fellow-creatures, showing our features but not expressing our mind;
and the one whose eidolon, while betraying least of the being within,
reflects most of the beings without, is the most popular and
considered the most self-revealed. We may take it as a certainty that
we never really know any one. We may know the broad outlines of
character; and we generally believe far more than we have warranty
for; but we rarely, if ever, penetrate the inner circle wherein the
man's real self hides. If our friend is a person of small curiosity
and large self-respect, we may trust him not to commit a base action;
if he has a calm temperament, with physical strength and without
imagination, he will not do a cowardly one; if he has the habit of
truth, he will not tell a lie on any paltry occasion; if he is
tenacious and secret, he will not betray his cause nor his friend. But
we know very little more than this. Even with one's most familiar
friend there is always one secret door in the casket which is never
opened; and those which are thrown wide apart are not those which lead
to the most cherished treasures. With the frankest or the shallowest
there are depths never sounded; what shall we say, then, of those who
have real profundity of character?
Who is not conscious of an ego that no man has seen? In praise or
blame we feel that we are not thoroughly known. There is something
infinitely pathetic in this dumb consciousness of an inner self, an
unrevealed truth, which bears us up through injustice and makes us
shrink from excessive praise. Our very lovers love us for the least
worthy part of us, or for fancied virtues which we do not possess; and
if our worst enemies knew us as we are, they would come round to the
other side and shake hands over the grave of their mistaken estimate.
The mask hides the reality in either case, for good or for ill; and we
know that if it could be removed, we should be judged differently. For
the matter of that it never can be removed. The most transparent are
judged according to the temper of the spectator; and the mind sees
what it brings in our judgment of our fellows as well as in other
things.
But, apart from that inner nature, that hidden part which so few
people even imagine exists in each other, the masks we wear in society
cover histories, sufferings, feelings, which would set the world
aflame if betrayed. No one who gets below the smooth crust of
conventional life can be ignorant of the fierce lava flood that
sometimes flows and rages underneath. In those quiet drawing-rooms
where everything looks the embodiment of harmony, of tranquil
understanding, and where the absence of mystery is the first thing
felt, there are dramas at the very time enacting of which only the
exceptionally observant catch the right cue. Ruin faces some whose
ship of good fortune seems sailing steadily on a halcyon sea; a
hideous secret stands like a spectre in the doorway of another. The
domestic happiness which these covenant between themselves to show in
the full sunshine to the world is no better than a Dead Sea apple
displayed for pride, for policy, and of which those who eat alone know
the extreme bitterness. The grand repute which makes men honour the
name to the very echo, is a sham, and tottering to its fall. Here the
confessing religionist hides by the fervour of his amens the
scepticism which he dares not show by the honesty of his negation;
there the respectable moralist denounces in his mask the iniquities
which he practises daily when he lays it aside. To the right the masks
of two loving friends greet each other with smiles and large
expressions of affection, then part, to push the friendly falsehood
aside, and to whisper confidentially to the crowd what scoundrelism
they have mutually embraced; to the left another couple of unreasoning
foes want only to see each other in unmasked simplicity to become fast
allies for life. The world and all it disguises play sad mischief with
human affections as well as with truth.
Everything serves for a mask. A man's public character makes one which
is as impenetrable in its disguise as any. The world takes one or two
salient points and subordinates every other characteristic to these.
It ignores all those subtle intricacies which modify thought and
action at every turn, producing apparent inconsistency--but only
apparent; and it boldly blocks out a mask of one or two dominant
lines as the representative of a nature protean because complex. Any
quality that makes itself seen from behind this mask which popular
opinion has created out of a man's public character is voted as
inconsistent, or, it may be, insincere; and the richer the nature the
less it is understood. So it is with us all in our degree:--a thought
which might lead us to gentler judgments on each other than it is the
fashion to cultivate, knowing as we do that we each wear a mask which
hides our real self from the world; and that if this real self is less
beautiful than our admirers say, it is infinitely less hideous than
our enemies would make it to appear.
_HEROES AT HOME._
We may say what we like about the worthlessness of the world and the
solid charms of home, but the plain fact, stripped of oratorical
disguise, is that we mostly give society the best we have and keep the
worst of ourselves for our own. The hero at home is not half so fine a
fellow as the hero in public, and cares far less for his audience.
