LAY MORALS
CHAPTER 1
THE problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then
to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life
thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best
of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which
they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between
two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is
doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for
the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or
spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and
prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life,
that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be
sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to
throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor
that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or
actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for
it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to
him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-
dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its
dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.
A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and
contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as
they can grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when
they come to advise the young, must be content to retail
certain doctrines which have been already retailed to them in
their own youth. Every generation has to educate another
which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily
accept the responsibility of parentship, having very
different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when
that responsibility falls due. What are they to tell the
child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have
themselves so few and such confused opinions? Indeed, I do
not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and
yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some
words to say in his own defence. Where does he find them?
and what are they when found?
As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-
nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-
eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion,
and, flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth
and applause. Besides these, or what might be deduced as
corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any
effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and
book-keeping, and how to walk through a quadrille.
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be
Christians. It may be want of penetration, but I have not
yet been able to perceive it. As an honest man, whatever we
teach, and be it good or evil, it is not the doctrine of
Christ. What he taught (and in this he is like all other
teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a
ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views,
but a view. What he showed us was an attitude of mind.
Towards the many considerations on which conduct is built,
each man stands in a certain relation. He takes life on a
certain principle. He has a compass in his spirit which
points in a certain direction. It is the attitude, the
relation, the point of the compass, that is the whole body
and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details are
comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by
this, and this only, can they be explained and applied. And
thus, to learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all,
like a historical artist, think ourselves into sympathy with
his position and, in the technical phrase, create his
character. A historian confronted with some ambiguous
politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one
pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every
side, and grope for some central conception which is to
explain and justify the most extreme details; until that is
found, the politician is an enigma, or perhaps a quack, and
the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big words; but
once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature
appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from
point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble
which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not
even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man to
bend his imagination to such athletic efforts. Yet without
this, all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall
understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more
than broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains
buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is
a dead language in our ears.
Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our
current doctrines.
'Ye cannot,' he says, 'SERVE GOD AND MAMMON.' Cannot? And
our whole system is to teach us how we can!
'THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE WISER IN THEIR GENERATION
THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT.' Are they? I had been led to
understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for
example, prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty
was the best policy; that an author of repute had written a
conclusive treatise 'How to make the best of both worlds.'
Of both worlds indeed! Which am I to believe then - Christ
or the author of repute?
'TAKE NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW.' Ask the Successful
Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to
admit that this is not only a silly but an immoral position.
All we believe, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or
our contemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence,
or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as
unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the 'same mind that
was in Christ.' We disagree with Christ. Either Christ
meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong. Well
says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament,
and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader
may recognise: 'Let but one of these sentences be rightly
read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left
one stone of that meeting-house upon another.'
It may be objected that these are what are called 'hard
sayings'; and that a man, or an education, may be very
sufficiently Christian although it leave some of these
sayings upon one side. But this is a very gross delusion.
Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and
agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere
the phrase be done. The universe, in relation to what any
man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly
comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and travailing
ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man;
or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain,
one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we
can dimly study with these mortal eyes. But what any man can
say of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation
to this little and plain corner, which is no less visible to
us than to him. We are looking on the same map; it will go
hard if we cannot follow the demonstration. The longest and
most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and
shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive
the aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument
is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly
parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new
star or an old street-lamp. And briefly, if a saying is hard
to understand, it is because we are thinking of something
else.
But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as
our prophet, and to think of different things in the same
order. To be of the same mind with another is to see all
things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few
indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is
to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of
his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his
vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at
once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare,
your mind will at once accept. You do not belong to the
school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that
theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is
overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that
discipleship is tested. We are all agreed about the middling
and indifferent parts of knowledge and morality; even the
most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon trust.
But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand
upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system
looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly
beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things
outside. Then only can you be certain that the words are not
words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are
you sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a
star and not a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart
of the mystery, since it was for these that the author wrote
his book.
Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often,
Christ finds a word that transcends all common-place
morality; every now and then he quits the beaten track to
pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and
magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of
thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday
conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept
some higher principle of conduct. To a man who is of the
same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some centre not
too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct from
some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude - or,
shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy - every such
saying should come home with a thrill of joy and
corroboration; he should feel each one below his feet as
another sure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each
should be another proof that in the torrent of the years and
generations, where doctrines and great armaments and empires
are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding by
the eternal stars. But alas! at this juncture of the ages it
is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole
fellowship of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder
and implicitly denies the saying. Christians! the farce is
impudently broad. Let us stand up in the sight of heaven and
confess. The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin
Franklin. HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY, is perhaps a hard
saying; it is certainly one by which a wise man of these days
will not too curiously direct his steps; but I think it shows
a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences; I
think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without
hyperbole, we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin
Franklin.
LAY MORALS
CHAPTER II
BUT, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a
world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of
all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts
engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some
conscience and Christianity of method. A man cannot go very
far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor
commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness; for
these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of
duty.
Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it
is case law at the best which can be learned by precept. The
letter is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which
underlies, and cannot be uttered, alone is true and helpful.
This is trite to sickness; but familiarity has a cunning
disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty from
the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall
dead upon the ear after several repetitions. If you see a
thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing
too often, you no longer hear it. Our attention requires to
be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a
thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of
about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar
means. The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the
common run of hearers; it has become mere words of course;
and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit
like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod;
they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say;
ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and
it cannot startle their composure. And so with this byword
about the letter and the spirit. It is quite true, no doubt;
but it has no meaning in the world to any man of us. Alas!
it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less: that
while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at
noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth. But let a
man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs,
and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what with the
multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of the shadow
as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made
the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be
compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and
complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing
than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a
surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the
very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of
leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.
Look now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is this a
place for you? Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?
Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be
proposed for the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines
and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable
multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and
at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can
you or your heart say more?
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of
life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own person,
and had every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys
upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson does
experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both to
age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but
the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly
was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times
and men and circumstances change about your changing
character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane affords
an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the best
in this changed theatre of a tomorrow? Will your own Past
truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future?
And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what
hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside
us on their unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes,
impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another
sphere of things?
And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of
scene, do you offer me these two score words? these five bald
prohibitions? For the moral precepts are no more than five;
the first four deal rather with matters of observance than of
conduct; the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT COVET, stands upon another
basis, and shall be spoken of ere long. The Jews, to whom
they were first given, in the course of years began to find
these precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less
than six hundred and fifty others! They hoped to make a
pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to
life in some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the
scientific game of whist. The comparison is just, and
condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be
more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to play
our game in life to the noblest and the most divine
advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view
of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously
leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of
spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than
is afforded by these five precepts?
HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER. Yes, but does that mean to
obey? and if so, how long and how far? THOU SHALL NOT KILL.
Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be
best fulfilled by killing. THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.
But some of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed
of marriage and under the sanction of religion and law. THOU
SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS. How? by speech or by silence
also? or even by a smile? THOU SHALT NOT STEAL. Ah, that
indeed! But what is TO STEAL?
To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to
be our guide? The police will give us one construction,
leaving the word only that least minimum of meaning without
which society would fall in pieces; but surely we must take
some higher sense than this; surely we hope more than a bare
subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to prosper
and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live
rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a
policeman. The approval or the disapproval of the police
must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous
and good. There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the
condemnation of the law. The law represents that modicum of
morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;
but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own
more stringent judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave
man has ever given a rush for such considerations. The
Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling for this
social bond into which we all are born when we come into the
world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently
share throughout our lives:- but even to them, no more than
to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state
supersede the higher law of duty. Without hesitation and
without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments
rather than abstain from doing right. But the accidental
superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in
allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to
denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate their just
crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.
The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active
conscience or a thoughtful head. But to show you how one or
the other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of
frontier is left unridden by this invaluable eighth
commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man's
life.
He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous,
flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some
high motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life.
I should tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the
eighth commandment. But he got hold of some unsettling
works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his
views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was
the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my
friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of
education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly
childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of
air; for all of which he was indebted to his father's wealth.
At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who
followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees
in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force.
He was at that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably
curious in the aspects of life; and he spent much of his time
scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-
kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and
many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this
also struck him. He began to perceive that life was a
handicap upon strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he
had been told, a fair and equal race. He began to tremble
that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all
the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against
so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly
open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being
as himself. There sat a youth beside him on the college
benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at
intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have
it washed. It was my friend's principle to stay away as
often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.
But there was something that came home to him sharply, in
this fellow who had to give over study till his shirt was
washed, and the scores of others who had never an opportunity
at all. IF ONE OF THESE COULD TAKE HIS PLACE, he thought;
and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes. He was
eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and despised himself
as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs of
Fortune. He could no longer see without confusion one of
these brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity.
Had he not filched that fellow's birthright? At best was he
not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and
greedily devouring stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged
to his father, who had worked, and thought, and given up his
liberty to earn it; but by what justice could the money
belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing but help
to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more even
and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these
considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal
position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end,
and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation
of expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only
unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting
anger with which young men regard injustices in the first
blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely
acquiesce in their existence, and knowingly profit by their
complications. Yet all this while he suffered many indignant
pangs. And once, when he put on his boots, like any other
unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his best
consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free
himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not
his, and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare
of life.
Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at
great expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think
his perplexities were thickest. When he thought of all the
other young men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop
of families, who must remain at home to die, and with all
their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and how he,
by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no
labour, no devotion of soul and body, that could repay and
justify these partialities. A religious lady, to whom he
communicated these reflections, could see no force in them
whatever. 'It was God's will,' said she. But he knew it was
by God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which
cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by
God's will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which
excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity
of Pilate. He knew, moreover, that although the possibility
of this favour he was now enjoying issued from his
circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his own will;
and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest and
sunshine. And hence this allegation of God's providence did
little to relieve his scruples. I promise you he had a very
troubled mind. And I would not laugh if I were you, though
while he was thus making mountains out of what you think
molehills, he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly
practising many other things that to you seem black as hell.
Every man is his own judge and mountain-guide through life.
There is an old story of a mote and a beam, apparently not
true, but worthy perhaps of some consideration. I should, if
I were you, give some consideration to these scruples of his,
and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it is
not unlikely that there may be something under both. In the
meantime you must hear how my friend acted. Like many
invalids, he supposed that he would die. Now, should he die,
he saw no means of repaying this huge loan which, by the
hands of his father, mankind had advanced him for his
sickness. In that case it would be lost money. So he
determined that the advance should be as small as possible;
and, so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in
an upper room, and grudged himself all but necessaries. But
so soon as he began to perceive a change for the better, he
felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and brighten
his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a
help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a
help to him.
I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and
partial in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too
little of his parents; but I do say that here are some
scruples which tormented my friend in his youth, and still,
perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the midst of his
enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in
justice, and point, in their confused way, to some more
honourable honesty within the reach of man. And at least, is
not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth commandment? And
what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did that
precept afford my friend throughout these contentions? 'Thou
shalt not steal.' With all my heart! But AM I stealing?
The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us
from pursuing any transaction to an end. You can make no one
understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain,
whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of
mankind, and either a good or an evil to the world. We have
a sort of blindness which prevents us from seeing anything
but sovereigns. If one man agrees to give another so many
shillings for so many hours' work, and then wilfully gives
him a certain proportion of the price in bad money and only
the remainder in good, we can see with half an eye that this
man is a thief. But if the other spends a certain proportion
of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco, and a certain
other proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or
trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his own past
adventures, and only the remainder in downright work such as
he is paid to do, is he, because the theft is one of time and
not of money, - is he any the less a thief? The one gave a
bad shilling, the other an imperfect hour; but both broke the
bargain, and each is a thief. In piecework, which is what
most of us do, the case is none the less plain for being even
less material. If you forge a bad knife, you have wasted
some of mankind's iron, and then, with unrivalled cynicism,
you pocket some of mankind's money for your trouble. Is
there any man so blind who cannot see that this is theft?
Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been
playing fast and loose with mankind's resources against
hunger; there will be less bread in consequence, and for lack
of that bread somebody will die next winter: a grim
consideration. And you must not hope to shuffle out of blame
because you got less money for your less quantity of bread;
for although a theft be partly punished, it is none the less
a theft for that. You took the farm against competitors;
there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility and be
answerable for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took
it. By the act you came under a tacit bargain with mankind
to cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you were
under no superintendence, you were on parole; and you have
broke your bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself
among the rest if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.
Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work
which is not as good as you can make it, which you have
palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in
execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on parole and
in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your
own heart and condemn you for a thief. Have you a salary?
If you trifle with your health, and so render yourself less
capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily pocket
the emolument - what are you but a thief? Have you double
accounts? do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or
ambiguous process, gain more from those who deal with you
than it you were bargaining and dealing face to face in front
of God? - What are you but a thief? Lastly, if you fill an
office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of
hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and
still draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of
this office, or still book your profits and keep on flooding
the world with these injurious goods? - though you were old,
and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are
you but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere
curiosities of the intellect, in an age when the spirit of
honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all business is
conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade, that
not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit. I would say less if I thought
less. But looking to my own reason and the right of things,
I can only avow that I am a thief myself, and that I
passionately suspect my neighbours of the same guilt.
Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you
find that in your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and
follow the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a
stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs.
Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the stress
of time nor the scrutiny of conscience. Even before the
lowest of all tribunals, - before a court of law, whose
business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand
miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically
wrong that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of
society by their misdeeds - even before a court of law, as we
begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following
at each other's tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning
to be reproved and punished, and declared no honesty at all,
but open theft and swindling; and simpletons who have gone on
through life with a quiet conscience may learn suddenly, from
the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade may be a
custom of the devil. You thought it was easy to be honest.
Did you think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful?
Did you think the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as
a horn-pipe? and you could walk through life like a gentleman
and a hero, with no more concern than it takes to go to
church or to address a circular? And yet all this time you
had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you
would not have broken it for the world!
The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of
little use in private judgment. If compression is what you
want, you have their whole spirit compressed into the golden
rule; and yet there expressed with more significance, since
the law is there spiritually and not materially stated. And
in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the sixth to
the ninth, are rather legal than ethical. The police-court
is their proper home. A magistrate cannot tell whether you
love your neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less
whether you have murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery,
or held up your hand and testified to that which was not; and
these things, for rough practical tests, are as good as can
be found. And perhaps, therefore, the best condensation of
the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,
'neminem laedere' and 'suum cuique tribuere.' But all this
granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are
inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that while
they tell the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can
never direct an anxious sinner what to do.
Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a
succinct proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing
in our faces. We grant them one and all and for all that
they are worth; it is something above and beyond that we
desire. Christ was in general a great enemy to such a way of
teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any of these plump
commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers
from the letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal
affair; in the war of righteousness every man fights for his
own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot
shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an
indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time
and case. The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an
advocate who pleads at my tribunal. He has to show not the
law, but that the law applies. Can he convince me? then he
gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving various
counsels to varying people, and often jealously careful to
avoid definite precept. Is he asked, for example, to divide
a heritage? He refuses: and the best advice that he will
offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth commandment which
figures so strangely among the rest. TAKE HEED, AND BEWARE
OF COVETOUSNESS. If you complain that this is vague, I have
failed to carry you along with me in my argument. For no
definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced
from heaven by the voice of God. And life is so intricate
and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not
twice in the ages, shall we find that nice consent of
circumstances to which alone it can apply.
LAY MORALS
CHAPTER III
ALTHOUGH the world and life have in a sense become
commonplace to our experience, it is but in an external
torpor; the true sentiment slumbers within us; and we have
but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to rekindle
our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first
surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this
connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead
ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning
as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away
by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the
theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green,
commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this
hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on
summer eves upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead
embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent
void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that
the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.
Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the
truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with
mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known no other,
it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.
But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of
wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful
to himself. He inhabits a body which he is continually
outliving, discarding and renewing. Food and sleep, by an
unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the freshness of his
countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his eyes, his
brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and
touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and
intently ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation,
to rise up and run, to perform the strange and revolting
round of physical functions. The sight of a flower, the note
of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he looks
unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
bonfires of the universe. He comprehends, he designs, he
tames nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a
balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins interminable labours,
joins himself into federations and populous cities, spends
his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit
unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of
unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days. His
sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest
stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing defying
explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and
can be extinguished with a touch. His heart, which all
through life so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but
a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin. His whole body,
for all its savage energies, its leaping and its winged
desires, may yet be tamed and conquered by a draught of air
or a sprinkling of cold dew. What he calls death, which is
the seeming arrest of everything, and the ruin and hateful
transformation of the visible body, lies in wait for him
outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
diseases from within. He is still learning to be a man when
his faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not
yet understood himself or his position before he inevitably
dies. And yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no
thought of his last end, lives as though he were eternal,
plunges with his vulnerable body into the shock of war, and
daily affronts death with unconcern. He cannot take a step
without pain or pleasure. His life is a tissue of
sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more
directly from himself or his surroundings. He is conscious
of himself as a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves,
chooses, and is satisfied; conscious of his surroundings as
it were of an inexhaustible purveyor, the source of aspects,
inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting
caresses. Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights
and agonies.
Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a
root in man. To him everything is important in the degree to
which it moves him. The telegraph wires and posts, the
electricity speeding from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the
glad or sorrowful import of the message, and the paper on
which it is finally brought to him at home, are all equally
facts, all equally exist for man. A word or a thought can
wound him as acutely as a knife of steel. If he thinks he is
loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be
in a distant land and short of necessary bread. Does he
think he is not loved? - he may have the woman at his beck,
and there is not a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if
we are to make any account of this figment of reason, the
distinction between material and immaterial, we shall
conclude that the life of each man as an individual is
immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of
mankind as a race turn upon material conditions. The
physical business of each man's body is transacted for him;
like a sybarite, he has attentive valets in his own viscera;
he breathes, he sweats, he digests without an effort, or so
much as a consenting volition; for the most part he even
eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were
between two thoughts. His life is centred among other and
more important considerations; touch him in his honour or his
love, creatures of the imagination which attach him to
mankind or to an individual man or woman; cross him in his
piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns from
his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous
emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees himself at
a blow from the web of pains and pleasures.
It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a
rounded and autonomous empire; but that in the same body with
him there dwell other powers tributary but independent. If I
now behold one walking in a garden, curiously coloured and
illuminated by the sun, digesting his food with elaborate
chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing himself by
the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand
delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the
path, and all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about
America, or the dog-star, or the attributes of God - what am
I to say, or how am I to describe the thing I see? Is that
truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is it
not a man and something else? What, then, are we to count
the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded?
It is a question much debated. Some read his history in a
certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive
digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown
upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools of
theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of
doubt. Yet either of these views, however plausible, is
beside the question; either may be right; and I care not; I
ask a more particular answer, and to a more immediate point.
What is the man? There is Something that was before hunger
and that remains behind after a meal. It may or may not be
engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it
changes, heightens, and sanctifies. Thus it is not engaged
in lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is
engaged in love, where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of
the desire, and where age, sickness, or alienation may deface
what was desirable without diminishing the sentiment. This
something, which is the man, is a permanence which abides
through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now
triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate
distress of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.
So, to the man, his own central self fades and grows clear
again amid the tumult of the senses, like a revolving Pharos
in the night. It is forgotten; it is hid, it seems, for
ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold himself
once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.
Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and
eats, that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the
outer and lower sides of man. This inner consciousness, this
lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the
individual exists and must order his conduct, is something
special to himself and not common to the race. His joys
delight, his sorrows wound him, according as THIS is
interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they
arise in an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the
tributary chieftains of the mind. He may lose all, and THIS
not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and THIS
leap in his bosom with a cruel pang. I do not speak of it to
hardened theorists: the living man knows keenly what it is I
mean.
'Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and
more divine than the things which cause the various effects,
and, as it were, pull thee by the strings. What is that now
in thy mind? is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything
of that kind?' Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most
notable passages in any book. Here is a question worthy to
be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the utterance of
your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard
intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your
thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a
higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
above all base considerations? This soul seems hardly
touched with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no
fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious - and that
as though we read it in the eyes of some one else - of a
great and unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to
pass over and look beyond the objects of desire and fear, for
something else. And this something else? this something
which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the
kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are
alike indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards
conduct - by what name are we to call it? It may be the love
of God; or it may be an inherited (and certainly well
concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate the race;
I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it
will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I
intend no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready,
and more than willing, to accept the rigid consequence, and
lay aside, as far as the treachery of the reason will permit,
all former meanings attached to the word righteousness. What
is right is that for which a man's central self is ever ready
to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is
what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible
with the fixed design of righteousness.
To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of
definition. That which is right upon this theory is
intimately dictated to each man by himself, but can never be
rigorously set forth in language, and never, above all,
imposed upon another. The conscience has, then, a vision
like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the
most part illuminates none but its possessor. When many
people perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree
upon a word as symbol; and hence we have such words as TREE,
STAR, LOVE, HONOUR, or DEATH; hence also we have this word
RIGHT, which, like the others, we all understand, most of us
understand differently, and none can express succinctly
otherwise. Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some
steps towards comprehension of our own superior thoughts.
For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that a man,
through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware
of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost
suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy. As we said
before, his inner self or soul appears to him by successive
revelations, and is frequently obscured. It is from a study
of these alternations that we can alone hope to discover,
even dimly, what seems right and what seems wrong to this
veiled prophet of ourself.
All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call
impression as well as what we call intuition, so far as my
argument looks, we must accept. It is not wrong to desire
food, or exercise, or beautiful surroundings, or the love of
sex, or interest which is the food of the mind. All these
are craved; all these should be craved; to none of these in
itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable
want, we recognise a demand of nature. Yet we know that
these natural demands may be superseded; for the demands
which are common to mankind make but a shadowy consideration
in comparison to the demands of the individual soul. Food is
almost the first prerequisite; and yet a high character will
go without food to the ruin and death of the body rather than
gain it in a manner which the spirit disavows. Pascal laid
aside mathematics; Origen doctored his body with a knife;
every day some one is thus mortifying his dearest interests
and desires, and, in Christ's words, entering maim into the
Kingdom of Heaven. This is to supersede the lesser and less
harmonious affections by renunciation; and though by this
ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get thither a
whole and perfect man. But there is another way, to
supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul and all
the faculties and senses pursue a common route and share in
one desire. Thus, man is tormented by a very imperious
physical desire; it spoils his rest, it is not to be denied;
the doctors will tell you, not I, how it is a physical need,
like the want of food or slumber. In the satisfaction of
this desire, as it first appears, the soul sparingly takes
part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets and disapproves the
satisfaction. But let the man learn to love a woman as far
as he is capable of love; and for this random affection of
the body there is substituted a steady determination, a
consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
adopts, and commands the other. The desire survives,
strengthened, perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in
scope and character. Life is no longer a tale of betrayals
and regrets; for the man now lives as a whole; his
consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
remains approvingly conscious of himself.
Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul
demands. It demands that we shall not live alternately with
our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and
disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no
longer oppose, but serve each other to a common end. It
demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but great and
comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like
notes in a harmonious chord. That were indeed a way of peace
and pleasure, that were indeed a heaven upon earth. It does
not demand, however, or, to speak in measure, it does not
demand of me, that I should starve my appetites for no
purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself; or, in a
weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned
to guide and enjoy with wisdom. The soul demands unity of
purpose, not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up
all his strength and sweetness, all his passion and wisdom,
into one, and make of him a perfect man exulting in
perfection. To conclude ascetically is to give up, and not
to solve, the problem. The ascetic and the creeping hog,
although they are at different poles, have equally failed in
life. The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back
his seamen in a cock-boat, and has lost the ship. I believe
there are not many sea-captains who would plume themselves on
either result as a success.
But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive
impulses and march with one mind through life, there is
plainly one thing more unrighteous than all others, and one
declension which is irretrievable and draws on the rest. And
this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In the best of
times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear,
strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free,
that we enjoy communion with our soul. At the worst, we are
so fallen and passive that we may say shortly we have none.
An arctic torpor seizes upon men. Although built of nerves,
and set adrift in a stimulating world, they develop a
tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes
engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and
soon loses both the will and power to look higher
considerations in the face. This is ruin; this is the last
failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation on the
spot and without the form of judgment. 'What shall it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and LOSE HIMSELF?'
It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul
and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part
of moral and religious education is directed; not only that
of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under
which we are all God's scholars till we die. If, as
teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must say
what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that
soul's dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul
would have him think of them. If, from some conformity
between us and the pupil, or perhaps among all men, we do in
truth speak in such a dialect and express such views, beyond
question we shall touch in him a spring; beyond question he
will recognise the dialect as one that he himself has spoken
in his better hours; beyond question he will cry, 'I had
forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had
forgot to use them! I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly
upright, and to that I will listen and conform.' In short,
say to him anything that he has once thought, or been upon
the point of thinking, or show him any view of life that he
has once clearly seen, or been upon the point of clearly
seeing; and you have done your part and may leave him to
complete the education for himself.
Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want
greatness; and the dialect in which alone it can be
intelligibly uttered is not the dialect of my soul. It is a
sort of postponement of life; nothing quite is, but something
different is to be; we are to keep our eyes upon the indirect
from the cradle to the grave. We are to regulate our conduct
not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future; and to
value acts as they will bring us money or good opinion; as
they will bring us, in one word, PROFIT. We must be what is
called respectable, and offend no one by our carriage; it
will not do to make oneself conspicuous - who knows? even in
virtue? says the Christian parent! And we must be what is
called prudent and make money; not only because it is
pleasant to have money, but because that also is a part of
respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
without decent possessions. Received in society! as if that
were the kingdom of heaven! There is dear Mr. So-and-so; -
look at him! - so much respected - so much looked up to -
quite the Christian merchant! And we must cut our conduct as
strictly as possible after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and
lay our whole lives to make money and be strictly decent.
Besides these holy injunctions, which form by far the greater
part of a youth's training in our Christian homes, there are
at least two other doctrines. We are to live just now as
well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven, where we
shall be good. We are to worry through the week in a lay,
disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a
different life on Sunday.
The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to
all these positions, without stepping aside to justify them
on their own ground. It is because we have been disgusted
fifty times with physical squalls, and fifty times torn
between conflicting impulses, that we teach people this
indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by
remote consequences instead of the immediate face of things.
The very desire to act as our own souls would have us,
coupled with a pathetic disbelief in ourselves, moves us to
follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows? they may be
on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number,
the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in
concert with a whole civilised nation, there are surely a
majority of chances that we must be acting right. And again,
how true it is that we can never behave as we wish in this
tormented sphere, and can only aspire to different and more
favourable circumstances, in order to stand out and be
ourselves wholly and rightly! And yet once more, if in the
hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend to nod
and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set
apart for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around
you on the possibilities of life.
This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be,
said for these doctrines. Only, in the course of this
chapter, the reader and I have agreed upon a few catchwords,
and been looking at morals on a certain system; it was a pity
to lose an opportunity of testing the catchwords, and seeing
whether, by this system as well as by others, current
doctrines could show any probable justification. If the
doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have
condemned the system. Our sight of the world is very narrow;
the mind but a pedestrian instrument; there's nothing new
under the sun, as Solomon says, except the man himself; and
though that changes the aspect of everything else, yet he
must see the same things as other people, only from a
different side.
And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of
him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of
the majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his
eyes the one authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be
a docile citizen; he will never be a man. It is ours, on the
other hand, to disregard this babble and chattering of other
men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before
us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before
heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that
knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as
loyalty to a man's own better self; and from those who have
not that, God help me, how am I to look for loyalty to
others? The most dull, the most imbecile, at a certain
moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational
sense of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through
contempt and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of
his dear soul. Be glad if you are not tried by such
extremities. But although all the world ranged themselves in
one line to tell you 'This is wrong,' be you your own
faithful vassal and the ambassador of God - throw down the
glove and answer 'This is right.' Do you think you are only
declaring yourself? Perhaps in some dim way, like a child
who delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening
wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some
truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you
stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a
thousand weak ones with your body; perhaps, by this
declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of false
witness against humanity and the little ones unborn. It is
good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to
respect oneself and utter the voice of God. God, if there be
any God, speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of
men; the thoughts and habits of each fresh generation and
each new-coined spirit throw another light upon the universe
and contain another commentary on the printed Bibles; every
scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something new,
is a letter of God's alphabet; and though there is a grave
responsibility for all who speak, is there none for those who
unrighteously keep silence and conform? Is not that also to
conceal and cloak God's counsel? And how should we regard
the man of science who suppressed all facts that would not
tally with the orthodoxy of the hour?
Wrong? You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning
round the revolving shoulder of the world. Not truth, but
truthfulness, is the good of your endeavour. For when will
men receive that first part and prerequisite of truth, that,
by the order of things, by the greatness of the universe, by
the darkness and partiality of man's experience, by the
inviolate secrecy of God, kept close in His most open
revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages must
be, wrong? Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong to
God. And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer,
every man of men, who wishes truly, must be right. He is
right to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and
candour. That let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not
sparing a thought for contrary opinions; that, for what it is
worth, let him proclaim. Be not afraid; although he be
wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed Dagon he insults. For
the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering,
inept tradition which the people holds. These truths survive
in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and
confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the
many, in their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and
misinterpret.
So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call
'rank conformity': the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can
be laid on men. And now of Profit. And this doctrine is
perhaps the more redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of
men; not only the heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient,
cowlike squadrons. A man, by this doctrine, looks to
consequences at the second, or third, or fiftieth turn. He
chooses his end, and for that, with wily turns and through a
great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark. There may be
political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there can
spring no great moral zeal. To look thus obliquely upon life
is the very recipe for moral slumber. Our intention and
endeavour should be directed, not on some vague end of money
or applause, which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month
or a year, or twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the
approval of others, but on the rightness of that act. At
every instant, at every step in life, the point has to be
decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be gained or
lost. At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step
we must set down the foot and sound the trumpet. 'This have
I done,' we must say; 'right or wrong, this have I done, in
unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and God.' The
profit of every act should be this, that it was right for us
to do it. Any other profit than that, if it involved a
kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God's upright
soldier, to leave me untempted.
It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it
is made directly and for its own sake. The whole man, mind
and body, having come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates
conduct. There are two dispositions eternally opposed: that
in which we recognise that one thing is wrong and another
right, and that in which, not seeing any clear distinction,
we fall back on the consideration of consequences. The truth
is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought
very wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which
have the disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out;
the more serious part of men inclining to think all things
RATHER WRONG, the more jovial to suppose them RIGHT ENOUGH
FOR PRACTICAL PURPOSES. I will engage my head, they do not
find that view in their own hearts; they have taken it up in
a dark despair; they are but troubled sleepers talking in
their sleep. The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very
distinctly upon many points of right and wrong, and often
differs flatly with what is held out as the thought of
corporate humanity in the code of society or the code of law.
Am I to suppose myself a monster? I have only to read books,
the Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster
no longer; and instead I think the mass of people are merely
speaking in their sleep.
It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in
school copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame.
I ask no other admission; we are to seek honour, upright
walking with our own conscience every hour of the day, and
not fame, the consequence, the far-off reverberation of our
footsteps. The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is what
concerns righteousness. Better disrespectable honour than
dishonourable fame. Better useless or seemingly hurtful
honour, than dishonour ruling empires and filling the mouths
of thousands. For the man must walk by what he sees, and
leave the issue with God who made him and taught him by the
fortune of his life. You would not dishonour yourself for
money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then, for
a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person's theory
in morals?
So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can
calculate the bearing of his own behaviour even on those
immediately around him, how much less upon the world at large
or on succeeding generations! To walk by external prudence
and the rule of consequences would require, not a man, but
God. All that we know to guide us in this changing labyrinth
is our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a few
old precepts which commend themselves to that. The precepts
are vague when we endeavour to apply them; consequences are
more entangled than a wisp of string, and their confusion is
unrestingly in change; we must hold to what we know and walk
by it. We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by knowledge.
You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or
eminently respectable: you love him because you love him;
that is love, and any other only a derision and grimace. It
should be the same with all our actions. If we were to
conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was never torn
between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute
consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every
action of his life to a self-dictation as absolute and
unreasoned as that which bids him love one woman and be true
to her till death. But we should not conceive him as
sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against each
other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality
instead of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his
end through a thousand sinister compromises and
considerations. The one man might be wily, might be adroit,
might be wise, might be respectable, might be gloriously
useful; it is the other man who would be good.
The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be
successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially,
not outwardly, respectable. Does your soul ask profit? Does
it ask money? Does it ask the approval of the indifferent
herd? I believe not. For my own part, I want but little
money, I hope; and I do not want to be decent at all, but to
be good.
LAY MORALS
CHAPTER IV
WE have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps
varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation
of events and circumstances. Now, for us, that is ultimate.
It may be founded on some reasonable process, but it is not a
process which we can follow or comprehend. And moreover the
dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except in very
lively and well-living natures; and between-whiles we must
brush along without it. Practice is a more intricate and
desperate business than the toughest theorising; life is an
affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and prompt action are
alone possible and right. As a matter of fact, there is no
one so upright but he is influenced by the world's chatter;
and no one so headlong but he requires to consider
consequences and to keep an eye on profit. For the soul
adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and
cares only to combine them for some common purpose which
shall interest all. Now, respect for the opinion of others,
the study of consequences, and the desire of power and
comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature of man; and
the more undeniably since we find that, in our current
doctrines, they have swallowed up the others and are thought
to conclude in themselves all the worthy parts of man.
These, then, must also be suffered to affect conduct in the
practical domain, much or little according as they are
forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.
Now, a man's view of the universe is mostly a view of the
civilised society in which he lives. Other men and women are
so much more grossly and so much more intimately palpable to
his perceptions, that they stand between him and all the
rest; they are larger to his eye than the sun, he hears them
more plainly than thunder, with them, by them, and for them,
he must live and die. And hence the laws that affect his
intercourse with his fellow-men, although merely customary
and the creatures of a generation, are more clearly and
continually before his mind than those which bind him into
the eternal system of things, support him in his upright
progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his
bodily life. And hence it is that money stands in the first
rank of considerations and so powerfully affects the choice.
For our society is built with money for mortar; money is
present in every joint of circumstance; it might be named the
social atmosphere, since, in society, it is by that alone
that men continue to live, and only through that or chance
that they can reach or affect one another. Money gives us
food, shelter, and privacy; it permits us to be clean in
person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains us books
for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses of
others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the
best in life. If we love, it enables us to meet and live
with the loved one, or even to prolong her health and life;
if we have scruples, it gives us an opportunity to be honest;
if we have any bright designs, here is what will smooth the
way to their accomplishment. Penury is the worst slavery,
and will soon lead to death.
But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it.
The rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself
nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but
perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.
The table may be loaded and the appetite wanting; the purse
may be full, and the heart empty. He may have gained the
world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him,
in a great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he may
live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. Without an
appetite, without an aspiration, void of appreciation,
bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in his great house, let
him sit and look upon his fingers. It is perhaps a more
fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than
to be born a millionaire. Although neither is to be
despised, it is always better policy to learn an interest
than to make a thousand pounds; for the money will soon be
spent, or perhaps you may feel no joy in spending it; but the
interest remains imperishable and ever new. To become a
botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher, an antiquary, or
an artist, is to enlarge one's possessions in the universe by
an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort of
property, than to purchase a farm of many acres. You had
perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps
you have two thousand five hundred after it. That represents
your gain in the one case. But in the other, you have thrown
down a barrier which concealed significance and beauty. The
blind man has learned to see. The prisoner has opened up a
window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects; he will
never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and
changing seasons, ships on the river, travellers on the road,
and the stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes have broken
jail! And again he who has learned to love an art or science
has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches; if
prosperity come, he will not enter poor into his inheritance;
he will not slumber and forget himself in the lap of money,
or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which is
not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into
living delight and satisfaction. ETRE ET PAS AVOIR - to be,
not to possess - that is the problem of life. To be wealthy,
a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the
second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all
honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free
from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love
with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear
possession in absence or unkindness - these are the gifts of
fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can
buy nothing. For what can a man possess, or what can he
enjoy, except himself? If he enlarge his nature, it is then
that he enlarges his estates. If his nature be happy and
valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if it were his park
and orchard.
