everyone knows, among the commonest objects in a country walk, so
common, indeed, that the professional nature-lover says very little
about them. They cannot grow there, they cannot be dropped from
above--they are distinctly earth-worn boots. I have inquired of my own
domestic people, and caused inquiry to be made in a large number of
households, and there does not appear to be any regular custom of taking
boots away to remote and picturesque spots to abandon them. Some
discarded boots of my own were produced, but they were quite different
from the old boot of the outer air. These home-kept old boots were
lovely in their way, hoary with mould running into the most exquisite
tints of glaucophane and blue-grey, but it was a different way
altogether from that of the wild boot.
A friend says, that these boots are cast away by tramps. People, he
states, give your tramp old boots and hats in great profusion, and the
modesty of the recipient drives him to these picturesque and secluded
spots to effect the necessary change. But no nature-lover has ever
observed the tramp or tramp family in the act of changing their clothes,
and since there are even reasons to suppose that their garments are not
detachable, it seems preferable to leave the wayside boot as a pleasant
flavouring of mystery to our ramble. Another point, which also goes to
explode this tramp theory, is that these countryside boots _never occur
in pairs_, as any observer of natural history can testify....
So our Cockney Jefferies proceeds, presently coming upon a cinder path.
They use cinders a lot about Sutton, to make country paths with; it
gives you an unexpected surprise the first time it occurs. You drop
suddenly out of a sweetly tangled lane into a veritable bit of the Black
Country, and go on with loathing in your soul for your fellow-creatures.
There is also an abundance of that last product of civilisation, barbed
wire. Oh that I were Gideon! with thorns and briers of the wilderness
would I teach these elders of Sutton! But a truce to dark thoughts!
We take our last look at the country from the open down above Sutton.
Blue hills beyond blue hills recede into the remote distance; from
Banstead Down one can see into Oxfordshire. Windsor Castle is in minute
blue silhouette to the left, and to the right and nearer is the Crystal
Palace. And closer, clusters red-roofed Sutton and its tower, then
Cheam, with its white spire, and further is Ewell, set in a variegated
texture of autumn foliage. Water gleams--a silver thread--at Ewell, and
the sinking sun behind us catches a window here and there, and turns it
into an eye of flame. And so to Sutton station and home to Cockneydom
once more.
FROM AN OBSERVATORY
It will be some time yet before the rising of the moon. Looking down
from the observatory one can see the pathways across the park dotted out
in yellow lamps, each with a fringe of dim green; and further off, hot
and bright, is the tracery of the illuminated streets, through which the
people go to and fro. Save for an occasional stirring, or a passing
voice speaking out of the dimness beneath me, the night is very still.
Not a cloud is to be seen in the dark midwinter sky to hide one speck of
its broad smears of star dust and its shining constellations.
As the moon rises, heaven will be flooded with blue light, and one after
another the stars will be submerged and lost, until only a solitary
shining pinnacle of brightness will here and there remain out of the
whole host of them. It is curious to think that, were the moon but a
little brighter and truly the ruler of the night, rising to its empire
with the setting of the sun, we should never dream of the great stellar
universe in which our little solar system swims--or know it only as a
traveller's tale, a strange thing to be seen at times in the Arctic
Circle. Nay, if the earth's atmosphere were some few score miles higher,
a night-long twilight would be drawn like an impenetrable veil across
the stars. By a mere accident of our existence we see their multitude
ever and again, when the curtains of the daylight and moonlight, and of
our own narrow pressing necessities, are for a little while drawn back.
Then, for an interval, we look, as if out of a window, into the great
deep of heaven. So far as physical science goes, there is nothing in the
essential conditions of our existence to necessitate that we should have
these transitory glimpses of infinite space. We can imagine men just
like ourselves without such an outlook. But it happens that we have it.
If we had not this vision, if we had always so much light in the sky
that we could not perceive the stars, our lives, so far as we can infer,
would be very much as they are now; there would still be the same needs
and desires, the same appliances for our safety and satisfaction; this
little gaslit world below would scarcely miss the stars now, if they
were blotted out for ever. But our science would be different in some
respects had we never seen them. We should still have good reason, in
Foucault's pendulum experiment, for supposing that the world rotated
upon its axis, and that the sun was so far relatively fixed; but we
should have no suspicion of the orbital revolution of the world. Instead
we should ascribe the seasonal differences to a meridional movement of
the sun. Our spectroscopic astronomy--so far as it refers to the
composition of the sun and moon--would stand precisely where it does,
but the bulk of our mathematical astronomy would not exist. Our calendar
would still be in all essential respects as it is now; our year with the
solstices and equinoxes as its cardinal points. The texture of our
poetry might conceivably be the poorer without its star spangles; our
philosophy, for the want of a nebular hypothesis. These would be the
main differences. Yet, to those who indulge in speculative dreaming, how
much smaller life would be with a sun and a moon and a blue beyond for
the only visible, the only thinkable universe. And it is, we repeat,
from the scientific standpoint a mere accident that the present--the
daylight--world periodically opens, as it were, and gives us this
inspiring glimpse of the remoteness of space.
