CHAPTER I

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THE WORKS OF

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

SWANSTON EDITION

VOLUME IX

_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five

Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS

STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies

have been printed, of which only Two Thousand

Copies are for sale._

_This is No._ ........

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF NOTE FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF R. L. S.

[_See also overleaf._]]

[Illustration]

THE WORKS OF

ROBERT LOUIS

STEVENSON

VOLUME NINE

LONDON : PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND

WINDUS : IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL

AND COMPANY LIMITED : WILLIAM

HEINEMANN : AND LONGMANS GREEN

AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

PAGE

I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 7

II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 19

III. OLD MORTALITY 26

IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 36

V. AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER 46

VI. PASTORAL 53

VII. THE MANSE 61

VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 68

IX. THOMAS STEVENSON 75

X. TALK AND TALKERS: I. 81

XI. TALK AND TALKERS: II. 94

XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 105

XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED 116

XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 124

XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 134

XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 148

MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN

CHAPTER I

PAGE

The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's

fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets

King Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The

Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John 165

CHAPTER II

1833-1851

Birth and childhood--Edinburgh--Frankfort-on-the-Main--Paris--The

Revolution of 1848--The Insurrection--Flight to Italy--Sympathy

with Italy--The insurrection in Genoa--A student in Genoa--The

lad and his mother 184

CHAPTER III

1851-1858

Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a

strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming

at Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His

engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson 203

CHAPTER IV

1859-1868

Fleeming's marriage--His married life--Professional

difficulties--Life at Claygate--Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin--and

of Fleeming--Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh 220

CHAPTER V

Notes of Telegraph Voyages, 1858-1873 231

CHAPTER VI

1869-1885

Edinburgh--Colleagues--_Farrago vitae_--I. The family

circle--Fleeming and his sons--Highland life--The cruise of the

steam-launch--Summer in Styria--Rustic manners--II. The

Drama--Private theatricals--III. Sanitary associations--The

phonograph--IV. Fleeming's acquaintance with a student--His late

maturity of mind--Religion and morality--His love of

heroism--Taste in literature--V. His talk--His late

popularity--Letter from M. Trelat 260

CHAPTER VII

1875-1885

Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death

of Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death

of the Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on

Fleeming--Telpherage--The end 293

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

TO

MY MOTHER

IN THE NAME OF PAST JOY

AND PRESENT SORROW

I DEDICATE

THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

_SS. "Ludgate Hill,"

within sight of Cape Race_

_NOTE_

_This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to

read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A

certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth,

portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle,--taken

together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost

awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I

had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the

charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and

when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to

appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be

surprised at the occurrence._

_My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental

youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the

person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret; not because I love him

better, but because with him I am still in a business partnership, and

cannot divide interests._

_Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in

"The Cornhill," "Longman's," "Scribner," "The English Illustrated," "The

Magazine of Art," "The Contemporary Review"; three are here in print for

the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may be regarded as

a private circulation._

_R. L. S._

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

I

THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

"This is no' my ain house;

I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books,[1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by

the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people

thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should

arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United

Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many

different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,

from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the

Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the

seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race

that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate

the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish

mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but

the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in

Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking

woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the

most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India,

along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan,

is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying

stages of transition. You may go all over the States, and--setting aside

the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or

Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as

in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in

the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone

round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our

fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality

of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local custom and prejudice,

even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the

nineteenth century--_imperia in imperio_, foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours

is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature,

steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick

about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the

Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between

the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is

begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life

easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and

ignorance. He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the

same disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for

some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon

his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he

will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an

authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of

Japan to be uneatable--a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of

Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese,

it was proposed to give them solid English fare--roast beef and plum

pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic

folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the

chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit

inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of

miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance

of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is

better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.

Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He

wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.

He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in

America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of

which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a

term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a

subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast

virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view

partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,

at the largest, to a clique of States; and the whole scope and

atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in

reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their

cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness

of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find

myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to

him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example

were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible

to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England

self-sufficiency no better justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most

ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;

he is probably ignorant of India, but, considering his opportunities, he

is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one

country, for instance--its frontier not so far from London, its people

closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the

English--of which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the

sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by

anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good

intelligence--a University man, as the phrase goes--a man, besides, who

had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we

live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London;

among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice

he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things

were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter

of law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be

informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me

roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained

to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the

brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked

me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a

monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the

experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in

education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always

widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant

White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt

ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.[2]

A Scotsman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States,

and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and

strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into England. The

change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted

wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers

of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the

windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see

Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure

of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of

many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody

country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant busyness,

making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air,

gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance

into the tamest landscape. When the Scottish child sees them first he

falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep

turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of

the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets;

the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows,

stiles, and privy pathways in the fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers;

chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding

English speech--they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to

English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The

sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is blunted, but I doubt

whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more

rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long

accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens

the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotsman's eye--the

domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,

venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We

have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country

places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood

has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are

sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are

steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and

permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of

cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotsman

never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these

brick houses--rickles of brick, as he might call them--or on one of

these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is,

and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. "This is no' my ain

house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought

with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it

has not yet been, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his

imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and

breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly

resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England

foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,

surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,

insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own

long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or

two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems

incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should

have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold

our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with

a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with

less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like

a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much,

and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet

surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too

often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often

withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind

evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out

of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational

counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one

interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotsman is vain, interested

in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts

and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is

self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in

Scotland or the Scots, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does

not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and

being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you

continue to associate, he would rather be reminded of your baser origin.

Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour,

the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.

That you should continually try to establish human and serious

relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and

desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something

more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the

attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of

the educated English towers over a Scotsman by the head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scottish and English youth

begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up

those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and,

to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in

both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once

rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a

greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy,

and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy

of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself

to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily

transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind

and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a

less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in

present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are

younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and

perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scottish boyhood--days of

great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth

of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter

Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The

typical English Sunday, with a huge midday dinner and the plethoric

afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of

the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two

divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first

questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What

is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with,

"What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To

glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol

of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked

opens to us Scots a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is

asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly

together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would

have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight

for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days

kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material

conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying

everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the

black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities,

imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the

warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the

architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to

themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the

contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or

Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic

life, costumed, disciplined, and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be

regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege

besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his

compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly

different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a

bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the

public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has

been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and

nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the

exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All

classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman

in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie

from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, one to

smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of

the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class

in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,

fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment,

ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the

sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think,

that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these

uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality.

Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in

while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a

juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study

the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our

tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,

lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the

college gates, in the glare of the shop-windows, under the green glimmer

of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in

wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of

the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, _la treve

de Dieu_.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his

country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and

from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying

iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery

mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in

song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories

in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of

oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.

Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of

the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland

have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish

history--Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five--were still either failures

or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the

Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a

moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small,

the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone

the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of

that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and unpopulous. It is not so for

nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater

readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing,

like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of

boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error

serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the

heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of

number and Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter

Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed

in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked

within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.

Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet

you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove

to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander

wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in

another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social

constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.

Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the

Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scots. Yet

the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the

Scottish lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he

regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch,

after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped

out and kissed the earth at Portpatrick. They had been in Ireland,

stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well

liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that

they kissed, at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people

who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and

hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious,

the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe.

They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English,

but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their

minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their

ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scottish and

not English, or Scottish and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus

influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political

aggregation blind them to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian

Empire would seem to answer No; the far more galling business of Ireland

clinches the negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common

morals, a common language, or a common faith, that join men into

nations? There were practically none of these in the case we are

considering.

The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the

Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.

When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in spirit; even

at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his

compatriot in the South the Lowlander stands consciously apart. He has

had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in

other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home

in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to

remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the

Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent of the mind.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1881.

[2] The previous pages, from the opening of this essay down to

"provocations," are reprinted from the original edition of 1881; in

the reprints of which they still stand. In the Edinburgh Edition

they were omitted, and the essay began with "A Scotsman."--ED.

II

SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES

I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to

the profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_;[3] and the fact is I seem to be

in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am

willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one

point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the

University itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that

are still the same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in

short, as would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of

yesterday, supposing them to meet and grow confidential.

The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more

swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so

that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time

and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last

year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it

near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I

began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found

it, mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that

posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the

dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,

with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but

I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more

emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a

praiser of things past.

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has

doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by

gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it

does; and, what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased

to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very

best of _Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more

strange), had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and

do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have

befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of

advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that,

on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the

most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,

unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the

whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good,

flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning

journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable

gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my

college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his

virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they

were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically

alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how

much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)

seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and

dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may

be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and

that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in

particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in

my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by

his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of

much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at

last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly

shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good

deal of its interest for myself.

But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no

means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if

they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait,

to be sure--long may they have him!--and they have still Tait's

class-room, cupola and all; but think of what a different place it was

when this youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the

benches, and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior[4] was

airing his robust old age. It is possible my successors may have never

even heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the

last century. He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and

plain; he spoke with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire;

his reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with

post-chaises--a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the

Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. Thus he

was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I

could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward,

and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the

windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my

grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from

Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak

good-humouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone

also; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow

him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.

To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a

prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man

filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-offs. But they

cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that

Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly

liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere

sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a

fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of

that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class

time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in

out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the same

part as Lindsay--the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the

dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it

was a part that scarce became him; he somehow lacked the means: for all

his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much

of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible

innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him

best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he

received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show,

trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging

nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!

Truly, he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed,

but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious,

troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist

has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his

spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed

artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it

must have been thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy I behold him

frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem

to see most clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I

never knew but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so

kind a spectacle, and that was Dr. Appleton.[5] But the light in his

case was tempered and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and

flashed vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to

goodwill.

I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.

Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of

merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am

the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I

cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen

times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)

while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he

did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting

upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me

a great deal of trouble to put in exercise--perhaps as much as would

have taught me Greek--and sent me forth into the world and the

profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they

say it is always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is

its own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this

I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more

deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less education.

One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say

of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still

alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise

you very much that I have no intention of saying it.

Meanwhile, how many others have gone--Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not

who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch

and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest

parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their

fathers in their "resting-graves"! And again, how many of these last

have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of

education! That was one thing, at least, from which my truantry

protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be

sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of

knowledge which is worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There

are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be

poor, or drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than

the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for

the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have

done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate manner of

study that now grows so common, read night and day for an examination.

As he went on, the task became more easy to him, sleep was more easily

banished, his brain grew hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary

knowledge daily fuller and more orderly. It came to the eve of the

trial, and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what he

knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, and

being (as I said) high up, and the house itself standing on a hill,

commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my

student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked

abroad. Day was breaking, the east was tinging with strange fires, the

clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless

terror seized upon his mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed;

he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew that it was

normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find the strength to

look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the

street. In the cool air and silence, and among the sleeping houses, his

strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had

passed, and an abject fear of its return.

"Gallo canente, spes redit,

Aegris salus refunditur,

Lapsis fides revertitur,"

as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him that

good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic,

and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He

dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose

up, he wandered; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the

sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the

distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the

appointed hour he came to the door of the place of examination; but when

he was asked, he had forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they

had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted

him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could

only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all,

his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own

intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.

