never sated with the sea. There is the trout stream as clear as
crystal, where he is sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the
moors, where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot at, are
handy; and there is no end to the picturesque bits just made for his
sketch-book. Whatever his tastes may make him--naturalist, sailor,
sportsman, artist--he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten or
eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now that his playtime
has come round again. At every turn he falls upon little scenes which
give him an odd pleasure, as if they belonged to another life--things
he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint books, long ago.
Here go by two countrywomen, whose red and purple dresses are touched
by the sun with startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside
road; there clatters past on horseback a group of market-girls with
flapping straw hats, and carrying their baskets on their arms as if
they were a set of Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn
their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London man with frank
curiosity as they canter on and smother him with dust. Now he passes
through the midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a
barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where, standing under an
ivied porch, a pretty young woman unconsciously makes a picture as she
bends down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with sweets and
cakes. The idyl here is so complete that the contemplation of pence
given for the accommodation of the barn, or the calculation of
shillings to be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the
little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist for the good
things its small soul coveted, does not enter his mind.
The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent would be a kind
of high treason to the poetic instinct; so the London man
instinctively feels, glad to recognize the ideal he is mainly
responsible for making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is fishing in
the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows skim the ground or dart
slanting above his head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a
dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young birds rustle in
and out of the foliage; distant cattle low; cottage children laugh;
everywhere he finds quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence
of disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all who live here
must feel the same delightful influences as those which he is feeling
now, and be as innocent and virtuous as the place is beautiful and
quiet.
But the charm does not last. Very few of us retain to the end of our
holidays the same enthusiastic delight in our Arcadia that we had in
the beginning. Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the illusion
better; and with it the excitement; but a long spell in one place,
however beautiful--unless indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes
personally fond of the place and interested in the people--is almost
sure to end in weariness. At first the modern pilgrim is savagely
disinclined to society and his kind. All the signs and circumstances
of the life he has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to watch
the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers which put into his
little harbour, and the excursionists who come by them he accounts as
heathens and accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate
generation and made only for evildoers. He has no reverence for the
post, and his soul is not rejoiced at the sight of letters. Even his
daily paper is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts as
equal in importance with the picturesque bits he wishes to sketch, or
the rare ferns and beetles to be found by long rambles and much
diligence. By degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearns after
the life he has left, and he begins to look for the signs thereof with
interest, not to say pleasure. He watches the arrival of the boat, or
he strolls up to the railway station and speculates on the new comers
with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance, he hails him with
enthusiastic cordiality; and in his extremity is reduced to fraternize
with men 'not in his way.' He becomes peevish at the lateness of the
mail, and he reads his _Times_ from beginning to end, taking in even
the agony column and the advertisements. He finds his idyllic pictures
to be pictures, and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better than
their neighbours; and, as for the absence of human passions--they are
merely dwarfed to the dimensions of the life, and are as relatively
strong here as elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages
quarrel among each other for trifles which he would have thought only
children could have noticed; and they gossip to an extent of which he
in his larger metropolitan life has no experience.
If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom of visitors, he is
as much an object of curiosity and surmise as if he were a man of
another hemisphere; and he may think himself fortunate if vague
reports do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality, or his
sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage at home, he is nobody
here. He may be sure that, however great his name in art and
literature, it will not be accounted to him for honour--it will only
place him next to a well-conditioned mountebank; political fame,
patent to all the world, rank which no one can mistake, and money
which all may handle, alone going down in remote country places and
carrying esteem along with them. If a wise man, he will forgive the
uncharitable surmises and the contempt of which he is the object,
knowing the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless vacuity from
which they spring; but they are not the less unpleasant, and to
understand a cause is not therefore to rejoice in the effect.
As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of circumstance gradually
becoming unbearable. He misses the familiar conveniences and orderly
arrangements of his London life. He has a raging tooth, and there is
no dentist for miles round; he falls sick, or sprains his ankle, and
the only doctor at hand is a half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman
skilled in herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His
letters go astray among the various hands to which they are entrusted;
his paper is irregular; _Punch_ and his illustrated weeklies come a
day late, with torn covers and greasy thumbmarks testifying to the
love of pictorial art which encountered them by the way. He finds that
he wants the excitement of professional life and the changeful action
of current history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in a
corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious; but he misses
the centralized interest of metropolitan life, and catches himself
hankering after the old intellectual fleshpots with the fervour of an
exile, counting the days of his further stay.
