L E AVE S
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LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY
CALIFORNIA
B. H. BI.ACK\VI,I .1., 1
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LEAVES OF PROSE
LEAVES OF
PROSE
BY ANNIE MATHESON
WITH TWO STUDIES
BY MAY SINCLAIR
STEPHEN SWIFT
AND COMPANY LIMITED
TEN JOHN STREET
ADELPHI MCMXII
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
PAGE
CHRISTMAS DAY i
LONDON IN SPRING 2
SORDELLO AT THE EAST END 7
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R.A. 17
FEBRUARY FAIR-MAIDS 18
PHILOSOPHY, POETRY AND THE LABOUR PARTY 22
ELECTION OF THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL 29
THE SOUL OF THE PEOPLE 30
LOAVES 39
THE CHILDREN OF THE STATE 41
SNOWDROP-TIME 44
DAFFODILS 45
THE FEEDING OF NECESSITOUS SCHOOL CHILDREN 49
THYRSIS IN A LONDON SQUARE 55
THE MEMORIAL TO MRS. BROWNING 60
A FLOWER FOR MRS. BROWNING'S GRAVE 66
MRS. BROWNING AS A SOCIAL REFORMER 71
A SONG OF NOBEL THOMSON 79
THE GLEAM 80
A FRAGMENT 83
THE OXFORD PAGEANT AND RUSKIN HALL 89
NOTE ON " SILAS MARNER " FROM THE TEMPLE
CLASSICS 96
THE PROFFERED SHIPS 106
IN MID-MAY'S GLORY 108
INTRODUCTION TO " SAYINGS FROM THE SAINTS " 1 1 1
THE LADY OF THE LAKE 117
AN EASTER REVERIE 131
FORGOTTEN BOOKS 135
ROSES 144
BETWEEN THE RAINS 145
NEIGHBOURING GARDENS 148
APPRECIATION OF "SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE" 154
v
' " 437
PAGE
" GOING INTO THE SILENCE" 169
A HOLIDAY ON DARTMOOR 177
L'ENVOI TO THE THREE FOLLOWING SONNETS 183
To THE PEACEMAKER'S MEMORY 184
AN EARLY VICTORIAN NOVEL 186
THE CHILDREN IN GEORGE ELIOT'S STORIES 219
THE WORDS AND WAYS OF CHILDREN 224
IN EARLY AUTUMN 232
THE OPEN WINDOW 234
YOUNG ART AND MY LITTLE RED RIDING
HOOD 237
CHILDREN OF THE LONDON AND SOUTH WESTERN
RAILWAY 242
FROM A COTTAGE WINDOW 246
His SOLILOQUY 250
CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI 251
THE IDEAL WOMAN AS WORDSWORTH AND
SHELLEY SAW HER 257
FOR THE COMMON CAUSE 261
A RECURRENT QUESTION 263
SNOW-WHITE 269
IN PRAISE OF "ADAM BEDE " 274
ST. PAUL'S CHIMES 283
TWO STUDIES BY MAY SINCLAIR
A SERVANT OF THE EARTH 289
GEORGE MEREDITH 301
VI
THE publishers desire to thank Mr. Henry Frowde,
Messrs. Methuen, and Messrs. J. M. Dent, for
permission to reproduce Miss Matheson's essays
from the World's Classics, The Temple Classics, and
the Little Library ; and Mr. Eveleigh Nash for
allowing them to reprint her Introduction to
Sayings from the Saints ; and to acknowledge the
courtesy of the Contemporary Review, Athenaeum,
Journal of Education, Pall Mall Gazette, Westminster
Gazette, Mothers in Council, Guardian, Queen,
Weekly Sun, and Torkshire Post, for permission to
reprint many of her poems and articles ; as well
as the living authors from whom she has made
occasional brief quotations in her essays; also
such holders of copyright as Messrs. Smith, Elder,
Messrs. Burns & Gates, Messrs. Constable,
Messrs. Chatto & Windus, and Mr. David
Douglas, for the right to use such quotations
as those from The Ring and the Book, from
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, from Swinburne, from
George Meredith, and from the Diary of Sir
Walter Scott.
They further desire to thank Miss May Sinclair
for permitting them to append to this volume two
vii
essays by her which had originally been intended for
By Divers Paths* a companion volume about to be
re-issued by the said publishers of Leaves of Prose,
who further wish to acknowledge the courtesy of
the periodicals in which Miss Sinclair's articles first
appeared. If in the above acknowledgments there
has been any oversight, it is inadvertent and will
be much regretted.
* " By 'Divers Paths " edited by Miss Matheson> who con-
tributes 42 of the essays and poems contains two fine sonnets by
Miss May Sinclair, several charming studies of South African
life by Miss Eleanor Tyrrell, poems by Mrs. Maude Egerton King,
and essays by <Dr. C. //. Herford, T>r. Greville MacT>ona/d, and
Mr. C. C. Cotlenll.
Vlll
CHRISTMAS DAY
THERE is no word save One to tell
The secret of this world of pain ;
Its flame of love that conquers hell,
Its anguished loss that yet is gain.
One only Word since time began
May utter what we dumbly feel,
And thro' the infinite in Man
The infinite in God reveal.
He is our Christmas Joy, our Hope,
Our Immortality, our Strength
The Word of God, for whom we grope
Thro' all the stumbling journey's length.
Oh, when at last unveiled we see
The Face for which till death we long,
Then shall we know that Word to be
Our Life, our Rapture, and our Song !
LONDON IN SPRING
commotion of the spring is in heaven and
earth," wrote John Addington Syrnonds, u a rest-
lessness like the approach of some great delivering
passion " ; and what Symonds felt among the
snowfields of the High Alps, we, with diversities
of manifestation, have been feeling here in London.
Full of smoke and din is the great city ; defaced,
even on the surface of it, with hideous placards,
foul breathing-blots of underground railways,
squalid ruck-heaps of poverty and ruin ; but how
possessed with the great poem and pageant of life,
how thrilled and penetrated by the pathos of our
struggling and baffled humanity, comedy and
tragedy jostling one another, yet with barely time
to laugh or weep in the incessant contest for bread
and standing-room. No artist, though he starve
there, can fail to perceive something of the strange
and touching fascination of this sombre and alluring
city, stained, disfigured, blackened, yet beautiful
with a beauty that moves the heart and haunts
the mind, and reaches the deep hiding-places of
the soul. It has in it some undefinable quality
of sweet unexpectedness, some paradoxical charm
of old and new commingling, some mystic hint of
the eternal and the divine in communion with the
human and the sorrowful. There, in the midst
of the hurrying, tramping feet of the thousands
of eager wayfarers who encircle with their un-
heeding processions the ever-open church of
2
St. Paul's, the great dome keeps a heart of silence
and of rest in the midst of the noise of noon, and,
in the sky of sunset or of sunrise, lends emphasis
to the loveliness of the glowing clouds by some-
thing nobly human in its unembarrassed outline.
There, the pigeons, with their soft yet opal-tinted
plumage, fly about the steps of the cathedral, and
haunt the ancient Guildhall. There, past the feet
of the old Abbey, the shrine of literature and art
and a thousand historic memories, past the Houses
of Parliament and the Temple Gardens, the ancient
river the river sung by Chaucer and by Milton,
and by Shakespeare himself flows dreamily
onward in the midst of all the restless sorrow and
sin and hope flows under its succession of en-
chanted bridges, consecrated anew by the poets
and the novelists of this complex, hurrying cen-
tury, till it reaches the thronging ships in the
docks, where Labour toils unceasingly under its
heaviest burdens. There, in the graveyards and
the parks and the open spaces, the little children
take joy of the flowers that they may not pluck,
and the birds make their lovely jargoning, and
the grass grows green again.
London is always beautiful, but never, surely,
so pathetically beautiful as in spring. And the
spring is coming is coming at last. The u com-
motion " that precedes her coming has long been
making noisy prelude to the coming melodies,
like the half-irritating tuning of the instruments
in some great orchestra. Sleet and rain we had,
and wind and sunshine, after the long frost-bound
winter ; and many days ago now the fragrance of
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OF
the palm-willows was already on the air, floating
in from the railway sidings at Child's Hill and
Hendon, where they scatter their sweets as lavishly
as in distant country lanes. Soon the travellers
between London and Richmond will find them-
selves speeding through seas of white blossom, in
the orchards on which they look from their rail-
way windows. Already, the great commons of
Chislehurst and Wimbledon and Wandsworth
must be loading their breezes with the delicious
scent of growing trees and reawakened turf and
tiny flowers hidden in the grass ; and in the deeps
of Epping Forest the fairy wood-sorrel must be
once more carpeting whole acres with its frail
bewitching loveliness. The uplands of High
Barnet and the great beeches in the Hadley
Woods must be stirring with new life and colour,
and merry with the song of birds. And here in
town the joy goes on apace ; already the lilacs are
a mist of green leaf, and from my top-floor
window at the back of a little thoroughfare among
London shops, I look through the bare branches
of an ancient mulberry-tree in the garden of my
neighbour the haberdasher, and see that the young
"forest tree" behind it is aglow with April
verdure. The leaves of the sycamore have broken
their pink sheaths, and many of the laburnums
at Belsize and Hampstead have unfolded their
button-like buds in neatly cut leaves. For a full
week the almond trees have been out along the
Bayswater Road, and the fairest of them all is one
which grows within a corner of area-railing, where
such a tree might seem impossible. They are mostly
4
wan and pale this year ; but perhaps their lovely
sisters on the south side of Kensington Gardens
may blush in rosier buds and petals against that
pearly blue of sky which is their true background.
Nor is it only in Kensington Gardens that this
dainty and lustrous blossom clothes the bare black
branches with colours of heaven. In the garden
of many a suburban street, in many a sordid and
smoky corner, by many a forgotten grave in
London's vast outlying burial-grounds, the almond
tree is blossoming, and He who " is the perfect
Poet" is speaking to the hearts He has fashioned.
It is in its symbolism like that other earliest
blossom of which Browning wrote :
" The blackthorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine, were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow."
In the lanes where the woodbine leaves are
showing the brown bloominess on the backs of
their unfolding leaves, where the little green buds
of the hawthorn are swelling among the newly
opened foliage, and, like a miniature dandelion-
clock, the coltsfoot is making patches of white
down in the wayside grass, spring breathes a
thousand tender memories of the days that are
gone. The white violets will soon be budding in
their leafy coverts, the celandines already are
starring the fields ; but it seems that the gaiety
of the celandine and the fragrance of the violet
have a sorrow in them, now that death has stolen
from us so many of those " dear familiar faces "
5
OF
that were with us in the meadows and the byways
of our vanished youth.
Yet when the springtime comes to us amid the
heart-throbs of a great city, where human needs
and aspirations are crying to us on every side,
then is there new hope in the sunlight, new
vitality in the blossom-laden wind, new love in
the very whispering of the churchyard grass.
That great and ancient river which, through the
long frost, lay bound and deadened under huge
blocks of ice, while the sea-gulls hovered hungrily
above it, is once more bearing its accustomed
freight, and flowing more genially eastward under
the bridge which George Eliot has made immortal.
The sunshine is upon it, the warm, common,
life-giving sunshine. The brotherhood of the
world is in the air, and every sense is quickened
with the joy of a welcome release from the
captivity of a long and bitter winter.
" Once more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new."
In such a mood we ask no idle sentimental
dreaming over the cherished past : our hearts
echo Tennyson's song of wages we demand no
other guerdon than " the glory of going on, and
still to be."
SORDELLO AT THE EAST END
BROWNING says of Bordello :
" He felt
An error, an exceeding error melt
While he was occupied with Mantuan chants,
Behoved him think of men, and take their wants,
Such as he now distinguished every side,
As his own want which might be satisfied,
And, after that, think of rare qualities
Of his own soul demanding exercise."
Some such motto might well be written above
the hearth of the University Settlements.
This indeed is the idea which Westcott ex-
pressed in his own forcible prose when he said :
" The question which we must always be striving
to answer is, * How shall I do my part in this
common life in which I share ? ' Sooner s or later
here or hereafter when our eyes are opened, I
believe that we shall see that all the sorrows and
sins, which fill us with grief and almost with
despair, touch ourselves nearly, and are indeed
parts of our own life for which we in our measure
are responsible/'
And it is with a certain pleasant sense of
paradox that we note how a poem often derided for
its obscurity has for years been teaching, despite
the bewilderment of its gorgeous Italian colouring
and the complex harmonies which half conceal its
concentrated unity of meaning, a doctrine which
7
OF
might well be made the text of a popular move-
ment of the day, a movement of which its enemies
have said that it is in danger of losing its true out-
line in the clouds of talk which encircle it.
But as far as the east is from the west is the
temperate enthusiasm of the University Settlers
from the imitative sentiment of the gossips who
discuss it, and who, without any actual expendi-
ture of time, or strength, or money, yet wrap
themselves in a vague philanthropic intention.
The paradox, like other paradoxes, is exactly
what all but the narrow-minded would desire.
That the purpose of such a movement should be
in accordance with the teaching of a great poet
who through years of popular neglect patiently
preached his gospel to the few who would listen, is
precisely what a believer would wish and expect.
The author of " Obiter Dicta " assured us that
" Faith may be well left alone, for she is, to give
her her due, our largest manufacturer of good
works, and, whenever her furnaces are blown out,
morality suffers."
Happily this commercial island of ours has
never been quite without the poets and prophets
who rekindle such furnaces and tend them with
unconscious passion. Nor is it always those
faggot-pilers who are popularly regarded as the
briskest workmen who really do the most to keep
the flame at a white heat.
Who shall say how many poets of lower rank
have been illumined in some crucial moment by
the burning truths which now and then flash
from Browning's "Sordello"'? Who shall say into
8
SO^DSLLO <A<r me e^tsr
how many towns and cities these lesser men have
carried the sacred flame which they borrowed
from a book the world has not cared to read ? It
is a story of the temptations, disciplines, failures,
through which Sordello, the young Italian versifier,
is taught at last, and just too late for this life, to
recognise the mission of every true poet as that
of a God-inspired friend of the people, a divinely
kindled lover of humanity. That it should seem
obscure to many English readers is at once
accounted for by the fact that it presupposes
an intimate knowledge of Italian history. To
Browning the typical reader is what the typical
school-boy was to Macaulay. He credits him
with his own encyclopaedic knowledge, his own
powerful and emotional intellect, his own faculty
for seeing round corners without moving an inch
from the central standpoint, his own vivid over-
leaping mode of reasoning, at once so elliptical,
parenthetical, and cautiously questioned.
That " Sordello" can at moments be musically,
convincingly lucid no one can doubt who
remembers the few master touches by which the
artistic temperament is made to breathe before
the reader in the following passage :
"a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense ; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
Some happy lands, that have luxurious names.
OF
You recognise at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled
(As though she would not trust them with her
world)
A veil that shows a sky not near so blue,
And lets but half the sun look fervid through.
How can such love ? . . .
. . . fresh births of beauty wake
Fresh homage, every grade of love is past,
With every mode of loveliness : then cast
Inferior idols off their borrowed crown
Before a coming glory. Up and down
Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine
To throb the secret forth ; a touch divine
And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod ;
Visibly through his garden walketh God."
More touching to some of us than the just-
quoted description of a youthful poet are the
powerful lines in which Browning himself, speak-
ing for once in his own person, chooses, as the life-
long mistress of his heart, Humanity in its most
hungry, tattered and forlorn aspect, declaring that
it is just the supreme need, the unsatisfied craving,
the forlorn wretchedness, which have won his love.
" Peasants, queens,
Take them, made happy by whatever means,
Parade them for the common credit, vouch
That a luckless residue, we send to crouch
In corners out of sight, was just as framed
For happiness, its portion might have claimed
As well."
10
SOT^DSLLO
It is impossible to quote at length the marvel-
lous passage in which he symbolises the suffering
he yearns over, pausing at last to say how the
miserable, tired out, despised existence of the
Many
" seems to fall
Toward me no wreath, only a lip's unrest
To quiet, surcharged eyelids to be pressed
Dry of their tears upon my bosom. Strange
Such sad chance should produce in thee such
change,
My love ! warped souls and bodies ! "
Well may the lover of " warped souls and bodies "
passionately remind us of the need of a Power
above us and beyond us, and add, with profound
significance :
4 'But of a Power its representative
Who, being for authority the same,
Communication different, should claim
A course, the first chose and this last revealed
This Human clear, as that Divine concealed
What utter need ! "
That is a need which the founders of the
University Settlements did not fail to recognise
a need which was present to the mind of him
with whose memory Toynbee Hall must ever be
associated, as well as to the preacher who wrote
concerning the Oxford House : " We find that
a lot of men at Oxford, while perfectly recogni-
sing the preference of others for a work wholly
cut off from a particular religious tie, yet for
ii
OF
themselves feel that the secular work has its best
background in a * foyer' of worship and prayer."
There are some who seem to fear that these
Settlements are not secular enough for their pur-
pose, as though the ruling out of the world into
" sacred " and " secular " were not of itself a kind
of profanity.
" All service ranks the same with God,"
and, if to clean a window for His sake be often
better than to preach a sermon, then why should
there be these futile divisions and distinctions ?
To assume that churches and parishes are all very
well for the West, but that agnosticism is the only
straight road to the hearts of costermongers, and
that nothing is so damning to work in the East as
any positive belief that is a theory which shall
not here be admitted. No, if the Settlements die,
it will not be because they are wrecked on religious
controversies, but because they sink for want of
religious faith.
Well might Westcott say at the meeting which
united Oxford and Cambridge in one " indissoluble
bond," not " to baffle God who loves the world,"
but to try at least to put themselves at His
service :
44 1 certainly cannot forget how can I forget ?
that the central fact of my faith of our faith
brings before us with a power that nothing
could surpass, the supreme truth that all that is
noblest in life is common to men as men. I
cannot forget that the crowning sign of the
Christ was not the restoration of lost powers, was
12
not even the temporal conquest of death, but that
a gospel is preached to the poor. I cannot forget
that we believe and profess our belief in one
Church in which all diversities of class and en-
dowment are only provisions for the fulfilment
of diversities of office."
The work of the Settlements must, it is true,
often include drudgery, friction, weariness ; but
how true it is that
" This work is a work which has the special
qualities of mercy it is twice blessed, and, if
the blessing prove greater on one side than on the
other, it will be on the side of those that go there
rather than on the side of those to whom they
go."
This paper has touched on Browning's eloquent
description of that artistic temperament, allathirst
for beauty, sensuous and spiritual, with which
Sordello was gifted for blessing or for cursing.
Nowhere perhaps are the special dangers of such
a nature and Browning is ever emphasising
their perils more likely to be fostered than in
life at Oxford or Cambridge. Which of us,
feeling in ourselves those very possibilities, does
not shudder in reading of how, in this world,
Sordello failed
" As one content to merely be supposed
Singing or fighting elsewhere, while he dozed " ?
If there be any who realise the good which the
University Settlements may do in strengthening
the moral fibre and spiritual earnestness of the
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OF
workers, but doubt on the other hand whether
there will be any practical result in the neighbour-
hood which they try to help, there are two facts
of which they may be reminded. First, let them
consider that the whole system of local admini-
stration in England is based on the tacit assump-
tion that there exists everywhere " a resident
leisured class " able and willing to do the work of
Vestries, Poor Law Boards, and the like ; and
then reflect that in the East of London such a
class is ruinously absent.
In the second place, let them remember all the
harm that has been done by a fussy patronising
benevolence on the one hand and a cold mechani-
cal officialism on the other; and ask themselves
whether there be any gift more certain to be
fruitful of good than that deep, patient, individual
love which we are taught to pray for as the very
bond of peace and of all perfectness, the love
which seeks intimate knowledge, frequent inter-
course, individual relationship. Surely the in-
ference is not far to seek. The residents at the
Settlement ought to supply at least a few of that
class of much-needed municipal workers who in
the past have been too often only conspicuous in
the East End by their absence. They ought also,
by the mere fact that they are neighbours in a
literal sense, and have a right to share in the
common needs and sympathies of the community,
to be able to enter into relations of simple friend-
ship and brotherhood with those among whom
they dwell. What is sometimes called friendship
is often as great a sham as what is sometimes
H
SO^DSLLO vfr rne e^sr
called brotherhood, but that does not change the
fact that the true friendship and the true brother-
hood are divine boons. Never are they more
divine than when they overleap class distinctions,
forget traditional prejudices, ignore sectarian
divisions. A great compeer of Browning's has
given us a very lovely and perfect lyric, in which
the two voices sing of the love of lovers that it is
" Love that can shape or can shatter a life till the
life shall have fled ?
Nay, let us welcome him, Love that can lift up
a life from the dead."
And may it not be said of all unselfish passion,
above all of that enthusiasm of humanity which
is neither more nor less than divinely inspired
love, that it may be vital enough to kindle into a
more vivid and beautiful existence even the dull
unbeautiful deadness of East London ?
" Nay, let us welcome him, Love that can lift up
a life from the dead."
In an article in Time, in which Canon Barnett
gave a clear and detailed account of the plan and
aim of "A University Settlement/' he reminds us
that
"Vain will it be to get good houses, clean
streets, and universal comfort, if at the same time
men do not find delight in service. It would be
safe indeed to go a step further, and add, vain is
the gospel which makes a man anxious to save his
own soul, if at the same time he is not made more
anxious to give his soul to save his friends."
15
OF
Surely that is a truth not very unlike the truth
expressed in that quotation from " Sordello " with
which this paper opened.
Canon Barnett rightly tells us that " Happily
there is no need to rouse public feeling as to the
way in which the poor that is, the majority of
Englishmen live. Unnoticed influences have
brooded like spirits over the chaos of politics and
trade, and directed the thought of men to one
end."
How many thousands of men and women in
England have been stirred at the eleventh hour to
a really energetic resolve that Lazarus shall no
longer lie untended at the gate ! The filth and
squalor of our large towns have not, alas, come
suddenly and recently into existence. How is it
that, only suddenly and recently, the question has
become a burning question, and at last, thus late
in the day, there seems likely to be some little
outcome of good work ?
Why is it ? It is because at last faith's furnace
has waxed hot enough to melt even callous and
stupid hearts to shame. Not Browning only, but
scores of inspired workers, known and unknown,
have been ready to immolate their very souls and
bodies in this furnace rather than fall down and
worship the eyeless golden image of the dwellers-
at-ease, and at last, after long waiting, there has
been a vision of God.
16
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R.A.
UNMOVED by changing forms of many a creed,
He served the Altar with a toil divine,
Filled Christ's own chalice with the sacred wine
And broke the bread for sacramental need,
Stooped low the sad and hungry souls to feed
Who make their life the dungeon where they
pine,
Through their dim grating called the stars to
shine,
And wrought for Him who is the Light indeed.
Now, past deep waters that he crossed dry-shod,
Beyond Philistia, quit of Amalek,
In joy of artistry and honour increast,
He does the bidding of the beautiful God
An acolyte of the Eternal Priest,
After the order of Melchizedek.
FEBRUARY FAIR-MAIDS
THEY are here, the February Fair-Maids, and we
think of the great poet, not dead, but ever speak-
ing to our hearts, who enshrined for us in words of
welcome the quaint country name of these " first-
lings,"doubtless the name they bore in that Lincoln-
shire village of his boyhood where " the little glen
in the neighbourhood called by the old monkish
name of Holywell " he remembered " white with
snowdrops in their season " that village of which
he wrote in sweet Miltonian cadences in his " Ode
to Memory " :
<c Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-
side,
The seven elms, the poplars four,
That stand beside my father's door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves . . .
O ! hither lead thy feet !
Pour round mine ears the live-long bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridged wolds."
There is something in the cool tranquility of
the pastoral and sylvan picture, the woods, the
running water, the " wattled folds," that seems a
fit setting for the glen of snowdrops, those white
" fair maids " of February, snooded with that
delicate and vital green which makes them the
18
very promise and type of stainless purity and
eternal spring.
But, after all, their loveliness appeals to us with
a more moving charm, perhaps, as they come forth
in their dazzling hopefulness from the sooty
mould of old flower-pots on London window-
sills, " innocent whitenesses " (to steal and reverse
Charles Lamb's pretty name for the little chimney-
sweeps) as yet unspotted by the bleak and wintry
world. Before our London almond tree, our wild
"flow'r o' the peach," puts forth the delicate
rose-flush of heaven in stony corners of our sordid
streets, before the chestnut buds begin to glisten,
or the birds to make their sweet springtide
"jargoning "in grimy London gardens and in
smutty London squares, the snowdrops lift their
heads in graceful hardihood, as unsullied as Pom-
pilia, as unconscious as Pippa.
Is it an accident that our English country-folk
have rechristened so many of our white flowers
with such especial felicity ? The pheasant-eyed
narcissus is the Sweet Nancy, the white flower of
the Italian painters is the Mary Lily, the snowdrop
is the Fair Maid of February. But, after all, for
the last of these three, the name by which it is most
widely known is the loveliest and most appropriate.
White as the driven snow it is, hung upon its
smooth stem, tipped with the heavenward-point-
ing spear, as if it had indeed dropped there, with
the inimitable poise of clinging rain or pendent
dew, instead of having in truth arisen, after the
divinely human fashion, through slow processes
of struggling development, extracting beauty from
'9
OF
ugliness, and purity from "a handful of poor
earth."
This brief paper was suggested by the haunting
music of that one line in Tennyson's unrhymed
poem to a snowdrop from which its title is taken ;
but it is in his far more perfect lyric of " Early
Spring," a lyric which must surely last as long as
the English language lasts, that the snowdrop and
the crocus speak to us most :
66 O Heart, look down and up
Serene, secure,
Warm as the crocus cup,
Like snowdrops pure."
It is in a lyric even briefer, and for once as
simple and as musical, that Browning has be-
queathed to us a line about our February
flower :
" For each glance of the eye so bright and black,
Though I keep with heart's endeavour,
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my soul for ever !
"Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger ;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer ! "
That is simple enough for a dullard, and it
breathes the magic which cannot be defined ; in
a word, it is poetry.
But loveliest magic of all, passing even this of
language, is in the snowdrop itself, in silent and
20
natural ways, transmuting the black earth of
London into a flower fit for the angels, and yet
more fit for men and women :
Like to life's poetry that comes not by
A poet's dreams, but blossoms in the dust
Of lowly deeds and patient-handed toil.