People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent

reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of

the mind as fell on this young man. We all have by our bedsides the box

of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a

young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is

playing with the lock.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] For the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, 1886.

[4] Professor Tait's laboratory assistant.

[5] Charles Edward Appleton, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John's College,

Oxford, founder and first editor of the _Academy_: born 1841, died

1879.

III

OLD MORTALITY

I

There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison,

on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep

cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of

the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long.

The aisles are lined with the enclosed sepulchres of families, door

beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadows of

the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves.

There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant

incidents are woven with my memory of the place. I here made friends

with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely

cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped

about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel

once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and

kept my wild heart flying; and once--she possibly remembers--the wise

Eugenia followed me to that austere enclosure. Her hair came down, and

in the shelter of a tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the

braid. But for the most part I went there solitary, and, with

irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after

name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a

regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had

thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room,

wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the

silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture; and

he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in

scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like

a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was possible,

then, to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe,

monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a

painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly

more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed

beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the

housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the

fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea.

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David

Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's

dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own

nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and

grey tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his

elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk

among the tombs of spirits: and it is only in the course of years, and

after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to

see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own

for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,

and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the

meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,

the sweet whiff of chloroform--for there, on the most thoughtless, the

pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a

divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of

man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his

ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go

again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be

still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.

The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in

immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken

gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of

a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet

here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard

alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the

memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon

their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy

of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to

excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity

of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back

not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in

that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding

the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits

us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to

his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he

should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to

Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a

grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count

"Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more

pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.

And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I

began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was

weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was

day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to

see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and

modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally

from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have

observed two working women with a baby halting by a grave; there was

something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child,

the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles

under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I

overheard their judgment on that wonder: "Eh! what extravagance!" To a

youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and

pregnant saying appeared merely base.

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was

unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red

evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral,

told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his

labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey;

and, in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season

of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others

whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung

about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to

keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with

mankind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was

no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on

spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well

to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide

the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and

dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened, for

"Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients--familiarly

but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a

servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright

table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe

beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the

burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a

superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he

attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is

on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton

differs from the Scottish. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years

of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride

common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor

even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the

shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be

something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic

labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil

isle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient

effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his

contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall,

he counts them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps

appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly

influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many

common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But

I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose

unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage

built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane

above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the

upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate; 'tis

certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of death-bed

dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's

natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his

family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now

behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The

grave-digger heard him out; then he raised himself up on one elbow, and

with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his

lifelong labours. "Doctor," he said, "I hae laid three hunner and

fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating

Heaven, "I would hae likit weel to hae made out the fower hunner." But

it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part

to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him.

II

I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground

of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave,

is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he

sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague

epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is

all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire

unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to

be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable,

and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant

Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his

truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, and gather

flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no

longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice

or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a

power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn

compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble

fallibility. When we have fallen through story after story of our vanity

and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin

to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our

own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and

still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in

with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf

the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that

at the last, when such a pin falls out--when there vanishes in the least

breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for

our supply--when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the

faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with

those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to

memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace

of our life.

III

One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us

labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most

serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint

thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great

gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student

gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw

him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we

loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than

when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked

among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds

of a most influential life.

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,

I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow

of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding,

urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our

friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, and inhumane;

and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry demolish honest sentiment. I

can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit

streets, "La ci darem la mano" on his lips, a noble figure of a youth,

but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere

on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and

his self-respect miserably went down.

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore,

bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had

deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there

was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body

he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed

resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He

returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth;

lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable;

at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him

down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but

with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that

unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low.

Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great

while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his

last step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile.

The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him,

the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but

himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to

think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his

instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of

remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and

pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him

then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over

whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we

gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the

rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear

and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts

that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we

disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of

his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently

awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see

him there, so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not cast

down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to

pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our

wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to

fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who

condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for

a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own

disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they

repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.

But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: _mene, mene_; and

condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had

earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to murmur.

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength;

but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had

betrayed him--"for our strength is weakness"--he began to blossom and

bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore

thrown down before the great deliverer. We

"in the vast cathedral leave him;

God accept him,

Christ receive him!"

IV

If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the

irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these

foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the

difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the

heroes of defeat.

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; pause,

with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A

pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and

an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a

reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example;

and, in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of

the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the

valley of humiliation;--of whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had

the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you,

that in former times men have met with angels here, have found pearls

here, and have in this place found the words of life."

IV

A COLLEGE MAGAZINE

I

All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the

pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,

which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one

to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I

saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either

read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note

down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus

I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it

was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished

to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I

would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I

practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with

myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any

one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and

country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also;

often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played

many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations

from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried

to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school

of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the

most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught

me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less

intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and

the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come

by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set

me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as

there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever

I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a

thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was

either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I

must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was

unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again

unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts

I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the

co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt,

to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to

Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these

monkey tricks, which was called "The Vanity of Morals": it was to have

had a second part, "The Vanity of Knowledge"; and as I had neither

morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was

never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for

recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first

in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast

on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas

Browne. So with my other works: "Cain," an epic, was (save the mark!) an

imitation of "Sordello": "Robin Hood," a tale in verse, took an eclectic

middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in

_Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my

innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first

draft of _The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no less a

man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with

staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of

course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not

Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought

to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the

inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of "The Book of

Snobs." So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and

down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were

not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas,

but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another

hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the

other, originally known as _Semiramis: a Tragedy_, I have observed on

bookstalls under the _alias_ of "Prince Otto." But enough has been said

to show by what arts of impersonation and in what purely ventriloquial

efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have

profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was

never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we

could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival

of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier

and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: "But this is not

the way to be original!" It is not; nor is there any way but to be born

so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this

training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be

none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike

Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have

tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a

prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative.

Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It

is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers, it is

almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless

exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the

considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the

student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose

and preserve a fitting key of language, he should long have practised

the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that

he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens

of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself

knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's

ability) able to do it.

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines

beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he

please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very

true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have

had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own

performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I

could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them

even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I

must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain

with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why

you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way

of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These

were returned; and I was not surprised or even pained. If they had not

been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there

was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked

at--well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on

learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the

occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in

print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of

the public.

II

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted

among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,

Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an

accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of

the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with

pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like

some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in

their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table,

many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a

former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read;

here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks

askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect

on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned

mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of

dead lions than all the living dogs of the professoriate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very

humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;

yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I

was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and, in particular, proud of

being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were

then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name

on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential

in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been

reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that

battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They

were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most

conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a

reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to

one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill

fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comedie Humaine_.

He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I

write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to

heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower

than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would

have it (I daresay very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he

particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its

truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a

pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a

boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely

tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he

took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk

of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years

thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good

hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his

manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are

very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and

to explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon

the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same

kind, "there was a suffering relative in the background." From this

genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me

out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I

best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking

quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer;

smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow

with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick,

with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation

and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and

downs, he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to

breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of

his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had

set himself to found the strangest thing in our society: one of those

periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions;

in which young gentlemen from the Universities are encouraged, at so

much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and calumniate

private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a

man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod;

and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for

Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as

they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works,

as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon

some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a

favourite slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his

own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his

paper single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic;

up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily

ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In

that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of

courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless

ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems

there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his

paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it

must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the

mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.

We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor

thing to come into the world at all and leave no more behind one than

Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and

this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in

a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,

graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_

(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without

haggling, for some pence--this book may alone preserve a memory of James

Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were

all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and

made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and

hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active

brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers

of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University

building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four

were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the main point of the

concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of

arithmetic--that flatterer of credulity--the adventure must succeed and

bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that

morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three

distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my

first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my

fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not

withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart,

I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be

worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I

kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of twelve

pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It

was a comfortable thought to me that I had a father.

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it,

for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed

obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all

four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the

hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been

a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be

still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked

so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that

might have gone to print a "Shakespeare" on, and was instead so clumsily

defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity

myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the

wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into

half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a

copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged,

and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact,

passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will

not say that I was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any

chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the

better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had

the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid

over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who

rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than

formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise

with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I

told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to

work I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one

day from the printed author to the manuscript student.

III

From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers.

The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to

straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains

invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the

thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of

its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent

and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of

Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand

alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert

drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough--he smelt of

the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the

hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the

two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the old Adam that pleases

men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a wayfarer besides,

and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's

profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man

of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to

recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a

maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other

country two such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of

some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.

V

AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER

I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the

uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there

may yet linger a decrepit representative of this bygone good fellowship;

but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life

who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew

Fairservice,--though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence

could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern

flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall, stooping form, and an

earnestness in his wrinkled face, that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don

Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been

nourished in his youth on "Walker's Lives" and "The Hind let Loose."

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch

preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this

as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the

infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell

the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_. It is

impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden

in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its

shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from

the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of

each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make

him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best

that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but

to me it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he

had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking-horse. Latterly he

was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the

parish register worth all the reasons in the world. "_I am old and well

stricken in years_," he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold

enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over

all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a

gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and

reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry

figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.

He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of

places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were

meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad

shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was

condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were

thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were

profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will

consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with

the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen

who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen

Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,

for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your

garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,

throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile

section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in

supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of

your own artichokes, "_That I wull, mem_," he would say, "_with

pleesure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_." Ay, and

even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer

our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad,

professing that "_our wull was his pleesure_," but yet reminding us that

he would do it "_with feelin's_,"--even then, I say, the triumphant

master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance

only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and

that the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit

of the unworthy takes."

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting

sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in supreme

aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned, or wild. There was one

exception to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on

the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery

was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his

bill in order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me

once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned

common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew "_proud_" within him when

he came on a burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with

their graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for

so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish

recollections from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the

beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his

boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures, and when he

went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth

where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite

reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have

shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.

But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking

for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers

together. They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments

for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas

and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His preference for the more useful

growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-plots, and

an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He

would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling

reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.

Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,

raised "_finer o' them_"; but it seemed that no one else had been

favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere

foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with

perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so-and-so had wondered, and

such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his

rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a

plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with

solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the

other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he

would quote Scripture: "_Paul may plant, and Apollos may water_"; all

blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or

untimely frosts.

