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Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett
[Illustration: Logo]
London
William Heinemann, Ltd
First Published 1924
Second Impression May 1924
Printed in England at
The Westminster Press, Harrow Road
London, W.9
_NOTE_
_Lovers of Mr. Hewlett’s work will understand that these Essays have
not been subjected to the severe revision which Mr. Hewlett would
undoubtedly have given them before publication in this book. In one or
two minor points his Executors have felt doubtful about the deletion
or insertion of a passage, but in these cases the decision has always
been the same--that his readers would prefer to have the Essays in Mr.
Hewlett’s original form._
_Thanks are due to the editors of “The Times” and “The Evening
Standard”; “The London Mercury,” “The Cornhill Magazine,” “The
Nineteenth Century,” and other periodicals, for permission to reprint
certain of these Essays._
CONTENTS
PAGE
A Return to the Nest 1
“And now, O Lord ...” 7
The Death of the Sheep 12
The Solitary Reaper 16
Interiors 19
The Plight of Their Graces 25
The Village 30
The Curtains 39
Happiness in the Village 43
Otherwhereness 48
The Journey to Cockaigne 54
Suicide of the Novel 59
Immortal Works 65
Ballad-Origins 69
Real and Temporal Creation 77
Peasant Poets 82
Doggerel or Not 88
The Iberian’s House 93
Scandinavian England 99
Our Blood and State in 1660 103
“Merrie” England 109
Endings--I 115
“ II 124
Beaumarchais 132
The Cardinal de Retz 148
“L’Abbesse Universelle”: Madame de Maintenon 166
Pierre de L’Estoile 172
La Bruyère 191
Couleur de Rose 211
Art and Heart 217
A Novel and a Classic 223
The Other Dorothy 229
Realism with a Difference 247
Mr. Pepys His Apple-cart 253
One of Lamb’s Creditors 269
Crocus and Primrose 278
Daffodils 285
Windflowers 291
Tulips 297
Summer 304
The Lingering of the Light 310
A RETURN TO THE NEST
Why it was that my great-grandfather left the village in Somerset in
and on which his forefathers, I believe, had lived from the time of
Domesday, why he forsook agriculture and cider for the law, married
in Shoreditch, settled in Fetter Lane, went back to Somerset to bury
his first child, and returned to London to beget my grandfather, be
ultimately responsible for _me_, and break finally with his family
cradle, I never understood until the other day when, in good company,
I took the road, left the bare hills--how softly contoured, how
familiar, and how dear--of South Wilts, topped the great rock on which
Shaftesbury lifts, dived down into Blackmore Vale, and so entered my
county of origin at its nearest point, namely Wincanton (where I saw,
by the by, a palæolithic man alive and walking the world)--to find
myself in a land of corn and wine and oil, or so it seemed, such a
land as those who love deep loam, handsome women, fine manners and a
glut of apples more than most things in this life (and there are few
things better), would never leave if they could help it. That is a long
sentence with which to begin an essay, but it expresses what I did, and
very much how I did it.
In a word, I left Broadchalke and drove to Yeovil, within ten miles
of which thriving town the family to which I belong itself throve
and cultivated its virtues, if any. My great-grandfather and I were
not acquainted; but I remember my grandfather perfectly well, and
can testify that he had virtues. He was on the tall side of the mean
height, a deep-chested, large-headed old man, with hair snowy white,
a rosy face, and cool, extremely honest blue eyes. He was hasty in
his movements (and in his temper), trundled about rather than walked.
I used to think as a boy that it could not be wholesome, and must be
most inconvenient, to have such clean hands, such dazzling linen, and
such polished pink filberts instead of finger-nails. I never saw him
otherwise dressed than in black broadcloth, with shoes polished like
looking-glasses, and a shirt-collar just so starched that it stood up
enclosing his chin, yet so little that it took on the contours of his
cheeks where they pressed it. He had a deep voice, with a cheer in it.
