[Illustration]




Pagan Papers

By Kenneth Grahame




Contents

 The Romance of the Road
 The Romance of the Rail
 Non Libri Sed Liberi
 Loafing
 Cheap Knowledge
 The Rural Pan
 Marginalia
 The Eternal Whither
 Deus Terminus
 Of Smoking
 An Autumn Encounter
 The White Poppy
 A Bohemian in Exile
 Justifiable Homicide
 The Fairy Wicket
 Aboard the Galley
 The Lost Centaur
 Orion




The Romance of the Road


Among the many places of magic visited by Pantagruel and his company
during the progress of their famous voyage, few surpass that island
whose roads did literally “go” to places—_“ou les chemins cheminent,
comme animaulx”_: and would-be travellers, having inquired of the road
as to its destination, and received satisfactory reply, _“se guindans”_
(as the old book hath it—hoisting themselves up on) _“au chemin
opportun, sans aultrement se poiner ou fatiguer, se trouvoyent au lieu
destiné.”_

The best example I know of an approach to this excellent sort of
vitality in roads is the Ridgeway of the North Berkshire Downs. Join it
at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames; at once it strikes
you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid, purposeful
manner, running along the highest ridge of the Downs a broad green
ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the neighbouring
grass, yet distinct for all that. No villages nor homesteads tempt it
aside or modify its course for a yard; should you lose the track where
it is blent with the bordering turf or merged in and obliterated by
criss-cross paths, you have only to walk straight on, taking heed of no
alternative to right or left; and in a minute ’tis with you
again—arisen out of the earth as it were. Or, if still not quite
assured, lift you your eyes, and there it runs over the brow of the
fronting hill. Where a railway crosses it, it disappears indeed—hiding
Alpheus-like, from the ignominy of rubble and brick-work; but a little
way on it takes up the running again with the same quiet persistence.
Out on that almost trackless expanse of billowy Downs such a track is
in some sort humanly companionable: it really seems to lead you by the
hand.

The “Rudge” is of course an exceptional instance; but indeed this
pleasant personality in roads is not entirely fanciful. It exists as a
characteristic of the old country road, evolved out of the primitive
prehistoric track, developing according to the needs of the land it
passes through and serves: with a language, accordingly, and a meaning
of its own. Its special services are often told clearly enough; but
much else too of the quiet story of the country-side: something of the
old tale whereof you learn so little from the printed page. Each is
instinct, perhaps, with a separate suggestion. Some are martial and
historic, and by your side the hurrying feet of the dead raise a
ghostly dust. The name of yon town—with its Roman or Saxon suffix to
British root—hints at much. Many a strong man, wanting his _vates
sacer,_ passed silently to Hades for that suffix to obtain. The little
rise up yonder on the Downs that breaks their straight green line
against the sky showed another sight when the sea of battle surged and
beat on its trampled sides; and the Roman, sore beset, may have gazed
down this very road for relief, praying for night or the succouring
legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under
her sun-bonnet—so may some girl-ancestress of hers have watched with
beating heart the Wessex levies hurry along to clash with the heathen
and break them on the down where the ash trees grew. And yonder, where
the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of drooping boughs—is
that gleam of water or glitter of lurking spears?

Some sing you pastorals, fluting low in the hot sun between dusty
hedges overlooked by contented cows; past farmsteads where man and
beast, living in frank fellowship, learn pleasant and serviceable
lessons each of the other; over the full-fed river, lipping the
meadow-sweet, and thence on either side through leagues of hay. Or
through bending corn they chant the mystical wonderful song of the
reaper when the harvest is white to the sickle. But most of them,
avoiding classification, keep each his several tender significance; as
with one I know, not so far from town, which woos you from the valley
by gentle ascent between nut-laden hedges, and ever by some touch of
keen fragrance in the air, by some mystery of added softness under
foot—ever a promise of something to come, unguessed, delighting. Till
suddenly you are among the pines, their keen scent strikes you through
and through, their needles carpet the ground, and in their swaying tops
moans the unappeasable wind—sad, ceaseless, as the cry of a warped
humanity. Some paces more, and the promise is fulfilled, the hints and
whisperings become fruition: the ground breaks steeply away, and you
look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads, rolling woodland,
and—bounding all, blent with the horizon, a greyness, a gleam—the
English Channel. A road of promises, of hinted surprises, following
each other with the inevitable sequence in a melody.

But we are now in another and stricter sense an island of _chemins qui
cheminent:_ dominated, indeed, by them. By these the traveller,
veritably _se guindans,_ may reach his destination _“sans se poiner ou
se fatiguer”_ (with large qualifications); but _sans_ very much else
whereof he were none the worse. The gain seems so obvious that you
forget to miss all that lay between the springing stride of the early
start and the pleasant weariness of the end approached, when the limbs
lag a little as the lights of your destination begin to glimmer through
the dusk. All that lay between! “A Day’s Ride a Life’s Romance” was the
excellent title of an unsuccessful book; and indeed the journey should
march with the day, beginning and ending with its sun, to be the
complete thing, the golden round, required of it. This makes that mind
and body fare together, hand in hand, sharing the hope, the action, the
fruition; finding equal sweetness in the languor of aching limbs at eve
and in the first god-like intoxication of motion with braced muscle in
the sun. For walk or ride take the mind over greater distances than a
throbbing whirl with stiffening joints and cramped limbs through a
dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover vaster spaces with Lavengro,
footing it with gipsies or driving his tinker’s cart across lonely
commons, than with many a globe-trotter or steam-yachtsman with diary
or log? And even that dividing line—strictly marked and rarely
overstepped—between the man who bicycles and the man who walks, is less
due to a prudent regard for personal safety of the one part than to an
essential difference in minds.

There is a certain supernal, a deific, state of mind which may indeed
be experienced in a minor degree, by any one, in the siesta part of a
Turkish bath. But this particular golden glow of the faculties is only
felt at its fulness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open
air. “A man ought to be seen by the gods,” says Marcus Aurelius,
“neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.” Though this does
not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make of humanity, yet
the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight in these
unblest days of hurry. If ever seen at all, ’tis when after many a mile
in sun and wind—maybe rain—you reach at last, with the folding star,
your destined rustic inn. There, in its homely, comfortable
strangeness, after unnumbered chops with country ale, the hard facts of
life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from accustomed
cares and worries—you are set in a peculiar nook of rest. Then old
failures seem partial successes, then old loves come back in their
fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of regret, then old
jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing of the gods above,
nothing of men below—not even their company. To-morrow you shall begin
life again: shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything;
meanwhile you sit, and the jolly world swings round, and you seem to
hear it circle to the music of the spheres. What pipe was ever thus
beatifying in effect? You are aching all over, and enjoying it; and the
scent of the limes drifts in through the window. This is undoubtedly
the best and greatest country in the world; and none but good fellows
abide in it.

    Laud we the Gods,
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars.




The Romance of the Rail


In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of
the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer
begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier times,
three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out
from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not
rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or
if it were not North and South America. “And there be certaine flitting
islands,” says one, “which have been oftentimes seene, and when men
approached near them they vanished.” “It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down,” said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the
“getting-off place”); “it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” And
so on, and so on; each with his special hope or “wild surmise.” There
was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles. And in that first fair
world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before
experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine
morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning,
lo! a new country: and he rides by fields and granges never visited
before, through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps
down to welcome the mysterious stranger. And he marries the Princess,
and dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks “I will look
upon my father’s face again, though the leagues be long to my own
land.” And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning
he is made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory.
Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you
may, a man’s stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal
and unalterable scale. The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as
you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch
and hail; and the night cometh, when no man can work.

To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
this second generation of steam. _Pereunt et imputantur;_ they pass
away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed—not fully nor
worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
immediate recognition as poetic material. “For as it is dislocation and
detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who
re-attaches things to Nature and the whole—re-attaching even artificial
things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper insight—disposes
very easily of the most disagreeable facts”; so that he looks upon “the
factory village and the railway” and “sees them fall within the great
Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider’s geometrical web.” The
poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that
“Nature loves the gliding train of cars”; “instead of which” the poet
still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been
more flexible and liberal. Turner saw and did his best to seize the
spirit of the thing, its kinship with the elements, and to blend
furnace-glare and rush of iron with the storm-shower, the wind and the
thwart-flashing sun-rays, and to make the whole a single expression of
irresoluble force. And even in a certain work by another and a very
different painter—though I willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate
romantic intention—you shall find the element of romance in the
vestiges of the old order still lingering in the first transition
period: the coach-shaped railway carriages with luggage piled and
corded on top, the red-coated guard, the little engine tethered well
ahead as if between traces. To those bred within sight of the sea,
steamers will always partake in somewhat of the “beauty and mystery of
the ships”; above all, if their happy childhood have lain among the
gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western Highlands, where,
twice a week maybe, the strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a
piece of the busy, mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand
alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing
whistle—judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In
the days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles from
certain railway stations, veritable “horns of Elf-land, faintly
blowing.” Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom
train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the journey bit by
bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of
dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses looming up on
either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and
purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed in through
the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter; Endymion-like, “my first touch
of the earth went nigh to kill”: but it was only to hurry northwards
again on the wings of imagination, from dust and heat to the dear
mountain air. “We are only the children who might have been,” murmured
Lamb’s dream babes to him; and for the sake of those dream-journeys,
the journeys that might have been, I still hail with a certain
affection the call of the engine in the night: even as I love sometimes
to turn the enchanted pages of the railway a b c, and pass from one to
the other name reminiscent or suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian
maybe, or savouring of Wessex, or bearing me away to some sequestered
reach of the quiet Thames.




