Ewriting Format by Carl Peterson © 2001

Contents
I.

Across The Plains II.

The Old Pacific Capital III.

Fontainebleau IV.

Epilogue
to "An Inland Voyage" V.

Random Memories VI.

Random Memories Continued VII.

The Lantern-bearers VIII.

A Chapter on Dreams IX.

Beggars X.

Letter
to a Young Gentleman XI.

Pulvis et Umbra XII.

A Christmas Sermon
CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS
LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO
MONDAY.

- It was,
if I remember rightly,
five o'clock when we were all signalled
to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.

An emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night,
another on the Sunday morning,
our own on Sunday afternoon,
a fourth early on Monday;
and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was
to travel.

There was a babel of bewildered men,
women,
and children.

The wretched little booking-office,
and the baggage-room,
which was not much larger,
were crowded thick
with emigrants,
and were heavy and rank
with the atmosphere of dripping clothes.

Open carts full of bedding stood by the half-hour in the rain.

The officials loaded each other
with recriminations.

A bearded,
mildewed little man,
whom I take
to have been an emigrant agent,
was all over the place,
his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering.

It was plain that the whole system,
if system there was,
had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers.My own ticket was given me at once,
and an oldish man,
who preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil,
got my baggage registered,
and counselled me
to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word
to move.

I had taken along
with me a small valise,
a knapsack,
which I carried on my shoulders,
and in the bag of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES,
in six fat volumes.

It was as much as I could carry
with convenience even
for short distances,
but it insured me plenty of clothing,
and the valise was at that moment,
and often after,
useful
for a stool.

I am sure I sat
for an hour in the baggage- room,
and wretched enough it was;
yet,
when at last the word was passed
to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way,
it was only
to exchange discomfort
for downright misery and danger.I followed the porters in
to a long shed reaching downhill from West Street
to the river.

It was dark,
the wind blew clean through it from end
to end;
and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other.

I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed;
and certainly the scene must have been exceptional,

for it was too dangerous
for daily repetition.

It was a tight jam;
there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.

In
to the upper skirts of the crowd porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork,
clove their way
with shouts.

I may say that we stood like sheep,
and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep- dogs;
and I believe these men were no longer answerable
for their acts.

It mattered not what they were carrying,
they drove straight in
to the press,
and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful.


with my own hand,

for instance,
I saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee,
she sitting on a box;
and since I heard of no accident,
I must suppose that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening.

It will give some idea of the state of mind
to which we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least attention
to my act.

It was not till some time after that I understood what I had done myself,

for
to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of human life.

Cold,
wet,
clamour,
dead opposition
to progress,
such as one encounters in an evil dream,
had utterly daunted the spirits.

We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the conditions of the world.


for my part,
I shivered a little,
and my back ached wearily;
but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear,
and all the activities of my nature had become tributary
to one massive sensation of discomfort.At length,
and after how long an interval I hesitate
to guess,
the crowd began
to move,
heavily straining through itself.

About the same time some lamps were lighted,
and threw a sudden flare over the shed.

We were being filtered out in
to the river boat
for Jersey City.

You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,
through the dense,
choking crush,
every one overladen
with packages or children,
and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way;
but it ended at length
for me,
and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and
with a trifle of elbow-room
to stretch and breathe in.

This was on the starboard;

for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side,
by which we had entered.

In vain the seamen shouted
to them
to move on,
and threatened them
with shipwreck.

These poor people were under a spell of stupor,
and did not stir a foot.

It rained as heavily as ever,
but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls,
not without danger
to a boat so badly ballasted as ours;
and we crept over the river in the darkness,
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge,
illuminated steamers running many knots,
and heralding their approach by strains of music.

The contrast between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel,

with her list
to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants,
was of that glaring description which we count too obvious
for the purposes of art.The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.

I had a fixed sense of calamity,
and
to judge by conduct,
the same persuasion was common
to us all.

A panic selfishness,
like that produced by fear,
presided over the disorder of our landing.

People pushed,
and elbowed,
and ran,
their families following how they could.

Children fell,
and were picked up
to be rewarded by a blow.

One child,
who had lost her parents,
screamed steadily and
with increasing shrillness,
as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him,
but no one else seemed so much as
to remark her distress;
and I am ashamed
to say that I ran among the rest.

I was so weary that I had twice
to make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station,
so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.

There was no waiting-room,
no refreshment room;
the cars were locked;
and
for at least another hour,
or so it seemed,
we had
to camp upon the draughty,
gaslit platform.

I sat on my valise,
too crushed
to observe my neighbours;
but as they were all cold,
and wet,
and weary,
and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement
to which we had been subjected,
I believe they can have been no happier than myself.

I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy,

for oranges and nuts were the only refection
to be had.

As only two of them had even a pretence of juice,
I threw the other four under the cars,
and beheld,
as in a dream,
grown people and children groping on the track after my leavings.At last we were admitted in
to the cars,
utterly dejected,
and far from dry.


for my own part,
I got out a clothes-brush,
and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood in
to the bargain;
but no one else,
except my next neighbour
to whom I lent the brush,
appeared
to take the least precaution.

As they were,
they composed themselves
to sleep.

I had seen the lights of Philadelphia,
and been twice ordered
to change carriages and twice countermanded,
before I allowed myself
to follow their example.TUESDAY.

- When I awoke,
it was already day;
the train was standing idle;
I was in the last carriage,
and,
seeing some others strolling
to and fro about the lines,
I opened the door and stepped forth,
as from a caravan by the wayside.

We were near no station,
nor even,
as far as I could see,
within reach of any signal.

A green,
open,
undulating country stretched away upon all sides.

Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;
but the contours of the land were soft and English.

It was not quite England,
neither was it quite France;
yet like enough either
to seem natural in my eyes.

And it was in the sky,
and not upon the earth,
that I was surprised
to find a change.

Explain it how you may,
and
for my part I cannot explain it at all,
the sun rises
with a different splendour in America and Europe.

There is more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings;
more purple,
brown,
and smoky orange in those of the new.

It may be from habit,
but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter;
it has a duskier glory,
and more nearly resembles sunset;
it seems
to fit some subsequential,
evening epoch of the world,
as though America were in fact,
and not merely in fancy,
farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.

I thought so then,
by the railroad side in Pennsylvania,
and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent.

If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted,
and in which my eyesight is accomplice.Soon after a train whisked by,
announcing and accompanying its passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine;
and as it was
for this we had been waiting,
we were summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our way.

The whole line,
it appeared,
was topsy-turvy;
an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic hours in
to arrear.

We paid
for this in the flesh,

for we had no meals all that day.

Fruit we could buy upon the cars;
and now and then we had a few minutes at some station
with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale;
but we were so many and so ravenous that,
though I tried at every opportunity,
the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way
to the counter.Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.

There was not a cloud;
the sunshine was baking;
yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way,
the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.

It had an inland sweetness and variety
to one newly from the sea;
it smelt of woods,
rivers,
and the delved earth.

These,
though in so far a country,
were airs from home.

I stood on the platform by the hour;
and as I saw,
one after another,
pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream,
and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance,
and beheld the sun,
no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean,
but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began
to exult
with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come in
to a rich estate.

And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman,
and heard that it was called the Susquehanna,
the beauty of the name seemed
to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land.

As when Adam
with divine fitness named the creatures,
so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy.

That was the name,
as no other could be,

for that shining river and desirable valley.None can care
for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names;
and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich,
poetical,
humorous,
and picturesque as the United States of America.

All times,
races,
and languages have brought their contribution.

Pekin is in the same State
with Euclid,

with Bellefontaine,
and
with Sandusky.

Chelsea,

with its London associations of red brick,
Sloane Square,
and the King's Road,
is own suburb
to stately and primeval Memphis;
there they have their seat,
translated names of cities,
where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
and both,
while I was crossing the continent,
lay,
watched by armed men,
in the horror and isolation of a plague.

Old,
red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory,
below anglified New York.

The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables:

Delaware,
Ohio,
Indiana,
Florida,
Dakota,
Iowa,
Wyoming,
Minnesota,
and the Carolinas;
there are few poems
with a nobler music
for the ear:

a songful,
tuneful land;
and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent,
his verse will be enriched,
his pages sing spontaneously,

with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg.

I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow
with her children;
these I was
to watch over providentially
for a certain distance farther on the way;
but as I found she was furnished
with a basket of eatables,
I left her in the waiting-room
to seek a dinner
for myself.

I mention this meal,
not only because it was the first of which I had partaken
for about thirty hours,
but because it was the means of my first introduction
to a coloured gentleman.

He did me the honour
to wait upon me after a fashion,
while I was eating;
and
with every word,
look,
and gesture marched me farther in
to the country of surprise.

He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
or the Christy Minstrels of my youth.

Imagine a gentleman,
certainly somewhat dark,
but of a pleasant warm hue,
speaking English
with a slight and rather odd foreign accent,
every inch a man of the world,
and armed
with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss
to name their parallel in England.

A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered,
but then he sets you right
with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved
to admire.

And again,
the abstract butler never stoops
to familiarity.

But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time;
he is familiar like an upper form boy
to a fag;
he unbends
to you like Prince Hal
with Poins and Falstaff.

He makes himself at home and welcome.

Indeed,
I may say,
this waiter behaved himself
to me throughout that supper much as,

with us,
a young,
free,
and not very self-respecting master might behave
to a good-looking chambermaid.

I had come prepared
to pity the poor negro,

to put him at his ease,

to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race;
but I assure you I put my patronage away
for another occasion,
and had the grace
to be pleased
with that result.Seeing he was a very honest fellow,
I consulted him upon a point of etiquette:

if one should offer
to tip the American waiter?

Certainly not,
he told me.

Never.

It would not do.

They considered themselves too highly
to accept.

They would even resent the offer.

As
for him and me,
we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation;
he,
in particular,
had found much pleasure in my society;
I was a stranger;
this was exactly one of those rare conjunctures....

Without being very clear seeing,
I can still perceive the sun at noonday;
and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a quarter.WEDNESDAY.

- A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train;
and morning found us far in
to Ohio.

This had early been a favourite home of my imagination;
I have played at being in Ohio by the week,
and enjoyed some capital sport there
with a dummy gun,
my person being still unbreeched.

My preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY PAPER,
and was read aloud
to me by my nurse.

It narrated the doings of one Custaloga,
an Indian brave,
who,
in the last chapter,
very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other;
a trick I never forgave him.

The idea of a man being an Indian brave,
and then giving that up
to be a baronet,
was one which my mind rejected.

It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others
to escape from uninhabited islands.But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.

We were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken
to the Rocky Mountains.

The country was flat like Holland,
but far from being dull.

All through Ohio,
Indiana,
Illinois,
and Iowa,
or
for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my waking moments,
it was rich and various,
and breathed an elegance peculiar
to itself.

The tall corn pleased the eye;
the trees were graceful in themselves,
and framed the plain in
to long,
aerial vistas;
and the clean,
bright,
gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop.

It was a sort of flat paradise;
but,
I am afraid,
not unfrequented by the devil.

That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt;
a chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument,
as it struck home upon the heart and seemed
to travel
with the blood.

Day came in
with a shudder.

White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain,
as we see them more often on a lake;
and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon
to horizon,
the mists had still been there,
and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria.

The fences along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement;
one
to recommend tobaccos,
and the other
to vaunt remedies against the ague.

At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill,
a native of the state,
who had got in at some way station,
pronounced it,

with a doctoral air,
"a fever and ague morning."


The Dutch widow was a person of some character.

She had conceived at first sight a great aversion
for the present writer,
which she was at no pains
to conceal.

But being a woman of a practical spirit,
she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions,
and encouraged me
to buy her children fruits and candies,

to carry all her parcels,
and even
to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat.

Nay,
she was such a rattle by nature,
and,
so powerfully moved
to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced,

for want of a better,

to take me in
to confidence and tell me the story of her life.

I heard about her late husband,
who seemed
to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.

I could tell you her prospects,
her hopes,
the amount of her fortune,
the cost of her housekeeping by the week,
and a variety of particular matters that are not usually disclosed except
to friends.

At one station,
she shook up her children
to look at a man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.;
while
to me she explained how she had been keeping company
with this Mr. Z.,
how far matters had proceeded,
and how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling
to the West.

Then,
when I was thus put in possession of the facts,
she asked my judgment on that type of manly beauty.

I admired it
to her heart's content.

She was not,
I think,
remarkably veracious in talk,
but broidered as fancy prompted,
and built castles in the air out of her past;
yet she had that sort of candour,

to keep me,
in spite of all these confidences,
steadily aware of her aversion.

Her parting words were ingeniously honest.

"I am sure," said she,
"we all OUGHT
to be very much obliged
to you."

I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease;
but I had a certain respect
for such a genuine dislike.

A poor nature would have slipped,
in the course of these familiarities,
in
to a sort of worthless toleration
for me.We reached Chicago in the evening.

I was turned out of the cars,
bundled in
to an omnibus,
and driven off through the streets
to the station of a different railroad.

Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city.

I remember having subscribed,
let us say sixpence,
towards its restoration at the period of the fire;
and now when I beheld street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers,
I thought it would be a graceful act
for the corporation
to refund that sixpence,
or,
at the least,

to entertain me
to a cheerful dinner.

But there was no word of restitution.

I was that city's benefactor,
yet I was received in a third-class waiting- room,
and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own expense.I can safely say,
I have never been so dog-tired as that night in Chicago.

When it was time
to start,
I descended the platform like a man in a dream.

It was a long train,
lighted from end
to end;
and car after car,
as I came up
with it,
was not only filled but overflowing.

My valise,
my knapsack,
my rug,

with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double;
I was hot,
feverish,
painfully athirst;
and there was a great darkness over me,
an internal darkness,
not
to be dispelled by gas.

When at last I found an empty bench,
I sank in
to it like a bundle of rags,
the world seemed
to swim away in
to the distance,
and my consciousness dwindled within me
to a mere pin's head,
like a taper on a foggy night.When I came a little more
to myself,
I found that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful,
rosy little German gentleman,
somewhat gone in drink,
who was talking away
to me,
nineteen
to the dozen,
as they say.

I did my best
to keep up the conversation;

for it seemed
to me dimly as if something depended upon that.

I heard him relate,
among many other things,
that there were pickpockets on the train,
who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket;
but though I caught the words,
I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad
to hear it.

What else he talked about I have no guess;
I remember a gabbling sound of words,
his profuse gesticulation,
and his smile,
which was highly explanatory:

but no more.

And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly;
for,
first,
I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has conceived a doubt;
next,
he tried me in German,
supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar
with the English tongue;
and finally,
in despair,
he rose and left me.

I felt chagrined;
but my fatigue was too crushing
for delay,
and,
stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once in
to a dreamless stupor.The little German gentleman was only going a little way in
to the suburbs after a DINER FIN,
and was bent on entertainment while the journey lasted.

Having failed
with me,
he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada,
and was not one jot less weary than myself.

Nay,
even in a natural state,
as I found next morning when we scraped acquaintance,
he was a heavy,
uncommunicative man.

After trying him on different topics,
it appears that the little German gentleman flounced in
to a temper,
swore an oath or two,
and departed from that car in quest of livelier society.

Poor little gentleman!

I suppose he thought an emigrant should be a rollicking,
free-hearted blade,

with a flask of foreign brandy and a long,
comical story
to beguile the moments of digestion.THURSDAY.

- I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,

for when I awoke next morning,
I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge,

with sweet milk,
and coffee and hot cakes,
at Burlington upon the Mississippi.

Another long day's ride followed,

with but one feature worthy of remark.

At a place called Creston,
a drunken man got in.

He was aggressively friendly,
but,
according
to English notions,
not at all unpresentable upon a train.


for one stage he eluded the notice of the officials;
but just as we were beginning
to move out of the next station,
Cromwell by name,
by came the conductor.

There was a word or two of talk;
and then the official had the man by the shoulders,
twitched him from his seat,
marched him through the car,
and sent him flying on
to the track.

It was done in three motions,
as exact as a piece of drill.

The train was still moving slowly,
although beginning
to mend her pace,
and the drunkard got his feet without a fall.

He carried a red bundle,
though not so red as his cheeks;
and he shook this menacingly in the air
with one hand,
while the other stole behind him
to the region of the kidneys.

It was the first indication that I had come among revolvers,
and I observed it
with some emotion.

The conductor stood on the steps
with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him;
and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,

for he turned without further ado,
and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.

They were speaking English all about me,
but I knew I was in a foreign land.Twenty minutes before nine that night,
we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs,
on the eastern bank of the Missouri river.

Here we were
to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai,
set apart
for emigrants.

But I gave way
to a thirst
for luxury,
separated myself from my companions,
and marched
with my effects in
to the Union Pacific Hotel.

A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom,
in my plain European way,
I should call the boots,
were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.

They took my name,
assigned me a number,
and proceeded
to deal
with my packages.

And here came the tug of war.

I wished
to give up my packages in
to safe keeping;
but I did not wish
to go
to bed.

And this,
it appeared,
was impossible in an American hotel.It was,
of course,
some inane misunderstanding,
and sprang from my unfamiliarity
with the language.


for although two nations use the same words and read the same books,
intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary.

The business of life is not carried on by words,
but in set phrases,
each
with a special and almost a slang signification.

Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs;
so that what I was asking,
which seemed very natural
to me,
appeared
to him a monstrous exigency.

He refused,
and that
with the plainness of the West.

This American manner of conducting matters of business is,
at first,
highly unpalatable
to the European.

When we approach a man in the way of his calling,
and
for those services by which he earns his bread,
we consider him
for the time being our hired servant.

But in the American opinion,
two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk
with a view
to exchanging favours if they shall agree
to please.

I know not which is the more convenient,
nor even which is the more truly courteous.

The English stiffness unfortunately tends
to be continued after the particular transaction is at an end,
and thus favours class separations.

But on the other hand,
these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open field
for the insolence of Jack-in-office.I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal,
and unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.

I knew nothing,
I said,
of the ways of American hotels;
but I had no desire
to give trouble.

If there was nothing
for it but
to get
to bed immediately,
let him say the word,
and though it was not my habit,
I should cheerfully obey.He burst in
to a shout of laughter.

"Ah!" said he,
"you do not know about America.

They are fine people in America.

Oh!

you will like them very well.

But you mustn't get mad.

I know what you want.

You come along
with me."


And issuing from behind the counter,
and taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance,
he led me
to the bar of the hotel."

There," said he,
pushing me from him by the shoulder,
"go and have a drink!"
THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains,
where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.

I had been but a latent emigrant;
now I was
to be branded once more,
and put apart
with my fellows.

It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant House,

with more than a hundred others,

to be sorted and boxed
for the journey.

A white-haired official,

with a stick under one arm,
and a list in the other hand,
stood apart in front of us,
and called name after name in the tone of a command.

At each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us,
and I soon concluded that this was
to be set apart
for the women and children.

The second or central car,
it turned out,
was devoted
to men travelling alone,
and the third
to the Chinese.

The official was easily moved
to anger at the least delay;
but the emigrants were both quick at answering their names,
and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board.The families once housed,
we men carried the second car without ceremony by simultaneous assault.

I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad-car,
that long,
narrow wooden box,
like a flat-roofed Noah's ark,

with a stove and a convenience,
one at either end,
a passage down the middle,
and transverse benches upon either hand.

Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable
for their extreme plainness,
nothing but wood entering in any part in
to their constitution,
and
for the usual inefficacy of the lamps,
which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned.

The benches are too short
for anything but a young child.

Where there is scarce elbow-room
for two
to sit,
there will not be space enough
for one
to lie.

Hence the company,
or rather,
as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer Station,
the company's servants,
have conceived a plan
for the better accommodation of travellers.

They prevail on every two
to chum together.


to each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw,
and covered
with thin cotton.

The benches can be made
to face each other in pairs,

for the backs are reversible.

On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench
to bench,
making a couch wide enough
for two,
and long enough
for a man of the middle height;
and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions
with the head
to the conductor's van and the feet
to the engine.

When the train is full,
of course this plan is impossible,

for there must not be more than one
to every bench,
neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.

It was
to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now bestirred himself.

He made a most active master of ceremonies,
introducing likely couples,
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each.

The greater the number of happy couples the better
for his pocket,

for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds.

His price
for one board and three straw cushions began
with two dollars and a half;
but before the train left,
and,
I am sorry
to say,
long after I had purchased mine,
it had fallen
to one dollar and a half.The match-maker had a difficulty
with me;
perhaps,
like some ladies,
I showed myself too eager
for union at any price;
but certainly the first who was picked out
to be my bedfellow,
declined the honour without thanks.

He was an old,
heavy,
slow-spoken man,
I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over
with great timidity,
and then began
to excuse himself in broken phrases.

He didn't know the young man,
he said.

The young man might be very honest,
but how was he
to know that?

There was another young man whom he had met already in the train;
he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer
to chum
with him upon the whole.

All this without any sort of excuse,
as though I had been inanimate or absent.

I began
to tremble lest every one should refuse my company,
and I be left rejected.

But the next in turn was a tall,
strapping,
long-limbed,
small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman,

with a soldierly smartness in his manner.


to be exact,
he had acquired it in the navy.

But that was all one;
he had at least been trained
to desperate resolves,
so he accepted the match,
and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial benediction,
and pocketed his fees.The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.

I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine,
certainly a score;
then came the Chinese,
then we,
then the families,
and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what,
if I have it rightly,
is called his caboose.

The class
to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over,
so
to speak,

to both sides;
so that there were some Caucasians among the Chinamen,
and some bachelors among the families.

But our own car was pure from admixture,
save
for one little boy of eight or nine who had the whooping-cough.

At last,
about six,
the long train crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river
to Omaha,
westward bound.It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.

There was thunder in the air,
which helped
to keep us restless.

A man played many airs upon the cornet,
and none of them were much attended to,
until he came
to "Home,
sweet home."

It was truly strange
to note how the talk ceased at that,
and the faces began
to lengthen.

I have no idea whether musically this air is
to be considered good or bad;
but it belongs
to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.

Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment.

If you wallow naked in the pathetic,
like the author of "Home,
sweet home," you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion;
and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness.

It did not come
to tears that night,

for the experiment was interrupted.

An elderly,
hard-looking man,

with a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retired slaver,
turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that "damned thing."

"I've heard about enough of that," he added;
"give us something about the good country we're going to."

A murmur of adhesion ran round the car;
the performer took the instrument from his lips,
laughed and nodded,
and then struck in
to a dancing measure;
and,
like a new Timotheus,
stilled immediately the emotion he had raised.The day faded;
the lamps were lit;
a party of wild young men,
who got off next evening at North Platte,
stood together on the stern platform,
singing "The Sweet By-and-bye"
with very tuneful voices;
the chums began
to put up their beds;
and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end.

But it was not so;
for,
the train stopping at some station,
the cars were instantly thronged
with the natives,
wives and fathers,
young men and maidens,
some of them in little more than nightgear,
some
with stable lanterns,
and all offering beds
for sale.

Their charge began
with twenty-five cents a cushion,
but fell,
before the train went on again,

to fifteen,

with the bed-board gratis,
or less than one-fifth of what I had paid
for mine at the Transfer.

This is my contribution
to the economy of future emigrants.A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.

He sells books (such books!),
papers,
fruit,
lollipops,
and cigars;
and on emigrant journeys,
soap,
towels,
tin washing dishes,
tin coffee pitchers,
coffee,
tea,
sugar,
and tinned eatables,
mostly hash or beans and bacon.

Early next morning the newsboy went around the cars,
and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of the hour.

It requires but a copartnery of two
to manage beds;
but washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate of three.

I myself entered a little after sunrise in
to articles of agreement,
and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare,
and Dubuque.

Shakespeare was my own nickname on the cars;
Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow;
and Dubuque,
the name of a place in the State of Iowa,
that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma,
and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking,
and sometimes chewing and smoking together.

I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.

Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel,
and Pennsylvania a brick of soap.

The partners used these instruments,
one after another,
according
to the order of their first awaking;
and when the firm had finished there was no want of borrowers.

Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove,
and retired
with the whole stock in trade
to the platform of the car.

There he knelt down,
supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing,
and made a shift
to wash his face and neck and hands;
a cold,
an insufficient,
and,
if the train is moving rapidly,
a somewhat dangerous toilet.On a similar division of expense,
the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves
with coffee,
sugar,
and necessary vessels;
and their operations are a type of what went on through all the cars.

Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning;
at the first station the natives would come on board
with milk and eggs and coffee cakes;
and soon from end
to end the car would be filled
with little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards.

It was the pleasantest hour of the day.There were meals
to be had,
however,
by the wayside:

a breakfast in the morning,
a dinner somewhere between eleven and two,
and supper from five
to eight or nine at night.

We had rarely less than twenty minutes
for each;
and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting
for some express upon a side track among miles of desert,
we might have taken an hour
to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up
to time.


for haste is not the foible of an emigrant train.

It gets through on sufferance,
running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block,
it is unhesitatingly sacrificed;
and they cannot,
in consequence,
predict the length of the passage within a day or so.

Civility is the main comfort that you miss.

Equality,
though conceived very largely in America,
does not extend so low down as
to an emigrant.

Thus in all other trains,
a warning cry of "All aboard!" recalls the passengers
to take their seats;
but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants,
and from the Transfer all the way
to San Francisco,
I found this ceremony was pretermitted;
the train stole from the station without note of warning,
and you had
to keep an eye upon it even while you ate.

The annoyance is considerable,
and the disrespect both wanton and petty.Many conductors,
again,
will hold no communication
with an emigrant.

I asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop
for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question,

with a like result;
a third time I returned
to the charge,
and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face
for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away.

I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality;

for when another person made the same inquiry,
although he still refused the information,
he condescended
to answer,
and even
to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough
for me
to hear.

It was,
he said,
his principle not
to tell people where they were
to dine;

for one answer led
to many other questions,
as what o'clock it was?

or,
how soon should we be there?

and he could not afford
to be eternally worried.As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities,
a great deal of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.

He has it in his power indefinitely
to better and brighten the emigrant's lot.

The newsboy
with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark,
bullying,
contemptuous,
insolent scoundrel,
who treated us like dogs.

Indeed,
in his case,
matters came nearly
to a fight.

It happened thus:

he was going his rounds through the cars
with some commodities
for sale,
and coming
to a party who were at SEVEN- UP or CASCINO (our two games),
upon a bed-board,
slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards,
knocking one man's hand
to the floor.

It was the last straw.

In a moment the whole party were upon their feet,
the cigars were upset,
and he was ordered
to "get out of that directly,
or he would get more than he reckoned for."

The fellow grumbled and muttered,
but ended by making off,
and was less openly insulting in the future.

On the other hand,
the lad who rode
with us in this capacity from Ogden
to Sacramen
to made himself the friend of all,
and helped us
with information,
attention,
assistance,
and a kind countenance.

He told us where and when we should have our meals,
and how long the train would stop;
kept seats at table
for those who were delayed,
and watched that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried.

You,
who live at home at ease,
can hardly realise the greatness of this service,
even had it stood alone.

When I think of that lad coming and going,
train after train,

with his bright face and civil words,
I see how easily a good man may become the benefactor of his kind.

Perhaps he is discontented
with himself,
perhaps troubled
with ambitions;
why,
if he but knew it,
he is a hero of the old Greek stamp;
and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents,
and that perhaps exorbitant,
he is doing a man's work,
and bettering the world.I must tell here an experience of mine
with another newsboy.

I tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the American,
which is perhaps their most bewildering character
to one newly landed.

It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train;
and I am told I looked like a man at death's door,
so much had this long journey shaken me.

I sat at the end of a car,
and the catch being broken,
and myself feverish and sick,
I had
to hold the door open
with my foot
for the sake of air.

In this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of merchandise.

I made haste
to let him pass when I observed that he was coming;
but I was busy
with a book,
and so once or twice he came upon me unawares.

On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside;
and though I myself apologised,
as if
to show him the way,
he answered me never a word.

I chafed furiously,
and I fear the next time it would have come
to words.

But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder,
and a large juicy pear was put in
to my hand.

It was the newsboy,
who had observed that I was looking ill,
and so made me this present out of a tender heart.


for the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child;
he lent me newspapers,
thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale,
and came repeatedly
to sit by me and cheer me up.

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night,
but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud.

We were at sea - there is no other adequate expression - on the plains of Nebraska.

I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon,
and sat by the hour upon that perch
to spy about me,
and
to spy in vain
for something new.

It was a world almost without a feature;
an empty sky,
an empty earth;
front and back,
the line of railway stretched from horizon
to horizon,
like a cue across a billiard-board;
on either hand,
the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.

Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers,
no bigger than a crown-piece,
bloomed in a continuous flower-bed;
grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;
and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned in
to wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted in
to their surroundings,
and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board.