21
PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, AND THE
LABOUR PARTY
"IN reply to the just and urgent claims of the
workmen suddenly deprived of their means of
livelihood, and unable in a day to find another,"
cried Auguste Comte I quote from M. Levy
Bruhl's summary " our economists can only re-
peat with merciless pedantry their barren aphorism
about absolute industrial liberty. To all com-
plaints they dare to answer that it is a question
of time ! And this to men who require food
to-day ! "
But Comte was not of those who content
themselves with quack remedies or cheap social
nostrums. He liked to say "that the considera-
tion of duty is bound up with the spirit of the
whole." . . . "Every one," he taught, "has
duties, and towards all. No one has any right
properly so called. ... In us the intellect is only
a means. Love is the principle, action is the end."
This is calming and bracing doctrine, after
utterances of a blatantly selfish kind, published
under the heading of "The Liberals and the
Labour Men," glorifying self-interest as the
pivot of human life.
Who can doubt that Comte is right and that
Love, not the lower motive just named, is at
the heart of all true communal progress and
evolution ?
It is the hidden spring of that self-control
22
TOSTRT <^NT> THS L^BOU T<AR<TT
which a well-known poet and essayist has pro-
claimed as the most valuable of all habits, and
goes even deeper than the desired intercourse
between labour and academic knowledge so con-
vincingly advocated by Canon Barnett.
Like all vital and noble forces, Love, as the
principle of action, needs and demands the
widest and deepest knowledge attainable within
the boundaries of Love's own limiting obligations.
Shelley, whose sympathy with labour was pas-
sionate, wrote :
"The wise want love, and those who love want
wisdom :
And all best things are thus confused to ill
Many are strong and rich and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt ; they know not what they do."
But Shelley's Demogorgon, in a vision that
passes beyond the horizon of our mortal day and
yet includes it, sees that
" Love from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's
strength."
It may be that there is no perfect art, even of
23
OF
living, no absolute loveliness, even of creation, in
which there is not a fine self-restraint.
But Labour, the mighty Cyclops, long prisoned
yet ever of close kinship with Olympus, must
needs draw strength and beauty from more
elemental sources than mere social conventions,
or traditional orthodoxies of intellectual scribes
or wrangling pharisees.
May not Labour in this be like the poet-girl
who, in that romance of social reform which
Ruskin is said to have honoured as the greatest
poem of the nineteenth century, tells us that she
"... had relations with the Unseen, and drew
The elemental nutriment and heat
From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,
Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark."
I have had the high honour of living in the
closest intercourse with labouring people, and I
know that their lives, which in pathos are ever on
the edge of tragedy, often breathe the very spirit
of the deepest poetry.
The burden that the Cyclops must bear in city
streets and slums, where the very soap and water
have to be paid for, indirectly in time and
strength if not in money, is a load that only the
hardest heart can realise without shame and grief,
when once the sense of corporate responsibility
and practical brotherhood has been permanently
awakened.
But even there, and still more here, in the
country, where some measure of lovely vision and
decent living are within reach of many labouring
24 .
me
homes, there is a pagan joy of living, a fatalistic
acceptance of the inevitable lot, an underlying
faith, not in churches or shibboleths, but in all
that Dolly Winthrop trusted to as "Them
above" a heart not far from the eternities, and
eyes that look at moments towards the everlasting
hills.
Yet I cannot deny that the labourer whom I
know best a skilful workman, upright, loyal,
tender-hearted is, or at all events was, when he
first crossed my path, deeply seared and embittered
by our unjust and unchristian social conditions,
and only too ready to respond to such a dastardly
cry as that here reprinted as a cruel misrepresenta-
tion of the intentions of the Labour Party that
Labour Party from which we look for a battle-cry
ennobled by the awful sufferings which Labour has
endured.
Here is the terrible line which made me suffer
shame for the mighty Cyclops whom I love and
reverence, and on whose weary shoulders rest the
very foundations of society :
" Self-interest is the strongest motive in human
nature. Look after your own interests. Stand by
your own class.''
To write that upon the Labour programme
would indeed be to sink to the level of degrading
class feeling and class distinctions. It is not only
unworthy of a great cause, it is also suicidal ; for
any section of the community that founds conduct
upon the selfish pedantries of the old, already
OF
superseded, political economy is writing upon
itself a sentence of death.
Besides our own island poets, there is one bard
of world-wide fame who has especially avowed
himself the poet of Democracy. He, Walt
Whitman, looks not to self-interest, but to love, as
the moving power of the world, and sees round
every human heart that divine halo, though our
our eyes are often blind to it.
When he bids you,
" Whoever you are ! claim your own at any
hazard,"
he speaks not of the poor toys of the moment,
but of that which neither time nor death can
wrest from you. He bids you be
" Master or Mistress in your own rights over
Nature, elements, pain, passions, dissolution."
There are creeds and crowns that are merely
political, of which he would say with Mr.
Swinburne through the lips of Hertha
" A creed is a rod
And a crown is of night ;
But this thing is of God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit,
And live out thy life as the light."
He believes with Wordsworth that Life
" . . . is energy of love
Divine or human, exercised in strife,
26
me
In pain or tribulation and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass
Through shades of silent rest to endless joy."
Shelley wrote of love :
" It makes the reptile equal to the God."
But Browning gives to the same thought an
expression at once juster and more daring :
" For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Among his worlds, I will dare to say."
The crawling of the worm is not for man
least of all for " Labour men," dear to the Eternal
Craftsman who chose the shed of a carpenter as
the nursery on earth of Divine Love.
Shelley, who defied the horrible travesties of
Christianity too often current under its name, yet
wrote concerning the true symbol of sacrificial
love that
" . . . blazoned, as on Heaven's immortal
noon,
The Cross leads generations on/'
And M. Levy Bruhl reminds us that Comte
towards the close of his life read every day in
that little book of " The Imitation " which bears
the name of one who lived a hard and self-
renouncing life.
They have both moved the world and be-
queathed, to us who love and labour, thoughts to
strengthen that invaluable habit of self-control
from within, whereby labour may achieve some of
27
OF 7*3088
the mighty victories so finely suggested by Mr.
Frederick Rogers, who has hope that " the
horrible conditions of so much of our factory life,
the tragedy of the aged in industry, the long hours
of labour for some, and the difficulty of obtaining
labour for others," may at last be immediately
and energetically grappled with.
Year by year the great army of Labour must
count its maimed and slain upon the battlefield.
It is on their behalf that the mighty host has now
become articulate. It is a great moment. May we
not say to Labour, as Mr. George Meredith said
to Age, when speaking of that Nature whereby,
as he teaches, " the gloomy Wherefore of our
battlefield" is solved " in the Spirit,"
" But hast thou in thy season set her fires
To burn from Self to Spirit through the lash,
Honoured the sons of Earth shall hold thee
high:
Yea, to spread light when thy proud letter I
Drops prone and void as any thoughtless
dash " ?
28
ELECTION OF THE LONDON
COUNTY COUNCIL
Now let your great traditions guard your heart,
Brave city of Milton, Shakespeare's capital !
Where good and evil still hold carnival
And in your civic contests bear a part !
Let proud philosophy and love and art
Call forth artillery from their arsenal
To thunder for your rights municipal
And sweep corruption from your crowded mart !
No slave of party ever can be free ;
Oh, learn of charity from that Saint Paul
To whom you dedicate your central dome,
A citizen of no mean city, he,
And keep your altar-hearth aglow for all
To make, amid your many mansions, Home !
THE SOUL OF THE PEOPLE
A PLEA FOR DIVERSITY IN UNITY
WE hear much on all hands of physical deteriora-
tion, and whatever may be the precise ultimatum
on this matter, it is at all events certain that to
multitudes of our fellow-citizens the conditions of
a sound physical life and a home fit for the rearing
of children seem to be not only unattainable, but
almost beyond hope. It is true that every man
must first bear his own sufficient load of individual
responsibility, in the effort to live honestly and
nobly in this world of harassing conflict and sordid
competition. But he who can impotently stand
unhelpingand unmoved, while the souls and bodies
of his own people and kindred go down under
burdens too heavy to be borne, must be dead to
the essential verities by which we claim to be a
Christian nation. For such a nation takes upon
itself the name of a Master in social ethics who
taught that, although the suffering inherent in the
discipline of this transient outward body must not
even weigh in the scale against the education of
an eternal and beautiful spirit, yet the sons and
daughters of men should be fair and healthy as the
glorious lilies of the field ; taught that for necessary
food and clothing it is not His will that they
should lack ; taught that to close the heart
against the physical needs of any human creature
was to court a worse fate than drowning with a
millstone round the neck ; and left, as a vital part
30
<THe SOUL OF THS
of His tradition, the daily consecration of the body
as a temple of His own transcendent Presence.
But the problem of physical deterioration must
be attacked at its source and centre as well as
through its environment. Our whole social
structure demands gradual rebuilding after a
diviner plan until there be given to every man the
birthright of such an outward lot as shall leave
the life of the soul unshackled and unimpaired.
Nevertheless it is impossible even to glance at
modern therapeutics without perceiving that in
all national uplifting the sou! of the people reacts
upon the body, and the highest level of racial
efficiency will never be attained where there is
spiritual flaccidity and blindness and corruption.
Without ever wholly separating the two con-
siderations, or regarding the claims of the spirit
to the exclusion of the claims of the body, it may
be permissible, on non-controversial and non-party
lines, to touch upon one cardinal error which seems
to permeate official dissensions in the so-called
religious life of our unchristian Christian empire.
I am a woman. I believe in those profound
distinctions of sex wherein lies much of what is
highest and most godlike in the nature made in
the image of the Eternal.
" Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy, his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield
Everywhere."
But when Robert Browning thus defined the
OF
masculine prerogative, through the lips of the old
Pope in "The Ring and the Book," he was far
indeed from denying to woman that share in the
guidance of the imperial hearth which even Ruskin
claimed for her at the very moment when he
warned her against cheap feminine effrontery in the
direction of theological disputations. There is
much that I gladly leave to the masculine sword
and spear and shield, for I know well that
" The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink
Together."
But I cannot forget that on woman rests the
crowning responsibility of motherhood, and no
true woman, whether married or unmarried, can
wholly ignore the needs of the children who
surround her, even though those children may not
be her own. Therefore women may in all modesty
and charity have a word to say, on behalf of the
children in our schools and churches, on whom the
offence of our quarrelsome literalism reacts with
deadening and disastrous result. And, since women
are popularly supposed to be religious reactionaries,
it is perhaps not unfitting that the many English-
women who believe that the Church needs reform-
ing from within should, by finding a spokeswoman,
however unworthy, utter their plea for a sane and
progressive religious unity, a unity strengthened
and deepened by the catholic diversity which it
includes.
It must be clear to the meanest understanding
that, unless the entire historic ideal of the Ecclesia
be a stereotyped and depraved futility, the eccle-
32
me SOUL OF rne TSOTLS
siastical cannot be wholly separated from the
theological and the ethical.
The magnification of orthodoxy by subservient
selfishness and narrow bigotry has been once for
all branded with scorn by the Master's scathing
denunciation of self-seeking and self-righteous
dignitaries as vipers and hypocrites, but that de-
nunciation was perfectly consonant with his choice
of an honest and orthodox bigot for that sudden
heart-stirring illumination which made of a man,
proud at once of his civic liberties and his eccle-
siastical education, the most catholic and humbly
self-sacrificing of His ambassadors.
There can be little doubt that those who regard
themselves as the responsible leaders of Christianity
in England stand just now in a crossway pass of
extreme peril and have a right to remind their
followers everywhere that England in this matter
also expects every man to do his duty. On the
one hand a hard, literal, fossilised interpretation
of the creeds daily turns away thousands from
altars to which " the feast's own Founder "
would welcome every earnest heart. On the
other hand, the very foundation of all that makes
for home and peace and brotherhood in our
rotten social fabric is being undermined by a tide
of neo-paganism, a tide which, held at bay for a
time by that rock whereon the ancient Church
was built as the citadel of mutual reverence and
steadfast covenant in man's daily intercourse with
his fellows, now seeks to sweep away everything
beneath the iridescent foam of its self-indulgent
pseudo-philosophy, except the shifting sands of
c 33
OF
animalism, emotionalism, and blatant sentimental
rhapsody.
"The laws of marriage," of which Tennyson
long since wrote that they were, in his ideal woman,
" charactered in gold
Upon the blanched tablets of her heart/'
are openly mocked at, or treated with a scarcely
veiled contempt ; and one of the sincerest and
most distinguished of our sociological writers in
the present day has indicated with sufficient plain-
ness in his recent utterances concerning education
that, in his opinion, stimulus is more important
than discipline or so-called " morality," and that
the teachers of our boys need not be over-nice or
sternly pure-hearted if only they will call forth
in every possible direction the dormant energies
of slowly awakening manhood, forgetting that,
while apathy is indeed the most hopeless of
deadly sins, yet there is, as in the vision of
Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," a ghastly Life-
in-Death of lurid sensationalism that throws the
dice against Death-in-Life with a perpetual risk
of an even deeper perdition.
Between these two extremes of ecclesiastical
idolatry and hysterical materialism, regarding as
beyond present cavil the vast multitude of the
so-called Free Churches, and considering only the
form of religion hitherto chosen by the State for
self-expression, since, for those of us who are
Anglicans, criticism should begin at home, we
have the three labelled companies within the visible
national shrine, too often more desirous of keeping
34
THS SOUL OF THS TSOTLS
their own phylacteries intact than of realising
that eternal fraternity in the universal Father-
hood, to which the Founder of their religion
sought to redeem the souls and bodies of men.
Everywhere, both within and without the
Church, there are good men and true who lay
down their lives daily for the faith that rules their
conduct through the Spirit of Truth. But not
the less is it certain that the tares still grow
among the wheat, sown by the Power that walks
in darkness and delights to scatter maleficent seed
wherever there are divisions and wranglings within
the sacred precincts. And therefore is it still pain-
fully evident that each of the three controversial
groups within the consecrated edifice seeks eagerly
to legalise its own exclusive interpretation of the
great charter, and is too much occupied in pro-
claiming that it is not as other men to have time
for that ever-present kingdom into which none
may enter save through the doorways of love.
Ail alike are guilty of the same primary mistake,
whether it be those of us who demand above all
else the externals of a beautiful and ancient
symbolism, as a witness to that divine Self-sacrifice
in which the veriest "Low Churchman" does,
though he would find for it some other form of
expression, in his heart devoutly believe ; or those
who ask chiefly for legalised freedom and a faith
that lives by works ; or those who, in their eager-
ness to glorify what has come to them through
the crude formula of an illiterate age, forget how
the mystery of sacrificial redemption and the un-
speakable humility of Love, may be blasphemed
35
OF
and distorted by the inadequacy of crude language,
or by the squalid forms of an irreverent familiarity.
"High," and "Broad" and "Low" alike lose
sight too often of that height and breadth and
depth of the Divine Love to which all alike
should witness, and through whose power all
social and religious progress must ever proceed.
If they really believed, as they think they believe,
that the Divine Spirit is present in the Church to
guide into all Truth, then they would fear no
multiplicity of opinion, no variety of intellectual
belief, in a Church that would be unmistakable in
its ethical unity and would find ample expression
in the simple yet mystic sacraments of the Water
and Bread and Wine. If, cleaving the wood, we
find the Eternal there, and partaking of the broken
loaf we find Him present also in that symbol of
our fellowship with the whole family in heaven
and earth, and, bowing our heart to that cup of
sorrow which is the privilege of our common
humanity, we share in His sacred chalice, can we
not forego the petty and vulgar clamour which
seeks to prescribe to other citizens of the Holy
City the precise shape of their vesture or the suit-
able ritual for their communion ?
Can we not trust all details to the informing
and inspiring Spirit ? Must we fetter the Body
that we name His temple, lest superstition should
creep in, or Truth should walk waywardly, or
Love should fall to baseness ?
There was One, the son of a Jewish peasant
maiden, who, when He was asked how and where
men should worship, discovered to His questioners
36
me SOUL OF rne
His true Divinity when He answered : " God is
a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship
Him in spirit and in truth."
He was right who taught that men will receive as
much of the Divine Life as they are able to receive
neither less nor more ; and what is true of the
individual soul must be true also of that corporate
fellowship which history has named the Ecclesia.
But that will best be attained by absolute free-
dom of religious teaching in accordance with the
wish of each child's parents, giving to each religious
or " secularist " contingent in the great army the
choice of its own teachers, the control, by that
section of the people and for that section of the
people, of its own religious or ethical teaching,
while securing under the popular control of the
whole united kingdom the intellectual and physical
efficiency of each.
The highest and most vital unity, both in the
realm of what we call "Nature "and in the world
of human affairs, is correlative with expansion,
development, complexity. Uniformity, on the
other hand, is always deadening and retrograde in
its influence. In national education in imperial
education there can be no fundamental and pro-
gressive unity which does not include perfect free-
dom of diversity and rest upon absolute equality
of opportunity. No Education Bill and no new
Rubric can be of enduring value unless this double
condition be fulfilled.
Of this at least we may be certain, that if a day
ever come in which Christianity in Church and
State shall have ceased all useless wrangling and
37
s OF
morbid self-analysis, and, like her Master, shall
have given herself up entirely to feeding and
healing, educating and redeeming, the bodies and
the souls of men, in that day degeneration and
deterioration will be stayed at their source and we
shall see new heavens and a new earth.
LOAVES
TO THE LOAF-MAKER
BY A SONG-MAKER
[The Archbishop [of York] . . . mentioned that he was
very much touched the other day by receiving from a
journeyman baker towards the building of a church in his
parish the sum of $oo, the savings of a lifetime, along
with a letter in which he said he gave the amount as a
small thank-offering for the benefits God had given him ever
since his baptism* YORKSHIRE POST, April 21, 1910.]
OH, my brother, my brother, I would I could do
as much !
Every day thro* the heat and stress
You made your loaves for the Lord to bless
Loaves you could see and touch
To feed the hungry or help the faint,
Bring needed life to sinner and saint,
Like the sun, who thro' all the journey's
length
To the just and the unjust giveth strength !
Oh, my brother, my brother, I would I had always
made
At daily cost of the oven's heat
Such holy loaves for the folk to eat
Served as the Master bade
Still counting even the counter-pelf
A trust from the Lord of Life Himself,
And feeding the folk with the best of good
Made quick in the fires of brotherhood !
39
OF
Oh, I have striven, have striven, to earn my right
to my bread,
Were it only to lift with joyful song
The bitter days that should make men strong,
Or give, in love's own stead,
A call to battle, a passing breath
Of courage and hope in face of death !
I made the loaves, but the loaves were few,
And I often failed, as the Master knew.
You, my brother, my brother, were crowned with
a ceaseless toil,
Till out of your faithful, labouring life
The furnace flush of your oven-strife
You won a thrifty spoil,
You, who have laid on the altar-stone
A double gift for the Lord to own
The daily bread that is life-bread good,
And the Bread of the Spirit's Brotherhood !
You who have fed men's bodies to work the will
of the soul
Faithfully serving, won in the end
To helping the soul itself, my friend,
The body's life to control,
Soul-hunger's agony to redress,
And man with the Bread of Life to bless,
So heartening singers, who with bent head,
Have wrought, in the mills of God, man's
bread.
40
THE CHILDREN OF THE STATE*
THE wise care of the children of the State is a duty
beyond all party question, and the conciliatory,
statesmanlike energy of the State Children's Aid
Association will do much to strengthen the hands
of men on both sides of the House in any measures
of reform which come before Parliament touching
this great and perplexing responsibility. Among
our Poor Law Guardians are men and women
whose self-denial and devotion put to shame many
of their critics ; but Guardians cannot move in
advance of the national verdict, and it is a part
of the work of this society to enlighten unofficial
opinion.
If we understand the Association aright, more
individual care for the children of the State is
the very heart of its contention more home-life,
with all its variety of give and take and rough and
smooth; less of that safe, machine-like, inflexible
institution-routine, which, from its very per-
fection and inevitableness, deadens character,
crushes spontaneity, and injures health. Courage,
resource, originality what chance is there of
these where childhood is governed in the aggre-
gate and humanity is adjusted to the average ?
What though the great and tender humourist
who wrote " Oliver Twist " has taught this over
and over again with tragic and reiterated emphasis ?
* A portion of an article which appeared in the Guardian
in April 1898.
41
OF
Unhappily it needs to be hammered at still, in-
cluding as it does the other terrible truism that
in such a uniformity of process it is usually the
finest nature that suffers most. On the other
hand, if ordinary children need constant and dis-
cerning care, how much more the children who
are born into the world with a physique weakened
by parental poverty or vice, even when the character
bears no hereditary taint of parental feebleness
or despair.
Education, while reckoning with heredity, may
often take courage from the possibility of a healthy
atavism, and seek to evoke the moral beauty of
some forgotten ancestor, if the nearer forebears
have been less promising. Nor dare we forget
that in the most unattractive child there is ever
latent the divine ideal of the unseen angel. And
yet once more, it cannot be too often repeated,
in regard to much that is most tender and lovely
in the earliest unfolding of human identity, that
the more delicate and sensitive it is, the more
easily may it be smitten and warped ; so that it is
likely to be precisely those children whose future
citizenship might have most enriched the State
with noble refinement and subtle wisdom who, if
bred up in huge institutions, will, for the term of
their mortal life, be stunted and debased by the
necessarily unvarying commonplaces formalised
to meet the requirements not of the particular
child, but of a whole herd of children. If any
objector reply that nothing is so healthy as the
normal and the commonplace, that is but an
evasion after all. It might indeed have force if
42
rns CHii/De$ OF me
originality were, as in the gospel of the Decadent,
merely synonymous with unreality and morbidity ;
but no one who cares for children with a love
which gives insight can escape the feeling that
childhood, even when it is most normal and
vigorous, is, in its very buoyancy and simplicity,
full of ever new surprises of individual charm.
Alas ! charm is not the word associated in any
memory with that name, in itself a brand, which
is happily being banished from the tongue of
decency, now that the undeserved and unasked
burden of dependent poverty no longer labels as
a " pauper " that " child of the State " who, like
every other child ever born into this wicked world,
is also a "child of God." Instead of the old
" pauper spirit," which was only another word for
apathy, we want, by means of home life, to develop
in every child more of that vigour and strenuous
personality of which. Chapman wrote so bravely :
" A spirit that on life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is."
43
SNOWDROP-TIME
The author wishes to acknowledge her debt, since she wrote
these lines when haunted by "E. Nisbcfs " beautiful poem
" Little Brown Brother"
66 IT'S rather dark in the earth to-day,"
Said one little bulb to his brother ;
" But I thought that I felt a sunbeam ray
We must strive and grow till we find the way ! "
And they nestled close to each other.
Then they struggled and toiled by day and by
night,
Till two little snowdrops, in green and white,
Rose out of the darkness and into the light,
And softly kissed one another.
44
DAFFODILS
IT is a late spring, but one flower has sprung up
and blossomed with fairy-like rapidity first the
blade, then the bud, after that the full flower in
the sun. It is here, not singly, but in troops and
companies. In the avenue to the great beautiful
house hard by, it stars the turf on either hand in
wild, unstudied profusion, though more resplendent
on that side of it which is sheltered from the east
wind than on those other levels where the cutting
north-easter blows. In our own cottage gardens
the bright yellow blossoms are already gay. They
seem to bring incarnate sunshine into the wintry
borders the one bit of colour that can rival in
its brilliance the glorious red and pink of japonica
and ribes, starring with gold the dull garden-
beds, under the windows and
" beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
They laugh for joy, and justify Wordsworth's
epithet of " jocund " as their inevitable right and
title. They were barely in time this year to
" take the winds of March with beauty
Before the swallow dares,"
but the April showers are much to their liking,
and indeed it is in the " Shepheard's Calendar " for
April that Spenser bids us
45
OF
" Strowe the ground with daffadowndillies,
And cowslips, and kingcups, and loued lillies."
Did not Broome write long ago :
" The joyous spring draws nigh ! Ambrosial
showers
Unbind the earth, the earth unbinds the flowers,
The flowers blow sweet, the daffodils unfold
The spreading glories of their blooming gold '' ?
That they have always made merry " beside the
margin of a lake/' Spenser had noted long before
the days of Wordsworth, for he tells us that when
news was brought to the mother of Marianell that
Britomart had killed him, the messenger found her
" Among her watry sisters by a pond,
Gathering sweete daffadillyes, to have made
Gay girlonds from the Sun their forheads fayr
to shade."
Old Richardson gives many spellings of this
flower's name a name which seems at first to
have been daffadils : through the French Aspodille
and the Italian Asphodelo he traces back to the
Greek Ao-^o&Ao?.
The old daffadil spelling recalls at once
Constable's charming song, of which the first two
verses run :
" Diaphenia, like the daffa-down-dilly,
White as the sunne, faire as the lilly,
Heigh ho, how I doe love thee !
I doe love thee as my lambs
Are beloved of their dams,
How blest were I if thou would'st prove me !
46
" Diaphenia, like the spreading roses,
That in thy sweetes all sweetes encloses,
Faire sweet how I doe love thee !
I doe love thee as each flower
Loves the sunne's life-giving power.
For dead, thy breath to life might move me."
Was it that white and gold are the Easter
colours and splendour was a part of the transient
pomp of Death, the divine messenger, or was it
a healthy delight in its very mirthfulness a sense
of tragic contrast, mingling with the glowing joy
of hope, that made the older poets not infrequently
strew this flower of sunshine above the beloved
dust of their dead ? In a pastoral masque by
Hughes we find the lines :
" On his lovely body shower
Leaves of roses, virgin lilies,
Cowslips, violets, daffodillies,
And with garlands dress the bower."
And does not Milton
" Bid amarantus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strow the laureat herse where Lycid lies " ?
Our later poet T. E. Brown, in writing of the
death of a child, touches a simpler and perhaps
more modern note:
" O God, to Thee I yield
The gift Thou givest most precious, most divine !
Yet to what field
I must resign
47
His little feet
That wont to be so fleet,
I muse. O, joy to think
On what soft brink
Of flood he plucks the daffodils,
On what empurpled hills
He stands, Thy kiss all fresh upon his brow,
And wonders, if his father sees him now ! "
But indeed every spring garland intertwines
the flower of love with the secret promise of some
far-off goal.
