154. +Latin Vulgate (ed. Saint Jerome) Psalm 126, verse 1:

"canticum graduum Salomonis nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum

laboraverunt qui aedificant eam nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem

frustra vigilavit qui custodit." King James Bible's translation:

"When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them

that dream."

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*

[172] As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the

wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road,

helped him on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance.

And as the man told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a

little place in the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had

passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and,

the story told, went forward on his journey comforted. And that

night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came to

Florian, a dream which did for him the office of the finer sort of

memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as

sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above

ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the

house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its

doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it,

was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically

blent on wall [173] and floor, and some finer light and shadow

running in and out along its curves and angles, and with all its

little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the thought of

almost thirty years which lay between him and that place, yet with a

flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as if it

were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his

dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design

he then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story

of his spirit--in that process of brain-building by which we are,

each one of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear

and favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and

how his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised

house he could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of

the soul which had come to be there--of which indeed, through the law

which makes the material objects about them so large an element in

children's lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward

being woven through and through each other into one inextricable

texture--half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form,

from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither

from who knows how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw

a child moving, and could divide the main streams at least of

the winds that had played on [174] him, and study so the first stage

in that mental journey.

The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always

called it, (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home,

soon enough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really

was an old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates--

descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant

pieces still hung in one of the rooms--might explain, together with

some other things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about

everything there--the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls

with which the light and shadow played so delicately; might explain

also the tolerance of the great poplar in the garden, a tree most

often despised by English people, but which French people love,

having observed a certain fresh way its leaves have of dealing with

the wind, making it sound, in never so slight a stirring of the air,

like running water.

The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the

staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way

up at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the

blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against

the blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit

in autumn was so fresh. At the next turning came the closet which

held on its deep shelves the best china. Little angel [175] faces

and reedy flutings stood out round the fireplace of the children's

room. And on the top of the house, above the large attic, where the

white mice ran in the twilight--an infinite, unexplored wonderland of

childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet,

thrum of coloured silks, among its lumber--a flat space of roof,

railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the

house, as I said, stood near a great city, which sent up heavenwards,

over the twisting weather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of rolling

cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sunshine. But the child of

whom I am writing did not hate the fog because of the crimson lights

which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites which

gleamed through its openings, on summer mornings, on turret or

pavement. For it is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty

is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects

which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the

rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see

inwardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight,

a difference for the sense, in those whites and reds through the

smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at

the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a handful of earth

is virgin and untouched, in the lack of better ministries to its

desire of beauty.

[176] This house then stood not far beyond the gloom and rumours of

the town, among high garden-wall, bright all summer-time with Golden-

rod, and brown-and-golden Wall-flower--Flos Parietis, as the

children's Latin-reading father taught them to call it, while he was

with them. Tracing back the threads of his complex spiritual habit,

as he was used in after years to do, Florian found that he owed to

the place many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him,

certain inward lights under which things most naturally presented

themselves to him. The coming and going of travellers to the town

along the way, the shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the

neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of bright weather

there, its singular darknesses which linked themselves in his mind to

certain engraved illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the

coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, with

its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells--a citadel of

peace in the heart of the trouble--all this acted on his childish

fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects and incidents never

failed to throw him into a well-recognised imaginative mood, seeming

actually to have become a part of the texture of his mind. Also,

Florian could trace home to this point a pervading preference in

himself for a kind of comeliness and dignity, an urbanity literally,

in modes of life, which he connected with the pale [177] people of

towns, and which made him susceptible to a kind of exquisite

satisfaction in the trimness and well-considered grace of certain

things and persons he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way

through the world.

So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things

without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with

the birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read,

wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of

his memory. The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell

through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever

more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood

still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the

influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie

about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How

indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what

capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the

white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in

the rock for ever," giving form and feature, and as it were assigned

house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and

thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not

otherwise. The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater

world without, steal in upon us, each by its own special little

passage-way, through the wall of custom [178] about us; and never

afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, or

trick, in the mode of their first entrance to us. Our

susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold experiences--

our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily pain, for

instance--belong to this or the other well-remembered place in the

material habitation--that little white room with the window across

which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind, with

just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it,

on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes a

sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system of

visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and

passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents--the

angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow--become

parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound.

Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined was a peculiarly

strong sense of home--so forcible a motive with all of us--prompting

to us our customary love of the earth, and the larger part of our

fear of death, that revulsion we have from it, as from something

strange, untried, unfriendly; though life-long imprisonment, they

tell you, and final banishment from home is a thing bitterer still;

the looking forward to but a short space, a mere childish goûter and

dessert of it, before the end, being so great a resource of [179]

effort to pilgrims and wayfarers, and the soldier in distant

quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some power of solace to the

thought of sleep in the home churchyard, at least--dead cheek by dead

cheek, and with the rain soaking in upon one from above.

So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like those I have

been speaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being

indeed the early familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical

conception, of rest and security. Out of so many possible

conditions, just this for you and that for me, brings ever the

unmistakeable realisation of the delightful chez soi; this for the

Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn white curtain and

the shaded lamp; that, quite other, for the wandering Arab, who folds

his tent every morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted

ruins, or in old tombs.

With Florian then the sense of home became singularly intense, his

good fortune being that the special character of his home was in

itself so essentially home-like. As after many wanderings I have

come to fancy that some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen,

the true landscape, true home-counties, by right, partly, of a

certain earthy warmth in the yellow of the sand below their gorse-

bushes, and of a certain grey-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of

the hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen farther

south; so I think that the sort of [180] house I have described, with

precisely those proportions of red-brick and green, and with a just

perceptible monotony in the subdued order of it, for its

distinguishing note, is for Englishmen at least typically home-life.

And so for Florian that general human instinct was reinforced by this

special home-likeness in the place his wandering soul had happened to

light on, as, in the second degree, its body and earthly tabernacle;

the sense of harmony between his soul and its physical environment

became, for a time at least, like perfectly played music, and the

life led there singularly tranquil and filled with a curious sense of

self-possession. The love of security, of an habitually undisputed

standing-ground or sleeping-place, came to count for much in the

generation and correcting of his thoughts, and afterwards as a

salutary principle of restraint in all his wanderings of spirit. The

wistful yearning towards home, in absence from it, as the shadows of

evening deepened, and he followed in thought what was doing there

from hour to hour, interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret

he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, out of strange

ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to time, his spirit

found itself alone; and in the tears shed in such absences there

seemed always to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his last

tears might be.

And the sense of security could hardly have [181] been deeper, the

quiet of the child's soul being one with the quiet of its home, a

place "inclosed" and "sealed." But upon this assured place, upon the

child's assured soul which resembled it, there came floating in from

the larger world without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or

over the high garden walls, two streams of impressions, the

sentiments of beauty and pain--recognitions of the visible, tangible,

audible loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous

element in them--and of the sorrow of the world, of grown people and

children and animals, as a thing not to be put by in them. From this

point he could trace two predominant processes of mental change in

him--the growth of an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of

suffering, and, parallel with this, the rapid growth of a certain

capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form--the sweet

curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely

persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or

sang,--marking early the activity in him of a more than customary

sensuousness, "the lust of the eye," as the Preacher says, which

might lead him, one day, how far! Could he have foreseen the

weariness of the way! In music sometimes the two sorts of

impressions came together, and he would weep, to the surprise of

older people. Tears of joy too the child knew, also to older

people's surprise; real tears, once, of relief from long-strung,

[182] childish expectation, when he found returned at evening, with

new roses in her cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place

where there was a wood, and brought back for him a treasure of fallen

acorns, and black crow's feathers, and his peace at finding her again

near him mingled all night with some intimate sense of the distant

forest, the rumour of its breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant

and the branches lifted in them, and of the perfect nicety of the

little cups that fell. So those two elementary apprehensions of the

tenderness and of the colour in things grew apace in him, and were

seen by him afterwards to send their roots back into the beginnings

of life.

Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of the

element of pain in things--incidents, now and again, which seemed

suddenly to awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which

Goethe has called the Weltschmerz, and in which the concentrated

sorrow of the world seemed suddenly to lie heavy upon him. A book

lay in an old book-case, of which he cared to remember one picture--a

woman sitting, with hands bound behind her, the dress, the cap, the

hair, folded with a simplicity which touched him strangely, as if not

by her own hands, but with some ambiguous care at the hands of

others--Queen Marie Antoinette, on her way to execution--we all

remember David's drawing, meant merely to make her ridiculous. The

face [183] that had been so high had learned to be mute and

resistless; but out of its very resistlessness, seemed now to call on

men to have pity, and forbear; and he took note of that, as he closed

the book, as a thing to look at again, if he should at any time

find himself tempted to be cruel. Again, he would never quite forget

the appeal in the small sister's face, in the garden under the

lilacs, terrified at a spider lighted on her sleeve. He could trace

back to the look then noted a certain mercy he conceived always for

people in fear, even of little things, which seemed to make him,

though but for a moment, capable of almost any sacrifice of himself.

Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had had their sorrows,

lived about him; and this sensibility was due in part to the tacit

influence of their presence, enforcing upon him habitually the fact

that there are those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in a

sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of all he could recall, in

unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the stair, sounding

bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an

aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his death in

distant India; how it seemed to make the aged woman like a child

again; and, he knew not why, but this fancy was full of pity to him.

There were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too--of the white

angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a [184]

flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quite

delicately human in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundred

different expressions of voice--how it grew worse and worse, till it

began to feel the light too much for it, and at last, after one wild

morning of pain, the little soul flickered away from the body, quite

worn to death already, and now but feebly retaining it.

So he wanted another pet; and as there were starlings about the

place, which could be taught to speak, one of them was caught, and he

meant to treat it kindly; but in the night its young ones could be

heard crying after it, and the responsive cry of the mother-bird

towards them; and at last, with the first light, though not till

after some debate with himself, he went down and opened the cage, and

saw a sharp bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings; and therewith

came the sense of remorse,--that he too was become an accomplice in

moving, to the limit of his small power, the springs and handles of

that great machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play

pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures.