The train toiled over this infinity like a snail;
and being the one thing moving,
it was wonderful what huge proportions it began
to assume in our regard.

It seemed miles in length,
and either end of it within but a step of the horizon.

Even my own body or my own head seemed a great thing in that emptiness.

I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others.

Day and night,
above the roar of the train,
our ears were kept busy
with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches,
which began after a while
to seem proper
to that land.
to one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy,
this greatness of the air,
this discovery of the whole arch of heaven,
this straight,
unbroken,
prison-line of the horizon.

Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days,
at the foot's pace of oxen,
painfully urging their teams,
and
with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun
for which they steered,
and which daily fled them by an equal stride.

They had nothing,
it would seem,

to overtake;
nothing by which
to reckon their advance;
no sight
for repose or
for encouragement;
but stage after stage,
only the dead green waste under foot,
and the mocking,
fugitive horizon.

But the eye,
as I have been told,
found differences even here;
and at the worst the emigrant came,
by perseverance,

to the end of his toil.

It is the settlers,
after all,
at whom we have a right
to marvel.

Our consciousness,
by which we live,
is itself but the creature of variety.

Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?

What livelihood can repay a human creature
for a life spent in this huge sameness?

He is cut off from books,
from news,
from company,
from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs.

A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope.

He may walk five miles and see nothing;
ten,
and it is as though he had not moved;
twenty,
and still he is in the midst of the same great level,
and has approached no nearer
to the one object within view,
the flat horizon which keeps pace
with his advance.

We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers,
and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings.

But what is
to be said of the Nebraskan settler?

His is a wall-paper
with a vengeance - one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness.His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world;
it quails before so vast an outlook,
it is tortured by distance;
yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs in
to his cabin,
and can repose his sight upon things near at hand.

Hence,
I am told,
a sickness of the vision peculiar
to these empty plains.Yet perhaps
with sunflowers and cicadae,
summer and winter,
cattle,
wife and family,
the settler may create a full and various existence.

One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior
to her lot.

This was a woman who boarded us at a way station,
selling milk.

She was largely formed;
her features were more than comely;
she had that great rarity - a fine complexion which became her;
and her eyes were kind,
dark,
and steady.

She sold milk
with patriarchal grace.

There was not a line in her countenance,
not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,
but spoke of an entire contentment
with her life.

It would have been fatuous arrogance
to pity such a woman.

Yet the place where she lived was
to me almost ghastly.

Less than a dozen wooden houses,
all of a shape and all nearly of a size,
stood planted along the railway lines.

Each stood apart in its own lot.

Each opened direct off the billiard-board,
as if it were a billiard- board indeed,
and these only models that had been set down upon it ready made.

Her own,
in
to which I looked,
was clean but very empty,
and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.

This extreme newness,
above all in so naked and flat a country,
gives a strong impression of artificiality.


with none of the litter and discoloration of human life;

with the paths unworn,
and the houses still sweating from the axe,
such a settlement as this seems purely scenic.

The mind is loth
to accept it
for a piece of reality;
and it seems incredible that life can go on
with so few properties,
or the great child,
man,
find entertainment in so bare a playroom.And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points;
or at least it contained,
as I passed through,
one person incompletely civilised.

At North Platte,
where we supped that evening,
one man asked another
to pass the milk-jug.

This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a respectable appearance;
a darkish man,
high spoken,
eating as though he had some usage of society;
but he turned upon the first speaker
with extraordinary vehemence of tone -
"There's a waiter here!" he cried."

I only asked you
to pass the milk," explained the first.Here is the retort verbatim -
"Pass!

Hell!

I'm not paid
for that business;
the waiter's paid
for it.

You should use civility at table,
and,
by God,
I'll show you how!"
The other man very wisely made no answer,
and the bully went on
with his supper as though nothing had occurred.

It pleases me
to think that some day soon he will meet
with one of his own kidney;
and that perhaps both may fall.

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

to cross such a plain is
to grow homesick
for the mountains.

I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming,
which I knew we were soon
to enter,
like an ice-bound whaler
for the spring.

Alas!

and it was a worse country than the other.

All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains,
or over the main ridge of the Rockies,
which is a fair match
to them
for misery of aspect.

Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path;
tumbled boulders,
cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications - how drearily,
how tamely,
none can tell who has not seen them;
not a tree,
not a patch of sward,
not one shapely or commanding mountain form;
sage-brush,
eternal sage- brush;
over all,
the same weariful and gloomy colouring,
grays warming in
to brown,
grays darkening towards black;
and
for sole sign of life,
here and there a few fleeing antelopes;
here and there,
but at incredible intervals,
a creek running in a canon.

The plains have a grandeur of their own;
but here there is nothing but a contorted smallness.

Except
for the air,
which was light and stimulating,
there was not one good circumstance in that God- forsaken land.I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way;
and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside eating-house,
the evening we left Laramie,
I fell sick outright.

That was a night which I shall not readily forget.

The lamps did not go out;
each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood,
and the shadows were confounded together in the long,
hollow box of the car.

The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes;
here two chums alongside,
flat upon their backs like dead folk;
there a man sprawling on the floor,

with his face upon his arm;
there another half seated
with his head and shoulders on the bench.

The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train;
others stirred,
turned,
or stretched out their arms like children;
it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep;
and as I passed
to and fro,
stepping across the prostrate,
and caught now a snore,
now a gasp,
now a half-formed word,
it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.

Although it was chill,
I was obliged
to open my window,

for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable
to one who was awake and using the full supply of life.

Outside,
in a glimmering night,
I saw the black,
amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly in
to our wake.

They that long
for morning have never longed
for it more earnestly than I.And yet when day came,
it was
to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world.

Mile upon mile,
and not a tree,
a bird,
or a river.

Only down the long,
sterile canons,
the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.

That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land;
it was the one actor,
the one spectacle fit
to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.

And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes,
and now will bear an emigrant
for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic
to the Golden Gates;
how at each stage of the construction,
roaring,
impromptu cities,
full of gold and lust and death,
sprang up and then died away again,
and are now but wayside stations in the desert;
how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side
with border ruffians and broken men from Europe,
talking together in a mixed dialect,
mostly oaths,
gambling,
drinking,
quarrelling and murdering like wolves;
how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard,
in this last fastness,
the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes;
and then when I go on
to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats,
and
with a view
to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit
to Paris,
it seems
to me,
I own,
as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live,
as if it brought together in
to one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank,
and offered
to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended,
and the most varied subject
for an enduring literary work.

If it be romance,
if it be contrast,
if it be heroism that we require,
what was Troy town
to this?

But,
alas!

it is not these things that are necessary - it is only Homer.Here also we are grateful
to the train,
as
to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils.

Thirst,
hunger,
the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared,
so lightly do we skim these horrible lands;
as the gull,
who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.

Yet we should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past;
and
to keep the balance true,
since I have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey,
perhaps more than was enough,
let me add an original document.

It was not written by Homer,
but by a boy of eleven,
long since dead,
and is dated only twenty years ago.

I shall punctuate,

to make things clearer,
but not change the spelling."

My dear Sister Mary,
- I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you read my letter.

If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has not written
to you before now,
you will be surprised
to heare that we are in California,
and that poor Thomas" (another brother,
of fifteen) "is dead.

We started from - in July,

with plenly of provisions and too yoke oxen.

We went along very well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California,
when the Indians attacked us.

We found places where they had killed the emigrants.

We had one passenger
with us,
too guns,
and one revolver;
so we ran all the lead We had in
to bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit.

It was about two o'clock in the afternoon;
droave the cattel a little way;
when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon."

Jerry took out one of the guns
to shoot it,
and told Tom drive the oxen.

Tom and I drove the oxen,
and Jerry and the passenger went on.

Then,
after a little,
I left Tom and caught up
with Jerry and the other man.

Jerry stopped Tom
to come up;
me and the man went on and sit down by a little stream.

In a few minutes,
we heard some noise;
then three shots (they all struck poor Tom,
I suppose);
then they gave the war hoop,
and as many as twenty of the redskins came down upon us.

The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes."

I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot;
so I told the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead,
and that we had better try
to escape,
if possible.

I had no shoes on;
having a sore foot,
I thought I would not put them on.

The man and me run down the road,
but We was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony.

We then turend the other way,
and run up the side of the Mountain,
and hid behind some cedar trees,
and stayed there till dark.

The Indians hunted all over after us,
and verry close
to us,
so close that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle.

At dark the man and me started on,
I stubing my toes against sticks and stones.

We traveld on all night;
and next morning,
just as it was getting gray,
we saw something in the shape of a man.

It layed Down in the grass.

We went up
to it,
and it was Jerry.

He thought we ware Indians.

You can imagine how glad he was
to see me.

He thought we was all dead but him,
and we thought him and Tom was dead.

He had the gun that he took out of the wagon
to shoot the prairie Chicken;
all he had was the load that was in it."

We traveld on till about eight o'clock,
We caught up
with one wagon
with too men
with it.

We had traveld
with them before one day;
we stopt and they Drove on;
we knew that they was ahead of us,
unless they had been killed to.

My feet was so sore when we caught up
with them that I had
to ride;
I could not step.

We traveld on
for too days,
when the men that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them another inch.

We unyoked the oxen;
we had about seventy pounds of flour;
we took it out and divided it in
to four packs.

Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a blanket.

I carried a little bacon,
dried meat,
and little quilt;
I had in all about twelve pounds.

We had one pint of flour a day
for our alloyance.

Sometimes we made soup of it;
sometimes we (made) pancakes;
and sometimes mixed it up
with cold water and eat it that way.

We traveld twelve or fourteen days.

The time came at last when we should have
to reach some place or starve.

We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks.

The morning come,
we scraped all the flour out of the sack,
mixed it up,
and baked it in
to bread,
and made some soup,
and eat everything we had.

We traveld on all day without anything
to eat,
and that evening we Caught up
with a sheep train of eight wagons.

We traveld
with them till we arrived at the settlements;
and know I am safe in California,
and got
to good home,
and going
to school."

Jerry is working in - .

It is a good country.

You can get from 50
to 60 and 75 Dollars
for cooking.

Tell me all about the affairs in the States,
and how all the folks get along."


And so ends this artless narrative.

The little man was at school again,
God bless him,
while his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.

FELLOW-PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific
to the Central Pacific line of railroad.

The change was doubly welcome;
for,
first,
we had better cars on the new line;
and,
second,
those in which we had been cooped
for more than ninety hours had begun
to stink abominably.

Several yards away,
as we returned,
let us say from dinner,
our nostrils were assailed by rancid air.

I have stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting;
and as the dwelling-cars drew near,
there would come a whiff of pure menagerie,
only a little sourer,
as from men instead of monkeys.

I think we are human only in virtue of open windows.

Without fresh air,
you only require a bad heart,
and a remarkable command of the Queen's English,

to become such another as Dean Swift;
a kind of leering,
human goat,
leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence.

I do my best
to keep my head the other way,
and look
for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train.

But one thing I must say,
the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive.The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high,
and so proportionally airier;
they were freshly varnished,
which gave us all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed;
the seats drew out and joined in the centre,
so that there was no more need
for bed boards;
and there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened at night.I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was among.

They were in rather marked contrast
to the emigrants I had met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.

They were mostly lumpish fellows,
silent and noisy,
a common combination;
somewhat sad,
I should say,

with an extraordinary poor taste in humour,
and little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external curiosity.

If they heard a man's name and business,
they seemed
to think they had the heart of that mystery;
but they were as eager
to know that much as they were indifferent
to the rest.

Some of them were on nettles till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker;
but beyond that,
whether you were Catholic or Mormon,
dull or clever,
fierce or friendly,
was all one
to them.

Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little,
and,
I am bound
to say,
unkindly.

A favourite witticism was
for some lout
to raise the alarm of "All aboard!" while the rest of us were dining,
thus contributing his mite
to the general discomfort.

Such a one was always much applauded
for his high spirits.

When I was ill coming through Wyoming,
I was astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship -
to meet
with little but laughter.

One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me,
as was then very easy;
and that not from ill- nature,
but mere clodlike incapacity
to think,

for he expected me
to join the laugh.

I did so,
but it was phantom merriment.

Later on,
a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits,
and though,
of course,
there were not wanting some
to help him,
it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow-passengers.

"Oh,
I hope he's not going
to die!" cried a woman;
"it would be terrible
to have a dead body!" And there was a very general movement
to leave the man behind at the next station.

This,
by good fortune,
the conductor negatived.There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters;
in others,
little but silence.

In this society,
more than any other that ever I was in,
it was the narrator alone who seemed
to enjoy the narrative.

It was rarely that any one listened
for the listening.

If he lent an ear
to another man's story,
it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer
for one of his own.

Food and the progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated;
many joined
to discuss these who otherwise would hold their tongues.

One small knot had no better occupation than
to worm out of me my name;
and the more they tried,
the more obstinately fixed I grew
to baffle them.

They assailed me
with artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future;
but I was perpetually on my guard,
and parried their assaults
with inward laughter.

I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars
for the secret.

He owed me far more,
had he understood life,

for thus preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey.

I met one of my fellow-passengers months after,
driving a street tramway car in San Francisco;
and,
as the joke was now out of season,
told him my name without subterfuge.

You never saw a man more chapfallen.

But had my name been Demogorgon,
after so prolonged a mystery he had still been disappointed.There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves,
one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles,
the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world,
mysterious race.

Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish;

for my part,
I can make nothing of them at all.

A division of races,
older and more original than that of Babel,
keeps this close,
esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.

Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes.

This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of the strangest races dwell next door
to you at home.The rest were all American born,
but they came from almost every quarter of that Continent.

All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains
with me.

From Virginia,
from Pennsylvania,
from New York,
from far western Iowa and Kansas,
from Maime that borders on the Canadas,
and from the Canadas themselves - some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better wages.

The talk in the train,
like the talk I heard on the steamer,
ran upon hard times,
short commons,
and hope that moves ever westward.

I thought of my shipful from Great Britain
with a feeling of despair.

They had come 3000 miles,
and yet not far enough.

Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde,
and stood
to welcome them at Sandy Hook.

Where were they
to go?

Pennsylvania,
Maine,
Iowa,
Kansas?

These were not places
for immigration,
but
for emigration,
it appeared;
not one of them,
but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel and left it
for an ungrateful country.

And it was still westward that they ran.

Hunger,
you would have thought,
came out of the east like the sun,
and the evening was made of edible gold.

And,
meantime,
in the car in front of me,
were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter?

Hungry Europe and hungry China,
each pouring from their gates in search of provender,
had here come face
to face.

The two waves had met;
east and west had alike failed;
the whole round world had been prospected and condemned;
there was no El Dorado anywhere;
and till one could emigrate
to the moon,
it seemed as well
to stay patiently at home.

Nor was there wanting another sign,
at once more picturesque and more disheartening;
for,
as we continued
to steam westward toward the land of gold,
we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east;
and these were as crowded as our own.

Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines?

Were they all bound
for Paris,
and
to be in Rome by Easter?

It would seem not,
for,
whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried
to us through the windows,
in a kind of wailing chorus,

to "come back."

On the plains of Nebraska,
in the mountains of Wyoming,
it was still the same cry,
and dismal
to my heart,
"Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good country we were going to."

And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded
with the unemployed,
and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.If,
in truth,
it were only
for the sake of wages that men emigrate,
how many thousands would regret the bargain!

But wages,
indeed,
are only one consideration out of many;

for we are a race of gipsies,
and love change and travel
for themselves.

DESPISED RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings,
the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.

They seemed never
to have looked at them,
listened
to them,
or thought of them,
but hated them A PRIORI.

The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.

They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries,
and hence there was no calumny too idle
for the Caucasians
to repeat,
and even
to believe.

They declared them hideous vermin,
and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them.

Now,
as a matter of fact,
the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European women,
that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance,
I have
for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.

I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women,
but
for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured.

Again,
my emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty.

I cannot say they were clean,

for that was impossible upon the journey;
but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us
to shame.

We all pigged and stewed in one infamy,
wet our hands and faces
for half a minute daily on the platform,
and were unashamed.

But the Chinese never lost an opportunity,
and you would see them washing their feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as decency permitted
to wash their whole bodies.

I may remark by the way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty.

A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse;
but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.

Lastly,
these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon,
and that alone,
which stank.

I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America.

The Chinese are considered stupid,
because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English.

They are held
to be base,
because their dexterity and frugality enable them
to underbid the lazy,
luxurious Caucasian.

They are said
to be thieves;
I am sure they have no monopoly of that.

They are called cruel;
the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation.

I am told,
again,
that they are of the race of river pirates,
and belong
to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire.

But if this be so,
what remarkable pirates have we here!

and what must be the virtues,
the industry,
the education,
and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish,
now it is the Chinese that must go.

Such is the cry.

It seems,
after all,
that no country is bound
to submit
to immigration any more than
to invasion;
each is war
to the knife,
and resistance
to either but legitimate defence.

Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic,
which loved
to depict herself
with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates.

And certainly,
as a man who believes that he loves freedom,
I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention.

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand- lot,
the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring
for arms and butchery.

"At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator,
"ye rose in the name of freedom
to set free the negroes;
can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"



for my own part,
I could not look but
with wonder and respect on the Chinese.

Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun
to keep pigs.

Gun-powder and printing,
which the other day we imitated,
and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as
to desire
to imitate,
were theirs in a long- past antiquity.

They walk the earth
with us,
but it seems they must be of different clay.

They hear the clock strike the same hour,
yet surely of a different epoch.

They travel by steam conveyance,
yet
with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course.

Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall;
what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin;
religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside;
philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein
to wonder at;
all this travelled alongside of me
for thousands of miles over plain and mountain.

Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way,
or whether our eyes,
which yet were formed upon the same design,
beheld the same world out of the railway windows.

And when either of us turned his thoughts
to home and childhood,
what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld that old,
gray,
castled city,
high throned above the firth,

with the flag of Britain flying,
and the red-coat sentry pacing over all;
and the man in the next car
to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain,
and call it,

with the same affection,
home.Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese;
and that,
it is hardly necessary
to say,
was the noble red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days.

I saw no wild or independent Indian;
indeed,
I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train;
but now and again at way stations,
a husband and wife and a few children,
disgracefully dressed out
with the sweepings of civilisation,
came forth and stared upon the emigrants.

The silent stoicism of their conduct,
and the pathetic degradation of their appearance,
would have touched any thinking creature,
but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them
with a truly Cockney baseness.

I was ashamed
for the thing we call civilisation.

We should carry upon our consciences so much,
at least,
of our forefathers' misconduct as we continue
to profit by ourselves.If oppression drives a wise man mad,
what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes,
who have been driven back and back,
step after step,
their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward,
until at length they are shut up in
to these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and even there find themselves invaded,
insulted,
and hunted out by ruffianly diggers?

The eviction of the Cherokees (
to name but an instance),
the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked,
the ill-faith of all,
nay,
down
to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here
with me upon the train,
make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him
to pardon or forget.

These old,
well- founded,
historical hatreds have a savour of nobility
for the independent.

That the Jew should not love the Christian,
nor the Irishman love the English,
nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American,
is not disgraceful
to the nature of man;
rather,
indeed,
honourable,
since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race,
and not personal
to him who cherishes the indignation.


TO THE GOLDEN GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed,
and leaves no particular impressions on the mind.

By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped
to breakfast at Toano,
a little station on a bleak,
high- lying plateau in Nevada.

The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same,
he grew very friendly,
and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering.

"You see," said he,
"I tell you this,
because I come from your country."

Hail,
brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.

There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting
to the human mind;
thus the French,
in small affairs,
reckon strictly by halfpence;
and you have
to solve,
by a spasm of mental arithmetic,
such posers as thirty-two,
forty-five,
or even a hundred halfpence.

In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push
for complexity,
and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT,
or old Mexican real.

The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents,
eight
to the dollar.

When it comes
to two bits,
the quarter-dollar stands
for the required amount.

But how about an odd bit?

The nearest coin
to it is a dime,
which is,
short by a fifth.

That,
then,
is called a SHORT bit.

If you have one,
you lay it triumphantly down,
and save two and a half cents.

But if you have not,
and lay down a quarter,
the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of change;
and thus you have paid what is called a LONG BIT,
and lost two and a half cents,
or even,
by comparison
with a short bit,
five cents.

In country places all over the Pacific coast,
nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken,
which vastly increases the cost of life;
as even
for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny,
as the case may be.

You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long;
but I have discovered a plan
to make it broader,

with which I here endow the public.

It is brief and simple - radiantly simple.

There is one place where five cents are recognised,
and that is the post-office.

A quarter is only worth two bits,
a short and a long.

Whenever you have a quarter,
go
to the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps;
you will receive in change two dimes,
that is,
two short bits.

The purchasing power of your money is undiminished.

You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same;
and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps in
to the bargain.

Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head
for this discovery.From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible
to man,
and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time
to Elko.

As we were standing,
after our manner,
outside the station,
I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars,
and take
to their heels across country.

They were tramps,
it appeared,
who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before;
and several of my fellow- passengers had already seen and conversed
with them while we broke our fast at Toano.

These land stowaways play a great part over here in America,
and I should have liked dearly
to become acquainted
with them.At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.

I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small,
stout,
ruddy man,
followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself."

Excuse me,
sir," he said,
"but do you happen
to be going on?"


I said I was,
whereupon he said he hoped
to persuade me
to desist from that intention.

He had a situation
to offer me,
and if we could come
to terms,
why,
good and well.

"You see," he continued,
"I'm running a theatre here,
and we're a little short in the orchestra.

You're a musician,
I guess?"


I assured him that,
beyond a rudimentary acquaintance
with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension whatever
to that style.

He seemed much put out of countenance;
and one of his taller companions asked him,
on the nail,

for five dollars."

You see,
sir," added the latter
to me,
"he bet you were a musician;
I bet you weren't.

No offence,
I hope?"


"None whatever," I said,
and the two withdrew
to the bar,
where I presume the debt was liquidated.This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,
who thought they had now come
to a country where situations went a- begging.

But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.

Indeed,
I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler
to decide the bet.Of all the next day I will tell you nothing,

for the best of all reasons,
that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes,
fiery hot and deadly weary.

But some time after I had fallen asleep that night,
I was awakened by one of my companions.

It was in vain that I resisted.

A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes;
and he declared we were in a new country,
and I must come forth upon the platform and see
with my own eyes.

The train was then,
in its patient way,
standing halted in a by-track.

It was a clear,
moonlit night;
but the valley was too narrow
to admit the moonshine direct,
and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines.

A hoarse clamour filled the air;
it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains.

The air struck chill,
but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils - a fine,
dry,
old mountain atmosphere.

I was dead sleepy,
but I returned
to roost
with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.When I awoke next morning,
I was puzzled
for a while
to know if it were day or night,

for the illumination was unusual.

I sat up at last,
and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed;
and suddenly we shot in
to an open;
and before we were swallowed in
to the next length of wooden tunnel,
I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left,
a foaming river,
and a sky already coloured
with the fires of dawn.

I am usually very calm over the displays of nature;
but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this.

It was like meeting one's wife.

I had come home again - home from unsightly deserts
to the green and habitable corners of the earth.

Every spire of pine along the hill-top,
every trouty pool along that mountain river,
was more dear
to me than a blood relation.

Few people have praised God more happily than I did.

And thenceforward,
down by Blue Canon,
Alta,
Dutch Flat,
and all the old mining camps,
through a sea of mountain forests,
dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went,
not I only,
but all the passengers on board,
threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness,
and bawled like schoolboys,
and thronged
with shining eyes upon the platform and became new creatures within and without.

The sun no longer oppressed us
with heat,
it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side,
until we were fain
to laugh ourselves
for glee.

At every turn we could see farther in
to the land and our own happy futures.

At every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes in
to the golden air,
and crowing
for the new day and the new country.


for this was indeed our destination;
this was "the good country" we had been going
to so long.By afternoon we were at Sacramento,
the city of gardens in a plain of corn;
and the next day before the dawn we were lying
to upon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay.

The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;
the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco;
the bay was perfect - not a ripple,
scarce a stain,
upon its blue expanse;
everything was waiting,
breathless,

for the sun.

A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais,
and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder;
the air seemed
to awaken,
and began
to sparkle;
and suddenly
"The tall hills Titan discovered,"
and the city of San Francisco,
and the bay of gold and corn,
were lit from end
to end
with summer daylight.[1879.]
CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL
THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC
THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman
to a bent fishing-hook;
and the comparison,
if less important than the march through Georgia,
still shows the eye of a soldier
for topography.

Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank;
the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend;
and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.

Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay,
while the Pacific Ocean,
though hidden by low hills and forest,
bombards her left flank and rear
with never-dying surf.

In front of the town,
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west,
and then westward
to enclose the bay.

The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance;
you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day;
at night,
the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam;
and from all round,
even in quiet weather,
the distant,
thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.These long beaches are enticing
to the idle man.

It would be hard
to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting
to the mind.

Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.

Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,
trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song.

Strange sea- tangles,
new
to the European eye,
the bones of whales,
or sometimes a whole whale's carcase,
white
with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind,
lie scattered here and there along the sands.

The waves come in slowly,
vast and green,
curve their translucent necks,
and burst
with a surprising uproar,
that runs,
waxing and waning,
up and down the long key-board of the beach.

The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant
to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again,
and is met and buried by the next breaker.

The interest is perpetually fresh.

On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy,
in calm,
sunny weather,
such a spectacle of Ocean's greatness,
such beauty of changing colour,
or such degrees of thunder in the sound.

The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.Inshore,
a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.

Here and there a lagoon,
more or less brackish,
attracts the birds and hunters.

A rough,
undergrowth partially conceals the sand.

The crouching,
hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the kind of wood
for murderers
to crawl among - and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills
with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung
with Spaniard's Beard.

Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near
to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other things are now
for ever altered - and it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying in the sands,
its white windmills bickering in the chill,
perpetual wind,
and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the ocean.

A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up in
to the inland canons;
the roar of water dwells in the clean,
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney;
go where you will,
you have but
to pause and listen
to hear the voice of the Pacific.

You pass out of the town
to the south-west,
and mount the hill among pine-woods.

Glade,
thicket,
and grove surround you.

You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.

You see a deer;
a multitude of quail arises.

But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance,
like that of wind among the trees,
only harsher and stranger
to the ear;
and when at length you gain the summit,
out breaks on every hand and
with freshened vigour that same unending,
distant,
whispering rumble of the ocean;

for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula,
and the noise no longer only mounts
to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz,
but from your right also,
round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse,
and from down before you
to the mouth of the Carmello river.

The whole woodland is begirt
with thundering surges.

The silence that immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this distant,
circling rumour.

It sets your senses upon edge;
you strain your attention;
you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand;
you walk listening like an Indian hunter;
and that voice of the Pacific is a sort of disquieting company
to you in your walk.When once I was in these woods I found it difficult
to turn homeward.

All woods lure a rambler onward;
but in those of Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me
to prolong my walks.

I would push straight
for the shore where I thought it
to be nearest.

Indeed,
there was scarce a direction that would not,
sooner or later,
have brought me forth on the Pacific.

The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in these excursions.

I never in all my visits met but one man.

He was a Mexican,
very dark of hue,
but smiling and fat,
and he carried an axe,
though his true business at that moment was
to seek
for straying cattle.

I asked him what o'clock it was,
but he seemed neither
to know nor care;
and when he in his turn asked me
for news of his cattle,
I showed myself equally indifferent.

We stood and smiled upon each other
for a few seconds,
and then turned without a word and took our several ways across the forest.One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was new
to me.

After a while the woods began
to open,
the sea
to sound nearer hand.

I came upon a road,
and,

to my surprise,
a stile.

A step or two farther,
and,
without leaving the woods,
I found myself among trim houses.

I walked through street after street,
parallel and at right angles,
paved
with sward and dotted
with trees,
but still undeniable streets,
and each
with its name posted at the corner,
as in a real town.

Facing down the main thoroughfare - "Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,

with benches and sounding-board,
as though
for an orchestra.

The houses were all tightly shuttered;
there was no smoke,
no sound but of the waves,
no moving thing.

I have never been in any place that seemed so dreamlike.

Pompeii is all in a bustle
with visitors,
and its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination;
but this town had plainly not been built above a year or two,
and perhaps had been deserted overnight.

Indeed,
it was not so much like a deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight,
and
with no one on the boards.

The barking of a dog led me at last
to the only house still occupied,
where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre.

The place was "The Pacific Camp Grounds,
the Christian Seaside Resort."

Thither,
in the warm season,
crowds come
to enjoy a life of teetotalism,
religion,
and flirtation,
which I am willing
to think blameless and agreeable.

The neighbourhood at least is well selected.