One may imagine countless meteors and comets streaming through the solar
system, unobserved by those who dwelt under such conditions as have just
been suggested, or some huge dark body from the outer depths sweeping
straight at that little visible universe, and all unsuspected by the
inhabitants. One may imagine the scientific people of such a world, calm
in their assurance of the permanence of things, incapable almost of
conceiving any disturbing cause. One may imagine how an imaginative
writer who doubted that permanence would be pooh-poohed. "Cannot we see
to the uttermost limits of space?" they might argue, "and is it not
altogether blue and void?" Then, as the unseen visitor draws near, begin
the most extraordinary perturbations. The two known heavenly bodies
suddenly fail from their accustomed routine. The moon, hitherto
invariably full, changes towards its last quarter--and then, behold! for
the first time the rays of the greater stars visibly pierce the blue
canopy of the sky. How suddenly--painfully almost--the minds of thinking
men would be enlarged when this rash of the stars appeared.
And what then if _our_ heavens were to open? Very thin indeed is the
curtain between us and the unknown. There is a fear of the night that is
begotten of ignorance and superstition, a nightmare fear, the fear of
the impossible; and there is another fear of the night--of the starlit
night--that comes with knowledge, when we see in its true proportion
this little life of ours with all its phantasmal environment of cities
and stores and arsenals, and the habits, prejudices, and promises of
men. Down there in the gaslit street such things are real and solid
enough, the only real things, perhaps; but not up here, not under the
midnight sky. Here for a space, standing silently upon the dim, grey
tower of the old observatory, we may clear our minds of instincts and
illusions, and look out upon the real.
And now to the eastward the stars are no longer innumerable, and the sky
grows wan. Then a faint silvery mist appears above the housetops, and at
last in the midst of this there comes a brilliantly shining line--the
upper edge of the rising moon.
THE MODE IN MONUMENTS
STRAY THOUGHTS IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY
On a sharp, sunlight morning, when the white clouds are drifting swiftly
across the luminous blue sky, there is no finer walk about London than
the Highgate ridge. One may stay awhile on the Archway looking down upon
the innumerable roofs of London stretching southward into the haze, and
shining here and there with the reflection of the rising sun, and then
wander on along the picturesque road by the college of Saint Aloysius to
the new Catholic church, and so through the Waterlow Park to the
cemetery. The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of children and
aged persons in perambulators during the middle hours of the day, and in
the summer evening time a haunt of young lovers; but your early wanderer
finds it solitary save for Vertumnus, who, with L.C.C. on the front of
him, is putting in crocuses. So we wander down to the little red lodge,
whence a sinuous road runs to Hampstead, and presently into the close
groves of monuments that whiten the opposite slope.
How tightly these white sepulchres are packed here! How different this
congestion of sorrow from the mossy latitude of God's Acre in the
country! The dead are crammed together as closely as the living seemed
in that bird's-eye view from the Archway. There is no ample shadow of
trees, no tangled corners where mother earth may weave flower garlands
over her returning children. The monuments positively jostle and elbow
each other for frontage upon the footways. And they are so rawly clean
and assertive. Most of them are conspicuously new whitened, with
freshly-blackened or newly-gilt inscriptions, bare of lichen, moss, or
mystery, and altogether so restless that it seems to the meditative man
that the struggle for existence, for mere standing room and a show in
the world, still rages among the dead. The unstable slope of the hill,
with its bristling array of obelisks, crosses and urns, craning one
above another, is as directly opposed to the restfulness of the village
churchyard with its serene outspreading yews as midday Fleet Street to a
Sabbath evening amidst the Sussex hills. This cemetery is, indeed, a
veritable tumult of tombs.