I have remarked how, in the process of our brain-building, as the

house of thought in which we live gets itself together, like some

airy bird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance straws, compact

at last, little accidents have their consequence; and thus it

happened that, as he [185] walked one evening, a garden gate, usually

closed, stood open; and lo! within, a great red hawthorn in full

flower, embossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and

branches, so aged that there were but few green leaves thereon--a

plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood.

The perfume of the tree had now and again reached him, in the

currents of the wind, over the wall, and he had wondered what might

be behind it, and was now allowed to fill his arms with the flowers--

flowers enough for all the old blue-china pots along the chimney-

piece, making fête in the children's room. Was it some periodic

moment in the expansion of soul within him, or mere trick of heat in

the heavily-laden summer air?

But the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and in

dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson

flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about

his feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on

either side. Always afterwards, summer by summer, as the flowers

came on, the blossom of the red hawthorn still seemed to him

absolutely the reddest of all things; and the goodly crimson, still

alive in the works of old Venetian masters or old Flemish tapestries,

called out always from afar the recollection of the flame in those

perishing little petals, as it pulsed gradually out of them, kept

long in the drawers of an old cabinet.

[186] Also then, for the first time, he seemed to experience a

passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an

inexplicable excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and

from which he half longed to be free. A touch of regret or desire

mingled all night with the remembered presence of the red flowers,

and their perfume in the darkness about him; and the longing for some

undivined, entire possession of them was the beginning of a

revelation to him, growing ever clearer, with the coming of the

gracious summer guise of fields and trees and persons in each

succeeding year, of a certain, at times seemingly exclusive,

predominance in his interests, of beautiful physical things, a kind

of tyranny of the senses over him.

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in

the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements

in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his

intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract

thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion. Such

metaphysical speculation did but reinforce what was instinctive in

his way of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, that

sensible vehicle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the

necessary concomitant of any perception of things, real enough to be

of any weight or reckoning, in his house of thought. There were

times when he could think of the [187] necessity he was under of

associating all thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link

between himself and actual, feeling, living objects; a protest in

favour of real men and women against mere grey, unreal abstractions;

and he remembered gratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less

than the religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so much of its

spiritual verity into things that may be seen, condescends in part to

sanction this infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, wherein

the world of sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought as a

kind of keeper and sentinel over his soul therein. But certainly, he

came more and more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as

in an actual body, or of any world but that wherein are water and

trees, and where men and women look, so or so, and press actual

hands. It was the trick even his pity learned, fastening those who

suffered in anywise to his affections by a kind of sensible

attachments. He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable

sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale

amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from

the lilies, from golden summer days, from women's voices; and then

what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the

child's flesh to violets in the turf above him. And thinking of the

very poor, it was not the things which most men care most for that he

yearned to give them; [188] but fairer roses, perhaps, and power to

taste quite as they will, at their ease and not task-burdened, a

certain desirable, clear light in the new morning, through which

sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their way

to their early toil.

So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like

a musical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness,

but always with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment,

the phases of the seasons and of the growing or waning day, down even

to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling--the light

cast up from the snow, bringing out their darkest angles; the brown

light in the cloud, which meant rain; that almost too austere

clearness, in the protracted light of the lengthening day, before

warm weather began, as if it lingered but to make a severer workday,

with the school-books opened earlier and later; that beam of June

sunshine, at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way of gold-

dust across the darkness; all the humming, the freshness, the perfume

of the garden seemed to lie upon it--and coming in one afternoon in

September, along the red gravel walk, to look for a basket of yellow

crab-apples left in the cool, old parlour, he remembered it the more,

and how the colours struck upon him, because a wasp on one bitten

apple stung him, and he felt the passion of [189] sudden, severe

pain. For this too brought its curious reflexions; and, in relief

from it, he would wonder over it--how it had then been with him--

puzzled at the depth of the charm or spell over him, which lay, for a

little while at least, in the mere absence of pain; once, especially,

when an older boy taught him to make flowers of sealing-wax, and he

had burnt his hand badly at the lighted taper, and been unable to

sleep. He remembered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical

thing--a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely, through

the languid scent of the ointments put upon the place to make it

well.

Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the sensible world, then,

as often afterwards, there would come another sort of curious

questioning how the last impressions of eye and ear might happen to

him, how they would find him--the scent of the last flower, the soft

yellowness of the last morning, the last recognition of some object

of affection, hand or voice; it could not be but that the latest look

of the eyes, before their final closing, would be strangely vivid;

one would go with the hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful

bystander, impressed how deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a

mere frail retiring of all things, great or little, away from one,

into a level distance?

For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear

of death--the fear of death [190] intensified by the desire of

beauty. Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes,

afterwards, at the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at

Munich, where all the dead must go and lie in state before burial,

behind glass windows, among the flowers and incense and holy candles-

-the aged clergy with their sacred ornaments, the young men in their

dancing-shoes and spotless white linen--after which visits, those

waxen, resistless faces would always live with him for many days,

making the broadest sunshine sickly. The child had heard indeed of

the death of his father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever had

taken him, so that though not in action he had yet died as a soldier;

and hearing of the "resurrection of the just," he could think of him

as still abroad in the world, somehow, for his protection--a grand,

though perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things,

like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible--and

of that, round which the mourners moved so softly, and afterwards

with such solemn singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a

deserted lodging. So it was, until on a summer day he walked with

his mother through a fair churchyard. In a bright dress he rambled

among the graves, in the gay weather, and so came, in one corner,

upon an open grave for a child--a dark space on the brilliant grass--

the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing down the little

jewelled [191] branches of the dwarf rose-bushes in flower. And

therewith came, full-grown, never wholly to leave him, with the

certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physical horror of

death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower

forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. No benign, grave

figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in the world

for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above them,

possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. For sitting

one day in the garden below an open window, he heard people talking,

and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick woman had

seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call her hence; and

from the broken talk evolved with much clearness the notion that not

all those dead people had really departed to the churchyard, nor were

quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, half-fugitive

life in their old homes, quite free by night, though sometimes

visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no great goodwill

towards those who shared the place with them. All night the figure

sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was not quite

gone in the morning--an odd, irreconcileable new member of the

household, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect

by its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead he had

pitied so, for being [192] thus. Afterwards he came to think of

those poor, home-returning ghosts, which all men have fancied to

themselves--the revenants--pathetically, as crying, or beating with

vain hands at the doors, as the wind came, their cries

distinguishable in it as a wilder inner note. But, always making

death more unfamiliar still, that old experience would ever, from

time to time, return to him; even in the living he sometimes caught

its likeness; at any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere

of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image

with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed

itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest

company, or happiest communing with himself.

To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions like

these attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested

by religious books, which therefore they often regard with much

secret distaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual

thoughts as a too depressing element in life. To Florian such

impressions, these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the

years, of the relationship between life and death, had been suggested

spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong

innate sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by

actual circumstances; and religious sentiment, that [193] system of

biblical ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to

him as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a

"lively hope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he

yielded himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of

mystical appetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him

through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that

this early pre-occupation with them already marked the child out for

a saint. He began to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy

days, all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the

secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure

water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of

something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He

pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the

exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob

looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were

attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as he

glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of conceiving

religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards remained--

a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a

transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more

expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or

exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, [194] youth, age,

tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking--a mirror, towards which men might

turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves

therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a

kind of sacred transaction--a complementary strain or burden, applied

to our every-day existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it

re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of some higher and more

consistent harmony. A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts,

wherein those sacred personalities, which are at once the reflex and

the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this

region in his intellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but

tend still further to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic

persons he would always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there.

And he could hardly understand those who felt no such need at all,

finding themselves quite happy without such heavenly companionship,

and sacred double of their life, beside them.

Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place

in his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm

or beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial

errands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings;

marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angels

thereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to its [195]

appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily life borrowed a

sacred colour and significance; the very colours of things became

themselves weighty with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses'

tabernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in the

first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep,

effusive unction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due

attitude for the reception of our every-day existence; and for a time

he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe,

generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and

event of life, of its celestial correspondent.

Sensibility--the desire of physical beauty--a strange biblical awe,

which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemn music--

these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the age

of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in

another place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating much

from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the

days till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little

careless about others even, in his strong desire for it--when Lewis

fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer.

At last the morning came, very fine; and all things--the very

pavement with its dust, at the roadside--seemed to have a white,

pearl-like lustre in them. They were to travel by a [196] favourite

road on which he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of

those two prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than

ever before, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had

started and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been

left behind, and must even now--so it presented itself to him--have

already all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of

one left by others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he

returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as

he passed in search of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a

look of meekness in their denudation, and at last through that

little, stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched him like

the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him,

so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his

pleasure in the realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And

so, with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home-sickness,

thus capriciously sprung up within him, he was driven quickly away,

far into the rural distance, so fondly speculated on, of that

favourite country-road.

NOTES

172. *Published in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1878.

EMERALD UTHWART*

[197] WE smile at epitaphs--at those recent enough to be read easily;

smile, for the most part, at what for the most part is an unreal and

often vulgar branch of literature; yet a wide one, with its flowers

here or there, such as make us regret now and again not to have

gathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair average of the like.

Their very simplicity, of course, may set one's thoughts in motion to

fill up the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almost

always worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominican

church, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you may

linger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-letter

memorials of the German students who died here--aetatis flore!--at

the University, famous early in the last century; young nobles

chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic. Note one in

particular! Loving parents and elder brother meant to record [198]

carefully the very days of the lad's poor life--annos, menses, dies;

sent the order, doubtless, from the distant old castle in the

Fatherland, but not quite explicitly; the spaces for the numbers

remain still unfilled; and they never came to see. After two

centuries the omission is not to be rectified; and the young man's

memorial has perhaps its propriety as it stands, with those

unnumbered, or numberless, days. "Full of affections," observed,

once upon a time, a great lover of boys and young men, speaking to a

large company of them:--"full of affections, full of powers, full of

occupation, how naturally might the younger part of us especially

(more naturally than the older) receive the tidings that there are

things to be loved and things to be done which shall never pass away.

