sincere and the most unbiassed which

mortal mouth can utter—even these were looked upon as poisoned and as

poisonous. ‘Drown their last accents,’ was the cry, ‘lest they should

lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their doom!’

{108a} But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would

think—unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and

fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of

drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the

last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the

river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the

angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.

Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the

peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,

pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who

fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and

persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of

a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath,

of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it

covered the house of their murderer; and of how it scared him with its

lurid glare.

Hear Daniel Defoe: {108b}

‘If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made

desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who

can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God “That

oppression makes a wise man mad”? And therefore were there no other

original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of

Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of

those times might have justified to all the world, nature having

dictated to all people a right of defence when illegally and

arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of

nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country.’

Bear this remonstrance of Defoe’s in mind, and though it is the fashion

of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn, the noble

band of Covenanters—though the bitter laugh at their old-world religious

views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling silence on

their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through all

society—be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was good about

the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty, for country and

religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two hundred years ago.

* * * * *

EDINBURGH, 28_th November_ 1866.

THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW

History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt

correctly; and rival historians expose each other’s blunders with

gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period

he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live.

The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of

inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of

experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of

landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable

marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by

imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom

not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that

what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying

island of Laputa. It is for this reason in particular that we are all

becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the least

refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters,

sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist

Jericho—but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of

Englishmen and English legislation. A little while ago, and we were

still for liberty; ‘crowd a few more thousands on the bench of

Government,’ we seemed to cry; ‘keep her head direct on liberty, and we

cannot help but come to port.’ This is over; _laisser faire_ declines in

favour; our legislation grows authoritative, grows philanthropical,

bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of

inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of

England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing

it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is

that we scarcely know it.

Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new

altars. Like all other principles, she has been proved to be

self-exclusive in the long run. She has taken wages besides (like all

other virtues) and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were

accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were

truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours’

poverty. A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic

phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or shipowners

may imply for operatives, tenants, or seamen, and we not unnaturally

begin to turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny. Freedom,

to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the

free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of

yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed,

ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their

mines and workshops by the lash of famine. So much, in other men’s

affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to despair of virtue

in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to discharge

upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors. The landlord has

long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those who do business on land

have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner; the professions look

askance upon the retail traders and have even started their co-operative

stores to ruin them; and from out the smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a

finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord.

Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not perceive the

conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat damnable. Thus, piece by

piece, each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away the branch on

which some other interest is seated, do we apply in detail our

Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive that we are all labouring

together to bring in Socialism at large. A tendency so stupid and so

selfish is like to prove invincible; and if Socialism be at all a

practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grand-children

will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far

liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this not in the

least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers;

but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward

on its bosom, apparently undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory.

If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my conception

of his character, he might rest from his troubling and look on: the walls

of Jericho begin already to crumble and dissolve. That great servile

war, the Armageddon of money and numbers, to which we looked forward when

young, becomes more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a

peaceable and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in

political tactics and dead to political results.

The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of

Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution (if

it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the state of Parliament is

not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the future.

Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. We

may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish obstruction—a

bitter trial, which it supports with notable good humour. But the excuse

is merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and France;

and what are we to say of these? President Cleveland’s letter may serve

as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of

the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of

popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we

begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our

private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take

upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played

by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot

trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;

and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours,

pretty much at random, and say to these: ‘Be ye our conscience; make laws

so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them so wisely,

that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous and happy,

world without end. Amen.’ And who can look twice at the British

Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task? I am not advancing

this as an argument against Socialism: once again, nothing is further

from my mind. There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not even

Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it came, and did one-tenth

part of what it offers, I for one should make it welcome. But if it is

to come, we may as well have some notion of what it will be like; and the

first thing to grasp is that our new polity will be designed and

administered (to put it courteously) with something short of inspiration.

It will be made, or will grow, in a human parliament; and the one thing

that will not very hugely change is human nature. The Anarchists think

otherwise, from which it is only plain that they have not carried to the

study of history the lamp of human sympathy.

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what

headmarks must we look for in the life? We chafe a good deal at that

excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs the

prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official. The

official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many of us.

I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable in any

other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember in my dreams the

eye-glass of a certain _attaché_ at a certain embassy—an eyeglass that

was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked; and my next most

disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the city

of San Francisco. I lived in that city among working folk, and what my

neighbours accepted at the postman’s hands—nay, what I took from him

myself—it is still distasteful to recall. The bourgeois, residing in the

upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this

peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about

a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the

eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine

(if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most faculties are

void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the

dregs. In every contact with authority, with their employer, with the

police, with the School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the

workhouse, they have equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted

civility of the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several

out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be

appreciated. Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will be the

golden age of officials. In all our concerns it will be their beloved

duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging words, analogy will

aid us to imagine. It is likely these gentlemen will be periodically

elected; they will therefore have their turn of being underneath, which

does not always sweeten men’s conditions. The laws they will have to

administer will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body

which is to regulate their administration no wiser than the British

Parliament. So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude

most galling to the blood—servitude to many and changing masters, and for

all the slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office. And if the

Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall

have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as a

moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable—the newspaper. For

the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it

stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses

and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent

to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private

property, the days of the independent journal are numbered. State

railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State

newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.

But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime would perhaps

be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would pass away.

But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be more

contraventions. We see already new sins ringing up like mustard—School

Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins—none of which I

would be thought to except against in particular, but all of which, taken

together, show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the

beginning. If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded,

if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron

justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion

multiplied. Take the case of work alone. Man is an idle animal. He is

at least as intelligent as the ant; but generations of advisers have in

vain recommended him the ant’s example. Of those who are found truly

indefatigable in business, some are misers; some are the practisers of

delightful industries, like gardening; some are students, artists,

inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by successive hopes; and the

rest are those who live by games of skill or hazard—financiers,

billiard-players, gamblers, and the like. But in unloved toils, even

under the prick of necessity, no man is continually sedulous. Once

eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the hope of

riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering. Society

will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old

days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected

overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If

the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may

succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long

hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip will be in the

overseer’s hands, and not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question

of each man doing his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of

sentiment will be forgotten. To dock the skulker’s food is not enough;

many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their

shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the

whip will be in the overseer’s hand; and his own sense of justice and the

superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only checks on

its employment. Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen,

and yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector. It is

admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil

not to be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while

you will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the sergeant can no

longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we shall see, or

our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector.

This for the unfortunate. But with the fortunate also, even those whom

the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well. It is concluded that

in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially sound, the

level of comfort will be high. It does not follow: there are strange

depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case

of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is

possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into

squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of

human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly;

suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions,

the whole enterprise to be financially sound—a vaulting supposition—and

all the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort: we

have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or if it be what

man will even deign to accept for a continuance. It is certain that man

loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves that only or that best. He

is supposed to love comfort; it is not a love, at least, that he is

faithful to. He is supposed to love happiness; it is my contention that

he rather loves excitement. Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the

aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals. He does not think so

when he is hungry, but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on

the hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry. It

would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the

Lotos-eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it

not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to

a mere prerequisite of living.

That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor in

all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what he must have

is that which will seize and hold his attention. Regular meals and

weatherproof lodgings will not do this long. Play in its wide sense, as

the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts,

will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he

wearies for realities. Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the

unbroken pastime of a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in

the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man

cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical

adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs;

his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them

in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of

life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment,

furious contention with obstacles: these are the true elixir for all

vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic

enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are taken in

some pinch closer than the common, they cry, ‘Catch me here again!’ and

sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out.

It is as old as _Robinson Crusoe_; as old as man. Our race has not been

strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call

Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the

voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it

exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living;

he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of

any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns. If the people in

the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so

long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of

the world brighter. If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should

have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin, it would not occur to

him—at least for several hours—to ask if life were worth living; and if

such peril were a daily matter, he would ask it never more; he would have

other things to think about, he would be living indeed—not lying in a box

with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull. The aleatory, whether it touch

life, or fortune, or renown—whether we explore Africa or only toss for

halfpence—that is what I conceive men to love best, and that is what we

are seeking to exclude from men’s existences. Of all forms of the

aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working men—the danger of

misery from want of work—is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the

blood, it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is

passive; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly

touching them, it does truly season the men’s lives. Of those who fail,

I do not speak—despair should be sacred; but to those who even modestly

succeed, the changes of their life bring interest: a job found, a

shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure

springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but

from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of

life. Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this

new state of life, they would also lose a certain something, which would

not be missed in the beginning, but would be missed progressively and

progressively lamented. Soon there would be a looking back: there would

be tales of the old world humming in young men’s ears, tales of the tramp

and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant. And in the stall-fed life of

the successful ant-heap—with its regular meals, regular duties, regular

pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded—the vicissitudes,

delights, and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth. This may seem

a shallow observation; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on

the surface. Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the

circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply;

the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our

descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures

on which they will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of intrigue and

of sedition.

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound. I am

no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know one

thing that bears on the economic question—I know the imperfection of

man’s faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count some rugged

elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have

said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned

beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious that they are

right; they may be right also in predicting a period of communal

independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable. But

the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality, just

when we were told it was beginning. Communes will not be all equal in

extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will the

surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be the old story

of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to me, a

new, inevitable danger. For the merchant and the manufacturer, in this

new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power that will

see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market. And

all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be small. Great

powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the aid of

newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness; national losses are

so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be counting its

gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune

all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs up, when

(let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of

Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body

politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet

and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official

correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man who has

dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a business difference

between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between

diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the arbitrament

of blows. So that the establishment of the communal system will not only

reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of economic inequality,

but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow

warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester,

Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the

highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed

into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad

literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the

victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At least this

will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such a world

with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly

suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires.

COLLEGE PAPERS

CHAPTER I—EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824

On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the _Lapsus

Linguæ_; _or_, _the College Tatler_; and on the 7th the first number

appeared. On Friday the 2nd of April ‘_Mr. Tatler_ became speechless.’

Its history was not all one success; for the editor (who applies to

himself the words of Iago, ‘I am nothing if I am not critical’)

overstepped the bounds of caution, and found himself seriously embroiled

with the powers that were. There appeared in No. XVI. a most bitter

satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared to Falstaff,

charged with puffing himself, and very prettily censured for publishing

only the first volume of a class-book, and making all purchasers pay for

both. Sir John Leslie took up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the

publisher, and threatened him with an action, till he was forced to turn

the hapless _Lapsus_ out of doors. The maltreated periodical found

shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was duly

issued from the new office. No. XVII. beheld _Mr. Tatler’s_ humiliation,

in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible assurances of

respect and admiration, he disclaims the article in question, and

advertises a new issue of No. XVI. with all objectionable matter omitted.

This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in a later advertisement, ‘a new

and improved edition.’ This was the only remarkable adventure of _Mr.