Another thing that presently comes painfully home to one is the lack of
individuality among all these dead. Not a necessary lack of
individuality so much as a deliberate avoidance of it. As one wanders
along the steep, narrow pathways one is more and more profoundly
impressed by the wholesale flavour of the mourning, the stereotyping of
the monuments. The place is too modern for _memento mori_ and the
hour-glass and the skull. Instead, Slap & Dash, that excellent firm of
monumental masons, everywhere crave to be remembered. Truly, the firm of
Slap & Dash have much to answer for among these graves, and they do not
seem to be ashamed of it.
From one elevated point in this cemetery one can count more than a
hundred urns, getting at last weary and confused with the receding
multitude. The urn is not dissimilar to the domestic mantel ornament,
and always a stony piece of textile fabric is feigned to be thrown over
its shoulder. At times it is wreathed in stony flowers. The only variety
is in the form. Sometimes your urn is broad and squat, a Silenus among
urns; sometimes fragile and high-shouldered, like a slender old maid;
here an "out-size" in urns stalwart and strong, and there a dwarf
peeping quaintly from its wrapping. The obelisks, too, run through a
long scale of size and refinement. But the curious man finds no hidden
connection between the carriage of the monument and the character of the
dead. Messrs. Slap & Dash apparently take the urn or obelisk that comes
readiest to hand. One wonders dimly why mourners have this overwhelming
proclivity for Messrs. Slap & Dash and their obelisk and urn.
The reason why the firm produces these articles may be guessed at. They
are probably easy to make, and require scarcely any skill. The
contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy shed in a back street,
where a human being passes dismally through life the while he chips out
an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his
employers' retailing. But the question why numberless people will
profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of
Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For
surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the
monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by
contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting
monument that no repetition can stale.
The artistic cowardice of the English is perhaps the clue to the
mystery. Your Englishman is always afraid to commit himself to criticism
without the refuge of a _tu quoque_. He is covered dead, just as he is
covered living, with the "correct thing." A respectable stock-in-trade
is proffered him by the insinuating shopman, to whom it is our custom to
go. He is told this is selling well, or that is much admired. Heaven
defend that he should admire on his own account! He orders the stock urn
or the stock slab because it is large and sufficiently expensive for his
means and sorrow, and because he knows of nothing better. So we mourn as
the stonemason decrees, or after the example and pattern of the Smiths
next door. But some day it will dawn upon us that a little thought and a
search after beauty are far more becoming than an order and a cheque to
the nearest advertising tradesman. Or it may be we shall conclude that
the anonymous peace of a grassy mould is better than his commercial
brutalities, and so there will be an end of him.
One may go from end to end of this cemetery and find scarcely anything
beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some
degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near
this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ.
In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is
to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is
the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure,
with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely
restful against the serried vulgarity around it.
But the tradesman ghoul will not leave us; he follows us up and down,
indecently clamouring his name and address, and at last turns our
meditation to despair. Certain stock devices become as painful as
popular autotypes. There is the lily broken on its stalk; we meet it
here on a cross and there on an obelisk, presently on the pedestal of an
urn. There is the hand pointing upward, here balanced on the top of an
obelisk and there upon a cross. The white-robed angel, free from the
remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again. "All this is
mine," says the tradesman ghoul. "Behold the names of me--Slap & Dash
here, the Ugliness Company there, and this the work of the Cheap and
Elegant Funeral Association. This is where we slew the art of sculpture.
These are our trophies that sculpture is no more. All this marble might
have been beautiful, all this sorrow might have been expressive, had it
not been for us. See, this is our border, No. A 5, and our pedestal No.
E, and our second quality urn, along of a nice appropriate text--a
pretty combination and a cheap one. Or we can do it you better in border
A 3, and pedestal C, and a larger urn or a hangel----"
The meditative man is seized with a dismal horror, and retreats to the
gates. Even there a wooden advertisement grins broadly at him in his
discomfiture, and shouts a name athwart his route. And so down the
winding road to the valley, and then up Parliament Hill towards
Hampstead and its breeze-whipped ponds. And the mind of him is full of a
dim vision of days that have been, when sculptor and stonemason were
one, when the artist put his work in the porch for all the world to see,
when people had leisure to think how things should be done and heart to
do them well, when there was beauty in the business of life and dignity
in death. And he wonders rather hopelessly if people will ever rise up
against these damnable tradesmen who ruin our arts, make our lives
costly and dismal, and advertise, advertise even on our graves.