"The dusky strand of death enwoven here
With true Love's tie, makes Love himself more
dear " ;
and if even the pagan Eros seemed, though but
" a trifler gay,
The prodigal of an immortal day
For ever spending, and yet never spent,''
the great living poet who wrote that fine descrip-
tion of him wrote also :
" For what is Beauty, if it doth not fire
The loving answer of an eager soul ?
Since 'tis the native food of man's desire,
And doth to good our varying world control ;
Which, when it was not, was for Beauty's sake
Desired and made by Love, who still doth make
A beauteous path thereon to Beauty's goal."
THE FEEDING OF NECESSITOUS
SCHOOL-CHILDREN
[ Lunacy is rapidly increasing ; poverty does not lessen ; while
degeneracy and crime have got entirely beyond control.
We are very near a precipice^ requiring only a " heave-
over" to go to pieces. ALBERT WILSON, M.D., " Edu-
cation, Personality, and Crime."]
THE virtuous person who refuses to undermine
parental responsibility by feeding necessitous
school-children forgets that we have already in-
terfered with parental responsibility by compel-
ling thousands of fathers and mothers to send
their children to school, whether they wish it or
not, and that having done this it is at least our
clear duty to take care that no slow murder or
mutilation result. There is an overwhelming
mass of evidence to prove that these terrible con-
sequences have not infrequently ensued where
undeveloped brain-machinery has been at the
same time whipped up and starved. The dis-
tinguished author of " Education, Personality, and
Crime," himself a physician who has had twenty-
five years of wide experience, writes that a we
are killing mentally and physically hundreds and
thousands of [these] our best national assets. . . .
The compulsion to attend school tells very heavily
on the starving poor, and the injury to the badly
nourished and defective children spells ruin for
their future careers. . . . Thousands of children
are growing up with slightly damaged brains, who
attract no special notice from the casual observer.
It is, however, just the little damage, sometimes
D 49
OF
curable, which turns the scale against an indi-
vidual in the struggle for existence. ... If the
child be starved, delicate, or neurotic, the State
inflicts untold mental suffering and injury, which
may wreck the future career, and even thereby
make criminals. ... It is as hopeless to expect
mentation and brain development from a starving
child as to move the Cornish express if there is
no fuel underneath the engine boiler."
The writer of this grave indictment is not a
sentimentalist. He boldly advocates eugenic re-
form of a very stringent character, and cuts clean
through a great many fanciful cobwebs. Nor, on
the other hand, does he share the dogmatism of a
crude agnostic denial ; for he remarks that " to
deny the influence of the Spirit on mind and
character is to limit science."
But he does not disguise the fact that our
present manufacture of criminals and lunatics is a
wasteful folly, in which the overpressure of ill-
nourished bodies plays a part so disastrous as to
need quite as much attention as ethical neglect or
the multiplication of the feeble-minded and the
unfit by means of ill-advised marriages. Nay, he
even goes so far as to say that "it seems as if
environment were more important than heredity
in the life of the individual." He tells us that,
although in his opinion there are to be found
among the poor some of the finest potentialities
of the race, yet among the boys in prison many
of them only sixteen "a great amount of de-
terioration in face and form is to be seen . . .
malnutrition is their ruin''
5
rne FSSVI^G OF
This assertion with regard to malnutrition he
supports with striking and detailed figures in
regard to the under weight of boys in reformatories,
where the unsatisfactory boys were progressively
subnormal in weight as compared with the "good"
ones. It has been shown by careful facts and
diagrams in the book already quoted that the
most important part of the brain, that " pyramidal
layer of the prefrontal," of which Shaw Bolton
has spoken as " the last to develop " and " the
region concerned with the general orderly co-
ordination of psychic processes," is incomplete at
birth and may be only gradually built up when the
child is well nourished and cared for. If young
children are so ill-nourished during education as
to leave this " master of the house " of thought
in infantile incapacity, it is not only they who will
suffer ; the agony may fall upon their children's
children in ever-increasing ratio. If we make it
illegal for the poor to withdraw exceptionally
sensitive and fragile children from public edu-
cation, it is no mere charity to lessen the risk
by insisting on proper food, but, on the contrary,
an act of bare justice. For let it always be re-
membered that instruction is but a small part of
education education is the evoking and unfolding
of all that is highest and best in the whole nature,
body and soul, as well as mind, and is not the out-
come of mental processes alone.
Without entering on controversial ground
regarding the Majority and Minority Reports, it
may be worth while to answer one statement, in
a leaflet now lying before me, which urges against
5'
OF
the present methods of feeding school-children that
an increase in pauperisation is indicated by the
greatly increased number of free meals during the
iforegoing year there estimated as an advance
from 4,546,771 to 7.702,506.
In reply, there are two obvious facts which may
be incisively urged.
In the first place, this feeding of necessitous
children, where, as at Bradford, it is supported out
of the rates working out at \d. in the pound does
but fulfil in another form the obligation of the
Guardians to permit no starvation, in accordance
with a statute now embodied and strengthened in
the Children's Act, a statute to which attention
was drawn by the late Rev. B. Waugh, who
emphasised its bearing on prevailing conditions by
a gruesome story of seven children at Swindon
who were dying under the very nose of the
relieving officer. By means of the Children's
Care Committees, which include much voluntary
help of an expert and humane order, the tendency
of public meals under a competent Education
Authority is to bring careless parents to their
duty and increase their sense of responsibility.
At Bradford, for instance, in the year ending
March 31, 1909, there were 194 parents paying
full cost, besides an average of 67 children each
day purchasing tickets at full price ; and 59
parents paying part of the cost, the total number
of individual children coming within this category
throughout the year being 610.
The statistics there show that, after deducting
rent, the income per head of the 5 182 persons, in
52
rne FSSVI^G OF
the households sending children to the free meals,
only amounted to is. ^\d. (presumably per week),
and that is not an allowance on which any child can
be properly clothed and nourished, at a time when
the growing brain is especially in need of sustenance.
That more children are fed means, therefore, that
there is less destructive starvation, less public and
private neglect, more compulsion of lazy or greedy
parents to do some small part at least of their duty.
Secondly, even more stress must be laid upon
the fact that the maintenance and restraint of
criminals and unemployables is a more expensive
item to the country than free meals in our midst.
Estimating our criminal population on Dr. Albert
Wilson's figures at 150,000 and the number of
lads passing yearly through our prisons at 16,000,
it only remains to be reiterated that in the opinion
of this expert, as well as in that of Dr. Arkle,
want of nutrition while at school is one chief cause
of degeneracy and crime.
With regard to girls, the plea is even more
urgent, for they are in a special sense the custodians
of the future, and if by overpressure and under-
feeding we overstrain or atrophy their capacity
for what Browning finely named "the Trust of
trusts," then we may expect physical deterioration
to go on apace. The study of the facts recently
tabulated will show that such deterioration is
already dangerously rapid, and in speaking on
this subject of child-degeneration it has been
well said by one well-known neurologist that
our Empire is bleeding to death at its heart.
Religious effort does somewhat staunch the wound,
53
s OF
but there is tragedy in the position of many a
young life, thrown upon the world with an affec-
tionate nature and right aspirations, yet either a
" born tired," to quote one doctor's nomenclature,
or one of those unfortunates to whom apply the
same doctor's terrible words regarding arrested
brain development through lack of nourishment,
when he writes that " the will is to them as a
withered plant that might have developed, but
has died of starvation soon after birth."
Are thousands of our young lives to find this
their fate, or shall we realise in time that, if the
State has a right to punish, the State has also a right
to protect, and to use, under official guidance and
organisation, the help of all those skilled.volunteers,
women as well as men, who are experts in education
and in social amelioration and have escaped the
cramping influence of lives bound up in red tape ?
Shall we be content that English children, and
their children after them, shall in ever-increasing
ratio degenerate and decline, or shall we do our
best that they may become what Mr. Robert
Bridges has so finely imaged for us in his poem
entitled "The Fair Brass 7 *:
" Heirs of our antique shrines,
Sires of our future fame,
Whose starry honour shines
In many a noble name
" Across the deathful days,
Link'd in the brotherhood
That loves our country's praise,
And lives for heavenly good."
54
THYRSIS IN A LONDON SQUARE
IT is that " sweet season " beloved of Chaucer and
of all the poets, the beginning of the blossoming
time which Matthew Arnold has associated for
all lovers of " Thyrsis " with Oxford and with
Clough.
Browning's lines descriptive of the cuckoo's
music have become classic, but, even while we
quote them, to some of us the thought of a very
different poet is present, one less robust, less opti-
mistic, with more of the minor third in his voice,
yet, like Browning, a lover of men, one who faced
all doubts with guileless sincerity, and drew his
daily inspiration of help and comfort for the human
brotherhood from the " only Source of all our
light and life." Who can hear
" the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows,"
without thinking of that " quick despairer," of
whom the cuckoo was to Matthew Arnold the
symbol, who vanished too soon from our midst
before the promise of the golden year had un-
folded to his sight, and while still his heart was
aching at the thought of human inequalities ?
" Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill'd his
head.
55
OF
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground ;
He could not wait their passing, he is dead.
" So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden-
trees,
.Come with the volleying rain and tossing
breeze :
The bloom is gone and with the bloom go I !
" Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come
on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and
swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-
smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow ;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-
trees,
And the full moon, and the white, evening star."
For us to-day the hedges are still white, and new
fronds of fern are still uncrumpling
"And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways."
We have not come yet to the " scent of hay new-
mown," but already we see the approach of that
56
" tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day
When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor,
With blossoms red and white of fallen May,
And chestnut-flowers are strewn."
The chestnut-flowers are for us but now be-
? inning to fade and the may to fall. London in
une is wont to gleam with a strange beauty.
Full at all times of a deep and tragic poetry, for a
brief space she puts on a wreath of joyous promise
that wafts its fragrance hither and thither into her
darkest and most poverty-stricken corners, on the
wings of a liberal, wide-reaching spring breeze that
dips into parks and squares for the healthy sweet-
ness that it carries for a moment into squalid
streets and sordid alleys.
One of the loveliest of dough's lyrics, " In a
London Square," is said to have been suggested by
a tree in Berkeley Square. It fits the season well,
and it breathes of a certain hard-won and gentle
fortitude, very characteristic of Clough, who, in
his sensitiveness to every vagrant sympathy and
every influence of his stormy and perplexed century,
blent as it was with a strenuous determination to
be true to his own individual sense of right and of
truth, was necessarily a man of sorrows.
The plane-tree, with its daintily fashioned tassels
and wide, cool leaves, grows well in the midst of
all the smoke and care and struggle of sad-hearted,
fain-to-be-gay, paradoxical London ; shares its
rainbow sunshine and sudden gleams of springtide,
57
s OF
and, to those who know the lyric, echoes ever the
admonition to a patient and hopeful self-restraint :
"Put forth thy leaf, thou lofty plane,
East wind and frost are safely gone ;
With zephyr mild and balmy rain
The summer comes serenely on ;
Earth, air, and sun, and skies combine
To promise all that's kind and fair :
But thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, contain thyself, and bear.
December days were brief and chill,
The winds of March were wild and drear,
And, nearing and receding still,
Spring never would, we thought, be here.
The leaves that burst, the suns that shine,
Had, not the less, their certain date :
And thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, refrain thyself, and wait."
That is one side of Clough, but we find in him
the verve and energy also which breathe through
those other lines of his :
" Go from the east to the west, as the sun and the
stars direct thee,
Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass
the earth.
Not for the gain of the gold ; for the getting, the
hoarding, the having,
But for the joy of the deed ; but for the Duty to do.
Go with the spiritual life, the higher volition and
action,
With the great girdle of God, go and encompass
the earth."
58
That impulse of world-wide service and un-
grudging gifts may well be echoing through many
obscure lives to-day in the after-glow of those
celebrations of " Empire Day" which we have
dedicated to the memory of England's greatest
Queen and to the recollection of those vast and
humbling responsibilities which unite the Mother
Country with her colonies. The way to righteous-
ness and peace is often a strait and difficult path,
where it is only too easy to be blinded by our own
arrogance, or trapped by our own prejudice. The
message of joy, of progress, of universal kinship,
has too often been stained, and torn, and debased.
It has been blotted by many tears and marred by
many cancellings. But Clough was right in those
last words he wrote when he bade us remember
that every noble effort avails, though its results
may be to our own eyes and those of our own
generation invisible. Every advancing wave falls
back a little. Every year has its winter, but in
the new beauty and resurrection of each year's
springtide there is ever a symbol of that
" far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
And the last word remembered to-day shall be
from the lips of Thyrsis, found in a pencilled line
or two beneath his pillow when he died :
" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main."
59
THE MEMORIAL TO
MRS. BROWNING
IT has been said that we are a nation of shop-
keepers, though the shopkeeper will naturally
reply that he may be as noble as any man. But
it may be asserted with juster poignancy that too
many of our so-called leaders are now a company
of fashion-mongers, who are constantly running
after some new mode of thought or novel literary
type, leaving the stolid majority to take out their
moral and intellectual tape-measures for the
purpose of testing conformity with what may be
called the ancient sartorial rule of thumb, while
a small, rather youthful, contingent cut out old
ethics to suit new conventions, and, in their own
estimation, sanctify folly itself with the sacred
word " advanced."
Fifty years after Mrs. Browning's death, among
the slaves to passing fashion, she was already out
of fashion. There seems to have been a difficulty
in collecting the required funds for the Ledbury
Memorial in her honour. It is true that her
noblest memorial lives in the hearts of that vast
unliterary throng described in our Authorised
Version as " the common people " ; and also
in the work of the great poet-theologian, whose
influence was the more masculine from the fact
that he was too passionate to be sentimental, too
many-sided to forget the claims of this homely
human life of ours, even when most absorbed in
60
TO
the eternal problems, and who wrote of his own
proudest achievement :
" If the rough ore be rounded to a ring,
Render all duty which good ring should do,
And, failing grace, succeed in guardianship,
Might mine but lie outside thine, Lyric Love,
Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)
Linking our England to his Italy ! "
The " posy " to that ring is too well known to
need quoting, and he must indeed be dull of ear
who does not feel the passionate music of the
opening lines :
" Oh, Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire,"
but it is not in these haunting lines, nor in the
last words of "Prospice," nor the married melo-
dies of " By the Fireside/' that Mrs. Browning's
influence is most coercive and penetrating for the
outside world, nor even, perhaps, in the "One
Word More." It is rather in the whole fabric and
texture of Browning's later work, and especially
of that marvellous poem of which Pompilia is the
light and joy.
No one who knows Mrs. Browning's " Aurora
Leigh " intimately will be likely to come to any
real intimacy also with the poems Browning
wrote after his marriage, and especially " The
Ring and the Book," without a sense of deeply
wedded kinship here and there between the two.
There is a delightful line of George Meredith's
in which he speaks of certain kinds of song as
OF 7*]{pse
free from "taint of personality." That certainly
cannot be said of either of the Brownings. In
spite of his wide range and extraordinary diversity
of subjects, the author of " Bishop Blougram "
and " Rabbi Ben Ezra " is everywhere unmistak-
able : and in almost all his multitudinous poems
his robust and salient personality is recognisable
at a glance. That of Elizabeth Barrett, even
before they were man and wife, had probably
touched his mind and heart the more poignantly
because of a vivid and delicate, and almost over-
balancing, emotional quality in it, which might
well seem opposed to Browning's own more
reticent and humorous storm and stress, though
both are distinguished by the like vitality or
enthusiasm, the like catholic open-mindedness
and unbaffled reverence. In both there is the
same boldly questioning yet entirely unswerving
faith, the same untiring affection for man as man,
the same sense of the sacredness of the body as
well as the soul, the same worshipping delight in
the beauty of ideal womanhood, the same un-
conquerable belief, so finely expressed in " Aurora
Leigh," that
" Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God/'
And, it may be added, the same humour to
perceive that
" Only he who sees, takes off his shoes ;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
Of that poem which Ruskin is said to have
62
ro <MI{S.
named as the greatest of his century benighted
Philistines have occasionally asserted that it is
* coarse." Such people, if they met the Angel of
Pity, radiant with divine fire and beauty, would
merely complain that it was indecent of him to
go barefoot. They need to be reminded, through
the lips of Mrs. Browning herself, that what they
consider the " coarsest " part of this wonderful
life of ours is sacred and vital until the divine
breath is withdrawn from it :
" Flower from root,
And spiritual from natural, grade by grade
In all our life. A handful of the earth,
To make God's image ! the despised poor earth,
The healthy odorous earth, I missed with it
The divine Breath that blows the nostrils out
To ineffable afflatus, ay, the breath
Which love is. Art is much, but love is more.
Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God
And makes heaven."
Mrs. Browning did her work so well that her
truths have become our truisms. We are, after
all, an ungrateful host. In all social reform we
have adopted her ideas so completely that half of
us forget they are hers. In a bygone day, when
courage was needed, this modest and brave
woman, out of the deep joy of her own happy
love and ideal marriage, took to herself the out-
cast and forgotten, and, in the power" of her great
poem, moved a smug and pharisaical world to
rescue the fallen, to redeem the poor, and to face
63
OF
with some degree of honesty social problems
which had been selfishly ignored.
Let it be once more conceded without hesitation
that her best memorial lives on in her husband's
work and in her own, and in that change in
the theology and social ethics of England, a
change that might almost be called a revolu-
tion, in which both the Brownings have had a
deeper share than is ordinarily recognised. But
when the country of her birth is asked for a
visible token of gratitude it were shameful to
haggle about the price or complain that there is no
money in the national purse. We are a cold and
stolid people, and occasionally it is to be feared
that the slowness of emotion, which we secretly
vaunt as indication of faithfulness, does not by
any means stand the test of adversity and of time,
so that it is not wonderful that Mrs. Browning-
was sometimes angry with England in the deep
wrath of wounded affection. There are certain
lines in her " Summing up in Italy (inscribed to
intelligent publics out of it) " which hit us hard
in our moods of political selfishness and cowardice.
Even in remembrance and in constancy we seem
to have fallen behind "her Italy." Long ago
the municipality of Florence placed on Casa
Guidi their noble memorial to Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, of whom they wrote there, in the
words of Tommaseo, "Che in cuore di donna
conciliave scienze di dotto, e spirito di poeta."
We cannot equal the beauty of the Florentine
inscription, of which only a fragment is given
here. Of her it may be said with truth, as
TO Jti'QS.
indeed is witnessed by her own words, that "her
Christianity was not confined to church and
rubrics it meant civilisation." There has been
no attempt here at any critical appraisement of
Mrs. Browning's precise standing as an artist,
though, whatever may be the deductions and
admissions demanded by such an appraisement, it
is only necessary to remember that she wrote the
so-called " Sonnets from the Portuguese " in
order to ensure her unassailable place among the
poets. But there are many who are careless of
poetry and who yet owe her a debt of lasting
gratitude for her work in the cause of social and
political reform.
A FLOWER FOR MRS. BROWNING'S
GRAVE
THERE is one flower which cannot be laid too often
on Mrs. Browning's grave, for it is her husband's
own gift. It blooms perennially, and there may
well be surprise that there are not more hands tearing
down the sprays of blossom to do her honour.
On this day, the anniversary of her birth, such an
offering may well be wreathed about her memory.
In the many disquisitions on " The Ring and
the Book" one subject of deep interest may not
impossibly have escaped many of the learned com-
mentators, because it is not a point of scholarship,
but of elementary human interest. I refer to
what I cannot but believe to have been Browning's
reason for choosing so extraordinary and terrible
a story, as his basis of fact, in the great dramatic
poem dedicated to his wife's memory the essential
metal in that elaborately wrought " guard ring "
wherewith he protected the golden circlet of love
and poesy that had claimed his wife in an eternal
marriage.
We have his own explicit authority for his un-
bounded admiration of " Aurora Leigh," that
dramatic romance in which a happy wife and
mother wrote with all the courage of virtue and of
love, on behalf of her outcast sisters on the one hand
and of her noble ideal of marriage on the other.
No so-called love was to Mrs. Browning worthy
of the name unless it was that supreme and
66
irrevocable passion which is of its own nature
divine, and therefore divinely pure and enduring
and unselfish. But she perceived that, in the out-
cry of society against moral debasement and
corruption, the vengeance not seldom fell with
vulgar and indiscriminating severity on one who
was often the victim rather than the culprit, and
in the name of the Highest she cast her stainless
shield upon the innocent while plunging her fiery
sword into the guilty not only those guilty in
the eyes of convention, but those guilty of the
greedy frivolity, the sanctimonious crookedness, the
petty hypocrisies, for which her religion reserved
its most scathing denunciation, the immorality not
of the " sinner," but of the Pharisee.
In that old law case recorded by the little yellow
book which Browning picked up on the Florentine
bookstall, he found just the weapon he wanted
for a worthy continuation of her holy crusade ;
for the events of which he read there made up a
tragedy of blood and fire upon the pages of human
history. The murder was an actual murder of
the most sanguinary description, the fire was that
divine fire which lights the temple of humanity
with a Presence more beautiful than anything that
can be fully manifested under conditions of time
and space.
Human love was to the Brownings no less ideal
in significance than what, in our ignorance, we
may assume to have been the symbolism of the
sacred flaming rose, in the mystic lore of the Rosi-
crucians. Aurora Leigh describes that highest
human love as the reflection of divine mystery,
OF
" Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life,
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to ! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves,
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour loves,
And civic ... all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central
Heart ! "
And Pompilia, when she is dying far away from
the man from whom she seems to the onlooker to
be hopelessly separated, knows well that in so
profound a love neither death nor distance can
divide, and that even in the life beyond she will
feel the comfort of his hand. Neither for him
nor for herself does she ask anything more of
earth. It is in the face of death that she says :
" No work begun shall ever pause for death !
Love will be helpful to me more and more
F the coming course, the new path I must tread,
My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for
that!
Tell him that if I seem without him now,
That's the world's insight ! Oh, he under-
stands !
So let him wait God's instant men call years ;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty ! "
Browning might well feel and not least in
those first years of his bereavement that here
indeed was the rosemary which he desired to twine
about the beloved name.
68
An essay necessarily limited with regard to
space does not allow detailed examination of the
interweaving thought and feeling which make the
hidden pattern, in the very warp and woof of the
two poems, such as I hope to indicate more fully
elsewhere.
But the main contention of this brief article is
so broad and simple as to appeal even to the pro-
verbial " man in the street." Nowhere can it be
more fittingly emblazoned than on the pages of a
paper devoted to the cares and hopes of the com-
monalty, and to the civic interests of a great
thronging city like our own.
The words of Caponsacchi's Shepherd-Judge,
when speaking of himself as an ancient gardener
who is talking concerning the flowers in his en-
closure, the women among whom he exercised his
pastoral office, may doubtless be echoed by many
a twentieth-century preacher, who finds amonghis
gay congregation a less exalted beauty of character
than in some low-born injured woman, of whom,
it may be, Pompilia was the prototype and fore-
runner, while herself the typical successor of Mrs.
Browning's daring imaginative conception as em-
bodied in Marian Erie, notwithstanding that
Pompilia's motherhood had been legalised by a
form of marriage, which to her childish ignorance
had conveyed no meaning. Marian Erie may
have been solely a puppet of the poet's brain ;
Pompilia was a living, breathing woman, the
creation of that Master from whose hand we all
must needs learn
OF
" Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's
true play."
Yet of both the Angel of the earthly garden might
have said, as did the old Pope of Pompilia :
" Those be the plants, imbedded yonder South
To mellow in the morning, those made fat
By the master's eye, that yield such timid leaf,
Uncertain bud, as product of his pains !
While see how this mere chance-sown, cleft-
nursed seed,
That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot
Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
From the inch-height whence it looks and longs !
my flower,
My rose, I gather for the breast of God."
Well might Browning say of Pompilia's history
that here was a story straight to his hand, for it
gave him the very sword and ring and posy
wherewith in his wife's name he might strike
many a ringing blow at the social corruption
which she had fought so nobly on behalf of the
defenceless, a fight in which her own unsullied
name and ideal love had strengthened the efficacy
of her championship.
Well also might he write of her in his immortal
dedication as of one "half-angel and half-bird,"
who, borne aloft on the wings of divine poetry,
was ever ready at the call of suffering or abase-
ment to come down to earth
" To toil for man, to suffer or to die."
70
MRS. BROWNING AS A SOCIAL
REFORMER
THE vital quality of Mrs. Browning's work is
the more impressive when brought with all its
trenchant variety in prose and verse within the
convenient compass of three small volumes.
Without going so far as one of our greatest writers,
who is said to have named " Aurora Leigh " as
the greatest poem of the last century, it is hardly
possible to doubt that Aurora, through whose lips
Mrs. Browning spoke, did change, imperceptibly
yet profoundly, the whole attitude of the insular
English mind with regard to one social question,
so that forgetfulness of the unmeasured debt
which we owe to her is only an indication of its
lasting reality, inasmuch as what was most
courageous and amazing to her own generation
now astonishes few save the ignorant or the un-
reasoning, and may be said to leaven all enlightened
Christian ethics, whether of thought or of action.
In his characterisation of the highest woman-
hood as essentially differing from the highest
manhood, in a royalty always shared by both and
always correlative, Ruskin reminds us, in words
too memorable to be either paraphrased or for-
gotten, that " what the woman is to be within her
gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress,
and the mirror of beauty, that she is also to be
without her gates, where order is more difficult,
distress more imminent, loveliness more rare."
71
OF TROSS
And looking back through the Victorian age of
literature on those who fulfilled this ideal in the
world of letters, it is hardly possible to be alto-
gether blind to the distinguished services rendered
by the collected poems just reissued. For, in
gazing closely on the nineteenth century, and
especially on the middle half of the nineteenth
century, amid the splendid toil and ever-fructifying
harvest of those masculine forces in philosophy, in
science, and in history, which by the hands of
men have given to our race new powers of social
economy, intellectual freedom and material wealth,
while echoing Ruskin's ascription of the highest
powers of knowledge and discretion to man, as the
ruler, the inventor, the defender, we find a rein-
forcement also of his belief in woman's province as
that of sovereign guidance at the very heart of
life. The writings of a handful of high-minded
and fearless women, among whom Mrs. Browning
stood facile princeps, have had a primary share in
the reawakening of the dormant national con-
science on questions of practical religion, and have
broken down those cold artificial traditions which
straitened compassion and shut out the visible
presence of the Master. It is true that, in this,
woman did not stand alone :
"The woman's cause is man's they rise or sink
together."