Tatler’s_ brief existence; unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee

manuscript in imitation of _Blackwood_, and a letter of reproof from a

divinity student on the impiety of the same dull effusion. He laments

the near approach of his end in pathetic terms. ‘How shall we summon up

sufficient courage,’ says he, ‘to look for the last time on our beloved

little devil and his inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able to

pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its attractions are over?

How shall we bid farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long

greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative at

the gate of _Alma Mater_?’ But alas! he had no choice: _Mr. Tatler_,

whose career, he says himself, had been successful, passed peacefully

away, and has ever since dumbly implored ‘the bringing home of bell and

burial.’

_Alter et idem_. A very different affair was the _Lapsus Linguæ_ from

the _Edinburgh University Magazine_. The two prospectuses alone, laid

side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the repeal of the

paper duty. The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1828–4 was almost

wholly dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses,

and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song. But

_Mr. Tatler_ was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages

afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it

then was. The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their

hats in the class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College;

and ‘Carriage Entrance’ was posted above the main arch, on what the

writer pleases to call ‘coarse, unclassic boards.’ The benches of the

‘Speculative’ then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the

‘Dialectic’ is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which

it is pointedly said that ‘nothing else could conveniently be made of

them.’ However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that

they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the taste of session

1823–4, which found enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted

cheese at Ambrose’s, or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull’s.

Duelling was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell

to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat

would be the result. Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim

were in every one’s mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted

Byron’s poetry and Scott’s novels, informed the ladies of his belief in

phrenology. In the present day he would dilate on ‘Red as a rose is

she,’ and then mention that he attends Old Greyfriars’, as a tacit claim

to intellectual superiority. I do not know that the advance is much.

But _Mr. Tatler’s_ best performances were three short papers in which he

hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the ‘_Divinity_,’ the

‘_Medical_,’ and the ‘_Law_’ of session 1823–4. The fact that there was

no notice of the ‘_Arts_’ seems to suggest that they stood in the same

intermediate position as they do now—the epitome of student-kind. _Mr.

Tatler’s_ satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown

superannuated in _all_ its limbs. His descriptions may limp at some

points, but there are certain broad traits that apply equally well to

session 1870–1. He shows us the _Divinity_ of the period—tall, pale, and

slender—his collar greasy, and his coat bare about the seams—‘his white

neckcloth serving four days, and regularly turned the third’—‘the rim of

his hat deficient in wool’—and ‘a weighty volume of theology under his

arm.’ He was the man to buy cheap ‘a snuff-box, or a dozen of pencils,

or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred quills,’ at any of the

public sale-rooms. He was noted for cheap purchases, and for exceeding

the legal tender in halfpence. He haunted ‘the darkest and remotest

corner of the Theatre Gallery.’ He was to be seen issuing from ‘aerial

lodging-houses.’ Withal, says mine author, ‘there were many good points

about him: he paid his landlady’s bill, read his Bible, went twice to

church on Sunday, seldom swore, was not often tipsy, and bought the

_Lapsus Linguæ_.’

The _Medical_, again, ‘wore a white greatcoat, and consequently talked

loud’—(there is something very delicious in that _consequently_). He

wore his hat on one side. He was active, volatile, and went to the top

of Arthur’s Seat on the Sunday forenoon. He was as quiet in a debating

society as he was loud in the streets. He was reckless and imprudent:

yesterday he insisted on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and

claret was claret then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and to-morrow

he asks you for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of the

_Lapsus_.

The student of _Law_, again, was a learned man. ‘He had turned over the

leaves of Justinian’s _Institutes_, and knew that they were written in

Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone’s

_Commentaries_, and _argal_ (as the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ says) he was

not a person to be laughed at.’ He attended the Parliament House in the

character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the

celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative

or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.

Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.

‘If a _Charlie_ should find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and

venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel

come to judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts

of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue. The magistrate

listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of guineas.’

Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine. Barclay,

Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Café, the

Rainbow, and Rutherford’s are to us. An hour’s reading in these old

pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is similar and so

much that is different; the follies and amusements are so like our own,

and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one pauses

and looks about him in philosophic judgment. The muddy quadrangle is

thick with living students; but in our eyes it swarms also with the

phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats of 1824. Two races meet:

races alike and diverse. Two performances are played before our eyes;

but the change seems merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.

Plot and passion are the same. It is the fall of the spun shilling

whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.

In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of the

present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail—whether we or the

readers of the _Lapsus_ stand higher in the balance.

CHAPTER II—THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

We have now reached the difficult portion of our task. _Mr. Tatler_, for

all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about the

students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred selves, for a

brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities, let such a

Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or the

Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark quadrangle.

We confess that this idea alarms us. We enter a protest. We bind

ourselves over verbally to keep the peace. We hope, moreover, that

having thus made you secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we

be dull, and set that down to caution which you might before have charged

to the account of stupidity.

The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions

which are the best salt of life. All the fine old professional flavour

in language has evaporated. Your very gravedigger has forgotten his

avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over

Ophelia’s grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of

bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of

life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed

down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth

undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not

attempt to join _Mr. Taller_ in his simple division of students into

_Law_, _Divinity_, and _Medical_. Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands

over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in _Love for

Love_) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying:

‘Sister, Sister—Sister everyway!’ A few restrictions, indeed, remain to

influence the followers of individual branches of study. The Divinity,

for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day,

is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain

to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.

Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit

to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher, although

it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority. Others

again (and this we think the worst method), finding German grammar a

somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of

independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold

the others without being laughed at.

Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more

distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed

down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more

featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has

descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions

of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on

a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare’s theatre. And in the midst of

all this weary sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of

every face. No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear

winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur’s Seat, and hear the church

bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered smoke

of the city. He will not break Sunday to so little purpose. He no

longer finds pleasure in the mere output of his surplus energy. He

husbands his strength, and lays out walks, and reading, and amusement

with deep consideration, so that he may get as much work and pleasure out

of his body as he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or

such flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.

See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three

minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit

that, if we have not made it ‘an habitation of dragons,’ we have at least

transformed it into ‘a court for owls.’ Solemnity broods heavily over

the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth of

merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment. You might as well try

‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death’

as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.

The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,

debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books. A reserved

rivalry sunders them. Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,

others are already inhabitants of that land

‘Where entity and quiddity,

‘Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly—

Where Truth in person does appear

Like words congealed in northern air.’

But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies—no pedantic

love of this subject or that lights up their eyes—science and learning

are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced

and which they solemnly pursue. ‘Labour’s pale priests,’ their lips seem

incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of

professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre fingers.

They walk like Saul among the asses.

The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper

dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial—a matter

of white greatcoats and loud voices—strangely different from the stately

frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their element in

the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour, which still

clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on their morbid

sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory

march along Princes Street. Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a

painful obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same

chill official manner, and with the same commonplace advances, the same

dogged observance of traditional behaviour. The shape of their raiment

is a burden almost greater than they can bear, and they halt in their

walk to preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one

would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course,

for ourselves; but we would as soon associate with a herd of sprightly

apes as with these gloomy modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our

Valentines, even our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon

nothing more amusing!

Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,

is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse

seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have

surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see

gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each

other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of

depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items

of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress for

approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their own.

An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a

man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful

spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of brotherhood. There

is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as

steady-going and systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.

Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful to

those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet in the

‘College Anthem’ have beguiled so many weary hours and added a pleasant

variety to the strain of close attention. But even these are too

evidently professional in their antics. They go about cogitating puns

and inventing tricks. It is their vocation, Hal. They are the

gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown when he leaves

the stage, their merriment too often sinks as the bell rings the hour of

liberty, and they pass forth by the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and

meditating fresh gambols for the morrow.

This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by too

many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to

think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced. We feel

inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of _University feeling_

which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.

Academical interests are so few and far between—students, as students,

have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry—there is such an

entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college friendships,

that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.

Our system is full of anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he was a shabby

student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory for

anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let there be an

end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this shuddering fine

ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both ourselves and the

College bettered. Let it be a sufficient reason for intercourse that two

men sit together on the same benches. Let the great A be held excused

for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he can say, ‘That

fellow is a student.’ Once this could be brought about, we think you

would find the whole heart of the University beat faster. We think you

would find a fusion among the students, a growth of common feelings, an

increasing sympathy between class and class, whose influence (in such a

heterogeneous company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all

branches of politics and social progress. It would do more than this.

If we could find some method of making the University a real mother to

her sons—something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and a

lottery of somewhat shabby prizes—we should strike a death-blow at the

constrained and unnatural attitude of our Society. At present we are not

a united body, but a loose gathering of individuals, whose inherent

attraction is allowed to condense them into little knots and coteries.

Our last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition. There

was no party spirit—no unity of interests. A few, who were mischievously

inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file;

but even before they reached their destination the feeble inspiration had

died out in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed

strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others slunk back

to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors. The same is visible

in better things. As you send a man to an English University that he may

have his prejudices rubbed off, you might send him to Edinburgh that he

may have them ingrained—rendered indelible—fostered by sympathy into

living principles of his spirit. And the reason of it is quite plain.

From this absence of University feeling it comes that a man’s friendships

are always the direct and immediate results of these very prejudices. A

common weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a

mutual vice is the readiest introduction. The studious associate with

the studious alone—the dandies with the dandies. There is nothing to

force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day

more wedded to their own original opinions and affections. They see

through the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments, all real

catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened into one

position—becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere, that it

shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air that

circulates in the general field of mankind.

Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our present state.

Specialism in study is another. We doubt whether this has ever been a

good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much worse now

than it was. Formerly, when a man became a specialist, it was out of

affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand devotion he left all

the world of Science to follow his true love; and he contrived to find

that strange pedantic interest which inspired the man who

‘Settled _Hoti’s_ business—let it be—

Properly based _Oun—_

Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _De_,

Dead from the waist down.’

Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the saving

clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of

choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-of-all-Trades;

and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws his

pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold—John the Specialist.

That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we hold that it

is _not_ the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind becomes narrowed

and circumscribed to one ‘punctual spot’ of knowledge. A rank unhealthy

soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself above others in his

one little branch—in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian

history—he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others. Having

all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in every other; and

he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and intolerant bigot. Dilettante

is now a term of reproach; but there is a certain form of dilettantism to

which no one can object. It is this that we want among our students. We

wish them to abandon no subject until they have seen and felt its

merit—to act under a general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a

commercial eagerness to excel in one.

In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are apostles

of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being, as we

should, true men and _loving_ students. Of course both of these could be

corrected by the students themselves; but this is nothing to the purpose:

it is more important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of alumni

could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and wider

sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say something upon this

head.

One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be when we

grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on restrictions and

acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till he

looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We

please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We would

fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end in another; and

that when we are in fact the octogenarians that we _seem_ at present,

there shall be no merrier men on earth. It is pleasant to picture us,

sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our

evening cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.