And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony,
and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few
ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of
moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at
Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of
moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after
all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to
understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others,
which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic
youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept
from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no
opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty
agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty
market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve
elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of
natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more
easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in
essentials here as in London--Arcadia being the poorer of the two,
inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of
bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of
classes.
By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his
work invigorated in body, but quite sufficiently sated in mind to
return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office
decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly
glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on
his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy
office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots.
Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr.
So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is
more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing
discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question
whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors
whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his
delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the
Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles
ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it
to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun
eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.
The peace to which we are all looking is not to be had in a Highland
glen nor a Devonshire lane; and beautiful as are the retreats
and show-places to which men of business rush for rest and
refreshment--peaceful as they are to look at, and happy as it seems to
us their inhabitants must be--it is all only a matter of the eye. They
are Arcadias, if one likes to call them so; but while a man's powers
remain to him they are halting-places only, not homes; and he who
would make them his home before his legitimate time, would come to a
weariness which should cause him to regret bitterly and often the
collar which had once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of
which he had so often growled.
_STRANGERS AT CHURCH._
If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to
temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else.
In those thronged show-places which have what is called a summer
season, church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when the service
is of an ornate kind, and the strangers' seats are chairs placed at
the west end, where in old times the village choir or the village
schoolboys used to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the
occupants; and there are certain displays of temper and feeling which
make you ask yourself whether these strangers think it a religious
service, or an operatic, at which they have come to assist, and
whether what you see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit
of the place or not. If the church is one that presents scenic
attractions in the manner in which the service is conducted, there is
a run on the front middle seats, as if the ceremonies to be performed
were so much legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you must
have a good view if you are to have your money's worth; and the more
knowing of the strangers take care to be early in the field, and to
establish themselves comfortably before the laggards come up. And when
the best places are all filled, and the laggards do come up, then the
human comedy begins.
Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly conscious of their
youth and good looks, but still more conscious of their bonnets. They
look with tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the middle,
and when the verger makes them understand that they must go to the
back of the side aisle, where they can be seen by no one but will only
be able to hear the service and say their prayers, they hesitate and
whisper to each other before they finally go up, feeling that the
great object for which they came to church has failed them, and they
had better have stayed away and taken their chance on the parade. When
they speak of it afterwards, they say it was 'awfully slow sitting
there;' and they determine to be earlier another time.
There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women with fans and
scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline the back places which the same
verger, with a fine sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in
temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer together, but by no
means in whispers; and finally elect to stand in the middle aisle,
trusting to their magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice
places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies who look as if
they were performing an act of condescension by coming at all without
special privileges and separation from the vulgar; as if they had an
inherent right to worship God in a superior and aristocratic manner,
and were not to be confounded with the rest of the miserable sinners
who ask for mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the front
seats everywhere; so why not in the place where they say sweetly they
are 'nothing of themselves,' and pray to be delivered 'from pride,
vainglory, and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and dyed and dressed
to represent the heyday of youth, who also is supposed to come to
church to say her prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would
be more at home at the green tables at Homburg than in an unpretending
chair of the strangers' quarter in the parish church. But she finds
her places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with much seeking;
and when she nods during the sermon, she has the good-breeding not to
snore. She too, has the odd trick of looking like condescension when
she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces behind her; and by
her manner she leaves on you the impression that she was a beauty in
her youth; has been always used to the deference and admiration of
men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine linen; that all of
you, whom she has the pleasure of surveying through her double
eyeglass, are nobodies in comparison with her august self; and that
she is out of place among you. She makes her demonstration, like the
rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that
no one offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is
ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does
sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the
unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. Only a few humble Christians
in fashionable attire take those back places contentedly, and find
they can say their prayers and sing their hymns with spiritual comfort
to themselves, whether they are shut out from a sight of the
decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of the officiating
ministers, or are in full view of the same. But then humble Christians
in fashionable attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel
and the needle's eye, remains.