Non Libri Sed Liberi


It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always
fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them—all night if
you let him—wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed tears
over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not read
them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a
remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers start with the
honest resolution that some day they will “shut down on” this fatal
practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter into their charmed
circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind them. Then will they
read out of nothing but first editions; every day shall be a debauch in
large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco shall be familiar to
their touch as buckram. Meanwhile, though, books continue to flaunt
their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun the fray. In fine,
one buys and continues to buy; and the promised Sabbath never comes.

The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein resembling
the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the first sight of
the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a trembling in the
limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a habit of melancholy
in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed with amorously for an
hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior passion aforesaid) takes
its destined place on the shelf—where it stays. And this saith the
scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail to remark with a certain awe
that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a happy secret and
radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is insufferably conceited, and
his conceit waxeth as his coat, now condemned to a fresh term of
servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby though his coat may be, yet
will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by the price
of any book. No man—no human, masculine, natural man—ever sells a book.
Men have been known in moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by
temporary necessity, to rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit
what they should not, to “wince and relent and refrain” from what they
should: these things, howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and
may happen to any of us. But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural;
and it is noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity,
contains no distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately it is hardly
known to exist: the face of the public being set against it as a
flint—and the trade giving such wretched prices.

In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the
reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment,
sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking
capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed,
books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life
that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. _Non angli sed
Angeli_ was the comment of a missionary (old style) on the small human
duodecimos exposed for sale in the Roman market-place; and many a
buyer, when some fair-haired little chattel passed into his possession,
must have felt that here was something vendible no more. So of these
you may well affirm _Non libri sed liberi;_ children now, adopted into
the circle, they shall be trafficked in never again.

There is one exception which has sadly to be made—one class of men, of
whom I would fain, if possible, have avoided mention, who are strangers
to any such scruples. These be Executors—a word to be strongly accented
on the penultimate; for, indeed, they are the common headsmen of
collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for harmless
books. Hoary, famous old collections, budding young collections, fair
virgin collections of a single author—all go down before the executor’s
remorseless axe. He careth not and he spareth not. “The iniquity of
oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,” and it is chiefly by the hand
of the executor that she doth love to scatter it. May oblivion be his
portion for ever!

Of a truth, the foes of the book-lover are not few. One of the most
insidious, because he cometh at first in friendly, helpful guise, is
the bookbinder. Not in that he bindeth books—for the fair binding is
the final crown and flower of painful achievement—but because he
bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and
the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart
grows sick with hope deferred. Each morn the maiden binds her hair,
each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage-porch, each autumn the
harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds lake and
stream, and still the bookbinder he bindeth not. Then a secret voice
whispereth: “Arise, be a man, and slay him! Take him grossly, full of
bread, with all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May; At gaming,
swearing, or about some act That hath no relish of salvation in it!”
But when the deed is done, and the floor strewn with fragments of
binder—still the books remain unbound. You have made all that horrid
mess for nothing, and the weary path has to be trodden over again. As a
general rule, the man in the habit of murdering bookbinders, though he
performs a distinct service to society, only wastes his own time and
takes no personal advantage.

And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in
leathern surcoats bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet
weathered the Cape and sailed into halcyon seas. For these books—well,
you kept them many weeks before binding them, that the oleaginous
printer’s-ink might fully dry before the necessary hammering; you
forbore to open the pages, that the autocratic binder might refold the
sheets if he pleased; and now that all is over—_consummatum est_—still
you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a quiet mind. For these purple
emperors are not to be read in bed, nor during meals, nor on the grass
with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief periods are all the whirling
times allow you for solid serious reading. Still, after all, you have
them; you can at least pulverise your friends with the sight; and what
have they to show against them? Probably some miserable score or so of
half-bindings, such as lead you scornfully to quote the hackneyed
couplet concerning the poor Indian whose untutored mind clothes him
before but leaves him bare behind. Let us thank the gods that such
things are: that to some of us they give not poverty nor riches but a
few good books in whole bindings. Dowered with these and (if it be
vouchsafed) a cup of Burgundy that is sound even if it be not old, we
can leave to others the foaming grape of Eastern France that was
vintaged in ’74, and with it the whole range of shilling shockers,—the
Barmecidal feast of the purposeful novelist—yea, even the countless
series that tell of Eminent Women and Successful Men.




Loafing


When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn
has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows
who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and
stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest,
realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence
has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures
than the other—that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart
supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes
straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been spent
in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others, the men
of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the
Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it: they are
very necessary to him. For _“Suave mari magno”_ is the motto of your
true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the struggles
and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making holiday that he
is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and maintain his
self-satisfaction at boiling-point. And so is he never very far away
from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof, but hovers more
or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star amidst whirling
constellations, he may watch the mad world “glance, and nod, and hurry
by.”

There are many such centres of contemplation along the West Coast of
Scotland. Few places are better loafing-ground than a pier, with its
tranquil “lucid interval” between steamers, the ever recurrent throb of
paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles, splash
of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry and scurry
of the human morrice. Here, _tanquam in speculo,_ the Loafer as he
lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in the
great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting, departing
woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference—he may
experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a dream;
as if, indeed, he were Heine’s god in dream on a mountain-side. Let the
drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his dream, will
vanish into the nothing whence they came. And these emotions may be
renewed each morning; if a fair one sail to-day, be sure that one as
fair will land to-morrow. The supply is inexhaustible.

But in the South perhaps the happiest loafing-ground is the gift of
Father Thames; for there again the contrast of violent action, with its
blisters, perspiration, and the like, throws into fine relief the bliss
of  “quietism.” I know one little village in the upper reaches where
loafing may be pushed to high perfection. Here the early hours of the
morning are vexed by the voices of boaters making their way down the
little street to the river. The most of them go staggering under
hampers, bundles of waterproofs, and so forth. Their voices are clamant
of feats to be accomplished: they will row, they will punt, they will
paddle, till they weary out the sun. All this the Loafer hears through
the open door of his cottage, where in his shirt-sleeves he is dallying
with his bacon, as a gentleman should. He is the only one who has had a
comfortable breakfast—and he knows it. Later he will issue forth and
stroll down in their track to the bridge. The last of these Argonauts
is pulling lustily forth; the river is dotted with evanishing blazers.
Upon all these lunatics a pitiless Phoebus shines triumphant. The
Loafer sees the last of them off the stage, turns his back on it, and
seeks the shady side of the street.

A holy calm possesses the village now; the foreign element has passed
away with shouting and waving of banners, and its natural life of
somnolency is in evidence at last. And first, as a true Loafer should,
let him respectfully greet each several village dog. _Arcades
ambo_—loafers likewise—they lie there in the warm dust, each outside
his own door, ready to return the smallest courtesy. Their own lords
and masters are not given to the exchange of compliments nor to
greetings in the market-place. The dog is generally the better
gentleman, and he is aware of it; and he duly appreciates the loafer,
who is not too proud to pause a moment, change the news, and pass the
time of day. He will mark his sense of this attention by rising from
his dust-divan and accompanying his caller some steps on his way. But
he will stop short of his neighbour’s dust-patch; for the morning is
really too hot for a shindy. So, by easy stages (the street is not a
long one: six dogs will see it out), the Loafer quits the village; and
now the world is before him. Shall he sit on a gate and smoke? or lie
on the grass and smoke? or smoke aimlessly and at large along the road?
Such a choice of happiness is distracting; but perhaps the last course
is the best—as needing the least mental effort of selection. Hardly,
however, has he fairly started his first daydream when the snappish
“ting” of a bellkin recalls him to realities. By comes the bicyclist:
dusty, sweating, a piteous thing to look upon. But the irritation of
the strepitant metal has jarred the Loafer’s always exquisite nerves:
he is fain to climb a gate and make his way towards solitude and the
breezy downs.

Up here all vestiges of a sordid humanity disappear. The Loafer is
alone with the south-west wind and the blue sky. Only a carolling of
larks and a tinkling from distant flocks break the brooding noonday
stillness; above, the wind-hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the
blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky,
his fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at will
among the tranquil clouds. This way Nirvana nearest lies. Earth no
longer obtrudes herself; possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so
below him the thing still “spins like a fretful midge.” The Loafer
knows not nor cares. His is now an astral body, and through golden
spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammelled flight. And
there he really might remain for ever, but that his vagrom spirit is
called back to earth by a gentle but resistless, very human summons,—a
gradual, consuming, Pantagruelian, god-like, thirst: a thirst to thank
Heaven on. So, with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation, he
bends his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one is
good; to commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom; but beer
is a thing of deity—beer is divine.

