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THE YELLOW BOOK
An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume II July 1894
[Illustration: Magazine Cover]
London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane
Boston: Copeland & Day Price 5/- Net
Contents
Literature
I. The Gospel of Content By Frederick Greenwood _Page_ 11
II. Poor Cousin Louis Ella D'Arcy 34
III. The Composer of "Carmen" Charles Willeby 63
IV. Thirty Bob a Week John Davidson 99
V. A Responsibility Henry Harland 103
VI. A Song Dollie Radford 116
VII. Passed Charlotte M. Mew 121
VIII. Sat est Scripsisse Austin Dobson 142
IX. Three Stories V., O., C.S. 144
X. In a Gallery Katharine de Mattos 177
XI. The Yellow Book, } Philip Gilbert Hamerton,
criticised } LL.D. 179
XII. Dreams Ronald Campbell Macfie 195
XIII. Madame Réjane Dauphin Meunier 197
XIV. The Roman Road Kenneth Grahame 211
XV. Betrothed Norman Gale 227
XVI. Thy Heart's Desire Netta Syrett 228
XVII. Reticence in Literature Hubert Crackanthorpe 259
XVIII. My Study Alfred Hayes 275
XIX. A Letter to the Editor Max Beerbohm 281
XX. An Epigram William Watson 289
XXI. The Coxon Fund Henry James 290
Art
I. The Renaissance of By Walter Crane _Page_ 7
Venus
II. The Lamplighter A. S. Hartrick 60
III. } The Comedy-Ballet }
IV. } of }
V. } Marionettes }
}
VI. Garçons de Café } Aubrey Beardsley 85
}
VII. The Slippers of }
Cinderella }
}
VIII. Portrait of Madame }
Réjane }
IX. A Landscape Alfred Thornton 117
X. Portrait of Himself }
}
XI. A Lady } P. Wilson Steer 171
}
XII. A Gentleman }
XIII. Portrait of Henry John S. Sargent, A.R.A. 191
James
XIV. A Girl Resting Sydney Adamson 207
XV. The Old Bedford Music }
Hall }
}
XVI. Portrait of Aubrey } Walter Sickert 220
Beardsley }
}
XVII. Ada Lundberg }
XVIII. An Idyll W. Brown Mac Dougal 256
XIX. The Old Man's Garden }
} E. J. Sullivan 270
XX. The Quick and the Dead }
XXI. A Reminiscence of Francis Forster 278
"The Transgressor"
XXII. A Study Bernhard Sickert 285
XXIII. For the Backs of Playing By Aymer Vallance 361
Cards
The Yellow Book
Volume II July, 1894
The Editor of THE YELLOW BOOK can in no case hold himself
responsible for rejected manuscripts; when, however, they are
accompanied by stamped addressed envelopes, every effort will be
made to secure their prompt return.
The Yellow Book
An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume II July, 1894
[Illustration: sketch of a woman in a park]
London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane
Boston: Copeland & Day
Agents for the Colonies: Robt. A. Thompson & Co.
The Renaissance of Venus
By Walter Crane
_By kind permission of G. F. Watts, Esq., R.A._
[Illustration: The Renaissance of Venus]
The Gospel of Content
By Frederick Greenwood
I
How it was that I, being so young a man and not a very tactful one,
was sent on such an errand is more than I should be able to explain.
But many years ago some one came to me with a request that I should go
that evening to a certain street at King's Cross, where would be found
a poor lady in great distress; that I should take a small sum of money
which was given to me for the purpose in a little packet which
disguised all appearance of coin, present it to her as a "parcel"
which I had been desired to deliver, and ask if there were any
particular service that could be done for her. For my own information
I was told that she was a beautiful Russian whose husband had barely
contrived to get her out of the country, with her child, before his
own arrest for some deep political offence of which she was more than
cognisant, and that now she was living in desperate ignorance of his
fate. Moreover, she was penniless and companionless, though not quite
without friends; for some there were who knew of her husband and had a
little help for her, though they were almost as poor as herself. But
none of these dare approach her, so fearful was she of the danger of
their doing so, either to themselves or her husband or her child, and
so ignorant of the perfect freedom that political exiles could count
upon in England. "Then," said I, "what expectation is there that she
will admit me, an absolute stranger to her, who may be employed by the
police for anything she knows to the contrary?" The answer was: "Of
course that has been thought of. But you have only to send up your
name, which, in the certainty that you would have no objection, has
been communicated to her already. Her own name, in England, is Madame
Vernet."
It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and
a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell
upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found
my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross
is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first
dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its
squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so
wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes.
On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more
melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with
foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday
marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls
that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these
thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and
small, was a maze of streets built to be "respectable" but now run
down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any
rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was
directed--a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with
two families at least in every one of them.
Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by
her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to
the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the
visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which,
though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any
coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed.
For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear
of intrusion--of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched
little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now
these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse
intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of
some poor little meal?
