PART II

I

THE POSTMAN

I must say a good word for the postman. He occupies so large a place in

most of our lives that, as a matter of common courtesy, the least we can

do is to recognize his value and importance. Others may not feel as I

do, but I confess that I bless the postman every day of my life. Not

that I am so fond of receiving letters, for I bless him with equal

fervency whether he calls or whether he passes. I know that in this

respect I am hopelessly illogical. If I am pleased to see the postmen

pass the gate, I ought, if strictly logical, to be sorry to see him

enter it. And, contrariwise, if the sight of the postman coming up the

path affords me gratification, the spectacle of his passing my gate

ought to fill me with disappointment. But I am _not_ logical, never was,

and never shall be. The best things in the world are hopelessly

illogical--motherhood for example. A mother sits in the arm-chair by the

fire, even as I write. She is chattering away to her baby. She knows

perfectly well that the baby doesn't understand a word she says. Knowing

that she would, if she were logical, give up talking to the child. But,

just because she is so hopelessly illogical, she prattles away as though

the baby could understand every word. It is a way mothers have, and we

love them all the better for it. An illogical lady is a very lovable

affair; but who ever fell in love with a syllogism? Robert Louis

Stevenson is the most lovable of all our English writers, and the most

illogical. Here is an entry from his diary, by way of illustration. 'A

little Irish girl,' he writes, 'is now reading my book aloud to her

sister at my elbow. They chuckle, and I feel flattered; anon they yawn,

and I am indifferent; such a wisely conceived thing is vanity.' Just so.

And why not? There is a higher wisdom than the wisdom of logic. If

Stevenson had been logical, he would have felt elated by the chuckles

and crushed by the yawns. But he knew better, and so do I. If the

postman passes my door, I heave a sigh of relief that I have no letters

to answer; it is almost as good as being granted a half-holiday. Am I

therefore to be angry when the postman enters the gate, and accept his

letters with a grunt? Not at all. In that case I throw my logic over the

hedge for the edification of my next-door neighbour, and feel pleased

that some of my friends are thinking of me. I greet the postman with a

smile, and try to make him feel that he has rendered me an appreciable

service, as indeed he has.

I am writing on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anthony

Trollope, and I fancy that it is the thought of Trollope and his

extraordinary work that has set me scribbling about the postman. For

Trollope was much more than a novelist. He was, in a sense, the prince

of British postmen, and the forerunner of Rowland Hill and Henniker

Heaton. To a far greater extent than we sometimes dream, we owe the

efficiency of our modern postal service to Anthony Trollope. But before

he died he became the victim of serious misgivings. He feared that we

were losing the art of letter-writing. He produced a bundle of his

mother's love-letters. 'In no novel of Richardson's or Miss Burney's,'

he declared, 'is there a correspondence so sweet, so graceful, and so

well expressed. What girl now studies the words with which she shall

address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction?' And

this lamentation was penned, mark you, years and years ago, before cheap

telegrams and picture post cards had become the normal means of

communication!

I suppose the real trouble is that we have allowed the amazing

development of our commercial correspondence to corrupt the character of

our private letter-writing. We indite all our letters in the phraseology

of the business college. We write briefly, tersely, pointedly, and, most

abominable of all, by return of post. I should like to write a separate

chapter in vigorous denunciation of the prompt reply. Private letters

should never be hastily answered. If my friend replies instantly to my

long, familiar letter, he gives me the painful impression that he wants

to be rid of me, and is unwilling to have on his mind the thought of the

letter he owes me. One of these days I shall start a new society to be

called the 'Wait a Week Society.' Its members will be solemnly pledged

to wait at least a week before replying to their private letters. There

are strong and subtle reasons for taking such a vow. First of all,

private letters should be easy, leisurely, chatty, and should only be

written when one is in the mood, or when, for some reason, the person to

whom it is addressed is specially in one's thoughts. To this, it may be

replied that one is never so much in the mood to write to a friend as

when he has just received a letter from that friend. But the argument is

fallacious. He is a very happy letter-writer indeed who can write me a

long, free, chatty letter without saying anything that will rub me the

wrong way or with which I shall disagree. During the first twenty-four

hours after receiving his letter, _those_ are the things that are most

emphatically impressed upon my mind. If I reply within twenty-four

hours, my letter to my friend will deal largely with those disputatious

and controversial points, and the inevitable result will be that _the

whole_ of my letter will grate upon him just as _part_ of his letter has

grated upon me. But if, as president of my own society, I wait a week

before replying to his letter, I shall see things in their true

perspective, and write him a long and breezy letter in which the things

that vexed me find no place at all. I am often asked, What is the

unpardonable sin? The only sin that I can never pardon is the sin of

writing angry letters. I can forgive a man for _speaking_ hastily; I

have a temper myself. But to deliberately commit one's spite to paper is

to become guilty of an amazing atrocity and to degrade at the same time

the postman's high and solemn office.

I bless the postman because he can do for me, and do better than I could

do, so many delicate things. I regard the postman as a faithful and

indispensable assistant. It often falls to a minister's lot to approach

people, and especially young people, on the most delicate and important

subjects. Upon their decisions much of their future happiness and

usefulness will depend. I must therefore go about the business with the

utmost care. But if I go to that young man and abruptly introduce the

matter to him, I at once put him in a false position, and greatly

imperil my chance of success. We are face to face; I have spoken to him,

and he, in common decency, must speak to me. It would be a thousand

times better if, having opened my heart to him, I could withdraw before

he uttered a single word. But as it is, I have forced him into a

position in which he must say something. His judgement is not ripe, his

mind is not made up, the whole subject is new to him, and yet my

indiscretion has placed him in such a position that he is compelled to

commit himself. He must say something without due consideration; I stand

there, like a highway-robber, with my pistol pointed at his brow, and he

must give me _words_. I may not want his words immediately; and he may

wish he need not give his words immediately; but we are both the victims

of a situation which I have foolishly precipitated. He speaks; and

however he may guard his utterance, his final decision will inevitably

be compromised by those hasty and immature sentences.

The evidence must be perfectly overwhelming that will lead a man to

reverse a decision once made. And here am I, his would-be friend and

helper, forcing him into a position from which he will find it very

difficult to extricate himself. I meant to do him good, and I have done

him incalculable harm. I meant to be his friend, and I have become his

enemy. So true is it that evil is wrought from want of thought as well

as want of heart.

Now see how much better the postman manages the matter. I sit down at

my desk and write exactly what I want to say. I am not under any

necessity to complete a sentence until I can do so to my own perfect

satisfaction. I can pause to consider the exact word that I wish to

employ. And if, when it is written, my letter does not please me, I can

tear it up without his being any the wiser, and write it all over again.

I am not driven to impromptu utterance or careless phraseology. I am

free of the inevitable effect upon my expression produced by the

presence of another person. I am not embarrassed by the embarrassment

that he feels on being approached on so vital a theme. I am cool,

collected, leisurely, and free. And the advantages that come to me in

inditing the letter are shared by him in receiving it. He is alone, and

therefore entirely himself. He is not disconcerted by the presence of an

interviewer. He owes nothing to etiquette or ceremony. He has the

advantage of having the case stated to him as forcefully and as well as

I am able to state it. He can read at ease and in silence without the

awkward feeling that, in one moment, he must make some sort of reply. If

he is vexed at my intrusion into his private affairs, he has time to

recover from his displeasure and to reflect that I am moved entirely by

a desire for his welfare. If he is flattered at my attention, he has

time to fling aside such superficial considerations and to face the

issue on its merits. The matter sinks into his soul; becomes part of his

normal life and thought; and, by the time we meet, he is prepared to

talk it over without embarrassment, without personal feeling, and

without undue reserve. In such matters--and they are among the most

important matters with which a minister is called to deal--the postman

is able to render me invaluable assistance.

There is something positively sacramental about the postman. For the

letters that he carries have no value in themselves; they are simply

paper and ink. They are precious only so far as they reveal the heart of

the sender to the heart of the receiver. Here, for instance, is a letter

for a young lady. She is at the door before the bell has ceased its

ringing. She greets the postman with a smile, and blushes as she glances

at the familiar handwriting. As soon as the postman has closed the gate

after him, she hurries down to the summer-house, her favourite retreat,

to read her letter. But she is not alone. Bruno, her big collie, goes

bounding after his mistress. She reads the first pages of the letter,

and allows the sheet to slip from her lap to the ground, whilst she

proceeds to devour the following pages. And as the fluttering missive

lies upon the floor of the summer-house, Bruno examines it. A dog's eyes

are sharper than a girl's eyes; yet how little the dog sees! He sees a

piece of white paper covered with black marks--sees perhaps more in that

respect than she does--yet he sees nothing, and less than nothing, for

all that. For she sees, not the black marks on the white paper, but the

very heart of one who worships her. She is gazing so intently into the

soul of her lover that she does not notice whether the 't's' are

crossed, or the 'i's' dotted. To her the letter is a sacramental thing;

its value lies not in itself, but in the revelation that it makes to

her.

And it is because the postman spends his whole life among just such

sacramental things that we welcome and honour him. We have an amiable

way of transferring to the messenger the welcome that we accord to the

message. Jessie Pope describes the joy of a mother on receiving a wire

from her soldier-boy that he will soon be back again from the front.

'_Home at six-thirty to-day._'

Oh, what a tumult of joy!

Growing suspense flies away,

God bless that telegraph-boy!

_God bless that telegraph-boy!_ Exactly. And that is why we honour the

postman. The messenger always shares in the welcome given to the message

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good

tidings, that publisheth peace! We ministers often share in the

postman's benediction. We are welcomed and honoured and loved, not so

much for our own sake as for the sake of the great, glad message that we

bear. The heart leaps up to the message and blesses the messenger. God

bless the telegraph-boy! God bless the postman!

II

CRYING FOR THE MOON

Let it be distinctly understood that nothing that I shall now say is

addressed to the crowd. To the crowd it would probably do more harm than

good. It is intended only for a single individual; and he, I think, will

understand. I am told that there is a unique secret by means of which a

wireless message from the British Navy can be transmitted to the

Admiralty Office without risk of interception. At the Admiralty a

superlatively sensitive and superlatively secret instrument is most

carefully attuned to the instrument of the battleship from which the

message is expected. Then, when all is ready, every wireless operator in

the Grand Fleet pulls out all the stops and bangs on all the keys of his

instrument, and the inevitable result is the creation of a din that is

almost deafening to all listeners at ordinary receivers. But through the

crash and the tumult the specially delicate instrument at the Admiralty

Office can distinctly hear its mate, and the priceless syllables

penetrate the thunder of senseless sound without the slightest loss or

leakage. I am about to attempt a similar experiment. I have a message

for a certain man. It is important that he, and he alone, should get it.

It would do untold damage if it were heard at other receivers. Let him

therefore take some pains to attune his instrument to mine.

Now it is usual, and it is altogether good, to encourage people to

entertain lofty ambitions, high ideals, and great expectations. It is a

most necessary injunction, and I have not a word to say against it. It

stirs the blood like a trumpet-blast. It rouses us like a challenge.