We feel strong, we feel active, we feel full of life; and these

feelings do not altogether deceive us, for we shall live for ever.

We see a long prospect before us, for which it is worth while to

work, even with much labour; for we are as yet young, and the past

portion of our lives is but small in comparison of that which

probably remains to us. It is most true! The past years of our life

are absolutely beyond proportion small in comparison with those which

certainly remain to us."

In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in a remote Sussex

churchyard, you may read that Emerald Uthwart was born on such a

[199] day, "at Chase Lodge, in this parish; and died there," on a day

in the year 18--, aged twenty-six. Think, thereupon, of the years of

a very English existence passed without a lost week in that bloomy

English place, amid its English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish

brick and raftered plaster; you may see it still, not far off, on a

clearing of the wooded hill-side sloping gradually to the sea. But

you think wrong. Emerald Uthwart, in almost unbroken absence from

his home, longed greatly for it, but left it early and came back

there only to die, in disgrace, as he conceived; of which it was he

died there, finding the sense of the place all around him at last,

like blessed oil in one's wounds.

How they shook their musk from them!--those gardens, among which the

youngest son, but not the youngest child, grew up, little considered

till he returned there in those last years. The rippling note of the

birds he distinguished so acutely seemed a part of this tree-less

place, open freely to sun and air, such as rose and carnation loved,

in the midst of the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters,

all alike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their flowers.

You need words compact rather of perfume than of colour to describe

them, in nice annual order; terms for perfume, as immediate and

definite as red, purple, and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed

to yield their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the loosening

wind [200] was strong from the south-west; some which found their way

slowly towards the neighbourhood of the old oaks and beech-trees.

Others consorted most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made for

pot-pourri to sweeten the old black mahogany furniture. The sweet-

pea stacks loved the broad path through the kitchen garden; the old-

fashioned garden azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey

which clung to one's finger. There were flowers all the sweeter for

a battle with the rain; a flower like aromatic medicine; another like

summer lingering into winter; it ripened as fruit does; and another

was like August, his own birthday time, dropped into March.

The very mould here, rich old black gardener's earth, was flower-

seed; and beyond, the fields, one after another, through the white

gates breaking the well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-

like; little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English

littleness of our little island, our land of vignettes. Here all was

little; the very church where they went to pray, to sit, the ancient

Uthwarts sleeping all around outside under the windows, deposited

there as quietly as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost

unrecorded, as there had been almost nothing to record; where

however, Sunday after Sunday, Emerald Uthwart reads, wondering, the

solitary memorial of one soldierly member of his race, who had,--

well! who had not died here [201] at home, in his bed. How wretched!

how fine! how inconceivably great and difficult!--not for him! And

yet, amid all its littleness, how large his sense of liberty in the

place he, the cadet doomed to leave it--his birth-place, where he is

also so early to die--had loved better than any one of them!

Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of the almost grown-up brothers,

the unrepressed noise, the unchecked hours, the old rooms, all their

own way, he is literally without the consciousness of rule. Only,

when the long irresponsible day is over, amid the dew, the odours, of

summer twilight, they roll their cricket-field against to-morrow's

game. So it had always been with the Uthwarts; they never went to

school. In the great attic he has chosen for himself Emerald

awakes;--it was a rule, sanitary, almost medical, never to rouse the

children--rises to play betimes; or, if he choose, with window flung

open to the roses, the sea, turns to sleep again, deliberately,

deliciously, under the fine old blankets.

A rather sensuous boy! you may suppose, amid the wholesome, natural

self-indulgence of a very English home. His days began there: it

closed again, after an interval of the larger number of them,

indulgently, mercifully, round his end. For awhile he became its

centre, old habits changing, the old furniture rearranged about him,

for the first time in many generations, though he left it now with

something like [202] resentment in his heart, as if thrust harshly

away, sent ablactatus a matre; made an effort thereon to snap the

last thread which bound him to it. Yet it would come back upon him

sometimes, amid so different a scene, as through a suddenly opened

door, or a rent in the wall, with softer thoughts of his people,--

there, or not there,--and a sudden, dutiful effort on his part to

rekindle wasting affection.

The youngest of four sons, but not the youngest of the family!--you

conceive the sort of negligence that creeps over even the kindest

maternities, in such case; unless, perhaps, sickness, or the sort of

misfortune, making the last first for the affectionate, that brought

Emerald back at length to die contentedly, interferes with the way of

nature. Little by little he comes to understand that, while the

brothers are indulged with lessons at home, are some of them free

even of these and placed already in the world, where, however, there

remains no place for him, he is to go to school, chiefly for the

convenience of others--they are going to be much away from home!--

that now for the first time, as he says to himself, an old-English

Uthwart is to pass under the yoke. The tutor in the house, meantime,

aware of some fascination in the lad, teaches him, at his own

irregularly chosen hours, more carefully than the others; exerts all

his gifts for the purpose, winning him on almost insensibly to

youthful proficiency in those difficult rudiments.

[203] See him as he stands, seemingly rooted in the spot where he has

come to flower! He departs, however, a few days before the departure

of the rest--some to foreign parts, the brothers, who shut up the old

place, to town. For a moment, he makes an effort to figure to

himself those coming absences as but exceptional intervals in his

life here; he will count the days, going more quickly so; find his

pleasure in watching the sands fall, as even the sands of time at

school must. In fact, he was scarcely ever to lie at ease here

again, till he came to take his final leave of it, lying at his

length so. In brief holidays he rejoins his people, anywhere,

anyhow, in a sort of hurry and makeshift:--Flos Parietis! thus

carelessly plucked forth. Emerald Uthwart was born on such a day "at

Chase Lodge, in this parish, and died there."

See him then as he stands! counting now the hours that remain, on the

eve of that first emigration, and look away next at the other place,

which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from those

garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomely

little, to that place of "great matters," great stones, great

memories out of reach. Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more

memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their

prehistoric, entirely unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or

before the days of the Druids. Centuries of almost "still" life--of

birth, death, [204] and the rest, as merely natural processes--had

made them and their home what we find them. Centuries of conscious

endeavour, on the other hand, had builded, shaped, and coloured the

place, a small cell, which Emerald Uthwart was now to occupy; a place

such as our most characteristic English education has rightly tended

to "find itself a house" in--a place full, for those who came within

its influence, of a will of its own. Here everything, one's very

games, have gone by rule onwards from the dim old monastic days, and

the Benedictine school for novices with the wholesome severities

which have descended to our own time. Like its customs,--there's a

book in the cathedral archives with the names, for centuries Past, of

the "scholars" who have missed church at the proper times for going

there--like its customs, well-worn yet well-preserved, time-stained,

time-engrained, time-mellowed, the venerable Norman or English stones

of this austere, beautifully proportioned place look like marble, to

which Emerald's softly nurtured being, his careless wild-growth must

now adapt itself, though somewhat painfully recoiling from contact

with what seems so hard also, and bright, and cold. From his native

world of soft garden touches, carnation and rose (they had been

everywhere in those last weeks), where every one did just what he

liked, he was passed now to this world of grey stone; and here it was

always the decisive word [205] of command. That old warrior

Uthwart's record in the church at home, so fine, yet so wretched, so

unspeakably great and difficult! seemed written here everywhere

around him, as he stood feeling himself fit only to be taught, to be

drilled into, his small compartment; in every movement of his

companions, with their quaint confining little cloth gowns; in the

keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, the instant

submission of others. In fact, by one of our wise English

compromises, we still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson

in attention and patience, at the least. Nay! by a double

compromise, with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach

them their pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-

towers, amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the

discipline, of monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the English

have never wholly lost an early inclination. The French and others

have swept their scholastic houses empty of it, with pedantic

fidelity to their theories. English pedants may succeed in doing the

like. But the result of our older method has had its value so far,

at least, say! for the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such

diagonal influences, through complication of influence, that

expression comes, in life, in our culture, in the very faces of men

and boys--of these boys. Nothing could better harmonise present with

past than the sight of them just here, as they [206] shout at their

games, or recite their lessons, over-arched by the work of medieval

priors, or pass to church meekly, into the seats occupied by the

young monks before them.

If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, it is also apt to

linger with us;--its flora of red and gold leaves on the branches

wellnigh to Christmas; the hot days that surprise you, and persist,

though heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the year's

indulgence so to deal with us. To the fanciful, such days may seem

most at home in the places where England has thus preferred to locate

the somewhat pensive education of its more favoured youth. As

Uthwart passes through the old ecclesiastical city, upon which any

more modern touch, modern door or window, seems a thing out of place

through negligence, the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along

with a sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under the

wholesome active wind from the East coast. The long, finely

weathered, leaden roof, and the great square tower, gravely

magnificent, emphatic from the first view of it over the grey down

above the hop-gardens, the gently-watered meadows, dwarf now

everything beside; have the bigness of nature's work, seated up there

so steadily amid the winds, as rain and fog and heat pass by. More

and more persistently, as he proceeds, in the "Green Court" at last,

they occupy the outlook. He is shown the narrow [207] cubicle in

which he is to sleep; and there it still is, with nothing else, in

the window-pane, as he lies;--"our tower," the "Angel Steeple,"

noblest of its kind. Here, from morning to night, everything seems

challenged to follow the upward lead of its long, bold,

"perpendicular" lines. The very place one is in, its stone-work, its

empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them, as Uthwart

belongs, yielding wholly from the first; seem to question you

masterfully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the great

memories of the past, of this school;--challenge you, so to speak, to

make moral philosophy one of your acquirements, if you can, and to

systematise your vagrant self; which however will in any case be here

systematised for you. In Uthwart, then, is the plain tablet, for the

influences of place to inscribe. Say if you will, that he is under

the power of an "embodied ideal," somewhat repellent, but which he

cannot despise. He sits in the schoolroom--ancient, transformed

chapel of the pilgrims; sits in the sober white and brown place, at

the heavy old desks, carved this way and that, crowded as an old

churchyard with forgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or

antipathetic competitors, as it may chance. In a delightful, exactly

measured, quarter of an hour's rest, they come about him, seem to

wish to be friends at once, good and bad alike, dull and clever;

wonder a little at the name, and [208] the owner. A family name--he

explains, good-humouredly; tries to tell some story no one could ever

remember precisely of the ancestor from whom it came, the one story

of the Uthwarts; is spared; nay! petulantly forbidden to proceed.

