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 THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 f " \^ <*r I
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW
 
 Alt rights reserved 
 
 From a Cornish Window 
 
 BY 
 
 A. T. QUILLER- COUCH 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 TWO SIDES OF THE FACE," "THE WESTCOTES 
 
 "DEAD MAN'S ROCK" 
 
 ETC. 
 
 JSl'iStOl 
 
 J. JV. Arrow smith, 1 1 Quay Street 
 
 Xon&on 
 Simbkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Ktnt Sf Company Limited 
 
 igc6
 
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 My dear William Archer, 
 
 Severe and ruthlessly honest man that you are, 
 you will find that the levities and the gravities of 
 this book do not accord, and will say so. 
 
 I plead only that they were written at intervals, 
 and in part for recreation, during years in which 
 their author has striven to maintain a cheerful 
 mind while a popular philosophy which he believed 
 to be cheap took possession of men and translated 
 itself into politics which he knew to be nasty. I 
 may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the 
 philosophy of the Superman, and succinctly describe 
 it as an attempt to stretch a part of the Darwinian 
 hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's 
 life and conduct. I need not remind you how 
 fatally its doctrine has flattered, in our time and 
 in our country, the worst instincts of the half- 
 educated : but let us remove it from all spheres in 
 which we are interested and contemplate it as 
 
 v
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 expounded by an American Insurance " Lobbyist," 
 a few days ago, before the Armstrong Committee : — 
 
 " The Insurance world to-day is the greatest financial 
 proposition in the United States; and, as great affairs 
 always do, it comviands a higher law." 
 
 I have read precisely the same doctrine in a 
 University Sermon preached by an Archbishop : 
 but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric; 
 the point being that in life, which is a struggle, 
 success has in itself something divine, by virtue of 
 which it can be to itself a law of right and wrong ; 
 and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the 
 noble obligation to command himself so soon and 
 in so far as he is rich enough or strong enough to 
 command other people. 
 
 But why (you will ask) do I drag this doctrine 
 into a dedication ? Because, my dear Archer, I 
 have fought against it for close upon seventeen 
 years; because seventeen years is no small slice 
 of a man's life — rather, so long a time that it has 
 taught me to prize my bruises and prefer that, if 
 anybody hereafter care to know me, he shall know 
 me as one whose spirit took its cheer in intervals 
 of a fight against detestable things ; that — let him 
 rank me in talent never so low beside my con- 
 temporaries who preached this doctrine — he shall at 
 
 vi
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 least have no excuse but to acquit me of being one 
 
 with them in mind or purpose ; and lastly, because 
 
 in these times few things have brought me such 
 
 comfort (stern comfort !) as I have derived from 
 
 your criticism, so hospitable to ideas, so inflexible 
 
 in judging right from wrong. As I have lived 
 
 lonelier it has been better for me, and a solace 
 
 beyond your guessing, to have been reminded that 
 
 criticism still lives amongst us and has a Roman 
 
 spirit. 
 
 A. T. QUILLER-COUCH 
 
 The Haven, 
 
 Fowey, 
 April 3rd, 1906. 
 
 vii
 
 January 
 
 SHOULD any reader be puzzled by the title of 
 this discursive volume, the following verses 
 may provide him with an explanation. They were 
 written some time ago for a lady who had requested, 
 required, requisitioned (I forget the precise shade of 
 the imperative) something for her album. " We are 
 in the last ages of the world," wrote Charles Lamb 
 to Barry Cornwall, " when St. Paul prophesied that 
 women should be ' headstrong, lovers of their own 
 will, having albums. ' " 
 
 BEATUS POSSIDENS. 
 
 I can't afford a mile of sward, 
 Parterres and peacocks gay ; 
 
 For velvet lawns and marble fauns 
 Mere authors cannot pay. 
 
 And so I went and pitched my tent 
 
 Above a harbour fair, 
 Where vessels picturesquely rigg'd 
 
 Obligingly repair.
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 The harbour is not mine at all : 
 
 I make it so — what odds ? 
 And gulls unwitting on my wall 
 
 Serve me for garden-gods. 
 
 By ships that ride below kaleid- 
 
 oscopically changed, 
 Unto my mind each day I find 
 
 My garden rearranged. 
 
 These, madam, are my daffodils, 
 
 My pinks, my hollyhocks, 
 My herds upon a hundred hills, 
 
 My phloxes and my flocks. 
 
 And when some day you deign to pay 
 
 The call that 's overdue, 
 I '11 wave a landlord's easy hand 
 
 And say, "Admire my view!" 
 
 Now I do not deny that a part of the content 
 expressed in these lines may come of resignation. 
 In some moods, were I to indulge them, it were 
 pleasant to fancy myself owner of a vast estate, 
 champaign and woodland ; able to ride from sea to 
 sea without stepping off my own acres, with villeins 
 and bondmen, privileges of sak and soke, infangthef, 
 outfangthef, rents, tolls, dues, royalties, and a private 
 gallows for autograph-hunters. These things, how- 
 ever, did not come to me by inheritance, and for
 
 JANUARY 
 
 a number of sufficient reasons I have not amassed 
 them. As for those other ambitions which fill the 
 dreams of every healthy boy, a number of them had 
 become of faint importance even before a break- 
 down of health seemed definitely to forbid their 
 attainment. Here at home, far from London, with 
 restored strength, I find myself less concerned with 
 them than are my friends and neighbours, yet more 
 keenly interested than ever in life and letters, art 
 and politics — all that men and women are saying 
 and doing. Only the centre of gravity has shifted, 
 so to speak. 
 
 I dare say, then, that resignation may have 
 some share in this content ; but if so 'tis an 
 unconscious and happy one. A man who has 
 been writing novels for a good part of his life 
 should at least be able to sympathise with various 
 kinds of men ; and, for an example or two, I can 
 understand — 
 
 i. Why Alexander cried (if he ever did) because 
 he had no second world to conquer. 
 
 2. Why Shakespeare, as an Englishman, wanted 
 
 a coat of arms and a respectable estate in 
 his own native country town. 
 
 3. What and how deep are the feelings beneath 
 
 that cri du cceur of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's 
 "Old Squire"—
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " I like the hunting of the hare 
 Better than that of the fox ; 
 I like the joyous morning air, 
 And the crowing: of the cocks. 
 
 'O 
 
 " I covet not a wider range 
 
 Than these dear manors give ; 
 I take my pleasures without change, 
 And as I lived I live. 
 
 " Nor has the world a better thing, 
 Though one should search it round, 
 Than thus to live one's own sole king 
 Upon one's own sole ground. 
 
 " I like the hunting of the hare ; 
 It brings me day by day 
 The memory of old days as fair, 
 With dead men past away. 
 
 " To these as homeward still I ply, 
 And pass the churchyard gate, 
 Where all are laid as I must lie, 
 I stop and raise my hat. 
 
 " I like the hunting of the hare : 
 New sports I hold in scorn. 
 I like to be as my fathers were 
 In the days ere I was born." 
 
 4. What — to start another hare — were Goldsmith's 
 feelings when he wrote —
 
 JANUARY 
 
 " And as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue 
 Pants to the place from whence at first she flew, 
 I still had hopes, my long vexations past, 
 Here to return — and die at home at last." 
 
 5. With what heart Don Quixote rode forth to 
 tilt at sheep and windmills, and again with 
 what heart in that saddest of all last chapters 
 he bade his friends look not for this year's 
 birds in last year's nests. 
 
 5. Why the young man went away sadly, because 
 he had great possessions and could not see 
 his way to bestowing them all on the poor; 
 why, on the contrary, St. Paulinus of Nola 
 and St. Francis of Assisi joyfully renounced 
 their wealth ; what Prudhon meant by saying 
 that " property is theft " ; and what a poor 
 Welsh clergyman of the seventeenth century 
 by proclaiming in verse and prose that he 
 was heir of all the world, and properties, 
 hedges, boundaries, landmarks meant nothing 
 to him, since all was his that his soul enjoyed; 
 yes, and even what inspired him to pen this 
 golden sentence — 
 
 " You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea 
 itself flow eth in your veins, till you are clothed with 
 the heavens and crowned with the stars."
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 My window, then, looks out from a small library 
 upon a small harbour frequented by ships of all 
 nations — British, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, 
 Russian, French, German, Italian, with now and 
 then an American or a Greek — and upon a shore 
 which I love because it is my native country. Of 
 all views I reckon that of a harbour the most 
 fascinating and the most easeful, for it combines 
 perpetual change with perpetual repose. It amuses 
 like a panorama and soothes like an opiate, and 
 when you have realised this you will understand why 
 so many thousands of men around this island appear 
 to spend all their time in watching tidal water. 
 Lest you should suspect me of taking a merely 
 dilettante interest in the view, I must add that I am 
 a Harbour Commissioner. 
 
 As for the house, it is a plain one ; indeed, very 
 like the house a child draws on a slate, and therefore 
 pleasing even externally to me, who prefer the 
 classical to any Gothic style of architecture. Why 
 so many strangers mistake it with its modest 
 dimensions for a hotel, I cannot tell you. I found 
 one in the pantry the other day searching for a 
 brandy-and-soda ; another rang the dining-room bell 
 and dumbfoundered the maid by asking what we had 
 for lunch ; and a third (a lady) cried when I broke 
 to her that I had no sitting-room to let. We make 
 it a rule to send out a chair whenever some unknown
 
 JANUARY. 
 
 invader walks into the garden and prepares to make 
 a water-colour sketch of the view. 
 
 There are some, too, whose behaviour cannot be 
 reconciled with the hallucination of a hotel, and 
 they must take the house for a public institution 
 of some kind, though of what kind I cannot guess. 
 There was an extremely bashful youth, for instance, 
 who roamed the garden for a while on the day after 
 the late Duke of Cambridge's funeral, and, suddenly 
 dashing in by the back door, wanted to know why 
 our flag was not at half-mast. There was also a 
 lady who called on the excuse that she had made 
 a life-study of the Brontes, and after opining (in 
 a guarded manner) that they came, originally, from 
 somewhere in Yorkshire, desired to be informed 
 how many servants we kept. I have sometimes 
 thought of rechristening our house The Hotel of the 
 Four Seasons, and thereby releasing its true name 
 (The Haven) to a friend who covets it for his own. 
 
 On the whole, however, these visitors disturb the 
 house and the view from my window very little. 
 The upper halves of them, as they pass up and 
 down the road, appear above my garden wall much 
 as the shadows that passed in Plato's cave. They 
 come, enjoy their holiday, and go, leaving the 
 window intent upon the harbour, its own folk and 
 its own business.
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 And now for the book, which is really not a book 
 at all, but a chapter of one. 
 
 Last autumn I returned from a holiday to find 
 that the publishing season had begun. This was 
 announced by a stack of new books, review copies 
 and presentation copies, awaiting me on my window- 
 seat. I regarded it sourly. A holiday is the most 
 unsettling thing in the world. At the end of it 
 I regain the well-worn chair with a sigh of pleasure 
 and reach for the familiar tobacco-jar, wondering 
 how I could have been fool enough to leave them ; 
 yet somehow this lively sense of repurchased habit 
 does not go far enough and compel me to work. 
 Being at home is a game, and so good a game that 
 I play at it merely, rearranging my shelves and, 
 under pretence of dealing with arrears of corres- 
 pondence, skimming the literary papers and book- 
 catalogues found amid the pile of letters. 
 
 It happened that the first postal-wrapper to be 
 broken enclosed a copy of The Academy, and The 
 Academy opened with this sentence : " Since our last 
 issue we have received one hundred and nineteen 
 new books and reprints." I looked across to the 
 pile on my window-seat and felt it to be insignificant, 
 though it interfered with my view of the English 
 Channel. One hundred and nineteen books in a 
 single week ! Yet who was I to exclaim at their 
 number ? — I, who (it appeared) had contributed one 
 
 8
 
 JANUARY 
 
 of them ? With that I remembered something 
 which had happened just before my holiday, and 
 began to reflect on it, for the first time seriously. 
 
 A publisher had asked me for a complete list of 
 my published works, to print it on the fly-leaf of 
 another of them. I sat down with the best intention 
 and compiled it for him, and, in honest oblivion, 
 omitted a couple — of books, mind you — not of 
 pamphlets, reviews, stray articles, short stories, or 
 any such trifles, but of books solemnly written for 
 this and future ages, solemnly printed, bound, and 
 put into circulation at the shops and libraries. (Here, 
 for the due impressiveness of the tale, it becomes 
 necessary to tell you that their author is an indolent 
 and painful writer, slow at the best of times.) 
 
 Well, the discovery that I had forgotten two of 
 my own books at first amused and then set me 
 thinking. "Here you are," said I to myself, a "writer 
 of sorts; and it's no use to pretend that you don't 
 wish to be remembered for a while after you are 
 dead and done with." 
 
 " Quite right," the other part of me assented 
 cheerfully. 
 
 "Well, then," urged the inquisitor, "this is a bad 
 look-out. If you had been born a Dumas — I am 
 speaking of fecundity, if you please, and of nothing 
 else — if you had been born a Dumas, and could rattle 
 off a romance in a fortnight, you might be excused
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 for not keeping tally of your productions. Pitiful, 
 dilatory worker that you are, if you cannot remember 
 them, how can you'expect the world (good Heavens!) 
 to take the trouble ? " 
 
 " I suppose it won't," responded the other part of 
 me, somewhat dashed ; then, picking up its spirits 
 again, "But, anyhow, I shall know where to lay the 
 blame." 
 
 "On yourself?" 
 
 " Most assuredly not." 
 
 " Where, then ? " 
 
 " Why, on the publishers." 
 
 "Ah, of course ! " (This with fine irony.) 
 
 " Yes, on the publishers. Most authors do this 
 during life, and now I begin to see that all authors 
 do it sooner or later. For my part, I shall defer it 
 to the future state." 
 
 " Why ? " 
 
 " Obviously because there will be no publishers 
 thereabouts to contradict me." 
 
 " And of what will you accuse them ? " 
 
 " That they never issued my work in the form it 
 deserved." 
 
 " I see. Poor fellow! You have the ' Edinburgh ' 
 Stevenson or something of that sort on your mind, 
 and are filled with nasty envy." 
 
 Upon this the other part of me fairly lost its 
 temper. 
 
 10
 
 JANUARY 
 
 " The ' Edinburgh ' Stevenson ! The ' Edinburgh ' 
 
 Ste , and you have known me all these years ! 
 
 The ' Edinburgh ' Stevenson is a mighty handsome 
 edition of a mighty fine writer, but I have no more 
 desire to promenade the ages in that costume than 
 to jump the moon. No, I am not going to break 
 any more of the furniture. I am handing you this 
 chair that you may seat yourself and listen . . . 
 Now ! The book which I shall accuse my publishers 
 of not having produced will be in one volume " 
 
 " Come, come. Modesty is all very well, but don't 
 overdo it." 
 
 " folio." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 " of three thousand odd pages, printed (blunt 
 
 type) in double columns, and here and there in 
 triple." 
 
 " O— oh ! " 
 
 " with marginalia by other hands, and foot- 
 notes running sometimes to twenty thousand words, 
 and, including above six thousand quotations from the 
 best poets — every one, in short, which has given me 
 pleasure of a certain quality, whether gentle or acute, 
 at one time or another in my life." 
 
 "! ! ! " 
 
 " the whole profusely, not to say extravagantly, 
 
 adorned with woodcuts in the text, not to mention 
 fifty or sixty full-page illustrations in copper." 
 
 ii
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW. 
 
 " By eminent artists ? " 
 
 " Some of them by eminent artists, for the reason 
 only that I number such among my friends ; the rest 
 by amateurs and members of my household who 
 would help, out of mere affection, in raising this 
 monument." 
 
 " They would do it execrably." 
 
 "I dare say; but that would not matter in the 
 least. The book should be bound in leather and 
 provided with serviceable clasps, as well as with a 
 couple of inner pockets for maps and charts. The 
 maps should contain plenty of sea, with monsters 
 rising from it — leviathans and sea-serpents — as they 
 do in Speed's map of Cornwall which hangs in the 
 hall." 
 
 " Your book will need a window-seat to hold 
 it." 
 
 "Ah, now you talk intelligently ! It was designed 
 for a window-seat, and its fortunate possessor will 
 take care to provide one. Have you any further 
 objections ? " 
 
 " Only this : that a book of such a size written by 
 one man (I make the objection as little personal as 
 I can) must perforce contain many dull pages." 
 
 " Hundreds of them ; whole reams of dull pages." 
 
 " They will be skipped." 
 
 " They will be inserted with that object." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 12
 
 JANUARY 
 
 " It is one of the conditions of becoming a 
 classic." 
 
 " Who will read you ? " 
 
 " Look here. Do you remember the story of that 
 old fellow — a Dutchman, I think — who took a fancy 
 to be buried in the church porch of his native 
 town, that he might hear the feet of the townsfolk, 
 generation after generation, passing over his head to 
 divine service ? " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 " Well. I shall stand on my shelf, bound in 
 good leather, between (say) Bayle's Dictionary and 
 Sibrandus Schnafnaburgemis, his Delectable Treatise; 
 and if some day, when the master of the house has 
 been coaxed by his womenfolk to take a holiday, and 
 they descend upon the books, which he (the humbug) 
 never reads, belabour and bang the dust out of 
 them and flap them with dusters, and all with that 
 vindictiveness which is the good housewife's right 
 attitude towards literature " 
 
 " Had you not better draw breath ? " 
 
 "Thank you. I will; for the end of the protasis 
 lies yet some way off. If, I say, some child of the 
 family, having chosen me out of the heap as a 
 capital fellow for a booby-trap, shall open me by 
 hazard and, attracted by the pictures, lug me off to 
 the window-seat, why then God bless the child ! 
 I shall come to my own. He will not understand 
 
 13
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW. 
 
 much at the time, but he will remember me with 
 affection, and in due course he will give me to his . 
 daughter among her wedding presents (much to 
 her annoyance, but the bridegroom will soothe her). 
 This will happen through several generations until 
 I find myself an heirloom. . . ." 
 
 " You begin to assume that by this time you will 
 be valuable. Also permit me to remark that you 
 have slipped into the present indicative." 
 
 " As for the present indicative, I think you began 
 it." 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Yes. But it doesn't matter. I begin precisely 
 at the right moment to assume a value which will 
 be attached to me, not for my own sake, but on 
 account of dear grandpapa's book-plate and auto- 
 graph on the fly-leaf. (He was the humbug who 
 never read me — a literary person ; he acquired me as 
 a ' review copy,' and only forbore to dispose of me 
 because at the current railway rates I should not 
 have fetched the cost of carriage.)" 
 
 " Why talk of hindrances to publishing such a 
 book, when you know full well it will never be 
 written ? " 
 
 " I thought you would be driven to some such 
 stupid knock-down argument. Whether or not 
 the book will ever be finished is a question that 
 lies on the knees of the gods. I am writing at it 
 
 H
 
 JANUARY. 
 
 every day. And just such a book was written once 
 and even published; as I discovered the other day 
 in an essay by Mr. Austin Dobson. The author, 
 I grant you, was a Dutchman (Mr. Dobson calls 
 him ' Vader Cats,') and the book contains everything 
 from a long didactic poem on Marriage (I also have 
 written a long didactic poem on Marriage) to a page 
 on Children's Games. (My book shall have a chapter 
 on Children's Games, with their proper tunes.) As 
 for poetry — poetry, says Mr. Dobson, with our 
 Dutch poet is not by any means a trickling rill 
 from Helicon : ' it is an inundation a la mode du pays, 
 2l flood in a flat land, covering everything far and 
 near with its sluggish waters.' As for the illustrations, 
 listen to this for the kind of thing I demand : — 
 
 " Perhaps the most interesting of these is to be found 
 in the large head-piece to the above-mentioned Children's 
 Gaines, the background of which exhibits the great square 
 of Middleburgh, with its old Gothic houses and central 
 clump of trees. This is, moreover, as delightful a picture 
 as any in the gallery. Down the middle of the fore- 
 ground, which is filled by a crowd of figures, advances a 
 regiment of little Dutchmen, marching to drum and fife, 
 and led by a fire-eating captain of fifteen. Around this 
 central group are dispersed knots of children playing 
 leap-frog, flying kites, blowing bubbles, whipping tops, 
 walking on stilts, skipping, and the like. In one corner 
 the children are busy with blind man's buff; in the other 
 the girls, with their stiff head-dresses and vandyked 
 
 15
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 aprons, are occupied with their dolls. Under the pump 
 some seventeenth-century equivalent for chuck-farthing 
 seems to be going on vigorously ; and, not to be behind- 
 hand in the fun, two little fellows in the distance are 
 standing upon their heads. The whole composition is 
 full of life and movement, and — so conservative is child- 
 hood — might, but for the costume and scene, represent a 
 playground of to-day." 
 
 " Such are the pictures which shall emerge, like 
 islands, among my dull pages. And there shall 
 be other pages, to be found for the looking. . . . 
 I must make another call upon your memory, my 
 friend, and refer it to a story of Hans Andersen's 
 which fascinated the pair of us in childhood, when 
 we were not really a pair but inseparables, and 
 before you had grown wise ; the story of the Student 
 and the Goblin who lodged at the Butterman's. 
 The Student, at the expense of his dinner, had 
 rescued a book from the butter-tub and taken it off 
 to his garret, and that night the Goblin, overcome 
 by curiosity, peeped through the keyhole, and lo ! 
 the garret was full of light. Forth and up from the 
 book shot a beam of light, which grew into the 
 trunk of a mighty tree, and threw out branches over 
 the bowed head of the student ; and every leaf was 
 fresh, and every flower a face, and every fruit a star, 
 and music sang in the branches. Well, there shall 
 be even such pages in my book." 
 
 16
 
 JANUARY 
 
 "Excuse me," said I, "but, knowing your indolence, 
 I begin to tire of the future indicative, which (allow 
 me to repeat) you first employed in this discussion." 
 
 " I did not," said the other part of me stoutly. 
 "And if I did, 'tis a trick of the trade. You of all 
 people ought to know that I write romances." 
 
 I do not at all demur to having the value of my books 
 enhanced by the contributions of others — by dear 
 grandpapa's autograph on the fly-leaf, for example. 
 But it annoys me to be blamed for other folks' 
 opinions. 
 
 The other day a visitor called and discoursed with 
 me during the greater part of a wet afternoon. He 
 had come for an interview — " dreadful trade," as 
 Edgar said of samphire-gathering — and I wondered, 
 as he took his departure, what on earth he would 
 find to write about : for I love to smoke and listen to 
 other men's opinions, and can boast with Montaigne 
 that during these invasive times my door has stood 
 open to all comers. He was a good fellow, too ; 
 having brains and using them : and I made him an 
 admirable listener. 
 
 It amused me, some while after, to read the 
 interview and learn that / had done the talking 
 and uttered a number of trenchant sayings upon 
 female novelists. Bu: the amusement changed to 
 
 *7
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 dismay when the ladies began to retort. For 
 No. i started with an airy restatement of what I 
 had never said, and No. 2 (who had missed to 
 read the interview) misinterpreted No. i.'s para- 
 phrase ; and by these and other processes within 
 a week my digestive silence had passed through a 
 dozen removes, and was incurring the just execration 
 of a whole sex. I began to see that my old college 
 motto — Quod taciturn velis nemini dixeris — which had 
 always seemed to me to err, if at all, on the side of 
 excess, fell short of adequacy to these strenuous 
 times. 
 
 I have not kept the letters ; but a friend of mine, 
 Mr. Algernon Dexter, has summarised a very similar 
 experience and cast it into chapters, which he allows 
 me to print here. He heads them — 
 
 HUNTING THE DRAG 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Scene: The chastely-furnished writing-room of Mr. Algernon 
 Dexter, a well-known male novelist. Bust of Pallas over 
 practicable door L.U.E. Boohs adorn the walls, inter- 
 spersed with portraits of female relatives. Mr. Dexter 
 discovered witJi Interviewer. Mr. D., poker in hand, is 
 bending over the fire, above which runs the legend, carved 
 in Roman letters across the mantelpiece, "Ne fodias ignem 
 gladio." 
 
 Interviewer (pulling out his watch) : " Dear me ! Only 
 five minutes to catch my train ! And I had several other 
 
 18
 
 JANUARY 
 
 questions to ask. I suppose, now, it 's too late to discuss 
 the Higher Education of Women ? " 
 
 Mr. D. (smiling) : " Well, I think there 's hardly time. 
 It will take you a good four minutes to get to the station." 
 
 Interviewer : "And I must get my typewriter out of 
 the cloakroom. Good-day, then, Mr. Dexter ! " {They 
 shake hands and part with mutual esteem.) 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Extract from "The Daily Post" 
 
 "MONDAY TALKS WITH OUR NOVELISTS.— No. MCVI. 
 Mr. ALGERNON DEXTER. 
 
 "'And now, Mr. Dexter,' said I, 'what is your opinion 
 of the Higher Education of Women ? ' 
 
 " The novelist stroked his bronze beard. ' That 's a 
 large order, eh ? Isn't it rather late in the day to discuss 
 Women's Education ? ' And with a humorous gesture 
 of despair he dropped the poker." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Tuesday's Letter 
 Sir, — In your issue of to-day I read with interest an 
 account of an interview with Mr. Dexter, the popular 
 novelist, and I observe that gentleman thinks it "rather 
 late in the day" to discuss the Higher Education of 
 Women. One can only be amused at this flippant dis- 
 missal of a subject dear to the hearts of many of us ; 
 a movement consecrated by the life-energies — I had 
 almost said the life-blood — of a Gladstone, a Sidgwick, 
 a Fitch, and a Piatt -Culpepper. Does Mr. Dexter 
 really imagine that he can look down on such names as 
 
 19
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 these ? Or are we to conclude that the recent successes 
 
 of " educated " women in fiction have got on his nerves ? 
 
 To suggest professional jealousy would be going too far, 
 
 no doubt. 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 " High School." 
 
 chapter IV. 
 
 Wednesday's Letters 
 
 (i) Sir, — I, too, was disgusted with Mr. Algernon 
 Dexter's cheap sneer at women's education. He has, 
 it seems, " no opinion " of it. Allow me to point out 
 that, whatever his opinion may be, Women's Education 
 has come to stay. The time is past when Woman could 
 be relegated to the kitchen or the nursery, and told, in 
 the words of the poet Byron, that these constituted her 
 " whole existence." Not so ; and if Mr. Dexter is 
 inclined to doubt it let him read the works of George 
 Elliot (Mrs. J. W. Cross) or Marian Crawford. They 
 will open his eyes to the task he has undertaken. 
 
 I am, Sir, yours, etc., 
 
 "Audi Alteram Partem." 
 
 (2) Sir, — Mr. Algernon Dexter thinks woman's educa- 
 tion "a large order" — not a very elegant expression, let 
 me say, en passant, for one who aspires to be known as 
 a " stylist." Still a large order it is, and one that as an 
 imperial race we shall be forced to envisage. If our 
 children are to be started in life as fit citizens of this 
 empire, with a grasp on its manifold and far-reaching 
 complexities of interest, and unless the Germans are to 
 
 20
 
 JANUARY 
 
 beat us, we must provide them with educated mothers. 
 "The child is father of the man," but the mother has, 
 me judice, no less influence upon his subsequent career. 
 And this is not to be done by putting back the hands of 
 the clock, or setting them to make pies and samplers, but 
 by raising them to mutually co-operate and further what 
 has been aptly termed " The White Man's Burden." 
 Such, at any rate, though I may not live to see it, is the 
 conviction of 
 
 "A Mus. Doc. of Forty Years' Standing." 
 
 (3) Sir, — "High School" has done a public service. 
 A popular novelist may be licensed to draw on his 
 imagination ; but hitting below the belt is another thing, 
 whoever wears it. Mr. Dexter's disdainful treatment of 
 that eminent educationist, Mr. Piatt-Culpepper — who is 
 in his grave and therefore unable to reply (so like a 
 man !) — can be called nothing less. I hope it will 
 receive the silent contempt it deserves. 
 
 Yours indignantly, 
 
 " Mere Woman." 
 
 chapter v. 
 Thursdafs Letters 
 (1) Sir, — Your correspondents, with whose indignation 
 I am in sympathy, have to me most unaccountably over- 
 looked the real gravamen of Mr. Dexter's offence. Unlike 
 them, I have read several of that gentleman's brochures, 
 and can assure you that he once posed as the advocate of 
 unbounded license for women in Higher Education, if 
 not in other directions. This volte face (I happen to know) 
 
 21
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 will come as a severe disappointment to many ; for we 
 had quite counted him one of us. 
 
 " We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, 
 Lived in his mild and magnificent eye," 
 
 shall have, it seems, to " record one lost soul more, one 
 more devil's triumph," etc. I subscribe myself, sir, more 
 in sorrow than in anger, 
 
 Percy Fladd, 
 
 President, H.W.E.L. 
 [Hoxion Women's Emancipation League). 
 
 (2) Sir, — Why all this beating about the bush ? The 
 matter in dispute between Mr. Dexter and his critics 
 was summed up long ago by Scotia's premier poet 
 (I refer to Robert Burns) in the lines — 
 
 "To make a happy fireside clime 
 To weans and wife, 
 That 's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life," 
 
 and vice versa. Your correspondents are too hasty in 
 condemning Mr. Dexter. He may have expressed him- 
 self awkwardly ; but, as I understood him, he never 
 asserted that education necessarily unsexed a woman, if 
 kept within limits. "A man's a man for a' that"; then 
 why not a woman ? At least, so says 
 
 "Auld Reekie." 
 
 (3) Sir, — Let Mr. Dexter stick to his guns. He is 
 not the first who has found the New Woman an unmiti- 
 gated nuisance, and I respect him for saying so in no 
 
 22
 
 JANUARY 
 
 measured terms. Let women, if they want husbands, 
 cease to write oratorios and other things in which man 
 is, by his very constitution, facile princeps, and let her 
 cultivate that desideratum in which she excels— a cosy 
 home and a bright smile to greet him on the doorstep 
 when he returns from a tiring day in the City. Until 
 that is done I, for one, shall remain 
 
 " Unmarried." 
 
 P.S. — Could a woman have composed Shakespeare ? 
 
 (4) Sir, — I had no intention of mixing in this corre- 
 spondence, and publicity is naturally distasteful to me. 
 Nor do I hold any brief for the Higher Education of 
 Women ; but when I see writer after writer — apparently 
 of my own sex — taking refuge in what has been called 
 the "base shelter of anonymity," I feel constrained to 
 sign myself, 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 (Mrs.) Rachel Ramsbotham. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Friday s Letters 
 
 (1) Sir, — After reading " Unmarried's" letter, one 
 can hardly wonder that he is so. He asks if any woman 
 could have written Shakespeare, and insinuates that she 
 would be better occupied in meeting him (" Unmarried ") 
 on the doorstep " with a bright smile." As to that, there 
 may be two opinions. Everyone to his taste, but for my 
 part, if his insufferable male conceit will allow him to 
 believe i-t — I would rather have written Shakespeare a 
 
 23
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 hundred times over, and I am not alone in this view. 
 Such men as Mr. Dexter and " Unmarried " are the 
 cause why half of us women prefer to remain single ; 
 the former may deny it, poker in hand, but murder will 
 out. In conclusion, let me add that I have never written 
 an oratorio in my life, though I sometimes attend them. 
 
 Yours, etc., 
 
 " Mere Woman." 
 
 (2) Sir, — Allow me to impale Mr. Dexter on the horns 
 of a dilemma. Either it is too late in the day to discuss 
 woman's education, or it is not. If the latter, why did 
 he say it is ? And if the former, why did he begin 
 discussing it ? That is how is strikes 
 
 "B.A. (Lond.)." 
 
 (3) Sir, — Re this woman's education discussion: 
 I write to inquire if there is any law of the land 
 which can hinder a woman from composing Shakespeare 
 if she wants to ? 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 " Interested." 
 
 (4) Sir, — Allusion has been made in this corre- 
 spondence (I think by Mr. Dexter) to the grave of that 
 eminent educationist, the late Piatt-Culpepper, which is 
 situate in the Highgate Cemetery. My interest being 
 awakened, I made a pilgrimage to it the other day, and 
 was shocked by its neglected condition. The coping has 
 been badly cemented, and a crack extends from the 
 upper right-hand corner to the base of the plinth, right 
 across the inscription. Doubtless a few shillings would 
 
 24
 
 JANUARY 
 
 repair the damage; but may I suggest, Sir, that some 
 worthier memorial is due to this pioneer of woman's 
 higher activities ? I have thought of a plain obelisk on 
 Shakespeare's Cliff, a locality of which he was ever 
 fond; or a small and inconspicuous lighthouse might, 
 without complicating the navigation of this part of 
 the Channel, serve to remind Englishmen of one 
 who diffused so much light during his all too brief 
 career. Choice, however, would depend on the funds 
 available, and might be left to an influential com- 
 mittee. Meanwhile, could you not open a subscription 
 list for the purpose? I enclose stamps for 2s., with 
 my card, and prefer to remain, for the present, 
 
 " Haud Immemor.'' 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Saturday's Letters 
 
 (i) Sir, — H. Immemor's suggestion clears the air, and 
 
 should persuade Mr. Dexter and his reactionary friends 
 
 to think twice before again inaugurating a crusade which 
 
 can only recoil upon their own heads. I enclose 5s., if 
 
 only as a protest against this un-English " hitting below 
 
 the belt," and am, 
 
 Yours, etc., 
 
 "Practical." 
 
 (2) Sir, — It is only occasionally that I get a glimpse 
 of your invaluable paper, and (perhaps, fortunately) 
 missed the issues containing Mr. Dexter's diatribes anent 
 woman. But what astounds me is their cynical audacity. 
 Your correspondents, though not in accord as to the 
 
 25
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 name of the victim (can it be more than one ?) agree 
 that, after encouraging her to unbridled license, Mr. 
 Dexter turned round and attacked her with a poker — 
 whether above or below the belt is surely immaterial. 
 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true ; but not once or 
 twice, I fear me, in " our fair island-story " has a similar 
 thing occurred. The unique (I hope) feature in this 
 case is the man Dexter's open boast that the incident is 
 closed, and it is now " too late in the day" to reopen it. 
 " Too late," indeed ! There is an American poem des- 
 cribing how a young woman was raking hay, and an 
 elderly judge came by, and wasn't in a position to marry 
 her, though he wanted to ; and the whole winds up by 
 saying that " too late " are the saddest words in the 
 language — especially, I would add, in this connection. 
 But, alas ! that men's memories should be so short ! is 
 
 the reflection of 
 
 " A Mother of Seven." 
 
 [This correspondence is now closed, unless Mr. Dexter 
 should wish to reply to his numerous critics. We do not 
 propose to open a subscription list, at any rate for the 
 present. — Ed. Daily Post.] 
 
 26
 
 ibruary 
 
 OTHAT I were lying under the olives ! " — if 
 I may echo the burthen of a beautiful little 
 poem by Mrs. Margaret L. Woods. I have not yet 
 consulted Zadkiel : but if I may argue from past 
 experience of February — " fill-dyke " — in a week or 
 so my window here will be alternately crusted with 
 Channel spray and washed clean by lashing south- 
 westerly showers ; and a wave will arch itself over 
 my garden wall and spoil a promising bed of violets ; 
 and I shall grow weary of oilskins, and weary of 
 hauling the long-line with icily-cold hands and 
 finding no fish. February — Pisces ? The fish, before 
 February comes, have left the coast for the warmer 
 deeps, and the zodiac is all wrong. Down here in 
 the Duchy many believe in Mr. Zadkiel and Old 
 Moore. I suppose the dreamy Celt pays a natural 
 homage to a fellow-mortal who knows how to make 
 up his mind for twelve months ahead. All the 
 woman in his nature surrenders to this business- 
 like decisiveness. "O man!" — the exhortation is 
 Mr. George Meredith's, or would be if I could 
 
 27
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 remember it precisely—" O man, amorously inclining, 
 before all things be positive ! " I have sometimes, 
 while turning the pages of Mrs. Beeton's admirable 
 cookery book, caught myself envying Mr. Beeton. 
 I wonder if her sisters envy Mrs. Zadkiel. She, 
 dear lady, no doubt feels that, if it be not in mortals 
 to command the weather her husband prophesies for 
 August, yet he does better — he deserves it. And, 
 after all, a prophecy in some measure depends for 
 its success on the mind which receives it. Back in 
 the forties — I quote from a small privately-printed 
 volume by Sir Richard Tangye — when the potato 
 blight first appeared in England, an old farmer in 
 the Duchy found this warning in his favourite 
 almanack, at the head of the page for August :— 
 
 "And potentates shall tremble and quail." 
 
 Now, "to quail" in Cornwall still carries its old 
 meaning, "to shrink," "to wither." The farmer 
 dug his potatoes with all speed, and next year the 
 almanack was richer by a score of subscribers. 
 
 Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, 
 " O that I were lying under the olives ! " " O to be 
 out of England now that February's here!" — for 
 indeed this is the time to take the South express and 
 be quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon 
 the Mediterranean shore before the carnivals and 
 regattas sweep it like a mistral. Nor need you be 
 
 28
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson 
 dilates in that famous little essay in " Virginibm 
 Puerisque " (or, as the young American lady preferred 
 to call it, " Virginis Pueribusque ") : — 
 
 " Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women 
 relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or 
 a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight 
 of an olive-garden ; and something significant or 
 monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony 
 of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress 
 of these Southern women, will come home to him 
 unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with 
 which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more 
 beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end 
 to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. 
 Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually 
 shifting : now you would say it was green, now grey, 
 now blue ; now tree stands above tree, like ' cloud on 
 cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness ; and now, at the 
 wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken 
 up with little momentary silverings and shadows." 
 
 English poets, too, have been at their best on the 
 Riviera : from Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted 
 one of the most brilliant little landscapes in our litera- 
 ture, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visited and 
 
 " Loved that hali, tho' white and cold, 
 Those niched shapes of noble mould, 
 
 A princely people's awful princes, 
 The grave, severe Genovese of old." 
 
 29
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 [I suppose, by the way, that every one who 
 has taken the trouble to compare the stanza of 
 "The Daisy" with that of the invitation "To the 
 Rev. F. D. Maurice," which immediately follows, 
 will have noted the pretty rhythmical difference 
 made by the introduction of the double dactyl in 
 the closing line of the latter ; the difference between 
 
 "Of olive, aloe, and maize, and vine," 
 and 
 
 "Making the little one leap for joy."' 
 
 But let Mrs. Woods resume the strain : — 
 
 " O that I were listening under the olives ! 
 So should I hear behind in the woodland 
 The peasants talking. Either a woman, 
 A wrinkled grandame, stands in the sunshine, 
 Stirs the brown soil in an acre of violets — 
 Large odorous violets — and answers slowly 
 A child's swift babble ; or else at noon 
 The labourers come. They rest in the shadow, 
 Eating their dinner of herbs, and are merry. 
 Soft speech Provengal under the olives ! 
 Like a queen's raiment from days long perished, 
 Breathing aromas of old unremembered 
 Perfumes, and shining in dust-covered palaces 
 With sudden hints of forgotten splendour — 
 So on the lips of the peasant his language, 
 His only now, the tongue of the peasant." 
 
 Say what you will, there is a dignity about these 
 
 30
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 Latin races, even in their trivial everyday move- 
 ments. They suggest to me, as those lines of Homer 
 suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which 
 almost seem to be memories of a time when all the 
 world was poetic : — 
 
 " Ot £' ore cj) Xi/ieVos TroXvjUevQeo'z cVtos ikovto 
 ' [aTi'a /xev oieiXavro, Oeaav o £v vtji fiekaivif . . . 
 'Ek: ce kcu avjol ftalvov ctti jIij^j/liiul OaXaaai^. 
 
 "And how poetic," says Pater, "the simple incident 
 seemed, told just thus ! Homer was always telling 
 things after this manner. And one might think 
 there had been no effort in it : that here was but 
 the almost mechanical transcript of a time naturally, 
 intrinsically poetic, a time in which one could hardly 
 have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors 
 pulled down their boat without making a picture 
 in ' the great style ' against a sky charged with 
 marvels." 
 
 One evening in last February a company of Pro- 
 ven$al singers, pipers, and tambour players came to 
 an hotel in Cannes, and entertained us. They were 
 followed next evening by a troupe of German-Swiss 
 jodelers ; and oh, the difference to me — and, for 
 that matter, to all of us ! It was just the difference 
 between passion and silly sentiment — silly and rather 
 vulgar sentiment. The merry Swiss boys whooped, 
 and smacked their legs, and twirled their merry Swiss
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 girls about, until vengeance overtook them — a ven- 
 geance so complete, so surprising, that I can hardly 
 now believe what my own eyes saw and my own ears 
 heard. One of the merry Swiss girls sang a love- 
 ditty with a jodeling refrain, which was supposed to 
 be echoed back by her lover afar in the mountains. 
 To produce this pleasing illusion, one of the merry 
 Swiss boys ascended the staircase, and hid himself 
 deep in the corridors of the hotel. All went well up 
 to the last verse. Promptly and truly the swain 
 echoed his sweetheart's call ; softly it floated down 
 to us — down from the imaginary pasture and across 
 the imaginary valley. But as the maiden challenged 
 for the last time, as her voice lingered on the last 
 note of the last verse . . . There hung a Swiss cuckoo- 
 clock in the porter's office, and at that very instant 
 the mechanical bird lifted its voice, and nine times 
 answered "Cuckoo" on the exact note! "Cuckoo, 
 Cuckoo, O word of fear ! " I have known coinci- 
 dences, but never one so triumphantly complete. 
 The jaw of the Swiss maiden dropped an inch ; 
 and, as well as I remember, silence held the com- 
 pany for five seconds before we recovered ourselves 
 and burst into inextinguishable laughter. 
 
 The one complaint I have to make of the Medi- 
 terranean is that it does not in the least resemble a 
 real sea ; and I daresay that nobody who has lived
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 by a real sea will ever be thoroughly content with 
 it. Beautiful — oh, beautiful, of course, whether one 
 looks across from Costebelle to the lighthouse on 
 Porquerolles and the warships in Hyeres Bay; or 
 climbs by the Calvary to the lighthouse of la 
 Garoupe, and sees on the one side Antibes, on the 
 other the Isles de Lerins ; or scans the entrance of 
 Toulon Harbour; or counts the tiers of shiDmner 
 
 * A. A. O 
 
 alongside the quays at Genoa! But somehow the 
 Mediterranean has neither flavour nor sparkle, nor 
 even any proper smell. The sea by Biarritz is 
 champagne to it. But hear how Hugo draws the 
 contrast in time of storm : — 
 
 " Ce n'etaient pas les larges lames de l'Ocean qui vont 
 devant elles et qui se deroulent royalement dans I'immen- 
 site ; c'etaient des houles courtes, brusques, furieuses. 
 L'Ocean est a son aise, il tourne autour du monde ; la 
 Mediterranee est dans un vase et le vent la secoue, c'est 
 ce qui lui donne cette vague haletante, breve et trapue. 
 Le flot se ramasse et lutte. II a autant de colere que le 
 fiot de l'Ocean et moins d'espace." 
 
 Also, barring the sardine and anchovy, I must 
 confess that the fish of the Mediterranean are what, 
 in the Duchy, we should call " poor trade." I don't 
 wish to disparage the Bouillabaisse, which is a dish 
 for heroes, and deserves all the heroic praises sung 
 of it:— 
 
 33
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is — 
 
 A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, 
 Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, 
 
 That Greenwich never could outdo ; 
 Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, 
 
 Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace : 
 All these you eat at Terre's tavern, 
 
 In that one dish of Bouillabaisse." 
 
 To be precise, you take a langouste, three rascas 
 (an edible but second-rate fish), a slice of conger, 
 a fine " chapon," or red rascas, and one or two 
 " poissons blancs " (our grey mullet, I take it, would 
 be an equivalent). You take a cooking-pot and put 
 your langouste in it, together with four spoonfuls of 
 olive-oil, an onion and a couple of tomatoes, and 
 boil away until he turns red. You then take off the 
 pot and add your fish, green herbs, four cloves of 
 garlic, and a pinch of saffron, with salt and red 
 pepper. Pour in water to cover the surface of the 
 fish, and cook for twenty minutes over a fast fire. 
 Then take a soup-plate, lay some slices of bread in 
 it, and pour the bouillon over the bread. Serve the 
 fish separately. Possibly you incline to add, in the 
 immortal words of the late Mr. Lear, " Serve up in a 
 clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as 
 fast as possible." You would make a great mistake. 
 The marvel to me is that no missionary has acclima- 
 tised this wonderful dish upon our coasts, where we 
 
 34
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 have far better fish for compounding it — red mullet, 
 for instance, in place of the rascas ; and whiting, or 
 even pollack or grey mullet, in place of the "poissons 
 blancs." For the langouste, a baby lobster might 
 serve ; and the saffron flavour would be no severe 
 trial to us in the Duchy, who are brought up 
 (so to say) upon saffron cake. As for Thackeray's 
 " dace," I disbelieve in it. No one w T ould add a 
 dace (which for table purposes has been likened to 
 an old stocking full of mud and pins : or was that a 
 tench ?) except to make a rhyme. Even Walton, 
 who gives instructions for cooking a chavender or 
 chub, is discreetly silent on the cooking of a dace, 
 though he tells us how to catch him. " Serve up in 
 a clean dish," he might have added, " and throw 
 him out of window as fast as possible." 
 
 "O that I were lying under the olives!" And 
 O that to olive orchards (not contiguous) I could 
 convey the newspaper men who are almost invariably 
 responsible when a shadow of distrust or suspicion 
 falls between us Englishmen and the race which 
 owns and tills these orchards. "The printing-press," 
 says Mr. Barrie, " is either the greatest blessing or 
 the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes 
 forgets which." I verily believe that if English 
 newspaper editors would nobly resolve to hold their 
 peace on French politics, say for two years, France 
 
 35
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 and England would " make friends " as easily as 
 Frenchmen and Englishmen "make friends" to-day.* 
 One hears talk of the behaviour of the English 
 abroad. But I am convinced that at least one-half 
 of their bad manners may be referred to their 
 education upon this newspaper nonsense, or to the 
 certainty that no complaint they may make upon 
 foreign shortcomings is too silly or too ill-bred to 
 be printed in an English newspaper. Here is an 
 example. I suppress the name of the writer — a 
 lady — in the devout hope that she has repented 
 before this. The letter is headed — 
 
 "THE AMENITIES OF RAILWAY TRAVELLING 
 
 IN FRANCE. 
 
 " Sir, — As your newspaper is read in France, may 
 I in your columns call attention to what I witnessed 
 yesterday ? I left Dinard by the 3.33 p.m. train en route 
 for Guingamp, having to change carriages at Lamballe. 
 An instant before the train moved off from the station, a 
 dying man belonging to the poorest class was thrust into 
 our second-class carriage and the door slammed to. The 
 poor creature, apparently dying of some wasting disease, 
 was absolutely on the point of death, and his ghastly 
 appearance naturally alarmed a little girl in the carriage. 
 At the next station I got down with my companion 
 and changed into a first-class compartment, paying the 
 difference. On remonstrating with the guard (sic), he 
 admitted that a railway carriage ought not to be turned 
 
 * This was written some time before the entente cordiale. 
 
 36
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 into an hospital, but added, ' We have no rules to 
 prevent it.' 
 
 " I ask, sir, is it decent or human, especially at 
 such a time, to thrust dying persons in the last stage 
 of poverty into a second-class carriage full of ladies 
 and children ? " 
 
 There's a pretty charity for you! "A dying man 
 belonging to the poorest class." — " Our second-class 
 carriage" — here's richness! as Mr. Squeers observed. 
 Here's sweetness and light ! But England has no 
 monopoly of such manners. There was a poor little 
 Cingalese girl in the train by which I travelled 
 homeward last February from Genoa and through 
 the Mont Cenis. And there were also three English- 
 men and a Frenchman — the last apparently (as 
 Browning put it) a person of importance in his day, 
 for he had a bit of red ribbon in his buttonhole and 
 a valet at his heels. At one of the small stations 
 near the tunnel our train halted for several minutes ; 
 and while the little Cingalese leaned out and gazed 
 at the unfamiliar snows — a pathetic figure, if ever 
 there was one — the three Englishmen and the 
 Frenchman gathered under the carriage door and 
 stared up at her just as if she were a show. There 
 was no nonsense about the performance — no false 
 delicacy : it was good, steady, eye-to-eye staring. 
 After three minutes of it, the Frenchman asked 
 deliberately, " Where do you come from ? " in a 
 
 37
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 careless, level tone, which did not even convey that 
 he was interested in knowing. And because the child 
 didn't understand, the three Englishmen laughed. 
 Altogether it was an unpleasing but instructive little 
 episode. 
 
 No : nastiness has no particular nationality : and 
 you will find a great deal of it, of all nationalities, 
 on the frontier between France and Italy. I do 
 not see that Monte Carlo provides much cause 
 for indignation, beyond the tit aux pigeons, which 
 is quite abominable. I have timed it for twenty- 
 five minutes, and it averaged two birds a minute 
 — fifty birds. Of these one escaped, one fluttered 
 on to the roof of the railway station and died 
 there slowly, under my eyes. The rest were 
 killed within the enclosure, some by the first 
 barrel, some by the second ; or if they still 
 lingered, were retrieved and mouthed by a well- 
 trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed. 
 Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would 
 walk about for a second or two, apparently unhurt ; 
 then suddenly stagger and topple over. Sometimes, 
 as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then 
 a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey 
 breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places 
 quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the 
 tables inside the Casino, it was largely Semitic. 
 
 38
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 On the road between Monte Carlo and Monaco, as 
 Browning says — 
 
 " It was noses, noses all the way." 
 
 Also it smelt distressingly : but that perhaps was its 
 misfortune rather than its fault. It did not seem 
 very happy ; nor was it composed of people who 
 looked as if they might have attained to distinction, 
 or even to ordinary usefulness, by following any other 
 pursuit. On the whole, one felt that it might as 
 well be gathered here as anywhere else. 
 
 " O that I were lying under the olives ! " But 
 since my own garden must content me this year, let 
 me conclude with a decent letter of thanks to the 
 friend who sent me, from Devonshire, a box of 
 violet roots that await the spring in a corner which 
 even the waves of the equinox cannot reach : — 
 
 TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME A 
 BOX OF VIOLETS. 
 
 Nay, more than violets 
 
 These thoughts of thine, friend ! 
 
 Rather thy reedy brook 
 
 — Taw's tributary — 
 
 At midnight murmuring, 
 
 Descried them, the delicate, 
 
 The dark-eyed goddesses, 
 
 39
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 There by his cressy beds 
 Dissolved and dreaming 
 Dreams that distilled in a dewdrop 
 All the purple of night, 
 All the shine of a planet. 
 
 Whereat he whispered ; 
 And they arising 
 — Of day's forget-me-nots 
 The duskier sisters — 
 Descended, relinquished 
 The orchard, the trout-pool, 
 The Druid circles, 
 Sheepfolds of Dartmoor, 
 Granite and sandstone, 
 Torridge and Tamar ; 
 By Roughtor, by Dozmare, 
 Down the vale of the Fowey 
 Moving in silence, 
 Brushing the nightshade 
 By bridges Cyclopean, 
 By Glynn, Lanhydrock, 
 Restormel, Lostwithiel, 
 Dark woodland, dim water, 
 
 dreaming town — 
 Down the vale of the Fowey, 
 Each in her exile 
 Musing the message — 
 Message illumined by love 
 As a starlit sorrow — 
 Passed, as the shadow of Ruth 
 From the land of the Moabite. 
 
 40
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 So they came — 
 Valley-born, valley-nurtured- 
 Came to the tideway, 
 The jetties, the anchorage, 
 The salt wind piping, 
 Snoring in equinox, 
 By ships at anchor, 
 By quays tormented, 
 Storm-bitten streets ; 
 Came to the Haven 
 Crying, "Ah, shelter us, 
 The strayed ambassadors ! 
 Lost legation of love 
 On a comfortless coast ! " 
 
 Nay, but a little sleep, 
 A little folding 
 Of petals to the lull 
 Of quiet rainfalls, — 
 Here in my garden, 
 In angle sheltered 
 From north and east wind- 
 Softly shall recreate 
 The courage of charity, 
 Henceforth not to me only 
 Breathing the message. 
 