But, however excellent the medicine may be, it cannot be expected to

suit every ailment. No one drug is a panacea for all our human ills. And

even the stimulating tonic to which I have referred does not at all meet

the need of the man for whom I am now prescribing. John Sheergood is a

friend of mine, and a really capital fellow. But I should not call him a

happy man. His trouble is that his ambitions are too lofty, his

expectations too great, and his ideals, in a sense, too high. He is

crying for the moon, and breaking his heart because he can't get it. I

am profoundly sorry for this morbid friend of mine, and should dearly

like to comfort him. His ideal is perfection, nothing less; and whenever

he falls short of it he is in the depths of despair. If, as a student,

he entered for a competition, he felt that he was in disgrace unless he

secured the very first place. If he sat for an examination, he counted

every mark short of the coveted hundred per cent. as an indelible stain

upon his character. He is in abject misery unless he can strike twelve

at every hour of the day. I both admire him and pity him at the same

time. His parents once told me that when he was a very small boy he

contracted measles. The illness went hardly with him, and left him frail

and debilitated. The doctor ordered a prolonged holiday by the seaside,

with plenty of good food, plenty of fresh air, and, above all, plenty of

bathing. He was only a little fellow, and when he approached the

bathing-sheds for the first time his father accompanied him.

'I don't want to go in, dad,' he cried appealingly; 'it's cold, and I'm

cold, and I don't like it!'

'It will make you grow up into a big man, sonny!' his father replied

persuasively.

Now this touched Jack on a very tender spot, for, although his father

was tall, and he himself cherished an inordinate admiration for tall

men, he was himself almost ridiculously small. He had several times

contrasted himself with other small boys of the same age, and had felt

shockingly humiliated.

'Will it really, dad; honour bright?' he asked anxiously, carefully

scrutinizing his father's face.

'It will indeed, sonny; that is why the doctor ordered it.'

Poor little Jack submitted with a wry face to the process of disrobing,

and, with a shiver, bravely approached the water. Summoning all his

reserves of courage, he waded in until the water was up to his knees, to

his waist, and at last to his neck. The excruciating part of the ordeal

was by this time over; and, for the sake of the benefit so confidently

promised him, he tolerated the caress of the waves for the next five

minutes. Then he rushed out of the water. As soon as he was beyond the

reach of the foam he stopped abruptly, surveyed himself carefully from

top to toe, and straightway burst into tears. His mother, who was

sitting knitting on the beach, at once ran to his assistance.

'Why, whatever's the matter, Jack? What are you crying for?'

'Oh, mum, just look how wee I am! And dad said that if I went into the

water it would make a big man of me!'

He has often since joined in the laugh, whenever the story of his

childish adventure has been related in his hearing. But it is worth

recording as being so eminently characteristic of him. He has never

outgrown that boyish peculiarity. He is always setting his heart on

instantaneous maturity. He seems to think that the world should have

been built on a sort of Jack-and-the-beanstalk principle. He is

continually sowing seeds overnight, and feeling depressed if he cannot

gather the fruit as soon as he wakes in the morning. Many of us have

watched the Indian conjurer sow the seed of a mango-tree; throw a cloth

over the pot; mutter mysterious charms and incantations; and then hit

the cloth. And, behold, a full-grown mango-tree! He replaces the cloth,

mutters further incantations, again removes the covering, and, lo, the

mango-tree is in full flower! And when a third time he uncovers the

plant, the mango-tree stands forth, every bough freighted with a heavy

load of fruit! I have no idea as to how the trick is done. I only know

that poor John Sheergood seems to be everlastingly lamenting the

misfortune that ordained him to any existence other than that of an

Indian conjurer. He is grievously disappointed, not because he was born

with no silver spoon in his mouth, but because he was born with no magic

wand in his hand. His mango-trees come to fruition very, very slowly.

John believes in quick returns and lightning changes; and he is

irritated and annoyed by the tardiness of that old-fashioned process

called growth. It is good for a man to have lofty ideals; but I am sure

that John Sheergood would be a happier man, and make us all more happy,

if he would only break himself of his inveterate habit of crying for the

moon.

In justice to John I am bound to say that, as on the sands years ago,

his principal disappointment is with himself. I have done my best to

persuade him that a man should be infinitely patient with himself.

Nothing is to be gained by getting out of temper with yourself. You may

scold yourself and scourge yourself unmercifully; but I doubt if it does

much good. A man must win his self-respect; and you can only learn to

respect yourself by being very gentle and very considerate and very

patient with yourself. A man's self-culture is his first and principal

charge; and he will never succeed unless he both loves himself and

treats himself lovingly. A man should be as gentle with himself as a

gardener is with his orchids; as a nurse is with her patient; as a

mother is with her troublesome child. A gardener who lost all patience

with his delicate plants; a nurse who treated her poor patient

peevishly; or a mother who met ill-temper with ill-temper could only

expect to fail. I have urged John Sheergood to treat himself with a

softer hand, and to greet himself with a smile. I lent him Henry

Drummond's lovely essay on _The Lilies_, taking the precaution, before

doing so, to underline the following sentences: 'Growth must be

spontaneous. A boy not only grows without trying, but he cannot grow if

he tries. The man who struggles in agony to grow makes the church into a

workshop when God meant it to be a beautiful garden.' There is a good

deal in the chapter that will have a special interest for my poor

self-castigated friend.

But, although his lash falls principally upon his own back, he is not

the only sufferer. I shall never forget when, as a young fellow, he

joined the church. His conversion was a very radiant experience, and, in

the ecstasy of it all, he formed a brightly rose-tinted conception of

what the fellowship of the church must be. The idea of being admitted to

the society of numbers of people as happy as himself! They would be able

to tell of experiences as glorious as his own; they would be sure to

congratulate him on his inexpressible joy, and to help him in relation

to the difficulties that beset his daily path. They would encourage him

by their sympathy and stimulate him by their example. Their conversation

would illumine for him the sacred page; their vivid testimonies to

answered prayer would give him greater confidence in approaching the

Throne of Grace; the very atmosphere that he expected to breathe would,

he felt sure, inflame his own devotion to the highest and holiest

things.

He has often since told me of his disillusionment. It happened to be a

wet night when he was received into membership, and there were fewer

members present than were usually there. As soon as the service was over

they broke up into knots. He overheard one group discussing a wedding;

and heard a man with a strident voice say that it was a beastly night to

be out without an umbrella. But nobody took any notice of John, and he

left the building. To complete his discomfiture he mistook the step as

he passed out of the church and stumbled awkwardly into the street. 'The

whole thing was an awful come-down,' he told me afterwards, 'the

greatest surprise I had ever known. I felt as if the bottom had dropped

out of everything.' He got over it, of course; and learned by happy

experience that the people who treated him so coyly on that memorable

night are not half as bad as they seemed. Many of them are now among his

dearest and most intimate friends; whilst even with the man who growled

at the weather he has since spent some really delightful times. One of

the oddest things in life is the dread that some people feel of

appearing as good as they really are. And John has found out now that,

in spite of the cold douche administered to him that night, there is in

the church a glow of genuine enthusiasm and a wealth of spirituality

that in those days he never suspected. But it did not reveal itself all

at once. The best things never do. And because the church did not put on

her beautiful garments as soon as he entered, John was mortified and

confounded. He felt just as he felt that day on the sands when he

discovered with disgust that, under the spell of the sea, he had not

immediately assumed gigantic proportions. As I say, he has got over it

now, and smiles at it, just as he smiles when his adventure by the

seaside is recounted.

He was a great favourite in the church, but his ingrained peculiarity

betrayed itself with unfailing regularity in one particular direction.

Oddly enough, in view of his own experience, he was a little severe with

new members. I do not mean that he treated them coldly or distantly;

nobody was more genial. But he expected too much of them. He was

disappointed unless the convert of yesterday proved himself the

full-blown saint of to-day. To satisfy him, they had to be raw recruits

one day and hardened veterans the next. It was merely another phase of

his Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. It was the magician and the

mango-tree over again. In a way it was very fine to see how he grieved

over the slightest lapse on the part of these new members. The smallest

inconsistency in their behaviour filled him with remorse, and he was

afflicted with the gravest suspicions as to our wisdom in welcoming such

people into fellowship. He failed, it seemed to me, to distinguish

between the raw material and the finished article. The Church evidently

had some very raw material in her membership when the Pauline Epistles

were written; and it is a mercy for John that he was not born some

centuries earlier.

John afterwards left us and entered the ministry. We were exceedingly

sorry to lose him. A man more generally honoured, respected, and beloved

I have seldom seen. The church was distinctly poorer after he left,

although we were all glad that he had given himself to so great a work.

But he carried his old characteristic up the pulpit steps with him. He

has often told me the story of that first sermon and the way it was

received. Such confidences between one minister and another are sacred,

and I shall not betray this one. But I never hear John refer to that

experience without thinking of Mark Rutherford. In his Autobiography,

Mark Rutherford tells how, on settling at his first pastorate, he put

all his soul into his first sermon. He was elated by the solemnity and

grandeur of his calling, and spoke out of the very depths of his heart.

'After the service was over,' he says, 'I went down into the vestry.

Nobody came near me but the chapel-keeper, who _said that it was

raining_, and immediately went away to put out the lights and shut up

the building. I had no umbrella, and there was nothing for it but to

walk home in the wet. When I got to my lodgings I found that my supper,

consisting of bread and cheese, was on the table, but there was no fire.

I was overwrought, and paced about for hours in hysterics. All that I

had been preaching seemed the merest vanity.' And so on. John

Sheergood's experience was not unlike it. It was the sudden descent from

the glowingly romantic ideal to the brutally prosaic reality. It nearly

killed John just as it nearly killed Mark Rutherford. But he is getting

over it. He is learning gradually, I think, that a minister can only get

the best out of his people by being very patient with them, just as the

people can only get the best out of their minister by being very patient

with him. The world has evidently been built that way. Jack and the

beanstalk is only a fairy-story and the mango-tree is a piece of

Oriental trickery; there is no room for such prodigies in a world like

this. Like the lilies, we begin in a very modest way, and grow very

slowly; we must therefore exercise infinite patience with each other. I

have fancied lately that some inkling of this has at length entered into

the mind even of John Sheergood, and he has seemed a very much happier

man in consequence.

III

OUR LOST ROMANCES

There are few days in a girl's life more critical than the day on which

the sawdust streams from the mangled carcase of her dearest doll. It is

a day of bitter disillusionment, a day in which a philosophy of some

kind is painfully born. The doll came into the home amidst all the

excitements of a birthday. It was instantly invested with every

attribute of personality. The task of naming it was as solemn a function

as the business of naming a baby. And when the choice had been made, and

the name selected, that name was as unalterable as though it had been

officially recorded at Somerset House. By that name it was greeted with

delight every morning; by that name it was hushed to sleep every night;

by that name it was introduced to other dolls, as well as to less

important people; and by that name it was addressed a hundred times a

day. The doll has suffered accidents and illnesses after the fashion of

fleshier folk; but such misadventures, as is the way with humans, has

only rendered her more dear. But now an accident has happened,

surpassing in seriousness all previous misfortunes. The thing has come

to pieces! The girl has a shapeless rag in her hand; the floor is all

powdered with sawdust; and her face is a spectacle for men and angels. I

say again that this is an extremely critical day in a girl's life, and

upon the way in which she negotiates this passage in her history a good

deal will eventually depend.

I do not quite know why I have made the feminine element so prominent in

my introduction. Boys are just the same. They affect to deride a girl's

ridiculous weakness in cherishing so great a tenderness for a doll; but,

for all their supercilious airs, they have illusions of their own. Dr.

