[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 111.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
LIFE’S GOLDEN AGE.
All the world has shrunk since the Golden Age of our childhood. Time
was longer, and people were taller then. A wet day was the depth of
despair and the end of all things; the hours also were longer, and a
year from January to December lapsed slowly by, like the prehistoric
ages. The future seemed to be bringing a measureless succession of such
years until the gigantic height of grown-up people would be reached;
but life was so long, it was hardly worth while to think about the
mystery of growing to their height at last. Our old home has shrunk
since those days; the rooms are smaller and darker; the streets, once
familiar, would be narrower if we could see them now; the garden has
shrunk too; the trees have been growing down; and the church spire is
stumpy, as if Time had pushed its top lower, like a shutting telescope.
Beyond the home circle who were part of our existence, the grown-up
people of the Golden Age were a mysterious race. They cared no more
for games or playthings; though we refused to believe that any length
of years would make us cease to care for hide-and-seek among the
gorse and the billows of fern, and for the mustering of tin armies or
the acquisition of new toys. Not only were the grown-up people in a
dried-up state of indifference to games and plays, but they actually
laughed at things that were not in the least funny. They never cried;
they never ran; they did not ask for pudding twice, though they might
have it; they had learned all possible lessons long ago, and had
managed to remember them for the rest of their lives, and they knew all
about everything always.
But oh, the green world of those days! Have the green lanes since
wound on through golden light and moving leaf-shadows? Have the
cornfields been so broad beyond the hedges, such a sea of warm and
breeze-swept yellow ripeness, flecked all along near the hedge-path
with sparkling blue, and with blazing red poppies? Have the skies
been so far away since, where the lark sang out of sight, and where,
with our head on the grass, we made upward voyages among the towering
white clouds in the clearness of breezy summer days? Have the summers
burned the dusty roads so white? And has the milk been so sweet within
sight of the sheds at a doorway under thatched eaves? Is the noontide
stillness of the hot country, the siesta of the birds, as deep as it
was then? Is the scent of the honeysuckle as strong, and the smell
of the hay? Are there bright beetles in the hayfield yet, and are
butterflies becoming extinct, compared with their old numbers? Is it
possible to have hay-battles, now that there seem to be so many painful
stubble-fields to traverse in this world of ours? Who will give us
back the heart-thrill of our first sight of the mountains? Who will
remind us of the actual refreshment of wading in the shallow sunny
brook, or swinging over it from ropes tied to white-blossomed trees?
Who will send us another song like our first hearing of the noise
of the great unresting sea, or another sight like the first vision
of its foam-fringed, sky-bounded, sun-dazzled waters? When the moon
shone on the water then, one longed to look all night; when the winter
stars were out, there was no pageant like the heaven of heavens. In
that Golden Age the world might have been created and called good but
yesterday, so new a world it was. We saw
The earth and every common sight
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
But the glory and the freshness were in ourselves. Wordsworth calls
it the hour ‘of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.’ Not
all the splendour has departed; the sun of those days and the light of
our first love are still lingering in the sunlight of to-day. George
Eliot tells us how a forest of young golden-brown oak branches with the
light gleaming through, and with ground-ivy and blue speedwell and
white star-flowers below, is more beautiful to the heart than all the
grandeur of tropical forests, because it holds ‘the subtle inextricable
associations the fleeting hours of our childhood had left behind them.
Our delight in the sunshine or the deep-bladed grass might be no more
than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the
sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and
transform our perception into love.’
A yearning for that Golden Age of life has come in earnest moments to
half the world; the poets have sighed for it; and one of the sweetest
songs that tell of saddest thought became a favourite long ago because
it told how, in gathering shells on the beach,
A dream came o’er me like a spell—
I thought I was again a child.
How, why is childhood called the happiest time of life? And if it be
life’s Golden Age, why cannot we keep the gold?