Too much embarrassed to make the right apology (which, to be right,
would have been without any embarrassment at all) I entered the room,
in which everything could be seen in one straightforward glance: the
little square table in the centre, with its old green cover and the
squat lamp on it, the two chairs, the dingy half carpet, the bed
wherein a child lay asleep in a lovely flush of colour, and the pale
woman with a still face, and with the eyes that are said to resemble
agates, standing before the hearth. Under the dark cloud of her hair
she looked the very picture of Suffering--Suffering too proud to
complain and too tired to speak. Beautiful as the lines of her face
were, it was white as ashes and spoke their meaning; but nothing had
yet tamed the upspringing nobility of her tall, slight, and yet
imperious form.
Receiving me with the very least appearance of curiosity or any other
kind of interest, but yet with something of proud constraint (which I
attributed too much, perhaps, to the untimely frying-pan), she waved
her hand toward the farther chair of the two, and asked to be excused
from giving me her attention for a moment. By that she evidently meant
that otherwise her supper would be spoiled. It is not everything that
can be left to cook unattended; and since this poor little supper was
a piece of fish scarce bigger than her hand, it was all the more
likely to spoil and the less could be spared in damage. So I quietly
took my seat in a position which more naturally commanded the view out
of window than of the cooking operations, and waited to be again
addressed.
On the mantel-board a noisy little American clock ticked as if its
mission was to hurry time rather than to measure it, the frying-pan
fizzed and bubbled without any abatement of its usual habit or any
sense of compunction, now and then the child tossed upon the bed from
one pretty attitude to another; and that was all that could be heard,
for Madame Vernet's movements were as silent as the movements of a
shadow. In almost any part of that small room she could be seen
without direct looking; but at a moment when she seemed struck into a
yet deeper silence, and because of it, I ventured to turn upon her
more than half an eye. Standing rigidly still, she was staring at the
door in an intensity of listening that transfigured her. But the door
was closed, and I with the best of hearing directed to the same place
could detect no new sound: indeed, I dare swear that there was none.
It was merely accidental that just at this moment the child, with
another toss of the lovely black head, opened her eyes wide; but it
deepened the impressiveness of the scene when her mother, seeing the
little one awake, placed a finger on her own lips as she advanced
nearer to the door. The gesture was for silence, and it was obeyed as
if in understood fear. But still there was nothing to be heard
without, unless it were a push of soft drizzle against the
window-panes. And this Madame Vernet herself seemed to think when,
after a little while, she turned back to the fire--her eyes mere
agates again which had been all ablaze.
Stooping to the fender, she had now got her fish into one warm plate,
and had covered it with another, and had placed it on the broad
old-fashioned hob of the grate to keep hot (as I surmised) while she
spoke with and got rid of me, when knocking was heard at the outer
door, a pair of hasty feet came bounding up the stair, careless of
noise, and in flashed a splendid radiant creature of a man in a thin
summer coat, and literally drenched to the skin.
It was Monsieur Vernet, whose real name ended in "ieff." By daring
ingenuity, by a long chain of connivance yet more hazardous, by
courage, effrontery, and one or two miraculous strokes of good
fortune, he had escaped from the fortress to which he had been
conveyed in secret and without the least spark of hope that he would
ever be released. For many months no one but himself and his jailers
knew whether he was alive or dead: his friends inclined to think him
the one thing or the other according to the brightness or the
gloominess of the hour. Smuggled into Germany, and running thence into
Belgium, he had landed in England the night before; and walking the
whole distance to London, with an interval of four hours' sleep in a
cartshed, he contrived to bring home nearly all of the four shillings
with which he started.
But these particulars, it will be understood, I did not learn till
afterwards. For that evening my visit was at an end from the moment
(the first of his appearance) when Vernet seized his wife in his arms
with a partial resemblance to murder. Unobserved, I placed my small
packet on the table behind the lamp, and then slipped out; but not
without a last view of that affecting "domestic interior," which
showed me those two people in a relaxed embrace while they made me a
courteous salute in response to another which was all awkwardness,
their little daughter standing up on the bed in her night-gown,
patiently yet eagerly waiting to be noticed by her father. In all
likelihood she had not to wait long.
This was the beginning of my acquaintance with a man who had a greater
number of positive ideas than any one else that ever I have known,
with wonderful intrepidity and skill in expounding or defending them.