Later the Loafer may decently make some concession to popular taste by
strolling down to the river and getting out his boat. With one paddle
out he will drift down the stream: just brushing the flowering rush and
the meadow-sweet and taking in as peculiar gifts the varied sweets of
even. The loosestrife is his, and the arrow-head: his the distant moan
of the weir; his are the glories, amber and scarlet and silver, of the
sunset-haunted surface. By-and-by the boaters will pass him
homeward-bound. All are blistered and sore: his withers are unwrung.
Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories; no corporeal
pangs clog his _æsthesis_—his perceptive faculty. Some have quarrelled
in the day and are no longer on speaking terms; he is at peace with
himself and with the whole world. Of all that lay them down in the
little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the
sweetest. For not even the blacksmith himself will have better claim to
have earned a night’s repose.




Cheap Knowledge


When at times it happens to me that I ’gin to be aweary of the sun, and
to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core—just because,
perhaps, I can’t afford Melampus Brown’s last volume of poems in large
paper, but must perforce condescend upon the two-and-sixpenny edition
for the million—then I bring myself to a right temper by recalling to
memory a sight which now and again in old days would touch the heart of
me to a happier pulsation. In the long, dark winter evenings, outside
some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest into the chilly
street, I would see some lad—sometimes even a girl—book in hand,
heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and straining eyes, careless
of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil behind them and about,
their happy spirits far in an enchanted world: till the ruthless
shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter
reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers. “My brother!” or “My
sister!” I would cry inwardly, feeling the link that bound us together.
They possessed, for the hour, the two gifts most precious to the
student—light and solitude: the true solitude of the roaring street.

Somehow this vision rarely greets me now. Probably the Free Libraries
have supplanted the flickering shop lights; and every lad and lass can
enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon “in luxury’s
sofa-lap of leather”; and of course this boon is appreciated and
profited by, and we shall see the divine results in a year or two. And
yet sometimes, like the dear old Baron in the “Red Lamp,” “I wonder?”

For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely
wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the
feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these
other readers, “all silent and all damned,” combine to set up a nervous
irritation fatal to quiet study. Had I to choose, I would prefer the
windy street. And possibly others have found that the removal of checks
and obstacles makes the path which leads to the divine mountain-tops
less tempting, now that it is less rugged. So full of human nature are
we all—still—despite the Radical missionaries that labour in the
vineyard. Before the National Gallery was extended and rearranged,
there was a little “St Catherine” by Pinturicchio that possessed my
undivided affections. In those days she hung near the floor, so that
those who would worship must grovel; and little I grudged it. Whenever
I found myself near Trafalgar Square with five minutes to spare I used
to turn in and sit on the floor before the object of my love, till
gently but firmly replaced on my legs by the attendant. She hangs on
the line now, in the grand new room; but I never go to see her. Somehow
she is not my “St Catherine” of old. Doubtless Free Libraries affect
many students in the same way: on the same principle as that now
generally accepted—that it is the restrictions placed on vice by our
social code which make its pursuit so peculiarly agreeable.

But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for,
it remains a question whether the type of mind that a generation or two
of Free Libraries will evolve is or is not the one that the world most
desiderates; and whether the spare reading and consequent fertile
thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive
of sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the
free run of these grocers’ shops to omnivorous appetites (and all young
readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared. Of
all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer’s boy of
letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
scores.

But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation may
be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would appear
that the patrons of these libraries are confining their reading, with a
charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed they cannot do
better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a good novel, not
the least merit of which is that it induces a state of passive,
unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go out and put
the world right. Next to fairy tales—the original world-fiction—our
modern novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it
has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or
ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the
Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in
training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the
objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead
discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of
wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.




The Rural Pan

(An April Essay)


Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the
restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little
hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic
Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin)
bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years
float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these
the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches
only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and
stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins
to blow a clearer note.

When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities will
abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this that
flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the day?
Mercury is out—some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed banks
crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his wake is
marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and fragments
of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to embrace the
slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the full gaze of
the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime reposeth, passively
beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards’ Club at Maidenhead. Here, O
Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity subjectively inclined, he is
neither objective nor, it must be said for him, at all objectionable,
like them of Mercury.

Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural
Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be
paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked
for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great
shadow of Streatley Hill, “annihilating all that’s made to a green
thought in a green shade”; or better yet, pushing an explorer’s prow up
the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester’s stately roof broods
over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and dabbles,
and all the air is full of the music of his piping. Southwards, again,
on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and jostling; dust that
is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither comes the young Apollo,
calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth certain Mercuries of the baser
sort, who do him obeisance, call him captain and lord, and then proceed
to skin him from head to foot as thoroughly as the god himself flayed
Marsyas in days of yore, at a certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good
instance of Time’s revenges. And yet Apollo returns to town and swears
he has had a grand day. He does so every year. Out of hearing of all
the clamour, the rural Pan may be found stretched on Ranmore Common,
loitering under Abinger pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the
sinuous Mole, abounding in friendly greetings for his foster-brothers
the dab-chick and water-rat.

For a holiday, Mercury loveth the Pullman Express, and a short hour
with a society paper; anon, brown boots on the pier, and the pleasant
combination of Métropole and Monopole. Apollo for his part will urge
the horses of the Sun: and, if he leaveth the society weekly to
Mercury, yet he loveth well the Magazine. From which _omphalos_ or hub
of the universe he will direct his shining team even to the far
Hesperides of Richmond or of Windsor. Both iron road and level highway
are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the
sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath
through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with feather
and fir. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is unsocial.
Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities, he loveth
the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are _adscripti
glebæ,_ addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof: perfect
in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is only half a god after
all, and the red earth in him is strong. When the pelting storm drives
the wayfarers to the sheltering inn, among the little group on bench
and settle Pan has been known to appear at times, in homely guise of
hedger-and-ditcher or weather-beaten shepherd from the downs. Strange
lore and quaint fancy he will then impart, in the musical Wessex or
Mercian he has learned to speak so naturally; though it may not be till
many a mile away that you begin to suspect that you have unwittingly
talked with him who chased the flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the
tide of fight at Marathon.

Yes: to-day the iron horse has searched the country through—east and
west, north and south—bringing with it Commercialism, whose god is
Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco and garrotes the streams
with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and corner fashion and
chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily a great part is
still spared—how great these others fortunately do not know—in which
the rural Pan and his following may hide their heads for yet a little
longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last common, spinney,
and sheep-down, and driven the kindly god, the well-wisher to
man—whither?




Marginalia


American Hunt, in his suggestive “Talks about Art,” demands that the
child shall be encouraged—or rather permitted, for the natural child
needs little encouragement—to draw when- and whereon-soever he can;
for, says he, the child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books
is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them, and indeed,
“to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it
the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.” Doubtless Sir
Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul, had some dim
feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarto of his,
in which “a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of
margin”: boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the
print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton’s “Bookhunter”:
wherein you read of certain folios with “their majestic stream of
central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, _sedgy with
citations._” But the good Doctor leaves the main stream for a backwater
of error in inferring that the chief use of margins is to be a
parading-ground for notes and citations. As if they had not absolute
value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In truth, Hunt’s child was
vastly the wiser man.

For myself, my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and
illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or “tail” edge,
the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old Nile;
up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them, let
fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys, gibbering with
terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees—a plant to the untutored hand of
easier outline than (say) your British oak. Meanwhile, all over the
unregarded text Balbus slew Caius on the most inadequate provocation,
or Hannibal pursued his victorious career, while Roman generals
delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving the usual satisfactory
licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal—all alike were pallid shades with faint,
thin voices powerless to pierce the distance. The margins of Cocytus
doubtless knew them: mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh
and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropic forest. Or,
in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded
in the text. To these digressions I probably owe what little education
I possess. For example, there was one sentence in our Roman history:
“By this single battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his
conquests in Asia Minor.” Serious historians really should not thus
forget themselves. ’Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform
“battle” into “bottle”; for “conquests” one could substitute a word for
which not even Macaulay’s school-boy were at a loss; and the result,
depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least one
ancient fight on the illustrator’s memory. But this plodding and
material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a
“clear sky” ever through which I could sail away at will to more
gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance
of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and ’twas no better.
Along Milton’s margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the
Arimaspian—what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil!
And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced
from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful
Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the Lobster
Quadrille by a certain shore.

It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins
is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and
crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled
against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent
pew: as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless,
and went to church. Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets
entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior
rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated: a depraved habit,
akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognised is the
absolute value of the margin itself—a value frequently superior to its
enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and takes
care to get it in “the little verses wot they puts inside the
crackers.” The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic
verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in
the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier
remains the more popular—because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper
might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this
first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is
pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it
deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote “Beowulf,” our other
English epic, grasped the great fact from the first, so that his work
is much the more popular of the two. The moral is evident. An authority
on practical book-making has stated that “margin is a matter to be
studied”; also that “to place the print in the centre of the paper is
wrong in principle, and to be deprecated.” Now, if it be “wrong in
principle,” let us push that principle to its legitimate conclusion,
and “deprecate” the placing of print on any part of the paper at all.
Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards,
when, I may ask—when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the
trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting
entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper
copies!