Samuel Johnson has told us how, as a boy, he consulted the oracle as to

his future fortunes. If some issue were hanging in the balance--a game

to be played, or an examination to be taken--he would endeavour to wrest

from the unseen the secret that it held. He would note a particular

stick or stone on the path before him; and then, with face turned

skywards, he would walk towards it. If he trod on the object which he

had chosen, he took it as a sign that he would win the game or pass the

examination that was causing him such uneasiness. If, on the other hand,

he stepped clean over it, he interpreted it as a sinister prediction of

disaster. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes confesses to a similar weakness. 'As

for all manner of superstitious observances,' says the autocrat of the

Breakfast Table, 'I used to think I must have been peculiar in having

such a list of them; but I now believe that half the children of the

same age go through the same experience. No Roman soothsayer ever had

such a catalogue of omens as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my

childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some

mighty issues to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in

one or more biographies, I well remember.' And Dr. Holmes goes on to

give us a good deal more in the same strain.

But, although they do not record it, there must have come to both Dr.

Johnson and Dr. Holmes a day very similar to that on which the sawdust

streamed from the mutilated doll. What about the day on which young

Samuel Johnson, his scrofulous face and screwed-up eyes turned skywards,

strode along the path towards the selected talisman, stepped plump upon

it, and then lost the game that followed after all? And what about the

day on which young Oliver Wendell Holmes, impatiently awaiting his

father's return from Boston, wondered if his parent would bring him the

pocket-knife for which he had so long and loudly clamoured? But there,

not fifty yards away, was a tree; and here, at his feet, was a stone.

'If I hit it, he'll bring it; if I miss it, he won't!' he cried; and,

taking more than usually careful aim, he threw the stone, and missed!

But the pocket-knife was in his father's handbag all the same! Boys or

girls, men or women, it matters not; there come into our lives great and

memorable days when we have to take farewell of our illusions. Our

romances leave us. There comes a Christmas Day on which, to our

uttermost bewilderment, we discover the secret history of Santa Claus.

And very much will depend upon the way in which we face such sensational

and eye-opening experiences.

We go through life leaving these shattered romances behind us. Our track

is marked by the spatter of burst bubbles. What then? And in answer to

that 'What then?' the obvious temptation is the temptation to cynicism.

Since the doll has turned out to be a mere matter of sawdust and rags,

since the talisman on the footpath told a lie, since the oracle of tree

and stone deceived us, we make up our minds to fling to the scrap-heap

such cherished beliefs as we still retain. We go in for a severe weeding

out of everything that is imaginative, everything that is mystical,

everything that is romantic. Life resolves itself into a dreary

wilderness of matter-of-fact, an arid desert of common sense. Dr. Oliver

Wendell Holmes was wiser. Referring to his oracular stone-throwing and

the rest of it, he says, 'I won't swear that I have not some tendency to

these unwise practices even at this present date. With these follies

mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well that I would not outgrow

them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust

in them.' It is a pity to sweep all our rainbow-tinted romances out of

life simply because one of them has been reduced to the terms of rag and

sawdust.

There stands before me as I write Sir John Millais' great picture of

'Bubbles.' Both the picture and the experience that it portrays are

wonderfully familiar. The curly head; the upturned face; the entire

absorption of the little bubble-blower in the shining balls that he is

hurling into space; the half-formed hope that this one, at least, may

not sputter out and become an unbeautiful splash of soapsuds on the

floor; the wistful half-expectancy that now, at last, he has created a

lovely globe that shall float on and on, like a little fairy-world, for

ever and for evermore. It is all in the picture, as every beholder has

observed; and it is all in life. It is the first tragedy of infancy; it

is the last tragedy of age. Bubbles; bubbles; bubbles; and yet what

would the world be without bubbles? They burst, of course; but we are

the happier for having blown them! Our dreams may never come true; but

it's lovely to dream! Illusions are part of life's treasure-trove. When

they go, they leave nothing behind them. When we lose them, we lose

everything. It is almost better to become criminal than to become

cynical. To be criminal implies an evil hand; but to be cynical reveals

a very evil heart. It is a thousand times better to be blowing bubbles

that, though fragile, are very fair than to move sulkily about the world

telling all the blowers of bubbles that their beautiful bubbles must

burst. 'I want to forget!' cried the poor little 'Lady of the

Decoration.' 'I want to begin life again as a girl with a few

illusions!' Every fool knows that bubbles must burst. The man who feels

it necessary to tell this to everybody proves, not that he possesses the

gift of prophecy, but that he lacks the saving grace of common sense.

The world would clearly be very much the poorer, and not one scrap the

richer, if no bubbles were left in it. It is altogether wholesome to

have a fair stock of illusions.

But at this point two serious questions press for answer. If illusions

are so good, why do they fail us? Why are our bubbles permitted to

burst? The question answers itself. If all the bubbles that had ever

been blown were still floating about the world, there would be nothing

so commonplace as bubbles. That is why the era of miracles ceased. It

was a very romantic phase in the Church's childhood, and it answers to

the superstitious element in our own. But we may easily exaggerate its

value. If the age of miracles had been indefinitely lengthened, the

effect would have been the same as if all the bubbles became

everlasting. If all the bubbles that had ever been blown were with us

still, who to-day would want to blow bubbles? And if miracles had once

become commonplace, their charm and significance would have instantly

vanished. 'I am persuaded,' Martin Luther sagely declares, 'that if

Moses had continued his working of miracles in Egypt for two or three

years, the people would have been so accustomed thereunto, and would

have so lightly esteemed them, that they would have thought no more of

the miracles of Moses than we think of the sun or the moon.' It would

not be hard to prove that even the miracles of the New Testament tended

to lose their effect. The amazement of the disciples at beholding what

they took to be a ghost on the water is attributed to the fact that

'they considered not the miracle of the loaves' which had taken place a

few hours earlier. A miracle was already so much a matter of course that

the memory no longer treasured it as something phenomenal. No pains were

taken to investigate its significance. It would have been a tragedy

unspeakable if the miraculous element in the faith had become

universally contemptible. As the eagle carefully builds the nest in

which her eaglets are to see the light, and afterwards as carefully

destroys it so that they may be forced to fly, so our illusions are

made for our enjoyment, and then dashed to pieces under our very eyes.

Our childhood was enriched beyond calculation by the fine romances that

gave it such bright colours; and, in exactly the same way, the childhood

of the Church was glorified by the wonder-workings of a Hand Invisible.

And the other question is this: What shall we do when our illusions

leave us? When the doll turns out to be sawdust and rag, when the

youthful oracle speaks falsely, when the bubble bursts, what then? And

again the answer is obvious. Why, to be sure, if one romance fails us,

we must get a better, that is all! Any man who has not been soured by

cynicism will confess that the romantic tints in the skein of life have

deepened, rather than faded, as the years passed on. Surely, surely, the

romance of youth was a lovelier thing than the romance of childhood!

When a girl feels how silly it is to play with dolls, she begins to

think of other things that will more appreciate her fondling. When a boy

sees that it is senseless to throw stones at trees as a means of

deciding his destiny, he takes to tossing precious stones and pretty

trinkets in quite other directions, but with pretty much the same end in

view. And so the romance of life--if life be well managed--increases

with the years, until, by the time we become grandfathers and

grandmothers, the world seems too wonderful for us, and we stand and

gaze bewildered at all its abounding surprises. Everything depends on

filling up the gaps. As soon as the sawdust streams out of the doll, as

soon as the futility of the oracle stands exposed, we must make haste to

fill the vacant place with something better.

Long, long ago there were a few Jewish Christians who felt just as a

girl feels when the component parts of her dearest doll suddenly fall

asunder, just as Samuel Johnson felt when the talisman prophesied

falsely, just as Oliver Wendell Holmes felt when he saw that he could

trust his oracle no more. They felt--those Hebrew believers--that

everything had gone from them. 'To how great splendour,' says Dr. Meyer,

'had they been accustomed--marble courts, throngs of white-robed

Levites, splendid vestments, the state and pomp of symbol, ceremonial

and choral psalm! And to what a contrast were they reduced--a meeting in

some hall, or school, with the poor, afflicted, and persecuted members

of a despised and hated sect!' But the writer of the epistle addressed

to them makes it his--or her--principal aim to point out that it is all

a mistake. Just as a girl's richest romance follows upon the

disillusionment of the terrible sawdust, so the wealthiest spiritual

heritage of these Jewish Christians comes to them in place of the things

that they were inclined to lament. 'For,' says the writer, 'ye have

come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly

Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general

assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and

to God the Judge of all and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and

to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of

sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.' And whoever

finds himself the heir of so fabulous a wealth can well afford to smile

at all his earlier disappointments.

IV

A FORBIDDEN DISH

I

I was at Wedge Bay. It was raining. Wondering what I should do, I

remembered the great caves along the shore. For ages the waves had been

at work scooping out for me a place of refuge for such a day as this. I

put on my coat, slipped a novel in the pocket, and set off along the

sands. I soon found a sheltered spot in which I was able to defy the

weather, and to watch the waves or read my book just as the fancy took

me. As a matter of fact, I had not much to read. The book was Sir Walter

Scott's _Kenilworth_, and the bookmark was already near the end. I read

therefore until, in the very climax of the tragic close, I suddenly came

upon a text. Or perhaps it was less a text than a reference to a text,

casually uttered in a moment of great excitement by one of the principal

characters in the story. But it acted on my mind as the lever at the

switch acts upon the oncoming railway train. In a flash, the novel and

all its thrilling interest were left far behind, and I was flying along

an entirely new track. And here are the words that so adroitly changed

the current of my thought:

'"Oh, if there be judgement in heaven, thou hast well deserved it," said

Foster, "and wilt meet it! Thou hast destroyed her by means of her best

affections--_it is a seething of the kid in the mother's milk_."'

Almost involuntarily I closed the book, slipped it back into my pocket,

and sat looking out to sea lost in a brown but interesting study.

II

_'Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk!'_ The striking

prohibition occurs three times--twice in the Book of Exodus, and once in

the Book of Deuteronomy. I do not know on what principle we assess the

relative value and importance of texts; but, surely, a great

commandment, thrice emphatically reiterated, ought not to be treated as

beneath our notice. I find that the interdict applies primarily to an

ancient Eastern custom. All nations have their own idea as to the

special delicacy of certain viands. We British people fancy lamb and

sucking-pig, and feel no shame in destroying the tiny creatures as soon

as they are born. The predilection of the Arab was for a new-born kid;

and when he wished to adorn his table with a particularly toothsome

morsel, it was his habit to serve up the kid boiled in milk taken from

the mother. It was against this favourite and familiar dish that the

stern and repeated prohibition was launched. I do not know if there was

any practical or utilitarian reason, based on hygienic or medical

grounds, for the emphatic decree. Perhaps, or perhaps not. Some of the

old commandments relating to animals seem to have been framed for no

other purpose than to inculcate a certain gentleness and courtesy in our

attitude towards these poorer relatives of ours. 'Thou shalt not kill a

cow and her calf on the same day'; 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that

treadeth out the corn'; and so on. It is difficult to see any real

reason why the ewe and her lamb, or the cow and her calf, should not go

to the shambles together. But it was strictly forbidden. And similarly,

'_Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk_.' The finer feelings

are certainly shocked at the thought of the cow and the calf going

together to the slaughter, and at the idea of boiling the newly born and

newly slain kid in the milk of its mother; and the most obvious moral

seems to be that we are not to treat the creatures of the field and the

forest in any way that grates and jars upon those finer instincts. As I

sat watching the foam playing with the strands of seaweed, it seemed to

me that, if ever I am asked to preach in support of the Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I should have here a theme all ready

to my hand. And I felt glad that I had read _Kenilworth_.