Indeed, when looked at under the domestic microscope, he is frequently
found to be eminently un-heroic--something of the nature of a botch
rather than nobility in undress and an ideal brought down to the line
of sight; which would be the case if he and all things else were what
they seem, and if heroism, like fine gold, was good all through. This
is not saying that the hero in public is a cheat. He has only turned
the best of his cloak outside, and hidden the seams and frays next his
skin. We know that every man's cloak must have its seams and frays;
and the vital question for each man's life is, Who ought to see most
of them, strangers or friends? We fear it must be owned that, whoever
ought, it is our friends who do get the worst of our wardrobe--the
people we love, and for whom we would willingly die if necessary;
whilst strangers, for whom we have no kind of affection, are treated
to the freshest of the velvet and the brightest of the embroidery. The
man, say, who is pre-eminently good company abroad, who keeps a
dinner-table alive with his quick wit and keen repartee, and who has
always on hand a store of unhackneyed anecdotes, the latest _on dits_,
and the newest information not known to Reuter, but who hangs up his
fiddle at his own fireside and in the bosom of his family is as silent
as the vocal Memnon at midnight, is not necessarily a cheat. He is an
actor without a part to play or a stage whereon to play it; a hero
without a flag; a bit of brute matter without an energizing force.
The excitement of applause, the good wine and the pleasant dishes, the
bright eyes of pretty women, the half-concealed jealousy of clever
men, the sensation of shining--all these things, which are spurs to
him abroad, are wanting at home; and he has not the originating
faculty which enables him to dispense with these incentives. He is a
first-class hero on his own ground; but it would be a tremendous
downfall to his reputation were his admirers to see him as he is off
parade, without the pomps and vanities to show him to advantage. He
has just been the social hero of a dinner; 'so bright, so lively, so
delightful,' says the hostess enthusiastically, with a side blow to
her own proprietor, who perhaps is pleasant enough by the domestic
hearth but only a dumb dog in public. The party has been 'made' by
him, rescued from universal dullness by his efforts alone; and every
woman admires him as he leaves in a polite blaze of glory, and only
wishes he could be secured for her own little affair next week. So he
takes his departure, a hero to the last, with a happy thought for
every one and a bright word all round. The hall-door closes on him,
and the hero sinks into the husband. He is as much transformed as soon
as he steps inside his brougham as was ever Cinderella after twelve,
with her state coach and footmen gone to pumpkin and green lizards. He
likes his wife well enough, as wives and liking go; but she does not
stir him up intellectually, and her applause is no whetstone for his
wit. Put the veriest chit of a girl as bodkin between them and he will
waken into life again, and become once more the conversational hero,
because he is no longer wholly at home. His wife probably does not
like it, and she laughs, as wives do, when she hears his praises from
those who know him only at his best, letting off his fireworks for the
applause of the crowd.
But then wives are proverbially unflattering in their estimates of
their husbands' heroics; and the Truth that used to live at the bottom
of a well has changed her name and abode in these later times, and has
come to mean the partner of your joys, who gives you her candid
opinion at home. Still, your good company abroad who sits like a mute
Memnon at home is not pleasant, though not necessarily a sham.
Certainly he is no hero all through, but he may be nothing worse than
one of those unfortunates whose intellect lives on drams and does not
take kindly to domestic pudding.
His wife does not approve of this hanging up of the fiddle by his own
fireside; yet she does the same thing on her side, and is as little a
heroine by the domestic hearth as he is a hero. What his talk is to
him her beauty is to her; and for whom, let us ask, does she make
herself loveliest? For her husband, or for a handful of fops and snobs
each one of whom individually is more indifferent to her than the
other? See her in society, a very Venus dressed by Worth and Bond
Street, if not by the Graces. Follow her home, and see her as her maid
sees her. The abundant _chevelure_, which is the admiration of the men
and the envy of the women who believe in it, is taken off and hung up
like her great-grandfather's wig, leaving her small round head covered
by a wisp of ragged ends broken and burnt by dyes and restorers; her
bloom of glycerine and powder is washed from her face, showing the
faded skin and betraying lines beneath; the antimony is rubbed off her
eyelids; the effects of belladonna leave her now contracting pupils;
her perfectly moulded form is laid aside with her dress; and the fair
queen of the _salon_--the heroine of gaslight loveliness--stands as a
lay-figure with bare tracts of possibilities whereon the artist may
work, but which tracts nature has forgotten or which she herself has
worked on so unmercifully as to have worn out. How many a heartache
would be healed if only the heroine, like the hero, could be followed
to the sanctuary of the dressing-room, and if the adored could appear
to the adorer as does the one to the maid the other to the valet!