CHAPTER III—DEBATING SOCIETIES

A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment. You do not

often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room

with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance

little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully

ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot

Question—oldest of dialectic nightmares—is often found astride of a

somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of

_general-utility_ men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they

fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the ‘Princess’s,’

which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt of

German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders. There is a

sad absence of striking argument or real lively discussion. Indeed, you

feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members; and it is not until you

rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit shamefully down again, amid

eleemosynary applause, that you begin to find your level and value others

rightly. Even then, even when failure has damped your critical ardour,

you will see many things to be laughed at in the deportment of your

rivals.

Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after eloquence.

They are of those who ‘pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope,’ and

who, since they expect that ‘the deficiencies of last sentence will be

supplied by the next,’ have been recommended by Dr. Samuel Johnson to

‘attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.’ They are

characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing damps them. They rise

from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch forth into another

with unabated vigour. They have all the manner of an orator. From the

tone of their voice, you would expect a splendid period—and lo! a string

of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out with stammerings and

throat-clearings. They possess the art (learned from the pulpit) of

rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a single syllable—of

striking a balance in a top-heavy period by lengthening out a word into a

melancholy quaver. Withal, they never cease to hope. Even at last, even

when they have exhausted all their ideas, even after the would-be

peroration has finally refused to perorate, they remain upon their feet

with their mouths open, waiting for some further inspiration, like

Chaucer’s widow’s son in the dung-hole, after

‘His throat was kit unto the nekké bone,’

in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue, and

give him renewed and clearer utterance.

These men may have something to say, if they could only say it—indeed

they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing to

say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that

makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to

cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery.

They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a

torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same

dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark

with the same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.

After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few

other varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,

whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who

votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an air

of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises,

emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever attempting to

tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men who ride pick-a-back on

their family reputation, or, if their family have none, identify

themselves with some well-known statesman, use his opinions, and lend him

their patronage on all occasions. This is a dangerous plan, and serves

oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a speech.

But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence

by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high

enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a

fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never

disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us

into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of

Pope’s couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind

friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of

applause. _Amis lecteurs_, this is a painful topic. It is possible that

we too, we, the ‘potent, grave, and reverend’ editor, may have suffered

these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.

Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.

In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any student

to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives should

repay him an hundredfold for them all. The life of the debating society

is a handy antidote to the life of the classroom and quadrangle. Nothing

could be conceived more excellent as a weapon against many of those

_peccant humours_ that we have been railing against in the jeremiad of

our last ‘College Paper’—particularly in the field of intellect. It is a

sad sight to see our heather-scented students, our boys of seventeen,

coming up to College with determined views—_roués_ in speculation—having

gauged the vanity of philosophy or learned to shun it as the middle-man

of heresy—a company of determined, deliberate opinionists, not to be

moved by all the sleights of logic. What have such men to do with study?

If their minds are made up irrevocably, why burn the ‘studious lamp’ in

search of further confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student

deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who

is yet employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent

and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable

positions. He should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive

farce of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we

desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a means of

melting down this museum of premature petrifactions into living and

impressionable soul that we insist on their utility. If we could once

prevail on our students to feel no shame in avowing an uncertain attitude

towards any subject, if we could teach them that it was unnecessary for

every lad to have his _opinionette_ on every topic, we should have gone a

far way towards bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of

thinkers; and this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to

perform.

We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with

them. We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through, and

then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment. We find men of

talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely different from

ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves. But the best means

of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk are

most inclined to condemn—I mean the law of _obliged speeches_. Your

senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the

negative, just as suits his best convenience. This tends to the most

perfect liberality. It is no good hearing the arguments of an opponent,

for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if you do take the

trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious search for weaknesses.

This is proved, I fear, in every debate; when you hear each speaker

arguing out his own prepared _spécialité_ (he never intended speaking, of

course, until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own

_coached-up_ subject without the least attention to what has gone before,

as utterly at sea about the drift of his adversary’s speech as Panurge

when he argued with Thaumaste, and merely linking his own prelection to

the last by a few flippant criticisms. Now, as the rule stands, you are

saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard

for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely,

the case as it stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you

not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard! How many new

difficulties take form before your eyes? how many superannuated arguments

cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced

eclecticism!

Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend also to

foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men. This

last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement of

our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we devote

a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.

At present they partake too much of the nature of a _clique_. Friends

propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society

degenerates into a sort of family party. You may confirm old

acquaintances, but you can rarely make new ones. You find yourself in

the atmosphere of your own daily intercourse. Now, this is an

unfortunate circumstance, which it seems to me might readily be

rectified. Our Principal has shown himself so friendly towards all

College improvements that I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised a

certain suggestion, which is not a new one with me, and which must often

have been proposed and canvassed heretofore—I mean, a real _University

Debating Society_, patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the

Professors, to which every one might gain ready admittance on sight of

his matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a necessity

to speak, and where the obscure student might have another object for

attendance besides the mere desire to save his fines: to wit, the chance

of drawing on himself the favourable consideration of his teachers. This

would be merely following in the good tendency, which has been so

noticeable during all this session, to increase and multiply student

societies and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a matter of much

difficulty. The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the

class-rooms at first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the

library, might be the place of meeting. There would be no want of

attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to

speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the

other, in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may

do the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might end,

perhaps, by rivalling the ‘Union’ at Cambridge or the ‘Union’ at Oxford.

CHAPTER IV—THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS {151}

It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society

by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius—that our climate is

essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords

of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability,

had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the

inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues. A ribbon of

the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person’s courage;

a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study and

acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the

stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged index

of social position.

Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering

after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind. To the

superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account for

his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the hard

labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could have

supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful _constitutional_ arm in

arm with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory of a vanished

respectability called for some outward manifestation, and the result

was—an umbrella. A pious castaway might have rigged up a belfry and

solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe

was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an

example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse

circumstances as we have ever met with.

It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very

foremost badge of modern civilisation—the Urim and Thummim of

respectability. Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the most

natural manner. Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were first

introduced into this country, what manner of men would use them, and what

class would adhere to the useless but ornamental cane. The first,

without doubt, would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their

health, or the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the second, it is

equally plain, would include the fop, the fool, and the Bobadil. Any one

acquainted with the growth of Society, and knowing out of what small

seeds of cause are produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions

of intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an

umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily welfare,

and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word, all those homely

and solid virtues implied in the term RESPECTABILITY. Not that the

umbrella’s costliness has nothing to do with its great influence. Its

possession, besides symbolising (as we have already indicated) the change

from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling in tents, implies a certain

comfortable provision of fortune. It is not every one that can expose

twenty-six shillings’ worth of property to so many chances of loss and

theft. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost

inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as

worthy of the Franchise. They have a qualification standing in their

lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake in the common-weal below their

arm. One who bears with him an umbrella—such a complicated structure of

whalebone, of silk, and of cane, that it becomes a very microcosm of

modern industry—is necessarily a man of peace. A half-crown cane may be

applied to an offender’s head on a very moderate provocation; but a

six-and-twenty shilling silk is a possession too precious to be

adventured in the shock of war.

These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came to

their present high estate. But the true Umbrella-Philosopher meets with

far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.

Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who

carries them: indeed, they are far more capable of betraying his trust;

for whereas a face is given to us so far ready made, and all our power

over it is in frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during the first

three or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from a whole

shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser’s disposition. An

undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the practised

Umbrella-Philosopher. O you who lisp, and amble, and change the fashion

of your countenances—you who conceal all these, how little do you think

that you left a proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand—that even

now, as you shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in

its ivory handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from

the exposed gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the

hidden hypocrisy of the ‘_dickey_’! But alas! even the umbrella is no

certain criterion. The falsity and the folly of the human race have

degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and while some

umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly

characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his

real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen

directly opposite to the person’s disposition. A mendacious umbrella is

a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself

below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends

armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the

bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets

‘with a lie in their right hand’?

The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social scale of

umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great bulk of their

subjects from having any at all, which was certainly a bad thing. We

should be sorry to believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool—the

idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have originated

in a nobody—and we have accordingly taken exceeding pains to find out the

reason of this harsh restriction. We think we have succeeded; but, while

admiring the principle at which he aimed, and while cordially recognising

in the Siamese potentate the only man before ourselves who had taken a

real grasp of the umbrella, we must be allowed to point out how

unphilosophically the great man acted in this particular. His object,

plainly, was to prevent any unworthy persons from bearing the sacred

symbol of domestic virtues. We cannot excuse his limiting these virtues

to the circle of his court. We must only remember that such was the

feeling of the age in which he lived. Liberalism had not yet raised the

war-cry of the working classes. But here was his mistake: it was a

needless regulation. Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a

powerful intellect, men, not by nature _umbrellarians_, have tried again

and again to become so by art, and yet have failed—have expended their

patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have

systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and

shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and

borrowing for the remainder of their lives. This is the most remarkable

fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet we challenge the candid

reader to call it in question. Now, as there cannot be any _moral

selection_ in a mere dead piece of furniture—as the umbrella cannot be

supposed to have an affinity for individual men equal and reciprocal to

that which men certainly feel toward individual umbrellas—we took the

trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to whether there was any

possible physical explanation of the phenomenon. He was unable to supply

a plausible theory, or even hypothesis; but we extract from his letter

the following interesting passage relative to the physical peculiarities

of umbrellas: ‘Not the least important, and by far the most curious

property of the umbrella, is the energy which it displays in affecting

the atmospheric strata. There is no fact in meteorology better

established—indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists are

agreed—than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation of the

air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and

is soon deposited in the form of rain. No theory,’ my friend continues,

‘competent to explain this hygrometric law has been given (as far as I am

aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait, Buchan, or any other writer;

nor do I pretend to supply the defect. I venture, however, to throw out

the conjecture that it will be ultimately found to belong to the same

class of natural laws as that agreeable to which a slice of toast always

descends with the buttered surface downwards.’

But it is time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much longer upon

this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished these few

desultory remarks—slender contributions towards a subject which has

fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better understood

by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers of to-day. If,

however, we have awakened in any rational mind an interest in the

symbolism of umbrellas—in any generous heart a more complete sympathy

with the dumb companion of his daily walk—or in any grasping spirit a

pure notion of respectability strong enough to make him expend his

six-and-twenty shillings—we shall have deserved well of the world, to say

nothing of the many industrious persons employed in the manufacture of

the article.

CHAPTER V—THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE

‘How many Cæsars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names, have

been rendered worthy of them? And how many are there, who might have

done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and

spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus’d into

nothing?’—_Tristram Shandy_, vol. I. chap xix.

Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey merchant. To

the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed out the

incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life—who seems

first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic appellation,

soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other, like the dead

sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight of name into

the abysses of social failure. Solomon possibly had his eye on some such

theory when he said that ‘a good name is better than precious ointment’;

and perhaps we may trace a similar spirit in the compilers of the English

Catechism, and the affectionate interest with which they linger round the

catechumen’s name at the very threshold of their work. But, be these as

they may, I think no one can censure me for appending, in pursuance of

the expressed wish of his son, the Turkey merchant’s name to his system,

and pronouncing, without further preface, a short epitome of the

‘Shandean Philosophy of Nomenclature.’

To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt from the very

cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I hailed Robin

Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows; and the

feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I found a

freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one of my

numerous _prænomina_. Look at the delight with which two children find

they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they

have a bond of union stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This

feeling, I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their freshness

and interest, become trite and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is

merely one of the sad effects of those ‘shades of the prison-house’ which

come gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no

weapon against the philosophy of names.

In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which

careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will have

been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible power the

whole course of your earthly fortunes. But the last name, overlooked by

Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition of success. Family

names, we must recollect, are but inherited nicknames; and if the

_sobriquet_ were applicable to the ancestor, it is most likely applicable

to the descendant also. You would not expect to find Mr. M‘Phun acting

as a mute, or Mr. M‘Lumpha excelling as a professor of dancing.

Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of

whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look what a pull

_Cromwell_ had over _Pym_—the one name full of a resonant imperialism,

the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree. Who would

expect eloquence from _Pym_—who would read poems by _Pym_—who would bow

to the opinion of _Pym_? He might have been a dentist, but he should

never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only wonder that he

succeeded as he did. Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon the roll of men

who have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the most unfavourable

appellations. But even these have suffered; and, had they been more

fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and the other have

shared the laurels with Isaiah. In this matter we must not forget that

all our great poets have borne great names. Chaucer, Spenser,

Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley—what a constellation of

lordly words! Not a single common-place name among them—not a Brown, not

a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would stop and look

at on a door-plate. Now, imagine if _Pepys_ had tried to clamber somehow

into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would that word have made upon

the list! The thing was impossible. In the first place a certain

natural consciousness that men would have held him down to the level of

his name, would have prevented him from rising above the Pepsine

standard, and so haply withheld him altogether from attempting verse.

Next, the booksellers would refuse to publish, and the world to read

them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation. And now, before I

close this section, I must say one word as to _punnable_ names, names

that stand alone, that have a significance and life apart from him that

bears them. These are the bitterest of all. One friend of mine goes

bowed and humbled through life under the weight of this misfortune; for

it is an awful thing when a man’s name is a joke, when he cannot be

mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even the intimation of his

death bids fair to carry laughter into many a home.

So much for people who are badly named. Now for people who are _too_

well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a false

position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under the fame of

some of the great ones of the past. A man, for instance, called William

Shakespeare could never dare to write plays. He is thrown into too

humbling an apposition with the author of _Hamlet_. Its own name coming

after is such an anti-climax. ‘The plays of William Shakespeare’? says

the reader—‘O no! The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,’ and he

throws the book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton

Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never

attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled

upon the tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is the case

of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I should have

advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the last-named gentleman,

and confine his ambition to the sawdust. But Mr. Rossetti has triumphed.

He has even dared to translate from his mighty name-father; and the voice

of fame supports him in his boldness.

Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter. A lifetime of

comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation. So

here, if it please you, we shall let it rest. Slight as these notes have

been, I would that the great founder of the system had been alive to see

them. How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive eloquence

would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and

sympathy would not the editor have received before the month was out!

Alas, the thing was not to be. Walter Shandy died and was duly buried,

while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his

fellow-countrymen. But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a

paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all

depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly

and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush

blindfold to the christening. In these days there shall be written a

‘Godfather’s Assistant,’ in shape of a dictionary of names, with their

concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be scattered broadcast

through the land, and shall be on the table of every one eligible for

godfathership, until such a thing as a vicious or untoward appellation

shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.

CRITICISMS

CHAPTER I—LORD LYTTON’S ‘FABLES IN SONG’

It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form

most natural to his talent. In some ways, indeed, it may be held

inferior to _Chronicles and Characters_; we look in vain for anything

like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in _Irene_, or for any

such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared, here and

there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy of its

model, Hugo’s _Legend of the Ages_. But it becomes evident, on the most

hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a step on the way towards

the later. It seems as if the author had been feeling about for his

definite medium, and was already, in the language of the child’s game,

growing hot. There are many pieces in _Chronicles and Characters_ that

might be detached from their original setting, and embodied, as they

stand, among the _Fables in Song_.

For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously. In the most

typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception

purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there is

something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting

criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a

hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or

foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the

fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be

more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went on,

and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. That

depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic:

the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriateness; and

it is natural enough that pleasantry of this description should become

less common, as men learn to suspect some serious analogy underneath.

Thus a comical story of an ape touches us quite differently after the

proposition of Mr. Darwin’s theory. Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the

bottom of this primitive sort of fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough

truths; so that at the end of some story, in which vice or folly had met

with its destined punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his

auditors, as we have often to assure tearful children on the like

occasions, that they may dry their eyes, for none of it was true.

But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers

and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot

deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in

his life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern

thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into

desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in all

points except that it is not altogether fabulous. And this new form,

such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents

the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also, there is,

underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea; and as in any

other fable, the object is to bring this home to the reader through the

intellect rather than through the feelings; so that, without being very

deeply moved or interested by the characters of the piece, we should

recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot revolves. But the

fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought humorous

situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral

expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery, in

fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous. We

find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature

division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson

embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New

Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the

collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to

resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral

sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with the

development of this change, yet another is developed: the moral tends to

become more indeterminate and large. It ceases to be possible to append

it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name

below a caricature; and the fable begins to take rank with all other

forms of creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of its

miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct formula without the

loss of all that is deepest and most suggestive in it.

Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;

there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already

mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables by

the utmost possible leniency of construction. ‘Composure,’ ‘Et Cætera,’

and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So, too, is

the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child, having

treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes back to

find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the same time,

the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a bundle of

love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone by, and then

long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded and sorrowfully

disappointing as the icicle. This is merely a simile poetically worked

out; and yet it is in such as these, and some others, to be mentioned

further on, that the author seems at his best. Wherever he has really

written after the old model, there is something to be deprecated: in

spite of all the spirit and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption

of that cheerful acceptation of things as they are, which, rightly or

wrongly, we come to attribute to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a

sense as of something a little out of place. A form of literature so

very innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton’s

conscious and highly-coloured style. It may be bad taste, but sometimes

we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose narration, and a little

Bewick by way of tail-piece. So that it is not among those fables that

conform most nearly to the old model, but one had nearly said among those

that most widely differ from it, that we find the most satisfactory

examples of the author’s manner.

In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most

remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he who

raised the wind; or that of the grocer’s balance (‘Cogito ergo sum’) who

considered himself endowed with free-will, reason, and an infallible

practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police made a descent upon

the shop, and find the weights false and the scales unequal; and the

whole thing is broken up for old iron. Capital fables, also, in the same

ironical spirit, are ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ the tale of the vainglorying

of a champagne-cork, and ‘Teleology,’ where a nettle justifies the ways

of God to nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of

luck, promptly changes its divinity.

In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will, although,

even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is another

group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look in vain

for any such playful liberties with Nature. Thus we have ‘Conservation

of Force’; where a musician, thinking of a certain picture, improvises in

the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes home inspired, and writes a

poem; and then a painter, under the influence of this poem, paints

another picture, thus lineally descended from the first. This is

fiction, but not what we have been used to call fable. We miss the

incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was

wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this the case with

others. ‘The Horse and the Fly’ states one of the unanswerable problems

of life in quite a realistic and straightforward way. A fly startles a

cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and the

driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed. The horse

continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by

running over an only child; and there is some little pathetic detail here

introduced in the telling, that makes the reader’s indignation very

white-hot against some one. It remains to be seen who that some one is

to be: the fly? Nay, but on closer inspection, it appears that the fly,

actuated by maternal instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs: is

maternal instinct, then, ‘sole author of these mischiefs all’? ‘Who’s in

the Right?’ one of the best fables in the book, is somewhat in the same

vein. After a battle has been won, a group of officers assemble inside a

battery, and debate together who should have the honour of the success;

the Prince, the general staff, the cavalry, the engineer who posted the

battery in which they then stand talking, are successively named: the

sergeant, who pointed the guns, sneers to himself at the mention of the

engineer; and, close by, the gunner, who had applied the match, passes

away with a smile of triumph, since it was through his hand that the

victorious blow had been dealt. Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour

over the gunner; the cannon-ball, who actually goes forth on the dread

mission, claims it over the cannon, who remains idly behind; the powder

reminds the cannon-ball that, but for him, it would still be lying on the

arsenal floor; and the match caps the discussion; powder, cannon-ball,

and cannon would be all equally vain and ineffectual without fire. Just

then there comes on a shower of rain, which wets the powder and puts out

the match, and completes this lesson of dependence, by indicating the

negative conditions which are as necessary for any effect, in their

absence, as is the presence of this great fraternity of positive

conditions, not any one of which can claim priority over any other. But

the fable does not end here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it

should. It wanders off into a discussion as to which is the truer

greatness, that of the vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.

And the speech of the rain is charming:

‘Lo, with my little drops I bless again

And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!

Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,

But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.

Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,

And poppied corn, I bring.

‘Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,

My violets spring.

Little by little my small drops have strength

To deck with green delights the grateful earth.’

And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,

but welcome for its own sake.

Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the emotions.

There is, for instance, that of ‘The Two Travellers,’ which is profoundly

moving in conception, although by no means as well written as some

others. In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten, saves his life

out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in his body; just as,

long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned himself to death,

had violently freed himself from Love at the cost of all that was finest

and fairest in his character. Very graceful and sweet is the fable (if

so it should be called) in which the author sings the praises of that

‘kindly perspective,’ which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye cover twenty

leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle about a man’s

hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the external world. The

companion fable to this is also excellent. It tells us of a man who had,

all his life through, entertained a passion for certain blue hills on the

far horizon, and had promised himself to travel thither ere he died, and

become familiar with these distant friends. At last, in some political

trouble, he is banished to the very place of his dreams. He arrives

there overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there

sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places with

him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old home whence

he has come. Such a story might have been very cynically treated; but it

is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and the

disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands that

things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the

unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it

our own. Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though there is much

practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly

and consolatory spirit is never absent. There is much that is cheerful

and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful. No one will be

discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all this hopefulness

and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague. It does not seem to

arise from any practical belief in the future either of the individual or

the race, but rather from the profound personal contentment of the

writer. This is, I suppose, all we must look for in the case. It is as

much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall prove a shrewd and cheerful

fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world does not seem to have gone much

amiss, but who has yet laughingly learned something of its evil. It will

depend much, of course, upon our own character and circumstances, whether

the encounter will be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or offend us

as an ill-timed mockery. But where, as here, there is a little tincture

of bitterness along with the good-nature, where it is plainly not the

humour of a man cheerfully ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant

and superior and smilingly attentive, upon the good and bad of our

existence, it will go hardly if we do not catch some reflection of the

same spirit to help us on our way. There is here no impertinent and

lying proclamation of peace—none of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do;

what we find here is a view of life that would be even grievous, were it

not enlivened with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed

by a stroke of pathos.

