Across the Plains, with other Memories and Essays

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Title: Across the Plains
with other memories and essays
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
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[This file was first posted on June 17, 1996]
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ACROSS THE PLAINS***
Transcribed from the 1915 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Second proof by Margaret Price.
ACROSS THE PLAINS
WITH
OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1915
* * * * *
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
TO PAUL BOURGET
Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never have heard
the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa itself
may be strange to your ears. To these barbaric seats there came the
other day a yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in every
page with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change your
own words: _J’ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces_, _c’est
avez vous que je me complais à vivre_.
R. L. S.
VAILIMA,
UPSOLU,
SAMOA.
LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
MY DEAR STEVENSON,
You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of these papers,
written before you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add a
preface to the volume. But it is your prose the public wish to read, not
mine; and I am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Acknowledgements are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz. _Fraser’s_,
_Longman’s_, the _Magazine of Art_, and _Scribner’s_. I will only add,
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces less
inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under circumstances of
especial gloom and sickness. “I agree with you the lights seem a little
turned down,” so you write to me now; “the truth is I was far through,
and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of
body and mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is true . . .”
Well, inasmuch as the South Seas sirens have breathed new life into you,
we are bound to be heartily grateful to them, though as they keep you so
far removed from us, it is difficult not to bear them a grudge; and if
they would reconcile us quite, they have but to do two things more—to
teach you new tales that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you,
at least once in a while in summer, to climates within reach of us who
are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the Thames.
Yours ever,
SIDNEY COLVIN.
_February_, 1892.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. ACROSS THE PLAINS 1
II. THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 51
III. FONTAINEBLEAU 72
IV. EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE” 95
V. RANDOM MEMORIES 112
VI. RANDOM MEMORIES CONTINUED 126
VII. THE LANTERN-BEARERS 138
VIII. A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 153
IX. BEGGARS 169
X. LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 182
XI. PULVIS ET UMBRA 193
XII. A CHRISTMAS SERMON 202
I
ACROSS THE PLAINS
LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN
FRANCISCO
_Monday_.—It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all
signalled to be present at the Ferry Depôt of the railroad. An emigrant
ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday
morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as
there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from
these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.
There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children. The wretched
little booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,
were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the
atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by the
half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each other with
recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been
an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if
system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many
passengers.
My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who preserved his
head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage registered, and
counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word
to move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack, which I
carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug the whole of
_Bancroft’s History of the United States_, in six fat volumes. It was as
much as I could carry with convenience even for short distances, but it
insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and
often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an hour in the
baggage-room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was
passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was only to
exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.
I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West
Street to the river. It was dark, the wind blew clean through it from
end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have been
exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was a
tight jam; there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute and
living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowd porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say
that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged among us like so
many maddened sheep-dogs; and I believe these men were no longer
answerable for their acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they
drove straight into the press, and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I
saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s knee, she sitting
on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose that there
were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will
give some idea of the state of mind to which we were reduced if I tell
you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least
attention to my act. It was not till some time after that I understood
what I had done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment
a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to
progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted
the spirits. We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered a little, and my back
ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the
activities of my nature had become tributary to one massive sensation of
discomfort.
At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd
began to move, heavily straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We were
being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush,
every one overladen with packages or children, and yet under the
necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length
for me, and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and with a
trifle of elbow-room to stretch and breathe in. This was on the
starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port
side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamen shouted to them to
move on, and threatened them with shipwreck. These poor people were
under a spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily
as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without
danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river
in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers running many
knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast
between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her
list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that
glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.
The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I had a fixed sense
of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common to
us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over
the disorder of our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their
families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up to
be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed
steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark
her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was
so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the
hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station, so that I
was quite wet by the time that I got under cover. There was no
waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and for at least
another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit
platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but
as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven stupidly crazy by
the mismanagement to which we had been subjected, I believe they can have
been no happier than myself. I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy,
for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be had. As only two of
them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,
and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the track
after my leavings.
At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from
dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the
bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent the
brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they were, they
composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and
been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I
allowed myself to follow their example.
_Tuesday_.—When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle;
I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan
by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could
see, within reach of any signal. A green, open, undulating country
stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian
corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land
were soft and English. It was not quite England, neither was it quite
France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in
the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.
Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the
sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is
more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from habit, but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it
has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit
some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in
fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the
springs of day. I thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania,
and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the
continent. If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in
which my eyesight is accomplice.
Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by
the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was
for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of “All
aboard!” and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic
hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals
all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had
a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at
every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.
Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’s day. There was not
a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among
which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to
one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth.
These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the
platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and
cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining
blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had
come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from
the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty
of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As
when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word
Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no
other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.
None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure
in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the
United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King’s Road, is own suburb to
stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated
names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
{8} and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed
men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York.
The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet
and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota,
Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a
nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer
shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his
pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would
strike the fancy in a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had
now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children;
these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther
on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I
left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself. I mention this
meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about
thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a
coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait upon me after a
fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture
marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed
strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy
Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but
of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd
foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so
patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in
England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he
sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to
familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time;
he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like
Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and
welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout
that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting
master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had come prepared
to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand
condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I
assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the
grace to be pleased with that result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of
etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly
not, he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves
too highly to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and
me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had
found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one
of those rare conjunctures.... Without being very clear seeing, I can
still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly
pocketed a quarter.
_Wednesday_.—A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on
board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been
a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the
week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person
being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which
appeared in _Cassell’s Family Paper_, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in
the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and
became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a
baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from
uninhabited islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great
plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was
flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in
my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance
peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas;
and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and
pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and
seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more often
on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon to
horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this paradise
was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences along the line
bore but two descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos,
and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the
state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a doctoral
air, “a fever and ague morning.”
The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at
first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no
pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no
difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her
children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep
upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such
a rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into confidence and
tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late husband, who
seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on
Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her
fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of
particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends. At
one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on the platform
and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had
been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and
how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling to the
West. Then, when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my
judgment on that type of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart’s
content. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but
broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her
past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words were
ingeniously honest. “I am sure,” said she, “we all _ought_ to be very
much obliged to you.” I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease; but I
had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike. A poor nature would
have slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of
worthless toleration for me.
We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled
into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a
different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember
having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of
ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would
be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the
least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there was no word of
restitution. I was that city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of
ham and eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in
Chicago. When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man
in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after
car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing. My
valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was
a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by
gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle
of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my
consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin’s head, like a taper on a
foggy night.
When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down
beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in
drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say. I
did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if
something depended upon that. I heard him relate, among many other
things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed
a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the
words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.
What else he talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of
words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly
explanatory: but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my confusion
very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has
conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps that I
was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose
and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for
delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.
The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs
after a _diner fin_, and was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than
myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we
scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman
flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from that car
in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he
thought an emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a
flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments
of digestion.
_Thursday_.—I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,
for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot
cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day’s ride
followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At a place called
Creston, a drunken man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but,
according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For
one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were
beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the
conductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had
the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through
the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in three
motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still moving
slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his
feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his
cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first
indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some
emotion. The conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,
for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering along the
track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.
They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign
land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific
Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri
river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai, set
apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated
myself from my companions, and marched with my effects into the Union
Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain
European way, I should call the boots, were installed behind a counter
like bank tellers. They took my name, assigned me a number, and
proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of war. I
wished to give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go
to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my
unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same
words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the
dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set
phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Some
international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman
at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural
to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that with
the plainness of the West. This American manner of conducting matters of
business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European. When we
approach a man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired servant.
But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk
with a view to exchanging favours if they shall agree to please. I know
not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the more truly
courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued
after the particular transaction is at an end, and thus favours class
separations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave
an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.
I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, and unbuttoned my
wrath under the similitude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire to give
trouble. If there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let
him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully
obey.
He burst into a shout of laughter. “Ah!” said he, “you do not know about
America. They are fine people in America. Oh! you will like them very
well. But you mustn’t get mad. I know what you want. You come along
with me.”
And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an old
acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.
“There,” said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, “go and have a
drink!”
THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. I had been
but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and put apart
with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I
found myself in front of the Emigrant House, with more than a hundred
others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official,
with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in
front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command. At
each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The
second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling
alone, and the third to the Chinese. The official was easily moved to
anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick at answering
their names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board.
The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony
by simultaneous assault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an
American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed
Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme
plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution,
and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed
but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The benches are too short
for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the
company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer
Station, the company’s servants, have conceived a plan for the better
accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together.
To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to
face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach
of night the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide
enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the
chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the
conductor’s van and the feet to the engine. When the train is full, of
course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to
every bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree. It
was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now
bestirred himself. He made a most active master of ceremonies,
introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the amiability and
honesty of each. The greater the number of happy couples the better for
his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. His
price for one board and three straw cushions began with two dollars and a
half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had
purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.
The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I
showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first
who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honour without
thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself
in broken phrases. He didn’t know the young man, he said. The young man
might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another
young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole. All this without any
sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I began to
tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left rejected.
But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his
manner. To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy. But that was all
one; he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted
the match, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial
benediction, and pocketed his fees.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine, certainly a score;
then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was
brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his
caboose. The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.
But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight
or nine who had the whooping-cough. At last, about six, the long train
crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river to
Omaha, westward bound.
It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder
in the air, which helped to keep us restless. A man played many airs
upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to
“Home, sweet home.” It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at
that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea whether musically
this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of
art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.
Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in
the pathetic, like the author of “Home, sweet home,” you make your
hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did
not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. An
elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as much
appearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retired slaver, turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that “damned thing.” “I’ve
heard about enough of that,” he added; “give us something about the good
country we’re going to.” A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the
performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then
struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled
immediately the emotion he had raised.
The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off
next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing “The Sweet By-and-bye” with very tuneful voices; the chums began
to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at
an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the
cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with
stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began with
twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to
fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had
paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the economy of
future emigrants.
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash
his face and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train
is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with
little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest
hour of the day.
There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: a breakfast in the
morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from five
to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes for
each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting for
some express upon a side track among miles of desert, we might have taken
an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For
haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on
sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they
cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or
so. Civility is the main comfort that you miss. Equality, though
conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an
emigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of “All aboard!”
recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I
found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station
without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while
you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton
and petty.
Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant. I
asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third
time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly
in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I
believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person
made the same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he
condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice loud
enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell people
where they were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as
what o’clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not
afford to be eternally worried.
As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of
your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy. He has it in his
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant’s lot. The
newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying,
contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed, in
his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going
his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to
a party who were at _Seven-up_ or _Cascino_ (our two games), upon a
bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking
one man’s hand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the
whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was
ordered to “get out of that directly, or he would get more than he
reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off,
and was less openly insulting in the future. On the other hand, the lad
who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made himself
the friend of all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance,
and a kind countenance. He told us where and when we should have our
meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table for those
who were delayed, and watched that we should neither be left behind nor
yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can hardly
realise the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone. When I
think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright
face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the
benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps
troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old
Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few
cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man’s work, and
bettering the world.
I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it
because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the
American, which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly
landed. It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am
told I looked like a man at death’s door, so much had this long journey
shaken me. I sat at the end of a car, and the catch being broken, and
myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for
the sake of air. In this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his
box of merchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he
was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon
me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and
though I myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered me
never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have
come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large
juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had observed
that I was looking ill, and so made me this present out of a tender
heart. For the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he
lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on
their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.
THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday
without a cloud. We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on
the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a
fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to
spy in vain for something new. It was a world almost without a feature;
an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway
stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on
either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.
Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a
crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen
upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and
again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more
and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their
surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. The
train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing
moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our
regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a
step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own head seemed a great
thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is
the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and
night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the
incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countless
clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that
land.
To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this
spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon. Yet
one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there
in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams,
and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they
steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing,
it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no
sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the
dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But the
eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the worst
the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the
settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our
consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay
a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off
from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence
but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most
varied spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles and see
nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he
is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to
the one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his
advance. We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers,
and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative
surroundings. But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a
wall-paper with a vengeance—one quarter of the universe laid bare in all
its gauntness.
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the
visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by
distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs into his
cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am
told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and winter, cattle, wife
and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. One
person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to
her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk.
She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she had that
great rarity—a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind,
dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but
spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous
arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me
almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all
nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood
apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if
it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that had been set
down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but
very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This
extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong
impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration
of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from
the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth
to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life
can go on with so few properties, or the great child, man, find
entertainment in so bare a playroom.
And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least
it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised. At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass
the milk-jug. This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a
respectable appearance; a darkish man, high spoken, eating as though he
had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with
extraordinary vehemence of tone—
“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.
“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained the first.
Here is the retort verbatim—
“Pass! Hell! I’m not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid for it.
You should use civility at table, and, by God, I’ll show you how!”
The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on with his
supper as though nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some
day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; and that perhaps both
may fall.
THE DESERT OF WYOMING
To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like
an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country
than the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad
mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match
to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely
and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that
drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications—how drearily,
how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch
of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush,
eternal sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring,
grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole
sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and there, but
at incredible intervals, a creek running in a cañon. The plains have a
grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a contorted
smallness. Except for the air, which was light and stimulating, there
was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken land.