However fine the faculties of some other Russians whom I have
encountered, they seemed to move in a heavily obstructive atmosphere;
Vernet appeared to be oppressed by none. His resolutions were as
prompt as his thought; whatever resource he could command in any
difficulty, whether the least or the greatest, presented itself to his
mind instantly, with the occasion for it; and every movement of his
body had the same quickness and precision. His pride, his pride of
aristocracy, could tower to extraordinary heights; his sensibility to
personal slights and indignities was so trenchant that I have seen him
white and quivering with rage when he thought himself rudely jostled
by a fellow-passenger in a crowded street. And yet any comrade in
conspiracy was his familiar if he only brought daring enough into the
common business; and wife, child, fortune, the exchange of ease for
the most desperate misery, all were put at stake for the sake of the
People and at the call of their sorrows and oppressions. And of one
sort of pride he had no sense whatever--fine gentleman as he was, and
used from his birth to every refinement of service and luxury: no
degree of poverty, nor any blameless shift for relieving it, touched
him as humiliating. Privation, whether for others or himself, angered
him; the contrast between slothful wealth and toiling misery enraged
him; but he had no conception of want and its wretched little
expedients as mortifying.
For example. It was in November, that dreary and inclement month, when
he began life anew in England with a capital of three shillings and
sevenpence. It was a bleak afternoon in December, sleet lightly
falling as the dusk came on and melting as it fell, when I found him
gathering into a little basket what looked in the half-darkness like
monstrous large snails. With as much indifference as if he were
offering me a new kind of cigarette, Vernet put one of these things
into my hand, and I saw that it was a beautifully-made miniature
sailor's hat. The strands of which it was built were just like twisted
brown straw to the eye, though they were of the smallness of
packthread; and a neat band of ribbon proportionately slender made all
complete. But what were they for? How were they made? The answer was
that the design was to sell them, and that they were made of the
cords--more artistically twisted and more neatly waxed than
usual--that shoemakers use in sewing. As for the bands, Madame Vernet
had amongst her treasures a cap which her little daughter had worn in
her babyhood; and this cap had close frills of lace, and the frills
were inter-studded with tiny loops of ribbon--a fashion of that time.
There were dozens of these tiny loops, and everyone of them made a
band for Vernet's little toy hats. Perhaps in tenderness for the
mother's feelings, he would not let her turn the ribbons to their new
use, but had applied them himself; and having spent the whole of a
foodless day in the manufacture of these little articles, he was now
about to go and sell them. He had selected his "pitch" in a flaring
bustling street a mile away; and he asked me ("I must lose no time,"
he said) to accompany him in that direction. I did so, with a cold and
heavy stone in my breast which I am sure had no counterpart in his
own. As he marched on, in his light and firm soldierly way, he was
loud in praise of English liberty: at such a moment _that_ was his
theme. Arrived near his "pitch," he bade me good-night with no
abatement of the high and easy air that was natural to him; and though
I instantly turned back of course, I knew that at a few paces farther
the violently proud man moved off the pathway into the gutter, and
stood there till eleven o'clock; for not before then did he sell the
last of his little penny hats. Another man, equally proud, might have
done the same thing in Vernet's situation, but not with Vernet's
absolute indifference to everything but the coldness of the night and
the too-great stress of physical want.
But this Russian revolutionist was far too capable and versatile a man
to lie long in low water. He had a genius for industrial chemistry
which soon got him employment and from the sufficiently comfortable
made him prosperous by rapid stages. But what of that? Before long
another wave of political disturbance rose in Europe; Russia, Italy,
France, 'twas all one to Vernet when his sympathies were roused; and
after one or two temporary disappearances he was again lost
altogether. There was no news of him for months; and then his wife,
who all this while had been sinking back into the pallid speechless
deadness of the King's Cross days, suddenly disappeared too.
II
For more than thirty years--a period of enormous change in all that
men do or think--no word of Vernet came to my knowledge. But though
quite passed away he was never forgotten long, and it was with an
inrush of satisfaction that, a year or two ago, I received this letter
from him:
"... I have been reading the ---- _Review_, and it determines
me to solicit a pleasure which I have been at full-cock to ask
for many times since I returned to England in 1887. Let us meet.
I have something to say to you. But let us not meet in this
horrifically large and noisy town. You know Richmond? You know
the Star and Garter Hotel there? Choose a day when you will go to
find me in that hotel. It shall be in a quiet room looking over
the trees and the river, and there we will dine and sit and talk
over our dear tobacco in a right place.
"To say one word of the past, that you may know and then forget.
Marie is gone--gone twelve years since; and my daughter, gone. I
do not speak of them. And do not you expect to find in me any
more the Vernet of old days."
Nor was he. The splendidly robust and soldierly figure of thirty-five
had changed into a thin, fine-featured old man, above all things
gentle, thoughtful, considerate. Except that there was no suggestion
of a second and an inner self in him, he might have been an
ecclesiastic; as it was, he looked rather as if he had been all his
life a recluse student of books and state affairs.
It was a good little dinner in a bright room overlooking the garden;
and it was served so early that the declining sunshine of a June day
shone through our claret-glasses when coffee was brought in. Our first
talk was of matters of the least importance--our own changing fortunes
over a period of prodigious change for the whole world. From that
personal theme to the greater mutations that affect all mankind was a
quick transition; and we had not long been launched on this line of
talk before I found that in very truth nothing had changed more than
Vernet himself. It was the story of Ignatius Loyola over again, in
little and with a difference.