I remember--for he had little else to say to me--how he used to put
his hand on my head and murmur, as if to himself, “My boy, my boy,” in
such a way that I felt in leaving him, as perhaps Jacob did with Isaac,
that it would be impossible ever to do anything wrong again and betray
such a noble affection. One other thing struck me, even then, young and
ungracious as I was, and that was his extraordinarily fine manners.
Since then, whenever I have considered manners, I have compared them
with his. He is for me the staple of courtesy. They were the manners
which bring a man more than half-way to meet you. He used them to all
the world: to me, to the servants, to the crossing-sweeper, to the
clerks from his office who used to come for papers when he was too old
to go into London. I know now where he got them. They were traditional
West Country manners; and sure enough when I walked the village street
where, if my grandfather never walked, my great-grandfather did,
the first man of whom I asked information met me with just the same
forwardness of service, and seemed to know tentacularly what precisely
lay behind the question which I put him. I had always been proud of my
grandfather; now I was proud of my county. For if manners don’t make a
man, they make a gentleman.
Let me call the village Bindon St. Blaise, to give myself freedom to
say that I don’t remember to have seen one more beautiful than it
looked on that sunny autumn day, drowsing, winking in the heat of noon.
The houses are of stone--and that stone saturated, as it seemed, in
centuries of sunlight. Yes, I have seen Bibury in Gloucestershire,
and Broadway in Worcestershire, Alfriston in Sussex, and Teffont in
Wilts; and Clovelly, and Boscastle, and Ponteland, and many another
haunt of peace; but never yet a place of grey and gold so established,
so decent in age, so recollected, so dignified as Bindon St. Blaise,
which my great-grandfather unwillingly, I am sure, forsook in 1780 or
thereabouts. Nobody could tell me which of its many fair houses he
had forsworn. The fancy could play with them at large. There was a
long-roofed farm with gables many and deep, with two rows of mullioned,
diamonded windows, each with its perfect dripstone, which I should
like to think was once ours, except that it faces north, and therefore
has gathered more moss than we should care about now. Perhaps it _was_
ours, and he left it, seeking the sun. But would he have gone to look
for it in Fetter Lane? No, no. I incline, however, to a smaller house
facing full south, with a walled garden full of apple trees, and a
pear tree reaching to the chimney stack, and a portico--whereover a
room looking straight into the eye of the sun. There was a radiant
eighteenth-century house for a man to have been born in! Could I have
brought myself to leave such a nest? Well, we shall see.
After luncheon at the Boulter Arms (let us call it), and an indication
where we should find “the Great House,” we went instead to see the
house of God, which lay on our road to it, almost within its park.
Like all that I have seen in Somerset, it is a spacious, well-ordered
church, mainly perpendicular, with the square tower and lace-worked
windows which belong to the type. The churchyard was beautifully kept,
planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order,
numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed
as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching
upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with
a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the
great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry
Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce,
in death were sprawled upon by their masters. Hannah Goodbody, for
instance, “for forty years in the service of the Right Hon. John
Charles Ferdinand, sixth Earl Boulter, Viscount and Baron Boulter of
Bindon St. Blaise”--had she not earned _quietus_, and need all that be
remembered against her? Percival Slade, “for twenty years Groom of the
Chambers to Ferdinand Charles John, seventh Earl”; Matilda Swinton,
housekeeper; Peter Wain, gamekeeper; Thomas Duffey, storekeeper--I
began to see what had been the matter with my great-grandfather.
Inside, the church revealed itself as a family vault so encumbered
with the dead that the living must have been incommoded. In the midst
of life they were in death indeed. Earls in effigy slept (like Priam’s
sons in the Iliad) beside their chaste wives--flat in brasses, worn
smooth in basalt, glaringly in plaster, as might be. A side-chapel
was so full of them that the altar was crowded out: and why not? They
were altar and sacrifice and deity in one. They spilled over on to the
floor, splayed out on the walls in tablets as massy as houseleeks; and
on the bosses of the vaulted roof one found the Boulter arms implanted
in the heart of the Mystic Rose. O too much Boulter--but we were not
shut of them yet. Discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies where
the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble
apartment, a withdrawing room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some
club-chairs, and a deeply padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray,
a match-stand--one missed them. There is, no doubt, a comic side to all
this. “J’ai trente mille livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said
the Abbé de Bonport. The same amazement might come upon an entrenched
Earl Boulter at any minute in the midst of his cushioned ease. Neither
coat-armour nor a private stove will ward off the mortal chills.