III

But the prohibition goes much farther than that. It enshrines a

tremendous principle, a principle that is nowhere else so clearly

stated. Sir Walter Scott evidently saw that; and no exposition could be

clearer than his. The circumstances were, briefly, these. The Countess

of Leicester was a prisoner. Just outside her room at the castle was a

trapdoor. It was supported by iron bolts; but it was so arranged that

even if the bolts were drawn, the trapdoor would still be held in its

place by springs. Yet the weight of a mouse would cause it to yield and

to precipitate its burden into the vault below. Varney and Foster

decided to draw these bolts so that, if the Countess attempted to

escape, the trap would destroy her. Later on, Foster heard the tread of

a horse in the court-yard, and then a whistle similar to that which was

the Earl's usual signal. The next moment the Countess's chamber opened,

and instantly the trapdoor gave way. There was a rushing sound, a heavy

fall, a faint groan, and all was over! At the same instant Varney called

in at the window, 'Is the bird caught? Is the deed done?' Deep down in

the vault Foster could see a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. It

flashed upon him that the noise that he had heard was not the Earl's

signal at all, but merely Varney's imitation, designed to deceive the

Countess and lure her to her doom. She had rushed out to welcome her

husband, and had miserably perished. In his indignation, Foster turned

upon Varney. 'Oh, if there be judgement in heaven, thou hast deserved

it,' he said, 'and wilt meet it! Thou hast destroyed her by means of her

best affections. _It is a seething of the kid in the mother's milk!_'

At that touchstone the inner meaning of the interdict stands revealed.

The mother's milk is Nature's beautiful provision for the life and

sustenance of the kid. Thou shalt not pervert that which was intended to

be a ministry of life into an instrument of destruction. The wifely

instinct that led the Countess to rush forth to welcome her lord was one

of the loveliest things in her womanhood, and Varney used it as the

agency by which he destroyed her. She was lured to her doom by means of

her best affections. Charles Lamb points out, in his _Tales from

Shakespeare_, that Iago compassed the death of the fair Desdemona in

precisely the same way. 'So mischievously did this artful villain lay

his plots to turn the gentle qualities of this innocent lady into her

destruction and make a net for her out of her own goodness to entrap

her!' It is this that the prohibition forbids. Thou shalt not take the

most sacred things in life and apply them to base and ignoble ends.

_Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk._

IV

The possibilities of application are simply infinite. There is nothing

high and holy that cannot be converted into an engine of destruction. A

girl is fond of music. The impulse is a lofty and admirable one. But it

may easily be used to lure her away from the best things into a life of

frivolity, voluptuousness, and sensation. A boy is fond of Nature. He

loves to climb the mountain, row on the river, or scour the bush.

Nothing could be better. But if it leads him to forsake the place of

worship, to forget God, to fling to the winds the faith of his boyhood,

and to settle down to a life of animalism and materialism, he has been

destroyed by means of his best affections. Or take our love of society

and of revelry. There are few things more enjoyable than to sit by the

fireside, or on the beach, with a few really congenial companions, to

talk, and tell stories, and recall old times; to laugh, to eat, and to

drink together. Talking and laughing and eating and drinking seem

inseparable at such times. And yet out of that human, and therefore

divine, impulse see the evils that arise! Look at our great national

drink curse, with its tale of squalor and misery and shame! Did these

men mean to be drunkards when first they entered the gaily lit bar-room?

Nothing was farther from their minds. They were following a true

instinct--the desire for companionship and congenial society. They have

been lured to their doom, like Sir Walter Scott's heroine, by means of

their best affections.

V

And what about Love? Love is a lovely thing, or why should we be so fond

of love-stories? The love of a man for a maid, and the love of a maid

for a man, are surely among the very sweetest and most sacred things in

life. No story is so fascinating as the story of a courtship. And that

is good, altogether good. Every man who has won the affection of a true,

sweet, beautiful girl feels that a new sanction has entered into life.

He is conscious of a new stimulus towards purity and goodness. And every

girl who has won the heart of a good, brave, great-hearted man feels

that life has become a grander and a holier thing for her. As

Shakespeare says:

Indeed I know

Of no more subtle master under heaven

Than is the maiden passion for a maid,

Not only to keep down the base in man,

But to teach high thoughts and amiable words,

And courtliness, and the desire for fame,

And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

Lord Lytton illustrates this magic force in his _Last Days of Pompeii_.

He tells us that Glaucus, the Athenian, 'had seen Ione, bright, pure,

unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of

Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and

changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal as, by

her intellectual and refining spells, she reversed the fable of Circe,

and converted the animals into men.' Here, then, is something altogether

good. It is clearly designed to minister new life to all who come

beneath its spell. And yet the sordid fact remains that, through the

degradation of this same high and holy impulse, thousands of young

people make sad shipwreck.

VI

But of all things designed to minister life to the world, the Cross is

the greatest and most awful. Its possibilities of regeneration are

simply infinite; and in its case the danger is therefore all the

greater. 'We preach Christ crucified,' wrote Paul, 'unto the Jews a

stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which

are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom

of God.' It is the most urgent and insistent note of the New Testament

that a man may convert into the instrument of his condemnation and

destruction that awful sacrifice which was designed for his redemption.

It is the sin of sins; the sin unpardonable; the sin so impressively

forbidden by that ancient and thrice reiterated commandment whose

significance Sir Walter Scott pointed out to me in the cave by the side

of the sea.

V

AN OLD MAID'S DIARY

_Christmas Eve, 1973._ Christmas-time once more! The season strangely

stirs the memory, and the ghosts of Christmases long gone by haunt my

solitary soul to-night. Somehow, a feeling creeps over me that this

Christmas will be my last. Am I sorry? Yes, one cannot help feeling

sorry, for life is very sweet. On the whole, I have been happy, and

have, I think, done good. But oh, the loneliness! And every year has

made it more unbearable. The friends of my girlhood have married, or

gone away, or died, and each Christmas has made this desperate

loneliness more hard to endure. Did God mean women to come into the

world, to feel as I have felt, to long as I have longed, and then, after

all, to die as I must die? None of the things for which women seem to be

made have come to me. And now I have no husband to shelter me; no

daughters to close my eyes; no tall sons to bear this poor body to its

burial. I have pretended to satisfy myself by mothering other people's

children; but it was cruel comfort, and often only made my heart to ache

the more. And now it is nearly over; I have come to my very last

Christmas. I have always loved to sit by the fire for a few minutes

before lighting the lamp; and to-night as I do so something reminds me

of the old days long gone by.

This little room, neat and cosy, but so quiet and so lonely, somehow

brings back to my mind a dream that I had as a girl. Was it one dream,

or was it several? Dear me, how the memory begins to piece it all

together when once it gets a start! I wonder if I can trace it in my

journal? I have always kept a journal--just for company. It runs into

several big volumes now, and the handwriting has strangely altered with

the years. I shall tear them all up and burn them to-morrow; it will be

one way of spending my last Christmas! I have said things to this old

journal of mine that a woman could not say to any soul alive. It has

done me good just to tell these old books all about it. But my dream or

dreams; when did they come? It must be sixty years ago, although,

despite my loneliness, it really does not seem so long. But it can be no

less, for it was in the days of the Great War. The war broke out in

1914--I was eighteen then!--but my dream came months afterwards when

things were at their worst. It must have been in 1915. I remember that I

had been watching the men in khaki. Everybody seemed to be going to the

front. My brothers went; the tradesmen who called for orders; the men

who served us in the shops; everybody was enlisting. All our menfolk had

become soldiers. And, thinking about all this, I dreamed. I wonder if I

entered it in my journal? And, if so, I wonder if I can find it? Yes;

here it is. Ah, I thought so. It was a series of dreams; night after

night for a week, Sunday alone excepted. I don't know why no dream came

on Sunday. I will copy these six entries here, so that I can destroy the

old volumes with their secrets without making an end of this. The dreams

began on Monday.

* * * * *

_Tuesday, October 5, 1915._ I had such a strange dream last night. I

thought I was at the front. Whether I was a nurse or not I have no idea;

but you never know such things in dreams. Anyhow, I was there. I saw

Fred and Charlie in the trenches as plainly as I have ever seen

anything, and Tom the butcher-boy, and the young fellow who used to

bring the groceries. And with them, and evidently on the best of terms

with them, I saw a tall fellow with fair hair--such a gentlemanly

fellow!--and after I had seen him I seemed to have no eyes for the

others. If I looked to Fred, he only pointed to the boy with the fair

hair. If I turned to Charlie, he nodded to the lad with the fair hair.

Tom and the grocer's assistant did the same. And then the fellow with

the fair hair looked up, and I saw his face--such a handsome face! He

smiled--such a lovely smile!--and I felt myself blush. My confusion

awoke me; and I knew it was a dream.

_Wednesday, October 6, 1915._ Would you believe it, you credulous old

journal, I dreamed of my white-haired boy again last night! Isn't it

silly? He was home from the war, wounded, but well again. And we were

being married; only think of it! I can see it all now as plainly as I

can see the white page before me as I write. The commotion at home; the

drive to the church; the church itself; the ceremony; how plain it all

was! Fred was best man; my white-haired boy evidently had no brothers.

Jessie, my own sweet little sister, was my bridesmaid, although she

looked a good deal older. It seemed funny to see her with her hair up,

and with long skirts. The church seemed full of soldiers. Everybody who

had known him, served with him, camped with him, or fought with him,

simply worshipped him. At weddings I have always looked at the bride,

and taken very little notice of the bridegroom. But at our wedding

everybody was looking at my white-haired boy--so tall, so handsome, so

fine--like a knight out of one of the tales of chivalry. And I was glad

that they were all looking at him. And I was so happy, oh, so very,

very happy! I was happy to think that everybody was so proud of my

white-haired boy. And I was still more happy to think that my

white-haired boy was mine, my very, very own. I was so happy that I

cried, cried as though my heart would break for joy and pride and

thankfulness. And my crying must have awakened me, for when I sat up and

stared round my old bedroom in surprise there were tears in my eyes

still. I wonder if I shall ever dream of my bridegroom again?

_Thursday, October 7, 1915._ I did; I really did! I dreamed of him

again! I saw the home in which we lived, a beautiful, beautiful home. I

do not mean that it was big, but that it was sweet and comfortable, and

everything so nice! I thought that he was walking with me on the lawn.

He was older, a good bit older; I should think twice as old as when I

first saw him in the trenches. But he was still the same, still tall,

still fair, and oh, such a perfect gentleman! What care he took of me!

How proud and devoted he seemed! And how he gloried in the children! For

I thought we had children, five of them! The eldest and the youngest

were boys, Arthur, so like his father as I saw him first, and the

youngest, Harry, such a romp! The three girls, too, were the light of

his eyes and the brightness of his life. What times we all had

together! I saw him once scampering across the fields with the children,

whilst I sat among the cowslips knitting and awaiting the return of my

merry madcaps. I saw him sitting with the rest of us around the fire in

winter, whilst he told tales of the things that he did at the war. How

the boys listened, almost worshipping! And again I saw him on the Sunday

at the church. He sat next the aisle. I was so happy in being beside

him, with the children on my right. What more, I wondered, could any

woman want to fill her cup up to the brim? And, wondering, I awoke.