The Eternal Whither


There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment, whose
practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man
at his post, and performing all the duties appertaining thereunto. This
was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere mill-horse enslavement to
his groove—the reception of payments; and it was spoken of both in
mockery of all mill-horses and for the due admonishment of others. And
yet that clerk had discovered for himself an unique method of seeing
Life at its best, the flowing, hurrying, travelling, marketing Life of
the Highway; the life of bagman and cart, of tinker, and pig-dealer,
and all cheery creatures that drink and chaffer together in the sun. He
belonged, above all, to the scanty class of clear-seeing persons who
know both what they are good for and what they really want. To know
what you would like to do is one thing; to go out boldly and do it is
another—and a rarer; and the sterile fields about Hell-Gate are strewn
with the corpses of those who would an if they could.

To be sure, being bent on the relaxation most congenial to one’s soul,
it is possible to push one’s disregard for convention too far: as is
seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation, in the
same establishment. In his office there was the customary
“attendance-book,” wherein the clerks were expected to sign each day.
Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing; he signs,
indeed, no more. Instead of signature you find, a little later, writ in
careful commercial hand, this entry: “Mr—- did not attend at his office
to-day, having been hanged at eight o’clock in the morning for
horse-stealing.” Through the faded ink of this record do you not seem
to catch, across the gulf of years, some waft of the jolly humanity
which breathed in this prince among clerks? A formal precisian,
doubtless, during business hours; but with just this honest love of
horseflesh lurking deep down there in him—unsuspected, sweetening the
whole lump. Can you not behold him, freed from his desk, turning to
pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still striveth to bury his
bone deep in the hearth-rug? For no filthy lucre, you may be sure, but
from sheer love of the pursuit itself! All the same, he erred; erred,
if not in taste, at least in judgment: for we cannot entirely acquit
him of blame for letting himself be caught.

In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy
selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our
happier fathers were free. Book-stealing, to be sure, remains to us;
but every one is not a collector; and, besides, ’tis a diversion you
can follow with equal success all the year round. Still, the instance
may haply be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily ask each
year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps for the
holiday-maker. ’Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead
flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some
flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner that
is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom
stimulus. To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness: why not
try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch—for
every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits
him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to
all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in
doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done;
the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the
sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes
with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town; these new
pleasures—these and their like—would furnish just that gentle
stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired
worker. And then the fact, that you would naturally have to select and
plan out your particular line of diversion without advice or
assistance, has its own advantage. For the moment a man takes to
dinning in your ears that you ought, you really ought, to go to Norway,
you at once begin to hate Norway with a hate that ever will be; and to
have Newlyn, Cromer, or Dawlish, Carinthia or the Austrian Tyrol jammed
down your throat, is enough to initiate the discovery that your own
individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking for manslaughter.

Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime. After
all, it is mostly a matter of heredity; these unfortunates are less
culpable than their neglectful ancestors; and it is a fault that none
need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still
remains the example of the turnpike-loving clerk, with all its golden
possibilities. Denied the great delight of driving a locomotive, or a
fire-engine—whirled along in a glorious nimbus of smoke-pant,
spark-shower, and hoarse warning roar—what bliss to the palefaced
quilldriver to command a penny steamboat between London Bridge and
Chelsea! to drive a four-horsed Jersey-car to Kew at sixpence a head!
Though turnpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be
taken on many a pleasant reach of Thames. What happiness in quiet
moments to tend the lock-keeper’s flower-beds—perhaps make love to his
daughter; anon in busier times to let the old gates swing, work the
groaning winches, and hear the water lap and suck and gurgle as it
slowly sinks or rises with its swaying freight; to dangle legs over the
side and greet old acquaintances here and there among the
parti-coloured wayfarers passing up or down; while tobacco palleth not
on the longest day, and beer is ever within easy reach. The iron tetter
that scurfs the face of our island has killed out the pleasant life of
the road; but many of its best conditions still linger round these old
toll gates, free from dust and clatter, on the silent liquid Highway to
the West.

These for the weaker brethren: but for him who is conscious of the
Gift, the path is plain.




Deus Terminus


The practical Roman, stern constructor of roads and codes, when he
needs must worship, loved a deity practical as himself; and in his
parcelling of the known world into plots, saying unto this man, Bide
here, and to that, Sit you down there, he could scarce fail to evolve
the god Terminus: visible witness of possession and dominion, type of
solid facts not to be quibbled away. We Romans of this latter day—so
hailed by others, or complacently christened by ourselves—are Roman in
nothing more than in this; and, as much in the less tangible realms of
thought as in our solid acres, we are fain to set up the statue which
shall proclaim that so much country is explored, marked out, allotted,
and done with; that such and such ramblings and excursions are
practicable and permissible, and all else is exploded, illegal, or
absurd. And in this way we are left with naught but a vague lingering
tradition of the happier days before the advent of the ruthless deity.

The sylvan glories of yonder stretch of woodland renew themselves each
autumn, regal as ever. It is only the old enchantment that is gone;
banished by the matter-of-fact deity, who has stolidly settled exactly
where Lord A.’s shooting ends and Squire B.’s begins. Once, no such
petty limitations fettered the mind. A step into the woodland was a
step over the border—the margin of the material; and then, good-bye to
the modern world of the land-agent and the “Field” advertisement! A
chiming of little bells over your head, and lo! the peregrine, with
eyes like jewels, fluttered through the trees, her jesses catching in
the boughs. ’Twas the favourite of the Princess, the windows of whose
father’s castle already gleamed through the trees, where honours and
favours awaited the adventurous. The white doe sprang away through the
thicket, her snowy flank stained with blood; she made for the enchanted
cot, and for entrance you too had the pass-word. Did you fail on her
traces, nor fox nor mole was too busy to spare a moment for friendly
advice or information. Little hands were stretched to trip you, fairy
gibe and mockery pelted you from every rabbit-hole; and O what Dryads
you have kissed among the leaves, in that brief blissful moment ere
they hardened into tree! ’Tis pity, indeed, that this sort of thing
should have been made to share the suspicion attaching to the poacher;
that the stony stare of the boundary god should confront you at the end
of every green ride and rabbit-run; while the very rabbits themselves
are too disgusted with the altered circumstances to tarry a moment for
so much as to exchange the time of day.

Truly this age is born, like Falstaff, with a white head and something
a round belly: and will none of your jigs and fantasies. The golden era
of princesses is past. For your really virtuous ’prentices there still
remain a merchant’s daughter or two, and a bottle of port o’ Sundays on
the Clapham mahogany. For the rest of us, one or two decent clubs, and
plenty of nice roomy lunatic asylums. “Go spin, you jade, go spin!” is
the one greeting for Imagination. And yet—what a lip the slut has! What
an ankle! Go to: there’s nobody looking; let us lock the door, pull
down the blinds, and write us a merry ballad.

’Tis ungracious, perhaps, to regret what is gone for ever, when so much
is given in return. A humour we have, that is entirely new; and
allotments that shall win back Astræa. Our Labor Program stands for
evidence that the Board School, at least, has done enduring work; and
the useless race of poets is fast dying out. Though we no longer
conjecture what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, yet many a prize (of guineas galore)
awaits the competitor who will stoop, week by week, to more practical
research. “Le monde marche,” as Renan hath it, “vers une sorte
d’americanisme.... Peut-être la vulgarité générale sera-t-elle un jour
la condition du bonheur des élus. Nous n’avons pas le droit d’etre fort
difficiles.” We will be very facile, then, since needs must;
remembering the good old proverb that “scornful dogs eat dirty
puddings.” But, ere we show Terminus the door, at least let us fling
one stone at the shrieking sulphureous houses of damnation erected as
temples in his honour, and dignified with his name! There, ’mid
clangour, dirt, and pestilence of crowding humanity, the very spirit of
worry and unrest sits embodied. The old Roman was not such a bad
fellow. His deity of demarcation at least breathed open air, and knew
the kindly touch of sun and wind. His simple rites were performed amid
flowers and under blue sky, by sunny roads or tranquil waters; and on
this particular altar the sacrifice was ordained to be free from any
stain of gore. Our hour of sacrifice, alas, has not yet come. When it
does—(_et haud procul absit!_)—let the offering be no bloodless one,
but let (for choice) a fat and succulent stationmaster smoke and
crackle on the altar of expiation!




Of Smoking


Concerning Cigarette Smoking: It hath been well observed by a certain
philosopher that this is a practice commendable enough, and pleasant to
indulge in, “when you’re not smoking”; wherein the whole criticism of
the cigarette is found, in a little room. Of the same manner of
thinking was one that I knew, who kept by him an ample case bulging
with cigarettes, to smoke while he was filling his pipe. Toys they be
verily, _nugæ,_ and shadows of the substance. Serviceable,
nevertheless, as shadows sometimes be when the substance is temporarily
unattainable; as between the acts of a play, in the park, or while
dressing for dinner: that such moments may not be entirely wasted. That
cigarette, however, which is so prompt to appear after dinner I would
reprehend and ban and totally abolish: as enemy to that diviner thing
before which it should pale its ineffectual fires in shame—to wit, good
drink, _“la dive bouteille”;_ except indeed when the liquor be bad, as
is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve in some sort as a sorry
consolation. But to leave these airy substitutes, and come to smoking.