But the name sticks the faster. Nicknames mark, for the most part,

popularity. Emerald! so every one called Uthwart, but shortened to

Aldy. They disperse; flock out into the court; acquaint him hastily

with the curiosities of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich

heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined

overgrown spaces where the old monastery stood, the stones of which

furnished material for the rambling prebends houses, now

"antediluvian" in their turn; are ready also to climb the scaffold-

poles always to be found somewhere about the great church, or dive

along the odd, secret passages of the old builders, with quite

learned explanations (being proud of, and therefore painstaking

about, the place) of architectural periods, of Gothic "late" and

"early," layer upon layer, down to round-arched "Norman," like the

famous staircase of their school.

The reader comprehends that Uthwart was come where the genius loci

was a strong one, with a claim to mould all who enter it to a

perfect, uninquiring, willing or unwilling, conformity to itself. On

Saturday half-holidays the scholars are taken to church in their

surplices, across the [209] court, under the lime-trees; emerge at

last up the dark winding passages into the melodious, mellow-lighted

space, always three days behind the temperature outside, so thick are

the walls;--how warm and nice! how cool and nice! The choir, to

which they glide in order to their places below the clergy, seems

conspicuously cold and sad. But the empty chapels lying beyond it

all about into the distance are a trap on sunny mornings for the

clouds of yellow effulgence. The Angel Steeple is a lantern within,

and sheds down a flood of the like just beyond the gates. You can

peep up into it where you sit, if you dare to gaze about you. If at

home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems

diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave,

of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height, the daring severity,

of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at

last, in due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic

arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come from further than

the light outside. Next morning they are here again. In contrast to

those irregularly broken hours at home, the passive length of things

impresses Uthwart now. It develops patience--that tale of hours, the

long chanted English service; our English manner of education is a

development of patience, of decorous and mannerly patience. "It is

good for a man that he bear the yoke in [210] his youth: he putteth

his mouth in the dust, he keepeth silence, because he hath borne it

upon him."--They have this for an anthem; sung however to wonderfully

cheerful and sprightly music, as if one liked the thought.

The aim of a veritable community, says Plato, is not that this or

that member of it should be disproportionately at ease, but that the

whole should flourish; though indeed such general welfare might come

round again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a

privilege of his individual being after all. The social type he

preferred, as we know, was conservative Sparta and its youth; whose

unsparing discipline had doubtless something to do with the fact that

it was the handsomest and best-formed in all Greece. A school is not

made for one. It would misrepresent Uthwart's wholly unconscious

humility to say that he felt the beauty of the askêsis+ (we need that

Greek word) to which he not merely finds himself subject, but as

under a fascination submissively yields himself, although another

might have been aware of the charm of it, half ethic, half physical,

as visibly effective in him. Its peculiarity would have lain in the

expression of a stress upon him and his customary daily existence,

beyond what any definitely proposed issue of it, at least for the

moment, explained. Something of that is involved in the very idea of

a classical education, at least for such as he; in its seeming

indirectness [211] or lack of purpose, amid so much difficulty, as

contrasted with forms of education more obviously useful or

practical. He found himself in a system of fixed rules, amid which,

it might be, some of his own tendencies and inclinations would die

out of him through disuse. The confident word of command, the

instantaneous obedience expected, the enforced silence, the very

games that go by rule, a sort of hardness natural to wholesome

English youths when they come together, but here de rigueur as a

point of good manners;--he accepts all these without hesitation; the

early hours also, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual

morning, to all that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious

mood he looked back on the morning of life, a preponderance, a

disproportionate place there, adding greatly to the effect of its

dreamy distance from him at this later time;--an ideal quality, he

might have said, had he ever used such words as that.

Uthwart duly passes his examination; and, in their own chapel in the

transept of the choir, lighted up late for evening prayer after the

long day of trial, is received to the full privileges of a Scholar

with the accustomed Latin words:--Introitum tuum et exitum tuum

custodiat Dominus! He takes them, not to heart, but rather to mind,

as few, if they so much as heard them, were wont to do; ponders them

for a while. They seem scarcely meant for him--words like those!

[212] increase however his sense of responsibility to the place, of

which he is now more exclusively than before a part--that he belongs

to it, its great memories, great dim purposes; deepen the

consciousness he had on first coming hither of a demand in the world

about him, whereof the very stones are emphatic, to which no average

human creature could be sufficient; of reproof, reproaches, of this

or that in himself.

It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, that Aldy

Uthwart had no feeling and was incapable of tears. They never came

to him certainly, when, at nights for the most part, the very touch

of home, so soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with a

sudden opulent rush of garden perfumes; came at the rattling of the

window-pane in the wind, with anything that expressed distance from

the bare white walls around him here. He thrust it from him

brusquely, being of a practical turn, and, though somewhat sensuous,

wholly without sentimentality. There is something however in the

lad's soldier-like, impassible self-command, in his sustained

expression of a certain indifference to things, which awakes suddenly

all the sentiment, the poetry, latent hitherto in another--James

Stokes, the prefect, his immediate superior; awakes for the first

time into ample flower something of genius in a seemingly plodding

scholar, and therewith also something of the waywardness popularly

thought to belong to [213] genius. Preceptores, condiscipuli, alike,

marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into the habits, the person, of

that tall, bashful, broad-shouldered, very Kentish, lad; so

unaffectedly nevertheless, that it is understood after all to be but

the smartness properly significant of change to early manhood, like

the down on his lip. Wistful anticipations of manhood are in fact

aroused in him, thoughts of the future; his ambition takes effective

outline. The well-worn, perhaps conventional, beauties of their

"dead" Greek and Latin books, associated directly now with the living

companion beside him, really shine for him at last with their

pristine freshness; seem more than to fulfil their claim upon the

patience, the attention, of modern youth. He notices as never before

minute points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil; points out thus, for

instance, to his junior, one day in the sunshine, how the Greeks had

a special word for the Fate which accompanied one who would come to a

violent end. The common Destinies of men, Moirai,+ Moerae--they

accompanied all men indifferently. But Kêr,+ the extraordinary

Destiny, one's Doom, had a scent for distant blood-shedding; and, to

be in at a sanguinary death, one of their number came forth to the

very cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the waves,

through powder and shot, through the rose-gardens;--where not?

Looking back, one might trace the red footsteps all along, side by

[214] side. (Emerald Uthwart, you remember, was to "die there," of

lingering sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the word glory

came to be softly whispered of them and of their end.) Classic

felicities, the choice expressions, with which James Stokes has so

patiently stored his memory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon

every act, every change in time or place, of their daily life in

common. He finds the Greek or the Latin model of their antique

friendship or tries to find it, in the books they read together.

None fits exactly. It is of military glory they are really thinking,

amid those ecclesiastical surroundings, where however surplices and

uniforms are often mingled together; how they will lie, in costly

glory, costly to them, side by side, (as they work and walk and play

now, side by side) in the cathedral aisle, with a tattered flag

perhaps above them, and under a single epitaph, like that of those

two older scholars, Ensigns, Signiferi, in their respective

regiments, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti,+ with the sapphic stanza

in imitation of the Horace they had learned here, written by their

old master.

Horace!--he was, had been always, the idol of their school; to know

him by heart, to translate him into effective English idiom, have an

apt phrase of his instinctively on one's lips for every occasion.

That boys should be made to spout him under penalties, would have

seemed doubtless to that sensitive, vain, winsome poet, [215] even

more than to grim Juvenal, quite the sorriest of fates; might have

seemed not so bad however, could he, from the "ashes" so persistently

in his thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, row upon row,

with black or golden heads, repeating him in the fresh morning, and

observed how well for once the thing was done; how well he was

understood by English James Stokes, feeling the old "fire" really

"quick" still, under the influence which now in truth quickened,

enlivened, everything around him. The old heathen's way of looking

at things, his melodious expression of it, blends, or contrasts

itself oddly with the everyday detail, with the very stones, the

Gothic stones, of a world he could hardly have conceived, its

medieval surroundings, their half-clerical life here. Yet not so

inconsistently after all! The builders of these aisles and cloisters

had known and valued as much of him as they could come by in their

own un-instructed time; had built up their intellectual edifice more

than they were aware of from fragments of pagan thought, as, quite

consciously, they constructed their churches of old Roman bricks and

pillars, or frank imitations of them. One's day, then, began with

him, for all alike, Sundays of course excepted,--with an Ode, learned

over-night by the prudent, who, observing how readily the words which

send us to sleep cling to the brain and seem an inherent part of it

next morning, kept him under [216] their pillows. Prefects, without

a book, heard the repetition of the Juniors, must be able to correct

their blunders. Odes and Epodes, thus acquired, were a score of days

and weeks; alcaic and sapphic verses like a bead-roll for counting

off the time that intervened before the holidays. Time--that tardy

servant of youthful appetite--brought them soon enough to the point

where they desired in vain "to see one of" those days, erased now so

willingly; and sentimental James Stokes has already a sense that this

"pause 'twixt cup and lip" of life is really worth pausing over,

worth deliberation:--all this poetry, yes! poetry, surely, of their

alternate work and play; light and shade, call it! Had it been,

after all, a life in itself less commonplace than theirs--that life,

the trivial details of which their Horace had touched so daintily,

gilded with real gold words?

Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy meantime enjoys his

triumphs in the Green Court; loves best however to run a paper-chase

afar over the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, of

the sea, in the autumn twilight; and his dutifulness to games at

least had its full reward. A wonderful hit of his at cricket was

long remembered; right over the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof,

was it? or over the roof, and onward into space, circling there

independently, minutely, as Sidus Cantiorum? A comic poem on it in

Latin, and a pretty one in English, [217] were penned by James

Stokes, still not so serious but that he forgets time altogether one

day, in a manner the converse of exemplary in a prefect, whereupon

Uthwart, his companion as usual, manages to take all the blame, and

the due penalty next morning. Stokes accepted the sacrifice the more

readily, believing--he too--that Aldy was "incapable of pain." What

surprised those who were in the secret was that, when it was over, he

rose, and facing the head-master--could it be insolence? or was it

the sense of untruthfulness in his friendly action, or sense of the

universal peccancy of all boys and men?--said submissively: "And now,

sir, that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my

fault."

Submissiveness!--It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart. In

that very matter he had but yielded to a senior against his own

inclination. What he felt in Horace was the sense, original, active,

personal, of "things too high for me!", the sense, not really

unpleasing to him, of an unattainable height here too, in this royal

felicity of utterance, this literary art, the minute cares of which

had been really designed for the minute carefulness of a disciple

such as this--all attention. Well! the sense of authority, of a

large intellectual authority over us, impressed anew day after day,

of some impenetrable glory round "the masters of those who know," is,

of course, one of the effects we [218] look for from a classical

education:--that, and a full estimate of the preponderating value of

the manner of the doing of it in the thing done; which again, for

ingenuous youth, is an encouragement of good manners on its part:--"I

behave myself orderly." Just at those points, scholarship attains

something of a religious colour. And in that place, religion,

religious system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself in a

way of which even the least serious by nature could not be unaware.

Their great church, its customs and traditions, formed an element in

that esprit de corps into which the boyish mind throws itself so

readily. Afterwards, in very different scenes, the sentiment of that

place would come back upon him, as if resentfully, by contrast with

the conscious or unconscious profanities of others, crushed out about

him straightway, by the shadow of awe, the minatory flash, felt

around his unopened lips, in the glance, the changed manner. Not to

be "occupied with great matters" recommends in heavenly places, as we

know, the souls of some. Yet there were a few to whom it seemed

unfortunate that religion whose flag Uthwart would have borne in

hands so pure, touched him from first to last, and till his eyes were

finally closed on this world, only, again, as a thing immeasurable,

surely not meant for the like of him; its high claims, to which no

one could be equal; its reproaches. He would scarcely have proposed

to "enter into" [219] such matters; was constitutionally shy of them.

His submissiveness, you see, was a kind of genius; made him

therefore, of course, unlike those around him; was a secret; a thing,

you might say, "which no one knoweth, saving he that receiveth it."

Thus repressible, self-restrained, always concurring with the

influence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others, in the bustle

of school life he did not count even with those who knew him best,

with those who taught him, for the intellectual capacity he really

had. In every generation of schoolboys there are a few who find out,

almost for themselves, the beauty and power of good literature, even

in the literature they must read perforce; and this, in turn, is but

the handsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual world,

should they have the good fortune, or rather, acquire the skill, to

deal with it properly. It has something of the stir and unction--

this intellectual awaking with a leap--of the coming of love. So it

was with Uthwart about his seventeenth year. He felt it, felt the

intellectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within him--

hê pterou dynamis,+ says Plato, in the Phaedrus; but again, as some do

with everyday love, withheld, restrained himself; the status of a

freeman in the world of intellect can hardly be for him. The sense

of intellectual ambition, ambitious thoughts such as sweeten the toil

of some of those about him, [220] coming to him once in a way, he is

frankly recommended to put them aside, and acquiesces; puts them from

him once for all, as he could do with besetting thoughts and

feelings, his preferences, (as he had put aside soft thoughts of home

as a disobedience to rule) and with a countenance more good-humoured

than ever, an absolute placidity. It is fit he should be treated

sparingly in this matter of intellectual enjoyment. He is made to

understand that there is at least a score of others as good scholars

as he. He will have of course all the pains, but must not expect the

prizes, of his work; of his loyal, incessant, cheerful industry.

But only see him as he goes. It is as if he left music, delightfully

throbbing music, or flowers, behind him, as he passes, careless of

them, unconsciously, through the world, the school, the precincts,

the old city. Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are

deterred for a while, even among the rich sights of the venerable

place, as he walks out and in, in his prim gown and purple-tasselled

cap; goes in, with the stream of sunlight, through the black shadows

of the mouldering Gothic gateway, like youth's very self, eternal,

immemorial, eternally renewed, about those immemorially ancient

stones. "Young Apollo!" people say--people who have pigeon-holes for

their impressions, watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise

books. His very dress seems touched [221] with Hellenic fitness to

the healthy youthful form. "Golden-haired, scholar Apollo!" they

repeat, foolishly, ignorantly. He was better; was more like a real

portrait of a real young Greek, like Tryphon, Son of Eutychos, for

instance, (as friends remembered him with regret, as you may see him

still on his tombstone in the British Museum) alive among the paler

physical and intellectual lights of modern England, under the old

monastic stonework of the Middle Age. That theatrical old Greek god

never took the expressiveness, the lines of delicate meaning, such as

were come into the face of the English lad, the physiognomy of his

race; ennobled now, as if by the writing, the signature, there, of a

grave intelligence, by grave information and a subdued will, though

without a touch of melancholy in this "best of playfellows." A

musical composer's notes, we know, are not themselves till the fit

executant comes, who can put all they may be into them. The somewhat

unmeaningly handsome facial type of the Uthwarts, moulded to a mere

animal or physical perfection through wholesome centuries, is

breathed on now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influences

from past and present a thousandfold, crossing each other in this

late century, and yet at unity in the simple law of the system to

which he is now subject. Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and

healthy nature, an untainted [222] physique, and limited by it, those

combining mental influences leave the firm unconscious simplicity of

the boyish nature still unperplexed. The sisters, their friends,

when he comes rarely upon them in foreign places, are proud of the

schoolboy's company--to walk at his side; the brothers, when he sees

them for a day, more considerate than of old. Everywhere he leaves

behind him an odd regret for his presence, as he in turn wonders

sometimes at the deference paid to one so unimportant as himself by

those he meets by accident perhaps; at the ease, for example, with

which he attains to the social privileges denied to others.

They tell him, he knows it already, he would "do for the army."

"Yes! that would suit you," people observe at once, when he tells

them what "he is to be"--undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military,

very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what one is, neither

more nor less. And the first mention of Uthwart's purpose defines

also the vague outlooks of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too.

Uniforms, their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and steel,

and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at service time--

uniforms and surplices were always close together here, where a

military garrison had been established in the suburbs for centuries

past, and there were always sons of its officers in the school. If

you stole out of an evening, it was like a stage scene-- [223] nay!

like the Middle Age, itself, with this multitude of soldiers mingling

in the crowd which filled the unchanged, gabled streets. A military

tradition had been continuous, from the days of crusading knights who

lay humbly on their backs in the "Warriors' Chapel" to the time of

the civil wars, when a certain heroic youth of eighteen was brought

to rest there, onward to Dutch and American wars, and to Harry, and

Geoffrey, and another James also, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti.

It was not so long since one of them sat on those very benches in the

sixth form; had come back and entered the school, in full uniform, to

say good-bye! Then the "colours" of his regiment had been brought,

to be deposited by Dean and Canons in the cathedral; and a few weeks

later they had passed, scholars and the rest in long procession, to

deposit Ensign--himself there under his flag, or what remained of it,

a sorry, tattered fringe, along the staff he had borne out of the

battle at the cost of his life, as a little tablet explained. There

were others in similar terms. Alas! for that extraordinary,

peculiarly-named, Destiny, or Doom, appointed to walk side by side

with one or another, aware from the first, but never warning him,

till the random or well-considered shot comes.

Meantime however, the University, with work in preparation thereto,

fills up the thoughts, the hours, of these would-be soldiers, of

James [224] Stokes, and therefore of Emerald Uthwart, through the

long summer-time, till the Green Court is fragrant with lime-blossom,

and speech-day comes, on which, after their flower-service and sermon

from an old comrade, Emerald surprises masters and companions by the

fine quality of a recitation; still more when "Scholar Stokes" and he

are found bracketed together as "Victors" of the school, who will

proceed together to Oxford. His speech in the Chapter-house was from

that place in Homer, where the soul of the lad Elpenor, killed by

accident, entreats Ulysses for due burial rites. "Fix my oar over my

grave," he says, "the oar I rowed with when I lived, when I went with

my companions." And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers

was the scruple with which those naturally graceful lips dealt with

every word, every syllable, put upon them. He seemed to be thinking

only of his author, except for just so much of self-consciousness as

was involved in the fact that he seemed also to be speaking a little

against his will; like a monk, it might be said, who sings in choir

with a really fine voice, but at the bidding of his superior, and

counting the notes all the while till his task be done, because his

whole nature revolts from so much as the bare opportunity for

personal display. It was his duty to speak on the occasion. They

had always been great in speech-making, in theatricals, from before

[225] the days when the Puritans destroyed the Dean's "Great Hall"

because "the King's Scholars had profaned it by acting plays there";

and that peculiar note or accent, as being conspicuously free from

the egotism which vulgarises most of us, seemed to befit the person

of Emerald, impressing weary listeners pleasantly as a novelty in

that kind. Singular!--The words, because seemingly forced from him,

had been worth hearing. The cheers, the "Kentish Fire," of their

companions might have broken down the crumbling black arches of the

old cloister, or roused the dead under foot, as the "Victors" came

out of the Chapter-house side by side; side by side also out of that

delightful period of their life at school, to proceed in due course

to the University.