There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his

favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the bee-hive. Their

sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold

of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot

say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some

recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he

was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal

dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But he could stand

by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest

that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the

cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a

man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the

bees for text. "_They are indeed wonderfu' creatures, mem_," he said

once. "_They just mind me o' what the Queen of Sheba said to

Solomon--and I think she said it wi' a sigh,--'The half of it hath not

been told unto me.'_"

As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters,

of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred

quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon

most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns,

are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding

themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the

very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap

educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he had

dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew

poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his

heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so that he

rarely spoke without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave

a raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the

Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and

ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love:

he interposed between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry,

touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher. He

protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a

great difference between official execution and wanton sport. His

mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master's

particular corner, and adding, "Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't

deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," "_Eh, mem_,"

replied Robert, "_but I wouldna say that, for I think he's just a most

deservin' gentleman_." Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate

terms, and accustomed to use language to each other somewhat without the

bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position of a

seat in the garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at

it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accustomed

to such controversies several times a day was quietly enjoying this

prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit--every one but Robert, to whom the

perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who,

after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no

more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall

to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "_Eh,

but, gentlemen, I wad hae nae mair words about it!_" One thing was

noticeable about Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor

sectarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the

doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. I have no

doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as

considerably out of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy;

and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about

Free-Churchism; but, at least, he never talked about these views, never

grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or

practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally characteristic of

Scots piety; Scots sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and

Scots believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and

missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally tender

heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and

pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny

creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and

the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,

"Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade."

But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of

his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cottage, with

the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that

he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: "_He

was real pleased wi' it at first, but I think he's got a kind o' tired

o' it now_"--the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all

these pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had

digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the

flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new

and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to

honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour

of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and yet not

one of them falleth to the ground."

Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to

greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the haughty

Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant

of God.

VI

PASTORAL

To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with

novelties; but to leave it when years have come only casts a more

endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr.

Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly

the central features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new

impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of

native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany

Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer

marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the

soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the

remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in

particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for

Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one

of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers

about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of

Scotland are incomparable in themselves--or I am only the more Scottish

to suppose so--and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory.

How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or

Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright

burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den

behind Kingussie! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses,

but the list would grow too long if I remembered all; only I may not

forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for

all its pollutions, that Water of Leith of the many and well-named

mills--Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn

of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless

trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from

Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the

Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I

loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy

by subterranean pipes for the service of the sea-beholding city in the

plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole

course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput

may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be

breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent

cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it

would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland

sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river;

it would take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the

most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the

sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain _genius loci_, I am

condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who

cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would

gladly carry the reader along with me.

John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the

Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,

sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the

drove-roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were

thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England,

sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a

rough business, not without danger. The drove-roads lay apart from

habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea

fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the

one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes

were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of

which offences had a moorland burial, and were never heard of in the

courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,--by

two men after his watch,--and at least once, betrayed by his habitual

anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic

prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more

heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter

places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the

inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to

wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by

snatches; in the grey of the summer morning, and already from far up the

hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his shoutings; and in

the lambing-time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This

wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the

Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which

men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part he was

at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural

abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only

by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot

amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre;

I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing

Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing

dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities: his hail at sight

of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met

but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with

the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the

ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone

in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me

a cry" over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and

for me to overtake and bear him company.

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in

ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honeyed,

friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He

laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw,

hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was

permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like

a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain, and a threat of latent

anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and

harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of

Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a

surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with

new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master,

stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging

loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding

me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men

of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking

Scots and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing

at least but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you;

when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing

took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans

of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the

yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionately thinned and

strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the

weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of

sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present so

humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that

weariness was excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten

his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the

sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so

that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every

knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with

lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the

masthead and spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to

fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story.

But John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the constant

butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to work with the

like of them, he said,--not more than possible. And then he would expand

upon the subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one

really good dog that he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty

pounds for it; but a good collie was worth more than that, more than

anything, to a "herd"; he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like

of them!" he would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of

his assistants.

Once--I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born

_Britannis in montibus_, indeed, but alas! _inerudito saeculo_--once, in

the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on

the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach

to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their

misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had

found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for

restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights.

"How were they marked?" he asked; and since John had bought right and

left from many sellers, and had no notion of the marks--"Very well,"

said the farmer, "then it's only right that I should keep

them."--"Well," said John, "it's a fact that I canna tell the sheep; but

if my dog can, will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well

as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he

had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's

dog into the midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he

knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost

them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless

by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and

without pause or blunder singled out, first one and then the other, the

two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and

refused. And the shepherd and his dog--what do I say? the true shepherd

and his man--set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and

"smiled to ither" all the way home, with the two recovered ones before

them. So far, so good; but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is

by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in

virtue; and John had another collie tale of quite a different

complexion. At the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton,

wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for

washing sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he

was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the

deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew him

for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant farm; one whom

perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to

market. But what did the practitioner so far from home? and why this

guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the pool?--for it was towards the

pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, and

presently saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about to see

if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over

head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike

homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and

the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence

before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for alas!

he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; and it was

from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse

himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.

A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life,

in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it

ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or

written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that

writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who

reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have

never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors

rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine

_dilettante_, but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to

speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of

motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death, or

childbirth; and thus ancient out-door crafts and occupations, whether

Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the

scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged

things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much

to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal

taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of

the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost

art which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are

perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all

epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution

but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain

low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees,

next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see

squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his

berries--his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his

name I never heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,

which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but

at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run

some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still

tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have

moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had

one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe

my taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of

John Todd. He it was that made it live for me as the artist can make all

things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep

upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy

aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I

never weary of recalling to mind; the shadow of the night darkening on

the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow-shower moving here and there

like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black

dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly

harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre-piece to all these

features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's

eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of

bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I

still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not

far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking

hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile,

standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch

of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

VII

THE MANSE

I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty

Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the

choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain

water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for

the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and

darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;

and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill

just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black

heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many

other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was

when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife,

have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it

must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the

point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be

exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb

to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as

low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may

be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;--and the

year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side I may find

the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces

by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace

of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall

"spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots

lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a

pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with

an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the

sound of mills--the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain;

the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods

pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the

midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish

stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I

supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is

difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of

stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, and came to man

and woman-hood, in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the

earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with

outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of

the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest

could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign

places: a well-beloved house--its image fondly dwelt on by many

travellers.

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,

judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a

man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the

display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of

his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him: partly

for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are

concerned for beauty, and above all for beauty in the old; partly for

the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all

observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I

now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with

a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons

or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a

library of bloodless books--or so they seemed in those days, although I

have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read

them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our

imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian

pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for

I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and

when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went,

quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that,

if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture.

"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will

He slumber that thee keeps,"

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to

set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a

task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the

old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the

performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness,

and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that,

for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception

into so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed

the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with

no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my

grandfather should strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts

and reminders of his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he

should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving

all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the

rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.

The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had

over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the end of

his many days. He sat by the dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale

face, and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given

him a dose of our good old Scots medicine, Dr. Gregory's powder. Now

that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have

a savour of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the

palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being

accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a

"barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her

hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I

had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he

decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming

opportunely to the kitchen door--for such was our unlordly fashion--I

was taken for the last time from the presence of my grandfather.

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must

suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I,

though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.

He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it

in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the

quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have

been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also and am persuaded

I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made

embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never

made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of

knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.

He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better

with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had

chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly

inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try

as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all

the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my

blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and

centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love

of mills--or had I an ancestor a miller?--and a kindness for the

neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry--or

had I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played

himself?--for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me

played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green

avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still

a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,

perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet

thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its

site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I

had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I

have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our

first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of

Burns's Dr. Smith--"Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have

forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at

first hand.

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or

part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.

Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculi_ or

part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower

order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to

college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking

down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;--we may have had a

rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I

know not what wynd of the old smoky city; or, upon some holiday

excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a

flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these

were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of the

lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of

myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this

would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges

with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scots

still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a

daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not

unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a

grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and

some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two

longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;

and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow

backward the careers of our _homunculi_ and be reminded of our antenatal

lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the

elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at

Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of

letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.

Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the

great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and

shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying

from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a West

India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and

managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my

engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he

sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us "The

Pirate" and "The Lord of the Isles"; I was with him, too, on the Bell

Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and

the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he

must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible

words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe,"

and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat

unmoved reading in his Bible--or affecting to read--till one after

another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes,

parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them

well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up

can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of

ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly

preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions

of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldaean

plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see

peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops,

what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his

habits....

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with

me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in

his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an

aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,

like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts

awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be

distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the

old divine.

VIII

MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET

Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their

recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and

scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a

buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on

the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which

cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,

the little sun-bright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye

with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. _Glueck und unglueck

wird gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the

original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to

wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to

fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and

looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,

substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one

but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once

waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on

both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an

island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening to the

shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the grey old

garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done

rightly: the place was rightly peopled--and now belongs not to me but to

my puppets--for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will

grow faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall

once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it

is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in

butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that

memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire

to weave it into art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.

I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon

its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its

tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the

sound of the sentences is still in my mind's ear; and I am under a spell

to write of that island again.

I

The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the

Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see

the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you

shall be able to mark on a clear surfy day the breakers running white on

many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember seeing it, framed

in the round bull's-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its

shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless, clear light of the

early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood

upon it, in those days, a single rude house of uncemented stones,

approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it

was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely

withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of

peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of

the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores

of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole,

sounding as we went; and, having taken stock of all possible

accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations.

For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor

in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black

rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran

reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct

of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from

land, the work would be one of years; and my father was now looking for

a shore station where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men

live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.

I saw Earraid next from the stern-thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough

and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a

beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier

of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a

street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden

bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put

together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the

hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her

moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking

tools; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern

to and fro, in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any

midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday,

when the sound of the tools ceased, and there fell a crystal quiet. All

about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best,

walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully

smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening

to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath

services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner

reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double

tier of sleeping-bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the

chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent

lighthouse prayer.

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed

to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the

very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,

the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the

great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a

brace of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either

board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,

before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where

the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron

barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes

waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the

mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant

assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might

play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the

Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with

an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect

between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of

sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and

growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the

calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were

different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, and the night fell dark, and

the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and

the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded

with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their

sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when

some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and

sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr.

Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of

undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human

minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that

I saw Dhu Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer

afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an

enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,

riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she

rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.

II

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse

settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the

first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face

of things unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence,

save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, grey, rain-beaten ram

that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the

haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was

found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's

priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the

boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and

the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden

springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the

isle,--all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt

with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.

"Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_

On the pinnacle of a rock,

That I might often see

The face of the ocean;

That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,

Source of happiness;

That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves

Upon the rocks:

At times at work without compulsion--

This would be delightful;

At times plucking dulse from the rocks;

At times at fishing."

So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred

years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.

And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and

sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring

for days together on French battle-fields; and I would sit in my isle (I

call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the

loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds,

and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other

war which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man; the

unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy

years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls,

and the poor rewards. It was a long look forward; the future summoned me

as with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and

beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a

childish bather on the beach.

There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much

together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and

spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most

part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures;

wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise

the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and

as hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems

now to look backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that

loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our

necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other

day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my part, I

was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and

sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had

lost, to attain to that composure; and which had been upon the whole our

best estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some

experience, or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a

western islet.