However, I forgive them their quality, but not their oppression of
other people’s tombstones.
For we too were oppressed, and not diverted. We were seeking our
ancestors, but they were not here. They had fled to Fetter Lane, and I
cannot blame them. The doubt about my great-grandfather is solved. He
left the village of Bindon St. Blaise because he saw no other way of
escape from an Earl on his tomb. He married, his wife bore him a son,
which died young. Moved then by piety, he brought down the innocent
to be buried, secure that upon that unknown life no great name could
intrude. I should have done the same thing, I believe.
“AND NOW, O LORD ...”
“And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was
how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the
midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium,
if better there be.
Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an
interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding
in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares
somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue
he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at
that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered,
dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient,
bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst
two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty
heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for
royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled
a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all
necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was
interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have
given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet
we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we
were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be
stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and
we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow
a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are
inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show
that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same
clay as the children of light.
You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than
they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of
most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron
one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair
and far they were come--but there they were at it, hammer and tongs.
I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but
not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and
avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning
flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The
baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and
with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign
Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had
no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific,
for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water
until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam,
until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth.
Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met
above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and
oared away towards the bridge. I would have given a good deal to see
that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no
end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom
I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that
she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle
standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings.
What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky?
Against that extreme example of the picturesque I could only advance
that I had seen an elm-tree fall on a man in Gray’s Inn and kill him
instantly. Or that, at the corner of Montague Place, I saw a runaway
brewer’s dray barge into a four-wheeler. It missed the cab (on whose
box the driver sat intact), but caught the horse full and knocked him
and the shafts with him down some area steps across the pavement--where
indeed he remained as in his stall until he could be built up from
below. Extreme urgency had hurtled him down the steps, but no
persuasion, fore or aft, would move him up again. So they built him
up with trusses of straw. Nothing quite so good as that ever happened
to me in a four-wheeler; but I haven’t done so badly either. I was
driving once through Paris very early in the morning from the Gare de
Lyon to Saint-Lazare. You are lucky to get a cab at all at such times,
and I thought myself so to have a crazy old victoria and a horse tied
together with string. We did not exactly go, but we got, into the rue
Lafayette, where, without any warning, the victoria parted amidships.
The driver on his box and two wheels went on with the horse; I and my
companion fell forward into the road and the hood of the thing atop of
us. I set up a yell, half-laughter, half-alarm, which caused our man
to look round. When he saw what had happened he pulled up, and very
carefully descended from his perch. Did he come to help us? Not so. He
went directly and deliberately into a cabaret, without any notice taken
of any kind, and we saw him put away a noggin, or whatever it is, of
cognac. Then, with the same meditated method, he came to extricate his
charges. They, however, had by that time extricated themselves, and
considered themselves shut of him.
When a Frenchman begins to drive anything, horse or motor, he seems to
become intoxicated with progress, and content just to drive, not to
guide, and never, at any rate, to stop. I have been the victim also
of that generous ardour. It was in Algiers, ages ago, but not such
ages that there were not tramcars along the sea-front. A baker in his
covered cart was taking us to see some sight or other; and along the
sea-front held his course magnificently indifferent to everything
but the speed and joy of it all--aided not a little thereto by the
fine afternoon, the business of the road, and the café tables hemming
it, dense with customers. For it was the hour of absinthe. The trams
flashed past us, coming or going, but little cared he for that. His
object was to pass them, and he did pass one or two. Presently,
however, at a curve he flogged his horse to pass one, on the wrong
side, and just as he drew level, behold, another bearing swiftly down
upon us! I confess that I blenched--but he did not; rather held on
his way, and not until the last tick of our last minute on earth did
it strike him that he must do something. And what did he do? He gave
a wild shout and turned his horse sharply to the left. On his left
was the overflow of a café--tin tables, bentwood chairs, syphons,
opal-brimmed glasses, citizens in straw hats, with straws to their
mouths, with cigars or newspapers--as thick as a flock of sheep. Into
the midst of this, as once Don Quixote hurled himself, we plunged,
horse, cart and passengers. Tables flew right and left, citizens were
upset, glasses shivered, waiters wrung their hands. You never saw
such a sight. And what did we do? I and my companion sat where we
were, laughing ourselves ill, fighting for breath. Our driver slowly
dismounted and looked round. He disregarded entirely the havoc he
had made, and thought only of his honour. The driver of the tram was
waiting for him. They met, and each lifted a bunched hand, in which all
the finger-tips met and formed a little cage, to within an inch of the
other’s nose. Then began _des injures_, which could only have ended in
one of two ways. The arrival of the gendarmes decided in which of the
two it was to end.