They left it precipitately, after brief residence there, taking

advantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join the army at once,

regretted--James Stokes for his high academic promise, Uthwart for a

quality, or group of qualities, not strictly to be defined. He

seemed, in short, to harmonise by their combination in himself all

the various qualities proper to a large and varied community of

youths of nineteen or twenty, to which, when actually present there,

he was felt from hour to hour to be indispensable. In fact school

habits and standards had survived in a world not so different from

that of school for those who are faithful to its type. When he

looked back upon [226] it a little later, college seemed to him,

seemed indeed at the time, had he ventured to admit it, a strange

prolongation of boyhood, in its provisional character, the narrow

limitation of its duties and responsibility, the very divisions of

one's day, the routine of play and work, its formal, perhaps pedantic

rules. The veritable plunge from youth into manhood came when one

passed finally through those old Gothic gates, from a somewhat dreamy

or problematic preparation for it, into the world of peremptory

facts. A college, like a school, is not made for one; and as Uthwart

sat there, still but a scholar, still reading with care the books

prescribed for him by others--Greek and Latin books--the contrast

between his own position and that of the majority of his coevals

already at the business of life impressed itself sometimes with an

odd sense of unreality in the place around him. Yet the schoolboy's

sensitive awe for the great things of the intellectual world had but

matured itself, and was at its height here amid this larger

competition, which left him more than ever to find in doing his best

submissively the sole reward of so doing. He needs now in fact less

repression than encouragement not to be a "passman," as he may if he

likes, acquiescing in a lowly measure of culture which certainly will

not manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk, broom-blossom into

verbenas, but only, perhaps not so faultily, leave Emerald Uthwart

and the like of him [227] essentially what they are. "He holds his

book in a peculiar way," notes in manuscript one of his tutors;

"holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below, just as his

tough little mind clings to the sense of the Greek words he can

English so closely, precisely." Again, as at school, he had put his

neck under the yoke; though he has now also much reading quite at his

own choice; by preference, when he can come by such, about the place

where he finds himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if it

might be, of his own quaint rooms on the second floor just below the

roof; of what he can see from his windows in the old black front

eastwards, with its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather

and natural decay (when you look close the very stone is a composite

of minute dead bodies) relieving heads like his so effectively on

summer mornings. On summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-

flowers, comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and left;

seems to come from beyond the Oxford meadows, with sensitive, half-

repellent thoughts from the gardens at home. He looks down upon the

green square with the slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross

it on the way to chapel on yellow Sunday mornings, or upwards to the

dome, the spire; can watch them closely in freakish moonlight, or

flickering softly by an occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind

him. Yet how hard, how forbidding sometimes, under [228] a late

stormy sky, the scheme of black, white, and grey, to which the group

of ancient buildings could attune itself. And what he reads most

readily is of the military life that intruded itself so oddly, during

the Civil War, into these half-monastic places, till the timid old

academic world scarcely knew itself. He treasures then every

incident which connects a soldier's coat with any still recognisable

object, wall, or tree, or garden-walk; that walk, for instance, under

Merton garden where young Colonel Windebank was shot for a traitor.

His body lies in Saint Mary Magdalen's churchyard. Unassociated to

such incident, the mere beauties of the place counted at the moment

for less than in retrospect. It was almost retrospect even now, with

an anticipation of regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when

the oars splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the fields on

May evenings among the fritillaries--does the reader know them? that

strange remnant just here of a richer extinct flora--dry flowers,

though with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes' heads, the rude

call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, and in colour like

rusted blood, as if they grew from some forgotten battle-field, the

bodies, the rotten armour--yet delicate, beautiful, waving proudly.

In truth the memory of Oxford made almost everything he saw after it

seem vulgar. But he feels also nevertheless, characteristically,

that such local pride (fastus he terms it) is proper [229] only for

those whose occupations are wholly congruous with it; for the gifted,

the freemen who can enter into the genius, who possess the liberty,

of the place; that it has a reproach in it for the outsider, which

comes home to him.

Here again then as he passes through the world, so delightfully to

others, they tell him, as if weighing him, his very self, against his

merely scholastic capacity and effects, that he would "do for the

army"; which he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last,

through all his successes there, the army had still been scholar

Stokes' choice, and he had no difficulty, as the reader sees, in

keeping Uthwart also faithful to first intentions. Their names were

already entered for commissions; but the war breaking out afresh,

information reaches them suddenly one morning that they may join

their regiment forthwith. Bidding good-bye therefore, gladly,

hastily, they set out with as little delay as possible for Flanders;

and passing the old school by their nearest road thither, stay for an

hour, find an excuse for coming into the hall in uniform, with which

it must be confessed they seem thoroughly satisfied--Uthwart quite

perversely at ease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black

facings--and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they

scarcely know whither finally, among the featureless villages, the

long monotonous lines of the windmills, the poplars, blurred with

cold fogs, but marking the [230] roads through the snow which covers

the endless plain, till they come in sight at last of the army in

motion, like machines moving--how little it looked on that endless

plain!--pass on their rapid way to fame, to unpurchased promotion, as

a matter of course to responsibility also, till, their fortune

turning upon them, they miscarry in the latter fatally. They joined

in fact a distinguished regiment in a gallant army, immediately after

a victory in those Flemish regions; shared its encouragement as fully

as if they had had a share in its perils; the high character of the

young officers consolidating itself easily, pleasantly for them, till

the hour of an act of thoughtless bravery, almost the sole irregular

or undisciplined act of Uthwart's life, he still following his

senior--criminal however to the military conscience, under the actual

circumstances, and in an enemy's country. The faulty thing was done,

certainly, with a scrupulous, a characteristic completeness on their

part; and with their prize actually in hand, an old weather-beaten

flag such as hung in the cathedral aisle at school, they bethought

them for the first time of its price, with misgivings now in rapid

growth, as they return to their posts as nearly as may be, for the

division has been ordered forward in their brief absence, to find

themselves under arrest, with that damning proof of heroism, of

guilt, in their possession, relinquished however along with the

swords they will never handle [231] again--toys, idolised toys of our

later youth, we weep at the thought of them as never to be handled

again!--as they enter the prison to await summary trial next day on

the charge of wantonly deserting their posts while in position of

high trust in time of war.

The full details of what had happened could have been told only by

one or other of themselves; by Uthwart best, in the somewhat matter-

of-fact and prosaic journal he had managed to keep from the first,

noting there the incidents of each successive day, as if in

anticipation of its possible service by way of pièce justificative,

should such become necessary, attesting hour by hour their single-

hearted devotion to soldierly duty. Had a draughtsman equally

truthful or equally "realistic," as we say, accompanied them and made

a like use of his pencil, he might have been mistaken at home for an

artist aiming at "effect," by skilful "arrangements" to tickle

people's interest in the spectacle of war--the sudden ruin of a

village street, the heap of bleeding horses in the half-ploughed

field, the gaping bridges, hand or face of the dead peeping from a

hastily made grave at the roadside, smoke-stained rents in cottage-

walls, ignoble ruin everywhere--ignoble but for its frank expression.

But you find in Uthwart's journal, side by side with those ugly

patches, very precise and unadorned records of their common

gallantry, the more effective indeed for their simplicity; [232] and

not of gallantry only, but of the long-sustained patience also, the

essential monotony of military life, even on a campaign. Peril,

good-luck, promotion, the grotesque hardships which leave them smart

as ever, (as if, so others observe, dust and mire wouldn't hold on

them, so "spick and span" they were, more especially on days of any

exceptional risk or effort) the great confidence reposed in them at

last; all is noted, till, with a little quiet pride, he records a

gun-shot wound which keeps him a month alone in hospital wearily; and

at last, its hasty but seemingly complete healing.

Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid gun-shots,

putrefying wounds, green corpses, they never lacked good spirits, any

more than the birds warbling perennially afresh, as they will, over

such gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers them. And

at length fortune, their misfortune, perversely determined that

heroism should take the form of patience under the walls of an

unimportant frontier town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly

made only for appearance' sake, like the work in the trenches--

gardener's work! round about the walls they are called upon to

superintend day after day. It was like a calm at sea, delaying one's

passage, one's purpose in being on board at all, a dead calm, yet

with an awful feeling of tension, intolerable at last for those who

were still all athirst for action. How dumb and [233] stupid the

place seemed, in its useless defiance of conquerors, anxious, for

reasons not indeed apparent, but which they were undoubtedly within

their rights in holding to, not to blow it at once into the air--the

steeple, the perky weathercock--to James Stokes in particular, always

eloquent in action, longing for heroic effort, and ready to pay its

price, maddened now by the palpable imposture in front of him morning

after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively to Uthwart, seduced at

last from the clearer sense of duty and discipline, not by the

demonstrated ease, but rather by the apparent difficulty of what

Stokes proposes to do. They might have been deterred by recent

example. Colonel --, who, as every one knew, had actually gained a

victory by disobeying orders, had not been suffered to remain in the

army of which he was an ornament. It was easy in fact for both,

though it seemed the heroic thing, to dash through the calm with

delightful sense of active powers renewed; to pass into the

beleaguered town with a handful of men, and no loss, after a manner

the feasibility of which Stokes had explained acutely but in vain at

headquarters. He proved it to Uthwart at all events, and a few

others. Delightful heroism! delightful self-indulgence! It was

delayed for a moment by orders to move forward at last, with hopes

checked almost immediately after by a countermand, bringing them

right round their [234] stupid dumb enemy to the same wearisome

position once again, to the trenches and the rest, but with their

thirst for action only stimulated the more. How great the

disappointment! encouraging a certain laxity of discipline that had

prevailed about them of late. They take advantage however of a vague

phrase in their instructions; determine in haste to proceed on their

plan as carefully, as sparingly of the lives of others as may be;

detach a small company, hazarding thereby an algebraically certain

scheme at headquarters of victory or secure retreat, which embraced

the entire country in its calculations; detach themselves; finally

pass into the place, and out again with their prize, themselves

secure. Themselves only could have told the details--the intensely

pleasant, the glorious sense of movement renewed once more; of

defiance, just for once, of a seemingly stupid control; their dismay

at finding their company led forward by others, their own posts

deserted, their handful of men--nowhere!

In an ordinary trial at law, the motives, every detail of so

irregular an act might have been weighed, changing the colour of it.