The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who condoles so sweetly with
your little troubles, and whose affectionate compassion soothes you
like the trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a pleasant
air, but who leaves her sick husband at home to get through the weary
hours as he best may, who bullies her servants and scolds her
children--she too, is a heroine of a class that does not look well
when closely studied. The pretty young mother, making play with her
pretty young children in the Park--a smiling picture of love and
loveliness--when followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent
fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending the children up
to the nursery and probably seeing them no more until Park hour
to-morrow, when their beautiful little _têtes d'ange_ will enhance her
own loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more beautiful because
making the picture more complete; Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal
philanthropy, refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but full
of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken to mitigate at
Borioboolagha; Croesus scattering showers of gold abroad, and
applauded to the echo when his name, with the donation following, is
read out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings at
home; the eloquent upholder of human equality in public, snubbing in
private all who are one degree below him in the social scale, and
treating his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter on the
motto _Noblesse oblige_, when the house-door is shut between him and
the world, running honesty so fine that it is almost undistinguishable
from roguery--all these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home, and
make their heroism within the four walls literally a vanishing
quantity.
People who live on the outside of the charmed circle of letters, but
who believe that the men and women that compose it are of a different
mould from the rest of mankind, and who long to be permitted to
penetrate the rose-hedge and learn the facts of Armida's garden for
themselves, sometimes learn them too clearly for their dreams to be
ever possible again. They have a favourite author--a poet, say, or a
novelist. If a poet, he is probably one whose songs are full of that
delicious melancholy which makes them so divinely sad; an æsthetic
poet; a blighted being; a creature walking in the moonlight among the
graves and watering their flowers with his tears:--if a novelist, he
is one whose sprightly fancy makes the dull world gay. A friend takes
the worshipper to the shrine where the idol is to be found; in other
words, they go to call on him at his own house. The melancholy poet
'hidden in the light of thought,' is a rubicund, rosy-gilled
gentleman, brisk, middle-aged, comfortable, respectable, particular as
to his wines, a connoisseur as to the merits of the _chef_, a _bon
vivant_ of the Horatian order, and in his talk prone to personal
gossip and feeble humour. The lively novelist, on the other hand, is a
taciturn, morose kind of person, afflicted with perennial catarrh,
ever ready with an unpleasant suggestion, given to start disagreeable
topics of a grave, not to say depressing, nature, perhaps a rabid
politician incapable of a give-and-take argument, or a pessimistic
economist, taking gloomy views of the currency and despondent about
our carrying trade.
As for the women, they never look the thing they are reputed to be,
save in fashion, and sometimes in beauty. A woman who goes to public
meetings and makes speeches on all kinds of subjects, tough as well as
doubtful, presents herself in society with the look of an old maid and
the address of a shy schoolgirl. A sour kind of essayist, who finds
everything wrong and nothing in its place, has a face like the full
moon and looks as if she fed on cream and butter. A novelist who sails
very near the wind, and on whom the critics are severe by principle,
is as quiet as a Quakeress in her conversation and as demure as a nun
in her bearing; while a writer of religious tracts has her gowns from
Paris and gives small suppers out of the proceeds. The public
character and the private being of almost every person in the world
differ widely from each other; and the hero of history who is also the
hero to his valet has yet to be found.
Some people call this difference inconsistency, and some
manysidedness; to some it argues unreality, to others it is but the
necessary consequence of a complex human nature, and a sign that the
mind needs the rest of alternation just as much as the body. We cannot
be always in the same groove, never changing our attitude nor object.
Is it inconsistency or supplement, contradiction or compensation? The
sterner moralists, and those whose minds dwell on tares, say the
former; those who look for wheat even on the stony ground and among
thorns assert the latter. Anyhow, it is certain that those who desire
ideals and who like to worship heroes would do well to content
themselves with adoration at a long range. Distance lends enchantment,
and ignorance is bliss in more cases than one. Heroism at home is
something like the delicacy of Brobdingnag, or the grandiosity of
Lilliput; and the undress of the domestic hearth is more favourable to
personal comfort than to public glory. To keep our ideals intact we
ought to keep them unknown. Our goddesses should not be seen eating
beefsteaks and drinking stout; our poets are their best in print, and
social small-talk does not come like truths divine mended from their
tongue; our sages and philanthropists gain nothing, and may lose much,
by being rashly followed to their firesides. Yet a man's good work and
brave word are, in any case, part of his real self, though they may
not be the whole; and even if he is not true metal all through, his
gold, so far as it goes, counts for more than its alloy, and his
public heroism overtops his private puerility.