I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick outright. That
was a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps did not go out;
each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, and the shadows were
confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay
in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like
dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his
arm; there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.
The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of
the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out their arms like
children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep;
and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now
a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the
worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill,
I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon
became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of
life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills
shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have
never longed for it more earnestly than I.
And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly
quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a
river. Only down the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting and
awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the
deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed
in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad
has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage
tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some £12 from the Atlantic to
the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring,
impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then
died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with
border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed
dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like
wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last
fastness, the scream of the “bad medicine waggon” charioting his foes;
and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was
conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more
extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to
me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age
in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of
the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great
writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an
enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be
heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? But, alas! it is
not these things that are necessary—it is only Homer.
Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us
swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared, so
lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely
through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful
of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I
have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more
than was enough, let me add an original document. It was not written by
Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty
years ago. I shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.
“_My dear Sister Mary_,—_I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when
you read my letter_. _If Jerry_” (_the writer’s eldest brother_)
“_has not written to you before now_, _you will be surprised to heare
that we are in California_, _and that poor Thomas_” (_another
brother_, _of fifteen_) “_is dead_. _We started from_ — _in July_,
_with plenly of provisions and too yoke oxen_. _We went along very
well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California_,
_when the Indians attacked us_. _We found places where they had
killed the emigrants_. _We had one passenger with us_, _too guns_,
_and one revolver_; _so we ran all the lead We had into bullets_
(_and_) _hung the guns up in the wagon so that we could get at them
in a minit_. _It was about two o’clock in the afternoon_; _droave
the cattel a little way_; _when a prairie chicken alited a little way
from the wagon_.
“_Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it_, _and told Tom drive
the oxen_. _Tom and I drove the oxen_, _and Jerry and the passenger
went on_. _Then_, _after a little_, _I left Tom and caught up with
Jerry and the other man_. _Jerry stopped Tom to come up_; _me and
the man went on and sit down by a little stream_. _In a few
minutes_, _we heard some noise_; _then three shots_ (_they all struck
poor Tom_, _I suppose_); _then they gave the war hoop_, _and as many
as twenty of the redskins came down upon us_. _The three that shot
Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes_.
“_I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot_; _so I told the other man
that Tom and Jerry were dead_, _and that we had better try to
escape_, _if possible_. _I had no shoes on_; _having a sore foot_,
_I thought I would not put them on_. _The man and me run down the
road_, _but We was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony_. _We then
turend the other way_, _and run up the side of the Mountain_, _and
hid behind some cedar trees_, _and stayed there till dark_. _The
Indians hunted all over after us_, _and verry close to us_, _so close
that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle_. _At dark the man and me
started on_, _I stubing my toes against sticks and stones_. _We
traveld on all night_; _and next morning_, _just as it was getting
gray_, _we saw something in the shape of a man_. _It layed Down in
the grass_. _We went up to it_, _and it was Jerry_. _He thought we
ware Indians_. _You can imagine how glad he was to see me_. _He
thought we was all dead but him_, _and we thought him and Tom was
dead_. _He had the gun that he took out of the wagon to shoot the
prairie Chicken_; _all he had was the load that was in it_.
“_We traveld on till about eight o’clock_, _We caught up with one
wagon with too men with it_. _We had traveld with them before one
day_; _we stopt and they Drove on_; _we knew that they was ahead of
us_, _unless they had been killed to_. _My feet was so sore when we
caught up with them that I had to ride_; _I could not step_. _We
traveld on for too days_, _when the men that owned the cattle said
they would_ (_could_) _not drive them another inch_. _We unyoked the
oxen_; _we had about seventy pounds of flour_; _we took it out and
divided it into four packs_. _Each of the men took about 18 pounds
apiece and a blanket_. _I carried a little bacon_, _dried meat_,
_and little quilt_; _I had in all about twelve pounds_. _We had one
pint of flour a day for our alloyance_. _Sometimes we made soup of
it_; _sometimes we_ (_made_) _pancakes_; _and sometimes mixed it up
with cold water and eat it that way_. _We traveld twelve or fourteen
days_. _The time came at last when we should have to reach some
place or starve_. _We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks_. _The
morning come_, _we scraped all the flour out of the sack_, _mixed it
up_, _and baked it into bread_, _and made some soup_, _and eat
everything we had_. _We traveld on all day without anything to eat_,
_and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons_.
_We traveld with them till we arrived at the settlements_; _and know
I am safe in California_, _and got to good home_, _and going to
school_.
“_Jerry is working in_ —. _It is a good country_. _You can get from
50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking_. _Tell me all about the affairs
in the States_, _and how all the folks get along_.”
And so ends this artless narrative. The little man was at school again,
God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.
FELLOW-PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific
line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had
better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been
cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably. Several
yards away, as we returned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils were
assailed by rancid air. I have stood on a platform while the whole train
was shunting; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a
whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of
monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without
fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the
Queen’s English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering,
human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do
my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than
the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But one
thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive.
The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so
proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us all a
sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew out and
joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for bed boards; and
there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened
at night.
I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was
among. They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met on
board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They were mostly lumpish
fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should
say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and little interest in
their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external
curiosity. If they heard a man’s name and business, they seemed to think
they had the heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know that
much as they were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were on nettles
till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but
beyond that, whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce
or friendly, was all one to them. Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of “All aboard!” while
the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the general
discomfort. Such a one was always much applauded for his high spirits.
When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was astonished—fresh from the
eager humanity on board ship—to meet with little but laughter. One of
the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very
easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to
think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was
phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent
epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to
help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case
evoked among his fellow-passengers. “Oh, I hope he’s not going to die!”
cried a woman; “it would be terrible to have a dead body!” And there was
a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.
There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,
little but silence. In this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was
rarely that any one listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to
another man’s story, it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer
for one of his own. Food and the progress of the train were the subjects
most generally treated; many joined to discuss these who otherwise would
hold their tongues. One small knot had no better occupation than to worm
out of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed I
grew to baffle them. They assailed me with artful questions and
insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually
on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter. I am sure
Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for the secret. He owed me far
more, had he understood life, for thus preserving him a lively interest
throughout the journey. I met one of my fellow-passengers months after,
driving a street tramway car in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now
out of season, told him my name without subterfuge. You never saw a man
more chapfallen. But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a
mystery he had still been disappointed.
There were no emigrants direct from Europe—save one German family and a
knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New
Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing
privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my
part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart
from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign
in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel—that some of the
strangest races dwell next door to you at home.
The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter
of that Continent. All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New
York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the
Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves—some one or two were fleeing in
quest of a better land and better wages. The talk in the train, like the
talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope
that moves ever westward. I thought of my shipful from Great Britain
with a feeling of despair. They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far
enough. Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome
them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to go? Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa,
Kansas? These were not places for immigration, but for emigration, it
appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel
and left it for an ungrateful country. And it was still westward that
they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the
sun, and the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the car
in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite
quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates
in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had
met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been
prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one
could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home.
Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more
disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward toward the land of
gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey
east; and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these return
voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and
to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows,
in a kind of wailing chorus, to “come back.” On the plains of Nebraska,
in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my
heart, “Come back!” That was what we heard by the way “about the good
country we were going to.” And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San
Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other
side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.
If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how
many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one
consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change
and travel for themselves.
DESPISED RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards
our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.
They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of
them, but hated them _a priori_. The Mongols were their enemies in that
cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and
cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too
idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared
them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when
they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so
like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and
suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an
instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most
attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man’s wife is less
pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were
dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the
journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us
to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and
faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing
their feet—an act not dreamed of among ourselves—and going as far as
decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way
that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their
sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who
is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.
Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the
surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which
stank. I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the
freshest of the three.
These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The
Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and
frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They
are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They
are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that they are
of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and
dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what
remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the
industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is
the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to
immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and
resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he
loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a
vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring for arms and butchery. “At the call of Abraham Lincoln,” said
the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can
ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?”
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs. Gun-powder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and
a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth
with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the
clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so
old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this
travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain.
Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or
whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the
same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there
not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray,
castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain
flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next
car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of
porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the
Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man
of old story—over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all
these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that
such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way
stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed
out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the
emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic
degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking
creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a
truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call
civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of
our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts
of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the
States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these
hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves
invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of
the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the
ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up
a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways
base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old,
well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the
independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of
the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed,
honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not
personal to him who cherishes the indignation.
TO THE GOLDEN GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular
impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we
stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying
plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some
advice on the country I was now entering. “You see,” said he, “I tell
you this, because I come from your country.” Hail, brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.
There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is
revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon
strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental
arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred
halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for
complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no
longer exists—the _bit_, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the
bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to
two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how
about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a
fifth. That, then, is called a _short_ bit. If you have one, you lay it
triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have not,
and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a
dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a _long
bit_, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short
bit, five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing
lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost
of life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or
sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case may be. You would say that this system
of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a
plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public. It is brief
and simple—radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are
recognised, and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth two
bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to the
post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you will receive
in change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing power of
your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of beer
all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of
postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me
on the head for this discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner,
outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the
cars, and take to their heels across country. They were tramps, it
appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night
before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and
conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land
stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked
dearly to become acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others
taller and ruddier than himself.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be going on?”
I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from
that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to
terms, why, good and well. “You see,” he continued, “I’m running a
theatre here, and we’re a little short in the orchestra. You’re a
musician, I guess?”
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with “Auld Lang
Syne” and “The Wearing of the Green,” I had no pretension whatever to
that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his taller
companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.
“You see, sir,” added the latter to me, “he bet you were a musician; I
bet you weren’t. No offence, I hope?”
“None whatever,” I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume
the debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, who
thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-begging.
But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more
than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons,
that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and
desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had
fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was
in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his
eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth
upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its
patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit
night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and
only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the
blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the
nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I
returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were
day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and
suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine
upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires
of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you
will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting
one’s wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the
green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to
me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than
I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all
the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping
thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but
all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and
weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes
upon the platform and became new creatures within and without. The sun
no longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every
turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air,
and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our
destination; this was “the good country” we had been going to so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of
corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oakland
side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;
the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
perfect—not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything
was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first
upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely
shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly
“The tall hills Titan discovered,”
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.
[1879.]
II
THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL
THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC
THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General
Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important
than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for
topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the
Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is cosily
ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California faces
across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and
forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front
of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and
then westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about
the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you can
see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the outline of
the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying
foam; and from all round, even in quiet weather, the distant, thrilling
roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like
smoke above a battle.
These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to
find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the mind.
Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and
out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of
infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the European eye, the
bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale’s carcase, white with
carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along
the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their
translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing
and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of
these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.
The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean’s greatness,
such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in the sound.
The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.
Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a
lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,
undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy live-oaks
flourish singly or in thickets—the kind of wood for murderers to crawl
among—and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from
the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with
Spaniard’s Beard. Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near
to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City—though that and so many
other things are now for ever altered—and it was from here that you had
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first fogs of
the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.
The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the
ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the
inland cañons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of
Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but
to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out of
the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine-woods. Glade,
thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks that
lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the
sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind
among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length
you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour
that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you
are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts
to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your
right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before
you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirt
with thundering surges. The silence that immediately surrounds you where
you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this distant,
circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge; you strain your
attention; you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near
at hand; you walk listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the
Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.
When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward.
All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was the surf
that particularly invited me to prolong my walks. I would push straight
for the shore where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce
a direction that would not, sooner or later, have brought me forth on the
Pacific. The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and
discovery in these excursions. I never in all my visits met but one man.
He was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried
an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek for straying
cattle. I asked him what o’clock it was, but he seemed neither to know
nor care; and when he in his turn asked me for news of his cattle, I
showed myself equally indifferent. We stood and smiled upon each other
for a few seconds, and then turned without a word and took our several
ways across the forest.
One day—I shall never forget it—I had taken a trail that was new to me.
After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer hand. I
came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther,
and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I
walked through street after street, parallel and at right angles, paved
with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each
with its name posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down the
main thoroughfare—“Central Avenue,” as it was ticketed—I saw an open-air
temple, with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The
houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but of
the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place that seemed
so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its
antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this town had
plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been deserted
overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as like a
scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards. The
barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still occupied, where a
Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre.
The place was “The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort.”
Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism,
religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and
agreeable. The neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pacific
booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a
wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in
amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and
interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals. To the east, and
still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven
among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are
very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of
all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats
that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walk
into the hamlet, you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue
that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe
is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper—prayers,
you would say, that had somehow missed their destination—and a man
guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the sheet, writes
home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.
The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard
region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt
from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of
the other. For days together a hot, dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The
cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is
blowing from the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of
California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the
distance. A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be
favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The
inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the
pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally
at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up
perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its time,
like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may
become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.
To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of
experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a run. Every here
and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit,
scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But
this last is only in semblance. For after this first squib-like
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a
deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree. The
resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole
and in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing
flames, which are only as the match to the explosion, have already
scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but beginning
for this giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of
the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the column,
is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; while
underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being eaten out
by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface. A
little while, and, without a nod of warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off
short across the ground and falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the
fire continues its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash;
and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with
radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these subterranean
spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree instead of the print of
an old one. These pitch-pines of Monterey are, with the single exception
of the Monterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest trees. No words
can give an idea of the contortion of their growth; they might figure
without change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and
at the rate at which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and
gallop through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time
when there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their
nativity. At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death; while it
is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of the nobler
redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard
California may be as bald as Tamalpais.