Scott and Thackeray and Dickens to mention
only three out of the many names that throng to
mind each in his several way, did much to
make the ice-bound hedges less thorny in rigid
72
SOCIAL
obstructiveness. But a man would have to be
either more or less than a man before he could
penetrate the inmost defences of feminine vanity
and self-deception with the piercing weapons and
unsparing zeal of such a Britomart as Mrs.
Browning. There are some subjects on which
only a woman could so poignantly and un-
answerably appeal to women themselves.
Mrs. Browning's stainless name and high and
noble character lent an added brightness to the
sword which always has "the strength of ten"
for one whose " heart is pure." Moreover, her
crusade was all the more powerful, and the more
moving, because even the basest mind could not
in her case represent it as the outcome of any
personal bitterness. For her life was crowned
with the " ecstasy " and
" mystery of love,
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason's self
Enlarges rapture."
The sanctity of marriage was to her no mere
article of faith, though it was that too, but a
part of
"Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First, God's love.
And next, [he smiled,] the love of wedded souls
Which still presents that mystery's counterpart."
Supremely happy in her own married love, she
was overwhelmed with compassion for those who
had met such anguish of treason as had never
approached her own life.
73
OF
Even if Browning had not written his " Posy to
the Ring," it would still not have been difficult
to understand the singular appropriateness of such
an offering as "The Ring and the Book "to her who
had, with brave and unmistakable clearness, taught
that women who stood high in their own order,
for virtue and piety, were blinding themselves to
the corporate responsibility of all womanhood
and degrading their own protected liberty, by
ignoring, with that most scathing contempt of
all, which declines even to see, the ignorance, the
danger, the deadening agony, of many of those
who, less guarded than themselves, were yet of
like flesh and blood, members of the same great
human family.
Careful reading of "The Ring and the Book"
will emphasise the special significance of such a
votive offering to her who, crowned with ideal
wifehood and rejoicing motherhood, had been the
champion of women and children for her own time
and for all time, and whose Marian Erie had felt
as Pompilia did about her own little son, that
beyond her, his mother, her child had no claimant
except God. Through certain lines from " Aurora
Leigh," uplifted and transfigured in "The Posy,"
Browning makes us feel anew, of the poet who
taught and laboured through Aurora's lips, that it
was in her tender ardour of service that to him she
was most divine. And has she not herself reminded
us that
" The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men, as God in Nazareth " ?
74
SOCIAL
"How sound of heart and clear of head," how
replenished with heavenly common sense, is the
best and most potent of Aurora's wisdom, and how
delightful often in its salient sense of laughter as
well as tears ! It is difficult to choose where there
is such wealth, but it is pleasant to find her hitting
out squarely at one modern fashion of cant in the
lines :
" Mere passion will not prove a volume worth
Its gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keel
Mean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.
There's more than passion goes to make a man
Or book."
The pungent humour is insistent everywhere,
whether it be in the graphic touch which describes
how certain good men drew back their chairs when
they shrank away from the utterance of a coarse
and unchivalrous personality,
" As if they spied black-beetles on the floor,"
or in that description of the other sort of man who
" Sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,
He has to mount a stool to get at them,
And meantime lives on quite the common way
With everybody's morals."
But there is abundant power of another kind, as
in that prayer to the "Supreme Artist" for those
who
" sit by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off" ;
75
s OF
or in those other lines which flash upon us the
first moment of a perfect understanding between
soul and soul :
" As when the sudden finger of the wind
Will wipe a row of single city-lamps
To a pure white line of flame, more luminous
Because of obliteration ; more intense,
The intimate presence carrying in itself
Complete communication, as with souls
Who, having put the body off, perceive
Through simply being."
Few can doubt that, although such living verse as
"Cowper's Grave" and "The Sleep" and " Con-
fessions " will echo down the centuries in the
power of a vital faith and a poet's intensity of
simple human feeling, Mrs. Browning's most
certain claim to a permanent place in English
literature a claim more certain even than that
won by such poems as "A Musical Instrument"
and " My Kate," or by the throb of a world-wide
patriotism in her flaming and beautiful lyrics for
Italy will rest upon those " Sonnets from the
Portuguese " which never existed in any language
save the language of the heart, until she wrote them
and hid them away, where Browning afterwards
found them and urged that the world should have
the joy of them. The sonnets alone would have
secured her immortality. But, had she written
nothing else, notwithstanding that their intrinsic
value as sonnets would have remained the same,
yet without her work as a social reformer on
behalf of suffering women and children, they
76
M1(S. B%pfr$yp(G SOCIAL
would have lost an added charm as part of the
expression of a noble personality. She who wrote
" Aurora Leigh " and " The Cry of the Children "
sowed a multiplying harvest in many widely differ-
ing fields. It would be impossible to enumerate
all the unselfish battles and redeeming labours into
which her spirit has crept. Through many a
heart there rings ever the refrain of her words :
" Patient children think what pain
Makes a young child patient ponder !
Wronged too commonly to strain
After right, or wish, or wonder."
Marriage and birth and death all were to Mrs.
Browning the revelation of the Divine in the human.
We think instinctively of her to whom "The
Ring and the Book " was dedicated when Pom-
pilia, whose son was born at this season, blissful in
the new-born human light, kindled in the Divine
Light, tells us :
" Christmas before me was not that a chance ?
I never realised God's birth before
How he grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers."
And in the name of the Divine Love, whose
festival we keep, she pleads with us for every little
human child to-day, most of all for every child
who is grieved or injured or forgotten.
If some, who are children no longer, are sad
because this Christmas there seems to be one child
missing, she has a message for them also. In the
77
OF <p%pse
same volume that contains "Aurora Leigh" she
tells us of God :
" He lends not ; but gives to the end,
As he loves to the end. If it seem
That he draws back a gift, comprehend
'Tis to add to it rather amend,
And finish it up to your dream.
So look up, friends ! You, who indeed
Have possessed in your house a sweet piece
Of the Heaven which men strive for, must need
Be more earnest than others are, speed
Where they loiter, persist where they cease."
A SONG OF NOBEL THOMSON
For a moment when the mind of the singer is at play
"Never mind!" or "No matter!" old dis-
putants said.
Now, " mind is all matter " " all matter is
mind"
The myriad electrons will never be dead,
For now Nobel Thomson has nobly defined
Their name, that of corpuscles well underlined !
Altho' the great riddle of earth be unread,
No negative answer can crush us with dread,
The old mocking " Nay" is to limbo assigned ;
The " negatives " now are with " positives" wed,
And all things are fashioned by Life, Love,
and Mind ;
For even the blankest " material " creed
Proclaims omnipresent, fulfilling our need,
The Force in our dust that has moulded
mankind,
Wrought Beauty, Truth, Goodness, for man's
daily Bread !
The great veil is trembling: ah, what lies
behind ?
79
THE GLEAM
WINTER has not yet vanished, but to-day there is
a foreboding of spring. The aconites are up.
The woodbine leaves are unfolding their soft,
delicious green. The spears of daffodil and lily-
of-the-valley have already pierced the mould.
Although, at this sunny noonday hour, the birds
are quiet, save for a sweet twittering amid the
gay tumult of the south-west wind, there have
been joyous bursts of melody at evening and in
the morning, and already Little Bo-peep's " lambs'
tails " are hanging on the boughs of the hazel-
trees. The skies are full of a strange mystic
beauty pearly bars through which the pale azure
of infinite distances may at moments be seen to
gleam translucently, and at other moments a
nearer and more earthly brilliance, though still of
the heavens, a blueness, vivid as nemophila flowers,
looks laughingly. The funereal beauty of the
dark pines, with their plume-like enrobing and
red-brown stems, does but emphasise the light
and colour of the surrounding world, the rich
warmth of the ploughed fields, the peculiar fawn-
like brown of last year's oak-leaves, which seem
to cling to the boughs expressly to catch every
passing vibration of the cool and delicate sunlight,
the mossy tints of the fragrant arbor vitae, the
shining silver of the birch-stems that re-echo the
silvery tints of the harmless low-lying clouds.
Already I have heard the lambs calling to their
80
rne
mothers, in a field just out of sight beyond the
pine-copse ; and long ago the tiny buds have been
showing on my youthful mountain ash that is
hardly much taller than a maid of sixteen summers,
a prim, yet graceful, tree, whose upward-forking
branches, that still show clustered stalks where
the birds have bared them of every scarlet berry,
make a favourite perch for my redbreasts when
they come to remind me that it is their lunch-
time.
It is a day of swiftly chasing lights and
shadows, a day that shows the lovely under-side
of the leaves blown backward by the wind, and
emphasises the amazing glossiness of the laurels
a day when it is not difficult to realise for once
that we are sailing gaily through the circum-
ambient air, with the dear old earth as our flying-
boat, and all the stars for our companions. Petty
cares and ambitions are put to flight. There is a
moving Presence in wood and field.
" Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter,"
and on the invisible ladder, 'twixt the lower and
the higher, " young angels pass." The thoughts
of the young poet and the old intermingle the
thought of Keats, who gave us the famous line
about music that is " unheard " in the sense in
which God is unseen, and the thought of Tenny-
son, who in his last years wrote, in his perfect
lyric of the spring, those childlike and beautiful
words about the " young angels " that ascend and
descend amid the unfolding ecstasy. It is a day
F 81
OF TfiOSS
when the " Gleam " of which Tennyson sang
enters many a heart, that does not know itself for
a poet, yet arises to " follow the Gleam " at
once tranquillised and inspirited by the touch of
some infinite possibility beyond the credence of
the mere senses, a possibility of which Beauty,
Truth, and Love are but differing aspects a day
when in many a soul there wakes, however
dumbly, something of the fine courage that
breathes through the verses of that later poet who
has written :
" I will not doubt, though all my ships at sea
Come drifting home with broken masts and
sails ;
I shall believe the Hand that never fails,
From seeming evil worketh good for me ;
And though I weep because those sails are
battered,
Still will I cry, while my best hopes lie shattered,
<I trust in Thee/
" I will not doubt ; well anchored in the faith,
Like some staunch ship, my soul braves every
gale;
So strong its courage that it will not fail
To breast the mighty unknown sea of Death.
Oh, may I cry, when body parts with spirit,
' I do not doubt,' so listening worlds may hear it,
With my last breath."
82
A FRAGMENT
WAS it of love or of spring-time that Caponsacchi
was speaking when he said :
" I paced the city : it was the first Spring.
By the invasion I lay passive to,
In rushed new things, the old were rapt away " ?
He had just seen Pompilia, the woman whose
noble simplicity and purity were to be among the
regenerating forces which awakened him to the
fact that he had been a " fribble" and "cox-
comb " ; but it is with a quite literal meaning also
that he tells us that " it was the new Spring."
Love and spring-time what new thing can be
said of either, except that the eternal parable is
rewritten every Easter, sealed with the profound
significance of the most joyous fact in the world's
history, and prophesying "some far-off divine
event," in which shall be consummated that
deepest and purest love of all, which is, we are
told, even more enduring than faith and hope ?
Once again the earth is putting forth her
symbols and unfolding her beautiful hieroglyph,
not only in field and lane and woodland, but even
in the byways and corners of town and city.
Already the rosy splendour of the almond-trees
has glowed and paled again, and the leafless elms
have shown their clusters of dusky red blossoms,
and now I have seen one of them opening its green
buds. Lilacs are rapidly unfolding their leaves,
83
OF
and here and there the hawthorns are showing a
bright verdure.
In London the spring must always carry with
it a certain charm of surprise and incongruity.
The exquisite cleanness of the new leaves and
flowers, the stainless splendour of the vernal tints,
the exhilarating purity of the early perfumes
who would look for these in the midst of so much
smoke and grime, so much that is sordid, or
worldly, or poverty-stricken ? Yet here they are,
unsullied as an angel's wing and sweet as the airs
of heaven. Already I have seen the loveliness of the
budding trees at the back of the Marylebone Work-
house ; already, after an early shower, I have met
the penetrating and delicious odour of the sweet-
poplar in St. James's Square so unmistakable
a fragrance that, though I have not discovered the
tree, which may be hiding in a back garden or
round an area corner, I know that it is there, as
we know the sun is shining when we feel the light
in our eyes. There are sheltered bits in Kensington
Gardens which are already "a mist of green, and
nothing perfect," and the little blue scyllas seem
to be blooming this year even more fully than
usual in outlying garden plots. As I stood
last Sunday morning in St. Paul's Churchyard,
watching the crowd of pigeons that walked about
tamely and companionably round the feet of the
children who were feeding them, I saw that the
crocuses were at their most perfect moment of
blooming, and recalled a charming letter from
Mr. G. D. Leslie to his friend Mr. Marks, in
which he evolves a theory of his own as to why the
gold crocus is generally smaller than the purple or
the white.
I know of one town in the Midlands, full of
hot and noisy factories, where, at this time of year,
the little windows of the back streets in the slums
used to be adorned with glasses of the purple
crocus, plucked by the eager flower-loving factory
"hands" and their children, down in the flat
meadows by the winding Trent. In those fields,
in bygone days, the wild anemone, which generally
is found in the woods, was wont to grow with a
special grace and vigour, the witchery of its deli-
cate outline enhanced by the deeper pink in its
pencillings, which it owed probably to the lavish
moisture.
Here in the south only the plane-tree, our
London tree par excellence, still remains bare,
except for the three little fairy-like balls of last
year, which hang here and there from the branches,
and mark it out almost as distinctively as the
peeling of the bark. On the north side of London
the coltsfoot is in full bloom, and I have seen it
also in Kent, where the earliest fruit trees are
beginning to be snowy. The grey and gold of
the sunset on Sunday evening was hardly more
beautiful than the later sky which followed, when
the moon and stars looked down through fleecy
clouds and far-away azure deeps. And there has
been more than one afternoon since, when the Law
Courts and National Gallery, in the very heart of
our great thoroughfares, have gloomed forth
grandly against a pale gold background, touched
with diaphanous cloud-ripples.
85
S OF <piiose
London owes much of its supreme fascination to
the river and to the birds which fly above it.
Sea-gulls and swallows are among the most beauti-
ful birds in the world, and there are a host of
others that, when the swallows are here with the
May-time, will be sharing London festivities with
them. It is wonderful how many singing-birds
seem to make themselves happy in suburban
gardens. But it was further afield that I this
year heard the skylark most jubilant, some three
weeks ago, beyond Eltham, one sunny, windy
morning, when I watched two English girls on
horseback taking their ditches very prettily, in
company with a young brother, whose horse at first
refused to follow for all the urging in the world.
The lark was pouring forth his " harmonious mad-
ness " above a bit of grass-land, such as may often
be found just outside London. It is surprising
what a variety of field and woodland and wild,
blossomy common, surround this huge, struggling
city. We owe much to those hard-working en-
thusiasts who have secured to us open spaces within
our borders, and turned ill-kempt burial-grounds
into cheering gardens. It is a moment when every
one wishes success to the hard-worked people
who are doing their best to save the glories of
tree and moorland from the hand of the artificial
spoiler.
Among London schemes which appeal to all
hearts alike, apart from party prejudice or theo-
logical wrangling, there are two or three which
seem to make a stronger appeal than usual in these
first days of sunshine and fresh air. There is the
86
delightful enterprise lately set on foot for secur-
ing to outworn labouring women, and especially
mothers, an occasional breath of sunshine and
sweet air before they break down under the
perpetual strain of their daily burden. Not to
speak of the Children's Country Holidays Fund,
which every one knows and delights in, and the
State Children's Aid, which has done so much to
give our State children a more natural environ-
ment than was possible in the old barrack schools,
there is the Children's Invalid Aid Association,
which seeks to give to every crippled child in
London a helpful and understanding friend, and
yearly does so much in arranging for needed rest
and change in convalescent homes. On the chil-
dren of the nation depends the future of the race,
and nothing must be allowed to rob them of that
precious vitality and enjoyment of life which
make sunshine doubly welcome and spring-time
an added joy.*
The beauty of London in the spring-time is at
all times the more poignant from its mingling of
the infinite and the impossible, its conflict between
the lavish blossoming of Nature and the straiten-
ing greed of man ; but, if the ideal of civic
responsibility fulfil the promise which has been
slowly and gradually unfolding for more than
* The addresses to which helpers and sympathisers may
write are : Children's Invalid Aid, 13 Buckingham Street ;
Women's Holiday Fund, 47 St. James's Square ; Children's
Country Holidays Fund, 1 8 Buckingham Street, Strand ;
State Children's Aid Association, 61 Old Broad Street, E.C.
" Omnia vincit amor " is the motto of the Children's Invalid
Aid Association.
87
Lefres OF
nineteen hundred years on behalf of the poor
and the sorrowful, then, century by century, the
world may draw nearer to that spring-time of the
Golden Year when at last there will be written
upon the walls of our cities: " Omnia vincit
amor."
88
THE OXFORD PAGEANT AND
RUSKIN HALL
I AM tempted to quote from the prologue to the
published "Scheme of the Oxford Historical
Pageant,'' which begins as follows :
"It is no long time now to the unfolding of
one of the most beautiful and stately scenes that
Oxford has seen for many a long day. The
latter days of June and the earlier days of July
will witness such a wealth of historical renaissance
and such a pomp of picturesque ceremonial as
cannot fail to add new and wonderful charm even
to a city which has already so many potent spells
within the circle of her dreaming spires, She has
gazed calm-eyed on many a gallant scene, this
ancient mother of men ; she has watched the
deeds of kings and nobles, bishops and warriors,
courtiers and academics ; she has seen them
carried to their triumphs and to their graves.
And now she has cast about in the dim recesses
of her memory and bethought her of the brave
companies that she has viewed of old ; and here,
amid the fair lawns and streams, she will set forth,
brilliant and unclouded as when they first met
her gaze, the noblest memories of a thousand
years."
To those of us who are not among the fortunate
crowd privileged to be present at this pageant,
Oxford is nevertheless always, and through all the
OF
changing seasons, full of pageantry and the glamour
of historic memories. Now, as at all times, youth
and music fill the ancient chapels with their ioy ;
eager young spirits, in whom mind and body seem
fitly mated, throng the pavements, hold comrade-
ship in the gardens, weave new and everlasting
memories, lay quick, persistent fingers upon the
doorways of knowledge, urging the well-worn
keys in the old locks, and, in rare moments of
intimate talk or unspoken companionship, looking
through the eyes of some fellow-wayfarer into
that <c Glory of God " that makes manhood,
behold for an instant the unspeakable Wisdom,
veiled and mysterious, yet radiating a power and
purity beyond all written words.
Dull must he be of heart who could pass by
unmoved the continual procession of unfolding
life and destiny, in this centre of immemorial
tradition and unresting development, this city of
unconscious paradox and sacramental heritage,
where the very old and the very new are so
mysteriously at one, and the outward ritual of
education, bracing and uplifting though it be, is
instinct with an eternal grace that overleaps,
and creates to ever new vicissitudes, the ideal it
embodies.
This wide bay-window in a tutorial house where
these jottings are written down, looking out on
tower and dome and spire, with a foreground of
delicious greenery and old-world garden, is all a
part of the educational hospitality and ordered
life, that help to give poise and recollectedness to
the lives that pass through the gateways of this
90
OXFOT^D
majestic University ; but even more moving in its
symbolism was that rough, bare room, now yearly
coming into closer touch with the University,
where a day or two ago I talked with some of the
fifty residents of Ruskin Hall, twenty of them
miners who will later return to their mining work
men who win intellectual luxury through
physical deprivation, and to whom " plain living
and high thinking " are alike a passion and a
necessity. Spirited, independent, earnest, some
of them are said to be among the best debaters at
the Union, and on one and another of the faces
it is impossible to mistake the intellectual distinc-
tion, or that still higher distinction of character,
that transcends and turns to scorn all those mere
externals and trapperies of lifewhichTeufelsdrockh
characterised as " clothes."
Ruskin Hall has wide-reaching Imperial possi-
bilities, and the national potentialities of its
modest beginnings are indicated by the fact that
95,000 working men, members of the Amalga-
mated Society of Engineers, have made four
levies of one penny each to help the work of the
college. Of the amount (^300) produced by the
first levy, which was made in 1903, 250 was
devoted to the fund for purchasing the present
buildings, and with the remaining ^50 one of
their fellow-members was in residence at the
college for the whole of the year 1903. 150 of
the amount provided by the second levy went to
the fund for the new buildings, and with the
remaining 150 three of their fellow-members
came into residence for the whole of 1904. By
s OF
their third levy six of their fellow- members were
at the college for the whole of 1905. By their
fourth levy nine of their fellow-members are at
the college for the whole of this year.*
My first vision of Oxford, more than a quarter
of a century ago, was a dreamland of all that is
most perfect in youthful friendship and human
fellowship ; of days when among those who took
part in that charmed circle through which for a
few fleeting days I passed spellbound, were men
who have since taken a distinguished part in the
service of their compatriots overseas as well as
nearer home, but who had then scarcely closed their
University career, of whom indeed the impression
given was that of thinkers rather than men of
action, though doubtlesss those who knew more
intimately the " iron will " and untiring executive
ability on which their fellows would lean in a
great crisis, may in one instance have understood,
better than a passing visitor, the force behind that
simplicity and charm. Others there were also
a brilliant group of friends and comrades, just
about to leave their undergraduate days behind
them and bid farewell to Balliol and to Oxford
who as scholars and men of letters and helpers
of the poor, have more than fulfilled the promise
of those days, and have through life been loyal
to those old attachments. Among their seniors,
the men whose widely differing influences most
potently converged, in this particular coterie, to
make life a disciplined art from which nothing
* These statistics were taken verbatim from the report
published in the year of the Oxford Pageant.
9 2
rne
intrinsically high or beautiful should be absent
Jowett, T. H. Green, Lewis Nettleship, Walter
Pater, Arnold Toynbee have all passed beyond
our mortal vision, though they have left their
mark enduringly in many a noble life. It is
possible that among these influences, Arnold
Toynbee's may have been deepest of all. But it
must not be forgotten that Clough's Oxford
pamphlet on Retrenchment had preceded Toyn-
bee's work and that of Leonard Montefiore in
paths that led straight towards the movement of
which Ruskin Hall is one manifestation among
many, long before the days of the actual road-
mending by Ruskin's followers.
Clough was known to that generation chiefly
through his poems, but in "that serene, that
earnest air," which alternated with a very pretty
wit and went hand in hand with old-world
courtesy and charm, at many an undergraduate
breakfast table and supper party, the good
tradition remained, quickened and deepened
doubtless by the present and living influence of
Arnold Toynbee and the men and women who
admired and loved him.
It is only in looking back that I realise how
those days were making the future of to-day.
At the moment the pageant of life and spring
caught the hours in their uplifting whirl, and,
though much was felt and divined, the outward
eyes were too much dazzled to see clearly or
remember fully.
It was a wondrous May- time on the edge of
June, when the days were all one long succession of
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OF
eager conversation and stimulating companionship,
and "the Master" who was Jowett in those
days flitted rosy-cheeked and smiling through
those fragrant gardens, all sweet with syringa
and lilac and may, where we spent such moments
as were not engrossed with chapels and breakfast
parties and cloistered wanderings through ever-
new delights of sunshine and conversation.
To-day the place is full of thoughts and
memories and hopes, and that glamour of
delicious sunlight which comes next to health
and youth and love in its vitalising joy. If I
have dwelt for a moment on the pathos and the
promise of those rough, brave lives at Ruskin
Hall, I do not forget that the faery background,
which, year by year, is woven by new generations
of those who come here drinking deeply of all
the best that wealth and culture can give, is to
those very lives an influence and a romance which,
if rightly used, may be a part of Oxford's gifts to
them. With a faith that approaches certainty, I
look to the successors of Arthur Hugh Clough
and the group that followed him, and to the sane
generosity of all great literature, to achieve in
time, for those born into a straitened heritage, a
less stinted measure for their cup of intellectual
joy, their share in the beauty and uplifting of our
common lot. For these last, during their brief
sojourn at Ruskin Hall, each day may bring its
own pageantry, whether they be present at the
Historical Pageant or not.
Having begun with the opening words in what
may be called the prologue to the book of the
94
rne OXFOT^D
Pageant, it may be worth while to add a quota-
tion from " Q's " final paragraph in what may
not unfittingly be named its epilogue:
" I say confidently, therefore, that the Historical
Pageant of 1907 can never divulge the secret of
Oxford. It may do better, though. Merely by
being youthful, ardent, gay ... it may pass
into the secret itself and be of a piece with it.
" ' Tower tall, city wall,
A river running past ;
Youth played when each was made,
And shall them all outlast.' "
That is a verse of enchantment ; but finer still,
perhaps, is the closing stanza of "An Invitation
to the Pageant," by Robert Bridges :
" Farewell ! for whether we be young or old,
Thou dost remain, but we shall pass away ;
Time shall against himself thy house uphold,
And build thy sanctuary from decay ;
Children unborn shall be thy pride and stay.
May earth protect thee, and thy sons be true,
And God with heavenly food thy life renew,
Thy pleasure and thy grace from day to day."
95
NOTE ON "SILAS MARNER"
FROM THE TEMPLE CLASSICS
\lncludedbere by the courtesy of the publishers.']
ASSOCIATIONS are "chancey" and unreasoning
things. I seldom find myself thinking of " Silas
Marner " without hearing a line of Browning with
which it has no definite or obvious relation, a line
which even now is murmuring, with a steady and
unexpected claim upon attention :
"One star, its chrysolite "
So haunting and insistent is this caprice of
memory that it seems impossible to write even
the briefest " appreciation " of the book without
finding it somewhere upon the page.
Is it that in this long-ago story there is a flaw-
less and crystalline unity, as pure and illuminating
as it is convincing, and touching the recollection
with that same sense of divinity in everyday things
which is felt sometimes in the coming of the stars
at evening or the quivering music of the aspen-
leaves at noon ?