_Friday, October 8, 1915._ My dreams are getting to be like parts of a

serial story. How real my white-haired boy seems to be! He has come into

my life, and I cannot believe that he is only a dream-thing. I went for

a walk yesterday with mother and Jessie, and they said I was silent and

absent-minded. The truth was that I was thinking about him, yet how

could I tell them? Nobody knows but my journal and myself. And last

night--it seems scarcely possible--I saw him again! It was not quite so

nice, for I thought we were very old. He was no longer tall and erect,

but slightly bent, though stately still. And I leaned heavily upon his

arm. And the children came, and brought their children--such a lot of

them there seemed to be. He grew as young as ever in playing with these

troops of happy little people. And for them there was no fun like a game

with grandpapa. And as I sat and watched them, I liked to think that all

these boys and girls would have something of him about them, and would

grow up to cherish his dear memory as their ideal of all that a

Christian gentleman should be. And sometimes I thought of their

children, and their children's children, till I saw, floating before my

fancy, hundreds and thousands of children yet to be; and I speculated

idly as to how far his fine influence would carry down these coming

generations. And once more I awoke.

_Saturday, October 9, 1915._ Oh, my journal, my journal! I dreamed of my

white-haired boy again! How I wish I never had! If only I had always

been able to think of him as I saw him on Wednesday night and Thursday!

I was once more at the war. You know what funny things dreams are. In

the trenches I again saw Fred and Charlie and Tom the butcher-boy, and

the young fellow who used to bring the groceries. But this time they

were all in action; when I saw them before they were resting. The air

was heavy with battle-smoke; the great guns roared and reverberated;

shells screamed and burst about me. It was like night, although I knew

that it was daytime. As I stood and watched--looking for somebody--four

Red Cross men passed me. They were bearing a stretcher, and on the

stretcher was a mangled form. His face was hidden by his arm, half lying

across his eyes. A strange impulse seized me. I sprang forward, raised

his arm in the semi-darkness; there was a sudden flash caused by I know

not what, and in the light of that fearful and revealing flash I

recognized my white-haired boy! I trudged beside the stretcher to the

hospital, knowing neither what I did nor what I said. And when we

reached the hospital, my white-haired boy was dead! My white-haired boy,

my white-haired boy, my white-haired boy was dead! Oh that I had never

dreamed again!

_Sunday, October 10, 1915._ I dreamed once more, but not of my

white-haired boy. I dreamed of myself; pity me that I had nothing better

to dream of! I am only a girl; but in my dream I saw myself an old

woman, old and lonely! Oh, so very, very lonely! I was sitting, I

thought, in the dusk beside a bright and cheery fire in a neat and cosy

little room. Neat and cosy, but oh, so lonely; and I felt sorry for

myself, very sorry. For the self that I saw in my dream was a sad old

self, a disappointed old self, a self that had fought bravely against

being soured, but a self that had, after all, only partly succeeded. It

was not a nice dream; the nice dreams that I had earlier in the week

will never come again. No, it was not a nice dream, and I awoke feeling

uneasy and unhappy; and my head was aching.

* * * * *

_Christmas Eve, 1973._ And so, with a shaky, withered hand, I have

copied into the last pages of my journal the entries that I made in the

first of these old volumes. What did they mean, those dreams that came

to me so long ago? Was there a white-haired boy at the war, a

white-haired boy who, if there had been no war, or if just one cruel

shell had failed to explode, would have been the glory of my life and

the father of my children? But there _was_ a war, and the fatal shell

_did_ burst, and my white-haired boy and I never met, _never met_. The

five happy children--those two fine boys and the three lovely

girls--will never now gladden these dim old eyes of mine. Those troops

of grandchildren, and those hosts of unborn generations that I saw in my

happy fancy, will never leave the land of dreams and alight on this old

world. In the days of the war, I remember how people wept with the

widows, and sorrowed with the mothers whose brave sons were stricken

down. And, God knows, none of that sympathy was wasted. Oh, it was

heart-breaking to see the lusty women who would never see their husbands

again; and the broken mothers who would never even have the poor

consolation of visiting the graves of their fallen sons. And I was only

a girl, a girl of nineteen. And nobody wept with me. I did not even weep

for myself. Nobody knew about my white-haired boy. I did not know. But I

know now. Yes, _I know now_. And God knows; I pillow my poor tired old

head on that, God knows, _God knows_! And so this, then, is to be my

last Christmas! Ah, well, so be it! And perhaps--who can tell?--perhaps,

in a world where we women shall know neither wars, nor weddings, nor

widowhood, I shall before next Christmas have found the face of my

girlish dreams!

VI

THE RIVER

It is my great good fortune to dwell on the green and picturesque banks

of a broad and noble river. 'Rivers,' says an old Spanish proverb which

Izaak Walton quotes with a fine smack of approval, 'rivers were made for

wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.'

Let us beware lest we fall beneath the Spaniard's lash. For myself, I

can at least affirm that I never saunter beside these blue, fast-flowing

waters without feeling that the lines have fallen unto me in pleasant

places. It is wonderful how, after awhile, the winding river seems to

weave itself into the very texture and fabric of one's life. You stroll

by it, bathe in it, row on it, fish in it, until every rock and every

bank, every crag and every cliff, every twist and every bay, every deep

and every shallow, takes its place among the intimacies and fond

familiarities of life. It is one of the wonders of the world that this

little island in the southern seas should pour into the Pacific so many

fine majestic streams. And here, beside the lordliest of them all, I

have made my home. It is good to stand on these green banks, to survey

the great expanse of gleaming waters, and to see the stately ships glide

in and out. I often think of that early morning when John Forster found

Carlyle standing beside the Thames at Chelsea, lost in an evident

reverie of admiration. 'I should as soon have thought of assaulting him

as of addressing him,' says Forster. To be sure! We do lots of things in

this life of which we have no reason to be ashamed, things that are

indeed altogether to our credit, yet in the performance of which we do

not care to be discovered. It would be a sad old world, for example, if

love-making went out of fashion; but no man cares to be caught in the

act, for all that. Carlyle was caught making love to the Thames, as I

have often made love to the Derwent, and he keenly resented the

intrusion. 'He abruptly turned away,' adds the offender, 'and moved

across the roadway toward Cheyne Row, with that curious slow shuffle

habitual with him, and I saw him no more.'

Why, my very Bible seems a new book as I ponder its pages by the banks

of the Derwent. What a different story the Old Testament would have had

to tell if Jerusalem had stood by the side of a river like this! The

Jews never forgave the frowning Providence that denied to their fair

city a river. They heard how Babylon stood proudly surveying the

shining waters of the Euphrates, how Nineveh was beautified by the

lordly Tigris, how Thebes glittered in stately grandeur on the Nile, and

how Rome sat in state beside the Tiber; and they were consumed with envy

because no broad river protected them from their foes, and bore to their

gates the wealthy merchandise of many lands. I never noticed until I

dwelt by these blue waters how all the Psalms and prophecies are

coloured by this phase of Judean life. The prophets were for ever

dreaming of the river; the psalmists were for ever singing of the river.

Nothing delighted the people like a vision, such as visited Ezekiel, of

a broad river rushing out from Jerusalem. No greater or more glowing

message ever reached the disconsolate and riverless people than when

Isaiah proclaimed, 'The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad

rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall

gallant ship pass thereby!' Jehovah, that is to say, shall impart to

Jerusalem all the advantages of a river without any of its attendant

dangers. Many a faithless river, by bearing the destroyer on its bosom

to the city gates, had proved the undoing of the people after all. But

no such fate shall overwhelm Jerusalem. And, hearing this, the riverless

city was comforted.

It is recorded of the Right. Hon. John Burns that, in the days when he

was President of the Local Government Board, he found himself strolling

on the Terrace of the House of Commons, surveying, with all the

transports of a born Londoner, the shining waters of the Thames. His

reverie was, however, rudely interrupted by a supercilious American who

was inclined to regard with scornful contempt the object of Mr. Burns'

ecstatic admiration. 'After all,' the American demanded, 'what is it but

a ditch compared with the Missouri or the Mississippi?' This was more

than even a Cabinet Minister could be expected to stand. 'The Missouri

and the Mississippi!' Mr. Burns exclaimed in a fine burst of patriotic

indignation. 'The Missouri and the Mississippi are water, sir, and

nothing but water; but that,' pointing to the Thames, '_that_, sir, is

liquid history, _liquid history_!' Yes, Mr. Burns is quite right. The

Thames has a glory of its own among the world's historic streams,

although it is only a matter of degree. All rivers are liquid history.

The records of the world's great rivers constitute themselves, to all

intents and purposes, the history of the race. To take a single

illustration, it is obvious that the student who has mastered the

history and hydrography of the Niger, the Congo, the Zambesi, the

Orange, and the Nile has little more to learn about Africa. From the

times of which Herodotus writes, when Cyrus lost his temper with the

Tigris, and turned it out of its channel for drowning one of his sacred

white horses, rivers have loomed very largely in the annals of human

history. Indeed, Professor Shailer Mathews, in _The Making of

To-morrow_, says that there never was, until recent times, a nation that

did not paddle or sail its way into history. Civilization, he says, got

its first start on water. 'In the early days rivers were thoroughfares,

and they continued to be thoroughfares until the middle of last century.

Even the United States was born on water. It was easier to get to New

Orleans from Montreal by way of the Mississippi than overland.' One has

only to conjure up the wealthy historical traditions that cluster about

the names of the Euphrates and the Nile, the Indus and the Volga, the

Rhine and the Danube, the Tiber and the Thames, in order to convince

himself that the records of the world's great waterways are inextricably

interwoven with the annals of the human race.

We cannot, however, disguise from ourselves the fact that the affection

that we feel for our rivers is not based solely, or even primarily, on

utilitarian considerations. Nobody supposes that it is the navigable

qualities of the Ganges that have led the Hindus to believe that to die

on its banks, or to drink before death of its waters, is to secure to

themselves everlasting felicity. Yet, when we attempt to account in so

many words for the fascination of the river, the task becomes intricate

and difficult. Macaulay spent his thirty-eighth birthday on the banks of

the Rhone, and transferred his impressions to his journal. 'I was

delighted,' he says, 'by my first sight of the blue, rushing,

healthful-looking river. I thought, as I wandered along the quay, of the

singular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on

their banks; of the feeling of the Hindus about the Ganges, of the

Hebrews about the Jordan, of the Egyptians about the Nile, of the Romans

about the Tiber, and of the Germans about the Rhine. Is it that rivers

have, in a greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the

appearance of animation, and something resembling character? They are

sometimes slow and dark-looking; sometimes fierce and impetuous;

sometimes bright, dancing, and almost flippant.' However that may be,

the fact itself remains; and it is surprising that our literature does

not more adequately reflect this marked peculiarity. Macaulay himself

felt the lack, and dreamed of writing a great epic poem on the Thames.

'I wonder,' he said, 'that no poet has thought of writing such a poem.

Surely there is no finer subject of the sort than the whole course of

the river from Oxford downwards.' But a century has gone by and the poem

has not been penned. Shakespeare dwelt beside the Avon; Goethe loved to

stroll among the willows on the banks of the Lahn; Coleridge was born,

and spent the most impressionable years of his life in the beautiful

valley of the Otter. And one of the tenderest idylls of our literary

history is the picture of Wordsworth wandering hand in hand with Dorothy

among the most delightful river scenery of which even England can boast.

Yet, beyond a few sonnets and snippets, nothing came of it all. Neither

the laughing little streams nor the more majestic and historic waterways

have ever yet found their laureates.

But there are compensations. If the bards have been strangely and

unaccountably irresponsive to the music of the waters, our great prose

writers have caught its murmur and its meaning. Two particularly, John

Bunyan and Rudyard Kipling, have given us the classics of the river.