The Pacific booms in front.

Westward is Point Pinos,

with the lighthouse in a wilderness of sand,
where you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano,
making models and bows and arrows,
studying dawn and sunrise in amateur oil-painting,
and
with a dozen other elegant pursuits and interests
to surprise his brave,
old-country rivals.


to the east,
and still nearer,
you will come upon a space of open down,
a hamlet,
a haven among rocks,
a world of surge and screaming sea- gulls.

Such scenes are very similar in different climates;
they appear homely
to the eyes of all;

to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland.

And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design;
and,
if you walk in
to the hamlet,
you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are unfamiliar
to the memory.

The joss-stick burns,
the opium pipe is smoked,
the floors are strewn
with slips of coloured paper - prayers,
you would say,
that had somehow missed their destination - and a man guiding his upright pencil from right
to left across the sheet,
writes home the news of Monterey
to the Celestial Empire.The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard region.

On the streets of Monterey,
when the air does not smell salt from the one,
it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of the other.


for days together a hot,
dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven,
yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils.

The cause is not far
to seek,

for the woods are afire,
and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.

These fires are one of the great dangers of California.

I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke,
by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.

A little thing will start them,
and,
if the wind be favourable,
they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.

The inhabitants must turn out and work like demons,

for it is not only the pleasant groves that are destroyed;
the climate and the soil are equally at stake,
and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains.

California has been a land of promise in its time,
like Palestine;
but if the woods continue so swiftly
to perish,
it may become,
like Palestine,
a land of desolation.
to visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of experience.

The fire passes through the underbrush at a run.

Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root
to summit,
scattering tufts of flame,
and is quenched,
it seems,
as quickly.

But this last is only in semblance.


for after this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,
there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree.

The resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots.

Thus,
after the light,
showy,
skirmishing flames,
which are only as the match
to the explosion,
have already scampered down the wind in
to the distance,
the true harm is but beginning
for this giant of the woods.

You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it scorched indeed from top
to bottom,
but apparently survivor of the peril.

Make the circuit,
and there,
on the other side of the column,
is a clear mass of living coal,
spreading like an ulcer;
while underground,

to their most extended fibre,
the roots are being eaten out by fire,
and the smoke is rising through the fissures
to the surface.

A little while,
and,
without a nod of warning,
the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and falls prostrate
with a crash.

Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business;
the roots are reduced
to a fine ash;
and long afterwards,
if you pass by,
you will find the earth pierced
with radiating galleries,
and preserving the design of all these subterranean spurs,
as though it were the mould
for a new tree instead of the print of an old one.

These pitch-pines of Monterey are,

with the single exception of the Monterey cypress,
the most fantastic of forest trees.

No words can give an idea of the contortion of their growth;
they might figure without change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it;
and at the rate at which trees grow,
and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills of California,
we may look forward
to a time when there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their nativity.

At least they have not so much
to fear from the axe,
but perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;
while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of the nobler redwood.

Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.I have an interest of my own in these forest fires,

for I came so near
to lynching on one occasion,
that a braver man might have retained a thrill from the experience.

I wished
to be certain whether it was the moss,
that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests,
which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree.

I suppose I must have been under the influence of Satan,

for instead of plucking off a piece
for my experiment what should I do but walk up
to a great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching,
strike a match,
and apply the flame gingerly
to one of the tassels.

The tree went off simply like a rocket;
in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire.

Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work combating the original conflagration.

I could see the waggon that had brought them tied
to a live oak in a piece of open;
I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood in
to the sunlight.

Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up
to convenient bough.
to die
for faction is a common evil;
But
to be hanged
for nonsense is the devil.I have run repeatedly,
but never as I ran that day.

At night I went out of town,
and there was my own particular fire,
quite distinct from the other,
and burning as I thought
with even greater vigour.But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power upon the climate.

At sunset,

for months together,
vast,
wet,
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.

From the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble,
although it is always sad.

The upper air is still bright
with sunlight;
a glow still rests upon the Gabelano Peak;
but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels;
they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;
they float,
a little higher,
in clouds of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration;

to the south,
where they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia,
they double back and spire up skyward like smoke.

Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world.

The air grows chill and deadly as they advance.

The trade-wind freshens,
the trees begin
to sigh,
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns
with the brackish water of the sands.

It takes but a little while till the invasion is complete.

The sea,
in its lighter order,
has submerged the earth.

Monterey is curtained in
for the night in thick,
wet,
salt,
and frigid clouds,
so
to remain till day returns;
and before the sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons
to the bosom of the sea.

And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill,
a few steps out of the town and up the slope,
the night will be dry and warm and full of inland perfume.

MEXICANS,
AMERICANS,
AND INDIANS
The history of Monterey has yet
to be written.

Founded by Catholic missionaries,
a place of wise beneficence
to Indians,
a place of arms,
a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another,
an American capital when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations,
and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the State
to the capital of a county,
and from that again,
by the loss of its charter and town lands,

to a mere bankrupt village,
its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity
with which the soil has changed-hands.

The Mexicans,
you may say,
are all poor and landless,
like their former capital;
and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air.The town,
when I was there,
was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved
with sea-sand,
and two or three lanes,
which were watercourses in the rainy season,
and were,
at all times,
rent up by fissures four or five feet deep.

There were no street lights.

Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added
to the dangers of the night,

for they were often high above the level of the roadway,
and no one could tell where they would be likely
to begin or end.

The houses were,

for the most part,
built of unbaked adobe brick,
many of them old
for so new a country,
some of very elegant proportions,

with low,
spacious,
shapely rooms,
and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them
to the heart.

At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell began
to hang about the lower floors;
and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.There was no activity but in and around the saloons,
where people sat almost all day long playing cards.

The smallest excursion was made on horseback.

You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied
to posts,
and making a fine figure
with their Mexican housings.

It struck me oddly
to come across some of the CORNHILL illustrations
to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA,
and see all the characters astride on English saddles.

As a matter of fact,
an English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco,
and,
you may say,
a thing unknown in all the rest of California.

In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey,
you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and down dale,
and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses
with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs,
checking them dead
with a touch,
or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard.

The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American.

The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish,

to something,
in its sad fixity,
not unlike the pure Indian,
although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country.

As
for the second,
it was a matter of perpetual surprise
to find,
in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans,
a people full of deportment,
solemnly courteous,
and doing all things
with grace and decorum.

In dress they ran
to colour and bright sashes.

Not even the most Americanised could always resist the temptation
to stick a red rose in
to his hat-band.

Not even the most Americanised would descend
to wear the vile dress hat of civilisation.

Spanish was the language of the streets.

It was difficult
to get along without a word or two of that language
for an occasion.

The only communications in which the population joined were
with a view
to amusement.

A weekly public ball took place
with great etiquette,
in addition
to the numerous fandangoes in private houses.

There was a really fair amateur brass band.

Night after night serenaders would be going about the street,
sometimes in a company and
with several instruments and voice together,
sometimes severally,
each guitar before a different window.

It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America,
and hear the guitar accompany,
and one of these old,
heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount in
to the night air,
perhaps in a deep baritone,
perhaps in that high- pitched,
pathetic,
womanish al
to which is so common among Mexican men,
and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely human but altogether sad.The town,
then,
was essentially and wholly Mexican;
and yet almost all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans,
and it was from the same class,
numerically so small,
that the principal officials were selected.

This Mexican and that Mexican would describe
to you his old family estates,
not one rood of which remained
to him.

You would ask him how that came about,
and elicit some tangled story back-foremost,
from which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men,
and the Mexicans greedy like children,
but no other certain fact.

Their merits and their faults contributed alike
to the ruin of the former landholders.

It is true they were improvident,
and easily dazzled
with the sight of ready money;
but they were gentlefolk besides,
and that in a way which curiously unfitted them
to combat Yankee craft.

Suppose they have a paper
to sign,
they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms
with any great minuteness;
nay,
suppose them
to observe some doubtful clause,
it is ten
to one they would refuse from delicacy
to object
to it.

I know I am speaking within the mark,

for I have seen such a case occur,
and the Mexican,
in spite of the advice of his lawyer,
has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.


to have spoken in the matter,
he said,
above all
to have let the other party guess that he had seen a lawyer,
would have "been like doubting his word."

The scruple sounds oddly
to one of ourselves,
who have been brought up
to understand all business as a competition in fraud,
and honesty itself
to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of agreements.

This single unworldly trait will account
for much of that revolution of which we are speaking.

The Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers,
but certainly the accusation cuts both ways.

In a contest of this sort,
the entire booty would scarcely have passed in
to the hands of the more scupulous race.Physically the Americans have triumphed;
but it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered.

This is,
of course,
but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being solved in the various States of the American Union.

I am reminded of an anecdote.

Some years ago,
at a great sale of wine,
all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh.

The agent had the curiosity
to visit him some time after and inquire what possible use he could have
for such material.

He was shown,
by way of answer,
a huge vat where all the liquors,
from humble Gladstone
to imperial Tokay,
were fermenting together.

"And what," he asked,
"do you propose
to call this?"

"I'm no very sure," replied the grocer,
"but I think it's going
to turn out port."

In the older Eastern States,
I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races in going
to turn out English,
or thereabout.

But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones.

The elements are differently mingled in the south,
in what we may call the Territorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast.

Above all,
in these last,
we may look
to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or evil,
who shall forecast?

but certainly original and all their own.

In my little restaurant at Monterey,
we have sat down
to table day after day,
a Frenchman,
two Portuguese,
an Italian,
a Mexican,
and a Scotchman:

we had
for common visitors an American from Illinois,
a nearly pure blood Indian woman,
and a naturalised Chinese;
and from time
to time a Switzer and a German came down from country ranches
for the night.

No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land
to visitors from the Eastern States,

for each race contributes something of its own.

Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of California,
none indeed of their virtues,
but the debasing use of opium.

And chief among these influences is that of the Mexicans.The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.

They still preserve a sort of international independence,
and keep their affairs snug
to themselves.

Only four or five years ago Vasquez,
the bandit,
his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot
for him in other parts of California,
returned
to his native Monterey,
and was seen publicly in her streets and saloons,
fearing no man.

The year that I was there,
there occurred two reputed murders.

As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of every one behind his back,
it is not possible
for me
to judge how much truth there may have been in these reports;
but in the one case every one believed,
and in the other some suspected,
that there had been foul play;
and nobody dreamed
for an instant of taking the authorities in
to their counsel.

Now this is,
of course,
characteristic enough of the Mexicans;
but it is a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in this inaction.

Even when I spoke
to them upon the subject,
they seemed not
to understand my surprise;
they had forgotten the traditions of their own race and upbringing,
and become,
in a word,
wholly Mexicanised.Again,
the Mexicans,
having no ready money
to speak of,
rely almost entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless paper.

Pedro the penniless pays you
with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel.

It is a sort of local currency by courtesy.

Credit in these parts has passed in
to a superstition.

I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling
for months
to recover a debt,
and getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper.

The very storekeepers are averse
to asking
for cash payments,
and are more surprised than pleased when they are offered.

They fear there must be something under it,
and that you mean
to withdraw your custom from them.

I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me
with fervour
to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand;
and partly from the commonness of the case,
partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition which made all men welcome
to their tables,
a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable
to pay,
and still find credit
for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.

Now this villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown in
to Californian nature.

I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans;
I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit,
and profit by it in the meanwhile,
without a thought
for consequences.

Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage
to be gained from this;
they lead on the farmer in
to irretrievable indebtedness,
and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill.

So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges,
and except that the Jew knows better than
to foreclose,
you may see Americans bound in the same chains
with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexican.

It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain,
were natural
to the soil rather than
to the race that holds and tills it
for the moment.In the meantime,
however,
the Americans rule in Monterey County.

The new county seat,
Salinas City,
in the bald,
corn-bearing plain under the Gabelano Peak,
is a town of a purely American character.

The land is held,

for the most part,
in those enormous tracts which are another legacy of Mexican days,
and form the present chief danger and disgrace of California;
and the holders are mostly of American or British birth.

We have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these large landholders - land-thieves,
land-sharks,
or land-grabbers,
they are more commonly and plainly called.

Thus the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.

How they came there is an obscure,
vexatious question,
and,
rightly or wrongly,
the man is hated
with a great hatred.

His life has been repeatedly in danger.

Not very long ago,
I was told,
the stage was stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen thirsting
for his blood.

A certain house on the Salinas road,
they say,
he always passes in his buggy at full speed,

for the squatter sent him warning long ago.

But a year since he was publicly pointed out
for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney.

Kearney is a man too well known in California,
but a word of explanation is required
for English readers.

Originally an Irish dray-man,
he rose,
by his command of bad language,

to almost dictatorial authority in the State;
throned it there
for six months or so,
his mouth full of oaths,
gallowses,
and conflagrations;
was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman,
backed by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns;
completed his own ruin by throwing in his lot
with the grotesque Green-backer party;
and had at last
to be rescued by his old enemies,
the police,
out of the hands of his rebellious followers.

It was while he was at the top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey
with his battle- cry against Chinese labour,
the railroad monopolists,
and the land- thieves;
and his one articulate counsel
to the Montereyans was
to "hang David Jacks."

Had the town been American,
in my private opinion,
this would have been done years ago.

Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the West,
and I have seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey
to adjust a competition of titles
with the face of a captain going in
to battle and his Smith-and- Wesson convenient
to his hand.On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old friend,
the truck system,
in full operation.

Men live there,
year in year out,

to cut timber
for a nominal wage,
which is all consumed in supplies.

The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice in a new country,
where labour should be precious,
and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the success of the demagogue Kearney.In a comparison between what was and what is in California,
the praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel.

The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley,
bare,
dotted
with chaparal,
overlooked by quaint,
unfinished hills.

The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms,
a clear and shallow river,
loved by wading kine;
and at last,
as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,
passes a ruined mission on a hill.

From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean,
and the ear is filled
with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore.

But the day of the Jesuit has gone by,
the day of the Yankee has succeeded,
and there is no one left
to care
for the converted savage.

The church is roofless and ruinous,
sea-breezes and sea-fogs,
and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,
daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall.

As an antiquity in this new land,
a quaint specimen of missionary architecture,
and a memorial of good deeds,
it had a triple claim
to preservation from all thinking people;
but neglect and abuse have been its portion.

There is no sign of American interference,
save where a headboard has been torn from a grave
to be a mark
for pistol bullets.

So it is
with the Indians
for whom it was erected.

Their lands,
I was told,
are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor,
and
with that exception no man troubles his head
for the Indians of Carmel.

Only one day in the year,
the day before our Guy Fawkes,
the PADRE drives over the hill from Monterey;
the little sacristy,
which is the only covered portion of the church,
is filled
with seats and decorated
for the service;
the Indians troop together,
their bright dresses contrasting
with their dark and melancholy faces;
and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers,
you may hear God served
with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple under heaven.

An Indian,
stone-blind and about eighty years of age,
conducts the singing;
other Indians compose the choir;
yet they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends,
and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang.

The pronunciation was odd and nasal,
the singing hurried and staccato.

"In saecula saeculoho-horum," they went,

with a vigorous aspirate
to every additional syllable.

I have never seen faces more vividly lit up
with joy than the faces of these Indian singers.

It was
to them not only the worship of God,
nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better days,
but was besides an exercise of culture,
where all they knew of art and letters was united and expressed.

And it made a man's heart sorry
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them
to dig and
to reap,

to read and
to sing,
who had given them European mass-books which they still preserve and study in their cottages,
and who had now passed away from all authority and influence in that land -
to be succeeded by greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots.

So ugly a thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of Jesus.But revolution in this world succeeds
to revolution.

All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense.

The Monterey of last year exists no longer.

A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway.

Three sets of diners sit down successively
to table.

Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks;
and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers,
and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations,
as a resort
for wealth and fashion.

Alas
for the little town!

it is not strong enough
to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai,
and the poor,
quaint,
penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish,
like a lower race,
before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.[1880]
CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS
I
THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart.

It is a place that people love even more than they admire.

The vigorous forest air,
the silence,
the majestic avenues of highway,
the wilderness of tumbled boulders,
the great age and dignity of certain groves - these are but ingredients,
they are not the secret of the philtre.

The place is sanative;
the air,
the light,
the perfumes,
and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.

The artist may be idle and not fear the "blues."

He may dally
with his life.

Mirth,
lyric mirth,
and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very essence of the better kind of art;
and these,
in that most smiling forest,
he has the chance
to learn or
to remember.

Even on the plain of Biere,
where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of fancy,
a larger air,
a higher heaven,
something ancient and healthy in the face of nature,
purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria.

There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their youth,
or the old better contented
with their age.The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country
to the artist.

The field was chosen by men in whose blood there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo,
Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients.

It was chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art,
of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells
to paint the river- side primrose.

It was then chosen
for its proximity
to Paris.

And
for the same cause,
and by the force of tradition,
the painter of to-day continues
to inhabit and
to paint it.

There is in France scenery incomparable
for romance and harmony.

Provence,
and the valley of the Rhone from Vienne
to Tarascon,
are one succession of masterpieces waiting
for the brush.

The beauty is not merely beauty;
it tells,
besides,
a tale
to the imagination,
and surprises while it charMs. Here you shall see castellated towns that would befit the scenery of dreamland;
streets that glow
with colour like cathedral windows;
hills of the most exquisite proportions;
flowers of every precious colour,
growing thick like grass.

All these,
by the grace of railway travel,
are brought
to the very door of the modern painter;
yet he does not seek them;
he remains faithful
to Fontainebleau,

to the eternal bridge of Gretz,

to the watering-pot cascade in Cernay valley.

Even Fontainebleau was chosen
for him;
even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered.

But one thing,
at least,
is certain,
whatever he may choose
to paint and in whatever manner,
it is good
for the artist
to dwell among graceful shapes.

Fontainebleau,
if it be but quiet scenery,
is classically graceful;
and though the student may look
for different qualities,
this quality,
silently present,
will educate his hand and eye.But,
before all its other advantages - charm,
loveliness,
or proximity
to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already colonised.

The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time and tact.

The population must be conquered.

The innkeeper has
to be taught,
and he soon learns,
the lesson of unlimited credit;
he must be taught
to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat,
and
with little baggage beyond a box of colours and a canvas;
and he must learn
to preserve his faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink of the best,
borrow money
to buy tobacco,
and perhaps not pay a stiver
for a year.

A colour merchant has next
to be attracted.

A certain vogue must be given
to the place,
lest the painter,
most gregarious of animals,
should find himself alone.

And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome,
than fresh perils spring up upon the other side;
and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate.

This is the crucial moment
for the colony.

If these intruders gain a footing,
they not only banish freedom and amenity;
pretty soon,
by means of their long purses,
they will have undone the education of the innkeeper;
prices will rise and credit shorten;
and the poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet.

"Not here,
O Apollo!" will become his song.

Thus Trouville and,
the other day,
St.

Raphael were lost
to the arts.

Curious and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student uses
to defend his lair;
like the cuttlefish,
he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool;
but at such a time and
for so practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence.

Where his own purse and credit are not threatened,
he will do the honours of his village generously.

Any artist is made welcome,
through whatever medium he may seek expression;
science is respected;
even the idler,
if he prove,
as he so rarely does,
a gentleman,
will soon begin
to find himself at home.

And when that essentially modern creature,
the English or American girl-student,
began
to walk calmly in
to his favourite inns as if in
to a drawing-room at home,
the French painter owned himself defenceless;
he submitted or he fled.

His French respectability,
quite as precise as ours,
though covering different provinces of life,
recoiled aghast before the innovation.

But the girls were painters;
there was nothing
to be done;
and Barbizon,
when I last saw it and
for the time at least,
was practically ceded
to the fair invader.

Paterfamilias,
on the other hand,
the common tourist,
the holiday shopman,
and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree,
he hounded from his villages
with every circumstance of contumely.This purely artistic society is excellent
for the young artist.

The lads are mostly fools;
they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness;
they are at that stage of education,

for the most part,
when a man is too much occupied
with style
to be aware of the necessity
for any matter;
and this,
above all
for the Englishman,
is excellent.


to work grossly at the trade,

to forget sentiment,

to think of his material and nothing else,
is,

for awhile at least,
the king's highway of progress.

Here,
in England,
too many painters and writers dwell dispersed,
unshielded,
among the intelligent bourgeois.

These,
when they are not merely indifferent,
prate
to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art.

And this is the lad's ruin.


for art is,
first of all and last of all,
a trade.

The love of words and not a desire
to publish new discoveries,
the love of form and not a novel reading of historical events,
mark the vocation of the writer and the painter.

The arabesque,
properly speaking,
and even in literature,
is the first fancy of the artist;
he first plays
with his material as a child plays
with a kaleidoscope;
and he is already in a second stage when he begins
to use his pretty counters
for the end of representation.

In that,
he must pause long and toil faithfully;
that is his apprenticeship;
and it is only the few who will really grow beyond it,
and go forward,
fully equipped,

to do the business of real art -
to give life
to abstractions and significance and charm
to facts.

In the meanwhile,
let him dwell much among his fellow-craftsmen.

They alone can take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years.

They alone can behold
with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard,
this polishing of empty sentences,
this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects.

Outsiders will spur him on.

They will say,
"Why do you not write a great book?

paint a great picture?"

If his guardian angel fail him,
they may even persuade him
to the attempt,
and,
ten
to one,
his hand is coarsened and his style falsified
for life.And this brings me
to a warning.

The life of the apprentice
to any art is both unstrained and pleasing;
it is strewn
with small successes in the midst of a career of failure,
patiently supported;
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress;
and if he come not appreciably nearer
to the art of Shakespeare,
grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B,
ab.

But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic,
stand up,
put a violence upon his will,
and,

for better or worse,
begin the business of creation.

This evil day there is a tendency continually
to postpone:

above all
with painters.

They have made so many studies that it has become a habit;
they make more,
the walls of exhibitions blush
with them;
and death finds these aged students still busy
with their horn-book.

This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages;
in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used
to call them "Snoozers."

Continual returns
to the city,
the society of men farther advanced,
the study of great works,
a sense of humour or,
if such a thing is
to be had,
a little religion or philosophy,
are the means of treatment.

It will be time enough
to think of curing the malady after it has been caught;

for
to catch it is the very thing
for which you seek that dream-land of the painters' village.

"Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education;
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly,
all else being forgotten,
as if they were an object in themselves.Lastly,
there is something,
or there seems
to be something,
in the very air of France that communicates the love of style.

Precision,
clarity,
the cleanly and crafty employment of material,
a grace in the handling,
apart from any value in the thought,
seem
to be acquired by the mere residence;
or if not acquired,
become at least the more appreciated.

The air of Paris is alive
with this technical inspiration.

And
to leave that airy city and awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but
to change externals.

The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys and the lofty groves,
from the wildernesses that are still pretty in their confusion,
and the great plain that contrives
to be decorative in its emptiness.

II
In spite of its really considerable extent,
the forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.

I know the whole western side of it
with what,
I suppose,
I may call thoroughness;
well enough at least
to testify that there is no square mile without some special character and charm.

Such quarters,

for instance,
as the Long Rocher,
the Bas-Breau,
and the Reine Blanche,
might be a hundred miles apart;
they have scarce a point in common beyond the silence of the birds.

The two last are really conterminous;
and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand political vicissitudes.

But in the one the great oaks prosper placidly upon an even floor;
they beshadow a great field;
and the air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs.

In the other the trees find difficult footing;
castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon another,
the foot slips,
the crooked viper slumbers,
the moss clings in the crevice;
and above it all the great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms,
and,

with a grace beyond church architecture,
canopies this rugged chaos.

Meanwhile,
dividing the two cantons,
the broad white causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue:

a road conceived
for pageantry and
for triumphal marches,
an avenue
for an army;
but,
its days of glory over,
it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves,
and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep.

A little upon one side,
and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder;
a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont,
all juniper and heather;
and close beyond that you may walk in
to a zone of pine trees.

So artfully are the ingredients mingled.

Nor must it be forgotten that,
in all this part,
you come continually forth upon a hill-top,
and behold the plain,
northward and westward,
like an unrefulgent sea;
nor that all day long the shadows keep changing;
and at last,

to the red fires of sunset,
night succeeds,
and
with the night a new forest,
full of whisper,
gloom,
and fragrance.

There are few things more renovating than
to leave Paris,
the lamplit arches of the Carrousel,
and the long alignment of the glittering streets,
and
to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive.

It is a changeful place
to paint,
a stirring place
to live in.

As fast as your foot carries you,
you pass from scene
to scene,
each vigorously painted in the colours of the sun,
each endeared by that hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.

The most savage corners bear a name,
and have been cherished like antiquities;
in the most remote,
Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if
with conscious art;
and man,

with his guiding arrows of blue paint,
has countersigned the picture.

After your farthest wandering,
you are never surprised
to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,

to strike the centre point of branching alleys,
or
to find the aqueduct trailing,
thousand-footed,
through the brush.

It is not a wilderness;
it is rather a preserve.

And,
fitly enough,
the centre of the maze is not a hermit's cavern.

In the midst,
a little mirthful town lies sunlit,
humming
with the business of pleasure;
and the palace,
breathing distinction and peopled by historic names,
stands smokeless among gardens.Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug who called himself the hermit.

In a great tree,
close by the highroad,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson;
thither he mounted at night,
by the romantic aid of a rope ladder;
and if dirt be any proof of sincerity,
the man was savage as a Sioux.

I had the pleasure of his acquaintance;
he appeared grossly stupid,
not in his perfect wits,
and interested in nothing but small change;

for that he had a great avidity.

In the course of time he proved
to be a chicken- stealer,
and vanished from his perch;
and perhaps from the first he was no true votary of forest freedom,
but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar,
and his cabin in the tree was only stock-in-trade
to beg withal.

The choice of his position would seem
to indicate so much;

for if in the forest there are no places still
to be discovered,
there are many that have been forgotten,
and that lie unvisited.

There,

to be sure,
are the blue arrows waiting
to reconduct you,
now blazed upon a tree,
now posted in the corner of a rock.

But your security from interruption is complete;
you might camp
for weeks,
if there were only water,
and not a soul suspect your presence;
and if I may suppose the reader
to have committed some great crime and come
to me
for aid,
I think I could still find my way
to a small cavern,
fitted
with a hearth and chimney,
where he might lie perfectly concealed.

A confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him
with food;

for water,
he would have
to make a nightly tramp as far as
to the nearest pond;
and at last,
when the hue and cry began
to blow over,
he might get gently on the train at some side station,
work round by a series of junctions,
and be quietly captured at the frontier.Thus Fontainebleau,
although it is truly but a pleasure-ground,
and although,
in favourable weather,
and in the more celebrated quarters,
it literally buzzes
with the tourist,
yet has some of the immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests.

And the solitary,
although he must return at night
to his frequented inn,
may yet pass the day
with his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees.

The demands of the imagination vary;
some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;
others,
like the ostrich,
are content
with a solitude that meets the eye;
and others,
again,
expand in fancy
to the very borders of their desert,
and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county.


to these last,
of course,
Fontainebleau will seem but an extended tea-garden:

a Rosherville on a by-day.

But
to the plain man it offers solitude:

an excellent thing in itself,
and a good whet
for company.

III
I was
for some time a consistent Barbizonian;
ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI,
it was a pleasant season;
and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is
for me,
as
for so many others,
a green spot in memory.

The great Millet was just dead,
the green shutters of his modest house were closed;
his daughters were in mourning.

The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the history of art:

in a lesser way,
it was an epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter.

The PETIT CENACLE was dead and buried;
Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their expedients;
the tradition of their real life was nearly lost;
and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a sort of gospel,
and still gave the cue
to zealous imitators.

But if the book be written in rose-water,
the imitation was still farther expurgated;
honesty was the rule;
the innkeepers gave,
as I have said,
almost unlimited credit;
they suffered the seediest painter
to depart,

to take all his belongings,
and
to leave his bill unpaid;
and if they sometimes lost,
it was by English and Americans alone.

At the same time,
the great influx of Anglo- Saxons had begun
to affect the life of the studious.

There had been disputes;
and,
in one instance at least,
the English and the Americans had made common cause
to prevent a cruel pleasantry.

It would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities;
but in practice when they look upon each other,
they have an eye
to nothing but defects.

The Anglo-Saxon is essentially dishonest;
the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we call "Fair Play."

The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest,
and,
when that defender of innocence retired over-seas and left his bills unpaid,
he marvelled once again;
the good and evil were,
in his eyes,
part and parcel of the same eccentricity;
a shrug expressed his judgment upon both.At Barbizon there was no master,
no pontiff in the arts.