Their general character would have told in their favour, but actually

told against them now; they had but won an exceptional trust to

betray it. Martial courts exist not for consideration, but for vivid

exemplary effect and prompt punishment. "There is a kind of tribunal

incidental [235] to service in the field," writes another diarist,

who may tell in his own words what remains to be told. "This court,"

he says, "may consist of three staff-officers only, but has the power

of sentencing to death. On the --st two young officers of the --th

regiment, in whom it appears unusual confidence had been placed, were

brought before this court, on the charge of desertion and wantonly

exposing their company to danger. They were found guilty, and the

proper penalty death, to be inflicted next morning before the

regiment marches. The delinquents were understood to have appealed

to a general court-martial; desperately at last, to 'the judgment of

their country'; but were held to have no locus standi whatever for an

appeal under the actual circumstances. As a civilian I cannot but

doubt the justice, whatever may be thought of the expediency, of such

a summary process in regard to the capital penalty. The regiment to

which the culprits belonged, with some others, was quartered for the

night in the faubourg of Saint --, recently under blockade by a

portion of our forces. I was awoke at daybreak by the sound of

marching. The morning was a particularly clear one, though, as the

sun was not yet risen, it looked grey and sad along the empty street,

up which a party of grey soldiers were passing with steady pace. I

knew for what purpose.

"The whole of the force in garrison here [236] had already marched to

the place of execution, the immense courtyard of a monastery,

surrounded irregularly by ancient buildings like those of some

cathedral precincts I have seen in England. Here the soldiers then

formed three sides of a great square, a grave having been dug on the

fourth side. Shortly afterwards the funeral procession came up.

First came the band of the --th, playing the Dead March; next the

firing party, consisting of twelve non-commissioned officers; then

the coffins, followed immediately by the unfortunate prisoners,

accompanied by a chaplain. Slowly and sadly did the mournful

procession approach, when it passed through three sides of the

square, the troops having been previously faced inwards, and then

halted opposite to the grave. The proceedings of the court-martial

were then read; and the elder prisoner having been blindfolded was

ordered to kneel down on his coffin, which had been placed close to

the grave, the firing party taking up a position exactly opposite at

a few yards' distance. The poor fellow's face was deadly pale, but

he had marched his last march as steadily as ever I saw a man step,

and bore himself throughout most bravely, though an oddly mixed

expression passed over his countenance when he was directed to remove

himself from the side of his companion, shaking his hand first. At

this moment there was hardly a dry eye, and several young soldiers

fainted, numberless as must be [237] the scenes of horror which even

they have witnessed during these last months. At length the

chaplain, who had remained praying with the prisoner, quietly

withdrew, and at a given signal, but without word of command, the

muskets were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of the

unfortunate man sprang up, falling again on his back. One shot had

purposely been reserved; and as the presiding officer thought he was

not quite dead a musket was placed close to his head and fired. All

was now over; but the troops having been formed into columns were

marched close by the body as it lay on the ground, after which it was

placed in one of the coffins and buried.

"I had almost forgotten his companion, the younger and more fortunate

prisoner, though I could scarcely tell, as I looked at him, whether

his fate was really preferable in leaving his own rough coffin

unoccupied behind him there. Lieutenant (I think Edward) Uthwart, as

being the younger of the two offenders, 'by the mercy of the court'

had his sentence commuted to dismissal from the army with disgrace.

A colour-sergeant then advanced with the former officer's sword, a

remarkably fine one, which he thereupon snapped in sunder over the

prisoner's head as he knelt. After this the prisoner's regimental

coat was handed forward and put upon him, the epaulettes and buttons

being then torn off and flung to a distance. This part of [238] such

sentences is almost invariably spared; but, I suppose through

unavoidable haste, was on the present occasion somewhat rudely

carried out. I shall never forget the expression of this man's

countenance, though I have seen many sad things in the course of my

profession. He had the sort of good looks which always rivet

attention, and in most minds friendly interest; and now, amid all his

pain and bewilderment, bore a look of humility and submission as he

underwent those extraordinary details of his punishment, which

touched me very oddly with a sort of desire (I cannot otherwise

express it) to share his lot, to be actually in his place for a

moment. Yet, alas! --no! say rather Thank Heaven! the nearest

approach to that look I have seen has been on the face of those whom

I have known from circumstances to be almost incapable at the time of

any feeling whatever. I would have offered him pecuniary aid,

supposing he needed it, but it was impossible. I went on with the

regiment, leaving the poor wretch to shift for himself, Heaven knows

how, the state of the country being what it is. He might join the

enemy!"

What money Uthwart had about him had in fact passed that morning into

the hands of his guards. To tell what followed would be to accompany

him on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details of which

he could never afterwards recall. See him lingering for morsels

[239] of food at some shattered farmstead, or assisted by others

almost as wretched as himself, sometimes without his asking. In his

worn military dress he seems a part of the ruin under which he creeps

for a night's rest as darkness comes on. He actually came round

again to the scene of his disgrace, of the execution; looked in vain

for the precise spot where he had knelt; then, almost envying him who

lay there, for the unmarked grave; passed over it perhaps

unrecognised for some change in that terrible place, or rather in

himself; wept then as never before in his life; dragged himself on

once more, till suddenly the whole country seems to move under the

rumour, the very thunder, of "the crowning victory," as he is made to

understand. Falling in with the tide of its heroes returning to

English shores, his vagrant footsteps are at last directed homewards.

He finds himself one afternoon at the gate, turning out of the quiet

Sussex road, through the fields for whose safety he had fought with

so much of undeniable gallantry and approval.

On that July afternoon the gardens, the woods, mounted in flawless

sweetness all round him as he stood, to meet the circle of a flawless

sky. Not a cloud; not a motion on the grass! At the first he had

intended to return home no more; and it had been a proof of his great

dejection that he sent at last, as best he could, for money. They

knew his fate already [240] by report, and were touched naturally

when that had followed on the record of his honours. Had it been

possible they would have set forth at any risk to meet, to seek him;

were waiting now for the weary one to come to the gate, ready with

their oil and wine, to speak metaphorically, and from this time forth

underwent his charm to the utmost--the charm of an exquisite

character, felt in some way to be inseparable from his person, his

characteristic movements, touched also now with seemingly irreparable

sorrow. For his part, drinking in here the last sweets of the

sensible world, it was as if he, the lover of roses, had never before

been aware of them at all. The original softness of his temperament,

against which the sense of greater things thrust upon him had

successfully reacted, asserted itself again now as he lay at ease,

the ease well merited by his deeds, his sorrows. That he was going

to die moved those about him to humour this mood, to soften all

things to his touch; and looking back he might have pronounced those

four last years of doom the happiest of his life. The memory of the

grave into which he had gazed so steadily on the execution morning,

into which, as he feels, one half of himself had then descended, does

not lessen his shrinking from the fate before him, yet fortifies him

to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternal familiarity to death;

in a few weeks' time this battle too is fought out; it is as if the

thing were ended. [241] The delightful summer heat, the freshness it

enhances--he contrasts such things no longer with the sort of place

to which he is hastening. The possible duration of life for him was

indeed uncertain, the future to some degree indefinite; but as

regarded any fairly distant date, anything like a term of years, from

the first there had been no doubt at all; he would be no longer here.

Meantime it was like a delightful few days' additional holiday from

school, with which perforce one must be content at last; or as though

he had not been pardoned on that terrible morning, but only reprieved

for two or three years. Yet how large a proportion they would have

seemed in the whole sum of his years. He would have liked to lie

finally in the garden among departed pets, dear dead dogs and horses;

faintly proposes it one day; but after a while comprehends the

churchyard, with its white spots in the distant flowery view, as

filling harmoniously its own proper place there. The weary soul

seemed to be settling deeper into the body and the earth it came of,

into the condition of the flowers, the grass, proper creatures of the

earth to which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits him

considerately; is repelled with politeness; goes on his way pondering

inwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme of

another world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as

the breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242]

the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he

had successfully hidden from his eyes all beside.

His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, for a certain

change of opinion of immense weight to him--a revision or reversal of

judgment. It came about in this way. When peace was arranged, with

question of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain battles or

incidents therein were fought over again, sometimes in the highest

places of debate. On such an occasion a certain speaker cites the

case of Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being "pessimi

exempli": whereupon a second speaker gets up, prepared with full

detail, insists, brings that incidental matter to the front for an

hour, tells his unfortunate friend's story so effectively,

pathetically, that, as happens with our countrymen, they repent. The

matter gets into the newspapers, and, coming thus into sympathetic

public view, something like glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last

touch of animation. Just not too late he received the offer of a

commission; kept the letter there open within sight. Aldy, who

"never shed tears and was incapable of pain," in his great physical

weakness, wept--shall we say for the second time in his life? A less

excitement would have been more favorable to any chance there might

be of the patient's surviving. In fact the old gun-shot wound,

wrongly thought to be cured, which had caused [243] the one illness

of his life, is now drawing out what remains of it, as he feels with

a kind of odd satisfaction and pride--his old glorious wound! And

then, as of old, an absolute submissiveness comes over him, as he

gazes round at the place, the relics of his uniform, the letter lying

there. It was as if there was nothing more that could be said.

Accounts thus settled, he stretched himself in the bed he had

occupied as a boy, more completely at his ease than since the day

when he had left home for the first time. Respited from death once,

he was twice believed to be dead before the date actually registered

on his tomb. "What will it matter a hundred years hence?" they used

to ask by way of simple comfort in boyish troubles at school,

overwhelming at the moment. Was that in truth part of a certain

revelation of the inmost truth of things to "babes," such as we have

heard of? What did it matter--the gifts, the good-fortune, its

terrible withdrawal, the long agony? Emerald Uthwart would have been

all but a centenarian to-day.

Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon,

August --th, 18--.