"Yes," said he, my mind filling with unspoken wonder at this during a
brief pause in the conversation, "Yes, prison did me good. Not in the
rough way you think, perhaps, as of taking nonsense out of a man with
a stick, but as solitude. Strict Catholics go into retreat once a
year, and it does them good as Catholics: whether otherwise I do not
know, but it is possible. You have a wild philosopher whom I love; and
wild philosophers are much the best. In them there is more philosophic
sport, more surprise, more shock; and it is shock that crystallises.
They startle the breath into our own unborn thoughts--thoughts formed
in the mind, you know, but without any ninth month for them: they wait
for some outer voice to make them alive. Well, once upon a time I
heard this philosopher, your Mr. Ruskin, say that only the most noble,
most virtuous, most beautiful young men should be allowed to go to the
war; the others, never. And he maintained it--ah! in language from
some divine madhouse in heaven. But as to that, it is a great
objection that your army is already small. Yet of this I am nearly
sure; it is the wrong men who go to gaol. The rogues and thieves
should give place to honest men--honest _reflective_ men. Every
advantage of that conclusive solitude is lost on blackguard persons
and is mostly turned to harm. For them prescribe one, two, three
applications of your cat-o'-nine tails----"
"There is knout like it!" said I, intending a severity of retort which
I hoped would not be quite lost in the pun.
"----and then a piece of bread, a shilling, and dismissal to the most
devout repentance that brutish crime is ever acquainted with,
repentance in stripes. Imprisonment is wasted on persons of so
inferior character. Waste it not, and you will have accommodation for
wise men to learn the monk's lesson (did you ever think it _all_
foolishness?) that a little imperious hardship, a time of seclusion
with only themselves to talk to themselves, is most improving. For
statesmen and reformers it should be an obligation."
"And according to your experience what is the general course of the
improvement? In what direction does it run?"
"At best? In sum total? You know me that I am no monk nor lover of
monks, but I say to you what the monk would say were he still a man
and intelligent. The chief good is rising above petty irritation,
petty contentiousness; it is patience with ills that _must_ last long;
it is choosing to build out the east wind instead of running at it
with a sword."
"And, if I remember aright, you never had that sword out of your
hand."
"From twenty years old to fifty, never out of my hand. But there were
excuses--no, but more than excuses; remember that that was another
time. Now how different it is, and what satisfaction to have lived to
see the change!"
"And what is the change you are thinking of!"
"One that I have read of--only he must not flatter himself that he
alone could find it out--in some Review articles of an old friend of
Vernet's whose portrait is before me now." And then, a little to my
distress, but more to my pleasure, he quoted from two or three
forgotten papers of mine on the later developments of social humanity,
the "evolution of goodness" in the relations of men to each other, the
new, great and rapid extension of brotherly kindness; observations and
theories which were welcomed as novel when they were afterwards taken
up and enlarged upon by Mr. Kidd in his book on "Social Evolution."
"For an ancient conspirator and man of the barricades," continued
Vernet, by this time pacing the room in the dusk which he would not
allow to be disturbed, "for a blood-and-iron man who put all his hopes
of a better day for his poor devils of fellow-creatures on the
smashing of forms and institutions and the substitution of others, I
am rather a surprising convert, don't you think? But who could know in
those days what was going on in the common stock of mind by--what
shall we call it? Before your Darwin brought out his explaining word
'evolution' I should have said that the change came about by a sort of
mental chemistry; that it was due to a kind of chemical ferment in
the mind, unsuspected till it showed entirely new growths and
developments. And even now, you know, I am not quite comfortable with
'evolution' as the word for this sudden spiritual advance into what
you call common kindness and more learned persons call 'altruism.' It
does not satisfy me, 'evolution.'"
"But you can say why it doesn't, perhaps."
"Nothing, more, I suppose, than the familiar association of
'evolution' with slow degrees and gradual processes. Evolution seems
to speak the natural coming-out of certain developments from certain
organisms under certain conditions. The change comes, and you see it
coming; and you can look back and trace its advance. But here? The
human mind has been the same for ages; subject to the same teaching;
open to the same persuasions and dissuasions; as quick to see and as
keen to think as it is now; and all the while it has been staring on
the same cruel scenes of misery and privation: no, but very often
worse. And then, presto! there comes a sudden growth of fraternal
sentiment all over this field of the human mind; and such a growth
that if it goes on, if it goes on straight and well, it will transform
the whole world. Transform its economies?--it will change its very
aspect. Towns, streets, houses will show the difference; while as to
man himself, it will make him another being. For this is neither a
physical nor a mere intellectual advance. As for that, indeed, perhaps
the intellectual advance hasn't very much farther to go on its own
lines, which are independent of morality, or of goodness as I prefer
to say: the simple word! Well, do you care if evolution has pretty
nearly done with intellect? Would you mind if intellect never made a
greater shine? Will your heart break if it never ascends to a higher
plane than it has reached already?"