It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter,
or that first pipe of the evening which “Hesperus, who bringeth all
good things,” brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is
smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss
of one’s first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of
merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to the
vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to the
latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that arises
at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although with most
of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, the
morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarums and
excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there are certain
halcyon periods sure to arrive—Sundays, holidays, and the like—the
whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one beatific pipe
after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that of the gods
“when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are lightly curled.”
Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so this particular pipe
of the day always carries with it festal reminiscences: memories of
holidays past, hopes for holidays to come; a suggestion of sunny lawns
and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense withal of something free and
stately, as of  “faint march-music in the air,” or the old Roman cry of
“Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement.”

If there be any fly in the pipe-smoker’s ointment, it may be said to
lurk in the matter of  “rings.” Only the exceptionally gifted smoker
can recline in his chair and emit at will the perfect smoke-ring, in
consummate eddying succession. He of the meaner sort must be content
if, at rare heaven-sent intervals—while thinking, perhaps, of nothing
less—there escape from his lips the unpremeditated flawless circle.
Then _“deus fio”_ he is moved to cry, at that breathless moment when
his creation hangs solid and complete, ere the particles break away and
blend with the baser atmosphere. Nay, some will deny to any of us
terrene smokers the gift of fullest achievement: for what saith _the_
poet of the century? “On the earth the broken arcs: in the heaven the
perfect round!”

It was well observed by a certain character in one of Wilkie Collins’s
novels (if an imperfect memory serveth me rightly) that women will take
pleasure in scents derived from animal emanations, clarified fats, and
the like; yet do illogically abhor the “clean, dry, vegetable smell” of
tobacco. Herein the true base of the feminine objection is reached;
being, as usual, inherent want of logic rather than any distaste, in
the absolute, for the thing in question. Thinking that they ought to
dislike, they do painfully cast about for reasons to justify their
dislike, when none really exist. As a specimen of their so-called
arguments, I remember how a certain fair one triumphantly pointed out
to me that my dog, though loving me well, could yet never be brought to
like the smell of tobacco. To whom I, who respected my dog (as Ben
saith of Master Shakespeare) on this side idolatry as much as anything,
was yet fain to point out—more in sorrow than in anger—that a dog,
being an animal who delights to pass his whole day, from early morn to
dewy eve, in shoving his nose into every carrion beastliness that he
can come across, could hardly be considered _arbiter elegantiarum_ in
the matter of smells. But indeed I did wrong to take such foolish
quibbling seriously; nor would I have done so, if she hadn’t dragged my
poor innocent dog into the discussion.

Of Smoking in Bed: There be who consider this a depravity—an instance
of that excess in the practice of a virtue which passes into vice—and
couple it with dram-drinking: who yet fail to justify themselves by
argument. For if bed be by common consent the greatest bliss, the
divinest spot, on earth, _“ille terrarum qui præter omnes angulus
ridet”;_ and if tobacco be the true Herb of Grace, and a joy and
healing balm, and respite and nepenthe,—if all this be admitted, why
are two things, super-excellent separately, noxious in conjunction? And
is not the Bed Smoker rather an epicure in pleasure—self indulgent
perhaps, but still the triumphant creator of a new “blend,” reminding
one of a certain traveller’s account of an intoxicant patronised in the
South Sea Islands, which combines the blissful effect of getting drunk
and remaining sober to enjoy it? Yet I shall not insist too much on
this point, but would only ask—so long as the smoker be unwedded—for
some tolerance in the matter and a little logic in the discussion
thereof.

Concerning Cigars: That there be large sums given for these is within
common knowledge. 1_d.,_ 2_d.,_ nay even 4_d.,_ is not too great a
price, if a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In
this sort of smoking, however, I find more of vainglory and ostentation
than solid satisfaction; and its votaries would seem to display less a
calm, healthy affection for tobacco than (as Sir T. Browne hath it) a
“passionate prodigality.” And, besides grievous wasting of the pocket,
atmospheric changes, varyings in the crops, and the like, cause
uncertainty to cling about each individual weed, so that man is always
more or less at the mercy of Nature and the elements—an unsatisfactory
and undignified position in these latter days of the Triumphant
Democracy. But worst and fatallest of all, to every cigar-smoker it is
certain to happen that once in his life, by some happy combination of
time, place, temperament, and Nature—by some starry influence, maybe,
or freak of the gods in mocking sport—once, and once only, he will
taste the aroma of the perfect leaf at just the perfect point—the ideal
cigar. Henceforth his life is saddened; as one kissed by a goddess in a
dream, he goes thereafter, as one might say, in a sort of
love-sickness. Seeking he scarce knows what, his existence becomes a
dissatisfied yearning; the world is spoiled for him, its joys are
tasteless: so he wanders, vision-haunted, down dreary days to some
miserable end.

Yet, if one will walk this path and take the risks, the thing may be
done at comparatively small expense. To such I would commend the Roman
motto, slightly altered—_Alieni appetens, sui avarus._ There be always
good fellows, with good cigars for their friends. Nay, too, the boxes
of these lie open; an the good cigar belongs rather to him that can
appreciate it aright than to the capitalist who, owing to a false
social system, happens to be its temporary guardian and trustee. Again
there is a saying—bred first, I think, among the schoolmen at
Oxford—that it is the duty of a son to live up to his father’s income.
Should any young man have found this task too hard for him, after the
most strenuous and single-minded efforts, at least he can resolutely
smoke his father’s cigars. In the path of duty complete success is not
always to be looked for; but an approving conscience, the sure reward
of honest endeavour, is within reach of all.




An Autumn Encounter


For yet another mile or two the hot dusty road runs through level
fields, till it reaches yonder shoulder of the downs, already golden
three-parts up with ripening corn. Thitherwards lies my inevitable way;
and now that home is almost in sight it seems hard that the last part
of the long day’s sweltering and delightful tramp must needs be haunted
by that hateful speck, black on the effulgence of the slope. Did I not
know he was only a scarecrow, the thing might be in a way
companionable: a pleasant suggestive surmise, piquing curiosity,
gilding this last weary stage with some magic of expectancy. But I
passed close by him on my way out. Early as I was, he was already up
and doing, eager to introduce himself. He leered after me as I swung
down the road,—mimicked my gait, as it seemed, in a most uncalled-for
way; and when I looked back, he was blowing derisive kisses of farewell
with his empty sleeve.

I had succeeded, however, in shaking off the recollection between the
morning’s start and now; so it was annoying that he should force
himself on me, just when there was no getting rid of him. At this
distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it
seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering,
heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate—are
the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable?—I used to watch Her
pacing demurely towards me through the corn. It was ridiculous, it was
fatuous, under all the circumstances it was monstrous, and yet{...}! We
were both under twenty, so She was She, and I was I, and there were
only we three the wide world over, she and I and the unbetraying gate.
_Porta eburnea!_ False visions alone sped through you, though Cupid was
wont to light on your topmost bar, and preen his glowing plumes. And to
think that I should see her once more, coming down the path as if not a
day had passed, hesitating as of old, and then—but surely her ankles
seem—Confound that scarecrow!...

His sex is by this time painfully evident; also his condition in life,
which is as of one looking back on better days. And now he is upon a
new tack. Though here on the level it is still sultry and airless, an
evening breeze is playing briskly along the slope where he stands, and
one sleeve saws the air violently; the other is pointed stiffly
heavenwards. It is all plain enough, my poor friend! The sins of the
world are a heavy burden and a grievous unto you. You have a mission,
you must testify; it will forth, in season and out of season. For man,
he wakes and sleeps and sins betimes: but crows sin steadily, without
any cessation. And this unhappy state of things is your own particular
business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it:
“Salvation, damnation, damnation, salvation!” And the jolly earth
smiles in the perfect evenglow, and the corn ripples and laughs all
round you, and one young rook (only fledged this year, too!), after an
excellent simulation of prostrate, heart-broken penitence, soars
joyously away, to make love to his neighbour’s wife. “Salvation,
damnation, damn—” A shifty wriggle of the road, and he is transformed
once more. Flung back in an ecstasy of laughter, holding his lean
sides, his whole form writhes with the chuckle and gurgle of merriment.
Ho, ho! what a joke it was! How I took you all in! Even the rooks! What
a joke is everything, to be sure!

Truly, I shall be glad to get quit of this heartless mummer.
Fortunately I shall soon be past him. And now, behold! the old dog
waxes amorous. Mincing, mowing, empty sleeve on hollow breast, he would
fain pose as the most irresistible old hypocrite that ever paced a
metropolitan kerb. “Love, you young dogs,” he seems to croak, “Love is
the one thing worth living for! Enjoy your present, rooks and all, as I
do!” Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the golden influence
of the hour? More than one supple waist (alas! for universal masculine
frailty!) has been circled by that tattered sleeve in days gone by; a
throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now fails to give a manly
curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive, and not a particle of
the passion that inspired it long ago?

At last I confront him, face to face: and the villain grins
recognition, completely unabashed. Nay, he cocks his eye with a
significant glance under the slouch of his shapeless hat, and his arm
points persistently and with intelligence up the road. My good fellow,
I know the way to the Dog and Duck as well as you do: I was going there
anyhow, without your officious interference—and the beer, as you justly
remark, is unimpeachable. But was this really all you’ve been trying to
say to me, this last half-hour? Well, well!