Palizzi bore rule at Gretz - urbane,
superior rule - his memory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore,
his mind fertile in theories;
sceptical,
composed,
and venerable
to the eye;
and yet beneath these outworks,
all twittering
with Italian superstition,
his eye scouting
for omens,
and the whole fabric of his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback.

Cernay had Pelouse,
the admirable,
placid Pelouse,
smilingly critical of youth,
who,
when a full-blown commercial traveller,
suddenly threw down his samples,
bought a colour-box,
and became the master whom we have all admired.

Marlotte,

for a central figure,
boasted Olivier de Penne.

Only Barbizon,
since the death of Millet,
was a headless commonwealth.

Even its secondary lights,
and those who in my day made the stranger welcome,
have since deserted it.

The good Lachevre has departed,
carrying his household gods;
and long before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely death.

He died before he had deserved success;
it may be,
he would never have deserved it;
but his kind,
comely,
modest countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him.

Another - whom I will not name - has moved farther on,
pursuing the strange Odyssey of his decadence.

His days of royal favour had departed even then;
but he still retained,
in his narrower life at Barbizon,
a certain stamp of conscious importance,
hearty,
friendly,
filling the room,
the occupant of several chairs;
nor had he yet ceased his losing battle,
still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy,
still waiting the return of fortune.

But these days also were too good
to last;
and the former favourite of two sovereigns fled,
if I heard the truth,
by night.

There was a time when he was counted a great man,
and Millet but a dauber;
behold,
how the whirligig of time brings in his revenges!


to pity Millet is a piece of arrogance;
if life be hard
for such resolute and pious spirits,
it is harder still
for us,
had we the wit
to understand it;
but we may pity his unhappier rival,
who,

for no apparent merit,
was raised
to opulence and momentary fame,
and,
through no apparent fault was suffered step by step
to sink again
to nothing.

No misfortune can exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost progress,
even bravely supported as it was;
but
to those also who were taken early from the easel,
a regret is due.

From all the young men of this period,
one stood out by the vigour of his promise;
he was in the age of fermentation,
enamoured of eccentricities.

"Il faut faire de la peinture nouvelle," was his watchword;
but if time and experience had continued his education,
if he had been granted health
to return from these excursions
to the steady and the central,
I must believe that the name of Hills had become famous.Siron's inn,
that excellent artists' barrack,
was managed upon easy principles.

At any hour of the night,
when you returned from wandering in the forest,
you went
to the billiard-room and helped yourself
to liquors,
or descended
to the cellar and returned laden
with beer or wine.

The Sirons were all locked in slumber;
there was none
to check your inroads;
only at the week's end a computation was made,
the gross sum was divided,
and a varying share set down
to every lodger's name under the rubric:

ESTRATS.

Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied;
and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion
to the easiness of your disposition.

At any hour of the morning,
again,
you could get your coffee or cold milk,
and set forth in
to the forest.

The doves had perhaps wakened you,
fluttering in
to your chamber;
and on the threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest.

Close by were the great aisles,
the mossy boulders,
the interminable field of forest shadow.

There you were free
to dream and wander.

And at noon,
and again at six o'clock,
a good meal awaited you on Siron's table.

The whole of your accommodation,
set aside that varying item of the ESTRALS,
cost you five francs a day;
your bill was never offered you until you asked it;
and if you were out of luck's way,
you might depart
for where you pleased and leave it pending.

IV
Theoretically,
the house was open
to all corners;
practically,
it was a kind of club.

The guests protected themselves,
and,
in so doing,
they protected Siron.

Formal manners being laid aside,
essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted;
the new arrival had
to feel the pulse of the society;
and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished.

A man might be as plain,
as dull,
as slovenly,
as free of speech as he desired;
but
to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies.

I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon;
it would be difficult
to say in words what they had done,
but they deserved their fate.

They had shown themselves unworthy
to enjoy these corporate freedoms;
they had pushed themselves;
they had "made their head";
they wanted tact
to appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette.

And once they were condemned,
the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty;
after one evening
with the formidable Bodmer,
the Baily of our commonwealth,
the erring stranger was beheld no more;
he rose exceeding early the next day,
and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture.

These sentences of banishment were never,
in my knowledge,
delivered against an artist;
such would,
I believe,
have been illegal;
but the odd and pleasant fact is this,
that they were never needed.

Painters,
sculptors,
writers,
singers,
I have seen all of these in Barbizon;
and some were sulky,
and some blatant and inane;
but one and all entered at once in
to the spirit of the association.

This singular society is purely French,
a creature of French virtues,
and possibly of French defects.

It cannot be imitated by the English.

The roughness,
the impatience,
the more obvious selfishness,
and even the more ardent friendships of the Anglo-Saxon,
speedily dismember such a commonwealth.

But this random gathering of young French painters,

with neither apparatus nor parade of government,
yet kept the life of the place upon a certain footing,
insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the docile,
and by caustic speech enforced their edicts against the unwelcome.


to think of it is
to wonder the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.

This inbred civility -
to use the word in its completest meaning - this natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties,
seems all that is required
to make a governable nation and a just and prosperous country.Our society,
thus purged and guarded,
was full of high spirits,
of laughter,
and of the initiative of youth.

The few elder men who joined us were still young at heart,
and took the key from their companions.

We returned from long stations in the fortifying air,
our blood renewed by the sunshine,
our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest;
the Babel of loud voices sounded good;
we fell
to eat and play like the natural man;
and in the high inn chamber,
panelled
with indifferent pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air,
the talk and laughter sounded far in
to the night.

It was a good place and a good life
for any naturally- minded youth;
better yet
for the student of painting,
and perhaps best of all
for the student of letters.

He,
too,
was saturated in this atmosphere of style;
he was shut out from the disturbing currents of the world,
he might forget that there existed other and more pressing interests than that of art.

But,
in such a place,
it was hardly possible
to write;
he could not drug his conscience,
like the painter,
by the production of listless studies;
he saw himself idle among many who were apparently,
and some who were really,
employed;
and what
with the impulse of increasing health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes,
he became tormented
with the desire
to work.

He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions,
hearty meals,
long,
sweltering walks,
mirth among companions;
and still floating like music through his brain,
foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud
to have conceived,
headless epics,
glorious torsos of dramas,
and words that were alive
with import.

So in youth,
like Moses from the mountain,
we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter.

They are dreams and unsubstantial;
visions of style that repose upon no base of human meaning;
the last heart- throbs of that excited amateur who has
to die in all of us before the artist can be born.

But they come
to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison.

We were all artists;
almost all in the age of illusion,
cultivating an imaginary genius,
and walking
to the strains of some deceiving Ariel;
small wonder,
indeed,
if we were happy!

But art,
of whatever nature,
is a kind mistress;
and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness,
others succeed,
graver and more substantial;
the symptoms change,
the amiable malady endures;
and still,
at an equal distance,
the House Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

V
Gretz lies out of the forest,
down by the bright river.

It boasts a mill,
an ancient church,
a castle,
and a bridge of many sterlings.

And the bridge is a piece of public property;
anonymously famous;
beaming on the incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions.

I have seen it in the Salon;
I have seen it in the Academy;
I have seen it in the last French Exposition,
excellently done by Bloomer;
in a black-and-white by Mr. A.

Henley,
it once adorned this essay in the pages of the MAGAZINE OF ART.

Long-suffering bridge!

And if you visit Gretz to-morrow,
you shall find another generation,
camped at the bottom of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas,
and doggedly painting it again.The bridge taken
for granted,
Gretz is a less inspiring place than Barbizon.

I give it the palm over Cernay.

There is something ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay,

with the inn tables standing in one corner,
as though the stage were set
for rustic opera,
and in the early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers.

It is vastly different
to awake in Gretz,

to go down the green inn- garden,

to find the river streaming through the bridge,
and
to see the dawn begin across the poplared level.

The meals are laid in the cool arbour,
under fluttering leaves.

The splash of oars and bathers,
the bathing costumes out
to dry,
the trim canoes beside the jetty,
tell of a society that has an eye
to pleasure.

There is "something
to do" at Gretz.

Perhaps,

for that very reason,
I can recall no such enduring ardours,
no such glories of exhilaration,
as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.

This "something
to do" is a great enemy
to joy;
it is a way out of it;
you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment,
and behold them gone!

But Gretz is a merry place after its kind:

pretty
to see,
merry
to inhabit.

The course of its pellucid river,
whether up or down,
is full of gentle attractions
for the navigator:

islanded reed-mazes where,
in autumn,
the red berries cluster;
the mirrored and inverted images of trees,
lilies,
and mills,
and the foam and thunder of weirs.

And of all noble sweeps of roadway,
none is nobler,
on a windy dusk,
than the highroad
to Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.But even Gretz is changed.

The old inn,
long shored and trussed and buttressed,
fell at length under the mere weight of years,
and the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests.

They,
indeed,
recall the ancient wooden stair;
they recall the rainy evening,
the wide hearth,
the blaze of the twig fire,
and the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.

But the material fabric is now dust;
soon,

with the last of its inhabitants,
its very memory shall follow;
and they,
in their turn,
shall suffer the same law,
and,
both in name and lineament,
vanish from the world of men.

"
for remembrance of the old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it,
let me tell one story.

When the tide of invasion swept over France,
two foreign painters were left stranded and penniless in Gretz;
and there,
until the war was over,
the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.

It was difficult
to obtain supplies;
but the two waifs were still welcome
to the best,
sat down daily
with the family
to table,
and at the due intervals were supplied
with clean napkins,
which they scrupled
to employ.

Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.

But they stood firm;
eat they must,
but having no money they would soil no napkins.

VI
Nemours and Moret,

for all they are so picturesque,
have been little visited by painters.

They are,
indeed,
too populous;
they have manners of their own,
and might resist the drastic process of colonisation.

Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected,
I never knew it inhabited but once,
when Will H.

Low installed himself there
with a barrel of PIQUETTE,
and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the weir,
in sight of the green country and
to the music of the falling water.

It was a most airy,
quaint,
and pleasant place of residence,
just too rustic
to be stagey;
and from my memories of the place in general,
and that garden trellis in particular - at morning,
visited by birds,
or at night,
when the dew fell and the stars were of the party - I am inclined
to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny.

Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things,
and lies dustily slumbering in the plain - the cemetery of itself.

The great road remains
to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage bells;
and,
like memorial tablets,
there still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former generation,
dead or decorated long ago.

In my time,
one man only,
greatly daring,
dwelt there.

From time
to time he would walk over
to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon,
and after some communication
with flesh and blood return
to his austere hermitage.

But even he,
when I last revisited the forest,
had come
to Barbizon
for good,
and closed the roll of Chaillyites.

It may revive - but I much doubt it.

Acheres and Recloses still wait a pioneer;
Bourron is out of the question,
being merely Gretz over again,
without the river,
the bridge,
or the beauty;
and of all the possible places on the western side,
Marlotte alone remains
to be discussed.

I scarcely know Marlotte,
and,
very likely
for that reason,
am not much in love
with it.

It seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet.

The inn of Mother Antonie is unattractive;
and its more reputable rival,
though comfortable enough,
is commonplace.

Marlotte has a name;
it is famous;
if I were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

VII
These are the words of an old stager;
and though time is a good conservative in forest places,
much may be untrue to-day.

Many of us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on,
but yet left a portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods.

I would not dig
for these reliquiae;
they are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich the finder;
and yet there may lie,
interred below great oaks or scattered along forest paths,
stores of youth's dynamite and dear remembrances.

And as one generation passes on and renovates the field of tillage
for the next,
I entertain a fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth in
to the forest they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their predecessors,
and,
like those "unheard melodies" that are the sweetest of all,
the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field of trees.

Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer farther,
those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves,
surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions?

We are not content
to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight;
we would leave,
if but in gratitude,
a pillar and a legend.One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this memorable forest,
rifle its sweets,
pack themselves
with vital memories,
and when the theft is consummated depart again in
to life richer,
but poorer also.

The forest,
indeed,
they have possessed,
from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly,
and they will return
to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams,
and use it
for ever in their books and pictures.

Yet when they made their packets,
and put up their notes and sketches,
something,
it should seem,
had been forgotten.

A projection of themselves shall appear
to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness,
a natural child of fancy,
begotten and forgotten unawares.

Over the whole field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like indefatigable bagmen;
but the imps of Fontainebleau,
as of all beloved spots,
are very long of life,
and memory is piously unwilling
to forget their orphanage.

If anywhere about that wood you meet my airy bantling,
greet him
with tenderness.

He was a pleasant lad,
though now abandoned.

And when it comes
to your own turn
to quit the forest,
may you leave behind you such another;
no Antony or Werther,
let us hope,
no tearful whipster,
but,
as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure,
the child of happy hours.No art,
it may be said,
was ever perfect,
and not many noble,
that has not been mirthfully conceived.And no man,
it may be added,
was ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross
to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment.

Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste
to Fontainebleau,
and once there let him address himself
to the spirit of the place;
he will learn more from exercise than from studies,
although both are necessary;
and if he can get in
to his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far
to undo the evil of his sketches.

A spirit once well strung up
to the concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare
to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.

The incommunicable thrill of things,
that is the tuning-fork by which we test the flatness of our art.

Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns,
and still spurs up
to further effort and new failure.

Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid works;
and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be apt
to love the literal in our productions.

In all sciences and senses the letter kills;
and to-day,
when cackling human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio pictures,
it is a lesson most useful
to be learnt.

Let the young painter go
to Fontainebleau,
and while he stupefies himself
with studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade,
let him walk in the great air,
and be a servant of mirth,
and not pick and botanise,
but wait upon the moods of nature.

So he will learn - or learn not
to forget - the poetry of life and earth,
which,
when he has acquired his track,
will save him from joyless reproduction.[1882.]
CHAPTER IV - EPILOGUE
TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE"
THE country where they journeyed,
that green,
breezy valley of the Loing,
is one very attractive
to cheerful and solitary people.

The weather was superb;
all night it thundered and lightened,
and the rain fell in sheets;
by day,
the heavens were cloudless,
the sun fervent,
the air vigorous and pure.

They walked separate:

the Cigarette plodding behind
with some philosophy,
the lean Arethusa posting on ahead.

Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the way;
each had perhaps time
to tire of them before he met his comrade at the designated inn;
and the pleasures of society and solitude combined
to fill the day.

The Arethusa carried in his knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans,
and employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.

In this path,
he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang,
Mr. Dobson,
Mr. Henley,
and all contemporary roundeleers;
but
for good reasons,
he will be the last
to publish the result.

The Cigarette walked burthened
with a volume of Michelet.

And both these books,
it will be seen,
played a part in the subsequent adventure.The Arethusa was unwisely dressed.

He is no precisian in attire;
but by all accounts,
he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp;
having set forth indeed,
upon a moment's notice,
from the most unfashionable spot in Europe,
Barbizon.

On his head he wore a smoking-cap of Indian work,
the gold lace pitifully frayed and tarnished.

A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue,
which the satirical called black;
a light tweed coat made by a good English tailor;
ready-made cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters completed his array.

In person,
he is exceptionally lean;
and his face is not,
like those of happier mortals,
a certificate.


for years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion;
the police everywhere,
but in his native city,
looked askance upon him;
and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied admittance
to the casino of Monte Carlo.

If you will imagine him,
dressed as above,
stooping under his knapsack,
walking nearly five miles an hour
with the folds of the ready-made trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks,
and still looking eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit - the figure,
when realised,
is far from reassuring.

When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley)
to his exile at Roussillon,
I wonder if he had not something of the same appearance.

Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt,

for he too must have tinkered verses as he walked,

with more success than his successor.

And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather,
the same nights of uproar,
men in armour rolling and resounding down the stairs of heaven,
the rain hissing on the village streets,
the wild bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long in
to the bare inn- chamber - the same sweet return of day,
the same unfathomable blue of noon,
the same high-coloured,
halcyon eves - and above all,
if he had anything like as good a comrade,
anything like as keen a relish
for what he saw,
and what he ate,
and the rivers that he bathed in,
and the rubbish that he wrote,
I would exchange estates to-day
with the poor exile,
and count myself a gainer.But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys,

for which the Arethusa was
to pay dear:

both were gone upon in days of incomplete security.

It was not long after the Franco- Prussian war.

Swiftly as men forget,
that country-side was still alive
with tales of uhlans,
and outlying sentries,
and hairbreadth 'scapes from the ignominious cord,
and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and invaded.

A year,
at the most two years later,
you might have tramped all that country over and not heard one anecdote.

And a year or two later,
you would - if you were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript array - have gone your rounds in greater safety;

for along
with more interesting matter,
the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men's imaginations.
for all that,
our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he was conscious of arousing wonder.

On the road between that place and Chatillon-sur-Loing,
however,
he encountered a rural postman;
they fell together in talk,
and spoke of a variety of subjects;
but through one and all,
the postman was still visibly preoccupied,
and his eyes were faithful
to the Arethusa's knapsack.

At last,

with mysterious roguishness,
he inquired what it contained,
and on being answered,
shook his head
with kindly incredulity.

"NON," said he,
"NON,
VOUS AVEZ DES PORTRAITS."

And then
with a languishing appeal,
"VOYONS,
show me the portraits!" It was some little while before the Arethusa,

with a shout of laughter,
recognised his drift.

By portraits he meant indecent photographs;
and in the Arethusa,
an austere and rising author,
he thought
to have identified a pornographic colporteur.

When countryfolk in France have made up their minds as
to a person's calling,
argument is fruitless.

Along all the rest of the way,
the postman piped and fluted meltingly
to get a sight of the collection;
now he would upbraid,
now he would reason - "VOYONS,
I will tell nobody";
then he tried corruption,
and insisted on paying
for a glass of wine;
and,
at last when their ways separated - "NON," said he,
"CE N'EST PAS BIEN DE VOTRE PART.

O NON,
CE N'EST PAS BIEN."

And shaking his head
with quite a sentimental sense of injury,
he departed unrefreshed.On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at Chatillon-sur-Loing,
I have not space
to dwell;
another Chatillon,
of grislier memory,
looms too near at hand.

But the next day,
in a certain hamlet called La Jussiere,
he stopped
to drink a glass of syrup in a very poor,
bare drinking shop.

The hostess,
a comely woman,
suckling a child,
examined the traveller
with kindly and pitying eyes.

"You are not of this department?"

she asked.

The Arethusa told her he was English.

"Ah!" she said,
surprised.

"We have no English.

We have many Italians,
however,
and they do very well;
they do not complain of the people of hereabouts.

An Englishman may do very well also;
it will be something new."

Here was a dark saying,
over which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his grenadine;
but when he rose and asked what was
to pay,
the light came upon him in a flash.

"O,
POUR VOUS," replied the landlady,
"a halfpenny!" POUR VOUS?

By heaven,
she took him
for a beggar!

He paid his halfpenny,
feeling that it were ungracious
to correct her.

But when he was forth again upon the road,
he became vexed in spirit.

The conscience is no gentleman,
he is a rabbinical fellow;
and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.That night the travellers slept in Gien;
the next day they passed the river and set forth (severally,
as their custom was) on a short stage through the green plain upon the Berry side,

to Chatillon- sur-Loire.

It was the first day of the shooting;
and the air rang
with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen.

Overhead the birds were in consternation,
wheeling in clouds,
settling and re-arising.

And yet
with all this bustle on either hand,
the road itself lay solitary.

The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone,
and I remember he laid down very exactly all he was
to do at Chatillon:

how he was
to enjoy a cold plunge,

to change his shirt,
and
to await the Cigarette's arrival,
in sublime inaction,
by the margin of the Loire.

Fired by these ideas,
he pushed the more rapidly forward,
and came,
early in the afternoon and in a breathing heat,

to the entering-in of that ill-fated town.

Childe Roland
to the dark tower came.A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path."

MONSIEUR EST VOYAGEUR?"

he asked.And the Arethusa,
strong in his innocence,
forgetful of his vile attire,
replied - I had almost said
with gaiety:

"So it would appear."


"His papers are in order?"

said the gendarme.

And when the Arethusa,

with a slight change of voice,
admitted he had none,
he was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom,
stripped
to the shirt and trousers,
but still copiously perspiring;
and when he turned upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance,
that was (like Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared
for grief.

Here was a stupid man,
sleepy
with the heat and fretful at the interruption,
whom neither appeal nor argument could reach.THE COMMISSARY.

You have no papers?
THE ARETHUSA.

Not here.THE COMMISSARY.

Why?
THE ARETHUSA.

I have left them behind in my valise.THE COMMISSARY.

You know,
however,
that it is forbidden
to circulate without papers?
THE ARETHUSA.

Pardon me:

I am convinced of the contrary.

I am here on my rights as an English subject by international treaty.THE COMMISSARY (
WITH SCORN).

You call yourself an Englishman?
THE ARETHUSA.

I do.THE COMMISSARY.

Humph.

- What is your trade?
THE ARETHUSA.

I am a Scotch advocate.THE COMMISSARY (
WITH SINGULAR ANNOYANCE).

A Scotch advocate!

Do you then pretend
to support yourself by that in this department?
The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension.

The Commissary had scored a point.THE COMMISSARY.

Why,
then,
do you travel?
THE ARETHUSA.

I travel
for pleasure.THE COMMISSARY (POINTING
TO THE KNAPSACK,
AND
WITH SUBLIME INCREDULITY).

AVEC CA?

VOYEZ-VOUS,
JE SUIS UN HOMME INTELLIGENT!

(
with that?

Look here,
I am a person of intelligence!)
The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust,
the Commissary relished his triumph
for a while,
and then demanded (like the postman,
but
with what different expectations!)
to see the contents of the knapsack.

And here the Arethusa,
not yet sufficiently awake
to his position,
fell in
to a grave mistake.

There was little or no furniture in the room except the Commissary's chair and table;
and
to facilitate matters,
the Arethusa (
with all the innocence on earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed.

The Commissary fairly bounded from his seat;
his face and neck flushed past purple,
almost in
to blue;
and he screamed
to lay the desecrating object on the floor.The knapsack proved
to contain a change of shirts,
of shoes,
of socks,
and of linen trousers,
a small dressing-case,
a piece of soap in one of the shoes,
two volumes of the COLLECTION JANNET lettered POESIES DE CHARLES D'ORLEANS,
a map,
and a version book containing divers notes in prose and the remarkable English roundels of the voyager,
still
to this day unpublished:

the Commissary of Chatillon is the only living man who has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles.

He turned the assortment over
with a contumelious finger;
it was plain from his daintiness that he regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of infection.

Still there was nothing suspicious about the map,
nothing really criminal except the roundels;
as
for Charles of Orleans,

to the ignorant mind of the prisoner,
he seemed as good as a certificate;
and it was supposed the farce was nearly over.The inquisitor resumed his seat.THE COMMISSARY (AFTER A PAUSE).

EH BIEN,
JE VAIS VOUS DIRE CE QUE VOUS ETES.

VOUS ETES ALLEMAND ET VOUS VENEZ CHANTER A LA FOIRE.

(Well,
then,
I will tell you what you are.

You are a German and have come
to sing at the fair.)
THE ARETHUSA.

Would you like
to hear me sing?

I believe I could convince you of the contrary.THE COMMISSARY.

PAS DE PLAISANTERIE,
MONSIEUR!
THE ARETHUSA.

Well,
sir,
oblige me at least by looking at this book.

Here,
I open it
with my eyes shut.

Read one of these songs - read this one - and tell me,
you who are a man of intelligence,
if it would be possible
to sing it at a fair?
THE COMMISSARY (CRITICALLY).

MAIS OUI.

TRES BIEN.THE ARETHUSA.

COMMENT,
MONSIEUR!

What!

But do you not observe it is antique.

It is difficult
to understand,
even
for you and me;
but
for the audience at a fair,
it would be meaningless.THE COMMISSARY (TAKING A PEN).

ENFIN,
IL FAUI EN FINIR.

What is your name?
THE ARETHUSA (SPEAKING
WITH THE SWALLOWING VIVACITY OF THE ENGLISH).

Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n.THE COMMISSARY (AGHAST).

HE!

QUOI?
THE ARETHUSA (PERCEIVING AND IMPROVING HIS ADVANTAGE).

Rob'rt- Lou's-Stev'ns'n.THE COMMISSARY (AFTER SEVERAL CONFLICTS
WITH HIS PEN).

EH BIEN,
IL FAUT SE PASSER DU NOM.

CA NE S'ECRIT PAS.

(Well,
we must do without the name:

it is unspellable.)
The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation,
in which I have been chiefly careful
to preserve the plums of the Commissary;
but the remainder of the scene,
perhaps because of his rising anger,
has left but little definite in the memory of the Arethusa.

The Commissary was not,
I think,
a practised literary man;
no sooner,
at least,
had he taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the PROCES-VERBAL,
than he became distinctly more uncivil and began
to show a predilection
for that simplest of all forms of repartee:

"You lie!" Several times the Arethusa let it pass,
and then suddenly flared up,
refused
to accept more insults or
to answer further questions,
defied the Commissary
to do his worst,
and promised him,
if he did,
that he should bitterly repent it.

Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first,
instead of beginning
with a sense of entertainment and then going on
to argue,
the thing might have turned otherwise;

for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered.

But it was too late;
he had been challenged the PROCES-VERBAL was begun;
and he again squared his elbows over his writing,
and the Arethusa was led forth a prisoner.A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.

Thither was our unfortunate conducted,
and there he was bidden
to empty forth the contents of his pockets.

A handkerchief,
a pen,
a pencil,
a pipe and tobacco,
matches,
and some ten francs of change:

that was all.

Not a file,
not a cipher,
not a scrap of writing whether
to identify or
to condemn.

The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution."

I regret," he said,
"that I arrested you,

for I see that you are no VOYOU."

And he promised him every indulgence.The Arethusa,
thus encouraged,
asked
for his pipe.

That he was told was impossible,
but if he chewed,
he might have some tobacco.

He did not chew,
however,
and asked instead
to have his handkerchief."

NON," said the gendarme.

"NOUS AVONS EU DES HISTOIRES DE GENS QUI SE SONT PENDUS."

(No,
we have had histories of people who hanged themselves.)
"What," cried the Arethusa.

"And is it
for that you refuse me my handkerchief?

But see how much more easily I could hang myself in my trousers!"
The man was struck by the novelty of the idea;
but he stuck
to his colours,
and only continued
to repeat vague offers of service."

At least," said the Arethusa,
"be sure that you arrest my comrade;
he will follow me ere long on the same road,
and you can tell him by the sack upon his shoulders."


This promised,
the prisoner was led round in
to the back court of the building,
a cellar door was opened,
he was motioned down the stair,
and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt
to suppose itself prepared
for any mortal accident.

Prison,
among other ills,
was one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa.

Even as he went down the stairs,
he was telling himself that here was a famous occasion
for a roundel,
and that like the committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier,
he too would make his prison musical.

I will tell the truth at once:

the roundel was never written,
or it should be printed in this place,

to raise a smile.

Two reasons interfered:

the first moral,
the second physical.It is one of the curiosities of human nature,
that although all men are liars,
they can none of them bear
to be told so of themselves.


to get and take the lie
with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic;
and the Arethusa,
who had been surfeited upon that insult,
was blazing inwardly
with a white heat of smothered wrath.

But the physical had also its part.

The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground,
and it was only lighted by an unglazed,
narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of a green vine.

The walls were of naked masonry,
the floor of bare earth;
by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin,
a water- jug,
and a wooden bedstead
with a blue-gray cloak
for bedding.


to be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon,
the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise,
and plunged in
to the gloom and damp of this receptacle
for vagabonds,
struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood.

Now see in how small a matter a hardship may consist:

the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot,

with the very spade-marks,
I suppose,
of the labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack;
and what
with the poor twilight and the irregular surface,
walking was impossible.

The caged author resisted
for a good while;
but the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper;
and at length,

with such reluctance as you may fancy,
he was driven
to climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering.

There,
then,
he lay upon the verge of shivering,
plunged in semi-darkness,
wound in a garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague,
and (in a spirit far removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received.

These are not circumstances favourable
to the muse.Meantime (
to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic pace.

In those days of liberty and health he was the constant partner of the Arethusa,
and had ample opportunity
to share in that gentleman's disfavour
with the police.

Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of
with that disastrous comrade.

He was himself a man born
to float easily through life,
his face and manner artfully recommending him
to all.

There was but one suspicious circumstance he could not carry off,
and that was his companion.

He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main ;
nor the Franco-Belgian frontier;
nor the inn at La Fere;
last,
but not least,
he is pretty certain
to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire.At the town entry,
the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower;
and a moment later,
two persons,
in a high state of surprise,
were confronted in the Commissary's office.


for if the Cigarette was surprised
to be arrested,
the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and appointments of his captive.