 Clean-breath'd Sirens ! 
 Henceforth the mariner, 
 Here on the tideway 
 Dragging, foul of keel, 
 Long-strayed but fortunate, 
 
 4 1
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Out of the fogs, the vast 
 Atlantic solitudes, 
 Shall, by the hawser-pin 
 Waiting the signal — 
 " Leave-go-anchor ! " 
 Scent the familiar 
 Fragrance of home ; 
 So in a long breath 
 Bless us unknowingly : 
 Bless them, the violets, 
 Bless me, the gardener, 
 Bless thee, the giver. 
 
 * # * * 
 
 My business (I remind myself) behind the window 
 is not to scribble verses : my business, or a part of 
 it, is to criticise poetry, which involves reading 
 poetry. But why should anyone read poetry in 
 these days ? 
 
 Well, one answer is that nobody does. 
 
 I look around my shelves and, brushing this answer 
 aside as flippant, change the form of my question. 
 Why do we read poetry ? What do we find that it 
 does for us ? We take to it (I presume) some 
 natural need, and it answers that need. But what 
 is the need ? And how does poetry answer it ? 
 
 Clearly it is not a need of knowledge, or of what 
 we usually understand by knowledge. We do not 
 go to a poem as we go to a work on Chemistry or 
 Physics, to add to our knowledge of the world 
 
 42
 
 tf] 
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 about us. For example, Keats' glorious lines to the 
 Nightingale — 
 
 " Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird ..." 
 
 are unchallengeable poetry ; but they add nothing to 
 our stock of information. Indeed, as Mr. Bridges 
 pointed out the other day, the information they 
 contain is mostly inaccurate or fanciful. Man is, as 
 a matter of fact, quite as immortal as a nightingale in 
 every sense but that of sameness. And as for the 
 
 " Magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," 
 
 Science tells us that no such things exist in this or 
 any other ascertained world. So, when Tennyson 
 tells us that birds in the high Hall garden were 
 crying, " Maud, Maud, Maud," or that 
 
 " There has fallen a splendid tear 
 From the passion-flower at the gate : 
 She is coming, my dove, my dear ; 
 She is coming, my life, my fate ; 
 The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near ' ; 
 And the white rose weeps, ' She is late ' . . ." 
 
 the poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by 
 scientific stardards of truth is demonstrably false, 
 and even absurd. On the other hand (see Coleridge's 
 Biographia Literaria, c. xiv.), the famous lines — 
 
 43
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " Thirty days hath September, 
 April, June, and November, . . ." 
 
 though packed with trustworthy information, are 
 quite as demonstrably unpoetical. The famous 
 senior wrangler who returned a borrowed volume of 
 Paradise Lost with the remark that he did not see 
 what it proved, was right — so far as he went. And 
 conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man 
 would think to improve Newton's Principia and 
 Darwin's Origin of Species by casting them into 
 blank verse; or Euclid's Elements by writing them 
 out in ballad metre — 
 
 The king sits in Dunfermline town, 
 Drinking the blude-red wine ; 
 ' O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle 
 Upon a given straight line ? ' 
 
 We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what 
 Science, with other methods, can do much better. 
 What craving, then, does it answer ? And if the crav- 
 ing be for knowledge of a kind, then of what kind ? 
 
 The question is serious. We agree — at least I 
 assume this — that men have souls as well as 
 intellects ; that above and beyond the life we know 
 and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas 
 there exists a spiritual life of which our intellect is 
 unable to render account. We have (it is believed) 
 affinity with this spiritual world, and we hold it by 
 
 44
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 virtue of something spiritual within us, which we 
 call the soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual 
 region and remain, I dare say, an estimable citizen ; 
 but I cannot see what business you have with 
 Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, 
 Poetry demands that you believe something further ; 
 which is, that in this spiritual region resides and is 
 laid up that eternal scheme of things, that universal 
 order, of which the phenomena of this world are but 
 fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows. 
 
 A hard matter to believe, no doubt ! We see this 
 world so clearly ; the spiritual world so dimly, so 
 rarely, if at all ! We may fortify ourselves with the 
 reminder (to be found in Blanco White's famous 
 sonnet) that the first man who lived on earth had to 
 wait for the darkness before he saw the stars and 
 guessed that the Universe extended beyond this 
 earth — 
 
 " Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd 
 Within thy beams, O Sun ! or who could find, 
 Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd, 
 
 That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? " 
 
 He may, or may not, believe that the same duty 
 governs his infinitesimal activity and the motions of 
 the heavenly bodies — 
 
 "Awake, my soul, and with the sun 
 Thy daily stage of duty run . . ." 
 
 45
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 — that his duty is one with that of which Words- 
 worth sang — 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are 
 fresh and strong." 
 
 But in a higher order of some sort, and his duty of 
 conforming with it, he does not seem able to avoid 
 believing. 
 
 This, then, is the need which Poetry answers. 
 It offers to bring men knowledge of this universal 
 order, and to help them in rectifying and adjusting 
 their lives to it. It is for gleams of this spiritual 
 country that the poets watch — 
 
 " The gleam, 
 The light that never was on sea or land. . . ." 
 
 "I am Merlin," sang Tennyson, its life-long watcher, 
 in his old age — 
 
 " I am Merlin, 
 And I am dying ; 
 I am Merlin, 
 Who follow the gleam." 
 
 They do not claim to see it always. It appears 
 to them at rare and happy intervals, as the Vision 
 of the Grail to the Knights of the Round Table. 
 " Poetry," said Shelley, " is the record of the
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 best and happiest moments of the happiest and 
 
 best minds." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 If this be the need, how have our poets been 
 answering it of late years ? How, for instance, did 
 they answer it during the South African War, 
 when (according to our newspapers) there was 
 plenty of patriotic emotion available to inspire 
 the great organ of national song ? Well, let us 
 kick up what dust we will over "Imperial ideals," 
 we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not 
 yet " accepted of song " : they have not inspired 
 poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed 
 for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted 
 the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but 
 no quality ; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. 
 Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into 
 causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, 
 Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one 
 to consider why he should so often be first- 
 rate when neglecting or giving the lie to his pet 
 political doctrines, and invariably below form when 
 enforcing them. For the rest, the Warden of 
 Glenalmond bubbled and squeaked, and Mr. Alfred 
 Austin, like the man at the piano, kept on doing his 
 best. It all came to nothing : as poetry it never 
 began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a 
 few mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of 
 
 47
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 war. Mr. Owen Seaman (who may pass for our 
 contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty 
 at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a 
 little deeper than surface-polish. One man alone — 
 Mr. Henry Newbolt — struck a note which even his 
 opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty 
 of the turbulence of passion, but none of the gravity 
 of thoughtful emotion. I don't doubt they were, one 
 and all, honest in their way. But as poetry their 
 utterances were negligible. As writers of real 
 poetry the Anti-Jingoes, and especially the Celts, 
 held and still hold the field. 
 
 I will not adduce poets of admitted eminence — 
 Mr. Watson, for instance, or Mr. Yeats — to prove my 
 case. I am content to go to a young poet who has 
 his spurs to win, and will ask you to consider this little 
 poem, and especially its final stanza. He calls it — 
 
 A CHARGE 
 
 If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem 
 Commissioned by thy absent Lord, and while 
 
 'Tis incomplete, 
 Others would bribe thy needy skill to them — 
 
 Dismiss them to the street ! 
 
 Should'st thou at last discover Beauty's grove, 
 At last be panting on the fragrant verge, 
 But in the track, 
 Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love — 
 Turn, at her bidding, back. 
 
 48
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears, 
 And every spectre mutters up more dire 
 
 To snatch control 
 And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears, — 
 
 Then to the helm, O Soul ! 
 
 Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea 
 Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, 
 
 Both castaway, 
 And one must perish — let it not be he 
 
 Whom thou art sworn to obey. 
 
 The author of these lines is a Mr. Herbert Trench, 
 who (as I say) has his spurs to win. Yet I defy you 
 to read them without recognising a note of high 
 seriousness which is common to our great poets and 
 utterly foreign to our modern bards of empire. The 
 man, you will perceive, dares to talk quite boldly 
 about the human soul. Now you will search long in 
 our Jingo bards for any recognition of the human 
 soul : the very word is unpopular. And as men of 
 eminence write, so lesser wits imitate. A while ago I 
 picked up a popular magazine, and happened on 
 these verses — fluently written and, beyond a doubt, 
 honestly meant. They are in praise of King 
 Henry VIII.:— 
 
 King Harry played at tennis, and he threw the dice 
 
 a-main, 
 And did all things that seemed to him for his own 
 
 and England's gain ; 
 
 49
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 He would not be talked to lightly, he would not be 
 
 checked or chid ; 
 And he got what things he dreamed to get, and did — 
 
 what things he did. 
 
 When Harry played at tennis it was well for this 
 
 our Isle — 
 He cocked his nose at Interdicts ; he 'stablished us 
 
 the while — 
 He was lustful ; he was vengeful ; he was hot and 
 
 hard and proud ; 
 But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the 
 
 crowd. 
 
 * ■» ■!:• * 
 
 So Harry played at tennis, and we perfected the 
 
 game 
 Which astonied swaggering Spaniards when the fat 
 
 Armada came. 
 And possession did he give us of our souls in sturdi- 
 
 ness ; 
 And he gave us peace from priesthood : and he gave 
 
 us English Bess ! 
 
 When Harry played at tennis we began to know 
 
 this thing — 
 That a mighty people prospers in a mighty-minded 
 
 king. 
 We boasted not our righteousness — we took on us 
 
 our sin, 
 For Bluff Hal was just an Englishman who played 
 
 the game to win. 
 
 You will perceive that in the third stanza the 
 
 50
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 word " soul " occurs : and I invite you to compare 
 this author's idea of a soul with Mr. Trench's. This 
 author will have nothing to do with the old advice 
 about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking 
 humbly before God. The old notion that to conquer 
 self is a higher feat than to take a city he dismisses 
 out of hand. "Be lustful, be vengeful," says he, 
 " but play the game to win, and you have my 
 applause. Get what you want, set England fairly 
 in sight of the crowd, and you are a mighty-minded 
 man." Now the first and last comment upon such 
 a doctrine must be that, if a God exist, it is false. 
 It sets up a part to override the whole : it flaunts 
 a local success against the austere majesty of Divine 
 law. In brief, it foolishly derides the universal, 
 saying that it chooses to consider the particular as 
 more important. But it is not. Poetry's concern 
 is with the universal : and what makes the Celts 
 (however much you may dislike them) the most 
 considerable force in English poetry at this moment 
 is that the}- occupy themselves with that universal 
 truth, which, before any technical accomplishment, 
 is the guarantee of good poetry. 
 
 Now, when you tell yourself that the days of 
 " English Bess " were jolly fine empire-making days, 
 and produced great poets (Shakespeare, for example) 
 worthy of them ; and when you go on to reflect that 
 these also are jolly fine empire-making days, but 
 
 5i
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 that somehow Mr. Austin is your laureate, and that 
 the only poetry which counts is being written by 
 men out of harmony with your present empire- 
 making mood, the easiest plan (if you happen to 
 think the difference worth considering) will be to 
 call the Muse a traitress, and declare that every 
 poem better than Mr. Austin's is a vote given to — 
 whatever nation your Yellow Press happens to be 
 insulting at this moment. But, if you care to look 
 a little deeper, you may find that some difference 
 in your methods of empire-making is partly account- 
 able for the change. A true poet must cling to 
 universal truth ; and by insulting it (as, for example, 
 by importing into present-day politics the spirit 
 which would excuse the iniquities of Henry VIII. 
 on the ground that ' he gave us English Bess ' ! ) you 
 are driving the true poet out of your midst. Read 
 over the verses above quoted, and then repeat to 
 yourself, slowly, these lines : — 
 
 " Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea 
 Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, 
 
 Both castaway, 
 And one must perish — let it not be he 
 
 Whom thou art sworn to obey." 
 
 I ask no more. If a man cannot see the difference 
 at once, I almost despair of making him perceive 
 why poetry refuses just now even more obstinately 
 than trade (if that be possible) to " follow the flag." 
 
 52
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 It will not follow, because you are waving the flag 
 over self-deception. You may be as blithe as Plato 
 in casting out the poets from your commonwealth — 
 though for other reasons than his. You may be as 
 blithe as Dogberry in determining, of reading and 
 writing, that they may appear when there is no need 
 of such vanity. But you are certainly driving them 
 forth to say, in place of " O beloved city of Cecrops ! " 
 " O beloved city of God ! " There was a time, not 
 many years ago, when an honest poet could have 
 used both cries together and deemed that he meant 
 the same thing by the two. But the two cries 
 to-day have an utterly different meaning — and by 
 your compulsion or by the compulsion of such 
 politics as you have come to tolerate. 
 
 And therefore the young poet whom I have quoted 
 has joined the band of those poets whom we are 
 forcing out of the city, to leave our ideals to the fate 
 which, since the world began, has overtaken all 
 ideals which could not get themselves " accepted by 
 song." Even as we drum these poets out we know 
 that they are the only ones worth reckoning with, 
 and that man cannot support himself upon assur- 
 ances that he is the strongest fellow in the world, 
 and the richest, and owns the biggest house, and 
 pays the biggest rates, and wins whatever game he 
 plays at, and stands so high in his clothes that while 
 the Southern Cross rises over his hat-brim it is 
 
 53
 
 FKOAI A COKMiii WINDOW 
 
 already broad day on the seat of his breeches. For 
 that is what it all comes to : and the sentence upon 
 the man who neglects the warning of these poets, 
 while he heaps up great possessions, is still, " Thou 
 fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." 
 And where is the national soul you would choose, 
 at that hasty summons, to present for inspection, 
 having to stand your trial upon it ? Try Park Lane, 
 or run and knock up the Laureate, and then come 
 and report your success ! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Weeks ago I was greatly reproached by a corre- 
 spondent for misusing the word " Celtic," and 
 informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench 
 a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms ; that a 
 notable percentage of the names connected with the 
 "Celtic Revival" — Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes 
 — are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I 
 have been following the multitude to speak loosely. 
 Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that 
 the lax use of the word " Celt " ill beseems one who 
 has been irritated often enough by the attempts of 
 well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get 
 hold of this or that poet and straightly assign this 
 or that quality of his verse to a certain set of 
 corpuscles in his mixed blood. Although I believe 
 that my correspondent is too hasty in labelling 
 
 54
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 men's descent from their names — for the mother has 
 usually some share in producing a child ; although 
 I believe that Mr. Yeats, for instance, inherits Cornish 
 blood on one side, even if Irish be denied him on 
 the other ; yet the rebuke contains some justice. 
 
 Still, I must maintain that these well- meaning 
 theorists err only in applying a broad distinction 
 with overmuch nicety. There is, after all, a certain 
 quality in a poem of Blake's, or a prose passage of 
 Charlotte Bronte's, which a critic is not only unable 
 to ignore, but which — if he has any " comparative " 
 sense — he finds himself accounting for by saying, 
 " This man, or this woman, must be a Celt or have 
 some admixture of Celtic blood." I say quite 
 confidently that quality cannot be ignored. You 
 open (let us say) a volume of Blake, and your eye 
 falls on these two lines — 
 
 " When the stars threw down their spears 
 And watered heaven with their tears," 
 
 and at once you are aware of an imagination different 
 in kind from the imagination you would recognise 
 as English. Let us, if you please, rule out all 
 debate of superiority ; let us take Shakespeare for 
 comparison, and Shakespeare at his best : — 
 
 " These our actors, 
 As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
 Are melted into air, into thin air ; 
 
 55
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
 The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
 And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 Finer poetry than this I can hardly find in English 
 to quote for you. But fine as it is, will you not 
 observe the matter-of-factness (call it healthy, if 
 you will, and I shall not gainsay you) beneath 
 Shakespeare's noble language ? It says divinely 
 what it has to say ; and what it has to say is full 
 of solemn thought. But, for better or worse (or, 
 rather, without question of better or worse), Blake's 
 imagination is moving on a different plane. We 
 may think it an uncomfortably superhuman plane ; 
 but let us note the difference, and note further that 
 this plane was habitual with Blake. Now because 
 of his immense powers we are accustomed to think 
 of Shakespeare as almost superhuman : we pay 
 that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the 
 enormous impression they produce on us. But 
 a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this 
 uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole 
 five acts of Hamlet. So great is Shakespeare, 
 that he tempts us to think him capable of any 
 
 56
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 flight of wing ; but set down a line or two of 
 
 Blake's— 
 
 "A robin redbreast in a cage 
 Puts all heaven in a rage . . . 
 A skylark wounded on the wing 
 Doth make a cherub cease to sing." 
 
 — and, simple as the thought is, at once you feel it 
 to lie outside the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. 
 Shakespeare's men are fine, brave, companionable 
 fellows, full of passionate love, jealousy, ambition ; 
 of humour, gravity, strength of mind ; of laughter 
 and rage, of the joy and stress of living. But self- 
 sacrifice scarcely enters into their notion of the 
 scheme of things, and they are by no means men 
 to go to death for an idea. We remember what 
 figure Shakespeare made of Sir John Oldcastle, and 
 I wish we could forget what figure he made of Joan 
 of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy — the 
 philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full- 
 blooded men — he is a great encourager of virtue ; 
 and so such lines as — 
 
 " The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
 Is lust in action ..." 
 
 are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as — 
 
 "A robin redbreast in a cage 
 Puts all heaven in a rage ..." 
 
 are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. 
 
 57
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 He can tell us that 
 
 " We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 He can muse on that sleep to come : — 
 
 " To die, to sleep ; 
 To sleep ; perchance to dream ; aye, there 's the rub ; 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
 Must give us pause." 
 
 But that even in this life we may be more truly 
 ourselves when dreaming than when waking — that 
 what we dream may perchance turn out to be more 
 real and more important than what we do — such 
 a thought overpasses his imaginative range ; or, 
 since to dogmatise on his imaginative range is 
 highly dangerous, let us be content with saying 
 that it lies outside his temperament, and that he 
 would have hit on such a thought only to dismiss 
 it with contempt. So when we open a book of 
 poems and come upon a monarch crying out that 
 
 "A wild and foolish labourer is a king, 
 To do and do and do and never dream," 
 
 we know that we are hearkening to a note which is 
 not Shakespearean at all, not practical, not English. 
 And we want a name for that note. 
 
 I have followed the multitude to call it Celtic 
 
 5*
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 because in practice when we come upon this note 
 we are pretty safe to discover that the poet who 
 utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, 
 for instance, told me that he must be an Irishman 
 before ever I reflected that his name was Irish, or 
 thought of looking up his descent). Since, however, 
 the blood of most men in these islands is by this 
 time mixed with many strains : since also, though 
 the note be not native with him, nothing forbids 
 even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from learning it 
 and assimilating it : lastly, since there is obvious 
 inconvenience in using the same word for an ethnical 
 delimitation and a psychological, when their bound- 
 aries do not exactly correspond — and if some Anglo- 
 Saxons have the " Celtic " note it is certain that 
 many thousands of Celts have not ; why then I shall 
 be glad enough to use a better and a handier and a 
 more exact, if only some clever person will provide 
 it. 
 
 Meanwhile, let it be understood that in speaking 
 of a "Celtic" note I accuse no fellow-creature of 
 being an Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Manxman, 
 Cornishman, or Breton. The poet will as a rule 
 turn out to be one or other of these, or at least to 
 have 1 a traceable strain of Celtic blood in him. But 
 to the note only is the term applied, Now this note 
 may be recognised by many tokens ; but the first 
 and chiefest is its insistence upon man's brotherhood 
 
 59
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 with bird and beast, star and flower, everything, in 
 short, which we loosely call "nature," his brotherhood 
 even with spirits and angels, as one of an infinite 
 number of microcosms reflecting a common image 
 of God. And poetry which holds by this creed will 
 hardly be subservient to societies and governments 
 and legalised doctrines and conventions ; it will hold 
 to them by a long and loose chain, if at all. It flies 
 high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view 
 of all manner of things which in the temple, the 
 palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken 
 as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 
 "dissoluteness" — if you will give that word its 
 literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues 
 carry no reflection of heaven ; it sees that heaven, 
 on the other hand — so infinite is its care — may shake 
 with anger from bound to bound at the sight of a 
 caged bird. It sees that the souls of living things, 
 even of the least conspicuous, reach up by chains 
 and are anchored in heaven, while "great" events 
 slide by on the surface of this skimming planet with 
 empires and their ordinances. 
 
 "And so the Emperor went in the procession under 
 the splendid canopy. And all the people in the streets 
 and at the windows said, ' Bless us ! what matchless 
 new clothes our Emperor has! 'But he hasn't any- 
 thing on ! ' cried a little child. ' Dear me, just listen 
 
 60
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 to what the little innocent says,' observed his father, 
 and the people whispered to each other what the child 
 had said. ' He hasn't anything on ! ' they began to 
 shout at last. This made the Emperor's flesh creep, 
 because he thought that they were right ; but he said 
 to himself, ' I must keep it up through the procession, 
 anyhow.' And he walked on still more majestically, 
 and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the 
 train, though there was none to carry." 
 
 This parable of the Emperor without clothes can 
 be matched, for simplicity and searching directness, 
 against any parable outside of the Gospels, and it 
 agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the 
 wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that 
 wisdom here. I observe that when the poets 
 preach it we tender them our applause. We applaud 
 Vaughan's lines: — 
 
 " Happy those early days, when I 
 Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . . 
 When yet I had not walk'd above 
 A mile or two from my first love, 
 And looking back — at that short space — 
 Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
 When on some gilded cloud or flow'r 
 My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of eternity. . . ." 
 
 We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode — 
 
 61
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
 The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And cometh from afar : 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home : 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! . . ." 
 
 We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he 
 tells us of a Child that — 
 
 " The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God ; 
 and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches. 
 He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse ; 
 the one imitates his pureness, the other falls into his 
 simplicity. . . . His father hath writ him as his own 
 little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that 
 he cannot. remember, and sighs to see what innocence he 
 hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with his 
 little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and 
 exchanged but one heaven for another." 
 
 But while we applaud this pretty confident attri- 
 bution of divine wisdom to children, we are much 
 too cautious to translate it into practice. " It is far 
 too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth prudently, 
 " to be recommended to faith as more than an 
 element in our instincts of immortality;" and he 
 might have added that, while the Child may be 
 Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege 
 
 62
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 of spanking. Even so I observe that, while able 
 to agree cordially with Christ on the necessity of 
 becoming as little children as a condition of entering 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious 
 as to act upon any such belief; nay, we find 
 ourselves obliged to revise and re -interpret the 
 wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too 
 impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, 
 forbids oaths of all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be 
 serious, or we should have to upset a settled practice 
 of the courts. And as for resisting no evil and 
 forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens ! what 
 would become of our splendid armaments ! The 
 suggestion, put so down rightly, is quite too wild. 
 In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society 
 could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines 
 laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. (I forget 
 the Bishop's exact words, but the)/' amounted to 
 a complete and thoroughly common -sense repu- 
 diation of Gospel Christianity.) 
 
 No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine 
 teaching touches on conduct, we must as practical 
 men correct it, and with a special look-out for its 
 indulgent misunderstanding of children. Children, 
 as a matter of experience, have no sense of the 
 rights of property. They steal apples. 
 
 And yet — there must be something in this 
 downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went 
 
 63
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such 
 stress on it ; and since our own hearts respond 
 so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim 
 divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length 
 of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men 
 of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit 
 of shadows. " Shadows we are and shadows we 
 pursue" sounded an exquisitely solemn note in an 
 election speech; but after all, we must take the 
 world as we find it, and the world as we find 
 it has its own recognised rewards. No success 
 attended the poet who wrote that — 
 
 " Those little new-invented things — 
 Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys, 
 So ribbands are and rings, 
 Which all our happiness destroys. 
 
 Nor God 
 
 In His abode, 
 
 Nor saints, nor little boys, 
 Nor Angels made them ; only foolish men, 
 Grown mad with custom, on those toys 
 Which more increase their wants to date. . . ." 
 
 He found no publisher, and they have been rescued 
 by accident after two hundred years of oblivion. (It 
 appears, nevertheless, that he was a happy man.) 
 
 And yet — I repeat — since we respond to it so 
 readily, whether in welcome or in irritation, there 
 must be something in this claim set up for childish 
 
 64
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 simplicity ; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate 
 and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken 
 to sounding its note so boldly. Whatever else they 
 do, on the conventional ideals of this generation 
 they speak out with an uncompromising and highly 
 disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they 
 are held, if at all, by a long and loose chain to the 
 graven images to which we stand bound arm-to-arm 
 and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take 
 a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with 
 a boldness which is the more impressive for being 
 unconscious. And they declare that they see us tied 
 to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas. 
 * # # * 
 
 P.S. — I made bold enough to say in the course of 
 these remarks that Euclid's Elements could hardly be 
 improved by writing them out in ballad metre. A 
 friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion, 
 cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I 
 do so with pleasure in the following — 
 
 65
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS. 
 
 The King sits in Dunfermline toun 
 Drinking the blude-red wine : 
 
 " O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle 
 Upon a given straight line ? " 
 
 O up and spake an eldern knight, 
 Sat at the King's right knee — 
 
 " Of a' the clerks by Granta side 
 Sir Patrick bears the gree. 
 
 " 'Tis he was taught by the Tod-huntere 
 Tho' not at the tod-hunting ; 
 
 Yet gif that he be given a line, 
 He '11 do as brave a thing." 
 
 Our King has written a braid letter 
 
 To Cambrigge or thereby, 
 And there it found Sir Patrick Spens 
 
 Evaluating sr« 
 
 He hadna warked his quotient 
 
 A point but barely three, 
 There stepped to him a little foot-page 
 
 And louted on his knee. 
 
 The first word that Sir Patrick read, 
 
 " Plus x " was a' he said : 
 The neist word that Sir Patrick read, 
 
 'Twas "plus expenses paid." 
 
 66
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 The last word that Sir Patrick read, 
 
 The tear blinded his e'e : 
 "The pound I most admire is not 
 
 In Scottish currencie." 
 
 Stately stepped he east the wa', 
 And stately stepped he north : 
 
 He fetched a compass frae his ha' 
 And stood beside the Forth. 
 
 Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth, 
 
 And gurlier by-and-by — 
 " O never yet was sic a storm, 
 
 Yet it isna sic as I ! " 
 
 Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth 
 
 Until Dunfermline toun ; 
 And tho' he came with a kittle wame 
 
 Fu' low he louted doun. 
 
 "A line, a line, a gude straight line, 
 
 O King, purvey me quick ! 
 And see it be of thilka kind 
 
 That 's neither braid nor thick/' 
 
 " Nor thick nor braid ? " King Jamie said, 
 
 " I '11 eat my gude hat-band 
 If arra line as ye define 
 
 Be found in our Scotland." 
 
 "Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule, 
 
 It sail be ruled by me;" 
 And lichtly with his little pencil 
 
 He's ruled the line A B. 
 
 67
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 Stately stepped he east the wa\ 
 
 And stately stepped he west ; 
 " Ye touch the button," Sir Patrick said, 
 
 "And I sail do the rest." 
 
 And he has set his compass foot 
 
 Untill the centre A, 
 From A to B he 's stretched it oot — 
 
 " Ye Scottish carles, give way ! " 
 
 Syne he has moved his compass foot 
 
 Untill the centre B, 
 From B to A he's stretched it oot, 
 
 And drawn it viz-a-vee. 
 
 The tane circle was BCD, 
 
 And ACE the tither : 
 " I rede ye well," Sir Patrick said, 
 
 " They interseck ilk ither. 
 
 " See here, and where they interseck — 
 
 To wit with yon point C — 
 Ye '11 just obsairve that I conneck 
 
 The twa points A and B. 
 
 "And there ye have a little triangle 
 
 As bonny as e'er was seen ; 
 The whilk is not isosceles, 
 
 Nor yet it is scalene." 
 
 " The proof ! the proof ! " King Jamie cried 
 " The how and eke the why ! " 
 
 Sir Patrick laughed within his beard — 
 " 'Tis ex hypothcsi — 
 
 68
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 " When I ligg'd in my mither's wame, 
 
 I learn'd it frae my mither, 
 That things was equal to the same, 
 
 Was equal ane to t'ither. 
 
 " Sith in the circle first I drew 
 
 The lines B A, B C, 
 Be radii true, I wit to you 
 
 The baith maun equal be. 
 
 " Likewise and in the second circle, 
 
 Whilk I drew widdershins, 
 It is nae skaith the radii baith, 
 
 A B, AC, be twins. 
 
 "And sith of three a pair agree 
 
 That ilk suld equal ane, 
 By certes they maun equal be 
 
 Ilk unto ilk by-lane." 
 
 " Now by my faith ! " King Jamie saith, 
 
 " What plane geometrie ! 
 If only Potts had written in Scots, 
 
 How loocid Potts wad be ! " 
 
 " Now wow's my life ! " said Jamie the King, 
 And the Scots lords said the same, 
 
 For but it was that envious knicht, 
 Sir Hughie o' the Graeme. 
 
 " Flim-flam, flim-flam ! " and " Ho indeed ? " 
 
 Quod Hughie o' the Graeme ; 
 " 'Tis I could better upon my heid 
 
 This prabblin prablem-game." 
 
 69
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 Sir Patrick Spens was nothing laith 
 When as he heard "flim-flam," 
 
 But syne he's ta'en a silken claith 
 And wiped his diagram. 
 
 " Gif my small feat may better'd be, 
 
 Sir Hew, by thy big head, 
 What I hae done with an A B C 
 
 Do thou with X Y Z." 
 
 Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew, 
 
 And loudly laucht the King; 
 But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew, 
 
 And played that eldritch thing! 
 
 He's play'd it reel, he's play'd it jig, 
 
 And the baith alternative ; 
 And he 's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg, 
 
 That's Proposetion Five. 
 
 And there they've met, and there they've fet, 
 
 Forenenst the Asses' Brigg, 
 And waefu', waefu' was the fate 
 
 That gar'd them there to ligg. 
 
 For there Sir Patrick's slain Sir Hew, 
 And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens — 
 
 Now was not that a fine to-do 
 For Euclid's Elemen's ? 
 
 But let us sing Long live the King ! 
 
 And his foes the Deil attend 'em : 
 For he has gotten his little triangle, 
 
 Quod crat faciendum ! 
 
 70
 
 M 
 
 arcj 
 
 TJOW quietly its best things steal upon the world ! 
 * * And in a world where a single line of Sappho's 
 survives as a something more important than the 
 entire political history of Lesbos, how little will 
 the daily newspaper help us to take long views ! 
 
 Whether England could better afford to lose 
 Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair 
 question to put to an Englishman. But every 
 Englishman knows in his heart which of these 
 two glories of his birth and state will survive the 
 other, and by which of them his country will 
 earn in the end the greater honour. Though in 
 our daily life we — perhaps wisely — make a practice 
 of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our 
 most perdurable claim on man's remembrance, 
 for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all 
 phenomena. 
 
 The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous 
 bookseller of Charing Cross Road, rediscovered 
 (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet. 
 Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the 
 
 7i
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Republic of Letters under many obligations. To 
 begin with, he loves his trade and honours the 
 wares in which he deals, and so continues the good 
 tradition that should knit writers, printers, vendors 
 and purchasers of books together as partakers of an 
 excellent mystery. He studies — and on occasion 
 will fight for — the whims as well as the convenience 
 of his customers. It was he who took arms against 
 the Westminster City Council in defence of the 
 out-of-door-stall, the " classic sixpenny box," and 
 at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at 
 pains to make his secondhand catalogues better 
 reading than half the new books printed, and they 
 cost us nothing. He has done, also, his pious 
 share of service to good literature. He has edited 
 James Thomson, him of The City of Dreadful Night. 
 He has helped us to learn more than we knew of 
 Charles Lamb. He has even written poems of his 
 own and printed them under the title of Rosemary 
 and Pansies, in a volume marked "Not for sale" — a 
 warning which I, as one of the fortunate endowed, 
 intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has 
 discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne. 
 
 Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the 
 discovery let us rehearse the few facts known of 
 the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne. He was 
 born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford 
 shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert 
 
 72
 
 MARCH 
 
 and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered 
 Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On 
 leaving the University he took orders ; was admitted 
 Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657 ; 
 took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669 ; 
 became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando 
 Bridgman, at Teddington ; and died there a few 
 months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty- 
 eight. He wrote a polemical tract on Roman 
 Forgeries, which had some success ; a treatise on 
 Christian E thicks, which, being full of gentle wisdom, 
 was utterly neglected ; an exquisite work, Centuries 
 of Meditations, never published ; and certain poems, 
 which also he left in manuscript. And there the 
 record ends. 
 
 Next let us tell by how strange a chance this 
 forgotten author came to his own. In 1896 or 
 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes 
 of MS. on a street bookstall, and bought them for 
 a few pence. Mr. Brooke happened to be a man 
 learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he 
 no sooner began to examine his purchase than 
 he knew that he had happened on a treasure. At 
 the same time he could hardly believe that writings 
 so admirable were the work of an unknown author. 
 In choice of subject, in sentiment, in style, they 
 bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry 
 Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they 
 
 73
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 must be assigned to Vaughan. He communicated 
 his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who became 
 so deeply interested in it that he purchased the 
 manuscripts and set about preparing an edition of 
 Vaughan, in which the newly-found treasures were 
 to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in 
 passing, was by no means a safe judge of charac- 
 teristics in poetry. With all his learning and 
 enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read 
 a poem with which he was unacquainted or which 
 perchance he had forgotten, to assign it to its true 
 or even its probable author. But when you hear that 
 so learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these 
 writings worthy of Vaughan, you may be the less apt 
 to think me extravagant in holding that man to have 
 been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines : — 
 
 " How like an Angel came I down ! 
 How bright are all things here ! 
 When first among His works I did appear 
 
 O how their Glory me did crown ! 
 The world resembled His Eternity, 
 
 In which my soul did walk ; 
 And everything that I did see 
 Did with me talk. 
 * * * * 
 
 " The streets were paved with golden stones, 
 The boys and girls were mine, 
 O how did all their lovely faces shine ! 
 The sons of men were holy ones ; 
 
 74
 
 MARCH 
 
 In joy and beauty they appeared to me 
 And everything which here I found, 
 
 While like an angel I did see, 
 Adorned the ground. 
 
 " Proprieties" — 
 That is to say, "properties," "estates" — 
 
 " Proprieties themselves were mine, 
 
 And hedges ornaments, 
 Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents 
 
 Did not divide my joys, but all combine. 
 Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed 
 
 My joys by others worn ; 
 For me they all to wear them seemed 
 
 When I was born." 
 
 Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and 
 elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just 
 before his death, he was endeavouring to find means 
 to publish. After his death the two manuscripts 
 passed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the 
 well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who 
 in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when 
 a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, 
 Mr. Dobell bought — and this is perhaps the strangest 
 part of the story — a third manuscript volume, which 
 Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an 
 inkling that it bore upon Mr. Brooke's discovery. 
 
 75
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " though nothing is needed but to compare it with 
 the other volumes in order to see that all these 
 are in the same handwriting." 
 
 Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them 
 with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. 
 Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their 
 author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author 
 be? 
 
 Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume 
 of Giles Fletcher's, Christ's Victory and Triumph, 
 which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended 
 a number of seventeenth- century poems not pre- 
 viously collected ; and to one of these, entitled " The 
 Ways of Wisdom," he drew Mr. Dobell's attention 
 as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To 
 Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the 
 manuscript poems was at once evident. Mr. Brooke 
 had found the poem in a little book in the British 
 Museum entitled, A Serious and Pathcticall Contem- 
 plation of the Mercies of God, in several most Devout 
 and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same (a publisher's 
 title it is likely) : and this book contained other pieces 
 in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. 
 Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no 
 doubt at all that the author of the manuscript poem 
 and of the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings must 
 be one and the same person. But, again, who could 
 he be ? 
 
 76
 
 MARCH 
 
 A sentence in an address " To the Reader " 
 prefixed to the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings 
 provided the clue. The editor of this work (a 
 posthumous publication), after eulogising the un- 
 named author's many virtues wound up with a 
 casual clue to his identity : — 
 
 " But being removed out of the Country to the service 
 of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he 
 died young and got early to those blissful mansions to 
 which he at all times aspir'd." 
 
 But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the 
 secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the 
 clue — that the author of Devout and Sublime Thanks- 
 givings was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman 
 — had only to be followed up ; and it led to the 
 name of Thomas Traherne. This information was 
 obtained from Wood's Athena Oxonienses, which 
 mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, 
 Roman Forgeries and Christian Ethicks. 
 
 The next step was to get hold of these two works 
 and examine them, if perchance some evidence 
 might be found that Traherne was also the author 
 of the manuscripts, which as yet remained a 
 guess, standing on Mr. Dobell's conviction that 
 the verses in the manuscripts and those in Devout 
 and Sublime Thanksgivings must be by the same 
 hand. 
 
 n
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 By great good fortune that evidence was found 
 in Christian Ethicks, in a poem which, with some 
 variations, occurred too in the manuscript Centuries 
 of Meditations. Here then at last was proof positive, 
 or as positive as needs be. 
 
 The most of us writers hope and stake for a 
 diuturnity of fame ; and some of us get it. Sed 
 ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata 
 perierunt? "That bay leaves were found green in 
 the tomb of St. Humbert after a hundred and fifty 
 years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir 
 Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain 
 green in the dust for close on two hundred and 
 thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that 
 only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a 
 chance sentence in a dark preface to a forgotten 
 book has it come to light. 
 
 I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction 
 in the discovery ? His was by choice a vita fallens. 
 Early in life he made, as we learn from a passage in 
 Centuries of Meditations, his election between worldly 
 prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the 
 chase of fleeting phenomena and rest upon the 
 soul's centre : — 
 
 " When I came into the country and, being seated 
 among silent trees and woods and hills, had all my time 
 
 78
 
 MARCH 
 
 in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it 
 cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to satiate the 
 burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from 
 my youth ; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather 
 to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather 
 clothes, and to feed upon bread and water, so that I 
 might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep 
 many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my 
 time would be devoured in care and labour. And God 
 was so pleased to accept of that desire that from that 
 time to this I have had all things plentifully provided for 
 me without any care at all, my very study of Felicity 
 making me more to prosper than all the care in the whole 
 world. So that through His blessing I live a free and 
 kingly life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, 
 or, much more, as it is at this day." 
 
 Yet Traherne is no quietist : a fervent, passionate 
 lover, rather, of simple and holy things. He sees 
 with the eyes of a child: the whole world shines 
 for him " apparell'd in celestial light," and that 
 light, he is well aware, shines out on it, through 
 the eyes which observe it, from the divine soul of 
 man. The verses which I quoted above strike a 
 note to which he recurs again and again. Listen 
 to the exquisite prose in which he recounts the 
 "pure and virgin apprehension" of his childhood: — 
 
 "The corn was orient and immortal wheat which 
 never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought 
 it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust 
 
 79
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 and stones of the street were as precious as gold ; the 
 gates were at first the end of the world. The green 
 trees when I saw them first through one of the gates 
 transported and ravished me ; their sweetness and unusual 
 beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with 
 ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. 
 The Men ! O what venerable and reverend creatures 
 did the aged seem ! Immortal Cherubim ! And young 
 men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange 
 seraphic pieces of life and beauty ! Boys and girls 
 tumbling in the street were moving jewels ; I knew not 
 that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets 
 were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, 
 their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as 
 their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The 
 skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and 
 stars, and all the world was mine ; and I the only spec- 
 tator and enjoyer of it. . . ." 
 
 All these things he enjoyed, his life through, un- 
 cursed by the itch for "proprietorship": he was 
 like the Magnanimous Man in his own Christian 
 E thicks — "one that scorns the smutty way of 
 enjoying things like a slave, because he delights 
 in the celestial way and the Image of God." 
 In this creed of his all things are made for 
 man, if only man will inherit them wisely : even 
 God, in conferring benefits on man, is moved 
 and rewarded by the felicity of witnessing man's 
 grateful delight in them : — 
 
 80
 
 MARCH 
 
 " For God enjoyed is all His end, 
 Himself He then doth comprehend 
 When He is blessed, magnified, 
 Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified." 
 
 Yes, and " undeified almost, if once denied." A 
 startling creed, this ; but what a bold and great- 
 hearted one ! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which 
 not only receives the rivers of God's bliss but " all 
 it doth receive returns again." It is the Beloved 
 of the old song, "Quia Amore Langueo ; " whom 
 God pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all 
 things. So in one of his loveliest poems he shows 
 it standing on the threshold to hear news of a 
 great guest, never dreaming that itself is that 
 great guest all the while — 
 
 ON NEWS 
 
 I. 
 
 News from a foreign country came, 
 
 As if my treasure and my wealth lay there : 
 So much it did my heart enflame, 
 
 'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear, 
 Which thither went to meet 
 The approaching sweet, 
 And on the threshold stood 
 To entertain the unknown Good. 
 It hover'd there 
 As if 'twould leave mine ear, 
 
 81
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 And was so eager to embrace 
 The joyful tidings as they came, 
 
 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place 
 To entertain that same. 
 
 II. 
 
 As if the tidings were the things, 
 
 My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure, 
 Or else did bear them on their wings — 
 
 With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure- 
 My Soul stood at that gate 
 To recreate 
 Itself with bliss, and to 
 Be pleased with speed. A fuller view 
 It fain would take, 
 Yet journeys back again would make 
 Unto my heart : as if 'twould fain 
 Go out to meet, yet stay within 
 To fit a place to entertain 
 And bring the tidings in. 
 
 III. 
 
 What sacred instinct did inspire 
 
 My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong ? 
 What secret force moved my desire 
 
 To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young ? 
 Felicity I knew 
 W T as out of view ; 
 And being here alone, 
 I saw that happiness was gone 
 From me ! For this 
 I thirsted absent bliss, 
 
 82
 
 MARCH 
 
 And thought that sure beyond the seas, 
 Or else in something near at hand 
 
 I knew not yet (since nought did please 
 I knew), my bliss did stand. 
 
 IV. 
 
 But little did the infant dream 
 
 That all the treasures of the world were by : 
 And that himself was so the cream 
 
 And crown of all which round about did lie. 
 Yet thus it was : The Gem, 
 The Diadem, 
 The Ring enclosing all 
 That stood upon this earthly ball ; 
 The Heavenly Eye, 
 Much wider than the sky, 
 Wherein they all included were, 
 
 The glorious Soul that was the King 
 Made to possess them, did appear 
 A small and little thing. 
 
 I must quote from another poem, if only for the 
 pleasure of writing down the lines : — 
 
 THE SALUTATION. 
 
 These little limbs, 
 These eyes and hands which here I find, 
 These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins — 
 
 Where have ye been ? behind 
 What curtain were ye from me hid so long ? 
 Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue ? 
 
 83
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 When silent I 
 So many thousand, thousand years 
 Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, 
 
 How could I smiles or tears 
 Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? 
 Welcome ye treasures which I now receive! 
 * # # # 
 
 These poems waited for two hundred and thirty 
 years to be discovered on a street bookstall ! There 
 are lines in them and whole passages in the un- 
 published Centuries of Meditations which almost set 
 one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether 
 the best of men be known, or whether there be not 
 more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand 
 remembered in the known account of Time ? " 
 
 *P <rp «s* *n 
 
 I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss 
 how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the 
 one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the 
 discovery here, and content myself with wondering 
 if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and 
 enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass. 
 For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my 
 father's house the talk might run on divinity, 
 politics, the theatre ; but literature was the great 
 thing. Other callings might do well enough, but 
 writers were a class apart, and to be a great writer 
 was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this 
 habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it 
 
 84
 
 MARCH 
 
 yet ; have not so far outgrown it but that literary- 
 discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though 
 they lie remote from literature's service to man (who 
 has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity 
 if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after 
 Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent 
 working days in trying to discover the historical 
 facts of which Robinson Crusoe may be an allegory. 
 One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove 
 that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment 
 of the time they force me to waste ; and a new 
 searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to 
 whistle and I come to him — though, to be sure, that 
 gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark 
 Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon — 
 
 SONNET CCXVIII. 
 Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will : 
 And where is Will alive but hath a way? 
 So in device thy wit is starved still 
 And as devised by Will. That is to say, 
 My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal 
 Thou hast ; but all that capital messuage 
 Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall. 
 Haply the disproportion may engage 
 The harmless ail-too- wise which otherwise 
 Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue 
 That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise 
 My wit, to whom ? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo ! 
 And here revoke all previous testaments : 
 Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents. 
 
 85
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 After this confession you will pardon any small 
 complacency that may happen to betray itself in 
 the ensuing narrative. 
 
 Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne 
 by announcing another trouvaille, and one which 
 excited me not a little : — 
 
 "Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which 
 I had purchased, I came upon some loose leaves which 
 were headed A Prospect of Society. The title struck me as 
 familiar, and I had only to read a few lines to recognise 
 them as belonging to [Goldsmith's] The Traveller. But the 
 opening lines of my fragment are not the opening lines 
 of the poem as it was published ; in fact, the first two 
 lines of A Prospect of Society are lines 353-4 in the first 
 edition of The Traveller. ... A further examination of 
 the fragment which I had discovered showed that it is 
 not what is usually understood as a 'proof of The 
 Traveller, but rather the material, as yet formless 
 and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally 
 evolved." 
 
 Now — line for corresponding line — the text dis- 
 covered by Mr. Dobell often differs, and sometimes 
 considerably, from that of the first edition of The 
 Traveller, and these variations are highly interest- 
 ing, and make Mr. Dobell's "find" a valuable one. 
 But on studying the newly discovered version I 
 very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's 
 opinion that we had here the formless, unarranged 
 
 86
 
 MARCH 
 
 material out of which Goldsmith built an exquisitely 
 articulated poem.* And, doubting this, I had to 
 doubt what Mr. Dobell deduced from it — that "it 
 was in the manner in which a poem, remarkable 
 for excellence of form and unity of design, was 
 created out of a number of verses which were at first 
 crudely conceived and loosely connected that Gold- 
 smith's genius was most triumphantly displayed." 
 For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on 
 A Prospect of Society before it became evident to 
 me (i) that the lines were not " unarranged," but 
 disarranged ; and (2) that whatever the reason of this 
 disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible ; 
 that the disorder was too insane to be accepted either 
 as an order in which he could have written the poem, 
 or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed 
 it to circulate among his friends, unless he desired 
 them to believe him mad. Take, for instance, this 
 collocation : — 
 
 " Heavens ! how unlike their Belgic sires of old ! 
 Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold ; 
 Where shading elms beside the margin grew, 
 And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew." 
 
 Or this:— 
 
 " To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign, 
 We turn, where France displays her bright domain. 
 
 * Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, The Traveller; 
 or, A Prospect of Society. Later editions dropped the sub-title. 
 
 87
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease, 
 Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please, 
 How often have I led thy sportive choir 
 With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire ? 
 No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display, 
 But Winter lingering chills the lap of May; 
 No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast, 
 But meteors glare and frowning storms invest." 
 
 Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would 
 account for that sort of thing, whereas a poem more 
 pellucidly logical than The Traveller does not exist in 
 English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil 
 and began some simple counting, with this result : — 
 
 The first 42 lines of The Prospect correspond 
 with lines 353-400 of The Traveller. 
 
 The next 42 with lines 311-352. 
 
 The next 34 with lines 277-310. 
 
 The next 36 with lines 241-276. 
 
 The next 36 with lines 205-240. 
 
 The next 36 with lines 169-204. 
 
 The next 38 with lines 131-168. 
 
 The next 28 with lines 103-130. 
 
 And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with 
 lines 73-92. 
 
 In other words, The Prospect is merely an early draft 
 of The Traveller printed backwards in fairly regular 
 sections. 
 
 88
 
 MARCH 
 
 But how can this have happened ? The explana- 
 tion is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith 
 finished writing out each page of his poem for press, 
 he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding ; and, 
 when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages 
 in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid 
 compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty 
 with the manuscript as it reached him, you have 
 what Mr. Dobell has recovered — an immortal poem 
 printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call 
 the result delightful, and (when you come to think 
 of it) the blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to 
 be almost postulable. 
 
 Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon 
 the hypothesis that Goldsmith patiently built a fine 
 poem out of a congeries of fine passages pitchforked 
 together at haphazard — a splendid rubbish heap : 
 and Mr. Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect 
 set of duplicate proofs — fellow, no doubt, to that 
 set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own 
 or the printer's carelessness, sliced up with the 
 scissors and rearranged before submitting it to 
 Johnson's friendly revision. 
 
 The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to 
 come. We all know how easy it is to turn obstinate 
 and defend a pet theory with acrimony. Mr. Dobell 
 
 S 9
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm 
 had committed him to no little expense in publishing 
 The Prospect, with a preface elaborating his theory, 
 he did a thing which was worth a hundred dis- 
 coveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my 
 explanation was the right one, and promptly com- 
 mitted himself to further expense in bringing out a 
 new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. 
 So do men behave who are at once generous of 
 temper and anxious for the truth. 
 
 He himself had been close upon the explanation. In 
 his preface he had actually guessed that the "author's 
 manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into 
 confusion and was then printed without any attempt 
 at rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the 
 right solution, and only failed to follow up the 
 clue. 
 
 His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far 
 as it goes we can collate it with the first edition of 
 The Traveller, and exactly discover the emendations 
 made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion 
 with Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor " in 
 the year 1783, at my request, marked with a pencil 
 the lines which he had furnished, which are only 
 line 420, ' To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' 
 and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet 
 but one. ... He added, ' These are all of which 
 I can be sure.' " We cannot test his claim to the 
 
 90
 
 MARCH 
 
 concluding lines, for the correspondent passage is 
 missing from Mr. Dobell's fragment ; but Johnson's 
 word would be good enough without the internal 
 evidence of the verses to back it. " To stop too 
 faithful, and too faint to go," is his improvement, 
 and an undeniable one, upon Goldsmith's " And 
 faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not 
 been at pains to examine all the revised lines, but 
 they are numerous, and generally (to my thinking) 
 betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost con- 
 sistently improvements. There is one alteration, 
 however, — unmistakably due to Johnson, — which 
 some of us will join with Mr. Dobell in regretting. 
 Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally 
 showed some restiveness at the lines — 
 
 " Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour 
 When first ambition toil'd for foreign power," 
 
 and induced Goldsmith to substitute — 
 
 " Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour 
 When first ambition struck at regal power," 
 
 which may or may not be more creditable in senti- 
 ment, but is certainly quite irrelevant in its context, 
 which happens to be a denunciation of the greed for 
 gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, 
 all but meaningless, and must have irritated and 
 
 9i
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 puzzled many readers of a poem otherwise clearly 
 and continuously argued. In future editions of The 
 Traveller, Goldsmith's original couplet should be 
 restored ; and I urge this (let the Tory reader be 
 assured) not from any ill-will towards our old friend 
 the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred 
 name of Logic. 
 
 * *• * * 
 
 Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and 
 discoveries. They would be worse than trivial 
 indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by 
 which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to 
 regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history 
 of literary reputations, and not primarily as the 
 writer of such words as these — 
 
 "A little touch of something like pride is seated 
 in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without 
 which his humility and modesty would be contemptible 
 virtues." 
 
 " It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without 
 loving God or man. Love is a transcendent excellence 
 in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the 
 nature of every grace and virtue. That which maketh 
 the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so 
 bitter and comfortless to men, is its death in the 
 separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but 
 love not." 
 
 92
 
 MARCH 
 
 "All things do first receive that give: 
 
 Only 'tis God above 
 That from and in Himself doth live ; 
 
 Whose all-sufficient love 
 Without original can flow, 
 And all the joys and glories show 
 Which mortal man can take delight to know. 
 He is the primitive, eternal Spring, 
 The endless Ocean of each glorious thing. 
 
 The soul a vessel is, 
 A spacious bosom, to contain 
 
 All the fair treasures of His bliss, 
 Which run like rivers from, into, the main, 
 And all it doth receive, return again." 
 
 "You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself 
 floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the 
 heavens and crowned with the stars." 
 
 93
 
 A?" 1 
 
 " Thus, then, live I 
 
 Till 'raid all the gloom 
 By Heaven ! the bold sun 
 Is with me in the room 
 Shining, shining! 
 
 " Then the clouds part, 
 
 Swallows soaring between ; 
 The spring is alive 
 
 And the meadows are green ! 
 