THE DEATH OF THE SHEEP
Alfred de Vigny, it seems, wrote a poem of stoic intention called _La
Mort du Loup_, in which he apostrophised in his eloquent way that
particular among other _sublimes animaux_. I have never read a line of
it myself, but can well understand, when Sainte-Beuve regrets that it
should have been written too much from the standpoint of seeking in
nature at all costs subjects of meditative poetry, that Sainte-Beuve
may have been right. The pathetic fallacy is a stumbling-block to
the egoistic travellers we are. De Vigny on his dead wolf may have
been lifted as far, or nearly as far, as Sterne on his dead donkey.
Personally, I am busking for a short excursion on a dead sheep; but
although there were elements of the high sublime in the climax, and
of the horrid in the anti-climax of the tragedy, it is not on their
account that I wish to relate it; rather because it seemed to me at
the time to be representative, exactly to prefigure the countryside
in which I saw it all done. It may stand up as type, or as symbol, of
the fells and the life lived there; it has in it much of their lonely
grandeur and savagery, of their harshness and plainness, of their
entire absence of amenity; in a word, of their Nordic quality which
does not so much insist as take for granted, in a way disconcerting
to the Southerner, that neither man nor woman, dog nor sheep more or
less makes one straw’s worth of difference to the day’s work, but that
we are all alike rolled round, as Wordsworth said, “with stocks and
stones and trees.” He himself, Nordic to the bone, saw nothing amiss
with it; and no doubt it is all right.
The sheep must have died rather suddenly in the late afternoon. When I
went down the fell-side, at six, to fish in the river there was nothing
but greenness to be seen; when I came up again, round about eight
o’clock, I saw, or thought I saw, a grey rock where had been no rock
before. It was the sheep, and quite cold. She must have felt her time
at hand, withdrawn herself from her companions, and descended the hill
deliberately to be alone with fate. Then, as I see it now, she stood
there, facing down the hill, which in health her kind never does, and
awaited the end of all things. Then, as the chills crept up, she lay
down and put her muzzle flatlings to that rooty earth which in life
she had so diligently sought, and with the scent of it to comfort her
(the best thing she knew) given up what ghost she had. She looked, as I
stood over her, to be asleep--asleep with large, bare eyelids covering
her blank amber eyes--and grandly indifferent to me and the rest of
us. I left her, a warrior taking her rest. There she lay all night;
and in the morning, her former mates feeding all about her, there she
was. A windless silver rain was falling, straight as rods of glass. The
fell was blanched with it, as with hoar frost; but she took no notice
of the rain. A crow or two wheeled about, and bore off in the haze as
soon as I showed myself. I went down to look at the sheep. She lay
easily, her nose to the ground, while others of her nation gazed at
me, foolishly serious, heaving at the side. Whatever had taken place at
that supreme hour of yesterday evening, it had changed this corruptible
into something other than a sheep. Sheep-nature had gone; she had not a
sheep’s face any more. Her dead eyes looked wiselier through their lids
than their empty ones unveiled, and fuller, too, as if charged with
weightier news. Sterner, too, she appeared--with her lips curled back;
the rabbit-look gone.