I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near to
lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill
from the experience. I wished to be certain whether it was the moss,
that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up so
rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I suppose I must have
been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece
for my experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a
portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike a
match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The tree went
off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of
fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work
combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that had
brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch
the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood into the
sunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was
literally not worth a pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate
expostulation I should have been run up to convenient bough.
To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out
of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the
other, and burning as I thought with even greater vigour.
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power
upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy
fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top above
Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. The upper
air is still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon the Gabelano
Peak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in
scarves among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a
gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to the south, where they
have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they
double back and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as they
advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all the
windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their
cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little
while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has
submerged the earth. Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick,
wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before
the sun’s rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to
the bosom of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most
chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be
dry and warm and full of inland perfume.
MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS
The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a
Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an
American capital when the first House of Representatives held its
deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the
State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its
charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline
is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families
in California.
Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which
the soil has changed-hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and
landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold
themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of
their ancient air.
The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were
watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by
fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short
sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for
they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could
tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for
the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new
a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely
rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the
heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a
graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the
chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.
There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat
almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the _Cornhill_
illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s _Erema_, and see all the characters
astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a
rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a thing unknown in all
the rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey,
you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding—men always at
the hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory
spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face
in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are
surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure
Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian,
although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all
the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to
find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of
deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and
decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the
most Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose
into his hat-band. Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear
the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the
streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that
language for an occasion. The only communications in which the
population joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the numerous fandangoes
in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night
after night serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a
company and with several instruments and voice together, sometimes
severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar
accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount
into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that
high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human but altogether sad.
The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all
the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the
same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were
selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to him. You would ask him
how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from
which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men,
and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact. Their
merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former
landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with
the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in a
way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they
have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay, suppose them to
observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from
delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I
have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of
his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken
in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that
he had seen a lawyer, would have “been like doubting his word.” The
scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to
understand all business as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to
be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of
agreements. This single unworldly trait will account for much of that
revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the name of being
great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts both ways. In a
contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed into
the hands of the more scupulous race.
Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how
far they have themselves been morally conquered. This is, of course, but
a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being
solved in the various States of the American Union. I am reminded of an
anecdote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were
purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh. The
agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what
possible use he could have for such material. He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to
imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. “And what,” he asked, “do you
propose to call this?” “I’m no very sure,” replied the grocer, “but I
think it’s going to turn out port.” In the older Eastern States, I think
we may say that this hotch-potch of races in going to turn out English,
or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones.
The elements are differently mingled in the south, in what we may call
the Territorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast.
Above all, in these last, we may look to see some monstrous
hybrid—Whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original
and all their own. In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down
to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a
Mexican, and a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from
Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese;
and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign
land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race contributes
something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of
California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium.
And chief among these influences is that of the Mexicans.
The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. They still preserve a
sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to
themselves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops
being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of
California, returned to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in her
streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there, there
occurred two reputed murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his back, it is not
possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these
reports; but in the one case every one believed, and in the other some
suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an
instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of
course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy
feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in
this inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed
not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the traditions of their
own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly Mexicanised.
Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost
entirely in their business transactions upon each other’s worthless
paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally
penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in
these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing
but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to
asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when they
are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you
mean to withdraw your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising
chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness
of the case, partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican
tradition which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be
notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for
the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous
habit of living upon “tick” has grown into Californian nature. I do not
mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax
as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State
expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a
thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the
advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into
irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave
hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may
see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had
formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the
race that holds and tills it for the moment.
In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new
county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is
held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another
legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief danger and disgrace of
California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth. We
have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which
flow from the existence of these large landholders—land-thieves,
land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called.
Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How
they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or
wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been
repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen
thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say,
he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter sent him
warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for death
by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well
known in California, but a word of explanation is required for English
readers. Originally an Irish dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad
language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there
for six months or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and
conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed
by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own
ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and
had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the
hands of his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his
fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-cry against Chinese
labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his one
articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to “hang David Jacks.” Had the
town been American, in my private opinion, this would have been done
years ago. Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the West,
and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a
competition of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and
his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.
On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old
friend, the truck system, in full operation. Men live there, year in
year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in
supplies. The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new country, where
labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which
explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue
Kearney.
In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers
of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by
the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with
chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by
many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and
at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,
passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye
embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous
sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has
gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to
care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous,
sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,
daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to
preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been
its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a
headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So
it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was told,
are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor,
and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of
Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the
_padre_ drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is
the only covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and
decorated for the service; the Indians troop together, their bright
dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God
served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple
under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years of age,
conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the
Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin so
correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. “In
sæcula sæculoho-horum,” they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every
additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with
joy than the faces of these Indian singers. It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better
days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art
and letters was united and expressed. And it made a man’s heart sorry
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to
read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from
all authority and influence in that land—to be succeeded by greedy
land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may our
Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of
Jesus.
But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in
this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no
longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three
sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes
figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is
advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway
stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little town!
it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting
caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of
Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire
vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.
[1880.]
III
FONTAINEBLEAU
VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS
I
THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that people
love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence,
the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the
great age and dignity of certain groves—these are but ingredients, they
are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative; the air, the
light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.
The artist may be idle and not fear the “blues.” He may dally with his
life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of
the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most
smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the
plain of Biére, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of
fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in
the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria.
There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their
youth, or the old better contented with their age.
The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country
to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still
raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art—Millet who
loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped
in the glamour of the ancients. It was chosen before the day of that
strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the
culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures—that voluntary aversion
of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful effects—that
disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint
the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.
And for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France scenery
incomparable for romance and harmony. Provence, and the valley of the
Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of masterpieces waiting
for the brush. The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a
tale to the imagination, and surprises while it charms. Here you shall
see castellated towns that would befit the scenery of dreamland; streets
that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite
proportions; flowers of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.
All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door
of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even in
Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But one
thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to paint and in
whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell among graceful
shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classically
graceful; and though the student may look for different qualities, this
quality, silently present, will educate his hand and eye.
But, before all its other advantages—charm, loveliness, or proximity to
Paris—comes the great fact that it is already colonised. The institution
of a painters’ colony is a work of time and tact. The population must be
conquered. The innkeeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to welcome as a favoured
guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage
beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his
faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow
money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour
merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given to the
place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should find himself
alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome, than fresh
perils spring up upon the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist
are knocking at the gate. This is the crucial moment for the colony. If
these intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom and amenity;
pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they will have undone the
education of the innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the
poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. “Not here, O
Apollo!” will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St.
Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying are the
shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the
cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but
at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him
licence. Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do
the honours of his village generously. Any artist is made welcome,
through whatever medium he may seek expression; science is respected;
even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon
begin to find himself at home. And when that essentially modern
creature, the English or American girl-student, began to walk calmly into
his favourite inns as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter
owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French
respectability, quite as precise as ours, though covering different
provinces of life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls
were painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he hounded
from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.
This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads
are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they
are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much
occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and
this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at the
trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else,
is, for awhile at least, the king’s highway of progress. Here, in
England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among
the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent,
prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this
is the lad’s ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade.
The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love
of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation
of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and
even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with
his material as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a
second stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; that is
his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really grow beyond
it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business of real art—to
give life to abstractions and significance and charm to facts. In the
meanwhile, let him dwell much among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can
take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of
these years. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the
dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal
painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on.
They will say, “Why do you not write a great book? paint a great
picture?” If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to
the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style
falsified for life.
And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art
is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the
midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest scholar
is conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer
to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.
But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up,
put a violence upon his will, and, for better or worse, begin the
business of creation. This evil day there is a tendency continually to
postpone: above all with painters. They have made so many studies that
it has become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush
with them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages;
in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to call them
“Snoozers.” Continual returns to the city, the society of men farther
advanced, the study of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing
is to be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the means of
treatment. It will be time enough to think of curing the malady after it
has been caught; for to catch it is the very thing for which you seek
that dream-land of the painters’ village. “Snoozing” is a part of the
artistic education; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else
being forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.
Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very
air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, clarity,
the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling,
apart from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere
residence; or if not acquired, become at least the more appreciated. The
air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave that
airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to
change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from
the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are
still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be
decorative in its emptiness.
II
In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau
is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western side of it with
what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to testify
that there is no square mile without some special character and charm.
Such quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Bréau, and the
Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point
in common beyond the silence of the birds. The two last are really
conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a
thousand political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and
the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In the other the
trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon
another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in
the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes spiring and casting
forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church architecture, canopies
this rugged chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white
causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road conceived for
pageantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days
of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and
only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away
and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and
you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the
other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close
beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the
ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part,
you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold the plain,
northward and westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long
the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night
succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and
fragrance. There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the glittering
streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.
In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as your
foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted
in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of
forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient
refuge of his race.
And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in the
most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with
conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has
countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you are never
surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the
centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing,
thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness; it is rather
a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit’s
cavern. In the midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with
the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and
peopled by historic names, stands smokeless among gardens.
Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug
who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family
Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope
ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a
Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly
stupid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small
change; for that he had a great avidity. In the course of time he proved
to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to
indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be
discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie
unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock. But
your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks, if
there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I may
suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me for
aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a
hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A
confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for
water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest
pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and
offers some of the repose of natural forests. And the solitary, although
he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with
his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands
of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon
by windows; others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that
meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter’s camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem but
an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the plain man
it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for
company.
III
I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; _et ego in Arcadia vixi_,
it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the
borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in
memory. The great Millet was just dead, the green shutters of his modest
house were closed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my first
visit was thus an epoch in the history of art: in a lesser way, it was an
epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The _Petit Cénacle_ was dead
and buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest
from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost;
and the petrified legend of the _Vie de Bohéme_ had become a sort of
gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators. But if the book be
written in rose-water, the imitation was still farther expurgated;
honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I have said, almost
unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to depart, to take
all his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they sometimes
lost, it was by English and Americans alone. At the same time, the great
influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious.
There had been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and
the Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It
would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities; but
in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to nothing
but defects. The Anglo-Saxon is essentially dishonest; the French is
devoid by nature of the principle that we call “Fair Play.” The
Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that defender
of innocence retired over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled
once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the
same eccentricity; a shrug expressed his judgment upon both.
At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore
rule at Gretz—urbane, superior rule—his memory rich in anecdotes of the
great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and
venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with
Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of
his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had
Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who,
when a full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples,
bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all admired.
Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Barbizon,
since the death of Millet, was a headless commonwealth. Even its
secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger welcome, have
since deserted it. The good Lachèvre has departed, carrying his
household gods; and long before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our
midst by an untimely death. He died before he had deserved success; it
may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest
countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another—whom I
will not name—has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his
decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he still
retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious
importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, the occupant of several
chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon
great canvases that none would buy, still waiting the return of fortune.
But these days also were too good to last; and the former favourite of
two sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night. There was a time
when he was counted a great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the
whirligig of time brings in his revenges! To pity Millet is a piece of
arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it is
harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may pity his
unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opulence and
momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was suffered step by step
to sink again to nothing. No misfortune can exceed the bitterness of
such back-foremost progress, even bravely supported as it was; but to
those also who were taken early from the easel, a regret is due. From
all the young men of this period, one stood out by the vigour of his
promise; he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.
“Il faut faire de la peinture nouvelle,” was his watchword; but if time
and experience had continued his education, if he had been granted health
to return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must
believe that the name of Hills had become famous.
Siron’s inn, that excellent artists’ barrack, was managed upon easy
principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering
in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to
liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine.
The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your
inroads; only at the week’s end a computation was made, the gross sum was
divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger’s name under the
rubric: _estrats_. Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was
levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness
of your disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get
your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest. The doves had
perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold
of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the
great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest
shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again
at six o’clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron’s table. The whole of
your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the _estrals_, cost
you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked
it; and if you were out of luck’s way, you might depart for where you
pleased and leave it pending.
IV
Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it was a
kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they
protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was
the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the
society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished.
A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he
desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free
Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have
seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in
words what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown
themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had pushed
themselves; they had “made their head”; they wanted tact to appreciate
the “fine shades” of Barbizonian etiquette. And once they were
condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty; after
one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of our commonwealth,
the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the next
day, and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture.
These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered
against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd
and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. Painters,
sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and
some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at
once into the spirit of the association. This singular society is purely
French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It
cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, the impatience, the
more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent friendships of the
Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth. But this random
gathering of young French painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of
government, yet kept the life of the place upon a certain footing,
insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech
enforced their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder
the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.
This inbred civility—to use the word in its completest meaning—this
natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all that is
required to make a governable nation and a just and prosperous country.
Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of
laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who joined
us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We
returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by
the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the
Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the
natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent
pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and
laughter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life
for any naturally-minded youth; better yet for the student of painting,
and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was
saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the
disturbing currents of the world, he might forget that there existed
other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a
place, it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience,
like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw himself
idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, employed;
and what with the impulse of increasing health and the continual
provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to
work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals,
long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and still floating like
music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might
be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas,
and words that were alive with import. So in youth, like Moses from the
mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall
never enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that
repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-throbs of that
excited amateur who has to die in all of us before the artist can be
born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent
achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison. We were all artists;
almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and
walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if
we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and
though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others
succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable
malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House Beautiful
shines upon its hill-top.