 " I jump up like mad, 
 
 Break the old pipe in twain, 
 And away to the meadows, 
 The meadows again ! " 
 
 THE poem of FitzGerald's from which these 
 verses come was known, I believe, to very 
 few until Mr. E. V. Lucas exhumed it from Half- 
 hours with the Worst Authors, and reprinted it in 
 that delightful little book The Open Road. I have 
 a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned 
 executor was but dimly aware of its existence. 
 For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it 
 to his Omar Khayyam — perversely, no doubt. In 
 the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to 
 
 94
 
 APRIL 
 
 a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's 
 lifetime ; but I confess that since a club took him 
 up and feasted his memory with field-marshals 
 and other irrelevant persons in the chair, and since 
 his fame has become vulgarised not only in Thames- 
 side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the 
 North American continent, one at least of his 
 admirers has suffered a not unnatural revulsion, 
 until now he can scarcely endure to read the 
 immortal quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, 
 and deserve to be by reason of their style — " fame's 
 great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin after 
 all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a 
 grown man's thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's 
 or Wordsworth's, or a page of Ibsen's Peer Gynt 
 against the whole of it, any day. 
 
 This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of 
 FitzGerald's verses to express that jollity which 
 should be every man's who looks up from much 
 reading or writing and knows that Spring has 
 
 come. 
 
 * # # * 
 
 " Solvitur acvis hiems grata vice veris ct favoni 
 Trahuntque siccas machines carinas ..." 
 
 In other words, I look out of the window and 
 decide that the day has arrived for launching the 
 boat — 
 
 95
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " This is that happy morn, 
 That day, long wished day ! " 
 
 and, to my mind, the birthday of the year. Poten- 
 tates and capitalists who send down orders to 
 Cowes or Southampton that their yachts are to be 
 put in commission, and anon arrive to find every- 
 thing ready (if they care to examine), from the 
 steam capstan to the cook's apron, have little 
 notion of the amusement to be found in fitting out 
 a small boat, say of five or six tons. I sometimes 
 doubt if it be not the very flower, or at least the 
 bloom, of the whole pastime. The serious face 
 with which we set about it ; the solemn procession 
 up the river to the creek where she rests, the high 
 tide all but lifting her; the silence in which we 
 loose the moorings and haul off; the first thrill of 
 buoyant water underfoot ; the business of stepping 
 the mast; quiet days of sitting or pottering about 
 on deck in the sunny harbour; vessels passing up 
 and down, their crews eyeing us critically as the 
 rigging grows and the odds and ends — block, tackle 
 and purchase — fall into their ordered places; and 
 through it all the expectation running of the 
 summer to come, and "blue days at sea" and un- 
 familiar anchorages — unfamiliar, but where the boat 
 
 is, home will be — 
 
 " Such bliss 
 Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss." 
 
 96
 
 APRIL 
 
 Homer, who knew what amused men, constantly 
 lays stress on this business of fitting out : — 
 
 "Then at length she (Athene) let drag the swift ship 
 to the sea, and stored within it all such tackling as 
 decked ships carry. And she moored it at the far end of 
 the harbour. ... So they raised the mast of pine tree, 
 and set it in the hole of the cross plank, and made it fast 
 with forestays, and hauled up the white sails with twisted 
 ropes of oxhide." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " First of all they drew the ship down to the deep 
 water, and fixed the oars in leathern loops all orderly, 
 and spread forth the white sails. And squires, haughty 
 of heart, bare for them their arms " — but you'll observe 
 that it was the masters who did the launching, etc., like 
 wise men who knew exactly wherein the fun of the 
 business consisted. "And they moored her high out in 
 the shore water, and themselves disembarked. There 
 they supped and waited for evening to come on," 
 
 You suggest, perhaps, that our seafaring is but play : 
 and you are right. But in our play we catch a cupful 
 of the romance of the real thing. Also we have the 
 real thing at our doors to keep us humble. Day by 
 day beneath this window the statelier shipping goes 
 by ; and our twopenny adventurings and discoveries 
 do truly (I believe) keep the greater wonder and 
 interest awake in us from day to day — the wonder 
 
 97
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 and interest so memorably expressed in Mr. Bridges's 
 poem, A Passer By : — 
 
 " Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, 
 Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West, 
 That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding, 
 Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest ? 
 " Ah ! soon when Winter has all our vales opprest, 
 When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling, 
 Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest 
 
 In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling ? 
 
 " I there before thee, in the country so well thou knowest, 
 Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air : 
 
 I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest, 
 And anchor queen of the strange shipping there, 
 
 Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare. . . . 
 
 "And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless, 
 
 I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine 
 That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless, 
 
 Thy port assured in a happier land than mine. 
 But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine. 
 
 As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding, 
 From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line 
 
 In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding." 
 
 Though in all human probability I shall never 
 be the first to burst into a silent sea, I can declare 
 quite seriously that I never steer into an unfamiliar 
 
 98
 
 APRIL 
 
 creek or haven but, as its recesses open, I can 
 understand something of the awe of the boat's crew in 
 Andrew Marvell's " Bermudas; " yes, and something 
 of the exultation of the great Columbus himself! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 In a later paper I may have to tell of these 
 voyages and traffickings. For the while I leave 
 the reader to guess how and in what corner of 
 the coast I happened on the following pendant to 
 Air. Dobell's trouvaille. 
 
 It may not challenge comparison with Mr. Flinders 
 Petrie's work in Egypt or with Mr. Hogarth's Cretan 
 explorations ; but I say confidently that, since 
 Mr. Pickwick unearthed the famous inscribed stone, 
 no more fortunate or astonishing discovery has 
 rewarded literary research upon our English soil 
 than the two letters which with no small pride 
 I give to the world this month. 
 
 Curiously enough, they concern Mr. Pickwick. 
 
 But, perhaps, by way of preface I shall remind 
 the reader that the final number of Pickwick was 
 issued in November, 1837. The first French version 
 — which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald justly calls "a rude 
 adaptation rather than a translation " — appeared in 
 1838, and was entitled Lc Club de Pickwickistes, 
 Roman Comique, traduit libremeni de V Anglais par 
 Mdme. Eugenie Giboyct. With equal justice Mr. 
 
 99
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Fitzgerald complains (The History of Pickwick, 
 p. 276) that " the most fantastic tricks are played 
 with the text, most of the dialogue being left out 
 and the whole compressed into two small volumes." 
 Yet, in fact, Mme. Giboyet (as will appear) was 
 more sinned against than sinning. Clearly she 
 undertook to translate the immortal novel in collab- 
 oration with a M. Alexandre D , and was driven 
 
 by the author's disapproval to suppress M. D 's 
 
 share of the work. The dates are sufficient evidence 
 that this was done (as it no doubt had to be done) in 
 haste. I regret that my researches have yielded no 
 further information respecting this M. Alexandre 
 
 D . The threat in the second letter may or may 
 
 not have been carried out. I am inclined to hope 
 that it was, feeling sure that the result, if ever 
 discovered, will prove in the highest degree enter- 
 taining. "With this I may leave the letters to speak 
 for themselves. 
 
 " 45 Doughty Street, 
 
 " September 25th, 1837. 
 
 "My dear Madam, — It is true that when granting 
 the required permission to translate Pickwick into 
 French, I allowed also the license you claimed for 
 yourself and your c oil ab or at cur — of adapting rather 
 
 100
 
 APRIL 
 
 than translating, and of presenting my hero under 
 such small disguise as might commend him better to 
 a Gallic audience. But I am bound to say that — to 
 judge only from the first half of your version, which 
 is all that has reached me — you have construed this 
 permission more freely than I desired. In fact, the 
 parent can hardly recognise his own child. 
 
 " Against your share in the work, Madame, I have 
 little to urge, though the damages you represent 
 Mrs. Bardell as claiming — 300,000 francs, or £12,000 
 of our money — strikes me as excessive. It is rather 
 (I take as my guide the difference in the handwriting) 
 to your collaborateur that I address, through you, my 
 remonstrances. 
 
 " I have no radical objection to his making 
 Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman members 
 of His Majesty King Louis XIII. 's corps of 
 Musketeers, if he is sincerely of opinion that French 
 taste will applaud the departure. I even commend 
 his slight idealisation of Snodgrass (which, by the 
 way, is not the name of an English mountain), and 
 the amorousness of Tupman (Aramis) gains — I 
 candidly admit — from the touch of religiosity which 
 he gives to the character ; though I do not, as he 
 surmises, in the course of my story, promote Tupman 
 to a bishopric. The development — preferable as on 
 some points the episcopal garb may be considered to 
 the green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail worn 
 
 101
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 by him at Madame Chasselion's/fo champctrc — would 
 jar upon our Anglican prejudices. As for Winkle 
 (Porthos), the translation nicely hits off his love of 
 manly exercises, while resting his pretensions on a 
 more solid basis of fact than appears in the original. 
 In the incident of the baldric, however, the imposture 
 underlying Mr. W.'s green shooting-coat is conveyed 
 with sufficient neatness. 
 
 " M. D has been well advised again in break- 
 ing up the character of Sam Weller and making 
 him, like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once. 
 Buckingham (Jingle) and Fenton (a capital rendering 
 of the Fat Boy) both please me ; and in expanding 
 the episode of the sausage and the trouser-buttons 
 
 M. D has shown delicacy and judgment by 
 
 altering the latter into diamond studs. 
 
 " Alas ! madam, I wish the same could be said 
 for his treatment of my female puppets, which not 
 only shocks but bewilders me. In her earlier 
 appearances Mrs. Bardell (Milady) is a fairly con- 
 sistent character ; and why M. D should hazard 
 
 that consistency by identifying her with the middle- 
 aged lady at the great White Horse, Ipswich, passes 
 my comprehension. I say, madam, that it bewilders 
 
 me; but for M. D 's subsequent development of 
 
 the occurrences at that hostelry I entertain feelings 
 of which mere astonishment is, perhaps, the mildest. 
 I can hardly bring myself to discuss this with a 
 
 102
 
 APRIL 
 
 lady ; but you will allow me to protest in the very 
 strongest terms that Mr. Pickwick made that un- 
 fortunate mistake about the sleeping apartment in 
 the completest innocence, that in ejaculating 
 ' ha-hum ' he merely uttered a note of warning, 
 
 and that 'ha-hum' is not (as M. D suspects) 
 
 an English word from which certain syllables have 
 been discreetly removed ; that in thrusting his head 
 through the bed-curtains he was, as I am careful 
 to say, ' not actuated by any definite object ' ; and 
 that, as a gentleman should, he withdrew at the 
 earliest possible moment. His intercepted duel with 
 Mr. Peter Magnus (De Wardes) rests, as I fondly 
 imagined I had made clear, upon a complete mis- 
 understanding. The whole business of the fleur-de- 
 lys on Mrs. Bardell's shoulder is a sheer interpolation 
 and should be expunged, not only on grounds of 
 morality, but because when you reach the actual 
 trial, ' Bardell v. Pickwick,' you will find this 
 discovery of the defendant's impossible either to 
 ignore or to reconcile with the jury's verdict. 
 Against the intervention of Richelieu (Mr. Nupkins) 
 
 I have nothing to urge. M. D opines that I 
 
 shall in the end deal out poetical justice to Mrs. 
 Bardell as Milady. He is right. I have, indeed, 
 gone so far as to imprison her ; but I own that her 
 execution (as suggested by him) at the hands of 
 the Queer Client, with Pickwick and his friends 
 
 103
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 (or, alternatively, Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. Perker, and 
 Bob Sawyer) as silent spectators, seems to me almost 
 as inconsistant with the spirit of the tale as his other 
 proposal to kidnap Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the boot 
 of Mr. Weller's coach, and substitute for his lordship 
 the Chancery prisoner in an iron mask. I trust, 
 madam, that these few suggestions will, without 
 setting any appreciable constraint on your fancy, 
 enable you to catch something more of the spirit 
 of my poor narrative than I have been able to detect 
 in some of the chapters submitted ; and I am, with 
 every assurance of esteem, 
 
 " Your obliged servant, 
 
 " Boz. 
 
 :< P.S. — The difference between Anjou wine and 
 the milk punch about which you inquire does not 
 seem to me to necessitate any serious alteration of 
 
 the chapter in question. M. D 's expressed 
 
 intention of making Master Bardell in later life the 
 executioner of King Charles I. of England must 
 stand over for some future occasion. The present 
 work will hardly yield him the required opportunity 
 for dragging in King Charles' head." 
 
 (2) 
 
 " Madame,— Puisque M. Boz se mefie des pro- 
 positions lui faites sans but quelconque que de 
 
 104
 
 APRIL 
 
 concilier les gens d'esprit, j'ai l'honneur de vous 
 annoncer nettement que je me retire d'une besogne 
 aussi rude que malentendue. II dit que j'ai concu 
 son Pickwick tout autrement que lui. Soit ! Je 
 l'ecrirai, ce Pickwick, selon mon propre gout. Que 
 M. Boz redoute mes Trois Pickwickistes ! Agreez, 
 Madame, etc., etc., 
 
 "Alexandre (le Grand)." 
 
 I am told that literary aspirants in these days do 
 not read books, or read them only for purposes of 
 review-writing. Yet these pages may happen to 
 fall in the way of some literary aspirant faint on a 
 false scent, yet pursuing ; and to him, before telling 
 of another discovery, I will address one earnest word 
 of caution. Let him receive it as from an elder 
 brother who wishes him well. 
 
 My caution is — Avoid irony as you would the 
 plague. 
 
 Years ago I was used to receive this warning (on 
 an average) once a week from my old and dear friend 
 Sir Wemyss Reid ; and once a week I would set 
 myself, assailing his good nature, to cajole him into 
 printing some piece of youthful extravagance which 
 he well knew — and I knew — and he knew that 
 I knew — would infuriate a hundred staid readers of 
 The Speaker and oblige him to placate in private a 
 
 105
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 dozen puzzled and indignant correspondents. For 
 those were days before the beards had stiffened on 
 the chins of some of us who assembled to reform 
 politics, art, literature, and the world in general from 
 
 a somewhat frowsy upstairs coffee-room in C 
 
 Street : days of old — 
 
 " When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek 
 And all the world and we seem'd much less cold 
 And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold. ..." 
 
 Well, these cajoleries were not often successful, yet 
 often enough to keep the sporting instinct alive and 
 active, and a great deal oftener than F — — -'s equally 
 disreputable endeavours : it being a tradition with 
 
 the staff that F had sworn by all his gods to get 
 
 in an article which would force the printer to flee the 
 country. I need scarcely say that the tradition was 
 groundless, but we worked it shamelessly. 
 
 In this way on January gth, 1897 ( a y ear m which 
 the Westminster Aquarium was yet standing), and 
 shortly after the issue of the New Year's Honours' 
 List, the following article appeared in The Speaker. 
 The reader will find it quite harmless until he comes 
 to the sequel. It was entitled — 
 
 NOOKS OF OLD LONDON. 
 
 I. — -THE WESTMINSTER SCUTORIUM. 
 
 Let me begin by assuring the reader that the West- 
 minster Scutorium has absolutely no connection with 
 
 106
 
 APRIL 
 
 the famous Aquarium across the road. I suppose that 
 every Londoner has heard, at least, of the Aquarium, 
 but I doubt if one in a hundred has heard of the little 
 Scutorium which stands removed from it by a stone's 
 throw, or less ; and I am certain that not one in a 
 thousand has ever stooped his head to enter by its 
 shy, squat, fifteenth-century doorway. It is a fact that 
 the very policeman at the entrance to Dean's Yard 
 did not know its name, and the curator assures me 
 that the Post Office has made frequent mistakes in 
 delivering his letters. So my warning is not quite 
 impertinent. 
 
 But a reader of antiquarian tastes, who cares as little 
 as I do for hypnotisers and fasting men, and does not 
 mind a trifle of dust, so it be venerable, will not regret 
 an hour spent in looking over the Scutorium, or a chat 
 with Mr. Melville Robertson, its curator, or Clerk of 
 the Ribands (Stemmata) — to give him his official title. 
 Mr. Robertson ranks, indeed, with the four pursuivants 
 of Heralds' College, from which the Scutorium was 
 originally an offshoot. He takes an innocent delight in 
 displaying his treasures and admitting you to the stores 
 of his unique information ; and I am sure would welcome 
 more visitors. 
 
 Students of Constitutional History will remember that 
 strange custom, half Roman, half Medieval, in accord- 
 ance with which a baron or knight, on creation or 
 accession to his title and dignities, deposited in the king's 
 keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself, together 
 with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued 
 — plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral 
 masks of the old Roman families, the respect paid to 
 
 107
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 them by the household, and the important part they 
 played on festival days, at funerals, &c. — that this 
 offering was a formal recognition of the pairia potestas of 
 the monarch as father of his people. Few are aware, 
 however, that the custom has never been discontinued, 
 and that the cupboards of Westminster contain a waxen 
 memorial of almost every man whom the king has 
 delighted to honour, from the Conquest down to the very 
 latest knight gazetted. The labour of modelling and 
 painting these effigies was discontinued as long ago as 
 1586; and the masks are no longer likenesses, but oval 
 plates of copper, each bearing its name on a label. 
 Mr. Robertson informed me that Charles I. made a brief 
 attempt to revive the old practice. All the Stuarts, 
 indeed, set store on the Scutorium and its functions; and 
 I read in an historical pamphlet, by Mr. J. Saxby Hine, 
 the late curator, that large apartments were allocated to 
 the office in Inigo Jones's first designs for Whitehall. 
 But its rosy prospects faded with the accession of 
 William of Orange. Two years later the custody of the 
 shields (from which it obtained its name) was relegated 
 to the Heralds' College ; and the Scutorium has now to 
 be content with the care of its masks and the perform- 
 ance of some not unimportant duties presently to be 
 recounted. 
 
 A reference from the Heralds' College sent me in quest 
 of Mr. Melville Robertson. But even in Dean's Yard 
 I found it no easy matter to run him to earth. The 
 policeman (as I have said) could give me no help. At 
 length, well within the fourth doorway on the east side, 
 after passing the railings, I spied a modest brass plate 
 with the inscription Clerk of the Ribands. Hours 11 to 3. 
 
 108
 
 APRIL 
 
 The outside of the building has a quite modern look, 
 but the architect has spared the portal, and the three 
 steps which lead down to the flagged entrance hall seem 
 to mark a century apiece. I call it an entrance hall, but 
 it is rather a small adytum, spanned by a pointed arch 
 carrying the legend Stcmmata Qvid Facivnt. The modern 
 exterior is, in fact, but a shell. All within dates from 
 Henry VI. ; and Mr. Robertson (but this is only a 
 theory) would explain the sunken level of the ground- 
 floor rooms by the action of earthworms, which have 
 gradually lifted the surface of Dean's Yard outside. He 
 contends the original level to be that of his office, which 
 lies on the right of the adytum. A door on the left 
 admits to two rooms occupied by the nomenclator, 
 Mr. Pender, and two assistant clerks, who comprise the 
 staff. Straight in front, a staircase leads to the upper 
 apartments. 
 
 Mr. Robertson was writing when the clerk ushered me 
 in, but at once professed himself at my service. He is 
 a gentleman of sixty, or thereabouts, with white hair, a 
 complexion of a country squire, and very genial manners. 
 For some minutes we discussed the difficulty which had 
 brought me to him (a small point in county history), and 
 then he anticipated my request for permission to inspect 
 his masks. 
 
 " Would you like to see them ? They are really very 
 curious, and I often wonder that the public should evince 
 so small an interest." 
 
 " You get very few visitors? " 
 
 " Seldom more than two a day; a few more when the 
 Honours' Lists appear. I thought at first that your 
 visit might be in connection with the new List, but 
 
 109
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 reflected that it was too early. In a day or two we shall 
 be comparatively busy." 
 
 " The Scutorium is concerned then with the Honours' 
 Lists?" 
 
 " A little," replied Mr. Robertson, smiling. " That is 
 to say, we make them." Then, observing my evident 
 perplexity, he laughed. " Well, perhaps that is too 
 strong an expression. I should have said, rather, that 
 we fill up the blanks." 
 
 " I had always understood that the Prime Minister 
 drew up the Lists before submitting them to Her 
 Majesty." 
 
 " So he does — with our help. Oh, there is no secrecy 
 about it ! " said Mr. Robertson, in a tone almost rallying. 
 " The public is free of all information, only it will not 
 inquire. A little curiosity on its part would even save 
 much unfortunate misunderstanding." 
 
 " In what way ? " 
 
 "Well, the public reads of rewards (with which, by 
 the way, I have nothing to do) conferred on really 
 eminent men — Lord Roberts, for instance, or Sir Henry 
 Irving, or Sir Joseph Lister. It then goes down the 
 List and, finding a number of names of which it has 
 never heard, complains that Her Majesty's favour has 
 been bestowed on nonentities ; whereas this is really the 
 merit of the List, that they arc nonentities." 
 
 " I don't understand." 
 
 " Well, then, they dent exist." 
 
 " But surely " 
 
 " My dear sir," said Mr. Robertson, still smiling, and 
 handing me his copy of The Times, "cast your eye down 
 that column ; take the names of the new knights — 
 
 no
 
 APRIL 
 
 'Blain, Clarke, Edridge, Farrant, Laing, Laird, Wardle' 
 — what strikes you as remarkable about them ? " 
 " Why, that I have never heard of any of them." 
 "Naturally, for there are no such people. I made 
 them up ; and a good average lot they are, though 
 perhaps the preponderance of monosyllables is a little 
 too obvious." 
 
 " But see here. I read that ' Mr. Thomas Wardle is 
 a silk merchant of Staffordshire.' " 
 
 " But I assure you that I took him out of Pickwick." 
 
 " Yes, but here is ' William Laird,' for instance. I 
 hear that already two actual William Lairds — one of 
 Birkenhead, the other of Glasgow— are convinced that 
 the honour belongs to them." 
 
 "No doubt they will be round in a day or two. The 
 Heralds' College will refer them to me— not simultane- 
 ously, if I may trust Sir Albert Woods's tact — and I 
 shall tell them that it belongs to neither, but to another 
 William Laird altogether. But, if you doubt, take the 
 Indian promotions. Lord Salisbury sometimes adds a 
 name or two after I send in the List, and — well, you 
 know his lordship is not fond of the dark races and has a 
 somewhat caustic humour. Look at the newC.I.E.'s: 
 ' Rai Bahadur Pandit Bhag Rum.' Does it occur to 
 you that a person of that name really exists ? ' Khan 
 Bahadur Naoraji (' Naoraji,' mark you) Pestonji Vakil ' 
 — it 's the language of extravaganza ! The Marquis goes 
 too far : it spoils all verisimilitude." 
 
 Mr. Robertson grew quite ruffled. 
 
 " Then you pride yourself on verisimilitude ? " I 
 suggested. 
 
 "As I think you may guess ; and we spare no pains to 
 
 in
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 attain it, whether in the names or in the descriptions 
 supplied to the newspapers. ' William Arbuthnot Blain, 
 Esq.' — you have heard of Balzac's scouring Paris for 
 a name for one of his characters. I assure you I scoured 
 England for William Arbuthnot Blain — 'identified with 
 the movement for improving the dwellings of the 
 labouring classes' — or is that Richard Farrant, Esq.? 
 In any case, what more likely, on the face of it ? 
 ' Frederick Wills, Esq., of the well-known tobacco firm 
 of Bristol ' — the public swallows that readily : and yet it 
 never buys a packet of their Westward Ho ! Mixture 
 (which I smoke myself) without reading that the Wills's 
 of Bristol are W. D. and H. O. — no Frederick at all." 
 
 " But," I urged, " the purpose of this " 
 
 " I should have thought it obvious ; but let me give you 
 the history of it. The practice began with William III. 
 He was justly scornful of the lax distribution of honours 
 which had marked all the Stuart reigns. You will 
 hardly believe it, but before 1688 knighthoods, and even 
 peerages, went as often as not to men who qualified by 
 an opportune loan to the Exchequer, or even by presiding 
 at a public feast. (I say nothing of baronetcies, for their 
 history is notorious.) At first William was for making a 
 clean sweep of the Honours' List, or limiting it to two 
 or three well-approved recipients. But it was argued 
 that this seeming niggardliness might injure His Majesty's 
 popularity, never quite secure. The Scutorium found a 
 way out of the dilemma. Sir Croftoa Byng, the then 
 Clerk of the Ribands, proposed the scheme, which has 
 worked ever since. I may tell you that the undue largesse 
 of honours finds in the very highest quarters as little 
 favour as ever it did. Of course, there are some whose 
 
 112
 
 APRIL 
 
 services to science, literature, and art cannot be ignored — 
 the late Lord Leighton, for instance, or Sir George 
 Newnes, or Sir Joseph Lister again ; and these are 
 honoured, while the public acclaims. But the rest are 
 represented only in my collection of masks — and an 
 interesting one it is. Let me lead the way." 
 
 But I have left myself no space for describing the 
 treasures of the Scutorium. The two upper stories are 
 undoubtedly the least interesting, since they contain the 
 modern, unpainted masks. Each mask has its place, its 
 label, and on the shelf below it, protected by a slip of 
 glass, a description of the imaginary recipient of the 
 royal favour. One has only to look along the crowded 
 shelves to be convinced that Mr. Melville Robertson's 
 office is no sinecure. The first floor is devoted to a small 
 working library and a museum (the latter undergoing 
 rearrangement at the time of my visit). But the 
 cellars ! — or (as I should say) the crypt ! In Beaumont's 
 words — 
 
 " Here 's a world of pomp and state 
 Buried in dust, once dead by fate ! " 
 
 Here in their native colours, by the light of Mr. Robert- 
 son's duplex lantern, stare the faces of the illustrious 
 dead, from Rinaldus FitzTurold, knighted on Senlac 
 field, to stout old Crosby Martin, sea-rover, who received 
 the accolade (we '11 hope he deserved it) from the Virgin 
 Queen in 1586. A few even are adorned with side-locks, 
 which Mr. Pender, the nomenclatov, keeps scrupulously 
 dusted. In almost every case the wax has withstood the 
 tooth of time far better than one could have expected. 
 Mr. Robertson believes that the pigments chosen must 
 
 "3
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 have had some preservative virtue. If so, the secret has 
 been lost. But Mr. Pender has touched over some of 
 the worst decayed with a mixture of copal and pure 
 alcohol, by which he hopes at least to arrest the mischief; 
 and certainly the masks in the Scutorium compare very 
 favourably with the waxen effigies of our royalties 
 preserved in the Abbey, close by. Mr. Robertson has a 
 theory that these, too, should by rights belong to his 
 museum : but that is another story, and a long one. 
 Suffice it to say that I took my leave with the feelings of 
 one who has spent a profitable afternoon : and for further 
 information concerning this most interesting nook of old 
 London I can only refer the reader to the pamphlet 
 already alluded to, The Westminster Scutorium : Its 
 History and Present Uses. By J. Saxby Hine, C.B., 
 F.S.A. Theobald & Son, Skewers Alley, Chancery 
 Lane, E.C. 
 
 This article appeared to my beloved editor innocent 
 enough to pass, and to me (as doubtless to the reader) 
 harmless enough in all conscience. Now listen to the 
 sequel. 
 
 Long afterwards an acquaintance of mine — a 
 barrister with antiquarian tastes — was dining with 
 me in my Cornish home, and the talk after dinner 
 fell upon the weekly papers and reviews. On The 
 Speaker he touched with a reticence which I set 
 down at first to dislike for his politics. By and by, 
 however, he let slip the word "untrustworthy." 
 
 114
 
 APRIL 
 
 " Holding your view of its opinions," I suggested, 
 " you might fairly say ' misleading.' ' Untrustworthy ' 
 is surely too strong a word." 
 
 "I am not talking," said he, "of its opinions, 
 but of its mis-statements of fact. Some time ago it 
 printed an article on a place which it called 'The 
 Westminster Scutorium,' and described in detail. 
 I happened to pick the paper up at my club and 
 read the article. It contained a heap of historical 
 information on the forms and ceremonies which 
 accompany the granting of titles, and was appar- 
 ently the work of a specialist. Being interested 
 (as you know) in these matters, and having an 
 hour to spare, I took a hansom down to West- 
 minster. At the entrance of Dean's Yard I 
 found a policeman, and inquired the way to the 
 Scutorium. He eyed me for a moment, then he 
 said, 'Well, I thought I'd seen the last of 'em. 
 You 're the first to-day, so far ; and yesterday there 
 was only five. But Monday — and Tuesday — and 
 Wednesday ! There must have been thirty came as 
 late as Wednesday ; though by that time I 'd found 
 out what was the matter. All Monday they kept 
 me hunting round and round the yard, following 
 like a pack. Very respectable-looking old gentlemen, 
 too, the whole of 'em, else I should have guessed 
 they were pulling my leg. Most of 'em had copies 
 of a paper, The Speaker, and read out bits from it, 
 
 "5
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 and insisted on my searching in this direction and 
 that . . . and me being new to this beat, and seeing 
 it all in print ! We called in the postman to help. 
 By and by they began to compare notes, and found 
 they 'd been kidded, and some of 'em used language. 
 ... I really think, sir, you must be the last of 
 'em.'" 
 
 116
 
 ay 
 
 WAS travelling some weeks ago by a railway 
 *■ line alongside of which ran a quickset hedge. 
 It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to 
 the base of embankments, looped itself around 
 stations, flickered on the skyline above us, raced 
 us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again 
 on their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, 
 ran round and waited for us as we emerged. Its 
 importunity drove me to the other side of the 
 carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving 
 similarly. Now I can understand that a railway 
 company has excellent reasons for planting quickset 
 hedges alongside its permanent way. But their 
 unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do 
 we neglect the real parks of England ? — parks 
 enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here 
 and there and in the most timid fashion. And how 
 better could our millionaires use their wealth (since 
 they are always confiding to us their difficulties in 
 getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens 
 and endowing them, and so, without pauperising 
 
 117
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 anyone, build for themselves monuments not only 
 delightful, but perpetual ? — for, as Victor Hugo said, 
 the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. 
 I doubt it ; and experts, who have discussed with 
 me the modern products of the paper trade, share 
 my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library 
 has been sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. 
 So, you may say again, have free public gardens 
 and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit 
 that a fair percentage of the public avails itself of 
 these libraries and parks ; still the mass does not, 
 and they were intended for the mass. Their attrac- 
 tiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The 
 stream of public appreciation which pours through 
 them is not fathomless ; beyond a certain point it 
 does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking 
 slowness ; and candid librarians and curators can 
 sound its shallows accurately enough. What we 
 want is not a garden into which folk will find their 
 way if they have nothing better to do and can spare 
 the time with an effort. Or, to be accurate, we do 
 want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment ; but 
 what we want more is to catch our busy man and 
 build a garden about him in the brief leisure which, 
 without seeking it, he is forced to take. 
 
 Where are these gardens ? Why, beside and along 
 our railway lines. These are the great public parks 
 of England ; and through them travels daily a vast 
 
 118
 
 MAY 
 
 population held in enforced idleness, seeking distrac- 
 tion in its morning paper. Have you ever observed 
 how a whole carriageful of travellers on the Great 
 Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on 
 Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? 
 A garish appeal, no doubt : a few raying spokes of 
 colour, and the vision has gone. And I forestall the 
 question, " Is that the sort of thing you wish to see 
 extended ? — a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or 
 of scarlet lobelias, or of bright-blue larkspurs, all 
 the way from London to Liverpool ? " I suggest 
 nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, 
 when they follow the valleys — as railway lines 
 must in hilly districts — are extraordinarily beauti- 
 ful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing 
 better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye 
 Valley or in the Derbyshire Peak country, and even the 
 rich levels of Somerset have a beauty of their own 
 (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets 
 of buttercups) which artificial planting would spoil. 
 But — cant about Nature apart — every line has its 
 dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which 
 might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need 
 not labour this : here and there by a casual bunch 
 of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of 
 primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing 
 is proved, and has been proved again and again to 
 me by the comments of fellow-passengers. 
 
 ng
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of 
 mine, and must pause to dwell on some of its 
 beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise 
 it in the most modest fashion and test the apprecia- 
 tion of the public as we go along. Our flowers 
 would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for the 
 most part, native British plants, costing, say, from 
 thirty shillings to three pounds the hundred. A few 
 roods would do to begin with, if the spot were well 
 chosen ; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to 
 begin modestly, for though England possesses 
 several great artists in landscape gardening, their 
 art has never to my knowledge been seriously 
 applied to railway gardening, and the speed of the 
 spectators introduces a new and highly -amusing 
 condition, and one so singular and so important 
 as to make this almost a separate art. At any rate, 
 our gardeners would have to learn as they go, and 
 if any man can be called enviable it is an artist 
 learning to express art's eternal principles in a new 
 medium, under new conditons. 
 
 Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not 
 despond over ways and means. The beauty-spots of 
 Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry 
 of advertisement. Why should not this rivalry be 
 pressed into the service of beautifying the railway 
 lines along which the tourist must travel to reach 
 them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to 
 
 120
 
 MAY 
 
 speak) of our temples ? Would not the tourist 
 arrive in a better temper if met on his way with 
 silent evidence of our desire to please ? And, again, 
 is the advertising tradesman quite wise in offending 
 so many eyes with his succession of ugly hoardings 
 standing impertinently in green fields ? Can it be 
 that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the 
 liver which he promises to cure ? And if not, might 
 he not call attention to his wares at least as effec- 
 tively, if more summarily, by making them the 
 excuse for a vision of delight which passengers 
 would drop their newspapers to gaze upon ? Lastly, 
 the railway companies themselves have discovered 
 the commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and 
 long before their discovery (and as if by a kind of 
 instinct they were blundering towards it) they began 
 to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens — with 
 what happy result all who have travelled in South 
 Wales will remember. They should find it easy to 
 learn that the "development" of watering-places 
 and holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by 
 spending care upon their approaches. 
 
 But I come back to my imaginary millionaire — 
 the benevolent man who only wants to be instructed 
 how to spend his money — the "magnificent man" of 
 Aristotle's Ethics, nonplussed for the moment, and 
 in despair of discovering an original way of scattering 
 largesse for the public good. For, while anxious to 
 
 121
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 further my scheme by conciliating the commercial 
 instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in 
 the conception of our railways as vast public parks 
 only hindered by our sad lack of inventiveness from 
 ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands 
 and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The 
 millionaire I want is one who can rise to this con- 
 ception of it, and say with Blake — 
 
 "I will not cease from mental fight," 
 
 (nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter) 
 
 " Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand 
 Till we have built Jerusalem 
 In England's green and pleasant land." 
 
 For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with 
 good intentions. The mischief with them is their 
 lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will 
 agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than 
 to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million 
 of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for 
 the good of your kind. As a past master of that 
 game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those 
 poor brothers of mine who have more money than 
 they know how to use. 
 
 The railway — not that of the quickset hedges, 
 but the Great Western, on to which I changed after 
 
 122
 
 MAY 
 
 a tramp across Dartmoor — took me to pay a pious 
 visit to my old school : a visit which I never pay 
 without thinking — especially in the chapel where we 
 used to sing " Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing " 
 on the evening before holidays — of a passage in 
 Izaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton: — 
 
 " He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer 
 before his death he changed that for a journey to 
 Winchester College, to which school he was first removed 
 from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester 
 towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in 
 that journey, ' How useful was that advice of a holy 
 monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary 
 devotions in a constant place, because in that place we 
 usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed 
 us at our last being there ! And I find it thus far 
 experimentally true that at my now being in that school, 
 and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, 
 occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my 
 youth which then possessed me : sweet thoughts indeed, 
 that promised my growing years numerous pleasures 
 without mixtures of cares : and those to be enjoyed 
 when time — which I therefore thought slow-paced — 
 had changed my youth into manhood. But age and 
 experience have taught me that those were but empty 
 hopes : for I have always found it true, as my Saviour 
 did foretell, " Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." 
 Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the 
 same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the 
 same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one 
 
 123
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recrea- 
 tions, hopes, fears, and death.' " 
 
 But my visit on this occasion was filled with 
 thought less of myself than of a poet I had known 
 in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close ; not 
 intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately 
 that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place 
 for me — a small boy whom he had once, for a day or 
 two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter 
 (I dare say) had forgotten. 
 
 "T. E. B." 
 
 Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 
 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his 
 father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five 
 years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund 
 raised for a new St. Matthew's Church, and 
 characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter 
 penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice 
 and its memories. 
 
 " I was baptised there ; almost all whom I loved and 
 revered were associated with its history . . . ' The 
 only church in Douglas where the poor go' — 1 dare say 
 that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to 
 be so. ... I postulate the continuity. . . ." 
 
 I quote these words (and so leave them for a 
 
 124
 
 MAY 
 
 while) with a purpose, aware how trivial they may 
 seem to the reader. But to those who had the 
 privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be 
 trivial which they feel to be characteristic and in 
 some degree explicative of the man ; and with this 
 " I postulate the continuity " we touch accurately 
 and simply for once a note which sang in many 
 chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral, 
 nature it has ever been my lot to meet. 
 
 Let me record, and have done with, the few 
 necessary incidents of what was by choice a vita 
 fallens and " curiously devoid of incident." The 
 boy was but two years old when the family removed 
 to Kirk Braddan Vicarage, near Douglas ; the sixth 
 of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots mother 
 and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies 
 continued in his son and are worthy to live longer 
 in his description of them : — 
 
 " To think of a Pazon respecting men's vices even ; 
 not as vices, God forbid ! but as parts of them, very 
 likely all but inseparable from them ; at any rate, theirs ! 
 Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not 
 rebuking. My father would have considered he was 
 ' taking a liberty ' if he had confronted the sinner with 
 his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't 
 suppose for a moment that the ' weak brethren ' thought 
 he was conniving at their weakness. Not they: they 
 saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do 
 you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating 
 
 i 2 5
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 delicacy ? God only knows how far down into their 
 depths of misery the sweetness of that delicacy 
 descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and modesty. 
 It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the 
 others could not fail to be present." 
 
 Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though 
 of no University, was a scholar in grain ; was, for 
 example, so fastidious about composition that he 
 would make his son read some fragment of an 
 English classic to him before answering an invita- 
 tion ! "To my father style was like the instinct 
 of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes 
 which echoed through the life of his son — who 
 worshipped continuity. 
 
 From a course of tuition divided between his 
 father and the parish schoolmaster, Brown went, 
 at fifteen or over, to King William's College, and 
 became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of 
 well-meaning friends (but at the cost of much 
 subsequent pain), to Christ Church, Oxford, as a 
 servitor. He won his double first ; but he has left 
 on record an account of a servitor's position at 
 Christ Church in the early fifties, and to Brown 
 the spiritual humiliation can have been little less 
 than one long dragging anguish. He had, of course, 
 his intervals of high spirits ; but (says Mr. Irwin, 
 his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he 
 did not exaggerate what the position was to 
 
 126
 
 MAY 
 
 him. I have heard him refer to it over and over 
 again with a dispassionate bitterness there was 
 no mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused 
 to nominate him, after his two first classes, to 
 a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished 
 it. " A servitor never has been elected student — 
 ergo, he never shall be." Brown admired Gaisford, 
 and always spoke kindly of him " in all his dealings 
 with me." Yet the night after he won his double 
 first was " one of the most intensely miserable I was 
 ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right 
 kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in 
 April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still 
 kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the 
 brilliant young scholar had at length the ball at 
 his feet. 
 
 " This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to 
 his mother ; " it gives me an income of about ^"300 per 
 annum as long as I choose to reside at Oxford, and 
 about ^"220 in cash if I reside elsewhere. In addition 
 to this it puts me in a highly commanding position for 
 pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to 
 expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make 
 between ^"500 and ^"600 altogether per annum. So you 
 see, my dear mother, that your prayers have not been 
 unanswered, and that God will bless the generation of 
 those who humbly strive to serve Him. ... I have 
 not omitted to remark that the election took place on 
 April 21st, the anniversary of your birth and marriage." 
 
 127
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 How did he use his opportunity ? " He never 
 took kindly to the life of an Oxford fellow," 
 thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow 
 of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and 
 Vice -Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin 
 quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to 
 much the same effect. Their explanations lack 
 something of defmiteness. After a few terms of 
 private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and 
 there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his 
 old school. We can only be sure that his reasons 
 were honourable, and sufficed for him ; we may 
 include among them, if we choose, that nostalgia 
 which haunted him all his days, until fate finally 
 granted his wish and sent him back to his beloved 
 Argos "for good." 
 
 In the following year (1857) ne married his cousin, 
 Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay ; 
 and soon after left King William's College to become 
 "by some strange mischance" Head Master of the 
 Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this " Gloucester 
 episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be 
 recorded except that he ttated the whole business 
 and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. 
 W. E. Henley — destined to gather into his National 
 Observer, many years later, many blooms of Brown's 
 last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy. 
 
 From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate 
 
 128
 
 MAY 
 
 day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who 
 had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then 
 a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him 
 into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. 
 Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side ; 
 and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend 
 reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton 
 — Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. 
 Wilson was an old King William's boy ; knew 
 Brown, and named him. 
 
 " Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the 
 bishop, " I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, 
 and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing 
 at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat 
 Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his 
 pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly 
 volcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him 
 there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague 
 at the beginning of the following Term ; and, needless to 
 say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest 
 to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it 
 would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts 
 were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming 
 brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with 
 Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own 
 struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that 
 had passed to and fro over the pavement around him ; 
 and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate 
 life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at 
 Christ Church." 
 
 129 
 10
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Was he happy in his many years' work at 
 Clifton ? On the whole, and with some reser- 
 vation, we may say "yes" — "yes," although in 
 the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed 
 his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed 
 formality and routine ; he was, as he often pro- 
 claimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intract- 
 able Celt ; and if one may hint at a fault in 
 him, it was that now and then he soon tired. 
 A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at 
 times to knock on the bottom of his emotional 
 coffers ; and no doubt he was true to a mood when 
 he wrote — 
 
 " I 'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill 
 
 My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod, 
 But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still, 
 And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass — thank God ! 
 
 " Alert, I seek exactitude of rule, 
 
 I step and square my shoulders with the squad, 
 But there are blaeberries on old Barrule, 
 
 And Langness has its heather still — thank God ! " 
 
 — with the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may 
 go farther and allow that he played with the mood 
 until he sometimes forgot on which side lay serious- 
 ness and on which side humour. Still it was a 
 mood ; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 
 "Planting":— 
 
 130
 
 MAY 
 
 " Who would be planted chooseth not the soil 
 
 Or here or there, 
 
 Or loam or peat, 
 
 Wherein he best may grow 
 And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil — 
 
 The lily is most fair, 
 
 But says not ' I will only blow 
 Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil 
 
 What rock shall owe 
 
 The springs that wash his feet ; 
 The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil 
 
 That for his purple radiance is most meet — 
 
 Lord, even so 
 
 I ask one prayer, 
 
 The which if it be granted, 
 
 It skills not where 
 
 Thou plantest me, only I would be planted." 
 
 " You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old 
 Cliftonian. ... "I demur to your statement that when 
 you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of 
 thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have 
 the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist 
 upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was 
 to recognise two lives as necessary — the one the outer 
 Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and 
 cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a 
 tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must 
 see that it does not. . . . The pedagogic is needful for 
 bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy ; of the 
 inner life you know what I think." 
 
 These are wise words, and I believe they represent 
 
 13 1
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Brown more truly than utterances which only seem 
 more genuine because less deliberate. He was as 
 a house master excellent, with an excellence not 
 achievable by men whose hearts are removed 
 from their work : he awoke and enjoyed fervent 
 friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of 
 many youngsters ; he must have known of these 
 enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn 
 them ; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in 
 a kind of success which he certainly respected. He 
 longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his 
 Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to 
 believe he was unhappy. 
 
 Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How 
 shall I describe him ? A sturdy, thick-set figure, 
 inclining to rotundity, yet athletic ; a face extra- 
 ordinarily mobile ; bushy, grey eyebrows ; eyes at 
 once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the 
 primitive faun in their coverts ; a broad mouth made 
 for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. 
 " There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty ; 
 but the latter are not Rabelaisians." " I have an 
 idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this 
 area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter 
 he welcomed as a Godlike function. 
 
 " God sits upon His hill, 
 And sees the shadows fly ; 
 And if He laughs at fools, why should He not ? " 
 
 132
 
 MAY 
 
 And for that matter, why should not we ? Though 
 at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, 
 counselling moderation. " I am certain God made 
 fools for us to enjoy, but there must be an economy of 
 joy in the presence of a fool ; you must not betray 
 your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with 
 a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the 
 high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of 
 the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving 
 Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till 
 near the end of his time at Clifton) ; add a simple 
 natural piety which purged the parsonic of all 
 "churchiness." 
 
 " This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," 
 he writes from the Clifton College Library on the 
 morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all 
 the row and worry at the end of Term. . . . Where are 
 the men and women ? Well, now look here, you '11 not 
 mention it again. They 're all in church. See how good 
 God is ! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps 
 in which people, especially disagreeable people, get 
 caught— and lo! the universe forme!!! me— me. . . ." 
 
 I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a 
 certain right, since it once fell to me — a blundering 
 innocent in the hands of fate — to put them to 
 severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at 
 Clifton — awkward, and abominably conscious of it, 
 and sensitive — I had been billeted on Brown's 
 
 133
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake 
 (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be 
 covered out of sight ; it was past all aid of kindly 
 dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the 
 house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame 
 upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he 
 took me into the family circle — by no means an 
 expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open 
 gleefully to intruders — and for the inside of a week 
 treated me with a consideration so quiet and 
 pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest 
 friend or most distinguished visitor could not have 
 demanded more ? A boy notes these things, and 
 remembers. ... " If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin 
 quotes him as saying once over some trivial forget- 
 fulness, " what is to become of me ? " He was shy, 
 too, like the most of his countrymen — "jus' the 
 shy " — but with a proud reserve as far removed as 
 possible from sham humility — being all too sensible 
 and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence 
 of mind, though willing on all right occasions to 
 forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I 
 remarked on the omission of his name in an article 
 on ' Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, 
 with a smile, ' Perhaps I am among the major ! ' " 
 That smile had just sufficient irony — no more. 
 
 To this we may add a passion for music and a 
 passion for external nature — external to the most of 
 
 134
 
 MAY 
 
 us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present 
 at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of 
 elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his 
 power to impart. And yet we are beating about the 
 bush and missing the essential man, for he was 
 imprehensible — "Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford 
 calls him, and mast go to the Bay of Naples to fetch 
 home a simile : 
 
 " We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern 
 scenes ; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic 
 outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold 
 and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and 
 sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with 
 the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating under- 
 neath all the time." 
 
 Natures more masterfully commanding I have known : 
 never one more remarkable. In the mere possession 
 of him, rather than in his direct influence, all 
 Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least 
 as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." 
 But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian — with a 
 bent of homely piety ; Johnsonian — with a fiery 
 Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature : all 
 such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The 
 man was at once absolute and Protean : entirely 
 sincere, and yet a different being to each separate 
 friend. " There was no getting to the end of 
 Brown." 
 
 i35
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 I have said that we — those of us, at any rate, who 
 were not of Brown's House — were conscious of a 
 rich and honourable possession in him, rather than 
 of an active influence. Yet that influence must not 
 be underrated. Clifton, as I first knew it, was 
 already a great school, although less than twenty 
 years old. But, to a new-comer, even more im- 
 pressive than its success among schools, or its 
 aspirations, was a firmness of tradition which (I dare 
 to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation 
 of five times its age. It had already its type of boy; 
 and having discovered it and how to produce it, fell 
 something short of tolerance towards other types. 
 For the very reason which allows me with decency 
 to call the type an admirable one, I may be excused 
 for adding that the tradition demanded some patience 
 of those who could not easily manage to conform 
 with it. But there the tradition stood, permanently 
 rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful 
 to hold that Brown's passion for "continuity" had 
 much to do with planting and confirming it ? 
 Mr. Irwin quotes for us a passage from one of his 
 sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt 
 this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . 
 that is what we want — to feel the pulses of hearts 
 that are now dust." Did this passage occur, I 
 wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember 
 a fierce, hopeless, human protest against "change 
 
 136
 
 MAY 
 
 and decay " ? — the voice ringing down on each plea, 
 " What do the change-and-decay people say to 
 that ? " 
 
 " I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it 
 often seems, yet of all life Brown demanded it. 
 Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a letter 
 to a friend : — 
 
 " My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all ? Why 
 this sinking of the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the 
 spirit? There is no separation: life is continuous. All 
 that was stable and good, good and therefore stable, in 
 our union with the loved one, is unquestionably per- 
 manent, will endure for ever. It cannot be otherwise. 
 . . . When love has done its full work, has wrought 
 soul into soul so that every fibre has become part of the 
 common life — quis separabit ? Can you conceive yourself 
 as existing at all without her? No, you can't; well, 
 then, it follows that you don't, and never will." 
 
 I believe it to have been this passion for continuity 
 that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, 
 drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island 
 that there were times (one may almost fancy) when 
 the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere 
 seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I 
 believe this same passion drew him — master as he 
 was of varied and vocal English — to clothe the bulk 
 of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to 
 miss his mark with the public, which inevitably 
 
 137
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, 
 imperfectly educated. 
 
 "I would not be forgotten in this land" — 
 
 This line of another true poet of curiously similar 
 temperament* has haunted me through the reading 
 of Brown's published letters. But Brown's was no 
 merely selfish craving for continuity — to be remem- 
 bered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a 
 very noble one, he transferred the ambition to those 
 for whom he laboured. His own terror that Time 
 might obliterate the moment, 
 
 "And all this personal dream be fled," 
 
 became for his countrymen a very spring of helpful- 
 ness. Antiquum exquirite matron — he would do that 
 which they, in poverty and the stress of earning 
 daily bread, were careless to do — would explore for 
 them the ancient springs of faith and custom. 
 
 " Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to us 
 Of ancient heritage — 
 Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, 
 The limited horizon of our stage — 
 Old love, hope, fear, 
 All this I fain would fix upon the page; 
 That so the coming age, 
 Lost in the empire's mass, 
 
 * "The Quest of the Sangraal," R. S. Hawker. 
 
 138
 
 MAY 
 
 Yet haply longing for their fathers, here 
 May see, as in a glass, 
 What they held dear — 
 May say, ' 'Twas thus and thus 
 
 They lived ' ; and as the time-flood onward rolls 
 Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls." 
 
 This was his task, and the public of course set him 
 down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he 
 demands. " Shall I put on my next title-page, 
 ' Late Fellow of Oriel, etc' ? or am I always to 
 abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be 
 sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time 
 to consider), the language and feeling of the poems 
 were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his 
 countrymen's hearts ; but he also could, and did, 
 stand outside and observe them with affectionate, 
 comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, 
 too — not always, but as a rule — from that emotional 
 excess to which he knew himself most dangerously 
 prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood ; 
 but his mother was Scottish by descent, and from 
 my experience of what the Lowland Scot can do in 
 the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take 
 leave to doubt that the Manxman was wholly to 
 blame. There can, however, be no doubt that the 
 author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," 
 of " Mater Dolorosa," described himself accurately 
 as a " born sobber," or that an acquired self- 
 
 i39
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 restraint saved him from a form of intemperance 
 by which of late our literature has been somewhat 
 too copiously afflicted. 
 
 To scholarship, too, imposed upon and pene- 
 trating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare 
 flavour of the many literary judgments scattered 
 about his letters. They have a taste of native 
 earth, beautifully rarefied : to change the metaphor, 
 they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent 
 common sense. For a few examples : — 
 
 " I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on 
 Theocritus. So many French litterateurs give me the 
 idea that they don't go nearer the Greek authors than 
 the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve [Nouveaux 
 Licndis, vii. i — 52, on "The Greek Anthology"] is an 
 enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, 
 he never strikes me as knowing much about the 
 matter ! " 
 
 " Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly 
 enjoy. The dear old Abraham goes straight off into 
 your beautiful lines. Of course he has not a scrap of 
 modern impedimenta. You go through the customs at 
 the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have 
 nothing to declare. The blessed old man by your side is 
 himself a Roman to begin with, and you pass together 
 as cheerfully as possible. . . ." 
 
 " I have also been reading Karl Elze's Essays on 
 Shakespeare. He is not bad, but don't you resent the 
 imperturbable confidence of men who, after attributing 
 
 140
 
 MAY 
 
 a play of Shakespeare's to two authors, proceed to 
 suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and self- 
 sought exigency?" 
 