"Not a bit; if, in time, nobody is without a good working share of
what intellect there is amongst us."
"No, not a bit! Enough of intellect for the good and happiness of
mankind if we evolve no more of it. But this is another thing! This is
a _spiritual_ evolution, spiritual advance and development--a very
different thing! Mark you, too, that it is not shown in a few amongst
millions, but is common, general. And though, as you have said, it may
perish at its beginnings, trampled out by war, the terrible war to
come may absolutely confirm it. For my part, I don't despair of its
surviving and spreading even from the battle-field. It is your own
word that not only has the growth of common kindness been more urgent,
rapid and general this last hundred years than was ever witnessed
before in the whole long history of the world, but it has come out as
strongly in making war as in making peace. It is seen in extending to
foes a benevolence which not long ago would have been thought
ludicrous and even unnatural. Why, then, if that's so, the feeling may
be furthered and intensified by the very horrors of the next great
war, such horrors as there _must_ be; and--God knows! God knows!--but
from this beginning the spiritual nature of man may be destined to
rise as far above the rudimentary thing it is yet (I think of a
staggering blind puppy) as King Solomon's wits were above an
Eskimo's."
"Still the same enthusiast," I said to myself, "though with so great a
difference." But what struck me most was the reverence with which he
said "God knows!" For the coolest Encyclopedist could not have denied
the existence of God with a more settled air than did "the Vernet of
old days."
"And yet," so he went on, "were the human race to become all-righteous
in a fortnight, and to push out angels' wings from its shoulders,
every one! every one! all together on Christmas Day, it would still be
the Darwinian process. Yes, we must stick to it, that it is evolution,
I suppose, and I'm sure it contents me well enough. What matter for
the process! And yet do you know what I think?"
Lights had now been brought in by the waiter--a waiter who really
could not understand why not. But we sat by the open window looking
out upon the deepening darkness of the garden, beyond which the river
shone as if by some pale effulgence of its own, or perhaps by a little
store of light saved up from the liberal sunshine of the day.
"Do you know what I think?" said Vernet, with the look of a man who is
about to confess a weakness of which he is ashamed. "I sometimes think
that if I were of the orthodox I should draw an argument for
supernatural religion, against your strict materialists, from this
sudden change of heart in Christian countries. For that is what it is.
It is a change of heart; or, if you like to have it so, of spirit; and
the remarkable thing is that it is _nothing else_. Whether it lasts or
not, this awakening of brotherliness cannot be completely understood
unless that is understood. What else has changed, these hundred years?
There is no fresh discovery of human suffering, no new knowledge of
the desperate poverty and toil of so many of our fellow-creatures: nor
can we see better with our eyes, or understand better what we hear and
see. This that we are talking about is a heart-growth, which, as we
know, can make the lowliest peasant divine; not a mind-growth, which
can be splendid in the coldest and most devilish man. Well, then, were
I of the orthodox I should say this. When, after many generations, I
see a traceless movement of the spirit of man like the one we are
speaking of--a movement which, if it gains in strength and goes on to
its natural end, will transfigure human society and make it infinitely
more like heaven--I think the divine influence upon the development of
man as a spirit may be direct and continuous; or, it would be better
to say, not without repetition."
Vernet had to be reminded that the intellectual development of man had
also shown itself in sudden starts and rushes toward perfection--now
in one land, now in another; and never with an appearance of gradual
progress, as might be expected from the nature of things. And
therefore nothing in the spiritual advance which is declared by the
sudden efflorescence of "altruism" dissociates it from the common
theory of evolution. This he was forced to admit. "I know," he
replied; "and as to intellectual development showing itself by starts
and rushes, it is very obvious." But though he made the admission, I
could see that he preferred belief in direct influence from above. And
this was Vernet!--a most unexpected example of that Return to Religion
which was not so manifest when we talked together as it is to-day.
"You see, I am a soldier," he resumed, "and a soldier born and bred
does not know how to get on very long without feeling the presence of
a General, a Commander. That I find as I grow old; my youth would have
been ashamed to acknowledge the sentiment. And for its own sake, I
hope that Science is becoming an old gentleman too, and willing to see
its youthful confidence in the destruction of religious belief quite
upset. For upset it certainly will be, and very much by its own hands.
Most of the new professors were sure that the religious idea was to
perish at last in the light of scientific inquiry. None of them seemed
to suspect what I remember to have read in a fantastic magazine
article two or three years ago, that unbelief in the existence of a
providential God, the dissolution of that belief, would not retard but
probably draw on more quickly the greater and yet unfulfilled triumphs
of Christ on earth. Are you surprised at that? Certainly it is not the
general idea of what unbelief is capable of. 'And what,' says some one
in the story, 'what are those greater triumphs?' To which the answer
is: 'The extension of charity, the diffusion of brotherly love, greed
suppressed, luxury shameful, service and self-sacrifice a common
law'--something like what we see already between mother and child, it
was said. Now what do you think of that as a consequence of settled
unbelief? As for Belief, we must allow that _that_ has not done much
to bring on the greater triumphs of Christianity."