It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this book

some of the intenser qualities of the author’s work; and their absence is

made up for by much happy description after a quieter fashion. The burst

of jubilation over the departure of the snow, which forms the prelude to

‘The Thistle,’ is full of spirit and of pleasant images. The speech of

the forest in ‘Sans Souci’ is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for

nature of the modern sort, and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should

please us, than anything in _Chronicles and Characters_. There are some

admirable felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill,

whose summit

‘Did print

The azure air with pines.’

Moreover, I do not recollect in the author’s former work any symptom of

that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now and

again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches the

burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, ‘Thin, sable veils,

wherein a restless spark Yet trembled.’ But the description is at its

best when the subjects are unpleasant, or even grisly. There are a few

capital lines in this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded

to. Surely nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in

‘The Last Cruise of the Arrogant,’ ‘the shadowy, side-faced, silent

things,’ that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken

steam-engine. And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly

enough, how the water went down into the valleys, where it set itself

gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it would soberly carry

grain to town; yet the real strength of the fable is when it dealt with

the shut pool in which certain unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among

slugs and snails, and in the company of an old toad. The sodden

contentment of the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is

astonishing how unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her

horrible lover, the maggot.

And now for a last word, about the style. This is not easy to criticise.

It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and a full sound; the

lines are never lame, and the sense is carried forward with an

uninterrupted, impetuous rush. But it is not equal. After passages of

really admirable versification, the author falls back upon a sort of

loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of Mr. Browning’s

minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness, and an easy

acceptation of somewhat cheap finish. There is nothing here of that

compression which is the note of a really sovereign style. It is unfair,

perhaps, to set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side

with one of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect poet;

and yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture of a dog,

detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally almost

lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the clear,

simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has given us

of the ploughman’s collie. It is interesting, at first, and then it

becomes a little irritating; for when we think of other passages so much

more finished and adroit, we cannot help feeling, that with a little more

ardour after perfection of form, criticism would have found nothing left

for her to censure. A similar mark of precipitate work is the number of

adjectives tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help out the sense,

and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the sound of the

verses. I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton himself would

defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoön ‘Revealed to Roman

crowds, now _Christian_ grown, That _Pagan_ anguish which, in _Parian_

stone, The _Rhodian_ artist,’ and so on. It is not only that this is bad

in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in which it is found;

that such verses should not have appeared with the name of a good

versifier like Lord Lytton. We must take exception, also, in conclusion,

to the excess of alliteration. Alliteration is so liable to be abused

that we can scarcely be too sparing of it; and yet it is a trick that

seems to grow upon the author with years. It is a pity to see fine

verses, such as some in ‘Demos,’ absolutely spoiled by the recurrence of

one wearisome consonant.

CHAPTER II—SALVINI’S MACBETH

Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of

_Macbeth_. It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he

chose to play the Scottish usurper for the first time before Scotsmen;

and the audience were not insensible of the privilege. Few things,

indeed, can move a stronger interest than to see a great creation taking

shape for the first time. If it is not purely artistic, the sentiment is

surely human. And the thought that you are before all the world, and

have the start of so many others as eager as yourself, at least keeps you

in a more unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if it does not

enhance the delight with which you follow the performance and see the

actor ‘bend up each corporal agent’ to realise a masterpiece of a few

hours’ duration. With a player so variable as Salvini, who trusts to the

feelings of the moment for so much detail, and who, night after night,

does the same thing differently but always well, it can never be safe to

pass judgment after a single hearing. And this is more particularly true

of last week’s _Macbeth_; for the whole third act was marred by a

grievously humorous misadventure. Several minutes too soon the ghost of

Banquo joined the party, and after having sat helpless a while at a

table, was ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly

Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed

again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really wanted, that,

after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air.

The arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made

him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily

topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters went throughout

these cross purposes.

In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini’s Macbeth had an

emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place beside the same

artist’s Othello and Hamlet. It is the simplest and most unsympathetic

of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments of Hamlet is

redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity. Salvini sees nothing

great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle, and that courage which

comes of strong and copious circulation. The moral smallness of the man

is insisted on from the first, in the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy

with which he sees Duncan embracing Banquo. He may have some northern

poetry of speech, but he has not much logical understanding. In his

dealings with the supernatural powers he is like a savage with his

fetich, trusting them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he

is crossed, casting his belief aside and calling ‘fate into the list.’

For his wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew

for her fiery spirit to command. The nature of his feeling towards her

is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch. He always yields to

the woman’s fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much

meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.

Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who

happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement. Love has fallen

out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship. Only

once—at the very moment when she is showing herself so little a woman and

so much a high-spirited man—only once is he very deeply stirred towards

her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible transport of

admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini’s lips—‘Bring forth

men-children only!’

The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.

Macbeth’s voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be

forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman’s hands he seemed to have

blood in his utterance. Never for a moment, even in the very article of

the murder, does he possess his own soul. He is a man on wires. From

first to last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice. For, after all,

it is not here, but in broad daylight, with the exhilaration of conflict,

where he can assure himself at every blow he has the longest sword and

the heaviest hand, that this man’s physical bravery can keep him up; he

is an unwieldy ship, and needs plenty of way on before he will steer.

In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what he

has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the ‘twenty trenchèd

gashes’ on Banquo’s head. Thus Macbeth makes welcome to his imagination

those very details of physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in

him. As he runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to

realise to his mind’s eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he

is dressing out the phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination,

playing the part of justice, is to ‘commend to his own lips the

ingredients of his poisoned chalice.’ With the recollection of Hamlet

and his father’s spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which

that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy, it was

not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two

apparitions and the two men haunted. But there are none to be found.

Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo’s spirit and the ‘twenty

trenchèd gashes.’ He is afraid of he knows not what. He is abject, and

again blustering. In the end he so far forgets himself, his terror, and

the nature of what is before him, that he rushes upon it as he would upon

a man. When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something

really childish in the way he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing,

with an expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go

to bed. And what is the upshot of the visitation? It is written in

Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of Salvini’s voice

and expression:—‘O! _siam nell’ opra ancor fanciulli_’—‘We are yet but

young in deed.’ Circle below circle. He is looking with horrible

satisfaction into the mouth of hell. There may still be a prick to-day;

but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he may move untroubled in this

element of blood.

In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini’s

finest moment throughout the play. From the first he was admirably made

up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked

Othello. From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can see this

character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase; for the man

before you is a type you know well already. He arrives with Banquo on

the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride and

the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a

beast who has eaten his fill. But in the fifth act there is a change.

This is still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is

still the same face which in the earlier acts could be superficially

good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous. But now the atmosphere of

blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and

subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a

slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the

air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth complains of

the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no complaint—he has ceased

to notice it now; but the same smell is in his nostrils. A contained

fury and disgust possesses him. He taunts the messenger and the doctor

as people would taunt their mortal enemies. And, indeed, as he knows

right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife. About her he

questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety; and, in

tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can ‘minister to a mind

diseased.’ When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered

and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief

that he displays. There had been two of them against God and man; and

now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he had

expected. And so her death is not only an affliction, but one more

disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness. The speech that follows,

given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge, not so much for her

as for himself. From that time forth there is nothing human left in him,

only ‘the fiend of Scotland,’ Macduff’s ‘hell-hound,’ whom, with a stern

glee, we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf. He is

inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and

slaughter. Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail; but

when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all virtue goes out of

him; and though he speaks sounding words of defiance, the last combat is

little better than a suicide.

The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a headlong

unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful; and within

these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that, so

far as concerns Salvini himself, a third great success seems indubitable.

Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than a very small

fraction of the boards; and though Banquo’s ghost will probably be more

seasonable in his future apparitions, there are some more inherent

difficulties in the piece. The company at large did not distinguish

themselves. Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff’d

the average ranter. The lady who filled the principal female part has

done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal for what she

tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-walking scene is to make a

memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded in being wrong in art

without being true to nature.

And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which

somewhat interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of

the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall

insensible upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety

from a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it

leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business. To remedy this,

a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about the

prostrate king. A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T.

P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity of a Scots

audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed their

disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of

Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit to

gallery with inextinguishable laughter. It is, I am told, the Italian

tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the observance.

With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a stronger Lady

Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of those scenes in which

Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is left at the mercy of

Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice as well, and we should be

better able to follow and enjoy an admirable work of dramatic art.

CHAPTER III—BAGSTER’S ‘PILGRIM’S PROGRESS’

I have here before me an edition of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, bound in

green, without a date, and described as ‘illustrated by nearly three

hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.’ On the outside it is lettered

‘Bagster’s Illustrated Edition,’ and after the author’s apology, facing

the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial ‘Plan of the Road’ is

marked as ‘drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder,’ and engraved by J. Basire.

No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers had

judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant whether

or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand

that drew the plan. It seems, however, more than probable. The literal

particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots in

the devil’s garden, and carefully introduced the court-house in the town

of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the cuts; and in both, the

architecture of the buildings and the disposition of the gardens have a

kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was, the author of these

wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the best illustrator of

Bunyan. {183} They are not only good illustrations, like so many others;

but they are like so few, good illustrations of Bunyan. Their spirit, in

defect and quality, is still the same as his own. The designer also has

lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as

apposite as Bunyan’s; and text and pictures make but the two sides of the

same homespun yet impassioned story. To do justice to the designs, it

will be necessary to say, for the hundredth time, a word or two about the

masterpiece which they adorn.

All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their

creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more

interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth,

falls more and more into neglect. An architect may command a wreath of

vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came

from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall,

and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and

fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer

of allegories. The _Faëry Queen_ was an allegory, I am willing to

believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.