There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in
death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white
dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail
feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at
it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race,
and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering
as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy
it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on
secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall--much,
I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to
take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at
the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull
out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He
did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then
he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to
where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I
saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down
by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a
dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale.
In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them
from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a
taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had
seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and
went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last
indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her
lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However,
I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped
upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I
went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife.
She said--merely humouring my queasiness--that the remains should
be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of
my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of
sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves
together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over
their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of
dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared
bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the
murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil.
THE SOLITARY REAPER
The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to
harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our
broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He
might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and
there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red
wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar
scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence.
I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all
drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder-high, heavy in ear, bolt upright;
a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes
the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when
petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social,
but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests:
the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy,
thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which
succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it
slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against
the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies--all gone
now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just
begun. One man was reaping it.
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain:
O listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.
“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said,
munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in
agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing
in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall
celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The
children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is
now a forlorn convention--a mere vestige like the human appendix. For
the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the
bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that
now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles,
as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands--that is all there
is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both
sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the
“solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney
Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage,
and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of
him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears--why,
then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of
automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific
island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears
to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be
realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it
still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it
with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan
the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors.
I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s _automata_ are
not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.
INTERIORS
Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best--interiors
and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth
concentre there, and he is unhappy--a figure for Hans Andersen--who has
not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however
he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing,
through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded
lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am
sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we
dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we
are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be.
Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with
the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set
no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm
of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their
mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one
is looking at them--or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping
Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying.
Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique
in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is
ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead
you through a picture-gallery, so free are the indwellers of their
concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow
window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children--four little
girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over
bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her
they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy--“forty feeding
like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As
they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was
what the French call _cendré_, very glossy and smooth, and curling at
the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I
saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning
a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as
she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding,
no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in
the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her
eyes. And she _had_ been caught, not by the president, but by her elder
sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering.
Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile
as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I
believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You
ask--or I did--How come they to leave _me_ outside in the dark? Don’t
they know that I am one with them all?
I have seen a mother reading to her girls at work, and longed to
know what the book was, whether I had read it. If, as I believed, it
was Miss Alcott, then I was all right. I have seen a boy rigging a
three-masted vessel at a table, and knew by the way he was biting his
tongue how happy he was. And I have seen comedies for Molière. I saw
topers once in a tap-room, and a man in a cut-away coat and a shocking
hat standing up and trying to make good and not succeeding. He did not
belong to their parts--that was evident. I guessed him to be an outlier
from some race-meeting or other. But there he was, inside, warm, and
at least smelling the good cheer, and there he hoped to remain. He was
doing it, or trying it, on his gift--which was tongues. I don’t suppose
that I was thirty seconds passing that window, if so much; yet I could
see decisively that he wanted them to believe in him, and how badly.
They, a plain-faced, weather-seamed row, were not taking any. They were
tired with their day’s work, leaned to the wall, their legs, I am sure,
stretched out at length. Each with one horny hand held his pipe in its
place; one and all they looked down at their feet, and listened, and
judged him for a poor thing. The things you see!
They are not always so pleasant. Sometimes they can be pretty tragic
when you come to work them out. I passed a house once on the outskirts
of a country town, and across a laurel hedge and iron fence, and
between the branches of a monkey-puzzler, could see into a lighted
room. Not much to be seen, you might think. Gas was burning in a
central chandelier behind ground-glass globes. An engraving in a gilt
frame on a green wall; something in a tall glass case before the
window. I did not see the _aspidestris_, which must have been there.