The White Poppy


A riot of scarlet on gold, the red poppy of our native fields tosses
heavy tresses with gipsy _abandon;_ her sister of the sea-shore is
golden, a yellow blossom that loves the keen salt savour of the spray.
Of another hue is the poppy of history, of romance, of the muse. White
as the stark death-shroud, pallid as the cheeks of that queen of a
silent land whose temples she languorously crowns, ghost-like beside
her fuller-blooded kin, she droops dream-laden, _Papaver somniferum,_
the poppy of the magic juice of oblivion. In the royal plenitude of
summer, the scarlet blooms will sometimes seem but a red cry from earth
in memory of the many dews of battle that have drenched these acres in
years gone by, for little end but that these same “bubbles of blood”
might glow to-day; the yellow flower does but hint of the gold that has
dashed a thousand wrecks at her feet around these shores: for happier
suggestion we must turn to her of the pallid petals, our white Lady of
Consolation. Fitting hue to typify the crowning blessing of
forgetfulness! Too often the sable robes of night dissemble
sleeplessness, remorse, regret, self-questioning. Let black, then,
rather stand for hideous memory: white for blessed blank oblivion,
happiest gift of the gods! For who, indeed, can say that the record of
his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained with its
petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later years,
all which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory,
refusing to be shut out? Leave us alone, O gods, to remember our
felicities, our successes: only aid us, ye who recall no gifts, aptly
and discreetly to forget.

Discreetly, we say; for it is a tactful forgetfulness that makes for
happiness. In the minor matter, for instance, of small money
obligations, that shortness of memory which the school of Professors
Panurge and Falstaff rashly praises, may often betray into some
unfortunate allusion or reference to the subject which shall pain the
delicate feelings of the obliger; or, if he be of coarser clay, shall
lead him in his anger to express himself with unseemliness, and thereby
to do violence to his mental tranquillity, in which alone, as Marcus
Aurelius teacheth, lieth the perfection of moral character. This is to
be a stumbling-block and an offence against the brethren. It is better
to keep just memory enough to avoid such hidden rocks and shoals; in
which thing Mr Swiveller is our great exemplar, whose mental map of
London was a chart wherein every creditor was carefully “buoyed.”

The wise man prays, we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to
the prayer—and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think
that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our
friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories;
why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be
imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help in our
own petty case, we are moved to add a word for certain others who,
meaning no ill, unthinkingly go about to add to humanity’s already
heavy load of suffering. How much needless misery is caused in this
world by the reckless “recollections” of dramatic and other
celebrities? You gods, in lending ear to our prayer, remember too,
above all other sorts and conditions of men, these our poor erring
brothers and sisters, the sometime _sommités_ of Mummerdom!

Moments there are, it is true, when this traitor spirit tricks you:
when some subtle scent, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even
some touch of a fresher air on your cheeks at night—a breath of _“le
vent qui vient à travers la montagne”_—have power to ravish, to catch
you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic Paradise.
Moments only, alas! Then the evil crowd rushes in again, howls in the
sacred grove, tramples down and defiles the happy garden; and once more
you cry to Our Lady of Sleep, crowned of the white poppy. And you envy
your dog who, for full discharge of a present benefaction having wagged
you a hearty, expressive tail, will then pursue it gently round the
hearth-rug till, in restful coil, he reaches it at last, and oblivion
with it; every one of his half-dozen diurnal sleeps being in truth a
royal amnesty.

But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing? Perdita
blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but this
gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is “grace
and remembrance.” The fair Ophelia, rather: nay, for as a nursling she
hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a “sorrow’s crown
of sorrow.” What flowers are these her pale hand offers? “There’s
pansies, that’s for thoughts!” For me rather, O dear Ophelia, the white
poppy of forgetfulness.




A Bohemian in Exile

A Reminiscence


When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of
Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were
found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the
fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the
swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet
retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the
princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and
file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in
thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and
learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those
faithful commons I would speak, narrating only “the short and simple
annals of the poor.”

It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom
as a United States—a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities,
or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. “There
_once_ was a king of Bohemia”—but that was a long time ago, and even
Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free
States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying
speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go.

With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. “Just for
a handful of silver he left us”; though it was not exactly that, but
rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider
horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.

So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one—


But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their
success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still.

When old Pan was dead and Apollo’s bow broken, there were many faithful
pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills
and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in
their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the
faithful. We had never expected to become great in art or song; it was
the life itself that we loved; that was our end—not, as with them, the
means to an end.

We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we;
Give us the glory of going on and still to be.


Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had
changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.

Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past
was dead, and he wasn’t going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too,
would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man’s
death, said “he changed his life.” This is how Fothergill changed his
life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the
Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The Whitechapel barrows
are of all sizes, from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with half a
dozen heads of cabbages to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such as on
Sundays take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are all
precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes
the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally
suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a
hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and
numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized
“developed” one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white,
picked out with green—the barrow, not the donkey—and when his
arrangements were complete, stabled the whole for the night in
Bloomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite faded
from the sky, the exodus took place, those of us who were left being
assembled to drink a parting whisky-and-milk in sad and solemn silence.
Fothergill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft with a short
clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight, heading west at a
leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater
Road.

They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey,
from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It
seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was
enabled to put down his donkey and barrow, and set up a cart and a
mare—no fashionable gipsy-cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but a
light and serviceable cart, with a moveable tilt, constructed on his
own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and
other artists’ materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like
necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he
wanted to.

He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the merest
accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to
Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for a long
ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before
dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the
Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his
vesper pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short grass
beside him. He greeted me without surprise or effusion, as if we had
only parted yesterday, and without a hint of an allusion to past times,
but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last three years, and,
without ever telling his story right out, left a strange picturesque
impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty
years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life still
lingered on in places, it seemed, once one got well away from the
railway: there were two Englands existing together, the one fringing
the great iron highways wherever they might go—the England under the
eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places
were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as of old: the
England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes and
village-greens—the England of Parson Adams and Lavengro. The spell of
the free untrammelled life came over me as I listened, till I was fain
to accept of his hospitality and a horse-blanket for the night,
oblivious of civilised comforts down at the Bull. On the downs where
Alfred fought we lay and smoked, gazing up at the quiet stars that had
shone on many a Dane lying stark and still a thousand years ago; and in
the silence of the lone tract that enfolded us we seemed nearer to
those old times than to these I had left that afternoon, in the now
hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames.

When the news reached me, some time later, that Fothergill’s aunt had
died and left him her house near town and the little all she had
possessed, I heard it with misgivings, not to say forebodings. For the
house had been his grandfather’s, and he had spent much of his boyhood
there; it had been a dream of his early days to possess it in some
happy future, and I knew he could never bear to sell or let it. On the
other hand, can you stall the wild ass of the desert? And will not the
caged eagle mope and pine?

However, possession was entered into, and all seemed to go well for the
time. The cart was honourably installed in the coach-house, the mare
turned out to grass. Fothergill lived idly and happily, to all seeming,
with “a book of verses underneath the bough,” and a bottle of old
claret for the friend who might chance to drop in. But as the year wore
on small signs began to appear that he who had always “rather hear the
lark sing than the mouse squeak” was beginning to feel himself caged,
though his bars were gilded.

I was talking one day to his coachman (he now kept three men-servants),
and he told me that of a Sunday morning when the household had gone to
church and everything was quiet, Mr Fothergill would go into the
coach-house and light his pipe, and sit on the step of the brougham (he
had a brougham now), and gaze at the old cart, and smoke and say
nothing; and smoke and say nothing again. He didn’t like it, the
coachman confessed; and to me it seemed ominous.

One morning late in March, at the end of a long hard winter, I was
wakened by a flood of sunshine. The early air came warm and soft
through the open window; the first magic suggestion of spring was
abroad, with its whispered hints of daffodils and budding hawthorns;
and one’s blood danced to imagined pipings of Pan from happy fields far
distant. At once I thought of Fothergill, and, with a certain
foreboding of ill, made my way down to Holly Lodge as soon as possible.
It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master was
missing. In the very first of the morning, it seemed, or ever the
earliest under-housemaid had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and
along the passages, he must have quietly left the house. The servants
were cheerful enough, nevertheless, and thought the master must only
have “gone for a nice long walk,” and so on, after the manner of their
kind. Without a word I turned my steps to the coach-house. Sure enough,
the old cart was missing; the mare was gone from the paddock. It was no
good my saying anything; pursuit of this wild haunter of tracks and
by-paths would have been futile indeed. So I kept my own counsel.
Fothergill never returned to Holly Lodge, and has been more secret and
evasive since his last flight, rarely venturing on old camping grounds
near home, like to a bird scared by the fowler’s gun.

Once indeed, since then, while engaged in pursuit of the shy quarry
known as the Early Perp., late Dec., E. Eng., and the like, specimens
of which I was tracking down in the west, I hit upon him by accident;
hearing in an old village rumours concerning a strange man in a cart
who neither carried samples nor pushed the brewing interest by other
means than average personal consumption—tales already beginning to be
distorted into material for the myth of the future. I found him
friendly as ever, equally ready to spin his yarns. As the evening wore
on, I ventured upon an allusion to past times and Holly Lodge; but his
air of puzzled politeness convinced me that the whole thing had passed
out of his mind, as a slight but disagreeable incident in the even
tenor of his nomadic existence.