Certain it is that we find in this homely tale a
quaint humour, a tender religious charm, which
Mrs. Ewing in after-days might rival, in her own
very different and much more limited field, but
which even she could hardly surpass, and of which
Thackeray himself to name no other might
have been justly and modestly proud. There
may well be a lifting of eyebrows at the juxta-
position of Thackeray's name in such a com-
parison. Yet for true and intimate seriousness in
the primal relations of life the great satirist had
a master-touch, and, while he differed from
George Eliot as widely as each differed from their
contemporary, the great humourist who gave us
" Oliver Twist/' there was in both in him who
wrote " Philip " and " Esmond " and " The New-
comes,'' no less than in the creator of Dinah
Morris a gentleness of heart, a generous ampli-
tude of nature, a sanity and fine restraint, which
made it impossible to treat either their ethical ideals,
or their spirit of worship and of faith, with any
touch of mockery or of disrespect. Perhaps it
would be difficult to find any two novels, both, like
" Silas Marner " and " Vanity Fair," representing
life in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, which differ more than do these two
works of fiction, in material and in method ; but
both embody powerfully one part at least of the
meaning of that great seventeenth-century allegory
from which " Vanity Fair " took its name. And in
this story of peasant life it is driven home, with
a perfection of masterly self-effacement, worthy of
those immortal lines of George Meredith in praise
of the music that is
" free
Of taint of personality."
Full of sunshine and of neighbourly love, yet
enfolding at the outset the tragedy of a soul
which has lost faith in God and man, it evolves,
G 97
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unswervingly and inextricably, that far-reaching
discipline of life and self-created retribution,
which elude the crude methods and coarse reckon-
ing of the time-server and the hypocrite. It
faces wrongs and inequalities which might well
fill even the strongest with despair, were it not
for that Power, whose Love and Guidance, full
of sympathy with ordained renunciation, Dolly
Winthrop believed men ought to " trusten "
through all the perplexity of what, to a gross
and limited perception, so often looks like pur-
poseless and inequitable sacrifice. Dolly's un-
conscious philosophy is wide enough and deep
enough to support the whole burden of our
earthly mystery. It is through her unlettered
wisdom that the weaver's mournful early story
and ever-mellowing happiness of later life are
beheld, in that clearly mirrored divine radiance
which exalts and purifies human drama, whether
of tragedy or comedy. And it is not men and
women alone who live and move before us in that
wondrous light. What is it that enables George
Eliot by a few brief, sober touches to evoke with
such extraordinary vividness, not only certain
features of the landscape, but the very spirit that
breathes through them ? Is it that, in her long
country drives with her father, these English lanes
and hedgerows, these quiet pools and silvery
" runlets" and deep, delicious meadows, gave to
her some effluence of their very being, such as
enabled her to write of them ever afterwards with
the delicate reserve and divining magnetism of a
lifelong love ? It is, for instance, no mere
description which enchants us in that singularly
beautiful passage in which she speaks of " a
certain awe . . . such as we feel before some
quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky
before a steady glowing planet, or a full-
flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a
silent pathway."
With no forgetfulness of her reluctant sur-
render of the ancient creed, it must yet be main-
tained that George Eliot was at once too rational
and too religious too humbly and exaltedly
conscientious in every task she undertook to
have anything to do with that pseudo-romance of
over-strained fancy, against which our modern
"laughing philosopher'' of a later generation
serious and ardent under his ironical mask is
for ever running a-tilt. The naturalness and
inevitableness of that often-quoted scene at the
Rainbow, in which slow bovine vanity and sheer
ineptitude so nearly lead to a quarrel, give to the
villagers there a fitting niche beside the classic
Dogberry. The humour of that scene as indeed
of the whole book " too animate to need a
stress " is as different as possible from the self-
conscious epigrammatic sparkle of many later
imitative scenes among nineteenth-century novels
of agricultural life.
The weaver himself is a triumph of delicate
insight on the part of the author a triumph
the more subtle because his character is built on
such apparently simple lines. He for whose
hoarded gold is substituted a better treasure in
his golden-haired foster-daughter, touches us with
99
s OF
the same deep affection as that forsaken father
described by Balzac as of much the same period
of time, though of another country who was
never a miser except of the looks and words of
his cruel children, and to whom, in his torture-
chamber of gallant self-deception, there came no
heavenly deliverance except the deliverance of
death. Was there in Marner's admirably chosen
name any half-conscious reminiscence of another
earthly voyager whose way to " the dear God who
loveth us" lay through a hell of isolation that
ancient " Mariner " whose title only differs from
his own by the interposition of a single letter ?
This poor hungry-hearted craftsman had learned
very early that " the wedding feast " at life's table
is not for all in this world ; and though, unlike
the weird sailor in Coleridge's poem, he had never
willingly injured one of God's creatures it was
they who had injured him yet it seemed that for
long he must needs meet the waves of a buffeting
adversity, with almost as deep a solitariness of
soul as he who cried
" This soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea :
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be."
He, too, is won back to fellowship divine and
human by the " beauty " and the " happiness " of
one of the "happy living things " about his path,
though to him as well he deserved came a
messenger lovelier and more loving than the little
water-snakes of whom the " Ancient Mariner"
100
told "the Wedding Guest" that he "blessed
them unaware."
There came a day when he too, he, Silas Marner,
who had seemed shut out from that conscious
presence of Love which of itself is heaven, as he
looked into the eyes of a little laughing child,
could feel vaguely and inarticulately something of
what Swinburne's exquisitely simple lines have
made articulate for all men everywhere concerning
children :
"Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven
And blood have defiled each creed :
If of such be the kingdom of heaven,
It must be heaven indeed."
But with what an ideal realism in the true, not
the modern and debased, use of the word does
the incessant interaction of character and circum-
stance, with its gradual unforeseen development
and self-recording Nemesis, unfold itself! As
one vindication of the sense in which the word
"realism" has just been used, take, for example,
the inimitable drawing of Mr. Macey, always such
an entirely credible human creature, even when
he contrives to interpolate in his well-intended con-
dolences with Marner the gratifying information
that " you were allays a staring white-faced creatur,
partly like a bald-faced calf! "
Or consider the character of Nancy Lammeter.
Her portrait is touched in with a precision, a dainty
care and individuality of colouring, that impress
themselves vividly on the memory. Her singularly
limited ideal would in any less beautiful soul have
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OF
been written down as narrowness. Her rectitude of
purpose, in details of conduct in which she was as
determined as she was mistaken, would in a smaller
nature have been hated as obstinacy. But, although
George Eliot does not conceal these characteristics,
Nancy's exquisite sincerity of intention, " clear
as the flower-born dew," her self-forgetting
steadfastness of affection, have been pourtrayed
also, with such a faultless reality as to make
her primness a part of her fascination, and her
" set ways " as restful as the conventionalised
blossom- line of some perfect bit of decorative art.
Rarely does George Eliot permit herself, in rela-
tion to any of her dramatis -personce, the use of
that hard-worked and sometimes meaningless
adjective "sweet"; but to Nancy's name she
does prefix it ; and, indeed, this daughter of a
farming squire calls up to the reader the image
of those starry pheasant-eyed flowers, sheeny in
their snow-white, stainless exactitude, and fragrant
with a message beyond that of earth, to which
the Lancashire folk give Nancy Lammeter's
" christen " name. Of her, as of Mrs. GaskelPs
last and most perfect achievement, Molly Gibson,
we think, as among the people we have known,
rather than those of whom we have merely read.
But even Nancy, whose life is nobly in accord
with her belief that nothing in this world is
" worth doing wrong for," does not touch a
deeper or a higher note than Dolly Winthrop.
And Dolly's is in some ways a larger mind,
notwithstanding she was "no scholard," and a
nature touched with that best kind of sainthood
102
SIL^IS
which lies, not in the negative virtues virtues
which in such a life spring up of themselves but
in the cleansing drudgery of ever-repeated and
ever-chosen toil, for the world's humblest, coarsest
needs. Dolly lives so entirely in the joys and
sorrows of others, that to her the whole com-
munity is a family needing her maternal care.
Was there ever, even in Mrs. Poyser herself, a
more delightful creation than this excellent woman,
who, as mild and patient as she was hard-working,
viewed "the stronger sex in the light of animals
whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally
troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks " ? It is
like feeling the sunshine only to thiflk of her ;
"good-looking, fresh-complexioned," and "never
whimpering," and, when she was not tending her
jovial husband, or "that apple-cheeked youngster of
seven, with a clean-starched frill that looked like
a plate for the apples," never so happy as when
she stood by a sick-bed, or gave kindly help in a
house of mourning !
Besides, it is Dolly, with her practical faith and
pagan phrasing, who brings Marner the first spoken
word of comfort from what she calls " the right
quarter," and reminds us that "if we'n done our
part it isn't to be believed as Them as are above
us'll be worse nor we are, and come short o'
Their'n." More characteristic still is that later
saying of hers : " It's the will o' Them above as
a many things should be dark to us ; but there's
some things as I've never felt i' the dark about,
and they're mostly what comes i' the day's work."
Perhaps we love her most for her delicate tact and
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OF
magnanimity in that surpassing scene in which
Silas, " leaning forward to look at Baby with some
jealousy, as she was resting her head backward
against Dolly's arm, and eyeing him contentedly
from a distance "- made his little confession of
jealousy "But I want to do things for it myself,
else it may get fond o' somebody else, and not
fond o' me."
In this, as in all her novels, it is in her wonderful
mother-hearted touches in relation to the children
that George Eliot's inspiration is most striking of
all. Eppie, when she blossoms into womanhood,
is as real and as " taking " as a briar-rose, one of
those " dillicate-made " flowers, with their ineffable
perfume, as of sweetness wafted from far away,
which, with their heart-shaped petals, and colour-
ing of sunset cloudlets, grow by thousands in the
dusty lanes, to transfigure with their unconscious
symbolism at once ethereal and earthly the
possibilities of man's homeliest lot. But it is in
the pictures of Eppie's childhood that the novelist
attains her highest distinction. What could be
more absolutely perfect in irresistible humour
than the story of the " toal-hole " discipline,
with its atmosphere of tender and growing love
between the lonely old man and the little way-
ward, winsome child. Other writers have given
us children to love and to remember, in whom
there is often an element of the subtle or the
exceptional, but I venture to think that the main
attraction of George Eliot's children and herein
lies her greatness is in a kind of divine com-
monplaceness, as of daisies and buttercups. And
104
in the music that their voices make such music
as brings comfort and strength to many lonely
hearts there is not one false or self-conscious
note. To draw such children as that is only
possible to the highest genius of all. And they are,
as they should be, just taken for granted, as are
all the divinest things in life never insisted upon,
never " shown off," or dragged in. " In old days,"
as the author of " Silas Marner," reminds us, " there
were angels who came and took men by the hand
and led them away from the city of destruction.
We see no white-winged angels now. But yet
men are led away from threatening destruction :
a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth
gently towards a calm and bright land, so that
they look no more backward ; and the hand may
be a little child's."
105
THE PROFFERED SHIPS
WHY do they thrill us those ships that we dream
about,
Ships they will build us, far over the sea,
Ships that all fill us with welcomes that gleam
about
Timber and shrouding with noble elation,
Ships from each stalwart self-governing nation
Born of our Mother and born to be free ?
See them come floating, majestic and glorious,
Dreams that for beauty and strength are
delight
Comrades devoting young sinews victorious,
Sister to sister and brother to brother,
One in the love of the Homeland, the Mother,
One in the justice immortal in might !
Not for the passion of warfare and vanity,
But for the Kinship that cannot forget
Love that can fashion the bonds of humanity
Into the grace of an armour celestial,
Love that uplifts out of all that is bestial,
Love, whereon light, tho' it rise, cannot
set!
Brothers, the Homeland is proud at the thought
of you,
Hearts overflow to your generous words ;
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SHITS
Heaven is the dome to the temple that's wrought
of you,
Arching the hearth that, in world-wide embrace
of you,
Glows with the courage and champion grace of
you !
Send us your ships then bright messenger
birds !
Oh, may the God of our fathers bestow on us
Disciplined peace, without panic or strife !
But, should the rod of His chastisement throw
on us
Duties of war on behalf of the trampled,
May we, with oneness and strength unexampled,
Fight to the death for the Master of Life !
Dear far-off lands, our own ships will respond to
you ;
We will be loyal and true to our trust
Pledge we our bond thro' this life and beyond to
you,
Forge we our way thro' a tempest's commotion,
Ride we at ease on a billowless ocean,
Stand to attention, or crimson the dust !
107
IN MID-MAY'S GLORY
SUMMER in May ! The buttercups are here and
the sorrels have begun to redden. The fragile
stellarias along the lane's edge are beginning to
pass away, and the loveliest of the pale blue speed-
wells are laughing through the dewy grass in
many a meadow as the sun goes down. The
white Montana with a grace of the angels is
clambering over porches and sunny walls, and the
broom yellow and white and primrose-coloured
overlooking dazzling beds of pansies, neighbours
the sweet golden azaleas, in a garden where one
who loves Switzerland and Italy has now deep
blue gentians in full bloom. Hawthorns are out,
the Spanish chestnuts are in full leaf, and the old-
fashioned ribbongrass and forget-me-nots in the
cottage borders are in their glory. The buds of
pinks and carnations are still closed, but white
butterflies are sporting with one another and with
the flowers, and yesterday a queen-bee sailed into
my front sitting-room almost as unexpected an
apparition as the big tropical-looking moth, with
gorgeous torn wings, that I once found lying dead
outside one cottage porch not far away, or the
little grass-adder, a pretty creature, 28 inches
long, that last year glided past our kitchen door,
charming a little robin as it went, and met its
death at the hand of a neighbour before we learned
how harmless it was. Thus do I add to my
country experiences. Little fluffy rabbits I have
108
seen in many a bygone year, scuttling across our
woodland paths, but not till yesterday had I
watched the swift, graceful movements of a tiny
field-mouse, running swift as a lizard through the
undergrowth. Or was it some other creature
whose little lithe body I mistook for his ? Wis-
taria in lavish blossoming has succeeded red and
pink japonica, and the pungent smell of the ribes
is already over, though there is a little plant akin
to the borage, now full of deep blue jewel-like
blossoms, in careful gardens. The swallows are
flying low, as if they expected yet more rain ; but
the finches are full of music, and the nightingales
most melodious. I have not yet happened to
hear the call of the owls, though the cuckoo seems
to mark the refrain of the whole blossoming
world, that is full of the scent of the lilacs and of
the beautiful pheasant-eyed narcissus. Even the
lilies-of-the-valley are in bloom, and the yellow
banksia. What a wondrous county this is, and
how deeply it was beloved by its own great poet
and novelist who died here twelve months ago !
It is just a year since the ashes of George
Meredith were laid to rest, the flames having
burned to utmost purity the beautiful, outworn
garment he had laid aside. Do not his words
breathe along the meadow and the woodland in
the sweet south wind of our enchanting Surrey
wilds ?
" And song of England's rush of flowers
Is this full breeze with mellow stops,
That spins the lark for shine, for showers ;
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s OF Titos e
He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.
The stir in memory seem these things,
Which out of moisten'd turf and clay,
Astrain for light push patient rings,
Or leap to find the waterway.
So hard was earth an eyewink back ;
But now the common life has come,
The blotting cloud a dappled pack,
The grasses one vast underhum.
A burly joy each creature swells
With sound of its own hungry quest :
Earth has to fill her empty wells,
And speed the service of the nest.'*
no
INTRODUCTION TO "SAYINGS
FROM THE SAINTS"
[Reprinted here by the kind permission of the publisher,
Mr. Eveleigh Nash.'}
THIS little book is dedicated to one who gave,
and doubtless made doubly sacred by thoughts
that were prayers, a rosary made of shells from the
Bay of Salamis, which from Athens reached a shy
child of nine some forty-six years ago, in memory
of a meeting that was also a parting. It asks no
higher privilege than to be just such a gift from
heart to heart, a rosary in which the beads are of
God's making, gathered and polished by other
hands than those that have sought to string
them on the enduring, yet invisible, thread of
human friendship and love. Friendship and love
whereof the Saints in this volume have written as
the gift and the revelation of Him to whom with
one accord they cry: " Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest
in Thee."
From hand to hand and from heart to heart,
as a parting gift, a salutation on birthdays and
festivals, it asks a place in life to uplift and help
in those moments of meditation that come some-
times unforeseen as well as of set purpose, and
offers up a many-voiced harmony of that praise
which all the saints utter, "not only with their
lips, but with their lives/' a harmony attuned
to one triumphant note, through all diversity,
ill
OF
in its catholicity of Truth and Wisdom and
Love.
The stringing of beads is the humblest of offices
in the making of a beautiful thing, yet only under
orders could so unscholarly a hand have been
dipped into the treasury of the ages to find what
was needed for the fashioning of this memorial,
and it is well that he who set me this lowly but
illuminating task restricted me to the sayings of
saints within the canon, for otherwise, with freedom
to quote from the words of all good men and
women, the choice would have been too vast, and
I might have been still groping helplessly among
half-dug mines. Nevertheless, the magnificent and
practical testimony, of those whose sayings are
transcribed in this book, does but gain in weight
and in cogency from the sense of that surrounding
multitude of uncanonised saints whose thoughts
are seldom recorded, except in obscure and un-
selfish deeds, and in that Book of Life where the
last shall be first men and women who for the
sake of others have drudged heroically and suffered
silently and rejoiced evermore, and whose messages,
though scarcely heard in the fields of literature, are
vocal in the invisible choir.
At the suggestion of the same wise taskmaster, I
have so intermingled the jewels on my rosary that
the greatest and clearest are therein supported by
the lesser gems ; and the sayings of no saint, how-
ever great, can be found on many continuous pages
unsurrounded by those of others. Here and there
some glorious passage that cannot be broken is
left supreme and uninterrupted. But wherever it
112
THE
is possible, the wisdom of one is complemented or
echoed by another and yet another, leading as by
a natural transition to a new aspect of the same
truth, or to some apparently opposite view which
is its safeguard or its culmination, in the mighty
paradox of that wider truth which includes both.
If it be objected that such interwoven fragments
can never make a book properly so called, I reply
that it matters little what it is named, whether
day-book or rosary or sacred patchwork, so long
as it serve its purpose for wholesome invigoration
in daily care and toil, holy comfort and courage
in hours of darkness, a burnishing of the soul's
armour for mortal combat, and an assurance of
that communion of spirit with spirit which is
found in Him who is the All-embracing and the
Eternal.
With regard to the limitations laid upon me, I
have been rigidly obedient ; even the writer of the
" Imitation '' has not been included, nor the recluse
of Norwich, since neither of them appears in the
Calendar. Herein also has been gain, for we all
love Thomas a Kempis already ; and had I been
allowed to quote at will from the " Imitation,"
the austerity of an ideal wholly personal and con-
templative might have dimmed the almost dazzling
testimony of the canonised saints, whose many-
sided activity and inspired common sense are only
equalled by the heights of their mystic communion
and the profundity and universality of their love.
While they recognised, as the Catholic Church
has always recognised, those ever-present gifts of
healing and of miracle which have been neglected,
H 113
OF
forgotten, disused, their essential ideal is not the
negation of emotion, any more than the " pure
light unbroken by the prism " is devoid of those
qualities which, when it meets the refracting edges
of grief and discipline and renunciation, break
forth in all the glories of the prismatic colours
from seraphic red to deep celestial blue. Less
familiar, and therefore more stimulating to de-
votional exercise than even many of the tender and
love-inspiring passages of the " Imitation," is
that splendid saying of St. Teresa, that it mattered
comparatively little whether her soul was carried
to hell or to heaven, since, wherever she went, the
Supreme Good was present ; and the assurance
of St. Francis that "all we perceive materially in
this world of the Most High is the Body and
Blood of our Divine Lord, and the mysterious
words by which we were created and redeemed."
Amid the agony of a creation that " groaneth
and travaileth " toward diviner perfection, where
the Faith is still blasphemed by the horrors per-
petrated in its most holy name, there are problems
which embrace much that is beyond the reach of
our finite Reason, even though we are taught to
use its light as the light of God. Yet even now
we learn, through what is most enduring in human
affection and human loyalty, that the transitory is
but a mode of the Eternal, and the words education
and redemption, which are too often used chiefly
as controversial weapons, are symbols of infinite
suggestiveness and unutterable consolation.
The " Sayings" here recorded are untainted by
a danger which lurks in the latest revival of that
114
rne
ancient mystical heresy which is to some of us the
more ensnaring from the intermingling of vital
truth whereby it lives. Possibly that heresy is
never a more dividing influence in its self-centred
quietism than when, asserting that we are the
Universe, and essentially the God to whom we
pray, it reckons up righteousness by success and
virtue by freedom from pain.
The saints here quoted, though on many subjects
they use the very language and share the very
thoughts of the modern mystics, to a degree that is
almost startling, yet on this question divide from
them in a manner equally striking. St. Teresa,
St. Augustine, and St. Francis, and all their blessed
company, never said "we do not suffer"; but,
while they valued joy and health as divine gifts, they
welcomed, as the highest privilege, their share in the
wounding and the battle, whereby Love sacrifices
what is dearest for the uplifting of others, even
though they accounted all the anguish as nothing in
the presence of the Glory that is Eternal, that Glory
which is but another name for unconquerableTruth,
invincible Beauty, undying Love the Divine Love
that for them is the First and Last of all things,
round about whose throne the rainbow is unbroken.
And because the great Reality is beyond the power
of mortal utterance, their words are less arrogant
than the simpler and shallower assertions of those
modern opinions which think to have solved all
mysteries by maintaining what is, after all, but a
small part of the complexities of truth.
Longing passionately not only for a united Chris-
tendom, but for the day when the East and the West
s OF 7>%ose
shall join hands in the one worship to which both
through the centuries have brought such ineffable
foreshadowings, there is much here to remind us,
amid those transcendental treasures of the Orient
which have of late been thrown open to the world,
that while out of the East came all the mystic
lore of India, out of the East also came u the
deathless legacy of Isaiah and the practical mys-
ticism of that apostle who wrote of the Divine
One that ' in Him we live and move and have
our being.' '
116
THE LADY OI< THK LAKK
i; Lady of tli< ''was first published in
1810, and in his introduction to the edition of
1830 twenty years later Scott tells us how Ci
i, the action of which lay among scenes so
beautiful and so deeply imprinted on col-
lections, was a labour of love, and it was no less
II the manners and incident/.
duced. The frequent custom of James IV., and
particularly of James V., to walk through their
kingdom in disguise, afforded " him, he adds,
"the hint of an incident, which never fails to be
interesting if managed with the slightest address
or dexterity." Every autumn for many years
Scott was in the habit of spending some time in
that "romantic country " where the plot urif<
itself country of which he had read and seen
much, but heard traditionally even more and,
indeed, it is not difficult to divine that this stirring
and beautiful romance was interwoven with the
very texture of his earlier life. " Oddly enough,"
as he himself remarked, "it was in all the dignity
of danger, with a front and rear guard, and loaded
arms,' 7 that he first entered the enchant itry
that surrounds Loch Katrine when, as a very
young man, " a writer's apprentice " or, as we
should phrase it this side the Korder, a solid:
clerk he was entrusted with the execution of a
legal instrument against certain Maclarens, re-
fractory tenants of Stuart of AJ I fe was
117
OF
accompained by a sergeant and six men from a
Highland regiment near Stirling, " with directions
to see that the messenger discharged his duty
fully, and that the gallant sergeant did not exceed
his part by committing violence or plunder." The
sergeant, it seems, had known Rob Roy and was
full of stories about him, but, as it turned out,
the Maclarens, against whom the expedition was
directed, had already fled, and there was nothing
in any way out of tune with the making of
pleasant memories. Lockhart seems to think it
probable that this warlike excursion was not only
Scott's first entrance to the Loch Katrine country,
but was also a part of his first visit to the veteran
Invernayhle himself, a friend to whom he owed
endless stories of Highland adventure a notable
visit, for it was then, as a boy of fifteen, in quite
the early days of his legal apprenticeship, that he
first beheld the Vale of Perth, with the deep and
eager delight in its loveliness which he has himself
described. "I recollect," he says, " pulling up
the reins, without meaning to do so, and gazing
on the scene before me as if I had been afraid
it would shift, like those in a theatre, before I
could distinctly observe its different parts, or con-
vince myself that what I saw was real. Since that
hour, the recollection of that inimitable landscape
has possessed the strongest influence over my
mind, and retained its place as a memorable thing,
while much that was influential on my own for-
tunes has fled from my recollection."
It was many a long year afterwards that, when
writing u The Lady of the Lake," he went into
118
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Perthshire to verify the possibility of King James's
ride from the banks of Loch Vennachar to Stirling
Castle within the time allowed for it in the poem,
and, to his great delight, satisfied himself that it
could be done. He was the more anxious and
careful over every such detail because, as he him-
self tells us, Miss Rutherford, the aunt who was
so near his own age as to have grown up with
him in comradelike and cousinly friendship, had
warned him against risking a fall by issuing yet
another romance in verse after the immense
popularity and success of " The Lay of the Last
Minstrel " and " Marmion." " You stand high,' 1
she had said ; " do not rashly attempt to climb
higher ... a favourite will not be allowed even
to stumble with impunity." To which he replied
in the words of Montrose
" He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."
