take up my pen to-night, is the rather strange coincidence of two very
different accidents--a prophecy of my future and a return into my past.
No later than yesterday, seated in the coffee-room here, there came into
the tap of the hotel a poor mad Highland woman. The noise of her
strained, thin voice brought me out to see her. I could conceive that
she had been pretty once, but that was many years ago. She was now
withered and fallen-looking. Her hair was thin and straggling, her dress
poor and scanty. Her moods changed as rapidly as a weathercock before a
thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that
gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back
upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a
wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere
inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated
phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action.
She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the
drawing of the claymore," with a lofty disregard of cause or
common-sense; and she broke out suddenly, with uplifted hands and eyes,
into ecstatic "Heaven bless hims!" and "Heaven forgive hims!" She had
been a camp-follower in her younger days, and she was never tired of
expatiating on the gallantry, the fame, and the beauty of the 42nd
Highlanders. Her patriotism knew no bounds, and her prolixity was much
on the same scale. This Witch of Endor offered to tell my fortune, with
much dignity and proper oracular enunciation. But on my holding forth my
hand a somewhat ludicrous incident occurred. "Na, na," she said; "wait
till I have a draw of my pipe." Down she sat in the corner, puffing
vigorously and regaling the lady behind the counter with conversation
more remarkable for stinging satire than prophetic dignity. The person
in question had "mair weeg than hair on her head" (did not the chignon
plead guilty at these words?)--"wad be better if she had less
tongue"--and would come at last to the grave, a goal which, in a few
words, she invested with "warning circumstance" enough to make a Stoic
shudder. Suddenly, in the midst of this, she rose up and beckoned me to
approach. The oracles of my Highland sorceress had no claim to
consideration except in the matter of obscurity. In "question hard and
sentence intricate" she beat the priests of Delphi; in bold, unvarnished
falsity (as regards the past) even spirit-rapping was a child to her.
All that I could gather may be thus summed up shortly: that I was to
visit America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much
upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach,
I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone
relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first
was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of
Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact
that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The
second, in the middle of such nonsense, had a touch of the tragic. She
suddenly looked at me with an eager glance, and dropped my hand saying,
in what were tones of misery or a very good affectation of them, "Black
eyes!" A moment after she was at work again. It is as well to mention
that I have not black eyes.[38]
This incident, strangely blended of the pathetic and the ludicrous, set
my mind at work upon the future; but I could find little interest in the
study. Even the predictions of my sibyl failed to allure me, nor could
life's prospect charm and detain my attention like its retrospect.
Not far from Dunoon is Rosemore, a house in which I had spent a week or
so in my very distant childhood, how distant I have no idea; and one may
easily conceive how I looked forward to revisiting this place and so
renewing contact with my former self. I was under necessity to be early
up, and under necessity also, in the teeth of a bitter spring
north-easter, to clothe myself warmly on the morning of my long-promised
excursion. The day was as bright as it was cold. Vast irregular masses
of white and purple cumulus drifted rapidly over the sky. The great
hills, brown with the bloomless heather, were here and there buried in
blue shadows, and streaked here and there with sharp stripes of sun. The
new-fired larches were green in the glens; and "pale primroses" hid
themselves in mossy hollows and under hawthorn roots. All these things
were new to me; for I had noticed none of these beauties in my younger
days, neither the larch woods, nor the winding road edged in between
field and flood, nor the broad, ruffled bosom of the hill-surrounded
loch. It was, above all, the height of these hills that astonished me. I
remembered the existence of hills, certainly, but the picture in my
memory was low, featureless, and uninteresting. They seemed to have kept
pace with me in my growth, but to a gigantic scale; and the villas that
I remembered as half-way up the slope seemed to have been left behind
like myself, and now only ringed their mighty feet, white among the
newly kindled woods. As I felt myself on the road at last that I had
been dreaming for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy
took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could
let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence. I asked my
way from every one, and took good care to let them all know, before
they left me, what my object was, and how many years had elapsed since
my last visit. I wonder what the good folk thought of me and my
communications.
At last, however, after much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my
peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the
opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit
against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that
inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M---- and I found
"elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? Is
that little turfed slope the huge and perilous green bank down which I
counted it a feat, and the gardener a sin, to run? Are these two squares
of stone, some two feet high, the pedestals on which I walked with such
a penetrating sense of dizzy elevation, and which I had expected to find
on a level with my eyes? Ay, the place is no more like what I expected
than this bleak April day is like the glorious September with which it
is incorporated in my memory. I look at the gardener, disappointment in
my face, and tell him that the place seems sorrily shrunken from the
high estate that it had held in my remembrance, and he returns, with
quiet laughter, by asking me how long it is since I was there. I tell
him, and he remembers me. Ah! I say, I was a great nuisance, I believe.
But no, my good gardener will plead guilty to having kept no record of
my evil-doings, and I find myself much softened toward the place and
willing to take a kinder view and pardon its shortcomings for the sake
of the gardener and his pretended recollection of myself. And it is just
at this stage (to complete my re-establishment) that I see a little
boy--the gardener's grandchild--just about the same age and the same
height that I must have been in the days when I was here last. My first
feeling is one of almost anger, to see him playing on the gravel where I
had played before, as if he had usurped something of my identity; but
next moment I feel a softening and a sort of rising and qualm of the
throat, accompanied by a pricking heat in the eye balls. I hastily join
conversation with the child, and inwardly felicitate myself that the
gardener is opportunely gone for the key of the house. But the child is
a sort of homily to me. He is perfectly quiet and resigned, an
unconscious hermit. I ask him jocularly if he gets as much abused as I
used to do for running down the bank; but the child's perfect
seriousness of answer staggers me--"O no, grandpapa doesn't allow
it--why should he?" I feel caught: I stand abashed at the reproof; I
must not expose my childishness again to this youthful disciplinarian,
and so I ask him very stately what he is going to be--a good serious
practical question, out of delicacy for his parts. He answers that he is
going to be a missionary to China, and tells me how a missionary once
took him on his knee and told him about missionary work, and asked him
if he, too, would not like to become one, to which the child had simply
answered in the affirmative. The child is altogether so different from
what I have been, is so absolutely complementary to what I now am, that
I turn away not a little abashed from the conversation, for there is
always something painful in sudden contact with the good qualities that
we do not possess. Just then the grandfather returns; and I go with him
to the summer-house, where I used to learn my Catechism, to the wall on
which M----and I thought it no small exploit to walk upon, and all the
other places that I remembered.