IX

THOMAS STEVENSON

CIVIL ENGINEER

The death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general

reader. His service to mankind took on forms of which the public knows

little and understands less. He came seldom to London, and then only as

a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting

up for years at the same hotel where his father had gone before him;

faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same

theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine

out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more

beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and

wherever he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his

strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him

up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of

London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained

unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world,

guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian,

the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh

was a world-centre for that branch of applied science; in Germany, he

had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse illumination"; even in France,

where his claims were long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of

the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. And to show by one

instance the inverted nature of his reputation, comparatively small at

home, yet filling the world, a friend of mine was this winter on a

visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr.

Stevenson the author, because his works were much esteemed in Peru." My

friend supposed the reference was to the writer of tales; but the

Peruvian had never heard of "Dr. Jekyll"; what he had in his eye, what

was esteemed in Peru, were the volumes of the engineer.

Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818; the grandson of

Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of

Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David

Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the

engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or

conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was

finished before he was born; but he served under his brother Alan in the

building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and,

in conjunction with his brother David, he added two--the Chickens and

Dhu Heartach--to that small number of man's extreme outposts in the

ocean. Of shore lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer

than twenty-seven; of beacons,[6] about twenty-five. Many harbours were

successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster

of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too strong for man's

arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale

hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in

that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-o'-Groat's. In the

improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of

practice over both England and Scotland, nor had any British engineer

anything approaching their experience.

It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my

father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these proceeded

from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was as a harbour

engineer that he became interested in the propagation and reduction of

waves; a difficult subject, in regard to which he has left behind him

much suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results. Storms

were his sworn adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that

he approached that of meteorology at large. Many who knew him not

otherwise, knew--perhaps have in their gardens--his louvre-boarded

screen for instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of

course, in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had

done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle

that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and

brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not unnatural

jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It had its hour;

and, as I have told already, even in France it has blown by. Had it not,

it would have mattered the less, since all through his life my father

continued to justify his claim by fresh advances. New apparatus for

lights in new situations was continually being designed with the same

unwearied search after perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and

though the holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most

elegant contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much

later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications. The

number and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the

name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer

landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said: and, first, that

Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment

of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration, led him to just

conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments

he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help

of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend,

_emeritus_ Professor Swan,[7] of St. Andrews, and his later friend,

Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circumstance, and a great

encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have

succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks of applied

science. The second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and

only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and

importance of his inventions: holding as the Stevensons did a Government

appointment, they regarded their original work as something due already

to the nation, and none of them has ever taken out a patent. It is

another cause of the comparative obscurity of the name; for a patent not

only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's

instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed

anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least considerable

patent would stand out and tell its author's story.

But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what

we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He was a man

of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that

was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound

essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the

most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately

attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults

of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's

troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these not

inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. "I sat at his feet,"

writes one of these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow

was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that

no man could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent

taste, though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and

delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Oscar

Wilde; took a lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout

admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste;

and though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had

never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had left

school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, for

Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first

he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him

in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old

theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was

indisposed, he had two books, "Guy Mannering" and "The Parent's

Assistant," of which he never wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or,

as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views

were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. He was

actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a

divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same

sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,

founded and largely supported by himself. This was but one of the many

channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained.

The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a

sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited

often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own

unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice

was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he

perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence

of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchison

Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too,

were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death.

He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character;

and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy.

Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to him, and that delicate

employment of a scientific witness cost him many qualms. But he found

respite from these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong

study of natural science, in the society of those he loved, and in his

daily walks, which now would carry him far into the country with some

congenial friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old

book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog

that passed. His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much

freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic,

was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to

settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque;

and when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of

this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after

another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave

his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was

perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions,

passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found

the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger,

and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what

we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in

spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a

happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last

came to him unaware.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw

_sub voce_ Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be

defined as "a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted."

[7] William Swan, LL. D., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the

University of St. Andrews, 1859-80: born 1818, died 1894.

X

TALK AND TALKERS

Sir, we had a good talk.--JOHNSON.

As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle

silence.--FRANKLIN.

I

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,

gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an

illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of

time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international

congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public

errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by

day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament

but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no

book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.

Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good

talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,

freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,

comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,

tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written

words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden

dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the

truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can

only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and

may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of

the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or

merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug

is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary

groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like

schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our

period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;

that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the

harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of

pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our

education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any

age and in almost any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind

of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,

we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a

fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power

of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and

women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival

mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports

of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All

sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and

selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or

heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has

the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and

hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among

friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.

It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy

that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of

relations and the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be

accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company, and

circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the

quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not

that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and

more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of

conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying

where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is

rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing

prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing

in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol or follow

it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and

so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be

reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are

other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.

Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal

lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument;

asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and

opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the

admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of

ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the

vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay

ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we

swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once

launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower

up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out

for the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most

shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with

words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and

theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast

with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes

his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds

of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a

moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an

afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine in a beautiful

green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the

music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The

Flying Dutchman_ (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful

sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the noises of the city,

voices, bells, and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a

symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk

lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within

you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around

you with the colours of the sunset.

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,

rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,

anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the

whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter

in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental

elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is

fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is

proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should

proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should

keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses

of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience intersect

and illuminate each other. I am I, and you are you, with all my heart;

but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when,

instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit

housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to

corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change

when we leave off to speak of generalities--the bad, the good, the

miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus--and call up other men, by

anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or, trading on a

common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the

hues of life. Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing

of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of

history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken

in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified,

change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without

effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a

large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to

the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon,

Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can

leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that

embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for

their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically

human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A

technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art,

or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such

rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human

being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes

me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded

as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the

weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in

language, and far more human both in import and suggestion, than the

stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds and the people

generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often

excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living talk

draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a

creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last

resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of

gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip,

because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor

Scotsmen at all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all

the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities;

the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which

they express their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together

daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in

cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet

scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love.

And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would

have granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions.

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by

private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,

and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any

subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,

however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,

conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an

exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a

baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively

presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive

with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first

utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a

shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold

they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's

cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of

joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life

of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far

apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth;

and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to

fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable

man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain

proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable

adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen

questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be

instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on

equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for

without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach

it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein

pleasure lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd

Jack.[8] I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely

the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth

man necessary to compound a salad is a madman to mix it: Jack is that

madman. I know not which is more remarkable: the insane lucidity of his

conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of

method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject

treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles

like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,

transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling

of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and

flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.

It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack

it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and

such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence.

In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with

moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing

to compare with the vigour of these impersonations, the strange scale of

language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major

Dyngwell--

"As fast as a musician scatters sounds

Out of an instrument--"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant

particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence, and bathos,

each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder

of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging

to the same school, is Burly.[9] Burly is a man of a great presence; he

commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of

character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could

be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been

said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical

inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of

talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you

down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of

revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both

conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and

the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in

these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end

arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves

to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout

there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear

although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet

concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend

debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of

transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and

then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two

favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues

that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we

love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot,

in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full

measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat

from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard

adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an

enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery, and manners of its

own; live a life apart, more arduous, active, and glowing than any real

existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a

theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the

chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far

finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated

poetry, Burly the romantic prose of similar themes; the one glances high

like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many

changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but

both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched

ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of

contradiction.

Cockshot[10] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has

been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,

brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point

about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound

nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one

instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in

your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I _should_

have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the vigour with

which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by

a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas,

as an athlete bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He

has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic

gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the

thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in

these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable

even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy--as when idle

people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's

diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours

of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and

spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He

knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of

talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a

thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his

adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.

Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the

driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable

quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred,[11] on the

other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat

slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to

shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a

refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw

it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often

instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as

well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal

he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by

accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally,

they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and

humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into

the very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the

words next his skin, and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of

particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as

the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often

enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and, between us, on

this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known

him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it

in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life

with humorous or grave intention, and all the while never hurrying, nor

flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given

moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly

just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts

is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet

slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating

but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion

studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against his

will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and

poetic talk of Opalstein.[12] His various and exotic knowledge, complete

although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of

language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with

some, not _quite_ with me--_proxime accessit_, I should say. He sings

the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and

music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even

wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more

tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the

Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic

notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has

something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and

he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding

for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly

reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his

members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always,

perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings

into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are

conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake

off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional

disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who

find themselves one day giving too much and the next, when they are wary

out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel[13] is in another class

from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in

conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of

which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is

radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hill-top, and

from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours. He seems

not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest;

when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the

dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are silenced.

True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer, and

more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold so steady

an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a

score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends

into a strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In

these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen

Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the

insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve

wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric,

for there is none, alas! to give him answer.

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the

sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of

common friends. To have their proper weight they should appear in a

biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic,

it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent

himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk

where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you

were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the

greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason

that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce

Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk

with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of

man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes

out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren

of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our

being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have

it, and to be grateful for for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900).

[9] W. E. Henley (1849-1903).

[10] Fleeming Jenkin (1833-85).

[11] Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, Bart. (1843-98).

[12] John Addington Symonds (1840-93).

[13] Mr. Edmund Gosse.

XI

TALK AND TALKERS[14]

II

In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and

there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely

luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the

evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from

personal preference, to be alleged in support of this omission. Those

who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm,

have a ground in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed;

but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active,

life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil.

On the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and

others; they have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity

displayed and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying

for it as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of

honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal

man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and

nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar;

it is like his old primeval days upon the crags, a return to the

sincerity of savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilised.

And if it be delightful to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable

to his younger brother, the conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite

sure of your urbane and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's

vanities in silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an

ass, and send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but

radically more contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a

flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my

vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of

the debate. He will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear to

demonstrate my folly to my face.

For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered

society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the

admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more

atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious

ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an

uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their

character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are

silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying

around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat

in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make better

intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a

glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so with all.

Others in conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than

increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the

philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even

when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may

call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart

of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of

what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all

besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking,

tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument

seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed

countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him

to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would

have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so

superlatively conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is

allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose

his hold on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a

god. Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school

where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for

persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak

with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that

must be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully

them for their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some

one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy

may be particularly exercised.

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly

closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above

our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and

pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in

their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called

a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the

middle class--serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age

and add a distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is founded

more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the

march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they

have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have

held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and

harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we

can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we

were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or

woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,

sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining

after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse

like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective,

under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence

of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before

them "like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of

death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and

revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in

the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene marred

faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we

will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken,

we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds

are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considerations

overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so

stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;

classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of

travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I

have said, of the speaker's detachment,--and this is why, of two old

men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible

authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests

and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends;

each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by the other

lad; and yet each pair, of parent and child, were perpetually by the

ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy.

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent

and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is

perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits

handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning

experience with reverted eye; and, chirping and smiling, communicates

the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are

strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of

years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran

in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still

quickens his old honest heart--these are "the real long-lived things"

that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where

they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his

heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may

be learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is

now gathered to his stock--Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and

author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether

he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew

him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled

into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him

hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not

for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin--and for

that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the

traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by

Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in

the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,

and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could

not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and

Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the

parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and

he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.