Then, on one side of the fire a man in a black coat, asleep, and on
the other a woman in a white shawl, asleep--and that was all. Yes, but
wait. I remember a trial at some Assizes years ago, where a man was
arraigned for killing his wife. He pleaded not guilty, as of course;
but the evidence was clear. He had killed her with a chopper in the
scullery. He was convicted and sentenced to death, having had nothing
to say. Before his execution, but not long before it, he told the
chaplain of the gaol what he had done, and why. He said that he had
been married to the woman for twenty years; that they did not quarrel,
but had got out of the way of speaking to one another, and, in fact,
practically never did. It had not affected him for some time, he said;
but one evening, suddenly, it did. One evening he was struck with
horror, palsy-struck with the reflection: “Good God! I have sat dumb
before this woman, she dumb before me, for twenty years, and we may
have to sit so for another twenty.” He said that from that moment the
thought never left him, that the horror of the prospect daunted him,
and that by and by his heart failed him. He knew then that he could
not do it. Some wild resentment, some hot inconsiderate grudge wrought
madness in him--to that shocking end. By ordinary we do not use our
imagination, and so escape very likely as much misery as happiness,
glory and the like. But if the picture-making faculty awake of itself,
blaze the future at us, so vividly that we cannot doubt of its
truth--what then? Why, then, as often as not, despondency and madness.
I had no envy of that gas-illumined room, and was contented to be a
stranger to that disgruntled pair.
I have seen other things of sharper savour, where passion clearly was
involved, and, as it seemed, the creatures themselves uncurtained as
well as the room they occupied. Two of them, related long ago, I shall
always remember: the first, seen by chance from a window of the Army
and Navy Stores, which looked out over the purlieus of Westminster
towards the river. That showed me a mean second-floor bedroom just over
the way, and a little maid-servant in it, down at heels, draggled, her
cap awry, dusting and tidying up. All familiar, uninteresting, a matter
of routine, until suddenly I saw her throw her head up--a gesture of
real abandonment--and fall on her knees beside the bed. She buried
her face in her bare arm; and I moved away. That was no place for me.
Startling though, to be jolted out of the smooth apparatus of shopping,
away from obsequious service and the accepted convention, in return for
my half-crowns, that I was a temporary lord of the earth. All a sham,
that; but there across the street, in a frowsy bedroom, was reality--a
soul and its Disposer face to face.
The other was revealed when, as a very young man, I had chambers in Old
Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn. My bedroom there backed upon slums, but was
above them, being almost in the roof of a tall old house. One night,
very late, I was going to bed, and leaned far out of my window to get
air and see the stars. Before, and below me rather, rose a dark wall
of houses, entirely blind but for one lighted window. That revealed a
shabby sitting-room--a table with a sewing-machine and paraffin lamp;
little else. There was a man sitting by the table in his shirt-sleeves;
he was smoking while he read the evening paper. Then a door opened
and a tall, youngish woman came in. She was in white--evidently in
her nightdress--and her loose hair was about her shoulders. She stood
between door and table, resting her hand; I don’t think that she spoke.
The man, aware or unaware, went on reading. But presently he looked
up: their eyes met. He threw down pipe and paper and went to her. He
dropped to his knees, clasped hers, and bent his head to his hands. All
that I had seen before--I knew what I was doing--but I saw no more.
What did it mean? Husband and wife? Sinner and saviour? What do I know?
THE PLIGHT OF THEIR GRACES
The mills of God grind as the poet has declared, and they grind to the
same measure both the illustrious and the obscure. Naturally one hears
more of the sorrows of the great. The wailing of a duke will carry the
length of the realm, and since America is now interested domestically
in that estate it will reverberate in the Western continent also. The
Duke of Bedford has lately exhibited a part of his case to readers of
_The Times_, the Duke of Portland more explicitly his to his friends
and neighbours. Both their graces say in effect that the thing can’t be
done. They do not tell us why not; but we can infer it. To do things
properly, Welbeck and Woburn require some thirty housemaids; and how
are they to find thirty housemaids, or, having found them, as things
now are, pay for them? They do not ask, but the question follows for
the plainer sort, why should a man stand in the ridiculous position of
requiring thirty housemaids?