Here was a man about whom there could be no mistake:

a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner,
in apple-pie order,
dressed not
with neatness merely but elegance,
ready
with his passport,
at a word,
and well supplied
with money:

a man the Commissary would have doffed his hat
to on chance upon the highway;
and this BEAU CAVALIER unblushingly claimed the Arethusa
for his comrade!

The conclusion of the interview was foregone;
of its humours,
I remember only one.

"Baronet?"

demanded the magistrate,
glancing up from the passport.

"ALORS,
MONSIEUR,
VOUS ETES LE FIRS D'UN BARON?"

And when the Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the interview) denied the soft impeachment,
"ALORS," from the Commissary,
"CE N'EST PAS VOTRE PASSEPORT!" But these were ineffectual thunders;
he never dreamed of laying hands upon the Cigarette;
presently he fell in
to a mood of unrestrained admiration,
gloating over the contents of the knapsack,
commanding our friend's tailor.

Ah,
what an honoured guest was the Commissary entertaining!

what suitable clothes he wore
for the warm weather!

what beautiful maps,
what an attractive work of history he carried in his knapsack!

You are
to understand there was now but one point of difference between them:

what was
to be done
with the Arethusa?

the Cigarette demanding his release,
the Commissary still claiming him as the dungeon's own.

Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed some years of his life in Egypt,
where he had made acquaintance
with two very bad things,
cholera morbus and pashas;
and in the eye of the Commissary,
as he fingered the volume of Michelet,
it seemed
to our traveller there was something Turkish.

I pass over this lightly;
it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding,
highly possible that the Commissary (charmed
with his visitor) supposed the attraction
to be mutual and took
for an act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a bribe.

And at any rate,
was there ever a bribe more singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history?

The work was promised him
for the morrow,
before our departure;
and presently after,
either because he had his price,
or
to show that he was not the man
to be behind in friendly offices - "EH BIEN," he said,
"JE SUPPOSE QU'IL FAUT LAHER VOIRE CAMARADE."

And he tore up that feast of humour,
the unfinished PROCES-VERBAL.

Ah,
if he had only torn up instead the Arethusa's roundels!

There were many works burnt at Alexandria,
there are many treasured in the British Museum,
that I could better spare than the PROCES-VERBAL of Chatillon.

Poor bubuckled Commissary!

I begin
to be sorry that he never had his Michelet:

perceiving in him fine human traits,
a broad-based stupidity,
a gus
to in his magisterial functions,
a taste
for letters,
a ready admiration
for the admirable.

And if he did not admire the Arethusa,
he was not alone in that.
to the imprisoned one,
shivering under the public covering,
there came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.

He sprang
to his feet,
ready
to welcome a companion in calamity;
and instead of that,
the door was flung wide,
the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight,
and
with a magnificent gesture (being probably a student of the drama) - "VOUS ETES LIBRE!" he said.

None too soon
for the Arethusa.

I doubt if he had been half-an-hour imprisoned;
but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he carried) he should have been eight times longer;
and he passed forth
with ecstasy up the cellar stairs in
to the healing warmth of the afternoon sun;
and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a cow's in
to his nostril;
and he heard again (and could have laughed
for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum of life.And here it might be thought that my history ended;
but not so,
this was an act-drop and not the curtain.

Upon what followed in front of the barrack,
since there was a lady in the case,
I scruple
to expatiate.

The wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome woman,
and yet the Arethusa was not sorry
to be gone from her society.

Something of her image,
cool as a peach on that hot afternoon,
still lingers in his memory:

yet more of her conversation.

"You have there a very fine parlour," said the poor gentleman.

- "Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis),
"you are very well acquainted
with such parlours!" And you should have seen
with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before her!

I do not think he ever hated the Commissary;
but before that interview was at an end,
he hated Madame la Marechale.

His passion (as I am led
to understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye,
a pale cheek,
and a trembling utterance;
Madame meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador,
goading him
with barbed words and staring him coldly down.It was certainly good
to be away from this lady,
and better still
to sit down
to an excellent dinner in the inn.

Here,
too,
the despised travellers scraped acquaintance
with their next neighbour,
a gentleman of these parts,
returned from the day's sport,
who had the good taste
to find pleasure in their society.

The dinner at an end,
the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in the cafe.The cafe was crowded
with sportsmen conclamantly explaining
to each other and the world the smallness of their bags.

About the centre of the room,
the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat
with their new acquaintance;
a trio very well pleased,

for the travellers (after their late experience) were greedy of consideration,
and their sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners.

Suddenly the glass door flew open
with a crash;
the Marechal-des-logis appeared in the interval,
gorgeously belted and befrogged,
entered without salutation,
strode up the room
with a clang of spurs and weapons,
and disappeared through a door at the far end.

Close at his heels followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon,
imitating,

with a nice shade of difference,
the imperial bearing of his chief;
only,
as he passed,
he struck lightly
with his open hand on the shoulder of his late captive,
and
with that ringing,
dramatic utterance of which he had the secret - "SUIVEZ!" said he.The arrest of the members,
the oath of the Tennis Court,
the signing of the declaration of independence,
Mark Antony's oration,
all the brave scenes of history,
I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in the cafe at Chatillon.

Terror breathed upon the assembly.

A moment later,
when the Arethusa had followed his recaptors in
to the farther part of the house,
the Cigarette found himself alone
with his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables,
all the lusty sportsmen huddled in
to corners,
all their clamorous voices hushed in whispering,
all their eyes shooting at him furtively as at a leper.And the Arethusa?

Well,
he had a long,
sometimes a trying,
interview in the back kitchen.

The Marechal-des-logis,
who was a very handsome man,
and I believe both intelligent and honest,
had no clear opinion on the case.

He thought the Commissary had done wrong,
but he did not wish
to get his subordinates in
to trouble;
and he proposed this,
that,
and the other,

to all of which the Arethusa (
with a growing sense of his position) demurred."

In short," suggested the Arethusa,
"you want
to wash your hands of further responsibility?

Well,
then,
let me go
to Paris."


The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch."

You may leave," said he,
"by the ten o'clock train
for Paris."


And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure in the dining-room at Siron's.


CHAPTER V - RANDOM MEMORIES
I.

- THE COAST OF FIFE
MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the first night at school;

to a boy of any enterprise,
I believe,
they are more often agreeably exciting.

Misery - or at least misery unrelieved - is confined
to another period,

to the days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of departure;
when the old life is running
to an end,
and the new life,

with its new interests,
not yet begun:

and
to the pain of an imminent parting,
there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence.

The area railings,
the beloved shop-window,
the smell of semi- suburban tanpits,
the song of the church bells upon a Sunday,
the thin,
high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field - what a sudden,
what an overpowering pathos breathes
to him from each familiar circumstance!

The assaults of sorrow come not from within,
as it seems
to him,
but from without.

I was proud and glad
to go
to school;
had I been let alone,
I could have borne up like any hero;
but there was around me,
in all my native town,
a conspiracy of lamentation:

"Poor little boy,
he is going away - unkind little boy,
he is going
to leave us";
so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went,

with yearning and reproach.

And at length,
one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn,
and at a place where it seems
to me,
looking back,
it must be always autumn and generally Sunday,
there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw - the long empty road,
the lines of the tall houses,
the church upon the hill,
the woody hillside garden - a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart died;
and seating myself on a door- step,
I shed tears of miserable sympathy.

A benevolent cat cumbered me the while
with consolations - we two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road:

two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper,
and gambolled
for his entertainment,
watching the effect it seemed,

with motherly eyes.
for the sake of the cat,
God bless her!

I confessed at home the story of my weakness;
and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey,
and the reader owes the present paper,

to a cat in the London Road.

It was judged,
if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway,
some change of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated;
my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of Scotland;
and it was decided he should take me along
with him around a portion of the shores of Fife;
my first professional tour,
my first journey in the complete character of man,
without the help of petticoats.The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious on the map,
occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and Tay.

It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the rest,
from the windows of my father's house) dying away in
to the distance and the easterly HAAR
with one smoky seaside town beyond another,
or in winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-tops.

It has no beauty
to recommend it,
being a low,
sea-salted,
wind-vexed promontory;
trees very rare,
except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of rivers;
the fields well cultivated,
I understand,
but not lovely
to the eye.

It is of the coast I speak:

the interior may be the garden of Eden.

History broods over that part of the world like the easterly HAAR.

Even on the map,
its long row of Gaelic place- names bear testimony
to an old and settled race.

Of these little towns,
posted along the shore as close as sedges,
each
with its bit of harbour,
its old weather-beaten church or public building,
its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish,
not one but has its legend,
quaint or tragic:

Dunfermline,
in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood- red wine;
somnolent Inverkeithing,
once the quarantine of Leith;
Aberdour,
hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm,
hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled";
Burntisland where,
when Paul Jones was off the coast,
the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tidemarks,
and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect;
Kinghorn,
where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland
to the English wars;
Kirkcaldy,
where the witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea;
Dysart,
famous - well famous at least
to me
for the Dutch ships that lay in its harbour,
painted like toys and
with pots of flowers and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows,
and
for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop,
smoking a long German pipe;
Wemyss (pronounce Weems)
with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone,
on his flight from Culloden,
passed a night of superstitious terrors;
Leven,
a bald,
quite modern place,
sacred
to summer visitors,
whence there has gone but yesterday the tall figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi,
my uncle Dr. Balfour,
who was still walking his hospital rounds,
while the troopers from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the streets of the imperial city,
and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the magazine,
and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps already fingering his last despatch;
and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet,
the town of Alexander Selkirk,
better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.

So on,
the list might be pursued (only
for private reasons,
which the reader will shortly have an opportunity
to guess) by St.

Monance,
and Pittenweem,
and the two Anstruthers,
and Cellardyke,
and Crail,
where Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister:

on
to the heel of the land,

to Fife Ness,
overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie,
itself overlooking but the breach or the quiescence of the deep - the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front,
and as night draws in,
the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand,
and the star of the May Island on the other,
and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St.

Abb's.

And but a little way round the corner of the land,
imminent itself above the sea,
stands the gem of the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland,
St.

Andrews,
where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants,
and
to this day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not hushed.Here it was that my first tour of inspection began,
early on a bleak easterly morning.

There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore,
I recollect,
and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes raise their voices
to be audible.

Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
that I always imagine St.

Andrews
to be an ineffectual seat of learning,
and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf
to linger in its drowsy classrooms and confound the utterance of the professor,
until teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion,
and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the open lecture.

But upon all this,
and the romance of St.

Andrews in general,
the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang;
who has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and
with his incommunicable humour,
and long ago in one of his best poems,

with grace,
and local truth,
and a note of unaffected pathos.

Mr. Lang knows all about the romance,
I say,
and the educational advantages,
but I doubt if he had turned his attention
to the harbour lights;
and it may be news even
to him,
that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable.

Hanging about
with the east wind humming in my teeth,
and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets,
I looked
for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage.

Eighty years ago,
I find my grandfather writing:

"It is the most painful thing that can occur
to me
to have a correspondence of this kind
with any of the keepers,
and when I come
to the Light House,
instead of having the satisfaction
to meet them
with approbation and welcome their Family,
it is distressing when one-is obliged
to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour."

This painful obligation has been hereditary in my race.

I have myself,
on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspection of Turnberry Point,
bent my brows upon the keeper on the question of storm-panes;
and felt a keen pang of self-reproach,
when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin
for his infant child;
and then regained my equanimity
with the thought that I had done the man a service,
and when the proper inspector came,
he would be readier
with his panes.

The human race is perhaps credited
with more duplicity than it deserves.

The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a business of the most transparent nature.

As soon as the boat grates on the shore,
and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats,
the very slouch of the fellows' shoulders tells their story,
and the engineer may begin at once
to assume his "angry countenance."

Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded;
and if the brass be not immaculate,
certainly all will be
to match - the reflectors scratched,
the spare lamp unready,
the storm-panes in the storehouse.

If a light is not rather more than middling good,
it will be radically bad.

Mediocrity (except in literature) appears
to be unattainable by man.

But of course the unfortunate of St.

Andrews was only an amateur,
he was not in the Service,
he had no uniform coat,
he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father;
but he had a painful interview
for all that,
and perspired extremely.From St.

Andrews,
we drove over Magus Muir.

My father had announced we were "
to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's DANCE OF DEATH;
but it was only a jingling cab that came
to the inn door,
such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of Edinburgh.

Beyond this disappointment,
I remember nothing of that drive.

It is a road I have often travelled,
and of not one of these journeys do I remember any single trait.

The fact has not been suffered
to encroach on the truth of the imagination.

I still see Magus Muir two hundred years ago;
a desert place,
quite uninclosed;
in the midst,
the primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop;
the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,
Burley Balfour,
pistol in hand,
among the first.

No scene of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind;
not because Balfour,
that questionable zealot,
was an ancestral cousin of my own;
not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter;
not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box,
thus clearly indicating his complicity
with Satan;
nor merely because,
as it was after all a crime of a fine religious flavour,
it figured in Sunday books and afforded a grateful relief from MINISTERING CHILDREN or the MEMOIRS OF MRS. KATHATINE WINSLOWE.

The figure that always fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet,
sitting in the saddle
with his cloak about his mouth,
and through all that long,
bungling,
vociferous hurly-burly,
revolving privately a case of conscience.

He would take no hand in the deed,
because he had a private spite against the victim,
and "that action" must be sullied
with no suggestion of a worldly motive;
on the other hand,
"that action," in itself,
was highly justified,
he had cast in his lot
with "the actors," and he must stay there,
inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility.

"You are a gentleman - you will protect me!" cried the wounded old man,
crawling towards him.

"I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston,
and put his cloak about his mouth.

It is an old temptation
with me,

to pluck away that cloak and see the face -
to open that bosom and
to read the heart.


with incomplete romances about Hackston,
the drawers of my youth were lumbered.

I read him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on.

I even dug among the Wodrow manuscripts,
sitting shame-faced in the very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before,
and keenly conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted students.

All was vain:

that he had passed a riotous nonage,
that he was a zealot,
that he twice displayed (compared
with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military common sense,
and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir,
so much and no more could I make out.

But whenever I cast my eyes backward,
it is
to see him like a landmark on the plains of history,
sitting
with his cloak about his mouth,
inscrutable.

How small a thing creates an immortality!

I do not think he can have been a man entirely commonplace;
but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth,
or had the witnesses forgot
to chronicle the action,
he would not thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood,
and to-day he would scarce delay me
for a paragraph.

An incident,
at once romantic and dramatic,
which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture
for the eye,
how little do we realise its perdurable power!

Perhaps no one does so but the author,
just as none but he appreciates the influence of jingling words;
so that he looks on upon life,

with something of a covert smile,
seeing people led by what they fancy
to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed artifices of his own trade,
or roused by what they take
to be principles and are really picturesque effects.

In a pleasant book about a school- class club,
Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote.

A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some Academy boys - among them,
Colonel Fergusson himself,
Fleeming Jenkin,
and Andrew Wilson,
the Christian Buddhist and author of THE ABODE OF SNOW.

Before these learned pundits,
one member laid the following ingenious problem:

"What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?"

"I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow;
but
for me the tale itself has a bi-product,
and stands as a type of much that is most human.


for this inquirer who conceived himself
to burn
with a zeal entirely chemical,
was really immersed in a design of a quite different nature;
unconsciously
to his own recently breeched intelligence,
he was engaged in literature.

Putting,
pound,
potassium,
pot,
porter;
initial p,
mediant t - that was his idea,
poor little boy!

So
with politics and that which excites men in the present,
so
with history and that which rouses them in the past:

there lie at the root of what appears,
most serious unsuspected elements.The triple town of Anstruther Wester,
Anstruther Easter,
and Cellardyke,
all three Royal Burghs - or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished suburb,
I forget which - lies continuously along the seaside,
and boasts of either two or three separate parish churches,
and either two or three separate harbours.

These ambiguities are painful;
but the fact is (although it argue me uncultured),
I am but poorly posted upon Cellardyke.

My business lay in the two Anstruthers.

A tricklet of a stream divides them,
spanned by a bridge;
and over the bridge at the time of my knowledge,
the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west.

This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric;
during his fond tenancy,
he had illustrated the outer walls,
as high (if I remember rightly) as the roof,

with elaborate patterns and pictures,
and snatches of verse in the vein of EXEGI MONUMENTUM;
shells and pebbles,
artfully contrasted and conjoined,
had been his medium;
and I like
to think of him standing back upon the bridge,
when all was finished,
drinking in the general effect and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century.

Mr. Thomson,
the "curat" of Anstruther Easter,
was a man highly obnoxious
to the devout:

in the first place,
because he was a "curat";
in the second place,
because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life;
and in the third place,
because he was generally suspected of dealings
with the Enemy of Man.

These three disqualifications,
in the popular literature of the time,
go hand in hand;
but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself,
and in the proper phrase,
a manifest judgment.

He had been at a friend's house in Anstruther Wester,
where (and elsewhere,
I suspect) he had partaken of the bottle;
indeed,

to put the thing in our cold modern way,
the reverend gentleman was on the brink of DELIRIUM TREMENS.

It was a dark night,
it seems;
a little lassie came carrying a lantern
to fetch the curate home;
and away they went down the street of Anstruther Wester,
the lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand,
the barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumbering houses,
and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (
to all appearance) easy in his mind.

The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear and looked behind him;
the child,
already shaken by the minister's strange behaviour,
started also;
in so doing,
she would jerk the lantern;
and
for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded.

Then it was that
to the unhinged toper and the twittering child,
a huge bulk of blackness seemed
to sweep down,

to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge,
and
to vanish on the farther side in the general darkness of the night.

"Plainly the devil come
for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child.

What Mr. Thomson thought himself,
we have no ground of knowledge;
but he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a man praying.

On the rest of the journey
to the manse,
history is silent;
but when they came
to the door,
the poor caitiff,
taking the lantern from the child,
looked upon her
with so lost a countenance that her little courage died within her,
and she fled home screaming
to her parents.

Not a soul would venture out;
all that night,
the minister dwelt alone
with his terrors in the manse;
and when the day dawned,
and men made bold
to go about the streets,
they found the devil had come indeed
for Mr. Thomson.This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful association.

It was early in the morning,
about a century before the days of Mr. Thomson,
that his predecessor was called out of bed
to welcome a Grandee of Spain,
the Duke of Medina Sidonia,
just landed in the harbour underneath.

But sure there was never seen a more decayed grandee;
sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile.

Half-way between Orkney and Shetland,
there lies a certain isle;
on the one hand the Atlantic,
on the other the North Sea,
bombard its pillared cliffs;
sore-eyed,
short- living,
inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts;
in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand
for monuments;
there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot.

BELLE-ISLE-EN-MER - Fair-Isle- at-Sea - that is a name that has always rung in my mind's ear like music;
but the only "Fair Isle" on which I ever set my foot,
was this unhomely,
rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.

Here,
when his ship was broken,
my lord Duke joyfully got ashore;
here
for long months he and certain of his men were harboured;
and it was from this durance that he landed at last
to be welcomed (as well as such a papist deserved,
no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther Easter;
and after the Fair Isle,
what a fine city must that have appeared!

and after the island diet,
what a hospitable spot the minister's table!

And yet he must have lived on friendly terms
with his outlandish hosts.


for
to this day there still survives a relic of the long winter evenings when the sailors of the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the Fair-Islanders,
the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene,
and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing their melancholy voices.

All the folk of the north isles are great artificers of knitting:

the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics in the Spanish manner.


to this day,
gloves and nightcaps,
innocently decorated,
may be seen
for sale in the Shetland warehouse at Edinburgh,
or on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's house;
and
to this day,
they tell the story of the Duke of Medina Sidonia's adventure.It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction
for "persons of quality."

When I landed there myself,
an elderly gentleman,
unshaved,
poorly attired,
his shoulders wrapped in a plaid,
was seen walking
to and fro,

with a book in his hand,
upon the beach.

He paid no heed
to our arrival,
which we thought a strange thing in itself;
but when one of the officers of the PHAROS,
passing narrowly by him,
observed his book
to be a Greek Testament,
our wonder and interest took a higher flight.

The catechist was cross- examined;
he said the gentleman had been put across some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner,
the only link between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world;
and that he held services and was doing "good."

So much came glibly enough;
but when pressed a little farther,
the catechist displayed embarrassment.

A singular diffidence appeared upon his face:

"They tell me," said he,
in low tones,
"that he's a lord."

And a lord he was;
a peer of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach
with his Greek Testament,
and his plaid about his shoulders,
set upon doing good,
as he understood it,
worthy man!

And his grandson,
a good-looking little boy,
much better dressed than the lordly evangelist,
and speaking
with a silken English accent very foreign
to the scene,
accompanied me
for a while in my exploration of the island.

I suppose this little fellow is now my lord,
and wonder how much he remembers of the Fair Isle.

Perhaps not much;

for he seemed
to accept very quietly his savage situation;
and under such guidance,
it is like that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.


CHAPTER VI - RANDOM MEMORIES
II.

- THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER
ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred
to the Muse;
she inspired (really
to a considerable extent) Tennant's vernacular poem ANST'ER FAIR;
and I have there waited upon her myself
with much devotion.

This was when I came as a young man
to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater.

What I gleaned,
I am sure I do not know;
but indeed I had already my own private determination
to be an author;
I loved the art of words and the appearances of life;
and TRAVELLERS,
and HEADERS,
and RUBBLE,
and POLISHED ASHLAR,
and PIERRES PERDUES,
and even the thrilling question of the STRING- COURSE,
interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties
for some possible romance or as words
to add
to my vocabulary.


to grow a little catholic is the compensation of years;
youth is one-eyed;
and in those days,
though I haunted the breakwater by day,
and even loved the place
for the sake of the sunshine,
the thrilling seaside air,
the wash of waves on the sea- face,
the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below,
and the musical chinking of the masons,
my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere,
and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty.

I lodged
with a certain Bailie Brown,
a carpenter by trade;
and there,
as soon as dinner was despatched,
in a chamber scented
with dry rose-leaves,
drew in my chair
to the table and proceeded
to pour forth literature,
at such a speed,
and
with such intimations of early death and immortality,
as I now look back upon
with wonder.

Then it was that I wrote VOCES FIDELIUM,
a series of dramatic monologues in verse;
then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting novel - like so many others,
never finished.

Late I sat in
to the night,
toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death,
toiling
to leave a memory behind me.

I feel moved
to thrust aside the curtain of the years,

to hail that poor feverish idiot,

to bid him go
to bed and clap VOCES FIDELIUM on the fire before he goes;
so clear does he appear before me,
sitting there between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late night;
so ridiculous a picture (
to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present!

But he was driven
to his bed at last without miraculous intervention;
and the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently youthful business.

The weather was then so warm that I must keep the windows open;
the night without was populous
with moths.

As the late darkness deepened,
my literary tapers beaconed forth more brightly;
thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers,

to gyrate
for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper.

Flesh and blood could not endure the spectacle;

to capture immortality was doubtless a noble enterprise,
but not
to capture it at such a cost of suffering;
and out would go the candles,
and off would I go
to bed in the darkness raging
to think that the blow might fall on the morrow,
and there was VOCES FIDELIUM still incomplete.

Well,
the moths are - all gone,
and VOCES FIDELIUM along
with them;
only the fool is still on hand and practises new follies.Only one thing in connection
with the harbour tempted me,
and that was the diving,
an experience I burned
to taste of.

But this was not
to be,
at least in Anstruther;
and the subject involves a change of scene
to the sub-arctic town of Wick.

You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness,
the land faintly swelling,
faintly falling,
not a tree,
not a hedgerow,
the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge,
the wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.

Only as you approached the coast was there anything
to stir the heart.

The plateau broke down
to the North Sea in formidable cliffs,
the tall out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about
with surf,
the coves were over- brimmed
with clamorous froth,
the sea-birds screamed,
the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's edge;
here and there,
small ancient castles toppled on the brim;
here and there,
it was possible
to dip in
to a dell of shelter,
where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm,
and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon sun,
and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent sea.

As
for Wick itself,
it is one of the meanest of man's towns,
and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays.

It lives
for herring,
and a strange sight it is
to see (of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers,
as when a city crowds
to a review - or,
as when bees have swarmed,
the ground is horrible
with lumps and clusters;
and a strange sight,
and a beautiful,

to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon,
the sea-line rough as a wood
with sails,
and ever and again and one after another,
a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk.

This mass of fishers,
this great fleet of boats,
is out of all proportion
to the town itself;
and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the outer Hebrides),
who come
for that season only,
and depart again,
if "the take" be poor,
leaving debts behind them.

In a bad year,
the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time;
fights are common,
riots often possible;
an apple knocked from a child's hand was once the signal
for something like a war;
and even when I was there,
a gunboat lay in the bay
to assist the authorities.


to contrary interests,
it should be observed,
the curse of Babel is here added;
the Lews men are Gaelic speakers.

Caithness has adopted English;
an odd circumstance,
if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by descent.

I remember seeing one of the strongest instances of this division:

a thing like a Punch-and- Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard;
from the hutch or proscenium - I know not what
to call it - an eldritch- looking preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some one of the name of POWL,
whom I at last divined
to be the apostle
to the Gentiles;
a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly listening;
and on the outskirts of the crowd,
some of the town's children (
to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely playing tigg.

The same descent,
the same country,
the same narrow sect of the same religion,
and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!
In
to the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished breakwater,
in its cage of open staging;
the travellers (like frames of churches) over-plumbing all;
and away at the extreme end,
the divers toiling unseen on the foundation.

On a platform of loose planks,
the assistants turned their air-mills;
a stone might be swinging between wind and water;
underneath the swell ran gaily;
and from time
to time,
a mailed dragon
with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.

Youth is a blessed season after all;
my stay at Wick was in the year of VOCES FIDELIUM and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's;
and already I did not care two straws
for literary glory.

Posthumous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere of roses;
and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made another boy of me.


to go down in the diving-dress,
that was my absorbing fancy;
and
with the countenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver,
Bob Bain by name,
I gratified the whim.It was gray,
harsh,
easterly weather,
the swell ran pretty high,
and out in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at last on the diver's platform,
twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my whole person swollen
with ply and ply of woollen underclothing.

One moment,
the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head;
the next,
I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet.

As that intolerable burthern was laid upon me,
I could have found it in my heart (only
for shame's sake)
to cry off from the whole enterprise.

But it was too late.

The attendants began
to turn the hurdy-gurdy,
and the air
to whistle through the tube;
some one screwed in the barred window of the vizor;
and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men;
standing there in their midst,
but quite divorced from intercourse:

a creature deaf and dumb,
pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his own.

Except that I could move and feel,
I was like a man fallen in a catalepsy.

But time was scarce given me
to realise my isolation;
the weights were hung upon my back and breast,
the signal rope was thrust in
to my unresisting hand;
and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the ladder,
I began ponderously
to descend.Some twenty rounds below the platform,
twilight fell.

Looking up,
I saw a low green heaven mottled
with vanishing bells of white;
looking around,
except
for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder,
nothing but a green gloaming,
somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.

Thirty rounds lower,
I stepped off on the PIERRES PERDUES of the foundation;
a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand,
and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement;
and looking in at the creature's window,
I beheld the face of Bain.

There we were,
hand
to hand and (when it pleased us) eye
to eye;
and either might have burst himself
with shouting,
and not a whisper come
to his companion's hearing.

Each,
in his own little world of air,
stood incommunicably separate.Bob had told me ere this a little tale,
a five minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea,
which at that moment possibly shot across my mind.

He was down
with another,
settling a stone of the sea-wall.

They had it well adjusted,
Bob gave the signal,
the scissors were slipped,
the stone set home;
and it was time
to turn
to something else.

But still his companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb,
or only raised himself
to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown
to the vocabulary of the diver.

There,
then,
these two stood
for awhile,
like the dead and the living;
till there flashed a fortunate thought in
to Bob's mind,
and he stooped,
peered through the window of that other world,
and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet
with streaming tears.

Ah!

the man was in pain!

And Bob,
glancing downward,
saw what was the trouble:

the block had been lowered on the foot of that unfortunate - he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen tons of rock.That two men should handle a stone so heavy,
even swinging in the scissors,
may appear strange
to the inexpert.

These must bear in mind the great density of the water of the sea,
and the surprising results of transplantation
to that medium.


to understand a little what these are,
and how a man's weight,
so far from being an encumbrance,
is the very ground of his agility,
was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.

The knowledge came upon me by degrees.

As I began
to go forward
with the hand of my estranged companion,
a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared
with the weedy uprights of the staging:

overhead,
a flat roof of green:

a little in front,
the sea-wall,
like an unfinished rampart.

And presently in our upward progress,
Bob motioned me
to leap upon a stone;
I looked
to see if he were possibly in earnest,
and he only signed
to me the more imperiously.

Now the block stood six feet high;
it would have been quite a leap
to me unencumbered;

with the breast and back weights,
and the twenty pounds upon each foot,
and the staggering load of the helmet,
the thing was out of reason.