In his own introduction to the edition of 1830
he follows this up with his charming story of the
friend, bred up a farmer, to whom, knowing his
" powerful understanding, natural good taste, and
warm poetical feeling," he read, loner before
publication, the first canto of "The Lady of the
Lake." This good fellow, " a passionate admirer
of field sports," followed the account of the stag-
hunt with rapt attention till it reached the point
at which the dogs plunged into the lake to follow
their master, who had stepped into the shallop
119
OF
with Ellen Douglas, when he started up, struck
the table, and declared indignantly that " the
dogs must have been totally ruined by being
permitted to take the water after such a severe
chase." Scott was naturally delighted to find
that so good a sportsman should thus reassure
him by the complete illusionment. with which he
had followed the whole incident as though it had
actually happened. The author was, however,
somewhat disconcerted by the quickness with
which the same friend discovered the main secret
of the romance directly Fitzjames wound his
horn, helped probably by an old ballad in which
it is said of that personage, whose identity he
divined so readily:
" He took a bugle from his side,
He blew both loud and shrill,
And four-and-twenty belted knights
Came skipping owre the hill.'*
" This discovery," remarks Scott, " as Mr. Pepys
says of the rent in his camlet cloak, was but a
trifle, yet it troubled me ; and I was at a good
deal of pains to efface any marks by which I
thought my secret could be traced before the
conclusion, when I relied on it with the same
hope of producing effect with which the Irish
postboy is said to reserve a ' trot for the avenues.' '
To the admirable little biography of Scott by
Mr. Adamb nothing need here be added, except
a few touches bearing directly or indirectly on
" The Lady of the Lake " touches which can
but add warmth and colour to our realisation of
1 20
rne LAT*T OF rne
the brave, tender, vivid personality of one who
was man first and author afterwards, yet in whom
man and author were never at variance, the life
he lived, the aims he followed, being wholly in
accord with the high-hearted ideals of his romances
and novels. Born on August 15, 1771, to the
time of his death on September 21, 1832, his life
overflowed with noble energies and achievements
and untiring human fellowship. Every one knows
the main events of his career; his early years in
the office of his father, a writer to the Signet, his
eager devotion to literature, his long hours of
creative toil in the early morning before the tasks
of the lawyer's office could claim him, his marriage
in December 1797, following closely on the
mastery of all selfish elements of pain in an early
romance which left a deep mark upon his life, his
growing fame, his entanglement in the affairs of
the Ballantyne publishing house, his heroic and
persistent literary labours in the determination to
retrieve his bankruptcy. Permanently lamed as
the result of a fever when a mere baby, one of
his earliest recollections was of what happened to
him in his grandfather's house at Sandy Knowe,
where, some one having suggested that every time
a sheep was killed the lame baby should be swathed
in the warm sheepskin, he well remembered lying
on the floor in this odd garment while his white-
haired grandfather tried to coax him to crawl,
and an old kinsman who had been colonel of the
Greys a picturesque figure in cocked hat, em-
broidered scarlet waistcoat, light-coloured coat, and
milk-white locks tied in military fashion knelt on
121
LEAVES OF
the floor beside him, dragging his watch, trying
to induce the child to creep after it. His sur-
roundings, like his ancestry, were quite appro-
priate to the makings of a Border minstrel of
high degree. The influences went much deeper
than pictured memories of grey-haired military
kinsmen. Mr. Adams reminds us that he was
descended from " Auld Watt of Harden " and his
wife " the Flower of Yarrow," and we may add
that, distant kinsmen of his own having fallen at
Culloden, his Jacobite feeling was deepened by
the stories told in his childish hearing of the cruel
executions at Carlisle which followed.
From his grandmother, as well as from the old
books that lay in the window-seat at Sandy Knowe,
he learned many a stirring tale of Scottish
brigandry and adventure, while at the same time
his own outdoor life, in company with flowers
and birds and beasts, doubtless strengthened his
sense of kinship with those gentle, though not
human, brothers and sisters ; for he tells us he
" was usually carried out and laid down beside
the old shepherd, among the crags and rocks
round which he fed his sheep," and, in spite of
his shrunk and contracted limb, this fine ''open-
air treatment " made of him a healthy, high-
spirited, and, apart from his lameness, even a
"sturdy child."
No reader of " The Lady of the Lake " will be
surprised to find that his love of horses was
hereditary and that in manhood he told Miss
Seward he regarded the horse <c as the kindest and
most generous of the subordinate tribes," and
122
rne LAT>T OF rne
went on to say : " I hardly even except the dogs ;
at least they are usually so much better treated
that compassion for the steed should be thrown
into the scale when we weigh their comparative
merits." But his passionate feeling for animals
extended far beyond horses and dogs. He never
forgot his grudge against one distinguished
kinsman concerning whom he writes :
" When I was four or five years old I was
staying at Lessudden House, an old mansion, the
abode of this Raeburn. A large pigeon-house
was almost destroyed with starlings, then a
common bird, though now seldom seen. They
were seized in their nests and put in a bag, and I
think drowned, or threshed to death, or put to
some such end. The servants gave one to me,
which I in some degree tamed, and the brute of
a laird seized and wrung its neck. I flew at his
throat like a wild cat, and was torn from him with
no little difficulty."
In observing the place which Lufra holds in
the poem, it is not without interest to note that
Lockhart thinks "The Lady of the Lake" was
probably begun at Ashiestiel in the autumn of the
year 1809, though not published till the following
May, and that it was in the January of that same
year that Camp had died, the brave old dog who,
even in his last illness, would leave his mat by the
fire and go as far as failing strength would let
him to meet his beloved master, when the servant,
as he laid the cloth for dinner, roused him with the
news, u Camp, my good fellow, the Sheriff's coming
home by the ford," or " by the hill/' Scott's
I2 3
OF
daughter said she had never seen her father look
so sad as when he was smoothing down the turf
over Camp's grave while the whole family stood
round in tears. He was to have dined out that
night, but excused himself on the ground of " the
death of a dear old friend."
Scott's virtues were of the high and passionate
order, and far removed from the mere negations
of a weak or small nature. Integrity, purity,
honour these were with him the knightly rule
of life, the daily affirmations through those deeds
which wove the poetry of life itself in that
strenuous career of his. He early wrote : " ' My
mind to me a kingdom is.' I am a rightful
monarch, and, God to aid, I will not be dethroned
by any rebellious passion that may rear its standard
against me." That mind, which was indeed his
well-ruled kingdom, was stored to overflowing
with tales of Border chivalry and romance. He
had no need for research when he sat down to
write u The Lady of the Lake " in those early
morning hours at Ashestiel which provoked Miss
Rutherford's questioning.
In the measure of "The Lay of the Last Min-
strel," suggested, he tells us, by Coleridge's
" Christabel," he had now become a familiar and
practised rhymer. And if mind and hand were
ready, it is certain that his heart also leapt to the
congenial effort. We know where the scene of
the poem is laid, and it is interesting to remember
that Lockhart, commenting on a letter from one
of his friends who feared it might go ill with
Scott when the woman he had long loved and half
124
<THS LAT>T OF me
hoped to win became the wife of another, remarked
that "Scott had, however, in all likelihood, digested
his agony during a solitary ride in the Highlands."
That was thirteen years earlier, and when Scott
wrote " The Lady of the Lake " he had long been
a happy husband and father. At the time when
destiny withdrew from him what had been the
hope of so many years, he had not permitted any
bitterness to hold dominion over him, and had
thrown himself eagerly into all that could healthily
absorb every leisure moment outside his daily
tasks translations, poems, Border minstrelsy,
militia duties, and all " the little nameless unre-
membered acts of kindness and of love" that
marked his career at all times ; and within a year
after the destruction of his long-cherished dream,
he had met the lady of his final choice and pledged
to her that faithful devotion which blessed the
married life of both. Yet perhaps it is not
fanciful to find in the romance of " The Lady of
the Lake " not only the charm of buoyant happi-
ness, but also of a certain self-mastery and
chivalrous apprehension of moral strength, all the
more vital for
" A tinge it may be of their silent pain
Who have longed deeply once and longed in
vain/'
No appreciation of "The Lady of the Lake" would
be complete which could fail to note Ruskin's
quotation in " Sesame and Lilies " of two lovely
descriptive lines concerning Ellen Douglas, and the
flower which she herself chose as her emblem :
125
OF
" Even the light harebell raised its head,
Elastic from her airy tread."
<c But it is little," adds Ruskin, " to say of a woman
that she only does not destroy where she passes.
She should revive : the harebells should bloom,
not stoop, as she passes." It is interesting, by the
way, to note the intermingling of influences at the
close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries. In Scott's early childish
days Dr. Duncan almost the only visitor in his
grandfather's house at Sandy Knowe, a visitor
who was very impatient of the child's shouting
recitation of his favourite ballad, " Hardyknute,"
and on one occasion exclaimed, "One may as well
speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child
is " was old enough to remember having seen
Pope and many of his distinguished contemporaries.
Scott was in his fifteenth year when he met
Burns, who died in the same year as that in which
his own first volume of ballads was published.
The meeting occurred in the house of Professor
Ferguson, in the presence of Dugald Stuart and
other literary folk, one evening when Burns was
deeply moved "by a print of Bunbury's repre-
senting a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog
sitting in misery on the one side, and on the other
his widow, with a child in her arms." Scott was
a warm friend and literary admirer of Joanna
Baillie, and exchanged letters with Coleridge, as
well as with Goethe. On one occasion he quotes
Coleridge in support of his own belief that locality
plays a considerable part in the individual appeal of
126
LAT>T OF rne
much modern verse. Coleridge's name naturally
calls to mind that of Southey, and the fact that
Scott's earliest contribution to the Edinburgh
Review dealt with some of Southey's work. Sir
Walter's intercourse with the Wordsworths in
1 803 is full of the deepest interest. Space forbids
anything but the most cursory mention of his
friendship with Rogers and the two Hebers, and
of all that he did for James Hogg, " the Ettrick
shepherd," nor is it possible to make more than a
brief allusion to Crabbe's exclamation when he
read " The Poacher " in imitation of his own
heroic couplet : " This man, whoever he is, can
do all that I can do, and something more."
Scott's analysis of the character of Byron, whom he
knew well, both directly and through their common
friend Tom Moore, is very shrewd. In remem-
bering that he was the contemporary not only of
Cowper, but also of Keats and Shelley, to say
nothing of Leigh Hunt, though he lived so much
longer than any of them, there is a whimsical
pleasure in the coincidence that in one of the
letters in " Red Gauntlet," published a few years
after that exquisite lyric of Shelley's beginning
" One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,"
" Green Mantle " writes : " I will not use the name
of love on this occasion : for I have applied it too
often to transient whims and fancies to escape
your satire should I venture to apply it now. For
it is a phrase, I must confess, which I have used
a romancer would say, profaned a little too often"
127
OF
Scott's modesty about his own work came out
in a very amusing way in relation to " The Lady
of the Lake." James Ballantyne remembers
coming into his library soon after its publication
and asking his daughter : " Well, Miss Sophia, how
do you like ' The Lady of the Lake ' ? " Her answer
was given with perfect simplicity : " Oh, I have not
read it ; papa says there's nothing so bad for
young people as reading bad poetry.'' It was
about the same time that his little boy came home
from school after a fight which had been pro-
voked by his indignation at being, as he thought,
compared to a girl, his companions having dubbed
him " The Lady of the Lake," a title which to him
meant nothing. Indeed it was the same child
who, having been asked why people showed to his
father more reverence than to his uncles, after
considering for a minute or two, replied very
gravely: "It is commonly him that sees the hare
sitting."
It may be interesting to add, on the authority
of Mr. Robert Cadell, that "from the date of the
publication of ' The Lady of the Lake ' the post-
horse duty in Scotland rose in an extraordinary
degree, and indeed it continued to do so regularly
for a number of years, the author's succeeding
works keeping up the enthusiasm for our scenery
which he had thus originally created."
Mr. Cadell also supplied Lockhart with the
following details: "The quarto edition of 2050
copies disappeared instantly, and was followed in
the course of the same year by four editions in
octavo, viz., one of 3000, a second of 3250, and
128
THS LAT>T OF THS
a third and a fourth each of 6000 copies ; thus,
in the space of a few months, the extraordinary
number of 20,000 copies were disposed of. In
the next year, 1811, there was another edition of
3000; there was one of 2000 in 1814; another
of 2000 in 1815 ; of 2000 again in 1819; and
two, making between them 2500, appeared in
1825 : since which time * The Lady of the Lake,'
in collective editions of his poetry, and in separate
issues, must have circulated to the extent of at
least 20,000 copies more. So that down to the
month of July 1836 the legitimate sale in Great
Britain had been not less than 50,000 copies."
" The Lay of the Last Minstrel " is by many
set higher than "The Lady of the Lake," but un-
biased criticism is perhaps scarcely possible from
the present writer, who in days of earliest child-
hood fell in love first with " The Lady of the
Lake," and yielded to the enchantment of its
romantic verse a childish loyalty, which preceded
and in some degree awakened the love of poetry
in the stricter sense. It is easy here and there to
find fault with the occasional jog-trot or jerkiness
of the octosyllabic verse, but it has been well said
that in a stirring gallop over open country what
is most needed is the sense of vitality and verve,
and there can be no doubt that the sympathetic
reader is effectually carried away. Paradoxical
though it may seem, possibly the poem owes
somewhat of its gaiety and recklessness to the
complete mastery of rich and varied lore which
lay behind it. For the absence of mental effort
or strain may well have added to its limpid clear-
i 129
OF
ness and spontaneity, which are fresh and sweet
as the pure laughter of children, or of a Scottish
mountain stream as it sparkles among the flashing
pebbles. Yet to say this is to express but little
of its deeper charm.
Clearly as the mountains which surround Loch
Katrine are mirrored in its lucid depths, in this
enchanting little romance are reflected the noblest
characteristics of Sir Walter Scott. Men loved
him, not for his pardonable ambition to give an
added glory to a family already rich in high and
quixotic traditions, still less for his boyish deter-
mination to embody at Abbotsford some semblance
of his feudal dreams, but for his large-hearted
chivalry, his high integrity, his warm, quick-
beating heart of passion, his essential purity and
magnanimity.
Well may Swinburne say of him, in his essay
on that last published edition of his journal from
which we have here quoted : " While the language
in which he writes endures, while the human nature
to which he addressed himself exists, there can be
no end of the delight, the thanksgiving, and the
honour with which men will salute, aloud or in
silence, the utterance or the remembrance of his
name."
130
AN EASTER REVERIE
THOUSANDS who are not of the Christian faith feel
year by year the Earth's Easter parable, and that
faith is the richer in significance for those beauti-
ful myths, of many ages and many races, that have
now been crowned and consummated in our story
of the risen Master.
Deep within the heart of man lies the key to
the divine hieroglyph whereby he reads of a beauty
above and beyond and about him. Some may read
at leisure whole chapters at a time. Others must
drudge so hard that the messages reach them in
instantaneous flashes between heavy tasks : the
vision of the year's first golden blossom, perhaps,
as they wash the doorstep with hands benumbed by
the bitterness of winter and soul still drowsy from
the sleep of exhaustion ; or a sudden glory of the
river when the noonday sky leans its brightness on
its heaving bosom, as they toil for hard-won bread
in the docks.
Happy are they who, at morning, when the sun
goeth forth as a bridegroom, can pause for awhile
to read the sentence enscrolled in the heavens, and
at eventide can once more pause in the temple when
" A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey :
A whisper from the west
Shoots ' Add this to the rest,
Take it and try its worth : here dies another
day.' "
OF
The sunsets here in the south have of late been
of extraordinary beauty, and of a delicate, austere
charm that befits the leafless trees, the early twi-
light, the ascetic inclemency of the hard-fought
days. Again and again has it happened of late
that the sky, after the first going down of the sun,
has been a sea of wondrous pale green, on which
the apple-bloom clouds of rare pale rose-colour
have made long peaceful lines far above the horizon,
to the north-west of the clear golden splendour
above the vanished light. The bare trees and fields
do but emphasise the solemn loveliness, and seem
to await in grave stillness the rising of the moon
and the coming forth of the stars.
" Come, blessed barrier between day and day ! "
What, in that haunting and perfect line, Words-
worth has said of sleep, is what many a strenuous
spirit has felt about the last sleep of all. "The
New Mysticism" hints at the abolition of earthly
death, but perhaps in the innermost heart of us
we shrink back a little from that thought. Dear
and beautiful is the earth, full of sights and sounds
and old familiar faces that we love with steadfast
passion and cling to, as more to us than any unseen
heaven ; but, even as we gaze at them, they are
subject to the law of change, and we know that to
remain unchanged, among the ever changing, would
be a loneliness far deeper than that mysterious
change which can but deepen our consciousness of
the reality we sought in them, and, with them, shall
thereafter more completely behold. There is a
small butterfly, with wings of celestial azure, which
132
haunts warm coast-lands and is a veritable type of
Psyche. If the chrysalis from which it awoke
were capable of thought, it would be hard to
believe that it would desire the endless exist-
ence of a glorified and perfected chrysalis. Some
strange foreboding there would be that
" The ends of being and ideal grace "
would be missed, if the chrysalis, qua chrysalis, did
not die.
" The New Mysticism ! " that is the title of an
eloquent volume which suggests many uplifting
thoughts even to those who regard a part of its
" new " doctrine as an old and dangerous heresy.
" If Being and Existence are one,'' writes the
author, " one and indivisible ; if man's soul is the
expression of Eternal Spirit ; if our life does
depend upon * every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God/ is it any wonder that we perish
when we feed our minds as we do on words that
have no Spirit or Life in them, on words which
have only a spurious vitality of defective thought
and feeling ? When we come to examine the kind
of stuff we try to live on, we are surprised that we
should be able to last as long as we do. It literally
is 'such stuff as dreams are made of shadowy,
ghostly stuff of appearances, the picture of the
world of effects, the reflection of sense experience
with no substance in it."
It has been well written, "The eyes that see the
King in His beauty will see nothing else, for every-
thing will reflect that beauty." Nothing else?
Nothing but the beauty of that Presence, even in
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OF
our darkling lives here on earth? If that be so,
then indeed was Tennyson right when he wrote
that they who have attained to that open vision
behold us, whom they still love,
" With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all."
We weep that we seem to be divided from them ;
"And yet, this may be less so than appears,
This change and separation. Sparrows five
For just two farthings, and God cares for each.
If God is not too great for little cares,
Is any creature, because gone to God ? "
134
FORGOTTEN BOOKS
V. A PASTORAL
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH is not forgotten. His
immortality is secured, not only by the haunting
and individual sincerity of such lyrics as " Qua
Cursum Ventis," "A London Idyll," and " Qui
Laborat Orat," but also by Matthew Arnold's
" Thyrsis,'' in which the unanswerable pathos is
the more moving because it breathes through the
fragrance and blossoming of the year's loveliest
season. For, taking to heart the storms and
sorrows that raged outside his peaceful Oxford,
and the "life of men unblest," is he not tenderly
reproached for leaving the world too soon, like
that "too quick despairer," who flies away before
the fulness of the summer has come :
"So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day
When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor,
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut-flowers are strewn
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden-
trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing
breeze :
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go
I!"
'35
OF
Time has not conquered Clough, but only
given him a more recognised place among the
nineteenth-century poets.
Nevertheless, as a social reformer and prose-
writer, he is not much remembered, and, to most
of the men and women who throng our London
streets, the most fascinating and humorous of his
longer poems, that " Long Vacation Pastoral " to
which he gave the name of " The Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich '' is indeed a book either for-
gotten or unknown. Yet how it brims with
practical philosophy and sweet laughter and sound
common sense !
It may well be open to discussion how far, in
the strictest sense of the word, it is a " poem " at
all. It certainly does not pretend to the exquisite
melody and precision of lyric touch which dis-
tinguish " Ite Domum Saturae, Venit Hesperus,"
that mountain cattle-song in which, through all
its spontaneity and music, there breathes the same
open-eyed and paradoxically childlike acceptance
of life's ironic possibilities and insouciant charm,
and of the fact that
" work we must, and what we see, we see.
And God he knows, and what must be, must
be."
Clough's courage is almost always the fortitude
of endurance rather than the reckless dash of
bravado. He faces, in all directions, the com-
plexities of life and the fact that man's finite under-
standing is but a clumsy foot-rule, after all, for
the measuring of immeasurable spaces. He never
136
BOOKS
makes that a reason in favour of shirking the plain
mandate for its use, in so far as it can be used,
but only against imagining that there ever can be
a moment at which it has passed beyond its own
boundaries. In much of-his best work there is a
ceatain half-melancholy grace of patience, of self-
command, of hope that is never an unreasonable
hope a grace enlivened often by humour so
delicate as to be akin, not to mere ordinary
laughter, but to that wistful jesting which may
give the hint of coming tears.
Perhaps one reason why his simplest lyrics touch
us so deeply and haunt us so effectually is found
in a certain economy not only of language but of
feeling ; for, in the memoir edited by his wife, we
read that " His absolute sincerity of thought, his
intense feeling of reality, rendered it impossible
for him to produce anything superficial, and
therefore actually curtailed the amount of his
creations."
In a review which he wrote on the poems of
Alexander Smith and on those two volumes of
Matthew Arnold which appeared under the title
of " Poems by A./' he says of the former : " These
poems were not written among books and busts,
nor yet
" ' By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'
They have something substantive and lifelike,
immediate and first-hand about them. There is a
charm, for example, in finding, as we do, con-
tinual images drawn from the busy seats of
137
OF
industry ; it seems to satisfy a want that we have
long been conscious of, when we see the black
streams that welter out of factories, the dreary
lengths of urban and suburban dustiness,
" ' The squares and streets
And the faces that one meets,'
irradiated with a gleam of divine purity.
|C There are moods when one is prone to believe
that, in these last days, no longer by ' clear spring
or shady grove,' no more upon any Pindus or
Parnassus, or by the side of any Castaly, are the
true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers ; but,
we could believe, if anywhere, in the blank and
desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of
the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temp-
tation, and the dire Compulsion of what has once
been done there, with these tragic sisters around
him, and with pity also, and pure Compassion,
and pale Hope, that looks like despair, and Faith
in the garb of doubt, there walks the discrowned
Apollo, with unstrung lyre ; nay, and could he
sound it, those mournful muses would scarcely
be able, as of old, to respond and 'sing in turn
with their beautiful voices.' "
How discerning is this also from the same
forgotten essay :
" The lessons of reflectiveness and the maxims
of caution do not appear to be more needful or
more appropriate than exhortations to steady
courage and calls to action. There is something
certainly of an over-educated weakness of purpose
in Western Europe not in Germany only, or
138
BOOKS
France, but also in more busy England. There
is a disposition to press too far the finer and
subtler intellectual and moral susceptibilities : to
insist upon following out, as they say, to their
logical consequence, the notice of some organ of
the spiritual nature ; a proceeding which, perhaps,
is hardly more sensible in the grown man than it
would be in the infant to refuse to correct the
sensations of sight by those of touch."
Just as his plea for action comes with special
weight from one who must have had all the
impeding difficulties of subtle self-analysis to
contend with, so the very fact of his honest
scepticism adds profoundly to the value of that
unconquerable faith to which he won through
many-sided doubt.
His sense of brotherhood was too deep and
strong to find facile expression, but, turning to
his speeches at Oxford, we find that, when the
subject of debate was that " the character of a
gentleman was in the present day made too much
of," "Clough spoke neither for nor against the
proposition ; but for an hour and a half well on
two hours he went into the origin of the ideal,
historically tracing from mediaeval times how much
was implied originally in the notion of a ' gentle
knight ' truthfulness, consideration for others
(even self-sacrifice), courtesy, and the power of
giving outward expression to those moral qualities.
From this high standard he traced the deteriora-
tion into the modern Brummagem pattern which
gets the name," and then he added : " I have
known peasant men and women in the humblest
139
OF
places in whom dwell these qualities as truly as
they ever did in the best of lords and ladies, and
who had invented for themselves a whole economy
of manners to express them, who were very * poets
of courtesy.' '
This takes us by a natural transition to his
" Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich."
The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich is the Scotch
farmhouse to which Philip Hewson, Radical and
poet, is invited, as an incidental result of his
ironical allusion to the Game Laws, in a speech
made at a dinner given to the Highland peasantry,
to which he and his fellow-Oxonians had been
welcomed as guests while out on a reading party.
But, though the young Radical is the hero of the
" pastoral " (which is, by the way, a skilful experi-
ment in English hexameters), the poem turns
not so much on politics, in the narrow sense
of the word, as on social ethics in general, and
especially on the ethics of marriage :
" Stately is service accepted, but lovelier service
rendered,
Interchange of service the law and condition of
beauty."
Those two lines strike the keynote of the whole,
but it is far indeed from being a mere sermon,
and mingles the joy of wild mountain scenery
cool tarn and mountain torrent and golden-chang-
ing autumn trees with the peculiar charm of
Oxford and the brimming gaiety of undergraduate
life. Philip had to buy practical wisdom at the
140
BOOKS
usual price in the market, and to learn that the
romantic charm of poverty may be as factitious
in its way as the dazzling glamour of wealth or
the far more dazzling glamour of passion ; but,
in the end, he finds his mate in a woman as strong
and good as she is beautiful, the daughter of a
peasant, of clear and bright intellect and intuitions
full of the tender refinement of a high and noble
nature, as well as of that deep and faithful affection
without which no wisdom is really wise. It is in
the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich that he finds her,
but we are tempted to give in his own words his
earliest vision of what love is and how it rebukes
the lackadaisical fancies of mere fashion :
'* Oh, if they knew and considered, unhappy ones !
oh, could they see, could
But for a moment discern, how the blood of true
gallantry kindles,
How the old knightly religion, the chivalry semi-
quixotic
Stirs in the veins of a man at seeing some deli-
cate woman
Serving him, toiling for him, and the world ;
some tenderest girl, now
Over-weighted, expectant, of him, is it ? Who
shall, if only
Duly her burden be lightened, not wholly re-
moved from her, mind you,
Lightened if but by the love, the devotion man
only can offer,
Grand on her pedestal rise as urn-bearing statue
of Hellas ;
141
OF
Oh, could they feel at such moments how man's
heart, as into Eden
Carried anew, seems to see, like the gardener of
earth uncorrupted,
Eve from the hand of her Maker advancing, an
help meet for him,
Eve from his own flesh taken, a spirit restored
to his spirit,
Spirit but not spirit only, himself whatever
himself is,
Unto the mystery's end sole helpmate meet to
be with him ;
Oh, if they saw it and knew it ; we soon should
see them abandon
Boudoir, toilette, carriage, drawing-room, and
ball-room,
Satin for worsted exchange, gros-de-naples for
plain linsey-woolsey,
Sandals of silk for clogs, for health lackadaisical
fancies!"
One of the finest passages, though too long to
quote, is that which begins u But as the light of
day enters some populous city ," in which the
redeeming power of dawn is used as an image
of the redeeming and unifying power of love in the
midst of modern life :
" So that the whole great wicked artificial civilised
fabric
All its unfinished houses, lots for sale, and rail-
way out-works
Seems re-accepted, resumed to Primal Nature and
Beauty ! "
142
Singularly beautiful also is Elspie's vision of
what Philip is to her in her ideal and her work.
She has been describing the laborious upbuilding
of her own life, as of one side of a bridge :
u Sometimes I find myself dreaming at nights about
arches and bridges,
Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand
coming down, and
Dropping the great key-stone in the middle :
there in my dreaming,
There I felt the great key-stone coming in, and
through it
Feel the other part all the other stones of the
archway
Joined into mine with a strange happy sense of
completeness/'
It was Clough who wrote : " To earn his own
bread honestly in the strictest sense of the word
honestly to do plain, straightforward work or
business well and thoroughly, not with mere eye
service for the market, is really quite a sufficient
task for the ordinary mortal."