Bunyan's river--the river that all the pilgrims had to cross--is too

familiar to need more than the merest mention. And as for Mr. Kipling,

he, like Bunyan, is a writer of both poetry and prose. As a poet he has

failed to do justice to the river, as all the poets have failed. He has

given us a snippet, as all the poets have done. He makes the Thames

tells its own tale, and a wonderful tale it is.

I remember the bat-winged lizard birds,

The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds;

And the giant tigers that stalked them down

Through Regent's Park into Camden Town;

And I remember like yesterday

The earliest Cockney who came my way,

When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,

With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

But I forgave Kipling for not having repaired the omission of the older

poets when I read _Kim_. _Kim_ is the greatest story of a river that has

ever been written. Who can forget the old lama and his long, long search

for the River? Buddha, he thought, once took a bow and fired an arrow

from its string, and, where that arrow fell, there sprang up a river

'whose nature, by our Lord's beneficence, is that whoso bathes in it

washes away all taint and speckle of sin.' And so, through Mr. Kipling's

four hundred vivid pages, there wanders the old lama, through city and

rice-fields, over hills and across plains, asking, always asking, one

everlasting question: 'The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that

can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the

River?' All India, all the world seems to enter into that ceaseless cry.

It is the deepest, oldest, latest cry of the universal heart: 'The

River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin;

where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?' And it is the

Church's unspeakable privilege to take the old lama's hand and to point

his sparkling eyes to the cleansing fountains.

VII

FACES IN THE FIRE

It was half-past ten! I had no idea it was so late! Our little camp was

pitched about four miles up Captain's Gully, under the massive shelter

of Bulman's Ridge. It had been a perfect, cloudless day; all our

excursions--fishing, shooting, botanizing, and the rest--had been

crowned with delightful success; and after supper we sat round the great

camp fire, talking. We talked, of course, of the only things ever

discussed around camp fires--old times and old faces. I was struck with

the number of sentences that began '_I remember once----_.' Then, one by

one, the others stole away to their tents--those little white tents that

had looked like stray snowflakes in a wilderness of bush whenever we

caught sight of them from the hills in the daytime, yet which seemed all

the world to us at night. One by one, with a 'Here's off!' or a 'So

long!' the others had slipped quietly away, and the fire and I were at

last left to ourselves. How still it all was! Now and then I heard the

queer cry of a mopoke up the gully; and once there was the swish of a

bough beneath the leap of a 'possum. But, save for these, I could hear

no sound but the subdued hissing and rumbling of the logs as they

crumpled up in the fire before me. I remained for awhile, looking into

the glowing embers; and there, in the dying fire, the faces of my

companions all came back to me. And not theirs alone; for I saw, too,

the old familiar faces of which we had been chatting, and a hundred

others as well. It was then that I was startled by the 'possum in the

branches overhead. I looked at my watch; it was half-past ten; and I too

turned my back on the fire that had revealed so much. And I wondered, as

I moved away to my tent, why, by the side of the fire, we always think

of the Past, dream of the Past, talk of the Past. Why do our yesterdays

all spring to new and glorious life when the flickering flames are

lighting up our faces?

Our camp broke up a day or two later; and all such thoughts seemed to

have died with the fire that gave them birth. But, oddly enough, they

returned to me this morning. For, when I arose, I was conscious of a

distinct snap of winter in the atmosphere; and when I entered the study

I discovered that the divinity who presides over such matters had lit

the first fire of another year. I saluted it with pleasure, not merely

for the sake of the comfort it promised me, but for its own sake. I

greeted it as one greets an old and trusted friend. On this side of the

world we scarcely know what winter means, and we are therefore in danger

of underestimating the historic value of the fire. We can produce

nothing in Australia worthy of comparison with those stern winters with

which Northern and Western writers have made us so familiar. We are

accustomed to a literature which pours in upon us from high Northern

latitudes, and which describes, with a picturesque realism that evokes a

sympathetic shiver, the glacial snowdrifts that, for weeks on end, lie

deep along the hedgerows; the hapless bird that falls, frozen to death,

from the leafless bough; the rabbit that perishes of slow starvation in

its wretched burrow; and the fish that floats in stupor beneath the very

ice that furnishes the skater's paradise. But whilst, to us, snow and

ice are things of imagination or of memory, I felt thankful this

morning, as I knelt down like some old fire-worshipper and warmed my

numb hands at the cheerful blaze, that this Tasmanian winter of ours has

just enough sting in it to preserve in me a lively appreciation of this

ancient and honourable institution.

For the fireside is sanctified by a great and glorious tradition. It

enshrines all that is most mystical and most wonderful in our

civilization. In his pictures of the forest, Jack London again and again

emphasizes the magic effect of the fireside even on the creatures of the

wild. When White Fang, the wolf, saw the tongues of flame and clouds of

smoke that arose from beneath the Indian's hands, he was mystified. It

seemed to him a sign of some divinity in man of which he knew nothing.

It drew him as by some mesmeric influence. 'He crawled several steps

towards the flame. His nose touched it.' And when he felt the pain it

seemed as if an angry deity had smitten him.

In _The Call of the Wild_, Jack London returns to the same idea. Buck,

the great dog, was a creature of the wild, and sometimes the yearning

for the wild swept over him with almost irresistible authority. What was

it that kept him from bounding off into the forest and shaking the dust

of civilization from his paws for ever? It was because 'faithfulness and

devotion, things born of fire and roof,' had been developed within him.

He had sprawled on the hearth before John Thornton's fire; had looked up

hungrily into John Thornton's face; had learned to love his master more

than life itself; and to the fireside of his master he was bound by

invisible chains that he could not snap. 'Deep in the forest,' says Jack

London, 'a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call,

mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back

upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the

forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where

or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often

as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for

John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.' The fire; it is always

the fire. The fire seems, even to the brutes, to be the emblem of the

genius of our humanity.

For the triumph of humanity is the creation of home; and the soul of the

home is the fireside. The luxurious summer evenings, with their wide

range of out-of-door allurements, tend to discount the attractions of

the home, and to depreciate the value of domestic intercourse. We return

from business and rush out again for recreation. But winter furnishes a

salutary corrective. When the day's work is done, and the home is once

reached, everything conspires to enhance its seductive charms. Outside,

the dark and the cold, the bleak wind and the driving rain, threaten

multiple discomforts to the gadabout who dares to venture forth; whilst

within, the blazing fire, the cheerful hum of table talk, and the genial

hospitalities of home make their most resistless appeal amidst the

wintriest conditions. Was it not for this reason that the fire came to

be regarded for centuries as the natural emblem of domestic felicity? In

the days before matches were invented, when the lighting of a fire was a

much more laborious business than it is to-day, the first fire in the

home of a newly married pair was started by the bearing of a burning

brand from each of the homes from which bride and bridegroom came. It

was intended as a kind of ritual. The communication of the flame from

the old hearths which they had left to the new one which they had

established was designed to symbolize the perpetuation of all that was

worthiest and most sacred in the homes from which the young people had

come. It was the transfer of the Past--that radiant and tender Past that

saluted me from the glowing embers of my camp fire in the gully--to the

roseate and unborn future.

But although it was in my solitude that the fire in Captain's Gully

spoke to me, the fire is no lover of loneliness. It is the very emblem

of hospitality, and there are few graces more attractive. We boast that

an Englishman's home is his castle, and we do all that legislation can

accomplish to make that castle impregnable and inviolate. We close the

door, and draw the blinds, and we feel that we have effectually shut the

whole world out. And yet when a friend looks in, we suddenly discover

that our happiness consists, not in barring and bolting the heavy front

door, but in flinging it wide open. We seat him in the best chair; we

bring out the best dainties from the cupboard, the best books from the

shelves, and the best stories from the treasure-house of memory. The

fire crackles, cheeks glow, and eyes sparkle as the genial conversation

grows in interest and surprise. Nor is the pleasure by any means the

monopoly of the host; the guest shares it to the full. What is more

exhilarating or satisfying than an evening spent round a good fire with

a few kindred spirits in whose company one is perfectly at home? You can

speak or be silent, just as the mood takes you. You have not to labour

to be entertaining if you feel that you have nothing to say; nor need

you struggle to restrain yourself if you feel in the humour to talk. You

have not to weigh every word as you instinctively do in the presence of

less familiar or less trusted companions. You eat the fruit that is

handed round, or decline it, just as the whim of the moment dictates,

feeling under no obligation either way. You are entirely at your ease.

Sometimes the one conversation holds the entire group, and the

semi-circle listens, interested or amused, to the tale that one member

of the cluster is telling. At other times the party automatically

divides itself into knots; the gentlemen, it may be, breaking into

politics or business, and the ladies comparing notes on more enticing

themes. The fire blazes; the buzz of conversation rises and falls, sinks

and swells. Occasionally the attention is so concentrated on the subdued

voice of one speaker that scarcely a sound is audible outside the door;

a moment later the argument is so exciting, or the laughing so

boisterous, that everybody seems to be shouting at the same time. The

gramophone, and all such adventitious aids to the tolerable passage of a

leaden evening, are never so much as thought of. Even the piano is left

out in the cold. Every moment is crowded with the flush of unalloyed

delight. And when the last guest has vanished, and the house seems

silent and empty, it suddenly occurs to you that the great chief guest

whom you have been entertaining, or who has been entertaining you, was

the Past, the radiant and glorified Past. The phrase that we heard so

often in Captain's Gully, the '_I remember once----_,' has been the

key-note of the evening's gossip.

For the fact is that the fireside, whether in Captain's Gully in

summer-time or at home in dead of winter, is a sort of magic

observatory, a kind of camera-obscura. Outside, the world is wrapped in

impenetrable darkness. But the kindly glow of the fire stimulates the

memory, spurs the imagination, and brings back all our lost loves and

all our veiled landscapes in a beautified and idealized form. The lonely

man sees faces in the fire; but there are other things as well. The

springs and summers that haunt our fancy as we talk of them beside a

roaring fire are the blithest and gayest seasons that the world has ever

known. Never was sky so blue, or earth so fair, or sun so bright, or

air so sweet as the sky and the earth, the sun and the air, that we

contemplate from our coign of vantage by the side of the fire. The

fragrance of the hawthorn in the hedgerow; the humming of the bees along

the bank; the carolling of birds in the tree-tops; the bleating of the

lambs across the meadows,--these never appear so alluring as when we

view them from the wonderful observatory at the fireside. Dean Hole

tells with what sadness he used to pluck the last roses of summer. And

then, he says, 'the chill evenings come, curtains are drawn, and bright

fires glow. Then who is so happy as the rose-grower with the new

catalogues before him?' He sits by his fire and talks lovingly of the

roses that he grew in the summer that has vanished, and his eyes light

up with enthusiasm as he thinks of the still fairer blossoms of the

summer that will soon be here. And so two summer-times sit by his hearth

at mid-winter, and he revels in the company of each of them.

It is ever so. The crackling of the logs wakes up the slumbering Past,

and it all comes back to us. As soon as a man gets his feet on the

fender he instinctively thinks of old times and old companions. The

flames have destroyed much; but they also revive much. They bring back

to us our yesterdays; they bring back, indeed, the lordly yesterdays of

the remotest, stateliest antiquity. Surely that was the idea in

Macaulay's mind when he wrote 'Horatius':

And in the nights of winter,

When the cold north winds blow,

And the long howling of the wolves

Is heard amidst the snow;

When round the lonely cottage

Roars loud the tempest's din,

And the good logs of Algidus

Roar louder yet within;

When the oldest cask is opened,

And the largest lamp is lit;

When the chestnuts glow in the embers,

And the kid turns on the spit;

When young and old in circle

Around the firebrands close;

When the girls are weaving baskets,

And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armour,

And trims his helmet's plume;

When the goodwife's shuttle merrily

Goes flashing through the loom,--

With weeping and with laughter

Still is the story told,

How well Horatius kept the bridge

In the brave days of old.