But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.
It is not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life;
but it is the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the
individual man. And from this side, the question of money
has a very different scope and application. For no man can
be honest who does not work. Service for service. If the
farmer buys corn, and the labourer ploughs and reaps, and the
baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly you who eat must do
something in your turn. It is not enough to take off your
hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the admirable
constitution of society and your own convenient situation in
its upper and more ornamental stories. Neither is it enough
to buy the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only
changing the point of the inquiry; and you must first have
BOUGHT THE SIXPENCE. Service for service: how have you
bought your sixpences? A man of spirit desires certainty in
a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is
some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his
expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share in
profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner
and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile concern of
mankind.
Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are
so inappreciable to external tests, that this is not only a
matter for the private conscience, but one which even there
must be leniently and trustfully considered. For remember
how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and how
many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet
and joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of
letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps
better to be a living book. So long as we love we serve; so
long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we
are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a
friend. The true services of life are inestimable in money,
and are never paid. Kind words and caresses, high and wise
thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and
suffering, and all the charities of man's existence, are
neither bought nor sold.
Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion
of a man's services, is the wage that mankind pays him or,
briefly, what he earns. There at least there can be no
ambiguity. St. Paul is fully and freely entitled to his
earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and freely
entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true
business of each was not only something different, but
something which remained unpaid. A man cannot forget that he
is not superintended, and serves mankind on parole. He would
like, when challenged by his own conscience, to reply: 'I
have done so much work, and no less, with my own hands and
brain, and taken so much profit, and no more, for my own
personal delight.' And though St. Paul, if he had possessed
a private fortune, would probably have scorned to waste his
time in making tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion
none can be more easily pardoned than that by which a man,
already spiritually useful to the world, should restrict the
field of his chief usefulness to perform services more
apparent, and possess a livelihood that neither stupidity nor
malice could call in question. Like all sacrifices to public
opinion and mere external decency, this would certainly be
wrong; for the soul should rest contented with its own
approval and indissuadably pursue its own calling. Yet, so
grave and delicate is the question, that a man may well
hesitate before he decides it for himself; he may well fear
that he sets too high a valuation on his own endeavours after
good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where
others than himself shall judge the service and proportion
the wage.
And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are
born. They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are
their own paymasters on parole; and must pay themselves fair
wages and no more. For I suppose that in the course of ages,
and through reform and civil war and invasion, mankind was
pursuing some other and more general design than to set one
or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach
of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and
defended with so much eloquence and blood, for the
convenience of two or three millionaires and a few hundred
other persons of wealth and position. It is plain that if
mankind thus acted and suffered during all these generations,
they hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for
themselves and their descendants; that if they supported law
and order, it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they
denied themselves in the present, they must have had some
designs upon the future. Now, a great hereditary fortune is
a miracle of man's wisdom and mankind's forbearance; it has
not only been amassed and handed down, it has been suffered
to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a
consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new
spur to activity and honour, that with all this power of
service he should not prove unserviceable, and that this mass
of treasure should return in benefits upon the race. If he
had twenty, or thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker's,
or if all Yorkshire or all California were his to manage or
to sell, he would still be morally penniless, and have the
world to begin like Whittington, until he had found some way
of serving mankind. His wage is physically in his own hand;
but, in honour, that wage must still be earned. He is only
steward on parole of what is called his fortune. He must
honourably perform his stewardship. He must estimate his own
services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that
will be one among his functions. And while he will then be
free to spend that salary, great or little, on his own
private pleasures, the rest of his fortune he but holds and
disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his, because he
has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his services
have already been paid; but year by year it is his to
distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright and
outfit have been swallowed up in his, or to further public
works and institutions.
At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible
to be both rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a
far more continuous temptation to thieve than the labourer
who gets his shilling daily for despicable toils. Are you
surprised? It is even so. And you repeat it every Sunday in
your churches. 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God.' I have heard this and similar texts ingeniously
explained away and brushed from the path of the aspiring
Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish. One
excellent clergyman told us that the 'eye of a needle' meant
a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass
till they were unloaded - which is very likely just; and then
went on, bravely confounding the 'kingdom of God' with
heaven, the future paradise, to show that of course no rich
person could expect to carry his riches beyond the grave -
which, of course, he could not and never did. Various greedy
sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable doctrine
with relief. It was worth the while having come to church
that Sunday morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual,
meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and
figurative school-copybook; and if a man were only
respectable, he was a man after God's own heart.
Alas! I fear not. And though this matter of a man's services
is one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which
it is difficult to restrain the mind from judging. Thus I
shall be very easily persuaded that a man has earned his
daily bread; and if he has but a friend or two to whom his
company is delightful at heart, I am more than persuaded at
once. But it will be very hard to persuade me that any one
has earned an income of a hundred thousand. What he is to
his friends, he still would be if he were made penniless to-
morrow; for as to the courtiers of luxury and power, I will
neither consider them friends, nor indeed consider them at
all. What he does for mankind there are most likely hundreds
who would do the same, as effectually for the race and as
pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction of this
monstrous wage. Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable to
conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his
detention, I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.
At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that WHAT A
MAN SPENDS UPON HIMSELF, HE SHALL HAVE EARNED BY SERVICES TO
THE RACE. Thence flows a principle for the outset of life,
which is a little different from that taught in the present
day. I am addressing the middle and the upper classes; those
who have already been fostered and prepared for life at some
expense; those who have some choice before them, and can pick
professions; and above all, those who are what is called
independent, and need do nothing unless pushed by honour or
ambition. In this particular the poor are happy; among them,
when a lad comes to his strength, he must take the work that
offers, and can take it with an easy conscience. But in the
richer classes the question is complicated by the number of
opportunities and a variety of considerations. Here, then,
this principle of ours comes in helpfully. The young man has
to seek, not a road to wealth, but an opportunity of service;
not money, but honest work. If he has some strong
propensity, some calling of nature, some over-weening
interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or art,
he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two
reasons: the first external, because there he will render the
best services; the second personal, because a demand of his
own nature is to him without appeal whenever it can be
satisfied with the consent of his other faculties and
appetites. If he has no such elective taste, by the very
principle on which he chooses any pursuit at all he must
choose the most honest and serviceable, and not the most
highly remunerated. We have here an external problem, not
from or to ourself, but flowing from the constitution of
society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design of
righteousness. All that can be done is to present the
problem in proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the
individual. Now, the problem to the poor is one of
necessity: to earn wherewithal to live, they must find
remunerative labour. But the problem to the rich is one of
honour: having the wherewithal, they must find serviceable
labour. Each has to earn his daily bread: the one, because
he has not yet got it to eat; the other, who has already
eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.
Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and
comforts, whether for the body or the mind. But the
consideration of luxuries leads us to a new aspect of the
whole question, and to a second proposition no less true, and
maybe no less startling, than the last.
At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state
of surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us
with indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with
the callosities of habitual opulence. Born into what is
called a certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our
station. We squander without enjoyment, because our fathers
squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy, but from
brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the
presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence.
And not only do we squander money from habit, but still more
pitifully waste it in ostentation. I can think of no more
melancholy disgrace for a creature who professes either
reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend the smallest
fraction of his income upon that which he does not desire;
and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to drive, or
a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.
Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties
happy when it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be
twice blessed in its employment; and buyer and seller should
alike have their twenty shillings worth of profit out of
every pound. Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered
man, because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My
concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from
having bought a whistle when I did not want one. I find I
regret this, or would regret it if I gave myself the time,
not only on personal but on moral and philanthropical
considerations. For, first, in a world where money is
wanting to buy books for eager students and food and medicine
for pining children, and where a large majority are starved
in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid,
and cruel to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite
and enjoy no return of genuine satisfaction. My philanthropy
is wide enough in scope to include myself; and when I have
made myself happy, I have at least one good argument that I
have acted rightly; but where that is not so, and I have
bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive
that I have robbed the poor. And, second, anything I buy or
use which I do not sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy,
disturbs the balance of supply and demand, and contributes to
remove industrious hands from the production of what is
useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon ropes of
sand and things that are a weariness to the flesh. That
extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot,
in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another
question for each man's heart. He knows if he can enjoy what
he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger;
nay, it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing
really belongs to a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is
connected with propriety; and that only is the man's which is
proper to his wants and faculties.
A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by
poverty. Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply
want. It remains to be seen whether with half his present
income, or a third, he cannot, in the most generous sense,
live as fully as at present. He is a fool who objects to
luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest against
the waste of luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot
enjoy them. It remains to be seen, by each man who would
live a true life to himself and not a merely specious life to
society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he
merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last
he will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he will
be surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him
in complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.
Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived upon a
principle of rivalry, where each man and each household must
ape the tastes and emulate the display of others. One is
delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or
works of art or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of
these refinements, who am perhaps a plain athletic creature
and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel shirts and a camp bed,
am yet called upon to assimilate all these other tastes and
make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own. It may
be cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I
will spend my money as I please and for my own intimate
personal gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop
indeed to lay out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied
social decency or duty. I shall not wear gloves unless my
hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight in them.
Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the world;
that, in fact and for an obvious reason, of any woman who
shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I
have a mind. If I do not ask society to live with me, they
must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further right
but to refuse the invitation! There is a kind of idea abroad
that a man must live up to his station, that his house, his
table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence,
and equally imposing to the world. If this is in the Bible,
the passage has eluded my inquiries. If it is not in the
Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool. Throw
aside this fancy. See what you want, and spend upon that;
distinguish what you do not care about, and spend nothing
upon that. There are not many people who can differentiate
wines above a certain and that not at all a high price. Are
you sure you are one of these? Are you sure you prefer
cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of a
farthing? Are you sure you wish to keep a gig? Do you care
about where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in
a cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you
enjoy fine clothes? It is not possible to answer these
questions without a trial; and there is nothing more obvious
to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups
and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his
father's house, has still his education to begin. Let the
experiment be made, and he will find to his surprise that he
has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour; that the
cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes,
the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits,
but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his
former callous and somnambulous submission to wealth.
The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the
imaginary Bohemians of literature, is exactly described by
such a principle of life. The Bohemian of the novel, who
drinks more than is good for him and prefers anything to
work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a
respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability,
living for the outside, and an adventurer. But the man I
mean lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and not
what is thought proper, buys what he wants for himself, and
not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he can
do well and not what will bring him in money or favour. You
may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian.
And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be,
is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do
with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more
useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in
some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and
shares his sovereign or his shilling with a friend. The
poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian in virtue of their
birth. Do you know where beggars go? Not to the great
houses where people sit dazed among their thousands, but to
the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the
widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into
the treasury.
But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or
who in any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is
common to his level in society, falls out of society
altogether. I suppose the young man to have chosen his
career on honourable principles; he finds his talents and
instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit; in a
certain industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with
a healthy and becoming service; and he is not sure that he
would be doing so, or doing so equally well, in any other
industry within his reach. Then that is his true sphere in
life; not the one in which he was born to his father, but the
one which is proper to his talents and instincts. And
suppose he does fall out of society, is that a cause of
sorrow? Is your heart so dead that you prefer the
recognition of many to the love of a few? Do you think
society loves you? Put it to the proof. Decline in material
expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you than
for the Khan of Tartary. You will lose no friends. If you
had any, you will keep them. Only those who were friends to
your coat and equipage will disappear; the smiling faces will
disappear as by enchantment; but the kind hearts will remain
steadfastly kind. Are you so lost, are you so dead, are you
so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon
solid fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the
countenance of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a
report of ruin, who will drop you with insult at a shadow of
disgrace, who do not know you and do not care to know you but
by sight, and whom you in your turn neither know nor care to
know in a more human manner? Is it not the principle of
society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere
with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a
consideration of money goes before any consideration of
affection known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not
even the honour of thieves, and will rook their nearest and
dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go as far
as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not
put on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my
appetites and control my temper for the sake of those I love;
but society shall take me as I choose to be, or go without
me. Neither they nor I will lose; for where there is no
love, it is both laborious and unprofitable to associate.
But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend
money on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the
doctrine applies with equal force to the rich and to the
poor, to the man who has amassed many thousands as well as to
the youth precariously beginning life. And it may be asked,
Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not the best of
company? But the principle was this: that which a man has
not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully
enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind's
treasure which he holds as steward on parole. To mankind,
then, it must be made profitable; and how this should be done
is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for
himself, and about which none has a right to judge him. Yet
there are a few considerations which are very obvious and may
here be stated. Mankind is not only the whole in general,
but every one in particular. Every man or woman is one of
mankind's dear possessions; to his or her just brain, and
kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of its
hopes for the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of
good acts and source of blessings to the race. This money
which you do not need, which, in a rigid sense, you do not
want, may therefore be returned not only in public
benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses. Your
wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and
should be helped the first. There at least there can be
little imposture, for you know their necessities of your own
knowledge. And consider, if all the world did as you did,
and according to their means extended help in the circle of
their affections, there would be no more crying want in times
of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with a
doubt and received with confusion. Would not this simple
rule make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we
inhabit?
[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]
FATHER DAMIEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND
DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU
SYDNEY,
FEBRUARY 25, 1890.
SIR, - It may probably occur to you that we have met, and
visited, and conversed; on my side, with interest. You may
remember that you have done me several courtesies, for which
I was prepared to be grateful. But there are duties which
come before gratitude, and offences which justly divide
friends, far more acquaintances. Your letter to the Reverend
H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had
filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up
to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me
from the bonds of gratitude. You know enough, doubtless, of
the process of canonisation to be aware that, a hundred years
after the death of Damien, there will appear a man charged
with the painful office of the DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. After that
noble brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shall have lain
a century at rest, one shall accuse, one defend him. The
circumstance is unusual that the devil's advocate should be a
volunteer, should be a member of a sect immediately rival,
and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly office
ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall
leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me
inspiring. If I have at all learned the trade of using words
to convey truth and to arouse emotion, you have at last
furnished me with a subject. For it is in the interest of
all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every quarter
of the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but
that you and your letter should be displayed at length, in
their true colours, to the public eye.
To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I
shall then proceed to criticise your utterance from several
points of view, divine and human, in the course of which I
shall attempt to draw again, and with more specification, the
character of the dead saint whom it has pleased you to
vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you for
ever.
'HONOLULU,
'AUGUST 2, 1889.
'Rev. H. B. GAGE.
'DEAR BROTHER, - In answer to your inquiries about Father
Damien, I can only reply that we who knew the man are
surprised at the extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he
was a most saintly philanthropist. The simple truth is, he
was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted. He was not
sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay
at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but
circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the
island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to
Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements
inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as
occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure
man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he
died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.
Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the
government physicians, and so forth, but never with the
Catholic idea of meriting eternal life. - Yours, etc.,
'C. M. HYDE.' (1)
To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at
the outset on my private knowledge of the signatory and his
sect. It may offend others; scarcely you, who have been so
busy to collect, so bold to publish, gossip on your rivals.
And this is perhaps the moment when I may best explain to you
the character of what you are to read: I conceive you as a
man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with
what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you
again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off
the foil and to plunge home. And if in aught that I shall
say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I respect
and remember with affection, I can but offer them my regret;
I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of
interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted
by anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared
with the pain with which they read your letter. It is not
the hangman, but the criminal, that brings dishonour on the
house.
You belong, sir, to a sect - I believe my sect, and that in
which my ancestors laboured - which has enjoyed, and partly
failed to utilise, an exceptional advantage in the islands of
Hawaii. The first missionaries came; they found the land
already self-purged of its old and bloody faith; they were
embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm; what
troubles they supported came far more from whites than from
Hawaiians; and to these last they stood (in a rough figure)
in the shoes of God. This is not the place to enter into the
degree or causes of their failure, such as it is. One
element alone is pertinent, and must here be plainly dealt
with. In the course of their evangelical calling, they - or
too many of them - grew rich. It may be news to you that the
houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets
of Honolulu. It will at least be news to you, that when I
returned your civil visit, the driver of my cab commented on
the size, the taste, and the comfort of your home. It would
have been news certainly to myself, had any one told me that
afternoon that I should live to drag such matter into print.
But you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your own
level; and it is needful that those who are to judge betwixt
you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil's advocate, should
understand your letter to have been penned in a house which
could raise, and that very justly, the envy and the comments
of the passers-by. I think (to employ a phrase of yours
which I admire) it 'should be attributed' to you that you
have never visited the scene of Damien's life and death. If
you had, and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant
rooms, even your pen perhaps would have been stayed.
Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is
mine) has not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian
Kingdom. When calamity befell their innocent parishioners,
when leprosy descended and took root in the Eight Islands, a
QUID PRO QUO was to be looked for. To that prosperous
mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent
at last an opportunity. I know I am touching here upon a
nerve acutely sensitive. I know that others of your
colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something
almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with
yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a
certain envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human
trait to be espied in that performance. You were thinking of
the lost chance, the past day; of that which should have been
conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered.
Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room,
as you sat raging and writing; and if the words written were
base beyond parallel, the rage, I am happy to repeat - it is
the only compliment I shall pay you - the rage was almost
virtuous. But, sir, when we have failed, and another has
succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in;
when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a
plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes
of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying,
and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field
of honour - the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy
irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost for
ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat - some rags
of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.
Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right,
but the honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul;
the honour of the inert: that was what remained to you. We
are not all expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his
duty more narrowly, he may love his comforts better; and none
will cast a stone at him for that. But will a gentleman of
your reverend profession allow me an example from the fields
of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a
lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as
will sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful
rival's credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by
plain men of no pretensions that his mouth is, in the
circumstance, almost necessarily closed. Your Church and
Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help,
to edify, to set divine examples. You having (in one huge
instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should
not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence;
that when you had been outstripped in that high rivalry, and
sat inglorious in the midst of your wellbeing, in your
pleasant room - and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors,
toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of
Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last man on
earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who
would and did.
I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I
write these sentences - I think I see you leap at the word
pigsty, a hyperbolical expression at the best. 'He had no
hand in the reforms,' he was 'a coarse, dirty man'; these
were your own words; and you may think it possible that I am
come to support you with fresh evidence. In a sense, it is
even so. Damien has been too much depicted with a
conventional halo and conventional features; so drawn by men
who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to express
the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and silenced
by generous admiration, such as I partly envy for myself -
such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on
your bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method
of portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's
advocate, and leaves for the misuse of the slanderer a
considerable field of truth. For the truth that is
suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if
your letter be the means of substituting once for all a
credible likeness for a wax abstraction. For, if that world
at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall
be named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter
to the Reverend H. B. Gage.
You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement
destiny to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr.
Hyde. When I visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in
his resting grave. But such information as I have, I
gathered on the spot in conversation with those who knew him
well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but others
who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no
halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and
through whose unprepared and scarcely partial communications
the plain, human features of the man shone on me
convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I possess; and I
learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely and
sensitively understood - Kalawao, which you have never
visited, about which you have never so much as endeavoured to
inform yourself; for, brief as your letter is, you have found
the means to stumble into that confession. 'LESS THAN ONE-
HALF of the island,' you say, 'is devoted to the lepers.'
Molokai - 'MOLOKAI AHINA,' the 'grey,' lofty, and most
desolate island - along all its northern side plunges a front
of precipice into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of
cliff is, from east to west, the true end and frontier of the
island. Only in one spot there projects into the ocean a
certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, windy, and
rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the whole
bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same
relation as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now
be able to pick out the leper station on a map; you will be
able to judge how much of Molokai is thus cut off between the
surf and precipice, whether less than a half, or less than a
quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth - or, say, a twentieth; and
the next time you burst into print you will be in a position
to share with us the issue of your calculations.
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with
cheerfulness of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could
not drag you to behold. You, who do not even know its
situation on the map, probably denounce sensational
descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your
pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled
ashore there one early morning, there sat with me in the boat
two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien)
to the lights and joys of human life. One of these wept
silently; I could not withhold myself from joining her. Had
you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little
nearer, and you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable
deformations of our common manhood, and saw yourself landing
in the midst of such a population as only now and then
surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what a haggard
eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder
towards the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had
you found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had
you visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human
beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but still
breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which
the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails
under the brightness of the sun; you would have felt it was
(even to-day) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell
in. It is not the fear of possible infection. That seems a
little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the
disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of
affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he
breathes. I do not think I am a man more than usually timid;
but I never recall the days and nights I spent upon that
island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without
heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else. I find in
my diary that I speak of my stay as a 'grinding experience':
I have once jotted in the margin, 'HARROWING is the word';
and when the MOKOLII bore me at last towards the outer world,
I kept repeating to myself, with a new conception of their
pregnancy, those simple words of the song -
''Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.'
And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a
settlement purged, bettered, beautified; the new village
built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home excellently arranged;
the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries, all
indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place
when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and
slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting
brethren: alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with
what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only
knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.
You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as
painful abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily
by doctors and nurses. I have long learned to admire and
envy the doctors and the nurses. But there is no cancer
hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and
in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of length
in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression;
for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human
suffering by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor
or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon
hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their
high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to
recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with his own
hand the doors of his own sepulchre.
I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.
A. 'Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully
remembered in the field of his labours and sufferings. "He
was a good man, but very officious," says one. Another tells
me he had fallen (as other priests so easily do) into
something of the ways and habits of thought of a Kanaka; but
he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to
laugh at' [over] 'it. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot
find he was a popular.'
B. 'After Ragsdale's death' [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or
overseer, of the unruly settlement] 'there followed a brief
term of office by Father Damien which served only to publish
the weakness of that noble man. He was rough in his ways,
and he had no control. Authority was relaxed; Damien's life
was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.'
C. 'Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems to have
been a man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant
type: shrewd, ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind,
and capable of receiving and digesting a reproof if it were
bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least thing as
well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt
(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to
sacrifice his life; essentially indiscreet and officious,
which made him a troublesome colleague; domineering in all
his ways, which made him incurably unpopular with the
Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that his
boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the
means of bribes. He learned to have a mania for doctoring;
and set up the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular
rivals: perhaps (if anything matter at all in the treatment
of such a disease) the worst thing that he did, and certainly
the easiest. The best and worst of the man appear very
plainly in his dealings with Mr. Chapman's money; he had
originally laid it out' [intended to lay it out] 'entirely
for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not wisely; but
after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully and
revised the list. The sad state of the boys' home is in part
the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own
slovenly ways and false ideas of hygiene. Brother officials
used to call it "Damien's Chinatown." "Well," they would
say, "your China-town keeps growing." And he would laugh
with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors with
perfect obstinacy. So much I have gathered of truth about
this plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his
imperfections are the traits of his face, by which we know
him for our fellow; his martyrdom and his example nothing can
lessen or annul; and only a person here on the spot can
properly appreciate their greatness.'
I have set down these private passages, as you perceive,
without correction; thanks to you, the public has them in
their bluntness. They are almost a list of the man's faults,
for it is rather these that I was seeking: with his virtues,
with the heroic profile of his life, I and the world were
already sufficiently acquainted. I was besides a little
suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely
because Damien's admirers and disciples were the least likely
to be critical. I know you will be more suspicious still;
and the facts set down above were one and all collected from
the lips of Protestants who had opposed the father in his
life. Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the
image of a man, with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic,
and alive with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.
Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst
sides of Damien's character, collected from the lips of those
who had laboured with and (in your own phrase) 'knew the
man'; - though I question whether Damien would have said that
he knew you. Take it, and observe with wonder how well you
were served by your gossips, how ill by your intelligence and
sympathy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and how
widely our appreciations vary. There is something wrong
here; either with you or me. It is possible, for instance,
that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao, had heard
of the affair of Mr. Chapman's money, and were singly struck
by Damien's intended wrong-doing. I was struck with that
also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by
the fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I
may here tell you that it was a long business; that one of
his colleagues sat with him late into the night, multiplying
arguments and accusations; that the father listened as usual
with 'perfect good-nature and perfect obstinacy'; but at the
last, when he was persuaded - 'Yes,' said he, 'I am very much
obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have
been a theft.' There are many (not Catholics merely) who
require their heroes and saints to be infallible; to these
the story will be painful; not to the true lovers, patrons,
and servants of mankind.
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are
one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; that
you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and that,
having found them, you make haste to forget the overvailing
virtues and the real success which had alone introduced them
to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind. That
you may understand how dangerous, and into what a situation
it has already brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-
in-hand through the different phrases of your letter, and
candidly examine each from the point of view of its truth,
its appositeness, and its charity.
Damien was COARSE.
It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who
had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father.
But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to
cheer them with the lights of culture? Or may I remind you
that we have some reason to doubt if John the Baptist were
genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career you
doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he
was a 'coarse, headstrong' fisherman! Yet even in our
Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.
Damien was DIRTY.
He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty
comrade! But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine
house.
Damien was HEADSTRONG.
I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong
head and heart.
Damien was BIGOTED.
I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of
me. But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it
as a blemish in a priest? Damien believed his own religion
with the simplicity of a peasant or a child; as I would I
could suppose that you do. For this, I wonder at him some
way off; and had that been his only character, should have
avoided him in life. But the point of interest in Damien,
which has caused him to be so much talked about and made him
at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him,
his bigotry, his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently
for good, and strengthened him to be one of the world's
heroes and exemplars.
Damien WAS NOT SENT TO MOLOKAI, BUT WENT THERE WITHOUT
ORDERS.
Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for
blame? I have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church,
held up for imitation on the ground that His sacrifice was
voluntary. Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise?
Damien DID NOT STAY AT THE SETTLEMENT, ETC.
It is true he was allowed many indulgences. Am I to
understand that you blame the father for profiting by these,
or the officers for granting them? In either case, it is a
mighty Spartan standard to issue from the house on Beretania
Street; and I am convinced you will find yourself with few
supporters.
Damien HAD NO HAND IN THE REFORMS, ETC.
I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in
my description of the man I am defending; but before I take
you up upon this head, I will be franker still, and tell you
that perhaps nowhere in the world can a man taste a more
pleasurable sense of contrast than when he passes from
Damien's 'Chinatown' at Kalawao to the beautiful Bishop-Home
at Kalaupapa. At this point, in my desire to make all fair
for you, I will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony.
Here is a passage from my diary about my visit to the
Chinatown, from which you will see how it is (even now)
regarded by its own officials: 'We went round all the
dormitories, refectories, etc. - dark and dingy enough, with
a superficial cleanliness, which he' [Mr. Dutton, the lay-
brother] 'did not seek to defend. "It is almost decent,"
said he; "the sisters will make that all right when we get
them here."' And yet I gathered it was already better since
Damien was dead, and far better than when he was there alone
and had his own (not always excellent) way. I have now come
far enough to meet you on a common ground of fact; and I tell
you that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy, all the
reforms of the lazaretto, and even those which he most
vigorously opposed, are properly the work of Damien. They
are the evidence of his success; they are what his heroism
provoked from the reluctant and the careless. Many were
before him in the field; Mr. Meyer, for instance, of whose
faithful work we hear too little: there have been many since;
and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had more
devotion, than our saint. Before his day, even you will
confess, they had effected little. It was his part, by one
striking act of martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that
distressful country. At a blow, and with the price of his
life, he made the place illustrious and public. And that, if
you will consider largely, was the one reform needful;
pregnant of all that should succeed. It brought money; it
brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters;
it brought supervision, for public opinion and public
interest landed with the man at Kalawao. If ever any man
brought reforms, and died to bring them, it was he. There is
not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty Damien
washed it.
Damien WAS NOT A PURE MAN IN HIS RELATIONS WITH WOMEN, ETC.
How do you know that? Is this the nature of the conversation
in that house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied,
driving past? - racy details of the misconduct of the poor
peasant priest, toiling under the cliffs of Molokai?
Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to
have heard the rumour. When I was there I heard many
shocking tales, for my informants were men speaking with the
plainness of the laity; and I heard plenty of complaints of
Damien. Why was this never mentioned? and how came it to you
in the retirement of your clerical parlour?
But I must not even seem to deceive you. This scandal, when
I read it in your letter, was not new to me. I had heard it
once before; and I must tell you how. There came to Samoa a
man from Honolulu; he, in a public-house on the beach,
volunteered the statement that Damien had 'contracted the
disease from having connection with the female lepers'; and I
find a joy in telling you how the report was welcomed in a
public-house. A man sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty
to give his name, but from what I heard I doubt if you would
care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street. 'You
miserable little - ' (here is a word I dare not print, it
would so shock your ears). 'You miserable little - ,' he
cried, 'if the story were a thousand times true, can't you
see you are a million times a lower - for daring to repeat
it?' I wish it could be told of you that when the report
reached you in your house, perhaps after family worship, you
had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive it with
the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not
print; it would not need to have been blotted away, like
Uncle Toby's oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it
would have been counted to you for your brightest
righteousness. But you have deliberately chosen the part of
the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with
improvements of your own. The man from Honolulu - miserable,
leering creature - communicated the tale to a rude knot of
beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I will so
far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always at
his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been
drinking - drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess. It
was to your 'Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,' that you
chose to communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon
which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you the
extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was done. Your
'dear brother' - a brother indeed - made haste to deliver up
your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps) to the religious
papers; where, after many months, I found and read and
wondered at it; and whence I have now reproduced it for the
wonder of others. And you and your dear brother have, by
this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very edifying
to examine in detail. The man whom you would not care to
have to dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend
Dr. Hyde and the Reverend H. B. Gage: the Apia bar-room, the
Honolulu manse.
But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your
fellow-men; and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your
story to be true. I will suppose - and God forgive me for
supposing it - that Damien faltered and stumbled in his
narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror of
his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he,
who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the
letter of his priestly oath - he, who was so much a better
man than either you or me, who did what we have never dreamed
of daring - he too tasted of our common frailty. 'O, Iago,
the pity of it!' The least tender should be moved to tears;
the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do
was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!
Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have
drawn of your own heart? I will try yet once again to make
it clearer. You had a father: suppose this tale were about
him, and some informant brought it to you, proof in hand: I
am not making too high an estimate of your emotional nature
when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that you
would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it
shamed the author of your days? and that the last thing you
would do would be to publish it in the religious press?
Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father,
and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of
all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had
given you grace to see it.
(1) From the Sydney PRESBYTERIAN, October 26, 1889.
THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666
'A cloud of witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's interest did appear.'
INSCRIPTION ON BATTLEFIELD AT RULLION GREEN.
THE PENTLAND RISING
CHAPTER I - THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT
'Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
This tomb doth show for what some men did die.'
MONUMENT, GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD, EDINBURGH,
1661-1668. (1)
Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the
memory whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by
the deep tragedies which followed it. It is, as it were, the
evening of the night of persecution - a sort of twilight,
dark indeed to us, but light as the noonday when compared
with the midnight gloom which followed. This fact, of its
being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however,
an additional interest.
The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were 'out of
measure increased,' says Bishop Burnet, 'by the new
incumbents who were put in the places of the ejected
preachers, and were generally very mean and despicable in all
respects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard; they
were ignorant to a reproach; and many of them were openly
vicious. They . . . were indeed the dreg and refuse of the
northern parts. Those of them who arose above contempt or
scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were as
much hated as the others were despised.' (2) It was little
to be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk
refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to
listen to outed ministers in the fields. But this was not to
be allowed, and their persecutors at last fell on the method
of calling a roll of the parishioners' names every Sabbath,
and marking a fine of twenty shillings Scots to the name of
each absenter. In this way very large debts were incurred by
persons altogether unable to pay. Besides this, landlords
were fined for their tenants' absences, tenants for their
landlords', masters for their servants', servants for their
masters', even though they themselves were perfectly regular
in their attendance. And as the curates were allowed to fine
with the sanction of any common soldier, it may be imagined
that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor well
proven.
When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes,
and household utensils were seized upon, or a number of
soldiers, proportionate to his wealth, were quartered on the
offender. The coarse and drunken privates filled the houses
with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed their
dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and
blasphemed the religion of their humble hosts; and when they
had reduced them to destitution, sold the furniture, and
burned down the roof-tree which was consecrated to the
peasants by the name of Home. For all this attention each of
these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain
sum of money per day - three shillings sterling, according to
NAPHTALI. And frequently they were forced to pay quartering
money for more men than were in reality 'cessed on them.' At
that time it was no strange thing to behold a strong man
begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who were
deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other
way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge
from arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the
uplands. (3)
One example in particular we may cite:
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was,
unfortunately for himself, a Nonconformist. First he was
fined in four hundred pounds Scots, and then through cessing
he lost nineteen hundred and ninety-three pounds Scots. He
was next obliged to leave his house and flee from place to
place, during which wanderings he lost his horse. His wife
and children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants
were fined till they too were almost ruined. As a final
stroke, they drove away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold
them. (4) Surely it was time that something were done to
alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such tyranny.
About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person
calling himself Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people
to revolt. He displayed some documents purporting to be from
the northern Covenanters, and stating that they were prepared
to join in any enterprise commenced by their southern
brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the
matter. 'He was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was
drunk, and that was very often,' said Bishop Burnet. 'He was
a learned man, but had always been in armies, and knew no
other rule but to obey orders. He told me he had no regard
to any law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military
way.' (5)
This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed
which gave spirit and determination to the oppressed
countrymen, lit the flame of insubordination, and for the
time at least recoiled on those who perpetrated it with
redoubled force.
(1) THEATER of MORTALITY, p. 10; Edin. 1713.
(2) HISTORY OF MY OWN TIMES, beginning 1660, by Bishop
Gilbert Burnet, p. 158.
(3) Wodrow's CHURCH HISTORY, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.
(4) Crookshank's CHURCH HISTORY, 1751, second ed. p. 202.
(5) Burnet, p. 348.
THE PENTLAND RISING
CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNING
I love no warres,
I love no jarres,
Nor strife's fire.
May discord cease,
Let's live in peace:
This I desire.
If it must be
Warre we must see
(So fates conspire),
May we not feel
The force of steel:
This I desire.
T. JACKSON, 1651 (1)
UPON Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and
three other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of
Dalry and demanded the payment of his fines. On the old
man's refusing to pay, they forced a large party of his
neighbours to go with them and thresh his corn. The field
was a certain distance out of the clachan, and four persons,
disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all
night, met this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the
four soldiers to work for the ruin of their friend. However,
chided to the bone by their night on the hills, and worn out
by want of food, they proceeded to the village inn to refresh
themselves. Suddenly some people rushed into the room where
they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about
to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle. This was too
much for them to stand, and they repaired immediately to the
scene of this gross outrage, and at first merely requested
that the captive should be released. On the refusal of the
two soldiers who were in the front room, high words were
given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed forth
from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with
drawn swords. One of the latter, John M'Lellan of Barscob,
drew a pistol and shot the corporal in the body. The pieces
of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded, to the number of
ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturbed that
he never appears to have recovered, for we find long
afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a
pension for him. The other soldiers then laid down their
arms, the old man was rescued, and the rebellion was
commenced. (2)
And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of
himself; for, strange to say, this extraordinary man was
remarkably fond of literary composition, and wrote, besides
the amusing account of his own adventures just mentioned, a
large number of essays and short biographies, and a work on
war, entitled PALLAS ARMATA. The following are some of the
shorter pieces 'Magick,' 'Friendship,' 'Imprisonment,'
'Anger,' 'Revenge,' 'Duells,' 'Cruelty,' 'A Defence of some
of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie - to wit - Bowing
at the Name of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord's
Prayer and Good Lord deliver us, Of the Doxologie, Of
Surplesses, Rotchets, Canonnicall Coats,' etc. From what we
know of his character we should expect 'Anger' and 'Cruelty'
to be very full and instructive. But what earthly right he
had to meddle with ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.
Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information
concerning Gray's proceedings, but as it was excessively
indefinite in its character, he paid no attention to it. On
the evening of the 14th, Corporal Deanes was brought into
Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he had been shot while
refusing to sign the Covenant - a story rendered singularly
unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James
instantly dispatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to
come to Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dalry, and
commanded the thirteen or fourteen men in the town with him
to come at nine next morning to his lodging for supplies.
On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries
with 50 horse and 150 foot. Neilson of Corsack, and Gray,
who commanded, with a considerable troop, entered the town,
and surrounded Sir James Turner's lodging. Though it was
between eight and nine o'clock, that worthy, being unwell,
was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window.
Neilson and some others cried, 'You may have fair quarter.'
'I need no quarter,' replied Sir James; 'nor can I be a
prisoner, seeing there is no war declared.' On being told,
however, that he must either be a prisoner or die, he came
down, and went into the street in his night-shirt. Here Gray
showed himself very desirous of killing him, but he was
overruled by Corsack. However, he was taken away a prisoner,
Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner
naively remarks, 'there was good reason for it, for he
mounted himself on a farre better one of mine.' A large
coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all
his papers, were taken away by the rebels. They robbed
Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of
his horse, drank the King's health at the market cross, and
then left Dumfries. (3)
(1) FULLER'S HISTORIE OF THE HOLY WARRE, fourth ed. 1651.
(2) Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17.
(3) Sir J. Turner's MEMOIRS, pp. 148-50.
THE PENTLAND RISING
CHAPTER III - THE MARCH OF THE REBELS
'Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
Because with them we signed the Covenant.'
EPITAPH ON A TOMBSTONE AT HAMILTON. (1)
ON Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the
Council at Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this
'horrid rebellion.' In the absence of Rothes, Sharpe
presided - much to the wrath of some members; and as he
imagined his own safety endangered, his measures were most
energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards
round the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were
forced to take the oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were
commanded to give in their names. Sharpe, surrounded with
all these guards and precautions, trembled - trembled as he
trembled when the avengers of blood drew him from his chariot
on Magus Muir, - for he knew how he had sold his trust, how
he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must
their chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst
thunder-bolts be forged. But even in his fear the apostate
Presbyterian was unrelenting, unpityingly harsh; he published
in his manifesto no promise of pardon, no inducement to
submission. He said, 'If you submit not you must die,' but
never added, 'If you submit you may live!' (2)
Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At
Carsphairn they were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless
in a fit of oblivion, neglected to leave behind him the
coffer containing Sir James's money. Who he was is a
mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently
forgeries - that, and his final flight, appear to indicate
that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the King or
the Duke of York was heard to say, 'That, if he might have
his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms.'
(3)
Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and
marched onwards.
Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn,
frequently at the best of which their halting-place could
boast. Here many visits were paid to him by the ministers
and officers of the insurgent force. In his description of
these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,
admitting any kindness that was done to him with some
qualifying souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over
any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his chance to
suffer or to hear. He appears, notwithstanding all this, to
have been on pretty good terms with his cruel 'phanaticks,'
as the following extract sufficiently proves:
'Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard,
and order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be
preached by Mr. Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major
M'Cullough invited me to heare "that phanatick sermon" (for
soe they merrilie called it). They said that preaching might
prove an effectual meane to turne me, which they heartilie
wished. I answered to them that I was under guards, and that
if they intended to heare that sermon, it was probable I
might likewise, for it was not like my guards wold goe to
church and leave me alone at my lodgeings. Bot to what they
said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a
Turner. Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I
said, if I did not come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they
might fine me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the
suome of what I had exacted from the phanatics.' (4)
This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month.
The following is recounted by this personage with malicious
glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how
chaff is mixed with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious,
persons were engaged in this movement; nevertheless we give
it, for we wish to present with impartiality all the alleged
facts to the reader:
'Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me
a visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of
them blesse it. It fell Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing,
who said one of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard
in my life. He summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to
be their secondarie (for that was his language). "And if,"
said he, "thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight
for thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and
if thou wilt not fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then
we are not obliged to fight for it. They say," said he,
"that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming with the King's
General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot a threshing
to us." This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly
and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my
thirst.' (5)
Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside
alehouse, or in some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace,
who had now taken the command, would review the horse and
foot, during which time Turner was sent either into the
alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him
from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He
was, at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas
and Lanark, permitted to behold their evolutions. 'I found
their horse did consist of four hundreth and fortie, and the
foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen were
armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with
suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and
suord; and some with suords great and long.' He admired much
the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how they had
attained to it in so short a time. (6)
At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this
great wapinshaw, they were charged - awful picture of
depravity! - with the theft of a silver spoon and a
nightgown. Could it be expected that while the whole country
swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare
opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues - that among
a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there
should not be one Achan in the camp? At Lanark a declaration
was drawn up and signed by the chief rebels. In it occurs
the following:
'The just sense whereof ' - the sufferings of the country -
'made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for
self-defence, than to stay at home, burdened daily with the
calamities of others, and tortured with the fears of our own
approaching misery.' (7)
The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony
the epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer.
A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark
to Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the
wearied army stopped. But at twelve o'clock the cry, which
served them for a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!' and 'Mount the
prisoner!' resounded through the night-shrouded town, and
called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil
onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the
moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to
the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in
mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the
weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in
the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside
wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in
gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen,
whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide
themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and
left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the
moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly
through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking
moss. Those who kept together - a miserable few - often
halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging
comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again,
still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies;
onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the
darkness - onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their
scaffold at Edinburgh. It was calculated that they lost one
half of their army on that disastrous night-march.
Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles
from Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time. (8)
(1) A CLOUD OF WITNESSES, p. 376.
(2) Wodrow, pp. 19, 20.
(3) A HIND LET LOOSE, p. 123.
(4) Turner, p. 163.
(5) Turner, p. 198.
(6) IBID. p. 167.
(7) Wodrow, p. 29.
(8) Turner, Wodrow, and CHURCH HISTORY by James Kirkton, an
outed minister of the period.
THE PENTLAND RISING
CHAPTER IV - RULLION GREEN
'From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
From Remonstrators with associate bands,
Good Lord, deliver us!'
ROYALIST RHYME, KIRKTON, p. 127.
LATE on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four
days before Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain,
merchants in Haddington, beheld four men, clad like West-
country Whigamores, standing round some object on the ground.
It was at the two-mile cross, and within that distance from
their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered that
the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-
stained winding-sheet. (1) Many thought that this apparition
was a portent of the deaths connected with the Pentland
Rising.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they
left Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they
arrived about sunset. The position was a strong one. On the
summit of a bare, heathery spur of the Pentlands are two
hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of flat marshy
ground. On the highest of the two mounds - that nearest the
Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body - was the
greater part of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the
other Barscob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre
Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed infantry. Their
position was further strengthened by the depth of the valley
below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn.
The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights
and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted
obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy
splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading
gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too,
they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and
bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about
at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw
Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the
wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was
fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that peaceful
evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their
defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow
lifted his head from the blood-stained heather to strive with
darkening eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as
over his life and his cause, the shadows of night and of
gloom were falling and thickening.
It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry
was raised: 'The enemy! Here come the enemy!'
Unwilling to believe their own doom - for our insurgents
still hoped for success in some negotiations for peace which
had been carried on at Colinton - they called out, 'They are
some of our own.'
'They are too blacke ' (I.E. numerous), 'fie! fie! for ground
to draw up on,' cried Wallace, fully realising the want of
space for his men, and proving that it was not till after
this time that his forces were finally arranged. (2)
First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse
sent obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the
rebels. An equal number of Learmont's men met them, and,
after a struggle, drove them back. The course of the Rullion
Burn prevented almost all pursuit, and Wallace, on perceiving
it, dispatched a body of foot to occupy both the burn and
some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side.
Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the
foot of the hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then
dispatched a mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack
Wallace's outpost, but they also were driven back. A third
charge produced a still more disastrous effect, for Dalzell
had to check the pursuit of his men by a reinforcement.
These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-
General's ranks, for several of his men flung down their
arms. Urged by such fatal symptoms, and by the approaching
night, he deployed his men, and closed in overwhelming
numbers on the centre and right flank of the insurgent army.
In the increasing twilight the burning matches of the
firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent
to the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge,
many-armed giant breathing flame into the darkness.
Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud,
'The God of Jacob! The God of Jacob!' and prayed with
uplifted hands for victory. (3)
But still the Royalist troops closed in.
Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to
capture him with his own hands. Accordingly he charged
forward, presenting his pistols. Paton fired, but the balls
hopped off Dalzell's buff coat and fell into his boot. With
the superstition peculiar to his age, the Nonconformist
concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by
enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his
pocket, charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this,
and supposing, it is likely, that Paton was putting in larger
balls, hid behind his servant, who was killed. (4)
Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace
was enveloped in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor -
tightening, closing, crushing every semblance of life from
the victim enclosed in his toils. The flanking parties of
horse were forced in upon the centre, and though, as even
Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight
was the result.
But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or
wail the death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed
themselves for the peace, the liberty, and the religion of
their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in the field of death
for long, and when at last they were buried by charity, the
peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and
cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value
of their winding-sheets!
INSCRIPTION ON STONE AT RULLION GREEN:
HERE
AND NEAR TO
THIS PLACE LYES THE
REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK
AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK
MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND
ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED
PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE
KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN
INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE
OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF
REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS
UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER
1666. REV. 12. 11. ERECTED
SEPT. 28 1738.
BACK OF STONE:
A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's Interest did appear,
For to restore true Liberty,
O'erturned then by tyranny.
And by proud Prelats who did Rage
Against the Lord's Own heritage.
They sacrificed were for the laws
Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
These heroes fought with great renown;
By falling got the Martyr's crown. (5)
(1) Kirkton, p. 244.
(2) Kirkton.
(3) Turner.
(4) Kirkton.
(5) Kirkton.
THE PENTLAND RISING
CHAPTER V - A RECORD OF BLOOD
'They cut his hands ere he was dead,
And after that struck of his head.
His blood under the altar cries
For vengeance on Christ's enemies.'
EPITAPH ON TOMB AT LONGCROSS OF CLERMONT. (1)
MASTER ANDREW MURRAY, an outed minister, residing in the
Potterrow, on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds
of cheering and the march of many feet beneath his window.
He gazed out. With colours flying, and with music sounding,
Dalzell, victorious, entered Edinburgh. But his banners were
dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners were marched within
his ranks. The old man knew it all. That martial and
triumphant strain was the death-knell of his friends and of
their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were the
tokens of their courage and their death, and the prisoners
were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle to die
upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy.
Had he lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and
increasing woe; he would have seen the clouds, then but
gathering in mist, cast a more than midnight darkness over
his native hills, and have fallen a victim to those bloody
persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the
sea by many a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was
spared to him - he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four
days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God
was gathered to is fathers. (2)
When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir
Alexander Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his
house. Disliking their occupation, the soldiers gave him an
ugly time of it. All the night through they kept up a
continuous series of 'alarms and incursions,' 'cries of
"Stand!" "Give fire!"' etc., which forced the prelate to flee
to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest
which was denied him at home. (3) Now, however, when all
danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out in his true
colours, and scant was the justice likely to be shown to the
foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by. The
prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a part of St. Giles'
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his
credit be it spoken, they were amply supplied with food. (4)
Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of
quarter which had been given on the field of battle should
protect the lives of the miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure,
the greatest lawyer, gave no opinion - certainly a suggestive
circumstance - but Lord Lee declared that this would not
interfere with their legal trial, 'so to bloody executions
they went.' (5) To the number of thirty they were condemned
and executed; while two of them, Hugh M'Kail, a young
minister, and Neilson of Corsack, were tortured with the
boots.
The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their
bodies were dismembered and distributed to different parts of
the country; 'the heads of Major M'Culloch and the two
Gordons,' it was resolved, says Kirkton, 'should be pitched
on the gate of Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and Strong's
head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot's sett
on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. The armes of all the ten,
because they hade with uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at
Lanark, were sent to the people of that town to expiate that
crime, by placing these arms on the top of the prison.' (6)
Among these was John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, who saved
Turner's life at Dumfries; in return for which service Sir
James attempted, though without success, to get the poor man
reprieved. One of the condemned died of his wounds between
the day of condemnation and the day of execution. ' None of
them,' says Kirkton, 'would save their life by taking the
declaration and renouncing the Covenant, though it was
offered to them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much
lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those in the
country. When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over,
they clasped each other in their armes, and so endured the
pangs of death. When Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not
like an ordinary citizen, but like a heavenly minister,
relating his comfortable Christian experiences, and called
for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John
iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But most
of all, when Mr. M'Kail died, there was such a lamentation as
was never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon
all the street, or in all the numberless windows in the
mercate place.' (7)
The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and
its author:
'Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on
the world's consolations. Farewell to all my friends, whose
company hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have
done with the light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal
light, eternal life, everlasting love, everlasting praise,
everlasting glory. Praise to Him that sits upon the throne,
and to the Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul, that
hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and
healed all my diseases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that
excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His pleasure.
Bless the Lord, O my soul!' (8)
After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth
in the following words of touching eloquence: 'And now I
leave off to speak any more to creatures, and begin my
intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off.
Farewell father and mother, friends and relations! Farewell
the world and all delights! Farewell meat and drink!
Farewell sun, moon, and stars! - Welcome God and Father!
Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!
Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation!
Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!' (9)
At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the
soldiers to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their
closing ears. Hideous refinement of revenge! Even the last
words which drop from the lips of a dying man - words surely
the most sincere and the most unbiassed which mortal mouth
can utter - even these were looked upon as poisoned and as
poisonous. 'Drown their last accents,' was the cry, 'lest
they should lead the crowd to take their part, or at the
least to mourn their doom!' (10) But, after all, perhaps it
was more merciful than one would think -unintentionally so,
of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant
noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and
the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the
last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was
over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold
sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness
to the shores which they had reached.
Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even
of the peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of
Mid-Lothian, pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the
miserable fugitives who fell in their way. One strange story
have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton the
historian and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame
which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near
Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along
the ground; of how it covered the house of their murderer;
and of how it scared him with its lurid glare.
Hear Daniel Defoe: (11)
'If the poor people were by these insupportable violences
made desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild
despair, who can justly reflect on them when they read in the
Word of God "That oppression makes a wise man mad"? And
therefore were there no other original of the insurrection
known by the name of the Rising of Pentland, it was nothing
but what the intolerable oppressions of those times might
have justified to all the world, nature having dictated to
all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily
attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of
nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country.'
Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is
the fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and
to contemn, the noble band of Covenanters - though the bitter
laugh at their old-world religious views, the curl of the lip
at their merits, and the chilling silence on their bravery
and their determination, are but too rife through all society
- be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was good
about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and
liberty, for country and religion, on the 28th of November
1666, now just two hundred years ago.
EDINBURGH, 28TH NOVEMBER 1866.
(1) CLOUD OF WITNESSES, p. 389; Edin. 1765.
(2) Kirkton, p. 247.
(3) Ibid. p. 254.
(4) IBID. p. 247.
(5) IBID. pp. 247, 248.
(6) Kirkton, p. 248.
(7) Kirkton, p. 249.
(8) NAPHTALI, p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.
(9) Wodrow, p. 59.
(10) Kirkton, p. 246.
(11) Defoe's HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.
THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW
HISTORY is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are
told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each
other's blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian
has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of
us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest
epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate
tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity
of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an
insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas
continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable
course; the political soil itself steals forth by
imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on
its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and
cantonments; so that what appears to be an eternal city
founded on hills is but a flying island of Laputa. It is for
this reason in particular that we are all becoming Socialists
without knowing it; by which I would not in the least refer
to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing
supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the
walls of our individualist Jericho - but to the stealthy
change that has come over the spirit of Englishmen and
English legislation. A little while ago, and we were still
for liberty; 'crowd a few more thousands on the bench of
Government,' we seemed to cry; 'keep her head direct on
liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.' This is over;
LAISSER FAIRE declines in favour; our legislation grows
authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new
duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors,
who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of
England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that;
but one thing it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism in action,
and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it.
Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to
seek new altars. Like all other principles, she has been
proved to be self-exclusive in the long run. She has taken
wages besides (like all other virtues) and dutifully served
Mammon; so that many things we were accustomed to admire as
the benefits of freedom and common to all were truly benefits
of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours' poverty.
A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic
phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or
shipowners may imply for operatives, tenants, or seamen, and
we not unnaturally begin to turn to that other pole of hope,
beneficent tyranny. Freedom, to be desirable, involves
kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the
free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore,
only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-
fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated,
and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of
famine. So much, in other men's affairs, we have begun to
see clearly; we have begun to despair of virtue in these
other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to discharge
upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors. The
landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer;
those who do business on land have lost all trust in the
virtues of the shipowner; the professions look askance upon
the retail traders and have even started their co-operative
stores to ruin them; and from out the smoke-wreaths of
Birmingham a finger has begun to write upon the wall the
condemnation of the landlord. Thus, piece by piece, do we
condemn each other, and yet not perceive the conclusion, that
our whole estate is somewhat damnable. Thus, piece by piece,
each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away the
branch on which some other interest is seated, do we apply in
detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive that we
are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large. A
tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove
invincible; and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of
life, there is every chance that our grand-children will see
the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far
liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this
not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the
horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement of
the political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, apparently
undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr.
Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my
conception of his character, he might rest from his troubling
and look on: the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble
and dissolve. That great servile war, the Armageddon of
money and numbers, to which we looked forward when young,
becomes more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see
a peaceable and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men
immersed in political tactics and dead to political results.
The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the
House of Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of
this new evolution (if it proceed) will fall to be decided;
so that the state of Parliament is not only diagnostic of the
present but fatefully prophetic of the future. Well, we all
know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. We
may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish
obstruction - a bitter trial, which it supports with notable
good humour. But the excuse is merely local; it cannot apply
to similar bodies in America and France; and what are we to
say of these? President Cleveland's letter may serve as a
picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will
convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to
have seized on the organ of popular government in every land;
and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as
to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private
affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to
take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that
should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words,
is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with
decency; we cannot trust our consciences; and the remedy
proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours, pretty
much at random, and say to these: 'Be ye our conscience; make
laws so wise, and continue from year to year to administer
them so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves and
make us righteous and happy, world without end. Amen.' And
who can look twice at the British Parliament and then
seriously bring it such a task? I am not advancing this as
an argument against Socialism: once again, nothing is further
from my mind. There are great truths in Socialism, or no
one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if
it came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one
should make it welcome. But if it is to come, we may as well
have some notion of what it will be like; and the first thing
to grasp is that our new polity will be designed and
administered (to put it courteously) with something short of
inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a human
parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely
change is human nature. The Anarchists think otherwise, from
which it is only plain that they have not carried to the
study of history the lamp of human sympathy.
Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of
laws, what headmarks must we look for in the life? We chafe
a good deal at that excellent thing, the income-tax, because
it brings into our affairs the prying fingers, and exposes us
to the tart words, of the official. The official, in all
degrees, is already something of a terror to many of us. I
would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable
in any other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember
in my dreams the eye-glass of a certain ATTACHE at a certain
embassy - an eyeglass that was a standing indignity to all on
whom it looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is
of a bracing, Republican postman in the city of San
Francisco. I lived in that city among working folk, and what
my neighbours accepted at the postman's hands - nay, what I
took from him myself - it is still distasteful to recall.
The bourgeois, residing in the upper parts of society, has
but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl; but
about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about a
patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my
friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it;
and he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty of
imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it
tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the
dregs. In every contact with authority, with their employer,
with the police, with the School Board officer, in the
hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion
to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in
office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-way
provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be
appreciated. Well, this golden age of which we are speaking
will be the golden age of officials. In all our concerns it
will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with
what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine. It is
likely these gentlemen will be periodically elected; they
will therefore have their turn of being underneath, which
does not always sweeten men's conditions. The laws they will
have to administer will be no clearer than those we know to-
day, and the body which is to regulate their administration
no wiser than the British Parliament. So that upon all hands
we may look for a form of servitude most galling to the blood
- servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the
slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office. And if
the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least
fulness, we shall have lost a thing, in most respects not
much to be regretted, but as a moderator of oppression, a
thing nearly invaluable - the newspaper. For the independent
journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands
and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the
abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has
fairly taken its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid
the least touch on private property, the days of the
independent journal are numbered. State railways may be good
things and so may State bakeries; but a State newspaper will
never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.
But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime
would perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we
may suppose would pass away. But if Socialism were carried
out with any fulness, there would be more contraventions. We
see already new sins ringing up like mustard - School Board
sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins - none of
which I would be thought to except against in particular, but
all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a
hard master even in the beginning. If it go on to such
heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually
to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron justice, the
number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion
multiplied. Take the case of work alone. Man is an idle
animal. He is at least as intelligent as the ant; but
generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the
ant's example. Of those who are found truly indefatigable in
business, some are misers; some are the practisers of
delightful industries, like gardening; some are students,
artists, inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by
successive hopes; and the rest are those who live by games of
skill or hazard - financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and
the like. But in unloved toils, even under the prick of
necessity, no man is continually sedulous. Once eliminate
the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the hope of
riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering.
Society will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton
plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless,
demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of
the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be
purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may
succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries
and long hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip
will be in the overseer's hands, and not in vain. For, when
it comes to be a question of each man doing his own share or
the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will be
forgotten. To dock the skulker's food is not enough; many
will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put
their shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as
these, then, the whip will be in the overseer's hand; and his
own sense of justice and the superintendence of a chaotic
popular assembly will be the only checks on its employment.
Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen, and
yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.
It is admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a
sergeant is an evil not to be combated; offend the sergeant,
they say, and in a brief while you will either be disgraced
or have deserted. And the sergeant can no longer appeal to
the lash. But if these things go on, we shall see, or our
sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector.
This for the unfortunate. But with the fortunate also, even
those whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether
well. It is concluded that in such a state of society,
supposing it to be financially sound, the level of comfort
will be high. It does not follow: there are strange depths
of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the
case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all
besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-
heaps may sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not;
suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play
upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one
to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the
whole enterprise to be financially sound - a vaulting
supposition - and all the inhabitants to dwell together in a
golden mean of comfort: we have yet to ask ourselves if this
be what man desire, or if it be what man will even deign to
accept for a continuance. It is certain that man loves to
eat, it is not certain that he loves that only or that best.
He is supposed to love comfort; it is not a love, at least,
that he is faithful to. He is supposed to love happiness; it
is my contention that he rather loves excitement. Danger,
enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man
than regular meals. He does not think so when he is hungry,
but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the
hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go
hungry. It would be always after dinner in that society, as,
in the land of the Lotos-eaters, it was always afternoon; and
food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important, drops
in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite
of living.
That for which man lives is not the same thing for all
individuals nor in all ages; yet it has a common base; what
he seeks and what he must have is that which will seize and
hold his attention. Regular meals and weatherproof lodgings
will not do this long. Play in its wide sense, as the
artificial induction of sensation, including all games and
all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of
himself; but in the end he wearies for realities. Study or
experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of
a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in the house
by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man
cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes: his feet itch
for physical adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers,
pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new
things, cannot continue to look for them in books and
crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of life.
Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of
disappointment, furious contention with obstacles: these are
the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they
seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic
dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch closer than
the common, they cry, 'Catch me here again!' and sure enough
you catch them there again - perhaps before the week is out.
It is as old as ROBINSON CRUSOE; as old as man. Our race has
not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of
dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with
patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers
call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the
bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living;
he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out
of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he
yawns. If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at
him, he might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he
would find his blood oxygenated and his views of the world
brighter. If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the publishers,
should have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin, it
would not occur to him - at least for several hours - to ask
if life were worth living; and if such peril were a daily
matter, he would ask it never more; he would have other
things to think about, he would be living indeed - not lying
in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull. The
aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown -
whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence - that
is what I conceive men to love best, and that is what we are
seeking to exclude from men's existences. Of all forms of
the aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working
men - the danger of misery from want of work - is the least
inspiriting: it does not whip the blood, it does not evoke
the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive; and
yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly
touching them, it does truly season the men's lives. Of
those who fail, I do not speak - despair should be sacred;
but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of their
life bring interest: a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty
earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for
the successful poor; and it is not from these but from the
villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of
life. Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would
gain in this new state of life, they would also lose a
certain something, which would not be missed in the
beginning, but would be missed progressively and
progressively lamented. Soon there would be a looking back:
there would be tales of the old world humming in young men's
ears, tales of the tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful
emigrant. And in the stall-fed life of the successful ant-
heap - with its regular meals, regular duties, regular
pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded - the
vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem of
epic breadth. This may seem a shallow observation; but the
springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface.
Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the
circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be
given amply; the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if
the life of our descendants be such as we have conceived,
there are two beloved pleasures on which they will be likely
to fall back: the pleasures of intrigue and of sedition.
In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially
sound. I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even
as such, I know one thing that bears on the economic question
- I know the imperfection of man's faculty for business. The
Anarchists, who count some rugged elements of common sense
among what seem to me their tragic errors, have said upon
this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned
beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious
that they are right; they may be right also in predicting a
period of communal independence, and they may even be right
in thinking that desirable. But the rise of communes is none
the less the end of economic equality, just when we were told
it was beginning. Communes will not be all equal in extent,
nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will
the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be
the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit;
and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the
merchant and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a
sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power that will see its
crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market.
And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be
small. Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts,
even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular
consciousness; national losses are so unequally shared, that
one part of the population will be counting its gains while
another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune
all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs
up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached
the commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like
quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in
Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his
dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official
correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a
man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus
a business difference between communes will take on much the
same colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West,
and will lead as directly to the arbitrament of blows. So
that the establishment of the communal system will not only
reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of economic
inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a
world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole,
Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will
be fired on as they follow the highway, the trains wrecked on
the lines, the ploughman will go armed into the field of
tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad literature,
the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the
victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At
least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have
welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with
a vengeance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of military
powers and the foundation of new empires.
COLLEGE PAPERS
CHAPTER I - EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824
ON the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the
LAPSUS LINGUAE; OR, THE COLLEGE TATLER; and on the 7th the
first number appeared. On Friday the 2nd of April 'MR.
TATLER became speechless.' Its history was not all one
success; for the editor (who applies to himself the words of
Iago, 'I am nothing if I am not critical') overstepped the
bounds of caution, and found himself seriously embroiled with
the powers that were. There appeared in No. XVI. a most
bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared
to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very prettily
censured for publishing only the first volume of a class-
book, and making all purchasers pay for both. Sir John
Leslie took up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the
publisher, and threatened him with an action, till he was
forced to turn the hapless LAPSUS out of doors. The
maltreated periodical found shelter in the shop of Huie,
Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was duly issued from the new
office. No. XVII. beheld MR. TATLER'S humiliation, in which,
with fulsome apology and not very credible assurances of
respect and admiration, he disclaims the article in question,
and advertises a new issue of No. XVI. with all objectionable
matter omitted. This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in a
later advertisement, 'a new and improved edition.' This was
the only remarkable adventure of MR. TATLER'S brief
existence; unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee
manuscript in imitation of BLACKWOOD, and a letter of reproof
from a divinity student on the impiety of the same dull
effusion. He laments the near approach of his end in
pathetic terms. 'How shall we summon up sufficient courage,'
says he, 'to look for the last time on our beloved little
devil and his inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able
to pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its
attractions are over? How shall we bid farewell for ever to
that excellent man, with the long greatcoat, wooden leg and
wooden board, who acts as our representative at the gate of
ALMA MATER?' But alas! he had no choice: MR. TATLER, whose
career, he says himself, had been successful, passed
peacefully away, and has ever since dumbly implored 'the
bringing home of bell and burial.'
ALTER ET IDEM. A very different affair was the LAPSUS
LINGUAE from the EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE. The two
prospectuses alone, laid side by side, would indicate the
march of luxury and the repeal of the paper duty. The penny
bi-weekly broadside of session 1828-4 was almost wholly
dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous
verses, and University grievances are the continual burthen
of the song. But MR. TATLER was not without a vein of hearty
humour; and his pages afford what is much better: to wit, a
good picture of student life as it then was. The students of
those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in the
class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on
what the writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.'
The benches of the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but
all other Societies (the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor)
met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said
that 'nothing else could conveniently be made of them.'
However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain
that they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the
taste of session 1823-4, which found enough calls upon its
purse for porter and toasted cheese at Ambrose's, or
cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull's. Duelling was
still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell
to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that
single combat would be the result. Last and most wonderful
of all, Gall and Spurzheim were in every one's mouth; and the
Law student, after having exhausted Byron's poetry and
Scott's novels, informed the ladies of his belief in
phrenology. In the present day he would dilate on 'Red as a
rose is she,' and then mention that he attends Old
Greyfriars', as a tacit claim to intellectual superiority. I
do not know that the advance is much.
But MR. TATLER'S best performances were three short papers in
which he hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the
'DIVINITY,' the 'MEDICAL,' and the 'LAW' of session 1823-4.
The fact that there was no notice of the 'ARTS' seems to
suggest that they stood in the same intermediate position as
they do now - the epitome of student-kind. MR. TATLER'S
satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown
superannuated in ALL its limbs. His descriptions may limp at
some points, but there are certain broad traits that apply
equally well to session 1870-1. He shows us the DIVINITY of
the period - tall, pale, and slender - his collar greasy, and
his coat bare about the seams - 'his white neckcloth serving
four days, and regularly turned the third' - 'the rim of his
hat deficient in wool' - and 'a weighty volume of theology
under his arm.' He was the man to buy cheap 'a snuff-box, or
a dozen of pencils, or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a
hundred quills,' at any of the public sale-rooms. He was
noted for cheap purchases, and for exceeding the legal tender
in halfpence. He haunted 'the darkest and remotest corner of
the Theatre Gallery.' He was to be seen issuing from 'aerial
lodging-houses.' Withal, says mine author, 'there were many
good points about him: he paid his landlady's bill, read his
Bible, went twice to church on Sunday, seldom swore, was not
often tipsy, and bought the LAPSUS LINGUAE.'
The MEDICAL, again, 'wore a white greatcoat, and consequently
talked loud' - (there is something very delicious in that
CONSEQUENTLY). He wore his hat on one side. He was active,
volatile, and went to the top of Arthur's Seat on the Sunday
forenoon. He was as quiet in a debating society as he was
loud in the streets. He was reckless and imprudent:
yesterday he insisted on your sharing a bottle of claret with
him (and claret was claret then, before the cheap-and-nasty
treaty), and to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a penny to
buy the last number of the LAPSUS.
The student of LAW, again, was a learned man. 'He had turned
over the leaves of Justinian's INSTITUTES, and knew that they
were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with the
title-page of Blackstone's COMMENTARIES, and ARGAL (as the
gravedigger in HAMLET says) he was not a person to be laughed
at.' He attended the Parliament House in the character of a
critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated
speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative
or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood
unrivalled. Even in the police-office we find him shining
with undiminished lustre. 'If a CHARLIE should find him
rather noisy at an untimely hour, and venture to take him
into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel come to
judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine
precepts of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his
tongue. The magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him
only a couple of guineas.'
Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine.
Barclay, Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what
the Cafe, the Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us. An hour's
reading in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is
so much that is similar and so much that is different; the
follies and amusements are so like our own, and the manner of
frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one pauses and
looks about him in philosophic judgment. The muddy
quadrangle is thick with living students; but in our eyes it
swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted
hats of 1824. Two races meet: races alike and diverse. Two
performances are played before our eyes; but the change seems
merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume. Plot and
passion are the same. It is the fall of the spun shilling
whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.
In a future number we hope to give a glance at the
individualities of the present, and see whether the cast
shall be head or tail - whether we or the readers of the
LAPSUS stand higher in the balance.
COLLEGE PAPERS
CHAPTER II - THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY
WE have now reached the difficult portion of our task. MR.
TATLER, for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he
liked about the students of a former; but for the iron to
touch our sacred selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray
its most privy infirmities, let such a Judas look to himself
as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or the Diagnostic,
below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark quadrangle.
We confess that this idea alarms us. We enter a protest. We
bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace. We hope,
moreover, that having thus made you secret to our misgivings,
you will excuse us if we be dull, and set that down to
caution which you might before have charged to the account of
stupidity.
The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those
distinctions which are the best salt of life. All the fine
old professional flavour in language has evaporated. Your
very gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his
electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over
Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the
duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from
this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed
and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world
begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that
we must not attempt to join MR. TALLER in his simple division
of students into LAW, DIVINITY, and MEDICAL. Nowadays the
Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like Mrs.
Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in LOVE FOR LOVE) they may stand in
the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying: 'Sister, Sister -
Sister everyway!' A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
influence the followers of individual branches of study. The
Divinity, for example, must be an avowed believer; and as
this, in the present day, is unhappily considered by many as
a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two
ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus. Some swallow
it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to
believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher,
although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own
authority. Others again (and this we think the worst
method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run
their own little heresy as a proof of independence; and deny
one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold the others
without being laughed at.
Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little
more distinction between the faculties than the traditionary
ideal, handed down through a long sequence of students, and
getting rounder and more featureless at each successive
session. The plague of uniformity has descended on the
College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions of
men) now require their faculty and character hung round their
neck on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre.
And in the midst of all this weary sameness, not the least
common feature is the gravity of every face. No more does
the merry medical run eagerly in the clear winter morning up
the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the church bells
begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered
smoke of the city. He will not break Sunday to so little
purpose. He no longer finds pleasure in the mere output of
his surplus energy. He husbands his strength, and lays out
walks, and reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so
that he may get as much work and pleasure out of his body as
he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such
flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.
See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those
two or three minutes when it is full of passing students, and
we think you will admit that, if we have not made it 'an
habitation of dragons,' we have at least transformed it into
'a court for owls.' Solemnity broods heavily over the
enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth
of merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment. You
might as well try
'To move wild laughter in the throat of death'
as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid
company.
The studious congregate about the doors of the different
classes, debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing
note-books. A reserved rivalry sunders them. Here are some
deep in Greek particles: there, others are already
inhabitants of that land
'Where entity and quiddity,
'Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly -
Where Truth in person does appear
Like words congealed in northern air.'
But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies -
no pedantic love of this subject or that lights up their eyes
- science and learning are only means for a livelihood, which
they have considerately embraced and which they solemnly
pursue. 'Labour's pale priests,' their lips seem incapable
of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of
professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their
meagre fingers. They walk like Saul among the asses.
The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy
dapper dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but
yet genial - a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices -
strangely different from the stately frippery that is rife at
present. These men are out of their element in the
quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour,
which still clings to any collection of young men, jars
painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a
hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes
Street. Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful
obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same
chill official manner, and with the same commonplace
advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost
greater than they can bear, and they halt in their walk to
preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one
would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs. We
speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would as soon
associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy
modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even
our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing
more amusing!
Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in
dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the
devil with a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism
of wickedness that would have surprised the simpler sinners
of old. Some of these men whom we see gravely conversing on
the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other.
Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of
depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up
their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their
downward progress for approval and encouragement. These folk
form a freemasonry of their own. An oath is the shibboleth
of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a man swear, it
is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful
spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of
brotherhood. There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of
temper about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in
their own way as the studious in theirs.
Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be
ungrateful to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter,
whose active feet in the 'College Anthem' have beguiled so
many weary hours and added a pleasant variety to the strain
of close attention. But even these are too evidently
professional in their antics. They go about cogitating puns
and inventing tricks. It is their vocation, Hal. They are
the gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown
when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often sinks as
the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by
the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh
gambols for the morrow.
This is the impression left on the mind of any observing
student by too many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old
men; and one pauses to think how such an unnatural state of
matters is produced. We feel inclined to blame for it the
unfortunate absence of UNIVERSITY FEELING which is so marked
a characteristic of our Edinburgh students. Academical
interests are so few and far between - students, as students,
have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry - there is
such an entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary
college friendships, that we fancy that no University in the
kingdom is in so poor a plight. Our system is full of
anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he was a shabby student,
curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory for
anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let
there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand,
and this shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think
we shall find both ourselves and the College bettered. Let
it be a sufficient reason for intercourse that two men sit
together on the same benches. Let the great A be held
excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he
can say, 'That fellow is a student.' Once this could be
brought about, we think you would find the whole heart of the
University beat faster. We think you would find a fusion
among the students, a growth of common feelings, an
increasing sympathy between class and class, whose influence
(in such a heterogeneous company as ours) might be of
incalculable value in all branches of politics and social
progress. It would do more than this. If we could find some
method of making the University a real mother to her sons -
something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and a
lottery of somewhat shabby prizes - we should strike a death-
blow at the constrained and unnatural attitude of our
Society. At present we are not a united body, but a loose
gathering of individuals, whose inherent attraction is
allowed to condense them into little knots and coteries. Our
last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition.
There was no party spirit - no unity of interests. A few,
who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the College
of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they
reached their destination the feeble inspiration had died out
in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed
strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others
slunk back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors.
The same is visible in better things. As you send a man to
an English University that he may have his prejudices rubbed
off, you might send him to Edinburgh that he may have them
ingrained - rendered indelible - fostered by sympathy into
living principles of his spirit. And the reason of it is
quite plain. From this absence of University feeling it
comes that a man's friendships are always the direct and
immediate results of these very prejudices. A common
weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle:
a mutual vice is the readiest introduction. The studious
associate with the studious alone - the dandies with the
dandies. There is nothing to force them to rub shoulders
with the others; and so they grow day by day more wedded to
their own original opinions and affections. They see through
the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments, all
real catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually
stiffened into one position - becomes so habituated to a
contracted atmosphere, that it shudders and withers under the
least draught of the free air that circulates in the general
field of mankind.
Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our
present state. Specialism in study is another. We doubt
whether this has ever been a good thing since the world
began; but we are sure it is much worse now than it was.
Formerly, when a man became a specialist, it was out of
affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand devotion he
left all the world of Science to follow his true love; and he
contrived to find that strange pedantic interest which
inspired the man who
'Settled HOTI'S business - let it be -
Properly based OUN -
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic DE,
Dead from the waist down.'
Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the
saving clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of
necessity and not of choice. Knowledge is now too broad a
field for your Jack-of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully
utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws his pen
through a dozen branches of study, and behold - John the
Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not
deny; but we hold that it is NOT the way to be healthy or
wise. The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to
one 'punctual spot' of knowledge. A rank unhealthy soil
breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself above others
in his one little branch - in the classification of
toadstools, or Carthaginian history - he waxes great in his
own eyes and looks down on others. Having all his sympathies
educated in one way, they die out in every other; and he is
apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and intolerant bigot.
Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is a certain
form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this
that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no
subject until they have seen and felt its merit - to act
under a general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a
commercial eagerness to excel in one.
In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We
are apostles of our own caste and our own subject of study,
instead of being, as we should, true men and LOVING students.
Of course both of these could be corrected by the students
themselves; but this is nothing to the purpose: it is more
important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of alumni
could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and
wider sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say
something upon this head.
One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we
be when we grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to
lay on restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful
experience with every year, till he looked back on his youth
as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We please
ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We
would fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end
in another; and that when we are in fact the octogenarians
that we SEEM at present, there shall be no merrier men on
earth. It is pleasant to picture us, sunning ourselves in
Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our evening
cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.
COLLEGE PAPERS
CHAPTER III - DEBATING SOCIETIES
A DEBATING society is at first somewhat of a disappointment.
You do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his
pebbles in the same room with you; or, even if you do, you
will probably think the performance little to be admired. As
a general rule, the members speak shamefully ill. The
subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The
Ballot Question - oldest of dialectic nightmares - is often
found astride of a somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and
Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY men, to
do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many
functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,'
which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a
haunt of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish
borders. There is a sad absence of striking argument or real
lively discussion. Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for
your fellow-members; and it is not until you rise yourself to
hawk and hesitate and sit shamefully down again, amid
eleemosynary applause, that you begin to find your level and
value others rightly. Even then, even when failure has
damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be
laughed at in the deportment of your rivals.
Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers
after eloquence. They are of those who 'pursue with
eagerness the phantoms of hope,' and who, since they expect
that 'the deficiencies of last sentence will be supplied by
the next,' have been recommended by Dr. Samuel Johnson to
'attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.'
They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing
damps them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive
sentence, to launch forth into another with unabated vigour.
They have all the manner of an orator. From the tone of
their voice, you would expect a splendid period - and lo! a
string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out with
stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the art
(learned from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious
sentence by dwelling on a single syllable - of striking a
balance in a top-heavy period by lengthening out a word into
a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never cease to hope. Even
at last, even when they have exhausted all their ideas, even
after the would-be peroration has finally refused to
perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open,
waiting for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's
son in the dung-hole, after
'His throat was kit unto the nekke bone,'
in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his
tongue, and give him renewed and clearer utterance.
These men may have something to say, if they could only say
it - indeed they generally have; but the next class are
people who, having nothing to say, are cursed with a facility
and an unhappy command of words, that makes them the prime
nuisances of the society they affect. They try to cover
their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of
delivery. They look triumphantly round the room, as if
courting applause, after a torrent of diluted truism. They
talk in a circle, harping on the same dull round of argument,
and returning again and again to the same remark with the
same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of
novelty.
After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint
at a few other varieties. There is your man who is pre-
eminently conscientious, whose face beams with sincerity as
he opens on the negative, and who votes on the affirmative at
the end, looking round the room with an air of chastened
pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises,
emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever
attempting to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have
men who ride pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if
their family have none, identify themselves with some well-
known statesman, use his opinions, and lend him their
patronage on all occasions. This is a dangerous plan, and
serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to
adorn a speech.
But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting
Providence by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature
will be found high enough for shame. The success of three
simple sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the
fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the
thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us into a
quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one
of Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes,
and our kind friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace
by a feeble round of applause. AMIS LECTEURS, this is a
painful topic. It is possible that we too, we, the 'potent,
grave, and reverend' editor, may have suffered these things,
and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure. Let
us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.
In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend
any student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the
benefits he receives should repay him an hundredfold for them
all. The life of the debating society is a handy antidote to
the life of the classroom and quadrangle. Nothing could be
conceived more excellent as a weapon against many of those
PECCANT HUMOURS that we have been railing against in the
jeremiad of our last 'College Paper' - particularly in the
field of intellect. It is a sad sight to see our heather-
scented students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College
with determined views - ROUES in speculation - having gauged
the vanity of philosophy or learned to shun it as the middle-
man of heresy - a company of determined, deliberate
opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.
What have such men to do with study? If their minds are made
up irrevocably, why burn the 'studious lamp' in search of
further confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student
deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who
studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises,
should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark
flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He
should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce
of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we
desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a
means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions
into living and impressionable soul that we insist on their
utility. If we could once prevail on our students to feel no
shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any subject,
if we could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad
to have his OPINIONETTE on every topic, we should have gone a
far way towards bracing the intellectual tone of the coming
race of thinkers; and this it is which debating societies are
so well fitted to perform.
We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make
friends with them. We are taught to rail against a man the
whole session through, and then hob-a-nob with him at the
concluding entertainment. We find men of talent far
exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely different
from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves. But
the best means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome
rule which some folk are most inclined to condemn - I mean
the law of OBLIGED SPEECHES. Your senior member commands;
and you must take the affirmative or the negative, just as
suits his best convenience. This tends to the most perfect
liberality. It is no good hearing the arguments of an
opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even
if you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a
captious search for weaknesses. This is proved, I fear, in
every debate; when you hear each speaker arguing out his own
prepared SPECIALITE (he never intended speaking, of course,
until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own
COACHED-UP subject without the least attention to what has
gone before, as utterly at sea about the drift of his
adversary's speech as Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste,
and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a few
flippant criticisms. Now, as the rule stands, you are
saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced,
by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to
elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself;
and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle
digging of the vineyard! How many new difficulties take form
before your eyes? how many superannuated arguments cripple
finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced
eclecticism!
Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend
also to foster taste, and to promote friendship between
University men. This last, as we have had occasion before to
say, is the great requirement of our student life; and it
will therefore be no waste of time if we devote a paragraph
to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a CLIQUE.
Friends propose friends, and mutual friends second them,
until the society degenerates into a sort of family party.
You may confirm old acquaintances, but you can rarely make
new ones. You find yourself in the atmosphere of your own
daily intercourse. Now, this is an unfortunate circumstance,
which it seems to me might readily be rectified. Our
Principal has shown himself so friendly towards all College
improvements that I cherish the hope of seeing shortly
realised a certain suggestion, which is not a new one with
me, and which must often have been proposed and canvassed
heretofore - I mean, a real UNIVERSITY DEBATING SOCIETY,
patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the Professors,
to which every one might gain ready admittance on sight of
his matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not
a necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might
have another object for attendance besides the mere desire to
save his fines: to wit, the chance of drawing on himself the
favourable consideration of his teachers. This would be
merely following in the good tendency, which has been so
noticeable during all this session, to increase and multiply
student societies and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a
matter of much difficulty. The united societies would form a
nucleus: one of the class-rooms at first, and perhaps
afterwards the great hall above the library, might be the
place of meeting. There would be no want of attendance or
enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to
speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand,
and, on the other, in a public place, where a happy period or
a subtle argument may do the speaker permanent service in
after life. Such a club might end, perhaps, by rivalling the
'Union' at Cambridge or the 'Union' at Oxford.
COLLEGE PAPERS
CHAPTER IV - THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS (1)
IT is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our
whole Society by the fact that we live under the sign of
Aquarius - that our climate is essentially wet. A mere
arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords of yore, might
have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability, had
not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed
the inclination of Society to another exponent of those
virtues. A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of
medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove his
birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it
is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of
Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged
index of social position.
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the
hankering after them inherent in the civilised and educated
mind. To the superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may
sufficiently account for his quaint choice of a luxury; but
surely one who had borne the hard labour of a seaman under
the tropics for all these years could have supported an
excursion after goats or a peaceful CONSTITUTIONAL arm in arm
with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory of a
vanished respectability called for some outward
manifestation, and the result was - an umbrella. A pious
castaway might have rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday
mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe was
rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as
fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express
itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become
the very foremost badge of modern civilisation - the Urim and
Thummim of respectability. Its pregnant symbolism has taken
its rise in the most natural manner. Consider, for a moment,
when umbrellas were first introduced into this country, what
manner of men would use them, and what class would adhere to
the useless but ornamental cane. The first, without doubt,
would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their
health, or the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the
second, it is equally plain, would include the fop, the fool,
and the Bobadil. Any one acquainted with the growth of
Society, and knowing out of what small seeds of cause are
produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions of
intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage
of an umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard
for bodily welfare, and scorn for mere outward adornment,
and, in one word, all those homely and solid virtues implied
in the term RESPECTABILITY. Not that the umbrella's
costliness has nothing to do with its great influence. Its
possession, besides symbolising (as we have already
indicated) the change from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling
in tents, implies a certain comfortable provision of fortune.
It is not every one that can expose twenty-six shillings'
worth of property to so many chances of loss and theft. So
strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost
inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned
umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise. They have a
qualification standing in their lobbies; they carry a
sufficient stake in the common-weal below their arm. One who
bears with him an umbrella - such a complicated structure of
whalebone, of silk, and of cane, that it becomes a very
microcosm of modern industry - is necessarily a man of peace.
A half-crown cane may be applied to an offender's head on a
very moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty shilling silk
is a possession too precious to be adventured in the shock of
war.
These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general)
came to their present high estate. But the true Umbrella-
Philosopher meets with far stranger applications as he goes
about the streets.
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the
individual who carries them: indeed, they are far more
capable of betraying his trust; for whereas a face is given
to us so far ready made, and all our power over it is in
frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during the first three
or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from a
whole shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser's
disposition. An undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the
practised Umbrella-Philosopher. O you who lisp, and amble,
and change the fashion of your countenances - you who conceal
all these, how little do you think that you left a proof of
your weakness in our umbrella-stand - that even now, as you
shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in
its ivory handle the outward and visible sign of your
snobbery, or from the exposed gingham of its cover detect,
through coat and waistcoat, the hidden hypocrisy of the
'DICKEY'! But alas! even the umbrella is no certain
criterion. The falsity and the folly of the human race have
degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and
while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not
strikingly characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves
that he displays his real nature), others, from certain
prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the
person's disposition. A mendacious umbrella is a sign of
great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself
below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his
religious friends armed with the decent and reputable
gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these
inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with
a lie in their right hand'?
The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated
social scale of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented
the great bulk of their subjects from having any at all,
which was certainly a bad thing. We should be sorry to
believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool - the idea of
an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have
originated in a nobody - and we have accordingly taken
exceeding pains to find out the reason of this harsh
restriction. We think we have succeeded; but, while admiring
the principle at which he aimed, and while cordially
recognising in the Siamese potentate the only man before
ourselves who had taken a real grasp of the umbrella, we must
be allowed to point out how unphilosophically the great man
acted in this particular. His object, plainly, was to
prevent any unworthy persons from bearing the sacred symbol
of domestic virtues. We cannot excuse his limiting these
virtues to the circle of his court. We must only remember
that such was the feeling of the age in which he lived.
Liberalism had not yet raised the war-cry of the working
classes. But here was his mistake: it was a needless
regulation. Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined
to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature UMBRELLARIANS,
have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have
failed - have expended their patrimony in the purchase of
umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost
them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken
purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and
borrowing for the remainder of their lives. This is the most
remarkable fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet
we challenge the candid reader to call it in question. Now,
as there cannot be any MORAL SELECTION in a mere dead piece
of furniture - as the umbrella cannot be supposed to have an
affinity for individual men equal and reciprocal to that
which men certainly feel toward individual umbrellas - we
took the trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to
whether there was any possible physical explanation of the
phenomenon. He was unable to supply a plausible theory, or
even hypothesis; but we extract from his letter the following
interesting passage relative to the physical peculiarities of
umbrellas: 'Not the least important, and by far the most
curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it
displays in affecting the atmospheric strata. There is no
fact in meteorology better established - indeed, it is almost
the only one on which meteorologists are agreed - than that
the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation of the air;
while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely
produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain. No
theory,' my friend continues, 'competent to explain this
hygrometric law has been given (as far as I am aware) by
Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait, Buchan, or any other writer;
nor do I pretend to supply the defect. I venture, however,
to throw out the conjecture that it will be ultimately found
to belong to the same class of natural laws as that agreeable
to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered
surface downwards.'
But it is time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much
longer upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to
leave unfinished these few desultory remarks - slender
contributions towards a subject which has fallen sadly
backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better understood
by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers of
to-day. If, however, we have awakened in any rational mind
an interest in the symbolism of umbrellas - in any generous
heart a more complete sympathy with the dumb companion of his
daily walk - or in any grasping spirit a pure notion of
respectability strong enough to make him expend his six-and-
twenty shillings - we shall have deserved well of the world,
to say nothing of the many industrious persons employed in
the manufacture of the article.
(1) 'This paper was written in collaboration with James
Waiter Ferrier, and if reprinted this is to be stated, though
his principal collaboration was to lie back in an easy-chair
and laugh.' - [R.L.S., Oct. 25, 1894.]
COLLEGE PAPERS
CHAPTER V - THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE
'How many Caesars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the
names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many are
there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had
not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and
Nicodemus'd into nothing?' - TRISTRAM SHANDY, vol. I. chap
xix.
Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey
merchant. To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first
who fairly pointed out the incalculable influence of
nomenclature upon the whole life - who seems first to have
recognised the one child, happy in an heroic appellation,
soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other, like
the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer
weight of name into the abysses of social failure. Solomon
possibly had his eye on some such theory when he said that 'a
good name is better than precious ointment'; and perhaps we
may trace a similar spirit in the compilers of the English
Catechism, and the affectionate interest with which they
linger round the catechumen's name at the very threshold of
their work. But, be these as they may, I think no one can
censure me for appending, in pursuance of the expressed wish
of his son, the Turkey merchant's name to his system, and
pronouncing, without further preface, a short epitome of the
'Shandean Philosophy of Nomenclature.'
To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt
from the very cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride
with which I hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le
Diable as my name-fellows; and the feeling of sore
disappointment that fell on my heart when I found a
freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single
one of my numerous PRAENOMINA. Look at the delight with
which two children find they have the same name. They are
friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union
stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This feeling,
I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their
freshness and interest, become trite and indifferent. But
this, dear reader, is merely one of the sad effects of those
'shades of the prison-house' which come gradually betwixt us
and nature with advancing years; it affords no weapon against
the philosophy of names.
In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that
name which careless godfathers lightly applied to your
unconscious infancy will have been moulding your character,
and influencing with irresistible power the whole course of
your earthly fortunes. But the last name, overlooked by Mr.
Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition of success.
Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited nicknames;
and if the SOBRIQUET were applicable to the ancestor, it is
most likely applicable to the descendant also. You would not
expect to find Mr. M'Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M'Lumpha
excelling as a professor of dancing. Therefore, in what
follows, we shall consider names, independent of whether they
are first or last. And to begin with, look what a pull
CROMWELL had over PYM - the one name full of a resonant
imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a
degree. Who would expect eloquence from PYM - who would read
poems by PYM - who would bow to the opinion of PYM? He might
have been a dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a
statesman. I can only wonder that he succeeded as he did.
Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon the roll of men who have
triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the most
unfavourable appellations. But even these have suffered;
and, had they been more fitly named, the one might have been
Lord Protector, and the other have shared the laurels with
Isaiah. In this matter we must not forget that all our great
poets have borne great names. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley - what a constellation of
lordly words! Not a single common-place name among them -
not a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names
that one would stop and look at on a door-plate. Now,
imagine if PEPYS had tried to clamber somehow into the
enclosure of poetry, what a blot would that word have made
upon the list! The thing was impossible. In the first place
a certain natural consciousness that men would have held him
down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from
rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him
altogether from attempting verse. Next, the booksellers
would refuse to publish, and the world to read them, on the
mere evidence of the fatal appellation. And now, before I
close this section, I must say one word as to PUNNABLE names,
names that stand alone, that have a significance and life
apart from him that bears them. These are the bitterest of
all. One friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life
under the weight of this misfortune; for it is an awful thing
when a man's name is a joke, when he cannot be mentioned
without exciting merriment, and when even the intimation of
his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a home.
So much for people who are badly named. Now for people who
are TOO well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are
baptized into a false position, and find themselves beginning
life eclipsed under the fame of some of the great ones of the
past. A man, for instance, called William Shakespeare could
never dare to write plays. He is thrown into too humbling an
apposition with the author of HAMLET. Its own name coming
after is such an anti-climax. 'The plays of William
Shakespeare'? says the reader - 'O no! The plays of William
Shakespeare Cockerill,' and he throws the book aside. In
wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler, who
not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never
attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and
has excelled upon the tight-rope. A marked example of
triumph over this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
On the face of the matter, I should have advised him to
imitate the pleasing modesty of the last-named gentleman, and
confine his ambition to the sawdust. But Mr. Rossetti has
triumphed. He has even dared to translate from his mighty
name-father; and the voice of fame supports him in his
boldness.
Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter. A
lifetime of comparison and research could scarce suffice for
its elucidation. So here, if it please you, we shall let it
rest. Slight as these notes have been, I would that the
great founder of the system had been alive to see them. How
he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive eloquence
would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of
praise and sympathy would not the editor have received before
the month was out! Alas, the thing was not to be. Walter
Shandy died and was duly buried, while yet his theory lay
forgotten and neglected by his fellow-countrymen. But,
reader, the day will come, I hope, when a paternal government
will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all depressing
patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly
and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and
not rush blindfold to the christening. In these days there
shall be written a 'Godfather's Assistant,' in shape of a
dictionary of names, with their concomitant virtues and
vices; and this book shall be scattered broadcast through the
land, and shall be on the table of every one eligible for
godfathership, until such a thing as a vicious or untoward
appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.
CRITICISMS
CHAPTER I - LORD LYTTON'S 'FABLES IN SONG'
IT seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had
found the form most natural to his talent. In some ways,
indeed, it may be held inferior to CHRONICLES AND CHARACTERS;
we look in vain for anything like the terrible intensity of
the night-scene in IRENE, or for any such passages of massive
and memorable writing as appeared, here and there, in the
earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy of its
model, Hugo's LEGEND OF THE AGES. But it becomes evident, on
the most hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a step
on the way towards the later. It seems as if the author had
been feeling about for his definite medium, and was already,
in the language of the child's game, growing hot. There are
many pieces in CHRONICLES AND CHARACTERS that might be
detached from their original setting, and embodied, as they
stand, among the FABLES IN SONG.
For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously. In
the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by
means of a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat
trivial into the bargain; there is something playful about
it, that will not support a very exacting criticism, and the
lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a hint. Such
is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or
foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should
expect the fable, in company with other and more important
literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least
largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to degenerate
in conception from this original type. That depended for
much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic:
the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry
of this description should become less common, as men learn
to suspect some serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical
story of an ape touches us quite differently after the
proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory. Moreover, there lay,
perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of fable, a
humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end of
some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined
punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his
auditors, as we have often to assure tearful children on the
like occasions, that they may dry their eyes, for none of it
was true.
But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more
sophisticated hearers and authors: a man is no longer the
dupe of his own artifice, and cannot deal playfully with
truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in his
life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern
thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall
gradually into desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by
another, which is a fable in all points except that it is not
altogether fabulous. And this new form, such as we should
expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents the
essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also,
there is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral
idea; and as in any other fable, the object is to bring this
home to the reader through the intellect rather than through
the feelings; so that, without being very deeply moved or
interested by the characters of the piece, we should
recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot
revolves. But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before
he merely sought humorous situations. There will be now a
logical nexus between the moral expressed and the machinery
employed to express it. The machinery, in fact, as this
change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous. We find
ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a
miniature division of creative literature; and sometimes we
have the lesson embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as
in the parables of the New Testament, and sometimes merely
the statement or, at most, the collocation of significant
facts in life, the reader being left to resolve for himself
the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely moral
sentiment which has been thus created. And step by step with
the development of this change, yet another is developed: the
moral tends to become more indeterminate and large. It
ceases to be possible to append it, in a tag, to the bottom
of the piece, as one might write the name below a caricature;
and the fable begins to take rank with all other forms of
creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of
its miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct
formula without the loss of all that is deepest and most
suggestive in it.
Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands
the term; there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of
all the forms already mentioned, and even of another which
can only be admitted among fables by the utmost possible
leniency of construction. 'Composure,' 'Et Caetera,' and
several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So,
too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild:
the child, having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it
for ten minutes, comes back to find it already nearly melted,
and no longer beautiful: at the same time, the grandfather
has just remembered and taken out a bundle of love-letters,
which he too had stored away in years gone by, and then long
neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded and
sorrowfully disappointing as the icicle. This is merely a
simile poetically worked out; and yet it is in such as these,
and some others, to be mentioned further on, that the author
seems at his best. Wherever he has really written after the
old model, there is something to be deprecated: in spite of
all the spirit and freshness, in spite of his happy
assumption of that cheerful acceptation of things as they
are, which, rightly or wrongly, we come to attribute to the
ideal fabulist, there is ever a sense as of something a
little out of place. A form of literature so very innocent
and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's
conscious and highly-coloured style. It may be bad taste,
but sometimes we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose
narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece. So that
it is not among those fables that conform most nearly to the
old model, but one had nearly said among those that most
widely differ from it, that we find the most satisfactory
examples of the author's manner.
In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are
the most remarkable; such as that of the windmill who
imagined that it was he who raised the wind; or that of the
grocer's balance ('Cogito ergo sum') who considered himself
endowed with free-will, reason, and an infallible practical
judgment; until, one fine day, the police made a descent upon
the shop, and find the weights false and the scales unequal;
and the whole thing is broken up for old iron. Capital
fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are 'Prometheus
Unbound,' the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-cork,
and 'Teleology,' where a nettle justifies the ways of God to
nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of
luck, promptly changes its divinity.
In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you
will, although, even here, there may be two opinions
possible; but there is another group, of an order of merit
perhaps still higher, where we look in vain for any such
playful liberties with Nature. Thus we have 'Conservation of
Force'; where a musician, thinking of a certain picture,
improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes
home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter, under
the influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus
lineally descended from the first. This is fiction, but not
what we have been used to call fable. We miss the incredible
element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was
wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this the
case with others. 'The Horse and the Fly' states one of the
unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and
straightforward way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach
is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man
with a wife and family, are all killed. The horse continues
to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by
running over an only child; and there is some little pathetic
detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the
reader's indignation very white-hot against some one. It
remains to be seen who that some one is to be: the fly? Nay,
but on closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated
by maternal instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs:
is maternal instinct, then, 'sole author of these mischiefs
all'? 'Who's in the Right?' one of the best fables in the
book, is somewhat in the same vein. After a battle has been
won, a group of officers assemble inside a battery, and
debate together who should have the honour of the success;
the Prince, the general staff, the cavalry, the engineer who
posted the battery in which they then stand talking, are
successively named: the sergeant, who pointed the guns,
sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close
by, the gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a
smile of triumph, since it was through his hand that the
victorious blow had been dealt. Meanwhile, the cannon claims
the honour over the gunner; the cannon-ball, who actually
goes forth on the dread mission, claims it over the cannon,
who remains idly behind; the powder reminds the cannon-ball
that, but for him, it would still be lying on the arsenal
floor; and the match caps the discussion; powder, cannon-
ball, and cannon would be all equally vain and ineffectual
without fire. Just then there comes on a shower of rain,
which wets the powder and puts out the match, and completes
this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative
conditions which are as necessary for any effect, in their
absence, as is the presence of this great fraternity of
positive conditions, not any one of which can claim priority
over any other. But the fable does not end here, as perhaps,
in all logical strictness, it should. It wanders off into a
discussion as to which is the truer greatness, that of the
vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain. And the
speech of the rain is charming:
'Lo, with my little drops I bless again
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,
But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.
Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,
And poppied corn, I bring.
'Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,
My violets spring.
Little by little my small drops have strength
To deck with green delights the grateful earth.'
And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the
matter in hand, but welcome for its own sake.
Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with
the emotions. There is, for instance, that of 'The Two
Travellers,' which is profoundly moving in conception,
although by no means as well written as some others. In
this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten, saves his life
out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in his
body; just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly
resigned himself to death, had violently freed himself from
Love at the cost of all that was finest and fairest in his
character. Very graceful and sweet is the fable (if so it
should be called) in which the author sings the praises of
that 'kindly perspective,' which lets a wheat-stalk near the
eye cover twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the
humble circle about a man's hearth more to him than all the
possibilities of the external world. The companion fable to
this is also excellent. It tells us of a man who had, all
his life through, entertained a passion for certain blue
hills on the far horizon, and had promised himself to travel
thither ere he died, and become familiar with these distant
friends. At last, in some political trouble, he is banished
to the very place of his dreams. He arrives there overnight,
and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there sure
enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places
with him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the
old home whence he has come. Such a story might have been
very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone
is kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man
submissively takes the lesson, and understands that things
far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the
unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the
beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two
volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much
irony on abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory
spirit is never absent. There is much that is cheerful and,
after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful. No one will be
discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all this
hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat
vague. It does not seem to arise from any practical belief
in the future either of the individual or the race, but
rather from the profound personal contentment of the writer.
This is, I suppose, all we must look for in the case. It is
as much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall prove a
shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world
does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet
laughingly learned something of its evil. It will depend
much, of course, upon our own character and circumstances,
whether the encounter will be agreeable and bracing to the
spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed mockery. But where, as
here, there is a little tincture of bitterness along with the
good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a man
cheerfully ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and
superior and smilingly attentive, upon the good and bad of
our existence, it will go hardly if we do not catch some
reflection of the same spirit to help us on our way. There
is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace - none
of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is
a view of life that would be even grievous, were it not
enlivened with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon
redeemed by a stroke of pathos.
It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting
in this book some of the intenser qualities of the author's
work; and their absence is made up for by much happy
description after a quieter fashion. The burst of jubilation
over the departure of the snow, which forms the prelude to
'The Thistle,' is full of spirit and of pleasant images. The
speech of the forest in 'Sans Souci' is inspired by a
beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort, and
pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us, than
anything in CHRONICLES AND CHARACTERS. There are some
admirable felicities of expression here and there; as that of
the hill, whose summit
'Did print
The azure air with pines.'
Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any
symptom of that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is
noticeable now and again in the fables; and perhaps most
noticeably, when he sketches the burned letters as they hover
along the gusty flue, 'Thin, sable veils, wherein a restless
spark Yet trembled.' But the description is at its best when
the subjects are unpleasant, or even grisly. There are a few
capital lines in this key on the last spasm of the battle
before alluded to. Surely nothing could be better, in its
own way, than the fish in 'The Last Cruise of the Arrogant,'
'the shadowy, side-faced, silent things,' that come butting
and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken steam-engine.
And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly enough,
how the water went down into the valleys, where it set itself
gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it would
soberly carry grain to town; yet the real strength of the
fable is when it dealt with the shut pool in which certain
unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among slugs and snails,
and in the company of an old toad. The sodden contentment of
the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is
astonishing how unpleasantly we are startled by the
appearance of her horrible lover, the maggot.
And now for a last word, about the style. This is not easy
to criticise. It is impossible to deny to it rapidity,
spirit, and a full sound; the lines are never lame, and the
sense is carried forward with an uninterrupted, impetuous
rush. But it is not equal. After passages of really
admirable versification, the author falls back upon a sort of
loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of Mr.
Browning's minor pieces, and almost inseparable from
wordiness, and an easy acceptation of somewhat cheap finish.
There is nothing here of that compression which is the note
of a really sovereign style. It is unfair, perhaps, to set a
not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side with one
of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect
poet; and yet it is interesting, when we see how the
portraiture of a dog, detailed through thirty odd lines, is
frittered down and finally almost lost in the mere laxity of
the style, to compare it with the clear, simple, vigorous
delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has given us of the
ploughman's collie. It is interesting, at first, and then it
becomes a little irritating; for when we think of other
passages so much more finished and adroit, we cannot help
feeling, that with a little more ardour after perfection of
form, criticism would have found nothing left for her to
censure. A similar mark of precipitate work is the number of
adjectives tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help
out the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to
help out the sound of the verses. I do not believe, for
instance, that Lord Lytton himself would defend the lines in
which we are told how Laocoon 'Revealed to Roman crowds, now
CHRISTIAN grown, That PAGAN anguish which, in PARIAN stone,
The RHODIAN artist,' and so on. It is not only that this is
bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in
which it is found; that such verses should not have appeared
with the name of a good versifier like Lord Lytton. We must
take exception, also, in conclusion, to the excess of
alliteration. Alliteration is so liable to be abused that we
can scarcely be too sparing of it; and yet it is a trick that
seems to grow upon the author with years. It is a pity to
see fine verses, such as some in 'Demos,' absolutely spoiled
by the recurrence of one wearisome consonant.
CRITICISMS
CHAPTER II - SALVINI'S MACBETH
SALVINI closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance
of MACBETH. It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local
colour that he chose to play the Scottish usurper for the
first time before Scotsmen; and the audience were not
insensible of the privilege. Few things, indeed, can move a
stronger interest than to see a great creation taking shape
for the first time. If it is not purely artistic, the
sentiment is surely human. And the thought that you are
before all the world, and have the start of so many others as
eager as yourself, at least keeps you in a more unbearable
suspense before the curtain rises, if it does not enhance the
delight with which you follow the performance and see the
actor 'bend up each corporal agent' to realise a masterpiece
of a few hours' duration. With a player so variable as
Salvini, who trusts to the feelings of the moment for so much
detail, and who, night after night, does the same thing
differently but always well, it can never be safe to pass
judgment after a single hearing. And this is more
particularly true of last week's MACBETH; for the whole third
act was marred by a grievously humorous misadventure.
Several minutes too soon the ghost of Banquo joined the
party, and after having sat helpless a while at a table, was
ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-
box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed
again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really
wanted, that, after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin
his apostrophe to empty air. The arrival of the belated
spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made him nod all
over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily
topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters went
throughout these cross purposes.
In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth
had an emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place
beside the same artist's Othello and Hamlet. It is the
simplest and most unsympathetic of the three; but the absence
of the finer lineaments of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto,
breadth, and a headlong unity. Salvini sees nothing great in
Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle, and that courage which
comes of strong and copious circulation. The moral smallness
of the man is insisted on from the first, in the shudder of
uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan embracing
Banquo. He may have some northern poetry of speech, but he
has not much logical understanding. In his dealings with the
supernatural powers he is like a savage with his fetich,
trusting them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever
he is crossed, casting his belief aside and calling 'fate
into the list.' For his wife, he is little more than an
agent, a frame of bone and sinew for her fiery spirit to
command. The nature of his feeling towards her is rendered
with a most precise and delicate touch. He always yields to
the woman's fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know
how much meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly
hard and unloving. Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he
might take hold of any one who happened to be nearest to him
at a moment of excitement. Love has fallen out of this
marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship. Only
once - at the very moment when she is showing herself so
little a woman and so much a high-spirited man - only once is
he very deeply stirred towards her; and that finds expression
in the strange and horrible transport of admiration, doubly
strange and horrible on Salvini's lips - 'Bring forth men-
children only!'
The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience
best. Macbeth's voice, in the talk with his wife, was a
thing not to be forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman's
hands he seemed to have blood in his utterance. Never for a
moment, even in the very article of the murder, does he
possess his own soul. He is a man on wires. From first to
last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice. For, after
all, it is not here, but in broad daylight, with the
exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at
every blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand,
that this man's physical bravery can keep him up; he is an
unwieldy ship, and needs plenty of way on before he will
steer.
In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account
of what he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at
the 'twenty trenched gashes' on Banquo's head. Thus Macbeth
makes welcome to his imagination those very details of
physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in him. As he
runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to
realise to his mind's eye the reassuring spectacle of his
dead enemy, he is dressing out the phantom to terrify
himself; and his imagination, playing the part of justice, is
to 'commend to his own lips the ingredients of his poisoned
chalice.' With the recollection of Hamlet and his father's
spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which that
good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,
it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between
the two apparitions and the two men haunted. But there are
none to be found. Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for
Banquo's spirit and the 'twenty trenched gashes.' He is
afraid of he knows not what. He is abject, and again
blustering. In the end he so far forgets himself, his
terror, and the nature of what is before him, that he rushes
upon it as he would upon a man. When his wife tells him he
needs repose, there is something really childish in the way
he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an
expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough
to go to bed. And what is the upshot of the visitation? It
is written in Shakespeare, but should be read with the
commentary of Salvini's voice and expression:- 'O! SIAM NELL'
OPRA ANCOR FANCIULLI' - 'We are yet but young in deed.'