The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory,

poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust

against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with ‘his fingers in

his ears, he ran on,’ straight for his mark. He tells us himself, in the

conclusion to the first part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh;

indeed, he feared nothing, and said anything; and he was greatly served

in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style, which, like the talk

of strong uneducated men, when it does not impress by its force, still

charms by its simplicity. The mere story and the allegorical design

enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of

faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in

him, not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and

merely decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be

credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the

end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap

which he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant

literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in an

inconsistency. The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of

the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed, like stage-plays,

before the pilgrims. The son of Mr. Great-grace visibly ‘tumbles hills

about with his words.’ Adam the First has his condemnation written

visibly on his forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant

the net closes round the pilgrims, ‘the white robe falls from the black

man’s body.’ Despair ‘getteth him a grievous crab-tree cudgel’; it was

in ‘sunshiny weather’ that he had his fits; and the birds in the grove

about the House Beautiful, ‘our country birds,’ only sing their little

pious verses ‘at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines

warm.’ ‘I often,’ says Piety, ‘go out to hear them; we also ofttimes

keep them tame on our house.’ The post between Beulah and the Celestial

City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in country places. Madam

Bubble, that ‘tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion, in

very pleasant attire, but old,’ ‘gives you a smile at the end of each

sentence’—a real woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying ‘gave Mr.

Stand-fast a ring,’ for no possible reason in the allegory, merely

because the touch was human and affecting. Look at Great-heart, with his

soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his

taste in weapons; his delight in any that ‘he found to be a man of his

hands’; his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again

when he was down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above

all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: ‘I thought

I should have lost my man’—‘chicken-hearted’—‘at last he came in, and I

will say that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly to him.’

This is no Independent minister; this is a stout, honest, big-busted

ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long moustaches as he

speaks. Last and most remarkable, ‘My sword,’ says the dying

Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-heart delighted, ‘my sword I give to

him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, _and my courage and skill to

him that can get it_.’ And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox

than was ever dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that ‘all

the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’

In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision and the

same energy of belief. The quality is equally and indifferently

displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the tenderness of the pathos,

the startling vigour and strangeness of the incidents, the natural strain

of the conversations, and the humanity and charm of the characters.

Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes, the delights of

Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon and my Lord Hate-good,

Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, all have been imagined with the

same clearness, all written of with equal gusto and precision, all

created in the same mixed element, of simplicity that is almost comical,

and art that, for its purpose, is faultless.

It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his drawings.

He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He, too, will draw anything,

from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the courts of Heaven. ‘A

Lamb for Supper’ is the name of one of his designs, ‘Their Glorious

Entry’ of another. He has the same disregard for the ridiculous, and

enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style, so that we are pleased

even when we laugh the most. He is literal to the verge of folly. If

dust is to be raised from the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will

‘fly abundantly’ in the picture. If Faithful is to lie ‘as dead’ before

Moses, dead he shall lie with a warrant—dead and stiff like granite; nay

(and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of the author), it

is with the identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells the

sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at once distinguish in the text by

their names, Hopeful, Honest, and Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as

against By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other,

are in these drawings as simply distinguished by their costume. Good

people, when not armed _cap-à-pie_, wear a speckled tunic girt about the

waist, and low hats, apparently of straw. Bad people swagger in

tail-coats and chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large

majority in trousers, and for all the world like guests at a

garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands

before Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.

But above all examples of this artist’s intrepidity, commend me to the

print entitled ‘Christian Finds it Deep.’ ‘A great darkness and horror,’

says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless deathbed

with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and conflicts of

his hero. How to represent this worthily the artist knew not; and yet he

was determined to represent it somehow. This was how he did: Hopeful is

still shown to his neck above the water of death; but Christian has

bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness indicates his place.

As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for the

most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and each having a

printed legend of its own, however trivial the event recorded, you will

soon become aware of two things: first, that the man can draw, and,

second, that he possesses the gift of an imagination. ‘Obstinate

reviles,’ says the legend; and you should see Obstinate reviling. ‘He

warily retraces his steps’; and there is Christian, posting through the

plain, terror and speed in every muscle. ‘Mercy yearns to go’ shows you

a plain interior with packing going forward, and, right in the middle,

Mercy yearning to go—every line of the girl’s figure yearning. In ‘The

Chamber called Peace’ we see a simple English room, bed with white

curtains, window valance and door, as may be found in many thousand

unpretentious houses; but far off, through the open window, we behold the

sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails it with his hand:

‘Where am I now! is this the love and care

Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!

Thus to provide! That I should be forgiven!

And dwell already the next door to heaven!’

A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the damsels

point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains: ‘The Prospect,’ so the

cut is ticketed—and I shall be surprised, if on less than a square inch

of paper you can show me one so wide and fair. Down a cross road on an

English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon, a hazel shaw

upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing with her fair enchanted cup,

and Faithful, book in hand, half pauses. The cut is perfect as a symbol;

the giddy movement of the sorceress, the uncertain poise of the man

struck to the heart by a temptation, the contrast of that even plain of

life whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the wanton—the

artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely read Bunyan, he had

also thoughtfully lived. The Delectable Mountains—I continue skimming

the first part—are not on the whole happily rendered. Once, and once

only, the note is struck, when Christian and Hopeful are seen coming,

shoulder-high, through a thicket of green shrubs—box, perhaps, or

perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed or pointed, the hills stand

ranged against the sky. A little further, and we come to that

masterpiece of Bunyan’s insight into life, the Enchanted Ground; where,

in a few traits, he has set down the latter end of such a number of the

would-be good; where his allegory goes so deep that, to people looking

seriously on life, it cuts like satire. The true significance of this

invention lies, of course, far out of the way of drawing; only one

feature, the great tedium of the land, the growing weariness in

well-doing, may be somewhat represented in a symbol. The pilgrims are

near the end: ‘Two Miles Yet,’ says the legend. The road goes ploughing

up and down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms,

are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they

have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great,

piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows

them: two miles! it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of

Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in

the distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains his own.

You will remember when Christian and Hopeful ‘with desire fell sick.’

‘Effect of the Sunbeams’ is the artist’s title. Against the sky, upon a

cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent

woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the splendour—one

prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands ecstatically

lifted—yearn with passion after that immortal city. Turn the page, and

we behold them walking by the very shores of death; Heaven, from this

nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wider glory;

and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of

the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once

the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book

in his grasp—a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly

enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not

the first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the attitude of

the manikins—faces they have none, they are too small for that—something

in the way they swing these monstrous volumes to their singing, something

perhaps borrowed from the text, some subtle differentiation from the cut

that went before and the cut that follows after—something, at least,

speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the

horror of the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.

There is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with

a difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to

Tyburn in the cart. Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and trivial

enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the blot already mentioned

settles over and obliterates Christian. In two more cuts we behold them

drawing nearer to the other shore; and then, between two radiant angels,

one of whom points upward, we see them mounting in new weeds, their

former lendings left behind them on the inky river. More angels meet

them; Heaven is displayed, and if no better, certainly no worse, than it

has been shown by others—a place, at least, infinitely populous and

glorious with light—a place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children.

And then this symbolic draughtsman once more strikes into his proper

vein. Three cuts conclude the first part. In the first the gates close,

black against the glory struggling from within. The second shows us

Ignorance—alas! poor Arminian!—hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman

Vain-Hope; and in the third we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black

already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried high over the

mountain-tops of the world by two angels of the anger of the Lord.

‘Carried to Another Place,’ the artist enigmatically names his plate—a

terrible design.

Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his pencil

grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the

perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is

not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the

nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket Gate;

the scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian by the Mouth of

Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him whispering blasphemies; the

daylight breaking through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and

falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian’s further progress

along the causeway, between the two black pools, where, at every yard or

two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by—loathsome white

devilkins harbouring close under the bank to work the springes, Christian

himself pausing and pricking with his sword’s point at the nearest noose,

and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther side; or yet

again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first of Christian’s

journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull, the frog-like

limberness of limbs—crafty, slippery, lustful-looking devils, drawn

always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity.

Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes.

In another spirit that Good-Conscience ‘to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in

his lifetime,’ a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the

heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the

strange impressiveness of Bunyan’s words. It is no easy nor pleasant

thing to speak in one’s lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is an austere,

unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the folds of his

raiment are not merely claustral, but have something of the horror of the

pall. Be not afraid, however; with the hand of that appearance Mr.

Honest will get safe across.

Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays himself.

He loves to look at either side of a thing: as, for instance, when he

shows us both sides of the wall—‘Grace Inextinguishable’ on the one side,

with the devil vainly pouring buckets on the flame, and ‘The Oil of

Grace’ on the other, where the Holy Spirit, vessel in hand, still

secretly supplies the fire. He loves, also, to show us the same event

twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous photographs at the interval

of but a moment. So we have, first, the whole troop of pilgrims coming

up to Valiant, and Great-heart to the front, spear in hand and parleying;

and next, the same cross-roads, from a more distant view, the convoy now

scattered and looking safely and curiously on, and Valiant handing over

for inspection his ‘right Jerusalem blade.’ It is true that this

designer has no great care after consistency: Apollyon’s spear is laid

by, his quiver of darts will disappear, whenever they might hinder the

designer’s freedom; and the fiend’s tail is blobbed or forked at his good

pleasure. But this is not unsuitable to the illustration of the fervent

Bunyan, breathing hurry and momentary inspiration. He, with his hot

purpose, hunting sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget the things

that he has written yesterday. He shall first slay Heedless in the

Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his sleep, as

if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted Ground. And

again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of the

siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth, who did

not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that dangerous corner by

Deadman’s Lane. And, with all inconsistencies and freedoms, there is a

power shown in these sequences of cuts: a power of joining on one action

or one humour to another; a power of following out the moods, even of the

dismal subterhuman fiends engendered by the artist’s fancy; a power of

sustained continuous realisation, step by step, in nature’s order, that

can tell a story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and surprises,

fully and figuratively, like the art of words.

One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon—six cuts, weird

and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout a pale and stockish

figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects. There is no better

devil of the conventional order than our artist’s Apollyon, with his

mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and terrifying

expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the first you see him

afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable in suggestion.

Cut the second, ‘The Fiend in Discourse,’ represents him, not reasoning,

railing rather, shaking his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced,

his tail writhing in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while

Christian stands back a little, timidly defensive. The third illustrates

these magnificent words: ‘Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole

breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter: prepare

thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no

farther: here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming

dart at his breast.’ In the cut he throws a dart with either hand,

belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and

straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who

has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against

such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth

cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and

pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the

battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt

that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but ‘giving

back, as one that had received his mortal wound.’ The raised head, the

bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing relaxed in

agony, all realise vividly these words of the text. In the sixth and

last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim is seen kneeling with

clasped hands on the betrodden scene of contest and among the shivers of

the darts; while just at the margin the hinder quarters and the tail of

Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discounted.

In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the text, and

that point is one rather of the difference of arts than the difference of

artists. Throughout his best and worst, in his highest and most divine

imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the

human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses

the reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a

man’s affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully

parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising

freshness of the author’s fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in

ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible

before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to be

made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints

examined.

Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in any

other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which have, to

one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from childhood up,

and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant Maul,

and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town along

the road to the Celestial City, and that bright place itself, seen as to

a stave of music, shining afar off upon the hill-top, the candle of the

world.