His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.

On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at

sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet,

ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a

habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was

puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and

seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,

when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have

pointed with these minute-guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour

was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism,

stone, and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail

tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside

Jeremy Taylor's "Life of Christ" and greet me with the same open brow,

the same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the

man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence,

as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his

admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be

punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotsman,

that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the

colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was apposite, I

suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had

known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic

a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious

love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a certain

part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully

pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing

Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic display. A Moderate in

religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a

conversation with two young lads, revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new

to me. I have had--h'm--no such experience." It struck him, not with

pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as

he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young

fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought

the battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and

graceful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken

in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger or alarm.

His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he

had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted

by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I know

none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time

before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he

stuck to his duties like a chief part of his existence; and I remember

it as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang--a

thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; and as we took our places at

table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We are just what you would call

two bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth;

spoke of "twenty-shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of

old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday.

But what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read

_Othello_ to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved

nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing

parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was

employed, or the same idea differently treated. But _Othello_ had beaten

him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady--h'm--too painful for

me." The same night the hoardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque

of _Othello_," and the contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An

unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His

acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. All the

humanities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his gouty

footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was himself the instance

that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have

found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, discontent, or any

of the passions that debase; a life so honest and composed; a soul like

an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in

music--as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh

hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather

hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical

attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we

must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with;

they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile

vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even

from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the

chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old

lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after

years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.

If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity

of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened

to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time

chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It

requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal

these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is

disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment--if you

had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal

affair--a hyphen, a _trait d'union_, between you and your censor; age's

philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young

man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick

with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The

correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have

transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man

were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But

when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good

humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every

bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and

reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and

ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of

the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened,

who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind

of genial cruelty. Still there are some--and I doubt if there be any man

who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon

Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it

stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and

instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda: his conduct is the conduct of a

man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he

remorsefully considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men,

but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.

Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of

their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the

proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit

employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they

wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility

of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without

rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom

left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less

dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of

Vernon Whitford.

But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit

throned on infirmities like the old; they, are suitors as well as

sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to

follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into

something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to shine with a

certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself,

banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is

humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to

flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and

the commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the

commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided,

and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their

nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them

to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they

neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find

themselves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or

conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and

listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but

with candour and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be

something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt

Sally, then may the male debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ

reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail

him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten

it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk

between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear

fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of

difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman,

under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by

the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward

to the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation,

juggling the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced

with safety in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true

drawing-room queens.

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice

and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them

from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;

their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance;

their managing arts--the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured

barbarians--are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify

relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene

that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the

garden, on the road or the hillside, or _tete-a-tete_ and apart from

interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single

woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long

conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they

but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at

once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost

unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is

turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons

more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process

of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new

worlds of thought.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in _The

Spectator_.

XII

THE CHARACTER OF DOGS

The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great

extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal,

in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares

the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the

potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character

of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns

him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have

exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below

exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent

has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond

of dogs, "but in their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo'

fellow," and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the

vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the

creature's instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to

resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the

"automaton-dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like

strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working

independently of his control, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all

in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret,

enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the

stones; an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined:

an automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited

aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views

and understands, as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he

came "trailing clouds of glory." But with him, as with man, the field of

instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and

about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master must

conduct their steps by deduction and observation.

The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before

the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and

that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the

dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many

speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysic. At the same

blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for

him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of

the dog are many. He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice,

singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to

the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an

intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious

communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye,

he lies with his protesting paw; and when he rattles his dish or

scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some

apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect

have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his

master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a

new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and

this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the

sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience,

and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and

essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity

with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in

a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog

of gentlemanly feeling, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The

canine, like the human, gentleman demands in his misdemeanours

Montaigne's "_je ne sais quoi de genereux_." He is never more than half

ashamed of having barked or bitten; and for those faults into which he

has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he

retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be

caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has

been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts

the faculties of man--that because vainglory finds no vent in words,

creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross

and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with

speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we

had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with

his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he

would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to

Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their

own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans Christian

Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top

to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street

for shadows of offence--here was the talking dog.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into

his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of

franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye

ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and

patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and

became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a

gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole

race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The

number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.

Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far

more theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any

pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit

of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the

little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a

few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature

buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest

processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an

elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has

awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs--some, at the very least--if they

be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at

length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game

explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their

devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would

radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate

and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the

children of convention.

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to

some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally

precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the

converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog,

moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for

ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier is to receive

a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every

act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the

dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate

and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded

gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the

dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with

matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the

dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and

perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious

and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the

dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the

whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the

other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves

effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we

might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle

presented by a school--ushers, monitors, and big and little

boys--qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.

In each we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and

somewhat similar points of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a

contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like

impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find a double

life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism

combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs,

and I have known school heroes, that, set aside the fur, could hardly

have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of

old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the

dogs are trooping.

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of

female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted

their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a

romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at

war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part

he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of

Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial

situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign

without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine

wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was

somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very

alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet

bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer he

is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems

abhorrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot

order, he was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at

their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating

like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like

a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more,

when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame

who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one

hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of

a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly,

in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare

he would then have written _Troilus and Cressida_ to brand the offending

sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of

the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence;

but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral

suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of

decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark,

showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men;

and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience

loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase,

"the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of

effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he

accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I

begin to hope the period of _Sturm und Drang_ is closed.

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female

dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and

study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye,

somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of

amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he

was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter

over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very

proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting

duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be

neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how

he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened,

off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery,

saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and

his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part,

sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of

his day--his morning's walk with my father. And, perhaps from this

cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length

returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served

him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened

not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed

him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not

adore her as he adored my father--although (born snob) he was critically

conscious of her position as "only a servant"--he still cherished for

her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets

away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same

situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit

of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem

with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying

visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary

friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until

(for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he

was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not

the similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the

clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his

visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy;

and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so

destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly

obedient to the voice of reason.

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But

the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.

Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive

respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a

praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.

And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own

blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater

gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be

Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of

levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of

virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying

degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for

though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp

what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town,

there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning

to--the phrase is technical--to "rake the backets" in a troop. A friend

of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that

they had left one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or

a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than

he could guess. And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real

life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At

least, in their dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex,

but of the difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner;

for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and

keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his

master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to

which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform.

How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was

disappointed; and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating

than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety!

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or

nothing for men, with whom he merely co-existed as we do with cattle,

and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold

him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a

life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question

in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the

ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the

nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large

acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street-dog was once

adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do,

gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a

sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into

society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he

hunted no more cats; and, conscious of his collar, he ignored his old

companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise

the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was

alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he

still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired

respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to

condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And

thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With

the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the

vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they

live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of

their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a

thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay

upon his conscience; but Woggs,[15] whose soul's shipwreck in the matter

of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal,

and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his

favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these

unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is

the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness

and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow

or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of

sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he

often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his

haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful

parody or parallel.

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double

etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the

showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of

home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of

carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough

posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her

master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning

point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it

would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read

the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different

degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the

flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their

favour in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business

of their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our

persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same

processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right

against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see

them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and

with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet

as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to

solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still

inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have

they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from

courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief

reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man

shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an

art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and

strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters

are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting

aloft like Louis Quatorze giving and receiving flattery and favour; and

the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true

existence and become the dupes of their ambition.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which

last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his

aim, and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now

lies among the treasures of the nation at the British Museum.

XIII

A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED

These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama.

That national monument, after having changed its name to Park's, to

Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become,

for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are

still afoot, the rest clean vanished. In may be the Museum numbers a

full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may

boast their great collections; but to the plain private person they are

become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at different times,

possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak

Chest_, _The Wood Daemon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_,

_Der Freischuetz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_,

_The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The

Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of

Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the illumination of _The Maid of

the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In this roll-call of stirring

names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and though not half

of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of

their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures,

echoes of the past.

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain

stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the

city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a

party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those

days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself

had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith

Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in

working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few "robbers

carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the

plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon

another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One

figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters,

bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I

would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff,

2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how--if the name by

chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he figured, and what

immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then to

go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely

watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those

pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests,

palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults--it was a

giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a

loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it

by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen,

like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the

stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we

were trusted with another; and, incredible as it may sound, used to

demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or

with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal

vacillation, once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I

do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!"

These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we

could have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered

was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like

wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare

with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in

certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the

world all vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the

uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these

bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and touch

of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the deed

was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had brushed the

rest into the grey portfolio, and the boy was forth again, a little late

for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue winter's even,

and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or some kindred drama clutched against

his side--on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud in

exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the years of my

life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these, and that

was on the night when I brought back with me the "Arabian

Entertainments" in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints.

I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my

clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me.

I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said

he envied me. Ah, well he might!

The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.

Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable, as

set forth in the play-book, proved to be unworthy of the scenes and

characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: "Scene 6. The

Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of

stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting

direction"--such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to

be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much

appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of _The Blind_

_Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince, and once, I

think, abducted, I know nothing. And _The Old Oak Chest_, what was it

all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of

banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in

the third act (was it in the third?)--they are all fallen in a

deliquium, swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.

I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite

forgive that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to "twopence

coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it--crimson

lake!--the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)--with crimson

lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for

cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The latter colour with

gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of

such a savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can I

recall without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I

dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all

was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might,

indeed, set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was

simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry,

and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days

after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to complain;

they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person

can be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and

dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.

Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that

enticing double file of names where poetry, for the true child of Skelt,

reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have

travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or

abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and

are still but names. _The_ _Floating Beacon_--why was that denied me?

or _The Wreck Ashore? Sixteen-String Jack_, whom I did not even guess to

be a highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is

one sequence of three from that enchanted calendar that I still at times

recall, liked a loved verse of poetry: _Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_,

_Echo of Westminster Bridge_. Names, bare names, are surely more to

children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.

The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the

charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the

attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept

into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we

have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt

appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design

these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to

be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The

stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred

staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking

of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar

fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of

voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the

art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so

thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and

incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard

favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the

villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes

themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a

prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the

impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of

gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and

buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the

ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with

cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!

The scenery of Skeltdom--or, shall we say, the kingdom of

Transpontus?--had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland as

in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy

with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could

tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all-pervasive, running wild in

deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing

these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_--brave

growths. The graves were all embowelled in the Surrey-side formation;

the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to

be sure, had yet another, an Oriental string: he held the gorgeous East

in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the

Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But

on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the

Occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour

of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and

I am bound to say was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle

sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how

the congregated clouds themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is

the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the

nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and

corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee

Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes,

spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there again is that impressive

dungeon with the chains, which was so dull to colour. England, the

hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the

navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to visit it, was only

Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come

home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all

foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen

years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and

thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating

pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the

original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the

bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of

Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon

some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the

world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my

immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;

but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see

a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold

scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly

a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree--that set-piece--I seem

to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,

swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very

spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I

was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der

Freischuetz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;

acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent

theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took

from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and

yourself?