V
Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts a
mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many sterlings. And
the bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on
the incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have
seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in
the last French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a
black-and-white by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages
of the _Magazine of Art_. Long-suffering bridge! And if you visit Gretz
to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom of
Chevillon’s garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly painting it
again.
The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than
Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly in
the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing in
one corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the
early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under
the windows of the villagers. It is vastly different to awake in Gretz,
to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the
bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals
are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars
and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the
jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is
“something to do” at Gretz. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall
no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the
solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This “something to do”
is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high
spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone! But Gretz
is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The
course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle
attractions for the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the
red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies,
and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of
roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours
between its lines of talking poplar.
But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and
buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and the place
as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They,
indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening,
the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the company that
gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now
dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall
follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in
name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. “For remembrance of
the old house’ sake,” as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one
story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters
were left stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was
over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to
obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best, sat
down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals were
supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ. Madame
Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them. But they stood firm;
eat they must, but having no money they would soil no napkins.
VI
Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been little
visited by painters. They are, indeed, too populous; they have manners
of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation.
Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I never knew it inhabited
but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of
_piquette_, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the
weir, in sight of the green country and to the music of the falling
water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just
too rustic to be stagey; and from my memories of the place in general,
and that garden trellis in particular—at morning, visited by birds, or at
night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party—I am inclined to
think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny. Chailly-en-Bière
has outlived all things, and lies dustily slumbering in the plain—the
cemetery of itself. The great road remains to testify of its former
bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and, like memorial tablets,
there still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former generation,
dead or decorated long ago. In my time, one man only, greatly daring,
dwelt there. From time to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a
shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and after some communication
with flesh and blood return to his austere hermitage. But even he, when
I last revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed
the roll of Chaillyites. It may revive—but I much doubt it. Achères and
Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question, being
merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty;
and of all the possible places on the western side, Marlotte alone
remains to be discussed. I scarcely know Marlotte, and, very likely for
that reason, am not much in love with it. It seems a glaring and
unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie is unattractive; and its
more reputable rival, though comfortable enough, is commonplace.
Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I were the young painter I would
leave it alone in its glory.
VII
These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good
conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day. Many of us
have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a portion of
our souls behind us buried in the woods. I would not dig for these
reliquiæ; they are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the
finder; and yet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered
along forest paths, stores of youth’s dynamite and dear remembrances.
And as one generation passes on and renovates the field of tillage for
the next, I entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth
into the forest they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of
their predecessors, and, like those “unheard melodies” that are the
sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field
of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer farther,
those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves, surely in
Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions? We are not
content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would
leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.
One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this memorable
forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when
the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also.
The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is
theirs indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at night in the
fondest of their dreams, and use it for ever in their books and pictures.
Yet when they made their packets, and put up their notes and sketches,
something, it should seem, had been forgotten. A projection of
themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a
natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares. Over the whole
field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like
indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved
spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget
their orphanage. If anywhere about that wood you meet my airy bantling,
greet him with tenderness. He was a pleasant lad, though now abandoned.
And when it comes to your own turn to quit the forest, may you leave
behind you such another; no Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful
whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in
which we figure, the child of happy hours.
No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has
not been mirthfully conceived.
And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a
cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment.
Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to Fontainebleau, and
once there let him address himself to the spirit of the place; he will
learn more from exercise than from studies, although both are necessary;
and if he can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods
he will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches. A spirit once
well strung up to the concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will
hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.
The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we
test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and
condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. Thus it
is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid works; and the
more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be apt to love
the literal in our productions. In all sciences and senses the letter
kills; and to-day, when cackling human geese express their ignorant
condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be
learnt. Let the young painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he
stupefies himself with studies that teach him the mechanical side of his
trade, let him walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not
pick and botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will
learn—or learn not to forget—the poetry of life and earth, which, when he
has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.
[1882.]
IV
EPILOGUE TO “AN INLAND VOYAGE” {95}
THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the Loing,
is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people. The weather was
superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain fell in
sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the air
vigorous and pure. They walked separate: the Cigarette plodding behind
with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa posting on ahead. Thus each
enjoyed his own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to tire of
them before he met his comrade at the designated inn; and the pleasures
of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The Arethusa carried
in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the
hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels. In this path, he
must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, and all
contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be the last to
publish the result. The Cigarette walked burthened with a volume of
Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played a part in the
subsequent adventure.
The Arethusa was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian in attire; but by
all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp; having set
forth indeed, upon a moment’s notice, from the most unfashionable spot in
Europe, Barbizon. On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian work, the
gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished. A flannel shirt of an
agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed coat
made by a good English tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and
leathern gaiters completed his array. In person, he is exceptionally
lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.
For years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion;
the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked askance upon him;
and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied
admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will imagine him,
dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking nearly five miles
an hour with the folds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his
spindle shanks, and still looking eagerly round him as if in terror of
pursuit—the figure, when realised, is far from reassuring. When Villon
journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at
Roussillon, I wonder if he had not something of the same appearance.
Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too
must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his
successor. And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the
same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the
stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild
bull’s-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare
inn-chamber—the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of
noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves—and above all, if he had
anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a relish for what
he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the
rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates to-day with the poor
exile, and count myself a gainer.
But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for
which the Arethusa was to pay dear: both were gone upon in days of
incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco-Prussian war.
Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still alive with tales of
uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth ’scapes from the
ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and
invaded. A year, at the most two years later, you might have tramped all
that country over and not heard one anecdote. And a year or two later,
you would—if you were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript
array—have gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more
interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men’s
imaginations.
For all that, our voyager had got beyond Château Renard before he was
conscious of arousing wonder. On the road between that place and
Châtillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell
together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one and
all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and his eyes were
faithful to the Arethusa’s knapsack. At last, with mysterious
roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook
his head with kindly incredulity. “_Non_,” said he, “_non_, _vous avez
des portraits_.” And then with a languishing appeal, “_Voyons_, show me
the portraits!” It was some little while before the Arethusa, with a
shout of laughter, recognised his drift. By portraits he meant indecent
photographs; and in the Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he
thought to have identified a pornographic colporteur. When countryfolk
in France have made up their minds as to a person’s calling, argument is
fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and fluted
meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now he would upbraid, now he
would reason—“_Voyons_, I will tell nobody”; then he tried corruption,
and insisted on paying for a glass of wine; and, at last when their ways
separated—“_Non_,” said he, “_ce n’est pas bien de votre part_. _O non_,
_ce n’est pas bien_.” And shaking his head with quite a sentimental
sense of injury, he departed unrefreshed.
On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at
Châtillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Châtillon, of
grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain
hamlet called La Jussiére, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a very
poor, bare drinking shop. The hostess, a comely woman, suckling a child,
examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. “You are not of
this department?” she asked. The Arethusa told her he was English.
“Ah!” she said, surprised. “We have no English. We have many Italians,
however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of
hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something
new.” Here was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he
drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the
light came upon him in a flash. “_O_, _pour vous_,” replied the
landlady, “a halfpenny!” _Pour vous_? By heaven, she took him for a
beggar! He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to
correct her. But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed
in spirit. The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow;
and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.
That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the
river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short stage
through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Châtillon-sur-Loire. It
was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of
firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. Overhead the birds were in
consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and re-arising. And yet with
all this bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The
Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down
very exactly all he was to do at Châtillon: how he was to enjoy a cold
plunge, to change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette’s arrival, in
sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by these ideas, he
pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon and in
a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. Childe
Roland to the dark tower came.
A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.
“_Monsieur est voyageur_?” he asked.
And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile attire,
replied—I had almost said with gaiety: “So it would appear.”
“His papers are in order?” said the gendarme. And when the Arethusa,
with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he was informed
(politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.
The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and
trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the
prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph’s) “all
whelks and bubuckles,” the dullest might have been prepared for grief.
Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the
interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.
THE COMMISSARY. You have no papers?
THE ARETHUSA. Not here.
THE COMMISSARY. Why?
THE ARETHUSA. I have left them behind in my valise.
THE COMMISSARY. You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate
without papers?
THE ARETHUSA. Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on
my rights as an English subject by international treaty.
THE COMMISSARY (_with scorn_). You call yourself an Englishman?
THE ARETHUSA. I do.
THE COMMISSARY. Humph.—What is your trade?
THE ARETHUSA. I am a Scotch advocate.
THE COMMISSARY (_with singular annoyance_). A Scotch advocate! Do you
then pretend to support yourself by that in this department?
The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had
scored a point.
THE COMMISSARY. Why, then, do you travel?
THE ARETHUSA. I travel for pleasure.
THE COMMISSARY (_pointing to the knapsack_, _and with sublime
incredulity_). _Avec ça_? _Voyez-vous_, _je suis un homme intelligent_!
(With that? Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)
The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary
relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the postman,
but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the
knapsack. And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake to his
position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or no furniture in
the room except the Commissary’s chair and table; and to facilitate
matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on earth) leant the
knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from his
seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he
screamed to lay the desecrating object on the floor.
The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks,
and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of soap in one of
the shoes, two volumes of the _Collection Jannet_ lettered _Poésies de
Charles d’Orléans_, a map, and a version book containing divers notes in
prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this
day unpublished: the Commissary of Châtillon is the only living man who
has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment
over with a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he
regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of
infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing
really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the
ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a certificate; and it
was supposed the farce was nearly over.
The inquisitor resumed his seat.
THE COMMISSARY (_after a pause_). _Eh bien_, _je vais vous dire ce que
vous êtes_. _Vous êtes allemand et vous venez chanter à la foire_.
(Well, then, I will tell you what you are. You are a German and have
come to sing at the fair.)
THE ARETHUSA. Would you like to hear me sing? I believe I could
convince you of the contrary.
THE COMMISSARY. _Pas de plaisanterie_, _monsieur_!
THE ARETHUSA. Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book.
Here, I open it with my eyes shut. Read one of these songs—read this
one—and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be
possible to sing it at a fair?
THE COMMISSARY (_critically_). _Mais oui_. _Très bien_.
THE ARETHUSA. _Comment_, _monsieur_! What! But do you not observe it
is antique. It is difficult to understand, even for you and me; but for
the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.
THE COMMISSARY (_taking a pen_). _Enfin_, _il faui en finir_. What is
your name?
THE ARETHUSA (_speaking with the swallowing vivacity of the English_).
Robert-Louis-Stev’ns’n.
THE COMMISSARY (_aghast_). _Hé_! _Quoi_?
THE ARETHUSA (_perceiving and improving his advantage_).
Rob’rt-Lou’s-Stev’ns’n.
THE COMMISSARY (_after several conflicts with his pen_). _Eh bien_, _il
faut se passer du nom_. _Ca ne s’écrit pas_. (Well, we must do without
the name: it is unspellable.)
The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I
have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the Commissary; but
the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger, has left
but little definite in the memory of the Arethusa. The Commissary was
not, I think, a practised literary man; no sooner, at least, had he taken
pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the _procès-verbal_, than
he became distinctly more uncivil and began to show a predilection for
that simplest of all forms of repartee: “You lie!” Several times the
Arethusa let it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more
insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do his
worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly repent it.
Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first, instead of
beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going on to argue, the
thing might have turned otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the
Commissary was visibly staggered. But it was too late; he had been
challenged the _procès-verbal_ was begun; and he again squared his elbows
over his writing, and the Arethusa was led forth a prisoner.
A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie. Thither was our
unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the
contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and
tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a
file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to
condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.
“I regret,” he said, “that I arrested you, for I see that you are no
_voyou_.” And he promised him every indulgence.
The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told was
impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. He did not
chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.
“_Non_,” said the gendarme. “_Nous avons eu des histoires de gens qui se
sont pendus_.” (No, we have had histories of people who hanged
themselves.)
“What,” cried the Arethusa. “And is it for that you refuse me my
handkerchief? But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my
trousers!”
The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his
colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.
“At least,” said the Arethusa, “be sure that you arrest my comrade; he
will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him by the
sack upon his shoulders.”
This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the
building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the stair, and
bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.
The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose
itself prepared for any mortal accident. Prison, among other ills, was
one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa. Even as he went
down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous occasion
for a roundel, and that like the committed linnets of the tuneful
cavalier, he too would make his prison musical. I will tell the truth at
once: the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in this
place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered: the first moral, the
second physical.
It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are
liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. To get
and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the
Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing inwardly
with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the physical had also its
part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground, and
it was only lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the wall
and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The walls were of naked
masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an
earthenware basin, a water-jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray
cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a summer’s afternoon,
the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and plunged
into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck an
instant chill upon the Arethusa’s blood. Now see in how small a matter a
hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with
the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the foundations
of the barrack; and what with the poor twilight and the irregular
surface, walking was impossible. The caged author resisted for a good
while; but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper; and at
length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was driven to climb
upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then, he
lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a
garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far
removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just
received. These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.
Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining
and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the
Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days
of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the Arethusa, and
had ample opportunity to share in that gentleman’s disfavour with the
police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous
comrade. He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his
face and manner artfully recommending him to all. There was but one
suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his
companion. He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is
ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main; nor the
Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fère; last, but not least, he
is pretty certain to remember Châtillon-sur-Loire.