The reasons why that period is envied seem to be these: First, and
most subtly underlying all envy of childhood, is the knowledge that
it is the time when we have our whole life before us. Often it is not
the return of the state itself that is desired, but its anticipation
of a life which we feel to be swift and short, and of a past which is
irrevocable. Not to be children again, but to have our chance again,
is the wish underlying most of the yearning. Apart from this, there
are many other reasons. We may place as the second, the freedom of
childhood from responsibility and care; and next, its freshness and
its habitual joy; and last, but very far from least, the atmosphere of
loving service, kindness, and tenderness which surrounds that helpless
period. Of course, we are speaking of childhood under favourable
circumstances; no one, except, perhaps, a dying man, would envy the
beginning of life in extreme poverty or in loveless hardship.
Other reasons there are for looking back tenderly to that Golden Age:
it was the time when we possessed unconsciously all the spiritual
beauty that we recognise now as the inner charm of little children.
They walk in the paradise of an unfallen world; their simplicity is
their greatest attraction; their faith and trust in those that care for
and provide for them is absolutely perfect; without any words, they
know that the home-love will last; without taking thought, they expect
to-morrow to be cared for like to-day. Lastly, they love much, and from
the first love they receive, their life takes vigour and colour. They
are like young plants straining to the light, and enriched according to
their share of warmth and sunshine.
But there is to the Golden Age another side. It is not perfection;
it is not entirely happy. How imperfect it is, all of us know, and
the flaws on the surface are not the saddest; in fact, without some
of these, we should hardly recognise our human fellow-mortals, or we
should doubt that we knew them well. A great educator in his day was
wont to say that he dreaded receiving a boy whom the parents presented
with pride as faultless; he dreaded that the faults were within, ready
to break out as childhood disappeared. But all lovers of children will
acknowledge the manifold imperfection that is a part of their being;
and perhaps we should not love them so well if it was not craving our
sympathetic care. Again, this Golden Age is not an entirely happy time.
It is true that the outbursts of sobbing are forgotten sooner than we
can forget our sorrows; but the sobs were real while they lasted. As
George Eliot says, this anguish appears very trivial to weather-worn
mortals, who have to think about Christmas bills, dead loves, and
broken friendships; but it may be not less bitter, perhaps it is
even more bitter, than later troubles. ‘We can no longer recall the
poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered
sorrows of five or ten years ago. Surely, if we could recall that
early bitterness and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless
conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should
not pooh-pooh the griefs of children.’
So we have decided that the Golden Age is not perfect—anything but it!
And it is far from being entirely happy. There is another consideration
to be taken into account—what happiness we possessed in childhood we
did not understand or value. We had that ‘strangely perspectiveless
view of life’ which prevented us from enjoying our happiness as we
enjoy it now, when we know its value better, through experience and
through a wider view of the world. The want of a perspective to their
world gives to children’s grief its intensity; they cannot look beyond;
they cannot understand its passing away. But it also gives to joys
their shallowness; and there are manifold meanings in the saying,
that unless we have suffered we cannot rejoice. Therefore, in sighing
for life’s Golden Age again, the sigh means a wish, not for childhood
as childhood is, but for childhood with the added consciousness and
experience of after-years. To have freedom from care, and to know what
a burden care can be; to have freshness, and to know what _ennui_
means; to have habitual joyousness, after learning how anxiety can wear
the spirit out of life; to have love and wisdom watching over one,
as if one was what a child is to a mother’s heart, ‘the unconscious
centre and poise of the universe;’ and at the same time to know
the worth of such wisdom and love; to have our life all before us,
conscious of what life is and how short are the years; to find again
the Eden garden, innocent of evil, after having seen how evil fills
the world with misery; to be simple, after having found out the charm
and the wisdom of simplicity; to have—in a word—not childhood as it
is, but as it would be, if we with our present knowledge could begin
again:—this is what is wished for. This, too, is the secret of the
sympathetic touch in Gray’s well-known welcome of the breeze from the
school of his boyhood, that breeze that came from the happy hills, the
fields beloved in vain:
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
That second spring would be boyhood with manhood’s knowledge—an
impossible existence, a Golden Age that never was. It was because of
the grim troop of passions and diseases waiting ‘in the vale below,’
that Gray envied the boyhood that had not yet advanced to meet the
strife and miseries of the world. We call that Golden Age ‘the happiest
time,’ merely by contrast; we forget its small capacity for happiness,
its shallow understanding of the worth of those good things that we
envy; and we apostrophise it in poetry and prose, because we are
condemning the after-time as unhappy, without remembering our increased
capacity for happiness.