Circle below circle. He is looking with horrible
satisfaction into the mouth of hell. There may still be a
prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he
may move untroubled in this element of blood.
In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is
Salvini's finest moment throughout the play. From the first
he was admirably made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as
perfectly as ever he looked Othello. From the first moment
he steps upon the stage you can see this character is a
creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase; for the man
before you is a type you know well already. He arrives with
Banquo on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of
gesture, full of pride and the sense of animal wellbeing, and
satisfied after the battle like a beast who has eaten his
fill. But in the fifth act there is a change. This is still
the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is
still the same face which in the earlier acts could be
superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.
But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole
tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own
nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and
puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the
air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth
complains of the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no
complaint - he has ceased to notice it now; but the same
smell is in his nostrils. A contained fury and disgust
possesses him. He taunts the messenger and the doctor as
people would taunt their mortal enemies. And, indeed, as he
knows right well, every one is his enemy now, except his
wife. About her he questions the doctor with something like
a last human anxiety; and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks
him if he can 'minister to a mind diseased.' When the news
of her death is brought him, he is staggered and falls into a
seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that
he displays. There had been two of them against God and man;
and now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less
difference than he had expected. And so her death is not
only an affliction, but one more disillusion; and he
redoubles in bitterness. The speech that follows, given with
tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge, not so much for
her as for himself. From that time forth there is nothing
human left in him, only 'the fiend of Scotland,' Macduff's
'hell-hound,' whom, with a stern glee, we see baited like a
bear and hunted down like a wolf. He is inspired and set
above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and
slaughter. Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not
fail; but when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all
virtue goes out of him; and though he speaks sounding words
of defiance, the last combat is little better than a suicide.
The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a
headlong unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and
powerful; and within these somewhat narrow limits there is so
much play and saliency that, so far as concerns Salvini
himself, a third great success seems indubitable.
Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than a
very small fraction of the boards; and though Banquo's ghost
will probably be more seasonable in his future apparitions,
there are some more inherent difficulties in the piece. The
company at large did not distinguish themselves. Macduff, to
the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff'd the average
ranter. The lady who filled the principal female part has
done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal
for what she tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-
walking scene is to make a memorable failure. As it was
given, it succeeded in being wrong in art without being true
to nature.
And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform,
which somewhat interfered with the success of the
performance. At the end of the incantation scene the Italian
translator has made Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage.
This is a change of questionable propriety from a
psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect
it leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business.
To remedy this, a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and
pointed their toes about the prostrate king. A dance of High
Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would not
be more out of the key; though the gravity of a Scots
audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed
their disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar
irruption of Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a
London theatre from pit to gallery with inextinguishable
laughter. It is, I am told, the Italian tradition; but it is
one more honoured in the breach than the observance. With
the total disappearance of these damsels, with a stronger
Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of
those scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the
spectator is left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the
play would go twice as well, and we should be better able to
follow and enjoy an admirable work of dramatic art.
CRITICISMS
CHAPTER III - BAGSTER'S 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'
I HAVE here before me an edition of the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS,
bound in green, without a date, and described as 'illustrated
by nearly three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.'
On the outside it is lettered 'Bagster's Illustrated
Edition,' and after the author's apology, facing the first
page of the tale, a folding pictorial 'Plan of the Road' is
marked as 'drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder,' and engraved by
J. Basire. No further information is anywhere vouchsafed;
perhaps the publishers had judged the work too unimportant;
and we are still left ignorant whether or not we owe the
woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand that drew
the plan. It seems, however, more than probable. The
literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down
the flower-plots in the devil's garden, and carefully
introduced the court-house in the town of Vanity, is closely
paralleled in many of the cuts; and in both, the architecture
of the buildings and the disposition of the gardens have a
kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was, the author
of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
best illustrator of Bunyan. They are not only good
illustrations, like so many others; but they are like so few,
good illustrations of Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and
quality, is still the same as his own. The designer also has
lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and
almost as apposite as Bunyan's; and text and pictures make
but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story.
To do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say,
for the hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece
which they adorn.
All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of
their creators; and as the characters and incidents become
more and more interesting in themselves, the moral, which
these were to show forth, falls more and more into neglect.
An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves round the
cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came from the
chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall,
and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with
foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in much the same
situation as the writer of allegories. The FAERY QUEEN was
an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as an
imaginative tale in incomparable verse. The case of Bunyan
is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor
nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely
thrust against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest;
with 'his fingers in his ears, he ran on,' straight for his
mark. He tells us himself, in the conclusion to the first
part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh; indeed, he
feared nothing, and said anything; and he was greatly served
in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style, which,
like the talk of strong uneducated men, when it does not
impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity. The
mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his
equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of faith
that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark
in him, not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied
by cold and merely decorative invention, but the parts where
faith has grown to be credulity, and his characters become so
real to him that he forgets the end of their creation. We
can follow him step by step into the trap which he lays for
himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant
literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in
an inconsistency. The allegories of the Interpreter and of
the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are all actually
performed, like stage-plays, before the pilgrims. The son of
Mr. Great-grace visibly 'tumbles hills about with his words.'
Adam the First has his condemnation written visibly on his
forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant the
net closes round the pilgrims, 'the white robe falls from the
black man's body.' Despair 'getteth him a grievous crab-tree
cudgel'; it was in 'sunshiny weather' that he had his fits;
and the birds in the grove about the House Beautiful, 'our
country birds,' only sing their little pious verses 'at the
spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.' 'I
often,' says Piety, 'go out to hear them; we also ofttimes
keep them tame on our house.' The post between Beulah and
the Celestial City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in
country places. Madam Bubble, that 'tall, comely dame,
something of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant attire,
but old,' 'gives you a smile at the end of each sentence' - a
real woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying 'gave Mr.
Stand-fast a ring,' for no possible reason in the allegory,
merely because the touch was human and affecting. Look at
Great-heart, with his soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had
almost called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight in
any that 'he found to be a man of his hands'; his chivalrous
point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was
down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above
all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing:
'I thought I should have lost my man' - 'chicken-hearted' -
'at last he came in, and I will say that for my lord, he
carried it wonderful lovingly to him.' This is no
Independent minister; this is a stout, honest, big-busted
ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long
moustaches as he speaks. Last and most remarkable, 'My
sword,' says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-
heart delighted, 'my sword I give to him that shall succeed
me in my pilgrimage, AND MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN
GET IT.' And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox
than was ever dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are
told that 'all the trumpets sounded for him on the other
side.'
In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of
vision and the same energy of belief. The quality is equally
and indifferently displayed in the spirit of the fighting,
the tenderness of the pathos, the startling vigour and
strangeness of the incidents, the natural strain of the
conversations, and the humanity and charm of the characters.
Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes, the
delights of Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon and my
Lord Hate-good, Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, all
have been imagined with the same clearness, all written of
with equal gusto and precision, all created in the same mixed
element, of simplicity that is almost comical, and art that,
for its purpose, is faultless.
It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to
his drawings. He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He,
too, will draw anything, from a butcher at work on a dead
sheep, up to the courts of Heaven. 'A Lamb for Supper' is
the name of one of his designs, 'Their Glorious Entry' of
another. He has the same disregard for the ridiculous, and
enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style, so that we
are pleased even when we laugh the most. He is literal to
the verge of folly. If dust is to be raised from the unswept
parlour, you may be sure it will 'fly abundantly' in the
picture. If Faithful is to lie 'as dead' before Moses, dead
he shall lie with a warrant - dead and stiff like granite;
nay (and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of
the author), it is with the identical stone tables of the law
that Moses fells the sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at
once distinguish in the text by their names, Hopeful, Honest,
and Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as against By-ends,
Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other, are in
these drawings as simply distinguished by their costume.
Good people, when not armed CAP-A-PIE, wear a speckled tunic
girt about the waist, and low hats, apparently of straw. Bad
people swagger in tail-coats and chimney-pots, a few with
knee-breeches, but the large majority in trousers, and for
all the world like guests at a garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman
alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands before Christian in
laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose. But above
all examples of this artist's intrepidity, commend me to the
print entitled 'Christian Finds it Deep.' 'A great darkness
and horror,' says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is
the comfortless deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly
concludes the sorrows and conflicts of his hero. How to
represent this worthily the artist knew not; and yet he was
determined to represent it somehow. This was how he did:
Hopeful is still shown to his neck above the water of death;
but Christian has bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid
blackness indicates his place.
As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch
square for the most part, sometimes printed three or more to
the page, and each having a printed legend of its own,
however trivial the event recorded, you will soon become
aware of two things: first, that the man can draw, and,
second, that he possesses the gift of an imagination.
'Obstinate reviles,' says the legend; and you should see
Obstinate reviling. 'He warily retraces his steps'; and
there is Christian, posting through the plain, terror and
speed in every muscle. 'Mercy yearns to go' shows you a
plain interior with packing going forward, and, right in the
middle, Mercy yearning to go - every line of the girl's
figure yearning. In 'The Chamber called Peace' we see a
simple English room, bed with white curtains, window valance
and door, as may be found in many thousand unpretentious
houses; but far off, through the open window, we behold the
sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails it
with his hand:
'Where am I now! is this the love and care
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!
Thus to provide! That I should be forgiven!
And dwell already the next door to heaven!'
A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful,
the damsels point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains:
'The Prospect,' so the cut is ticketed - and I shall be
surprised, if on less than a square inch of paper you can
show me one so wide and fair. Down a cross road on an
English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon, a
hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing with her
fair enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in hand, half pauses.
The cut is perfect as a symbol; the giddy movement of the
sorceress, the uncertain poise of the man struck to the heart
by a temptation, the contrast of that even plain of life
whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the
wanton - the artist who invented and portrayed this had not
merely read Bunyan, he had also thoughtfully lived. The
Delectable Mountains - I continue skimming the first part -
are not on the whole happily rendered. Once, and once only,
the note is struck, when Christian and Hopeful are seen
coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of green shrubs -
box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed or
pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky. A little
further, and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan's insight
into life, the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he
has set down the latter end of such a number of the would-be
good; where his allegory goes so deep that, to people looking
seriously on life, it cuts like satire. The true
significance of this invention lies, of course, far out of
the way of drawing; only one feature, the great tedium of the
land, the growing weariness in well-doing, may be somewhat
represented in a symbol. The pilgrims are near the end: 'Two
Miles Yet,' says the legend. The road goes ploughing up and
down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched
arms, are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the
nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone with the
cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as
of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them: two miles!
it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of Beulah the
artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in
the distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains
his own. You will remember when Christian and Hopeful 'with
desire fell sick.' 'Effect of the Sunbeams' is the artist's
title. Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain, the radiant
temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent woods; they,
behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the splendour -
one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands
ecstatically lifted - yearn with passion after that immortal
city. Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very
shores of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen
half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and the two
pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of
the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly
illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist.
Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp - a family Bible
at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that
our second, impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not the
first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the
attitude of the manikins - faces they have none, they are too
small for that - something in the way they swing these
monstrous volumes to their singing, something perhaps
borrowed from the text, some subtle differentiation from the
cut that went before and the cut that follows after -
something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of
Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last
passage no less than of the glorious coming home. There is
that in the action of one of them which always reminds me,
with a difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas
Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart. Next come the
Shining Ones, wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass
into the river; the blot already mentioned settles over and
obliterates Christian. In two more cuts we behold them
drawing nearer to the other shore; and then, between two
radiant angels, one of whom points upward, we see them
mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind them
on the inky river. More angels meet them; Heaven is
displayed, and if no better, certainly no worse, than it has
been shown by others - a place, at least, infinitely populous
and glorious with light - a place that haunts solemnly the
hearts of children. And then this symbolic draughtsman once
more strikes into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude the
first part. In the first the gates close, black against the
glory struggling from within. The second shows us Ignorance
- alas! poor Arminian! - hailing, in a sad twilight, the
ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third we behold him, bound
hand and foot, and black already with the hue of his eternal
fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the world by two
angels of the anger of the Lord. 'Carried to Another Place,'
the artist enigmatically names his plate - a terrible design.
Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his
pencil grows more daring and incisive. He has many true
inventions in the perilous and diabolic; he has many
startling nightmares realised. It is not easy to select the
best; some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated
devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket Gate; the
scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian by the
Mouth of Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him
whispering blasphemies; the daylight breaking through that
rent cave-mouth of the mountains and falling chill adown the
haunted tunnel; Christian's further progress along the
causeway, between the two black pools, where, at every yard
or two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by -
loathsome white devilkins harbouring close under the bank to
work the springes, Christian himself pausing and pricking
with his sword's point at the nearest noose, and pale
discomfortable mountains rising on the farther side; or yet
again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first of
Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the
skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs - crafty, slippery,
lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though
possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are
they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes. In
another spirit that Good-Conscience 'to whom Mr. Honest had
spoken in his lifetime,' a cowled, grey, awful figure, one
hand pointing to the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say
all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness of
Bunyan's words. It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak in
one's lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is an austere,
unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the folds
of his raiment are not merely claustral, but have something
of the horror of the pall. Be not afraid, however; with the
hand of that appearance Mr. Honest will get safe across.
Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays
himself. He loves to look at either side of a thing: as, for
instance, when he shows us both sides of the wall - 'Grace
Inextinguishable' on the one side, with the devil vainly
pouring buckets on the flame, and 'The Oil of Grace' on the
other, where the Holy Spirit, vessel in hand, still secretly
supplies the fire. He loves, also, to show us the same event
twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous photographs at
the interval of but a moment. So we have, first, the whole
troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant, and Great-heart to
the front, spear in hand and parleying; and next, the same
cross-roads, from a more distant view, the convoy now
scattered and looking safely and curiously on, and Valiant
handing over for inspection his 'right Jerusalem blade.' It
is true that this designer has no great care after
consistency: Apollyon's spear is laid by, his quiver of darts
will disappear, whenever they might hinder the designer's
freedom; and the fiend's tail is blobbed or forked at his
good pleasure. But this is not unsuitable to the
illustration of the fervent Bunyan, breathing hurry and
momentary inspiration. He, with his hot purpose, hunting
sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget the things that he
has written yesterday. He shall first slay Heedless in the
Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in
his sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the
Enchanted Ground. And again, in his rhymed prologue, he
shall assign some of the glory of the siege of Doubting
Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth, who did not
meet with the besiegers till long after, at that dangerous
corner by Deadman's Lane. And, with all inconsistencies and
freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts:
a power of joining on one action or one humour to another; a
power of following out the moods, even of the dismal
subterhuman fiends engendered by the artist's fancy; a power
of sustained continuous realisation, step by step, in
nature's order, that can tell a story, in all its ins and
outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and figuratively, like
the art of words.
One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon -
six cuts, weird and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is
throughout a pale and stockish figure; but the devil covers a
multitude of defects. There is no better devil of the
conventional order than our artist's Apollyon, with his mane,
his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and terrifying
expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the first
you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but already
formidable in suggestion. Cut the second, 'The Fiend in
Discourse,' represents him, not reasoning, railing rather,
shaking his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his
tail writhing in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while
Christian stands back a little, timidly defensive. The third
illustrates these magnificent words: 'Then Apollyon straddled
quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void
of fear in this matter: prepare thyself to die; for I swear
by my infernal den that thou shalt go no farther: here will I
spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his
breast.' In the cut he throws a dart with either hand,
belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad
vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a
fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den.
The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames,
such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be
sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and
pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the
climacteric of the battle; Christian has reached nimbly out
and got his sword, and dealt that deadly home-thrust, the
fiend still stretched upon him, but 'giving back, as one that
had received his mortal wound.' The raised head, the
bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing
relaxed in agony, all realise vividly these words of the
text. In the sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the
pilgrim is seen kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden
scene of contest and among the shivers of the darts; while
just at the margin the hinder quarters and the tail of
Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discounted.
In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of
the text, and that point is one rather of the difference of
arts than the difference of artists. Throughout his best and
worst, in his highest and most divine imaginations as in the
narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the human-hearted
piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses the
reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the
kindness of a man's affections be expressed. In the cuts you
shall find faithfully parodied the quaintness and the power,
the triviality and the surprising freshness of the author's
fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in ready
symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially
invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact of
essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book
must be read and not the prints examined.
Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss
in any other words than those of gratitude a series of
pictures which have, to one at least, been the visible
embodiment of Bunyan from childhood up, and shown him,
through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant Maul,
and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and
town along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright
place itself, seen as to a stave of music, shining afar off
upon the hill-top, the candle of the world.
SKETCHES
CHAPTER I - THE SATIRIST
MY companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight.
He was by habit and repute a satirist. If he did
occasionally condemn anything or anybody who richly deserved
it, and whose demerits had hitherto escaped, it was simply
because he condemned everything and everybody. While I was
with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook my
reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul
of the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two out of
the ten commandments. Nothing escaped his blighting censure.
At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or lowered my
estimation of a friend. I saw everything with new eyes, and
could only marvel at my former blindness. How was it
possible that I had not before observed A's false hair, B's
selfishness, or C's boorish manners? I and my companion,
methought, walked the streets like a couple of gods among a
swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear openly
upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half
expected that these miserable beings, like the people of
Lystra, would recognise their betters and force us to the
altar; in which case, warned by the late of Paul and
Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have prevailed
upon me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish
virtue. More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no
divinity in our gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more
in the way of observing than healing their infirmities, we
were content to pass them by in scorn.
I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from
interest, but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from
the case. To understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose
yourself walking down the street with a man who continues to
sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of vitriol. You would be
much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of his
victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm
until his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the
crowd, you would run a good chance yourself of baptism with
his biting liquor. Now my companion's vitriol was
inexhaustible.
It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that
I was being anointed already out of the vials of his wrath,
that made me fall to criticising the critic, whenever we had
parted.
After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough
into his neighbours to find that the outside is false,
without caring to go farther and discover what is really
true. He is content to find that things are not what they
seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not exist
at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the
possession of virtue altogether. He has learnt the first
lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not even
suspected that there is another equally true, to wit, that no
man is wholly bad. Like the inmate of a coloured star, he
has eyes for one colour alone. He has a keen scent after
evil, but his nostrils are plugged against all good, as
people plugged their nostrils before going about the streets
of the plague-struck city.
Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the
knowledge of good like the infection of a horrible disease,
and batten and grow fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-
house. This was my first thought; but my second was not like
unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise, wise in his
generation, like the unjust steward. He does not want light,
because the darkness is more pleasant. He does not wish to
see the good, because he is happier without it. I recollect
that when I walked with him, I was in a state of divine
exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed when the
savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their lips; and
I recognise that this must be the man's habitual state. He
has the forbidden fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can
make himself a god as often and as long as he likes. He has
raised himself upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he
has touched the summit of ambition; and he envies neither
King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest, content in an elevation
as high as theirs, and much more easily attained. Yes,
certes, much more easily attained. He has not risen by
climbing himself, but by pushing others down. He has grown
great in his own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and
risking the fate of AEsop's frog, but simply by the habitual
use of a diminishing glass on everybody else. And I think
altogether that his is a better, a safer, and a surer recipe
than most others.
After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I
detect a spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I
have been comparing myself with our satirist, and all
through, I have had the best of the comparison. Well, well,
contagion is as often mental as physical; and I do not think
my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me
very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own
sawdust.
SKETCHES
CHAPTER II - NUITS BLANCHES
IF any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless
night, it should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly
child that woke from his few hours' slumber with the sweat of
a nightmare on his brow, to lie awake and listen and long for
the first signs of life among the silent streets. These
nights of pain and weariness are graven on my mind; and so
when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I
heard or saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.
Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I
listened eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet.
But nothing came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the
old cabinet that was made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle
of the coals on the extinguished fire. It was a calm; or I
know that I should have heard in the roar and clatter of the
storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild
career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance
and passing swiftly below the window; yet always returning
again from the place whence first he came, as though, baffled
by some higher power, he had retraced his steps to gain
impetus for another and another attempt.
As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the
rumbling of a carriage a very great way off, that drew near,
and passed within a few streets of the house, and died away
as gradually as it had arisen. This, too, was as a
reminiscence.
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt
of the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here
and there a lighted window. How often before had my nurse
lifted me out of bed and pointed them out to me, while we
wondered together if, there also, there were children that
could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were signs of
those that waited like us for the morning.
I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great
deep well of the staircase. For what cause I know not, just
as it used to be in the old days that the feverish child
might be the better served, a peep of gas illuminated a
narrow circle far below me. But where I was, all was
darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the
clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.
The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of
reproduction on the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of
that time for which, all night through, I waited and longed
of old. It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat
the question, 'When will the carts come in?' and repeat it
again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
street that I have heard once more this morning. The road
before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts. I
know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence
they come, or whither they go. But I know that, long ere
dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously past,
with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the same
clink of horses' feet. It was not for nothing that they made
the burthen of my wishes all night through. They are really
the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it
pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a
shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and
blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the
freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the
carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their
horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of
healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the
darkness. There is now an end of mystery and fear. Like the
knocking at the door in MACBETH, (1) or the cry of the
watchman in the TOUR DE NESLE, they show that the horrible
caesura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because
the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning
to bestir itself among the streets.
In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the
officious knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years
older than I had dreamed myself all night.
(1) See a short essay of De Quincey's.
SKETCHES
CHAPTER III - THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES
IT is all very well to talk of death as 'a pleasant potion of
immortality', but the most of us, I suspect, are of 'queasy
stomachs,' and find it none of the sweetest. (1) The
graveyard may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that
it is a very ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however
fair may be the life to which it leads. And though Enoch and
Elias went into the temple through a gate which certainly may
be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to
it through Ezekiel's low-bowed door and the vault full of
creeping things and all manner of abominable beasts.
Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which a
cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If
you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was in
obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning
found me lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars',
thoroughly sick of the town, the country, and myself.
Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying
a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves.
Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to
them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some
'talk fit for a charnel,' (2) something, in fine, worthy of
that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's law, who
has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and
the very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are
so much wrapped up in their profession that I had a good
chance of overhearing such conversation: the talk of fish-
mongers running usually on stockfish and haddocks; while of
the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches that
positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I
was doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into
the region of generalities. Their profession was forgotten
in their electorship. Politics had engulfed the narrower
economy of grave-digging. 'Na, na,' said the one, 'ye're a'
wrang.' 'The English and Irish Churches,' answered the
other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and it
had been called in question - 'The English and Irish Churches
have IMPOVERISHED the country.'
'Such are the results of education,' thought I as I passed
beside them and came fairly among the tombs. Here, at least,
there were no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning's
leader, to distract or offend me. The old shabby church
showed, as usual, its quaint extent of roofage and the
relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the fire
of thirty years ago. A chill dank mist lay over all. The
Old Greyfriars' churchyard was in perfection that morning,
and one could go round and reckon up the associations with no
fear of vulgar interruption. On this stone the Covenant was
signed. In that vault, as the story goes, John Knox took
hiding in some Reformation broil. From that window Burke the
murderer looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps
o' nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made
grave. Certainly he would have a selection here. The very
walks have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and
the whole ground is uneven, because (as I was once quaintly
told) 'when the wood rots it stands to reason the soil should
fall in,' which, from the law of gravitation, is certainly
beyond denial. But it is round the boundary that there are
the finest tombs. The whole irregular space is, as it were,
fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death's-heads and
scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs
and Latin mottoes - rich in them to such an extent that their
proper space has run over, and they have crawled end-long up
the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts
of odd corners among the sculpture. These tombs raise their
backs against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses, and
every here and there a clothes-pole projects between two
monuments its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red.
With a grim irony they recall the banners in the Invalides,
banners as appropriate perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors
and weavers as these others above the dust of armies. Why
they put things out to dry on that particular morning it was
hard to imagine. The grass was grey with drops of rain, the
headstones black with moisture. Yet, in despite of weather
and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and
beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable
rooms where whole families were born and fed, and slept and
died. At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the
graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones of a
scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full
of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the
window-seat. But you do not grasp the full connection
between these houses of the dead and the living, the
unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses,
till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the
surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a
level with its wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken
advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack
against its back. It startles you to see the red, modern
pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.
A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the
drift of bones that permeates the thin brown soil; but my
first disappointment had taught me to expect little from
Greyfriars' sextons, and I passed him by in silence. A
slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.
A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange
meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his
finger to his nose in so offensive a manner that I was put
upon my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old epitaphs
and peer through the gratings into the shadow of vaults.
Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them
old, and the other younger, with a child in her arms. Both
had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin, and both
had reached that stage of degradation, much lower in a woman
than a man, when all care for dress is lost. As they came
down they neared a grave, where some pious friend or relative
had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over
it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow
among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more
pleasant than it is in modern cemeteries, where every second
mound can boast a similar coronal; and here, where it was the
exception and not the rule, I could even fancy the drops of
moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of those who
laid it where it was. As the two women came up to it, one of
them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and
silently through the clouded shade, while the second stood
above her, gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling
baby. I was struck a great way off with something religious
in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard women; and I
drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they
were saying. Surely on them the spirit of death and decay
had descended; I had no education to dread here: should I not
have a chance of seeing nature? Alas! a pawnbroker could not
have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what
the kneeling woman said to the woman upright - this and
nothing more: 'Eh, what extravagance!'
O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed - wonderful,
but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men
are more like numerals than men. They must bear their
idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard
about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.
Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of
life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability
among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among
the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very
gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new
graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at
the improvidence of love.
Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of
the gates again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling
that I alone of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the
silent poem of these green mounds and blackened headstones.
(1) RELIGIO MEDICI, Part ii.
(2) DUCHESS OF MALFI.
SKETCHES
CHAPTER IV - NURSES
I KNEW one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she
waited for death. It was pleasant enough, high up above the
lane, and looking forth upon a hill-side, covered all day
with sheets and yellow blankets, and with long lines of
underclothing fluttering between the battered posts. There
were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by one of 'her
children,' and there were flowers in the window, and a sickly
canary withered into consumption in an ornamental cage. The
bed, with its checked coverlid, was in a closet. A great
Bible lay on the table; and her drawers were full of
'scones,' which it was her pleasure to give to young visitors
such as I was then.
You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary,
and the cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while,
and that died, were all indications of the want that ate into
her heart. I think I know a little of what that old woman
felt; and I am as sure as if I had seen her, that she sat
many an hour in silent tears, with the big Bible open before
her clouded eyes.
If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great
chain that had linked her to one child after another,
sometimes to be wrenched suddenly through, and sometimes,
which is infinitely worse, to be torn gradually off through
years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike! She
had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance -
repugnance which no man can conquer - towards the infirm and
helpless mass of putty of the earlier stage. She had spent
her best and happiest years in tending, watching, and
learning to love like a mother this child, with which she has
no connection and to which she has no tie. Perhaps she
refused some sweetheart (such things have been), or put him
off and off, until he lost heart and turned to some one else,
all for fear of leaving this creature that had wound itself
about her heart. And the end of it all - her month's
warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the life to
vain regret. Or, worse still, to see the child gradually
forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect and
neglect on the plea of growing manliness, and at last
beginning to treat her as a servant whom he had treated a few
years before as a mother. She sees the Bible or the Psalm-
book, which with gladness and love unutterable in her heart
she had bought for him years ago out of her slender savings,
neglected for some newer gift of his father, lying in dust in
the lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and the act
applauded for its unfeeling charity. Little wonder if she
becomes hurt and angry, and attempts to tyrannise and to
grasp her old power back again. We are not all patient
Grizzels, by good fortune, but the most of us human beings
with feelings and tempers of our own.
And so, in the end, behold her in the room that I described.
Very likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish
misery or recoil of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with
her old employers and the children are forbidden to see her
or to speak to her; or at best she gets her rent paid and a
little to herself, and now and then her late charges are sent
up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short visit.
How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them on
her lonely bed! How unsatisfactory their realisation, when
the forgetful child, half wondering, checks with every word
and action the outpouring of her maternal love! How bitter
and restless the memories that they leave behind! And for
the rest, what else has she? - to watch them with eager eyes
as they go to school, to sit in church where she can see them
every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed in the street,
or deliberately cut because the great man or the great woman
are with friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise
the old woman that loved them.
When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room
appear to her! Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing
to herself in the dark, with the fire burnt out for want of
fuel, and the candle still unlit upon the table.
And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers -
mothers in everything but the travail and the thanks. It is
for this that they have remained virtuous in youth, living
the dull life of a household servant. It is for this that
they refused the old sweetheart, and have no fireside or
offspring of their own.
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no
more nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own
offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising
than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart
and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long
as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to
blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end. This may be Utopian; but it is always a
little thing if one mother or two mothers can be brought to
feel more tenderly to those who share their toil and have no
part in their reward.
SKETCHES
CHAPTER V - A CHARACTER
THE man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and
squat. So far there is nothing in him to notice, but when
you see his eyes, you can read in these hard and shallow orbs
a depravity beyond measure depraved, a thirst after
wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of Hell for its own
sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching an
omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one
coughing at my side as though he would cough his soul out;
and turning round, I saw him stopping under a lamp, with a
brown greatcoat buttoned round him and his whole face
convulsed. It seemed as if he could not live long; and so
the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished
my cigar up and down the lighted streets.
He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his
thirst for evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in
wickedness. He is dumb; but he will not let that hinder his
foul trade, or perhaps I should say, his yet fouler
amusement, and he has pressed a slate into the service of
corruption. Look at him, and he will sign to you with his
bloated head, and when you go to him in answer to the sign,
thinking perhaps that the poor dumb man has lost his way, you
will see what he writes upon his slate. He haunts the doors
of schools, and shows such inscriptions as these to the
innocent children that come out. He hangs about picture-
galleries, and makes the noblest pictures the text for some
silent homily of vice. His industry is a lesson to
ourselves. Is it not wonderful how he can triumph over his
infirmities and do such an amount of harm without a tongue?
Wonderful industry - strange, fruitless, pleasureless toil?
Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see his
disinterested and laborious service? Ah, but the devil knows
better than this: he knows that this man is penetrated with
the love of evil and that all his pleasure is shut up in
wickedness: he recognises him, perhaps, as a fit type for
mankind of his satanic self, and watches over his effigy as
we might watch over a favourite likeness. As the business
man comes to love the toil, which he only looked upon at
first as a ladder towards other desires and less unnatural
gratifications, so the dumb man has felt the charm of his
trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of sin. It is a
mistake when preachers tell us that vice is hideous and
loathsome; for even vice has her Horsel and her devotees, who
love her for her own sake.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER I - NANCE AT THE 'GREEN DRAGON'
NANCE HOLDAWAY was on her knees before the fire blowing the
green wood that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only
now and then shot forth a smothered flame; her knees already
ached and her eyes smarted, for she had been some while at
this ungrateful task, but her mind was gone far away to meet
the coming stranger. Now she met him in the wood, now at the
castle gate, now in the kitchen by candle-light; each fresh
presentment eclipsed the one before; a form so elegant,
manners so sedate, a countenance so brave and comely, a voice
so winning and resolute - sure such a man was never seen!
The thick-coming fancies poured and brightened in her head
like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.
Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon
the stair, and as he entered the room she bent the closer to
her work. He glanced at the green fagots with a sneer, and
looked askance at the bed and the white sheets, at the strip
of carpet laid, like an island, on the great expanse of the
stone floor, and at the broken glazing of the casement
clumsily repaired with paper.
'Leave that fire a-be,' he cried. 'What, have I toiled all
my life to turn innkeeper at the hind end? Leave it a-be, I
say.'
'La, uncle, it doesn't burn a bit; it only smokes,' said
Nance, looking up from her position.
'You are come of decent people on both sides,' returned the
old man. 'Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-
agate? Get up, get on your hood, make yourself useful, and
be off to the "Green Dragon."'
'I thought you was to go yourself,' Nance faltered.
'So did I,' quoth Jonathan; 'but it appears I was mistook.'
The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began
to hang back. 'I think I would rather not, dear uncle,' she
said. 'Night is at hand, and I think, dear, I would rather
not.'
'Now you look here,' replied Jonathan, 'I have my lord's
orders, have I not? Little he gives me, but it's all my
livelihood. And do you fancy, if I disobey my lord, I'm
likely to turn round for a lass like you? No, I've that
hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I wouldn't walk a mile, not
for King George upon his bended knees.' And he walked to the
window and looked down the steep scarp to where the river
foamed in the bottom of the dell.
Nance stayed for no more bidding. In her own room, by the
glimmer of the twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on
her Sunday mittens; adjusted her black hood, and tied a dozen
times its cherry ribbons; and in less than ten minutes, with
a fluttering heart and excellently bright eyes, she passed
forth under the arch and over the bridge, into the thickening
shadows of the groves. A well-marked wheel-track conducted
her. The wood, which upon both sides of the river dell was a
mere scrambling thicket of hazel, hawthorn, and holly,
boasted on the level of more considerable timber. Beeches
came to a good growth, with here and there an oak; and the
track now passed under a high arcade of branches, and now ran
under the open sky in glades. As the girl proceeded these
glades became more frequent, the trees began again to decline
in size, and the wood to degenerate into furzy coverts. Last
of all there was a fringe of elders; and beyond that the
track came forth upon an open, rolling moorland, dotted with
wind-bowed and scanty bushes, and all golden brown with the
winter, like a grouse. Right over against the girl the last
red embers of the sunset burned under horizontal clouds; the
night fell clear and still and frosty, and the track in low
and marshy passages began to crackle under foot with ice.
Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of
the 'Green Dragon' hove in sight, and running close beside
them, very faint in the dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the
Great North Road. It was the back of the post-house that was
presented to Nance Holdaway; and as she continued to draw
near and the night to fall more completely, she became aware
of an unusual brightness and bustle. A post-chaise stood in
the yard, its lamps already lighted: light shone hospitably
in the windows and from the open door; moving lights and
shadows testified to the activity of servants bearing
lanterns. The clank of pails, the stamping of hoofs on the
firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and, last of all, the
energetic hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her ear. By
the stir you would have thought the mail was at the door, but
it was still too early in the night. The down mail was not
due at the 'Green Dragon' for hard upon an hour; the up mail
from Scotland not before two in the black morning.
Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled. Sam, the tall
ostler, was polishing a curb-chain wit sand; the lantern at
his feet letting up spouts of candle-light through the holes
with which its conical roof was peppered.
'Hey, miss,' said he jocularly, 'you won't look at me any
more, now you have gentry at the castle.'
Her cheeks burned with anger.
'That's my lord's chay,' the man continued, nodding at the
chaise, 'Lord Windermoor's. Came all in a fluster - dinner,
bowl of punch, and put the horses to. For all the world like
a runaway match, my dear - bar the bride. He brought Mr.
Archer in the chay with him.'
'Is that Holdaway?' cried the landlord from the lighted
entry, where he stood shading his eyes.
'Only me, sir,' answered Nance.
'O, you, Miss Nance,' he said. 'Well, come in quick, my
pretty. My lord is waiting for your uncle.'
And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot
and lighted by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a
table finishing a bowl of punch. One of these was stout,
elderly, and irascible, with a face like a full moon, well
dyed with liquor, thick tremulous lips, a short, purple hand,
in which he brandished a long pipe, and an abrupt and
gobbling utterance. This was my Lord Windermoor. In his
companion Nance beheld a younger man, tall, quiet, grave,
demurely dressed, and wearing his own hair. Her glance but
lighted on him, and she flushed, for in that second she made
sure that she had twice betrayed herself - betrayed by the
involuntary flash of her black eyes her secret impatience to
behold this new companion, and, what was far worse, betrayed
her disappointment in the realisation of her dreams. He,
meanwhile, as if unconscious, continued to regard her with
unmoved decorum.