 " Did you ever try to write a Burns song ? I mean 
 the equivalent in ordinary English of his Scotch. Can 
 it be done ? A Yorkshireman — could he do it ? A 
 Lancashire man (Waugh) ? I hardly think so. The 
 Ayrshire dialect has a Schwung and a confidence that no 
 English county can pretend to. Our dialects are apolo- 
 getic things, half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no 
 doubts, and for his audience unhesitatingly demands the 
 universe. ..." 
 
 " There is an 7j9oa in Fitzgerald's letters which is so 
 exquisitely idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes 
 you with him, exactly accommodating his pace to yours, 
 walks through meadows so tranquil, and yet abounding 
 in the most delicate surprises. And these surprises seem 
 so familiar, just as if they had originated with yourself. 
 What delicious blending ! What a perfect interweft of 
 thought and diction ! What a sweet companion ! " 
 
 Lastly, let me quote a passage in which his 
 thoughts return to Clifton, where it had been 
 suggested that Greek should be omitted from the 
 ordinary form-routine and taught in " sets," or 
 separate classes : — 
 
 " This is disturbing about Greek, ' set ' Greek. Yes, 
 you would fill your school to overflowing, of course you 
 would, so long as other places did not abandon the old 
 lines. But it would be detestable treachery to the cause 
 
 141
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 of education, of humanity. To me the learning of any 
 blessed thing is a matter of little moment. Greek is not 
 learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School boys. 
 But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational 
 than other faiths or cults ; the baptism of a regeneration 
 which releases us from I know not what original sin. 
 And if a man does not see that, he is a fool, such 
 a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he gravely asked 
 me to explain what I meant by original sin in such 
 a connection. . . ." 
 
 So his thoughts reverted to the school he had left 
 in 1892. In October, 1897, he returned to it on a 
 visit. He was the guest of one of the house masters, 
 Mr. Tait, and on Friday evening, October 29th, 
 gave an address to the boys of the house. He had 
 spoken for some minutes with brightness and vigour, 
 when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. 
 He died in less than two hours. 
 
 His letters have been collected and piously given 
 to the world by Mr. Irwin, one of his closest friends. 
 By far the greatest number of them belong to those 
 last five years in the Island — the happiest, perhaps, 
 of his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. 
 " Never the time and the place ..." but at least 
 Brown was more fortunate than most men. He 
 realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. 
 He could not carry off his friends to share it (and it 
 belongs to criticism of these volumes to say that he 
 was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could 
 
 142
 
 MAY 
 
 return and visit them or stay at home and write to 
 them concerning the realisation, and be sure they 
 understood. Therefore, although we desire more 
 letters of the Clifton period — although twenty years 
 are omitted, left blank to us — those that survive 
 confirm a fame which, although never wide, was 
 always unquestioned within its range. There could 
 be no possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He 
 was absolute. He lived a fierce, shy, spiritual life ; 
 a wise man, keeping the child in his heart : he loved 
 much and desired permanence in the love of his 
 kind. " Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth- 
 century namesake, " is a dream and folly of expec- 
 tation. There is nothing strictly immortal but 
 immortality." And yet, prosit amdsse ! 
 
 * * * # 
 
 The railway took me on to Oxford — 
 
 " Like faithful hound returning 
 For old sake's sake to each loved track 
 With heart and memory burning." 
 
 " I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her 
 husband, the late John Richard Green, "the 
 passionate enthusiasm with which he watched from 
 the train for the first sight of the Oxford towers 
 against the sky : " and although our enthusiasm 
 nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that 
 
 H3
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 which saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach 
 topped the rise of Shotover and its passengers beheld 
 the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful son of 
 Oxford can see her towers rise above the water- 
 meadows and re-greet them without a thrill ? 
 
 In the year 1688, and in a book entitled The 
 Guardian's Instruction, a Mr. Stephen Penton gave 
 the world a pleasing and lifelike little narrative — 
 superior, in my opinion, to anything in Verdant Green 
 — telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to 
 send his son to Oxford ; what doubts, misgivings, 
 hesitations he had, and how they were overcome. 
 I take the story to be fictitious. It is written in the 
 first person, professedly by the hesitating parent : 
 but the parent can hardly have been Penton, for the 
 story will not square with what we know of his life. 
 The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and 
 educated at Winchester and New College; proceeded 
 to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to ID 7o, and was 
 Principal of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. 
 He appears to have been chaplain to the Earl of 
 Aylesbury, and, according to Antony a Wood, 
 possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706. 
 
 The writer in The Guardian's Instruction is 
 portrayed for us — or is allowed to portray himself — 
 rather as an honest country squire, who had himself 
 spent a year or so of his youth at the University, 
 but had withdrawn when Oxford was invaded by 
 
 144
 
 MAY 
 
 the Court and the trouble between King Charles 
 and Parliament came to a head: and "God's grace, 
 the Good example of my parents, and a natural 
 love of virtue secured me so far as to leave Oxford, 
 though not much more learned, yet not much worse 
 than I came thither." A chill testimonial ! In short, 
 the old squire (as I will take leave to call him) 
 nursed a somewhat crotchety detestation of the 
 place, insomuch " that when I came to have 
 children, I did almost swear them in their childhood 
 never to be friends with Oxford." 
 
 He tried his eldest son with a course of foreign 
 travel as a substitute for University training; but 
 this turned out a failure, and he had the good sense 
 to acknowledge his mistake. So for his second boy 
 he cast about to find a profession ; " but what course 
 to take I was at a loss : Cambridge was so far off, 
 I could not have an eye upon him ; Oxford I was 
 angry with." 
 
 In this fix he consulted with a neighbour, " an old 
 grave learned divine," and rigid Churchman, who 
 confessed that many of the charges against Oxford 
 were well grounded, but averred that the place was 
 mending. The truth was, the University had been 
 loyal to the monarchy all through the Common- 
 wealth times ; and when Oliver Cromwell was dead, 
 and Richard dismounted, its members perceived, 
 through the maze of changes and intrigues, that 
 
 H5 
 11
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 in a little time the heart of the nation would revert 
 to the government which twenty years before it had 
 hated. And their impatient hopes of this " made 
 the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and curse 
 Meroz in the very streets ; insomuch that when the 
 King came in, they were not only like them that 
 dream, but like them who are out of their wits, 
 mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy " rag " (to 
 modernise the old gentleman's language) continued 
 for a twelvemonth : that is to sav, until the Vice- 
 Chancellor — holding that the demonstration, like 
 Miss Mary Bennet's pianoforte playing in Pride and 
 Prejudice, had delighted the company long enough — 
 put his foot down. And from that time the Univer- 
 sity became sober, modest, and studious as perhaps 
 any in Europe. The old gentleman wound up with 
 some practical advice, and a promise to furnish the 
 squire with a letter of recommendation to one of 
 the best tutors in Oxford. 
 
 Thus armed, the squire (though still with mis- 
 givings) was not long in getting on horseback with 
 his wife, his daughters, and his young hopeful, and 
 riding off to Oxford, where at first it seemed that 
 his worst suspicions would be confirmed ; " for at 
 ten o'clock in the inn, there arose such a roaring 
 and singing that my hair stood on end, and my 
 former prejudices were so heightened that I resolved 
 to lose the journey and carry back my son again, 
 
 146
 
 MAY 
 
 presuming that no noise in Oxford could be made 
 but scholars must do it " — a hoary misconception 
 still cherished, or until recently, by the Metropolitan 
 Police and the Oxford City Bench. In this instance 
 a proctor intervened, and quelled the disturbance by 
 sending "two young pert townsmen" to prison; 
 " and quickly came to my chamber, and perceiving 
 my boy designed for a gown, told me that it was 
 for the preservation of such fine youths as he 
 that the proctors made so bold with gentlemen's 
 lodgings." The squire had some talk with this 
 dignitary, who was a man of presence and suitable 
 address, and of sufficient independence to deny — 
 not for the first time in history — that dons were 
 overpaid. 
 
 Next morning the whole family trooped off to 
 call upon the tutor whom their old neighbour had 
 recommended. Oddly enough, the tutor seemed by 
 no means overwhelmed by the honour. " I thought 
 to have found him mightily pleased with the opinion 
 we had of his conduct, and the credit of having 
 a gentleman's son under his charge, and the father 
 with cap in hand. Instead of all this he talked 
 at a rate as if the gentry were obliged to tutors 
 more than tutors to them." The tutor, in short, 
 was decidedly tart in his admonitions to this honest 
 family — he did not forget, either, to assure them 
 that {generally) a college tutor was worse paid than 
 
 H7
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 a dancing-master. Here is a specimen of his advice 
 — sound and practical enough in its way : — 
 
 " I understand by one of your daughters that you 
 have brought him up a fine padd to keep here for his 
 health's sake. Now I will tell you the use of an horse 
 in Oxford, and then do as you think fit. The horse 
 must be kept at an ale-house or an inn, and he must have 
 leave to go once every day to see him eat oats, because 
 the master's eye makes him fat; and it will not be 
 genteel to go often to an house and spend nothing ; and 
 then there may be some danger of the horse growing 
 nsty if he be not used often, so you must give him leave 
 to go to Abingdon once every week, to look out of the 
 tavern window and see the maids sell turnips; and in 
 one month or two come home with a surfeit of poisoned 
 wine, and save any farther trouble by dying, and then you 
 will be troubled to send for your horse again. . . ." 
 
 The humour of college tutors has not greatly 
 altered in two hundred years. I have known one 
 or two capable of the sardonic touch in those 
 concluding words. But conceive its effect upon 
 the squire's lady and daughters ! No : you need 
 not trouble to do so, for the squire describes it: 
 "When the tutor was gone out of the room, I 
 asked how they liked the person and his converse. 
 My boy clung about his mother and cry'd to go 
 home again, and she had no more wit than to be 
 of the same mind ; she thought him too weakly 
 to undergo so much hardship as she foresaw was 
 
 148
 
 MAY 
 
 to be expected. My daughter, who (instead of 
 catechism and Lady's Calling) had been used to 
 read nothing but speeches in romances, and hearing 
 nothing of Love and Honour in all the talk, fell into 
 downright scolding at him ; call'd him the merest 
 scholar ; and if this were your Oxford breeding, 
 they had rather he should go to Constantinople to 
 learn manners ! But I, who was older and under- 
 stood the language, call'd them all great fools. 
 
 On the tutor's return they begged to have his 
 company at dinner, at their inn : but he declined, 
 kept the young man to dine with him, and next day 
 invited the family to luncheon. They accepted, fully 
 expecting (after the austerity of his discourse) to be 
 starved : " and the girles drank chocolette at no rate 
 in the morning, for fear of the worst." But they 
 were by no means starved. "It was very pleasant," 
 the squire confesses, "to see, when we came, the 
 constrained artifice of an unaccustomed complement." 
 There were silver tankards "heaped upon one 
 another," " napkins some twenty years younger than 
 the rest," and glasses "fit for a Dutchman at an 
 East-India Return^ The dinner was full enough for 
 ten. " I was asham'd, but would not disoblige him, 
 considering with myself that I should put this man 
 to such a charge of forty shillings at least, to 
 entertain me ; when for all his honest care and pains 
 
 149
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 he is to have but forty or fifty shillings a quarter ; 
 so that for one whole quarter he must doe the 
 drudgery to my son for nothing." After dinner, our 
 good squire strolled off to a public bowling-green, 
 " that being the onely recreation I can affect." And 
 "coming in, I saw half a score of the finest youths 
 the sun, I think, ever shined upon. They walked to 
 and fro, with their hands in their pockets, to see a 
 match played by some scholars and some gentlemen 
 fam'd for their skill. I gaped also and stared as a 
 man in his way would doe ; but a country ruff 
 gentleman, being like to lose, did swear at such a rate 
 that my heart did grieve that those fine young men 
 should hear it, and know there was such a thing as 
 swearing in the kingdom. Coming to my lodging, 
 I charged my son never to go to such publick places 
 unless he resolved to quarrel with me." 
 
 And so, having settled the lad and fitted him up 
 with good advice, the father, mother, and sisters 
 returned home. But the squire, being summoned to 
 Oxford shortly after to "sit in parliament" (pre- 
 sumably in the last Parliament held at Oxford, in 
 March, 1681), took that opportunity to walk the 
 streets and study the demeanour of the "scholars." 
 And this experiment would seem to have finally 
 satisfied him. " I walk'd the streets as late as most 
 people, and never in ten days ever saw any scholar 
 rude or disordered : so that as I grow old, and more 
 
 150
 
 MAY 
 
 engaged to speak the truth, I do repent of the 
 ill-opinion I have had of that place, and hope to 
 be farther obliged by a very good account of my 
 son." 
 
 Old Stephen Penton may have had a rambling 
 head ; but unless I have thumbed the bloom off his 
 narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader 
 will allow that he knew how to write. He gives us 
 the whole scene in the fewest possible touches : he 
 wastes no words in describing the personages in his 
 small comedy — comic idyll I had rather call it, for 
 after a fashion it reminds me of the immortal chatter 
 between Gorgo and Praxinoc in the fifteenth idyll 
 of Theocritus. There the picture is : the honest 
 opinionated country squire ; the acidulous tutor ; the 
 coltish son ; the fond, foolish, fussing mother ; the 
 prinking young ladies with their curls and romantic 
 notions ; the colours of all as fresh as if laid on 
 yesterday, the humour quite untarnished after two 
 hundred years. And I wonder the more at the 
 vivacity of this little sketch because, as many writers 
 have pointed out, no one has yet built upon University 
 life a novel of anything like first-class merit, and the 
 conclusion has been drawn that the elements of pro- 
 found human interest are wanting in that life. " Is 
 this so ? " asks the editor of Stephen Penton's 
 
 reminiscences in a volume published by the Oxford 
 
 Historical Society — 
 
 rsi
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " In spite of the character given to Oxford of being a 
 city of short memories and abruptly-ended friendships, 
 in spite of the inchoative qualities of youths of eighteen 
 or twenty, especially in respect to the 'ruling passion ' so 
 dear to novelists, yet surely in the three or four years 
 spent at Oxford by an incredible company of young 
 students ' fresh from public schools, and not yet tossed 
 about and hardened in the storms of life' — some of them 
 Penton's ' finest youths,' some obviously otherwise — 
 there must be, one would think, abundance of romantic 
 incident awaiting its Thackeray or Meredith. For how 
 many have these years been the turning point of a 
 life . . .!" 
 
 There at any rate is the fact : the novel of 
 University life has not been written yet, and perhaps 
 never will be. I am not at all sure that The 
 Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green do not mark the 
 nearest approach to it — save the mark ! And I am 
 not at all sure that The Adventures of Mr. Verdant 
 Green can be called a novel at all, while I am quite 
 certain it cannot be called a novel of first-class 
 merit. Tom Brown at Oxford still counts its 
 admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of 
 translation into Frencli ; but Tom Brown, though 
 robust enough, never seemed to get over his trans- 
 plantation from Rugby — possibly because his author's 
 heart remained at Rugby. "Loss and Gain" is not a 
 book for the many; and the many never did justice 
 to Mr. Hermann Merivale's " Faucit of Balliol " or 
 
 J 5 2
 
 MAY 
 
 Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's "Hugh Heron of Christ 
 Church." Neither of these two novels obtained the 
 hearing it deserved — and " Faucit of Balliol " was a 
 really remarkable book : but neither of them aimed 
 at giving a full picture of Oxford life. And the 
 interest of Miss Broughton's "Belinda" and Mr. 
 Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" lies outside the 
 proctor's rounds. Yes (and humiliating as the 
 confession may be), with all its crudities and 
 absurdities, Verdant Green does mark the nearest 
 approach yet made to a representative Oxford 
 novel. 
 
 How comes this ? Well, to begin with, Verdant 
 Green, with all his faults, did contrive to be 
 exceedingly youthful and high-spirited. And in the 
 second place, with all its faults, it did convey some 
 sense of what I may call the "glamour" of Oxford. 
 Now the University, on its part, being fed with a 
 constant supply of young men between the ages 
 of eighteen and twenty, does contrive, with all its 
 faults, to keep up a fair show of youth and high 
 spirits ; and even their worst enemies will admit 
 that Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of 
 their sons at any rate, a certain glamour. You may 
 argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which will 
 wear off in time ; an illusion, at all events, and to be 
 treated as such by the wise author intent on getting 
 at truth. To this I answer that, while it lasts, this 
 
 !53
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 glamour is just as much a fact as The Times news- 
 paper, or St. Paul's Cathedral, just as real a feature 
 of Oxford as Balliol College, or the river, or the 
 Vice-Chancellor's poker : and until you recognise it 
 for a fact and a feature of the place, and allow for it, 
 you have not the faintest prospect of realising Oxford. 
 Each succeeding generation finds that glamour, or 
 brings it ; and each generation, as it passes, deems 
 that its successor has either found or brought less of it. 
 But the glamour is there all the while. In turning over 
 a book the other day, written in 1870 by the Rev. 
 Robert Stephen Hawker, I come on this passage : — 
 
 " When I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty 
 years and upwards agone, I feel, notwithstanding modern 
 vaunt, the laudator tcmporis acti earnest within me yet, and 
 strong. Nowadays, as it seems to me, there is but little 
 originality of character in the still famous University ; a 
 dread of eccentric reputation appears to pervade College 
 and Hall : every ' Oxford man,' to adopt the well-known 
 name, is subdued into sameness within and without, 
 controlled as it were into copyism and mediocrity by the 
 smoothing-iron of the nineteenth century. Whereas in 
 my time and before it there were distinguished names, 
 famous in every mouth for original achievements and 
 ' deeds of daring-do.' There were giants in those days 
 — men of varied renown — and they arose and won for 
 themselves in strange fields of fame, record and place. 
 Each became in his day a hero of the Iliad or Odyssey 
 of Oxford life — a kind of Homeric man." 
 
 154
 
 MAY 
 
 To which I am constrained to reply, " Mere stuff 
 and nonsense ! " Mr. Hawker — and more credit to 
 him — carried away Homeric memories of his own 
 seniors and contemporaries. But was it in nature 
 that Mr. Hawker should discover Homeric propor- 
 tions in the feats of men thirty years his juniors ? 
 How many of us, I ask, are under any flattering 
 illusion about the performances of our juniors? We 
 cling to the old fond falsehood that there were giants 
 in our days. We honestly believed they were giants ; 
 it would hurt us to abandon that belief. It does not 
 hurt us in the least to close the magnifying-glass 
 upon the feats of those who follow us. But this 
 generation, too, will have its magnifying-glass. 
 " There were giants in our days ? " To be sure 
 there were ; and there are giants, too, in these, but 
 others, not we, have the eyes to see them. 
 
 Say that the scales have fallen from our eyes. 
 Very well, we must e'en put them on again if we 
 would write a novel of University life. And, be 
 pleased to note, it does not follow, because we 
 see the place differently now, that we see it more 
 truly. Also, it does not follow, because Oxford 
 during the last twenty years has, to the eye of the 
 visitor, altered very considerably, that the character- 
 istics of Oxford have altered to anything like the 
 same extent. Undoubtedly they have been modified 
 by the relaxation and suspension of the laws 
 
 1 55
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 forbidding Fellows to marry. Undoubtedly the 
 brisk growth of red-brick houses along the north 
 of the city, the domestic hearths, afternoon teas 
 and perambulators, and all things covered by the 
 opprobrious name of " Parks-system," have done 
 something to efface the difference between Oxford 
 and other towns. But on the whole I think they 
 have done surprisingly little. 
 
 ■» # # -:,<■ 
 
 Speaking as a writer of novels, then, I should 
 say that to write a good novel entirely concerned 
 with Oxford lies close upon impossibility, and will 
 prophesy that, if ever it comes to be achieved, it 
 will be a story of friendship. But her glamour 
 is for him to catch who can, whether in prose 
 
 or rhyme. 
 
 ALMA MATER. 
 
 Know you her secret none can utter ? 
 
 Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown ? 
 Still on the spire the pigeons flutter ; 
 
 Still by the gateway flits the gown ; 
 Still on the street, from corbel and gutter, 
 
 Faces of stone look down. 
 
 Faces of stone, and other faces — 
 
 Some from library windows wan 
 Forth on her gardens, her green spaces 
 
 Peer and turn to their books anon. 
 Hence, my Muse, from the green oases 
 
 Gather the tent, begone ! 
 
 156
 
 MAY 
 
 Nay, should she by the pavement linger 
 Under the rooms where once she played, 
 
 Who from the feast would rise and fling her 
 One poor sou for her serenade ? 
 
 One poor laugh from the antic finger 
 Thrumming a lute string frayed ? 
 
 Once, my dear — but the world was young then — 
 Magdalen elms and Trinity limes — 
 
 Lissom the blades and the backs that swung then, 
 Eight good men in the good old times — 
 
 Careless we, and the chorus flung then 
 Under St. Mary's chimes ! 
 
 Reins lay loose and the ways led random — 
 Christ Church meadow and Iffley track — 
 
 " Idleness horrid and dogcart " (tandem) — 
 Aylesbury grind and Bicester pack — 
 
 Pleasant our lines, and faith ! we scanned 'em : 
 Having that artless knack. 
 
 Come, old limmer, the times grow colder : 
 Leaves of the creeper redden and fall. 
 
 Was it a hand then clapped my shoulder ? 
 — Only the wind by the chapel wall. 
 
 Dead leaves drift on the lute ; so . . . fold her 
 Under the faded shawl. 
 
 Never we wince, though none deplore us, 
 We, who go reaping that we sowed ; 
 
 Cities at cock-crow wake before us — 
 Hey, for the lilt of the London road ! 
 
 One look back, and a rousing chorus ! 
 Never a palinode ! 
 
 r 57
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Still on her spire the pigeons hover ; 
 
 Still by her gateway haunts the gown ; 
 Ah, but her secret ? You, young lover, 
 
 Drumming her old ones forth from town, 
 Know you the secret none discover ? 
 
 Tell it — when you go down. 
 
 Yet if at length you seek her, prove her, 
 Lean to her whispers never so nigh ; 
 
 Yet if at last not less her lover 
 
 You in your hansom leave the High ; 
 
 Down from her towers a ray shall hover — 
 Touch you, a passer-by ! 
 
 158
 
 J un 
 
 THE following verses made their appearance some 
 years ago in the pages of the Pall Mall 
 Magazine. Since then (I am assured) they have 
 put a girdle round the world, and threaten, if not 
 to keep pace with the banjo hymned by Mr. Kipling, 
 at least to become the most widely - diffused of 
 their author's works. I take it to be of a piece 
 with his usual perversity that until now they 
 have never been republished except for private 
 amusement. 
 
 They belong to a mood, a moment, and I 
 cannot be at pains to rewrite a single stanza, 
 even though an allusion to " Oom Paul " cries 
 out to be altered or suppressed. But, after all, 
 the allusion is not likely to trouble President 
 Kruger's massive shade as it slouches across 
 the Elysian fields ; and after all, though he 
 became our enemy, he remained a sportsman. So 
 I hope we may glance at his name in jest 
 without a suspicion of mocking at the tragedy of 
 his fate. 
 
 159
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 THE FAMOUS BALLAD OF THE 
 ■JUBILEE CUP. 
 
 You may lift me up in your arms, lad, and turn my face 
 
 to the sun, 
 For a last look back at the dear old track where the 
 
 Jubilee Cup was won ; 
 And draw your chair to my side, lad — no, thank ye, I 
 
 feel no pain — 
 For I 'm going out with the tide, lad, but I '11 tell you the 
 
 tale again. 
 
 I'm seventy-nine, or nearly, and my head it has long 
 
 turned grey, 
 But it all comes back as clearly as though it was 
 
 yesterday — 
 The dust, and the bookies shouting around the clerk of 
 
 the scales, 
 And the clerk of the course, and the nobs in force, and 
 
 'Is 'Ighness, the Prince of W*les. 
 
 'Twas a nine-hole thresh to wind'ard, but none of us 
 
 cared for that, 
 With a straight run home to the service tee, and a finish 
 
 along the fiat. 
 "Stiff?" Ah, well you may say it! Spot-barred, and 
 
 at five-stone-ten ! 
 But at two and a bisque I 'd ha' run the risk; for I was 
 
 a greenhorn then. 
 
 So we stripped to the B. Race signal, the old red 
 swallow-tail — 
 
 1 60
 
 JUNE 
 
 There was young Ben Bolt, and the Portland colt, and 
 
 Aston Villa, and Yale ; 
 And W. G., and Steinitz, Leander, and The Saint, 
 And the German Emperor's Meteor, a-looking as fresh 
 
 as paint ; 
 
 John Roberts (scratch), and Safety Match, The Lascar, 
 
 and Lorna Doone, 
 Oom Paul (a bye), and Romany Rye, and me upon 
 
 Wooden Spoon ; 
 And some of us cut for partners, and some of us strung 
 
 to baulk, 
 And some of us tossed for stations — But there, what use 
 
 to talk ? 
 
 Three-quarter-back on the Kingsclere crack was station 
 
 enough for me, 
 With a fresh jackyarder blowing and the Vicarage goal 
 
 a-lee ! 
 And I leaned and patted her centre-bit, and eased the 
 
 quid in her cheek, 
 With a "Soh, my lass!" and a " Woa, you brute!" — 
 
 for she could do all but speak. 
 
 She was geared a thought too high, perhaps; she was 
 
 trained a trifle fine ; 
 But she had the grand reach forward ! / never saw 
 
 such a line ! 
 Smooth-bored, clean-run, from her fiddle head with its 
 
 dainty ear half-cock, 
 Hard-bit, pur sang, from her overhang to the heel of her 
 
 off hind sock. 
 
 161 
 12
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Sir Robert he walked beside me as I worked her down 
 
 to the mark ; 
 " There 's money on this, my lad," said he, " and most 
 
 of 'em 's running dark ; 
 But ease the sheet if you're bunkered, and pack the 
 
 scrimmages tight, 
 And use your slide at the distance, and we'll drink to 
 
 your health to-night ! " 
 
 But I bent and tightened my stretcher. Said I to 
 
 myself, said I, — 
 " John Jones, this here is the Jubilee Cup, and you have 
 
 to do or die." 
 And the words weren't hardly spoken when the umpire 
 
 shouted "Play!" 
 And we all kicked off from the Gasworks end with a 
 
 " Yoicks ! " and a " Gone away ! " 
 
 And at first I thought of nothing, as the clay flew by in 
 
 lumps, 
 But stuck to the old Ruy Lopez, and wondered who'd 
 
 call for trumps, 
 And luffed her close to the cushion, and watched each 
 
 one as it broke, 
 And in triple file up the Rowley mile we went like a 
 
 trail of smoke. 
 
 The Lascar made the running : but he didn't amount to 
 
 much, 
 For old Oom Paul was quick on the ball, and headed it 
 
 back to touch ; 
 
 162
 
 JUNE 
 
 And the whole first flight led off with the right, as The 
 
 Saint took up the pace, 
 And drove it clean to the putting green and trumped it 
 
 there with an ace. 
 
 John Roberts had given a miss in baulk, but Villa 
 
 cleared with a punt ; 
 And keeping her service hard and low, The Meteor 
 
 forged to the front, 
 With Romany Rye to windward at dormy and two to 
 
 play, 
 And Yale close up — but a Jubilee Cup isn't run for 
 
 every day. 
 
 We laid our course for the Warner — I tell you the pace 
 
 was hot ! 
 And again off Tattenham Corner a blanket covered the 
 
 lot. 
 Check side ! Check side ! Now steer her wide ! and 
 
 barely an inch of room, 
 With The Lascar's tail over our lee rail, and brushing 
 
 Leander's boom ! 
 
 We were running as strong as ever — eight knots — but it 
 
 couldn't last ; 
 For the spray and the bails were flying, the whole field 
 
 tailing fast ; 
 And the Portland colt had shot his bolt, and Yale was 
 
 bumped at the Doves, 
 And The Lascar resigned to Steinitz, stale-mated in 
 
 fifteen moves. 
 
 163
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 It was bellows to mend with Roberts— starred three for 
 
 a penalty kick : 
 But he chalked his cue and gave 'em the butt, and Oom 
 
 Paul scored the trick — 
 "Off-side— no-ball— and at fourteen all! Mark cock! 
 
 and two for his nob ! " — 
 When W. G. ran clean through his lee, and yorked him 
 
 twice with a lob. 
 
 He yorked him twice on a crumbling pitch, and wiped 
 
 his eye with a brace, 
 But his guy-rope split with the strain of it, and he 
 
 dropped back out of the race ; 
 And I drew a bead on The Meteor's lead, and challenging 
 
 none too soon, 
 Bent over and patted her garboard strake, and called 
 
 upon Wooden Spoon. 
 
 She was all of a shiver forward, the spoondrift thick on 
 
 her flanks, 
 But I 'd brought her an easy gambit, and nursed her 
 
 over the banks ; 
 She answered her helm — the darling ! — and woke up 
 
 now with a rush, 
 While The Meteor's jock he sat like a rock— he knew 
 
 we rode for his brush ! 
 
 There was no one else left in it. The Saint was using 
 
 his whip, 
 And Safety Match, with a lofting catch, was pocketed 
 
 deep at slip ; 
 
 164
 
 JUNE 
 
 And young Ben Bolt with his niblick took miss at 
 
 Leander's lunge, 
 But topped the net with the ricochet, and Steinitz threw 
 
 up the sponge. 
 
 But none of the lot could stop the rot — nay, don't ask 
 
 me to stop ! — 
 The Villa had called for lemons, Oom Paul had taken 
 
 his drop, 
 And both were kicking the referee. Poor fellow ! he 
 
 done his best ; 
 But, being in doubt, he'd ruled them out— which he 
 
 always did when pressed. 
 
 So, inch by inch, I tightened the winch, and chucked 
 
 the sandbags out — 
 I heard the nursery cannons pop, I heard the bookies 
 
 shout : 
 "The Meteor wins!" "No, Wooden Spoon!" "Check!" 
 
 " Vantage ! " " Leg before ! " 
 "Last lap!" "Pass Nap!" At his saddle-flap I put 
 
 up the helm and wore. 
 
 You may overlap at the saddle-flap, and yet be loo'd on 
 the tape : 
 
 And it all depends upon changing ends, how a seven- 
 year-old will shape ; 
 
 It was tack and tack to the Lepe and back — a fair ding- 
 dong to the Ridge, 
 
 And he led by his forward canvas yet as we shot 'neath 
 ammersmith Bridge. 
 
 165
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 He led by his forward canvas— he led from his strongest 
 
 suit — 
 But along we went on a roaring scent, and at Fawley 
 
 I gained a foot. 
 He fisted off with his jigger, and gave me his wash — 
 
 too late ! 
 Deuce — vantage— check ! By neck and neck, we rounded 
 
 into the straight. 
 
 I could hear the "Conquering 'Ero" a-crashing on 
 
 Godfrey's band, 
 And my hopes fell sudden to zero, just there with the 
 
 race in hand — 
 In sight of the Turf's Blue Ribbon, in sight of the 
 
 umpire's tape, 
 As I felt the tack of her spinnaker crack, as I heard the 
 
 steam escape ! 
 
 Had I lost at that awful juncture my presence of mind ? 
 
 . . . but no ! 
 I leaned and felt for the puncture, and plugged it there 
 
 with my toe . . . 
 Hand over hand by the Members' Stand I lifted and 
 
 eased her up, 
 Shot — clean and fair — to the crossbar there, and landed 
 
 the Jubilee Cup ! 
 
 "The odd by a head, and leg before," so the Judge he 
 
 gave the word : 
 And the Umpire shouted "Over!" but I neither spoke 
 
 nor stirred. 
 
 1 66
 
 JUNE 
 
 They crowded round : for there on the ground I lay in a 
 
 dead-cold swoon, 
 Pitched neck and crop on the turf atop of my beautiful 
 
 Wooden Spoon. 
 
 Her dewlap tire was punctured, her bearings all 
 
 red-hot; 
 She 'd a lolling tongue, and her bowsprit sprung, and her 
 
 running gear in a knot ; 
 And amid the sobs of her backers, Sir Robert loosened 
 
 her girth 
 And led her away to the knacker's. She had raced her 
 
 last on earth ! 
 
 But I mind me well of the tear that fell from the eye 
 
 of our noble Pr*nce, 
 And the things he said as he tucked me in bed — and 
 
 I 've lain there ever since ; 
 Tho' it all gets mixed up queerly that happened before 
 
 my spill, — 
 But I draw my thousand yearly : it '11 pay for the 
 
 doctor's bill. 
 
 I 'm going out with the tide, lad. — You '11 dig me a 
 
 humble grave, 
 And whiles you will bring your bride, lad, and your sons 
 
 (if sons you have), 
 And there, when the dews are weeping, and the echoes 
 
 murmur " Peace ! " 
 And the salt, salt tide comes creeping and covers the 
 
 popping-crease, 
 
 167
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 In the hour when the ducks deposit their eggs with a 
 
 boasted force, 
 They '11 look and whisper " How was it ? " and you '11 
 
 take them over the course, 
 And your voice will break as you try to speak of the 
 
 glorious first of June, 
 When the Jubilee Cup, with John Jones up, was won 
 
 upon Wooden Spoon. 
 
 * * * *• 
 
 " To me," said a well-known authority upon 
 education, "these athletics are the devil." To me 
 no form of athletics is the devil but that of paying 
 other people to be athletic for you ; and this, un- 
 happily — and partly, I believe, through our neglect 
 to provide our elementary schools with decent play- 
 grounds — is the form affected nowadays by large 
 and increasing crowds of Englishmen. The youth 
 of our urban populations would seem to be absorbed 
 in this vicarious sport. It throngs the reading- 
 rooms of free public libraries and working men's 
 institutes in numbers which delight the reformer 
 until he discovers that all this avidity is for racing 
 tips and cricket or football " items." I am not, 
 as a rule, a croaker ; but I do not think the young 
 Briton concerns himself as he did in the fifties, 
 sixties, and seventies of the last century with poetry, 
 history, politics, or indeed anything that asks for 
 serious thought. I believe all this professional 
 
 1 68
 
 JUNE 
 
 sport likely to be as demoralising for us as a nation 
 as were the gladiatorial shows for Rome ; and I 
 cannot help attributing to it some measure of that 
 combativeness at second-hand — that itch to fight 
 anyone and everyone by proxy — which, abetted by 
 a cheap press, has for twenty years been our curse. 
 
 Curse or no curse, it is spreading ; and something 
 of its progress may be marked in the two following 
 dialogues, the first of which was written in 1897. 
 Many of the names in it have already passed some 
 way toward oblivion ; but the moral, if I mistake 
 not, survives them, and the warning has become 
 more urgent than ever. 
 
 THE FIRST DIALOGUE ON CRICKET. 
 
 1897. 
 
 Some time in the summer of 1897 — I think towards 
 the end of August — I was whiling away the close of 
 
 an afternoon in the agreeable twilight of Mr. D 's 
 
 bookshop in the Strand, when I heard my name 
 uttered by some one who had just entered; and, 
 turning about, saw my friend Verinder, in company 
 with Grayson and a strapping youth of twenty or 
 thereabouts, a stranger to me. Verinder and Grayson 
 share chambers in the Temple, on the strength (it 
 is understood) of a common passion for cricket. 
 Longer ago than we care to remember — but Cam- 
 bridge bowlers remember — Grayson was captain of 
 
 169
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the Oxford eleven. His contemporary, Verinder, never 
 won his way into the team : he was a comparatively 
 poor man and obliged to read, and reading spoiled 
 his cricket. Therefore he had to content himself 
 with knocking up centuries in college matches, and 
 an annual performance among the Seniors. It was 
 rumoured that Grayson — always a just youth, too — 
 would have given him his blue, had not Verinder's 
 conscientiousness been more than Roman. My own 
 belief is that the distinction was never offered, and 
 that Verinder liked his friend all the better for it. 
 At the same time the disappointment of what at 
 that time of life was a serious ambition may account 
 for a trace of acidity which began, before he left 
 college, to flavour his comments on human affairs, 
 and has since become habitual to him. 
 
 Verinder explained that he and his companions 
 were on their way home from Lord's, where they 
 had been "assisting" — he laid an ironical stress on 
 the word — in an encounter between Kent and 
 Middlesex. " And, as we were passing, I dragged 
 
 these fellows in, just to see if old D had 
 
 anything." Verinder is a book-collector. "By the 
 way, do you know Sammy Dawkins ? You may call 
 him the Boy when you make his better acquaintance 
 and can forgive him for having chosen to go to 
 Cambridge. Thebes did his green, unknowing youth 
 engage, and — as the Oxford Magazine gloomily 
 
 170
 
 JUNE 
 
 prophesied — he bowls out Athens in his later 
 age." The Boy laughed cheerfully and blushed. 
 I felt a natural awe in holding out an exceed- 
 ingly dusty hand to an athlete whose fame had 
 already shaken the Antipodes. But it is the way 
 of young giants to be amiable ; and indeed this 
 one saluted me with a respect which he afterwards 
 accounted for ingenuously enough — " He always felt 
 like that towards a man who had written a book : 
 it seemed to him a tremendous thing to have done, 
 don't you know ? " 
 
 I thought to myself that half an hour in Mr. 
 
 D 's shop (which contains new books as well 
 
 as old) would correct his sense of the impressiveness 
 of the feat. Indeed, I read a dawning trouble in 
 the glance he cast around the shelves. " It takes 
 a fellow's breath away," he confessed. "Such a 
 heap of them ! But then I 've never been to the 
 British Museum." 
 
 "Then," said I, "you must be employing re- 
 searchers for the book you are writing." 
 
 "What?" he protested. "Me writing a book? 
 Not likely!" 
 
 "An article for some magazine, then?" 
 
 " Not a line." 
 
 " Well, at least you have been standing for your 
 photograph, to illustrate some book on Cricket that 
 - another fellow is writing." 
 
 171
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " You have me there. Yes, I 've been photographed 
 in the act of bowling—' Before ' and ' After ' : quite 
 like Somebody's Hair Restorer." 
 
 "Well," said I, "and I wish you had contributed 
 to the letterpress, too. For the wonder to me is, 
 not that you cricketers write books (for all the 
 world wants to read them), but that you do it so 
 prodigiously well." 
 
 "Oh," said he, "you mean Ranji! But he's 
 a terror." 
 
 " I was thinking of him, of course ; but of others 
 as well. Here, for instance, is a book I have just 
 bought, or rather an instalment of one : The 
 Encyclopedia of Sport, edited by the Earl of Suffolk 
 and Berkshire, Mr. Hedley Peek, and Mr. Aflalo, 
 published by Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen : Part IV., 
 CHA to CRO. I turn to the article on Cricket, 
 and am referred 'for all questions connected with 
 fast bowling, and for many questions associated 
 with medium and slow ' to ■ the following paper 
 by Tom Richardson.' " 
 
 " Tom Richardson ought to know," put in 
 Grayson. 
 
 " Good Heavens ! " said I, " I am not disputing 
 that ! But I remember Ruskin's insisting — I think 
 in Sesame and Lilies — that no true artist ever talks 
 much of his art. The greatest are silent. 'The 
 
 172
 
 JUNE 
 
 moment,' says Ruskin, ' a man can really do his 
 work he becomes speechless about it. All words 
 become idle to him — all theories.' And he goes on 
 to ask, in his vivacious way, ' Does a bird theorise 
 about building its nest ? ' Well, as to that one 
 cannot be sure. But I take it we may call 
 Richardson a true artist ? " 
 
 " Certainly we may." 
 
 •' And allow that he can really do his work ? " 
 
 " Rather ! " 
 
 "Then it seems to me that Ruskin's rule may 
 apply to other arts, but not to Cricket. For here 
 is Richardson not only talking about fast bowling, 
 but expressing himself with signal ease and pre- 
 cision. Listen to this, for instance : — 
 
 " ' A ball is said to break when, on touching the 
 ground, it deviates sharply from its original line of 
 flight.' 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " ' A ball is said to have " spin " on it when it gains 
 an acceleration of pace, not necessarily a variation of 
 direction, on touching the ground.' 
 
 " It would be hard, I think, to improve upon 
 these definitions. But let me satisfy you that I was 
 not exaggerating when I spoke of the dignity of 
 Mr. Richardson's English style : — 
 
 173
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 "'The bowler, whether born or made, should cultivate 
 and acquire a high action and a good swing of arm and 
 body, as such a delivery will make the ball rise quickly 
 and perpendicularly from the pitch ; but the action must 
 at all costs be easy and free, qualities which neither 
 imitation nor education must allow to disappear.' 
 
 " We often hear complaints — and reasonable 
 ones for the most part — that the wage given to first- 
 class professional cricketers is no longer adequate. 
 But one of the pet arguments for increasing it is 
 that their employment begins and ends with the 
 summer. Now, I certainly think that, while bowlers 
 write in this fashion, they can have little or nothing 
 to dread from the winter months." 
 
 " I declare," said Grayson, " I believe you are 
 jealous ! " 
 
 " Well, and why not ? For, mark you, Mr. 
 Richardson's is no singular case, of which we might 
 say — to comfort ourselves — that the Goddess of 
 Cricket, whom he serves so mightily, has touched 
 his lips and inspired him for a moment. Turn over 
 these pages. We poor novelists, critics, men of 
 letters, have no such paper, such type, as are lavished 
 on the experts who write here upon their various 
 branches of sport. Our efforts are not illustrated 
 by the Swan Engraving Company. And the rub 
 for us is that these gentlemen deserve it all ! I am 
 not going to admit— to you, at any rate — that their 
 
 i74
 
 JUNE 
 
 subjects are of higher interest than ours, or of more 
 importance to the world. But I confess that, as 
 a rule, they make theirs more interesting. When 
 Mr. C. B. Fry discourses about Long Jumping, or 
 Mr. W. Ellis about Coursing, or Mr. F. C. J. Ford 
 upon Australian Cricket, there are very few novelists 
 to whom I had rather be listening. It cannot be 
 mere chance that makes them all so eloquent ; nor 
 is it that they have all risen together to the height 
 of a single great occasion ; for though each must 
 have felt it a great occasion when he was invited 
 to assist in this sumptuous work, I remarked a 
 similar eloquence in those who contributed, the 
 other day, to Messrs. Longmans' ' Badminton 
 Library.' When sportsmen take to writing 
 admirable English, and peers of the realm to 
 editing it, I hardly see where we poor men of 
 letters can expect to come in." 
 
 "The only cure that I can see," said Verinder, 
 " is for Her Majesty to turn you into peers of the 
 realm. Some of you suggest this from time to 
 time, and hitherto it has puzzled me to discover 
 why. But if it would qualify you to edit the 
 writings of sportsmen " 
 
 " And why not ? These books sell : and if 
 aristocracy have its roots in commerce, shall not 
 the sale of books count as high as the sale of 
 beer ? The principle has been granted. Already 
 
 *75
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the purveyors of cheap and wholesome literature 
 are invited to kneel before the Queen, and receive 
 the accolade." 
 
 " She must want to cut Tit-bits out of them," 
 put in the Boy. 
 
 " Of course we must look at the proportion of 
 profit. Hitherto the profits of beer and literature 
 have not been comparable ; but this wonderful 
 boom in books of sport may redress the balance. 
 Every one buys them. When you entered I was 
 glancing through a volume of new verse, but without 
 the smallest intention of buying it. My purchases, 
 you see, are all sporting works, including, of course, 
 Prince Ranjitsinhji's Jubilee. Book of Cricket" 
 
 "Just so," snapped Verinder. "You buy books 
 about sport : we spend an afternoon in looking on at 
 sport. And so, in one way or another, we assist at 
 the damnation of the sporting spirit in England." 
 
 When Verinder begins in this style an oration is 
 never far distant. I walked back with the three to 
 the Temple. On our way he hissed and sputtered 
 like a kettle, and we had scarcely reached his 
 chamber before he boiled over in real earnest. 
 
 " We ought never to have been there ! It 's well 
 enough for the Boy : he has been playing steadily all 
 the summer, first for Cambridge and afterwards for 
 his county. Now he has three days off and is taking 
 his holiday. But Grayson and I — What the deuce 
 
 176
 
 JUNE 
 
 have we to do in that galley ? Far better we 
 joined a club down at Dulwich or Tooting and put 
 in a little honest play, of a week-end, on our own 
 account. We should be crocks, of course : our 
 cricketing is done. But we should be honest crocks. 
 At least it is better to take a back row in the per- 
 formance, and find out our own weakness, than 
 pay for a good seat at Lord's or the Oval, and be 
 connoisseurs of what Abel and Hearne and Brockwell 
 can and cannot do. If a man wants to sing the 
 praises of cricket as a national game, let him go down 
 to one of the Public Schools and watch its close or 
 cricket-ground on a half-holiday : fifteen acres of 
 turf, and a dozen games going on together, from Big 
 Side down to the lowest form match : from three to 
 four hundred boys in white flannels — all keen as 
 mustard, and each occupied with his own game, and 
 playing it to the best of his powers. Playing it — 
 mark you : not looking on. That 's the point : and 
 that 's what Wellington meant by saying — if he ever 
 said it — that Waterloo was won upon the playing- 
 fields at Eton. In my old school if a boy shirked 
 the game he had a poor time. Say that he shirked 
 it for an afternoon's lawn-tennis : it was lucky for 
 him if he didn't find his racquet, next day, nailed 
 up on the pavilion door like a stoat on a gamekeeper's 
 tree. That was the sporting spirit, sir, if the sporting 
 spirit means something that is to save England : and 
 
 177 
 13
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 we shall not win another Waterloo by enclosing 
 twenty-two gladiators in a ring of twenty-two 
 thousand loafers, whose only exercise is to cheer 
 when somebody makes a stroke, howl when some 
 other body drops a catch, and argue that a batsman 
 was not out when the umpire has given him ' leg- 
 Defore.' Even at football matches the crowd has 
 some chance of taking physical exercise on its own 
 account — by manhandling the referee when the 
 game is over. Sport ? The average subscriber to 
 Lord's is just as much of a sportsman as the 
 Spaniard who watches a bull-fight, and just a trifle 
 more of a sportsman than the bar-loafer who backs 
 a horse he has never clapped eyes on. You may 
 call it Cricket if you like : I call it assisting at a 
 Gladiatorial Show. True cricket is left to the village 
 greens." 
 
 " Steady, old man ! " protested the Boy. 
 
 " I repeat it. For the spirit of the game you 
 might have gone, a few years ago, to the Public 
 Schools ; but even they are infected now with the 
 gladiatorial ideal. As it is you must go to the 
 village green ; for the spirit, you understand — not 
 the letter " 
 
 " I believe you ! " chuckled young Dawkins. " Last 
 season I put in an off day with the villagers at home. 
 We played the nearest market town, and I put myself 
 on to bowl slows. Second wicket down, in came the 
 
 178
 
 JUNE 
 
 fattest man I ever saw. He was a nurseryman and 
 seedsman in private life, and he fairly hid the wicket- 
 keep. In the first over a ball of mine got up a bit 
 and took him in the ab-do-men. 'How's that?' 
 I asked. ' Well,' said the umpire, ' I wasn't azackly 
 looking, so I leave it to you. If it hit en in the 
 paunch, it's "not out"; and the fella must have 
 suffered. But if it took en in the rear, I reckon it 
 didn't hurt much, and it's "leg-before." ' I suppose 
 that is what you would call the ' spirit ' of cricket. 
 But, I say, if you have such a down on Lord's and 
 what you call the gladiatorial business, why on earth 
 do you go ? " 
 
 "Isn't that the very question I've been asking 
 myself?" replied Verinder testily. 
 
 " Perhaps we have an explanation here," I sug- 
 gested ; for during Verinder's harangue I had settled 
 myself in the window-seat, and was turning over the 
 pages of Prince Ranjitsinhji's book. 
 
 " ' It is a grand thing for people who have to work most 
 of their time to have an interest in something or other 
 outside their particular groove. Cricket is a first-rate 
 interest. The game has developed to such a pitch that 
 it is worth taking interest in. Go to Lord's and analyse 
 the crowd. There are all sorts and conditions of 
 men there round the ropes — bricklayers, bank-clerks, 
 soldiers, postmen, and stockbrokers. And in the 
 pavilion are Q.C.'s, artists, archdeacons, and leader- 
 writers. . . .' " 
 
 179
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " Oh, come ! " Grayson puts in. " Isn't that rather 
 hard on the stockbroker ? " 
 " It is what the book says. 
 
 " ' Bad men, good men, workers and idlers, all are 
 there, and all at one in their keenness over the game. 
 . . . Anything that puts very many different kinds of 
 people on a common ground must promote sympathy 
 and kindly feelings. The workman does not come away 
 from seeing Middlesex beating Lancashire, or vice versa, 
 with evil in his heart against the upper ten ; nor the 
 Mayfair homme dc plaisir with a feeling of contempt for 
 the street-bred masses. Both alike are thinking how 
 well Mold bowled, and how cleanly Stoddart despatched 
 Briggs's high-tossed slow ball over the awning. Even 
 that cynical nil admirari lawyer ' " 
 
 I pointed a finger at Verinder. 
 
 " ' Even that cynical nil admirari lawyer caught himself 
 cheering loudly when Sir Timothy planted Hallam's 
 would-be yorker into the press-box. True, he caught 
 himself being enthusiastic, and broke off at once ' " 
 
 • 
 
 " When I found it hadn't killed a reporter," 
 Verinder explained. "But I hope Ranjitsinhji has 
 some better arguments than these if he wants to 
 defend gladiatorial cricket. At least he allows that 
 a change has come over the game of late years, and 
 that this change has to be defended ? " 
 
 " Yes, he admits the change, and explains how it 
 came about. In the beginning we had local club 
 
 1 80
 
 JUNE 
 
 cricket pure and simple — the game of your Village 
 Green, in fact. Out of this grew representative 
 local cricket — that is, district or county cricket 
 which flourished along with local club cricket. Out 
 of county cricket, which in those days was only local 
 cricket glorified, sprang exhibition or spectacular or 
 gladiatorial cricket, which lived side by side with, 
 but distinct from, the other. Finally, exhibition and 
 county cricket merged and became one. And that is 
 where we are now." 
 
 " Does he explain how exhibition and county 
 cricket came, as he puts it, to be merged into one ? " 
 'Yes. The introduction of spectacular cricket (he 
 says) changed the basis of county cricket consider- 
 ably. For many years the exhibition elevens and 
 the counties played side by side ; but gradually the 
 former died out, and the new elements they had 
 introduced into the game were absorbed into county 
 cricket. The process was gradual, but in the end 
 complete. The old county clubs and the new ones 
 that from time to time sprang up added the exhibi- 
 tion side of cricket to the old local basis. The 
 county clubs were no longer merely glorified local 
 clubs, but in addition business concerns. They 
 provided popular amusement and good cricket ; 
 in fact, they became what they are now — local in 
 name, and partly local in reality, but also run upon 
 exhibition or spectacular lines." 
 
 181
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " A truly British compromise ! Good business at 
 the bottom of it, and a touch of local sentiment by 
 way of varnish. For of course the final excuse for 
 calling an eleven after Loamshire (let us say), and 
 for any pride a Loamshire man may take in its 
 doings, is that its members have been bred and 
 trained in Loamshire. But, because any such 
 limitation would sorely affect the gate-money, we 
 import players from Australia or Timbuctoo, stick 
 a Loamshire cap with the county arms on the head 
 of each, and confidently expect our public to swallow 
 the fiction and provide the local enthusiasm un- 
 dismayed." 
 
 " My dear Verinder, if you propose to preach rank 
 Chauvinism, I have done. But I don't believe you 
 are in earnest." 
 
 " In a sense, I am not. My argument would 
 exclude Ranjitsinhji himself from all matches but 
 a few unimportant ones. I vote for Greater Britain, 
 as you know : and in any case my best arguments 
 would go down before the sheer delight of watching 
 him at the wicket. Let the territorial fiction stand, 
 by all means. Nay, let us value it as the one relic 
 of genuine county cricket. It is the other side of 
 the business that I quarrel with." 
 
 " Be good enough to define the quarrel." 
 
 "Why, then, I quarrel with the spectacular side 
 of the New Cricket ; which, when you come to look 
 
 182
 
 JUNE 
 
 into it, is the gate-money side. How does Ranjit- 
 sinhji defend it ? " 
 
 " Let me see. ' Its justification is the pleasure it 
 provides for large numbers of the public.' " 
 
 "Quite so: the bricklayer and the stockbroker by 
 the ropes, and the cynical lawyer in the pavilion ! 
 But I prefer to consider the interests of the game." 
 