A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73

Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage

favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest

readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the

bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's or to Clarke's of Garrick

Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient

aspirations: _The Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish

the belief that when these shall see once more the light of day, B.

Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at

times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly

street--E.W., I think, the postal district--close below the fool's cap

of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey

Bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue

and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt

himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a

choking heart--I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental

money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.

XIV

A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S

The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we

admire the most; we choose and we revisit them for many and various

reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's

novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, "The Egoist," and the "Vicomte

de Bragelonne," form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these

comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; "The Pilgrim's Progress" in

the front rank, "The Bible in Spain" not far behind. There are besides a

certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my

shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once

like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms

(and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns, and Hazlitt.

Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of

brilliancy--glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into

insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and

frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but

"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"

must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual

literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they seem, I have long

been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death. I have never

read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without

reading some of him, and my delight in what I do read never lessens. Of

Shakespeare I have read all but _Richard_ _III._, _Henry VI._, _Titus

Andronicus_, and _All's Well that Ends Well_; and these, having already

made all suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never read--to make

up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for ever. Of

Moliere--surely the next greatest name of Christendom--I could tell a

very similar story; but in a little corner of a little essay these

princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and

pass on. How often I have read "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," or

"Redgauntlet," I have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it

is either four or five times that I have read "The Egoist," and either

five or six that I have read the "Vicomte de Bragelonne."

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent

so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the

last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but

the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the "Vicomte" began,

somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage

of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The

name of d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend,

for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first

perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time

out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I

understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is

of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot--a strange testimony to the

dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de

Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My next

reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I

would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the

shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly

retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down

with the "Vicomte" for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the

fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened

with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and

such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I

gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind

aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scottish

garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I

would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was

so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as

a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding

with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my

slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book

again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn

to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so

charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real,

perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.

Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my

favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it

my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously

than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in

these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to have me

read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a

look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me

with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am

not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about

the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the "Vicomte" one of the

first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow

myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the "Vicomte"

with that of "Monte Cristo," or its own elder brother, the "Trois

Mousquetaires," I confess I am both pained and puzzled.

To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in

the pages of "Vingt Ans Apres," perhaps the name may act as a deterrent.

A man might well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six

volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a

cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said to have

passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my

acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who

has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to be

dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: "_Enfin,

dit Miss Stewart_,"--and it was of Bragelonne she spoke--"_enfin il a

fait quelquechose: c'est, ma foi! bien heureux_." I am reminded of it,

as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear

d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my

flippancy.

Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of "Vingt Ans Apres" is

inclined to flee. Well, he is right there too, though not so right.

Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is

well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings out true;

sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our sympathies. But

I have never envied the King his triumph. And so far from pitying

Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of

malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady. Madame enchants

me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can

thrill and soften with the King on that memorable occasion when he goes

to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the "_Allons,

aimez-moi donc_," it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.

Not so with Louise. Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an

author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for

nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her

mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall

from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before

us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping

market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often

start the trick of "getting ugly"; and no disease is more difficult to

cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in

particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot

read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside

his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore

them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride too high for these

misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not

more lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn,

Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names, the

daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I

am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of desirable women. They

would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La Valliere. It

is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first,

could have plucked at the moustache of d'Artagnan.

Or perhaps, again, a portion of readers stumble at the threshold. In so

vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices

where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that

the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth

chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must confess, the

book goes heavily enough. But, from thenceforward, what a feast is

spread! Monk kidnapped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever

delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan,

with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the

moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St.

Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes,

and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the

Bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle again, with

the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan

the untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has

such epic variety and nobility of incident? often, if you will,

impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in

human nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more human nature?

not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight,

with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and

wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose,

must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But

there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong

as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with

every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.

And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired

with a more unstrained or a more wholesome morality?

Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d'Artagnan

only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to add

morality. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the

world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into

Sir Richard Burton's "Thousand and One Nights," one shall have been

offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless,

perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the

rascality and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one

shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by

that of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." And the point is that neither need

be wrong. We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we

cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there

be such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer

some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in

the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity.

I would scarce send to the "Vicomte" a reader who was in quest of what

we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the great eater,

worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man

of the great heart, and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not

yet clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial

portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever

indulgence, it will not be the portrait of a precisian. Dumas was

certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the

mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "_Monsieur,

j'etais une de ces bonnes pates d'hommes que Dieu a faits pour s'animer

pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes choses qui

accompagnent leur sejour sur la terre._" He was thinking, as I say, of

Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were fitted also

to Planchet's creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for

observe what follows: "_D'Artagnan s'assit alors pres de la fenetre, et,

cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru solide, il y reva._" In a

man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for

negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him;

abstinence, however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge

entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not near

his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which

is the armour of the artist. Now, in the "Vicomte," he had much to do

with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic justice should be all

upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal competence.

And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge;

once it is but flashed upon us, and received with the laughter of

Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint

Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Senart; in the

end, it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech of the

triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer

and wit and art, the swift transactor of much business, "_l'homme de

bruit, l'homme de plaisir, l'homme qui n'est que parceque les autres

sont_," Dumas saw something of himself and drew the figure the more

tenderly. It is to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's

honour; not seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible

to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life,

seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour can

survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member. The man

rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins of

the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his

dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so it was with Dumas on the

battlefield of life.

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man;

but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the

writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that

we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief

merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets

it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has

declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless

creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind, and

upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the

copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine,

natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district

visitor--no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all

refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a

good sovereign. Readers who have approached the "Vicomte," not across

country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the

"Mousquetaires" and "Vingt Ans Apres," will not have forgotten

d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady.

What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson,

to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom he had

personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself

or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say

there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is

none that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to

spy upon our actions--eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine

to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to

offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should

think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan--not d'Artagnan of the

memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer--a preference, I take the

freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh

and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And

this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not to be true

merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.

There is yet another point in the "Vicomte" which I find incomparable. I

can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is

represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas ever

made me either laugh or cry. Well, in this my late fifth reading of the

"Vicomte" I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Voliere business,

and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for

it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a

pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy

foot--within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like

the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear

authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to

me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with

those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular

charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always

brave, never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long tale,

evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and the heroes

pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a regret embitters

their departure; the young succeed them in their places, Louis Quatorze

is swelling larger and shining broader, another generation and another

France dawn on the horizon; but for us and these old men whom we have

loved so long, the inevitable end draws near, and is welcome. To read

this well is to anticipate experience. Ah, if only when these hours of

the long shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope

to face them with a mind as quiet!

But my paper is running out; the siege-guns are firing on the Dutch

frontier! and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade

fallen on the field of glory. _Adieu_--rather _au revoir_! Yet a sixth

time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse together

for Belle Isle.

XV

A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself

should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt

clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with

the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of

continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run

thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if

it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our

books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence

and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush

aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig

for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside

inn where, "towards the close of the year 17----," several gentlemen in

three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the

Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a

scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he,

to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping

fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than

the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the

brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I

can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane;

night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings

of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the "great

North Road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One

and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read

story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but

for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere

bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place,

the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different

from either. My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still

remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with

the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to

be the admirable opening of "What will He Do with It": it was no wonder

that I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified.

One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and

people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open

door of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in

a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the

figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental

impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to

the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling

with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and

witnessed the horrors of a wreck.[16] Different as they are, all these

early favourites have a common note--they have all a touch of the

romantic.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The

pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and the

passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon

we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we

know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon

merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of

these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is

surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but

I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both

which is not immoral, but simply non-moral; which either does not regard

the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy

relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to

do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and

hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of

the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of

arms, or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is

impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on

moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human

conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the most

joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and

places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.

One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long

rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of

lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls

up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we

feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.

And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain

attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts

of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep surroundings,

particularly torture and delight me. Something must have happened in

such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I

was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I

still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some

places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder;

certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart

for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive

and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with

its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is

known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his "Endymion" and

Nelson parted from his Emma--still seems to wait the coming of the

appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green

shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old

"Hawes Inn" at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.

There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of

its own, half inland, half marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the

tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden

with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and

Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of "The Antiquary." But you

need not tell me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or

not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.

So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and

inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some

quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of

these romances have we not seen determined at their birth; how many

people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once

into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near,

with express intimations--"here my destiny awaits me"--and we have but

dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in

a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that

should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night

and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and

suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour

had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the

Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a

horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green

shutters of the inn at Burford.[17]

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively

literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added

the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit

and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,

himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;

and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once

enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative

writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of

common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but

their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and

to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should

fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should

follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but

all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in

music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a

picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some

attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an

illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting

over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian

running with his fingers in his ears,--these are each culminating

moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for

ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they

are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it

was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the

last mark of truth upon a story, and fill up, at one blow, our capacity

for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind

that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This,

then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought,

or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to

the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words;

the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and

the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared

with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical

or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution,

and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford,

or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to

seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a

legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting

logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite

another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet.

The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is

likewise art.

English people of the present day[18] are apt, I know not why, to look

somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of

teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a

novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced

even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the

art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of

monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of "Sandy's Mull,"

preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people

work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's

inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But

even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.

Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in

the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived,

fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon

Crawley's blow were not delivered, "Vanity Fair" would cease to be a

work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the

discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consolation of

the reader. The end of "Esmond" is a yet wider excursion from the

author's customary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the

great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the great,

unblushing French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and

the breaking of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with a

manly martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the

necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of

"Robinson Crusoe" with the discredit of "Clarissa Harlowe." "Clarissa"

is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas,

with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character,

passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters

sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be

somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the

only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and

Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not

a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring

none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of

love, goes on from edition to edition, ever young, while "Clarissa" lies

upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was

twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a

chapter of "Robinson" read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he

had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another

man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and

printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.

Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to

borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but

one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at

length, and with entire delight, read "Robinson." It is like the story

of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from "Clarissa," would he have

been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet "Clarissa" has

every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted--pictorial

or picture-making romance. While "Robinson" depends, for the most part

and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of

circumstance.

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the

pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together, by a

common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion

clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres

indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only the highest

art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the

greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such

are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as

from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are

ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or

subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally

loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights

in age--I mean the "Arabian Nights"--where you shall look in vain for

moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us

among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.

Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment

and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to

these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his

romances. The early part of "Monte Cristo," down to the finding of the

treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed

who shared these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a

thing of packthread and Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is

one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull; but as for

these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant

where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is

very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk

and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an

old and very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage into

"Monte Cristo." Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader,

which can be reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more

than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their

springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies

filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures.

And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview

between Lucy and Richard Feverel is pure drama; more than that, it is

the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their

first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance; it has

nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy and

maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think

he would be a bold man who should choose between these passages. Thus,

in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in

the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine

voice; in the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune,

shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to

prefigure for ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may

hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more

genius--I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly

in the memory.