At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a
moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were confronted
in the Commissary’s office. For if the Cigarette was surprised to be
arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and
appointments of his captive. Here was a man about whom there could be no
mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in apple-pie
order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready with his
passport, at a word, and well supplied with money: a man the Commissary
would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and this _beau
cavalier_ unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade! The
conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I remember only
one. “Baronet?” demanded the magistrate, glancing up from the passport.
“_Alors_, _monsieur_, _vous êtes le firs d’un baron_?” And when the
Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied the soft
impeachment, “_Alors_,” from the Commissary, “_ce n’est pas votre
passeport_!” But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of
laying hands upon the Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of
unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
commanding our friend’s tailor. Ah, what an honoured guest was the
Commissary entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm
weather! what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he
carried in his knapsack! You are to understand there was now but one
point of difference between them: what was to be done with the Arethusa?
the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming him as
the dungeon’s own. Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed some
years of his life in Egypt, where he had made acquaintance with two very
bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in the eye of the Commissary,
as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there
was something Turkish. I pass over this lightly; it is highly possible
there was some misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary
(charmed with his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took
for an act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a
bribe. And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than an odd
volume of Michelet’s history? The work was promised him for the morrow,
before our departure; and presently after, either because he had his
price, or to show that he was not the man to be behind in friendly
offices—“_Eh bien_,” he said, “_je suppose qu’il faut lâher voire
camarade_.” And he tore up that feast of humour, the unfinished
_procès-verbal_. Ah, if he had only torn up instead the Arethusa’s
roundels! There were many works burnt at Alexandria, there are many
treasured in the British Museum, that I could better spare than the
_procès-verbal_ of Châtillon. Poor bubuckled Commissary! I begin to be
sorry that he never had his Michelet: perceiving in him fine human
traits, a broad-based stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a
taste for letters, a ready admiration for the admirable. And if he did
not admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.
To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came
suddenly a noise of bolts and chains. He sprang to his feet, ready to
welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung
wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and
with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the drama)—“_Vous
êtes libre_!” he said. None too soon for the Arethusa. I doubt if he
had been half-an-hour imprisoned; but by the watch in a man’s brain
(which was the only watch he carried) he should have been eight times
longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the
healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as
sweet as a cow’s into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have
laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum
of life.
And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was
an act-drop and not the curtain. Upon what followed in front of the
barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The
wife of the Maréchal-des-logis was a handsome woman, and yet the Arethusa
was not sorry to be gone from her society. Something of her image, cool
as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his memory: yet more
of her conversation. “You have there a very fine parlour,” said the poor
gentleman.—“Ah,” said Madame la Maréchale (des-logis), “you are very well
acquainted with such parlours!” And you should have seen with what a
hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before her! I do not
think he ever hated the Commissary; but before that interview was at an
end, he hated Madame la Maréchale. His passion (as I am led to
understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a
pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame meanwhile tasting the joys
of the matador, goading him with barbed words and staring him coldly
down.
It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit
down to an excellent dinner in the inn. Here, too, the despised
travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman of
these parts, returned from the day’s sport, who had the good taste to
find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end, the gentleman
proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the café.
The café was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each other
and the world the smallness of their bags. About the centre of the room,
the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new acquaintance; a trio
very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late experience) were
greedy of consideration, and their sportsman rejoiced in a pair of
patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew open with a crash; the
Maréchal-des-logis appeared in the interval, gorgeously belted and
befrogged, entered without salutation, strode up the room with a clang of
spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far end. Close
at his heels followed the Arethusa’s gendarme of the afternoon,
imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his
chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the
shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic utterance
of which he had the secret—“_Suivez_!” said he.
The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of
the declaration of independence, Mark Antony’s oration, all the brave
scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in
the café at Châtillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment
later, when the Arethusa had followed his recaptors into the farther part
of the house, the Cigarette found himself alone with his coffee in a ring
of empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners,
all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting
at him furtively as at a leper.
And the Arethusa? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview in
the back kitchen. The Maréchal-des-logis, who was a very handsome man,
and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear opinion on the
case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish to
get his subordinates into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and the
other, to all of which the Arethusa (with a growing sense of his
position) demurred.
“In short,” suggested the Arethusa, “you want to wash your hands of
further responsibility? Well, then, let me go to Paris.”
The Maréchal-des-logis looked at his watch.
“You may leave,” said he, “by the ten o’clock train for Paris.”
And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure
in the dining-room at Siron’s.
V
RANDOM MEMORIES
I.—THE COAST OF FIFE
MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the
first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are
more often agreeably exciting. Misery—or at least misery unrelieved—is
confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the “dreadful
looking-for” of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of
an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious
pre-existence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of
semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field—what a
sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar
circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems
to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I
been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was around
me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: “Poor little boy,
he is going away—unkind little boy, he is going to leave us”; so the
unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach. And
at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place
where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and
generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw—the long
empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the
woody hillside garden—a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart
died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of miserable
sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations—we
two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs
who had each tasted sorrow—and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled
for his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly eyes.
For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of
my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the
reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was
judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of
scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was
visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should
take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first
professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man,
without the help of petticoats.
The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious
on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and
Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the
rest, from the windows of my father’s house) dying away into the distance
and the easterly _haar_ with one smoky seaside town beyond another, or in
winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-tops. It has no
beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory;
trees very rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of
rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the
eye. It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden.
History broods over that part of the world like the easterly _haar_.
Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an
old and settled race. Of these little towns, posted along the shore as
close as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten
church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying
fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose
royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the
blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;
Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle
where the “bonny face was spoiled”; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones
was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between
tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his
voice and his broad lowland dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander “brak’s
neckbane” and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the
witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners
in the North Sea; Dysart, famous—well famous at least to me for the Dutch
ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one particular
Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop,
smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted
caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed
a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,
sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall
figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried “Deen Deen” along the streets of the
imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps
already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town
of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So
on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader
will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and
Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where
Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to the
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders
and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach
or the quiescence of the deep—the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front,
and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the
one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off
yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb’s. And but a
little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea,
stands the gem of the province and the light of mediæval Scotland, St.
Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox’s
jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this
day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not
hushed.
Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak
easterly morning. There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I
recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes
raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning,
and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its
drowsy classrooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until
teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull
beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages
of the open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews
in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who has
written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his
incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace,
and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all
about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if
he had turned his attention to the harbour lights; and it may be news
even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging
about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no
doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy
of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more
important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: “It is
the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of
this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House,
instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and
welcome their Family, it is distressing when one-is obliged to put on a
most angry countenance and demeanour.” This painful obligation has been
hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and
unauthorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper
on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach,
when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for his
infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had
done the man a service, and when the proper inspector came, he would be
readier with his panes. The human race is perhaps credited with more
duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a
business of the most transparent nature. As soon as the boat grates on
the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the
very slouch of the fellows’ shoulders tells their story, and the engineer
may begin at once to assume his “angry countenance.” Certainly the brass
of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate,
certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp
unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather
more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in
literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the
unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the
Service, he had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his
trade and stood (in the mediæval phrase) quite out of the danger of my
father; but he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired
extremely.
From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we
were “to post,” and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of
top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson’s _Dance of Death_; but it was
only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of
Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive.
It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do
I remember any single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach
on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred
years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate’s
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,
Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has
ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of
the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe’s ’bacco-box, thus clearly
indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was after
all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and
afforded a grateful relief from _Ministering Children_ or the _Memoirs of
Mrs. Kathatine Winslowe_. The figure that always fixed my attention is
that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about
his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly,
revolving privately a case of conscience. He would take no hand in the
deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and “that
action” must be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; on the
other hand, “that action,” in itself, was highly justified, he had cast
in his lot with “the actors,” and he must stay there, inactive but
publicly sharing the responsibility. “You are a gentleman—you will
protect me!” cried the wounded old man, crawling towards him. “I will
never lay a hand on you,” said Hackston, and put his cloak about his
mouth. It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see
the face—to open that bosom and to read the heart. With incomplete
romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I read
him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on. I even dug
among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room where
my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of
my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted
students. All was vain: that he had passed a riotous nonage, that he was
a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque
companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military
common sense, and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir,
so much and no more could I make out. But whenever I cast my eyes
backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains of history,
sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How small a thing
creates an immortality! I do not think he can have been a man entirely
commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the
witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus have haunted
the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me for a
paragraph. An incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once
awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the eye, how little do we
realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does so but the author,
just as none but he appreciates the influence of jingling words; so that
he looks on upon life, with something of a covert smile, seeing people
led by what they fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed
artifices of his own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles
and are really picturesque effects. In a pleasant book about a
school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote.
A “Philosophical Society” was formed by some Academy boys—among them,
Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew Wilson, the
Christian Buddhist and author of _The Abode of Snow_. Before these
learned pundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem: “What
would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?”
“I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products,” said
a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and
stands as a type of much that is most human. For this inquirer who
conceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really
immersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his
own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.
Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t—that was his
idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that which excites men in
the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past:
there lie at the root of what appears, most serious unsuspected elements.
The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke,
all three Royal Burghs—or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished
suburb, I forget which—lies continuously along the seaside, and boasts of
either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three
separate harbours. These ambiguities are painful; but the fact is
(although it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon
Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a
stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the time
of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west.
This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond
tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember
rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches
of verse in the vein of _exegi monumentum_; shells and pebbles, artfully
contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium; and I like to think of him
standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished, drinking in the
general effect and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.
The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century. Mr.
Thomson, the “curat” of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to
the devout: in the first place, because he was a “curat”; in the second
place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in
the third place, because he was generally suspected of dealings with the
Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular literature
of the time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing
quite by itself, and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had
been at a friend’s house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I
suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our
cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of _delirium
tremens_. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie came carrying a
lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they went down the street of
Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child’s hand, the
barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumbering houses,
and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance)
easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as
I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear and
looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister’s strange
behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for
the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded.
Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the twittering child, a huge
bulk of blackness seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as they
stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the farther side in the general
darkness of the night. “Plainly the devil come for Mr. Thomson!” thought
the child. What Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of
knowledge; but he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a
man praying. On the rest of the journey to the manse, history is silent;
but when they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern from
the child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that her little
courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her parents. Not
a soul would venture out; all that night, the minister dwelt alone with
his terrors in the manse; and when the day dawned, and men made bold to
go about the streets, they found the devil had come indeed for Mr.
Thomson.
This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful
association. It was early in the morning, about a century before the
days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed to
welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just landed in
the harbour underneath. But sure there was never seen a more decayed
grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of
exile. Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a certain isle;
on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its
pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and their
families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood
stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot.
_Belle-Isle-en-Mer_—Fair-Isle-at-Sea—that is a name that has always rung
in my mind’s ear like music; but the only “Fair Isle” on which I ever set
my foot, was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.
Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here
for long months he and certain of his men were harboured; and it was from
this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as well as such a
papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther Easter;
and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must that have appeared! and
after the island diet, what a hospitable spot the minister’s table! And
yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his outlandish hosts. For
to this day there still survives a relic of the long winter evenings when
the sailors of the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the
Fair-Islanders, the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up
the scene, and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast
contributing their melancholy voices. All the folk of the north isles
are great artificers of knitting: the Fair-Islanders alone dye their
fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and nightcaps,
innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland warehouse at
Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist’s house; and to
this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s adventure.
It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for “persons of
quality.” When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved,
poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to and
fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our
arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; but when one of the
officers of the _Pharos_, passing narrowly by him, observed his book to
be a Greek Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher flight. The
catechist was cross-examined; he said the gentleman had been put across
some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh’s schooner, the only link
between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held
services and was doing “good.” So much came glibly enough; but when
pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment. A
singular diffidence appeared upon his face: “They tell me,” said he, in
low tones, “that he’s a lord.” And a lord he was; a peer of the realm
pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, and his plaid
about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy
man! And his grandson, a good-looking little boy, much better dressed
than the lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent
very foreign to the scene, accompanied me for a while in my exploration
of the island. I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and wonder
how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much; for he seemed
to accept very quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it
is like that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.
VI
RANDOM MEMORIES
II.—THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER
ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a
considerable extent) Tennant’s vernacular poem _Anst’er Fair_; and I have
there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was when I came as
a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the
breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had
already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of
words and the appearances of life; and _travellers_, and _headers_, and
_rubble_, and _polished ashlar_, and _pierres perdues_, and even the
thrilling question of the _string-course_, interested me only (if they
interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words
to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation
of years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I haunted the
breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine,
the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green
glimmer of the divers’ helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the
masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry
was in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a certain Bailie
Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, as soon as dinner was despatched,
in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table
and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such
intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with
wonder. Then it was that I wrote _Voces Fidelium_, a series of dramatic
monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting
novel—like so many others, never finished. Late I sat into the night,
toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a
memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years,
to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap _Voces
Fidelium_ on the fire before he goes; so clear does he appear before me,
sitting there between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late
night; so ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool
present! But he was driven to his bed at last without miraculous
intervention; and the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this
eminently youthful business. The weather was then so warm that I must
keep the windows open; the night without was populous with moths. As the
late darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more brightly;
thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one
brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper.
Flesh and blood could not endure the spectacle; to capture immortality
was doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such a cost of
suffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go to bed in the
darkness raging to think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and
there was _Voces Fidelium_ still incomplete. Well, the moths are—all
gone, and _Voces Fidelium_ along with them; only the fool is still on
hand and practises new follies.
Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that was
the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was not to be,
at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a change of scene to the
sub-arctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more
unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly
falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate
stones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your ears and
(down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.
Only as you approached the coast was there anything to stir the heart.
The plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall
out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were
over-brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang
in the thyme on the cliff’s edge; here and there, small ancient castles
toppled on the brim; here and there, it was possible to dip into a dell
of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm,
and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon sun, and
(farther off) the rumour of the turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is
one of the meanest of man’s towns, and situate certainly on the baldest
of God’s bays. It lives for herring, and a strange sight it is to see
(of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking
fishers, as when a city crowds to a review—or, as when bees have swarmed,
the ground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and
a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, the
sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after
another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of
fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all proportion to the town
itself; and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from
the Long Island (as we call the outer Hebrides), who come for that season
only, and depart again, if “the take” be poor, leaving debts behind them.
In a bad year, the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting
time; fights are common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a
child’s hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when
I was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To
contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here
added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English;
an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by
descent. I remember seeing one of the strongest instances of this
division: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy box erected on the flat
grave-stones of the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium—I know not
what to call it—an eldritch-looking preacher laying down the law in
Gaelic about some one of the name of _Powl_, whom I at last divined to be
the apostle to the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very
devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town’s
children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely
playing tigg. The same descent, the same country, the same narrow sect
of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by
an accidental difference of dialect!
Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished
breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of
churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers
toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the
assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between wind
and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a
mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick was in the year of
_Voces Fidelium_ and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown’s; and already I
did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps
requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick
east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the diving-dress,
that was my absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain
handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.
It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out
in the open there were “skipper’s daughters,” when I found myself at last
on the diver’s platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my
whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One
moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the next,
I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As that
intolerable burthern was laid upon me, I could have found it in my heart
(only for shame’s sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was
too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to
whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of the
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing there
in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature deaf and
dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his own.
Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a
catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the
weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust
into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the
ladder, I began ponderously to descend.
Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw
a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around,
except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green
gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds
lower, I stepped off on the _pierres perdues_ of the foundation; a dumb
helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of
encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face
of Bain. There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to
eye; and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a whisper
come to his companion’s hearing. Each, in his own little world of air,
stood incommunicably separate.
Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes’ drama at the
bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it
well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone
set home; and it was time to turn to something else. But still his
companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or only
raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown to
the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for awhile,
like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into
Bob’s mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of that other
world, and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears.
Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was the
trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot of that unfortunate—he
was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen tons of rock.
That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the
scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. These must bear in mind
the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of
transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are,
and how a man’s weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very
ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.
The knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the
hand of my estranged companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: overhead, a flat roof of
green: a little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a stone; I
looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to me
the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high; it would have
been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the breast and back weights,
and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering load of the
helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb; and to
prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes.
Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As high as to
the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight. Even
when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued
their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must
be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and
propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little
higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected by the bottom of
the swell, running there like a strong breeze of wind. Or so I must
suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no impact;
only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne helplessly abroad, and
now swiftly—and yet with dream-like gentleness—impelled against my guide.
So does a child’s balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, and
touch, and slide off again from every obstacle. So must have
ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light crowds
that followed the Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land
beyond Cocytus.
There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to
infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your
feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied
to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes
and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown
so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons-although
I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed,
and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here
and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather
relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and
signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience before me even
then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell.
Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine
light—the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of
crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a
Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind.
Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I
desired. It was one of the best things I got from my education as an
engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with
sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about
harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to
wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it
supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his
ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one)
for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries
him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet
thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a
memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining
pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of
drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive
figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of
genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for
the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.
Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to
hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among the
roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and
shouting orders—not always very wise—than to be warm and dry, and dull,
and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in
those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it
much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate
times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone
from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending
their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse
potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would beleaguer them
closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller to-day upon the Thurso
coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among the moorlands,
and be told, quite openly, it marked a private still. He would not
indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach. And even if
he could, one little thing that happened to me could never happen to him,
or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.
We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded with
Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my
ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very
northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in
our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring
Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet
Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton,
its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands,
the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And here, in
the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a
chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with its
load of Hebridean fishers—as they had pursued _vetturini_ up the passes
of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil’s tomb—two
little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen
years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of white
mice. The coach passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the
distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered into that
country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when
(if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the
olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.
Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost.
For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the
negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the
mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the
days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at
that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the
shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where
no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an
antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians
struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather
or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to
their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on
the Fair Isle.
VII
THE LANTERN-BEARERS
I
THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion
of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of,
them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the
kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little
gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and
fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial
smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops
with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks
(that remarkable cigar) and the _London Journal_, dear to me for its
startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names:
such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.
These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and
sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their
subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a
haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets: to
the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes,
alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of
seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and
ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between—now charmed into
sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting
surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff’s edge brisk and clean and pungent of
the sea—in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful
bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its
summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard
was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy,
still flew the colours of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches
of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands
of Bell-the-Cat.
There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that
part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted;
but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in
the Lady’s Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by
the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side
with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for
life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even
common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single
penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew
the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of little
anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other’s heads, to the to the
much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill
recrimination—shrill as the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all,
you might have done this often; but though fishing be a fine pastime, the
podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a
point of honour that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again,
you might climb the Law, where the whale’s jawbone stood landmark in the
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and
spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe,
now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer,
now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your
clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth
of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees.
Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs,
when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following
my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the
wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the
sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide and the
menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word
that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house
under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and
cooking apples there—if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose
the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local
fruit capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand
and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on
sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the
crumbling turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans {141} (the
worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east
wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its
bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.
There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of
the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and
of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and
beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound
in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody—horror!—the
fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts,
and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged
in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died
there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been
tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that,
after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on
her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a
certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman
continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman
conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour
of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window
in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a
marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins
that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall
with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation,
the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of
rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour
mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any
east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head,
where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and
sons—their whole wealth and their whole family—engulfed under their eyes;
and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an
unfortunate homeward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, a
figure scarcely human, a tragic Mænad.
These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells
upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport
peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months’
holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys
and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so
that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun
and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the
Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in
its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to
introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm being
quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.
The idle manner of it was this:—
Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the
nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our-respective
villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern. The thing was so
well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and
the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our
particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a
cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned
top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned
aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught;
the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull’s-eye
under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns
about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the
hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being
fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly
copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars,
indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly
an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain
story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take
it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a
boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious “Have you got your
lantern?” and a gratified “Yes!” That was the shibboleth, and very
needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
with nothing but the thwarts above them—for the cabin was usually locked,
or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle
overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s-eyes
discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of
the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these
fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the
links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves
with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some
specimens—some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the
rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they
were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate,
was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only accidents in
the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk
by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned;
not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your
glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while,
deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a
bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.
II
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice
is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.
It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer,
the miser, as he figures in the “Old Bailey Reports,” a prey to the most
sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired
man, his house beleaguered by the impish schoolboy, and he himself
grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against these
pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a
life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that
had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at
once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone
escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which we
cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man had willingly
forgone both comfort and consideration. “His mind to him a kingdom was”;
and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a
dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had
the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble character in
itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is commonly
called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait of
mankind; scorn of men’s opinions, another element of virtue; and at the
back of all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a cur,
swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or
there-about) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait
to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne
either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us
that throb of the miser’s pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast
arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a
god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser,
consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more,
indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that
mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable
house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with
others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps
fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, and
possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who
have not one virtue to rub against another in the field of active life,
and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints. We
see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows
in what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their
treasure!
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of
the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song,
hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger
at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his
comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the
woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He
sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and
the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling
lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not
merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and
hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and
the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and
a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us,
that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist.
There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of
mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are
ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but
of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.
The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been
boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,
who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat before
a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of congested
poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked alone in the
woods, they have walked in cities under the countless lamps; they have
been to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have longed to knife
a man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate.
Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted
to the full—their books are there to prove it—the keen pleasure of
successful literary composition. And yet they fill the globe with
volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, and
whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with despairing
wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the
dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and
fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I
would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully
yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some
scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to
which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.
These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very
true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons of (what
they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional,
and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must
deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a
prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest
considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by
ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does
not make us different from our fellowmen, or it would make us incapable
of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just
like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped
a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew
very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys
and full of a poetry of his own. And this harping on life’s dulness and
man’s meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two
things: the cry of the blind eye, _I cannot see_, or the complaint of the
dumb tongue, _I cannot utter_. To draw a life without delights is to
prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of
poetry—well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may
have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded,
impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and
probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer
as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more
becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they
did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in
a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the
same romance—I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of
giving pain—say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take
shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow
boys; and say that I came on some such business as that of my
lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat
upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they
were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I
might upon these lines, and had I Zola’s genius, turn out, in a page or
so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a
master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and
when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and
dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the
boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and
indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is
highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of
the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask
themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the
ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.
III
For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside,
like Dancer’s, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist
with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has
so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his
note-book) that it may even touch them not; and the man’s true life, for
which he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The
clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing
ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another life,
plying another trade from that they chose; like the poet’s housebuilder,
who, after all, is cased in stone,
“By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts.
Rebuilds it to his liking.”
In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul,
with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to
court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his
nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of
foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the
true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a
squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives.
And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to
find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.
For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the
incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero’s constancy under the
submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing
sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his
whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief in
drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of
middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero
drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every description
of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal poetry, the
enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is
naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like
dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the
sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the
external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric
chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.
Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far
better—Tolstoi’s _Powers of Darkness_. Here is a piece full of force and
truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a
situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in part;
and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint of any
loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life, and even
when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are not
understood; they saw their life in fairer colours; even the deaf girl was
clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once
again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetry
and lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with
fairy tales.
IV
In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;
and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine
labours in the field, when André sinks beyond emotion, when Richard
Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, “not
cowardly, puts off his helmet,” when Kent has infinite pity on the dying
Lear, when, in Dostoieffky’s _Despised and Rejected_, the uncomplaining
hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please
the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright
face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly
supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them,
we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.
We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door,
here is the open air. _Itur in antiquam silvam_.
VIII
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS
THE past is all of one texture—whether feigned or suffered—whether acted
out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre of the
brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are
down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the
body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences; one is
vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to
remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream,
there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing;
another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of
it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great
alleviation of idle hours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet less
valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the
secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its
ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not
far from St. Kitt’s, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which
was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else’s, and for that matter
(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do
not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that they
are possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever: our old
days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which these
scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a last
night’s dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers
of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we
revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of
it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken
at the pocket’s edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left! for we
only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted
pictures of the past.
Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived
longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they
claim they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that all
men review for their amusement, these count in no second place the
harvests of their dreams. There is one of this kind whom I have in my
eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was
from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of
fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging
on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew
away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor
soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled hard against
the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows.
But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would have
him by the throat, and pluck him strangling and screaming, from his
sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at times very
strange, at times they were almost formless: he would be haunted, for
instance, by nothing more definite than a certain hue of brown, which he
did not mind in the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed
while he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on every detail of
circumstance, as when once he supposed he must swallow the populous
world, and awoke screaming with the horror of the thought. The two chief
troubles of his very narrow existence—the practical and everyday trouble
of school tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment—were
often confounded together into one appalling nightmare. He seemed to
himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called on, poor
little devil, to recite some form of words, on which his destiny
depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him; and
he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with his knees to his chin.
These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that time of
life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his power of
dreams. But presently, in the course of his growth, the cries and
physical contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his visions were
still for the most part miserable, but they were more constantly
supported; and he would awake with no more extreme symptom than a flying
heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear.
His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stocked with particulars,
became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life.
The look of the world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery
came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so
that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and
beautiful places as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, an odd
taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories laid in that
period of English history, began to rule the features of his dreams; so
that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat and was much engaged
with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and that for breakfast.
About the same time, he began to read in his dreams—tales, for the most
part, and for the most part after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so
incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed book, that he has ever
since been malcontent with literature.
And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-adventure
which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to dream in
sequence and thus to lead a double life—one of the day, one of the
night—one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another
that he had no means of proving to be false. I should have said he
studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it may
be supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, in his dream-life, he
passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his
teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity
of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the
South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall
_land_, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night
long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in
endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a
reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing
downward—beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers,
poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women—but all drowsy and weary
like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they
passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning
to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a
breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet,
haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.
Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he
can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the
gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken
off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them. I cannot
tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it was long
enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long enough to send
him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor;
whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to the common lot of man.
The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;
indeed, his nights were for some while like other men’s, now blank, now
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes appalling,
but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will
just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer
truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first floor of a
rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a
carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all
these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place,
among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked down from
the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused.
A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the
farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the
retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall of the house and
seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer; it
was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast looked right enough—indeed,
he was so old and dull and dusty and broken-down, that he should rather
have awakened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer
that this was no proper dog at all, but something hellish. A great many
dozing summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dog thrust
forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his mouth
like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked
to him with one eye. The dream went on, it matters not how it went; it
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was nothing in the sequel worthy
of that devilish brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly
in that very fact: that having found so singular an incident, my
imperfect dreamer should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and
fall back on indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors. It would
be different now; he knows his business better!