I laughed aloud in my tomb;
and
to prove
to Bob how far he was astray,
I gave a little impulse from my toes.

Up I soared like a bird,
my companion soaring at my side.

As high as
to the stone,
and then higher,
I pursued my impotent and empty flight.

Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders,
my heels continued their ascent;
so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf,
and must be hauled in,
hand over hand,
as sailors haul in the slack of a sail,
and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.

Yet a little higher on the foundation,
and we began
to be affected by the bottom of the swell,
running there like a strong breeze of wind.

Or so I must suppose;
for,
safe in my cushion of air,
I was conscious of no impact;
only swayed idly like a weed,
and was now borne helplessly abroad,
and now swiftly - and yet
with dream-like gentleness - impelled against my guide.

So does a child's balloon divagate upon the currents of the air,
and touch,
and slide off again from every obstacle.

So must have ineffectually swung,
so resented their inefficiency,
those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades,
and uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus.There was something strangely exasperating,
as well as strangely wearying,
in these uncommanded evolutions.

It is bitter
to return
to infancy,

to be supported,
and directed,
and perpetually set upon your feet,
by the hand of some one else.

The air besides,
as it is supplied
to you by the busy millers on the platform,
closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing,
till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer.

And
for all these reasons-although I had a fine,
dizzy,
muddle-headed joy in my surroundings,
and longed,
and tried,
and always failed,

to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me,
swift as humming-birds - yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back
to the ladder and signed
to me
to mount.

And there was one more experience before me even then.

Of a sudden,
my ascending head passed in
to the trough of a swell.

Out of the green,
I shot at once in
to a glory of rosy,
almost of sanguine light - the multitudinous seas incarnadined,
the heaven above a vault of crimson.

And then the glory faded in
to the hard,
ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn,

with a low sky,
a gray sea,
and a whistling wind.Bob Bain had five shillings
for his trouble,
and I had done what I desired.

It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer:

of which,
however,
as a way of life,
I wish
to speak
with sympathy.

It takes a man in
to the open air;
it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides,
which is the richest form of idling;
it carries him
to wild islands;
it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea;
it supplies him
with dexterities
to exercise;
it makes demands upon his ingenuity;
it will go far
to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one)
for the miserable life of cities.

And when it has done so,
it carries him back and shuts him in an office!

From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat,
he passes
to the stool and desk;
and
with a memory full of ships,
and seas,
and perilous headlands,
and the shining pharos,
he must apply his long-sighted eyes
to the petty niceties of drawing,
or measure his inaccurate mind
with several pages of consecutive figures.

He is a wise youth,

to be sure,
who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls,
and
for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other.Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay.

But how much better it was
to hang in the cold wind upon the pier,

to go down
with Bob Bain among the roots of the staging,

to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and shouting orders - not always very wise - than
to be warm and dry,
and dull,
and dead-alive,
in the most comfortable office.

And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality.

It may have still,
but I misdoubt it much.

The old minister of Keiss would not preach,
in these degenerate times,

for an hour and a half upon the clock.

The gipsies must be gone from their cavern;
where you might see,
from the mouth,
the women tending their fire,
like Meg Merrilies,
and the men sleeping off their coarse potations;
and where,
in winter gales,
the surf would beleaguer them closely,
bursting in their very door.

A traveller to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among the moorlands,
and be told,
quite openly,
it marked a private still.

He would not indeed make that journey,

for there is now no Thurso coach.

And even if he could,
one little thing that happened
to me could never happen
to him,
or not
with the same trenchancy of contrast.We had been upon the road all evening;
the coach-top was crowded
with Lews fishers going home,
scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my ears;
and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very northern
to behold.

Latish at night,
though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude,
we came down upon the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth,
that grave of mariners;
on one hand,
the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward;
in front was the little bare,
white town of Castleton,
its streets full of blowing sand;
nothing beyond,
but the North Islands,
the great deep,
and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.

And here,
in the last imaginable place,
there sprang up young outlandish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech;
and I saw,
pursuing the coach
with its load of Hebridean fishers - as they had pursued VETTURINI up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grot
to under Virgil's tomb - two little dark-eyed,
white-toothed Italian vagabonds,
of twelve
to fourteen years of age,
one
with a hurdy- gurdy,
the other
with a cage of white mice.

The coach passed on,
and their small Italian chatter died in the distance;
and I was left
to marvel how they had wandered in
to that country,
and how they fared in it,
and what they thought of it,
and when (if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives,
and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.Upon any American,
the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost.


for as far back as he goes in his own land,
he will find some alien camping there;
the Cornish miner,
the French or Mexican half-blood,
the negro in the South,
these are deep in the woods and far among the mountains.

But in an old,
cold,
and rugged country such as mine,
the days of immigration are long at an end;
and away up there,
which was at that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways,
hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools,
in a land of moors where no stranger came,
unless it should be a sportsman
to shoot grouse or an antiquary
to decipher runes,
the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick.

They were as strange
to their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle.


CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS
I
THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village,
where they tasted in a high degree the glory of existence.

The place was created seemingly on purpose
for the diversion of young gentlemen.

A street or two of houses,
mostly red and many of,
them tiled;
a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard,
and turning the chief street in
to a shady alley;
many little gardens more than usually bright
with flowers;
nets a-drying,
and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts;
a smell of fish,
a genial smell of seaweed;
whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners;
shops
with golf-balls and bottled lollipops;
another shop
with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL,
dear
to me
for its startling pictures,
and a few novels,
dear
for their suggestive names:

such,
as well as memory serves me,
were the ingredients of the town.

These,
you are
to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays,
and sparsely flanked
with villas enough
for the boys
to lodge in
with their subsidiary parents,
not enough (not yet enough)
to cocknify the scene:

a haven in the rocks in front:

in front of that,
a file of gray islets:


to the left,
endless links and sand wreaths,
a wilderness of hiding-holes,
alive
with popping rabbits and soaring gulls:


to the right,
a range of seaward crags,
one rugged brow beyond another;
the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one;
coves between - now charmed in
to sunshine quiet,
now whistling
with wind and clamorous
with bursting surges;
the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood,
the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea - in front of all,
the Bass Rock,
tilted seaward like a doubtful bather,
the surf ringing it
with white,
the solan- geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.

This choice piece of seaboard was sacred,
besides,

to the wrecker;
and the Bass,
in the eye of fancy,
still flew the colours of King James;
and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang
with horse-shoe iron,
and echoed
to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.There was nothing
to mar your days,
if you were a boy summering in that part,
but the embarrassment of pleasure.

You might golf if you wanted;
but I seem
to have been better employed.

You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk,
a certain sunless dingle of elders,
all mossed over by the damp as green as grass,
and dotted here and there by the stream-side
with roofless walls,
the cold homes of anchorites.


to fit themselves
for life,
and
with a special eye
to acquire the art of smoking,
it was even common
for the boys
to harbour there;
and you might have seen a single penny pickwick,
honestly shared in lengths
with a blunt knife,
bestrew the glen
with these apprentices.

Again,
you might join our fishing parties,
where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese,
a covey of little anglers,
boy and girl,
angling over each other's heads,

to the
to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves.

Indeed,
had that been all,
you might have done this often;
but though fishing be a fine pastime,
the podley is scarce
to be regarded as a dainty
for the table;
and it was a point of honour that a boy should eat all that he had taken.

Or again,
you might climb the Law,
where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind,
and behold the face of many counties,
and the smoke and spires of many towns,
and the sails of distant ships.

You might bathe,
now in the flaws of fine weather,
that we pathetically call our summer,
now in a gale of wind,

with the sand scourging your bare hide,
your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone,
the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees.

Or you might explore the tidal rocks,
above all in the ebb of springs,
when the very roots of the hills were
for the nonce discovered;
following my leader from one group
to another,
groping in slippery tangle
for the wreck of ships,
wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea,
and ever
with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide and the menaced line of your retreat.

And then you might go Crusoeing,
a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air:

digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links,
kindling a fire of the sea-ware,
and cooking apples there - if they were truly apples,

for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off
with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving,
in the neighbourhood of fire,
in
to mere sand and smoke and iodine;
or perhaps pushing
to Tantallon,
you might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the grassy court,
while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets;
or clambering along the coast,
eat geans (the worst,
I must suppose,
in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken root under a cliff,
where it was shaken
with an ague of east wind,
and silvered after gales
with salt,
and grew so foreign among its bleak surroundings that
to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.There are mingled some dismal memories
with so many that were joyous.

Of the fisher-wife,

for instance,
who had cut her throat at Canty Bay;
and of how I ran
with the other children
to the top of the Quadrant,
and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart,
and on the cart,
bound in a chair,
her throat bandaged,
and the bandage all bloody - horror!

- the fisher-wife herself,
who continued thenceforth
to hag-ride my thoughts,
and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight.

She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street;
but whether or no she died there,

with a wise terror of the worst,
I never inquired.

She had been tippling;
it was but a dingy tragedy;
and it seems strange and hard that,
after all these years,
the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.

Nor shall I readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died,
and a dark old woman continued
to dwell alone
with the dead body;
nor how this old woman conceived a hatred
to myself and one of my cousins,
and in the dread hour of the dusk,
as we were clambering on the garden-walls,
opened a window in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and
with a marrowy choice of language.

It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience!

But I recall
with a more doubtful sentiment,
compounded out of fear and exultation,
the coil of equinoctial tempests;
trumpeting squalls,
scouring flaws of rain;
the boats
with their reefed lugsails scudding
for the harbour mouth,
where danger lay,

for it was hard
to make when the wind had any east in it;
the wives clustered
with blowing shawls at the pier-head,
where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and sons - their whole wealth and their whole family - engulfed under their eyes;
and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward,
and she squalling and battling in their midst,
a figure scarcely human,
a tragic Maenad.These are things that I recall
with interest;
but what my memory dwells upon the most,
I have been all this while withholding.

It was a sport peculiar
to the place,
and indeed
to a week or so of our two months' holiday there.

Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot;

for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable
to man;
so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season,
regular like the sun and moon;
and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States.

It may still flourish in its native spot,
but nowhere else,
I am persuaded;

for I tried myself
to introduce it on Tweedside,
and was defeated lamentably;
its charm being quite local,
like a country wine that cannot be exported.The idle manner of it was this:-
Toward the end of September,
when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black,
we would begin
to sally from our- respective villas,
each equipped
with a tin bull's-eye lantern.

The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain;
and the grocers,
about the due time,
began
to garnish their windows
with our particular brand of luminary.

We wore them buckled
to the waist upon a cricket belt,
and over them,
such was the rigour of the game,
a buttoned top-coat.

They smelled noisomely of blistered tin;
they never burned aright,
though they would always burn our fingers;
their use was naught;
the pleasure of them merely fanciful;
and yet a boy
with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked
for nothing more.

The fishermen used lanterns about their boats,
and it was from them,
I suppose,
that we had got the hint;
but theirs were not bull's-eyes,
nor did we ever play at being fishermen.

The police carried them at their belts,
and we had plainly copied them in that;
yet we did not pretend
to be policemen.

Burglars,
indeed,
we may have had some haunting thoughts of;
and we had certainly an eye
to past ages when lanterns were more common,
and
to certain story-books in which we had found them
to figure very largely.

But take it
for all in all,
the pleasure of the thing was substantive;
and
to be a boy
with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough
for us.When two of these asses met,
there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?"

and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth,
and very needful too;
for,
as it was the rule
to keep our glory contained,
none could recognise a lantern-bearer,
unless (like the polecat) by the smell.

Four or five would sometimes climb in
to the belly of a ten-man lugger,

with nothing but the thwarts above them -
for the cabin was usually locked,
or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead.

There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered;
and in the chequering glimmer,
under the huge windy hall of the night,
and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware,
these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat,
and delight themselves
with inappropriate talk.

Woe is me that I may not give some specimens - some of their foresights of life,
or deep inquiries in
to the rudiments of man and nature,
these were so fiery and so innocent,
they were so richly silly,
so romantically young.

But the talk,
at any rate,
was but a condiment;
and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer.

The essence of this bliss was
to walk by yourself in the black night;
the slide shut,
the top-coat buttoned;
not a ray escaping,
whether
to conduct your footsteps or
to make your glory public:

a mere pillar of darkness in the dark;
and all the while,
deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart,

to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt,
and
to exult and sing over the knowledge.

II
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.

It may be contended,
rather,
that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives,
and is the spice of life
to his possessor.

Justice is not done
to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination.

His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it,
in which he dwells delighted;
and
for as dark as his pathway seems
to the observer,
he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.It would be hard
to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer,
the miser,
as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a prey
to the most sordid persecutions,
the butt of his neighbourhood,
betrayed by his hired man,
his house beleaguered by the impish schoolboy,
and he himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing
to the law against these pin-pricks.

You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity;
and then you call
to memory that had he chosen,
had he ceased
to be a miser,
he could have been freed at once from these trials,
and might have built himself a castle and gone escorted by a squadron.


for the love of more recondite joys,
which we cannot estimate,
which,
it may be,
we should envy,
the man had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration.

"His mind
to him a kingdom was";
and sure enough,
digging in
to that mind,
which seems at first a dust-heap,
we unearth some priceless jewels.


for Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it,
a noble character in itself;
disdain of many pleasures,
a chief part of what is commonly called wisdom;
disdain of the inevitable end,
that finest trait of mankind;
scorn of men's opinions,
another element of virtue;
and at the back of all,
a conscience just like yours and mine,
whining like a cur,
swindling like a thimble- rigger,
but still pointing (there or there-about)
to some conventional standard.

Here were a cabinet portrait
to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice;
and yet not Hawthorne either,

for he was mildly minded,
and it lay not in him
to create
for us that throb of the miser's pulse,
his fretful energy of gusto,
his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what:

insatiable,
insane,
a god
with a muck-rake.

Thus,
at least,
looking in the bosom of the miser,
consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life,

with more,
indeed,
of the poetic fire than usually goes
to epics;
and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth,
and
to and fro in his discomfortable house,
spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight.

And so
with others,
who do not live by bread alone,
but by some cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure;
who are meat salesmen
to the external eye,
and possibly
to themselves are Shakespeares,
Napoleons,
or Beethovens;
who have not one virtue
to rub against another in the field of active life,
and yet perhaps,
in the life of contemplation,
sit
with the saints.

We see them on the street,
and we can count their buttons;
but heaven knows in what they pride themselves!

heaven knows where they have set their treasure!
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:

the fable of the monk who passed in
to the woods,
heard a bird break in
to song,
hearkened
for a trill or two,
and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates;

for he had been absent fifty years,
and of all his comrades there survived but one
to recognise him.

It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols,
though perhaps he is native there.

He sings in the most doleful places.

The miser hears him and chuckles,
and the days are moments.


with no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I have evoked him on the naked links.

All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands:

seeking
for that bird and hearing him.

And it is just this that makes life so hard
to value,
and the delight of each so incommunicable.

And just a knowledge of this,
and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung
to us,
that fills us
with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist.

There,

to be sure,
we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron,
cheap desires and cheap fears,
that which we are ashamed
to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget;
but of the note of that time- devouring nightingale we hear no news.The case of these writers of romance is most obscure.

They have been boys and youths;
they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,
who was then most probably writing
to some one else;
they have sat before a sheet of paper,
and felt themselves mere continents of congested poetry,
not one line of which would flow;
they have walked alone in the woods,
they have walked in cities under the countless lamps;
they have been
to sea,
they have hated,
they have feared,
they have longed
to knife a man,
and maybe done it;
the wild taste of life has stung their palate.

Or,
if you deny them all the rest,
one pleasure at least they have tasted
to the full - their books are there
to prove it - the keen pleasure of successful literary composition.

And yet they fill the globe
with volumes,
whose cleverness inspires me
with despairing admiration,
and whose consistent falsity
to all I care
to call existence,

with despairing wrath.

If I had no better hope than
to continue
to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses,
and
to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears
with which they surround and animate their heroes,
I declare I would die now.

But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet;
if it were spent waiting at a railway junction,
I would have some scattering thoughts,
I could count some grains of memory,
compared
to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very true;
that it was the same
with themselves and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament;
that in this we were exceptional,
and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves;
but that our works must deal exclusively
with (what they call) the average man,
who was a prodigious dull fellow,
and quite dead
to all but the paltriest considerations.

I accept the issue.

We can only know others by ourselves.

The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen,
or it would make us incapable of writing novels;
and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me,
or he would not be average.

It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase;
but Whitman knew very well,
and showed very nobly,
that the average man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his own.

And this harping on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profession of incompetence;
it is one of two things:

the cry of the blind eye,
I CANNOT SEE,
or the complaint of the dumb tongue,
I CANNOT UTTER.


to draw a life without delights is
to prove I have not realised it.


to picture a man without some sort of poetry - well,
it goes near
to prove my case,

for it shows an author may have little enough.


to see Dancer only as a dirty,
old,
small-minded,
impotently fuming man,
in a dirty house,
besieged by Harrow boys,
and probably beset by small attorneys,
is
to show myself as keen an observer as .

.

.

the Harrow boys.

But these young gentlemen (
with a more becoming modesty) were content
to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails;
they did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in a book:

and it is there my error would have lain.

Or say that in the same romance - I continue
to call these books romances,
in the hope of giving pain - say that in the same romance,
which now begins really
to take shape,
I should leave
to speak of Dancer,
and follow instead the Harrow boys;
and say that I came on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links;
and described the boys as very cold,
spat upon by flurries of rain,
and drearily surrounded,
all of which they were;
and their talk as silly and indecent,
which it certainly was.

I might upon these lines,
and had I Zola's genius,
turn out,
in a page or so,
a gem of literary art,
render the lantern-light
with the touches of a master,
and lay on the indecency
with the ungrudging hand of love;
and when all was done,
what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and dulness!

how it would have missed the point!

how it would have belied the boys!


to the ear of the stenographer,
the talk is merely silly and indecent;
but ask the boys themselves,
and they are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence.


to the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded;
but ask themselves,
and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure,
the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

III
For,

to repeat,
the ground of a man's joy is often hard
to hit.

It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory,
like the lantern;
it may reside,
like Dancer's,
in the mysterious inwards of psychology.

It may consist
with perpetual failure,
and find exercise in the continued chase.

It has so little bond
with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch them not;
and the man's true life,

for which he consents
to live,
lie altogether in the field of fancy.

The clergyman,
in his spare hours,
may be winning battles,
the farmer sailing ships,
the banker reaping triumph in the arts:

all leading another life,
plying another trade from that they chose;
like the poet's housebuilder,
who,
after all,
is cased in stone,
"By his fireside,
as impotent fancy prompts.

Rebuilds it
to his liking."


In such a case the poetry runs underground.

The observer (poor soul,

with his documents!) is all abroad.


for
to look at the man is but
to court deception.

We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage,
hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales.

And the true realism were that of the poets,

to climb up after him like a squirrel,
and catch some glimpse of the heaven
for which he lives.And,
the true realism,
always and everywhere,
is that of the poets:


to find out where joy resides,
and give it a voice far beyond singing.
for
to miss the joy is
to miss all.

In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.

That is the explanation,
that the excuse.


to one who has not the secret of the lanterns,
the scene upon the links is meaningless.

And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.

Hence,
when we read the English realists,
the incredulous wonder
with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness,
and how he bears up
with his jibbing sweetheart,
and endures the chatter of idiot girls,
and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence,
instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel.

Hence in the French,
in that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality,
the disgusted surprise
with which we see the hero drift sidelong,
and practically quite untempted,
in
to every description of misconduct and dishonour.

In each,
we miss the personal poetry,
the enchanted atmosphere,
that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems
to ennoble what is base;
in each,
life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon in
to the colours of the sunset;
each is true,
each inconceivable;

for no man lives in the external truth,
among salts and acids,
but in the warm,
phantasmagoric chamber of his brain,

with the painted windows and the storied walls.Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better - Tolstoi's POWERS OF DARKNESS.

Here is a piece full of force and truth,
yet quite untrue.


for before Mikita was led in
to so dire a situation he was tempted,
and temptations are beautiful at least in part;
and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation,
sins against the modesty of life,
and even when a Tolstoi writes it,
sinks
to melodrama.

The peasants are not understood;
they saw their life in fairer colours;
even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry
for Mikita,
or he had never fallen.

And so,
once again,
even an Old Bailey melodrama,
without some brightness of poetry and lustre of existence,
falls in
to the inconceivable and ranks
with fairy tales.

IV
In nobler books we are moved
with something like the emotions of life;
and this emotion is very variously provoked.

We are so moved when Levine labours in the field,
when Andre sinks beyond emotion,
when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river,
when Antony,
"not cowardly,
puts off his helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear,
when,
in Dostoieffky's DESPISED AND REJECTED,
the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue.

These are notes that please the great heart of man.

Not only love,
and the fields,
and the bright face of danger,
but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported,
touch in us the vein of the poetic.

We love
to think of them,
we long
to try them,
we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.We have heard,
perhaps,
too much of lesser matters.

Here is the door,
here is the open air.

ITUR IN ANTIQUAM SILVAM.


CHAPTER VIII - A CHAPTER ON DREAMS
THE past is all of one texture - whether feigned or suffered - whether acted out in three dimensions,
or only witnessed in that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long,
after the jets are down,
and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the body.

There is no distinction on the face of our experiences;
one is vivid indeed,
and one dull,
and one pleasant,
and another agonising
to remember;
but which of them is what we call true,
and which a dream,
there is not one hair
to prove.

The past stands on a precarious footing;
another straw split in the field of metaphysic,
and behold us robbed of it.

There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim
to some dormant title or some castle and estate:

a claim not prosecutable in any court of law,
but flattering
to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours.

A man's claim
to his own past is yet less valid.

A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary,
and restore your family
to its ancient honours,
and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not far from St.

Kitt's,
as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours,
and is now unjustly some one else's,
and
for that matter (in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything
to anybody.

I do not say that these revolutions are likely;
only no man can deny that they are possible;
and the past,
on the other baud,
is,
lost
for ever:

our old days and deeds,
our old selves,
too,
and the very world in which these scenes were acted,
all brought down
to the same faint residuum as a last night's dream,

to some incontinuous images,
and an echo in the chambers of the brain.

Not an hour,
not a mood,
not a glance of the eye,
can we revoke;
it is all gone,
past conjuring.

And yet conceive us robbed of it,
conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge;
and in what naked nullity should we be left!


for we only guide ourselves,
and only know ourselves,
by these air-painted pictures of the past.Upon these grounds,
there are some among us who claim
to have lived longer and more richly than their neighbours;
when they lay asleep they claim they were still active;
and among the treasures of memory that all men review
for their amusement,
these count in no second place the harvests of their dreaMs. There is one of this kind whom I have in my eye,
and whose case is perhaps unusual enough
to be described.

He was from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer.

When he had a touch of fever at night,
and the room swelled and shrank,
and his clothes,
hanging on a nail,
now loomed up instant
to the bigness of a church,
and now drew away in
to a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness,
the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow,
and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows.But his struggles were in vain;
sooner or later the night-hag would have him by the throat,
and pluck him strangling and screaming,
from his sleep.

His dreams were at times commonplace enough,
at times very strange,
at times they were almost formless:

he would be haunted,

for instance,
by nothing more definite than a certain hue of brown,
which he did not mind in the least while he was awake,
but feared and loathed while he was dreaming;
at times,
again,
they took on every detail of circumstance,
as when once he supposed he must swallow the populous world,
and awoke screaming
with the horror of the thought.

The two chief troubles of his very narrow existence - the practical and everyday trouble of school tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment - were often confounded together in
to one appalling nightmare.

He seemed
to himself
to stand before the Great White Throne;
he was called on,
poor little devil,

to recite some form of words,
on which his destiny depended;
his tongue stuck,
his memory was blank,
hell gaped
for him;
and he would awake,
clinging
to the curtain-rod
with his knees
to his chin.These were extremely poor experiences,
on the whole;
and at that time of life my dreamer would have very willingly parted
with his power of dreaMs. But presently,
in the course of his growth,
the cries and physical contortions passed away,
seemingly
for ever;
his visions were still
for the most part miserable,
but they were more constantly supported;
and he would awake
with no more extreme symptom than a flying heart,
a freezing scalp,
cold sweats,
and the speechless midnight fear.

His dreams,
too,
as befitted a mind better stocked
with particulars,
became more circumstantial,
and had more the air and continuity of life.

The look of the world beginning
to take hold on his attention,
scenery came
to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts,
so that he would take long,
uneventful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful places as he lay in bed.

And,
what is more significant,
an odd taste that he had
for the Georgian costume and
for stories laid in that period of English history,
began
to rule the features of his dreams;
so that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat and was much engaged
with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour
for bed and that
for breakfast.

About the same time,
he began
to read in his dreams - tales,

for the most part,
and
for the most part after the manner of G.

P.

R.

James,
but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed book,
that he has ever since been malcontent
with literature.And then,
while he was yet a student,
there came
to him a dream- adventure which he has no anxiety
to repeat;
he began,
that is
to say,

to dream in sequence and thus
to lead a double life - one of the day,
one of the night - one that he had every reason
to believe was the true one,
another that he had no means of proving
to be false.

I should have said he studied,
or was by way of studying,
at Edinburgh College,
which (it may be supposed) was how I came
to know him.

Well,
in his dream-life,
he passed a long day in the surgical theatre,
his heart in his mouth,
his teeth on edge,
seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons.

In a heavy,
rainy,
foggy evening he came forth in
to the South Bridge,
turned up the High Street,
and entered the door of a tall LAND,
at the top of which he supposed himself
to lodge.

All night long,
in his wet clothes,
he climbed the stairs,
stair after stair in endless series,
and at every second flight a flaring lamp
with a reflector.

All night long,
he brushed by single persons passing downward - beggarly women of the street,
great,
weary,
muddy labourers,
poor scarecrows of men,
pale parodies of women - but all drowsy and weary like himself,
and all single,
and all brushing against him as they passed.

In the end,
out of a northern window,
he would see day beginning
to whiten over the Firth,
give up the ascent,
turn
to descend,
and in a breath be back again upon the streets,
in his wet clothes,
in the wet,
haggard dawn,
trudging
to another day of monstrosities and operations.

Time went quicker in the life of dreams,
some seven hours (as near as he can guess)
to one;
and it went,
besides,
more intensely,
so that the gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day,
and he had not shaken off their shadow ere it was time
to lie down and
to renew them.

I cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline;
but it was long enough
to leave a great black blot upon his memory,
long enough
to send him,
trembling
for his reason,

to the doors of a certain doctor;
whereupon
with a simple draught he was restored
to the common lot of man.The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;
indeed,
his nights were
for some while like other men's,
now blank,
now chequered
with dreams,
and these sometimes charming,
sometimes appalling,
but except
for an occasional vividness,
of no extraordinary kind.

I will just note one of these occasions,
ere I pass on
to what makes my dreamer truly interesting.

It seemed
to him that he was in the first floor of a rough hill-farm.

The room showed some poor efforts at gentility,
a carpet on the floor,
a piano,
I think,
against the wall;
but,

for all these refinements,
there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place,
among hillside people,
and set in miles of heather.

He looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard,
that seemed
to have been long disused.

A great,
uneasy stillness lay upon the world.

There was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock,
save
for an old,
brown,
curly dog of the retriever breed,
who sat close in against the wall of the house and seemed
to be dozing.

Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer;
it was quite a nameless feeling,

for the beast looked right enough - indeed,
he was so old and dull and dusty and broken-down,
that he should rather have awakened pity;
and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at all,
but something hellish.

A great many dozing summer flies hummed about the yard;
and presently the dog thrust forth his paw,
caught a fly in his open palm,
carried it
to his mouth like an ape,
and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the window,
winked
to him
with one eye.

The dream went on,
it matters not how it went;
it was a good dream as dreams go;
but there was nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish brown dog.

And the point of interest
for me lies partly in that very fact:

that having found so singular an incident,
my imperfect dreamer should prove unable
to carry the tale
to a fit end and fall back on indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors.

It would be different now;
he knows his business better!
For,

to approach at last the point:

This honest fellow had long been in the custom of setting himself
to sleep
with tales,
and so had his father before him;
but these were irresponsible inventions,
told
for the teller's pleasure,

with no eye
to the crass public or the thwart reviewer:

tales where a thread might be dropped,
or one adventure quitted
for another,
on fancy's least suggestion.

So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training;
and played upon their stage like children who should have slipped in
to the house and found it empty,
rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece
to a huge hall of faces.

But presently my dreamer began
to turn his former amusement of story-telling
to (what is called) account;
by which I mean that he began
to write and sell his tales.