'O, a man of wood,' thought Nance.
'What - what?' said his lordship. 'Who is this?'
'If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway's niece,' replied
Nance, with a curtsey.
'Should have been here himself,' observed his lordship.
'Well, you tell Holdaway that I'm aground, not a stiver - not
a stiver. I'm running from the beagles - going abroad, tell
Holdaway. And he need look for no more wages: glad of 'em
myself, if I could get 'em. He can live in the castle if he
likes, or go to the devil. O, and here is Mr. Archer; and I
recommend him to take him in - a friend of mine - and Mr.
Archer will pay, as I wrote. And I regard that in the light
of a precious good thing for Holdaway, let me tell you, and a
set-off against the wages.'
'But O, my lord!' cried Nance, 'we live upon the wages, and
what are we to do without?'
'What am I to do? - what am I to do?' replied Lord Windermoor
with some exasperation. 'I have no wages. And there is Mr.
Archer. And if Holdaway doesn't like it, he can go to the
devil, and you with him! - and you with him!'
'And yet, my lord,' said Mr. Archer, 'these good people will
have as keen a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps,
since they have done nothing to deserve it.'
'Deserve it?' cried the peer. 'What? What? If a rascally
highwayman comes up to me with a confounded pistol, do you
say that I've deserved it? How often am I to tell you, sir,
that I was cheated - that I was cheated?'
'You are happy in the belief,' returned Mr. Archer gravely.
'Archer, you would be the death of me!' exclaimed his
lordship. 'You know you're drunk; you know it, sir; and yet
you can't get up a spark of animation.'
'I have drunk fair, my lord,' replied the younger man; 'but I
own I am conscious of no exhilaration.'
'If you had as black a look-out as me, sir,' cried the peer,
'you would be very glad of a little innocent exhilaration,
let me tell you. I am glad of it - glad of it, and I only
wish I was drunker. For let me tell you it's a cruel hard
thing upon a man of my time of life and my position, to be
brought down to beggary because the world is full of thieves
and rascals - thieves and rascals. What? For all I know,
you may be a thief and a rascal yourself; and I would fight
you for a pinch of snuff - a pinch of snuff,' exclaimed his
lordship.
Here Mr. Archer turned to Nance Holdaway with a pleasant
smile, so full of sweetness, kindness, and composure that, at
one bound, her dreams returned to her. 'My good Miss
Holdaway,' said he, 'if you are willing to show me the road,
I am even eager to be gone. As for his lordship and myself,
compose yourself; there is no fear; this is his lordship's
way.'
'What? what?' cried his lordship. 'My way? Ish no such a
thing, my way.'
'Come, my lord,' cried Archer; 'you and I very thoroughly
understand each other; and let me suggest, it is time that
both of us were gone. The mail will soon be due. Here,
then, my lord, I take my leave of you, with the most earnest
assurance of my gratitude for the past, and a sincere offer
of any services I may be able to render in the future.'
'Archer,' exclaimed Lord Windermoor, 'I love you like a son.
Le' 's have another bowl.'
'My lord, for both our sakes, you will excuse me,' replied
Mr. Archer. 'We both require caution; we must both, for some
while at least, avoid the chance of a pursuit.'
'Archer,' quoth his lordship, 'this is a rank ingratishood.
What? I'm to go firing away in the dark in the cold
po'chaise, and not so much as a game of ecarte possible,
unless I stop and play with the postillion, the postillion;
and the whole country swarming with thieves and rascals and
highwaymen.'
'I beg your lordship's pardon,' put in the landlord, who now
appeared in the doorway to announce the chaise, 'but this
part of the North Road is known for safety. There has not
been a robbery, to call a robbery, this five years' time.
Further south, of course, it's nearer London, and another
story,' he added.
'Well, then, if that's so,' concluded my lord, 'le' 's have
t'other bowl and a pack of cards.'
'My lord, you forget,' said Archer, 'I might still gain; but
it is hardly possible for me to lose.'
'Think I'm a sharper?' inquired the peer. 'Gen'leman's
parole's all I ask.'
But Mr. Archer was proof against these blandishments, and
said farewell gravely enough to Lord Windermoor, shaking his
hand and at the same time bowing very low. 'You will never
know,' says he, 'the service you have done me.' And with
that, and before my lord had finally taken up his meaning, he
had slipped about the table, touched Nance lightly but
imperiously on the arm, and left the room. In face of the
outbreak of his lordship's lamentations she made haste to
follow the truant.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER II - IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED
THE chaise had been driven round to the front door; the
courtyard lay all deserted, and only lit by a lantern set
upon a window-sill. Through this Nance rapidly led the way,
and began to ascend the swellings of the moor with a heart
that somewhat fluttered in her bosom. She was not afraid,
but in the course of these last passages with Lord Windermoor
Mr. Archer had ascended to that pedestal on which her fancy
waited to instal him. The reality, she felt, excelled her
dreams, and this cold night walk was the first romantic
incident in her experience.
It was the rule in these days to see gentlemen unsteady after
dinner, yet Nance was both surprised and amused when her
companion, who had spoken so soberly, began to stumble and
waver by her side with the most airy divagations. Sometimes
he would get so close to her that she must edge away; and at
others lurch clear out of the track and plough among deep
heather. His courtesy and gravity meanwhile remained
unaltered. He asked her how far they had to go; whether the
way lay all upon the moorland, and when he learned they had
to pass a wood expressed his pleasure. 'For,' said he, 'I am
passionately fond of trees. Trees and fair lawns, if you
consider of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature, as
palaces and fine approaches - ' And here he stumbled into a
patch of slough and nearly fell. The girl had hard work not
to laugh, but at heart she was lost in admiration for one who
talked so elegantly.
They had got to about a quarter of a mile from the 'Green
Dragon,' and were near the summit of the rise, when a sudden
rush of wheels arrested them. Turning and looking back, they
saw the post-house, now much declined in brightness; and
speeding away northward the two tremulous bright dots of my
Lord Windermoor's chaise-lamps. Mr. Archer followed these
yellow and unsteady stars until they dwindled into points and
disappeared.
'There goes my only friend,' he said. 'Death has cut off
those that loved me, and change of fortune estranged my
flatterers; and but for you, poor bankrupt, my life is as
lonely as this moor.'
The tone of his voice affected both of them. They stood
there on the side of the moor, and became thrillingly
conscious of the void waste of the night, without a feature
for the eye, and except for the fainting whisper of the
carriage-wheels without a murmur for the ear. And instantly,
like a mockery, there broke out, very far away, but clear and
jolly, the note of the mail-guard's horn. 'Over the hills'
was his air. It rose to the two watchers on the moor with
the most cheerful sentiment of human company and travel, and
at the same time in and around the 'Green Dragon' it woke up
a great bustle of lights running to and fro and clattering
hoofs. Presently after, out of the darkness to southward,
the mail grew near with a growing rumble. Its lamps were
very large and bright, and threw their radiance forward in
overlapping cones; the four cantering horses swarmed and
steamed; the body of the coach followed like a great shadow;
and this lit picture slid with a sort of ineffectual
swiftness over the black field of night, and was eclipsed by
the buildings of the 'Green Dragon.'
Mr. Archer turned abruptly and resumed his former walk; only
that he was now more steady, kept better alongside his young
conductor, and had fallen into a silence broken by sighs.
Nance waxed very pitiful over his fate, contrasting an
imaginary past of courts and great society, and perhaps the
King himself, with the tumbledown ruin in a wood to which she
was now conducting him.
'You must try, sir, to keep your spirits up,' said she. 'To
be sure this is a great change for one like you; but who
knows the future?'
Mr. Archer turned towards her in the darkness, and she could
clearly perceive that he smiled upon her very kindly. 'There
spoke a sweet nature,' said he, 'and I must thank you for
these words. But I would not have you fancy that I regret
the past for any happiness found in it, or that I fear the
simplicity and hardship of the country. I am a man that has
been much tossed about in life; now up, now down; and do you
think that I shall not be able to support what you support -
you who are kind, and therefore know how to feel pain; who
are beautiful, and therefore hope; who are young, and
therefore (or am I the more mistaken?) discontented?'
'Nay, sir, not that, at least,' said Nance; 'not
discontented. If I were to be discontented, how should I
look those that have real sorrows in the face? I have faults
enough, but not that fault; and I have my merits too, for I
have a good opinion of myself. But for beauty, I am not so
simple but that I can tell a banter from a compliment.'
'Nay, nay,' said Mr. Archer, 'I had half forgotten; grief is
selfish, and I was thinking of myself and not of you, or I
had never blurted out so bold a piece of praise. 'Tis the
best proof of my sincerity. But come, now, I would lay a
wager you are no coward?'
'Indeed, sir, I am not more afraid than another,' said Nance.
'None of my blood are given to fear.'
'And you are honest?' he returned.
'I will answer for that,' said she.
'Well, then, to be brave, to be honest, to be kind, and to be
contented, since you say you are so - is not that to fill up
a great part of virtue?'
'I fear you are but a flatterer,' said Nance, but she did not
say it clearly, for what with bewilderment and satisfaction,
her heart was quite oppressed.
There could be no harm, certainly, in these grave
compliments; but yet they charmed and frightened her, and to
find favour, for reasons however obscure, in the eyes of this
elegant, serious, and most unfortunate young gentleman, was a
giddy elevation, was almost an apotheosis, for a country
maid.
But she was to be no more exercised; for Mr. Archer,
disclaiming any thought of flattery, turned off to other
subjects, and held her all through the wood in conversation,
addressing her with an air of perfect sincerity, and
listening to her answers with every mark of interest. Had
open flattery continued, Nance would have soon found refuge
in good sense; but the more subtle lure she could not
suspect, much less avoid. It was the first time she had ever
taken part in a conversation illuminated by any ideas. All
was then true that she had heard and dreamed of gentlemen;
they were a race apart, like deities knowing good and evil.
And then there burst upon her soul a divine thought, hope's
glorious sunrise: since she could understand, since it seemed
that she too, even she, could interest this sorrowful Apollo,
might she not learn? or was she not learning? Would not her
soul awake and put forth wings? Was she not, in fact, an
enchanted princess, waiting but a touch to become royal? She
saw herself transformed, radiantly attired, but in the most
exquisite taste: her face grown longer and more refined; her
tint etherealised; and she heard herself with delighted
wonder talking like a book.
Meanwhile they had arrived at where the track comes out above
the river dell, and saw in front of them the castle, faintly
shadowed on the night, covering with its broken battlements a
bold projection of the bank, and showing at the extreme end,
where were the habitable tower and wing, some crevices of
candle-light. Hence she called loudly upon her uncle, and he
was seen to issue, lantern in hand, from the tower door, and,
where the ruins did not intervene, to pick his way over the
swarded courtyard, avoiding treacherous cellars and winding
among blocks of fallen masonry. The arch of the great gate
was still entire, flanked by two tottering bastions, and it
was here that Jonathan met them, standing at the edge of the
bridge, bent somewhat forward, and blinking at them through
the glow of his own lantern. Mr. Archer greeted him with
civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance. He
guided the new-comer across the court-yard, looking sharply
and quickly in his face, and grumbling all the time about the
cold, and the discomfort and dilapidation of the castle. He
was sure he hoped that Mr. Archer would like it; but in truth
he could not think what brought him there. Doubtless he had
a good reason - this with a look of cunning scrutiny - but,
indeed, the place was quite unfit for any person of repute;
he himself was eaten up with the rheumatics. It was the most
rheumaticky place in England, and some fine day the whole
habitable part (to call it habitable) would fetch away bodily
and go down the slope into the river. He had seen the cracks
widening; there was a plaguy issue in the bank below; he
thought a spring was mining it; it might be tomorrow, it
might be next day; but they were all sure of a come-down
sooner or later. 'And that is a poor death,' said he, 'for
any one, let alone a gentleman, to have a whole old ruin
dumped upon his belly. Have a care to your left there; these
cellar vaults have all broke down, and the grass and hemlock
hide 'em. Well, sir, here is welcome to you, such as it is,
and wishing you well away.'
And with that Jonathan ushered his guest through the tower
door, and down three steps on the left hand into the kitchen
or common room of the castle. It was a huge, low room, as
large as a meadow, occupying the whole width of the habitable
wing, with six barred windows looking on the court, and two
into the river valley. A dresser, a table, and a few chairs
stood dotted here and there upon the uneven flags. Under the
great chimney a good fire burned in an iron fire-basket; a
high old settee, rudely carved with figures and Gothic
lettering, flanked it on either side; there was a hinge table
and a stone bench in the chimney corner, and above the arch
hung guns, axes, lanterns, and great sheaves of rusty keys.
Jonathan looked about him, holding up the lantern, and
shrugged his shoulders, with a pitying grimace. 'Here it
is,' he said. 'See the damp on the floor, look at the moss;
where there's moss you may be sure that it's rheumaticky.
Try and get near that fire for to warm yourself; it'll blow
the coat off your back. And with a young gentleman with a
face like yours, as pale as a tallow-candle, I'd be afeard of
a churchyard cough and a galloping decline,' says Jonathan,
naming the maladies with gloomy gusto, 'or the cold might
strike and turn your blood,' he added.
Mr. Archer fairly laughed. 'My good Mr. Holdaway,' said he,
'I was born with that same tallow-candle face, and the only
fear that you inspire me with is the fear that I intrude
unwelcomely upon your private hours. But I think I can
promise you that I am very little troublesome, and I am
inclined to hope that the terms which I can offer may still
pay you the derangement.'
'Yes, the terms,' said Jonathan, 'I was thinking of that. As
you say, they are very small,' and he shook his head.
'Unhappily, I can afford no more,' said Mr. Archer. 'But
this we have arranged already,' he added with a certain
stiffness; 'and as I am aware that Miss Holdaway has matter
to communicate, I will, if you permit, retire at once. To-
night I must bivouac; to-morrow my trunk is to follow from
the "Dragon." So if you will show me to my room I shall wish
you a good slumber and a better awakening.'
Jonathan silently gave the lantern to Nance, and she, turning
and curtseying in the doorway, proceeded to conduct their
guest up the broad winding staircase of the tower. He
followed with a very brooding face.
'Alas!' cried Nance, as she entered the room, 'your fire
black out,' and, setting down the lantern, she clapped upon
her knees before the chimney and began to rearrange the
charred and still smouldering remains. Mr. Archer looked
about the gaunt apartment with a sort of shudder. The great
height, the bare stone, the shattered windows, the aspect of
the uncurtained bed, with one of its four fluted columns
broken short, all struck a chill upon his fancy. From this
dismal survey his eyes returned to Nance crouching before the
fire, the candle in one hand and artfully puffing at the
embers; the flames as they broke forth played upon the soft
outline of her cheek - she was alive and young, coloured with
the bright hues of life, and a woman. He looked upon her,
softening; and then sat down and continued to admire the
picture.
'There, sir,' said she, getting upon her feet, 'your fire is
doing bravely now. Good-night.'
He rose and held out his hand. 'Come,' said he, 'you are my
only friend in these parts, and you must shake hands.'
She brushed her hand upon her skirt and offered it, blushing.
'God bless you, my dear,' said he.
And then, when he was alone, he opened one of the windows,
and stared down into the dark valley. A gentle wimpling of
the river among stones ascended to his ear; the trees upon
the other bank stood very black against the sky; farther away
an owl was hooting. It was dreary and cold, and as he turned
back to the hearth and the fine glow of fire, 'Heavens!' said
he to himself, 'what an unfortunate destiny is mine!'
He went to bed, but sleep only visited his pillow in uneasy
snatches. Outbreaks of loud speech came up the staircase; he
heard the old stones of the castle crack in the frosty night
with sharp reverberations, and the bed complained under his
tossings. Lastly, far on into the morning, he awakened from
a doze to hear, very far off, in the extreme and breathless
quiet, a wailing flourish on the horn. The down mail was
drawing near to the 'Green Dragon.' He sat up in bed; the
sound was tragical by distance, and the modulation appealed
to his ear like human speech. It seemed to call upon him
with a dreary insistence - to call him far away, to address
him personally, and to have a meaning that he failed to
seize. It was thus, at least, in this nodding castle, in a
cold, miry woodland, and so far from men and society, that
the traffic on the Great North Road spoke to him in the
intervals of slumber.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER III - JONATHAN HOLDAWAY
NANCE descended the tower stair, pausing at every step. She
was in no hurry to confront her uncle with bad news, and she
must dwell a little longer on the rich note of Mr. Archer's
voice, the charm of his kind words, and the beauty of his
manner and person. But, once at the stair-foot, she threw
aside the spell and recovered her sensible and workaday self.
Jonathan was seated in the middle of the settle, a mug of ale
beside him, in the attitude of one prepared for trouble; but
he did not speak, and suffered her to fetch her supper and
eat of it, with a very excellent appetite, in silence. When
she had done, she, too, drew a tankard of home-brewed, and
came and planted herself in front of him upon the settle.
'Well?' said Jonathan.
'My lord has run away,' said Nance.
'What?' cried the old man.
'Abroad,' she continued; 'run away from creditors. He said
he had not a stiver, but he was drunk enough. He said you
might live on in the castle, and Mr. Archer would pay you;
but you was to look for no more wages, since he would be glad
of them himself.'
Jonathan's face contracted; the flush of a black, bilious
anger mounted to the roots of his hair; he gave an
inarticulate cry, leapt upon his feet, and began rapidly
pacing the stone floor. At first he kept his hands behind
his back in a tight knot; then he began to gesticulate as he
turned.
'This man - this lord,' he shouted, 'who is he? He was born
with a gold spoon in his mouth, and I with a dirty straw. He
rolled in his coach when he was a baby. I have dug and
toiled and laboured since I was that high - that high.' And
he shouted again. 'I'm bent and broke, and full of pains.
D' ye think I don't know the taste of sweat? Many's the
gallon I've drunk of it - ay, in the midwinter, toiling like
a slave. All through, what has my life been? Bend, bend,
bend my old creaking back till it would ache like breaking;
wade about in the foul mire, never a dry stitch; empty belly,
sore hands, hat off to my Lord Redface; kicks and ha'pence;
and now, here, at the hind end, when I'm worn to my poor
bones, a kick and done with it.' He walked a little while in
silence, and then, extending his hand, 'Now you, Nance
Holdaway,' says he, 'you come of my blood, and you're a good
girl. When that man was a boy, I used to carry his gun for
him. I carried the gun all day on my two feet, and many a
stitch I had, and chewed a bullet for. He rode upon a horse,
with feathers in his hat; but it was him that had the shots
and took the game home. Did I complain? Not I. I knew my
station. What did I ask, but just the chance to live and die
honest? Nance Holdaway, don't let them deny it to me - don't
let them do it. I've been as poor as Job, and as honest as
the day, but now, my girl, you mark these words of mine, I'm
getting tired of it.'
'I wouldn't say such words, at least,' said Nance.
'You wouldn't?' said the old man grimly. 'Well, and did I
when I was your age? Wait till your back's broke and your
hands tremble, and your eyes fail, and you're weary of the
battle and ask no more but to lie down in your bed and give
the ghost up like an honest man; and then let there up and
come some insolent, ungodly fellow - ah! if I had him in
these hands! "Where's my money that you gambled?" I should
say. "Where's my money that you drank and diced?" "Thief!"
is what I would say; "Thief!"' he roared, '"Thief"'
'Mr. Archer will hear you if you don't take care,' said
Nance, 'and I would be ashamed, for one, that he should hear
a brave, old, honest, hard-working man like Jonathan Holdaway
talk nonsense like a boy.'
'D' ye think I mind for Mr. Archer?' he cried shrilly, with a
clack of laughter; and then he came close up to her, stooped
down with his two palms upon his knees, and looked her in the
eyes, with a strange hard expression, something like a smile.
'Do I mind for God, my girl?' he said; 'that's what it's come
to be now, do I mind for God?'
'Uncle Jonathan,' she said, getting up and taking him by the
arm; 'you sit down again, where you were sitting. There, sit
still; I'll have no more of this; you'll do yourself a
mischief. Come, take a drink of this good ale, and I'll warm
a tankard for you. La, we'll pull through, you'll see. I'm
young, as you say, and it's my turn to carry the bundle; and
don't you worry your bile, or we'll have sickness, too, as
well as sorrow.'
'D' ye think that I'd forgotten you?' said Jonathan, with
something like a groan; and thereupon his teeth clicked to,
and he sat silent with the tankard in his hand and staring
straight before him.
'Why,' says Nance, setting on the ale to mull, 'men are
always children, they say, however old; and if ever I heard a
thing like this, to set to and make yourself sick, just when
the money's failing. Keep a good heart up; you haven't kept
a good heart these seventy years, nigh hand, to break down
about a pound or two. Here's this Mr. Archer come to lodge,
that you disliked so much. Well, now you see it was a clear
Providence. Come, let's think upon our mercies. And here is
the ale mulling lovely; smell of it; I'll take a drop myself,
it smells so sweet. And, Uncle Jonathan, you let me say one
word. You've lost more than money before now; you lost my
aunt, and bore it like a man. Bear this.'
His face once more contracted; his fist doubled, and shot
forth into the air, and trembled. 'Let them look out!' he
shouted. 'Here, I warn all men; I've done with this foul
kennel of knaves. Let them look out!'
'Hush, hush! for pity's sake,' cried Nance.
And then all of a sudden he dropped his face into his hands,
and broke out with a great hiccoughing dry sob that was
horrible to hear. 'O,' he cried, 'my God, if my son hadn't
left me, if my Dick was here!' and the sobs shook him; Nance
sitting still and watching him, with distress. 'O, if he
were here to help his father!' he went on again. 'If I had a
son like other fathers, he would save me now, when all is
breaking down; O, he would save me! Ay, but where is he?
Raking taverns, a thief perhaps. My curse be on him!' he
added, rising again into wrath.
'Hush!' cried Nance, springing to her feet: 'your boy, your
dead wife's boy - Aunt Susan's baby that she loved - would
you curse him? O, God forbid!'
The energy of her address surprised him from his mood. He
looked upon her, tearless and confused. 'Let me go to my
bed,' he said at last, and he rose, and, shaking as with
ague, but quite silent, lighted his candle, and left the
kitchen.
Poor Nance! the pleasant current of her dreams was all
diverted. She beheld a golden city, where she aspired to
dwell; she had spoken with a deity, and had told herself that
she might rise to be his equal; and now the earthly ligaments
that bound her down had been tightened. She was like a tree
looking skyward, her roots were in the ground. It seemed to
her a thing so coarse, so rustic, to be thus concerned about
a loss in money; when Mr. Archer, fallen from the sky-level
of counts and nobles, faced his changed destiny with so
immovable a courage. To weary of honesty; that, at least, no
one could do, but even to name it was already a disgrace; and
she beheld in fancy her uncle, and the young lad, all laced
and feathered, hand upon hip, bestriding his small horse.
The opposition seemed to perpetuate itself from generation to
generation; one side still doomed to the clumsy and the
servile, the other born to beauty.
She thought of the golden zones in which gentlemen were bred,
and figured with so excellent a grace; zones in which wisdom
and smooth words, white linen and slim hands, were the mark
of the desired inhabitants; where low temptations were
unknown, and honesty no virtue, but a thing as natural as
breathing.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER IV - MINGLING THREADS
IT was nearly seven before Mr. Archer left his apartment. On
the landing he found another door beside his own opening on a
roofless corridor, and presently he was walking on the top of
the ruins. On one hand he could look down a good depth into
the green court-yard; on the other his eye roved along the
downward course of the river, the wet woods all smoking, the
shadows long and blue, the mists golden and rosy in the sun,
here and there the water flashing across an obstacle. His
heart expanded and softened to a grateful melancholy, and
with his eye fixed upon the distance, and no thought of
present danger, he continued to stroll along the elevated and
treacherous promenade.
A terror-stricken cry rose to him from the courtyard. He
looked down, and saw in a glimpse Nance standing below with
hands clasped in horror and his own foot trembling on the
margin of a gulf. He recoiled and leant against a pillar,
quaking from head to foot, and covering his face with his
hands; and Nance had time to run round by the stair and
rejoin him where he stood before he had changed a line of his
position.
'Ah!' he cried, and clutched her wrist; 'don't leave me. The
place rocks; I have no head for altitudes.'
'Sit down against that pillar,' said Nance. 'Don't you be
afraid; I won't leave you, and don't look up or down: look
straight at me. How white you are!'
'The gulf,' he said, and closed his eyes again and shuddered.
'Why,' said Nance, 'what a poor climber you must be! That
was where my cousin Dick used to get out of the castle after
Uncle Jonathan had shut the gate. I've been down there
myself with him helping me. I wouldn't try with you,' she
said, and laughed merrily.
The sound of her laughter was sincere and musical, and
perhaps its beauty barbed the offence to Mr. Archer. The
blood came into his face with a quick jet, and then left it
paler than before. 'It is a physical weakness,' he said
harshly, 'and very droll, no doubt, but one that I can
conquer on necessity. See, I am still shaking. Well, I
advance to the battlements and look down. Show me your
cousin's path.'
'He would go sure-foot along that little ledge,' said Nance,
pointing as she spoke; 'then out through the breach and down
by yonder buttress. It is easier coming back, of course,
because you see where you are going. From the buttress foot
a sheep-walk goes along the scarp - see, you can follow it
from here in the dry grass. And now, sir,' she added, with a
touch of womanly pity, 'I would come away from here if I were
you, for indeed you are not fit.'
Sure enough Mr. Archer's pallor and agitation had continued
to increase; his cheeks were deathly, his clenched fingers
trembled pitifully. 'The weakness is physical,' he sighed,
and had nearly fallen. Nance led him from the spot, and he
was no sooner back in the tower-stair, than he fell heavily
against the wall and put his arm across his eyes. A cup of
brandy had to be brought him before he could descend to
breakfast; and the perfection of Nance's dream was for the
first time troubled.
Jonathan was waiting for them at table, with yellow, blood-
shot eyes and a peculiar dusky complexion. He hardly waited
till they found their seats, before, raising one hand, and
stooping with his mouth above his plate, he put up a prayer
for a blessing on the food and a spirit of gratitude in the
eaters, and thereupon, and without more civility, fell to.
But it was notable that he was no less speedily satisfied
than he had been greedy to begin. He pushed his plate away
and drummed upon the table.
'These are silly prayers,' said he, 'that they teach us. Eat
and be thankful, that's no such wonder. Speak to me of
starving - there's the touch. You're a man, they tell me,
Mr. Archer, that has met with some reverses?'
'I have met with many,' replied Mr. Archer.
'Ha!' said Jonathan. 'None reckons but the last. Now, see;
I tried to make this girl here understand me.'
'Uncle,' said Nance, 'what should Mr. Archer care for your
concerns? He hath troubles of his own, and came to be at
peace, I think.'
'I tried to make her understand me,' repeated Jonathan
doggedly; 'and now I'll try you. Do you think this world is
fair?'
'Fair and false!' quoth Mr. Archer.
The old man laughed immoderately. 'Good,' said he, 'very
good, but what I mean is this: do you know what it is to get
up early and go to bed late, and never take so much as a
holiday but four: and one of these your own marriage day, and
the other three the funerals of folk you loved, and all that,
to have a quiet old age in shelter, and bread for your old
belly, and a bed to lay your crazy bones upon, with a clear
conscience?'
'Sir,' said Mr. Archer, with an inclination of his head, 'you
portray a very brave existence.'
'Well,' continued Jonathan, 'and in the end thieves deceive
you, thieves rob and rook you, thieves turn you out in your
old age and send you begging. What have you got for all your
honesty? A fine return! You that might have stole scores of
pounds, there you are out in the rain with your rheumatics!'
Mr. Archer had forgotten to eat; with his hand upon his chin
he was studying the old man's countenance. 'And you
conclude?' he asked.
'Conclude!' cried Jonathan. 'I conclude I'll be upsides with
them.'
'Ay,' said the other, 'we are all tempted to revenge.'
'You have lost money?' asked Jonathan.
'A great estate,' said Archer quietly.
'See now!' says Jonathan, 'and where is it?'
'Nay, I sometimes think that every one has had his share of
it but me,' was the reply. 'All England hath paid his taxes
with my patrimony: I was a sheep that left my wool on every
briar.'
'And you sit down under that?' cried the old man. 'Come now,
Mr. Archer, you and me belong to different stations; and I
know mine - no man better - but since we have both been
rooked, and are both sore with it, why, here's my hand with a
very good heart, and I ask for yours, and no offence, I
hope.'
'There is surely no offence, my friend,' returned Mr. Archer,
as they shook hands across the table; 'for, believe me, my
sympathies are quite acquired to you. This life is an arena
where we fight with beasts; and, indeed,' he added, sighing,
'I sometimes marvel why we go down to it unarmed.'
In the meanwhile a creaking of ungreased axles had been heard
descending through the wood; and presently after, the door
opened, and the tall ostler entered the kitchen carrying one
end of Mr. Archer's trunk. The other was carried by an aged
beggar man of that district, known and welcome for some
twenty miles about under the name of 'Old Cumberland.' Each
was soon perched upon a settle, with a cup of ale; and the
ostler, who valued himself upon his affability, began to
entertain the company, still with half an eye on Nance, to
whom in gallant terms he expressly dedicated every sip of
ale. First he told of the trouble they had to get his
Lordship started in the chaise; and how he had dropped a
rouleau of gold on the threshold, and the passage and
doorstep had been strewn with guinea-pieces. At this old
Jonathan looked at Mr. Archer. Next the visitor turned to
news of a more thrilling character: how the down mail had
been stopped again near Grantham by three men on horseback -
a white and two bays; how they had handkerchiefs on their
faces; how Tom the guard's blunderbuss missed fire, but he
swore he had winged one of them with a pistol; and how they
had got clean away with seventy pounds in money, some
valuable papers, and a watch or two.
'Brave! brave!' cried Jonathan in ecstasy. 'Seventy pounds!
O, it's brave!'
'Well, I don't see the great bravery,' observed the ostler,
misapprehending him. 'Three men, and you may call that three
to one. I'll call it brave when some one stops the mail
single-handed; that's a risk.'
'And why should they hesitate?' inquired Mr. Archer. 'The
poor souls who are fallen to such a way of life, pray what
have they to lose? If they get the money, well; but if a
ball should put them from their troubles, why, so better.'
'Well, sir,' said the ostler, 'I believe you'll find they
won't agree with you. They count on a good fling, you see;
or who would risk it? - And here's my best respects to you,
Miss Nance.'
'And I forgot the part of cowardice,' resumed Mr. Archer.
'All men fear.'
'O, surely not!' cried Nance.
'All men,' reiterated Mr. Archer.
'Ay, that's a true word,' observed Old Cumberland, 'and a
thief, anyway, for it's a coward's trade.'
'But these fellows, now,' said Jonathan, with a curious,
appealing manner - 'these fellows with their seventy pounds!
Perhaps, Mr. Archer, they were no true thieves after all, but
just people who had been robbed and tried to get their own
again. What was that you said, about all England and the
taxes? One takes, another gives; why, that's almost fair.
If I've been rooked and robbed, and the coat taken off my
back, I call it almost fair to take another's.'
'Ask Old Cumberland,' observed the ostler; 'you ask Old
Cumberland, Miss Nance!' and he bestowed a wink upon his
favoured fair one.
'Why that?' asked Jonathan.
'He had his coat taken - ay, and his shirt too,' returned the
ostler.
'Is that so?' cried Jonathan eagerly. 'Was you robbed too?'
'That was I,' replied Cumberland, 'with a warrant! I was a
well-to-do man when I was young.'
'Ay! See that!' says Jonathan. 'And you don't long for a
revenge?'
'Eh! Not me!' answered the beggar. 'It's too long ago. But
if you'll give me another mug of your good ale, my pretty
lady, I won't say no to that.'
'And shalt have! And shalt have!' cried Jonathan. 'Or
brandy even, if you like it better.'
And as Cumberland did like it better, and the ostler chimed
in, the party pledged each other in a dram of brandy before
separating.
As for Nance, she slipped forth into the ruins, partly to
avoid the ostler's gallantries, partly to lament over the
defects of Mr. Archer. Plainly, he was no hero. She pitied
him; she began to feel a protecting interest mingle with and
almost supersede her admiration, and was at the same time
disappointed and yet drawn to him. She was, indeed,
conscious of such unshaken fortitude in her own heart, that
she was almost tempted by an occasion to be bold for two.
She saw herself, in a brave attitude, shielding her imperfect
hero from the world; and she saw, like a piece of heaven, his
gratitude for her protection.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER V - LIFE IN THE CASTLE
FROM that day forth the life of these three persons in the
ruin ran very smoothly. Mr. Archer now sat by the fire with
a book, and now passed whole days abroad, returning late,
dead weary. His manner was a mask; but it was half
transparent; through the even tenor of his gravity and
courtesy profound revolutions of feeling were betrayed,
seasons of numb despair, of restlessness, of aching temper.
For days he would say nothing beyond his usual courtesies and
solemn compliments; and then, all of a sudden, some fine
evening beside the kitchen fire, he would fall into a vein of
elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting events, the
secrets of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous
discovery of crime, the visitations of the dead. Nance and
her uncle would sit till the small hours with eyes wide open:
Jonathan applauding the unexpected incidents with many a slap
of his big hand; Nance, perhaps, more pleased with the
narrator's eloquence and wise reflections; and then, again,
days would follow of abstraction, of listless humming, of
frequent apologies and long hours of silence. Once only, and
then after a week of unrelieved melancholy, he went over to
the 'Green Dragon,' spent the afternoon with the landlord and
a bowl of punch, and returned as on the first night, devious
in step but courteous and unperturbed of speech.
If he seemed more natural and more at his ease it was when he
found Nance alone; and, laying by some of his reserve, talked
before her rather than to her of his destiny, character and
hopes. To Nance these interviews were but a doubtful
privilege. At times he would seem to take a pleasure in her
presence, to consult her gravely, to hear and to discuss her
counsels; at times even, but these were rare and brief, he
would talk of herself, praise the qualities that she
possessed, touch indulgently on her defects, and lend her
books to read and even examine her upon her reading; but far
more often he would fall into a half unconsciousness, put her
a question and then answer it himself, drop into the veiled
tone of voice of one soliloquising, and leave her at last as
though he had forgotten her existence. It was odd, too, that
in all this random converse, not a fact of his past life, and
scarce a name, should ever cross his lips. A profound
reserve kept watch upon his most unguarded moments. He spoke
continually of himself, indeed, but still in enigmas; a
veiled prophet of egoism.
The base of Nance's feelings for Mr. Archer was admiration as
for a superior being; and with this, his treatment,
consciously or not, accorded happily. When he forgot her,
she took the blame upon herself. His formal politeness was
so exquisite that this essential brutality stood excused.
His compliments, besides, were always grave and rational; he
would offer reason for his praise, convict her of merit, and
thus disarm suspicion. Nay, and the very hours when he
forgot and remembered her alternately could by the ardent
fallacies of youth be read in the light of an attention. She
might be far from his confidence; but still she was nearer it
than any one. He might ignore her presence, but yet he
sought it.
Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of
superiority. Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate
man, who recoiled from a worm, who grew giddy on the castle
wall, who bore so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes,
she felt herself a head and shoulders taller in cheerful and
sterling courage. She could walk head in air along the most
precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor
the harshness of life's web, but was thrust cheerfully, if
need were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any
crawling horror. Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage,
as already it had mined and subverted Mr. Archer's palace.
Well, she faced it with a bright countenance and a busy hand.