 " ' From a purely cricket point of view,' he goes 
 on, ' not much can be said against it.' " 
 
 " Let us inquire into that. The New Cricket is 
 a business concern : it caters for the bricklayer, the 
 stockbroker, and the whole crowd of spectators. Its 
 prosperity depends on the attraction it offers them. 
 To attract them it must provide first-class players, 
 and the county that cannot breed first-class players 
 is forced to hire them. This is costly; but again 
 the cash comes out of the spectators' pockets, in 
 subscriptions and gate-money. Now are you going 
 to tell me that those who pay the piper will refrain 
 from calling the tune ? Most certainly they will not. 
 More and more frequently in newspaper reports 
 of cricket-matches you find discussions of what is 
 1 due to the public.' If stumps, for some reason or 
 other, are drawn early, it is hinted that the spectators 
 have a grievance ; a captain's orders are canvassed 
 and challenged, and so is the choice of his team ; a 
 dispute between a club and its servants becomes an 
 affair of the streets, and is taken up by the press, with 
 
 183
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 threats and counter-threats. In short, the interest 
 of the game and the interest of the crowd may not 
 be identical ; and whereas a captain used to consider 
 only the interest of the game, he is now obliged to 
 consider both. Does Ranjitsinhji point this out ? " 
 
 " He seems, at any rate, to admit it ; for I find 
 this on page 232, in his chapter upon 'Captaincy': — 
 
 " ' The duties of a captain vary somewhat according to 
 the kind of match in which his side is engaged, and to 
 the kind of club which has elected him. To begin with, 
 first-class cricket, including representative M.C.C., county 
 and university matches, is quite different from any other 
 — partly because the results are universally regarded as 
 more important, partly because certain obligations towards 
 the spectators have to be taken into consideration. The last 
 point applies equally to any match which people pay to come 
 to see. . . . With regard to gate-money matches. The 
 captains of the two sides engaged are, during the match, 
 responsible for everything in connection with it. They 
 are under an obligation to the public to see that the match is 
 played in such a way as the public has a reasonable right to 
 expect.' " 
 
 "And pray," demanded Verinder, "what are these 
 ' obligations towards the spectators,' and ' reasonable 
 rights ' of the public ? " 
 
 " Well, I suppose the public can reasonably de- 
 mand punctuality in starting play; a moderate 
 interval for luncheon and between innings; and 
 that stumps shall not be drawn, nor the match 
 
 184
 
 JUNE 
 
 abandoned, before the time arranged, unless circum- 
 stances make it absolutely necessary." 
 
 "And who is to be judge of these circumstances?" 
 
 "The captain, I suppose." 
 
 " In theory, yes ; but he has to satisfy the crowd. 
 It is the crowd's ' reasonable right ' to be satisfied ; 
 and by virtue of it the crowd becomes the final 
 judge. It allows the captain to decide, but will 
 barrack him if displeased with his decision. More- 
 over, you have given me examples to illustrate this 
 'reasonable right,' but you have not defined it. Now 
 I want to know precisely how far it extends, and 
 where it ceases. Does Ranjitsinhji provide this 
 definition ? " 
 
 " No," said I; " I cannot find that he does." 
 
 " To be sure he does not ; and for the simple 
 reason that these claims on the side of the public 
 are growing year by year. Already no one can say 
 how much they cover, and assuredly no one can 
 say where they are likely to stop. You observe that 
 our author includes even University matches under 
 the head of exhibition cricket, in which obligations 
 towards the spectators have to be taken into account. 
 You remember the scene at Lord's in 1893 when 
 Wells purposely bowled no-balls ; and again in 1896 
 when Shine bowled two no-balls to the boundary and 
 then a ball which went for four byes, the object in 
 each case being to deprive Oxford of the follow-on. 
 
 185
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 This policy was hotly discussed ; and luckily the 
 discussion spent itself on the question whether play 
 could be at the same time within the laws and clean 
 contrary to the ethics of cricket. But there was 
 also a deal of talk about what was ' due to the 
 public ' ; talk which would have been altogether 
 wide of the mark in the old days, when Oxford and 
 Cambridge met to play a mere friendly match and 
 the result concerned them alone." 
 
 "And is this," I asked, "the sum of your 
 indictment ? " 
 
 " Yes, I think that is all. And surely it is 
 enough." 
 
 " Then, as I make out, your chief objections to 
 spectacular cricket are two. You hold that it gives 
 vast numbers of people a false idea that they are 
 joining in a sport when in truth they are doing no 
 more than look on. And you contend that as the 
 whole institution resolves itself more and more into 
 a paid exhibition, the spectators will tend more and 
 more to direct the development of the game ; 
 whereas cricket in your opinion should be unin- 
 fluenced by those who are outside the ropes ? " 
 
 " That is my case." 
 
 "And I think, my dear Verinder, it is a strong 
 one. But there is just one little point which you 
 do not appear to have considered. And I was 
 coming to it just now — or rather Prince Ranjitsinhji 
 
 1 86
 
 JUNE 
 
 was coming to it — when you interrupted us. ' From 
 a purely cricket point of view,' he was saying, ' not 
 much can be said against exhibition cricket.' And 
 in the next sentence he goes on : 'At any rate it 
 promotes skill in the game and keeps up the 
 standard of excellence.' " 
 
 "To be sure it does that." 
 
 " And cricket is played by the best players to-day 
 with more skill than it was by the best players of 
 twenty or forty years ago ? " 
 
 " Yes, I believe that ; in spite of all we hear 
 about the great Alfred Mynn and other bygone 
 heroes." 
 
 "Come then," said I, "tell me, Is Cricket an art ? " 
 
 "Decidedly it is." 
 
 "Then Cricket, like other arts, should aim at 
 perfection ? " 
 
 " I suppose so." 
 
 " And that will be the highest aim of Cricket — 
 its own perfection ? And its true lovers should 
 welcome whatever helps to make it perfect ? " 
 
 " I see what you are driving at," said he. " But 
 Cricket is a social art, and must be judged by the 
 good it does to boys and men. You, I perceive, 
 make it an art-in-itself, and would treat it as the 
 gardeners treat a fine chrysanthemum, nipping off a 
 hundred buds to feed and develop a single perfect 
 bloom." 
 
 187
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " True : we must consider it also as a social art. 
 But, my dear fellow, are you not exaggerating the 
 destruction necessary to produce the perfect bloom ? 
 You talk of the crowd at Lord's or the Oval as if all 
 these thousands were diverted from honest practice 
 of the game to the ignoble occupation of looking on ; 
 whereas two out of three of them, were this spec- 
 tacle not provided, would far more likely be attending 
 a horse-race, or betting in clubs and public-houses. 
 The bricklayer, the stockbroker, the archdeacon, 
 by going to see Lockwood bowl, depopulate no 
 village green. You judge these persons by yourself, 
 and tell yourself reproachfully that but for this 
 attraction you, John Verinder, would be creditably 
 perspiring at a practice-net in Tooting or Dulwich ; 
 whereas, the truth is " 
 
 " Why are you hesitating ? " 
 
 " Because it is not a very pleasant thing to say. 
 But the truth is, your heart and your conscience in 
 this matter of athletics are a little younger than 
 your body." 
 
 " You mean that I am getting on for middle age." 
 
 " I mean that, though you talk of it, you will 
 never subscribe to that suburban club. You will 
 marry ; you will be made a judge : you will attend 
 cricket matches, and watch from the pavilion while 
 your son takes block for his first score against the 
 M.C.C. 
 
 iSS
 
 JUNE 
 
 " And when with envy Time transported, 
 Shall think to rob us of our joys, 
 I, with my girls (if I ever have any), will sit on the 
 top of a drag (if I ever acquire one) and teach 
 them at what to applaud, 
 While you go a-batting with your boys." 
 
 Verinder pulled a wry face, and the Boy smacked 
 him on the back and exhorted him to " buck up." 
 
 "And the round world will go on as before, and 
 the sun will patrol Her Majesty's dominions, and 
 still where the Union Jack floats he will pass the 
 wickets pitched and white-flannelled Britons playing 
 for all they are worth, while men of subject races 
 keep the score-sheet. And still when he arrives at 
 this island he will look down on green closes and 
 approve what we all allow to be one of the most 
 absolutely gracious sights on earth — the ordered 
 and moving regiments of schoolboys at cricket. 
 Grayson, reach round to that shelf against which 
 your chair is tilted ; take down poor Lefroy's poems, 
 and read us that sonnet of his, ' The Bowler.' ' 
 
 Grayson found the book and the place, and 
 read : — 
 
 " Two minutes' rest till the next man goes in ! 
 The tired arms lie with every sinew slack 
 On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back, 
 And elbows apt to make the leather spin 
 Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin, — 
 
 189
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 In knavish hands a most unkindly knack ; 
 
 But no guile shelters under the boy's black 
 
 Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin. 
 
 Two minutes only ! Conscious of a name, 
 
 The new man plants his weapon with profound 
 
 Long-practised skill that no mere trick may scare. 
 
 Not loth, the rested lad resumes the game : 
 
 The flung ball takes one maddening, tortuous bound, 
 
 And the mid-stump three somersaults in air ! " 
 
 "Topping!" the Boy ejaculated. "Who wrote it?" 
 " His name was Lefroy. He died young. He left 
 Oxford a few years before we went up. And I 
 think," continued Verinder, musing, "that I, who 
 detest making acquaintances, would give at this 
 moment a considerable sum to have known him. 
 Well," he continued, turning to me and puffing at 
 his pipe, "so you warn Grayson and me that we 
 must prepare to relinquish these and all the other 
 delights sung by Lefroy and Norman Gale and that 
 other poet — anonymous, but you know the man — in 
 his incomparable parody of Whitman : ' the perfect 
 feel of a fourer ' — 
 
 "'The thousand melodious cracks, delicious cracks, 
 the responsive echoes of my comrades and the hundred 
 thence resulting runs, passionately yearned for, never, 
 never again to be forgotten. 
 
 "'Overhead meanwhile the splendid silent sun, 
 blending all, fusing all, bathing all in floods of soft 
 ecstatic perspiration.' 
 
 190
 
 JUNE 
 
 — to all this we must say good-bye. And what do 
 you offer us in exchange ? " 
 
 " Merely the old consolation that life is short, art 
 is long ; that while you grow old, cricket in other 
 hands will be working out its perfection, and your 
 son, when you have one, will start with higher ideals 
 than you ever dreamed of." 
 
 "And this perfection — will it ever be attained?" 
 " I dare say never. For perhaps we may say after 
 Plato, and without irreverence, that the pattern of 
 perfect cricket is laid up somewhere in the skies, and 
 out of man's reach. But between it and ordinary 
 cricket we may set up a copy of perfection, as close 
 as man can make it, and, by little and little, closer 
 every year. This copy will be preserved, and cared 
 for, and advanced, by those professional cricketers 
 against whom the unthinking have so much to say ; 
 by these and by the few amateurs who, as time goes 
 on, will be found able to bear the strain. For the 
 search after perfection is no light one, and will admit 
 of no half-hearted service. I say nothing here of 
 material rewards, beyond reminding you that your 
 professional cricketer is poorly paid in comparison 
 with an inferior singer of the music-halls, although 
 he gives twice as much pleasure as your lion comique, 
 and of a more innocent kind. But he does more 
 than this. He feeds and guards the flame of art ; 
 and when his joints are stiff and his vogue is past, 
 
 jgi
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 he goes down as groundman and instructor to a 
 public school, and imparts to a young generation 
 what knowledge he can of the high mysteries whose 
 servant he has been : quite like the philosopher in 
 the Republic " 
 
 " Steady on ! " interposed Grayson. " How on 
 earth will the Boy stand up to Briggs' bowling 
 if you put these notions in his head ? He '11 be 
 awe-struck, and begin to fidget with his right foot." 
 
 " Oh, fire ahead! " said that cheerful youth. He 
 had possessed himself of Prince Ranjitsinhji's book 
 and coiled himself comfortably into a wicker chair. 
 — " You 're only rotting, I know. And you 've 
 passed over the most important sentence in the 
 whole book. Listen to this : ' There are very few 
 newspaper readers who do not turn to the cricket 
 column first when the morning journal comes; who 
 do not buy a halfpenny evening paper to find out 
 how many runs W.G. or Bobby Abel has made.' 
 That 's the long and short of the matter. Verinder, 
 which do you read first in your morning paper — the 
 Foreign Intelligence or the Cricket News?" 
 
 192
 
 JUNE 
 
 THE SECOND DIALOGUE. 
 1905. 
 
 A few days ago — to be precise, on Saturday the 
 24th of this month — my friend Verinder reminded 
 me of the long-past conversation. We had met by 
 appointment at Paddington to travel down to 
 Windsor for the second day of the Eton and 
 Winchester match, taking with us (or rather, being 
 taken by) a youngster whom we call The Infant. 
 The Infant, who talks little save in the bosom of 
 his family, and even so preserves beneath his talk 
 that fine reticence of judgment which most adorns 
 the age of fifteen, not unfrequently surprises me 
 by his experiments in the art of living. On this 
 occasion, while I was engaged in the booking-office 
 and Verinder in scanning the shelves of Messrs. 
 Smith's bookstall, he had found our train, chosen 
 our compartment, and laid out twopence in four 
 halfpenny papers, which he spread on the cushions 
 by way of reserving our seats. 
 
 " But why four," I asked, " seeing there are but 
 three of us ? " 
 
 " It will give us more room," he answered simply. 
 
 He had hoped, I doubt not, by this devise to 
 retain the whole compartment ; but the hope was 
 
 14
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 soon and abruptly frustrated by a tall, well-dressed 
 and pompous man who came striding down the 
 platform while we idled by the dooi, and thrusting 
 past us almost before we could give way, entered 
 the compartment, dropped into a corner seat, tossed 
 his copy of The Times on to the seat opposite, took 
 off his top-hat, examined it, replaced it when 
 satisfied of its shine, drew out a spare handkerchief, 
 opened it, flicked a few specks of dust from his 
 patent-leather boots, looked up while reaching across 
 for The Times, recognised me with a nod and a 
 "Good morning!" and buried himself in his paper. 
 I on my part, almost before glancing at his face, 
 had recognised him by his manner for a personage 
 next to whom it has been my lot to sit at one or two 
 public banquets. I will call him Sir John Crang. 
 He is a K.C.M.G., a Colonial by birth and breeding, 
 a Member of Parliament, and a person of the 
 sort we treat in these days with consideration. 
 Since the second year of Jubilee (in which he was 
 knighted) he and his kind have found themselves at 
 ease in Sion, and of his kind he has been perhaps 
 the most fortunate. In his public speeches he alludes 
 to himself humorously as a hustler. He has married 
 a wealthy lady, in every other respect too good for 
 him, entertains largely at dinners which should be 
 private but are reported in the press, and advocates 
 conscription for the youth of Great Britain. Upon 
 
 194
 
 JUNE 
 
 conscription for his native colony, as upon any other 
 of its duties towards Imperial defence, if you ques- 
 tion him, you will find him sonorously evasive. 
 
 The Infant, accustomed to surprise at the extent 
 of my acquaintance, gazed at him politely for a 
 moment as we took our seats and the train moved 
 out of the station. I noted a veiled disapproval in 
 his eye as he picked up a newspaper, and at that 
 moment Verinder, who had picked up another, 
 emitted a noise not unlike the snort of the engine 
 as it gathered speed. I glanced at him in some 
 apprehension. Verinder's bearing toward strangers 
 is apt to be brutal, and by an instinct acquired as his 
 companion on old reading-parties I was prepared to 
 be apologetic. 
 
 His ill-humour, however, had nothing to do with 
 Sir John Crang. He had laid the newspaper across 
 his knee, and was pointing to it with a scornful fore- 
 finger. 
 
 " Look here," he said. " Do you remember a talk 
 we had some years ago — you and I and Grayson ? 
 
 It started in D 's shop one afternoon after a 
 
 Kent and Middlesex match. You ought to remember, 
 for I picked up the Pall Mall Magazine a month later 
 and found you had made copy out of it." 
 
 "To be sure," said I. "We discussed cricket, 
 and a number of reputations then well known, about 
 which the public troubles itself no longer. Let us 
 
 i95
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 try their names upon The Infant here, and discover 
 with how many of them he is acquainted." 
 
 "We discussed," said Verinder, " the vulgarisation 
 of cricket. You made me say some hard things 
 about it, but be hanged to me if anything I prophe- 
 sied then came near to this ! Listen — 
 
 " ' I suppose I may say that, after some luck at starting, 
 I played a pretty good innings : but a total of 240 is 
 poor enough for first knock on such a wicket as Hove, 
 and, as things stand, the omens are against us. How- 
 ever, as I write this wire the clouds are gathering, and 
 there 's no denying that a downfall during the night may 
 help our chances.'" 
 
 " What on earth are you reading ? " I asked. 
 " Stay a moment. Here 's another — 
 
 " ' With Jones's wicket down, the opposition declared, 
 somewhat to the annoyance of the crowd : and indeed, 
 with Robinson set and playing the prettiest strokes all 
 around the wicket, I must admit that they voiced a 
 natural disappointment. They had paid their money, 
 and, after the long period of stonewalling which preceded 
 the tea interval, a crowded hour of glorious life would 
 have been exhilarating, and perhaps was no more than 
 their due. Dickson, however, took his barracking good- 
 humouredly. Towards the end Jones had twice appealed 
 against the light.' " 
 
 " I suppose," said I, " that is how cricket strikes 
 the Yellow Press. Who are the reporters ? " 
 
 196
 
 JUNE 
 
 "The reporters are the captains of two county 
 teams — two first-class county teams ; and they are 
 writing of a match actually in progress at this 
 moment. Observe A.'s fine sense of loyalty to a 
 captain's duty in his published opinion that his side 
 is in a bad way. Remark his chivalrous hope for 
 a sodden wicket to-morrow." 
 
 " It is pretty dirty," I agreed. 
 
 Verinder snorted. " I once tried to kill a man 
 at mid -on for wearing a pink shirt. But these 
 fellows! They ought to wear yellow flannels." 
 
 " What, by the way, is the tea interval ? " I 
 asked. 
 
 " It is an interval," answered Verinder seriously, 
 "in which the opposing captains adjourn to the 
 post office and send telegrams about themselves 
 and one another." 
 
 " Excuse me," put in Sir John Crang, looking up 
 from his Times and addressing me, " but I quite 
 agree with what you and your friend are saying. 
 Interest in the Australian tour, for instance, I can 
 understand ; it promotes good feeling, and anything 
 that draws closer the bonds of interest between our- 
 selves and the colonies is an imperial asset." 
 
 " Good Lord ! " murmured Verinder. 
 
 Sir John fortunately did not hear him. " But I 
 agree with you," he continued, "in condemning 
 this popular craze for cricket per se, which is after 
 
 197
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 all but a game with a ball and some sticks. I will 
 not go the length of our imperial poet and dub its 
 votaries 'flannelled fools.' That was poetical license, 
 eh ? though pardonable under the circumstances. 
 But, as he has said elsewhere, ' How little they know 
 of England who only England know.' ' (At this 
 point I reached out a foot and trod hard on 
 Verinder's toe.) "And to the broader outlook — I 
 speak as a pretty wide traveller — this insular 
 absorption in a mere game is bewildering." 
 
 "Infant!" said Verinder suddenly, still under 
 repression of my foot, " What are you reading ? " 
 
 The Infant looked up sweetly, withdrawing him- 
 self from his paper, however, by an effort. 
 
 " There 's a Johnny here who tells you how 
 Bosanquet bowls with what he calls his ' over-spin.' 
 He has a whole column about it with figures, just 
 like Euclid ; and the funny thing is, Bosanquet 
 writes just after to say that the Johnny knows 
 nothing about it." 
 
 "Abandoned child," commanded Verinder, "pass 
 me the paper. You are within measurable distance 
 of studying cricket for its own sake, and will come 
 to a bad end." 
 
 Within twenty seconds he and The Infant were 
 intently studying the diagrams, which Verinder 
 demonstrated to be absurd, while Sir John, a little 
 huffed by his manner, favoured me with a vision 
 
 1 98
 
 JUNJ 
 
 of England as she should be, with her ploughshares 
 beaten into Morris Tubes. 
 
 In the midst of this discourse Verinder looked 
 up. 
 
 " Let us not despair of cricket," says he. " She 
 has her victories, but as yet no prizes to be presented 
 with public speeches." 
 
 " Curious fellow that friend of yours," said Sir 
 John, as he took leave of me on Windsor platform. 
 " Yes, yes, I saw how you humoured him : but why 
 should he object to a man's playing cricket in a 
 pink shirt ? " 
 
 He went on his way toward the Castle, while we 
 turned our faces for Agar's Plough and the best game 
 in the world. 
 
 199
 
 July 
 
 r^UR Parliamentary Candidate — or Prospective 
 ^ Candidate, as we cautiously call him — has been 
 visiting us, and invited me to sit on the platform 
 and give the speeches my moral support. I like 
 our candidate, who is young, ardent, good-natured, 
 and keeps his temper when he is heckled ; seems, 
 indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his 
 opponents by that bright pugnacity which a true 
 Briton loves better than anything else in politics. 
 I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. 
 But I wish he would not choose to put his ardour 
 in competition with Sirius and the dog-days; and 
 I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. 
 Blank, M.P., to address us in his support. 
 
 Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which 
 pass, for convenience, under a common label. Yet 
 there are few men in England whose attitude of 
 mind towards his alleged principles I more cordially 
 loathe. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I 
 think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side 
 
 200
 
 JULY 
 
 which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a 
 hundred things which I believe. 
 
 We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester 
 fellow than I am able to think him. Still, and at 
 the best, he is a sort of composite photograph of 
 your average Member of Parliament — the type of 
 man to whom Great Britain commits the direction 
 of her affairs and, by consequence, her well-doing 
 and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or 
 Conservative, are not the features pretty much the 
 same ? a solid man, well past fifty, who has spent 
 the prime of his life in business and withdrawn 
 from it with a good reputation and a credit balance 
 equally satisfactory to himself and his bankers. Or 
 it may be that he has not actually retired but has 
 turned to politics to fill up those leisure hours which 
 are the reward or vexation (as he chooses to look at 
 them) of a prosperous man of business ; for, as 
 Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business 
 who employs his own capital, and employs it nearly 
 always in the same way, is by no means fully 
 employed. " If such a man is very busy, it is a 
 sign of something wrong. Either he is working at 
 detail, which subordinates would do better, or he 
 is engaged in too many speculations." In conse- 
 quence our commerce abounds with men of great 
 business ability and experience who, being short of 
 occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time 
 
 20 1
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 with work in Parliament, as well as proud to write 
 M.P. after their names. For my part I can think 
 of nothing better calculated to reassure anyone 
 whose dreams are haunted by apprehensions of 
 wild-cat legislative schemes, or the imminence of a 
 Radical millennium, than five minutes' contempla- 
 tion of our champions of progress as they recline 
 together, dignified and whiskered and bland, upon 
 the benches of St. Stephen's. 
 
 But let us proceed with our portrait, which I 
 vow is a most pleasing one. Our typical legislator 
 is of decent birth, or at least hopeful of acquiring 
 what he rightly protests to be but "the guinea 
 stamp" by judiciously munificent contributions to 
 his party's purse ; honest and scrupulous in dealing ; 
 neither so honest nor so scrupulous in thinking ; 
 addicted to phrases and a trifle too impatient of 
 their meaning, yet of proved carefulness in drawing 
 the line between phrase and practice ; a first-rate 
 committeeman (and only those who have sat long 
 in committee can sound the depths of this praise) ; 
 locally admired ; with much bonhomie of manner, 
 backed by a reputation for standing no nonsense; 
 good-tempered, honestly anxious to reconcile con- 
 flicting interests and do the best for the unconflicting 
 ones of himself and his country; but above all a 
 man who knows where to stop. I vow (I repeat) 
 he makes a dignified and amiable figure. One can 
 
 202
 
 JULY 
 
 easily understand why people like to be represented 
 by such a man. It gives a feeling of security — a 
 somewhat illusory one, I believe ; and security is 
 the first instinct of a state. One can understand 
 why the exhortations, dehortations, precepts, and 
 instructions of parents, preachers, schoolmasters 
 tend explicitly and implicitly to the reproduction 
 of this admired bloom. 
 
 Yet one may whisper that it has— shall we say ? — 
 its failings; and its failings are just those which are 
 least to be commended to the emulation of youth. 
 It is, for instance, constitutionally timid. Violent 
 action of any kind will stampede it in a panic, and, 
 like the Countess in Evan Harrington, it "does not 
 ruffle well." It betrays (I think) ill-breeding in its 
 disproportionate terror whenever an anarchist bomb 
 explodes, and in the ferocity of its terror it can be 
 crueller than the assailant. " My good people," it 
 provokes one to say, " by all means stamp out. these 
 dangers, but composedly, as becomes men conscious 
 of their strength. Even allowing for the unscru- 
 pulousness of your assailant, you have still nine 
 hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of 
 the odds in your favour ; and so long as you 
 answer the explosions of weak anarchy by cries 
 suggestive of the rage of the sheep, you merely 
 raise the uncomfortable suspicion that, after 
 all, there must be something amiss with a 
 
 203
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 civilisation which counts you among its most 
 expensive products." 
 
 But in the untroubled hour of prosperity this 
 weakness of breeding is scarcely less apparent. 
 Our admired bloom is admired rather for not doing 
 certain things than for doing others. His precepts 
 are cautious and mainly negative. He does not get 
 drunk (in public at any rate), and he expends much 
 time and energy in preventing men from getting 
 drunk. But he does not lead or heartily incite to 
 noble actions, although at times — when he has been 
 badly frightened — he is ready to pay men handsomely 
 to do them. He wins and loses elections on ques- 
 tions of veto. He had rather inculcate the passive 
 than the active virtues. He prefers temperance 
 and restraint to energy and resolve. He thinks 
 more of the organisation than the practice of 
 charity, esteems a penny saved as three halfpence 
 gained, had liefer detect an impostor than help a 
 deserving man. He is apt to label all generous 
 emotions as hysterical, and in this he errs ; for when 
 a man calls the generous emotions hysterical he 
 usually means that he would confuse them with 
 hysterics if they happened to him. 
 
 Now the passive virtues — continence, frugality, 
 and the like — are desirable, but shade off into mere 
 want of pluck ; while the active virtues — courage, 
 charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness — are 
 
 204
 
 JULY 
 
 ever those upon which the elect and noble souls in 
 history have laid the greater stress. I frankly detest 
 Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be a venal 
 person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) 
 imitation of the type. But, supposing him to be the 
 real thing, I still think that, if you want a model for 
 your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney. 
 If ever a man illustrated the beauty of the active 
 virtues in his life and in his death, that man was 
 Sidney ; but he also gave utterance in noble speech 
 to his belief in them. In the Apologie for Poetrie you 
 will find none of your art-for-art's-sake chatter : 
 Sidney boldly takes the line that poetry helps men, 
 and helps them not to well-being only, but to well- 
 doing, and again helps them to well-doing not merely 
 by teaching (as moral philosophy does) but by 
 inciting. For an instance — 
 
 " Who readeth JEneas carrying old Anchises on his 
 back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so 
 excellent an act? " 
 
 There speaks, anticipating Zutphen, the most perfect 
 knight in our history. Again — 
 
 " Truly I have known men that even with reading 
 Amadis de Gaule (which, God knoweth, wanteth much of 
 a perfect poesy) have found their hearts moved to the 
 exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage " — 
 
 all active virtues be it noted. " We are not damned 
 
 205
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 for doing wrong," writes Stevenson, " but for not 
 doing right. Christ will never hear of negative 
 morality : Thou shalt was ever His word, with 
 which He superseded Thou shalt not. To make our 
 morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the 
 imagination and to introduce into our judgments of 
 our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. ... In 
 order that a man may be kind and honest it may be 
 needful that 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." Yet how many times 
 a day will we say " don't " to our children for once 
 that we say "do"? But here I seem to be within 
 reasonable distance of discussing original sin, and 
 so I return to Mr. Blank. 
 
 I do not like Mr. Blank ; and I disliked his speech 
 the other night so heartily that it drove me to sit 
 down when I reached home and put my reflections 
 into verse ; into a form of verse, moreover, which 
 (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand 
 as little as the matter of it. He would think them 
 both impractical. Heaven help the creature ! 
 
 206
 
 JULY 
 
 CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE. 
 
 Who lives in suit of armour pent, 
 
 And hides himself behind a wall, 
 For him is not the great event, 
 
 The garland, nor the Capitol. 
 And is God's guerdon less than they ? 
 Nay, moral man, I tell thee Nay : 
 Nor shall the flaming forts be won 
 By sneaking negatives alone, 
 
 By Lenten fast or Ramazan, 
 But by the challenge proudly thrown — 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man ! 
 
 God, in His Palace resident 
 
 Of Bliss, beheld our sinful ball, 
 And charged His own Son innocent 
 
 Us to redeem from Adam's fall. 
 — " Yet must it be that men Thee slay." 
 — " Yea, tho' it must must I obey," 
 Said Christ, — and came, His royal Son, 
 To die, and dying to atone 
 
 For harlot and for publican. 
 Read on that rood He died upon — 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man ! 
 
 And by that rood where He was bent 
 I saw the world's great captains all 
 
 Go riding to the tournament — 
 Cyrus the Great and Hannibal, 
 
 207
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Caesar of Rome and Attila, 
 Lord Charlemagne with his array, 
 Lord Alisaundre of Macedon — 
 With flaming lance and habergeon 
 
 They passed, and to the rataplan 
 Of drums gave salutation — 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man ! 
 
 Had tall Achilles lounged in tent 
 
 For aye, and Xanthus neigh'd in stall, 
 The towers of Troy had ne'er been shent, 
 
 Nor stay'd the dance in Priam's hall. 
 Bend o'er thy book till thou be grey, 
 Read, mark, perpend, digest, survey — 
 Instruct thee deep as Solomon — 
 One only chapter thou shalt con, 
 
 One lesson learn, one sentence scan, 
 One title and one colophon — 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man ! 
 
 High Virtue's hest is eloquent 
 
 With spur and not with martingall : 
 Sufnceth not thou'rt continent : 
 
 Be courteous, brave, and liberal. 
 God fashion'd thee of chosen clay 
 For service, nor did ever say 
 "Deny thee this," "Abstain from yon," 
 Save to inure thee, thew and bone, 
 
 To be confirmed of the clan 
 That made immortal Marathon — 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man! 
 
 208
 
 JULY 
 
 Envoy. 
 
 Young Knight, the lists are set to-day : 
 Hereafter shall be long to pray 
 In sepulture with hands of stone. 
 Ride, then ! outride the bugle blown ! 
 
 And gaily dinging down the van 
 Charge with a cheer — Set on ! Set on ! 
 
 Virtue is that beseems a Man ! 
 
 * # * * 
 
 A friend to whom I showed these verses remarked 
 that Mr. Blank was indeed a person who fed his 
 soul upon negatives ; but that I possibly did 
 him some injustice in charging so much of this 
 to timidity, whereas the scent lay rather in the 
 gusto with which he judged his fellow-- men. 
 " And, by the way," said he, " is there not some 
 gusto in the scorn with which you are judging 
 Mr. Blank at this moment ? " " Do you remem- 
 ber," I answered, "how that man, after voting for 
 war the other day, went straight off to a meeting 
 of the Peace Society and put up a florid appeal 
 to the Prince of Peace for a time when wars 
 should be no more ? Let him be, however : I do 
 wrong to lose my temper with him. But on this 
 matter of national timidity I have something to 
 say. . . ." 
 
 I have been reading John Holland's two Discourses 
 of the Navy, written in 1638 and 1659, and published 
 
 209 
 15
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the other day by the Navy Records Society. The 
 object of Mr. Holland's discourses was to reform the 
 Navy, purge it of abuses, and strengthen it for the 
 defence of this realm ; and I have been curious to 
 compare his methods with those of our own Navy 
 League, which has been making such a noise for 
 ten years or so. The first thing I observe is the 
 attitude of mind in which he approaches his 
 subject : — 
 
 " If either the honour of a nation, commerce or trust 
 with all nations, peace at home, grounded upon our 
 enemies' fear or love of us abroad, and attended with 
 plenty of all things necessary either for the preservation 
 of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things 
 worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal 
 conceit) then next to God and thy King give thy thanks 
 for the same to the Navy. As for honour, who knows 
 not (that knows anything) that in all records of late 
 times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame and 
 renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread 
 that runs through the whole wooft, the burden of the 
 song, the scope of the text ? . . ." 
 
 He proceeds to enumerate some particular com- 
 mercial advantages due to our mastery of the sea, 
 and sums up in these words : — 
 
 " Suffice it thus far, nothing under God, who doth 
 all, hath brought so much, so great commerce to this 
 Kingdom as the rightly noble employments of our navy; 
 
 210
 
 JULY 
 
 a wheel, if truly turned, that sets to work all Christendom 
 by its motion ; a mill, if well extended, that in a sweet 
 yet sovereign composure contracts the grist of all nations 
 to its own dominions, and requires only the tribute of its 
 own people, not for, but towards, its maintenance." 
 
 The eloquence may be turgid, but the attitude is 
 dignified. The man does not scold ; does not 
 terrify. He lays his stress on the benefits of a 
 strong navy — on the renown it has won for England 
 in the past. He assumes his readers to be intelligent 
 men, amenable to advice which will help them to 
 perpetuate this renown and secure these benefits in 
 time to come. His exordium over, he settles down 
 to an exposition of the abuses which are impairing 
 our naval efficiency, and suggests reforms, some 
 wisely conceived, others not so wisely, with the 
 business-like, confident air of one who knows what 
 he is talking about. 
 
 Now I open the prospectus in which our Navy 
 League started out to make everyone's flesh creep, 
 and come plump upon language of this sort : — 
 
 " It is the close, let us suppose, of our second month 
 of war. The fleet has been neglected, and has been 
 overwhelmed, unready and unprepared. We have been 
 beaten twice at sea, and our enemies have established 
 no accidental superiority, but a permanent and over- 
 whelming one. The telegraph cables have been severed, 
 one and all ; these islands are in darkness " — 
 
 211
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 for presumably the gas-mains, as well as the cables, 
 have been " severed " (imposing word ! ) — 
 
 — " under a heavy cloud of woe. Invasion is in the air ; 
 our armies are mustering in the south. We are cut off 
 from the world, and can only fitfully perceive what is 
 happening. Our liners have been captured or sunk on 
 the high seas ; our ocean tramps are in our enemies' 
 hands ; British trade is dead, killed by the wholesale 
 ravages of the hostile cruisers. Our ports are insulted 
 or held up to ransom ; when news reaches us from India 
 it is to the effect that the enemy is before our troops, a 
 native insurrection behind. Malta has fallen, and our 
 outlying positions are passing from our hands. Food is 
 contraband, and may not be imported. Amid the jeers 
 of Europe 'the nation of shopkeepers' is writhing in 
 its death agony." 
 
 Pretty, is it not? But let us have just a little 
 more. 
 
 "COMMERCIAL COLLAPSE. 
 
 "And what of the internal, of the social position? 
 Consols have fallen to nearly 30 ; our vast investments 
 in India have been lost ; trade no longer exists. . . . 
 The railways have no traffic to carry. . . . Banks and 
 companies are failing daily. . . The East End of London 
 is clamouring for bread and peace at any price. If we 
 fall, we fall for ever. . . . The working man has to 
 choose whether he will have lighter taxation for the 
 moment, starvation and irretrievable ruin for the 
 future . . ." 
 
 212
 
 JULY 
 
 — and so on, till Z stands for Zero, or nothing at all. 
 Or, as the late Mr. Lear preferred to write : — 
 
 " Z said, ' Here is a box of Zinc. Get in, my little 
 
 master ! 
 We '11 shut you up : we '11 nail you down : we will, my 
 
 little master ! 
 We think we 've all heard quite enough of this your 
 
 sad disaster ! ' " 
 
 To speak as seriously as may be, the language is 
 no longer hortatory, like Holland's, but minatory, 
 even comminatory. It is (as its author would not 
 deny) the language of panic deliberately employed, 
 a calculated attempt to strengthen the materiel of 
 the navy at the cost of Englishmen's fears. Now 
 let me define my feeling towards the Navy League. 
 As an ordinary British citizen, I must heartily 
 approve its aim of strengthening the navy and 
 keeping it efficient. As an ordinary reasonable 
 man, I must admit that its efforts, if rightly 
 directed, may be of great national service. But 
 language such as I have quoted must (so far as it is 
 not merely contemptible) be merely demoralising, 
 and anyone who works on the fears of a nation — 
 and especially of a nation which declines conscription 
 and its one undoubted advantage of teaching men 
 what war means — does a harm which is none the 
 less wicked for being incalculable. These Navy 
 
 213
 
 FKOM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Leaguers cry incessantly for more material strength. 
 They tell us that in material strength we should at 
 least be equal to any two other countries. A few 
 months pass, and then, their appetite growing with 
 the terror it feeds upon, they insist that we must be 
 equal to any three other countries. Also " it does 
 not appear," they sagely remark, "that Nelson and 
 his contemporaries left any record as to what the 
 proportion of the blockading should bear (sic) to 
 one blockaded" — a curious omission of Nelson's, 
 to be sure ! He may perhaps have held that it 
 depended on the quality of the antagonists. 
 
 To this a few ordinary stupid Britons like myself 
 have always answered that no amount of materiel 
 can ever replace morale; and that all such panic- 
 making is a mischevious attempt to lower the breed, 
 and the more mischievous because its mischief may 
 for a while be imperceptible. We can see our war- 
 ships growing : we cannot see the stamina decaying ; 
 yet it is our stamina on which we must rely finally 
 in the fatal hour of trial. We said this, and we 
 were laughed at ; insulted as unpatriotic — a word of 
 which one may say in kindness that it would not 
 so readily leap to the lips of professional patriots 
 if they were able to understand what it means and, 
 by consequence, how much it hurts. 
 
 Yes, and behold, along comes Admiral Togo, and 
 at one stroke proves that we were simply, absolutely 
 
 214
 
 JULY 
 
 and henceforward incontestably right ! What were 
 our little three-power experts doing on the morrow 
 of Togo's victory ? They are making irrelevant 
 noises in the halfpenny press, explaining how 
 Admiral Togo did it with an inferior force, and in a 
 fashion that belies all their axioms. But I turn to 
 The Times and I read : — 
 
 " The event shows that mere material equality is but 
 as dust in the balance when weighed in the day of battle 
 against superiority of moral equipment." 
 
 — which, when you come to think of it, is precisely 
 what Bacon meant when he wrote : — 
 
 " Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, 
 Goodly Races of Horse, Chariots of Warre. Elephants, 
 Ordnance, Artillery and the like : all this is but a Sheep 
 in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition of the 
 People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) 
 in Armies importeth not much where the People is of 
 weake Courage : For (as Virgil saith) it never troubles 
 a Wolfe how many the Sheepe be." 
 
 Do our friends of the Navy League seriously 
 believe that a principle as old as humankind can 
 be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine 
 or of some novelty in guns ? Even in their notions 
 of what material strength means I hold them to 
 be mistaken. The last resource which a nation 
 ought to neglect is its financial credit. It was 
 
 215
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Walpole's long policy of peace which made possible 
 Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger 
 conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a 
 nation's cowardice to raise money for its protection. 
 An old text, my masters ! It seems a long while 
 that some of us were preaching it in vain until 
 Admiral Togo came along and proved it. 
 
 I observe that a Member of Parliament for a 
 West of England constituency (a better fellow than 
 Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments 
 with which these precious experts attacked me ; that 
 because I sometimes write novels I cannot be 
 supposed to think seriously on public affairs. My 
 only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral 
 view of the province of a man of letters consider 
 him worthy to pay income-tax. 
 
 I pass over some tempting reflections on the queer 
 anomaly that this prohibition should be addressed 
 (as it so often is) by writers to writers, by newspaper 
 writers to men who write books, and (so far as a 
 distinction can be drawn) by men who write in a 
 hurry to men who write deliberately. I wish to 
 look quietly into the belief on which it rests and 
 to inquire how that belief was come by. 
 
 There certainly was a time when such a belief 
 would have been laughed at as scarcely reasonable 
 
 216
 
 JULY 
 
 enough to be worth discussing. And that time, oddly- 
 enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest 
 era of the world's literature, the greatest era of 
 political discovery, and the greatest era of Empire- 
 making. The men who made Athens and the men 
 who made Rome would have disputed (I fear some- 
 what contemptuously) the axiom on which my friend 
 the West Country member builds his case. They 
 held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters 
 ought not to work in cloistral isolation, removed 
 from public affairs, and indifferent to them ; that on 
 the contrary they are direct servants of their State, 
 and have a peculiar call to express themselves on 
 matters of public moment. To convince you that 
 I am not advancing any pet theory of my own let 
 me present it in the words of a ^rave and judicious 
 student, Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of 
 Poetry at Oxford : — 
 
 " The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek 
 conception of art and morals. For though, in the view 
 of the philosopher, the virtue of the good citizen was 
 not always necessarily identical with the virtue of the 
 individual man, and though, in the city of Athens at 
 all events, a large amount of life was possible to the 
 individual apart from public interests, yet it is none the 
 less true that the life of the individual in every Greek 
 city was in reality moulded by the customary life, 
 tradition and character, in one intranslatable word, by 
 the ?j6ov of the State. Out of this native soil grew that 
 
 217
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 recognised, though not necessarily public, system of 
 education (wo\iTt/t?) irtufeia), consisting of reading and 
 writing, music and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle 
 themselves accepted as the basis of the constitution of 
 the State. But this preliminary education was only the 
 threshold to a subsequent system of political training, of 
 which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an oppor- 
 tunity of availing himself by his right to participate in 
 public affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics 
 themselves were an instrument of individual refinement. 
 ' The magistrates,' said he, in his great funeral oration, 
 ' who discharge public trusts, fulfil their domestic duties 
 also ; the private citizen, while engaged in professional 
 business, has competent knowledge of public affairs ; for 
 we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof 
 from these latter not as harmless, but as useless. More- 
 over, we always hear and pronounce on public matters 
 when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps strike out 
 for ourselves correct reasonings upon them ; far from 
 accounting discussion an impediment to action, we 
 complain only if we are not told what is to be done 
 before it becomes our duty to do it.' 
 
 "The strenuous exertion of the faculties of the indi- 
 vidual in the service of the State, described in these 
 eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions 
 of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 
 ' political ' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the 
 poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, 
 as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. 
 It prevailed most strongly through the period between 
 the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, 
 and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae 
 
 218
 
 1 
 
 *? 
 
 JULY 
 
 and Eumenides of iEschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, 
 the Clouds of Aristophanes, the History of Thucydides 
 and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment 
 being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the 
 souls of those who risked their lives at Marathon." — 
 History of English Poetry, vol. i., c 2. 
 
 In the most brilliant age of Greece, then, and 
 of Greek art and letters, the civic spirit was the 
 inspiring spirit. But as the Greek cities sank one *-. 
 by one before the Macedonian power and forfeited"*, '^ 
 their liberties, this civic spirit died for lack ofv ' r- 
 nourishment and exercise, and literature was driven^, • y 
 to feed on itself — which is about the worst thing ■* «> 
 that can ever happen to it, and one of the worst \ ^ 
 things that can happen to a nation. The old 
 political education gave place to an "encyclopaedic" 
 education. The language fell into the hands of 
 grammarians and teachers of rhetoric, whose in- 
 ventions may have a certain interest of their own, 
 but — to quote Mr. Courthope again — no longer 
 reflect the feelings and energies of free political life. 
 
 Roman literature drives home the same, or a 
 similar, moral. "The greatness of Rome was as 
 entirely civic in its origin as that of any Greek city, 
 and, like the Greek cities, Rome in the days of her 
 freedom, and while she was still fighting for the 
 mastery, preserved a system of political education, 
 both in the hearth and the Senate, which was suited 
 
 219 

 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to 
 Plutarch, ' wrote histories for his son, with his own 
 hand, in large characters; so that without leaving 
 his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the 
 illustrious actions of the ancient Romans and the 
 customs of his country': and what is of importance 
 to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even after 
 the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational 
 ideal was felt to be the foundation of Roman great- 
 ness by the orators and poets who adorned the golden 
 age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at 
 once the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's 
 eloquence, and still acts as its antiseptic. It breaks 
 through the conventional forms of Virgil's Eclogues 
 and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such 
 passages as the famous eulogy — 
 
 "Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra, 
 Nee pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus 
 Laudibus Italiae certent. . . ." 
 
 It closes the last Georgic on a high political note. 
 
 Avowedly it inspires the sEncid. It permeates all 
 
 that Horace wrote. These two poets never tire of 
 
 calling on their countrymen to venerate the Roman 
 
 virtues, to hold fast by the old Sabine simplicity 
 
 and 
 
 " Pure religion breathing household laws." 
 
 Again, when the mischief was done, and Rome 
 
 220
 
 JULY 
 
 had accepted the Alexandrine model of education 
 and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old 
 spirit in his denunciation of the hundred and more 
 trivialities which the new spirit engendered. It 
 was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot expect 
 quite the same shout from a man who leads a 
 forlorn sortie, and a man who defends a proud 
 citadel while yet it is merely threatened. But, 
 allowing for changed circumstances, you will find 
 that Juvenal's is just the old civic spirit turned to 
 fierceness by despair. And he strikes out unerringly 
 enough at the ministers of Rome's decline— at the 
 poets who chatter and the rhetoricians who declaim 
 on merely "literary" topics; the rich who fritter 
 away life on private luxuries and the pursuit of 
 trivial aims; the debased Greek with his "smattering 
 of encyclopaedic knowledge," but no devotion to 
 the city in which he only hopes to make money. 
 
 Now is this civic spirit in literature (however 
 humble its practitioners) one which England can 
 easily afford to dispise? So far as I know, it has been 
 reserved for an age of newspapers to declare explicitly 
 that such a spirit is merely mischievous ; that a poet 
 ought to be a man of the study, isolated amid the stir 
 of passing events, serenely indifferent to his country's 
 fortunes, or at least withholding his gift (allowed, 
 with magnificent but unconscious irony, to be 
 "divine") from that general contribution to the 
 
 221
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 public wisdom in which journalists make so brave 
 a show. He may, if he have the singular luck to 
 be a Laureate, be allowed to strike his lyre and sing 
 of an accouchement ; this being about the only event 
 on which politicians and journalists have not yet 
 claimed the monopoly of offering practical advice. 
 But farther he may hardly go : and all because a 
 silly assertion has been repeated until second-rate 
 minds confuse it with an axiom. People of a 
 certain class of mind seem capable of believing 
 anything they see in print, provided they see it 
 often. For these, the announcement that some- 
 body's lung tonic possesses a peculiar virtue has 
 only to be repeated at intervals along a railway 
 line, and with each repetition the assurance becomes 
 more convincing, until towards the journey's end 
 it wears the imperativeness almost of a revealed 
 truth. And yet no reasonable inducement to belief 
 has been added by any one of these repetitions. 
 The whole thing is a psychological trick. The 
 moral impressiveness of the first placard beyond 
 Westbourne Park Station depends entirely on 
 whether you are travelling from London to 
 Birmingham, or from Birmingham to London. 
 A mind which yields itself to this illusion could 
 probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale 
 pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were 
 anyone interested in enforcing such a harmless 
 
 222
 
 JULY 
 
 proposition : and I have no doubt that the Man in 
 the Street has long since accepted the reiterated 
 axiom that a poet should hold aloof from public 
 affairs, having no more capacity than a child for 
 understanding their drift. 
 
 Yet, as a matter of fact, the cry is just a cant 
 party trick, used by each party in its turn. Mr. 
 Kipling writes " Cleared," Mr. Alfred Austin hymns 
 "Jameson's Ride," and forthwith the Liberals lift 
 hands and voices in horror. Mr. Watson denounces 
 the Armenian massacres or the Boer War, and the 
 Unionists can hardly find words to express their 
 pained surprise. Mr. Swinburne inveighed against 
 Irishmen, and delighted a party ; inveighed against 
 the Czar, and divided a whole Front Bench between 
 shocked displeasure and half-humorous astonishment 
 that a poet should have any opinions about Russia, 
 or, having some, should find anybody to take them 
 seriously. It is all cant, my friends — nothing but cant ; 
 and at its base lies the old dispute between principle 
 and casuistry. If politics and statecraft rest ulti- 
 mately on principles of right and wrong, then a poet 
 has as clear a right as any man to speak upon them : 
 as clear a right now as when Tennyson lifted his 
 voice on behalf of the Fleet, or Wordsworth penned 
 his "Two Voices" sonnet, or Milton denounced the 
 massacres at Piedmont. While this nation retains a 
 conscience, its poets have a clear right and a clear 
 
 223
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 call to be the voice of that conscience. They may 
 err, of course ; they may mistake the voice of party 
 for the voice of conscience: "Jameson's Ride" and 
 "The Year of Shame" — one or both — may misread 
 that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by 
 their Tightness or wrongness, and again judge them 
 by their merits or defects as literature. Only do 
 not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral 
 conviction that is in him. 
 
 If, on the other hand, politics be a mere affair of 
 casuistry ; or worse — a mere game of opportunism in 
 which he excels who hits on the cleverest expedient 
 for each several crisis as it occurs ; then indeed you 
 may bid the poet hush the voice of principle, and 
 listen only to the sufficiently dissonant instruction 
 of those specialists at the game who make play in 
 Parliament and the press. If politics be indeed that 
 base thing connoted by the term " drift of public 
 affairs," then the axiom rests on wisdom after all. 
 The poet cannot be expected to understand the 
 "drift," and had better leave it to these specialists 
 in drifting. 
 
 But if you search, you will find that poetry — rare 
 gift as it is, and understood by so few — has really 
 been exerting an immense influence on public 
 opinion all the while that we have been deluged 
 with assertions of this unhappy axiom. Why, I 
 dare to say that one-half of the sense of Empire 
 
 224
 
 JULY 
 
 which now dominates political thought in Great 
 Britain has been the creation of her poets. The 
 public, if it will but clear its mind of cant, is 
 grateful enough for such poetry as Mr. Kipling's 
 "Flag of England" and Mr. Henley's "England, 
 my England " ; and gratefully recognises that the 
 spirit of these songs has passed on to thousands of 
 men, women, and children, who have never read a 
 line of Mr. Henley's or Mr. Kipling's composition. 
 
 As for the axiom, it is merely the complement of 
 that " Art for Art's sake " chatter which died a 
 dishonoured death but a short while ago, and which 
 it is still one of the joys of life to have outlived. 
 You will remember how loftily we were assured that 
 Art had nothing to do with morality : that the 
 novelist, e.g. who composed tales of human 
 conduct, had no concern with ethics — that is to 
 say with the principles of human conduct : that 
 "Art's only business was to satisfy Art," and so 
 forth. Well, it is all over now, and packed away 
 in the rag-bag of out-worn paradoxes; and we are 
 left to enjoy the revived freshness of the simple 
 truth that an artist exists to serve his art, and his 
 art to serve men and women. 
 