Here was he,
and here were the little people who did that part of his business,
in quite new conditions.

The stories must now be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours,
they must run from a beginning
to an end and fit (after a manner)
with the laws of life;
the pleasure,
in one word,
had become a business;
and that not only
for the dreamer,
but
for the little people of his theatre.

These understood the change as well as he.

When he lay down
to prepare himself
for sleep,
he no longer sought amusement,
but printable and profitable tales;
and after he had dozed off in his box-seat,
his little people continued their evolutions
with the same mercantile designs.

All other forms of dream deserted him but two:

he still occasionally reads the most delightful books,
he still visits at times the most delightful places;
and it is perhaps worthy of note that
to these same places,
and
to one in particular,
he returns at intervals of months and years,
finding new field-paths,
visiting new neighbours,
beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and sunset.

But all the rest of the family of visions is quite lost
to him:

the common,
mangled version of yesterday's affairs,
the raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare,
rumoured
to be the child of toasted cheese - these and their like are gone;
and,

for the most part,
whether awake or asleep,
he is simply occupied - he or his little people - in consciously making stories
for the market.

This dreamer (like many other persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune.

When the bank begins
to send letters and the butcher
to linger at the back gate,
he sets
to belabouring his brains after a story,

for that is his readiest money-winner;
and,
behold!

at once the little people begin
to bestir themselves in the same quest,
and labour all night long,
and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre.

No fear of his being frightened now;
the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things by-gone;
applause,
growing applause,
growing interest,
growing exultation in his own cleverness (
for he takes all the credit),
and at last a jubilant leap
to wakefulness,

with the cry,
"I have it,
that'll do!" upon his lips:


with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas,

with such outbreaks,
like Claudius in the play,
he scatters the performance in the midst.

Often enough the waking is a disappointment:

he has been too deep asleep,
as I explain the thing;
drowsiness has gained his little people,
they have gone stumbling and maundering through their parts;
and the play,

to the awakened mind,
is seen
to be a tissue of absurdities.

And yet how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service,
and given him,
as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes,
better tales than he could fashion
for himself.Here is one,
exactly as it came
to him.

It seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked man,
the owner of broad acres and a most damnable temper.

The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad,
on purpose
to avoid his parent;
and when at length he returned
to England,
it was
to find him married again
to a young wife,
who was supposed
to suffer cruelly and
to loathe her yoke.

Because of this marriage (as the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable
for father and son
to have a meeting;
and yet both being proud and both angry,
neither would condescend upon a visit.

Meet they did accordingly,
in a desolate,
sandy country by the sea;
and there they quarrelled,
and the son,
stung by some intolerable insult,
struck down the father dead.

No suspicion was aroused;
the dead man was found and buried,
and the dreamer succeeded
to the broad estates,
and found himself installed under the same roof
with his father's widow,

for whom no provision had been made.

These two lived very much alone,
as people may after a bereavement,
sat down
to table together,
shared the long evenings,
and grew daily better friends;
until it seemed
to him of a sudden that she was prying about dangerous matters,
that she had conceived a notion of his guilt,
that she watched him and tried him
with questions.

He drew back from her company as men draw back from a precipice suddenly discovered;
and yet so strong was the attraction that he would drift again and again in
to the old intimacy,
and again and again be startled back by some suggestive question or some inexplicable meaning in her eye.

So they lived at cross purposes,
a life full of broken dialogue,
challenging glances,
and suppressed passion;
until,
one day,
he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil,
followed her
to the station,
followed her in the train
to the seaside country,
and out over the sandhills
to the very place where the murder was done.

There she began
to grope among the bents,
he watching her,
flat upon his face;
and presently she had something in her hand - I cannot remember what it was,
but it was deadly evidence against the dreamer - and as she held it up
to look at it,
perhaps from the shock of the discovery,
her foot slipped,
and she hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand-wreaths.

He had no thought but
to spring up and rescue her;
and there they stood face
to face,
she
with that deadly matter openly in her hand - his very presence on the spot another link of proof.

It was plain she was about
to speak,
but this was more than he could bear - he could bear
to be lost,
but not
to talk of it
with his destroyer;
and he cut her short
with trivial conversation.

Arm in arm,
they returned together
to the train,
talking he knew not what,
made the journey back in the same carriage,
sat down
to dinner,
and passed the evening in the drawing-room as in the past.

But suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom.

"She has not denounced me yet" - so his thoughts ran - "when will she denounce me?

Will it be to- morrow?"

And it was not to-morrow,
nor the next day,
nor the next;
and their life settled back on the old terms,
only that she seemed kinder than before,
and that,
as
for him,
the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily more unbearable,
so that he wasted away like a man
with a disease.

Once,
indeed,
he broke all bounds of decency,
seized an occasion when she was abroad,
ransacked her room,
and at last,
hidden away among her jewels,
found the damning evidence.

There he stood,
holding this thing,
which was his life,
in the hollow of his hand,
and marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour,
that she should seek,
and keep,
and yet not use it;
and then the door opened,
and behold herself.

So,
once more,
they stood,
eye
to eye,

with the evidence between them;
and once more she raised
to him a face brimming
with some communication;
and once more he shied away from speech and cut her off.

But before he left the room,
which he had turned upside down,
he laid back his death- warrant where he had found it;
and at that,
her face lighted up.

The next thing he heard,
she was explaining
to her maid,

with some ingenious falsehood,
the disorder of her things.

Flesh and blood could bear the strain no longer;
and I think it was the next morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve.

They had been breakfasting together in one corner of a great,
parqueted,
sparely-furnished room of many windows;
all the time of the meal she had tortured him
with sly allusions;
and no sooner were the servants gone,
and these two protagonists alone together,
than he leaped
to his feet.

She too sprang up,

with a pale face;

with a pale face,
she heard him as he raved out his complaint:

Why did she torture him so?

she knew all,
she knew he was no enemy
to her;
why did she not denounce him at once?

what signified her whole behaviour?

why did she torture him?

and yet again,
why did she torture him?

And when he had done,
she fell upon her knees,
and
with outstretched hands:

"Do you not understand?"

she cried.

"I love you!"
Hereupon,

with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight,
the dreamer awoke.

His mercantile delight was not of long endurance;

for it soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements;
which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told.

But his wonder has still kept growing;
and I think the reader's will also,
if he consider it ripely.


for now he sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive inventors and performers.


to the end they had kept their secret.

I will go bail
for the dreamer (having excellent grounds
for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman - the hinge of the whole well-invented plot - until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration.

It was not his tale;
it was the little people's!

And observe:

not only was the secret kept,
the story was told
with really guileful craftsmanship.

The conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct,
and the emotion aptly graduated up
to the surprising climax.

I am awake now,
and I know this trade;
and yet I cannot better it.

I am awake,
and I live by this business;
and yet I could not outdo - could not perhaps equal - that crafty artifice (as of some old,
experienced carpenter of plays,
some Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice brought face
to face over the evidence,
only once it is in her hand,
once in his - and these in their due order,
the least dramatic first.

The more I think of it,
the more I am moved
to press upon the world my question:

Who are the Little People?

They are near connections of the dreamer's,
beyond doubt;
they share in his financial worries and have an eye
to the bank-book;
they share plainly in his training;
they have plainly learned like him
to build the scheme of a considerate story and
to arrange emotion in progressive order;
only I think they have more talent;
and one thing is beyond doubt,
they can tell him a story piece by piece,
like a serial,
and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim.

Who are they,
then?

and who is the dreamer?
Well,
as regards the dreamer,
I can answer that,

for he is no less a person than myself;
- as I might have told you from the beginning,
only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;
- and as I am positively forced
to tell you now,
or I could advance but little farther
with my story.

And
for the Little People,
what shall I say they are but just my Brownies,
God bless them!

who do one-half my work
for me while I am fast asleep,
and in all human likelihood,
do the rest
for me as well,
when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it
for myself.

That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention;
but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine,
since all goes
to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.

Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience.


for myself - what I call I,
my conscious ego,
the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes,
the man
with the conscience and the variable bank-account,
the man
with the hat and the boots,
and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections - I am sometimes tempted
to suppose he is no story-teller at all,
but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese,
and a realist bemired up
to the ears in actuality;
so that,
by that account,
the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie,
some Familiar,
some unseen collaborator,
whom I keep locked in a back garret,
while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding.

I am an excellent adviser,
something like Moliere's servant;
I pull back and I cut down;
and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make;
I hold the pen,
too;
and I do the sitting at the table,
which is about the worst of it;
and when all is done,
I make up the manuscript and pay
for the registration;
so that,
on the whole,
I have some claim
to share,
though not so largely as I do,
in the profits of our common enterprise.I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what part awake,
and leave the reader
to share what laurels there are,
at his own nod,
between myself and my collaborators;
and
to do this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough
to read,
the STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

I had long been trying
to write a story on this subject,

to find a body,
a vehicle,

for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.

I had even written one,
THE TRAVELLING COMPANION,
which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent,
and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius,
and that JEKYLL had supplanted it.

Then came one of those financial fluctuations
to which (
with an elegant modesty) I have hither
to referred in the third person.


for two days I went about racking my brains
for a plot of any sort;
and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window,
and a scene afterward split in two,
in which Hyde,
pursued
for some crime,
took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.

All the rest was made awake,
and consciously,
although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.

The meaning of the tale is therefore mine,
and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis,
and tried one body after another in vain;
indeed,
I do most of the morality,
worse luck!

and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience.

Mine,
too,
is the setting,
mine the characters.

All that was given me was the matter of three scenes,
and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary.

Will it be thought ungenerous,
after I have been so liberally ladling out praise
to my unseen collaborators,
if I here toss them over,
bound hand and foot,
in
to the arena of the critics?


for the business of the powders,
which so many have censured,
is,
I am relieved
to say,
not mine at all but the Brownies'.

Of another tale,
in case the reader should have glanced at it,
I may say a word:

the not very defensible story of OLALLA.

Here the court,
the mother,
the mother's niche,
Olalla,
Olalla's chamber,
the meetings on the stair,
the broken window,
the ugly scene of the bite,
were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried
to write them;

to this I added only the external scenery (
for in my dream I never was beyond the court),
the portrait,
the characters of Felipe and the priest,
the moral,
such as it is,
and the last pages,
such as,
alas!

they are.

And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me;

for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter,
and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first.

Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream;
sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan,
and yet in no case
with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract;
never
with the ethical narrowness;
conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem
to perceive in the arabesque of time and space.
for the most part,
it will be seen,
my Brownies are somewhat fantastic,
like their stories hot and hot,
full of passion and the picturesque,
alive
with animating incident;
and they have no prejudice against the supernatural.

But the other day they gave me a surprise,
entertaining me
with a love-story,
a little April comedy,
which I ought certainly
to hand over
to the author of A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE,

for he could write it as it should be written,
and I am sure (although I mean
to try) that I cannot.

- But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale
for Mr. Howells?


CHAPTER IX - BEGGARS
IN a pleasant,
airy,
up-hill country,
it was my fortune when I was young
to make the acquaintance of a certain beggar.

I call him beggar,
though he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which were open-mouthed,
indeed)
to beg
for him.

He was the wreck of an athletic man,
tall,
gaunt,
and bronzed;
far gone in consumption,

with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on his face;
but still active afoot,
still
with the brisk military carriage,
the ready military salute.

Three ways led through this piece of country;
and as I was inconstant in my choice,
I believe he must often have awaited me in vain.

But often enough,
he caught me;
often enough,
from some place of ambush by the roadside,
he would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude,
and launching at once in
to his inconsequential talk,
fall in
to step
with me upon my farther course.

"A fine morning,
sir,
though perhaps a trifle inclining
to rain.

I hope I see you well,
sir.

Why,
no,
sir,
I don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish,
but I am keeping about my ordinary.

I am pleased
to meet you on the road,
sir.

I assure you I quite look forward
to one of our little conversations."

He loved the sound of his own voice inordinately,
and though (
with something too off-hand
to call servility) he would always hasten
to agree
with anything you said,
yet he could never suffer you
to say it
to an end.

By what transition he slid
to his favourite subject I have no memory;
but we had never been long together on the way before he was dealing,
in a very military manner,

with the English poets.

"Shelley was a fine poet,
sir,
though a trifle atheistical in his opinions.

His Queen Mab,
sir,
is quite an atheistical work.

Scott,
sir,
is not so poetical a writer.


with the works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted,
but he was a fine poet.

Keats - John Keats,
sir - he was a very fine poet."


with such references,
such trivial criticism,
such loving parade of his own knowledge,
he would beguile the road,
striding forward uphill,
his staff now clapped
to the ribs of his deep,
resonant chest,
now swinging in the air
with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier;
and all the while his toes looking out of his boots,
and his shirt looking out of his elbows,
and death looking out of his smile,
and his big,
crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.He would often go the whole way home
with me:

often
to borrow a book,
and that book always a poet.

Off he would march,

to continue his mendicant rounds,

with the volume slipped in
to the pocket of his ragged coat;
and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while,
yet it came always back again at last,
not much the worse
for its travels in
to beggardom.

And in this way,
doubtless,
his knowledge grew and his glib,
random criticism took a wider range.

But my library was not the first he had drawn upon:

at our first encounter,
he was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical Queen Mab,
and "Keats - John Keats,
sir."

And I have often wondered how he came by these acquirements;
just as I often wondered how he fell
to be a beggar.

He had served through the Mutiny - of which (like so many people) he could tell practically nothing beyond the names of places,
and that it was "difficult work,
sir," and very hot,
or that so-and-so was "a very fine commander,
sir."

He was far too smart a man
to have remained a private;
in the nature of things,
he must have won his stripes.

And yet here he was without a pension.

When I touched on this problem,
he would content himself
with diffidently offering me advice.

"A man should be very careful when he is young,
sir.

If you'll excuse me saying so,
a spirited young gentleman like yourself,
sir,
should be very careful.

I was perhaps a trifle inclined
to atheistical opinions myself."


for (perhaps
with a deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these days
to admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism
with beer and skittles.Keats - John Keats,
sir - and Shelley were his favourite bards.

I cannot remember if I tried him
with Rossetti;
but I know his taste
to a hair,
and if ever I did,
he must have doted on that author.

What took him was a richness in the speech;
he loved the exotic,
the unexpected word;
the moving cadence of a phrase;
a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet:

the romance of language.

His honest head was very nearly empty,
his intellect like a child's;
and when he read his favourite authors,
he can almost never have understood what he was reading.

Yet the taste was not only genuine,
it was exclusive;
I tried in vain
to offer him novels;
he would none of them,
he cared
for nothing but romantic language that he could not understand.

The case may be commoner than we suppose.

I am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot
to a friend of mine in a public hospital and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps
with his last pence)
for a cheap Shakespeare.

My friend pricked up his ears;
fell at once in talk
with his new neighbour,
and was ready,
when the book arrived,

to make a singular discovery.


for this lover of great literature understood not one sentence out of twelve,
and his favourite part was that of which he understood the least - the inimitable,
mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in HAMLET.

It was a bright day in hospital when my friend expounded the sense of this beloved jargon:

a task
for which I am willing
to believe my friend was very fit,
though I can never regard it as an easy one.

I know indeed a point or two,
on which I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare,
that lover of big words,
could he revisit the glimpses of the moon,
or could I myself climb backward
to the spacious days of Elizabeth.

But in the second case,
I should most likely pretermit these questionings,
and take my place instead in the pit at the Blackfriars,

to hear the actor in his favourite part,
playing up
to Mr. Burbage,
and rolling out - as I seem
to hear him -
with a ponderous gusto-
"Unhousel'd,
disappointed,
unanel'd."


What a pleasant chance,
if we could go there in a party I and what a surprise
for Mr. Burbage,
when the ghost received the honours of the evening!
As
for my old soldier,
like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare,
he is long since dead;
and now lies buried,
I suppose,
and nameless and quite forgotten,
in some poor city graveyard.

- But not
for me,
you brave heart,
have you been buried!


for me,
you are still afoot,
tasting the sun and air,
and striding southward.

By the groves of Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid,
by the Hunters' Tryst,
and where the curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead,
I see and hear you,
stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness,
cheerfully discoursing of uncomprehended poets.

II
The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp,
his counterpart.

This was a little,
lean,
and fiery man,

with the eyes of a dog and the face of a gipsy;
whom I found one morning encamped
with his wife and children and his grinder's wheel,
beside the burn of Kinnaird.


to this beloved dell I went,
at that time,
daily;
and daily the knife-grinder and I (
for as long as his tent continued pleasantly
to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones,
and smoked,
and plucked grass,
and talked
to the tune of the brown water.

His children were mere whelps,
they fought and bit among the fern like vermin.

His wife was a mere squaw;
I saw her gather brush and tend the kettle,
but she never ventured
to address her lord while I was present.

The tent was a mere gipsy hovel,
like a sty
for pigs.

But the grinder himself had the fine self- sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage;
he did me the honours of this dell,
which had been mine but the day before,
took me far in
to the secrets of his life,
and used me (I am proud
to remember) as a friend.Like my old soldier,
he was far gone in the national complaint.

Unlike him,
he had a vulgar taste in letters;
scarce flying higher than the story papers;
probably finding no difference,
certainly seeking none,
between Tannahill and Burns;
his noblest thoughts,
whether of poetry or music,
adequately embodied in that somewhat obvious ditty,
"Will ye gang,
lassie,
gang
to the braes o' Balquidder."


- which is indeed apt
to echo in the ears of Scottish children,
and
to him,
in view of his experience,
must have found a special directness of address.

But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters,
he felt
with a deep joy the poetry of life.

You should have heard him speak of what he loved;
of the tent pitched beside the talking water;
of the stars overhead at night;
of the blest return of morning,
the peep of day over the moors,
the awaking birds among the birches;
how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities;
and
with what delight,
at the return of the spring,
he once more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors.

But we were a pair of tramps;
and
to you,
who are doubtless sedentary and a consistent first-class passenger in life,
he would scarce have laid himself so open;
-
to you,
he might have been content
to tell his story of a ghost - that of a buccaneer
with his pistols as he lived - whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie;
and that would have been enough,

for that would have shown you the mettle of the man.

Here was a piece of experience solidly and livingly built up in words,
here was a story created,
TERES ATQUE ROTUNDUS.And
to think of the old soldier,
that lover of the literary bards!

He had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave;
encountered men more terrible than any spirit;
done and dared and suffered in that incredible,
unsung epic of the Mutiny War;
played his part
with the field force of Delhi,
beleaguering and beleaguered;
shared in that enduring,
savage anger and contempt of death and decency that,

for long months together,
bedevil'd and inspired the army;
was hurled
to and fro in the battle-smoke of the assault;
was there,
perhaps,
where Nicholson fell;
was there when the attacking column,

with hell upon every side,
found the soldier's enemy - strong drink,
and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the scale,
and the fate of the flag of England staggered.

And of all this he had no more
to say than "hot work,
sir," or "the army suffered a great deal,
sir," or "I believe General Wilson,
sir,
was not very highly thought of in the papers."

His life was naught
to him,
the vivid pages of experience quite blank:

in words his pleasure lay - melodious,
agitated words - printed words,
about that which he had never seen and was connatally incapable of comprehending.

We have here two temperaments face
to face;
both untrained,
unsophisticated,
surprised (we may say) in the egg;
both boldly charactered:

- that of the artist,
the lover and artificer of words;
that of the maker,
the seeer,
the lover and forger of experience.

If the one had a daughter and the other had a son,
and these married,
might not some illustrious writer count descent from the beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder?
III
Every one lives by selling something,
whatever be his right
to it.

The burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my silver plate (the whole at the most moderate figure)
to a Jew receiver.

The bandit sells the traveller an article of prime necessity:

that traveller's life.

And as
for the old soldier,
who stands
for central mark
to my capricious figures of eight,
he dealt in a specially;

for he was the only beggar in the world who ever gave me pleasure
for my money.

He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the sense
to cling
to it,
accosting strangers
with a regimental freedom,
thanking patrons
with a merely regimental difference,
sparing you at once the tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours.

There was not one hint about him of the beggar's emphasis,
the outburst of revolting gratitude,
the rant and cant,
the "God bless you,
Kind,
Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence,
which is so notably false,
which would be so unbearable if it were true.

I am sometimes tempted
to suppose this reading of the beggar's part,
a survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and mourners keened beside the death-bed;

to think that we cannot now accept these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of life;
nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions.

They wound us,
I am tempted
to say,
like mockery;
the high voice of keening (as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a buffet;
and the rant and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust.

But the fact disproves these amateur opinions.

The beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man.

He knows what he is about when he bandages his head,
and hires and drugs a babe,
and poisons life
with POOR MARY ANN or LONG,
LONG AGO;
he knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens the nice conscience
with intolerable thanks;
they know what they are about,
he and his crew,
when they pervade the slums of cities,
ghastly parodies of suffering,
hateful parodies of gratitude.

This trade can scarce be called an imposition;
it has been so blown upon
with exposures;
it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly.

We pay them as we pay those who show us,
in huge exaggeration,
the monsters of our drinking-water;
or those who daily predict the fall of Britain.

We pay them
for the pain they inflict,
pay them,
and wince,
and hurry on.

And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's thanks;
and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased
for a shilling,
seems no scene
for an honest man.Are there,
then,
we may be asked,
no genuine beggars?

And the answer is,
Not one.

My old soldier was a humbug like the rest;
his ragged boots were,
in the stage phrase,
properties;
whole boots were given him again and again,
and always gladly accepted;
and the next day,
there he was on the road as usual,

with toes exposed.

His boots were his method;
they were the man's trade;
without his boots he would have starved;
he did not live by charity,
but by appealing
to a gross taste in the public,
which loves the limelight on the actor's face,
and the toes out of the beggar's boots.

There is a true poverty,
which no one sees:

a false and merely mimetic poverty,
which usurps its place and dress,
and lives and above all drinks,
on the fruits of the usurpation.

The true poverty does not go in
to the streets;
the banker may rest assured,
he has never put a penny in its hand.

The self-respecting poor beg from each other;
never from the rich.


to live in the frock-coated ranks of life,

to hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed
for twopence,
a man might suppose that giving was a thing gone out of fashion;
yet it goes forward on a scale so great as
to fill me
with surprise.

In the houses of the working class,
all day long there will be a foot upon the stair;
all day long there will be a knocking at the doors;
beggars come,
beggars go,
without stint,
hardly
with intermission,
from morning till night;
and meanwhile,
in the same city and but a few streets off,
the castles of the rich stand unsummoned.

Get the tale of any honest tramp,
you will find it was always the poor who helped him;
get the truth from any workman who has met misfortunes,
it was always next door that he would go
for help,
or only
with such exceptions as are said
to prove a rule;
look at the course of the mimetic beggar,
it is through the poor quarters that he trails his passage,
showing his bandages
to every window,
piercing even
to the attics
with his nasal song.

Here is a remarkable state of things in our Christian commonwealths,
that the poor only should be asked
to give.

IV
There is a pleasant tale of some worthless,
phrasing Frenchman,
who was taxed
with ingratitude:

"IL FAUT SAVOIR GARDER L'INDEPENDANCE DU COEUR," cried he.

I own I feel
with him.

Gratitude without familarity,
gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a friendship,
is a thing so near
to hatred that I do not care
to split the difference.

Until I find a man who is pleased
to receive obligations,
I shall continue
to question the tact of those who are eager
to confer them.

What an art it is,

to give,
even
to our nearest friends!

and what a test of manners,

to receive!

How,
upon either side,
we smuggle away the obligation,
blushing
for each other;
how bluff and dull we make the giver;
how hasty,
how falsely cheerful,
the receiver!

And yet an act of such difficulty and distress between near friends,
it is supposed we can perform
to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed
with grateful emotions.

The last thing you can do
to a man is
to burthen him
with an obligation,
and it is what we propose
to begin with!

But let us not be deceived:

unless he is totally degraded
to his trade,
anger jars in his inside,
and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.We should wipe two words from our vocabulary:

gratitude and charity.

In real life,
help is given out of friendship,
or it is not valued;
it is received from the hand of friendship,
or it is resented.

We are all too proud
to take a naked gift:

we must seem
to pay it,
if in nothing else,
then
with the delights of our society.

Here,
then,
is the pitiful fix of the rich man;
here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ,
and still sticks to-day,
firmer,
if possible,
than ever:

that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable.

Here and now,
just as of old in Palestine,
he has the rich
to dinner,
it is
with the rich that he takes his pleasure:

and when his turn comes
to be charitable,
he looks in vain
for a recipient.

His friends are not poor,
they do not want;
the poor are not his friends,
they will not take.


to whom is he
to give?

Where
to find - note this phase - the Deserving Poor?

Charity is (what they call) centralised;
offices are hired;
societies founded,

with secretaries paid or unpaid:

the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward.

I think it will take more than a merely human secretary
to disinter that character.

What!

a class that is
to be in want from no fault of its own,
and yet greedily eager
to receive from strangers;
and
to be quite respectable,
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect;
and play the most delicate part of friendship,
and yet never be seen;
and wear the form of man,
and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:

- and all this,
in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye!

O,
let him stick,
by all means:

and let his polity tumble in the dust;
and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin
to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man!


for a fool of this monstrosity of dulness,
there can be no salvation:

and the fool who looked
for the elixir of life was an angel of reason
to the fool who looks
for the Deserving Poor!
V
And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take.

He may subscribe
to pay the taxes.

There were the true charity,
impartial and impersonal,
cumbering none
with obligation,
helping all.

There were a destination
for loveless gifts;
there were the way
to reach the pocket of the deserving poor,
and yet save the time of secretaries!

But,
alas!

there is no colour of romance in such a course;
and people nowhere demand the picturesque so much as in their virtues.


CHAPTER X - LETTER
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES
TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth,
you address me on a point of some practical importance
to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some gravity
to the world:

Should you or should you not become an artist?

It is one which you must decide entirely
for yourself;
all that I can do is
to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision;
and I will begin,
as I shall probably conclude also,
by assuring you that all depends on the vocation.
to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.

Youth is wholly experimental.

The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again,
now in the airiest touch,
now
with a bitter hug;
now
with exquisite pleasure,
now
with cutting pain;
but never
with indifference,

to which he is a total stranger,
and never
with that near kinsman of indifference,
contentment.

If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated,
the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion
to the pleasure he receives.

It is not beauty that he loves,
nor pleasure that he seeks,
though he may think so;
his design and his sufficient reward is
to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate.


to him,
before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled,
all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult
to recall in later days;
or if there be any exception - and here destiny steps in - it is in those moments when,
wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses,
he calls up before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures.

Thus it is that such an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions,
and inclines insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and recording of experience.This,
which is not so much a vocation
for art as an impatience of all other honest trades,
frequently exists alone;
and so existing,
it will pass gently away in the course of years.

Emphatically,
it is not
to be regarded;
it is not a vocation,
but a temptation;
and when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your ambition,
he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own experience.


for the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare.

But again we have vocations which are imperfect;
we have men whose minds are bound up,
not so much in any art,
as in the general ARS ARTIUM and common base of all creative work;
who will now dip in
to painting,
and now study counterpoint,
and anon will be inditing a sonnet:

all these
with equal interest,
all often
with genuine knowledge.

And of this temper,
when it stands alone,
I find it difficult
to speak;
but I should counsel such an one
to take
to letters,

for in literature (which drags
with so wide a net) all his information may be found some day useful,
and if he should go on as he has begun,
and turn at last in
to the critic,
he will have learned
to use the necessary tools.

Lastly we come
to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise;

to the men who are born
with the love of pigments,
the passion of drawing,
the gift of music,
or the impulse
to create
with words,
just as other and perhaps the same men are born
with the love of hunting,
or the sea,
or horses,
or the turning-lathe.

These are predestined;
if a man love the labour of any trade,
apart from any question of success or fame,
the gods have called him.

He may have the general vocation too:

he may have a taste
for all the arts,
and I think he often has;
but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality
for one,
this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes,
and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind
to take his very trifling enterprise
with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire,
and
to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry.

The book,
the statue,
the sonata,
must be gone upon
with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play.

IS IT WORTH DOING?

- when it shall have occurred
to any artist
to ask himself that question,
it is implicitly answered in the negative.

It does not occur
to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa,
nor
to the hunter as he pursues his quarry;
and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste,
there is no room
for hesitation:

follow your bent.

And observe (lest I should too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at the first,
or rather not so constantly.

Habit and practice sharpen gifts;
the necessity of toil grows less disgusting,
grows even welcome,
in the course of years;
a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes
with indulgence in
to an exclusive passion.

Enough,
just now,
if you can look back over a fair interval,
and see that your chosen art has a little more than held its own among the thronging interests of youth.