She had got some washing, some rough seamstress work from the
'Green Dragon,' and from another neighbour ten miles away
across the moor. At this she cheerfully laboured, and from
that height she could afford to pity the useless talents and
poor attitude of Mr. Archer. It did not change her
admiration, but it made it bearable. He was above her in all
ways; but she was above him in one. She kept it to herself,
and hugged it. When, like all young creatures, she made long
stories to justify, to nourish, and to forecast the course of
her affection, it was this private superiority that made all
rosy, that cut the knot, and that, at last, in some great
situation, fetched to her knees the dazzling but imperfect
hero. With this pretty exercise she beguiled the hours of
labour, and consoled herself for Mr. Archer's bearing.
Pity was her weapon and her weakness. To accept the loved
one's faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss
the chain, and this pity it was which, lying nearer to her
heart, lent the one element of true emotion to a fanciful and
merely brain-sick love.
Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the 'Green
Dragon' and brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer. He,
upon seeing it, winced like a man under the knife: pain,
shame, sorrow, and the most trenchant edge of mortification
cut into his heart and wrung the steady composure of his
face.
'Dear heart! have you bad news?' she cried.
But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and
when, later on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her
on the threshold, as if with words prepared beforehand.
'There are some pains,' said he, 'too acute for consolation,
or I would bring them to my kind consoler. Let the memory of
that letter, if you please, be buried.' And then as she
continued to gaze at him, being, in spite of herself, pained
by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully sincere in word and
manner: 'Let it be enough,' he added haughtily, 'that if this
matter wring my heart, it doth not touch my conscience. I am
a man, I would have you to know, who suffers undeservedly.'
He had never spoken so directly: never with so convincing an
emotion; and her heart thrilled for him. She could have
taken his pains and died of them with joy.
Meanwhile she was left without support. Jonathan now swore
by his lodger, and lived for him. He was a fine talker. He
knew the finest sight of stories; he was a man and a
gentleman, take him for all in all, and a perfect credit to
Old England. Such were the old man's declared sentiments,
and sure enough he clung to Mr. Archer's side, hung upon his
utterance when he spoke, and watched him with unwearing
interest when he was silent. And yet his feeling was not
clear; in the partial wreck of his mind, which was leaning to
decay, some after-thought was strongly present. As he gazed
in Mr. Archer's face a sudden brightness would kindle in his
rheumy eyes, his eye-brows would lift as with a sudden
thought, his mouth would open as though to speak, and close
again on silence. Once or twice he even called Mr. Archer
mysteriously forth into the dark courtyard, took him by the
button, and laid a demonstrative finger on his chest; but
there his ideas or his courage failed him; he would
shufflingly excuse himself and return to his position by the
fire without a word of explanation. 'The good man was
growing old,' said Mr. Archer with a suspicion of a shrug.
But the good man had his idea, and even when he was alone the
name of Mr. Archer fell from his lips continually in the
course of mumbled and gesticulative conversation.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER VI - THE BAD HALF-CROWN
HOWEVER early Nance arose, and she was no sluggard, the old
man, who had begun to outlive the earthly habit of slumber,
would usually have been up long before, the fire would be
burning brightly, and she would see him wandering among the
ruins, lantern in hand, and talking assiduously to himself.
One day, however, after he had returned late from the market
town, she found that she had stolen a march upon that
indefatigable early riser. The kitchen was all blackness.
She crossed the castle-yard to the wood-cellar, her steps
printing the thick hoarfrost. A scathing breeze blew out of
the north-east and slowly carried a regiment of black and
tattered clouds over the face of heaven, which was already
kindled with the wild light of morning, but where she walked,
in shelter of the ruins, the flame of her candle burned
steady. The extreme cold smote upon her conscience. She
could not bear to think this bitter business fell usually to
the lot of one so old as Jonathan, and made desperate
resolutions to be earlier in the future.
The fire was a good blaze before he entered, limping dismally
into the kitchen. 'Nance,' said he, 'I be all knotted up
with the rheumatics; will you rub me a bit?' She came and
rubbed him where and how he bade her. 'This is a cruel thing
that old age should be rheumaticky,' said he. 'When I was
young I stood my turn of the teethache like a man! for why?
because it couldn't last for ever; but these rheumatics come
to live and die with you. Your aunt was took before the time
came; never had an ache to mention. Now I lie all night in
my single bed and the blood never warms in me; this knee of
mine it seems like lighted up with rheumatics; it seems as
though you could see to sew by it; and all the strings of my
old body ache, as if devils was pulling 'em. Thank you
kindly; that's someways easier now, but an old man, my dear,
has little to look for; it's pain, pain, pain to the end of
the business, and I'll never be rightly warm again till I get
under the sod,' he said, and looked down at her with a face
so aged and weary that she had nearly wept.
'I lay awake all night,' he continued; 'I do so mostly, and a
long walk kills me. Eh, deary me, to think that life should
run to such a puddle! And I remember long syne when I was
strong, and the blood all hot and good about me, and I loved
to run, too - deary me, to run! Well, that's all by. You'd
better pray to be took early, Nance, and not live on till you
get to be like me, and are robbed in your grey old age, your
cold, shivering, dark old age, that's like a winter's
morning'; and he bitterly shuddered, spreading his hands
before the fire.
'Come now,' said Nance, 'the more you say the less you'll
like it, Uncle Jonathan; but if I were you I would be proud
for to have lived all your days honest and beloved, and come
near the end with your good name: isn't that a fine thing to
be proud of? Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land
they used to run races each with a lighted candle, and the
art was to keep the candle burning. Well, now, I thought
that was like life: a man's good conscience is the flame he
gets to carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with that
still burning, why, take it how you will, the man's a hero -
even if he was low-born like you and me.'
'Did Mr. Archer tell you that?' asked Jonathan.
'No, dear,' said she, 'that's my own thought about it. He
told me of the race. But see, now,' she continued, putting
on the porridge, 'you say old age is a hard season, but so is
youth. You're half out of the battle, I would say; you loved
my aunt and got her, and buried her, and some of these days
soon you'll go to meet her; and take her my love and tell her
I tried to take good care of you; for so I do, Uncle
Jonathan.'
Jonathan struck with his fist upon the settle. 'D' ye think
I want to die, ye vixen?' he shouted. 'I want to live ten
hundred years.'
This was a mystery beyond Nance's penetration, and she stared
in wonder as she made the porridge.
'I want to live,' he continued, 'I want to live and to grow
rich. I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells and
see the ring, I do. Is this a life that I lived? I want to
be a rake, d' ye understand? I want to know what things are
like. I don't want to die like a blind kitten, and me
seventy-six.'
'O fie!' said Nance.
The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an
irreverent schoolboy. Upon that aged face it seemed a
blasphemy. Then he took out of his bosom a long leather
purse, and emptying its contents on the settle, began to
count and recount the pieces, ringing and examining each, and
suddenly he leapt like a young man. 'What!' he screamed.
'Bad? O Lord! I'm robbed again!' And falling on his knees
before the settle he began to pour forth the most dreadful
curses on the head of his deceiver. His eyes were shut, for
to him this vile solemnity was prayer. He held up the bad
half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying it
to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the
curses he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted -
old age and poverty, rheumatism and an ungrateful son. Nance
listened appalled; then she sprang forward and dragged down
his arm and laid her hand upon his mouth.
'Whist!' she cried. 'Whist ye, for God's sake! O my man,
whist ye! If Heaven were to hear; if poor Aunt Susan were to
hear! Think, she may be listening.' And with the
histrionism of strong emotion she pointed to a corner of the
kitchen.
His eyes followed her finger. He looked there for a little,
thinking, blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and
resumed his place upon the settle, the bad piece still in his
hand. So he sat for some time, looking upon the half-crown,
and now wondering to himself on the injustice and partiality
of the law, now computing again and again the nature of his
loss. So he was still sitting when Mr. Archer entered the
kitchen. At this a light came into his face, and after some
seconds of rumination he dispatched Nance upon an errand.
'Mr. Archer,' said he, as soon as they were alone together,
'would you give me a guinea-piece for silver?'
'Why, sir, I believe I can,' said Mr. Archer.
And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the
apartment. The blood shot into her face.
'What's to do here?' she asked rudely.
'Nothing, my dearie,' said old Jonathan, with a touch of
whine.
'What's to do?' she said again.
'Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,' returned
Mr. Archer.
'Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,' replied the
girl. 'I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up among
the good.'
'Well, well,' replied Mr. Archer, smiling, 'I must take the
merchant's risk of it. The money is now mixed.'
'I know my piece,' quoth Nance. 'Come, let me see your
silver, Mr. Archer. If I have to get it by a theft I'll see
that money,' she cried.
'Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the
world to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,'
said Mr. Archer. 'There it is as I received it.'
Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.
'Give him another,' she said, looking Jonathan in the face;
and when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney
and flung the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire. Its
base constituents began immediately to run; even as she
watched it the disc crumbled, and the lineaments of the King
became confused. Jonathan, who had followed close behind,
beheld these changes from over her shoulder, and his face
darkened sorely.
'Now,' said she, 'come back to table, and to-day it is I that
shall say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about
with Dick'; and covering her eyes with one hand, 'O Lord,'
said she with deep emotion, 'make us thankful; and, O Lord,
deliver us from evil! For the love of the poor souls that
watch for us in heaven, O deliver us from evil.'
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER VII - THE BLEACHING-GREEN
THE year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter
keen from the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on
the river dell. The mire dried up in the closest covert;
life ran in the bare branches, and the air of the afternoon
would be suddenly sweet with the fragrance of new grass.
Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter
'S.' The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high
and steep projection which was crowned by the ruins; the
upper loop enclosed a lawny promontory, fringed by thorn and
willow. It was easy to reach it from the castle side, for
the river ran in this part very quietly among innumerable
boulders and over dam-like walls of rock. The place was all
enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so
it was chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.
One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun
to wring and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the
thicket on the far side, drew very deliberately near, and sat
down in silence on the grass. Nance looked up to greet him
with a smile, but finding her smile was not returned, she
fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily to her
employment. Man or woman, the whole world looks well at any
work to which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed
of what she did. She was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet
that so well became her, and ashamed of her bare arms, which
were her greatest beauty.
'Nausicaa,' said Mr. Archer at last, 'I find you like
Nausicaa.'
'And who was she?' asked Nance, and laughed in spite of
herself, an empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr.
Archer's ears, indeed, like music, but to her own like the
last grossness of rusticity.
'She was a princess of the Grecian islands,' he replied. 'A
king, being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore.
Certainly I, too, was shipwrecked,' he continued, plucking at
the grass. 'There was never a more desperate castaway - to
fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of honour, a
grateful conscience, duties willingly taken up and faithfully
discharged; and to fall to this - idleness, poverty,
inutility, remorse.' He seemed to have forgotten her
presence, but here he remembered her again. 'Nance,' said
he, 'would you have a man sit down and suffer or rise up and
strive?'
'Nay,' she said. 'I would always rather see him doing.'
'Ha!' said Mr. Archer, 'but yet you speak from an imperfect
knowledge. Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil -
misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet
naught before him but this choice of sins. How would you say
then?'
'I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,' returned
Nance. 'I would say there was a third choice, and that the
right one.'
'I tell you,' said Mr. Archer, 'the man I have in view hath
two ways open, and no more. One to wait, like a poor mewling
baby, till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his
troubles in his hand, and to perish or be saved at once. It
is no point of morals; both are wrong. Either way this step-
child of Providence must fall; which shall he choose, by
doing or not doing?'
'Fall, then, is what I would say,' replied Nance. 'Fall
where you will, but do it! For O, Mr. Archer,' she
continued, stooping to her work, 'you that are good and kind,
and so wise, it doth sometimes go against my heart to see you
live on here like a sheep in a turnip-field! If you were
braver - ' and here she paused, conscience-smitten.
'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself.
'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they
stand? Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to
spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a
brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder? But what is
courage, then? The constancy to endure oneself or to see
others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere
shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire
of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we
seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand
still is the least heroic. Nance,' he said, 'did you ever
hear of HAMLET?'
'Never,' said Nance.
''Tis an old play,' returned Mr. Archer, 'and frequently
enacted. This while I have been talking Hamlet. You must
know this Hamlet was a Prince among the Danes,' and he told
her the play in a very good style, here and there quoting a
verse or two with solemn emphasis.
'It is strange,' said Nance; 'he was then a very poor
creature?'
'That was what he could not tell,' said Mr. Archer. 'Look at
me, am I as poor a creature?'
She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all
her hours; the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the
spotless ruffles, the slim hands; the long, well-shapen,
serious, shaven face, the wide and somewhat thin-lipped
mouth, the dark eyes that were so full of depth and change
and colour. He was gazing at her with his brows a little
knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow resting on his
knee.
'Ye look a man!' she cried, 'ay, and should be a great one!
The more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before the
fire.'
'My fair Holdaway,' quoth Mr. Archer, 'you are much set on
action. I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.' He continued,
looking at her with a half-absent fixity, ''Tis a strange
thing, certainly, that in my years of fortune I should never
taste happiness, and now when I am broke, enjoy so much of
it, for was I ever happier than to-day? Was the grass
softer, the stream pleasanter in sound, the air milder, the
heart more at peace? Why should I not sink? To dig - why,
after all, it should be easy. To take a mate, too? Love is
of all grades since Jupiter; love fails to none; and
children' - but here he passed his hand suddenly over his
eyes. 'O fool and coward, fool and coward!' he said
bitterly; 'can you forget your fetters? You did not know
that I was fettered, Nance?' he asked, again addressing her.
But Nance was somewhat sore. 'I know you keep talking,' she
said, and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a
sheet across her shoulder. 'I wonder you are not wearied of
your voice. When the hands lie abed the tongue takes a
walk.'
Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the
water's edge. In this part the body of the river poured
across a little narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly
over a bed of pebbles, then getting wind, as it were, of
another shelf of rock which barred the channel, began, by
imperceptible degrees, to separate towards either shore in
dancing currents, and to leave the middle clear and stagnant.
The set towards either side was nearly equal; about one half
of the whole water plunged on the side of the castle, through
a narrow gullet; about one half ran ripping past the margin
of the green and slipped across a babbling rapid.
'Here,' said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time at
the fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, 'come
here and see me try my fortune.'
'I am not like a man,' said Nance; 'I have no time to waste.'
'Come here,' he said again. 'I ask you seriously, Nance. We
are not always childish when we seem so.'
She drew a little nearer.
'Now,' said he, 'you see these two channels - choose one.'
'I'll choose the nearest, to save time,' said Nance.
'Well, that shall be for action,' returned Mr. Archer. 'And
since I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other
channel but yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for
lying still. You see this?' he continued, pulling up a
withered rush. 'I break it in three. I shall put each
separately at the top of the upper fall, and according as
they go by your way or by the other I shall guide my life.'
'This is very silly,' said Nance, with a movement of her
shoulders.
'I do not think it so,' said Mr. Archer.
'And then,' she resumed, 'if you are to try your fortune, why
not evenly?'
'Nay,' returned Mr. Archer with a smile, 'no man can put
complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.'
By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall,
and, bidding her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the
middle of the intake. The rusty fragment was sucked at once
over the fall, came up again far on the right hand, leaned
ever more and more in the same direction, and disappeared
under the hanging grasses on the castle side.
'One,' said Mr. Archer, 'one for standing still.'
But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging
for a while about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily
approached the bleaching-green and danced down the rapid
under Nance's eyes.
'One for me,' she cried with some exultation; and then she
observed that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on
the rock, with his hand raised like a person petrified.
'Why,' said she, 'you do not mind it, do you?'
'Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune
hangs?' said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely. 'And this is more
than fortune. Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate,
put up a prayer before I launch the next one.'
'A prayer,' she cried, 'about a game like this? I would not
be so heathen.'
'Well,' said he, 'then without,' and he closed his eyes and
dropped the piece of rush. This time there was no doubt. It
went for the rapid as straight as any arrow.
'Action then!' said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; 'and
then God forgive us,' he added, almost to himself.
'God forgive us, indeed,' cried Nance, 'for wasting the good
daylight! But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so serious
I shall begin to think you was in earnest.'
'Nay,' he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile;
'but is not this good advice? I have consulted God and
demigod; the nymph of the river, and what I far more admire
and trust, my blue-eyed Minerva. Both have said the same.
My own heart was telling it already. Action, then, be mine;
and into the deep sea with all this paralysing casuistry. I
am happy to-day for the first time.'
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
CHAPTER VIII - THE MAIL GUARD
SOMEWHERE about two in the morning a squall had burst upon
the castle, a clap of screaming wind that made the towers
rock, and a copious drift of rain that streamed from the
windows. The wind soon blew itself out, but the day broke
cloudy and dripping, and when the little party assembled at
breakfast their humours appeared to have changed with the
change of weather. Nance had been brooding on the scene at
the river-side, applying it in various ways to her particular
aspirations, and the result, which was hardly to her mind,
had taken the colour out of her cheeks. Mr. Archer, too, was
somewhat absent, his thoughts were of a mingled strain; and
even upon his usually impassive countenance there were
betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of
exultation, which the girl translated in terms of her own
hopes and fears. But Jonathan was the most altered: he was
strangely silent, hardly passing a word, and watched Mr.
Archer with an eager and furtive eye. It seemed as if the
idea that had so long hovered before him had now taken a more
solid shape, and, while it still attracted, somewhat alarmed
his imagination.
At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which
was only broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain
on the stone roof and about all that field of ruins; and they
were all relieved when the note of a man whistling and the
sound of approaching footsteps in the grassy court announced
a visitor. It was the ostler from the 'Green Dragon'
bringing a letter for Mr. Archer. Nance saw her hero's face
contract and then relax again at sight of it; and she thought
that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross black characters
of the address were easily distinguishable from the fine
writing on the former letter that had so much disturbed him.
He opened it and began to read; while the ostler sat down to
table with a pot of ale, and proceeded to make himself
agreeable after his fashion.
'Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,' said he. 'I haven't
been abed this blessed night.'
Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr.
Archer, who was reading his letter with a face of such
extreme indifference that she was tempted to suspect him of
assumption.
'Yes,' continued the ostler, 'not been the like of it this
fifteen years: the North Mail stopped at the three stones.'
Jonathan's cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked
with a great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the
noise, made so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet
tore off and stayed between his finger and thumb. It was
some little time before the old man was sufficiently
recovered to beg the ostler to go on, and he still kept
coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes. Mr. Archer, on his
side, laid the letter down, and, putting his hands in his
pocket, listened gravely to the tale.
'Yes,' resumed Sam, 'the North Mail was stopped by a single
horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him! There were four
insides and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard. Tom
showed himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him
covered, too, and could swear to that; but the Captain never
let on, up with a pistol and fetched poor Tom a bullet
through the body. Tom, he squelched upon the seat, all over
blood. Up comes the Captain to the window. "Oblige me,"
says he, "with what you have." Would you believe it? Not a
man says cheep! - not them. "Thy hands over thy head." Four
watches, rings, snuff-boxes, seven-and-forty pounds overhead
in gold. One Dicksee, a grazier, tries it on: gives him a
guinea. "Beg your pardon," says the Captain, "I think too
highly of you to take it at your hand. I will not take less
than ten from such a gentleman." This Dicksee had his money
in his stocking, but there was the pistol at his eye. Down
he goes, offs with his stocking, and there was thirty golden
guineas. "Now," says the Captain, "you've tried it on with
me, but I scorns the advantage. Ten I said," he says, "and
ten I take." So, dash my buttons, I call that man a man!'
cried Sam in cordial admiration.
'Well, and then?' says Mr. Archer.
'Then,' resumed Sam, 'that old fat fagot Engleton, him as
held the ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to,
picks up his cattle, and drives off again. Down they came to
the "Dragon," all singing like as if they was scalded, and
poor Tom saying nothing. You would 'a' thought they had all
lost the King's crown to hear them. Down gets this Dicksee.
"Postmaster," he says, taking him by the arm, "this is a most
abominable thing," he says. Down gets a Major Clayton, and
gets the old man by the other arm. "We've been robbed," he
cries, "robbed!" Down gets the others, and all around the
old man telling their story, and what they had lost, and how
they was all as good as ruined; till at last Old Engleton
says, says he, "How about Oglethorpe?" says he. "Ay," says
the others, "how about the guard?" Well, with that we
bousted him down, as white as a rag and all blooded like a
sop. I thought he was dead. Well, he ain't dead; but he's
dying, I fancy.'
'Did you say four watches?' said Jonathan.
'Four, I think. I wish it had been forty,' cried Sam. 'Such
a party of soused herrings I never did see - not a man among
them bar poor Tom. But us that are the servants on the road
have all the risk and none of the profit.'
'And this brave fellow,' asked Mr. Archer, very quietly,
'this Oglethorpe - how is he now?'
'Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang
through him,' said Sam. 'The doctor hasn't been yet. He'd
'a' been bright and early if it had been a passenger. But,
doctor or no, I'll make a good guess that Tom won't see to-
morrow. He'll die on a Sunday, will poor Tom; and they do
say that's fortunate.'
'Did Tom see him that did it?' asked Jonathan.
'Well, he saw him,' replied Sam, 'but not to swear by. Said
he was a very tall man, and very big, and had a 'ankerchief
about his face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like
a thorough gentleman, as he is.'
'A gentleman!' cried Nance. 'The dirty knave!'
'Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,' returned the
ostler; 'that's what I mean by a gentleman.'
'You don't know much of them, then,' said Nance.
'A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing. I call my
uncle a better gentleman than any thief.'
'And you would be right,' said Mr. Archer.
'How many snuff-boxes did he get?' asked Jonathan.
'O, dang me if I know,' said Sam; 'I didn't take an
inventory.'
'I will go back with you, if you please,' said Mr. Archer.
'I should like to see poor Oglethorpe. He has behaved well.'
'At your service, sir,' said Sam, jumping to his feet. 'I
dare to say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor
fellow like Tom - no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went
without his sleep to nurse him. And excuse me, sir,' added
Sam, 'you won't forget about the letter neither?'
'Surely not,' said Mr. Archer.
Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret
of the inn. The rain soaked in places through the roof and
fell in minute drops; there was but one small window; the
beds were occupied by servants, the air of the garret was
both close and chilly. Mr. Archer's heart sank at the
threshold to see a man lying perhaps mortally hurt in so poor
a sick-room, and as he drew near the low bed he took his hat
off. The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-looking soul with
a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned up; his cheeks
were crimson, and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on his brow
he found him burning with fever.
'I fear you suffer much,' he said, with a catch in his voice,
as he sat down on the bedside.
'I suppose I do, sir,' returned Oglethorpe; 'it is main
sore.'
'I am used to wounds and wounded men,' returned the visitor.
'I have been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now;
and, if you will suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till
the doctor comes.'
'It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,' said Oglethorpe.
'The trouble is they won't none of them let me drink.'
'If you will not tell the doctor,' said Mr. Archer, 'I will
give you some water. They say it is bad for a green wound,
but in the Low Countries we all drank water when we found the
chance, and I could never perceive we were the worse for it.'
'Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?' called Oglethorpe.
'Twice,' said Mr. Archer, 'and was as proud of these hurts as
any lady of her bracelets. 'Tis a fine thing to smart for
one's duty; even in the pangs of it there is contentment.'
'Ah, well!' replied the guard, 'if you've been shot yourself,
that explains. But as for contentment, why, sir, you see, it
smarts, as you say. And then, I have a good wife, you see,
and a bit of a brat - a little thing, so high.'
'Don't move,' said Mr. Archer.
'No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,' said Oglethorpe.
'At York they are. A very good lass is my wife - far too
good for me. And the little rascal - well, I don't know how
to say it, but he sort of comes round you. If I were to go,
sir, it would be hard on my poor girl - main hard on her!'
'Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you
here,' said Archer.
'Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,'
replied the guard. 'He played his hand, if you come to look
at it; and I wish he had shot worse, or me better. And yet
I'll go to my grave but what I covered him,' he cried. 'It
looks like witchcraft. I'll go to my grave but what he was
drove full of slugs like a pepper-box.'
'Quietly,' said Mr. Archer, 'you must not excite yourself.
These deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the
moment of alert, is hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke
blows away you see the man you fired at, taking aim, it may
be, at yourself. You should observe, too, that you were in
the dark night, and somewhat dazzled by the lamps, and that
the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted you. In such
circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a blunder-buss,
and no blame attach to his marksmanship.' . . .
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER
PROLOGUE - THE WINE-SELLER'S WIFE
THERE was a wine-seller's shop, as you went down to the river
in the city of the Anti-popes. There a man was served with
good wine of the country and plain country fare; and the
place being clean and quiet, with a prospect on the river,
certain gentlemen who dwelt in that city in attendance on a
great personage made it a practice (when they had any silver
in their purses) to come and eat there and be private.
They called the wine-seller Paradou. He was built more like
a bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour,
and with a hand like a baby for size. Marie-Madeleine was
the name of his wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of
entrancing women, nor was any fairer than herself. She was
tall, being almost of a height with Paradou; full-girdled,
point-device in every form, with an exquisite delicacy in the
face; her nose and nostrils a delight to look at from the
fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair's-breadth
inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid on even
like a flower's. A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she had
been found unawares bathing, and had blushed from head to
foot. She was of a grave countenance, rarely smiling; yet it
seemed to be written upon every part of her that she rejoiced
in life. Her husband loved the heels of her feet and the
knuckles of her fingers; he loved her like a glutton and a
brute; his love hung about her like an atmosphere; one that
came by chance into the wine-shop was aware of that passion;
and it might be said that by the strength of it the woman had
been drugged or spell-bound. She knew not if she loved or
loathed him; he was always in her eyes like something
monstrous - monstrous in his love, monstrous in his person,
horrific but imposing in his violence; and her sentiment
swung back and forward from desire to sickness. But the
mean, where it dwelt chiefly, was an apathetic fascination,
partly of horror; as of Europa in mid ocean with her bull.
On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign
gentlemen in the wine-seller's shop. They were both handsome
men of a good presence, richly dressed. The first was
swarthy and long and lean, with an alert, black look, and a
mole upon his cheek. The other was more fair. He seemed
very easy and sedate, and a little melancholy for so young a
man, but his smile was charming. In his grey eyes there was
much abstraction, as of one recalling fondly that which was
past and lost. Yet there was strength and swiftness in his
limbs; and his mouth set straight across his face, the under
lip a thought upon side, like that of a man accustomed to
resolve. These two talked together in a rude outlandish
speech that no frequenter of that wine-shop understood. The
swarthy man answered to the name of BALLANTRAE; he of the
dreamy eyes was sometimes called BALMILE, and sometimes MY
LORD, or MY LORD GLADSMUIR; but when the title was given him,
he seemed to put it by as if in jesting, not without
bitterness.
The mistral blew in the city. The first day of that wind,
they say in the countries where its voice is heard, it blows
away all the dust, the second all the stones, and the third
it blows back others from the mountains. It was now come to
the third day; outside the pebbles flew like hail, and the
face of the river was puckered, and the very building-stones
in the walls of houses seemed to be curdled with the savage
cold and fury of that continuous blast. It could be heard to
hoot in all the chimneys of the city; it swept about the
wine-shop, filling the room with eddies; the chill and gritty
touch of it passed between the nearest clothes and the bare
flesh; and the two gentlemen at the far table kept their
mantles loose about their shoulders. The roughness of these
outer hulls, for they were plain travellers' cloaks that had
seen service, set the greater mark of richness on what showed
below of their laced clothes; for the one was in scarlet and
the other in violet and white, like men come from a scene of
ceremony; as indeed they were.
It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their
influence on the scene which followed, and which makes the
prologue of our tale. For a long time Balmile was in the
habit to come to the wine-shop and eat a meal or drink a
measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more often alone,
when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and the
thoughts would show in the man's face in little glooms and
lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a water. For a
long time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart. His
sadness, the beauty of his smile when by any chance he
remembered her existence and addressed her, the changes of
his mind signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature, the
mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached from the
local and the accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected
her. Kindness was ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch
of an occasion to effervesce and crystallise. Now Balmile
had come hitherto in a very poor plain habit; and this day of
the mistral, when his mantle was just open, and she saw
beneath it the glancing of the violet and the velvet and the
silver, and the clustering fineness of the lace, it seemed to
set the man in a new light, with which he shone resplendent
to her fancy.
The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and
continuity of its outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon
man's whole periphery, accelerated the functions of the mind.
It set thoughts whirling, as it whirled the trees of the
forest; it stirred them up in flights, as it stirred up the
dust in chambers. As brief as sparks, the fancies glittered
and succeeded each other in the mind of Marie-Madeleine; and
the grave man with the smile, and the bright clothes under
the plain mantle, haunted her with incongruous explanations.
She considered him, the unknown, the speaker of an unknown
tongue, the hero (as she placed him) of an unknown romance,
the dweller upon unknown memories. She recalled him sitting
there alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet she was sure he
was not stupid. She recalled one day when he had remained a
long time motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act
of starting up, his eyes fixed on vacancy. Any one else must
have looked foolish; but not he. She tried to conceive what
manner of memory had thus entranced him; she forged for him a
past; she showed him to herself in every light of heroism and
greatness and misfortune; she brooded with petulant intensity
on all she knew and guessed of him. Yet, though she was
already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still
unalarmed; her thoughts were still disinterested; she had
still to reach the stage at which - beside the image of that
other whom we love to contemplate and to adorn - we place the
image of ourself and behold them together with delight.
She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her
back, her shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced
out. Her face was bright with the wind and her own thoughts;
as a fire in a similar day of tempest glows and brightens on
a hearth, so she seemed to glow, standing there, and to
breathe out energy. It was the first time Ballantrae had
visited that wine-seller's, the first time he had seen the
wife; and his eyes were true to her.
'I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty
tavern,' he said at last.
'I believe it is propinquity,' returned Balmile.
'You play dark,' said Ballantrae, 'but have a care! Be more
frank with me, or I will cut you out. I go through no form
of qualifying my threat, which would be commonplace and not
conscientious. There is only one point in these campaigns:
that is the degree of admiration offered by the man; and to
our hostess I am in a posture to make victorious love.'
'If you think you have the time, or the game worth the
candle,' replied the other with a shrug.
'One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe
her,' said Ballantrae.
'I am not very observant,' said Balmile. 'She seems comely.'
'You very dear and dull dog!' cried Ballantrae; 'chastity is
the most besotting of the virtues. Why, she has a look in
her face beyond singing! I believe, if you was to push me
hard, I might trace it home to a trifle of a squint. What
matters? The height of beauty is in the touch that's wrong,
that's the modulation in a tune. 'Tis the devil we all love;
I owe many a conquest to my mole' - he touched it as he spoke
with a smile, and his eyes glittered; - 'we are all
hunchbacks, and beauty is only that kind of deformity that I
happen to admire. But come! Because you are chaste, for
which I am sure I pay you my respects, that is no reason why
you should be blind. Look at her, look at the delicious nose
of her, look at her cheek, look at her ear, look at her hand
and wrist - look at the whole baggage from heels to crown,
and tell me if she wouldn't melt on a man's tongue.'
As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile
was constrained to do as he was bidden. He looked at the
woman, admired her excellences, and was at the same time
ashamed for himself and his companion. So it befell that
when Marie-Madeleine raised her eyes, she met those of the
subject of her contemplations fixed directly on herself with
a look that is unmistakable, the look of a person measuring
and valuing another - and, to clench the false impression,
that his glance was instantly and guiltily withdrawn. The
blood beat back upon her heart and leaped again; her obscure
thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew in fancy straight
to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant like
a nymph. And at that moment there chanced an interruption,
which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last
consecration on her now articulate love.
Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in
the last refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled
by his passage in the wind. It was to be judged he had come
from the same formal gathering at which the others had
preceded him; and perhaps that he had gone there in the hope
to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae with
unceremonious eagerness.
'At last, here you are!' he cried in French. 'I thought I
was to miss you altogether.'
The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings,
laid his hand on his companion's shoulder.
'My lord,' said he, 'allow me to present to you one of my
best friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount
Gladsmuir.'
The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.
'MONSEIGNEUR,' said Balmile, 'JE N'AI PAS LA PRETENTION DE
M'AFFUBLER D'UN TITRE QUE LA MAUVAISE FORTUNE DE MON ROI NE
ME PERMET PAS DE PORTER COMMA IL SIED. JE M'APPELLE, POUR
VOUS SERVIR, BLAIR DE BALMILE TOUT COURT.' [My lord, I have
not the effrontery to cumber myself with a title which the
ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the way it
should be. I call myself, at your service, plain Blair of
Balmile.]
'MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE OU MONSIEUR BLER' DE BALMAIL,' replied
the newcomer, 'LE NOM N'Y FAIT RIEN, ET L'ON CONNAIT VOS
BEAUX FAITS.' [The name matters nothing, your gallant
actions are known.]
A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together
to the table, called for wine. It was the happiness of
Marie-Madeleine to wait unobserved upon the prince of her
desires. She poured the wine, he drank of it; and that link
between them seemed to her, for the moment, close as a
caress. Though they lowered their tones, she surprised great
names passing in their conversation, names of kings, the
names of de Gesvre and Belle-Isle; and the man who dealt in
these high matters, and she who was now coupled with him in
her own thoughts, seemed to swim in mid air in a
transfiguration. Love is a crude core, but it has singular
and far-reaching fringes; in that passionate attraction for
the stranger that now swayed and mastered her, his harsh
incomprehensible language, and these names of grandees in his
talk, were each an element.
The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left
behind him matter of much interest to his companions; they
spoke together earnestly, their heads down, the woman of the
wine-shop totally forgotten; and they were still so occupied
when Paradou returned.
This man's love was unsleeping. The even bluster of the
mistral, with which he had been combating some hours, had not
suspended, though it had embittered, that predominant
passion. His first look was for his wife, a look of hope and
suspicion, menace and humility and love, that made the over-
blooming brute appear for the moment almost beautiful. She
returned his glance, at first as though she knew him not,
then with a swiftly waxing coldness of intent; and at last,
without changing their direction, she had closed her eyes.
There passed across her mind during that period much that
Paradou could not have understood had it been told to him in
words: chiefly the sense of an enlightening contrast betwixt
the man who talked of kings and the man who kept a wine-shop,
betwixt the love she yearned for and that to which she had
been long exposed like a victim bound upon the altar. There
swelled upon her, swifter than the Rhone, a tide of
abhorrence and disgust. She had succumbed to the monster,
humbling herself below animals; and now she loved a hero,
aspiring to the semi-divine. It was in the pang of that
humiliating thought that she had closed her eyes.
Paradou - quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence -
felt the insult through his blood; his inarticulate soul
bellowed within him for revenge. He glanced about the shop.
He saw the two indifferent gentlemen deep in talk, and passed
them over: his fancy flying not so high. There was but one
other present, a country lout who stood swallowing his wine,
equally unobserved by all and unobserving - to him he dealt a
glance of murderous suspicion, and turned direct upon his
wife. The wine-shop had lain hitherto, a space of shelter,
the scene of a few ceremonial passages and some whispered
conversation, in the howling river of the wind; the clock had
not yet ticked a score of times since Paradou's appearance;
and now, as he suddenly gave tongue, it seemed as though the
mistral had entered at his heels.
'What ails you, woman?' he cried, smiting on the counter.
'Nothing ails me,' she replied. It was strange; but she
spoke and stood at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn
upward by her aspirations.
'You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!' cried
the husband.
The man's passion was always formidable; she had often looked
on upon its violence with a thrill, it had been one
ingredient in her fascination; and she was now surprised to
behold him, as from afar off, gesticulating but impotent.
His fury might be dangerous like a torrent or a gust of wind,
but it was inhuman; it might be feared or braved, it should
never be respected. And with that there came in her a sudden
glow of courage and that readiness to die which attends so
closely upon all strong passions.