 225 
 16
 
 A u ^ 
 
 ust 
 
 AS it was reported to me, the story went that one 
 Sunday morning in August a family stood in a 
 window not far from this window of mine — the 
 window of an hotel coffee-room — and debated where 
 to go for divine worship. They were three : father, 
 mother, and daughter, arrived the night before from 
 the Midlands, to spend their holiday. " The fisher- 
 folk down here are very religious," said the father, 
 contemplating the anchored craft — yachts, trading- 
 steamers, merchantmen of various rigs and nation- 
 alities — in which he supposed the native population 
 to go a-fishing on week-days : for he had been told 
 in the Midlands that we were fisher-folk. " Plymouth 
 Brethren mostly, I suppose," said the wife : " we 
 changed at Plymouth." "Bristol." "Was it 
 Bristol ? Well, Plymouth was the last big town we 
 stopped at : I am sure of that. And this is on 
 the same coast, isn't it ?" "What are Plymouth 
 Brethren ? " the daughter asked. " Oh, well, my 
 dear, I expect they are very decent, earnest people. 
 It won't do us any harm to attend their service, if 
 
 226
 
 AUGUST 
 
 they have one. What I say is, when you 're away 
 on holiday, do as the Romans do." The father had 
 been listening with an unprejudiced air, as who 
 should say, " I am here by the seaside for rest and 
 enjoyment." He called to the waiter, "What places 
 of worship have you ? " The waiter with professional 
 readiness hinted that he had some to suit all tastes, 
 "Church of England, Wesleyan, Congregational, 
 
 Bible Christian " " Plymouth Brethren ? " The 
 
 waiter had never heard of them : they had not, at 
 any rate, been asked for within his recollection. He 
 retired crestfallen. " That 's the worst of these 
 waiters," the father explained : " they get 'em down 
 for the season from Lord knows where, Germany 
 perhaps, and they can tell you nothing of the place." 
 " But this one is not a German, and he told me last 
 night he'd been here for years." "Well, the 
 question is, Where we are to go? Here, Ethel" — 
 as a second daughter entered, buttoning her gloves — 
 " your mother can't make up her mind what place of 
 worship to try." " Why, father, how can you ask ? 
 We must go to the Church, of course — I saw it 
 from the 'bus — and hear the service in the fine old 
 Cornish language." 
 
 Now, I suspect that the friend to whom I am 
 indebted for this story introduced a few grace-notes 
 into his report. But it is a moral story in many 
 respects, and I give it for the sake of the one or two 
 
 227
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 morals which may be drawn from it. In the first 
 place, absurd as these people appear, their ignorance 
 but differs by a shade or two from the knowledge of 
 certain very learned people of my acquaintance. 
 That is to say, they know about as much concerning 
 the religion of this corner of England to-day as the 
 archaeologists, for all their industry, know concerning 
 the religion of Cornwall before it became subject to 
 the See of Canterbury in the reign of Athelstan, 
 a.d. 925-40 ; and their hypotheses were constructed 
 on much the same lines. Nay, the resemblance in 
 method and in the general muddle of conclusions 
 obtained would have been even more striking had 
 these good persons mixed up Plymouth Brethren 
 (founded in 1830) with the Pilgrim Fathers who 
 sailed out of Plymouth in 1620, and are already 
 undergoing the process of mythopceic conversion 
 into Deucalions and Pyrrhas of the United States of 
 America. Add a slight confusion of their tenets with 
 those of Mormonism, or at least a disposition to lay 
 stress on all discoverable points of similarity between 
 Puritans and Mormons, and really you have a not 
 unfair picture of the hopeless mess into which our 
 researchers in the ancient religions of Cornwall have 
 honestly contrived to plunge themselves and us. It 
 was better in the happy old days when we all 
 believed in the Druids ; when the Druids explained 
 everything, and my excellent father grafted mistletoe 
 
 228
 
 AUGUST 
 
 upon his apple-trees — in vain, because nothing will 
 persuade the mistletoe to grow clown here. But 
 nobody believes in the Druids just now : and the old 
 question of the Cassiterides has never been solved to 
 general satisfaction : and the Indian cowrie found in 
 a barrow at Land's End, the tiny shell which raised 
 such a host of romantic conjectures and inspired 
 Mr. Canton to write his touching verses : — 
 
 '& 
 
 " What year was it that blew 
 
 The Aryan's wicker-work canoe 
 Which brought the shell to English land ? 
 What prehistoric man or woman's hand, 
 With what intent, consigned it to this grave — 
 This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's 
 last wave ? 
 
 " Beside it in the mound 
 
 A charmed bead of flint was found. 
 Some woman surely in this place 
 Covered with flowers a little baby-face, 
 And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast ; 
 And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless 
 West? 
 
 * * * * 
 
 "No man shall ever know. 
 
 It happened all so long ago 
 That this same childless woman may 
 Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay 
 And watched for tin-ships that no longer came, 
 Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman 
 flame." 
 
 220,
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 This cowrie — are we even certain that it was Indian? 
 — that it differed so unmistakably from the cowries 
 discoverable by twos and threes at times on a little 
 beach off which I cast anchor half a dozen times 
 every summer ? I speak as a man anxious to get at 
 a little plain knowledge concerning the land of his 
 birth, and the researchers seem honestly unable to 
 give me any that does not tumble to pieces even in 
 their own hands. For — and this seems the one 
 advance made — the researchers themselves are 
 honest nowadays. Their results may be disappoint- 
 ing, but at least they no longer bemuse themselves 
 and us with the fanciful and even mystical specula- 
 tions their predecessors indulged in. Take the 
 case of our inscribed stones and wayside crosses. 
 Cornwall is peculiarly rich in these : of crosses alone 
 it possesses more than three hundred. But when 
 we make inquiry into their age we find ourselves in 
 almost complete fog. The merit of the modern 
 inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he 
 acknowledges the fog, and does not pretend to guide 
 us out of it by haphazard hypotheses propounded 
 with pontifical gravity and assurance — which was 
 the way of that erratic genius, the Rev. R. S. 
 Hawker : — 
 
 "Wheel-tracks in old Cornwall there were none, but 
 there w r ere strange and narrow paths across the moor- 
 lands, which, the forefathers said, in their simplicity, 
 
 230
 
 AUGUST 
 
 were first traced by Angels' feet. These, in truth, were 
 trodden and worn by religious men : by the Pilgrim as 
 he paced his way towards his chosen and votive bourne ; 
 or by the Palmer, whose listless footsteps had neither a 
 fixed Kebla nor future abode. Dimly visible, by the 
 darker hue of the crushed grass, these strait and narrow 
 roads led the traveller along from one Hermitage to 
 another Chapelry, or distant and inhabited cave ; or the 
 byeways turned aside to reach some legendary spring, 
 until at last, far, far away, the winding track stood still 
 upon the shore, where St. Michael of the Mount rebuked 
 the dragon from his throne of rock above the seething 
 sea. But what was the wanderer's guide along the bleak 
 unpeopled surface of the Cornish moor ? The Wayside 
 Cross ! . . ." 
 
 Very pretty, no doubt ! but, unlike the Wayside 
 Cross, this kind of writing leads nowhere. We 
 want Mr. Hawker's authority for what " the fore- 
 fathers said, in their simplicity " ; without that, what 
 the forefathers said resembles what the soldier said 
 in being inadmissible as evidence. We want Mr. 
 Hawker's authority for saying that these paths "in 
 truth, were trodden and worn by religious men." 
 Nay we want his authority for saying that there 
 were any paths at all ! The hypotheses of symbolism 
 are even worse ; for these may lead to anything. 
 Mr. Langdon was seriously told on one occasion 
 that the four holes of a cross represented the four 
 evangelists. "This," says he plaintively, "it will be 
 
 231
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 admitted, is going a little too far, as nothing else but 
 four holes could be the result of a ring and cross 
 combined." At Phillack, in the west of Cornwall, 
 there is part of a coped stone having a rude cable 
 mounting along the top of the ridge. Two sapient 
 young archaeologists counted the remaining notches 
 of this cable, and, finding they came to thirty-two, 
 decided at once that they represented our Lord's 
 age ! They were quite certain, having counted them 
 twice. In fact, there seems to be nothing that 
 symbolism will not prove. Do you meet with a 
 pentacle? Its five points are the fingers of Omni- 
 potence. With a six-pointed star ? Then Omni- 
 potence has taken an extra finger, to include the 
 human nature of the Messiah : and so on. It 
 reminds one of the Dilly Song: — 
 
 " I will sing you Five, O ! " 
 
 " What is your Five, O ? " 
 
 " Five it is the Dilly Bird that 's never seen 
 
 but heard, O ! " 
 " I will sing you Six, O ! . . ." 
 
 And six is "The Cherubim Watchers," or "The 
 Crucifix," or "The Cheerful Waiters," or "The 
 Ploughboys under the Bowl," or whatever local 
 fancy may have hit on and made traditional. 
 
 The modern researcher is honest and sticks to 
 facts ; but there are next to no facts. And when 
 
 232
 
 AUGUST 
 
 he comes to a tentative conclusion, he must hedge it 
 about with so many " ifs," that practically he leaves 
 us in total indecision. Nothing, for instance, can 
 exceed the patient industry displayed in the late 
 Mr. William Copeland Borlase's Age of the Saints 
 ■ — a monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall : 
 but, in a way, no more hopeless book was ever 
 penned. The author confessed it, indeed, on his 
 last page. " There seems to be little ground for 
 hope that we shall be ever able to gain a perfect!}' 
 true insight into the history of the epoch with which 
 we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes 
 of so tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put 
 it, to be not unlike that of gathering up the broken 
 pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the 
 hope of fitting them together so as to make one 
 large and perfect vase, but finding during the process 
 that they belong to several vessels, not one of which 
 is capable of restoration as a whole, though some 
 faint notion of the pristine shape of each may be 
 gained from the general pattern and contour of its 
 shards. All that can be gained from the materials at 
 hand is a reasonable probability that Cornwall, before 
 it bent its neck to the See of Canterbury, had been 
 invaded by three distinct streams of missionary effort 
 — from Ireland, from Wales, and from Brittany 
 But even in what order they came no man can say 
 for certain. 
 
 233
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 The young lady in my friend's story wished to 
 hear the service of the Church of England in " the 
 fine old Cornish language." Alas ! if Edward VI. 
 and his advisers had been as wise, the religious 
 history of Cornwall, during two centuries at least, 
 had been a happier one. It was liberal to give 
 Englishmen a Liturgy in their own tongue ; but it 
 was neither liberal nor conspicuously intelligent to 
 impose the same upon the Cornishmen, who neither 
 knew nor cared about the English language. It may 
 be easy to lay too much stress upon this grievance ; 
 since Cornishmen of this period had a knack of 
 being " agin the government, anyway," and had 
 contrived two considerable rebellions less than sixty 
 years before, one because they did not see their way 
 to subscribing £2,500 towards fighting King James IV. 
 of Scotland for protecting Perkin Warbeck, and the 
 other under Perkin's own leadership. But it was at 
 least a serious grievance ; and the trouble began in 
 the first year of Edward VI.'s reign. The King 
 began by issuing several Injunctions about religion ; 
 and among them, this one : That all images found in 
 churches, for divine worship or otherwise, should be 
 pulled down and cast forth out of those churches; 
 and that all preachers should persuade the people 
 from praying to saints, or for the dead, and from the 
 use of beads, ashes, processions, masses, dirges, and 
 praying to God publicly in an unknown tongue. A 
 
 234
 
 AUGUST 
 
 Mr. Bod}', one of the commissioners appointed to 
 carry out this Injunction, was pulling down images 
 in Helston church, near the Lizard, when a priest 
 stabbed him with a knife : " of which wound he 
 instantly fell dead in that place. And though the 
 murderer was taken and sent up to London, tried, 
 found guilty of murder in Westminster Hall, and 
 executed in Smithfield, yet the Cornish people 
 flocked together in a tumultuous and rebellious 
 manner, by the instigation of their priests in divers 
 parts of the shire or county, and committed many 
 barbarities and outrages in the same." These 
 disturbances ended in Arundel's rebellion, the purpose 
 of which was to demand the restoration of the old 
 Liturgy ; and, in truth, the Seven Articles under 
 which thev formulated this demand must have 
 
 J 
 
 seemed very moderate indeed to their conservative 
 minds. The rebellion failed, of course, after a five 
 weeks' siege of Exeter; and was bloodily revenged, 
 with something of the savage humour displayed by 
 Jeffreys in punishing a later Western rebellion. 
 This part of the business was committed to Sir 
 Anthony (alias W 7 illiam) Kingston, Knight, a Glou- 
 cestershire man, as Provost Marshal ; and " it is 
 memorable what sport he made, by virtue of his 
 office, upon men in misery." Here are one or two 
 of his merry conceits, which read strangely like the 
 jests reported by Herodotus : — 
 
 235
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 (i) "One Boyer, Mayor of Bodmin in Cornwall, had 
 been amongst the rebels, not willingly, but enforced : to 
 him the Provost sent word he would come and dine with 
 him : for whom the Mayor made great provision. A 
 little before dinner, the Provost took the Mayor aside, 
 and whispered him in the ear, that an execution must 
 that day be done in the town, and therefore required to 
 have a pair of gallows set up against dinner should be done. 
 The Mayor failed not of the charge. Presently after 
 dinner the Provost, taking the Mayor by the hand, 
 intreated him to lead him where the gallows was, which, 
 when he beheld, he asked the Mayor if he thought them 
 to be strong enough. 'Yes' (said the Mayor), 'doubtless 
 they are.' ' Well, then ' (said the Provost), ' get you up 
 speedily, for they are provided for you.' ' I hope ' 
 (answered the Mayor), ' you mean not as you speak.' 
 'In faith' (said the Provost), 'there is no remedy, for 
 you have been a busie rebel.' And so without respite 
 or defence he was hanged to death ; a most uncourteous 
 part for a guest to offer his host." — Sir Rich. Baker, 1641. 
 
 (2) " Near the same place dwelt a Miller, who had 
 been a busie actor in that rebellion ; who, fearing the 
 approach of the Marshal, told a sturdy fellow, his 
 servant, that he had occasion to go from home, and 
 therefore bid him, that if any man came to inquire after 
 the miller, he should not speak of him, but say that 
 himself was the miller, and had been so for three years 
 before. So the Provost came and called for the miller, 
 when out comes the servant and saith he was the man. 
 The Provost demanded how long he had kept the mill ? 
 ' These three years ' (answered the servant). Then the 
 Provost commanded his men to lay hold on him and 
 
 236
 
 AUGUST 
 
 hang him on the next tree. At this the fellow cried out 
 that he was not the miller, but the miller's man. ' Nay, 
 sir ' (said the Provost), • I will take you at your word, 
 and if thou beest the miller, thou art a busie knave ; if 
 thou beest not, thou art a false lying knave ; and howso- 
 ever, thou canst never do thy master better service than 
 to hang for him ' ; and so, without more ado, he was 
 dispatched." — Ibid. 
 
 The story of one Mayow, whom Kingston hanged 
 at a tavern signpost in the town of St. Columb, has 
 a human touch. "Tradition saith that his crime 
 was not capital ; and therefore his wife was advised 
 by her friends to hasten to the town after the 
 Marshal and his men, who had him in custody, and beg 
 his life. Which accordingly she prepared to do ; and 
 to render herself the more amiable petitioner before 
 the Marshal's eyes, this dame spent so much time in 
 attiring herself and putting on her French hood, 
 then in fashion, that her husband was put to death 
 before her arrival." 
 
 Such was the revenge wreaked on a population 
 which the English of the day took so little pains to 
 understand that (as I am informed) in an old 
 geography book of the days of Elizabeth, Cornwall 
 is described as " a foreign country on that side of 
 England next to Spain." 
 
 # ■» # # 
 
 And now that the holiday season is upon us, and 
 
 237
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the visitor stalks our narrow streets, perhaps he will 
 not resent a word or two of counsel in exchange for 
 the unreserved criticism he lavishes upon us. We 
 are flattered by his frequent announcement that on 
 the whole he finds us clean and civil and fairly 
 honest ; and respond with the assurance that we are 
 always pleased to see him so long as he behaves 
 himself. We, too, have found him clean and fairly 
 honest ; and if we have anything left to desire, it is 
 only that he will realise, a little more constantly, the 
 extent of his knowledge of us, and the extent to 
 which his position as a visitor should qualify his 
 bearing towards us. I address this hint particularly 
 to those who make copy out of their wanderings in 
 our midst ; and I believe it has only to be suggested, 
 and it will be at once recognised for true, that the 
 proper attitude for a visitor in a strange land is one 
 of modesty. He may be a person of quite consider- 
 able importance in his own home, even if that home 
 be London ; but when he finds himself on strange 
 soil he may still have a deal to learn from the people 
 who have lived on that soil for generations, adapted 
 themselves to its conditions and sown it with 
 memories in which he cannot have a share. 
 
 In truth, many of our visitors would seem to 
 suffer from a confusion of thought. Possibly the 
 Visitors' Books at hotels and places of public resort 
 may have fostered this. Our guest makes a stay of 
 
 238
 
 AUGUST 
 
 a few weeks in some spot to which he has been 
 attracted by its natural beauty : he idles and watches 
 the inhabitants as they go about their daily business; 
 and at the end he deems it not unbecoming to record 
 his opinion that they are intelligent, civil, honest, 
 and sober — or the reverse. He mistakes. It is he 
 who has been on probation during these weeks — his 
 intelligence, his civility, his honesty, his sobriety. 
 For my part, I look forward to a time when Visitors' 
 Books shall record the impressions which visitors 
 leave behind them, rather than those which they 
 bear away. For an instance or two : — 
 
 (i) " The Rev. and Mrs. — ■ — , of , arrived here in 
 
 August, 1897, and spent six weeks. We found them 
 clean, and invariably sober and polite. We hope they 
 will come often. 
 
 (2) " Mr. X and his friend Y, from Z, came over here, 
 attired in flannels and the well-known blazer of the 
 Tooting Bee Cricket Club. They shot gulls in the 
 harbour, and made themselves a public nuisance by 
 constant repetition of a tag from a music-hall song, with 
 an indecent sub-intention. Their behaviour towards the 
 young women of this town was offensive. Seen in 
 juxtaposition with the natural beauties of this coast, 
 they helped one to realise how small a thing (under 
 certain conditions) is man. 
 
 (3) " Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so and family spent a 
 fortnight here. The lady complained that the town was 
 
 239
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 dull, which we (who would have the best reason to 
 complain of such a defect) do not admit. She announced 
 her opinion in the street, at the top of her voice; and 
 expressed annoyance that there should be no band, to 
 play of an evening. She should have brought one. 
 Her husband carried about a note-book and asked us 
 questions about our private concerns. He brought no 
 letters of introduction, and we do not know his business. 
 The children behaved better. 
 
 (4) " Mr. Blank arrived here on a bicycle, and 
 charmed us with the geniality of his address. We hope 
 to see him again, as he left without discharging a number 
 of small debts." 
 
 It is, I take it, because the Briton has grown 
 accustomed to invading other people's countries, 
 that he expects, when travelling, to find a polite 
 consideration which he does not import. But the 
 tourist pushes the expectation altogether too far. 
 When he arrives at a town which lays itself out to 
 attract visitors for the sake of the custom they 
 bring, he has a right to criticise, if he feel quite sure 
 he is a visitor of the sort which the town desires. This 
 is important : for a town may seek to attract visitors, 
 and yet be exceedingly unwilling to attract some 
 kinds of visitors. But should he choose to plant 
 himself upon a spot where the inhabitants ask only 
 to go about the ordinary occupations of life in 
 quietness, it is the height of impertinence to proclaim 
 that the life of the place does not satisfy his needs. 
 
 240
 
 AUGUST 
 
 Most intolerable of all is the conduct of the uninvited 
 stranger who settles for a year or two in some quiet 
 town — we suffer a deal from such persons along the 
 south-western littoral — and starts with the intention 
 of "putting a little 'go' into it," or, in another of 
 his favourite phrases, of " putting the place to 
 rights." Men of this mind are not to be reasoned 
 with ; nor is it necessary that they should be reasoned 
 with. Only, when the inevitable reaction is felt, 
 and they begin to lose their temper, I would beg 
 them not to assume too hastily that the "natives" 
 have no sense of humour. All localities have a 
 sense of humour, but it works diversely with them. 
 A man may even go on for twenty years, despising 
 his neighbours for the lack of it. But when the 
 discovery comes, he will be lucky if the remembrance 
 of it do not wake him up of nights, and keep him 
 writhing in his bed — that is, if we suppose him to 
 have a sense of humour too. 
 
 An aeronaut who had lost his bearings, descending 
 upon some farm labourers in Suffolk, demanded 
 anxiously where he was. " Why, don't you know ? 
 You be up in a balloon, bo." A pedestrian in 
 Cornwall stopped a labourer returning from work, 
 
 and asked the way to St. . "And where might 
 
 you come from ? " the labourer demanded. " I 
 don't see what affair that is of yours. I asked you 
 the way to St. ." " Well then, if you don't tell 
 
 241 
 17
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 us where you be come from, we bain't goin' to tell 
 
 you the way to St. ." It seems to me that both 
 
 of these replies contain humour, and the second a 
 deal of practical wisdom. 
 
 The foregoing remarks apply, with very little 
 modification, to those strangers who take up their 
 residence in Cornwall and, having sojourned among 
 us for a while without ever penetrating to the con- 
 fidence of the people, pass judgment on matters of 
 which, because they were above learning, knowledge 
 has been denied to them. A clergyman, dwelling in 
 a country parish where perhaps he finds himself the 
 one man of education (as he understands it), is prone 
 enough to make the mistake ; yet not more fatally 
 prone than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees 
 his unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they 
 are, bat as a clever novelist would present them to 
 amuse an upper or middle class reader. Stevenson 
 (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that 
 he could make nothing of us : — 
 
 "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, 
 
 242
 
 AUGUST 
 
 older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this 
 close esoteric family apart from neighbouring English- 
 men. 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." 
 
 This straightforward admission is worth (to my 
 mind) any half-dozen of novels written about us by 
 "foreigners "who, starting with the Mudie-convention 
 and a general sense that we are picturesque, write 
 commentaries upon what is a sealed book and deal 
 out judgments which are not only wrong, but wrong 
 with a thoroughness only possible to entire self- 
 complacency. 
 
 * ■» * * 
 
 And yet ... It seems to a Comishman so 
 easy to get at Cornish hearts — so easy even for a 
 stranger if he will approach them, as they will at 
 once respond, with that modesty which is the first 
 secret of fine manners. Some years ago I was privi- 
 leged to edit a periodical — though short-lived not 
 wholly unsuccessful — the Cornish Magazine. At the 
 end of each number we printed a page of " Cornish 
 Diamonds," as we called them — scraps of humour 
 picked up here and there in the Duchy by Cornish 
 correspondents ; and in almost all of them the 
 Cornishman was found gently laughing at himself; 
 in not one of them (so far as I remember) at the 
 
 243
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 stranger. Over and over again the jest depended on 
 our small difficulties in making our own distinctions 
 of thought understood in English. Here are a few 
 examples : — 
 
 (i) " Please God," said Aunt Mary Bunny, " if I 
 live till this evenin' and all's well I "11 send 
 for the doctor." 
 
 (2) " I don't name no names," said Uncle Billy, 
 
 " but Jack Tremenheere 's the man." 
 
 (3) " I shan't go there nor nowhere else," said 
 
 old Jane Caddy, " I shall go 'long up 
 Redruth." 
 
 (4) " I thought 'twere she, an' she thought 'twere 
 
 I," said Gracey Temby, " but when we 
 come close 'twadn't narry wan o' us." 
 
 (5) A crowd stood on the cliff watching a stranded 
 
 vessel and the lifeboat going out to her. 
 " What vessel is it ? " asked a late arrival. 
 " The Dennis Lane.'''' 
 " How many be they aboord ? " 
 "Aw, love and bless 'ee, there's three poor 
 
 dear sawls and wan old Irishman." 
 
 (6) Complainant (cross-examining defendant's 
 
 witness) : " What colour was the horse ? " 
 "Black." 
 
 2 44
 
 AUGUST 
 
 " Well, I'm not allowed to contradict you, and 
 I wouldn' for worlds: but I say he wasn't." 
 
 (7) A covey of partridges rose out of shot, flew 
 
 over the hedge, and was lost to view. 
 " Where do you think they 've gone ? " said 
 
 the sportsman to his keeper. " There 's a 
 
 man digging potatoes in the next field. 
 
 Ask if he saw them." 
 "Aw, that's old Sam Petherick : he hasna 
 
 seed 'em, he 's hard o' hearin'." 
 
 (8) Schoolmaster. — " I 'm sorry to tell you, Mr. 
 
 Minards, that your son Zebedee is little 
 better than a fool." 
 Parent. — " Naw, naw, schoolmaster; my 
 Zebedee 's no fule ; only a bit easy to teach." 
 
 [I myself know a farmer who approached the 
 head master of a Grammar School and begged for a 
 reduction in terms: "because," he pleaded, "I know 
 my son : he 's that thick you can get very little into 
 en, and I believe in payment by results."] 
 
 Here we pass from confusion of language into 
 mere confusion of thought, the classical instance of 
 which is the Mevagissey man who, having been 
 asked the old question, ' ; If a herring and a half 
 cost three-halfpence, how many can you buy for 
 a shilling ? " and having given it up and been told 
 the answer, responded brightly, " Why, o' course ! 
 
 245
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Darn me, if I wasn' thinkin' of pilchards!" I met 
 with a fair Devon rival to this story the other day in 
 the reported conversation of two farmers discussing the 
 electric light at Chagford (run by Chagford's lavish 
 water-power). " It do seem out of reason," said the 
 one, "to make vire out o' watter." " No," agreed 
 the other, "it don't seem possible: but there" — after 
 a slow pause — " 'tis butiful water to Chaggyford ! " 
 
 It was pleasant, while the Magazine lasted, to record 
 these and like simplicities : and though the voyage was 
 not long, one may recall without regret its send-off, 
 brave enough in its way : — 
 
 '"WISH 'EE WELL!' 
 
 " The ensign 's dipped ; the captain takes the wheel. 
 
 ' So long ! ' the pilot waves, and ' Wish 'ee well ! ' 
 Go little craft, and with a home-made keel 
 'Mid loftier ships, but with a heart as leal, 
 
 Learn of blue waters and the long sea swell ! 
 
 " Through the spring days we built and tackled thee, 
 Tested thy timbers, saw thy rigging sound, 
 Bent sail, and now put forth unto the sea 
 Where those leviathans, the critics, be, 
 And other monsters diversely profound. 
 
 " Some bronzed Phoenician with his pigmy freight 
 Haply thy herald was, who drave of yore 
 Deep-laden from Bolerium by the Strait 
 Of Gades, and beside his city's gate 
 Chaffered in ingots cast of Cornish ore. 
 
 246
 
 AUGUST 
 
 " So be thou fortunate as thou art bold ; 
 
 Fare, little craft, and make the world thy friend : 
 And, it may be— when all thy journey 's told 
 With anchor dropped and tattered canvas rolled, 
 And some good won for Cornwall in the end — 
 
 " Thou wilt recall, as best, a lonely beach, 
 
 And a few exiles, to the barter come, 
 Who recognised the old West-country speech, 
 And touched thee, reverent, whispering each to each — 
 
 • She comes from far — from very far— from home. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 I have a special reason for remembering The 
 Cornish Magazine, because it so happened that the 
 first number (containing these hopeful verses) was 
 put into my hands with the morning's letters as I 
 paced the garden' below this Cornish Window, 
 careless of it or of anything but a doctor's verdict 
 of life or death in the house above. The verdict 
 was for life. . . 
 
 Years ago as a child I used to devour in that 
 wonderful book Good Words for the Young, the 
 Lilliput Levee and Lilliput Lyrics of the late William 
 Brighty Rands: and among Rands' lyrics was one 
 upon "The Girl that Garibaldi kissed." Of late 
 years Rands has been coming to something like his 
 own. His verses have been republished, and that 
 excellent artist Mr. Charles Robinson has illustrated 
 
 247
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 them. But I must tell Mr. Robinson that his 
 portrait of the Girl that Garibaldi kissed does not 
 in the least resemble her. I speak with knowledge — 
 I the child who have lived to meet and know the 
 child whom Garibaldi kissed and blessed as the 
 sailors were weighing anchor to carry him out of 
 this harbour and away from England. Wild horses 
 shall not drag from me the name of that young 
 person ; because it happened — well, at an easily 
 discoverable date — and she may not care for 
 me to proclaim her age (as certainly she does not 
 look it). 
 
 " He bowed to my own daughter, 
 And Polly is her name ; 
 She wore a shirt of slaughter, 
 Of Garibaldi flame — 
 
 " Of course I mean of scarlet ; 
 
 But the girl he kissed — who knows ? — 
 May be named Selina Charlotte, 
 And dressed in yellow clothes! " 
 
 But she isn't ; and she wasn't ; for she wore a 
 scarlet pelisse as they handed her up the yacht's 
 side, and the hero took her in his arms. 
 
 "It would be a happy plan 
 
 For everything that 's human, 
 If the pet of such a man 
 Should grow to such a woman ! 
 
 248
 
 AUGUST 
 
 " If she does as much in her way 
 As he has done in his — 
 Turns bad things topsy-turvy, 
 And sad things into bliss — 
 
 " O we shall not need a survey 
 To find that little miss, 
 Grown to a woman worthy 
 Of Garibaldi's kiss ! " 
 
 Doggrel ? Yes, doggrel no doubt ! Let us pass on. 
 
 In the early numbers of our Cornish Magazine 
 a host of contributors (some of them highly dis- 
 tinguished) discussed the question, " How to develop 
 Cornwall as a holiday resort." " How to bedevil 
 it " was, I fear, our name in the editorial office for 
 this correspondence. More and more as the debate 
 went on I found myself out of sympathy with it, 
 and more and more in sympathy with a lady who 
 raised an indignant protest — 
 
 " Unless Cornishmen look to it, their country will be 
 spoilt before they know it. Already there are signs of 
 it — pitiable signs. Not many months ago I visited 
 Tintagel, which is justly one of the prides of the Duchy. 
 The 'swinging seas' are breaking against the great cliffs 
 as they broke there centuries ago when Arthur and 
 Launcelot and the Knights of the Round Table peopled 
 the place. The castle is mostly crumbled away now, 
 but some fraction of its old strength still stands to face 
 
 249
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the Atlantic gales, and to show us how walls were built 
 in the grand old days. In the valley the grass is green 
 and the gorse is yellow, and overhead the skies are blue 
 and delightful : hut facing Arthur's Castle — grinning 
 down, as it were, in derision — there is being erected a 
 modern hotel — ' built in imitation of Arthur's Castle,' as 
 one is told ! . . . There is not yet a rubbish shoot 
 over the edge of the cliff, but I do not think I am wrong 
 in stating that the drainage is brought down into that 
 cove where long ago (the story runs) the naked baby 
 Arthur came ashore on the great wave ! " 
 
 In summing up the discussion I confess with shame 
 that I temporised. It was hard to see one's native 
 country impoverished by the evil days in which 
 mining (and to a lesser degree, agriculture) had 
 fallen ; to see her population diminishing and her 
 able-bodied sons emigrating by the thousand. It is 
 all very pretty for a visitor to tell us that the charm 
 of Cornwall is its primaeval calm, that it seems to 
 sleep an enchanted sleep, and so on ; but we who 
 inhabit her wish (and not altogether from mer- 
 cenary motives) to see her something better than 
 a museum of a dead past. I temporised therefore 
 with those who suggested that Cornwall might 
 yet enrich herself by turning her natural beauty 
 to account : yet even so I had the sense to add 
 that— 
 
 " Jealous as I am for the beauty of our Duchy, and 
 
 250
 
 AUGUST 
 
 delighted when strangers admire her, I am, if possible, 
 more jealous for the character of her sons, and more 
 eager that strangers should respect them. And I do see 
 (and hope to be forgiven for seeing it) that a people 
 which lays itself out to exploit the stranger and the 
 tourist runs an appreciable risk of deterioration in 
 manliness and independence. It may seem a brutal 
 thing to say, but as I had rather be poor myself than 
 subservient, so would I liefer see my countrymen poor 
 than subservient. It is not our own boast — we have it 
 on the fairly unanimous evidence of all who have visited 
 us — that hitherto Cornishmen have been able to combine 
 independence with good manners. For Heaven's sake, 
 I say, let us keep that reputation, though at great cost ! 
 But let us at the same time face the certainty that, 
 when we begin to take pay for entertaining strangers it 
 will be a hard reputation to keep. Were it within 
 human capacity to decide between a revival of our 
 ancient industries, fishing and mining, and the develop- 
 ment of this new business, our decision would be prompt 
 enough. But it is not." 
 
 I despaired too soon. Our industries seem in 
 a fair way to revive, and with that promise I 
 recognise that even in despair my willingness to 
 temporise was foolish. For my punishment — though 
 I helped not to erect them, — hideous hotels thrust 
 themselves insistently on my sight as I walk our 
 magnificent northern cliffs, and with the thought 
 of that drain leading down to Arthur's cove 
 I am haunted by the vision of Merlin erect 
 
 251
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 above it, and by the memory of Hawker's canorous 
 lines : — 
 
 " He ceased ; and all around was dreamy night : 
 There stood Dundagel, throned ; and the great sea 
 Lay, like a strong vassal at his master's gate, 
 And, like a drunken giant, sobbed in sleep! " 
 
 252
 
 Qeptember 
 
 In the Bag, 
 
 August 30th. 
 
 r b ' 
 
 A T the village shop you may procure milk, 
 * *■ butter, eggs, peppermints, trowsers, sun- 
 bonnets, marbles, coloured handkerchiefs, and a 
 number of other necessaries, including the London 
 papers. But if you wish to pick and choose, you 
 had better buy trowsers than the London papers ; 
 for this is less likely to bring you into conflict with 
 the lady who owns the shop and asserts a prior 
 claim on its conveniences. One of us (I will call 
 him X) went ashore and asked for a London "daily." 
 " Here 's Lloyd's Weekly News for you," said the 
 lady ; " but you can't have the daily, for I haven't 
 finished reading it myself." " Very well," said I, 
 when this was reported ; " if I cannot read the 
 news I want, I will turn to and write it." So I 
 descended to the shop, and asked for a bottle of ink ; 
 since, oddly enough, there was none to be found on 
 board. The lady produced a bottle and a pen. 
 "But I don't want the pen," I objected. "They 
 
 ?55
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 go together," said she : " Whatever use is a bottle of 
 ink without a pen ? " For the life of me I could 
 discover no answer to this. I paid my penny, and 
 on returning with my purchases to the boat, I 
 propounded the following questions : — 
 
 (i) Qucere. If, as the lady argued, a bottle of ink 
 be useless without a pen, by what process of reasoning 
 did she omit a sheet of paper from her pennyworth ? 
 
 (2) Suppose that I damage or wear out this pen 
 before exhausting the bottle of ink, can she reason- 
 ably insist on my taking a second bottle as a condition 
 of acquiring a second pen ? 
 
 (3) Suppose, on the other hand, that (as I compute) 
 one pen will outlast two and a half bottles of ink ; 
 that one bottle will distil thirty thousand words; and 
 that the late James Anthony Froude (who lived close 
 by) drew his supply of writing materials from this 
 shop : how many unused pens (at a guess) must that 
 distinguished man have accumulated in the process 
 of composing his History of England ? 
 
 We sailed into Salcombe on Saturday evening, in 
 a hired yacht of twenty-eight tons, after beating 
 around the Start and Prawl against a sou'westerly 
 wind and a strong spring tide. Now the tide off the 
 Start has to be studied. To begin with, it does not 
 coincide in point of time with the tide inshore. The 
 flood, or east stream, for instance, only starts to run 
 there some three hours before it is high water at 
 
 2 54
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 Salcombe ; but, having started, runs with a ven- 
 geance, or, to be more precise, at something like 
 three knots an hour during the high springs; and 
 the consequence is a very lively race. Moreover, the 
 bottom all the way from Start Point to Bolt Tail is 
 extremely rough and irregular, which means that 
 some ten or twelve miles of vicious seas can be set 
 going on very short notice. Altogether you may 
 spend a few hours here as uncomfortably as anywhere 
 up or down Channel, with the single exception of 
 Portland Race. If you turn aside for Salcombe, 
 there is the bar to be considered ; and Salcombe bar 
 is a danger to be treated with grave respect. The 
 Channel Pilot will tell us why : — 
 
 " There is 8 ft. water at L.W. springs on the bar at 
 the entrance, but there are patches of 6 feet. Vessels 
 drawing 20 ft. can cross it {when the sea is smooth) at 
 H.W. springs, and those of 16 ft. at H.W. neaps. In 
 S. gales there is a breaking, heavy sea, and no vessel 
 should then attempt the bar; in moderate S. winds 
 vessels may take it at high water." 
 
 The bearing of these observations on the present 
 narrative will appear anon. For the present, entering 
 Salcombe with plenty of water and a moderate S.W. 
 breeze, we had nothing to distract our attention from 
 the beauty of the spot. I suppose it to be the most 
 imposing river-entrance on the south coast ; perhaps 
 
 2 55
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 the most imposing on any of the coasts of Britain. 
 But being lazy and by habit a shirker of word- 
 painting, I must have recourse to the description 
 given in Mr. Arthur Underbill's Our Silver Streak, 
 most useful and pleasant of handbooks for yachtsmen 
 cruising in the Channel : — 
 
 " As we approach Salcombe Head (part of Bolt Head), 
 its magnificent form becomes more apparent. It is said 
 to be about four hundred and thirty feet in height, but it 
 looks very much more. Its base is hollowed out into 
 numerous caverns, into which the sea dashes, while the 
 profile of the head, often rising some forty or fifty feet 
 sheer from the water, slopes back at an angle of about 
 forty- five degrees in one long upward sweep, broken in 
 the most fantastic way into numerous pinnacles and 
 needles, which remind one forcibly of the aiguilles of the 
 valley of Chamounix. I do not think that any headland 
 in the Channel is so impressive as this." 
 
 As we passed it, its needles stood out darkly 
 against a rare amber sky — such a glow as is only seen 
 for a brief while before a sunset following much rain; 
 and it had been raining, off and on, for a week past. 
 I daresay that to the weatherwise this glow signified 
 yet dirtier weather in store ; but we surrendered 
 ourselves to the charm of the hour. Unconscious 
 of their doom the little victims played. We crossed 
 the bar, sailed past the beautiful house in which 
 Froude spent so many years, sailed past the little 
 
 256
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 town, rounded a point, saw a long quiet stretch of 
 river before us, and cast anchor in deep water. The 
 address at the head of this paper is no sportive 
 invention of mine. You may verify it by the 
 Ordnance Map. We were in the Bag. 
 
 I awoke that night to the hum of wind in the 
 rigging and the patter of rain on deck. It blew and 
 rained all the morning, and at noon took a fresh 
 breath and began to blow viciously. After luncheon 
 we abandoned our project of walking to Bolt Head, 
 and chose such books from the cabin library as 
 might decently excuse an afternoon's siesta. A 
 scamper of feet fetched me out of my berth and up 
 on deck. By this time a small gale was blowing, 
 and to our slight dismay the boat had dragged her 
 anchors and carried us up into sight of Kingsbridge. 
 Luckily our foolish career was arrested for the 
 moment ; and, still more luckily, within handy 
 distance of a buoy — laid there, I believe, for the use 
 of vessels under quarantine. We carried out a 
 hawser to this buoy, and waited until the tide 
 should ease and allow us to warp down to it. Our 
 next business was with the peccant anchors. We 
 had two down — the best anchor and kedge; and 
 supposed at first that the kedge must have parted. 
 But a couple of minutes at the capstan reassured us. 
 It was the kedge which had been holding us, to the 
 extent of its small ability. And the Bag is an 
 
 257 
 18
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 excellent anchorage after all, but not if you happen 
 to get your best anchor foul of its chain. We hauled 
 up, cleared, warped down to the buoy; and then, 
 hoisting mizzen and headsails, cast loose and worked 
 back to our old quarters. 
 
 The afternoon's amusement, though exciting 
 enough in its way, was not what we had come 
 to Salcombe to seek. And since the weather pro- 
 mised nothing better, and already a heap of more or 
 less urgent letters must be gathering dust in the post 
 office at Plymouth, we resolved to beat over the bar 
 at high water next morning (this morning), and, as 
 Mr. Lang puts it, " know the brine salt on our lip?, 
 and the large air again": for there promised to be 
 plenty of both between Bolt Head and the Mewstone. 
 
 "Shun delays, they breed remorse," and "Time 
 wears all his locks before " (or, as the Fourth-form 
 boy translated it in pentameter, " Tempus habet mill as 
 posteriori comas "). The fault was mine for wasting 
 an invaluable hour among the " shy traffickers " of 
 Salcombe. By the time we worked down to the bar 
 the tide had been ebbing for an hour and a half. 
 The wind still blew strong from the south-west, and 
 the seas on the bar were not pleasant to contemplate. 
 Let alone the remoter risk of scraping on one of the 
 two shallow patches which diversify the west (and 
 
 258
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 only practicable) side of the entrance, if one of 
 those big fellows happened to stagger us at the 
 critical moment of " staying " it would pretty 
 certainly mean disaster. Also the yacht (as I began 
 by saying) was a hired one, and the captain tender 
 about his responsibility. Rather ignominiously, 
 therefore, we turned tail; and just as we did so, a 
 handsome sea, arched and green, the tallest of the 
 lot, applauded our prudence. All the same, our 
 professional pride was wounded. To stay at anchor 
 is one thing : to weigh and stand for the attempt and 
 then run home again " hard up," as a sailor would 
 say, is quite another. There was a Greek mariner, the 
 other day, put on his trial with one or two comrades 
 for murder and mutiny on the high seas. They had 
 disapproved of their captain's altering the helm, and 
 had pitched him incontinently overboard. On being 
 asked what he had to say in his defence, the prisoner 
 merely cast up his hands and sobbed, " Oh, cursed 
 hour in which we put about ! " We recalled this 
 simple but apposite story. 
 
 Having seen to our anchor and helped to snug 
 down the mainsail, I went below in the very worst of 
 tempers, to find the cabin floor littered with the 
 contents of a writing-case and a box of mixed 
 biscuits, which had broken loose in company. As I 
 stooped to collect the debris, this appeal (type-written) 
 caught my eye : — 
 
 259
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " Dear Sir, — Our paper is contemplating a Symposium 
 of literary and eminent men — 
 
 (Observe the distinction.) 
 
 — on the subject of ' What is your favourite Modern 
 Lyric ? ' I need not say how much interest would 
 attach to the opinion of one who," etc. 
 
 I put my head up the companion and addressed a 
 friend who was lacing tight the cover of the mainsail 
 viciously, with the help of his teeth. 
 
 " Look here, X," I said. " What is your favourite 
 Modern Lyric ? " 
 
 " That one," he answered (still with the lace 
 between his teeth), " which begins — 
 
 " ' Curse the people, blast the people, 
 Damn the lower orders ! ' " 
 
 X as a rule calls himself a Liberal-Conservative: 
 but a certain acerbity of temper may be forgiven in 
 a man who has just assisted (against all his instincts) 
 in an act of poltroonery. He explained, too, that it 
 was a genuine, if loosely remembered, quotation 
 from Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer. 
 "Yet in circumstances of peril," he went on, "and 
 in moments of depression, you cannot think what 
 sustenance I have derived from those lines." 
 
 "Then you had best send them up," said I, "to 
 the Daily Post. It is conducting a Symposium." 
 
 " If two wrongs do not make a right," he answered 
 
 260
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 tartly, "even less will an assembly of deadly dry 
 persons make something to drink." 
 
 # * * * 
 
 That evening, in the cabin, we held a symposium on 
 our own account and in the proper sense of the term, 
 while the rain drummed on the deck and the sky-lights. 
 
 X said, " The greatest poem written on love during 
 these fifty years — and we agree to accept love as the 
 highest theme of lyrical poetry — is George Meredith's 
 Love in the Valley. I say this and decline to argue 
 about it." 
 
 " Nor am I disposed to argue about it," I answered, 
 " for York Powell — peace to his soul for a great man 
 gone — held that same belief. In his rooms in Christ 
 Church, one night while The Oxford Book of Verse 
 was preparing and I had come to him, as everyone 
 came, for counsel. ... I take it, though, that 
 we are not searching for the absolute best but for our 
 own prime favourite. You remember what Swinburne 
 says somewhere of Hugo's Gastibelza : — 
 
 " ' Gastibelza, l'homme a la carabine, 
 
 Chantait ainsi : 
 Quelqu'un a-t-il connu Dona Sabine ? 
 
 Quelqu'un d'ici ? 
 Dansez, chantez, villageois ! la nuit gagne 
 
 Le mont Falou — 
 Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne 
 
 Me rendra fou ! ' 
 
 261
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " ' The song of songs which is Hugo's/ he calls it ; 
 and goes on to ask how often one has chanted or 
 shouted or otherwise declaimed it to himself, on 
 horseback at full gallop or when swimming at his 
 best as a boy in holiday time ; and how often the 
 matchless music, ardour, pathos of it have not 
 reduced his own ambition to a sort of rapturous 
 and adoring despair — yes, and requickened his old 
 delight in it with a new delight in the sense that he 
 will always have this to rejoice in, to adore, and to 
 recognise as something beyond the reach of man. 
 Well, that is the sense in which our poem should be 
 our favourite poem. Now, for my part, there 's a 
 page or so of Browning's Saul " 
 
 " What do you say to Meredith's Phcvbus with 
 Admctus?" interrupted X. 
 
 I looked up at him quickly, almost shamefacedly. 
 " Now, how on earth did you guess — ■ — " 
 
 X laid down his pipe, stared up at the sky-light, 
 and quoted, almost under his breath : — 
 
 " ' Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats ! 
 Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few ! ' " 
 
 Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith — 
 whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and 
 the most of it so " harsh and crabbed," as not only 
 "dull fools" suppose — beside the great poets who 
 
 262
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 have been his contemporaries, and to feel no im- 
 propriety in the comparison? That was the question 
 X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes 
 later. 
 
 "Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that 
 with Meredith you have hold of a man. You know 
 — as surely, for example, as while you are listening to 
 Handel— that the stuff is masculine, and great at 
 that." 
 
 " That is not all the secret," I maintained, 
 " although it gets near to the secret. Why is it 
 possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Words- 
 worth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety ? 
 Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty 
 beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Words- 
 worth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, 
 than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly with- 
 in the range of emotion ? Why ? Because Coleridge 
 and Meredith both have a philosophy of life : and he 
 who has a philosophy of life may write little or 
 much ; may on the one hand write Christabel and 
 leave it unfinished and decline upon opium ; or may, 
 on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 
 ' keep up his end ' (as the saying is) nobly to the 
 last, and vex us all the while with his asperities ; and 
 yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet. 
 Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has 
 one right background and one only : and that 
 
 263
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and 
 
 Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they 
 
 masculine ? The answer is, They have philosophy." 
 
 "You are on the old tack again: the old to 
 
 KaOoXoV ! 
 
 " Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch 
 land, so you may e'en fill another pipe and play the 
 interlocutor. . . . You remember my once asking 
 why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for 
 that their stuff is rotten we agreed). The reason 
 is, they are engaged in mistaking the part for the 
 whole, and that part a non-essential one ; they are 
 setting up the present potency of Great Britain as a 
 triumphant and insolent exception to laws which (if 
 we believe in any gods better than anarchy and 
 chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and 
 may even regulate ' the most ancient heavens.' You 
 may remember my expressed contempt for a recent 
 poem which lauded Henry VIII because — 
 
 " ' He was lustful, he was vengeful, he was hot 
 and hard and proud ; 
 But he set his England fairly in the sight of 
 all the crowd.' 
 
 — a worse error, to my mind, than Froude's, who 
 merely idolised him for chastising the clergy. Well, 
 after our discussion, I asked myself this question : 
 ' Why do we not as a great Empire-making people, 
 
 264
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 ruling the world for its good, assassinate the men 
 who oppose us ? ' We do not ; the idea revolts us. 
 But why does it revolt us ? 
 
 "We send our armies to fight, with the certainty 
 (if we think at all) that we are sending a percentage 
 to be killed. We recently sent out two hundred 
 thousand with the sure and certain knowledge that 
 some thousands must die ; and these (we say) were 
 men agonising for a righteous cause. Why did it not 
 afflict us to send them ? — whereas it would have 
 afflicted us inexpressibly to send a man to end the 
 difficulty by putting a bullet or a knife into Mr. 
 Kruger, who ex hypothesi represented an unrighteous 
 cause, and who certainly was but one man. 
 
 " Why ? Because a law above any that regulates 
 the expansion of Great Britain says, ' That shalt do 
 no murder.' And that law, that Universal, takes the 
 knife or the pistol quietly, firmly, out of your hand. 
 You send a battalion, with Tom Smith in it, to fight 
 Mr. Kruger's troops; you know that some of them 
 must in all likelihood perish ; but, thank your stars, 
 you do not know their names. Tom Smith, as it 
 happens, is killed ; but had you known with absolute 
 certainty that Tom Smith would be killed, you could 
 not have sent him. You must have withdrawn him, 
 and substituted some other fellow concerning whom 
 your prophetic vision was less uncomfortably definite. 
 You can kill Tom Smith if he has happened to kill 
 
 265
 
 FROM A COKNlaH WINDOW 
 
 Bob Jones : you are safe enough then, being able to 
 excuse yourself — how ? By Divine law again (as you 
 understand it). Divine law says that whoso sheddeth 
 man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed — that is 
 to say, by you : so you can run under cover and 
 hang Tom Smith. But when Divine law does not 
 protect you, you are powerless. At the most you 
 can send him off to take his ten-to-one chance 
 in a battalion, and when you read his name in the 
 returns, come mincing up to God and say : ' So 
 poor old Tom 's gone ! How the deuce was / to 
 know ? ' 
 
 " I say nothing of the cowardice of this, though it 
 smells to Heaven. I merely point out that this law 
 'Thou shalt do no murder' — this Universal — must 
 be a tremendous one, since even you, my fine swash- 
 buckling, Empire-making hero, are so much afraid of 
 it that you cannot send even a Reservist to death 
 without throwing the responsibility on luck — nos 
 te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam — and have not even 
 the nerve, without its sanction, to stick a knife 
 into an old man whom vou accuse as the 
 wicked cause of all this bloodshed. If vou believed 
 in your accusations, why couldn't you do it ? Because 
 a universal law forbade you, and one you have 
 to believe in, truculent Jingo though you be. 
 Why, consider this ; your poets are hymning King 
 Edward the Seventh as the greatest man on earth, 
 
 266
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 and yet, if he might possess all Africa to-morrow at 
 the expense of signing the death-warrant of one 
 innocent man who opposed that possession, he 
 could not write his name. His hand would fall 
 numb. Such power above kings has the Universal, 
 though silly poets insult it who should be its 
 servants. 
 
 " Now of all the differences between men and 
 women there is none more radical than this : that a 
 man naturally loves law, whereas a woman naturally 
 hates it and never sees a law without casting about 
 for some way of dodging it. Laws, universals, 
 general propositions — her instinct with all of them 
 is to get off by wheedling the judge. So, if you 
 want a test for a masculine poet, examine first 
 whether or no he understands the Universe as a 
 thing of law and order." 
 
 "Then, by your own test, Kipling— the Jingo 
 Kipling — is a most masculine poet, since he talks of 
 little else." 
 
 " I will answer you, although I believe you are not 
 serious. At present Mr. Kipling's mind, in search of 
 a philosophy, plays with the contemplation of a 
 world reduced to law and order ; the law and order 
 being such as universal British rule would impose. 
 There might be many worse worlds than a world so 
 ruled, and in verse the prospect can be made to look 
 fair enough : — 
 
 267
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " ' Keep ye the Law — be swift in all obedience — 
 Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge 
 the ford. 
 Make ye sure to each his own 
 That he reap where he hath sown ; 
 By the peace among Our peoples let men know 
 we serve the Lord ! ' 
 
 Clean and wholesome teaching it seems, persuading 
 civilised men that, as they are strong, so the 
 obligation rests on them to set the world in order, 
 carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its 
 bloodstained corners. Yet as a political philosophy 
 it lacks the first of all essentials, and as Mr. Kipling 
 develops it we begin to detect the flaw in the system : — 
 
 " ' The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood 
 and stone ; 
 'E don't obey no orders unless they is his own ; 
 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful : 'e leaves 'em all 
 
 about, 
 An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 
 'eathen out. 
 All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, 
 All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less. 
 
 Etc' 
 
 " What is wrong with this ? Why, simply that it 
 leaves Justice altogether out of account. The system 
 has no room for it ; even as it has no room for 
 clemency, mansuetude, forbearance towards the 
 
 268
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his 
 children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose 
 liver with a frantically foolish religious creed ; but all 
 this does not justify me in taking possession of his 
 house, and either poking him out or making him a 
 serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a 
 thing as universal justice, then all men have their 
 rights under it — even verminous persons. We are 
 obliged to put constraint upon them when their 
 habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised 
 nations are obliged to put constraint upon uncivilised 
 ones which shock their moral sense beyond a certain 
 point — as by cannibalism or human sacrifice. But 
 such interference should stand upon a nice sense of 
 the offender's rights, and in practice does so stand. 
 The custom of polygamy, for instance (as practised 
 abroad), horribly offends quite a large majority of His 
 Majesty's lieges ; yet Great Britain tolerates poly- 
 gamy even in her own subject races. Neither 
 polygamy nor uncleanliness can be held any just 
 excuse for turning a nation out of its possessions. 
 