HOW I DIED
It is now ten years ago since I received my death warrant. All these ten
years I have been, and I am, and shall be, I hope, for years yet, a
Doomed Man. It only occurred to me yesterday that I had been
dodging--missing rather than dodging--the common enemy for such a space
of time. _Then_, I know, I respected him. It seemed he marched upon me,
inexorable, irresistible; even at last I felt his grip upon me. I bowed
in the shadow. And he passed. Ten years ago, and once since, he and I
have been very near. But now he seems to me but a blind man, and we,
with all our solemn folly of medicine and hygiene, but players in a game
of Blind Man's Buff. The gaunt, familiar hand comes out suddenly,
swiftly, this time surely? And it passes close to my shoulder; I hear
someone near me cry, and it is over.... Another ream of paper; there is
time at least for the Great Book still.
Very close to the tragedy of life is the comedy, brightest upon the very
edge of the dark, and I remember now with a queer touch of sympathetic
amusement my dear departed self of the middle eighties. How the thing
staggered me! I was full of the vast ambition of youth; I was still at
the age when death is quite out of sight, when life is still an
interminable vista of years; and then suddenly, with a gout of blood
upon my knuckle, with a queer familiar taste in my mouth, that cough
which had been a bother became a tragedy, and this world that had been
so solid grew faint and thin. I saw through it; saw his face near to my
own; suddenly found him beside me, when I had been dreaming he was far
beyond there, far away over the hills.
My first phase was an immense sorrow for myself. It was a purely selfish
emotion. You see I had been saving myself up, denying myself half the
pride of life and most of its indulgence, drilling myself like a
drill-sergeant, with my eyes on those now unattainable hills. Had I
known it was to end so soon, I should have planned everything so
differently. I lay in bed mourning my truncated existence. Then
presently the sorrow broadened. They were so sorry, so genuinely sorry
for me. And they considered me so much now. I had this and that they
would never have given me before--the stateliest bedding, the costliest
food. I could feel from my bed the suddenly disorganised house, the
distressed friends, the new-born solicitude. Insensibly a realisation of
enhanced importance came to temper my regrets for my neglected sins. The
lost world, that had seemed so brilliant and attractive, dwindled
steadily as the days of my illness wore on. I thought more of the
world's loss, and less of my own.
Then came the long journey; the princely style of it! the sudden
awakening on the part of external humanity, which had hitherto been wont
to jostle me, to help itself before me, to turn its back upon me, to my
importance. "He has a diseased lung--cannot live long"....
I was going into the dark and I was not afraid--with ostentation. I
still regard that, though now with scarcely so much gravity as
heretofore, as a very magnificent period in my life. For nearly four
months I was dying with immense dignity. Plutarch might have recorded
it. I wrote--in touchingly unsteady pencil--to all my intimate friends,
and indeed to many other people. I saw the littleness of hate and
ambition. I forgave my enemies, and they were subdued and owned to it.
How they must regret these admissions! I made many memorable remarks.
This lasted, I say, nearly four months.
The medical profession, which had pronounced my death sentence,
reiterated it steadily--has, indeed, done so now this ten years. Towards
the end of those four months, however, dying lost its freshness for me.
I began to detect a certain habitual quality in my service. I had
exhausted all my memorable remarks upon the subject, and the strain
began to tell upon all of us.
One day in the spring-time I crawled out alone, carefully wrapped, and
with a stick, to look once more--perhaps for the last time--on sky and
earth, and the first scattered skirmishers of the coming army of
flowers. It was a day of soft wind, when the shadows of the clouds go
sweeping over the hills. Quite casually I happened upon a girl
clambering over a hedge, and her dress had caught in a bramble, and the
chat was quite impromptu and most idyllic. I remember she had three or
four wood anemones in her hand--"wind stars" she called them, and I
thought it a pretty name. And we talked of this and that, with a light
in our eyes, as young folks will.
I quite forgot I was a Doomed Man. I surprised myself walking home with
a confident stride that jarred with the sudden recollection of my
funereal circumstances. For a moment I tried in vain to think what it
was had slipped my memory. Then it came, colourless and remote. "Oh!
Death.... He's a Bore," I said; "I've done with him," and laughed to
think of having done with him.
"And why not so?" said I.
THE END
_This book appeared some years ago at another price and in another
form. The Publisher believes that its present guise will bring it
within the reach of all and sundry, who, while delighting in the
marriage of_ wit _with_ wisdom, _cannot complete the trilogy with
the third desideratum of_ wealth.
PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH
[Illustration: Front Book Cover]
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[Illustration: Back Book Cover]
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