"And how is Unbelief to do this mighty work?" said I.
"You would like to know! Why, in a most natural way, and not at all
mysterious. But if you ask in how long a time----! Well, it is thus,
as I understand. What the destruction of religious faith might have
made of the world centuries ago we cannot tell; nothing much worse,
perhaps, than it was under Belief, for belief can exist with little
change of heart. But these are new times. Unbelief cannot annihilate
the common feeling of humanity. On the contrary, we see that it is
just when Science breaks religion down into agnosticism that a new day
of tenderness for suffering begins, and poverty looks for the first
time like a wrong. And why? To answer that question we should remember
what centuries of belief taught us as to the place of man on earth in
the plan of the Creator. This world, it was 'a scene of probation.'
The mystery of pain and suffering, the burdens of life apportioned so
unequally, the wicked prosperous, goodness wretched, innocent weakness
trodden down or used up in starving toil--all this was explained by
the scheme of probation. It was only for this life; and every hour of
it we were under the eyes of a heavenly Father who knows all and
weighs all; and there will be a future of redress that will leave no
misery unreckoned, no weakness unconsidered, no wrong uncompensated
that was patiently borne. Don't you remember? And how comfortable the
doctrine was! How entirely it soothed our uneasiness when, sitting in
warmth and plenty, we thought of the thousands of poor wretches
outside! And it was a comfort for the poor wretches too, who believed
most when they were most miserable or foully wronged that in His own
good time God would requite or would avenge.
"Very well. But now, says my magazine sermoniser, suppose this idea of
a heavenly Father a mistake and probation a fairy tale; suppose that
there is no Divine scheme of redress beyond the grave: how do we
mortals stand to each other then? How do we stand to each other in a
world empty of all promise beyond it? What is to become of our
scene-of-probation complacency, we who are happy and fortunate in the
midst of so much wrong? And if we do not busy ourselves with a new
dispensation on their behalf, what hope or consolation is there for
the multitude of our fellow-creatures who are born to unmerited misery
in the only world there is for any of us? It is clear that if we must
give up the Divine scheme of redress as a dream, redress is an
obligation returned upon ourselves. All will not be well in another
world: all must be put right in this world or nowhere and never.
Dispossessed of God and a future life, mankind is reduced to the
condition of the wild creatures, each with a natural right to ravage
for its own good. If in such conditions there is a duty of forbearance
from ravaging, there is a duty of helpful surrender too; and unbelief
must teach both duties, unless it would import upon earth the hell it
denies. 'Unbelief is a call to bring in the justice, the compassion,
the oneness of brotherhood that can never make a heaven for us
elsewhere.' So the thing goes on; the end of the argument being that
in this way unbelief itself may turn to the service of Heaven and do
the work of the believer's God. More than that: in the doing of it the
spiritual nature of man must be exalted, step by step. That may be its
way of perfection. On that path it will rise higher and higher into
Divine illuminations which have touched it but very feebly as yet,
even after countless ages of existence.
"Do you recognise these speculations?" said Vernet, after a silence.
I recognised them well enough, without at all anticipating that so
much of them would presently re-appear in the formal theory of more
than one social philosopher.
There was a piano in the little room we dined in. For a minute or two
Vernet, standing with his cigar between his lips, went lightly over
the keys. The movement, though extremely quick, was wonderfully soft,
so that he had not to raise his voice in saying:
"I have an innocent little speculation of my own. How long will it be
before this spiritual perfectioning is pretty near accomplishment? Two
thousand years? One thousand years? Twenty generations at the least!
Ah, that is the despair of us poor wretches of to-day and to-morrow.
Well, when the time comes I fancy that an entirely new literature will
have a new language. There will certainly be a new literature if ever
spiritual progress equals intellectual progress. The dawning of
conceptions as yet undreamt of, enlightenments higher than any yet
attained to, may be looked for, I suppose, as in the natural order of
things; and even _without_ extraordinary revelations to the spirit,
the spiritual advance must have an enormous effect in disabusing,
informing and inspiring mental faculty such as we know it now. And
meanwhile? Meanwhile words are all that we speak with, and how weak
are words? Already there are heights and depths of feeling which they
are hardly more adequate to express than the dumbness of the dog can
express his love for his master. Yet there is a language that speaks
to the deeper thought and finer spirit in us as words do not--moving
them profoundly though they have no power of articulate response. They
heave and struggle to reply, till our breasts are actually conscious
of pain sometimes; but--no articulate answer. Do you recognise----?"
I pointed to the piano with the finger of interrogation.