But what to this man was included in the day's
u plain straightforward work " is implied in the
fact that he once walked for four days over a rough
country to get medicine for the sick child of a
peasant stranger in the Highlands ; and that he
seems to have regarded this as a simple act of
elementary duty.
ROSES
GIFTS for a lover, most exquisite roses !
Love, who uncloses
Your leaves, to uncover
Summer's own sweetness, uplifts far above her
Messages brought by her, brought by the summer :
(Ah, tho' she brought them, He only, He wrought
them /)
Love made the roses, not any chance comer.
Crimson of burning, your heart- petals fashion-
Whiteness of passion
To blushes returning,
Gold of the sunset and dim divine yearning,
Pale as the dawn-star when day dawns above him !
(Fragrance, the soul of them, breathes thro 1 the
whole of them )
Roses, the Rose-maker wants us to love Him !
144
BETWEEN THE RAINS
IT seems that the earth is thankful and the trees
rejoice. The nights of soft refreshing rain have
quieted the dusty ground, and now the south
wind swings her censer thro' the fir-woods, and
even the alabaster box once broken by a woman's
hands can scarcely have poured forth a fragrance
more celestial or more penetrating. The rain we
still ask for rain and yet more rain gives
promise of descending speedily from the brooding,
dove-coloured skies that earlier in the day have
been white and blue and pearl-colour, with delicious
April-like changes of passing showers, on this
May morning. But the sweet outpouring of the
clouds through many an hour of this week's
nights and days has already wrought miracles.
May-flowering tulips, crimson and white, have
unfolded. The mountain ash is full of blossom,
and I have just seen a whole border of self-sown
nemophila in full glory of heavenly azure, while,
hard by, the pansies and violas in my friend's
garden looked on the graceful white Italian sun-
dial, near the climbing passion-flower, as yet only
in leaf. The lupins, blue and white, are in bud,
and in the same bed, bordered by the golden
Alison, now in full splendour, I noticed, to my
amazement, that some of the rhododendrons are
already shedding their bloom ! Nay, more, the
sycamore, which a fortnight ago was full of
blossom, is now dangling its little bunches of
K 145
OF <pi{pse
keys. The laburnums are showing their pale
gold, and the white lilac is at the height of its
beauty. Its homelier neighbour, with its clean
country smell, is very lavish this year in bloom
and in sweetness, now that it is no longer dried
up with thirst, and it adorns the gardens of rich
and poor alike,
" With many a pointed blossom, rising delicate,
with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle."
The red and green blossoms of the arbor vitae
have long ago turned to fruit, but the chestnuts
have lighted their lovely lamps among the green,
and many of the roses are in bud, though the
" heaps of the guelder-rose" are most of them
still but half out. The limes have scattered the
tiny, dainty pink spathes that held their freshly
unfolded leaves, and before we know we shall have
June standing in the doorway, and be haunted by
Browning's Garden Fancies :
" Where I find her not beauties vanish ;
Whither I follow her, beauties flee ;
Is there no method to tell her in Spanish
June's twice June since she breathed it with
me ? "
I have heard the wood-pigeons making love in
a little copse just off the common, but the robins
are quieter than usual, and thrushes and black-
birds seem still for a while to have lowered their
jubilant outpourings in a pause, whether of bliss
or of expectancy, while we wait for the further
146
plenitude of the coming rain. As I left a cottage
where Death had just taken by the hand one of
the children who used to come running to meet
me when I passed along the lane, the " wandering
voice" of the cuckoo seemed to echo with a
mellower and more plaintive sweetness than its
wont from the far horizon, and thinking of the
boy's mother and how cold and frozen had seemed
all that I could strive to say to her of my own
certainty that " it is well with the child," I longed
for that " fountain of tears " whereof Arthur
O'Shaughnessy wrote before he entered the " un-
discovered country " :
" You may feel, when a falling leaf brushes
Your face, as though some one had kiss'd you ;
Or think at least some one who miss'd you
Had sent you a thought, if that cheers ;
Or a bird's little song, faint and broken,
May pass for a tender word spoken :
Enough, while around you there rushes
That life-drowning torrent of tears.
u But the floods and the tears meet and gather ;
The sound of them all grows like thunder :
O into what bosom, I wonder,
Is pour'd the whole sorrow of years ?
For Eternity only seems keeping
Account of the great human weeping :
May God, then, the Maker and Father
May He find a place for the tears ! "
NEIGHBOURING GARDENS
THEY are all -parterres in Allah's Garden ; for His
garden embraces the blossoming of the rose as well
as the mystic splendour of the desert. In every
unbrutalised heart that poet finds an echo who
wrote that
" A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot."
There are three gardens here that neighbour one
another, and, though all are well loved and toiled
for, some who know them might almost maintain,
perhaps, that the smallest of the three betrays
the most cherishing care, the most thoughtfully
fastidious choice of effects. It lies embosomed in
trees and greensward, and crowds an amazing
variety of precious things into its tiny rock-garden,
in which the straight, narrow paths are hardly more
than six feet long in their miniature mazes.
The Norwegian pine in the further corner of the
lawn seems to have come straight out of Hans
Andersen's fairy tales, and the garden itself is
tended by a maiden worthy of his legends, fearless,
and regardless of the winds of our English climate,
waking with the sun all the year round, a skilled
musician, an experienced bee-keeper, and the owner
of one of the best herbariums in the county. But
she is only chief of the staff to the owners of the
garden, and its master makes of it all a love-offer-
ing to its mistress, a chatelaine still often in the
" land of pain " an exile from her beloved garden.
148
Therefore it is full of sweet perfumes and rare
colours : celestial blue in the borders, scarlet
and flaming orange here and there among the
dark foliage, white and delicate yellow and all
shades of madder and brown in its masses of
viola.
But the heart of the garden is its rosery. Roses
of every form and hue, from purest white and
creamy gold and pale pink, to the deepest, most
delicious crimson and the sunset glow of rosy,
transparent lemon-colour. Tea-roses especially are
the glory of this garden ; and, now that the season
is late and their blooming less abundant, exquisite
shades of crimson make an open glory in their
midst,where elect pentstemons have been cunningly
planted among them, to defeat all idea of formality
or primness, in one large, luxuriant rose-bed. The
sweet, poignant odour of the white jasmine floats
down to them from that sunny wall of the house
where wistaria has bloomed before it ; and all about
the fruit-beds hide lovely things with learned
names ivory white and dimmest blue while the
purple clematis flaunts it about the windows that
look on the lawn.
But the big garden, that runs this charming
demesne very close, possesses the overmastering
charm of great stately elms and beeches not to
mention one magnificent cedar-tree the charm,
too, of winding shrubberies and lovers' walks ;
benches from which to watch the sun set over the
orchard or behind the distant village spire ; a great
sense of space and u retired-leisure," and the
antiquity that has seen many generations come
149
OF
and go, and hides within its depths endless romances
and joys and sorrows. Ah, well ! no small modern
garden, however alluring, can ever have quite the
fascination of these fields of poetry that have
grown up half of themselves and take the heart
back to that garden where Jane Eyre talked with
Rochester, or that glorious mingling of flowers
and fruit-trees where Hetty Sorrel picked red
currants, or that other garden where Vernon Whit-
ford fell asleep.
The roses on which its mistress spends so much
loving labour, glorious and generous though they
be in fragrance and in colour, may perhaps be
rivalled, though the Gloire de Dijon on the loggia
would be hard to beat, and the daintily pencilled
salpiglossis, in which she takes such pride, may
find competitors in newer gardens. But the garden
itself, as it stretches out behind the dazzling scarlet
and green where geraniums and begonias flash
their brightness, has all the glamour of "im-
memorial elms '' and half-forgotten days and
bygone dreams.
Yet the third garden, embraced by one of the
loveliest and most peaceful estates in the Midlands,
equally old and spacious, and presided over by
three lovely young goddesses worthy alike of the
" lovesome spot " and of their father, the ideal
country rector all enchanting and each one
different from the other this third garden is a
Garden of Eden without any forbidding sword.
Its tall hollyhocks and spreading cedars have
their counterparts in the other garden ; but the
smell of its yew-hedges in the sun, and the sweetness
150
of the big lavender-bush, which holds a story
characteristic of the rector's kind heart, the close
neighbourhood of the homely and ancient village
church, the mingling of all estates and orders of
men and women among those who find its gates
ever open to them and its simple hospitality
always at their service all these things leave in-
describable memories in those hidden places of
the soul that, Jong afterwards, like Wordsworth's
daffodils, help to make the bliss of many a
solitude.
Of all the three gardens it may be said that half
their beauty lies in the fact that they give Nature
a little of her own way and have not been pruned
to death. Old Quarles would have loved them ;
for in his " Hieroglyphs on the Life of Man,"
beginning with the folly of over-zeal in such
matters, he goes on to touch on the deep mystery
on which many a wise modern physician is begin-
ning to rely a mystery which holds the attention
of all those who grope after the idea that the true
remedy for human withering and weakness may lie
deep in that well-spring of being which is but
another name for the divine sonship of man. Of
flowers and flames he makes his imagery, but in
the main he is not hard to follow.
No brief is held for Quarles, or for what may be
but a half-truth at the best, but he clothes it in a
quaint bit of rhyme, of which a snatch will make
a pretty tag to this string of holiday recollections,
even though it be quoted but in fragmentary and
skipping fashion ; and those who like it not may
yet smile at the conceit :
OF
"Always pruning, always cropping,
Is her brightness still obscur'd ?
Ever dressing, ever topping ?
Always curing, never cur'd ?
You that always are bestowing
Costly pains in life's repairing,
Are but always overthrowing
Nature's work by over-caring :
Nature worketh for the better,
If not hinder'd that she cannot ;
Art stands by as her abetter,
Ending nothing she began not ;
But to make a trade of trying
Drugs and doses, always pruning,
Is to die for fear of dying ;
He's untun'd, that's always tuning.
Hold thy hand, health's dear maintainer
Life, perchance, may burn the stronger :
Having substance to sustain her,
She, untouch'd, may last the longer :
When the artist goes about
To redress her flame, I doubt,
Oftentimes he snuffs it out."
All the little gardens of earth, said the writer,
are a part of Allah's Garden ; but so, indeed, are
the wildernesses ; and in the midst of them is that
152
true Pierian spring of which Quarles and his
fellow-poets have quaffed deeply, but where every
wayfarer and fool may quench his thirst a well-
spring which may have stood for much more,
perhaps, than we fancy the Greeks dreamed of,
until Plato came, and a greater even than Plato
one of the many dim visions of the Fountain of
Living Water, the Well of Life.
'53
APPRECIATION OF "SCENES OF
CLERICAL LIFE "
[Here reprinted from " The World's Classics " by Mr. Henry
Frow de 1 s kind permission .]
WHEN George Eliot began to write these " Scenes
of Clerical Life," though she was already thirty-
six, and had done much valuable work in the way
of translation and editorial routine, she was still
very diffident of her own powers, and thought she
was lacking in certain qualifications necessary to
the novelist.
We have to thank George Lewes, and also, we
must add, Mr. Blackwood, the publisher to whom
Lewes submitted these first anonymous stories, for
the warm encouragement and sympathy which led
her to enrich the world by a gift so much greater
than she, or her friends either, had at first divined
in her.
Those who have not leisure to read Mr. Cross's
deeply interesting biography, yet desire authentic
knowledge of her life in relation to her work,
can find all they need, very succinctly and sympa-
thetically given, in Sir Leslie Stephen's charming
volume.
The setting of the three stories now before us
lay in that Warwickshire which George Eliot knew
and loved so well, the county into which her
father, Robert Evans, who was, as we know, more
or less the prototype of Adam Bede and Caleb
Garth, had moved his home, when he became
scenes OF CLS^IC^L LIFS
agent for the Arbury estate under Francis Newdi-
gate, on the death of that Sir Roger Newdigate of
Arbury Park who was the original of Sir Chris-
topher Cheverel in " Mr. Gilfil's Love-story.''
Harriet Poynton, Robert Evans's first wife, who
had died ten years before George Eliot's birth,
had been for many years a trusted servant and
friend of the Newdigate family at Arbury Park,
in the parish of Chilvers Coton, better known to
us under its pseudonym of Shepperton. Milly
Barton seems to have been the wife of a Mr.
Gwyther, curate of Chilvers Coton, who died when
George Eliot was sixteen years old, and had been
a friend of Mrs. Robert Evans, the latter being
the original, by the way, of Mrs. Hacket. We
learn also that Mr. Tryan's persecution was sug-
gested by an actual experience, the details, of course,
being altered. In " Mr. GilfiPs Love-story " the
excellent plot was of George Eliot's own con-
struction, though a certain Sally Shilton, the
daughter of a collier, transformed by the novelist
into Catharine Sarti, had really been adopted by
the Newdigates; and their young heir, Charles
Parker, did, like Captain Wybrow, die suddenly,
this girl, who gave promise of musical gifts, being
at that time a little over twenty. The musical
training given to her did not avail for the career
the Newdigates had intended for her, inasmuch as
her health proved too delicate, and she married
a Mr. Ebdell, who was the vicar of Chilvers Coton.
Out of these facts and her own vivid memories
and creations George Eliot wove this beautiful
trilogy which made her first volume of fiction.
'55
OF
It was no haphazard collection of short stories ;
for when she first showed to Lewes in the Sep-
tember of 1856 the scenes in "Amos Barton,"
with which these stories began, she expressed a
hope that she might be able to write a series of
tales embodying her impressions of the country
clergy who had come her way, and these studies
breathe the very atmosphere of English country
life, as she knew it, in the early half of the nine-
teenth century. They are at once simple and
complex, elementary and profound. For they
touch the deepest realities of life itself, with all its
hidden complexities and apparent simplicities ;
turning, like the noblest Greek tragedy, on those
primary emotions which are our essential heritage,
emotions which, while linking us with what is
highest and most tender in the animals as part of
our family, link us also with the Divine Love
wherein we are born, and toward which the whole
creation "groaneth and travaileth."
Strikingly diverse, despite their common setting,
they nevertheless all turn upon the educating
power of that Infinite Love, manifested through
transcendent human affections "loves" that
" in higher love endure," affection and loyalty
through which the Most High often teaches us
that, as has been well said, " our hearts are restless
till they rest in Him," and find that love His
dwelling-place.
They are all stories of love and sorrow. Nor
is the leit-motif which unites them merely what
Tennyson has expressed, in the well-known lines
of Maud,"
156
OF CLST^IC^L LfFS
"The dusky strand of Death enwoven here
With dear Love's tie, makes Love himself more
dear."
It is much more than that ; for it suggests that
through death as well as through life the Divine
Love educates and redeems. Even when death
comes, not as Walt Whitman's gentle " Mother "
and " Deliveress,'' but seeming, as death often
does, a cruel and unwelcome guest, snatching the
young mother from husband and children when
we think they need her most, or leaving a May-
nard Gilfil bereft of his heart's desire on the very
verge of its apparent consummation, we are yet
made to feel, as in all highest art, that in the
uttermost grief, as well as in profoundest rapture
and joy, human lives are lifted into unseen possi-
bilities, and are confronted with a vaster outlook,
a more unquenchable hope, than our little cur-
tained stage of earthly existence can ever hold
or express ; so that the protagonist in the conflict
is found at the moment of death crowned with
promises no human words can formulate, no
mortal vision pursue to their fulfiment. The
love of Amos Barton, too absolute to dream that
any fool could doubt its loyalty, was not crushed
or embittered by the bereavement which robbed
him of his chief outward joy and comfort, but
was consecrated to higher issues which, through
his grief and loneliness, lifted this poor " mongrel,"
whose " very faults were middling," into fellow-
ship with the loftiest and noblest souls, and gave
to Milly's children a heritage that was far beyond
157
OF
ordinary wealth. The tragedy in which Maynard
Gilfil was involved forbids any cheap glibness on
the part of the critic. I may indeed well be
warned off by some sneering and cynical person,
who will inquire at this point whether it is pro-
posed to analyse the wit and wisdom of these
beautiful stories on the level of a Sunday school
tract. But is there any admirer of this clean-
limbed, candid young chevalier sans reproche who
does not find him vastly nearer to all we worship,
after he has passed through his mortal anguish with
the courage of self-surrender and unmurmuring
self-abnegation, than when he is merely an untried,
charming young parson very deeply and unselfishly
in love ?
George Eliot had, doubtless, a special know-
ledge of timber through her long, intimate
drives with her father over the estates for which
he was responsible, and her imagery is especially
telling when she compares " the dear old vicar,''
Mr. Gilfil, to a tree. "The heart of him was
sound, the grain was of the finest ; and in the
grey-haired man who filled his pocket with sugar-
plums for the little children, whose most biting
words were directed against the evil-doing of the
rich man, and who, with all his social pipes and
slipshod talk, never sank below the highest level
of his parishioners' respect, there was the main
trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature
that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of
its life-current in a first and only love the love
of Tina."
We are told that Mr. Blackwood was dis-
scenes OF CL&RJGJL LIFS
satisfied with the first part of "Janet's Repentance,"
when it was sent to him for publication as part of
"the series/' and I must admit that it seems to
me the least satisfactory part of the volume before
us. But the middle and end are so masterly and
so moving that the story as a whole is surely one
of the greatest of George Eliot's gifts to her fellow-
men. Here, as in "Silas Marner " and "Adam
Bede,'' she fearlessly drew for us the story of a
soul not only restored and redeemed, but far
stronger and more beautiful at the end of the
battle than in the smooth days of untroubled
youth.
And how full of sane, quick-beating charity are
all these studies of human nature ! All alike lead
to the equipoise not of
" that false calm which many feign,
And call that peace which is a dearth of pain,"
but to that deep and vibrating peace which passeth
understanding, that secret home and temple of the
heart, which
" For its very vestibule doth own
The tree of Jesus and the pyre of Joan."
" Ideas," as George Eliot truly says, " are often
poor ghosts ; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern
them ; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and
cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes
they are made flesh ; they breathe upon us with
warm breath, they touch us with soft responsiv
hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and
speak to us in appealing tones ; they are clothed in
OF
a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith,
and its love. Then their presence is a power, then
they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn
after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is
drawn to flame."
We have already been reminded that " while we
are coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at
his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labelling
his opinions ' Evangelical and narrow,' or
( Latitudinarian and Pantheistic,' or * Anglican
and supercilious ' that man, in his solitude, is
perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is
a hard one, because strength and patience are
failing him to speak the difficult word, and do
the difficult deed."
We all know the dangers of indiscriminate
giving, but Mr. Jerome's open-handedness was
not indiscriminate, and modern selfishness, as well
as certain forms of modern philanthropy and
stultified communism, might well ponder deeply
on Mr. Jerome's assurance that " I'd rether give
ten shiliin' an' help a man to stand on his own
legs, nor pay half-a-crown to buy him a parish
crutch ; it's the ruination on him if he once goes
to the parish. I've see'd many a time, if you help
a man wi' a present in a neeborly way, it sweetens
his blood he thinks it kind on you ; but the
parish shillins turn it sour he niver thinks 'em
enough."
Here is practical wisdom of the best, that
practical wisdom which is born of the heart where
Wisdom and Love are one.
Colonel Newcome himself is not more finely
1 60
scenes OF CL&III&AL LIFS
drawn than Mr. Tryan, who, dwelling among the
squalid homes of the saddest and most poverty-
stricken, " wants to mek himself their brother,
like ; can't abide to preach to the fastin' on a full
stomach."
There is not space here to quote the description
of Mr. Tryan's study, but there is a fine passage
in which George Eliot remarks that u the man
who could live in such a room, unconstrained by
poverty, must either have his vision fed from within
by an intense passion, or he must have chosen that
least attractive form of self-mortification which
wears no haircloth and has no meagre days, but
accepts the vulgar, the commonplace and the ugly,
whenever the highest duty seems to lie among
them."
Sir Leslie Stephen has laid his finger on the
true vindication of George Eliot's work from the
charge of a too pedantic didacticism and philo-
sophic seriousness, when he reminds us that it is
absurd to expect an author steeped in philosophic
ideals to present us in fiction with a world
entirely devoid of their influence, and elsewhere
remarks, with a certain mordant incisiveness : " If
anybody holds that morality is a matter of fancy,
and that the ideal of the sensualist is as good as
that of the saint, he may logically conclude that
the morality of the novelist is really a matter of
indifference. I hold myself that there is some
real difference between virtue and vice, and that
the novelist will show consciousness of the fact in
proportion to the power of his mind and the
range of his sympathies."
L 161
OF
Even George Eliot's detractors are wont to
make an exception in favour of these early stories
and of " Silas Marner." I am of the other school.
By this I do not mean that I set these stories
lower, for I believe them to be masterpieces of
their kind and their kind is of the best but
only that I set the other work high also am, in
fact, in no sense a detractor, but a born admirer.
It is, doubtless, an idiosyncrasy of temperament,
and one which I am not insistent to defend, that
while I confess the later novels are more open to
criticism than the earlier, yet for sheer enjoyment
" Middlemarch " and "Daniel Deronda" have
been' to me quite as enthralling as any ; and even
the much-criticised "Felix Holt" has given me
especially keen delight.
In all George Eliot's work, if I except " Brother
Jacob" and "The Lifted Veil" and "Theo-
phrastus Such," I find power, humour, reality,
indestructible charm. Yet, seeking to adjust the
relative claims of her first fiction and her latest
volumes, I confess that Milly Barton is to me a
more vivid reality than some of the later heroines,
Mr. Bates has to my thinking more verisimilitude
than certain subsidiary characters in "Deronda,"
and Mr. Jerome is a more familiar acquaintance
than Mirah : but that is possibly the result of my
own limited vision, whereby I fail to recognise
Gwendolens and Mirahs when I meet them, or find
the salient oddities of a Mr. Bates more lifelike
than the cruel emptiness and obstinacy of a
Rosamond Vincy, whose blonde loveliness would,
I fear, effectually blind me to her baleful character,
162
scenes OF CLSI^IC^L LTFB
What does seem incontrovertible is the almost
overwhelming force with which the earlier novels
bring home to the heart the joys and sorrows of
people whom our commonplace souls would, if
we met them in the flesh, be likely to pronounce
rather uointeresting ; and the genius with which
the value and significance of the individual lot
and of the individual soul, is intertwined with
the realisation that each is but one unseen drop
in the rushing torrent of wider events, that
torrent itself being but an infinitesimal incident in
the cycle of a vaster cosmos.
Those of us who believe with Browning that
"each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan ;
Each living his own, to boot,"
must be grateful for the superb art which never
leaves either the " each " or the " many " out of
account, and, while indicating the power of even
human qualities to react upon environment and
insensibly modify circumstance, invigorates and
uplifts the spirit with a faith deeper than any
circumscribing formula or narrowing logic of
mere words faith which enabled Janet Dempster
to say in the moment of parting with her earthly
deliverer, " God will not forsake me," and to
walk " in the presence of unseen witnesses of the
Divine Love that had rescued her, of the human
Jove that waited for its eternal repose until it had
seen her endure to the end."
There is a resplendent passage which I had
marked for possible quotation, but since Sir
163
OF
Leslie Stephen has forestalled me in his chapter
on " Scenes of Clerical Life," I will content
myself with pointing out the exquisitely simple
word of comfort that follows close on this
same passage, which, but for that, might have
seemed to imply the loneliness of a world from
which God was absent. Tina, who is likened by
Bates to his darling flowers, the " nesh and
dilicate " cyclamens, is here, as often throughout
" Mr. GilfiTs Love-story," compared to a little
fluttering bird ; and the thought of the sparrow
that cannot fall to the ground "without our
Father " would seem to be implicit in the allusion
to her "torn nest," when, on the very next page
to that which writes those terrible words which
say she and her trouble were " hidden and uncared
for," we read that, when she knelt down to say
the little prayer of her childhood, she added the
words, " O God, help me to bear it," and " that
day the prayer seemed to be heard."
In " Amos Barton," the first of the three stories
now before us, which, in the poignant simplicity
of its unsentimental pathos, and its awakening of
our sympathy for the dullest and most common-
place of men, is from one point of view the
author's supreme triumph, it is easy to admit
faults of construction. It is much less perfectly
welded than some of George Eliot's later work,
and even betrays here and there a certain stiffness
and awkwardness in its transition from scene to
scene. Its unfolding is less organic and inevitable
than that of " Adam Bede," for instance. Yet I
am not at all sure that what at first appears a
164
scenes OF CLS^IC^L LIFS
defect may not be an obscure source of added
power in the grip which the story takes of the
imagination, whether it does not for that very
reason hold the reader with a more impressive
sense of actuality, as though some unaccustomed
narrator were recalling vividly remembered facts
which require a certain effort to marshal them in
their due order. And it would be difficult to
find one of George Eliot's stories more vital with
the natural humour of life's delightful absurdities
and incongruities, its mingling of the heroic with
the trivial, the Divine with the homely. Of wit
also it has more than its share.
In this quiet story of a village town, in which
there are no sensational incidents, no swift sur-
prises, no men or women in any way remarkable
except for simple goodness, the very laughter
provoked by the author's scathing sallies against
those petty egotisms and self-deceptions, which
we are apt to treat more leniently in ourselves
than in others perhaps, not only relieves the strain
of what would otherwise be a sense of grief too
heavy to be borne, but at the same time really
deepens the probing influence of its noble pathos
a pathos which is always finely restrained, and
therefore the more moving. It stands for ever to
the honour of Charles Dickens, whose most vaunted
pathetic scenes lacked precisely that quality of
self-restraint, that he was among the first to recog-
nise and extol, in the then unknown writer, " the
exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humour
and pathos." In "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev.
Amos Barton," a story in which the closing scenes
165
OF
touched with that economy of language, that
wise control of feeling, which makes them the
more profoundly touching from the absence of
any emotional flourishes or rhetorical exaggeration,
the children around Milly's death-bed are not
likely to be forgotten by any one who, in imagina-
tion, has once stood beside them. Indeed, in
her presentment of children, George Eliot always
stands supreme, and her supremacy lies in the
very fact that her children are as normal and
delightful as hedgerow flowers. They are just
such children as cross life's daily path, cheering
as daisies and buttercups, or those dainty, fragrant
bindweeds that bear a star in their pale blossom-
ing and do not despise even the kerbstones of the
village roadway, or the hillocks of the village
graves. In the early stories they are especially
bewitching, and it is not only Patty Barton who
warms the memory with a loved, caressing presence s
but a whole troop of merry boys and girls who
are never obtruded on the reader's attention, yet
add to the sunshine and the sweetness of a world
where there is much suffering, but also much
innocent though transient delight, as well as more
enduring joy.