It so happens that I have just been to Woburn for the first time
in my life, have made the circuit of the great wall, some ten feet
high and, I daresay, ten miles round, have entered at one fine gate
and issued at another after a traverse of the noble spaces of the
park, in which herds of deer, occasional ostriches, lamas, bisons,
remote and solitary buffaloes, and heaven knows what, were to be seen
peacefully feeding, as if no kind of anxiety was fretting the peace
and amplitude of it all. The trees, the boscages, the lake, the great
piled grey house unapproachable of the vulgar, the model villages with
their cottage-fronts all stamped with a crowned B--all these splendid
established things passed by me like an opium-eater’s dream: all so
seeming secure, inevitable and right; all, actually, so shaky, doomed,
and infernally wrong. And with the Lord of Welbeck’s wail in my ears, I
also saw that, truly, it could not be done.
It is not a matter of housemaids alone. It is a matter of gardeners,
of woodmen, of a permanent staff of masons and bricklayers--for with
a wall of ten feet by ten miles there will always be repairs. Other
services in proportion. Where are we then? I avoid arithmetic for
excellent reasons; but I do see that thirty housemaids at £50 a year
apiece plus board come to £3,000 a year, and that the others will
figure out accordingly. How is it to be done? It is not. And why should
it be done? God knows.
Whether their Graces know is another matter. I think that they are
beginning to know--but even so, they are only at the beginning of
the problem. For it is not so easy as it sounds just to drop Welbeck
or Woburn and live _en pension_ at Dieppe. What are you to do with
Welbeck in the meantime? And if you don’t want it yourself, who, do
you suppose, will want it? And let it be remembered that their Graces,
besides Welbeck and Woburn, possess each another house, not made with
hands, an indestructible house. They are dukes for ever after the order
of Melchisedech. Like snails, wherever they go--to Dieppe, to a flat
in the Temple, to a caravan, to the banks of the Susquehanna--they must
carry that blazoned house on their backs. And I cannot imagine a more
inhospitable or superfluous mansion for the life of me.
The only nobility worth talking about is one of birth, and even that
won’t bear talking about very seriously. Lord Chesterfield, the famous
one of the family, had a gallery of ancestors which was a wonder to
behold of completeness and splendour. But he was wise enough to correct
it with two pictures: a scrubby old man, labelled Adam de Stanhope, and
a scrubby old woman, Eve de Stanhope. He had the values straightened
out thus wittily, at any rate for himself. Then there was the
family-tree of the Wynns, or another Welsh house, which had an asterisk
some distance down, with a note attached: “About this time the creation
of the world took place.” This is perhaps all very foolish, but we can
understand it.
We supplemented that intelligible aristocracy in our country, first
with an aristocracy of office, and then with one of rank; and it is
on those in particular that the economic crisis presses. Noble birth
is a matter of tradition and, so to speak, of God’s grace. If you are
nobly born you may black boots, sell matches or beg at a church door.
Hidalgos, grandees of Spain, do these things in their own country, and
remain grandees of Spain. Even ignoble pursuits cannot stultify noble
birth. There it is. Official nobility, too, is very well, while ability
to office persists: but that kind died out because ability to office
refused to be hereditary. The first Earls were governors of earldoms,
that is of counties. The first Viscounts were Vicecomites, Sheriffs.
But Lord Viscount Northcliffe is not a sheriff. If he is an aristocrat
it is by virtue of rank. Now rank is not quite like beauty. Handsome
is as handsome does, we know; but rank is as rank is able to be. You
may make a man a duke, of course, but it is possible that he will
make himself ridiculous; and if he does that, and if he does it often
enough, and if there are enough of him, he will make the Fountain of
Honour itself ridiculous. I don’t know who was the first of our kings
to ennoble, his Quelconques, his “unfortunate females,” as Carlyle used
to say: I think it was Henry VIII; but whoever he was he sowed the
seed of a fungus in the ranks of the peers. One knows what the French
kings did, what Charles II, what the Hanoverians did. Whether, when the
politicians took control of the Fountain of Honour and commercialised
its golden waters, they did any worse, it were hard to say. They made
common what had already become vulgar. The peerage of late years is
only less absurd because it is less conspicuous. That at least is
to the good. Yet there remains this last thing to be said about it.
An aristocracy of birth is self-sufficient, but one of rank demands
self-evidence, quite a different matter. It drives you back upon
wealth, without which it is an absurdity. A grandee of Spain selling
matches will pass--but how about a Caroline or Georgian marquess
driving a taxi, or taking his turn at a music-hall?