 " And another reason for insisting upon the strictest 
 reading of justice in these dealings between nations 
 is the temptation which the least laxity offers to the 
 stronger — a temptation which Press and Pulpit made 
 no pretence of resisting during the late war. ' We 
 are better than they,' was the cry ; ' we are cleanlier, 
 less ignorant ; we have arts and a literature, whereas 
 
 269
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 they have none ; we make for progress and enlighten- 
 ment, while they are absurdly conservative, if not 
 retrogressive. Therefore the world will be the 
 better by our annexing their land, and substituting 
 our government for theirs. Therefore our cause, too, 
 is the juster.' But therefore it is nothing of the sort. 
 A dirty man may be in the right, and a clean man in 
 the wrong ; an ungodly man in the right, and a godly 
 man in the wrong ; and the most specious and well- 
 intentioned system which allows justice to be con- 
 fused with something else will allow it to be stretched 
 even by well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying, 
 and flat piracy." 
 
 " Are you trying to prove," demanded X, " that 
 Mr. Kipling is a feminine poet ? " 
 
 " No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion 
 that in his worse mood he is a sham-masculine 
 one. The ' Recessional ' proves that, man of genius 
 that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. 
 But too often he is trying to dodge it with sham law. 
 A woman would not appeal to law at all : she would 
 boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an 
 undoubted but misguided man, has to find some 
 other way out ; so he takes a twopenny-halfpenny 
 code as the mood seizes him — be it the code of a 
 barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew — and hymns it 
 lustily against the universal code : and the pity and 
 the sin of it is that now and then by flashes — 
 
 270
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat '—he sees the 
 truth. 
 
 "You remember the figure of the Cave which 
 Socrates invented and explained to Glaucon in Plato's 
 ' Republic' ? He imagined men seated in a den which 
 has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are 
 turned to the wall of the den, and they sit with necks 
 and legs chained so that they cannot move. Behind 
 them, and between them and the light, runs a raised 
 way with a low wall along it, ' like the screen over which 
 marionette-players show their puppets.' Along this 
 wall pass men carrying all sorts of vessels and 
 statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, 
 others silent ; and as the procession goes by the 
 chained prisoners see only the shadows passing 
 across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the 
 voices echoed from it, suppose that the sound comes 
 from the shadows. 
 
 " To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse 
 one might take this famous picture and make one 
 fearsome addition to it. There sits (one might go 
 on to say) among the prisoners a young man different 
 from them in voice and terribly different to look 
 upon, because he has two pairs of eyes, the one 
 turned towards the light and realities, the other 
 towards the rock-face and the shadows. Using, 
 now one, now the other of these two pairs of eyes, 
 he never knows with which at the moment he is 
 
 271
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 gazing, whether on the realities or on the shadows, 
 but always supposes what he sees at the moment to 
 be the realities, and calls them ' Things as They Are.' 
 Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of 
 the greater vision, and he speaks enchantingly when 
 he discourses of the shadows on the rock, thereby 
 deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom 
 his genius has played the crimp to, enticing them 
 into the den and hocussing and chaining them there. 
 For, seeing the shadows pass to the interpretation of 
 such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed 
 behold Things as They Are, and that these are the 
 only things worth knowing. 
 
 " The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in 
 his greater moments cannot help but see that he, 
 with every inspired singer, is by right the prophet of 
 a law and order compared with which all the majestic 
 law and order of the British Empire are but rags 
 and trumpery : — 
 
 " ' I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God, 
 
 I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three ; 
 I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell, 
 And — ye— would — make- a Knight o' me!' 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. 
 Meredith, and brought away this for his pains : — 
 
 272
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 " ' I suppose I should regard myself as getting old — I 
 am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old 
 either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young 
 man's eye. I have always hoped I should not grow old 
 as some do — with a palsied intellect, living backwards, 
 regarding other people as anachronisms because they 
 themselves have lived on into other times, and left their 
 sympathies behind them with their years.' 
 
 " He never will. He will always preserve the 
 strength of manhood in his work because hope, the 
 salt of manhood, is the savour of all his philosophy. 
 When I think of his work as a whole — his novels 
 and poems together — this confession of his appears 
 to me, not indeed to summarise it — for it is far too 
 multifarious and complex — but to say the first and 
 the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts 
 a solemnity of his own into the warning, ne tit pueri 
 contempseris annos. He has never grown old, because 
 his hopes are set on the young ; and his dearest wish, 
 for those who can read beneath his printed word, is 
 to leave the world not worse, but so much the better 
 as a man may, for the generations to come after him. 
 To him this is ' the cry of the conscience of life ' : — 
 
 " ' Keep the young generations in hail, 
 And bequeath them no tumbled house.' 
 
 To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment 
 supreme,' and perhaps the bitterest words this master 
 
 273 
 19
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 of Comedy has written are for the seniors of the race 
 
 who — 
 
 " ' On their last plank, 
 
 Pass mumbling it as nature's final page,' 
 
 and cramp the young with their rules of ' wisdom,' 
 lest, as he says scornfully : — 
 
 " ' Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay, 
 Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain, 
 And ancients musical at close of day.' 
 
 ' Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet : — 
 
 " ' Her gabbiing grt-y she eyes askant, nor treads 
 
 The ways they walk ; by what they speak oppressed.' 
 
 But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges 
 gall, is usually cheerful with the cheerfulness of 
 health. Sometimes he consciously expounds it ; 
 oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always 
 (I believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at 
 the base of everything he writes. 
 
 " The next thing to be noted is that he does not 
 hope in youth because it is a period of license 
 and waywardness, but because it is a period of 
 imagination — 
 
 " ' Days, when the ball of our vision 
 
 Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,' 
 
 and because it therefore has a better chance of 
 grasping what is Universal than has the prudential 
 
 274
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 wisdom of age which contracts its eye to particulars 
 and keeps it alert for social pitfalls — the kind of 
 wisdom seen at its best (but its best never made a 
 hero) in Bubb Doddington's verses : — 
 
 " ' Love thy country, wish it well, 
 Not with too intense a care ; 
 'Tis enough that, when it fell, 
 Thou its ruin didst not share.' 
 
 Admirable caution ! Now contrast it for a moment 
 with, let us say, the silly quixotic figure of Horatius 
 with the broken bridge behind him : — 
 
 " ' Round turned he, as not deigning 
 
 Those craven ranks to see : 
 Nought spake he to Lars Porsena, 
 
 To Sextus nought spake he ; 
 But he saw on Palatinus 
 
 The white porch of his home — ' 
 
 " I protest I have no heart to go on with the 
 quotation : so unpopular is its author, just now, and 
 so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the boyish 
 tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what 
 Mr. Meredith chooses to trust rather than Bubb 
 Doddington's, and he trusts it as being the likelier to 
 apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius 
 with an army in front and a broken bridge behind 
 him was a nobler figure than Bubb Doddington 
 wishing his country well but not with too intense a 
 
 275
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 care ; and not only nobler but — this is the point — 
 more obedient to divine law, more expressive of that 
 which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trusts 
 youth, it is as a time of imagination ; and if he trusts 
 imagination, it is as a faculty for apprehending the 
 Universal in life — that is to say, a divine law behind 
 its shows and simulacra. 
 
 "In 'The Empty Purse' you will find him instruct- 
 ing youth towards this law; but that there may be no 
 doubt of his own belief in it, as an order not only 
 controlling men but overriding angels and demons, 
 first consider his famous sonnet, ' Lucifer in Starlight' 
 — to my thinking one of the finest in our language : — 
 
 " ' On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. 
 
 Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend 
 Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, 
 Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. 
 Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. 
 And now upon his western wing he leaned, 
 Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, 
 Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. 
 
 Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars 
 
 With memory of the old revolt from Awe, 
 He reached a middle height, and at the stars, 
 Which are the brain of Heaven, he looked, and sank. 
 Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, 
 The army of unalterable law.' 
 
 * # # * 
 
 "Suppose my contention — that poetry should 
 
 276
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 concern itself with universals — to be admitted: 
 suppose we all agreed that Poetry is an expression of 
 the universal element in human life, that (as Shelley 
 puts it) ' a poem is the very image of life expressed 
 in its eternal truth.' There remains a question quite 
 as important : and that is, How to recognise the 
 Universal when we see it ? We may talk of a 
 Divine law, or a Divine order — call it what we will — 
 which regulates the lives of us poor men no less than 
 the motions of the stars, and binds the whole 
 universe, high and low, into one system : and we 
 may have arrived at the blessed wish to conform 
 with this law rather than to strive and kick against 
 the pricks and waste our short time in petulant 
 rebellion. So far, so good : but how are we to know 
 the law ? How, with the best will in the world, are 
 we to distinguish order from disorder ? What 
 assurance have we, after striving to bring ourselves 
 into obedience, that we have succeeded ? We may 
 agree, for example, with Wordsworth that Duty is a 
 stern daughter of the Voice of God, and that through 
 Duty ' the most ancient heavens,' no less than we 
 ourselves, are kept fresh and strong. But can we 
 always discern this Universal, this Duty ? What is 
 the criterion ? And what, when we have chosen, is 
 the sanction of our choice ? 
 
 "A number of honest people will promptly refer 
 us to revealed religion. ' Take (they say) your 
 
 277
 
 l<KOM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 revealed religion on faith, and there you have the law 
 and the prophets, and your universals set out for you, 
 and your principles of conduct laid down. What 
 more do you want ? ' 
 
 "To this I answer, 'We are human, and we need 
 also the testimony of Poetry ; and the priceless value 
 of poetry for us lies in this, that it does not echo the 
 Gospel like a parrot. If it did, it would be servile, 
 superfluous. It is ministerial and useful because it 
 approaches truth by another path. It does not say 
 ditto to Mr. Burke — it corroborates. And it corrobo- 
 rates precisely because it does not say ditto, but 
 employs a natural process of its own which it 
 employed before ever Christianity was revealed. 
 You may decide that religion is enough for you, and 
 that you have no need of poetry ; but if you have any 
 intelligent need of poetry it will be because poetry, 
 though it end in the same conclusions, reaches them 
 by another and separate path. 
 
 " Now (as I understand him) Mr. Meredith con- 
 nects man with the Universal, and teaches him to 
 arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding 
 him that he is a child of Earth. ' You are amenable,' 
 he says in effect, ' to a law which all the firmament 
 obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied to one 
 planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would 
 apprehend the law, study your mother, Earth, which 
 also obeys it. Search out her operations ; honour
 
 SEP TEMiiiiR 
 
 your mother as legitimate children, and let your 
 honour be the highest you can pay — that of making 
 yourself docile to her teaching. So will you stand 
 the best chance, the only likely chance, of living in 
 harmony with that Will which over-arches Earth 
 and us all.' 
 
 " In this doctrine Mr. Meredith believes passion- 
 ately ; so let there be no mistake about the thorough- 
 ness with which he preaches it. Even prayer, he 
 tells us in one of his novels, is most useful when like 
 a fountain it falls back and draws refreshment from 
 earth for a new spring heavenward : — 
 
 " ' And there vitality, there, there solely in song 
 
 Besides, where earth and her uses to men, their 
 needs, 
 Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it 
 strong, 
 The Master said : and the studious eye that reads, 
 (Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the 
 mount), 
 In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound. 
 Pursue thy craft : it is music drawn of the fount 
 To spring perennial ; well-spring is common 
 ground.' 
 
 And it follows that to one who believes in the 
 teaching of earth so whole-heartedly earth is not a 
 painted back-cloth for man to strut against and 
 attitudinise,, but a birth-place from which he cannot 
 
 279
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 escape, and in relation with which he must be 
 considered, and must consider himself, on pain of 
 becoming absurd. Even 
 
 " ' His cry to heaven is a cry to her 
 He would evade.' 
 
 She is a stern mother, be it understood, no coddling 
 one : — 
 
 " ' He may entreat, aspire, 
 
 He may despair, and she has never heed, 
 
 She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need, 
 
 Not his desire.' 
 
 When we neglect or misread her lessons, she 
 punishes; at the best, she offers no fat rewards to 
 the senses, but — 
 
 " ' The sense of large charity over the land ; 
 
 Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough, 
 And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal.' 
 
 (' Lean fare,' as the poet observes ; and unpalatable, 
 for instance, to our Members of Parliament, to 
 whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the highest 
 compliment within their range of apprehension by 
 assuming that quite a large number of them could 
 write cheques for £69,000 without inconvenience.) 
 At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things 
 we have desired, a serene fortitude to endure their 
 loss : — 
 
 280
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 " ' Love born of knowledge, love that gains 
 Vitality as Earth it mates, 
 The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, 
 The Life, the Death, illuminates. 
 
 " ' For love we Earth, then serve we all ; 
 Her mystic secret then is ours : 
 We fall, or view our treasures fall, 
 Unclouded — as beholds her flowers 
 
 " ' Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, 
 Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, 
 When lowly, with a broken neck, 
 The crocus lays her cheek to mire.' 
 
 But at least it is the true milk for man that she 
 distils — 
 
 " ' From her heaved breast of sacred common mould'; 
 
 the breast (to quote from another poem) — 
 
 " ' Which is his well of strength, his home of rest, 
 And fair to scan.' 
 
 And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, 
 which is Self — our 'distempered devil of Self,' 
 gluttonous of its own enjoyments and therefore 
 necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance 
 and self-control — walks among men like his own 
 wise physician, Melampus, with eyes that search the 
 book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to 
 discover and extract her healing secrets. 
 
 281
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " ' With love exceeding a simple love of the things 
 
 That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck ; 
 Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings 
 From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and 
 peck ; 
 Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball ; 
 Or cast their web between bramble and thorny 
 hook ; 
 The good physician Melampus, loving them all, 
 Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a 
 book. 
 
 " ' For him the woods were a home and gave him the 
 key 
 Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs 
 and flowers. 
 The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we 
 To earth he sought, and the link of their life 
 with ours. . . .' 
 
 " Here by another road we come to a teaching 
 which is also the Gospels' : that to apprehend the 
 highest truth one must have a mind of extreme 
 humility. ' blessed are the meek, for they shall 
 inherit the earth,' ' Neither shall they say, Lo here ! 
 or Lo there ! for behold the kingdom of God is 
 within you,' 'And He took a little child and set him 
 in the midst of them,' &c. Poetry cannot make 
 these sayings any truer than they are, but it can 
 illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so 
 (be it humbly said) can help their acceptance by 
 
 282
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 man. If they come down from heaven, derived 
 from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms 
 them by arguments taken from his own earth, 
 instructing him the while to read it as — 
 
 " ' An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet 
 Buried, and breathing, and to be,' 
 
 and teaching him, ' made lowly wise,' that the truth 
 of the highest heavens lies scattered about his feet. 
 
 " ' Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage, 
 He served them, loving them, healing them ; sick 
 or maimed, 
 Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage 
 
 Outran the measure, his juice of the woods 
 reclaimed. 
 He played on men, as his master Phoebus on strings 
 
 Melodious : as the God did he drive and check, 
 Through love exceeding a simple love of the things 
 That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.' 
 
 " I think, if we consider the essence of this 
 teaching, we shall have no difficulty now in under- 
 standing why Mr. Meredith's hopes harp so per- 
 sistently on the 'young generations,' why our duty 
 to them is to him ' the cry of the conscience of life,' 
 or why, as he studies Earth, he maintains that — 
 
 " ' Deepest at her springs, 
 Most filial, is an eye to love her young.' 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " But Meredith, if a true poet, is also and
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 undeniably a hard one : and a poet must not only 
 preach but persuade. • He dooth not only show 
 the way,' says Sidney, 'but giveth so sweet a 
 prospect into the way as will intice any man to 
 enter into it.' 
 
 " Here, my dear X, I lay hands on you and drag 
 you in as the Conscientious Objector. ' How ? ' you 
 will ask. ' Is not the plain truth good enough for 
 men ? And if poetry must win acceptance for her 
 by beautiful adornments, alluring images, capti- 
 vating music, is there not something deceptive 
 in the business, even if it be not downright 
 dishonest ? ' Well, I think you have a right to be 
 answered." 
 
 "Thank you," said X. 
 
 " And I don't think you are convincingly answered 
 by Keats' — 
 
 " ' Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 
 
 With all respect to the poet, we don't know it ; and 
 if we did it would come a long way short of all we 
 need to know. The Conscientious Objector will none 
 the less maintain that truth and beauty have never 
 been recognised as identical, and that, in practice, to 
 employ their names as convertible terms would lead 
 to no end of confusion. I like the man (you will be 
 glad to hear), because on an important subject he 
 
 284
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 will be satisfied with nothing less than clear thinking. 
 My own suspicion is that, when we have yielded him 
 the inquiry which is his due into the relations between 
 truth and beauty, we shall discover that spiritual 
 truth — with which alone poetry concerns itself — is 
 less a matter of ascertained facts than of ascertained 
 harmonies, and that these harmonies are incapable of 
 being expressed otherwise than in beautiful terms. 
 But pending our inquiry (which must be a long one) 
 let us put to the objector a practical question : 
 ' What forbids a man, who has the truth to tell, from 
 putting it as persuasively as possible ? Were not the 
 truths of the Gospel conveyed in parables ? And is 
 their truth diminished because these parables are 
 exquisite in form and in language ? Will you only 
 commend persuasiveness in a sophist who engages to 
 make the worst argument appear the better, and 
 condemn it in a teacher who employs it to enforce 
 truth ? ' The question, surely, is answered as soon 
 as we have asked it. 
 
 " And the further particular question, Is Mr. 
 Meredith a persuasive poet ? will be answered as 
 promptly by us. He can be — let us grant — a 
 plaguily forbidding one. His philosophy is not 
 easy; yet it seems to me a deal easier than many 
 of his single verses. I hope humbly, for instance, 
 one of these days, to discover what is meant by such 
 a verse as this : — 
 
 285
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " ' Thou animatest ancient tales, 
 
 To prove our world of linear seed ; 
 Thy very virtue now assails 
 A tempter to mislead.' 
 
 Faint, yet pursuing, I hope ; but I must admit that 
 such writing does not obviously allure, that it rather 
 dejects the student by the difficulty of finding a stool 
 to sit down and be stoical on. ' Nay,' to parody 
 Sidney, ' he dooth as if your journey should lye 
 through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a 
 handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers.' He 
 is, in short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and 
 at times to all appearance so deliberately and yet so 
 wantonly difficult, that you wonder what on earth 
 you came out to pursue and why you should be 
 tearing your flesh in these thickets. 
 
 "And then you remember the swinging cadences 
 of ' Love in the Valley ' — the loveliest love-song of 
 its century. Who can forget it ? : 
 
 " ' Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping 
 Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star, 
 Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, 
 
 Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar. 
 Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting ; 
 
 So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. 
 Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well- 
 spring, 
 Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.' 
 
 286
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but 
 you will wrestle through them in the hope of hearing 
 that voice again, or even an echo of it. 
 
 " ' Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day 
 of the Daughter of Hades,' 'The Empty Purse,' 
 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phoebus 
 with Admetus ' — you come back to each again and 
 again, compelled by the wizardry of single lines and by 
 a certain separate glamour which hangs about each 
 of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in 
 its own way a superb performance; lines here and 
 there so haunt you with their beauty that you 
 must go back and read the whole poem over for the 
 sake of them. Other lines you boggle over, and yet 
 cannot forget them ; you hope to like them better at 
 the next reading ; you re-read, and wish them away, 
 yet find them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your 
 memory that you cannot do without them. Take, for 
 instance, the last stanza of ' Phoebus with Admetus ": — 
 
 " ' You with shelly horns, rams ! and promontory goats, 
 You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew ! 
 Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats ! 
 
 Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few ! 
 You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the 
 rays, 
 You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent ; 
 He has been our fellow, the morning of our days ; 
 Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.' 
 
 287
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable 
 was the glorious third line : almost as soon ' promon- 
 tory goats ' fastened itself on memory ; and almost 
 as soon the last two lines were perceived to be 
 excellent, and the fourth also. These enforced you, 
 for the pleasure of recalling them, to recall the whole, 
 and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward 
 the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as 
 being too obscurely and almost fantastically ex- 
 pressed. Having once passed it in, I find ' You that 
 leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its 
 delicate labial pause and its delicate consonantal 
 chime, one of the most fascinating lines in the 
 stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to 
 admit, it has become one of the best liked, I am 
 forced in fairness to ask myself if hundreds of lines 
 of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or 
 fantastic may not justify themselves after many 
 readings. 
 
 " The greatest mistake, at all events, is to suppose 
 him ignorant or careless of the persuasiveness which 
 lies in technical skill ; though we can hardly be 
 surprised that he has not escaped a charge which was 
 freely brought against Browning, than whom, perhaps, 
 no single poet was ever more untiring in technical 
 experiment. Every poem of Browning's is an 
 experiment — sometimes successful, sometimes not — 
 in wedding sense with metre ; and so is every poem 
 
 288
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 of Mr. Meredith's (he has even attempted galliambics), 
 though he cannot emulate Browning's range. But 
 he, too, has had his amazing successes — in the long, 
 swooping lines of ' Love in the Valley ' : — 
 
 " ' Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, 
 Swift as the swallow along the river's light, 
 Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, 
 Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.' 
 
 — in the ' Young Princess,' the stanzas of which are 
 a din of nightingales' voices ; in ' The Woods of 
 Westermain ' and ' The Nuptials of Attila,' where 
 the ear awaits the burthen, as the sense awaits the 
 horror, of the song, and the poet holds back both, 
 increasing the painful expectancy; or in the hammered 
 measure of ' Phcebus with Admetus ' — a real triumph. 
 Of each of these metres you have to admit at once 
 that it is strange and arresting, and that you cannot 
 conceive the poem written in any other. And, as I 
 have said, their very asperities tend, with repetition, 
 to pass into beauties. 
 
 " But, in the end, he is remembered best for his 
 philosophy, as the poet who tells us to have courage 
 and trust in nature, that thereby we may attain 
 whatever heaven may be. ' Neither shall they say, 
 Lo, here ! or Lo, there ! for behold the kingdom of 
 heaven is within you' — yes, and hell, too, Mr. 
 Meredith wants us : — 
 
 289 
 2d
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " ' In tragic life, God wot, 
 No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : 
 We are betrayed by what is false within.' 
 
 So, again, in ' The Woods of Westermain,' we are 
 warned that the worst betrayal for man lies in the 
 cowardice of his own soul : — 
 
 " ' But have care. 
 
 In yourself may lurk the trap.' 
 
 Are you at heart a poltroon or a palterer, cruel, dull, 
 envious, full of hate ? Then Nature, the mother of 
 the strong and generous, will have no pity, but will 
 turn and rend you with claws. ' Trust her with your 
 whole heart,' says Mr. Meredith, 'and go forward 
 courageously until you follow 
 
 " ' Where never was track 
 On the path trod of all.' 
 
 The fight is an ennobling one, when all is said : 
 
 rejoice in it, because our children shall use the 
 
 victory. 
 
 " ' Take stripes or chains ; 
 
 Grip at thy standard reviled. 
 
 And what if our body be dashed from the steeps ? 
 
 Our spoken in protest remains. 
 
 A younger generation reaps.' *' 
 
 290
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 From a Cornish Window, 
 
 Thursday, Sept. 2nd. 
 " Hoist up sail while gale doth last. . ." 
 
 I do not call this very sound advice : but we 
 followed it, and that is the reason why I am able to 
 send off my monthly packet from the old address. 
 Also it came very near to being a reason why I had 
 no letter to send. The wind blew as obstinately as 
 ever on the Tuesday morning ; but this time we 
 arranged our start more carefully, and beat out over 
 the bar in comparatively smooth water. The seas 
 outside were not at all smooth, but a Newlyn-built 
 boat does not make much account of mere seas, and 
 soon after midday we dropped anchor in Plymouth 
 Cattewater, and went ashore for our letters. 
 
 We were sworn to reach home next day, and 
 somehow we forgot to study the barometer, which 
 was doing its best to warn us. The weather was 
 dirtier than ever and the wind harder. But we had 
 grown accustomed to this : and persuaded ourselves 
 that, once outside of the Rame, we could make a 
 pretty fetch of it for home and cover the distance at 
 our best speed — which indeed we did. But I confess 
 that as we passed beyond the breakwater, and met 
 the Plymouth trawlers running back for shelter, I 
 began to wonder rather uneasily how the barometer 
 might be behaving, and even dallied with the 
 
 291
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 resolution to go below and see. We were well dressed 
 down, however — double - reefed mainsail, reefed 
 mizzen, foresail and storm jib — and after our beating 
 at Salcombe none of us felt inclined to raise the 
 question of putting back. There was nothing to 
 hurt, as yet : the boat was shaking off the water like 
 a duck, and making capital weather of it ; we told 
 each other that once beyond the Rame, with the sea 
 on our quarter, we should do handsomely. And the 
 gale — the newspapers called it a hurricane, but it 
 was merely a gale — waited patiently until we were 
 committed to it. Half an hour later we took in the 
 mizzen, and, soon after, the foresail : and even so, 
 and close-hauled, were abreast of Looe Island just 
 forty-seven minutes after passing the Rame — nine 
 miles. For a 28-ton cruiser this will be allowed to 
 be fair going. For my own part I could have wished 
 it faster : not from any desire to break " records," 
 but because, should anything happen to our gear, v>e 
 were uncomfortably close to a lee-shore, and the best 
 behaved of boats could not stand up against the 
 incessant shoreward thrust of the big seas crossing 
 us. Also, to make matters worse, the shore itself 
 now and then vanished in the "dirt." On the whole, 
 therefore, it was not too soon for us that we opened 
 the harbour and 
 
 " saw on Palatinus 
 The white porch of our home," 
 
 292
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 though these were three or four times hidden from 
 us by the seas over which we toppled through the 
 harbour's mouth and into quiet water. While the 
 sails were stowing I climbed down the ladder, and 
 sat in front of the barometer, and wondered how 
 I should like this sort of thing if I had to go 
 through it often, for my living. 
 
 293
 
 October 
 
 " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. . . ." 
 
 I HAVE been planting a perennial border in the 
 garden and consulting, with serious damage to 
 the temper, a number of the garden-books now in 
 fashion. When a man drives at practice — when he 
 desires to know precisely at what season, in what 
 soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon lilies, 
 to decide between Ayrshire Ruga and Fellenberg for 
 the pillar that requires a red rose, to fix the right 
 proportion of sand and leaf-mould to suit his carna- 
 tions — when " his only plot " is to plant the bergamot 
 — he resents being fobbed off with prattle : — 
 
 " My squills make a brave show this morning, and the 
 little petticoated Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower 
 rock-garden (surely Narcissus ought to have been a girl!) 
 begins to ' take the winds of March with beauty.' I am 
 expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will benefit 
 the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower 
 before Billy comes home from school," etc. 
 
 But the other day, in "The Garden's Story," by 
 Mr. George H. Ellwanger, I came upon a piece of 
 
 294
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause 
 in my search for quite other information. Mr. 
 Ellwanger, a great American gardener, has observed 
 that our poets usually sing of autumn in a minor key, 
 which startles an American who, while accustomed to 
 our language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the 
 still air and sunshine and glowing colour of his own 
 autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a dank, 
 sodden season, bleak or shivering. "The sugar and 
 scarlet maple, the dogwood and sumac, are wanting 
 to impart their warmth of colour; and St. Martin's 
 summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence " 
 comparable with that of the Indian summer over 
 there. The Virginia creeper which reddens our 
 Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an im- 
 portation of no very long standing — old enough to be 
 accepted as a feature of the place, not yet old enough 
 to be inseparably connected with it in song. Yet — 
 
 "Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most 
 universally admired. This might almost answer to our 
 own fall of the leaf, and is far less sombre than many 
 apostrophes to the season that occur throughout English 
 verse." 
 
 From this Mr. Ellwanger proceeds to compare 
 Keats's with the wonderful " Ode to Autumn " which 
 Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs 
 to its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be 
 
 295
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 sure, and far less obedient to form, but with lines so 
 haunting and images so full of beauty that they 
 do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the 
 magnificent opening : — 
 
 " I saw old Autumn in the misty morn 
 
 Stand shadowless like Silence, listening 
 To silence, for no lonely bird would sing 
 Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, 
 Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . ." 
 
 I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing 
 the two odes until Mr. Ellwanger invited me. He 
 notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds throughout 
 Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, 
 that the two poets were contemplating two different 
 stages of autumn. Keats, more sensuous, dwells on 
 the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late 
 October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close "on 
 the birth of trembling winter": he sings more 
 austerelv of November's desolation : — 
 
 J 
 
 "Where is the pride of Summer — the green prime — 
 The many, many leaves all twinkling ? — Three 
 On the moss'd elm ; three on the naked lime 
 Trembling, — and one upon the old oak tree ! 
 Where is the Dryad's immortality ? 
 Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew, 
 Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through 
 In the smooth holly's green eternity. 
 
 296
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 " The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplish'd hoard, 
 The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, 
 
 And honey bees have stored 
 The sweets of summer in their luscious cells ; 
 The swallows all have wing'd across the main ; 
 But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, 
 
 And sighs her tearful spells 
 Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. 
 
 Alone, alone 
 
 Upon a mossy stone 
 She sits and reckons up the dead and gone 
 With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . ." 
 
 The last image involves a change of sex in 
 personified Autumn : an awkwardness, I allow. But 
 if the awkwardness of the change can be excused, 
 Hood's lines excuse it : — 
 
 " O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded 
 Under the languid downfall of her hair ; 
 She wears a coronal of flowers faded 
 
 Upon her forehead, and a face of care ; 
 There is enough of wither'd everywhere 
 To make her bower, — and enough of gloom. . ." 
 
 In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its 
 irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more 
 force of poetry in Hood's ode than in Keats's ; and 
 this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater 
 poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore 
 
 297
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 to find that Mr. Bridges, in his already famous 
 Essay on Keats, ranks " Autumn " as the very best 
 of all Keats's Odes. 
 
 Now whether one agrees with him or not, there is 
 no loose talk in Mr. Bridges's criticism. He tells us 
 precisely why he prefers this poem to that other : 
 and such definiteness in critical writing is not only 
 useful in itself but perhaps the severest test of a 
 critic's quality. No task can well be harder than to 
 take a poem, a stanza, or a line, to decide "Just here 
 lies the strength, the charm ; or just here the loose- 
 ness, the defect." In any but the strongest hands 
 these methods ensure mere niggling ingenuity, in 
 which all appreciation of the broader purposes of the 
 author — of Aristotle's "universal" — disappears, while 
 the critic reveals himself as an industrious pick-thank 
 person concerned with matters of slight and secondary 
 importance. But if well conducted such criticism 
 has a particular value. As Mr. Bridges says: — 
 
 " If my criticism should seem sometimes harsh, that 
 is, I believe, due to its being given in plain terms, a 
 manner which I prefer, because by obliging the writer to 
 say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes 
 easier to point out, and in this way the true business of 
 criticism may be advanced ; nor do I know that, in a 
 work of this sort, criticism has any better function than 
 to discriminate between the faults and merits of the best 
 art : for it commonly happens, when any great artist 
 
 298
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 comes to be generally admired, that his faults, being 
 graced by his excellences, are confounded with them in 
 the popular judgment, and being easy of imitation, are 
 the points of his work which are most liable to be 
 copied." 
 
 Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he 
 considers the Odes to be in many respects the most 
 important division of Keats's poetry. " Had Keats," 
 he says, " left us only his Odes, his rank among the 
 poets would be not lower than it is, for they have 
 stood apart in literature, at least the six most 
 famous of them." 
 
 These famous six are : (i) " Psyche," (2) " Melan- 
 choly," (3) " Nightingale," (4) " Grecian Urn," 
 (5) " Indolence," (6) " Autumn " ; and Mr. Bridges 
 is not content until he has them arranged in a 
 hierarchy. He draws up a list in order of merit, and 
 in it gives first place — "for its perfection" — to 
 "Autumn" : — 
 
 " This is always reckoned among the faultless master- 
 pieces of English poetry ; and unless it be objected as a 
 slight blemish that the words ' Think not of them ' in 
 the second line of the third stanza are somewhat 
 awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I 
 do not know that any sort of fault can be found in it." 
 
 But though " Autumn " (1) is best as a whole, the 
 " Nightingale " (2) altogether beats it in splendour 
 
 299
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 and intensity of mood ; and, after pointing out its 
 defects, Mr. Bridges confesses, " I could not name 
 any English poem of the same length which contains 
 so much beauty as this ode." Still, it takes second 
 place, and next comes " Melancholy " (3). " The 
 perception in this ode is profound, and no doubt 
 experienced " ; but in spite of its great beauty " it 
 does not hit so hard as one would expect. I do not 
 know whether this is due to a false note towards the 
 end of the second stanza, or to a disagreement 
 between the second and third stanzas." Next in 
 order come " Psyche " (4) and, disputing place with 
 it, the "Grecian Urn" (5). "Indolence" (6) closes 
 the procession ; and I dare say few will dispute her 
 title to the last place. 
 
 But with these six odes we must rank (a) the 
 fragment of the " May Ode," immortal on account 
 of the famous passage of inimitable beauty descriptive 
 of the Greek poets — 
 
 " ' Leaving great verse unto a little clan.' " — 
 
 and (b) (c) the Odes to "Pan" and to "Sorrow" 
 from " Endymion." Of the latter Mr. Sidney Colvin 
 has written : — 
 
 " His later and more famous lyrics, though they are 
 free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure 
 this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command 
 over such various sources of imaginative and musical 
 
 300
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the 
 spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like 
 that of the best Elizabethan love-songs ; a sense as 
 keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India 
 and the East ; a power like that of Coleridge, and 
 perhaps caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird 
 and beautiful associations almost with a word ; clear 
 visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of Celtic 
 imagination ; all these elements come here commingled, 
 yet in a strain perfectly individual." 
 
 With this Mr. Bridges entirely agrees ; but adds : — 
 
 " It unfortunately halts in the opening, and the first 
 and fourth stanzas especially are unequal to the rest, as 
 is again the third from the end, ' Young Stranger,' which 
 for its matter would with more propriety have been cast 
 into the previous section ; and these impoverish the 
 effect, and contain expressions which might put some 
 readers off. If they would begin at the fifth stanza and 
 omit the third from the end, they would find little that 
 is not admirable." 
 
 Now, for my part, when in book or newspaper 
 I come upon references to Isaiah lxi. 1-3, or 
 Shakespeare, K. Henry IV., Pt. ii., Act 4, Sc. 5, 
 1. 163, or the like, I have to drop my reading at 
 once and hunt them up. So I hope that these 
 references of Mr. Bridges will induce the reader to 
 take his Keats down from the shelf. And I hope 
 further that, having his Keats in hand, the reader 
 
 301
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 will examine these odes again and make out an order 
 for himself, as I propose to do. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Mr. Bridges's order of merit was : (i) " Autumn," 
 (2) the " Nightingale," (3) " Melancholy," (4) 
 "Psyche," (5) "Grecian Urn," (6) "Indolence"; 
 leaving us to rank with these (a) the fragment 
 of the " May Ode," and (6) (c) the Odes to 
 "Pan" and to "Sorrow" from " Endymion." 
 
 Now of "Autumn," to which he gives the first 
 place " for its perfection," one may remark that 
 Keats did not entitle it an Ode, and the omission 
 may be something more than casual. Certainly its 
 three stanzas seem to me to exhibit very little of that 
 progression of thought and feeling which I take to be 
 one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from 
 an ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to 
 draw : but I suppose that in theory the lyric deals 
 summarily with its theme, whereas the ode treats it 
 in a sustained progressive manner. But sustained 
 treatment is hardly possible within the limits of three 
 stanzas, and I can discover no progression. The 
 first two stanzas elaborate a picture of Autumn ; the 
 third suggests a reflection — 
 
 " Where are the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ? 
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too " — 
 
 and promptly, with a few added strokes, all pictorial, 
 
 302
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 the poet works that reflection into decoration. A 
 sonnet could not well be more summary. In fact, 
 the poem in structure of thought very closely 
 resembles a sonnet ; its first two stanzas correspond- 
 ing to the octave, and its last stanza to the sestett. 
 
 This will perhaps be thought very trivial criticism 
 of a poem which most people admit to be, as a piece 
 of writing, all but absolutely flawless. But allowing 
 that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express, 
 I yet doubt if it deserve the place assigned to it by 
 Mr. Bridges. Expression counts for a great deal : 
 but ideas perhaps count for more. And in the value 
 of the ideas expressed I cannot see that " Autumn " 
 comes near to rivalling the "Nightingale" (for 
 instance) or " Melancholy." The thought that 
 Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither 
 the rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the 
 thought that 
 
 " In the very temple of Delight 
 
 Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 
 
 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous 
 tongue 
 
 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine ; 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung." 
 
 To test it in another way : — It is perfect, no doubt : 
 but it has not the one thing that now and then in 
 poetry rises (if I may use the paradox) above 
 
 303
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the 
 Odes contain, what I may call the Great Thrill. It 
 nowhere compels that sudden "silent, upon a peak in 
 Darien " shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of 
 poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 
 " Nightingale " or before the closing lines of 
 "Psyche." Such verse as 
 
 " Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path 
 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
 The same that oft-times hath 
 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn" — 
 
 reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root 
 
 of all tears and joy. Such verse links poetry to Love 
 
 itself— 
 
 " Half angel and half bird, 
 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire." 
 
 The " Ode on a Grecian Urn " does not perhaps 
 quite reach this divine thrill : but its second and 
 third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to 
 it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza) ; and I 
 should not quarrel with one who preferred these two 
 stanzas even to the close of " Psyche." 
 
 Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this 
 poetic height — the mere feat of causing this most 
 exquisite vibration in the human nerves — gives a 
 poem a quality and a rank apart ; a quality and a 
 
 304
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 rank not secured to " Autumn " by all its excellence 
 of expression. I grant, of course, that it takes two 
 to produce this thrill— the reader as well as the poet. 
 And if any man object to me that he, for his part, 
 feels a thrill as poignant when he reads stanza 2 
 of " Autumn ' as when he reads stanza 7 
 of the "Nightingale," then I confess that I shall 
 have some difficulty in answering him. But I believe 
 very few, if any, will assert this of themselves. And 
 perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on 
 this point in another way. Suppose that of these 
 four poems, "Autumn," "Nightingale," "Psyche," 
 and " Grecian Urn," one were doomed to perish, and 
 fate allowed us to choose which one should be 
 abandoned. Sorrowful as the choice must be, I 
 believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves 
 least loth to part with "Autumn"; that the loss of 
 either of the others would be foreseen as a sharper 
 wrench. 
 
 For the others lie close to human emotion ; are 
 indeed interpenetrated with emotion ; whereas 
 "Autumn" makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to 
 the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative 
 picture ; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in 
 stanza 4 of the " Grecian Urn " — 
 
 " What little town by river or sea-shore, 
 Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn ? " 
 
 3°5 
 21
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near 
 to spoiling these lines by the three answering 
 ones — 
 
 " And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
 Will silent be ; and not a soul to tell 
 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return " 
 
 — which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a 
 confusion of thought ; since (in Mr. Colvin's words) 
 " they speak of the arrest of life as though it were 
 an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely 
 a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in 
 that sphere its own compensations." 
 
 But it is time to be drawing up one's own order 
 for the Odes. The first place, then, let us give to the 
 " Nightingale," for the intensity of its emotion, for 
 the sustained splendour and variety of its language, 
 for the consummate skill with which it keeps the 
 music matched with the mood, and finally because it 
 attains, at least twice, to the " great thrill." Nor 
 can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who 
 confesses that he " could not name any English 
 poem of the same length which contains so much 
 beauty as this ode." 
 
 For the second place, one feels inclined at first to 
 bracket "Psyche" with the "Grecian Urn." Each 
 develops a beautiful idea. In " Psyche " the poet 
 addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision " of all 
 
 306
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 Olympus's faded hierarchy," and promises her that, 
 though born ' 
 
 " Too late for antique vows, 
 Too, too late for the fond believing lyre," 
 
 she shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple 
 built in some untrodden region of his mind — 
 
 " And in the midst of this wide quietness 
 A rosy sanctuary will I dress 
 With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, 
 
 With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, 
 With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, 
 
 Who breeding flowers will never breed the same : 
 And there shall be for thee all soft delight 
 
 That shadowy thought can win, 
 A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, 
 
 To let the warm Love in ! " 
 
 The thought of the " Grecian Urn " is (to quote Mr. 
 Bridges) "the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, 
 because of its unchanging expression of perfection." 
 And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, 
 there is little to choose between the two odes. Each 
 has the " great thrill," or something very like it. 
 The diction of "Psyche" is more splendid; the 
 mood of the "Grecian Urn" happier and (I think) 
 rarer. But " Psyche " asserts its superiority in the 
 orderly development of its idea, which rises steadily 
 to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, 
 and on that note triumphantly closes : whereas the 
 
 307
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 "Grecian Urn" marches uncertainly, recurs to its 
 main idea without advancing it, reaches something 
 like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping 
 over a pun (as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 
 " O Attic shape ! fair attitude ! ") at the entrance of 
 the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make 
 a forcible close. 
 
 (i) "Nightingale," (2) "Psyche," (3) "Grecian 
 Urn." Shall the next place go to " Melancholy ? " 
 The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with the 
 idea of " Autumn ") is particularly fine ; and when we 
 supply the first stanza which Keats discarded we see 
 it to be well developed. The discarded stanza lies 
 open to the charge of staginess. One may answer that 
 Keats meant it to be stagey : that he deliberately 
 surrounded the quest of the false Melancholy with 
 those paste-board "properties" — the bark of dead 
 men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail " long 
 severed, yet still hard with agony," the cordage 
 woven of large uprootings from the skull of bald 
 Medusa " — in order to make the genuine Melancholy 
 more effective by contrast.* Yet, as Mr. Bridges 
 
 * The discarded opening stanza ran : — 
 
 "Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, 
 And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, 
 Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans 
 
 To fill it out blood-stained and aghast ; 
 Although your rudder be a dragon's tail 
 Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony, 
 
 308
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one 
 would expect : and it has seemed to me that the 
 composition of Durer's great drawing may have 
 something to do with this. Diirer did surround his 
 Melancholia with " properties," and he did evoke a 
 figure which all must admit to be not only tremen- 
 dously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever 
 Keats ma}- say; a figure so haunting, too, that it 
 obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and 
 scares away his delicate figure of 
 
 " Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu . . ." — 
 
 reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china 
 shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a 
 false note in the second stanza : — 
 
 " Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, 
 Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, 
 And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes." 
 
 So prone was Keats to sound this particular false 
 note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three 
 pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's 
 want of taste in his speech about women and his 
 lack of true insight into human passion. The worst 
 
 Your cordage large uprootings from the skull 
 Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail 
 To find the Melancholy — whether she 
 Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull." 
 
 309
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to 
 blind him to his magnificent opportunity in "Lamia" 
 — an opportunity of which the missing is felt as 
 positively cruel : but it betrayed him also into 
 occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost rival 
 Leigh Hunt's — 
 
 " The two divinest things the world has got — 
 A lovely woman in a rural spot." 
 
 This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place 
 below " Autumn " ; of which (I hope) reason has 
 been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4). 
 And (6) longo intervallo comes " Indolence," which 
 may be fearlessly called an altogether inferior 
 performance. 
 
 The " May Ode " stands by itself, an exquisite 
 fragment. But the two odes from Endymion may be 
 set well above " Indolence," and that to " Sorrow," 
 in my opinion, above "Autumn," and only a little 
 way behind the leaders. 
 
 But the fall of the year is marked for us by a 
 ceremony more poignant, more sorrowfully season- 
 able than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us 
 
 celebrate — 
 
 LAYING UP THE BOAT. 
 
 There arrives a day towards the end of October — 
 or with luck we may tide over into November — when 
 
 310
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter 
 force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. 
 Hitherto we have kept a silent compact and ignored 
 all change in the season. We have watched the 
 blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into 
 grey, and let pass their scarcely perceptible warnings. 
 One afternoon a few kitti wakes appeared. A week 
 later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like 
 beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the 
 hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss 
 them. When our hands grew chill with steering we 
 rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly 
 in our pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter 
 gust breaks the spell. We take one look around the 
 harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and tossing ; 
 we cast another seaward at the thick weather through 
 which, in a week at latest, will come looming the 
 earliest of the Baltic merchantmen, our November 
 visitors — bluff vessels with red-painted channels, 
 green deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits 
 overhanging astern, and the Danish flag fluttering 
 aloft in the haze. Then we find speech ; and with 
 us, as with the swallows, the move into winter 
 quarters is not long delayed when once it comes into 
 discussion. We have dissembled too long ; and 
 know, as we go through the form of debating it, that 
 our date must be the next spring-tides. 
 
 This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of 
 
 3 11
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 bidding farewell to summer ; and we go through it, 
 when the day comes, in ceremonial silence. Favete 
 Unguis ! The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at 
 this season reach their height a little after night-fall, 
 and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast 
 off our moorings and head up the river with our 
 backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy 
 astern and are ourselves towed by the silent yachts- 
 man, you may call it a procession. She has been 
 stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, 
 and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her 
 alongside the town quay and beneath the shears — 
 the abhorred shears — which lift this too out of its 
 step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry 
 of Polydorus. We lower it, lay it along the deck, 
 and resume our way ; past quay doors and windows 
 where already the townsfolk are beginning to light 
 their lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews 
 rest with elbows on bulwarks and stare down upon us 
 idly through the dusk. She is after all but a little 
 cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like 
 the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our 
 own; and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, 
 or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as samite — those 
 heavenly wings ! — nor felt her gallant spirit straining 
 to beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. 
 Yet even to them her form, in pure white with gilt 
 fillet, might tell of no common obsequies. 
 
 312
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is 
 renewed ; and the shipwright who sent this keel 
 down the ways to her element surely beheld the birth 
 of a goddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but 
 the conditions of his work keep him a modest man ; 
 for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of 
 half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt 
 his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. 
 Nor has the language a word for their appalling 
 candour. Often, admiring how cheerfully he tolerates 
 them, I have wondered what it would feel like to 
 compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen 
 reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the ship 
 was a framework only until the terrible moment 
 when with baptism she took life. Did he in the 
 rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realise that she 
 had passed from him ? Ere the local artillery band 
 had finished " Rule Britannia," and while his friends 
 were still shaking his hands and drinking to him, 
 did he know his loss in his triumph ? His fate is to 
 improve the world, not to possess ; to chase perfection, 
 knowing that under the final mastering touch it must 
 pass from his hand ; to lose his works and anchor 
 himself upon the workmanship, the immaterial 
 function. For of art this is the cross and crown in 
 one ; and he, modest man, was born to the sad 
 eminence. 
 
 She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by 
 
 313
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 something better. Like a slave's her beautiful un- 
 taught body came to us ; but it was we who gave 
 wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its 
 grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She is 
 ours, too, by our gratitude, since the delicate machine 
 
 " Has like a woman given up its joy ; " 
 
 and by memories of her helpfulness in such modest 
 perils as we tempt, of her sweet companionship 
 through long days empty of annoyance — land left be- 
 hind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols 
 of the market-place, its sordid worries ; the breast flung 
 wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, 
 void perhaps, but so beatincally clean ! Then it was 
 that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge 
 without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisper- 
 ings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her 
 tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, 
 creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine — I 
 think at times that she has found a more human 
 language. Who that has ever steered for hours 
 together cannot report of a mysterious voice " break- 
 ing the silence of the seas," as though a friend were 
 standing and speaking astern ? or has not turned 
 his head to the confident inexplicable call ? The 
 fishermen fable of drowned sailors " hailing their 
 names." But the voice is of a single speaker; it 
 bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead ; 
 
 3H
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 it calls no name ; it utters no particular word. It 
 merely speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being 
 tricked by an illusion so absurd, I steal a glance at 
 the yatchsman forward. He is smoking, placidly 
 staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the 
 speaker, and patently he has heard nothing. Was 
 it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate ? She, too, knows 
 the voice ; even answered it one day, supposing 
 it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our 
 common secret. But we never hear it together. 
 She is seated now on the lee side of the cockpit, 
 her hands folded on the coaming, her chin rested 
 on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the 
 sail and across the sea from which they surely 
 have drawn their wine-coloured glooms. She has 
 not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not 
 Cynthia. Then either it must be the wild, 
 obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the 
 impassable bar of speech, to break through and 
 be at one with her master, or else — Can it 
 have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds, with 
 mischievous harp ? 
 
 " That was the chirp of Ariel 
 You heard, as overhead it flew, 
 The farther going more to dwell 
 And wing our green to wed our blue ; 
 But whether note of joy or knell 
 Not his own Father-singer knew; 
 
 315
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Nor yet can any mortal tell, 
 Save only how it shivers through ; 
 The breast of us a sounded shell, 
 The blood of us a lighted dew." 
 
 Perhaps ; but for my part I believe it was the ship ; 
 and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of 
 those who need a figure-head to remind them of a 
 vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain 
 romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, 
 unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have 
 known a crew to set so much store by one that they 
 kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the fore- 
 castle and duly adorned their darling when in port. 
 But this is materialism. The true personality of a 
 ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with 
 a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all 
 weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, 
 and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling through 
 and along every nerve of her. Are you converted ? 
 That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, 
 and for an hour be a god ! For indeed you shall be a 
 god, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall 
 run out with the chain as you slip moorings — run 
 out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, 
 winged ! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the 
 times to which you were born, each wave shall turn 
 back a page as it rolls past to break on the shore 
 towards which you revert no glance. Even the 
 
 316
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that 
 
 coast. 
 
 " Sails of silk and ropes of sendal, 
 Such as gleam in ancient lore, 
 And the singing of the sailor, 
 
 And the answer from the shore " — 
 
 these shall pass and leave you younger than romance 
 — a child open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a 
 sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch the 
 gannets diving — 
 
 " As Noah saw them dive 
 O'er sunken Ararat." 
 
 Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of 
 a kingdom I must pause to describe for you, though 
 when you reach it you will forget my description 
 and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that 
 is a part of its charm. 
 
 Walter Pater, reading the Odyssey, was brought 
 up (as we say) " with a round turn '* by a passage 
 wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy 
 how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, 
 and stepped ashore. It filled him with wonder that 
 so simple an incident — nor to say ordinary — could 
 be made so poetical ; and, having pondered it, he 
 divided the credit between the poet and his fortunate 
 age — a time (said he) in which one could hardly have 
 spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled 
 
 3*7
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 down their boat without making a picture " in the 
 great style" against a sky charged with marvels. 
 
 You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth 
 of which I am telling, and are swept over the rolling 
 bar into quiet water — you will discover (and with 
 ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater was entirely 
 mistaken, and the credit belongs neither to Homer 
 nor to his fortunate age. For here are woods with 
 woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches 
 with fishermen hauling nets ; and all these men, as 
 they go about their work, contrive to make pictures 
 "in the great style" against a sky charged with 
 marvels, obviously without any assistance from 
 Homer, and quite as if nothing had happened 
 for, say, the last three thousand years. That the 
 immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially 
 "heroic age" — or that, if it have, that age is yours — 
 you will discover by watching your own yachtsman 
 as he moves about lowering foresail and preparing 
 to drop anchor. 
 