Again, in the manner of following the services you see the oddest
diversity among the strangers at church. The regular congregation has
by this time got pretty well in step together, and stands up or sits
down, speaks or keeps silence, with some kind of uniformity; even the
older men having come to tolerate innovations which at first split the
parish into factions. But the strangers, who have come from the north
and from the south, from the east and from the west, have brought
their own views and habits, and take a pride in making them manifest.
Say that the service is only moderately High--that is, conducted with
decency and solemnity but not going into extremes; your left-hand
neighbour evidently belongs to one of the ultra-Ritualistic
congregations, and disdains to conceal her affiliation. If she be a
tall woman, and therefore conspicuous, her genuflexions are more
profound than any other person's; and her sudden and automatic way of
dropping on her knees, and then getting up again as if she were worked
by wires, attracts the attention of all about her. She crosses herself
at various times; and ostentatiously forbears to use her book save at
certain congregational passages. She regards the service as an act of
priestly sacrifice and mediation, and her own attitude therefore is
one of acceptance, not participation.
Your neighbour on your right is a sturdy Low Churchman, who sticks to
the ways of his father and flings hard names at the new system. He
makes his protest against what he calls 'all this mummery' visibly, if
not audibly. He sits like a rock during the occasional intervals when
modern congregations rise; and he reads his Prayer-book with unshaken
fidelity from first to last, making the responses, which are intoned
by the choir and the bulk of the congregation, in a loud and level
voice, and even muttering _sotto voce_ the clergyman's part after him.
In the creed, when the Ritualistic lady bends both her knees and
almost touches the ground, he simply bobs his head, as if saluting
Robinson or Jones; and during the doxology, where she repeats the
obeisance, and looks as if she were speaking confidentially to the
matting, he holds up his chin and stares about him. She, the
pronounced Ritualist, knows all the hymns by heart and joins in them
like one well accustomed; but he, the Evangelist, stumbles over the
lines, with his _pince-nez_ slipping off his nose, satisfied if he
catches a word here and there so as to know something of his
whereabouts. She sings correctly all through; but he can do no more
than put in a fancy note on occasions, and perhaps come in with a
flourish at the end. There are many such songsters at church who think
they have done all that can be demanded of them in the way of
congregational harmony if they hit the last two notes fairly, and join
the pack at the Amen.
Sometimes the old-fashioned worshippers get put into the front row,
and there, without prayer-stool or chair-back against which to steady
themselves, find kneeling an impossibility; so they either sit with
their elbows on their knees, or betray associations with square pews
and comfortable corners at home, by turning their backs to the altar,
and burying their faces in their rush-bottomed seats. The Ritualist
would have knelt as straight as an arrow and without quivering once
all through.
People are generally supposed to go to church for devotion, but, if
they do, devotion and vanity are twin sisters. Look at the number of
pretty hands which find it absolutely necessary to take off their
gloves, and which are always wandering up to the face in becoming
gestures and with the right curve. Or, if the hands are only mediocre,
the rings are handsome; and diamonds sparkle as well in a church as
anywhere else. And though one vows to renounce the lusts of the world
as well as of the flesh, there is no use in having diamonds if one's
neighbours don't see them. Look too, at the pretty faces which know so
well the effect produced by a little paint and powder beneath a
softening mask of thin white lace. Is this their best confession of
sin? And again, those elaborate toilets in which women come to pray
for forgiveness and humility; are they for the honour of God? It
strikes us that the honour of God has very little to do with that
formidable, and may be unpaid, milliner's bill, but the admiration of
men and the envy of other women a great deal. The Pope is wise to make
all ladies go to his religious festivals without bonnets and in rigid
black. It narrows the margin of coquetry somewhat, if it does not
altogether remove it. But dress ever was, and ever will be, as webs
spread in the way of woman's righteousness; and we have no doubt that
Eve frilled her apron of fig-leaves before she had worn it a day.
All sorts of characters throng these strangers' seats; and some are
typical. There are the men of low stature and awkward bearing, with
stubbly chins, who stand in constrained positions and wear no gloves.