'I do scorn you,' she said.
'What is that?' he cried.
'I scorn you,' she repeated, smiling.
'You love another man!' said he.
'With all my soul,' was her reply.
The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook
with it.
'Is this the - ?' he cried, using a foul word, common in the
South; and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to
the ground. There he lay for the least interval of time
insensible; thence fled from the house, the most terrified
person in the county. The heavy measure had escaped from his
hands, splashing the wine high upon the wall. Paradou caught
it. 'And you?' he roared to his wife, giving her the same
name in the feminine, and he aimed at her the deadly missile.
She expected it, motionless, with radiant eyes.
But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and
the unconscious rivals stood confronted. It was hard to say
at that moment which appeared the more formidable. In
Paradou, the whole muddy and truculent depths of the half-man
were stirred to frenzy; the lust of destruction raged in him;
there was not a feature in his face but it talked murder.
Balmile had dropped his cloak: he shone out at once in his
finery, and stood to his full stature; girt in mind and body
all his resources, all his temper, perfectly in command in
his face the light of battle. Neither spoke; there was no
blow nor threat of one; it was war reduced to its last
element, the spiritual; and the huge wine-seller slowly
lowered his weapon. Balmile was a noble, he a commoner;
Balmile exulted in an honourable cause. Paradou already
perhaps began to be ashamed of his violence. Of a sudden, at
least, the tortured brute turned and fled from the shop in
the footsteps of his former victim, to whose continued flight
his reappearance added wings.
So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself,
Marie-Madeleine transferred to him her eyes. It might be her
last moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there
inimitable courage and illimitable valour to protect. And
when the momentary peril was gone by, and the champion turned
a little awkwardly towards her whom he had rescued, it was to
meet, and quail before, a gaze of admiration more distinct
than words. He bowed, he stammered, his words failed him; he
who had crossed the floor a moment ago, like a young god, to
smite, returned like one discomfited; got somehow to his
place by the table, muffled himself again in his discarded
cloak, and for a last touch of the ridiculous, seeking for
anything to restore his countenance, drank of the wine before
him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift. It was little
wonder if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent eyes,
laughed out loud and brief, and drank with raised glass, 'To
the champion of the Fair.'
Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter;
she disdained the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but
it did not reach her spirit. For her, the world of living
persons was all resumed again into one pair, as in the days
of Eden; there was but the one end in life, the one hope
before her, the one thing needful, the one thing possible -
to be his.
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER
CHAPTER I - THE PRINCE
THAT same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man
in distress of mind. Now he sat, now walked in a high
apartment, full of draughts and shadows. A single candle
made the darkness visible; and the light scarce sufficed to
show upon the wall, where they had been recently and rudely
nailed, a few miniatures and a copper medal of the young
man's head. The same was being sold that year in London, to
admiring thousands. The original was fair; he had beautiful
brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine,
a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of
youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom
come upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness.
He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver;
his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons;
for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a
distinguished personage incognito. Now he sat with a bowed
head, now walked precipitately to and fro, now went and gazed
from the uncurtained window, where the wind was still
blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.
The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the
high notes and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly
near or were suddenly swallowed up, in the current of the
mistral. Tears sprang in the pale blue eyes; the expression
of his face was changed to that of a more active misery, it
seemed as if the voices of the bells reached, and touched and
pained him, in a waste of vacancy where even pain was
welcome. Outside in the night they continued to sound on,
swelling and fainting; and the listener heard in his memory,
as it were their harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a northern
city, and the acclamations of a multitude, the cries of
battle, the gross voices of cannon, the stridor of an
animated life. And then all died away, and he stood face to
face with himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came
upon his mind, and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes
men upon the brink of cliffs.
On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of
glasses, a bottle, and a silver bell. He went thither
swiftly, then his hand lowered first above the bell, then
settled on the bottle. Slowly he filled a glass, slowly
drank it out; and, as a tide of animal warmth recomforted the
recesses of his nature, stood there smiling at himself. He
remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose, and he
saw his life shine and broaden and flow out majestically,
like a river sunward. The smile still on his lips, he lit a
second candle and a third; a fire stood ready built in a
chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones and the gnarled
olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle on
the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him
like his hopes. To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands
lightly clasped, his breath deeply and pleasurably taken.
Victory walked with him; he marched to crowns and empires
among shouting followers; glory was his dress. And presently
again the shadows closed upon the solitary. Under the gilt
of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment
showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed
up the actual failure: defeat, the long distress of the
flight, exile, despair, broken followers, mourning faces,
empty pockets, friends estranged. The memory of his father
rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied; despair
sharpened into wrath. There was one who had led armies in
the field, who had staked his life upon the family
enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open air,
the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept
direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy,
and buzzed about by priests? A pretty king, if he had not a
martial son to lean upon! A king at all?
'There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians;
he was more of a man than my papa!' he thought. 'I saw him
lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him - and he
died for my papa! All died for him, or risked the dying, and
I lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in
heather like a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me
Carluccio - me, the man of the house, the only king in that
king's race.' He ground his teeth. 'The only king in
Europe!' Who else? Who has done and suffered except me? who
has lain and run and hidden with his faithful subjects, like
a second Bruce? Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France, at
least, the lewd effeminate traitor!' And filling the glass
to the brim, he drank a king's damnation. Ah, if he had the
power of Louis, what a king were here!
The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he
persevered in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed
the fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine: a boy
at odds with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he
was now burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and
solitary excess.
From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice
attracted him.
'By . . .
HEATHERCAT
CHAPTER I - TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT
THE period of this tale is in the heat of the KILLING-TIME;
the scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and
morasses, haunted only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers,
the dragoons that came in chase of them, the women that wept
on their dead bodies, and the wild birds of the moorland that
have cried there since the beginning. It is a land of many
rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written there in
prehistoric symbols. Strange green raths are to be seen
commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows
of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint,
durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an
antiquity older perhaps than any, and still living and active
- a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic
population. These rugged and grey hills were once included
in the boundaries of the Caledonian Forest. Merlin sat here
below his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with
Kentigern; here fell into his enchanted trance. And the
legend of his slumber seems to body forth the story of that
Celtic race, deprived for so many centuries of their
authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral inheritance
of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate courage.
The Traquairs of Montroymont (MONS ROMANUS, as the erudite
expound it) had long held their seat about the head-waters of
the Dule and in the back parts of the moorland parish of
Balweary. For two hundred years they had enjoyed in these
upland quarters a certain decency (almost to be named
distinction) of repute; and the annals of their house, or
what is remembered of them, were obscure and bloody. Ninian
Traquair was 'cruallie slochtered' by the Crozers at the
kirk-door of Balweary, anno 1482. Francis killed Simon
Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought letters of
slayers at the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of
compounding, married (without tocher) Simon's daughter
Grizzel, which is the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came
first to an intermarriage. About the last Traquair and
Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this book, among many
other things, to tell.
The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the
King also, but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill
days for Montroymont when the Bishops came in and the
dragoons at the heels of them. Ninian (then laird) was an
anxious husband of himself and the property, as the times
required, and it may be said of him, that he lost both. He
was heavily suspected of the Pentland Hills rebellion. When
it came the length of Bothwell Brig, he stood his trial
before the Secret Council, and was convicted of talking with
some insurgents by the wayside, the subject of the
conversation not very clearly appearing, and of the reset and
maintenance of one Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before
Bothwell with a musket, and afterwards, for a continuance of
months, delved the garden at Montroymont. Matters went very
ill with Ninian at the Council; some of the lords were clear
for treason; and even the boot was talked of. But he was
spared that torture; and at last, having pretty good
friendship among great men, he came off with a fine of seven
thousand marks, that caused the estate to groan. In this
case, as in so many others, it was the wife that made the
trouble. She was a great keeper of conventicles; would ride
ten miles to one, and when she was fined, rejoiced greatly to
suffer for the Kirk; but it was rather her husband that
suffered. She had their only son, Francis, baptized
privately by the hands of Mr. Kidd; there was that much the
more to pay for! She could neither be driven nor wiled into
the parish kirk; as for taking the sacrament at the hands of
any Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at those of Curate
Haddo, there was nothing further from her purposes; and
Montroymont had to put his hand in his pocket month by month
and year by year. Once, indeed, the little lady was cast in
prison, and the laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested man, had
to ride up and take her place; from which he was not
discharged under nine months and a sharp fine. It scarce
seemed she had any gratitude to him; she came out of gaol
herself, and plunged immediately deeper in conventicles,
resetting recusants, and all her old, expensive folly, only
with greater vigour and openness, because Montroymont was
safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to consider.
When he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed,
in December 1680, and late in the black night, my lady was
from home. He came into the house at his alighting, with a
riding-rod yet in his hand; and, on the servant-maid telling
him, caught her by the scruff of the neck, beat her
violently, flung her down in the passageway, and went
upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light. It was
three in the morning when my lady returned from that
conventicle, and, hearing of the assault (because the maid
had sat up for her, weeping), went to their common chamber
with a lantern in hand and stamping with her shoes so as to
wake the dead; it was supposed, by those that heard her, from
a design to have it out with the good man at once. The
house-servants gathered on the stair, because it was a main
interest with them to know which of these two was the better
horse; and for the space of two hours they were heard to go
at the matter, hammer and tongs. Montroymont alleged he was
at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within his
power to pay the annual rents; she had served him basely by
keeping conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake; his
friends were weary, and there was nothing else before him but
the entire loss of the family lands, and to begin life again
by the wayside as a common beggar. She took him up very
sharp and high: called upon him, if he were a Christian? and
which he most considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry
glebes, or of his soul? Presently he was heard to weep, and
my lady's voice to go on continually like a running burn,
only the words indistinguishable; whereupon it was supposed a
victory for her ladyship, and the domestics took themselves
to bed. The next day Traquair appeared like a man who had
gone under the harrows; and his lady wife thenceforward
continued in her old course without the least deflection.
Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and
suffered his wife to go on hers without remonstrance. He
still minded his estate, of which it might be said he took
daily a fresh farewell, and counted it already lost; looking
ruefully on the acres and the graves of his fathers, on the
moorlands where the wild-fowl consorted, the low, gurgling
pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling
curlews - things that were yet his for the day and would be
another's to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering
till the dusk at his approaching ruin, which no device of
arithmetic could postpone beyond a year or two. He was
essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and
landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons
come and go, and his cattle increase, until the limit of age;
he would have been content at any time to die, if he could
have left the estates undiminished to an heir-male of his
ancestors, that duty standing first in his instinctive
calendar. And now he saw everywhere the image of the new
proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or
fowling for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very
gooseberries in the Place garden; and saw always, on the
other hand, the figure of Francis go forth, a beggar, into
the broad world.
It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took
every test and took advantage of every indulgence; went and
drank with the dragoons in Balweary; attended the communion
and came regularly to the church to Curate Haddo, with his
son beside him. The mad, raging, Presbyterian zealot of a
wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house must
have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret
indulgence of the curate, who had a great sympathy with the
laird, and winked hard at the doings in Montroymont. This
curate was a man very ill reputed in the countryside, and
indeed in all Scotland. 'Infamous Haddo' is Shield's
expression. But Patrick Walker is more copious. 'Curate
Hall Haddo,' says he, SUB VOCE Peden, 'or HELL Haddo, as he
was more justly to be called, a pokeful of old condemned
errors and the filthy vile lusts of the flesh, a published
whore-monger, a common gross drunkard, continually and
godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually
breathing flames against the remnant of Israel. But the Lord
put an end to his piping, and all these offences were
composed into one bloody grave.' No doubt this was written
to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it claimed
for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent
judge. At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes
off not wholly amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not
that he showed any graces of the Christian, but had a sort of
Pagan decency, which might almost tempt one to be concerned
about his sudden, violent, and unprepared fate.
HEATHERCAT
CHAPTER II - FRANCIE
FRANCIE was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather
childish of his age, though not backward in schooling, which
had been pushed on far by a private governor, one M'Brair, a
forfeited minister harboured in that capacity at Montroymont.
The boy, already much employed in secret by his mother, was
the most apt hand conceivable to run upon a message, to carry
food to lurking fugitives, or to stand sentry on the skyline
above a conventicle. It seemed no place on the moorlands was
so naked but what he would find cover there; and as he knew
every hag, boulder, and heather-bush in a circuit of seven
miles about Montroymont, there was scarce any spot but what
he could leave or approach it unseen. This dexterity had won
him a reputation in that part of the country; and among the
many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he passed
under the by-name of Heathercat.
How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.
He took much forethought for the boy's future, seeing he was
like to be left so poorly, and would sometimes assist at his
lessons, sighing heavily, yawning deep, and now and again
patting Francie on the shoulder if he seemed to be doing ill,
by way of a private, kind encouragement. But a great part of
the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his eyes
sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the
particulars of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be
absent a dozen times for once that his father would observe
it.
On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother,
which must be kept private from all, the father included in
the first of them. Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter
of a horse's shoes, and claps down incontinent in a hag by
the wayside. And presently he spied his father come riding
from one direction, and Curate Haddo walking from another;
and Montroymont leaning down from the saddle, and Haddo
getting on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy, bald-pated
man, more like a dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came to a
halt within two fathoms of the child.
'Montroymont,' the curate said, 'the deil's in 't but I'll
have to denunciate your leddy again.'
'Deil's in 't indeed!' says the laird.
'Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?' pursues
Haddo; 'or to a communion at the least of it? For the
conventicles, let be! and the same for yon solemn fule,
M'Brair: I can blink at them. But she's got to come to the
kirk, Montroymont.'
'Dinna speak of it,' says the laird. 'I can do nothing with
her.'
'Couldn't ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,'
suggested Haddo. 'No? I'm wae to hear it. And I suppose ye
ken where you're going?'
'Fine!' said Montroymont. 'Fine do I ken where: bankrup'cy
and the Bass Rock!'
'Praise to my bones that I never married!' cried the curate.
'Well, it's a grievous thing to me to see an auld house dung
down that was here before Flodden Field. But naebody can say
it was with my wish.'
'No more they can, Haddo!' says the laird. 'A good friend
ye've been to me, first and last. I can give you that
character with a clear conscience.'
Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down
into the Dule Valley. But of the curate Francis was not to
be quit so easily. He went on with his little, brisk steps
to the corner of a dyke, and stopped and whistled and waved
upon a lassie that was herding cattle there. This Janet
M'Clour was a big lass, being taller than the curate; and
what made her look the more so, she was kilted very high. It
seemed for a while she would not come, and Francie heard her
calling Haddo a 'daft auld fule,' and saw her running and
dodging him among the whins and hags till he was fairly
blown. But at the last he gets a bottle from his plaid-neuk
and holds it up to her; whereupon she came at once into a
composition, and the pair sat, drinking of the bottle, and
daffing and laughing together, on a mound of heather. The
boy had scarce heard of these vanities, or he might have been
minded of a nymph and satyr, if anybody could have taken
long-leggit Janet for a nymph. But they seemed to be huge
friends, he thought; and was the more surprised, when the
curate had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones
after him with screeches of laughter, and Haddo turn about
and caper, and shake his staff at her, and laugh louder than
herself. A wonderful merry pair, they seemed; and when
Francie had crawled out of the hag, he had a great deal to
consider in his mind. It was possible they were all fallen
in error about Mr. Haddo, he reflected - having seen him so
tender with Montroymont, and so kind and playful with the
lass Janet; and he had a temptation to go out of his road and
question her herself upon the matter. But he had a strong
spirit of duty on him; and plodded on instead over the braes
till he came near the House of Cairngorm. There, in a hollow
place by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was
aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years
older than himself. The two approached with the precautions
of a pair of strange dogs, looking at each other queerly.
'It's ill weather on the hills,' said the stranger, giving
the watchword.
'For a season,' said Francie, 'but the Lord will appear.'
'Richt,' said the barefoot boy; 'wha're ye frae?'
'The Leddy Montroymont,' says Francie.
'Ha'e, then!' says the stranger, and handed him a folded
paper, and they stood and looked at each other again. 'It's
unco het,' said the boy.
'Dooms het,' says Francie.
'What do they ca' ye?' says the other.
'Francie,' says he. 'I'm young Montroymont. They ca' me
Heathercat.'
'I'm Jock Crozer,' said the boy. And there was another
pause, while each rolled a stone under his foot.
'Cast your jaiket and I'll fecht ye for a bawbee,' cried the
elder boy with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing
back his jacket.
'Na, I've nae time the now,' said Francie, with a sharp
thrill of alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.
'Ye're feared. Heathercat indeed!' said Crozer, for among
this infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of
Crozer had gone forth and was resented by his rivals. And
with that they separated.
On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the
recollection of this untoward incident. The challenge had
been fairly offered and basely refused: the tale would be
carried all over the country, and the lustre of the name of
Heathercat be dimmed. But the scene between Curate Haddo and
Janet M'Clour had also given him much to think of: and he was
still puzzling over the case of the curate, and why such ill
words were said of him, and why, if he were so merry-
spirited, he should yet preach so dry, when coming over a
knowe, whom should he see but Janet, sitting with her back to
him, minding her cattle! He was always a great child for
secret, stealthy ways, having been employed by his mother on
errands when the same was necessary; and he came behind the
lass without her hearing.
'Jennet,' says he.
'Keep me,' cries Janet, springing up. 'O, it's you, Maister
Francie! Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.'
'Ay, it's me,' said Francie. 'I've been thinking, Jennet; I
saw you and the curate a while back - '
'Brat!' cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one
moment made as if she would have stricken him with a ragged
stick she had to chase her bestial with, and the next was
begging and praying that he would mention it to none. It was
'naebody's business, whatever,' she said; 'it would just
start a clash in the country'; and there would be nothing
left for her but to drown herself in Dule Water.
'Why?' says Francie.
The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.
'And it isna that, anyway,' continued Francie. 'It was just
that he seemed so good to ye - like our Father in heaven, I
thought; and I thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been
wrong about him from the first. But I'll have to tell Mr.
M'Brair; I'm under a kind of a bargain to him to tell him
all.'
'Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!' cried the lass.
'I've naething to be ashamed of. Tell M'Brair to mind his
ain affairs,' she cried again: 'they'll be hot eneugh for
him, if Haddie likes!' And so strode off, shoving her beasts
before her, and ever and again looking back and crying angry
words to the boy, where he stood mystified.
By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he
would say nothing to his mother. My Lady Montroymont was in
the keeping-room, reading a godly book; she was a wonderful
frail little wife to make so much noise in the world and be
able to steer about that patient sheep her husband; her eyes
were like sloes, the fingers of her hands were like tobacco-
pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like a trap; and even when
she was the most serious, and still more when she was angry,
there hung about her face the terrifying semblance of a
smile.
'Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had
handed it over, and she had read and burned it, 'Did you see
anybody?' she asked.
'I saw the laird,' said Francie.
'He didna see you, though?' asked his mother.
'Deil a fear,' from Francie.
'Francie!' she cried. 'What's that I hear? an aith? The
Lord forgive me, have I broughten forth a brand for the
burning, a fagot for hell-fire?'
'I'm very sorry, ma'am,' said Francie. 'I humbly beg the
Lord's pardon, and yours, for my wickedness.'
'H'm,' grunted the lady. 'Did ye see nobody else?'
'No, ma'am,' said Francie, with the face of an angel, 'except
Jock Crozer, that gied me the billet.'
'Jock Crozer!' cried the lady. 'I'll Crozer them! Crozers
indeed! What next? Are we to repose the lives of a
suffering remnant in Crozers? The whole clan of them wants
hanging, and if I had my way of it, they wouldna want it
long. Are you aware, sir, that these Crozers killed your
forebear at the kirk-door?'
'You see, he was bigger 'n me,' said Francie.
'Jock Crozer!' continued the lady. 'That'll be Clement's
son, the biggest thief and reiver in the country-side. To
trust a note to him! But I'll give the benefit of my
opinions to Lady Whitecross when we two forgather. Let her
look to herself! I have no patience with half-hearted
carlines, that complies on the Lord's day morning with the
kirk, and comes taigling the same night to the conventicle.
The one or the other! is what I say: hell or heaven -
Haddie's abominations or the pure word of God dreeping from
the lips of Mr. Arnot,
'"Like honey from the honeycomb
That dreepeth, sweeter far."'
My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial
subjects: the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the
turpitudes of the whole Crozer race - which, indeed, had
never been conspicuous for respectability. She pursued the
pair of them for twenty minutes on the clock with wonderful
animation and detail, something of the pulpit manner, and the
spirit of one possessed. 'O hellish compliance!' she
exclaimed. 'I would not suffer a complier to break bread
with Christian folk. Of all the sins of this day there is
not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating, as damnable
compliance': the boy standing before her meanwhile, and
brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet,
and Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket. And yet, with all
his distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much:
his father and himself being 'compliers' - that is to say,
attending the church of the parish as the law required.
Presently, the lady's passion beginning to decline, or her
flux of ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her
audience. Francie bowed low, left the room, closed the door
behind him: and then turned him about in the passage-way, and
with a low voice, but a prodigious deal of sentiment,
repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over, to the
end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on
'damnable' and 'hellish.' FAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI -
disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no
doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs into his
tutor's chamber with a quiet mind. M'Brair sat by the cheek
of the peat-fire and shivered, for he had a quartan ague and
this was his day. The great night-cap and plaid, the dark
unshaven cheeks of the man, and the white, thin hands that
held the plaid about his chittering body, made a sorrowful
picture. But Francie knew and loved him; came straight in,
nestled close to the refugee, and told his story. M'Brair
had been at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had
licensed both on the same day; and at this tale, told with so
much innocency by the boy, the heart of the tutor was
commoved.
'Woe upon him! Woe upon that man!' he cried. 'O the
unfaithful shepherd! O the hireling and apostate minister!
Make my matters hot for me? quo' she! the shameless limmer!
And true it is, that he could repose me in that nasty,
stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your mother
drew me out - the Lord reward her for it! - or to that cold,
unbieldy, marine place of the Bass Rock, which, with my
delicate kist, would be fair ruin to me. But I will be
valiant in my Master's service. I have a duty here: a duty
to my God, to myself, and to Haddo: in His strength, I will
perform it.'
Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and
bade him in the future to avert his very eyes from the doings
of the curate. 'You must go to his place of idolatry; look
upon him there!' says he, 'but nowhere else. Avert your
eyes, close your ears, pass him by like a three days' corp.
He is like that damnable monster Basiliscus, which defiles -
yea, poisons! - by the sight.' - All which was hardly
claratory to the boy's mind.
Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to
Francie. Traquair was a good shot and swordsman: and it was
his pleasure to walk with his son over the braes of the
moorfowl, or to teach him arms in the back court, when they
made a mighty comely pair, the child being so lean, and
light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly,
pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside)
showing already white with many anxieties, and his face of an
even, flaccid red. But this day Francie's heart was not in
the fencing.
'Sir,' says he, suddenly lowering his point, 'will ye tell me
a thing if I was to ask it?'
'Ask away,' says the father.
'Well, it's this,' said Francie: 'Why do you and me comply if
it's so wicked?'
'Ay, ye have the cant of it too!' cries Montroymont. 'But
I'll tell ye for all that. It's to try and see if we can
keep the rigging on this house, Francie. If she had her way,
we would be beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by the
wayside. When ye hear her - when ye hear folk,' he corrected
himself briskly, 'call me a coward, and one that betrayed the
Lord, and I kenna what else, just mind it was to keep a bed
to ye to sleep in and a bite for ye to eat. - On guard!' he
cried, and the lesson proceeded again till they were called
to supper.
'There's another thing yet,' said Francie, stopping his
father. 'There's another thing that I am not sure that I am
very caring for. She - she sends me errands.'
'Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,' said Traquair.
'Ay, but wait till I tell ye,' says the boy. 'If I was to
see you I was to hide.'
Montroymont sighed. 'Well, and that's good of her too,' said
he. 'The less that I ken of thir doings the better for me;
and the best thing you can do is just to obey her, and see
and be a good son to her, the same as ye are to me, Francie.'
At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie
swelled within his bosom, and his remorse was poured out.
'Faither!' he cried, 'I said "deil" to-day; many's the time I
said it, and DAMNABLE too, and HELLITSH. I ken they're all
right; they're beeblical. But I didna say them beeblically;
I said them for sweir words - that's the truth of it.'
'Hout, ye silly bairn!' said the father, 'dinna do it nae
mair, and come in by to your supper.' And he took the boy,
and drew him close to him a moment, as they went through the
door, with something very fond and secret, like a caress
between a pair of lovers.
The next day M'Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a
long advising with Janet on the braes where she herded
cattle. What passed was never wholly known; but the lass
wept bitterly, and fell on her knees to him among the whins.
The same night, as soon as it was dark, he took the road
again for Balweary. In the Kirkton, where the dragoons
quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the noise of a
ranting song and people laughing grossly, which was highly
offensive to his mind. He gave it the wider berth, keeping
among fields; and came down at last by the water-side, where
the manse stands solitary between the river and the road. He
tapped at the back door, and the old woman called upon him to
come in, and guided him through the house to the study, as
they still called it, though there was little enough study
there in Haddo's days, and more song-books than theology.
'Here's yin to speak wi' ye, Mr. Haddie!' cries the old wife.
And M'Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little,
round, red man seated in one chair and his feet upon another.
A clear fire and a tallow dip lighted him barely. He was
taking tobacco in a pipe, and smiling to himself; and a
brandy-bottle and glass, and his fiddle and bow, were beside
him on the table.
'Hech, Patey M'Briar, is this you?' said he, a trifle
tipsily. 'Step in by, man, and have a drop brandy: for the
stomach's sake! Even the deil can quote Scripture - eh,
Patey?'
'I will neither eat nor drink with you,' replied M'Brair. 'I
am come upon my Master's errand: woe be upon me if I should
anyways mince the same. Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit
this kirk which you encumber.'
'Muckle obleeged!' says Haddo, winking.
'You and me have been to kirk and market together,' pursued
M'Brair; 'we have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have
sat in the same teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and
I know you still retain for me some carnal kindness. It
would be my shame if I denied it; I live here at your mercy
and by your favour, and glory to acknowledge it. You have
pity on my wretched body, which is but grass, and must soon
be trodden under: but O, Haddo! how much greater is the
yearning with which I yearn after and pity your immortal
soul! Come now, let us reason together! I drop all points
of controversy, weighty though these be; I take your defaced
and damnified kirk on your own terms; and I ask you, Are you
a worthy minister? The communion season approaches; how can
you pronounce thir solemn words, "The elders will now bring
forrit the elements," and not quail? A parishioner may be
summoned to-night; you may have to rise from your miserable
orgies; and I ask you, Haddo, what does your conscience tell
you? Are you fit? Are you fit to smooth the pillow of a
parting Christian? And if the summons should be for
yourself, how then?'
Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part
of his temper. 'What's this of it?' he cried. 'I'm no waur
than my neebours. I never set up to be speeritual; I never
did. I'm a plain, canty creature; godliness is cheerfulness,
says I; give me my fiddle and a dram, and I wouldna hairm a
flee.'
'And I repeat my question,' said M'Brair: 'Are you fit - fit
for this great charge? fit to carry and save souls?'
'Fit? Blethers! As fit's yoursel',' cried Haddo.
'Are you so great a self-deceiver?' said M'Brair. 'Wretched
man, trampler upon God's covenants, crucifier of your Lord
afresh. I will ding you to the earth with one word: How
about the young woman, Janet M'Clour?'
'Weel, what about her? what do I ken?' cries Haddo.
'M'Brair, ye daft auld wife, I tell ye as true's truth, I
never meddled her. It was just daffing, I tell ye: daffing,
and nae mair: a piece of fun, like! I'm no denying but what
I'm fond of fun, sma' blame to me! But for onything sarious
- hout, man, it might come to a deposeetion! I'll sweir it
to ye. Where's a Bible, till you hear me sweir?'
'There is nae Bible in your study,' said M'Brair severely.
And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to
accept the fact.
'Weel, and suppose there isna?' he cried, stamping. 'What
mair can ye say of us, but just that I'm fond of my joke, and
so's she? I declare to God, by what I ken, she might be the
Virgin Mary - if she would just keep clear of the dragoons.
But me! na, deil haet o' me!'
'She is penitent at least,' says M'Brair.
'Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she
accused me?' cried the curate.
'I canna just say that,' replied M'Brair. 'But I rebuked her
in the name of God, and she repented before me on her bended
knees.'
'Weel, I daursay she's been ower far wi' the dragoons,' said
Haddo. 'I never denied that. I ken naething by it.'
'Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,' said
M'Brair. 'Poor, blind, besotted creature - and I see you
stoytering on the brink of dissolution: your light out, and
your hours numbered. Awake, man!' he shouted with a
formidable voice, 'awake, or it be ower late.'
'Be damned if I stand this!' exclaimed Haddo, casting his
tobacco-pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in
pieces. 'Out of my house with ye, or I'll call for the
dragoons.'
'The speerit of the Lord is upon me,' said M'Brair with
solemn ecstasy. 'I sist you to compear before the Great
White Throne, and I warn you the summons shall be bloody and
sudden.'
And at this, with more agility than could have been expected,
he got clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in
the face of the pursuing curate. The next Lord's day the
curate was ill, and the kirk closed, but for all his ill
words, Mr. M'Brair abode unmolested in the house of
Montroymont.
HEATHERCAT
CHAPTER III - THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE
THIS was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon
the west a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools. These
presently drained into a burn that made off, with little
noise and no celerity of pace, about the corner of the hill.
On the far side the ground swelled into a bare heath, black
with junipers, and spotted with the presence of the standing
stones for which the place was famous. They were many in
that part, shapeless, white with lichen - you would have said
with age: and had made their abode there for untold
centuries, since first the heathens shouted for their
installation. The ancients had hallowed them to some ill
religion, and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by
the prudent before the fall of day; but of late, on the
upspringing of new requirements, these lonely stones on the
moor had again become a place of assembly. A watchful picket
on the Hill-end commanded all the northern and eastern
approaches; and such was the disposition of the ground, that
by certain cunningly posted sentries the west also could be
made secure against surprise: there was no place in the
country where a conventicle could meet with more quiet of
mind or a more certain retreat open, in the case of
interference from the dragoons. The minister spoke from a
knowe close to the edge of the ring, and poured out the words
God gave him on the very threshold of the devils of yore.
When they pitched a tent (which was often in wet weather,
upon a communion occasion) it was rigged over the huge
isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew
why. And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope
below, and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the
turfy soil of the Ring itself. In truth the situation was
well qualified to give a zest to Christian doctrines, had
there been any wanted. But these congregations assembled
under conditions at once so formidable and romantic as made a
zealot of the most cold. They were the last of the faithful;
God, who had averted His face from all other countries of the
world, still leaned from heaven to observe, with swelling
sympathy, the doings of His moorland remnant; Christ was by
them with His eternal wounds, with dropping tears; the Holy
Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly adopted by
Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the
heart of each and on the lips of the minister. And over
against them was the army of the hierarchies, from the men
Charles and James Stuart, on to King Lewie and the Emperor;
and the scarlet Pope, and the muckle black devil himself,
peering out the red mouth of hell in an ecstasy of hate and
hope. 'One pull more!' he seemed to cry; 'one pull more, and
it's done. There's only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and
the three Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.' And with such an
august assistance of powers and principalities looking on at
the last conflict of good and evil, it was scarce possible to
spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile, AB AGENDO
devils whose holy place they were now violating.
There might have been three hundred to four hundred present.
At least there were three hundred horses tethered for the
most part in the ring; though some of the hearers on the
outskirts of the crowd stood with their bridles in their
hand, ready to mount at the first signal. The circle of
faces was strangely characteristic; long, serious, strongly
marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown cheeks, the
mouth set and the eyes shining with a fierce enthusiasm; the
shepherd, the labouring man, and the rarer laird, stood there
in their broad blue bonnets or laced hats, and presenting an
essential identity of type. From time to time a long-drawn
groan of adhesion rose in this audience, and was propagated
like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among the keepers
of the horses. It had a name; it was called 'a holy groan.'
A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out
before it and whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a
sudden fierceness that carried away the minister's voice and
twitched his tails and made him stagger, and turned the
congregation for a moment into a mere pother of blowing
plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain followed and was
dashed straight into their faces. Men and women panted aloud
in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth were
bared along all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids,
mantles, and riding-coats were proved vain, and the
worshippers felt the water stream on their naked flesh. The
minister, reinforcing his great and shrill voice, continued
to contend against and triumph over the rising of the squall
and the dashing of the rain.
'In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing
cock,' he said; 'and fifty mile and not get a light to your
pipe; and an hundred mile and not see a smoking house. For
there'll be naething in all Scotland but deid men's banes and
blackness, and the living anger of the Lord. O, where to
find a bield - O sirs, where to find a bield from the wind of
the Lord's anger? Do ye call THIS a wind? Bethankit! Sirs,
this is but a temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of
wind, this is but a spit of rain and by with it. Already
there's a blue bow in the west, and the sun will take the
crown of the causeway again, and your things'll be dried upon
ye, and your flesh will be warm upon your bones. But O,
sirs, sirs! for the day of the Lord's anger!'
His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution,
and a voice that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it
was, it was the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular
degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged
beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy hill-top,
the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe,
a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of
the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and
frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely
tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine,
and redolent of the soil.
A little before the coming of the squall there was a
different scene enacting at the outposts. For the most part,
the sentinels were faithful to their important duty; the
Hill-end of Drumlowe was known to be a safe meeting-place;
and the out-pickets on this particular day had been somewhat
lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the inordinate
length of the discourse. Francie lay there in his appointed
hiding-hole, looking abroad between two whin-bushes. His
view was across the course of the burn, then over a piece of
plain moorland, to a gap between two hills; nothing moved but
grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed his field of
view, heading northward: he heard the psalms, and sang words
of his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his
own design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his
bosom alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague.
Courage was uppermost during the singing, which he
accompanied through all its length with this impromptu
strain:
'And I will ding Jock Crozer down
No later than the day.'
Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at
the wind's will, as by the opening and shutting of a door;
wild spasms of screaming, as of some undiscerned gigantic
hill-bird stirred with inordinate passion, succeeded to
intervals of silence; and Francie heard them with a critical
ear. 'Ay,' he thought at last, 'he'll do; he has the bit in
his mou' fairly.'
He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock
Crozer, had been established at a very critical part of the
line of outposts; namely, where the burn issues by an abrupt
gorge from the semicircle of high moors. If anything was
calculated to nerve him to battle it was this. The post was
important; next to the Hill-end itself, it might be called
the key to the position; and it was where the cover was bad,
and in which it was most natural to place a child. It should
have been Heathercat's; why had it been given to Crozer? An
exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed through
his marrow every time he faced the question. Was it possible
that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours
abroad to his - Heathercat's - discredit? that his honour was
publicly sullied? All the world went dark about him at the
thought; he sank without a struggle into the midnight pool of
despair; and every time he so sank, he brought back with him
- not drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage by the
locks. His heart beat very slowly as he deserted his
station, and began to crawl towards that of Crozer.
Something pulled him back, and it was not the sense of duty,
but a remembrance of Crozer's build and hateful readiness of
fist. Duty, as he conceived it, pointed him forward on the
rueful path that he was travelling. Duty bade him redeem his
name if he were able, at the risk of broken bones; and his
bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation. An
awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he
should disgrace himself by weeping. He consoled himself,
boy-like, with the consideration that he was not yet
committed; he could easily steal over unseen to Crozer's
post, and he had a continuous private idea that he would very
probably steal back again. His course took him so near the
minister that he could hear some of his words: 'What news,
minister, of Claver'se? He's going round like a roaring
rampaging lion. . . .