 It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as 
 Wilson painted — a broad-bosomed flood between 
 deep and tranquil woods, the main banks holding here 
 and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, 
 but opening into creeks where the oaks dip their 
 branches in the high tides, where the stars are 
 glassed all night long without a ripple, and where 
 you may spend whole days with no company but 
 
 318
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 herons and sandpipers. Even by the main river 
 each separate figure — the fisherman on the shore, the 
 ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing 
 between them — moves slowly upon a large landscape, 
 while, permeating all, " the essential silence cheers 
 and blesses." After a week at anchor in the heart of 
 this silence Cynthia and I compared notes, and set 
 down the total population at fifty souls; and even so 
 she would have it that I had included the owls. Lo ! 
 the next morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke 
 us in our berths, and, raising the flap of our dew- 
 drenched awning, we "descried at sunrise an emerging 
 prow " of a peculiarly hideous excursion steamboat. 
 She blew no whistle, and we were preparing to laugh 
 at her grotesque temerity when we became aware of 
 a score of boats putting out towards her from the 
 shadowy banks. Like spectres they approached, 
 reached her, and discharged their complements, until 
 at last a hundred and fifty passengers crowded her 
 deck. In silence — or in such silence as a paddle- 
 boat can achieve — she backed, turned, and bore them 
 away : on what festal errand we never discovered. 
 We never saw them return. For aught I know they 
 may never have returned. They raised no cheer ; 
 no band accompanied them ; they passed without 
 even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes 
 at most the apparition had vanished around the river- 
 bend seawards and out of sight. We stared at the 
 
 3*9
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 gently heaving water, turned, and caught sight of 
 Euergetes, his head and red cap above the forecastle 
 hatch. (I call our yachtsman Euergetes because 
 it is so unlike his real name that neither he nor 
 his family will recognise it.) "Why, Euergetes," 
 exclaimed Cynthia, " wherever did they all come 
 from ? " " I'm sure I can't tell you, ma'am," he 
 answered, "unless 'twas from the woods" — giving us 
 to picture these ardent holiday-makers roosting all 
 night in the trees while we slumbered. But the odd 
 thing was that the labourers manned the fields that 
 day, the fishermen the beach that evening, in un- 
 diminished numbers. We landed, and could detect 
 no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent 
 days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, 
 though easy, was startling. 
 
 I suppose that "in the great style" could hardly be 
 predicated of our housekeeping on these excursions ; 
 and yet it achieves, in our enthusiastic opinion, a 
 primitive elegance not often recaptured by mortals 
 since the passing of the Golden Age. We cook for 
 ourselves, but bring a fine spirit of emulation both 
 to cuisine and service. We dine frugally, but the 
 claret is sound. From the moment when Euergetes 
 awakes us by washing down the deck, and the sound 
 of water rushing through the scuppers calls me forth 
 to discuss the weather with him, method rules the 
 early hours, that we may be free to use the later as 
 
 320
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 we list. First the cockpit beneath the awning must 
 be prepared as a dressing-room for Cynthia; next 
 Euergetes summoned on deck to valet me with the 
 simple bucket. And when I am dressed and tingling 
 from the douche, and sit me down on the cabin top, 
 barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and 
 Euergetes has been sent ashore for milk and eggs, 
 bread and clotted cream, there follows a peaceful 
 half-hour until Cynthia flings back a corner of the 
 awning and, emerging, confirms the dawn. Then 
 begins the business, orderly and thorough, of redding 
 up the cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the 
 lower deck, folding away the awning, and transform- 
 ing the cockpit into a breakfast-room, with table 
 neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has returned, 
 and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red 
 mullet cooking. Cynthia clatters the cups and 
 saucers, while in the well by the cabin door I perform 
 some acquired tricks with the new-laid eggs. There 
 is plenty to be done on board a small boat, but it is 
 all simple enough. Only, you must not let it over- 
 take you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears ! 
 
 By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, 
 my pipe is lit, and a free day lies before us — 
 
 " All the wood to ransack, 
 All the wave explore." 
 
 We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. 
 
 321 
 22
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 The nearest railway lies six miles off, and is likely 
 to deposit no one in whom we have the least 
 concern. The woods are deep, we carry our lunch- 
 basket and may roam independent of taverns. If 
 the wind invite, we can hoist our small sail ; if not, 
 we can recline and drift and stare at the heavens, or 
 land and bathe, or search in vain for curlews' or 
 kingfishers' nests, or in more energetic moods seek 
 out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine. 
 Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul 
 out of those delectable waters, remote and enchanted 
 as the lake whence the fisherman at the genie's 
 orders drew fish for the young king of the Black 
 Isles. But such days as these require no filling, and 
 why should I teach you how to fill them ? 
 
 Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, 
 when the awning has been spread once more, and 
 after long hours in the open our world narrows to 
 the circle of the reading-lamp in the cockpit. Our 
 cabin is prepared. Through the open door we see 
 its red curtain warm in the light of the swinging 
 lamp, the beds laid, the white sheets turned back. 
 Still we grudge these moments to sleep. Outside we 
 hear the tide streaming seawards, light airs play 
 beneath the awning, above it rides the host of 
 heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, 
 we have home — larder, cellar, library, tables, and 
 cupboards ; life's small appliances with the human 
 
 322
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 comradeship they serve, chosen for their service after 
 severely practical discussion, yet ultimately by the 
 heart's true nesting-instinct. We are isolated, bound 
 even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of 
 chain only. To-morrow we can lift anchor and 
 spread wing ; but we carry home with us. 
 
 " I will make you brooches and toys for your delight 
 Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night ; 
 I will make a palace fit for you and me 
 Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. 
 
 I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room 
 Where white flows the river and bright blows the 
 
 broom ; 
 And you shall wash your linen and keep your body 
 
 white 
 In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night." 
 
 You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. 
 Will you think it ridiculous that after such royal 
 days of summer, her inconspicuous obsequies have 
 before now put me in mind of Turner's " Fighting 
 Temeraire " ? I declare, at any rate, that the fault 
 lies not with me, but with our country's painters and 
 poets for providing no work of art nearer to my 
 mood. We English have a great seafaring and a 
 great poetical past. Yet the magic of the sea and 
 shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and for its 
 finest expression we must still turn to an art in 
 which as a race we are less expert, and stand before 
 
 323
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. 
 The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming 
 when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their 
 bard and sit enshrined in "a great English national 
 epic as grand as the Odyssey." It may be, but as yet 
 our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine 
 adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a 
 spirited but accidental look, and suggest the excur- 
 sionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language 
 — not even The Ancient Mariner — binds as that 
 
 picture binds, the 
 
 "Mystic spell, 
 Which none but sailors know or feel, 
 And none but they can tell " — 
 
 if indeed they can tell. In it Turner seized and 
 rolled together in one triumphant moment the 
 emotional effect of noble shipping and a sentiment 
 as ancient and profound as the sea itself — human 
 regret for transitory human glory. The great war- 
 ship, glimmering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, 
 moving like a queen to execution ; the pert and 
 ignoble tug, itself an emblem of the new order, 
 eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow 
 loveliness it supersedes ; the sunset hour, closing 
 man's labour ; the fading river-reach — you may call 
 these things obvious, but all art's greatest effects are 
 obvious when once genius has discovered them. I 
 should know well enough by this time what is 
 
 324
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 coming when I draw near that picture, and yet my 
 heart never fails to leap with the old wild wonder. 
 There are usually one or two men standing before it 
 — I observe that it affects women less — and I glance 
 at them furtively to see how they take it. If ever I 
 surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe we shall 
 shake hands. And why not ? For the moment we 
 are not strangers, but men subdued by the wonder 
 and sadness of our common destiny: "we feel that 
 we are greater than we know." We are two English- 
 men, in one moment realising the glories of our blood 
 and state. We are alone together, gazing upon a 
 new Pacific, " silent, upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 For — and here lies his subtlety — in the very flush 
 of amazement the painter flatters you by whispering 
 that for you has his full meaning been reserved. The 
 Temdrairc goes to her doom unattended, twilit, 
 obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle of the 
 river. You alone have eyes for the passing of 
 greatness, and a heart to feel it. 
 
 " There 's a far bell ringing," 
 
 but you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the 
 close of day, the end of deeds. 
 
 So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a 
 sense of proud exclusiveness mingles with our high 
 regret. Astern the jettymen and stevedores are 
 wrangling over their latest job ; trains are shunting, 
 
 325
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes 
 amid clouds of dust. We and we only assist at 
 the passing of a goddess. Euergetes rests on his 
 oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep 
 shadow of the shore, and with a soft grating noise — 
 ah, the eloquence of it !— takes ground. Silently we 
 carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm ; 
 silently we slip the legs under her channels, lift and 
 make fast her stern moorings, lash the tiller for the 
 last time, tie the coverings over cabintop and well ; 
 anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due 
 rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November dark- 
 ness has settled on the river ere we push off our 
 boat, in a last farewell committing her— our treasure 
 " locked up, not lost " — to a winter over which Jove 
 shall reign genially 
 
 " Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera." 
 
 As we thread our dim way homeward among the 
 riding-lights flickering on the black water, the last 
 pale vision of her alone and lightless follows and 
 reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, 
 the long nights. She is haunting me yet as I land 
 on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's 
 edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my 
 library- door. I throw it open, and lo ! a bright fire burn- 
 ing, and, smiling over against the blaze of it, cheerful, 
 companionable, my books have been awaiting me. 
 
 326
 
 N 
 
 ovember 
 
 WILL the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat 
 more serious gossip ? 
 In my childhood I used to spend long holidays 
 with my grandparents in Devonshire, and afterwards 
 lived with them for a while when the shades of the 
 prison-house began to close and I attended my 
 first " real " school as a day-boy. I liked those 
 earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had 
 great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and 
 rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting 
 with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask 
 and shot-flask for his gun — an old muzzle-loader. 
 Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to 
 learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind ; and 
 my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. 
 Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of 
 her acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly 
 imperious, lady : and I do seem to remember that 
 she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. 
 But she loved her own with a thoroughness which 
 
 3 2 7
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 extended — good housewife that she was — down to 
 the last small office. 
 
 In short, here were two of the best and most 
 affectionate grandparents in the world, who did 
 what they knew to make a child happy all the 
 week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, 
 and on Sunday they took me to public worship and 
 acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my 
 twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with 
 Hell, and would wake up in the night and lie awake 
 with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I 
 had no very vivid fear for myself — or if vivid it was 
 but occasional and rare. Little pietistic humbug 
 that I was, I fancied myself among the elect : but 
 I had a desperate assurance that both my parents 
 were damned, and I loved them too well to find the 
 conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what 
 kept me from tackling my father on the state of his 
 soul. The result would have been extremely salutary 
 for me : for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth 
 of conviction of his own which he united with limit- 
 less tolerance, and a very warm affection for his 
 mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not : but 
 for two or three years at least my childhood was 
 tormented with visions of Hell derived from the 
 pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived 
 from my reading — the ghost of an evil old woman 
 in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, 
 
 328
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 The Tapestried Room, and a jumble of devils from 
 a chapter of Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late 
 Physician. I had happened on these horrors among 
 the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case. 
 
 For three or four years these companions — the 
 vision of Hell particularly and my parents in it — 
 murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason 
 that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy 
 or man I have never been troubled at all by Hell or 
 the fear of it. 
 
 The strangest part of the whole affair is that no 
 priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in 
 private of any life but this present one, or indeed 
 about religion at all. I suppose there must be some 
 instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off 
 certain cases as hopeless from the first . . . and 
 yet I have always been eager to discuss serious 
 things with the serious. 
 
 There has been no great loss, though — apart from 
 the missing of sociableness — if one may judge the 
 arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the 
 analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a 
 future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be 
 discussed without resort to analogy. But there are 
 good and bad analogies, and of all bad ones that 
 which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who 
 will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) 
 is the common one of the seed and the flower. 
 
 329
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " The flowers that we behold each year 
 In chequer'd meads their heads to rear, 
 
 New rising from the tomb ; 
 The eglantines and honey daisies, 
 And all those pretty smiling faces 
 That still in age grow young — 
 Even those do cry 
 That though men die, 
 Yet life from death may come," 
 
 wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations 
 of British schoolboys have turned into Latin 
 alcaics ; and how often have we not "sat under" 
 this argument in church at Easter or when the 
 preacher was improving a Harvest Festival ? 
 Examine it, and you see at once that the argument 
 is not in pari materia ; that all the true correspond- 
 ence between man and the flower-seed begins and 
 ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, 
 blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of 
 seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his 
 seed behind him — all in this world. The " seed " 
 argument makes an illicit jump from one world to 
 another after all its analogies have been met and 
 satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went 
 to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible 
 indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. 
 As things are, one might as validly reason from 
 the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as 
 from the flower to prove that man goes thither. 
 
 33o
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude 
 of the seed : but his argument is a totally different 
 one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what 
 form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not 
 the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may 
 chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God 
 will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him : 
 in other words, he tells us that since bare grain 
 may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully 
 different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this 
 world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies 
 planted here should be raised in wonderful form 
 hereafter. Objections may be urged against this 
 illustration : I am only concerned to point out that 
 it illustrates an argument entirely different from 
 the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should 
 have to endure far less frequently were it our 
 custom to burn our dead, and did not interment 
 dig a trap for facile rhetoric. 
 
 Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do 
 not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general 
 warning against interpreting the future life in terms 
 of this one, w T hereas its delights and pains can 
 have little or nothing in common with ours. We 
 try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating 
 and perpetuating ours — or some of them ; but the 
 attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight 
 to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity 
 
 33 1
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate 
 to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about 
 it ; by reason of which incapacity he falls back 
 upon the easier, misleading conception of " Ever- 
 lasting Life." In Eternity time is not : a man 
 dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for 
 in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow 
 are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. 
 This vacuum of time you may call " Everlasting 
 Life," but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily 
 and almost inevitably understand by " Everlasting 
 Life," which to them is an endless prolongation of 
 time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as 
 consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggera- 
 tion or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, 
 they invite the retort, "And pray what would 
 become of any one of our known pleasures, or 
 even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made 
 everlasting ? " As Jowett asked, with his usual dry 
 sagacity, in his Introduction to the Phcsdo — 
 
 "What is the pain that does not become deadened 
 after a thousand years ? or what is the nature of that 
 pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony ? 
 Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as 
 they are keen ; of any others which are both intense and 
 lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . 
 To beings constituted as we are the monotony of singing 
 psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of 
 
 33 2
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 hell, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by 
 them." 
 
 This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive 
 that the critic is setting up his rest upon the very 
 fallacy he attacks — the fallacy of using " Eternity " 
 and " Everlasting Life " as convertible terms. He 
 neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, 
 through endless time, of pleasures which delight us 
 because they are transitory : he does not see, or 
 for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a pro- 
 longation of time at all, but an absolute negation of it. 
 There seems to be no end to the confusion of 
 men's thought on this subject. Take, for example, 
 this extract from our late Queen's private journal 
 (1883) :— 
 
 "After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in 
 dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most 
 interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight 
 much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to 
 sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and 
 what it would be if he did not feel and know that there 
 was another world where there would be no partings : 
 and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and 
 philosophers who would make you believe that there 
 was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain 
 all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were 
 such a thing possible, God, who is Love, would be far 
 more cruel than any human being." 
 
 333
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable 
 interview — these two, aged and great, meeting at a 
 point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel 
 themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and 
 exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where 
 neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that 
 they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not 
 Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret 
 the future life in terms of this one ? Speculation 
 will not carry us far upon this road ; yet, so far as 
 we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. 
 Cruelty implies the infliction of pain : and there 
 can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, 
 then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have 
 done with feeling ? Or what on the living, if they 
 live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness 
 without discovering the cheat ? Let us hold most 
 firmly that there has been no cheat ; but let us 
 also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there 
 be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that 
 would make it a cheat would also blot out com- 
 pletely all chance of discovery, and therefore all 
 pain of discovering. 
 
 This is a question on which, beyond pleading that 
 what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the 
 result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not 
 
 334
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 only because here is not the place for metaphysics, 
 but because — to quote Jowett again — "considering 
 the ' feebleness of the human faculties and the 
 uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to 
 believe that the fewer our words the better. At 
 the approach of death there is not much said : 
 good men are too honest to go out of the world 
 professing more than they know. There is perhaps 
 no important subject about which, at any time, even 
 religious people speak so little to one another." 
 
 I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall 
 into this reticence because as they grow older the 
 question seems to settle itself without argument, 
 and they cease by degrees to worry themselves 
 about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly 
 with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all 
 furious egoists ; at forty or thereabouts — and especi- 
 ally if we have children, as at forty every man 
 ought — our centre of gravity has completely shifted. 
 We care a great deal about what happens to the 
 next generation, we care something about our work, 
 but about ourselves and what becomes of us in the 
 end I really think we care very little. By this time, 
 if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are 
 by no means so splendidly interesting as they used 
 to be, but subjects rather of humorous and charitable 
 comprehension. 
 
 Of all the opening passages in Plato — master 
 
 335
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 of beautiful openings — I like best that of the Laws. 
 The scene is Crete ; the season, midsummer ; 
 and on the long dusty road between Cnosus and 
 the cave and temple of Zeus the three persons of 
 the dialogue — strangers to one another, but bound 
 on a common pilgrimage — join company and fall 
 into converse together. One is an Athenian, one a 
 Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are 
 elderly. Characteristically, the invitation to talk 
 comes from the Athenian. 
 
 " It will pass the time pleasantly," he suggests ; " for 
 I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and 
 temple of Zeus is considerable, and doubtless there are 
 shady places under the lofty trees which will protect us 
 from the scorching sun. Being no longer young, we 
 may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the 
 whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by 
 conversation." 
 
 " Yes, Stranger," answers Cleinias the Cretan, " and if 
 we proceed onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, 
 which are of rare height and beauty, and there are green 
 meadows in which we may repose and converse." 
 
 "Very good." 
 
 " Very good indeed ; and still better when we see 
 them. Let us move on cheerily." 
 
 So, now walking, anon pausing in the shade to 
 rest, the three strangers beguile their journey, which 
 (as the Athenian was made, by one of Plato's cunning 
 
 336
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 touches, to foresee) is a long one; and the dialogue, 
 moving with their deliberate progress, extends to a 
 length which no doubt in the course of some 2,300 
 years has frightened away many thousands of general 
 readers. Yet its slow amplitude, when you come 
 to think of it, is appropriate ; for these elderly men 
 are in no hurry, although they have plenty to talk 
 about, especially on the subjects of youth and 
 religion. "They have," says Jowett, "the feelings 
 of old age about youth, about the state, about 
 human things in general. Nothing in life seems to 
 be of much importance to them : they are spectators 
 rather than actors, and men in general appear to 
 the Athenian speaker to be the playthings of the 
 gods and of circumstances. Still they have a 
 fatherly care of the young, and are deeply impressed 
 by sentiments of religion. . . ." 
 
 "Human affairs," says the Athenian, "are hardly 
 worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be in 
 earnest about them — a sad necessity constrains us. . . . 
 And so I say that about serious matters a man should 
 be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he 
 should not be serious ; and that God is the natural 
 and worthy object of our most serious and blessed 
 endeavours. For man, as I said before, is made to be the 
 plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of 
 him ; wherefore also every man and woman should walk 
 seriously and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and 
 be of another mind from what they are at present." 
 
 337 
 23
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 But on the subject of youth, too, our Athenian 
 is anxiously, albeit calmly, serious : and especially 
 on the right education of youth, " for," says he, 
 " many a victory has been and will be suicidal to 
 the victors ; but education is never suicidal." By 
 education he explains himself to mean — 
 
 " that education in virtue from youth upwards which 
 makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of 
 citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and 
 how to obey. This is the only education which, upon 
 our view, deserves the name ; and that other sort of 
 training which aims at the acquisition of wealth or 
 bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelli- 
 gence and justice is mean and illiberal, and is not 
 worthy to be called education at all." 
 
 Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an 
 age which for many years (if I live) I shall be 
 able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though 
 speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that 
 the talk of these three imaginary interlocutors of 
 his upon youth, and the feeling that colours it, 
 convey more of the truth about old age than does 
 Cicero's admired treatise on that subject or any 
 of its descendants. For these treatises start with 
 the false postulate that age is concerned about 
 itself, whereas it is the mark of age to be indifferent 
 about itself, and this mark of indifference deepens with 
 the years. Nor did Cicero once in his De Senectute get 
 
 338
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian 
 lets fall almost casually — that a man should honour 
 an aged parent as he would the image of a God 
 treasured up and dwelling in his house. 
 
 The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, 
 differs little, if at all, from Mr. Meredith's, as you 
 may see for yourself by turning back to the foot 
 of p. 272 of this book and reading the two or 
 three pages which follow it. Speaking as a parent, 
 I say that this outlook is — I won't say the right 
 one, though this too I believe — the outlook a man 
 naturally takes as he grows older : naturally, because 
 it is natural for a man to have children, and he 
 who has none may find alleviations, but must miss 
 the course of nature. As I write there comes back 
 to me the cry of my old schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, 
 protesting from the grave — 
 
 " But when I think if we must part 
 
 And all this personal dream be fled — 
 O, then my heart ! O, then my useless heart ! 
 
 Would God that thou wert dead — 
 A clod insensible to joys or ills — 
 A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills ! " 
 
 I hear the note of anguish : but the appeal itself 
 passes me by. " All this personal dream " must 
 flee : it is better that it should flee ; nay, much of 
 our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But 
 we can continue in the children. 
 
 339
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 I think that perhaps the worst of having no 
 children of their own is that t makes, or tends to 
 make, men and women indifferent to children in 
 general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of 
 childless men and women reach out (as it were) 
 wistfully, almost passionately towards the young. 
 Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, 
 regard them as nuisances, and yet regard themselves 
 as patriots — though of a state which presumably is 
 to disappear in a few years, and with their acqui- 
 escence. I own that a patriotism which sets up no 
 hope upon its country's continuous renewal and 
 improvement, or even upon its survival beyond 
 the next few years, seems to me as melancholy 
 as it is sterile. 
 
 Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano 
 more sedulously than that instrument, in my opinion, 
 deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in talk with 
 me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching 
 multitudes of poor children to play upon pianos pro- 
 vided by the rates. As a historical fact, very few poor 
 children play or have ever played on pianos provided 
 by the rates. But I prefer, passing this correction 
 over, to point out to my indignant friends that the 
 upper and middle classes in England are ceasing to 
 breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon 
 race is to lose one of its most cherished accomplish- 
 ments — unless we are content to live and see our 
 
 34°
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp 
 and penny whistle — we must endow the children of 
 the poor with pianos — or perhaps as "labour certifi- 
 cates" abbreviate the years at our disposal for 
 instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American 
 sculptor's grand allegorical conception of " Freedom 
 presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and the Fine Arts." 
 
 To drop irony — and indeed I would expel it, if 
 I could, once and for all from these pages — I like 
 recreation as much as most men, and have grown 
 to find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business 
 of sitting on Education Committees. Some fifteen 
 years ago, in the first story in my first book of 
 short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a 
 dreadful sound : " the footfall of a multitude more 
 terrible than an army with banners, the ceaseless 
 pelting feet of children — of Whittingtons turning 
 and turning again." Well, I still hear that footfall : 
 but it has become less terrible to me, though not 
 one whit less insistent : and it began to grow less 
 terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain 
 little book, The Invisible Playmate, to the author of 
 which (Mr. William Canton) I desire here to tender 
 my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book 
 Mr. Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by 
 an imaginary Arm. (Arminius ?), Altegans, an elderly 
 
 34i
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 German cobbler of " the village of Wieheisstes, in 
 the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland." 
 Its name is the " Erster Schulgang," and I will 
 own, and gratefully, that few real poems by real 
 ''classics" have so sung themselves into my ears, 
 or so shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have 
 the passages which I here set down for the mere 
 pleasure of transcribing them : — 
 
 " The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children ; 
 delightful as it is unexpected ; as romantic in present- 
 ment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world 
 — and all under it, too, when their time comes — the 
 children are trooping to school. The great globe swings 
 round out of the dark into the sun ; there is always 
 morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region 
 of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little 
 ones afoot — shining companies and groups, couples, and 
 bright solitary figures ; for they all seem to have a soft 
 heavenly light about them ! 
 
 " He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages ; on 
 lonely moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread 
 the expanse of green waste, and occasionally a hawk 
 hovers overhead, or the mountain ash hangs its scarlet 
 berries above the huge fallen stones set up by the Druids 
 in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the 
 woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the 
 glen, along the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; 
 tresspassing on the railway lines, making short cuts 
 through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats : he sees them 
 in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky 
 
 342
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only 
 as a strange tradition. 
 
 " The morning-side of the planet is alive with them ; 
 one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as 
 the vast continents sweep ' eastering out of the high 
 shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and as new 
 nations with their cities and villages, their fields, woods, 
 mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, 
 lo ! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again 
 fresh troops of ' these small school-going children of 
 the dawn.' . . . 
 
 " What are weather and season to this incessant 
 panorama of childhood ? The pigmy people trudge 
 through the snow on moor and hill-side ; wade down 
 flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, 
 frost or the white smother of ' millers and bakers at 
 fisticuffs.' Most beautiful of all, he sees them travelling 
 schoolward by that late moonlight which now and 
 again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn." 
 
 My birthday falls in November month. Here, 
 behind this Cornish window, we are careful in our 
 keeping of birthdays ; we observe them solemnly, 
 stringent in our cheerful ritual; — and this has been 
 my birthday sermon ! 
 
 343
 
 D 
 
 t, 
 
 ecemoer 
 
 TTARD by the edge of the sand-hills, and close 
 *■ * beside the high road on the last rise before it 
 dips to the coast, stands a turfed embankment 
 surrounded by a shallow fosse. This is none of 
 our ancient camps (" castles " we call them in 
 Cornwall), as you perceive upon stepping within the 
 enclosure, which rises in a complete circle save for 
 two entrances cut through the bank and facing one 
 another. You are standing in a perfectly level area 
 a hundred and thirty feet in diameter ; the surround- 
 ing rampart rises to a height of eight or nine feet, 
 narrowing towards the top, where it is seven feet 
 wide ; and around its inner side you may trace seven 
 or eight rows of seats cut in the turf, but now almost 
 obliterated by the grass. 
 
 This Round (as we call it) was once an open-air 
 theatre or planguary (piain-an-guare, place of the 
 play). It has possibly a still older history, and may 
 have been used by the old Cornish for their councils 
 and rustic sports ; but we know that it was used as 
 a theatre, perhaps as early as the fourteenth century, 
 certainly as late as the late sixteenth : and, what is 
 
 344
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 more, we have preserved for us some of the plays 
 performed in it. 
 
 They are sacred or miracle plays, of course. If 
 you draw a line from entrance to entrance, then at 
 right angles to it there runs from the circumference 
 towards the centre of the area a straight shallow 
 trench, terminating in a spoon-shaped pit. The 
 trench is now a mere depression not more than a 
 foot deep, the pit three feet : but doubtless time has 
 levelled them up, and there is every reason to suppose 
 that the pit served to represent Hell (or, in the drama 
 of The Resurrection, the Grave), and the trench 
 allowed the performers, after being thrust down into 
 perdition, to regain the green-room unobserved — 
 either actually unobserved, the trench being covered, 
 or by a polite fiction, the audience pretending not to 
 see. My private belief is that, the stage being erected 
 above and along the trench, they were actually hidden 
 while they made their exit. Where the trench meets 
 the rampart a semi-circular hollow, about ten feet in 
 diameter, makes a breach in the rows of seats. 
 Here, no doubt, stood the green-room. 
 
 The first notice of the performance of these plays 
 occurs in Carew's Survey of Cornwall, published in 
 1602 : — 
 
 " Pastimes to delight the mind, the Cornishmen have 
 guary miracles and three-men's songs: and for exercise 
 
 345
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 of the body hunting, hawking, shooting, wrestling, 
 hurling, and such other games. 
 
 " The guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a 
 kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some 
 scripture history with that grossness which accompanied 
 the Romans' veins comedia. For representing it they raise 
 an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the 
 diameter of his inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. 
 The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, 
 to hear and see it ; for they have therein devils and 
 devices to delight as well the eye as the ear ; the players 
 con not their parts without book, but are prompted by 
 one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back 
 with the book in his hand and telleth them softly what 
 they must pronounce aloud." 
 
 Our Round, you observe, greatly exceeds the 
 dimensions given by Carew. But there were several 
 in the west : one for instance, traceable fifty years 
 ago, at the northern end of the town of Redruth, 
 which still keeps the name of Planguary; and 
 another magnificent one, of stone, near the church- 
 town of St. Just by the Land's End. Carew may 
 have seen only the smaller specimens. 
 
 As for the plays — well, they are by no means 
 masterpieces of literature, yet they reveal here and 
 there perceptions of beauty such as go with sincerity 
 even though it be artless. Beautiful for instance is 
 the idea, if primitive the writing, of a scene in one, 
 Ovigo Mundi, where Adam, bowed with years, sends 
 
 346
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 his son Seth to the gate of Paradise to beg his 
 release from the weariness of living (I quote from 
 Norris's translation) : — 
 
 " O dear God, I am weary, 
 Gladly would I see once 
 
 The time to depart. 
 Strong are the roots of the briars, 
 That my arms are broken 
 
 Tearing up many of them. 
 " Seth my son I will send 
 To the gate of Paradise forthwith, 
 
 To the Cherub, the guardian. 
 Ask him if there will be for me 
 Oil of mercy at the last 
 
 From the Father, the God of Grace." 
 
 Seth answers that he does not know the road to 
 Paradise. " Follow," says Adam — 
 
 " Follow the prints of my feet, burnt ; 
 No grass or flower in the world grows 
 In that same road where I went — 
 I and thy Mother surely also — 
 Thou wilt see the tokens." 
 
 Fine too is the story, in the Passio Domini Nosiri, 
 of the blind soldier Longius, who is led forward and 
 given a lance, to pierce Christ's body on the Cross. 
 He thrusts and the holy blood heals him of his 
 blindness. Local colour is sparingly imported. One 
 
 347
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 of the executioners, as he bores the Cross, says 
 boastfully : — 
 
 "'I will bore a hole for the one hand, 
 There is not a fellow west of Hayle 
 Who can bore better." 
 
 — and in the Resurrectio Pilate rewards the gaoler for 
 his trustiness with the Cornish manors of "Fekenal, 
 Carvenow and Merthyn," and promises the soldiers 
 by the Sepulchre "the plain of Dansotha and Barrow 
 Heath." A simplicity scarcely less refreshing is 
 exhibited in The Life of St. Meriasec (a play recently 
 recovered) by a scholar whom a pompous pedagogue 
 is showing off. He says : — 
 
 " God help A, B, and C ! 
 The end of the song is D : 
 No more is known to me," 
 
 but promises to learn more after dinner. 
 
 Enthusiasts beg us to make the experiment of 
 " reviving" these old plays in their old surroundings. 
 But here I pause, while admitting the temptation. 
 One would like to give life again, if only for a day, 
 to the picture which Mr. Norris conjures up : — 
 
 " The bare granite plain of St. Just, in view of Cape 
 Cornwall and of the transparent sea which beats 
 
 348
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 against that magnificent headland. . . . The mighty 
 gathering of people from many miles around hardly 
 showing like a crowd in that extended region, where 
 nothing ever grows to limit the view on any side, with 
 their booths and tents, absolutely necessary where so 
 many people had to remain three days on the spot, 
 would give a character to the assembly probably more 
 like what we hear of the so-called religious revivals in 
 America than of anything witnessed in more sober 
 Europe." 
 
 But alas ! I foresee the terrible unreality which 
 would infect the whole business. Very pretty, no 
 doubt, and suggestive would be the picture of the 
 audience arrayed around the turf benches — 
 
 " In gradibus sedit populus de cespite factis" — 
 
 but one does not want an audience to be acting; 
 and this audience would be making-believe even 
 more heroically than the actors — that is, if it took 
 the trouble to be in earnest at all. For the success 
 of the experiment would depend on our reconstructing 
 the whole scene — the ring of entranced spectators as 
 well as the primitive show; and the country-people 
 would probably, and not entirely without reason, 
 regard the business as " a stupid old May game." 
 The only spectators properly impressed would be a 
 handful of visitors and solemn antiquarians. I can 
 see those visitors. If it has ever been your lot to 
 witness the performance of a " literary " play in 
 
 349
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 London and cast an eye over the audience it 
 attracts, you too will know them and their stigmata 
 — their ineffable attire, their strange hirsuteness, 
 their air of combining instruction with amusement, 
 their soft felt hats indented along the crown. No! 
 We may, perhaps, produce new religious dramas in 
 these ancient Rounds : decidedly we cannot revive 
 
 the old ones. 
 
 * * # # 
 
 While I ponder these things, standing in the 
 deserted Round, there comes to me — across the sky 
 where the plovers wheel and flash in the wintry 
 sunshine — the sound of men's voices carolling at an 
 unseen farm. They are singing The First Nowell ; but 
 the fourth Nowell — the fourth of the refrain — is the 
 clou of that most common, most excellent carol, and 
 gloriously the tenors and basses rise to it. No, we 
 cannot revive the old Miracle Plays : but here in the 
 Christmas Carols we have something as artlessly 
 beautiful which we can still preserve, for with them 
 we have not to revive, but merely to preserve, the 
 
 conditions. 
 
 # * * # 
 
 In a preface to a little book of carols chosen (and 
 with good judgment) some years ago by the Rev. H. 
 R. Bramley, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and well 
 edited in the matter of music by Sir John Stainer, 
 I read that — 
 
 35°
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 " The time-honoured and delightful custom of thus 
 celebrating the Birthday of the Holy Child seems, with 
 some change of form, to be steadily and rapidly gaining 
 ground. Instead of the itinerant ballad-singer, or the 
 little bands of wandering children, the practice of singing 
 carols in Divine Service, or by a full choir at some fixed 
 meeting, is becoming prevalent." 
 
 Since Mr. Bramley wrote these words the practice 
 has grown more prevalent, and the shepherds of 
 Bethlehem are in process of becoming thoroughly 
 sophisticated and self-conscious. For that is what 
 it means. You may (as harassed bishops will admit) 
 do a number of irrelevant things in church, but 
 you cannot sing the best carols there. You cannot 
 toll in your congregation, seat your organist at the 
 organ, array your full choir in surplices, and tune up 
 to sing, for example — 
 
 " Rise up, rise up, brother Dives, 
 And come along with me ; 
 There 's a place in Hell prepared for you 
 To sit on the serpent's knee." 
 
 Or this— 
 
 "Ina manger laid and wrapped I was — 
 So very poor, this was my chance — 
 Between an ox and a silly poor ass, 
 To call my true love to the dance." 
 Or this— 
 
 35i
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 "Joseph did whistle and Mary did sing, 
 And all the bells on earth did ring; 
 On Christmas Day in the morning." 
 
 These are verses from carols, and from excellent 
 carols : but I protest that with " choirs and places 
 where they sing" they will be found incongruous. 
 Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection 
 "some," he says, "from their legendary, festive or 
 otherwise less serious character, are unfit for use 
 within the church." 
 
 Now since, as we know, these old carols were 
 written to be sung in the open air, or in the halls 
 and kitchens of private houses, I prefer to put Mr. 
 Bramley's proposition conversely, and say that the 
 church is an unsuitable place for carol singing. If 
 the clergy persist in so confining it, they will no 
 doubt in process of time evolve a number of new 
 compositions which differ from ordinary hymns 
 sufficiently to be called carols, but from which the 
 peculiar charm of the carol has evaporated. This 
 charm (let me add) by no means consists in mere 
 primitiveness or mere archaism. Genuine carols (if 
 we could only get rid of affectation and be honest 
 authors in our own century without straining to age 
 ourselves back into the fifteenth) might be written 
 to-day as appropriately as ever. "Joseph did 
 whistle," &c, was no less unsuited at the date of 
 its composition to performance by a full choir in 
 
 352
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 a chancel than it is to-day. But whatever the 
 precise nature of the charm may be, you can prove 
 by a very simple experiment that such a performance 
 tends to impair it. Assemble a number of carollers 
 about your doorstep or within your hall, and listen 
 to their rendering of "The first good joy," or 
 *' The angel Gabriel ; " then take them off to church 
 and let them sing these same ditties to an organ 
 accompaniment. You will find that, strive against 
 it as they may, the tune drags slower and slower ; 
 the poem has become a spiritless jingle, at once 
 dismal and trivial. Take the poor thing out into the 
 fresh air again and revive it with a fife and drum ; 
 stay it with flagons and comfort it with apples, for 
 it is sick of improper feeding. 
 
 No, no : such a carol as " God rest you, merry 
 gentlemen," has a note which neither is suited by, 
 nor can be suited to, what people call " the sacred 
 edifice": while "Joseph was an old man," "I saw 
 three ships" and "The first good joy" are plainly 
 impossible. Associate them with organ and sur- 
 pliced choir, and you are mixing up things that differ. 
 Omit them, at the same time banning the house- 
 to-house carolier, and you tyrannically limit men's 
 devotional impulses. I am told that the clergy frown 
 upon house-to-house carolling, because they believe 
 it encourages drunkenness. Why then, let them take 
 the business in hand and see that too much drink is 
 
 35; 
 24
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 neither taken nor offered. This ought not to be very 
 difficult. But, as with the old plays, so with carol- 
 singing, it is easier and more consonant with the 
 Puritan temper to abolish a practice than to elevate 
 it and clear away abuses : and the half-instructed 
 mind is taught with fatal facility to condemn use 
 and abuse in a lump, to believe carol-singing a wile 
 of the Evil One because Bill once went around 
 carol-singing and came home drunk. 
 
 In parishes where a more tolerant spirit prevails 
 I am glad to note that the old custom, and even a 
 taste for the finer ditties, seem to be reviving. 
 Certainly the carollers visit us in greater numbers 
 and sing with more evidence of careful practice than 
 they did eight or ten years ago : and friends in various 
 parts of England have a like story to tell. In this 
 corner the rigour of winter does not usually begin 
 before January, and it is no unusual thing to be able 
 to sit out of doors in sunshine for an hour or so in 
 the afternoon of Christmas Da}'. The vessels in 
 sight fly their flags and carry bunches of holly at 
 their topmast-heads : and I confess the day is made 
 cheerfuller for us if they are answered by the voices 
 of carollers on the waterside, or if, walking inland, I 
 hear the note of the clarionet in some " town-place " 
 or meet a singing-party tramping between farm and 
 farm. 
 
 354
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 That the fresh bloom of the carol was evanescent 
 
 and all too easily destroyed I always knew ; but 
 
 never realised its extreme fugacity until, some five 
 
 years ago, it fell to me to prepare an anthology, 
 
 which, under the title of The Oxford Book of English 
 
 Verse, has since achieved some popularity. I believed 
 
 that previous English anthologists had unjustly, even 
 
 unaccountably, neglected our English carols, and 
 
 promised myself to redress the balance. I hunted 
 
 through many collections, and brought together a 
 
 score or so of pieces which, considered merely as 
 
 carols, were gems of the first water. But no sooner 
 
 did I set them among our finer lyrics than, to my 
 
 dismay, their colours vanished; the juxtaposition 
 
 became an opposition which killed them, and all but 
 
 half a dozen had to be withdrawn. There are few 
 
 gems more beautiful than the amethyst : but an 
 
 amethyst will not live in the company of rubies. A few 
 
 held their own — the exquisite "I sing of aMaiden" for 
 
 instance — 
 
 " I sing of a Maiden 
 
 That is makeles ; x 
 
 King of all kings 
 
 To her son she ches. 2 
 
 " He came al so still 
 
 There his mother was, 
 As dew in April 
 
 That falleth on the grass. 
 1 Without a mate. 2 Chose. 
 
 355
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " He came al so still 
 
 To his mother's bour, 
 As dew in April 
 
 That falleth on the flour. 
 
 " He came al so still 
 
 There his mother lay 
 As dew in April 
 
 That falleth on the spray. 
 
 " Mother and maiden 
 
 Was never none but she ; 
 Well may such a lady 
 Goddes mother be." 
 
 or " Lestenyt, lordings," or " Of one that is so fair 
 and bright;" and my favourite, "The Seven Virgins," 
 set among the ballads lost none of its lovely candour. 
 But on the whole, and sorely against my will, it had 
 to be allowed that our most typical carols will not 
 bear an ordeal through which many of the rudest 
 ballads pass safely enough. So it will be found, I 
 suspect, with the carols of other nations. I take a 
 typical English one, exhumed not long ago by 
 Professor Fliigel from a sixteenth century MS. at 
 Balliol College, Oxford, and pounced upon as a gem 
 by two such excellent judges of poetry as Mr. Alfred 
 W. Pollard and Mr. F. Sidgwick : — 
 
 " Can I not sing but Hoy ! 
 The jolly shepherd made so much joy 1 
 
 356
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 The shepherd upon a hill he sat, 
 He had on him his tabard 1 and his hat, 
 His tar-box, his pipe and his flagat; 2 
 And his name was called jolly, jolly Wat, 
 
 For he was a good herd's-boy, 
 Ut hoy! 
 
 For in his pipe he made so much joy. 
 
 " The shepherd upon a hill was laid 
 His dog to his girdle was tayd, 
 He had not slept but a little braid 
 But Gloria in excelsis was to him said 
 Ut hoy ! 
 For in his pipe he made so much joy. 
 
 " The shepherd on a hill he stood, 
 Round about him his sheep they yode, 3 
 He put his hand under his hood, 
 He saw a star as red as blood. 
 Ut hoy ! 
 For in his pipe he made so much joy." 
 
 The shepherd of course follows the star, and it 
 guides him to the inn and the Holy Family, whom 
 he worships : — 
 
 " ' Now farewell, mine own herdsman Wat ! ' 
 ' Yea, 'fore God, Lady, even so I hat : 4 
 Lull well Jesu in thy lap, 
 And farewell Joseph, with thy round cap ! ' 
 Ut hoy! 
 For in his pipe he made so much joy." 
 
 1 Short coat. 2 Flagon. 3 Went. 
 
 4 Am hight, called. 
 
 357
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 Set beside this the following Burgundian carol (of 
 which, by the way, you will find a charming 
 translation in Lady Lindsay's A Christinas Posy) : — 
 
 " Giullo, pran ton tamborin ; 
 Toi, pran tai fleute, Robin. 
 Au son de ces instruman — 
 Turelurelu, patapatapan — 
 Au son de ces instruman 
 Je diron Noel gaiman. 
 
 " C'eto lai mode autrefoi 
 De loiie le Roi de Roi ; 
 Au son de ces instruman — 
 Turelurelu, patapatapan — 
 Au son de ces instruman 
 Ai nos an fau faire autan. 
 
 " Ce jor le Diale at ai cu, 
 Randons an graice ai Jesu; 
 Au son de ces instruman — 
 Turelurelu, patapatapan — 
 Au son de ces instruman 
 Fezon lai nique ai Satan. 
 
 " L'homme et Dei son pu d'aicor 
 Que lai fleute et le tambor. 
 Au son de ces instruman — 
 Turelurelu, patapatapan — 
 Au son de ces instruman 
 Chanton, danson, sautons-an ! " 
 
 To set either of these delightful ditties alongside of 
 the richly-jewelled lyrics of Keats or of Swinburne, 
 
 353
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 of Victor Hugo or of Gautier would be to sin 
 
 against congruity, even as to sing them in church 
 
 would be to sin against congruity. 
 
 ■» «. * # 
 
 There was one carol, however, which I was fain 
 to set alongside of " The Seven Virgins,'' and 
 omitted only through a scruple in tampering with 
 two or three stanzas, necessary to the sense, but in 
 all discoverable versions so barbarously uncouth as 
 to be quite inadmissible. And yet "The Holy Well" 
 is one of the loveliest carols in the language, and I 
 cannot give up hope of including it some day : for 
 the peccant verses as they stand are quite evidently 
 corrupt, and if their originals could be found I have 
 no doubt that the result would be flawless beauty. 
 Can any of my readers help to restore them ? 
 
 "The Holy Well," according to Mr. Bramley, is 
 traditional in Derbyshire. "Joshua Sylvester," in A 
 Garland of Christmas Carols, published in 1861, took 
 his version from an eighteenth-century broadsheet 
 printed at Gravesend, and in broadsheet form it 
 seems to have been fairly common. I choose the 
 version given by Mr. A. H. Bullen in his Carols and 
 Poems, published by Nimmo in 1886 : — 
 
 " As it fell out one May morning, 
 And upon one bright holiday, 
 Sweet Jesus asked of His dear mother 
 If He might go to play. 
 
 359
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " To play, to play, sweet Jesus shall go, 
 And to play pray get you gone ; 
 And let me hear of no complaint 
 At night when vou come home. 
 
 " Sweet Jesus went down to yonder town, 
 As far as the Holy Well, 
 And there did see as fine children, 
 As any tongue can tell. 
 
 " He said, God bless you every one, 
 
 And your bodies Christ save and see : 
 Little children shall I play with you, 
 And you shall play with Me ? " 
 
 So far we have plain sailing ; but now, with the 
 children's answer, comes the trouble : — 
 
 " But they made answer to Him, No : 
 They were lords' and ladies' sons ; 
 And He, the meanest of them all, 
 Was but a maiden's child, born in an ox's stall. 
 
 " Sweet Jesus turn'd Him around, 
 And He neither laughed nor smiled, 
 But the tears came trickling from His eyes 
 Like water from the skies." 
 
 A glance, as I contend, shows these lines to be 
 corrupt : they were not written, that is to say, in 
 the above form, which violates metre and rhyme- 
 arrangement, and is both uncouth and redundant. 
 The carol now picks up its pace again and proceeds — 
 
 360
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 " Sweet Jesus turned Him round about, 
 To His mother's dear home went He, 
 And said, I have been in yonder town 
 As far as you can see." 
 
 Some versions give " As after you can see." Jesus 
 repeats the story precisely as it has been told, with 
 His request to the children and their rude answer. 
 Whereupon Mary says : — 
 
 " Though You are but a maiden's child, 
 Born in an ox's stall, 
 Though art the Christ, the King of Heaven, 
 And the Saviour of them all. 
 
 " Sweet Jesus, go down to yonder town 
 As far as the Holy Well, 
 And take away those sinful souls 
 And dip them deep in Hell. 
 
 " Nay, nay, sweet Jesus said, 
 Nay, nay, that may not be ; 
 There are too many sinful souls 
 Crying out for the help of Me." 
 
 On this exquisite close the carol might well end, 
 as Mr. Bullen with his usual fine judgment makes it 
 end. But the old copies give an additional stanza, 
 and a very silly one : — 
 
 " O then spoke the angel Gabriel, 
 Upon one good St. Stephen, 
 Although you 're but a maiden's child, 
 You are the King of Heaven." 
 
 361
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " One good St. Stephen " is obviously an ignorant 
 misprint for " one good set steven," i.e. " appointed 
 time," and so it appears in Mr. Bramley's book, and 
 in Mr. W. H. Husk's Songs of the Nativity. 
 But the stanza is foolish, and may be dismissed. 
 To amend the text of the children's answer is less 
 legitimate. Yet one feels sorely tempted : and 
 I cannot help suggesting that the original ran 
 something like this : — 
 
 "But they made answer to Him, No : 
 They were lords and ladies all ; 
 And He was but a maiden's child, 
 Born in an ox's stall. 
 
 " Sweet Jesus turned Him round about, 
 And He neither laughed nor smiled, 
 But the tears came trickling from His eyes 
 To be but a maiden's child. . . ." 
 
 I plead for this suggestion: (i) that it adds nothing 
 to the text and changes but one word ; (2) that it 
 removes nothing but the weak and unrhyming " Like 
 water from the skies " ; and (3) that it leads directly 
 to Mary's answer : — 
 
 " Though you are but a maiden's child, 
 Born in an ox's stall," &c. 
 
 But it were better to hunt out the original than 
 
 362
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 to accept any emendation ; and I hope you will 
 agree that the original of this little poem, so 
 childlike and delicately true, is worth hunting for. 
 "The carol," says Mr. Husk, "has a widely-spread 
 popularity. On a broadside copy printed at Graves- 
 end " — presumably the one from which " Joshua 
 Sylvester" took his version — "there is placed 
 immediately under the title a woodcut purporting 
 to be a representation of the site of the Holy Well, 
 Palestine ; but the admiration excited thereby for 
 the excellent good taste of the printer is too soon 
 alas ! dispelled, for between the second and 
 third stanzas we see another woodcut represent- 
 ing a feather-clad-and-crowned negro seated on 
 a barrel, smoking — a veritable ornament of a 
 tobacconists' paper." 
 
 One of the finest carols written of late years is 
 Miss Louise Imogen Guiney's Trysts Noel. It is 
 deliberately archaic, and (for reasons hinted at above) 
 I take deliberate archaism to be about the worst 
 fault a modern carol-writer can commit. Also it 
 lacks the fine simplicity of Christina Rossetti's 
 /;;- the bleak midwinter. I ought to dislike it, 
 too, for its sophisticated close. Yet its curious 
 rhythm and curious words haunt me in spite of 
 all prejudice: — 
 
 363
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " The Ox he openeth wide the Doore 
 And from the Snowe he calls her inne ; 
 And he hath seen her smile therefore, 
 Our Ladye without sinne. 
 Now soone from Sleepe 
 A Starre shall leap, 
 And soone arrive both King and Hinde : 
 
 Amen, Amen ; 
 But O the Place cou'd I but finde! 
 
 " The Ox hath husht his Voyce and bent 
 Trewe eye of Pity ore the Mow ; 
 And on his lovelie Neck, forspent, 
 The Blessed lays her Browe. 
 Around her feet 
 Full Warme and Sweete 
 His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell ; 
 
 Amen, Amen; 
 But sore am I with vaine Travel ! 
 
 " The Ox is Host in Juda's stall, 
 And Host of more than onely one, 
 For close she gathereth withal 
 Our Lorde, her little Sonne. 
 Glad Hinde and King 
 Their Gyfte may bring, 
 But wou'd to-night my Teares were there ; 
 
 Amen, Amen ; 
 Between her Bosom and His hayre ! " 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The days are short. I return from this Christmas 
 
 364
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 ramble and find it high time to light the lamp and 
 pull the curtains over my Cornish Window. 
 
 " The days are sad— it is the Holy tide : 
 
 The Winter morn is short, the Night is long ; 
 So let the lifeless Hours be glorified 
 
 With deathless thoughts and echo'd in sweet song : 
 And through the sunset of this purple cup 
 
 They will resume the roses of their prime, 
 And the old Dead will hear us and wake up, 
 
 Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime ! " 
 
 Friends dead and friends afar— I remember you at 
 this season, here with the log on the hearth, the 
 holly around the picture frames and the wine at my 
 elbow. One glass in especial to you, my old friend 
 in the far north ! — 
 
 CHRISTMAS EVE 
 
 " Friend, old friend in the manse by the fireside 
 sitting, 
 Hour by hour while the grey ash drips from the 
 
 log, 
 You with a book on your knee, your wife with her 
 knitting, 
 Silent both, and between you, silent, the dog — 
 
 "^Silent here in the south sit I, and, leaning, 
 
 One sits watching the fire, with chin upon hand, 
 Gazes deep in its heart — but ah ! its meaning 
 Rather I read in the shadows and understand. 
 
 365
 
 FROM A CORNISH WINDOW 
 
 " Dear, kind, she is ; and daily dearer, kinder, 
 
 Love shuts the door on the lamp and our two selves : 
 Not my stirring awakened the flame that behind her 
 Lit up a name in the leathern dusk of the shelves. 
 
 " Veterans are my books, with tarnished gilding : 
 Yet there is one gives back to the winter grate 
 Gold of a sunset flooding a college building, 
 Gold of an hour I waited — as now I wait — 
 
 " For a light step on the stair, a girl's low laughter, 
 Rustle of silks, shy knuckles tapping the oak, 
 Dinner and mirth upsetting my rooms, and, after, 
 Music, waltz upon waltz, till the June day broke. 
 
 " Where is her laughter now ? Old tarnished covers — 
 You that reflect her with fresh young face unchanged — 
 Tell that we met, that we parted, not as lovers : 
 
 Time, chance, brought us together, and these 
 estranged. 
 
 " Loyal we were to the mood of the moment granted, 
 Bruised not its bloom, but danced on the wave of its 
 
 joy; 
 
 Passion, wisdom, fell back like a wall enchanted 
 Ringing a floor for us both — Heaven for the boy ! 
 
 " Where is she now ? Regretted not, though departed, 
 Blessings attend and follow her all her days ! 
 — Look to your hound : he dreams of the hares he 
 started, 
 Whines, and awakes, and stretches his limbs to the 
 blaze. 
 
 366
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 " Far old friend in the manse, by the grey ash peeling 
 Flake by flake from the heat in the Yule log's core, 
 Look past the woman you love — On wall and ceiling 
 Climbs not a trellis of roses — and ghosts — of yore ? 
 
 " Thoughts, thoughts ! Whistle them back like hounds 
 returning — 
 Mark how her needles pause at a sound upstairs. 
 Time for bed, and to leave the log's heart burning ! 
 Give ye good-night, but first thank God in your 
 prayers ! " 
 
 THE END 
 
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