Time will do the rest,
if devotion help it;
and soon your every thought will be engrossed in that beloved occupation.But even
with devotion,
you may remind me,
even
with unfaltering and delighted industry,
many thousand artists spend their lives,
if the result be regarded,
utterly in vain:

a thousand artists,
and never one work of art.

But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well,
art among the rest.

The worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker.

And the artist,
even if he does not amuse the public,
amuses himself;
so that there will always be one man the happier
for his vigils.

This is the practical side of art:

its inexpugnable fortress
for the true practitioner.

The direct returns - the wages of the trade are small,
but the indirect - the wages of the life - are incalculably great.

No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terMs. The soldier and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement,
but they are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language.

In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its pleasure.

I take the author,

with whose career I am best acquainted;
and it is true he works in a rebellious material,
and that the act of writing is cramped and trying both
to the eyes and the temper;
but remark him in his study,
when matter crowds upon him and words are not wanting - in what a continual series of small successes time flows by;

with what a sense of power as of one moving mountains,
he marshals his petty characters;

with what pleasures,
both of the ear and eye,
he sees his airy structure growing on the page;
and how he labours in a craft
to which the whole material of his life is tributary,
and which opens a door
to all his tastes,
his loves,
his hatreds,
and his convictions,
so that what he writes is only what he longed
to utter.

He may have enjoyed many things in this big,
tragic playground of the world;
but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work?

Suppose it ill paid:

the wonder is it should be paid at all.

Other men pay,
and pay dearly,

for pleasures less desirable.Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only;
it affords besides an admirable training.


for the artist works entirely upon honour.

The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned
to spend the bulk of your endeavours.

Merits of design,
the merit of first-hand energy,
the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires - these they can recognise,
and these they value.

But
to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish,
which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels,

for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip,"
for which,
day after day,
he recasts and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be ever blind.


to those lost pains,
suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit,
posterity may possibly do justice;
suppose,
as is so probable,
you fall by even a hair's breadth of the highest,
rest certain they shall never be observed.

Under the shadow of this cold thought,
alone in his studio,
the artist must preserve from day
to day his constancy
to the ideal.

It is this which makes his life noble;
it is by this that the practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character;
it is
for this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if only
for a moment) on the followers of Apollo,
and that sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.And here there fall two warnings
to be made.

First,
if you are
to continue
to be a law
to yourself,
you must beware of the first signs of laziness.

This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual effort;
the standard is easily lowered,
the artist who says "IT WILL DO," is on the downward path;
three or four pot- boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times)
to falsify a talent,
and by the practice of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded
to cheap finish.

This is the danger on the one side;
there is not less upon the other.

The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law
to himself,
debauches the small heads.

Perceiving recondite merits very hard
to attain,
making or swallowing artistic formulae,
or perhaps falling in love
with some particular proficiency of his own,
many artists forget the end of all art:


to please.

It is doubtless tempting
to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois;
yet it should not be forgotten,
it is he who is
to pay us,
and that (surely on the face of it)
for services that he shall desire
to have performed.

Here also,
if properly considered,
there is a question of transcendental honesty.


to give the public what they do not want,
and yet expect
to be supported:

we have there a strange pretension,
and yet not uncommon,
above all
with painters.

The first duty in this world is
for a man
to pay his way;
when that is quite accomplished,
he may plunge in
to what eccentricity he likes;
but emphatically not till then.

Till then,
he must pay assiduous court
to the bourgeois who carries the purse.

And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent,
it can never have been a strong one,
and he will have preserved a better thing than talent - character.

Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop
to this necessity,
one course is yet open:

he can desist from art,
and follow some more manly way of life.I speak of a more manly way of life,
it is a point on which I must be frank.


to live by a pleasure is not a high calling;
it involves patronage,
however veiled;
it numbers the artist,
however ambitious,
along
with dancing girls and billiard markers.

The French have a romantic evasion
for one employment,
and call its practitioners the Daughters of Joy.

The artist is of the same family,
he is of the Sons of Joy,
chose his trade
to please himself,
gains his livelihood by pleasing others,
and has parted
with something of the sterner dignity of man.

Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage;
and this Son of Joy was blamed
for condescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde.

The poet was more happily inspired;

with a better modesty he accepted the honour;
and anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am
to believe them) recovered the vicarious disgrace
to their profession.

When it comes
to their turn,
these gentlemen can do themselves more justice;
and I shall be glad
to think of it;

for
to my barbarian eyesight,
even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that assembly.

There should be no honours
for the artist;
he has already,
in the practice of his art,
more than his share of the rewards of life;
the honours are pre-empted
for other trades,
less agreeable and perhaps more useful.But the devil in these trades of pleasing is
to fail
to please.

In ordinary occupations,
a man offers
to do a certain thing or
to produce a certain article
with a merely conventional accomplishment,
a design in which (we may almost say) it is difficult
to fail.

But the artist steps forth out of the crowd and proposes
to delight:

an impudent design,
in which it is impossible
to fail without odious circumstances.

The poor Daughter of Joy,
carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd,
makes a figure which it is impossible
to recall without a wounding pity.

She is the type of the unsuccessful artist.

The actor,
the dancer,
and the singer must appear like her in person,
and drain publicly the cup of failure.

But though the rest of us escape this crowning bitterness of the pillory,
we all court in essence the same humiliation.

We all profess
to be able
to delight.

And how few of us are!

We all pledge ourselves
to be able
to continue
to delight.

And the day will come
to each,
and even
to the most admired,
when the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost,
and he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed.

Then shall he see himself condemned
to do work
for which he blushes
to take payment.

Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) he must lie exposed
to the gibes of the wreckers of the press,
who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have not read,
and the praise of excellence which they cannot understand.And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers.

LES BLANCS ET LES BLEUS (
for instance) is of an order of merit very different from LE VICOMTE DE BRAGLONNE;
and if any gentleman can bear
to spy upon the nakedness of CASTLE DANGEROUS,
his name I think is Ham:

let it be enough
for the rest of us
to read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart.

Thus in old age,
when occupation and comfort are most needful,
the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner.

The painter indeed,
if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of the public,
gains great sums and can stand
to his easel until a great age without dishonourable failure.

The writer has the double misfortune
to be ill-paid while he can work,
and
to be incapable of working when he is old.

It is thus a way of life which conducts directly
to a false position.
for the writer (in spite of notorious examples
to the contrary) must look
to be ill-paid.

Tennyson and Montepin make handsome livelihoods;
but we cannot all hope
to be Tennyson,
and we do not all perhaps desire
to be Montepin.

If you adopt an art
to be your trade,
weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money.

What you may decently expect,
if you have some talent and much industry,
is such an income as a clerk will earn
with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output.

Nor have you the right
to look
for more;
in the wages of the life,
not in the wages of the trade,
lies your reward;
the work is here the wages.

It will be seen I have little sympathy
with the common lamentations of the artist class.

Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field labourer;
or do they think no parallel will lie?

Perhaps they have never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer;
or do they suppose their contributions
to the arts of pleasing more important than the services of a colonel?

Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was content
to live;
or do they think,
because they have less genius,
they stand excused from the display of equal virtues?

But upon one point there should be no dubiety:

if a man be not frugal,
he has no business in the arts.

If he be not frugal,
he steers directly
for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX SALTIMBANQUE;
if he be not frugal,
he will find it hard
to continue
to be honest.

Some day,
when the butcher is knocking at the door,
he may be tempted,
he may be obliged,

to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work.

If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own,
he is even
to be commanded;

for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family,
than that he should attain
to - or preserve - distinction in the arts.

But if the pressure comes,
through his own fault,
he has stolen,
and stolen under trust,
and stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can reach him.And now you may perhaps ask me,
if the debutant artist is
to have no thought of money,
and if (as is implied) he is
to expect no honours from the State,
he may not at least look forward
to the delights of popularity?

Praise,
you will tell me,
is a savoury dish.

And in so far as you may mean the countenance of other artists you would put your finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career of art.

But in so far as you should have an eye
to the commendations of the public or the notice of the newspapers,
be sure you would but be cherishing a dream.

It is true that in certain esoteric journals the author (
for instance) is duly criticised,
and that he is often praised a great deal more than he deserves,
sometimes
for qualities which he prided himself on eschewing,
and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied themselves the privilege of reading his work.

But if a man be sensitive
to this wild praise,
we must suppose him equally alive
to that which often accompanies and always follows it - wild ridicule.

A man may have done well
for years,
and then he may fail;
he will hear of his failure.

Or he may have done well
for years,
and still do well,
but the critics may have tired of praising him,
or there may have sprung up some new idol of the instant,
some "dust a little gilt,"
to whom they now prefer
to offer sacrifice.

Here is the obverse and the reverse of that empty and ugly thing called popularity.

Will any man suppose it worth the gaining?


CHAPTER XI - PULVIS ET UMBRA
We look
for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed;
not success,
not happiness,
not even peace of conscience,
crowns our ineffectual efforts
to do well.

Our frailties are invincible,
our virtues barren;
the battle goes sore against us
to the going down of the sun.

The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong;
and we look abroad,
even on the face of our small earth,
and find them change
with every climate,
and no country where some action is not honoured
for a virtue and none where it is not branded
for a vice;
and we look in our experience,
and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules,
but at the best a municipal fitness.

It is not strange if we are tempted
to despair of good.

We ask too much.

Our religions and moralities have been trimmed
to flatter us,
till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised,
and only please and weaken.

Truth is of a rougher strain.

In the harsh face of life,
faith can read a bracing gospel.

The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments;
and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos,
in whose joints we are but moss and fungus,
more ancient still.

I
Of the Kosmos in the last resort,
science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling.

There seems no substance
to this solid globe on which we stamp:

nothing but symbols and ratios.

Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down;
gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space,
is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances;
and the suns and worlds themselves,
imponderable figures of abstraction,
NH3,
and H2O.

Consideration dares not dwell upon this view;
that way madness lies;
science carries us in
to zones of speculation,
where there is no habitable city
for the mind of man.But take the Kosmos
with a grosser faith,
as our senses give it us.

We behold space sown
with rotatory islands,
suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems:

some,
like the sun,
still blazing;
some rotting,
like the earth;
others,
like the moon,
stable in desolation.

All of these we take
to be made of something we call matter:

a thing which no analysis can help us
to conceive;

to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds.

This stuff,
when not purified by the lustration of fire,
rots uncleanly in
to something we call life;
seized through all its atoms
with a pediculous malady;
swelling in tumours that become independent,
sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory;
one splitting in
to millions,
millions cohering in
to one,
as the malady proceeds through varying stages.

This vital putrescence of the dust,
used as we are
to it,
yet strikes us
with occasional disgust,
and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf,
or the air of a marsh darkened
with insects,
will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire
for cleaner places.

But none is clean:

the moving sand is infected
with lice;
the pure spring,
where it bursts out of the mountain,
is a mere issue of worms;
even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth:

the animal and the vegetable:

one in some degree the inversion of the other:

the second rooted
to the spot;
the first coming detached out of its natal mud,
and scurrying abroad
with the myriad feet of insects or towering in
to the heavens on the wings of birds:

a thing so inconceivable that,
if it be well considered,
the heart stops.


to what passes
with the anchored vermin,
we have little clue,
doubtless they have their joys and sorrows,
their delights and killing agonies:

it appears not how.

But of the locomotory,

to which we ourselves belong,
we can tell more.

These share
with us a thousand miracles:

the miracles of sight,
of hearing,
of the projection of sound,
things that bridge space;
the miracles of memory and reason,
by which the present is conceived,
and when it is gone,
its image kept living in the brains of man and brute;
the miracle of reproduction,

with its imperious desires and staggering consequences.

And
to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable,
all these prey upon each other,
lives tearing other lives in pieces,
cramming them inside themselves,
and by that summary process,
growing fat:

the vegetarian,
the whale,
perhaps the tree,
not less than the lion of the desert;

for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded
with predatory life,
and more drenched
with blood,
both animal and vegetable,
than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space
with unimaginable speed,
and turns alternate cheeks
to the reverberation of a blazing world,
ninety million miles away.

II
What a monstrous spectre is this man,
the disease of the agglutinated dust,
lifting alternate feet or lying drugged
with slumber;
killing,
feeding,
growing,
bringing forth small copies of himself;
grown upon
with hair like grass,
fitted
with eyes that move and glitter in his face;
a thing
to set children screaming;
- and yet looked at nearlier,
known as his fellows know him,
how surprising are his attributes!

Poor soul,
here
for so little,
cast among so many hardships,
filled
with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent,
savagely surrounded,
savagely descended,
irremediably condemned
to prey upon his fellow lives:

who should have blamed him had he been of a piece
with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?

And we look and behold him instead filled
with imperfect virtues:

infinitely childish,
often admirably valiant,
often touchingly kind;
sitting down,
amidst his momentary life,

to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity;
rising up
to do battle
for an egg or die
for an idea;
singling out his friends and his mate
with cordial affection;
bringing forth in pain,
rearing
with long-suffering solicitude,
his young.


to touch the heart of his mystery,
we find,
in him one thought,
strange
to the point of lunacy:

the thought of duty;
the thought of something owing
to himself,

to his neighbour,

to his God:

an ideal of decency,

to which he would rise if it were possible;
a limit of shame,
below which,
if it be possible,
he will not stoop.

The design in most men is one of conformity;
here and there,
in picked natures,
it transcends itself and soars on the other side,
arming martyrs
with independence;
but in all,
in their degrees,
it is a bosom thought:

- Not in man alone,

for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well,
and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant,
the oyster,
and the louse,
of whom we know so little:

- But in man,
at least,
it sways
with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second,
even
with the selfish:

that appetites are starved,
fears are conquered,
pains supported;
that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance,
although it were a child's;
and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war;
and the more noble,
having strongly conceived an act as due
to their ideal,
affront and embrace death.

Strange enough if,

with their singular origin and perverted practice,
they think they are
to be rewarded in some future life:

stranger still,
if they are persuaded of the contrary,
and think this blow,
which they solicit,
will strike them senseless
for eternity.

I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents:

of organised injustice,
cowardly violence and treacherous crime;
and of the damning imperfections of the best.

They cannot be too darkly drawn.

Man is indeed marked
for failure in his efforts
to do right.

But where the best consistently miscarry,
how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue
to strive;
and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting,
that in a field from which success is banished,
our race should not cease
to labour.If the first view of this creature,
stalking in his rotatory isle,
be a thing
to shake the courage of the stoutest,
on this nearer sight,
he startles us
with an admiring wonder.

It matters not where we look,
under what climate we observe him,
in what stage of society,
in what depth of ignorance,
burthened
with what erroneous morality;
by camp-fires in Assiniboia,
the snow powdering his shoulders,
the wind plucking his blanket,
as he sits,
passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator;
in ships at sea,
a man inured
to hardship and vile pleasures,
his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself
to rob him,
and he
for all that simple,
innocent,
cheerful,
kindly like a child,
constant
to toil,
brave
to drown,

for others;
in the slums of cities,
moving among indifferent millions
to mechanical employments,
without hope of change in the future,

with scarce a pleasure in the present,
and yet true
to his virtues,
honest up
to his lights,
kind
to his neighbours,
tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,
perhaps long-suffering
with the drunken wife that ruins him;
in India (a woman this time) kneeling
with broken cries and streaming tears,
as she drowns her child in the sacred river;
in the brothel,
the discard of society,
living mainly on strong drink,
fed
with affronts,
a fool,
a thief,
the comrade of thieves,
and even here keeping the point of honour and the touch of pity,
often repaying the world's scorn
with service,
often standing firm upon a scruple,
and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches:

- everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage,
everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:

- ah!

if I could show you this!

if I could show you these men and women,
all the world over,
in every stage of history,
under every abuse of error,
under every circumstance of failure,
without hope,
without help,
without thanks,
still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue,
still clinging,
in the brothel or on the scaffold,

to some rag of honour,
the poor jewel of their souls!

They may seek
to escape,
and yet they cannot;
it is not alone their privilege and glory,
but their doom;
they are condemned
to some nobility;
all their lives long,
the desire of good is at their heels,
the implacable hunter.Of all earth's meteors,
here at least is the most strange and consoling:

that this ennobled lemur,
this hair-crowned bubble of the dust,
this inheritor of a few years and sorrows,
should yet deny himself his rare delights,
and add
to his frequent pains,
and live
for an ideal,
however misconceived.

Nor can we stop
with man.

A new doctrine,
received
with screams a little while ago by canting moralists,
and still not properly worked in
to the body of our thoughts,
lights us a step farther in
to the heart of this rough but noble universe.


for nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship
with the original dust.

He stands no longer like a thing apart.

Close at his heels we see the dog,
prince of another genus:

and in him too,
we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal,
the same constancy in failure.

Does it stop
with the dog?

We look at our feet where the ground is blackened
with the swarming ant:

a creature so small,
so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes,
that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings;
and here also,
in his ordered politics and rigorous justice,
we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin.

Does it stop,
then,

with the ant?

Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life:

rather is this earth,
from the frosty top of Everest
to the next margin of the internal fire,
one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance.

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together.

It is the common and the god-like law of life.

The browsers,
the biters,
the barkers,
the hairy coats of field and forest,
the squirrel in the oak,
the thousand-footed creeper in the dust,
as they share
with us the gift of life,
share
with us the love of an ideal:

strive like us - like us are tempted
to grow weary of the struggle -
to do well;
like us receive at times unmerited refreshment,
visitings of support,
returns of courage;
and are condemned like us
to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will.

Are they like us,
I wonder,
in the timid hope of some reward,
some sugar
with the drug?

do they,
too,
stand aghast at unrewarded virtues,
at the sufferings of those whom,
in our partiality,
we take
to be just,
and the prosperity of such as,
in our blindness,
we call wicked?

It may be,
and yet God knows what they should look for.

Even while they look,
even while they repent,
the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust,
the yelping hounds burst upon their trail,
the bullet speeds,
the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist;
or the dew falls,
and the generation of a day is blotted out.


for these are creatures,
compared
with whom our weakness is strength,
our ignorance wisdom,
our brief span eternity.And as we dwell,
we living things,
in our isle of terror and under the imminent hand of death,
God forbid it should be man the erected,
the reasoner,
the wise in his own eyes - God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing,
that despairs of unrewarded effort,
or utters the language of complaint.

Let it be enough
for faith,
that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty,
strives
with unconquerable constancy:

Surely not all in vain.


CHAPTER XII - A CHRISTMAS SERMON
BY the time this paper appears,
I shall have been talking
for twelve months;
and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and seasonable manner.

Valedictory eloquence is rare,
and death- bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion.

Charles Second,
wit and sceptic,
a man whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity,
an easy-going comrade,
a manoeuvring king - remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along
with more than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid,
gentlemen,
I am an unconscionable time a-dying."


I
An unconscionable time a-dying - there is the picture ("I am afraid,
gentlemen,") of your life and of mine.

The sands run out,
and the hours are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by;
and when the last of these finds us,
we have been a long time dying,
and what else?

The very length is something,
if we reach that hour of separation undishonoured;
and
to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression)
to have served.There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in the German wilderness;
of how they mobbed Germanicus,
clamouing go home;
and of how,
seizing their general's hand,
these old,
war-worn exiles passed his finger along their toothless guMs. SUNT LACRYMAE RERUM:

this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.

And when a man has lived
to a fair age,
he bears his marks of service.

He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the army;
at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character.

It never seems
to them that they have served enough;
they have a fine impatience of their virtues.

It were perhaps more modest
to be singly thankful that we are no worse.

It is not only our enemies,
those desperate characters - it is we ourselves who know not what we do,
- thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think:

that
to scramble through this random business
with hands reasonably clean
to have played the part of a man or woman
with some reasonable fulness,

to have often resisted the diabolic,
and at the end
to be still resisting it,
is
for the poor human soldier
to have done right well.


to ask
to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving
for reward;
and what we take
to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.And again if we require so much of ourselves,
shall we not require much of others?

If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies,
is it not
to be feared we shall be even stern
to the trespasses of others?

And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying,
will he not be tempted
to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged?

It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at all,
think of it too much;
it is certain we all think too much of sin.

We are not damned
for doing wrong,
but
for not doing right;
Christ would never hear of negative morality;
THOU SHALT was ever his word,

with which he superseded THOU SHALT NOT.


to make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is
to defile the imagination and
to introduce in
to our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

If a thing is wrong
for us,
we should not dwell upon the thought of it;
or we shall soon dwell upon it
with inverted pleasure.

If we cannot drive it from our minds - one thing of two:

either our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it;
or else,
if our morality be in the right,
we are criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint.

A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is the passion
for interference
with others:

the Fox without the Tail was of this breed,
but had (if his biographer is
to be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date.

A man may have a flaw,
a weakness,
that unfits him
for the duties of life,
that spoils his temper,
that threatens his integrity,
or that betrays him in
to cruelty.

It has
to be conquered;
but it must never he suffered
to engross his thoughts.

The true duties lie all upon the farther side,
and must be attended
to
with a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of the decks has been effected.

In order that he may be kind and honest,
it may be needful he should become a total abstainer;
let him become so then,
and the next day let him forget the circumstance.

Trying
to be kind and honest will require all his thoughts;
a mortified appetite is never a wise companion;
in so far as he has had
to mortify an appetite,
he will still be the worse man;
and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will be required in judging life,
and a great deal of humility in judging others.It may be argued again that dissatisfaction
with our life's endeavour springs in some degree from dulness.

We require higher tasks,
because we do not recognise the height of those we have.

Trying
to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential
for gentlemen of our heroic mould;
we had rather set ourselves
to something bold,
arduous,
and conclusive;
we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy,
cut off a hand or mortify an appetite.

But the task before us,
which is
to co-endure
with our existence,
is rather one of microscopic fineness,
and the heroism required is that of patience.

There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life;
each must be smilingly unravelled.
to be honest,

to be kind -
to earn a little and
to spend a little less,

to make upon the whole a family happier
for his presence,

to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered,

to keep a few friends,
but these without capitulation - above all,
on the same grim condition,

to keep friends
with himself - here is a task
for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.

He has an ambitious soul who would ask more;
he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise
to be successful.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert:

whatever else we are intended
to do,
we are not intended
to succeed;
failure is the fate allotted.

It is so in every art and study;
it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

Here is a pleasant thought
for the year's end or
for the end of life.

Only self-deception will be satisfied,
and there need be no despair
for the despairer.

II
But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year,
moving us
to thoughts of self-examination:

it is a season,
from all its associations,
whether domestic or religious,
suggesting thoughts of joy.

A man dissatisfied
with his endeavours is a man tempted
to sadness.

And in the midst of the winter,
when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved,
it is well he should be condemned
to this fashion of the smiling face.

Noble disappointment,
noble self-denial,
are not
to be admired,
not even
to be pardoned,
if they bring bitterness.

It is one thing
to enter the kingdom of heaven maim;
another
to maim yourself and stay without.

And the kingdom of heaven is of the child-like,
of those who are easy
to please,
who love and who give pleasure.

Mighty men of their hands,
the smiters and the builders and the judges,
have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character;
and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns,
the shame were indelible if WE should lose it.

Gentleness and cheerfulness,
these come before all morality;
they are the perfect duties.

And it is the trouble
with moral men that they have neither one nor other.

It was the moral man,
the Pharisee,
whom Christ could not away with.

If your morals make you dreary,
depend upon it they are wrong.

I do not say "give them up,"
for they may be all you have;
but conceal them like a vice,
lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.A strange temptation attends upon man:


to keep his eye on pleasures,
even when he will not share in them;

to aim all his morals against them.

This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls;
and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.

I venture
to call such moralists insincere.

At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite,
their lyre sounds of itself
with relishing denunciations;
but
for all displays of the truly diabolic - envy,
malice,
the mean lie,
the mean silence,
the calumnious truth,
the back-biter,
the petty tyrant,
the peevish poisoner of family life - their standard is quite different.

These are wrong,
they will admit,
yet somehow not so wrong;
there is no zeal in their assault on them,
no secret element of gus
to warms up the sermon;
it is
for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation.

A man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship
with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls;

for these are gross and naked instances.

And yet in each of us some similar element resides.

The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will not share moves us
to a particular impatience.

It may be because we are envious,
or because we are sad,
or because we dislike noise and romping - being so refined,
or because - being so philosophic - we have an over-weighing sense of life's gravity:

at least,
as we go on in years,
we are all tempted
to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures.

People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations;
here is one
to be resisted.

They are fond of self-denial;
here is a propensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbours good.

One person I have
to make good:

myself.

But my duty
to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have
to make him happy - if I may.

III
Happiness and goodness,
according
to canting moralists,
stand in the relation of effect and cause.

There was never anything less proved or less probable:

our happiness is never in our own hands;
we inherit our constitution;
we stand buffet among friends and enemies;
we may be so built as
to feel a sneer or an aspersion
with unusual keenness,
and so circumstanced as
to be unusually exposed
to them;
we may have nerves very sensitive
to pain,
and be afflicted
with a disease very painful.

Virtue will not help us,
and it is not meant
to help us.

It is not even its own reward,
except
for the self-centred and - I had almost said - the unamiable.

No man can pacify his conscience;
if quiet be what he want,
he shall do better
to let that organ perish from disuse.

And
to avoid the penalties of the law,
and the minor CAPITIS DIMINUTIO of social ostracism,
is an affair of wisdom - of cunning,
if you will - and not of virtue.In his own life,
then,
a man is not
to expect happiness,
only
to profit by it gladly when it shall arise;
he is on duty here;
he knows not how or why,
and does not need
to know;
he knows not
for what hire,
and must not ask.

Somehow or other,
though he does not know what goodness is,
he must try
to be good;
somehow or other,
though he cannot tell what will do it,
he must try
to give happiness
to others.

And no doubt there comes in here a frequent clash of duties.

How far is he
to make his neighbour happy?

How far must he respect that smiling face,
so easy
to cloud,
so hard
to brighten again?

And how far,
on the other side,
is he bound
to be his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality?

How far must he resent evil?
The difficulty is that we have little guidance;
Christ's sayings on the point being hard
to reconcile
with each other,
and (the most of them) hard
to accept.

But the truth of his teaching would seem
to be this:

in our own person and fortune,
we should be ready
to accept and
to pardon all;
it is OUR cheek we are
to turn,
OUR coat that we are
to give away
to the man who has taken OUR cloak.

But when another's face is buffeted,
perhaps a little of the lion will become us best.

That we are
to suffer others
to be injured,
and stand by,
is not conceivable and surely not desirable.

Revenge,
says Bacon,
is a kind of wild justice;
its judgments at least are delivered by an insane judge;
and in our own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely.

But in the quarrel of our neighbour,
let us be more bold.

One person's happiness is as sacred as another's;
when we cannot defend both,
let us defend one
with a stout heart.

It is only in so far as we are doing this,
that we have any right
to interfere:

the defence of B is our only ground of action against A.

A has as good a right
to go
to the devil,
as we
to go
to glory;
and neither knows what he does.The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and militant mongerings of moral half-truths,
though they be sometimes needful,
though they are often enjoyable,
do yet belong
to an inferior grade of duties.

Ill-temper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious disguises;
this is the playground of inverted lusts.


with a little more patience and a little less temper,
a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case;
and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life,
or,
in public affairs,
by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased
to call our neighbour's vices,
might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

IV

to look back upon the past year,
and see how little we have striven and
to what small purpose;
and how often we have been cowardly and hung back,
or temerarious and rushed unwisely in;
and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;
- it may seem a paradox,
but in the bitterness of these discoveries,
a certain consolation resides.

Life is not designed
to minister
to a man's vanity.

He goes upon his long business most of the time
with a hanging head,
and all the time like a blind child.

Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that
to see the day break or the moon rise,
or
to meet a friend,
or
to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry,
fills him
with surprising joys - this world is yet
for him no abiding city.

Friendships fall through,
health fails,
weariness assails him;
year after year,
he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly.

It is a friendly process of detachment.

When the time comes that he should go,
there need be few illusions left about himself.

HERE LIES ONE WHO MEANT WELL,
TRIED A LITTLE,
FAILED MUCH:

- surely that may be his epitaph,
of which he need not be ashamed.

Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field:

defeated,
ay,
if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!

- but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit,
undishonoured.

The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arMs. Give him a march
with his old bones;
there,
out of the glorious sun-coloured earth,
out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy - there goes another Faithful Failure!
From a recent book of verse,
where there is more than one such beautiful and manly poem,
I take this memorial piece:

it says better than I can,
what I love
to think;
let it be our parting word.

"A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;
And from the west,
Where the sun,
his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old,
gray city An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace."

The smoke ascends In a rosy-and-golden haze.

The spires Shine,
and are changed.

In the valley Shadows rise.

The lark sings on.

The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks,
and the darkening air Thrills
with a sense of the triumphing night - Night,

with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep."

So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken,
and in my heart Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered
to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death."