"Yes," said Vernet, with a delicate sweep of the keyboard, "it is
this! It is music; music, which is felt to be the most subtle, most
appealing, most various of tongues even while we know that we are
never more than half awake to its pregnant meanings, and have not
learnt to think of it as becoming the last perfection of speech. But
that may be its appointed destiny. No, I don't think so only because
music itself is a thing of late, speedy and splendid development,
coming just before the later diffusion of spiritual growth. Yet there
is something in that, something which an evolutionist would think
apposite and to be expected. There is more, however, in what music
is--a voice always understood to have powerful innumerable meanings
appealing to we know not what in us, we hardly know how; and more,
again, in its being an exquisite voice which can make no use of
reason, nor reason of it; nor calculation, nor barter, nor anything
but emotion and thought. The language we are using now, we two, is
animal language by direct pedigree, which is worth observation don't
you think? And, for another thing, when it began it had very small
likelihood of ever developing into what it has become under the
constant addition of man's business in the world and the accretive
demands of reason and speculation. And the poets have made it very
beautiful no doubt; yes, and when it is most beautiful it is most
musical, please observe: most beautiful, and at the same time most
meaning. Well, then! A new nature, new needs. What do you think? What
do you say against music being wrought into another language for
mankind, as it nears the height of its spiritual growth?"
"I say it is a pretty fancy, and quite within reasonable speculation."
"But yet not of the profoundest consequence," added Vernet, coming
from the piano and resuming his seat by the window. "No; but what is
of consequence is the cruel tedium of these evolutionary processes. A
thousand years, and how much movement?"
"Remember the sudden starts towards perfection, and that the farther
we advance the more we may be able to help."
"Well, but that is the very thing I meant to say. Help is not only
desirable, it is imperatively called for. For an unfortunate offensive
movement rises against this better one, which will be checked, or
perhaps thrown back altogether, unless the stupid reformers who
confront the new spirit of kindness with the highwayman's demand are
brought to reason. What I most willingly yield to friend and brother I
do not choose to yield to an insulting thief; rather will I break his
head in the cause of divine Civility. Robbery is no way of
righteousness, and your gallant reformers who think it a fine heroic
means of bringing on a better time for humanity should be taught that
some devil has put the wrong plan into their heads. It is his way of
continuing under new conditions the old conflict of evil and good."
"But taught! How should these so-earnest ones be taught?"
"Ah, how! Then leave the reformers; and while they inculcate their
mistaken Gospel of Rancour, let every wise man preach the Gospel of
Content."
"Content--with things as they are?"
"Why, no, my friend; for that would be preaching content with
universal uncontent, which of course cannot last into a reign of
wisdom and peace. But if you ask me whether I mean content with a very
very little of this world's goods, or even contentment in poverty, I
say yes. There will be no better day till that gospel has found
general acceptance, and has been taken into the common habitudes of
life. The end may be distant enough; but it is your own opinion that
the time is already ripe for the preacher, and if he were no Peter the
Hermit but only another, another----"
"Father Mathew, inspired with more saintly fervour----"
"Who knows how far he might carry the divine light to which so many
hearts are awakening in secret? This first Christianity, it was but
'the false dawn.' Yes, we may think so."
Here there was a pause for a few moments, and then I put in a word to
the effect that it would be difficult to commend a gospel of content
to Poverty.
"But," said Vernet, "it will be addressed more to the rich and
well-to-do, as you call them, bidding them be content with enough. Not
forbidding them to strive for more than enough--that would never do.
The good of mankind demands that all its energies should be
maintained, but not that its energies should be meanly employed in
grubbing for the luxury that is no enjoyment but only a show, or that
palls as soon as it is once enjoyed, and then is no more felt as
luxury than the labourer's second pair of boots or the mechanic's
third shirt a week. For the men of thousands per annum the Gospel of
Content would be the wise, wise, wise old injunction to plain living
and high thinking, only with one addition both beautiful and wise:
kind thinking, and the high and the kind thinking made good in deed.
And it would work, this gospel; we may be sure of it already. For
luxury has became _common_; it is being found out. Where there was one
person at the beginning of the century who had daily experience of its
fatiguing disappointments, now there are fifty. Like everything else,
it loses distinction by coming abundantly into all sorts of hands; and
meanwhile other and nobler kinds of distinction have multiplied and
have gained acknowledgment. And from losing distinction--this you must
have observed--luxury is becoming vulgar; and I don't know why the
time should be so very far off when it will be accounted shameful.
Certain it is that year by year a greater number of minds, and such as
mostly determine the currents of social sentiment, think luxury _low_;
without going deeper than the mere look of it, perhaps. These are
hopeful signs. Here is good encouragement to stand out and preach a
gospel of content which would be an education in simplicity, dignity,
happiness, and yet more an education of heart and spirit. For nothing
that a man can do in this world works so powerfully for his own
spiritual good as the habit of sacrifice to kindness. It is so like a
miracle that it is, I am sure, the one way--the one way appointed by
the laws of our spiritual growth.