But if it be impossible to carry back to a new start in life the
experience life has given us, while we are thinking with a sad
fascination of that Golden Age, and feeling the ‘momentary bliss’
of recollection, we shall not find it impossible to reverse our
aspirations, and to combine with later life some part, and perhaps the
best part, of our young life’s treasures. We yearn for those two things
together—the happiness of the beginning, and the light upon it from the
experience of the end. We cannot go back; but why should we not gather
again and bring forward with us all that can be brought from the Golden
Age? Then, to some extent, our aspirations will be satisfied.
Out of that Golden Age all the best things can be picked up and carried
along with us still. Surely this is some comfort to us wayfarers who
must ‘move on!’ We cannot have life over again; but it can be made to
lengthen in worth by intensity of purpose, and of working, of loving.
These, and not time, are the true measure of life. We envy freedom from
responsibility; the child has his tasks as we have ours; his lesson may
be as hard as our duty, and harder; he is happily resigned to tasks
in obedience to the will of others; our buckling down to duty will
bring us our playtime too. Freshness comes next. Wordsworth, after
mourning that the glory and the dream were gone, acknowledged that he
could receive from the meanest flower thoughts too deep for tears; so
we strongly suspect that the glory and the dream were remaining, and
that he saw till the last the earth ‘apparelled in celestial light.’
The love of the open-air world of beauty is a great key to lifelong
freshness of soul. Another key to freshness is the custom of being
easily pleased. The smallest gift pleases a child; in later life, we
look more at the love of the giver than at the gift; but why should
not the manifold growth of small kindnesses refresh us? And how shall
we get habitual joy? It is a precious treasure; the home is rich where
there is one member of the household brimful of sunshine. A merry word
at home is magic for brightening life; and it is some encouragement to
know that of all social virtues, the habit of joyousness is the one
that grows fastest by patient effort. It fosters another childlike
treasure—the sense of delight in a home atmosphere of love. Let us not
fear to express our tenderness in word and deed for those who share
life’s burdens with us, and the glow of the Golden Age will be round
the hearth again. As for simplicity, it is already the lifelong dower
of many of the most gifted minds; it is almost a characteristic of the
intellectual men of noblest life. Why should we use long words when
short ones are kinder; why go roundabout ways when we only need openly
do our best? Wonderful as it may seem, simplicity is the most imitable
part of childhood. The absence of self-consciousness is the grand key
to it. If we cease thinking about the effect produced upon others, who
are supposed to have concentrated their attention upon our puny selves,
we shall escape much heart-burning, and gradually begin to brighten our
path with something of childhood’s brightness. As for faith and trust,
if they look higher than the roof of home, why should they not be as
the child’s huge trust? We should have fewer careworn looks, and the
habit of joy would be easier.
There is another quality that must crown this development of the
childlike character—it is sympathy—that wide and warm sympathy which
knows no growing old, and which is the fruition of our childhood’s
eager freshness. Best of all, in picking up those old treasures that we
carelessly dropped by the way when the Golden Age was ending, we may
yet be, all unconsciously, very near the paradise-garden where once we
walked, not knowing our good-fortune, and but half able to enjoy it.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER VIII.
For a few minutes, they stood looking blankly at one another in mute
astonishment, turning over and comparing the two telegrams together
with undecided minds; then at last Nora broke the silence. ‘I tell you
what it is,’ she said, with an air of profound wisdom; ‘they must have
got an epidemic of yellow fever over in Trinidad—they’re always having
it, you know, and nobody minds it, unless of course they die of it, and
even then I daresay they don’t think much about it. But papa and Mr
Hawthorn must be afraid that if we come out now, fresh from England, we
may all of us get it.’