After all, his gains may have outbalanced his losses. Had he cared, he
might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success;
certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any
impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he
was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen
sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he
doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from
the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in
toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust.

Some for the glories of this life, and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come:
Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.





Justifiable Homicide


This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks; so he
cannot be said to ask too much who seeks for exact information as to
how a young man ought, in justice to himself and to society, to deal
with his relations. During his minority he has lain entirely at their
mercy: has been their butt, their martyr, their drudge, their _corpus
vile._ Possessing all the sinews of war, this stiff-necked tribe has
consistently refused to “part”: even for the provision of those
luxuries so much more necessary than necessities. Its members have
crammed their victim full of precepts, rules of conduct, moral maxims,
and most miscellaneous counsel: all which he intuitively suspected at
the time, and has ascertained by subsequent experience, to be utterly
worthless. Now, when their hour has come, when the tocsin has sounded
at last, and the Gaul is at the gate, they still appear to think that
the old condition of things is to go on; unconscious, apparently, of
atonement due, of retribution to be exacted, of wrongs to be avenged
and of insults to be wiped away!

Over the north-west frontier, where the writ of the English Raj runs
not, the artless Afghan is happy in a code that fully provides for
relatives who neglect or misunderstand their obligations. An Afghan it
was who found himself compelled to reprove an uncle with an unfortunate
habit of squandering the family estate. An excellent relative, this
uncle, in all other respects. As a liar, he had few equals; he robbed
with taste and discretion; and his murders were all imbued with true
artistic feeling. He might have lived to a green old age of spotless
respectability but for his one little failing. As it was, justice had
to be done, _ruat cælum:_ and so it came about that one day the nephew
issued forth to correct him with a matchlock. The innocent old man was
cultivating his paternal acres; so the nephew was able, unperceived, to
get a steady sight on him. His finger was on the trigger, when suddenly
there slipped into his mind the divine precept: “Allah is merciful!” He
lowered his piece, and remained for a little plunged in thought;
meanwhile the unconscious uncle hoed his paddy. Then with a happy smile
he took aim once more, for there also occurred to him the precept
equally divine: “But Allah is also just.” With an easy conscience he
let fly, and behold! there was an uncle the more in Paradise.

It was probably some little affair of a similar quality that
constrained a recruit in a regiment stationed at Peshawur to apply for
leave of absence: in order to attend to family matters of importance.
The Colonel knew it was small use refusing the leave, as in that case
his recruit would promptly desert; so he could only ask, how long was
the transaction like to take? It was told him, after consideration,
that, allowing for all possible difficulties and delays, a month would
meet the necessities of the case; and on that understanding he allowed
his man to depart. At the end of the month he reappeared on duty, a
subdued but mellow cheer shining through his wonted impassiveness. His
Colonel ventured to inquire of him, in a general way, if the business
in question were satisfactorily concluded. And he replied: “I got him
from behind a rock.”

There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such
methods at home. We must be content to envy, without imitating, these
free and happy sons of the hills. And yet a few of the old school are
left us still: averse from change, mistrustful of progress, sticking
steadily to the good old-fashioned dagger and bowl. I had a friend who
disposed of a relative every spring. Uncles were his special line—(he
had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an
orphan)—though he had dabbled in aunts, and in his hot youth, when he
was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grand-parent or
two. But it was in uncles he excelled. He possessed (at the beginning
of his career) a large number of these connections, and pursuit of
them, from the mere sordid point of view of  _£ s. d.,_ proved
lucrative. But he always protested (and I believed him) that gain with
him was a secondary consideration. It would hardly be in the public
interest to disclose his _modus operandi._ I shall only remark that he
was one of the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the
artist by the conditions of modern London. Hence it happened that he
usually practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country
houses of such relations as were still spared him, where he was always
the life and soul of the place. Unfortunately he is no longer with us,
to assist in the revision of this article: nor was it permitted me to
soothe his last moments. The presiding Sheriff was one of those
new-fangled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and he
declined to admit me either in the capacity of a personal connection
or, though I tried my hardest, as the representative of “The National
Observer.” It only remains to be said of my much-tried and still
lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his untimely end.

But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march of
Time, and my poor friend’s Art (as himself in later years would
sorrowfully admit) is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of
old, or “Robbia’s craft so apt and strange”; while our thin-blooded
youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find
sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations. This is indeed a
most effective position: it exasperates, while it is unassailable. And
yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task. Not mere forgiveness:
it is simple duty to forgive—even one’s guardians. No young man of
earnest aspirations will be content to stop there. Nay: lead them on,
these lost ones, by the hand; conduct them “generously and gently, and
with linking of the arm”; educate them, eradicate their false ideals,
dispel their foolish prejudices; be to their faults a little blind and
to their virtues very kind: in fine, realise that you have a
mission—that these wretches are not here for nothing. The task will
seem hard at first; but only those who have tried can know how much may
be done by assiduous and kindly effort towards the chastening—ay! the
final redemption even!—of the most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles.




The Fairy Wicket


From digging in the sandy, over-triturated soil of times historical,
all dotted with date and number and sign, how exquisite the relief in
turning to the dear days outside history—yet not so very far off
neither for us nurslings of the northern sun—when kindly beasts would
loiter to give counsel by the wayside, and a fortunate encounter with
one of the Good People was a surer path to Fortune and the Bride than
the best-worn stool that ever proved step-ladder to aspiring youth. For
then the Fairy Wicket stood everywhere ajar—everywhere and to each and
all. “Open, open, green hill!”—you needed no more recondite sesame than
that: and, whoever you were, you might have a glimpse of the elfin
dancers in the hall that is litten within by neither sun nor moon; or
catch at the white horse’s bridle as the Fairy Prince rode through. It
has been closed now this many a year (the fairies, always strong in the
field, are excellent wicket-keepers); and if it open at all, ’tis but
for a moment’s mockery of the material generation that so deliberately
turned its back on the gap into Elf-Land—that first stage to the
Beyond.

It was a wanton trick, though, that these folk of malice used to play
on a small school-boy, new kicked out of his nest into the draughty,
uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the
feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle. The barrack-like school, the
arid, cheerless class-rooms, drove him to Nature for redress; and,
under an alien sky, he would go forth and wander along the iron road by
impassive fields, so like yet so unlike those hitherto a part of him
and responding to his every mood. And to him, thus loitering with
overladen heart, there would come suddenly a touch of warmth, of
strange surprise. The turn of the road just ahead—that, sure, is not
all unfamiliar? That row of elms—it cannot entirely be accident that
they range just _so?_ And, if not accident, then round the bend will
come the old duck-pond, the shoulder of the barn will top it, a few
yards on will be the gate—it swings-to with its familiar click—the dogs
race down the avenue—and then—and then! It is all wildly fanciful; and
yet, though knowing not Tertullian, a _“credo quia impossibile”_ is on
his tongue as he quickens his pace—for what else can he do? A step, and
the spell is shattered—all is cruel and alien once more; while every
copse and hedge-row seems a-tinkle with faint elfish laughter. The
Fairies have had their joke: they have opened the wicket one of their
own hand’s-breadths, and shut it in their victim’s face. When next that
victim catches a fairy, he purposes to tie up the brat in sight of his
own green hill, and set him to draw up a practical scheme for Village
Councils.

One of the many women I ever really loved, fair in the fearless old
fashion, was used to sing, in the blithe, unfettered accent of the
people: “I’d like to be a fairy, And dance upon my toes, I’d like to be
a fairy, And wear short close!” And in later life it is to her sex that
the wee (but very wise) folk sometimes delegate their power of torment.
Such understudies are found to play the part exceeding well; and many a
time the infatuated youth believes he sees in the depth of one sole
pair of eyes—blue, brown, or green (the fairy colour)—the authentic
fairy wicket standing ajar: many a time must he hear the quaint old
formula, “I’m sure, if I’ve ever done anything to lead you to think,”
etc (runs it not so?), ere he shall realise that here is the gate upon
no magic pleasance but on a cheap suburban villa, banging behind the
wrathful rate-collector or hurled open to speed the pallid householder
to the Registrar’s Office. In still grosser habitations, too, they
lurk, do the People of Mischief, ready to frolic out on the
unsuspecting one: as in the case, which still haunts my memory, of a
certain bottle of an historic Château-Yquem, hued like Venetian glass,
odorous as a garden in June. Forth from out the faint perfume of this
haunted drink there danced a bevy from Old France, clad in the fashion
of Louis-Quinze, peach-coloured knots of ribbon bedizening apple-green
velvets, as they moved in stately wise among the roses of the old
garden, to the quaint music—Rameau, was it?—of a fairy _cornemuse,_
while fairy Watteaus, Fragonards, Lancrets, sat and painted them. Alas!
too shallow the bottle, too brief the brawls: not to be recalled by any
quantity of Green Chartreuse.