M. Henri Lavedan wrote a novel upon that theme, a cynical, witty,
bitter, rattling novel, too, called “Le Bon Temps.” A party of
Parisians, men about town and their ladies, is lunching _al fresco_
at Armenonville or some such on a fine morning in May. A hurdy-gurdy
sounds a familiar air outside, which touches the tender top of some
quill in one of the _convives_. “Let’s have the old chap in,” he moves
the company. “He’s playing the _Blue Danube_, and will renew the youth
for some of us.” They have him in, a tattered, bearded, bright-eyed
_vecchio_, his instrument slung by a greasy strap to one shoulder,
on the other a foolish little troubled monkey in a red velveteen
petticoat. He lifts his old hat and recommences his grinding. One of
the guests covers his eyes, and so remains until the grinder has gone.
Then he lifts his head. “Do you know who that was?” “Not I indeed!”
“That was the Duc d’Epervier.” Then he tells the story of _Le Bon
Temps: Wein, Weib, und Gesang_, a rattling tale with a croak in it.
“Why do the people imagine a vain thing?” This is a case for tags.
THE VILLAGE
The gardener told my housekeeper, and she told me, that the policeman’s
wife had a baby. I said, Splendid! or Good!--it was one or the
other--which will show you that I knew what I was about. To have said
less than that--to have said simply, “Oh,” or “Why not?” would have
been to fail in tact. For in the village we take such a thing as a baby
seriously. We call it Increase, not a baby, in the old fashion, and
disregard the new probability that, while it may be so in one sense,
there are several in which it may well be called Decrease. When a
patriarch’s--or, I should say here, a Druid’s--wife had a baby, both
she and the Druid knew that, barring accidents, it would work for him,
if it was a boy, and in due course bring in a wife of its own, and
Increase of its own--all to work for the Druid until he died. Or, if
it was a girl, he would sell it to a neighbouring Druid for measures
of corn or heads of cattle. Increase then all round, however it turned
out. But it is different now. We have the name without the thing. If
it is a boy, as in fact the policeman’s is, it will be no use to him
until it is fifteen, and not much then. Suppose it gets a job somewhere
handy, it will pay its mother, say, five shillings a week, a bare
subsistence. At twenty, if still living at home, that may be increased
to ten shillings. Clothes and a motor-bike will somehow come out of the
rest. Precious little Increase there. And soon after twenty it will
marry and disappear from the household. But still the village holds
by the old fashion, and calls a boy-baby Increase. I have heard girls
dignified by the same title, though it is not so invariable. Yet there
is more chance of a girl proving useful to her parents than of a boy’s
being so. It depends entirely on the mother, whether as the child grows
up it finds out that she won’t stand any nonsense. There are still such
mothers left--I know two or three; but their numbers diminish with
every additional nonsense that crops up.
Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The
first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten
village law; the other comes about by circumstance, which provides that
whether we like it or not--and, on the whole, I am pretty sure that we
do like it--we are simply a large family. I don’t necessarily mean that
everybody is related to everybody else, though as a matter of fact he
is, but rather that everybody, from the time he was anybody, has always
known everybody else intimately: called him or her by his Christian
name--within limits--known the exact state of his wardrobe, the extent
of his earnings, the state of his pocket; what he had for dinner, or
will have to-morrow, where he has been, what he was doing, whom he is
courting, or by whom he is courted--and so on. I should fail entirely
to make plain the sense in which this extreme and (to a townsman)
extraordinary intimacy must be understood if I had not in reserve one
crowning example of it, beyond which I defy anybody to carry intimacy.
It is, then, the plain and literal fact that everybody in the village
knows, or can find out, exactly the amount, condition, value and period
of recurrence of everybody else’s underwear. There is no exception
to that. It is, it can be, it must be exposed to view and subject to
criticism every Monday afternoon in the garden of every cottage. When
you have a community with such a mutual knowledge among its members,
how can you help their taking each other seriously?