Now, when I come to think of it, is it any wonder that the days of auld

lang syne, and the old familiar faces, should all come back in the

flames? For the scientists tell me that this study-fire of mine is

simply the radiance of far-back ages suddenly released for my present

comfort. Long before a single black-fellow prowled about these vast

Australian solitudes, the sun bathed this huge continent in apparently

superfluous brightness. But the sun knew what it was doing. The coalbeds

gathered up and stored that sunshine through centuries of centuries. The

black men came; and the white men came; and here at last am I! I need

that sunshine of ages long gone by. The miner digs for it; brings it to

the surface; sends it to my study; and, lo, I am this very morning

warming my numb fingers at its genial glow!

And so the match with which I light a fire, either in the camp away up

in the bush, or in this quiet study at home, is nothing less than the

wand of a magician! At the barred and bolted doors of the irrecoverable

Past I tap with that small wand and cry, 'Open, Sesame!' And, lo, a

miracle is straightway wrought! The doors that have been closed for

years, perhaps for ages, swing suddenly open, and the sunshine comes

streaming out! That match liberates the imprisoned brightness. The

scientists say so, and I can easily believe it. For this is the

essential glory of the fireside. All the sunniest memories rush to mind

as we cluster round the hearth. All the sunniest experiences of the

dead and buried years spring to vigorous life once more. All the

sunniest faces--the dear, familiar faces of the long ago--smile at us

again from out the glowing embers. And perhaps--who shall say?--perhaps

some thought like this haunted the minds of a prophet of the Old

Testament and an apostle of the New when, greatly daring, they declared

that 'our God is a consuming fire!' Did they mean that, when we see Him

as He is, all the holiest and sweetest and most precious treasure of the

Past will be more our own? Did they mean that in Him the sunshine of all

the ages will again salute us?

VIII

THE MENACE OF THE SUNLIT HILL

I am writing on the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of

Dante. The poet was born in 1265; I am writing in 1915. Six hundred and

fifty years represent a tremendous slice of history; and these six

hundred and fifty years span a chasm between two specially notable

crises in the annals of this little world. Dante was born in a year of

battle and of tumult, of fierce dissension and of bitter strife. It was

a year that decided the destinies of empires and changed the face of

Europe. Such a year, too, is this in which I write, and, writing, look

down the long, long avenue of the centuries that intervene. This

morning, however, I am not concerned with the story of revolution and of

conflict, of political convulsions and of nations at war. Such a study

would have fascinations of its own; but I deliberately leave it that I

may contemplate the secret history of a great, a noble, and a tender

soul. Edward FitzGerald tells us that he and Tennyson were one day

looking in a shop window in Regent Street. They saw a long row of busts,

among which were those of Goethe and Dante. The poet and his friend

studied them closely and in silence. At last FitzGerald spoke. 'What is

it,' he asked, 'which is present in Dante's face and absent from

Goethe's?' The poet answered, '_The divine_!' Now how did that divine

element come into Dante's life? He has himself told us. Has the

spiritual autobiography of Dante, as revealed to us in the introductory

lines of his _Inferno_, ever taken that place among our devotional

classics to which it is justly entitled? Surely the pathos, the insight,

and the exquisite simplicity of that first page are worthy of comparison

with the choicest treasures of Bunyan or of Wesley, of Brainerd or of

Fox. Let us glance at it.

I

I have heard many evangelists preach on such texts as: 'The Son of Man

is come to seek and to save that which is lost.' It was necessary, of

course, that they should explain to their audiences what they meant by

this lost condition. Wisely enough, they have usually had recourse to

illustration. The child lost in a London crowd; the ship lost on a

trackless sea; the sheep lost among the lonely hills; the traveller lost

in the endless bush,--all these have been exploited again and again.

From literature, one of the best illustrations is the moving story of

Enoch Arden. When poor Enoch returns from his long sojourn on the

desolate island, he finds that his wife, giving him up for dead, has

married Philip, and that his children worship their new father. It is

the garrulous old woman at the inn who tells him, never dreaming that

she is speaking to Enoch. Says she:

'Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost!'

He, shaking his grey head pathetically,

Repeated, muttering, 'Cast away and lost!'

Again in deeper inward whispers, 'Lost!'

But none of these illustrations are as good as Dante's. He opens by

describing the emotions with which, at the age of thirty-five, his soul

awoke. He was lost!

In the midway of this our mortal life,

I found me in a gloomy wood, astray,

Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell

It were no easy task, how savage wild

That forest, how robust and rough its growth,

Which to remember only, my dismay

Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

Neither Bunyan's pilgrim in his City of Destruction, nor his City of

Mansoul beleaguered by fierce foes, is quite so human or quite so

convincing as this weird scene in the forest. The gloom, the loneliness,

the silence, and the absence of all hints as to a way out of his

misery; these make up a scene that combines all the elements of

adventure with all the elements of reality. Dante was lost, and knew it.

II

The poet cannot tell us by what processes he became entangled in this

jungle. 'How first I entered it I scarce can say.' But it does not very

much matter. The way by which he escaped is the thing that concerns us;

and to this theme he bravely addresses himself. In his description of

his earliest sensations in the dark forest, several things are

significant. He clearly regarded it as a very great gain, for example,

to have discovered that he was lost. 'I found me,' he says, 'I found me

in a gloomy wood, astray.' Those three words, '_I found me_,' remind us

of nothing so much as the record of the prodigal, 'And he came to

himself.' I am pleased to notice that it is of the incomparable story of

the prodigal that Dante's opening confession reminds most of his

expositors. Thus, Mr. A. G. Ferress Howell, in his valuable little

monograph on Dante, observes that this finding of himself 'shows that he

has got to the point reached by the prodigal son when he said, "I will

arise and go to my father." He found, that is to say, that he had

altogether missed the true object of life. The wild and trackless

wood,' Mr. Howell goes on to observe, 'represents the world as it was in

1300. Why was it wild and trackless? Because the guides appointed to

lead men to _temporal felicity_ in accordance with the teachings of

Philosophy, and to eternal felicity in accordance with the teachings of

Revelation--the Emperor and the Pope--were both of them false to their

trust.' So here was poor Dante, only knowing that he was hopelessly

lost; and unable to discover among the undergrowth about him any

suggestion of a way to safety.

III

Suddenly the Vision Beautiful breaks upon him. He stumbles blindly

through the forest until he arrives at the base of a sunlit mountain:

... a mountain's foot I reached, where closed

The valley that had pierced my heart with dread.

I looked aloft, and saw his shoulders broad

Already vested with that planet's beam

Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.

The hill is, of course, the life he fain would live--steep and

difficult, but free from the mists of the valley and the entanglements

of the wood. And is it not illumined by the Sun of Righteousness--'Who

leads all wanderers safe through every way'? He stepped out from the

valley and cheerfully commenced the ascent. And then his troubles began.

One after the other, wild beasts barred his way and dared him to

persist. His path was beset with the most terrible difficulties. Now

here, if anywhere, the poet betrays that spiritual insight, that flash

of genuine mysticism, that entitles him to rank with the great masters.

For whilst he wandered in the murky wood no ravenous beasts assailed

him. There, life, however unsatisfying, was at least free from conflict.

But as soon as he essayed to climb the sunlit hill his way was

challenged. It is a very ancient problem. The psalmist marvelled that,

whilst the wicked around him enjoyed a most profound and unruffled

tranquillity, his life was so full of perplexity and trouble. John

Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he, in

his pilgrim progress, be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the

people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? I have

often thought of the problem when out shooting. The dog invariably

ignores the dead birds and devotes all his energy to the fluttering

things that are struggling to escape. In the stress of the experience

itself, however, such comfortable thoughts do not occur to us, and it

seems passing strange that, whilst our days in the wood were undisturbed

by hungry eyes or gleaming fangs, our attempt to climb the sunlit hill

should bring about us a host of unexpected enemies. Many a young and

eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but

rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey

awaiting him.

IV

And such beasts! Trouble seemed to succeed trouble; difficulty followed

on the heels of difficulty; peril came hard upon peril.

Scarce the ascent

Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light,

And covered with a speckled skin, appeared,

Nor when it saw me, vanished, rather strove

To check my onward going; that ofttimes

With purpose to retrace my steps I turned.

He had scarcely recovered from the shock, and driven this peril from his

path, when

... a new dread succeeded, for in view

A lion came, 'gainst me, as it appeared,

With his head held aloft and hunger-mad.

That e'en the air was fear-struck. A she-wolf

Was at his heels, who in her leanness seemed

Full of all wants, and many a land hath made

Disconsolate ere now. She with such fear

O'erwhelmed me, at the sight of her appalled,

That of the height all hope I lost.

The panther, the lion, and the wolf; that is very suggestive, and we

must look into this striking symbolism a little more closely.

V

The three fierce creatures that challenged Dante's ascent of the sunlit

hill represent evils of various kinds and characters. If a man cannot be

deterred by one form of temptation, another will speedily present

itself. It is, as the old prophet said, 'as if a man did flee from a

lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on

the wall, and a serpent bit him.' If one form of evil is unsuccessful,

another instantly replaces it. If the panther is driven off, the lion

appears; and if the lion is vanquished, the lean wolf takes its place.

But there is more than this hidden in the poet's parable. Did Dante

intend to set forth no subtle secret by placing the three beasts in that

order? Most of his expositors agree that he meant the panther to

represent _Lust_, the lion to represent _Pride_, and the wolf to

represent _Avarice_. Lust is the besetting temptation of youth, and

therefore the panther comes first. Pride is the sin to which we succumb

most easily in the full vigour of life. We have won our spurs, made a

way for ourselves in the world, and the glamour of our triumph is too

much for us. And Avarice comes, not exactly in age, but just after the

zenith has been passed. The beasts were not equidistant. The lion came

some time after the panther had vanished; but the wolf crept at the

lion's heels. What a world of meaning is crowded into that masterly

piece of imagery! Assuming that this interpretation be sound, two other

suggestions immediately confront us; and we must lend an ear to each of

them in turn.

VI

The three creatures differed in character. The panther was _beautiful_;

the lion was _terrible_; the wolf was _horrible_. Although the poet knew

full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther's spring,

he was compelled to admire the creature's exquisite beauty. 'The hour,'

he says,

The hour was morning's prime, and on his way.

Aloft the sun ascended with those stars

That with him rose, when Love divine first moved

Those its fair works; so that with joyous hope

All things conspire to fill me, the gay skin

Of that swift animal, the matin dawn.

And the sweet season.

The lion, on the other hand, is the symbol of majesty and terror. But

the lean she-wolf was positively horrible. Her hungry eyes, her

gleaming fangs, her panting sides, filled the beholder with loathing.

'Her leanness seemed full of all wants.' The poet says that the very

sight of her o'erwhelmed and appalled him. Dante himself confessed that,

of the three, he regarded the last as by far the worst of these three

brutal foes. Now I fancy that, in the temptations that respectively

assail youth, maturity, and decline, I have noticed these same

characteristics. As a rule, the sins of youth are beautiful sins. The

appeals to youthful vice are invariably defended on aesthetic grounds.