SKETCHES

I. THE SATIRIST

My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight. He was by

habit and repute a satirist. If he did occasionally condemn anything or

anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto escaped,

it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody. While I was

with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook my reverence for

Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of the Almighty Himself,

on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments. Nothing escaped

his blighting censure. At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or

lowered my estimation of a friend. I saw everything with new eyes, and

could only marvel at my former blindness. How was it possible that I had

not before observed A’s false hair, B’s selfishness, or C’s boorish

manners? I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple

of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear

openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half expected

that these miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise

their betters and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the

late of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have

prevailed upon me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish

virtue. More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in

our gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing

than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in scorn.

I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,

but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case. To

understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose yourself walking down the

street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of

vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of

his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until

his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would

run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor. Now my

companion’s vitriol was inexhaustible.

It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being

anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to

criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his

neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go

farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that

things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they

do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they

are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue

altogether. He has learnt the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;

but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to wit,

that no man is wholly bad. Like the inmate of a coloured star, he has

eyes for one colour alone. He has a keen scent after evil, but his

nostrils are plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils

before going about the streets of the plague-struck city.

Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge of

good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow fat in

the real atmosphere of a lazar-house. This was my first thought; but my

second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise, wise

in his generation, like the unjust steward. He does not want light,

because the darkness is more pleasant. He does not wish to see the good,

because he is happier without it. I recollect that when I walked with

him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must

have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their

lips; and I recognise that this must be the man’s habitual state. He has

the forbidden fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself a god

as often and as long as he likes. He has raised himself upon a glorious

pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of ambition; and he

envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest, content in an

elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily attained. Yes, certes,

much more easily attained. He has not risen by climbing himself, but by

pushing others down. He has grown great in his own estimation, not by

blowing himself out, and risking the fate of Æsop’s frog, but simply by

the habitual use of a diminishing glass on everybody else. And I think

altogether that his is a better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most

others.

After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a

spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I have been comparing

myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the

comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I

do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me

very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.

II. NUITS BLANCHES

If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it

should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke from

his few hours’ slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie

awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among the silent

streets. These nights of pain and weariness are graven on my mind; and

so when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I heard or

saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.

Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened

eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing came,

save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was made by

Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished fire.

It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the roar and clatter

of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild career

of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance and passing swiftly

below the window; yet always returning again from the place whence first

he came, as though, baffled by some higher power, he had retraced his

steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.

As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling of a

carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed within a few

streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen. This,

too, was as a reminiscence.

I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the

garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a lighted

window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and pointed

them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there were

children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were signs of

those that waited like us for the morning.

I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well of

the staircase. For what cause I know not, just as it used to be in the

old days that the feverish child might be the better served, a peep of

gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me. But where I was, all was

darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the clock that

came ceaselessly up to my ear.

The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on the

pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all night

through, I waited and longed of old. It was my custom, as the hours

dragged on, to repeat the question, ‘When will the carts come in?’ and

repeat it again and again until at last those sounds arose in the street

that I have heard once more this morning. The road before our house is a

great thoroughfare for early carts. I know not, and I never have known,

what they carry, whence they come, or whither they go. But I know that,

long ere dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously past,

with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the same clink of horses’

feet. It was not for nothing that they made the burthen of my wishes all

night through. They are really the first throbbings of life, the

harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must

please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood

after years of miserable solitude. They have the freshness of the

daylight life about them. You can hear the carters cracking their whips

and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even

a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the

darkness. There is now an end of mystery and fear. Like the knocking at

the door in _Macbeth_, {205} or the cry of the watchman in the _Tour de

Nesle_, they show that the horrible cæsura is over and the nightmares

have fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men

is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.

In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious

knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had

dreamed myself all night.

III. THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES

It is all very well to talk of death as ‘a pleasant potion of

immortality’, but the most of us, I suspect, are of ‘queasy stomachs,’

and find it none of the sweetest. {206a} The graveyard may be cloak-room

to Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very ugly and offensive

vestibule in itself, however fair may be the life to which it leads. And

though Enoch and Elias went into the temple through a gate which

certainly may be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to

it through Ezekiel’s low-bowed door and the vault full of creeping things

and all manner of abominable beasts. Nevertheless, there is a certain

frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an

alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was

in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning found me

lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars’, thoroughly sick of

the town, the country, and myself.

Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in

hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was

delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some

snatch of sexton gossip, some ‘talk fit for a charnel,’ {206b} something,

in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner’s law,

who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan’s liquor, and the very

prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped up

in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such

conversation: the talk of fish-mongers running usually on stockfish and

haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches

that positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I was

doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into the region of

generalities. Their profession was forgotten in their electorship.

Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of grave-digging. ‘Na, na,’

said the one, ‘ye’re a’ wrang.’ ‘The English and Irish Churches,’

answered the other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and it

had been called in question—‘The English and Irish Churches have

_impoverished_ the country.’

‘Such are the results of education,’ thought I as I passed beside them

and came fairly among the tombs. Here, at least, there were no

commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning’s leader, to distract or

offend me. The old shabby church showed, as usual, its quaint extent of

roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the

fire of thirty years ago. A chill dank mist lay over all. The Old

Greyfriars’ churchyard was in perfection that morning, and one could go

round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar interruption.

On this stone the Covenant was signed. In that vault, as the story goes,

John Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil. From that window Burke

the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps o’

nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made grave.

Certainly he would have a selection here. The very walks have been

carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is uneven,

because (as I was once quaintly told) ‘when the wood rots it stands to

reason the soil should fall in,’ which, from the law of gravitation, is

certainly beyond denial. But it is round the boundary that there are the

finest tombs. The whole irregular space is, as it were, fringed with

quaint old monuments, rich in death’s-heads and scythes and hour-glasses,

and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes—rich in them to such

an extent that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled

end-long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts

of odd corners among the sculpture. These tombs raise their backs

against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses, and every here and there a

clothes-pole projects between two monuments its fluttering trophy of

white and yellow and red. With a grim irony they recall the banners in

the Invalides, banners as appropriate perhaps over the sepulchres of

tailors and weavers as these others above the dust of armies. Why they

put things out to dry on that particular morning it was hard to imagine.

The grass was grey with drops of rain, the headstones black with

moisture. Yet, in despite of weather and common sense, there they hung

between the tombs; and beyond them I could see through open windows into

miserable rooms where whole families were born and fed, and slept and

died. At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard;

and from another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman. Every here

and there was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery

inside upon the window-seat. But you do not grasp the full connection

between these houses of the dead and the living, the unnatural marriage

of stately sepulchres and squalid houses, till, lower down, where the

road has sunk far below the surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs

are scarcely on a level with its wall, you observe that a proprietor has

taken advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack against

its back. It startles you to see the red, modern pots peering over the

shoulder of the tomb.

A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones

that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had

taught me to expect little from Greyfriars’ sextons, and I passed him by

in silence. A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me

curiously. A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange

meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his finger to his

nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon my dignity, and turned

grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the

shadow of vaults.

Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the

other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with

famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of

degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress is

lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend or

relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over it,

as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so many

blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant than it is in modern

cemeteries, where every second mound can boast a similar coronal; and

here, where it was the exception and not the rule, I could even fancy the

drops of moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of those who

laid it where it was. As the two women came up to it, one of them

kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through the

clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating to

and fro to lull the muling baby. I was struck a great way off with

something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard

women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they

were saying. Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended;

I had no education to dread here: should I not have a chance of seeing

nature? Alas! a pawnbroker could not have been more practical and

commonplace, for this was what the kneeling woman said to the woman

upright—this and nothing more: ‘Eh, what extravagance!’

O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed—wonderful, but wearisome

in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like numerals than

men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on

a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare’s theatre.

Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of life; and

there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability among the disreputable,

a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia.

For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon

new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the

improvidence of love.

Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates

again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all whom

I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds

and blackened headstones.

IV. NURSES

I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for

death. It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking forth

upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow blankets, and

with long lines of underclothing fluttering between the battered posts.

There were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by one of ‘her

children,’ and there were flowers in the window, and a sickly canary

withered into consumption in an ornamental cage. The bed, with its

checked coverlid, was in a closet. A great Bible lay on the table; and

her drawers were full of ‘scones,’ which it was her pleasure to give to

young visitors such as I was then.

You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and the cat,

and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that died, were all

indications of the want that ate into her heart. I think I know a little

of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure as if I had seen her, that

she sat many an hour in silent tears, with the big Bible open before her

clouded eyes.

If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that had

linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched suddenly

through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn gradually

off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike! She

had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance—repugnance which

no man can conquer—towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty of the

earlier stage. She had spent her best and happiest years in tending,

watching, and learning to love like a mother this child, with which she

has no connection and to which she has no tie. Perhaps she refused some

sweetheart (such things have been), or put him off and off, until he lost

heart and turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving this creature

that had wound itself about her heart. And the end of it all—her month’s

warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the life to vain regret.

Or, worse still, to see the child gradually forgetting and forsaking her,

fostered in disrespect and neglect on the plea of growing manliness, and

at last beginning to treat her as a servant whom he had treated a few

years before as a mother. She sees the Bible or the Psalm-book, which

with gladness and love unutterable in her heart she had bought for him

years ago out of her slender savings, neglected for some newer gift of

his father, lying in dust in the lumber-room or given away to a poor

child, and the act applauded for its unfeeling charity. Little wonder if

she becomes hurt and angry, and attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her

old power back again. We are not all patient Grizzels, by good fortune,

but the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers of our own.

And so, in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely

and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of

thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the children

are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she gets her rent

paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late charges are sent

up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short visit. How bright

these visits seem as she looks forward to them on her lonely bed! How

unsatisfactory their realisation, when the forgetful child, half

wondering, checks with every word and action the outpouring of her

maternal love! How bitter and restless the memories that they leave

behind! And for the rest, what else has she?—to watch them with eager

eyes as they go to school, to sit in church where she can see them every

Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed in the street, or deliberately

cut because the great man or the great woman are with friends before whom

they are ashamed to recognise the old woman that loved them.

When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!

Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark, with

the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit upon the

table.

And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers—mothers in

everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that they have

remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household servant.

It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart, and have no fireside

or offspring of their own.

I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more nurses,

and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can be more

hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a

woman’s heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long

as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and

thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at an end.

This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing if one mother or two

mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to those who share their

toil and have no part in their reward.

V. A CHARACTER

The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat. So

far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes, you can

read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure depraved,

a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of Hell for its

own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching an omnibus

passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing at my side as

though he would cough his soul out; and turning round, I saw him stopping

under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round him and his whole

face convulsed. It seemed as if he could not live long; and so the sight

set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished my cigar up and down

the lighted streets.