They look like grooms; they may be clerks; but they are the men on
whom _Punch_ has had his eye for many years now, when he portrays the
British snob and diversifies him with the more modern cad. Then there
are the well-dressed, well set-up gentlemen of military appearance,
who carry their umbrellas under their arms as if they were swords, and
are evidently accustomed to have their own will and command other
people's; and the men who look like portraits of Montague Tigg, in
cheap kid gloves and suspicious jewelry, who pray into their hats, or
make believe to pray, while their bold eyes rove all about, fixing
themselves most pertinaciously on the old lady with the diamonds and
the giggling young ones with the paint. There is the bride in a white
bonnet and light silk dress, who carries an ivory-backed Church
Service with the most transparent attempts at unconsciousness, and the
bridegroom who lounges after her and looks sheepish; sometimes it is
the bride who straggles bashfully, and the groom who boldly leads the
way. There is the young widow with new weeds; the sedate mother of
many daughters; paterfamilias, with his numerous olive-branches,
leading on his arm the exuberant wife of his bosom flushed with coming
up the hill; the walking tourist, whose respect for Sunday goes to the
length of a clean collar and a clothes-brush; and the female
traveller, economical of luggage, who wears her waterproof and
sea-side hat, and is independent and not ashamed. There are the people
who come for simple distraction, because Sunday is such a dull day in
a strange place, and there is nothing else to do; and those who come
because it is respectable and the right thing, and they are accustomed
to it; those who come to see and be seen; and those--the select few,
the simple yearning souls--who come because they do honestly feel the
church to be the very House of God, and that prayer with its
confession of sin helps them to live better lives. But, good or bad,
vain or simple, arrogant or humble, they all sweep out when the last
word is said, and the cottagers and small townsfolk stand at their
doors to see them pass--'the quality coming out of church' counting as
_their_ Sunday sight. The women get ideas in millinery from the show,
and discuss with each other what is worn this year, and how ever can
they turn their old gowns into garments that shall imitate the last
effort of a Court milliner's genius--the result of many sleepless
nights? Fine ladies ridicule these clumsy apings of their humble
sisters, and long for the old sumptuary laws to be in force on all
below them; but if Sunday is the field-day and church the
parade-ground of the strangers, we cannot wonder if the natives try to
participate in the amusement. If Lady Jane likes to confess her shame
and humiliation on a velvet cushion and in silk attire, can we
reasonably blame Joan that her soul hankers after a hassock of felt,
and a penance-sheet of homespun cut according to my lady's pattern?
_IN SICKNESS._
Life not being holiday-making throughout, we have to allow for the bad
half-hours that must come to us; and, if we are wise, we make
provision to pass them with as little annoyance as possible. And of
all the bad half-hours to which we are destined, those to be spent in
sickness need the greatest amount of care to render them endurable.
Without going to the length of Michelet's favourite theory, which sees
in every woman nothing but an invalid more or less severely afflicted
according to individual temperament, but always under the influence of
diseased nerves and controlled by sickly fancies, there is no doubt
that women suffer very much more than men; while their patience under
physical ailments is one of the traditional graces with which they are
credited. Where men fume and fret at the interruption to their lives
brought about by a fit of illness, calculating anxiously the loss they
are sustaining during the forced inaction of their convalescence,
women submit resignedly, and make the best of the inevitable. With
that clear sense of Fate characteristic of them, they do not fight
against the evil which they know has to be borne, but wisely try to
lighten it by such wiles and arts as are open to them, and set
themselves to adorn the cross they must endure. One thing indeed,
makes invalidism less terrible to them than to men; and that is their
ability to perform their home duties, if not quite as efficiently as
when they are up and about, yet well enough for all practical purposes
in the conduct of the family. The woman who gives her mind to it can
keep her house in smooth working gear by dictation from her sick
couch; and what she cannot actively overlook she can arrange. So far
this removes the main cause of irritation with which the man must
battle in the best way he can, when his business comes to a
stand-still; or is given up into the hands of but a makeshift kind of
substitute taken at the best; while he is laid on his back undergoing
many things from doctors for the good of science and the final
settling of doubtful pathological points.