Edward looked once more at the telegrams very dubiously. ‘I don’t think
that’ll do, Miss Dupuy,’ he said, after re-reading them with a legal
scrutiny. ‘You see, your father says: “On no account go on board the
_Severn_.” Evidently, it’s this particular ship he has an objection to;
and perhaps my father’s objection may be exactly the same. It’s very
singular—very mysterious!’
‘Do you think,’ Marian suggested, ‘there can be anything wrong with the
vessel or the machinery? You know, they _do_ say, Edward, that some
ship-owners send ships to sea that aren’t at all safe or seaworthy. I
read such a dreadful article about it a little while ago in one of the
papers. Perhaps they think the _Severn_ may go to the bottom.’
‘Or else that there’s dynamite on board,’ Nora put in; ‘or a clockwork
thing like the one somebody was going to blow up that steamer with at
Hamburg, once, you remember! Oh, my dear, the bare idea of it makes me
quite shudder! Fancy being blown out of your berth, at dead of night,
into the nasty cold stormy water, and having a shark bite you in two
across the waist before you were really well awake, and had begun
properly to realise the situation!’
‘Not very likely, either of them,’ Edward said. ‘This is a new ship,
one of the very best on the line, and perfectly safe, except of course
in a hurricane, when anything on earth is liable to go down; so that
can’t possibly be Mr Dupuy’s objection to the _Severn_.—And as to
the clockwork, you know, Nora, the people who put those things on
board steamers, if there are any, don’t telegraph out to give warning
beforehand to the friends of passengers on the other side of the
Atlantic. No; for my part, I can’t at all understand it. It’s a perfect
mystery to me, and I give it up entirely.’
‘Well, what do you mean to do, dear?’ Marian asked anxiously. ‘Go back
at once, or go on in spite of it?’
‘I don’t think there’s any choice left us now, darling. The ship’s
fairly under weigh, you see; and nothing on earth would induce them to
stop her, once she’s started, till we get to Trinidad, or at least to
St Thomas.’
‘You don’t mean to say, Mr Hawthorn,’ Nora cried piteously, ‘they’ll
carry us on now to the end of the journey, whether we want to stop or
whether we don’t?’
‘Yes, I do, Miss Dupuy. They will, most certainly. I suspect they’ve
got no voice themselves in the matter. A mail-steamer is under contract
to sail from a given port on a given day, and not to stop for anything
on earth, except fire or stress of weather, till she lands the mails
safely on the other side, according to agreement.’
‘Well, that’s a blessing anyhow!’ Nora said resignedly; ‘because, if
so, it saves us the trouble of thinking anything more about the matter;
and papa can’t be angry with me for having sailed, if the captain
refuses to send us back, now we’ve once fairly started. Indeed, for my
part, I’m very glad of it, to tell you the truth, because it would have
been such a horrid nuisance to have to go on shore again and unpack all
one’s things just for a fortnight, after all the fuss and hurry we’ve
had already about getting them finished. What a pity the bothering old
telegrams came at all to keep us in suspense the whole way over!’
‘But suppose there _is_ some dynamite on board,’ Marian suggested
timidly. ‘Don’t you think, Edward, you’d better go and ask the captain?’
‘I’ll go and ask the captain, by all means, if that’s any relief to
you,’ Edward answered; ‘but I don’t think it likely he can throw any
particular light of his own upon the reason of the telegrams.’
The captain, being shortly found on the bridge, came down at his
leisure and inspected the messages; hummed and hawed a little
dubiously; smiled to himself with much good-humour; said it was a
confoundedly odd coincidence; and looked somehow as though he saw the
meaning of the two telegrams at once, but wasn’t anxious to impart
his knowledge to any inquiring third party. ‘Yellow fever!’ he said,
shrugging his shoulders sailor-wise, when Edward mentioned Nora’s first
suggestion. ‘No, no; don’t you believe it. ’Tain’t yellow fever. Why,
nobody who lives in the West Indies ever thinks anything of that, bless
you. Besides, _you_ wouldn’t get it; don’t you trouble your head about
it. You ain’t the sort or the build to get it. Men of your temperament
never do ketch yellow fever—it don’t affect ’em. No, no; it ain’t that,
you take my word for it.’