He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for evil,

and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness. He is dumb; but he

will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps I should say, his yet

fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into the service of

corruption. Look at him, and he will sign to you with his bloated head,

and when you go to him in answer to the sign, thinking perhaps that the

poor dumb man has lost his way, you will see what he writes upon his

slate. He haunts the doors of schools, and shows such inscriptions as

these to the innocent children that come out. He hangs about

picture-galleries, and makes the noblest pictures the text for some

silent homily of vice. His industry is a lesson to ourselves. Is it not

wonderful how he can triumph over his infirmities and do such an amount

of harm without a tongue? Wonderful industry—strange, fruitless,

pleasureless toil? Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see

his disinterested and laborious service? Ah, but the devil knows better

than this: he knows that this man is penetrated with the love of evil and

that all his pleasure is shut up in wickedness: he recognises him,

perhaps, as a fit type for mankind of his satanic self, and watches over

his effigy as we might watch over a favourite likeness. As the business

man comes to love the toil, which he only looked upon at first as a

ladder towards other desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the

dumb man has felt the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the

eyes of sin. It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is hideous

and loathsome; for even vice has her Hörsel and her devotees, who love

her for her own sake.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

CHAPTER I—NANCE AT THE ‘GREEN DRAGON’

Nance Holdaway was on her knees before the fire blowing the green wood

that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only now and then shot forth

a smothered flame; her knees already ached and her eyes smarted, for she

had been some while at this ungrateful task, but her mind was gone far

away to meet the coming stranger. Now she met him in the wood, now at

the castle gate, now in the kitchen by candle-light; each fresh

presentment eclipsed the one before; a form so elegant, manners so

sedate, a countenance so brave and comely, a voice so winning and

resolute—sure such a man was never seen! The thick-coming fancies poured

and brightened in her head like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.

Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon the stair,

and as he entered the room she bent the closer to her work. He glanced

at the green fagots with a sneer, and looked askance at the bed and the

white sheets, at the strip of carpet laid, like an island, on the great

expanse of the stone floor, and at the broken glazing of the casement

clumsily repaired with paper.

‘Leave that fire a-be,’ he cried. ‘What, have I toiled all my life to

turn innkeeper at the hind end? Leave it a-be, I say.’

‘La, uncle, it doesn’t burn a bit; it only smokes,’ said Nance, looking

up from her position.

‘You are come of decent people on both sides,’ returned the old man.

‘Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-agate? Get up, get on

your hood, make yourself useful, and be off to the “Green Dragon.”’

‘I thought you was to go yourself,’ Nance faltered.

‘So did I,’ quoth Jonathan; ‘but it appears I was mistook.’

The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began to hang back.

‘I think I would rather not, dear uncle,’ she said. ‘Night is at hand,

and I think, dear, I would rather not.’

‘Now you look here,’ replied Jonathan, ‘I have my lord’s orders, have I

not? Little he gives me, but it’s all my livelihood. And do you fancy,

if I disobey my lord, I’m likely to turn round for a lass like you? No,

I’ve that hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I wouldn’t walk a mile, not

for King George upon his bended knees.’ And he walked to the window and

looked down the steep scarp to where the river foamed in the bottom of

the dell.

Nance stayed for no more bidding. In her own room, by the glimmer of the

twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on her Sunday mittens; adjusted

her black hood, and tied a dozen times its cherry ribbons; and in less

than ten minutes, with a fluttering heart and excellently bright eyes,

she passed forth under the arch and over the bridge, into the thickening

shadows of the groves. A well-marked wheel-track conducted her. The

wood, which upon both sides of the river dell was a mere scrambling

thicket of hazel, hawthorn, and holly, boasted on the level of more

considerable timber. Beeches came to a good growth, with here and there

an oak; and the track now passed under a high arcade of branches, and now

ran under the open sky in glades. As the girl proceeded these glades

became more frequent, the trees began again to decline in size, and the

wood to degenerate into furzy coverts. Last of all there was a fringe of

elders; and beyond that the track came forth upon an open, rolling

moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and scanty bushes, and all golden brown

with the winter, like a grouse. Right over against the girl the last red

embers of the sunset burned under horizontal clouds; the night fell clear

and still and frosty, and the track in low and marshy passages began to

crackle under foot with ice.

Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of the ‘Green

Dragon’ hove in sight, and running close beside them, very faint in the

dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the Great North Road. It was the back of

the post-house that was presented to Nance Holdaway; and as she continued

to draw near and the night to fall more completely, she became aware of

an unusual brightness and bustle. A post-chaise stood in the yard, its

lamps already lighted: light shone hospitably in the windows and from the

open door; moving lights and shadows testified to the activity of

servants bearing lanterns. The clank of pails, the stamping of hoofs on

the firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and, last of all, the energetic

hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her ear. By the stir you would

have thought the mail was at the door, but it was still too early in the

night. The down mail was not due at the ‘Green Dragon’ for hard upon an

hour; the up mail from Scotland not before two in the black morning.

Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled. Sam, the tall ostler, was

polishing a curb-chain wit sand; the lantern at his feet letting up

spouts of candle-light through the holes with which its conical roof was

peppered.

‘Hey, miss,’ said he jocularly, ‘you won’t look at me any more, now you

have gentry at the castle.’

Her cheeks burned with anger.

‘That’s my lord’s chay,’ the man continued, nodding at the chaise, ‘Lord

Windermoor’s. Came all in a fluster—dinner, bowl of punch, and put the

horses to. For all the world like a runaway match, my dear—bar the bride.

He brought Mr. Archer in the chay with him.’

‘Is that Holdaway?’ cried the landlord from the lighted entry, where he

stood shading his eyes.

‘Only me, sir,’ answered Nance.

‘O, you, Miss Nance,’ he said. ‘Well, come in quick, my pretty. My lord

is waiting for your uncle.’

And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot and lighted

by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a table finishing a bowl of

punch. One of these was stout, elderly, and irascible, with a face like

a full moon, well dyed with liquor, thick tremulous lips, a short, purple

hand, in which he brandished a long pipe, and an abrupt and gobbling

utterance. This was my Lord Windermoor. In his companion Nance beheld a

younger man, tall, quiet, grave, demurely dressed, and wearing his own

hair. Her glance but lighted on him, and she flushed, for in that second

she made sure that she had twice betrayed herself—betrayed by the

involuntary flash of her black eyes her secret impatience to behold this

new companion, and, what was far worse, betrayed her disappointment in

the realisation of her dreams. He, meanwhile, as if unconscious,

continued to regard her with unmoved decorum.

‘O, a man of wood,’ thought Nance.

‘What—what?’ said his lordship. ‘Who is this?’

‘If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway’s niece,’ replied Nance, with a

curtsey.

‘Should have been here himself,’ observed his lordship. ‘Well, you tell

Holdaway that I’m aground, not a stiver—not a stiver. I’m running from

the beagles—going abroad, tell Holdaway. And he need look for no more

wages: glad of ’em myself, if I could get ’em. He can live in the castle

if he likes, or go to the devil. O, and here is Mr. Archer; and I

recommend him to take him in—a friend of mine—and Mr. Archer will pay, as

I wrote. And I regard that in the light of a precious good thing for

Holdaway, let me tell you, and a set-off against the wages.’

‘But O, my lord!’ cried Nance, ‘we live upon the wages, and what are we

to do without?’

‘What am I to do?—what am I to do?’ replied Lord Windermoor with some

exasperation. ‘I have no wages. And there is Mr. Archer. And if

Holdaway doesn’t like it, he can go to the devil, and you with him!—and

you with him!’

‘And yet, my lord,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘these good people will have as keen

a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps, since they have done

nothing to deserve it.’

‘Deserve it?’ cried the peer. ‘What? What? If a rascally highwayman

comes up to me with a confounded pistol, do you say that I’ve deserved

it? How often am I to tell you, sir, that I was cheated—that I was

cheated?’

‘You are happy in the belief,’ returned Mr. Archer gravely.

‘Archer, you would be the death of me!’ exclaimed his lordship. ‘You

know you’re drunk; you know it, sir; and yet you can’t get up a spark of

animation.’

‘I have drunk fair, my lord,’ replied the younger man; ‘but I own I am

conscious of no exhilaration.’

‘If you had as black a look-out as me, sir,’ cried the peer, ‘you would

be very glad of a little innocent exhilaration, let me tell you. I am

glad of it—glad of it, and I only wish I was drunker. For let me tell

you it’s a cruel hard thing upon a man of my time of life and my

position, to be brought down to beggary because the world is full of

thieves and rascals—thieves and rascals. What? For all I know, you may

be a thief and a rascal yourself; and I would fight you for a pinch of

snuff—a pinch of snuff,’ exclaimed his lordship.

Here Mr. Archer turned to Nance Holdaway with a pleasant smile, so full

of sweetness, kindness, and composure that, at one bound, her dreams

returned to her. ‘My good Miss Holdaway,’ said he, ‘if you are willing

to show me the road, I am even eager to be gone. As for his lordship and

myself, compose yourself; there is no fear; this is his lordship’s way.’

‘What? what?’ cried his lordship. ‘My way? Ish no such a thing, my

way.’

‘Come, my lord,’ cried Archer; ‘you and I very thoroughly understand each

other; and let me suggest, it is time that both of us were gone. The

mail will soon be due. Here, then, my lord, I take my leave of you, with

the most earnest assurance of my gratitude for the past, and a sincere

offer of any services I may be able to render in the future.’

‘Archer,’ exclaimed Lord Windermoor, ‘I love you like a son. Le’ ’s have

another bowl.’

‘My lord, for both our sakes, you will excuse me,’ replied Mr. Archer.

‘We both require caution; we must both, for some while at least, avoid

the chance of a pursuit.’

‘Archer,’ quoth his lordship, ‘this is a rank ingratishood. What? I’m

to go firing away in the dark in the cold po’chaise, and not so much as a

game of écarté possible, unless I stop and play with the postillion, the

postillion; and the whole country swarming with thieves and rascals and

highwaymen.’

‘I beg your lordship’s pardon,’ put in the landlord, who now appeared in

the doorway to announce the chaise, ‘but this part of the North Road is

known for safety. There has not been a robbery, to call a robbery, this

five years’ time. Further south, of course, it’s nearer London, and

another story,’ he added.

‘Well, then, if that’s so,’ concluded my lord, ‘le’ ’s have t’other bowl

and a pack of cards.’

‘My lord, you forget,’ said Archer, ‘I might still gain; but it is hardly

possible for me to lose.’

‘Think I’m a sharper?’ inquired the peer. ‘Gen’leman’s parole’s all I

ask.’

But Mr. Archer was proof against these blandishments, and said farewell

gravely enough to Lord Windermoor, shaking his hand and at the same time

bowing very low. ‘You will never know,’ says he, ‘the service you have

done me.’ And with that, and before my lord had finally taken up his

meaning, he had slipped about the table, touched Nance lightly but

imperiously on the arm, and left the room. In face of the outbreak of

his lordship’s lamentations she made haste to follow the truant.