"Yes, and what about preaching the gospel of content to Poverty? Well,
there we must be careful to discriminate--careful to disentangle
poverty from some other things which are the same thing in the common
idea. Say but this, that there must be no content with squalor, none
with any sort of uncleanness, and poverty takes its own separate place
and its own unsmirched aspect. An honourable poverty, clear of
squalor, any man should be able to endure with a tranquil mind. To
attain to that tranquillity is to attain to nobleness; and persistence
in it, though effort fail and desert go quite without reward,
ennobles. Contentment in poverty does not mean crouching to it or
under it. Contentment is not cowardice, but fortitude. There is no
truer assertion of manliness, and none with more grace and sweetness.
Before it can have an established place in the breast of any man, envy
must depart from it--envy, jealousy, greed, readiness to take
half-honest gains, a horde of small ignoble sentiments not only
disturbing but poisonous to the ground they grow in. Ah, believe me!
if a man had eloquence enough, fire enough, and that command of
sympathy that your Gordon seems to have had (not to speak of a man
like Mahomet or to touch on more sacred names), he might do wonders
for mankind in a single generation by preaching to rich and poor the
several doctrines of the Gospel of Content. A curse on the mean
strivings, stealings, and hoardings that survive from our animal
ancestry, and another curse (by your permission) on the gaudy vanities
that we have set up for objects in life since we became reasoning
creatures."
* * * * *
In effect, here the conversation ended. More was said, but nothing
worth recalling. Drifting back to less serious talk, we gossiped till
midnight, and then parted with the heartiest desire (I speak for
myself) of meeting soon again. But on our way back to town Vernet
recurred for a moment to the subject of his discourse, saying:
"I don't make out exactly what you think now of the prospect we were
talking of."
My answer pleased him. "I incline to think," said I, "what I have long
thought: that if there is any such future for us, and I believe there
is, we of the older European nations will be nowhere when it comes. In
existence--yes, perhaps; but gone down. You see we are becoming
greybeards already; while you in Russia are boys, with every mark of
boyhood on you. You, you are a new race--the only new race in the
world; and it is plain that you swarm with ideas of precisely the kind
that, when you come to maturity, may re-invigorate the world. But
first, who knows what deadly wars?"
He pressed his hand upon my knee in a way that spoke a great deal. We
parted, and two months afterwards the Vernet whose real name ended in
"ieff" was "happed in lead."
Poor Cousin Louis
By Ella D'Arcy
There stands in the Islands a house known as "Les Calais." It has
stood there already some three hundred years, and to judge from its
stout walls and weather-tight appearance, promises to stand some three
hundred more. Built of brown home-quarried stone, with solid stone
chimney-stacks and roof of red tiles, its door is set in the centre
beneath a semi-circular arch of dressed granite, on the keystone of
which is deeply cut the date of construction:
J V N I
1 6 0 3
Above the date straggle the letters, L G M M, initials of the
forgotten names of the builder of the house and of the woman he
married. In the summer weather of 1603 that inscription was cut, and
the man and woman doubtless read it with pride and pleasure as they
stood looking up at their fine new homestead. They believed it would
carry their names down to posterity when they themselves should be
gone; yet there stand the initials to-day, while the personalities
they represent are as lost to memory as are the builders' graves.
At the moment when this little sketch opens, Les Calais had belonged
for three generations to the family of Renouf (pronounced Rennuf), and
it is with the closing days of Mr. Louis Renouf that it purposes to
deal. But first to complete the description of the house, which is
typical of the Islands: hundreds of such homesteads placed singly, or
in groups--then sharing in one common name--may be found there in a
day's walk, although it must be added that a day's walk almost
suffices to explore any one of the Islands from end to end.
Les Calais shares its name with none. It stands alone, completely
hidden, save at one point only, by its ancient elms. On either side of
the doorway are two windows, each of twelve small panes, and there is
a row of five similar windows above. Around the back and sides of the
house cluster all sorts of outbuildings, necessary dependencies of a
time when men made their own cider and candles, baked their own bread,
cut and stacked their own wood, and dried the dung of their herds for
extra winter fuel. Beyond these lie its vegetable and fruit gardens,
which again are surrounded on every side by its many rich vergées of
pasture land.
Would you find Les Calais, take the high road from Jacques-le-Port to
the village of St. Gilles, then keep to the left of the schools along
a narrow lane cut between high hedges. It is a cart track only, as the
deep sun-baked ruts testify, leading direct from St. Gilles to
Vauvert, and, likely enough, during the whole of that distance you
will not meet with a solitary person. You will see nothing but the
green running hedgerows on either hand, the blue-domed sky above, from
whence the lark, a black pin-point in the blue, flings down a gush of
song; while the thrush you have disturbed lunching off that succulent
snail, takes short ground flights before you, at every pause turning
back an ireful eye to judge how much farther you intend to pursue him.
He is happy if you branch off midway to the left down the lane leading
straight to Les Calais.