For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in
the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father
before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the
teller’s pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart
reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted
for another, on fancy’s least suggestion. So that the little people who
manage man’s internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous
training; and played upon their stage like children who should have
slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled
actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my
dreamer began to turn his former amusement of story-telling to (what is
called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his
tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of
his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed
and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to an
end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the pleasure, in one
word, had become a business; and that not only for the dreamer, but for
the little people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as
he. When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought
amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off
in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the
same mercantile designs. All other forms of dream deserted him but two:
he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at
times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note that
to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at intervals
of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting new neighbours,
beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and
sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions is quite lost to him:
the common, mangled version of yesterday’s affairs, the
raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted
cheese—these and their like are gone; and, for the most part, whether
awake or asleep, he is simply occupied—he or his little people—in
consciously making stories for the market. This dreamer (like many other
persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the
bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate,
he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest
money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir
themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night
long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. No
fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp
are things by-gone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing
exultation in his own cleverness (for he takes all the credit), and at
last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, “I have it, that’ll
do!” upon his lips: with such and similar emotions he sits at these
nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he
scatters the performance in the midst. Often enough the waking is a
disappointment: he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing;
drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone stumbling and
maundering through their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is
seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have these
sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly
taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for
himself.
Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he was the son of a
very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most damnable
temper. The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad, on
purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he returned to England,
it was to find him married again to a young wife, who was supposed to
suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the
dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son to
have a meeting; and yet both being proud and both angry, neither would
condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy
country by the sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some
intolerable insult, struck down the father dead. No suspicion was
aroused; the dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to
the broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with
his father’s widow, for whom no provision had been made. These two lived
very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down to table
together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better friends; until
it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying about dangerous matters,
that she had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched him and
tried him with questions. He drew back from her company as men draw back
from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was the
attraction that he would drift again and again into the old intimacy, and
again and again be startled back by some suggestive question or some
inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they lived at cross purposes, a life
full of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion;
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil,
followed her to the station, followed her in the train to the seaside
country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where the murder
was done. There she began to grope among the bents, he watching her,
flat upon his face; and presently she had something in her hand—I cannot
remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against the dreamer—and
as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery,
her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the brink of the tall
sand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and
there they stood face to face, she with that deadly matter openly in her
hand—his very presence on the spot another link of proof. It was plain
she was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear—he could
bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut her
short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they returned together to
the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey back in the same
carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the evening in the drawing-room
as in the past. But suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer’s bosom.
“She has not denounced me yet”—so his thoughts ran—“when will she
denounce me? Will it be to-morrow?” And it was not to-morrow, nor the
next day, nor the next; and their life settled back on the old terms,
only that she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him, the
burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he
wasted away like a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all bounds
of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room,
and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning evidence.
There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, in the hollow of
his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she should
seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the door opened, and behold
herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence
between them; and once more she raised to him a face brimming with some
communication; and once more he shied away from speech and cut her off.
But before he left the room, which he had turned upside down, he laid
back his death-warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face
lighted up. The next thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid,
with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things. Flesh and
blood could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next
morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the mind)
that he burst from his reserve. They had been breakfasting together in
one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished room of many windows;
all the time of the meal she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no
sooner were the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone together,
than he leaped to his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; with a
pale face, she heard him as he raved out his complaint: Why did she
torture him so? she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did
she not denounce him at once? what signified her whole behaviour? why did
she torture him? and yet again, why did she torture him? And when he had
done, she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands: “Do you not
understand?” she cried. “I love you!”
Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer
awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it soon
became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements;
which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his
wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader’s will also, if he
consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as
of substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their
secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for
valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the
woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that
highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little
people’s! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told
with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in
the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated
up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and
yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this business; and yet
I could not outdo—could not perhaps equal—that crafty artifice (as of
some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by
which the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice
brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her hand, once
in his—and these in their due order, the least dramatic first. The more
I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question:
Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s,
beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the
bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned
like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange
emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one
thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a
serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who
are they, then? and who is the dreamer?
Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a
person than myself;—as I might have told you from the beginning, only
that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;—and as I am
positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little farther
with my story. And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but
just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I
am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well,
when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part
which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond
contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means
necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it
even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For
myself—what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland
unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the
conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the
boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the
general elections—I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller
at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any
cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by
that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the
single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen
collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the
praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the
pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Molière’s servant; I
pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and
sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the
sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is
done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on
the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in
the profits of our common enterprise.
I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what
part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his
own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will first
take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to read, the
_Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. I had long been trying to
write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong
sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and
overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one,
_The Travelling Companion_, which was returned by an editor on the plea
that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other
day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that _Jekyll_ had
supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which
(with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person.
For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and
on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene
afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the
powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the
rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in
much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is
therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and
tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality,
worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a
conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that
was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a
voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous,
after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen
collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the
arena of the critics? For the business of the powders, which so many
have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the
Brownies’. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at
it, I may say a word: the not very defensible story of _Olalla_. Here
the court, the mother, the mother’s niche, Olalla, Olalla’s chamber, the
meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite,
were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to write them; to
this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was
beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest,
the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas! they are.
And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for
it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and
from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic
sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but
suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what
would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical
narrowness; conveying hints instead of life’s larger limitations and that
sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and
space.
For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat fantastic,
like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque,
alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the
supernatural. But the other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me
with a love-story, a little April comedy, which I ought certainly to hand
over to the author of _A Chance Acquaintance_, for he could write it as
it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I
cannot.—But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent
a tale for Mr. Howells?
IX
BEGGARS
I.
IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune when I was young
to make the acquaintance of a certain beggar. I call him beggar, though
he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which were open-mouthed,
indeed) to beg for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, tall,
gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, with that disquieting smile
of the mortally stricken on his face; but still active afoot, still with
the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute. Three ways led
through this piece of country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I
believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he
caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he
would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at
once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my
farther course. “A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining
to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don’t feel as
hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am
pleased to meet you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward
to one of our little conversations.” He loved the sound of his own voice
inordinately, and though (with something too off-hand to call servility)
he would always hasten to agree with anything you said, yet he could
never suffer you to say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his
favourite subject I have no memory; but we had never been long together
on the way before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the
English poets. “Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle
atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical
work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the works of
Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet.
Keats—John Keats, sir—he was a very fine poet.” With such references,
such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own knowledge, he would
beguile the road, striding forward uphill, his staff now clapped to the
ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the
remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all the while his toes
looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and
death looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by
accesses of cough.
He would often go the whole way home with me: often to borrow a book, and
that book always a poet. Off he would march, to continue his mendicant
rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged coat; and
although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came always
back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into beggardom.
And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random
criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he had
drawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful of Shelley and
the atheistical Queen Mab, and “Keats—John Keats, sir.” And I have often
wondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I often wondered how
he fell to be a beggar. He had served through the Mutiny—of which (like
so many people) he could tell practically nothing beyond the names of
places, and that it was “difficult work, sir,” and very hot, or that
so-and-so was “a very fine commander, sir.” He was far too smart a man
to have remained a private; in the nature of things, he must have won his
stripes. And yet here he was without a pension. When I touched on this
problem, he would content himself with diffidently offering me advice.
“A man should be very careful when he is young, sir. If you’ll excuse me
saying so, a spirited young gentleman like yourself, sir, should be very
careful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions
myself.” For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these
days to admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer and skittles.
Keats—John Keats, sir—and Shelley were his favourite bards. I cannot
remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair,
and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him was
a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the
moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in
the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest
head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child’s; and when he
read his favourite authors, he can almost never have understood what he
was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I
tried in vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for
nothing but romantic language that he could not understand. The case may
be commoner than we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the
next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital and who was no sooner
installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last pence) for a cheap
Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk with
his new neighbour, and was ready, when the book arrived, to make a
singular discovery. For this lover of great literature understood not
one sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he
understood the least—the inimitable, mouth-filling rodomontade of the
ghost in _Hamlet_. It was a bright day in hospital when my friend
expounded the sense of this beloved jargon: a task for which I am willing
to believe my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it as an
easy one. I know indeed a point or two, on which I would gladly question
Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses
of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to the spacious days of
Elizabeth. But in the second case, I should most likely pretermit these
questionings, and take my place instead in the pit at the Blackfriars, to
hear the actor in his favourite part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and
rolling out—as I seem to hear him—with a ponderous gusto—
“Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d.”
What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party I and what a
surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received the honours of the
evening!
As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is long
since dead; and now lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite
forgotten, in some poor city graveyard.—But not for me, you brave heart,
have you been buried! For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and
air, and striding southward. By the groves of Comiston and beside the
Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters’ Tryst, and where the curlews and
plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, stalwartly carrying
your deadly sickness, cheerfully discoursing of uncomprehended poets.
II
The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his
counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a
dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped with his
wife and children and his grinder’s wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird.
To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and daily the
knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to
interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and
plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children
were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His
wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle, but
she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was
a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had the
fine self-sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage;
he did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the day
before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am proud
to remember) as a friend.
Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint. Unlike
him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; scarce flying higher than the
story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly seeking none,
between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or
music, adequately embodied in that somewhat obvious ditty,
“Will ye gang, lassie, gang
To the braes o’ Balquidder.”
—which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and to
him, in view of his experience, must have found a special directness of
address. But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he felt with
a deep joy the poetry of life. You should have heard him speak of what
he loved; of the tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars
overhead at night; of the blest return of morning, the peep of day over
the moors, the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long
winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at the return of the
spring, he once more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors. But we
were a pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a
consistent first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have laid
himself so open;—to you, he might have been content to tell his story of
a ghost—that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived—whom he had once
encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and that would have been
enough, for that would have shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a
piece of experience solidly and livingly built up in words, here was a
story created, _teres atque rotundus_.
And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literary bards! He
had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave; encountered men more
terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in that incredible,
unsung epic of the Mutiny War; played his part with the field force of
Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared in that enduring, savage
anger and contempt of death and decency that, for long months together,
bedevil’d and inspired the army; was hurled to and fro in the
battle-smoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, where Nicholson fell;
was there when the attacking column, with hell upon every side, found the
soldier’s enemy—strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled
in the scale, and the fate of the flag of England staggered. And of all
this he had no more to say than “hot work, sir,” or “the army suffered a
great deal, sir,” or “I believe General Wilson, sir, was not very highly
thought of in the papers.” His life was naught to him, the vivid pages
of experience quite blank: in words his pleasure lay—melodious, agitated
words—printed words, about that which he had never seen and was
connatally incapable of comprehending. We have here two temperaments
face to face; both untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in
the egg; both boldly charactered:—that of the artist, the lover and
artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeër, the lover and forger of
experience. If the one had a daughter and the other had a son, and these
married, might not some illustrious writer count descent from the
beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder?
III
Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. The
burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my silver
plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew receiver. The
bandit sells the traveller an article of prime necessity: that
traveller’s life. And as for the old soldier, who stands for central
mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specially; for he
was the only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure for my money.
He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the sense to
cling to it, accosting strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking
patrons with a merely regimental difference, sparing you at once the
tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not
one hint about him of the beggar’s emphasis, the outburst of revolting
gratitude, the rant and cant, the “God bless you, Kind, Kind gentleman,”
which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence,
which is so notably false, which would be so unbearable if it were true.
I am sometimes tempted to suppose this reading of the beggar’s part, a
survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and
mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept
these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of life;
nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. They wound us,
I am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening (as it yet
lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a buffet; and the rant and
cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the fact
disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar lives by his knowledge of
the average man. He knows what he is about when he bandages his head,
and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with _Poor Mary Ann_ or
_Long_, _long ago_; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical
ear and sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know
what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of
cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.
This trade can scarce be called an imposition; it has been so blown upon
with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we
pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our
drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay
them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And
truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar’s
thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for
a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.
Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars? And the answer is,
Not one. My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged boots
were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him again
and again, and always gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on
the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were his method; they
were the man’s trade; without his boots he would have starved; he did not
live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public, which
loves the limelight on the actor’s face, and the toes out of the beggar’s
boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a false and merely
mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above
all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does not
go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a
penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; never
from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear
canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose
that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a
scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the working
class, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long
there will be a knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without
stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,
in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich stand
unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was
always the poor who helped him; get the truth from any workman who has
met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or
only with such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course
of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails his
passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even to the
attics with his nasal song. Here is a remarkable state of things in our
Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be asked to give.
IV
There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who was
taxed with ingratitude: “_Il faut savoir garder l’indépendance du cœur_,”
cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude without familarity,
gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a friendship, is a
thing so near to hatred that I do not care to split the difference.
Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shall
continue to question the tact of those who are eager to confer them.
What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends! and what a test
of manners, to receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the
obligation, blushing for each other; how bluff and dull we make the
giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an act of
such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed we can
perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful
emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an
obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be
deceived: unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his
inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In
real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is
received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too
proud to take a naked gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else,
then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of
the rich man; here is that needle’s eye in which he stuck already in the
days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:
that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money
acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich
to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his
turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His
friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends,
they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where to find—note this
phase—the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised;
offices are hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid:
the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will
take more than a merely human secretary to disinter that character.
What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet
greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable,
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most
delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:—and all
this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle’s eye!
O, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust;
and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin
to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of
man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no
salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of
reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!