The boundary-line that divides high art from indecency is a very

difficult one to define. And it is so difficult to define because the

blandishments to which youth succumbs are for the most part the

blandishments of beauty. Like the panther, vice is cruel and pitiless;

yet the glamour of it is so fair that it 'blends with the matin dawn and

the sweet season.' The sins that bring down the strong man, on the other

hand, are not so much beautiful as terrible. The man in his prime goes

down before those terrific onslaughts that the forces of evil know so

well how to organize and muster. They are not lovely; they are leonine.

And is it not true that the temptations that work havoc in later life

are as a rule unalluring, hideous, and difficult to understand? The

world is thunderstruck. It seems so incomprehensible that, after having

survived his struggle with the beauteous panther and the terrible lion,

a man of such mettle should yield to a lean and ugly wolf!

VII

The other thing is this: there is a distinction in method, a difference

in approach, distinguishing these three beasts. The panther crouches,

springs suddenly upon its unsuspecting prey, and relies on the advantage

of surprise. Such are the sins of youth. 'Alas,' as George Macdonald so

tersely says,

Alas, how easily things go wrong!

A sigh too deep, or a kiss too long,

There follows a mist and a weeping rain.

And life is never the same again.

The lion meets you in the open, and relies upon his strength. The wolf

simply persists. He follows your trail day after day. You see his wicked

eyes, like fireflies, stabbing the darkness of the night. He relies not

upon surprise or strength, but on wearing you down at the last.

Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth--having beaten off the

_panther_--beware of the _lion_ and the _wolf_. And, still more

imperatively, let him that thinketh he standeth--having vanquished both

the _panther_ and the lion--take heed lest he fall at last to the grim

and frightful persistence of the lean _she-wolf_. It is just six hundred

and fifty years to-day since Dante was born; but, as my pen has been

whispering these things to me, the centuries have fallen away like a

curtain that is drawn. I have saluted across the ages a man of like

passions with myself, and his brave spirit has called upon mine to climb

the sunlit hill in spite of everything.

IX

AMONG THE ICEBERGS

Not so very long ago, and not so very far from this Tasmanian home of

mine, I beheld a spectacle that took me completely by surprise, and even

now baffles my best endeavours to describe it. I was on board a fine

steamship four days out from Hobart. In the early afternoon, as I was

rising from a brief siesta, I was startled by a voice exclaiming

excitedly, 'Oh, do come and see such a splendid iceberg!' I confess that

at first I entertained the notion with a liberal allowance of caution. I

was afflicted with very grave suspicions. At sea, folk are apt to forget

the calendar, and every day in the year has an awkward way of getting

itself mistaken for the first of April. But the manifest earnestness of

my informant bore down before it all base doubts, and I was sufficiently

convinced to hurry up to the promenade deck. I looked eagerly far out to

port, and then to starboard, but nothing was to be seen! It was the old

story of 'water, water everywhere!' My suspicions returned in an

aggravated form. Indignantly I sought out my informant, and peremptorily

demanded production of the promised iceberg. 'It's dead ahead,' he

replied calmly, 'and can therefore only be seen as yet from the bows.'

To the bows I accordingly hastened, and there I found a crowd,

comprising both passengers and crew, already congregated.

And surely enough, I then and there beheld the most magnificent and

awe-inspiring natural phenomenon upon which these eyes ever rested.

Right ahead of the ship there loomed up on the far horizon what

appeared, under an overcast, leaden sky, to be a fair-sized island, with

a high and rocky coast. In the distance stood a tall, rugged peak, as of

a mountain towering up like a monarch coldly proud of his desolate

island realm. The whole stood out strikingly gloomy and forbidding

against the distant eastern skyline. But, hey, presto! even as we

watched it, in less time than it takes to tell, a wonderful

transformation scene was enacted before our eyes. Suddenly, from over

the stern, the sun shone out, flinging all its radiant splendours on the

colossal object of our undivided attention.

In the twinkling of an eye, as if by magic, that which but a second ago

might have passed for a barren rocky island was transformed into a

brilliant mass of dazzling whiteness. Everything seemed to have been

transfigured. A fairyland of pearly palaces, flashing with diamonds and

emeralds, could not have eclipsed its glories now! There it still

stood, indescribably terrible and grand, right in our track, as though

daring us to approach any nearer to its gleaming purities. And as the

sunlight refracted about it, all the colours of the rainbow seemed to

play around its brow. Moreover, the genial warmth produced another

wonder. For, under its benign influence, the glittering peaks gave off

columns of vapour. They seemed to smoke like volcanoes.

In the mellow summer sun,

The icebergs, one by one,

Caught a spark of quickening fire,

Every turret smoked a censer,

Every pinnacle a pyre.

The wonder grew upon us as we watched. And yet, straight on, our good

ship held her way, her course unaltered and her speed unabated, as if,

fascinated by the majestic beauty before her, she were eager to dash

herself to pieces at the feet of such pure and awful loveliness. Ever

greater and ever more splendid it appeared as the distance lessened

between us and it, until we really seemed to be approaching an almost

perilous proximity. Then, of a sudden, the ship swerved to the

north-ward, and we ran by within a few hundred yards of the icy monster.

Who could help recalling the adventure of Coleridge's 'Ancient

Mariner'?

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold,

And ice, mast high, came floating by

As green as emerald.

And through the drifts, the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen,

Nor shapes of men, nor beasts we ken.

The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around,

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound.

Or Tennyson's lovely simile, wherein he says that we ourselves are like

Floating lonely icebergs, our crests above the ocean,

With deeply submerged portions united by the sea.

Then once again the fickle sun veiled his face, and that which had

appeared at first as a rocky island in mid-ocean, and afterwards as a

flashing palace of crystals, now assumed a dulled whiteness as of one

huge mass of purest chalk.

The heavy southern seas were dashing angrily against it, seeming

jealously to resent its escape from their own frozen dominions. And the

great clouds of spray which, as a consequence, were hurled into mid-air

gave an added grandeur to a spectacle that seemed to need no

supplementary charms. For miles around, the sea was strewn with

enormous masses of floating ice, some as large as an ordinary two-story

house, and all of the most fantastic shapes, which had apparently

swarmed off from the main berg. One long row of these, stretching out

from the monster right across the ship's course, looked for a moment not

unlike a great ice-reef connected with the berg, and caused no little

anxiety until the line of apparent peril had been safely negotiated.

When we were clean abreast, a gun was fired from the bridge of the

steamer, in order, I understand, to ascertain from the rapidity and

volume of the echo the approximate distance, and, by deduction, the size

of our polar acquaintance. Nor were there wanting those who were

sanguine enough to expect that the atmospheric vibration set in

operation by the explosion might finish the work of dislocation which

any cracks or fissures had already begun, and bring down at least some

tottering peaks or pinnacles. Sir John Franklin, in one of his northern

voyages, saw this feat accomplished. But, if any of my companions

expected to witness a similar phenomenon, they had reckoned without

their host. The unaffected dignity of the sullen monster mocked our puny

effort to bring about his downfall. Hercules scorned the ridiculous

weapons of the pigmies! The dull booming of the gun started a thousand

weird echoes on the desolate ice. They snarled out their remonstrance at

our intrusion upon their wonted solitude, and then again lapsed sulkily

into silence. The temperature dropped instantly, and I recalled a famous

saying of Dr. Thomas Guthrie's, whose life I had just been reading. In

one of his speeches, before the Synod of Angus and Mearns, he said, 'I

know of churches that would be all the better of some little heat. _An

iceberg of a minister_ has been floated in among them, and they have

cooled down to something below zero.' '_An iceberg of a minister!_' I

think of the nipping air on board when our ship was in the midst of the

ice; and the memory of it makes me shiver! '_An iceberg of a minister!_'

God, in His great mercy, save me from being such a minister as that!

The long-sustained excitement to which these events had given rise had

scarcely begun to subside when the cry arose, 'An iceberg on the

starboard bow!' This, in its turn, was speedily succeeded by 'Another!'

Then, 'An iceberg on the port bow!' And yet once more 'Another!' till we

were literally surrounded by icebergs. At tea-time we could peep through

the saloon portholes at no fewer than five of these polar giants.

Although most of them were larger than our first acquaintance--at least

one of them being about three miles in length--none of these later

appearances succeeded in arousing the same degree of enthusiasm as that

with which we hailed the advent of the first. For one thing, the charm

of novelty had, of course, begun to wear off. And, for another, they

were of a less romantic shape, most of them being perfectly flat, as

though some great polar plain were being broken up and we were being

favoured with the superfluous territory in casual instalments. And, by

the way, speaking of the shape of icebergs, I am told that the icebergs

of the two hemispheres are quite different in shape, the Arctic bergs

being irregular in outline, with lofty pinnacles and glittering domes,

while the Antarctic bergs are, generally speaking, flat-topped, and of

less fantastic form. The delicate traceries of the far North do not

reflect themselves in the sturdier and more matter-of-fact monsters of

the South. The appearance of icebergs in such numbers, of such

dimensions, in these latitudes, and at this time of the year,

constitutes, I am credibly informed, a very unusual if not, indeed, a

quite unique experience. The theory was freely advanced that some

volcanic disturbance had visited the polar regions and had dislodged

these massive fragments. However that may be, we were not at all sorry

that it had fallen to our happy lot to behold a spectacle of such

sublimity. And when we reflected that less than one-tenth of each mass

was visible above the water-line, we were able to form a more adequate

appreciation of the stupendous proportions of our gigantic neighbours.

Reflecting upon this aspect of the matter, I remembered to have heard,

in my college days, a popular London preacher make excellent use of this

phenomenon. 'When,' he said impressively, 'when you are tempted to judge

sin from its superficial appearance, and to judge it leniently, remember

that sins are like icebergs--_the greater part of them is out of

sight_!'

A certain amount of anxiety was felt, I confess, by most of us as night

cast her sable mantle over sea and ice. To admire an iceberg in broad

daylight is one thing; to be racing on amidst a crowd of them by night

is quite another. Ice, however, casts around it a weird, warning light

of its own, which makes its presence perceptible even in the darkest

night. So all night long the good ship sped bravely on her ocean track,

and all night long the captain himself kept cold and sleepless vigil on

the bridge. When morning broke, three fresh icebergs were to be seen

away over the stern. But we had now shaped a more northerly course; and

we therefore waved adieu to these magnificent monsters which we were so

delighted to have seen, and scarcely less pleased to have left. They

will doubtless have melted from existence long before they will have

melted from our memories.

Yes, they will have melted! And that reminds me of another famous saying

of the great Dr Thomas Guthrie, a saying which is peculiarly to the

point just now. 'The existence,' he said, 'of the Mohammedan power in

Turkey is just a question of time. Its foundations are year by year

wearing away, like that of an iceberg which has floated into warm seas,

and, as happens with that creation of a cold climate, it will by-and-by

become top-heavy, the centre of gravity being changed, and it will

topple over! What a commotion then!' Ah! what a commotion, to be sure!

They will have melted! Silly things! They grew weary of that realm of

white and stainless purity to which they once belonged; they broke away

from their old connexions and set out upon their long, long drift. They

drifted on and on towards the milder north; on and on towards warmer

seas; on and on towards the balmy breath and ceaseless sunshine of the

tropics. And, in return, the sunshine destroyed them. Yes, the sunshine

destroyed them. I have seen something very much like it in the Church

and in the world. 'Therefore,' says a great writer, who had himself felt

the fatal lure of too-much-sunshine, 'therefore let us take the more

steadfast hold of the things which we have heard, lest at any time we

drift away from them.' It is a tragedy of no small magnitude when, like

the iceberg, a man is lured by sparkling summer seas to his own

undoing.