I was summoned by letter into the country to perform an operation on

the dead body of a young man, formerly an officer in the army. The

cause of death is held to have been some [244] kind of distress of

mind, concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, the ball

still remaining somewhere in the body. My instructions were to

remove this, at the express desire, as I understood, of the deceased,

rather than to ascertain the precise cause of death. This however

became apparent in the course of my search for the ball, which had

enveloped itself in the muscular substance in the region of the

heart, and was removed with difficulty. I have known cases of this

kind, where anxiety has caused incurable cardiac derangement (the

deceased seems to have been actually sentenced to death for some

military offence when on service in Flanders), and such mental strain

would of course have been aggravated by the presence of a foreign

object in that place. On arriving at my destination, a small village

in a remote part of Sussex, I proceeded through the little orderly

churchyard, where however the monthly roses were blooming all their

own way among the formal white marble monuments of the wealthier

people of the neighbourhood. At one of these the masons were at

work, picking and chipping in the otherwise absolute stillness of the

summer afternoon. They were in fact opening the family burial-place

of the people who summoned me hither; and the workmen pointed out

their abode, conspicuous on the slope beyond, towards which I bent my

steps accordingly. I was conducted to a large upper [245] room or

attic, set freely open to sun and air, and found the body lying in a

coffin, almost hidden under very rich-scented cut flowers, after a

manner I have never seen in this country, except in the case of one

or two Catholics laid out for burial. The mother of the deceased was

present, and actually assisted my operations, amid such tokens of

distress, though perfectly self-controlled, as I fervently hope I may

never witness again.

Deceased was in his twenty-seventh year, but looked many years

younger; had indeed scarcely yet reached the full condition of

manhood. The extreme purity of the outlines, both of the face and

limbs, was such as is usually found only in quite early youth; the

brow especially, under an abundance of fair hair, finely formed, not

high, but arched and full, as is said to be the way with those

who have the imaginative temper in excess. Sad to think that had he

lived reason must have deserted that so worthy abode of it! I was

struck by the great beauty of the organic developments, in the

strictly anatomic sense; those of the throat and diaphragm in

particular might have been modelled for a teacher of normal

physiology, or a professor of design. The flesh was still almost as

firm as that of a living person; as happens when, as in this case,

death comes to all intents and purposes as gradually as in old age.

This expression of health and life, under my seemingly merciless

doings, together with the mother's distress, touched me to a degree

very [246] unusual, I conceive, in persons of my years and

profession. Though I believed myself to be acting by his express

wish, I felt like a criminal. The ball, a small one, much corroded

with blood, was at length removed; and I was then directed to wrap it

in a partly-printed letter, or other document, and place it in the

breast-pocket of a faded and much-worn scarlet soldier's coat, put

over the shirt which enveloped the body. The flowers were then

hastily replaced, the hands and the peak of the handsome nose

remaining visible among them; the wind ruffled the fair hair a

little; the lips were still red. I shall not forget it. The lid was

then placed on the coffin and screwed down in my presence. There was

no plate or other inscription upon it.

NOTES

197. *Published in the New Review, June and July 1892, and now

reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

210. +Transliteration: askêsis. Liddel and Scott definition:

"exercise, training."

213. +Transliteration: Moirai. Liddel and Scott definition:

"[singular =] one's portion in life, lot, destiny."

213. +Transliteration: Kêr. Brief Liddel and Scott definition:

"doom, death, destruction."

214. +Translation: "in this church established for boys."

219. +Transliteration: hê pterou dynamis.

DIAPHANEITÉ

[247] THERE are some unworldly types of character which the world is

able to estimate. It recognises certain moral types, or categories,

and regards whatever falls within them as having a right to exist.

The saint, the artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the

world's order as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, in

and by means of the main current of the world's energy. Often it

gives them late, or scanty, or mistaken acknowledgment; still it has

room for them in its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in

its affections. It is also patient of doctrinaires of every degree

of littleness. As if dimly conscious of some great sickness and

weariness of heart in itself, it turns readily to those who theorise

about its unsoundness. To constitute one of these categories, or

types, a breadth and generality of character is required. There is

another type of character, which is not broad and general, rare,

precious above all to the artist, a character which seems to have

been the supreme moral charm in the Beatrice of the [248] Commedia.

It does not take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that fine

edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine

themselves to the burning point. It crosses rather than follows the

main current of the world's life. The world has no sense fine enough

for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between

contrasted types of character--delicate provision in the organisation

of the moral world for the transmission to every part of it of the

life quickened at single points! For this nature there is no place

ready in its affections. This colourless, unclassified purity of

life it can neither use for its service, nor contemplate as an ideal.

"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long struggle of the

Imitatio Christi. The spirit which it forms is the very opposite of

that which regards life as a game of skill, and values things and

persons as marks or counters of something to be gained, or achieved,

beyond them. It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not

adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have

for or against its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit that

sees external circumstances as they are, its own power and tendencies

as they are, and realises the given conditions of its life, not

disquieted by the desire for change, or the preference of one part in

life rather than another, or passion, or opinion. The character we

mean to indicate achieves this [249] perfect life by a happy gift of

nature, without any struggle at all. Not the saint only, the artist

also, and the speculative thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in

the world, as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this

simplicity to the last. The struggle of this aspiration with a lower

practical aim in the mind of Savonarola has been subtly traced by the

author of Romola. As language, expression, is the function of

intellect, as art, the supreme expression, is the highest product of

intellect, so this desire for simplicity is a kind of indirect self-

assertion of the intellectual part of such natures. Simplicity in

purpose and act is a kind of determinate expression in dexterous

outline of one's personality. It is a kind of moral expressiveness;

there is an intellectual triumph implied in it. Such a simplicity is

characteristic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. The

artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only

to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and

nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive

of the inward becomes thinner and thinner. This intellectual throne

is rarely won. Like the religious life, it is a paradox in the

world, denying the first conditions of man's ordinary existence,

cutting obliquely the spontaneous order of things. But the character

we have before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose and

simplicity, coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature,

by [250] some happy gift, or accident of birth or constitution,

showing that it is indeed within the limits of man's destiny. Like

all the higher forms of inward life this character is a subtle

blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual

elements. But it is as a phase of intellect, of culture, that it is

most striking and forcible. It is a mind of taste lighted up by some

spiritual ray within. What is meant by taste is an imperfect

intellectual state; it is but a sterile kind of culture. It is the

mental attitude, the intellectual manner of perfect culture, assumed

by a happy instinct. Its beautiful way of handling everything that

appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the

laws of the higher intellectual life, but while culture is able to

trace those laws, mere taste is unaware of them. In the character

before us, taste, without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than

a mental attitude or manner. A magnificent intellectual force is

latent within it. It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten culture

that once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophêsas pote

met' erôtos,+ fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual

progress over again, but with a certain power of anticipating its

stages. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the

range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-

consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind,

the feeling that there is "so much to [251] know," rather as a

longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its

ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that

instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest one's own

confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from

without of light that is not yet inward. He who is ever looking for

the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a

strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky. That

truthfulness of temper, that receptivity, which professors often

strive in vain to form, is engendered here less by wisdom than by

innocence. Such a character is like a relic from the classical age,

laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. It has

something of the clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique.

Perhaps it is nearly always found with a corresponding outward

semblance. The veil or mask of such a nature would be the very

opposite of the "dim blackguardism" of Danton, the type Carlyle has

made too popular for the true interest of art. It is just this sort

of entire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all

that is really lifegiving in the established order of things; it

detects without difficulty all sorts of affinities between its own

elements, and the nobler elements in that order. But then its

wistfulness and a confidence in perfection it has makes it love the

lords of change. What makes revolutionists is either self-pity, or

indignation [252] for the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception

of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things. The nature

before us is revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth,

that chlidê,+ that pride of life, which to the Greek was a heavenly

grace. How can he value what comes of accident, or usage, or

convention, whose individual life nature itself has isolated and

perfected? Revolution is often impious. They who prosecute

revolution have to violate again and again the instinct of reverence.

That is inevitable, since after all progress is a kind of violence.

But in this nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued as

by distance. It is the revolutionism of one who has slept a hundred

years. Most of us are neutralised by the play of circumstances. To

most of us only one chance is given in the life of the spirit and the

intellect, and circumstances prevent our dexterously seizing that one

chance. The one happy spot in our nature has no room to burst into

life. Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every

one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless

uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, not by suppression

of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In these no single gift,

or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world easily

confounds these two conditions. It sees in the character before us

only indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life of

humanity [253] could hardly pass through it. Not by it could the

progress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise of Luther or

Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the

Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded

himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in

outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world.

The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of

the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral

sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature,

yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own.

Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the

insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature. Poetry and

poetical history have dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be

that some human victim be sent down into the grave. These are they

whom in its profound emotion humanity might choose to send. "What,"

says Carlyle, of Charlotte Corday, "What if she had emerged from her

secluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel-lovely, with half-

angelic, half-daemonic splendour; to gleam for a moment, and in a

moment be extinguished; to be held in memory, so bright complete was

she, through long centuries!"

Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet aroma in early

manhood. Afterwards, as the adulterated atmosphere of the world

assimilates [254] us to itself, the savour of it faints away.

Perhaps there are flushes of it in all of us; recurring moments of it

in every period of life. Certainly this is so with every man of

genius. It is a thread of pure white light that one might disentwine

from the tumultuary richness of Goethe's nature. It is a natural

prophecy of what the next generation will appear, renerved, modified

by the ideas of this. There is a violence, an impossibility about

men who have ideas, which makes one suspect that they could never be

the type of any widespread life. Society could not be conformed to

their image but by an unlovely straining from its true order. Well,

in this nature the idea appears softened, harmonised as by distance,

with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer.

People have often tried to find a type of life that might serve as a

basement type. The philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of

them can be this type; the order of nature itself makes them

exceptional. It cannot be the pedant, or the conservative, or

anything rash and irreverent. Also the type must be one discontented

with society as it is. The nature here indicated alone is worthy to

be this type. A majority of such would be the regeneration of the

world.

July, 1864.

NOTES

250. +Transliteration: philosophêsas pote met' erôtos.

252. +Transliteration: chlidê.

THE END