Marian gently hinted at unseaworthiness; but at this the good captain
laughed quite unceremoniously. ‘Go down!’ he cried—‘go down, indeed!
I’d like to see the hurricane that’d send the _Severn_ spinning to the
bottom. No, no; we may get hurricanes, of course—though this isn’t
the month for them. The rhyme says: “June—too soon; July—stand by;
Au-gust—you must; September—remember; October—all over.” Still, in
the course of nature we’re likely enough to have some ugly weather—a
capful of wind or so, I mean—nothing to speak of, for a ship of her
tonnage. But I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne the hurricane’s not
alive that’ll ever send the _Severn_ to the bottom, and I’ll pay it
you (if I lose) at the first port the lifeboat puts into after the
accident.—Dynamite! clockwork! that’s all gammon, my dear ma’am, that
is! The ship’s as good a ship as ever sailed the Bay o’ Biscay, and
there’s nothing aboard her more explosive than the bottle of champagne
I hope you’ll drink this evening for dinner.’
‘Then we can’t be put out?’ Nora asked, with her most beseeching smile.
‘My dear lady, not if I knew you were the Queen of England. Once we’re
off, we’re off in earnest, and nothing on earth can ever stop us till
we get safely across to St Thomas—the hand of God, the perils of the
sea, and the Queen’s enemies alone excepted,’ the captain added,
quoting with a smile the stereotyped formula of the bills of lading.
‘What do you think the telegram means, then?’ Nora asked again, a
little relieved by this confident assurance.
The captain once more hummed and hawed, and bit his nails, and looked
very awkward. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, after a minute’s internal debate,
‘perhaps—perhaps the niggers over yonder may be getting troublesome,
you know; and your family may think it an inopportune time for you
or Mr and Mrs Hawthorn to visit the colony.—All right, Jones, I’m
coming in a minute.—You must excuse me, ladies. In sight of land,
a cap’n ought always to be at his post on the bridge. See you at
dinner.—Good-morning, good-morning.’
‘It seems to me, Edward,’ Marian said, as he retreated opportunely,
‘the captain knows a good deal more about it than he wants to tell us.
He was trying to hide something from us; I’m quite sure he was.—Aren’t
you, Nora? I do hope there’s nothing wrong with the steamer or the
machinery!’
‘I didn’t notice anything peculiar about him myself,’ Edward answered,
with a little hesitation. ‘However, it’s certainly very singular. But
as we’ve got to go on, we may as well go on as confidently as possible,
and think as little as we can about it. The mystery will all be cleared
up as soon as we get across to Trinidad.’
‘If we ever get there!’ Nora said, half-jesting, and half in earnest.
As she spoke, Dr Whitaker the mulatto passed close by, pacing up
and down the quarter-deck for exercise, to get his sea-legs; and as
he passed her, he turned his eyes once more mutely upon her with
that rapid, timid, quickly shifting glance, the exact opposite of a
stare, which yet speaks more certainly than anything else can do an
instinctive admiration. Nora’s face flushed again, at least as much
with annoyance as with self-consciousness. ‘That horrid man!’ she cried
petulantly, with a little angry dash of her hand, almost before he was
well out of earshot. ‘How on earth can he have the impertinence to go
and look at me in that way, I wonder!’
‘Oh, don’t, dear!’ Marian whispered, genuinely alarmed lest the mulatto
should overhear her. ‘You oughtn’t to speak like that, you know.
Of course one feels at once a sort of natural shrinking from black
people—one can’t help that, I know—it seems to be innate in one. But
one oughtn’t to let them see it themselves at any rate. Respect their
feelings, Nora, do, dear, for my sake, I beg of you.’
‘Oh, it’s all very well for you, Marian,’ Nora answered, quite aloud,
and strumming on the deck with her parasol; ‘but for my part, you know,
if there’s anything on earth that I can’t endure, it’s a brown man.’