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into

the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most

pedestrian realism. "Robinson Crusoe" is as realistic as it is romantic;

both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does

romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal

with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is

to conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the

disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a

very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from

beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of

adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember

rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising.

Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy for

ever" to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be

found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of

the same interest the other day in a new book, "The Sailor's

Sweetheart," by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig

_Morning Star_ is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the

clothes, the books, and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things

to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate

interest of treasure-trove. But even treasure-trove can be made dull.

There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods

that fell to the lot of the "Swiss Family Robinson," that dreary family.

They found article after article, creature after creature, from

milk-kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no informing

taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in

the invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in

Verne's "Mysterious Island" is another case in point: there was no gusto

and no glamour about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two

hundred and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the _Morning

Star_ fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of

secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that

discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; and I was

made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be.

To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in

mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces

illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and

while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely

clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to

take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the

triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at

being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the

pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at

incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,

suffering, or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are

not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they

stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our

place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or

with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common

with them. It is not character but incident that wooes us out of our

reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves;

some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in

the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the

characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in

our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only,

do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable

things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we

are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which

it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, or calumniated.

It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in

which every incident, detail, and trick of circumstance shall be welcome

to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to

the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his

life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it

with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves

to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight,

fiction is called romance.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. "The Lady of the

Lake" has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness

and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would

make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through

just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells

undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the

mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside,

the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green

possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, "The Lady of the Lake,"

or that direct, romantic opening--one of the most spirited and poetical

in literature--"The stag at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength

and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that

ill-written, ragged book, "The Pirate," the figure of Cleveland--cast up

by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness--moving, with the

blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple

islanders--singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland

mistress--is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention.

The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene

and by such a lover, clinch, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast

upon which the tale is built. In "Guy Mannering," again, every incident

is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands

at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.

"'I remember the tune well,' he says,'though I cannot guess what should

at present so strongly recall it to my memory.' He took his flageolet

from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke

the corresponding associations of a damsel.... She immediately took up

the song--

"'Are these the links of Forth, she said;

Or are they the crooks of Dee,

Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head

That I so fain would see?'

"'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of

modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the

old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea

of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were something

strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's

appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the

scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the

four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is

laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will

observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is

how it runs in the original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring

about half-way down the descent and which had once supplied the castle

with water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy

would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten

to prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten

to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to

face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams

all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is

not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative

besides.

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong

light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the

finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the

romantic junctures of his story: and we find him utterly careless,

almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and

not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In

character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scots, he was delicate,

strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of

his heroes have already wearied three generations of readers. At times

his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety--with a

true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily

forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man

who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the

Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only

splendid romantic but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he

could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? It seems

to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his

surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they

play to him. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and

humorous visions, but hardly a great artist. He conjured up the romantic

with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it. Of the pleasures

of his art he tasted fully; but of its cares and scruples and distresses

never man knew less.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of

Charles Kingsley.

[17] Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat

with my own hands in "Kidnapped." Some day, perhaps, I may try a

rattle at the shutters.

[18] 1882.

XVI

A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE[19]

I

We have recently[20] enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some

detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant

and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre; Mr.

James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of

finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and

humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate

artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good-nature. That such doctors

should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they

seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both

content to talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing

exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to

the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the

art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of

prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call

by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,

at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom

present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic.

Fiction is in the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element

which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer,

Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet

I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these

two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting

lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then,

regarded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me

suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant

had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel,"

the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most

pleasing novel on that roll, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," the

desire is natural enough. I can conceive then, that he would hasten to

propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative

_in prose_.

Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be

denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded

lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature;

but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to

build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why,

then, are we to add "in prose"? "The Odyssey" appears to me the best of

romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and

Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of

the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a

narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the

long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the

principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice

of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration

in the same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured

verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of

dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are to

refuse "Don Juan," it is hard to see why you should include "Zanoni" or

(to bracket works of very different value) "The Scarlet Letter"; and by

what discrimination are you to open your doors to "The Pilgrim's

Progress" and close them on "The Faery Queen"? To bring things closer

home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called

"Paradise Lost" was written in English verse by one John Milton; what

was it then? It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose;

and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by some

inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine), turned bodily

into an English novel; and, in the name of clearness, what was it then?

But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is

obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want

for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is

applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or

of an imaginary series. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (a work of cunning

and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manoeuvres as

(let us say) "Tom Jones": the clear conception of certain characters of

man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great

number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation

of a certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the

more art--in which the greater air of nature--readers will differently

judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic;

but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of

life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas,

are presented--in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay--that

the novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and

adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free--who has the

right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more

precious still, of wholesale omission--is frequently defeated, and, with

all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and

passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the

sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth

will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours

of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art--to use the

daring phrase of Mr. James--can successfully "compete with life"; and

the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_.

Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most

various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the

ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly

delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and

employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art

only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few

of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of

light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of

incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and

agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun we cannot

look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete

with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,

the bitterness of death and separation--here is, indeed, a projected

escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress

coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed

with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the

insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense; none can "compete with

life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these

facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of

the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised and justly

commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a

last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every

case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience,

even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience

itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.

What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the

source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does "compete with

life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut

his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like

arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured

and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary

abstraction. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in

nature: asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand

upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine

and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up

relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme

of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the

mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues

instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all,

it imitates not life but speech; not the facts of human destiny, but the

emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them.

The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who

told their stories round the savage campfire. Our art is occupied, and

bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making

them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as

in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of

impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents, it

substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most

feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of

the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or

like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from

all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and

re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every

incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in

unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another

way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller

without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;

a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,

flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate

thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,

like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of

geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a

fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both

untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to

life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of

leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, a difference

which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the

meaning of the work.

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible

magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is

legion; and with each new subject--for here again I must differ by the

whole width of heaven from Mr. James--the true artist will vary his

method and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an

excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one

book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and

then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for

instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the

novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite

illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which

appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled

and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with

the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional

nature and moral judgment.

And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular

generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden

treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In

this book he misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to

quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our

judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake,

and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the

volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He

cannot criticise the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing

it with another work, "_I have been a child, but I have never been on a

quest for buried treasure_." Here, is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if

he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated

that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master

James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander,

and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck

and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly

retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and

beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent

reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born

artist, he contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into

revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of

cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things

which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done. Desire

is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it

is true that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work in question

has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable

that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such

a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and

well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest,

having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten

road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to

the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character

to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of

wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for the

sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown

up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only

within certain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of

another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this

elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with

but one class of qualities--the warlike and formidable. So as they

appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served

their end. Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals;

fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are

portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke

the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the

hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of

material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The

stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the

scent.

The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it

requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of

"Gil Blas," it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on

the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied

in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not

march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As

they enter, so they may go out; they must be consistent, but they need

not grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much of his own

work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying

it at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just

artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform

the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the

humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more

emotional moments. In his recent "Author of Beltraffio," so just in

conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed

employed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the heroine the

working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true

tragedy, the _scene a faire_, passes unseen behind the panels of a

locked door. The delectable invention of the young visitor is

introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his

method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose

me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it

belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very

differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked

class, of which I now proceed to speak.

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it

enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English

misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of

incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity;

and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece

proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a

higher pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore

be founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and

inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I

call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy

specimens, all of our own day and language: Meredith's "Rhoda Fleming,"

that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,[21] and hunted for

at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes"; and two of

Charles Reade's, "Griffith Gaunt" and "The Double Marriage," originally

called "White Lies," and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to

my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In

this kind of novel the closed door of "The Author of Beltraffio" must be

broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last

word; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution,

the protagonist and the _deus ex machina_ in one. The characters may

come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before

they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of

themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with

detail; to depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and

change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the

sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept

mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of

this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it

may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart

and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the

second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue

has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed

to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the

novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre.

A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead

of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be

plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in "Rhoda

Fleming," Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives

are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength

of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when

Balzac, after having begun the "Duchesse de Langeais" in terms of strong

if somewhat swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the

hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of

character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions;

when the passions are introduced in art at their full height, we look to

see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering

above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate.

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To

much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would,

somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he

desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its

worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He

uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with

the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point,

I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful

advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be

helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest,

as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that

we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character

or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an

illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it

a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as

sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of

the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the

argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men

talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may

be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor

any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that

is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of

the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it

will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but

to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he

keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care

particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material

detail of the day's manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the

environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent,

and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the

better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this

age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the

great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and

before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind

that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its

exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand

or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men,

working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their

complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that

simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their

excellence.

II

Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the

lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none

ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those

of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,

the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there

is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a

form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange

forgetfulness of the history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his

own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of

this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little

orthodoxies of the day--no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday

or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are

exclusive--the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary,

I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of

an originally strong romantic bent--a certain glow of romance still

resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by

accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as

often as not, that his reader rejoices--justly, as I contend. For in all

this excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central

human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean

himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances

of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and

aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why should he suppress

himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not

of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall

tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the

true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is

lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and

write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is

reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.--R. L. S.

[20] 1884.

[21] Now no longer so, thank Heaven!

MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN F.R.S., LL.D.

PREFACE[22]

On the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to

publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the

following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable

volumes, has been issued in England. In the States, it has not been

thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing

alone, shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its

justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to

a stranger out of all proportion. But Jenkin was a man much more

remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was

in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude

towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,

that he struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual

figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the

pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting for its own sake. If the

sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin, after

his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will be

altogether mine.

R. L. S.

_Saranac, Oct. 1887._

FOOTNOTE:

[22] First printed in England in 1907.--ED.

MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN

CHAPTER I

The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's

fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King

Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The

Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John.

In the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to

come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,

are found reputably settled in the county of Kent. Persons of strong

genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in

1555, to his contemporary "John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver

General of the County," and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the

proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree--a prince; "Guaith Voeth, Lord of

Cardigan," the name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the

present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from

Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew

to wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was

William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but

no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a

Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry or Robert) sat in the same place of

humble honour. Of their wealth we know that, in the reign of Charles I.,

Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,

and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court. This was an

estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and

Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in

capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage

of the sea at Sandgate. It had a chequered history before it fell into

the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to

another--to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to

Pavelys, Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and

Clarkes; a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be

no man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin

family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in

shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and

at least once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the

hands of the direct line. It is not my design, nor have I the necessary

knowledge, to give a history of this obscure family. But this is an age

when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first

time a human science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the

Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and

destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of

Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and

receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's

story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the

man is only an episode in the epic of the family. From this point of

view I ask the reader's leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man

who was my friend, with the accession of his great-grandfather, John

Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of

"Westward Ho!" was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of

Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long

enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk

themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their

connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended

in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and

brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John's mother had

married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to

be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner,

Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal

cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's

wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.

Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began

life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any

Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost

insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her

immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex

families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost

seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with

such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name the family

was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and

unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the

living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example

of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and

jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest

fruits of the neighbourhood; and, like all the family, very choice in

horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle-horse, Captain

(for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family chronicle

which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as the

vicar's foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in

the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the

man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of

his church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At

an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he

had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the

other imitated her father, and married "imprudently." The son, still

more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded

himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines,

and was lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_. If he did

not marry below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain

great-uncle William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post Office,

followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married "not

very creditably," and spent all the money he could lay his hands on. He

died without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak

intellect and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief

career as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered

later on. So soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger

Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders

of the third brother, Charles.

Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by

these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;

but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness,

both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a

virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his

relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt

both salt-water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as

I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's son had been a soldier;

William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy

Braddock's in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold

an estate on the James River, called after the parental seat; of which I

should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by

the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by

his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction

of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the _Prothee_, 64, that

the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's war, when

the _Prothee_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of

Barbadoes, and was "materially and distinguishedly engaged" in both the

actions with De Grasse. While at sea, Charles kept a journal, and made

strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of

which survive for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of

surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning

of Fleeming's education as an engineer. What is still more strange,

among the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room

of the _Prothee_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for

all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from

scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the man

to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned

farmer, a trade he was to practise on a large scale; and we find him

married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a

London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,

galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not

appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or

other it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with

his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.

Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were

in his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas)

he appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.

He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and

Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. "Lord Rokeby, his

neighbour, called him kinsman," writes my artless chronicler, "and

altogether life was very cheery." At Stowting his three sons, John,

Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all

born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is through the

report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at

these confused passages of family history.

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a

fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.

John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the

Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and

secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and

being very rich--she died worth about L60,000, mostly in land--she was

in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before

successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it

dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.

The grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not "married

imprudently," appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad

by the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she

adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with

her--it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in

Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a

place in the King's Body Guard, where he attracted the notice of George

III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797, being on guard at St.

James's Palace, William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne

was once more left heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the

Admiral, who had a kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by

the good looks and the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner

turned her eyes upon Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir,

however; he was to be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of

family farming. Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land;

Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let

one-half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various

scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole farm

amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over thirty

miles of country. The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and

ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the meanwhile without care

or fear. He was to check himself in nothing; his two extravagances,

valuable horses and worthless brothers, were to be indulged in comfort;

and whether the year quite paid itself or not, whether successive years

left accumulated savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the

golden aunt should in the end repair all.

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church

House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the

number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that

followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach

and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of

visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants' hall

laid for thirty or forty for a month together: of the daily press of

neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and

Dynes, were also kinsfolk: and the parties "under the great spreading

chestnuts of the old fore court," where the young people danced and made

merry to the music of the village band. Or perhaps, in the depth of

winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would

ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the

pony's saddle-girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of

the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads. John

the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, "loud and notorious with his whip

and spurs," settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the

shoes of his father and his aunt. Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is

briefly dismissed as "a handsome beau"; but he had the merit or the good

fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he

was not empty-handed for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of

Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod that his floggings became

matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon

that tall, rough-voiced formidable uncle entered with the lad into a

covenant; every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral

a penny; every day that he escaped, the process was to be reversed. "I

recollect," writes Charles, "going crying to my mother to be taken to

the Admiral to pay my debt." It would seem by these terms the

speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by

bringing the boy under remark. The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he

loved courage, and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would

ride the great horse into the pond. Presently it was decided that here

was the stuff of a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of

Charles Jenkin was entered on a ship's books.

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye,

where the master took "infinite delight" in strapping him. "It keeps me

warm and makes you grow," he used to say. And the stripes were not

altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very "raw," made progress

with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea,

always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the

glory was not altogether future, it wore a present form when he came

driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.

"I was not a little proud, you may believe," says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father

to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace. The Bishop had heard from his

brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an

order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the Royal Naval

College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the

head and said, "Charles will restore the old family"; by which I gather

with some surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam

and golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family was supposed to stand

in need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than

nature, above all to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages

of Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in

which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety

and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at

Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him and visited at Lord Melville's

and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have "bumptious

notions," and his head was "somewhat turned with fine people"; as to

some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain

Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The Captain had earned this

name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the

pages of Marryat. "Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another

dozen!" survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often

punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this

disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from

Sheerness in December 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his

pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which

were ordered into the care of the gunner. "The old clerks and mates," he

writes, "used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,

and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish

smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little

offensive."

The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at

the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July 1817

she relieved the flag-ship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus it befell that

Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played

a small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena.

Life on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never

lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on

shore except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were

signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the

accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty

watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that "unchristian" climate,

told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months,

according to O'Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men

and invalided home one hundred and seven, "being more than a third of

her complement." It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as

once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more

fortunate than some of his comrades. He drew in water-colour; not so

badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the

_Conqueror_ that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured

him some alleviations. Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the

Briars; and here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches

of the historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a

strange notion of the arts in our old English navy. Yet it was again as

an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a

second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to

windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of

health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and

at the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having "lost his

health entirely."

As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career

came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country

obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and

honourable services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.

He was first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and

keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.

Captain Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner

of the Ionian Islands--King Tom, as he was called--who frequently took

passage in the _Larne_. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean,

and was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at

night; and with his broad Scots accent, "Well, sir," he would say, "what

depth of water have ye? Well, now, sound; and ye'll just find so or so

many fathoms," as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was

generally right. On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir

Thomas came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.

"Bangham"--Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord

Bangham--"where the devil is that other chap? I left four fellows

hanging there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there

to-morrow." And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next

day. "Captain Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order

afloat," writes my author, "and King Tom ashore."

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities was in

the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a

subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, "then very

notorious," in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying

dollars and provisions for the Government. While yet a midshipman, he

accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In the

brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West

Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice

earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to

extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money

due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San

Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment

and the recovery of a "chest of money" of which they had been robbed.

Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure. This was

in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_, lying in the inner harbour of

Havannah. The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a

slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where

negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained

provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case, and

either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship,

already an eyesore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.

The position was invidious: on one side were the tradition of the

British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the other,

the certainty that if the slave were kept, the _Romney_ would be ordered

at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission

compromised. Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin

(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the

Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the

zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without

respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later the matter

was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain

Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13,

1876).

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's

flag-captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;

and about the same time closed his career by an act of personal bravery.

He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose

cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;

his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and

Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were

no longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and

slung up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act he

received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of

his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded,

and could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829 Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another

midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell-Jackson, who introduced him to his

family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos

Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally

Scottish; and on the mother's side, counted kinship with some of the

Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of

Auchenbreck. Her father, Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have

been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,

which casts a doubt upon the fact; but he had pride enough himself, and

taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in

Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as

I have it on a first account--a minister, according to another--a man at

least of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of

Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded. Another married

an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had

seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather

as a measure of the family annoyance than a mirror of the facts. The

marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and

made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the

daughters married no less a man than Clarkson Stanfield. But by the

father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions

and a truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For

long the sisters lived estranged; then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock

were reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the

name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister's

lips, until the morning when she announced: "Mary Adcock is dead; I saw

her in her shroud last night." Second-sight was hereditary in the house;

and sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock

had passed away. Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the

idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the

others supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and

married West Indian magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never

heard and would not care to hear: so strange a thing is this hereditary

pride. Of Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's

grandfather, I know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of

fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them

with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons was a

mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of

temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of the sons went

utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty. The third went to

India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the knowledge of

his relatives that he was thought to be long dead. Years later, when his

sister was living in Genoa, a red-bearded man of great strength and

stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with barbaric

gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted

her from her seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned

out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of

general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and, next

his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he had mixed

blood.

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became

the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of

this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts and courage. Not

beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the

part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left

unattended; and up to old age, had much of both the exigency and the

charm that mark that character. She drew naturally, for she had no

training, with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two

naval artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand. She played on

the harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the

age of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of

youthful enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without

introduction, found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and

begged for lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done,

and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a

friend. Nor was this all; for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for

the girl (once at least) to test her progress. But Mrs. Jenkin's talents

were not so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was

in an art for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature)

that she appeared before the public. Her novels, though they attained

and merited a certain popularity both in France and England, are a

measure only of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they

were written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end. In

the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as

well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking

infinite pains, which descended to her son. When she was about forty (as

near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to

learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and attained to such

proficiency that her collaboration in chamber music was courted by

professionals. And more than twenty years later the old lady might have

been seen dauntlessly beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more

ethereal part of courage; nor was she wanting in the more material.

Once when a neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid,

Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance, and

horsewhipped the man with her own hand.

How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the

young midshipman is not very easy to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one of

the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural piety,

boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor

fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,

suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;

he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for

his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you

would have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that,

to this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he

was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no

genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to

be upright, gallant, affectionate, and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was

more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was

very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to

vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life this want grew

more accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages had been the

rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more

unequal union. It was the Captain's good looks, we may suppose, that

gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of

his life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his

incapacity, and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain

contempt. She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his;

after his retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor Captain, who

could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance;

and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise

for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart

of his father. Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as

unfortunate. It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a

beautiful and touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific

work and what (while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful

qualities of Fleeming Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile,

extravagant, generous to a fault, and far from brilliant, had given in

the father an extreme example of its humble virtues. On the other side,

the wild, cruel, proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scots

Campbell-Jacksons had put forth, in the person of the mother, all its

force and courage.

The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823 the bubble of the golden aunt's

inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the nephew she had

so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless

him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened

there was not found so much as the mention of his name. He was deeply in

debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell

a piece of land to clear himself. "My dear boy," he said to Charles,

"there will be nothing left for you. I am a ruined man." And here

follows for me the strangest part of this story. From the death of the

treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin senior had still some nine years to

live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his

affairs were past restoration. But his family at least had all this

while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to

look for at their father's death; and yet when that happened, in

September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor John,

the days of his whips and spurs and Yeomanry dinners were quite over;

and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down,

for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a

peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and

here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two

ends meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the

road and not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and

manner, he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least

care for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment

with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,

announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased

to go. One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited

from such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special

gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the

end was perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated

correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of

pumps, road-engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam

threshing-machines; and I have it on Fleeming's word that what he did

was full of ingenuity--only, as if by some cross destiny, useless. These

disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but

rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same

field. "I glory in the professor," he wrote to his brother; and to

Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, "I was much pleased

with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure's"

(connoisseur's, _quasi_ amateur's) "engineering? Oh, what

presumption!--either of you or myself!" A quaint, pathetic figure,

this of uncle John, with his dung-cart and his inventions; and the

romantic fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost

Tribes, which seemed to the worthy man the key of all perplexities; and

his quiet conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he

was a good son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days

approached, he had proved himself a cheerful Stoic.

It followed from John's inertia that the duty of winding up the estate

fell into the hands of Charles. He managed it with no more skill than

might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John

and nothing for the rest. Eight months later he married Miss Jackson;

and with her money bought in some two-thirds of Stowting. In the

beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so

great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: "A Court

Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.

Henrietta Camilla Jenkin"; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his

wife was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was

heavily encumbered, and paid them nothing till some years before their

death. In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,

an indulgent mother, and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was

moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and

declining houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate

and to no money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him

known and loved.