In fine, the matter being ended, I turn and go my way home to the hotel,
where, in the cold afternoon, I write these notes with the table and
chair drawn as near the fire as the rug and the French polish will
permit.
One other thing I may as well make a note of, and that is how there
arises that strange contradiction of the hills being higher than I had
expected and everything near at hand being so ridiculously smaller. This
is a question I think easily answered: the very terms of the problem
suggest the solution. To everything near at hand I applied my own
stature, as a sort of natural unit of measurement, so that I had no
actual image of their dimensions but their ratio to myself; so, of
course, as one term of the proportion changed, the other changed
likewise, and as my own height increased my notion of things near at
hand became equally expanded. But the hills, mark you, were out of my
reach: I could not apply myself to them: I had an actual, instead of a
proportional eidolon of their magnitude; so that, of course (my eye
being larger and flatter nowadays, and so the image presented to me then
being in sober earnest smaller than the image presented to me now), I
found the hills nearly as much too great as I had found the other things
too small.
* * * * *
[_Added the next morning_.]--He who indulges habitually in the
intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps
a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a
more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even
comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the
realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street,
that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I
have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those
very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most
heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence
of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost
the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There
are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited,
as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can we fall back? The
very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour
of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the
others that they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as though a
farmer should plant all his fields in potatoes, instead of varying them
with grain and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, lose all his
harvest, while his neighbours, perhaps, may balance the profit and the
loss. Do not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk about all
pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything
is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy
is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. I
can no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a highwayman riding
down the lane. The fiat of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant,
unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental
drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more
subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary's drug; but it has a
sting of its own, and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the other.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The quotation here promised from one of the author's own early
dramatic efforts (a tragedy of Semiramis) is not supplied in the
MS.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
[38] "The old pythoness was right," adds the author in a note appended
to his MS. in 1887; "I have been happy: I did go to America (am even
going again--unless----): and I have been twice and once upon the
deep." The seafaring part of the prophecy remained to be fulfilled
on a far more extended scale in his Pacific voyages of
1888-90.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
II
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
(_A Fragment_: 1871)
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle, I
may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any
of my little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot
describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been
before me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections
to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except
the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by
a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way
I ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or
if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find
out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full
length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This process of
incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that
I have made this mistake with the present journey. Like a bad
daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you
nothing about the beginning and nothing about the end; but the doings of
some fifty or sixty hours about the middle remain quite distinct and
definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or
the one spot on an old picture that has been restored by the dexterous
hand of the cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister, called
upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that the
rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the first two or
three pages away; he gravely explained to the congregation how he found
himself situated; "And now," said he, "let us just begin where the rats
have left off." I must follow the divine's example, and take up the
thread of my discourse where it first distinctly issues from the limbo
of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,--as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so separated
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor
steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration
of another century or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime,
in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had
been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in
a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and
voices of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the
spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to
grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill--a
great, gaunt promontory of building,--half on dry ground and half arched
over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders, and crept through
between the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden
enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard within its privet
hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in
fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society
of parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read the
name of Smethurst, and the designation of "Canadian Felt Hat
Manufacturers." There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and I
could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees. The water was
dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with a little mist
of flying insects. There were some amorous ducks, also, whose
love-making reminded me of what I had seen a little farther down. But
the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I was perpetually haunted
with the terror of a return of the tic that had been playing such ruin
in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and supper,
and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my
intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to
Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by
that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to
introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own
pleasures. I can excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical
heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to
justify by present argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.
If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland
parks and woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or
two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward,
and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to
establish them as principles. This is not the general rule, however, and
accordingly the waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to
hear the route that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to
Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in
vain that I put up a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was
in vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that
there was "nothing to see there"--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave
way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to
leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a place with "nothing to
see"; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and in
and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person in a
strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to make set
habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up
the same road that I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the
hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put to
await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he looked
something like the typical Jew old-clothesman. As I drew near, he came
sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so curious an expression
on his face that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some
unwitting trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this
belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last
night; and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some
alarm for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's heart was full
of peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats aside to
go along the water-side and show me where the large trout commonly lay,
underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much disappointed, for my
sake, that there were none visible just then. Then he wandered off on to
another tack, and stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in
the hot sunshine, trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if
not me, some friend of mine--merely, I believe, out of a desire that we
should feel more friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he
made a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best
writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the
sense, and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had
little things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to
recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now
died out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and
active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river
above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be
able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great
pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will
forego present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing "a reminiscence" for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in
making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish
luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation,
and seen me safely shoved off into mid-stream, he ran away back to his
hats with the air of a man who had only just recollected that he had
anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very nice
punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to
an overhanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was bound in
gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish its
recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and
his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In
order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for
having failed to enjoy this treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
town in time for dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with
admiration; a look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from the
Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. I cannot be very
grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I
find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full
of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a
hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that
what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.
ANOTHER