_SEINE-FISHING._
Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England than the Cornish
fishermen. Their business, at all times hazardous, is doubly so on a
coast so dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is bought at
the expense of security. Isolated rocks which are set up like teeth
close round the jagged cliffs and far out from shore, cropping up at
intervals anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks which are
more perilous because more treacherous; strong currents which on the
calmest day keep the sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a
singularly tumultuous and changeable sea, where the ground-swell of
the Atlantic sweeps on in long waves which break into a surf that
would swamp any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of
surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow channel to the
coves, a mere water-path as one may call it, beset by rocks which
would break the boats to splinters if they were thrown against
them--all these circumstances make the trade of the Cornish fishermen
exceptionally dangerous; but they also make the men themselves
exceptionally resolute and daring. They are true fighters with nature
for food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set out to their
work that they may never come back from it alive.
No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its
character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and
halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when
the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat
caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as
a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats might
be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as
a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very
magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer
as little by shipwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though
each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst
cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken
lights, or steered too close in shore, or been lost in the fogs that
are so frequent about the Land's End. Or they may have been caught by
the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee shore; as so often
happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points.
But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though
life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with
only an insufficient quantity, is rather a miserable affair. The
material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque
little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not
in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation,
unification, whatever we like to call it--the law of the present day
by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for
one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own
hand--the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at
Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's seine' and 'a rich man's
seine,' almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or
partnerships of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any
share.
Fishermen's seines are not well regarded by the wealthy leaseholders
of the cove and foreshore; and the leaseholder has very large legal
rights and powers which it would be idle to blame him for exercising.
The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right of landing is
his; thus he can put on the screw when he wants to have things his own
way, and can threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right to
the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men will not go on his
seine, but choose either a united one of their own or independent
drift or trawl nets. Some, it is said, even object to the men fishing
at all, at any rate during the seine season; some have raised the
annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or four times its old
rate; and some go through a round of surly suspicion and irritating
supervision during the 'bulking' days, and higgle jealously over the
small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So that, on the whole,
the Cornish fisherman of the smaller coves has not much to boast of
beside his courage and good heart, and a sturdy independence and
honesty specially noticeable.
We know of no more animated scene than seine-fishing. From the first
act to the last there is a quaint old-world flavour about it
inexpressibly charming to people used to the prosaic life of modern
cities. The 'huers' who stand on the hills watching for the first
appearance of the 'school,' and who make known what they see either by
signals or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound of which no
one who has once heard it can ever forget; the smartness of the men
dressing the seine-boats which carry the huge net with all its
appurtenances; their quiet but eager watching for the school to come
within practicable distance--that is, into sufficiently shoal water,
and where the bottom is fairly level (else the fish all escape from
under the net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing the
school, and then the 'tucking' or lifting the fish from the sea to the
boats--every stage is full of interest; but this last is the prettiest
of all.
Imagine a moonlight night--low water at midnight--when the tucking
begins. The boat cannot come up to the ordinary landing, which is only
a roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent into the sea; so
those who would share in the sport are fain to take the fisherman's
path along the cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These rocks
are never very safe. Even the men themselves, trained to them as they
are from boyhood, sometimes slip on their slanting, broken,
seaweed-covered surfaces, when, if they cannot swim and are not
helped, all is over for them in this life; and for strangers they are
difficult at the best of times. But on an obscurely lighted night, and
after heavy rain, they are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the
boat a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch the exact
moment and make a spring before she drifts off again with the ebb. The
row across the little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn
and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the shadows are deep and
unfathomable; everywhere you see black rocks standing out from the
steely sea, and little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken
rocks. In the distance shine the magnificent Lizard Lights, and the
red and white revolving light of the terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the
horizon; the moon touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they
rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy sluggish rhythm of
their flow. Only round the foot of the cliffs and about the rocks they
break into spray that serves as high lights against the sombre grey
and black of the landscape. You pull across to the opposite point, and
then round into another smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and
the seine net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fishing-boats
set round on the outside of a circle of corks, within which is the
master-boat, where all hands are assembled pulling at the net, to draw
it closer. It is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart fellows
are hauling on the lines with the sailors' cheery cry and the sailors'
exuberant goodwill. Every now and then the master's voice cries out
'Break! break my sons!' when they shorten hold and go over to the
other side of the boat, pulling themselves gradually aslant again,
till the same order of 'Break! break!' shows that their purchase is
too slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough, and then the fun
begins.