V
And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He
may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial
and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were
a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket
of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But, alas!
there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere demand
the picturesque so much as in their virtues.
X
LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART
WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some
practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some
gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It
is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is
to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision; and I
will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all
depends on the vocation.
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth
is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and
delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.
These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in
the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure,
now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a
total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference,
contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated,
the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all
proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves,
nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of
human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all
that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of
a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there be
any exception—and here destiny steps in—it is in those moments when,
wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he calls up
before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus it is
that such an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines
insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting
and recording of experience.
This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all
other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will
pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be
regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father
the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your
ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own
experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the
vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we
have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the
general _ars artium_ and common base of all creative work; who will now
dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing
a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine
knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult
to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in
literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be
found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn
at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary tools.
Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise;
to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of
drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as
other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the
sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man
love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame,
the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may
have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of
his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable
zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain
candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that
would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement
worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the
statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and
the unflagging spirit of children at their play. _Is it worth
doing_?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that
question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur
to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor
to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and
the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.
If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room
for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe (lest I should too much
discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at
the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen
gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome,
in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with
indulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look
back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more
than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do
the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be
engrossed in that beloved occupation.
But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and
delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if the
result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one
work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing
anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would
not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even
if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will
always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side
of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct
returns—the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect—the wages of
the life—are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his
daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer have
moments of a worthier excitement, but they are purchased by cruel
hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life of the
artist there need be no hour without its pleasure. I take the author,
with whose career I am best acquainted; and it is true he works in a
rebellious material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying
both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter
crowds upon him and words are not wanting—in what a continual series of
small successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one
moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures,
both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on the page;
and how he labours in a craft to which the whole material of his life is
tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his
hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he
longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic
playground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a
morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should
be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less
desirable.
Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides
an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honour. The
public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you
are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design,
the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap
accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires—these
they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite
refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently
desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)
he must toil “like a miner buried in a landslip,” for which, day after
day, he recasts and revises and rejects—the gross mass of the public must
be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch
of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable,
you fall by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall
never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his
studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the
ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the
practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character; it is for
this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned
approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that
sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.
And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, if you are to
continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of
laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual
effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who says “_It will
do_,” is on the downward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough at
times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the practice
of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish.
This is the danger on the one side; there is not less upon the other.
The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law to
himself, debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very
hard to attain, making or swallowing artistic formulæ, or perhaps falling
in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget
the end of all art: to please. It is doubtless tempting to exclaim
against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be forgotten, it is he
who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services that
he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if properly considered,
there is a question of transcendental honesty. To give the public what
they do not want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there a strange
pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. The first
duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite
accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but
emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous court to
the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these
capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a
strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than
talent—character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot
stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art,
and follow some more manly way of life.
I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must be
frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves
patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious,
along with dancing girls and billiard markers. The French have a
romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the
Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of
Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing
others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man.
Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage;
and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the
example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was
more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the honour; and
anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered
the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it comes to their turn,
these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks
somewhat out of place in that assembly. There should be no honours for
the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his
share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other
trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful.
But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In
ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to produce a
certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in
which (we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps
forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight: an impudent design, in
which it is impossible to fail without odious circumstances. The poor
Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through
the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a
wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The actor,
the dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain
publicly the cup of failure. But though the rest of us escape this
crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the same
humiliation. We all profess to be able to delight. And how few of us
are! We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to delight. And the
day will come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardour
shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and he shall sit by
his deserted booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself condemned to do
work for which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if his lot were not
already cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the
press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which
they have not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot
understand.
And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers.
_Les blancs et les Bleus_ (for instance) is of an order of merit very
different from _Le Vicomte de Braglonne_; and if any gentleman can bear
to spy upon the nakedness of _Castle Dangerous_, his name I think is Ham:
let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it (not without tears) in
the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupation and comfort are
most needful, the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his
breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the
attention of the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel
until a great age without dishonourable failure. The writer has the
double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable
of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts
directly to a false position.
For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) must look
to be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montépin make handsome livelihoods; but we
cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps desire to be
Montépin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the
outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you have
some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn
with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you
the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of
the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen
I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist class.
Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field labourer; or do they
think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never observed what is the
retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they suppose their
contributions to the arts of pleasing more important than the services of
a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was content to live;
or do they think, because they have less genius, they stand excused from
the display of equal virtues? But upon one point there should be no
dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he
be not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of _le vieux
saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue to
be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be
tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of
work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his
own, he is even to be commanded; for words cannot describe how far more
necessary it is that a man should support his family, than that he should
attain to—or preserve—distinction in the arts. But if the pressure
comes, through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and
stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can reach
him.
And now you may perhaps ask me, if the débutant artist is to have no
thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours from
the State, he may not at least look forward to the delights of
popularity? Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far
as you may mean the countenance of other artists you would put your
finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career
of art. But in so far as you should have an eye to the commendations of
the public or the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would but be
cherishing a dream. It is true that in certain esoteric journals the
author (for instance) is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a
great deal more than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided
himself on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have
denied themselves the privilege of reading his work. But if a man be
sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to that
which often accompanies and always follows it—wild ridicule. A man may
have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will hear of his
failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well, but the
critics may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung up some
new idol of the instant, some “dust a little gilt,” to whom they now
prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of that
empty and ugly thing called popularity. Will any man suppose it worth
the gaining?
XI
PULVIS ET UMBRA
WE look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the
sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look
abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with
every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a
virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair
of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been
trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised,
and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh
face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing
more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of
the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient
still.
I
Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe
on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios
carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the
incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3, and H2O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;
science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable
city for the mind of man.
But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We
behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,
like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of
these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no
analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no
familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by
the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life;
seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in
tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy)
locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as
the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of
the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust,
and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a
marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that
we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is
infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain,
is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.
In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the
animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other:
the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal
mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering
into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if
it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored
vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows,
their delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share
with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the
projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and
reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image
kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction,
with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the
last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the
inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives
in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process,
growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than
the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks
to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.
II
What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with
hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a
thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for
so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely
descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who
should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a
being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with
imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often
touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of
right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle
for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with
cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering
solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in
him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the
thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an
ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of
shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in
most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with
independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:—Not in
man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and
doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster,
and the louse, of whom we know so little:—But in man, at least, it sways
with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even
with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains
supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance,
although it were a child’s; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the
risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due
to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their
singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be
rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of
the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them
senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of
misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised
injustice, cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning
imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is
indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best
consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should
continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and
inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race
should not cease to labour.
If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a
thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he
startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under
what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of
ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in
Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his
blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his
grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to
hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and
a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that
simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave
to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future,
with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues,
honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain
by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife
that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries
and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the
brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with
affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping
the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world’s
scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain
cost, rejecting riches:—everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of
man’s ineffectual goodness:—ah! if I could show you this! if I could show
you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history,
under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without
hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost
fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to
some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to
escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory,
but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives
long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.
Of all earth’s meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling:
that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this
inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare
delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however
misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with
screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly
worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the
heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man
denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer
like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another
genus: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an
unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the
dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming
ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that
we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in
his ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of
duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant?
Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all
the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest
to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues
and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation
groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law
of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field
and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the
dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of
an ideal: strive like us—like us are tempted to grow weary of the
struggle—to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment,
visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be
crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are they
like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the
drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings
of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity
of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God
knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they
repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping
hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating
in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of
a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our
weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.
And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under the
imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected, the
reasoner, the wise in his own eyes—God forbid it should be man that
wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the
language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole
creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy:
Surely not all in vain.
XII
A CHRISTMAS SERMON
BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve
months; {202} and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and
seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-bed sayings
have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and
sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity,
an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king—remembered and embodied all his
wit and scepticism along with more than his usual good humour in the
famous “I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying.”
I
An unconscionable time a-dying—there is the picture (“I am afraid,
gentlemen,”) of your life and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours
are “numbered and imputed,” and the days go by; and when the last of
these finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else? The very
length is something, if we reach that hour of separation undishonoured;
and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to
have served. There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in
the German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing go home;
and of how, seizing their general’s hand, these old, war-worn exiles
passed his finger along their toothless gums. _Sunt lacrymæ rerum_: this
was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon. And when a man has lived
to a fair age, he bears his marks of service. He may have never been
remarked upon the breach at the head of the army; at least he shall have
lost his teeth on the camp bread.
The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble
character. It never seems to them that they have served enough; they
have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to
be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies,
those desperate characters—it is we ourselves who know not what we
do,—thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we
think: that to scramble through this random business with hands
reasonably clean to have played the part of a man or woman with some
reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end
to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done
right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a
transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt
of self is only greed of hire.
And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much
of others? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not
to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others? And he
who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has
been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be tempted to think his
neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable that
nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is
certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damned for doing wrong,
but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative morality;
_thou shalt_ was ever his word, with which he superseded _thou shalt
not_. To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile
the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a
secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell
upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted
pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds—one thing of two: either
our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it; or
else, if our morality be in the right, we are criminal lunatics and
should place our persons in restraint. A mark of such unwholesomely
divided minds is the passion for interference with others: the Fox
without the Tail was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is to be
trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date. A man may have a
flaw, a weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his
temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into cruelty.
It has to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to engross his
thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther side, and must be
attended to with a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of the
decks has been effected. In order that he may be kind and honest, it may
be needful he should become a total abstainer; let him become so then,
and the next day let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be kind and
honest will require all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a
wise companion; in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will
still be the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness
will be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in judging
others.
It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life’s endeavour
springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we
do not recognise the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and
honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen
of our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold,
arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppress a
heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us,
which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic
fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no
cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.
To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to
make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when
that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but
these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep
friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude
and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a
hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself
can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended
to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and
study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well. Here is a
pleasant thought for the year’s end or for the end of life. Only
self-deception will be satisfied, and there need be no despair for the
despairer.
II
But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to
thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, from all its associations,
whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man
dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the
midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the
empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this
fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble self-denial,
are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.
It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim
yourself and stay without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the
child-like, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give
pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and
the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this
lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,
the shame were indelible if _we_ should lose it. Gentleness and
cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect
duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one
nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not
away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are
wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but
conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and
simpler people.
A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on pleasures, even
when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them. This
very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against
dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I
venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of
a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing
denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic—envy, malice,
the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back-biter, the
petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life—their standard is quite
different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so wrong;
there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of gusto
warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that they
reserve the choicest of their indignation. A man may naturally disclaim
all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of
the dolls; for these are gross and naked instances. And yet in each of
us some similar element resides. The sight of a pleasure in which we
cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular impatience. It
may be because we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we
dislike noise and romping—being so refined, or because—being so
philosophic—we have an over-weighing sense of life’s gravity: at least,
as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbour’s
pleasures. People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations; here is
one to be resisted. They are fond of self-denial; here is a propensity
that cannot be too peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad among
moral people that they should make their neighbours good. One person I
have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much more
nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy—if I may.
III
Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the
relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or
less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our
constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so
built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and so
circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very
sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue
will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own
reward, except for the self-centred and—I had almost said—the unamiable.
No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do
better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties
of the law, and the minor _capitis diminutio_ of social ostracism, is an
affair of wisdom—of cunning, if you will—and not of virtue.
In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit
by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or
why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not
ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must
try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it,
he must try to give happiness to others. And no doubt there comes in
here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he to make his neighbour
happy? How far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so
hard to brighten again? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to
be his brother’s keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far
must he resent evil?
The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ’s sayings on the
point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of them)
hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this: in
our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon
all; it is _our_ cheek we are to turn, _our_ coat that we are to give
away to the man who has taken _our_ cloak. But when another’s face is
buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are
to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and
surely not desirable. Revenge, says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice;
its judgments at least are delivered by an insane judge; and in our own
quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely. But in the
quarrel of our neighbour, let us be more bold. One person’s happiness is
as sacred as another’s; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one
with a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doing this, that we
have any right to interfere: the defence of B is our only ground of
action against A. A has as good a right to go to the devil, as we to go
to glory; and neither knows what he does.
The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and militant
mongerings of moral half-truths, though they be sometimes needful, though
they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an inferior grade of duties.
Ill-temper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious disguises;
this is the playground of inverted lusts. With a little more patience
and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in
almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady
quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some
denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour’s
vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.
IV
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and
to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and hung back,
or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long
we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in
the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life
is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long
business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a
blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the
day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the
dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world
is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails,
weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying
record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of
detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few
illusions left about himself. _Here lies one who meant well_, _tried a
little_, _failed much_:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need
not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a
defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus
Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit,
undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness
and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last
formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones;
there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the
dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!
From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such beautiful
and manly poem, I take this memorial piece: it says better than I can,
what I love to think; let it be our parting word.
“A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day’s work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.
“The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine, and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—
Night, with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.
“So be my passing!
My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.” {212}
[1888.]
FOOTNOTES
{8} Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first.
{95} See _An Inland Voyage_, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878.
{141} Wild cherries.
{202} _i.e._ in the pages of _Scribner’s Magazine_ (1888).
{212} From _A Book of Verses_ by William Ernest Henley. D. Nutt, 1888.
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