Aboard the Galley


He was cruising in the Southern Seas (was the Ulysses who told me this
tale), when there bore down upon him a marvellous strange fleet, whose
like he had not before seen. For each little craft was a corpse,
stiffly “marlined,” or bound about with tarred rope, as mariners do use
to treat plug tobacco: also ballasted, and with a fair mast and sail
stepped through his midriff. These self-sufficing ships knew no divided
authority: no pilot ever took the helm from the captain’s hands; no
mutines lay in bilboes, no passengers complained of the provisions. In
a certain island to windward (the native pilot explained) it was the
practice, when a man died, to bury him for the time being in dry,
desiccating sand, till a chief should pass from his people, when the
waiting bodies were brought out and, caulked and rigged _secumdum
artem,_ were launched with the first fair breeze, the admiral at their
head, on their voyage to the Blessed Islands. And if a chief should
die, and the sand should hold no store of corpses for his escort, this
simple practical folk would solve the little difficulty by knocking
some dozen or twenty stout fellows on the head, that the notable might
voyage like a gentleman. Whence this gallant little company, running
before the breeze, stark, happy, and extinct, all bound for the Isles
of Light! ’Twas a sight to shame us sitters at home, who believe in
those Islands, most of us, even as they, yet are content to trundle
City-wards or to Margate, so long as the sorry breath is in us; and,
breathless at last, to Bow or Kensal Green; without one effort, dead or
alive, to reach the far-shining Hesperides.

“Dans la galère, capitane, nous étions quatre-vingt rameurs!” sang the
oarsmen in the ballad; and they, though indeed they toiled on the
galley-bench, were free and happy pirates, members of an honoured and
liberal profession. But all we—pirates, parsons, stockbrokers, whatever
our calling—are but galley-slaves of the basest sort, fettered to the
oar each for his little spell. A common misery links us all, like the
chain that runs the length of the thwarts. Can _nothing_ make it worth
our while not to quarrel with our fellows? The menace of the storms is
for each one and for all: the master’s whip has a fine impartiality.
Crack! the lash that scored my comrade’s back has flicked my withers
too; yet neither of us was shirking—it was that grinning ruffian in
front. Well: to-morrow, God willing, the evasion shall be ours, while
he writhes howling. But why do we never once combine—seize on the ship,
fling our masters into the sea, and steer for some pleasant isle far
down under the Line, beyond the still-vexed Bermoothes? When ho for
feasting! Hey for tobacco and free-quarters! But no: the days pass, and
are reckoned up, and done with; and ever more pressing cares engage.
Those fellows on the leeward benches are having an easier time than we
poor dogs on the weather side? Then, let us abuse, pelt, vilify then:
let us steal their grub, and have at them generally for a set of
shirking, malingering brutes! What matter that to-morrow they may be to
windward, we to lee? We never can look ahead. And they know this well,
the gods our masters, pliers of the whip. And mayhap we like them none
the worse for it.

Indeed, there is a traitor sort among ourselves, that spins facile
phrases in the honour of these whipmasters of ours—as _“omnes eodem
cogimur,”_ and the rest; which is all very pretty and mighty consoling.
The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the present
arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we
are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and
make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on the
sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a
generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their
books; offer them drinks, peerages, and things; and say what
superlative fellows they are! But when the long-looked-for combination
comes, and we poor devils have risen and abolished fate, destiny, the
Olympian Council, early baldness, and the like, these poets will really
have to go.

And when every rhymester has walked the plank, shall we still put up
with our relations? True members of the “stupid party,” who never
believe in us, who know (and never forget) the follies of our
adolescence; who are always wanting us _not_ to do things; who are
lavish of advice, yet angered by the faintest suggestion of a small
advance in cash: shall the idle singers perish and these endure? No: as
soon as the last poet has splashed over the side, to the sharks with
our relations!

The old barkey is lightening famously: who shall be next to go? The
Sportsman of intolerable yarns: who slays twice over—first, his game,
and then the miserable being he button-holes for the tedious recital.
Shall we suffer _him_ longer? Who else? Who is that cowering under the
bulwarks yonder? The man who thinks he can imitate the Scottish accent!
Splash! And the next one? What a crowd is here! How they block the
hatchways, lumber the deck, and get between you and the purser’s
room—these fadmongers, teetotallers, missionaries of divers isms!
Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles! Then for tobacco
in a hammock ’twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled in a brooklet
losing itself in silver sands! Then for—but O these bilboes on our
ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare
back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern
Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do
it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private
differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen of
fortune, and I would be your Captain! “Who? you? you would make a
pretty Captain!” Better than you, you scurvy, skulking, little
galley-slave! “Galley-slave yourself, and be—- Pull together, boys, and
lie low! Here’s the Master coming with his whip!”




The Lost Centaur


It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great
volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from
babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an
ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and
noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor humanity
sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his pottering
little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be
the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the lords of earth
even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop: below, shod
with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality
of the armed heel. Instead of which—! How fallen was his first fair
hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of
the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the
clangorous walls of Troy—some touch of an imperial disdain ever
lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could contentedly hail
him—him, who had known Cheiron!—as hero and lord!

Achilles has passed, with the Centaurs and Troy; but the feeling
lingers.

Of strange and divers strands is twisted the mysterious cord that,
reaching back “through spaces out of space and timeless time,”
somewhere joins us to the Brute; a twine of mingled yarn, not utterly
base. As we grow from our animal infancy, and the threads snap one by
one at each gallant wing-stroke of a soul poising for flight into
Empyrean, we are yet conscious of a loss for every gain, we have some
forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing enough are we to “let the
ape and tiger die”; but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur
and feather are not all tigers and apes: which last vile folk, indeed,
exist for us only in picture-books, and chiefly offend by always
carrying the Sunday School ensign of a Moral at their tails.
Others—happily of less didactic dispositions—there be; and it is to
these unaffected, careless companions that the sensible child is wont
to devote himself; leaving severely alone the stiff, tame creatures
claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates, while cheerfully
admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his inferiority at
every point. Vainly, his snub nose projected earthwards, he essays to
sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the nobler animal) is leading
in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he realises his loss. And the
rest of the Free Company,—the pony, the cows, the great
cart-horses,—are ever shaming him by their unboastful exercise of some
enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who (did
but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and
be unto him as a brother,—which among all these unhappy bifurcations,
so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide,
philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times,
when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable
accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of
developing a Mind, the course of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is
wont—not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he is heir—to feel
a little discontented?

Ere now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein the animal is
already ascendant, has led by downward paths to the Goat-Foot, in whom
the submerged human system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments.
He, the peevish and irascible, shy of trodden ways and pretty
domesticities, is linked to us by little but his love of melody; but
for which saving grace, the hair would soon creep up from thigh to horn
of him. At times he will still do us a friendly turn: will lend a
helping hand to poor little Psyche, wilfully seeking her own salvation;
will stand shoulder to shoulder with us on Marathon plain. But in the
main his sympathies are first for the beast: to which his horns are
never horrific, but, with his hairy pelt, ever natural and familiar,
and his voice (with its talk of help and healing) not harsh nor
dissonant, but voice of very brother as well as very god.

And this declension—for declension it is, though we achieve all the
confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant _argot_
of the woods—may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our
primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform and
irradiate body as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never:
nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted to cut himself
wholly adrift from these his poor relations. The mute and stunted human
embryo that gazes appealingly from out the depths of their eyes must
ever remind him of a kinship once (possibly) closer. Nay, at times, it
must even seem to whelm him in reproach. As thus: “Was it really
necessary, after all, that we two should part company so early? May you
not have taken a wrong turning somewhere, in your long race after your
so-called progress, after the perfection of this be-lauded species of
yours? A turning whose due avoidance might perhaps have resulted in no
such lamentable cleavage as is here, but in some perfect embodiment of
the dual nature: as who should say a being with the nobilities of both
of us, the basenesses of neither? So might you, more fortunately
guided, have been led at last up the green sides of Pelion, to the
ancestral, the primeval, Centaur still waiting majestic on the summit!”
It is even so. Perhaps this thing might once have been, O cousin
outcast and estranged! But the opportunity was long since lost.
Henceforth, two ways for us for ever!




Orion


The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as of
the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.

Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children of
the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in right
case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon withal.
Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here, my
brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And for
this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or mandragora
shall purge it hence away?

Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription—now
horizontal, and now vertical—of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
cards they have the right to call the game. And so—since we must bow to
the storm—let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
Salvation—for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
gipsy’s van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to the
pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling
blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that
shining highway to the dim land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon:
where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at night tame
street lamps there are none—only the hunter’s fires, and the eyes of
lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is stifled and
gagged—buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a
stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when
’tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who
was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man,
i’ faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton: and was
versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who could have thought
that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him
in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack
calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers
tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when
they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American
Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his
wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet—let
the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr,
quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to
the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay,
truly: and next time he will not be caught.

Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have
hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have “come tripping
doon the stair,” rapt by the climbing passion from their
strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves,
too—the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are—which of us but
might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown
to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What marvel that
up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one in his ken,
the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone
forth on its irresistible appeal!

Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes of
the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs
creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the
windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is
muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless
old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk
and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look,
still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, ’tis
ever the old Pegasus—not yet the knacker’s own. “Hard times I’ve been
having,” he murmurs, as you rub his nose. “These fellows have really no
seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were wont to await
it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your English way of
hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings—well, I may be out of
date, but we wouldn’t have stood that sort of thing on Helicon.” So he
hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of date? Well, it
may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.

But for the Hunter—there he rises—couchant no more. Nay, flung full
stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his turn,
then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal ruin,
all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the Music-hall
artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall the
skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the
whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet—look up! Look up
and behold him confident, erect, majestic—there on the threshold of the
sky!