Among the fine qualities incontrovertibly recog-
nised in George Eliot's work, dramatic situation
is not, as a rule, very strikingly in evidence, but
there is a moment in " Mr. Gilfil's Love-story "
which must in this regard satisfy the most exacting
critic :
" c Yes, Maynard,' said Sir Christopher, chat-
166
scenes OF CLST^JC^L Lite
ting with Mr. Gilfil in the library, * it really is
a remarkable thing that I never in my life laid a
plan, and failed to carry it out. I lay my plans
well, and I never swerve from them that's it.
A strong will is the only magic.' '
There follows an allusion to the happy marriages
he has planned for Anthony, who is already beyond
the reach of earthly planning, and for two others
dear to the old man's heart, but all tangled in a
sorrowful destiny beyond his unravelling. And
then . . .
"The door burst open, and Caterina, ghastly
and panting, her eyes distended with terror, rushed
in, threw her arms round Sir Christopher's neck,
and gasping out ' Anthony . . . the Rookery
. . . dead ... in the Rookery,' fell fainting on
the floor."
As a finished work of art, " Mr. Gilfil's Love-
story " is, undoubtedly, the finest of the " Scenes
of Clerical Life," though "Amos Barton" is my
own favourite; but at is in " Janet's Repentance"
that we have perhaps the most perfect expression
of the wise and loving philosophy which underlies
them all. It is there that we are reminded that
" the only true knowledge of our fellow man is
that which enables us to feel with him which
gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are
beating under the mere clothes of circumstance
and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and
sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit
up by the love that sees in all forms of human
OF
thought and work, the life and death struggles of
separate human beings/'
If it be asked, how it was possible that one
who had renounced what is ordinarily called Chris-
tianity, could yet indicate with such sincerity, as
in these sketches of clerical life, the very source
and secret of its power, may we not reply that
her own faith was, doubtless, wider and deeper
than ever found full expression either in her words
or her life ? Mr. Gilbert Murray's beautiful
translation of Hecuba's prayer in "The Trojan
Women " seems to me to sum up what, consciously
or unconsciously, was the prayer that breathes
through all George Eliot's work, and must lead
many a soul to Him who is the Light of Light :
"Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high
Throne
Above the World, whoe'er thou art, unknown
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,
Or Reason of our Reason ; God, to thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod
To all that breathes and dies."
But there were moments who can doubt it ?
when the great novelist, passing beyond the barriers
of " surmise " and of that which limits our finite
share in the infinite Reason, entered into the Love
" which passeth knowledge," and, perceiving with
the eyes of the soul that " the end " is not in this
life, attained to those secrets which the intellect
cannot reach.
168
"GOING INTO THE SILENCE"
You will have bathed in stillness. CHARLES LAMB.
IT is easy to exaggerate the " sentimental emotion-
alism " of our grandmothers to forget that they
were often protected from hysterical fashions of
feeling and behaviour by a saving sense of humour
and a delicate wit. No doubt they had their
dangers, but the very quietness of their lives
tended to self-restraint, dignity, and reserve.
Among highly educated women and there were
many such, even though they were not all a Mrs.
Somerville or a Mrs. Browning, a Mrs. Gaskell or
a Miss Yonge the long hours of manual occu-
pation gave opportunity for original and reflective
thought and for a certain deepening of character,
such as only the finest natures gain in that opposing
stress of modern bustle and noise, by which too
frequently the weak and flimsy ones are frittered
away or ruinously disintegrated.
There is a verse of Matthew Arnold's " Fare-
well," in which he speaks of women as
" things that live and move,
Mined by the fever of the soul."
And the fever is likely to increase alarmingly with
the increase of complicated responsibility in our
modern life, and is likely also to tell most severely
on the tenderest and the bravest. If the women
of the past were sometimes, we are told, engrossed
in trivialities, through the lack of a wide intellec-
169
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tual outlook, the women of to-day may be in
danger of shallowness, through the very multi-
plicity of their interests and cares, or, on the
other hand, through their self-satisfied absorption
in the one person who is the centre of their lives.
But the door of salvation from this lowering
process is even now not shut to them, and there
are many ways in which some of the busiest may
still " buy oil for their lamps." If a woman be
ever so unfortunate as to be unable to enter the
temple of art for heavenly merchandise, or to
gather the flower of peace in her own garden plot,
or even, through some unhappy doubt, may feel
unable to join in the ancient liturgy, with its
joyous and tranquillising effects, there are yet
moments of enforced waiting and monotonous toil,
when the touch of unseen Love will meet all honest
effort after secret converse, by a rekindling of the
light that had gone out.
It sounds like a paradox to say that those
who are most vividly in touch with their fellow-
creatures most crave solitude ; but it is a para-
dox by no means so paradoxical as it looks. To
crave solitude is not to wish to be lonely nor to
desire continued isolation ; a solitude which was
perpetual would, indeed, lose all its charm. The
highest peak of a mountain-top is a heavenly
place; but who would choose to dwell there
always, unless, indeed, it proved that meeting-
place of souls, that " paved work of a sapphire
. . . When they ate and drank and saw God also,"
which Browning took as the symbol of the most
satisfying of all human companionships ?
170 '
rne
The soul that has never felt " life's fretful
fever " has never truly longed for solitude. And
though anything so unhealthy as " fever " may be
incompatible with the highest, purest love, and
with that " enthusiasm of humanity " which is the
most catholic of affections, yet even a perfectly
unselfish passion (and who is so perfect as to be
absolutely unselfish ?) may crave an occasional
withdrawal from the material presence of the
dearest of fellow-creatures, if only to realise its
own reality and find renewed strength and joy in
its own validity. Milton's Adam exclaims in his
own Eden :
" For solitude is sweet society,
And short retirement urges swift return."
One of Browning's loveliest lyrics asserts the con-
verse of this, and speaks of the dual solitude as
never so intense as when
" Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we ! "
But if this be true of the love of lovers, there
is a larger, deeper reason why those who renounce
themselves for the good of the race must, if their
sympathies be quick, meet the revitalising presence
of Love in solitude as well as in the crowd. Un-
doubtedly the women of to-day stand in special
need of that occasional solitude which it is often
so hard for them to secure. For many a noble-
hearted woman the only certainty of this calming
and bracing remedy for irritation and exhaustion
lies in the steadfast adherence to the practice of
setting apart out of the long, active, unselfish days,
171
s OF
one daily half-hour in which there is literal
obedience to the Master's command, not only to
enter into a room where others are not passing to
and fro, but also to " shut the door " to gain, in
fact, the quiet peace of what the Society of Friends
rightly names "going into the silence," a silence
wherein, as in Charles Lamb's " Quakers' Meet-
ing," " the mind " has often " been fed " as well
as the soul.
To live incessantly for others, and in others, is
to live a hundredfold ; and this multiplex activity
may doubtless be far less perilous, even physically,
than the maddening strain of a carking self-
regard ; yet it can only be healthily sustained by
the invigorating renewal of individuality in solitary
communion with that angel of Love and Light
with whom Israel wrestled till daybreak, and who
since the days of Israel has revealed His name
more fully.
To be alone is not to be lonely ; the deepest
loneliness of all is found in uncongenial company.
Doubtless a man feels this in proportion to the
vividness and sensitiveness of his sympathies. But
it was another side of the question which suggested
the paradox. The quick sense of human kindred
is a daily delight ; yet how precious must be ac-
counted those hours of joy in which it is untouched
by pain ! In that " star Rephan '' of which
Browning writes it may be otherwise. But that
thought stultifies itself at the outset, and merely
proves what has here been asserted, as by a sum
in subtraction you prove a sum in addition. For
we are met by the poet's implied suggestion that
172
i^ro rns
we have passed beyond that sphere where there is
no unhappiness, no sense of discord or of aspira-
tion, into a life where each is bound to all and no
sorrow is wholly individual, and wherein the old
French proverb becomes true in a deeper sense than
is intended, arid " il faut souffrir pour tre belle/'
If character is to become beautiful, with an ever
widening and deepening sympathy, the fire of
fellow-feeling must at times scorch and shrivel
many easeful, self-indulgent tendencies which
cannot vanish without a little salutary hurting.
As for the just punishment of that paltry self-
seeking and greed of admiration felt by the poor
thin-skinned wretches who call themselves sensi-
tive and are known as "touchy," it is not of their
self-centred pain that beauty can be born. To
such there is here no briefest allusion, for in no
large sense are they wont to excel in sympathy,
being much more likely to see all things refracted
and distorted through their own self-regarding
fantasies. On the other hand, all self-renouncing
regard for the just claims and true interests of
others tends to robustness of character.
To rejoice with those who rejoice, and to weep
with those who weep, with
" a heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathise,"
must doubtless involve pain as well as joy, even
though it meet Romola's definition of happiness,
as that to be chosen above all else, and though,
like all merging of self in greater and diviner
interests, it must necessarily ennoble and in-
173
s OF
vigorate ; yet even the suffering which there will
be may result in a deepening of that calm and
joyous energy which is, like all virtue, its own
crowning reward.
But energy, in proportion to the strenuousness
and reality of its effort, demands at intervals a
counterbalancing and regenerating repose. We
know from the lives of all men in all ages that
when the ear is very sensitive to the " still,
sad music of humanity," so that the sound of its
laughter and its tears, its joy and grief and hope
and failure, reverberate unceasingly through the
frail human brain of the listener, the tension at
times demands a withdrawal into the great silence,
where He who " fashioneth all the hearts of
them " may " cover them with His Presence from
the strife of tongues."
And if it be impossible to be alone with the
woods and hills or to go into a desert place apart,
a moment with a picture of Turner or a poem of
Wordsworth may take the soul into the stillness
in which the nearness of the Great Companion is
realised. Is not this the debt that we owe to all
great art ? Art may be what men call secular
surely a crass distinction, since the whole universe
is sacred but if it be noble art, it will always
draw aside the veil from that mysterious presence
chamber, the Temple of Rest.
The Divine Peace that abides there will seldom
permit either man or woman to remain long in
inactivity, for it is a part of the mystery that the
love which breathes such penetrating repose into
the out-wearied spirit is yet that energy of love
rns
of which Wordsworth wrote, as the very life of
life, when he said :
"Life, I repeat, is energy of love."
It is the other side of the paradox (which is in
itself by no means paradoxical) that they who
best love the Presence found in solitude will best
love their fellow-creatures.
If we seek solitude, cherishing hatred in our
heart, the solitude will certainly be odious to us,
and, though it may have been sought, it can
hardly be said to be loved. But for the servant
and the friend of Love, the wilderness will blossom
as the rose, and the solitary place will rejoice and
sing.
Perhaps to a woman longing to carry blessing
to the hearts and lives of others it may be in the
pressure of the crowd who will throng her return
that she will most vividly feel and touch the kindly
recreating Presence who, whether in the desert or
the market-place, is so perpetually waiting to renew
our humanity, that " Closer is He than breathing,
nearer than hands and feet." She will come back
into that multitudinous throng which constitutes
human life, with a new radiance on her face and
in her heart ; a look of courage for the downcast,
a tender smile for the sad, an electric silence of
sympathy for those who can bear no word. Her
own soul will kindle others with the joy of fellow-
ship and the anguish of pity. Life will be to her
one long poem, in which the sorrowful and sordid
details, the madness, the despair, are all trans-
175
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figured and redeemed by fellowship Divine and
human ; and at the end of life she will ask no
better guerdon than to be able to say of Love :
" He rushes on my mortal guess
With his immortal things.
I feel, I know him. On I press
He finds me 'twixt his wings."
176
A HOLIDAY ON DARTMOOR
To most people the sound of " the moors "
will at once suggest Scotland. To them "the
moors " mean a great waste of fragrant heather,
where through the long days, knee - deep in
the hardy, purple-blossomed twigs, they taste
the clear, invigorating air, and industriously
shoot.
But in England too there are moors. In York-
shire there are wide reaches of upland where the
brown grass waves among the purple ling and
the air is pure and sweet and fine.
And, to say nothing of Exmoor, in the northern
half of Devonshire, here in the midst of South
Devon there is a great moor, where gorse and
heather are breaking into bloom, where the wild
ponies cry to one another from the hills, and the
white-bosomed swallows fly hither and thither,
and the mountain streams are ever rushing and
leaping and making their sweet, cool noises among
the moss and fern. This moor is no wild desert,
no lofty, monotonous level. Sometimes it is
broad, rocky upland, all heath and gorse ; but
oftener it is broken here and there by cornfields
and green meadows.
Here on its edge, in the valleys and clustering
round the churches on the hills, are human habita-
tions, grey stone houses, thatched cottages, and
mills. But these have a comfortable woodland
air, as if they had come with the boulders or
M I 77
OF
grown with the trees. The blue smoke, as it
curls from their chimneys, brings no reminder
of towns or cities ; it does but emphasise the
tranquil solitude of the surrounding country.
Near to Princetown, in the heart of the moor,
still lingers a fragment of the primeval oak
forest where in old days the Druids celebrated
their mysterious rites. Memories cling round its
name. Wistman's Wood it is called. But even
the name is not so weird as the place. Ferns
grow on the mossy boughs of the gnarled and
ancient oaks. Often one of the trees will wreathe
its twisted branches with those of its neighbour in
fantastic entanglement. Luxuriantly leafy, but
crooked and dwarfed, are these oaks. Shoulder-
deep in bramble and bracken, they are half buried
also by slabs and pyramids of lichened rock and
time-worn stone. It is a fine place for twisted
ankles ; stepping into what looks like innocent
fern, the unwary explorer stumbles over a jagged
boulder or falls into a treacherous hollow or grassy
bog.
Below the lower edge of this elfin wood flows
a babbling, sobbing stream ; and, crowning the
slope above, wild, rocky slope, where the delicate
bell-heather is budding, and tiny orange-brown
butterflies are wandering, rise rugged masses of
granite, very like the tors which mark the sur-
rounding hills, though on a much larger scale.
Very different is this fortress of stone from the
cairn on the top of Snowdon and other Welsh
mountains. This is not a cone of heaped-up
shingle, but a pile of formidable slabs built up
178
cxf HOLID^T
one above the other, now jagged and irregular,
now shaped like a rude altar.
The loneliness even here is broken by the lowing
of the cattle beautiful red Devonshire cattle that
come for shelter from sun and wind beneath the
shadow of these rocks. There are sheep too, but
they have been shorn and cannot pretend to any
snowy whiteness, though in this part of the
county there is no warm-coloured loam to give
them the ruddy tinge to which the eye is accus-
tomed in the sea-coast valleys. As they wander
bleating over the hills they are but grey and
ordinary sheep.
August is not here a sultry month. There are
days when the sky is a deep, cloudless blue and
the air heavy with languid heat and sunshine.
But how many are the days when the pearly clouds
chase one another across the azure space, when
the hills are dappled with brilliant light among
the ever-shifting shadows ; days when the air is
pure and quickening, and the little red-breasted
wind^chat flies from twig to twig of the peach-
perfumed gorse, that is even now blossoming into
its August splendour of billowy gold.
On such a day should Wistman's Wood be
seen, and then from those granite boulders what
a glorious landscape rolls itself out ! Beyond the
open moorland the hills lie fold on fold, now
illumined by a distant flash of radiance to a bright
and delicate verdure, now almost golden in the
sunlight, now again dusky with fir-trees or
shadowed by those rounded blocks of snow-white
cloud that sail across the stainless blue overhead.
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OF
The heather is very late this year ; nor can this be
called exactly a heather country, though the
common purple heath grows well among the
gorse, and the bell-heather blossoms in the boggy
part of the moor, and ling will soon be tolerably
abundant. But the hue of the tiny heather-bells
has not yet darkened from the tint of the foxglove
to bluish purple, and is mingled here and there
with the russet of the reddening whortle-twigs.
Sometimes there is a glowing patch upon the
far-off hills, but the chief variety of colour is
given by the luxuriant woodland, which clothes
the lower slopes on the edge of the moor and
follows the courses of the streams. There also
the ash almost loses its sameness, and assumes
a certain statelinesss and wealth of foliage which
come near to beauty. Beech-trees are always
lovely, though in the wilder valleys they grow
too closely to develop that splendid strength and
symmetry which give to them so perfect a grace
in well-planted avenues. The oaks also are small,
and their stems seem to have caught the silvery
glimmer of their neighbours, the birch-trees.
The berries of the graceful mountain ash are not
yet scarlet ; and, though wild raspberries drop
their pink fruit into the sedgy undergrowth that
borders the woodland streams, and nuts have
taken the first touch of brown upon the hazels,
the lilac-tinted blackberry blossoms are not yet
over, and the wild strawberry is still plentiful.
The harebell does not grow here, but a dainty pale
blue campanula springs from the mossy turf under
the trees beside the brooks. Meadowsweet and
1 80
of HOLID^T
wood-betony and wild thyme grow plentifully,
and innumerable ferns, from the common poly-
pody to the royal osmunda. And everywhere in
the woods are sweet-smelling fir-teees, everywhere
the clear and sparkling rills are musical among
the stones, and fragments of rock peep out
through the undergrowth, clothed with ivy, and
lichen, and moss. These rocky, river-haunted
woods recall those lines of Keats in which Lorenzo
describes to Isabella the secret place where his
murderers buried him :
4 'Saying, moreover, * Isabel, my sweet !
Red whortleberries droop above my head
And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet ;
Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts ; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed :
Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
And it shall comfort me within the tomb.'" *
It only needs the orange-winged butterflies and
the yellowing bracken to make the picture
complete.
You will say this is not moorland scenery.
But it is all a part of Dartmoor just as truly
as the less frequent hut-circles and bogs, does
indeed follow the course of the Dart, and is in its
way characteristic : moreover, here we are on the
edge of the moor rather than in its central strong-
hold. Nevertheless, let us go forth again to the
wild, fenceless gorse-country, and breathe a more
* It is interesting to note that Keats writes his preface from
Teignmouth.
181
OF <p%pse
mountainous air, and scan a wider horizon, and
count the multitudinous heights and valleys that
lie beneath us ; and, southward, where the hills
roll more gently towards the coast, let our eyes
rest upon the level line of the distant sea. There
is a magical charm in this south country, not
least in these waste places. The air, though
exhilarating, is balmy ; the sky, though breezy, is
blue. There is a soft glamour and enchantment.
It is a land of dreams. Are we for once rid of
all painful realities, all torturing problems ? May
we construct a world of our own imaginings, an
idyllic world into which neither sin nor sorrow
can enter ?
What is that ugly blot upon the moor, that
dreary range of unbeautiful buildings ? It is a
prison. The world is not idyllic, and it is better
to face its ugly facts than to pretend a comfort-
able blindness. It is well for the soft effeminacy
of a self-indulgent age that it cannot always
escape the sight of suffering. The swallows fly,
the sun shines, the wild flowers unfold their gay
petals. The young rabbits are so tame that the
village children can catch them. This heathery
moorland suggests the wildest, sweetest freedom.
Yet even here there is a prison. Even here we
are reminded " what man has made of man."
182
L'ENVOI TO THE THREE
FOLLOWING SONNETS
Written in the week following King Edward's death, at
the moment of the terrible mining accident which called
forth Queen Alexandra? s help and sympathy in the midst
of her oivn grief.
OH, dear Queen-Mother, now we kiss your hands
For writing words that let us share your pain !
Would we might comfort you ! But not in
vain
Shall be your trust : the Empire understands
This day her duty, and through all her lands
True to that great commission shall remain,
Seeing in your son your " Dearest " once again
And deeply loyal to his least commands.
We bless you too for help to those poor wives
From whom the pitiless earth has swallowed up
The men they loved. Oh, may the God above,
Who visiteth " souls in prison," to such lives,
From the inscrutable depths that filled their cup
And yours, dear Mother, give Himself, who is
Love !
183
TO THE PEACEMAKER'S MEMORY
THREE SONNETS
I LIVE secluded and since life began
Had never once set eyes upon the King ;
Yet from my soul his praise I learned to sing
As one who built love's faithful artisan
A Palace of Pity : in his mortal span
Lay duties that might break an angel's wing
And crush a king thus human. Wondering,
I saw how he achieved them he, a man !
He shared his people's pleasures and withstood
The caste-conventions that might hold apart
A King and People. The great Architect
Blessed this Grand Mason of the Brotherhood
Who worked with generous toil of hand and
heart
In that vast temple love and peace erect.
VITAL and simple, scorning empty pride,
Duty to him was ever dominant.
He never scamped his work ; no touch of cant
Obscured this kingly heart that, far and wide,
Loved, pitied, wounded wastrels that abide
In a dark hell : on those poor lives that pant
For help and healing, he bestowed no rant,
But deep compassion with true deed allied.
God bless him, God who blesseth quick and dead,
Who hath the peacemakers His children called !
This man refused from work for us to cease
184
ro rne *P&>fceM*fKe3S
While breath was in his body. Disenthralled
Of that laborious crown which tires the head,
The faithful servant hath at last release.
WHO, who can boast when Death is standing by
To level king and commoner and call
An emperor as roughly as a thrall ?
Would God, when we poor labourers come to die
And our disrobements in their coffins lie,
Such well-earned peace as his might crown us all !
When on our little stage the curtains fall.
Will our small tasks show nothing left awry ?
He loved the suffering, and, untiring, sought
The nations of the earth with peace to crown.
No king could hold regalia more sublime
Than a world's love and peace by friendship
wrought
This jewelled circle is undying renown,
Not death, but coronation for all time.
AN EARLY VICTORIAN NOVEL
NEXT in discernment to the criticism of sympathy,
which is the most divining of all, is that unex-
pected and incisive appreciation which is the
criticism of antithesis, when those who stand at
the opposite pole of intellectual aspiration or
spiritual belief, by formulating some crying need,
or emphasising some contrary aspect of the truth,
unconsciously urge the fulfilment of the one or add
importance to the complement of the other.
And it would be difficult to find anywhere
phrases, or attitudes of mind, suggestive of a more
just discrimination of the precise and individual
value of such a novel as " John Halifax " than are
those to be found in Mr. Frederic Harrison's
Essay on Victorian Literature,* an essay in which
neither the book nor its author is even so much as
named. " Every one is afraid," says Mr. Harrison,
"to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or
to raise a sneer.''
It is because Miss Mulock feared none of these
things, but cared only to speak her message with
clearness and obedience, while earning an honest
day's wage by an honest day's work, that the book
not only went straight to its mark just where its
simple poetry was most profoundly wanted, but
has also retained an ever-widening popularity
wheresoever " the English tongue " is spoken ;
* " Studies in Early Victorian Literature " (Edward Arnold).
186
and has become, to many a draughtsman, trades-
man, and hard-handed toiler, on both sides of the
Atlantic, a dear companion and a household name.
Mr. Harrison also points out how many of our
great prose-writers of the century have occasion-
ally fallen into " bombast " or "fustian," turgidity
or elaborate self-consciousness ; and, if not too
" precious," have now and then been in danger of
descending to " limelights and coloured lenses " ;
or, avoiding the jerkiness of the great novelist
whom he wittily names as "a prose Browning/'
and following Matthew Arnold when he bade them
" flee Carlylese as the very devil," have, in the good
company of " Culture itself," fallen into " the trap
in the very act of warning others/* On the other
hand, he praises the " pure, natural, and most
articulate prose," of a conventional yet popular
writer who was a friend of his own, and there-
by unwittingly lays his finger on one secondary
excellence of the novel before us.
" Romance," he says, "finding little of romance
in the real world, has taken two different lines in
the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The
virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of
everyday life in ordinary situations. The dis-
reputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced,
unreal, unlovely, and hysterical sensationalism."
Both these dangers has "John Halifax" escaped
in the region of that " social romance " which the
same writer describes as " the true poetic function
of women." The book has sometimes been claimed
as the precursor and antetype of the ordinary
middle-class novel, of which it was supposed to set
OF
the fashion. But it was hardly a novel at all in
the ordinary sense of the word. It was a romance,
at once homely and " poetic " ; and that fact may
suggest some of its most obvious deficiencies and
many of its most striking merits.
" It is felt on all sides," says Maeterlinck, " that
the conditions of workaday life are changing, and
the youngest of us already differ entirely in speech
and action from the men of the preceding gene-
ration. A mass of useless conventions, habits,
pretences, and intermediaries, are being swept into
the gulf" ; and it may be fairly added that among
the unseen forces making in that direction has
been the far-reaching influence of this modest and
humane story of John Halifax the tanner, a study
from the life, in which Christianity stands sponsor
for the finest breeding, and claims as its own for
ever the dignity and simplicity of work.
The author " believed," writes a sympathetic
critic, " in the nobility of man as man, and looked
upon condition, circumstance, or birth, as an acci-
dent which ought not to determine his ultimate
position. Her ideal man, John Halifax, carried
about with him an old Greek Testament, in which,
after the name of an ancestor, was the inscription
' Gentleman.' Such a charter she held to be the
inalienable possession of every human being."
Another friend of Miss Mulock, who is at once
a man of letters and a man of affairs, said lately in
speaking of her : " I once asked an American why
his people thought so much of President Grant,
since his democratic ideals, excellent though they
might be, were, after all, shared by thousands of
188
his fellow-countrymen. *That may all be true,'
was the reply. ' But he was the first to figure it
out ! ' Well," he continued, " of the author of
6 John Halifax ' it may be said, ' She was the first
to figure out that ideal of manhood and of chivalry
before which the most inveterate class-prejudice
hid its silly face and was ashamed.' '
The social order is constantly falling out of tune :
she struck a true note which others were quick
to perceive and take up. She struck the note ; but
it may be added that it was characteristic of her
admirable reticence that, having once struck it,
she never forced or overlaboured it. Nor is she
responsible for every flat street-melody which gives
a false rendering of the new harmony.
If I may rephrase and intermingle thoughts
finely put by both the writers already quoted,
at the same time venturing to add a sequence or
two of resulting choice and amplification ; the
tree of life is of a unity so complex and incessant
that its most effulgent blossoming, though attri-
buted perhaps only to the few, is in reality put
forth by its soul as what Maeterlinck has called
the " Flower of the multitude " ; so that, even in
this more actual " fraternity," which bears the
deepening hue of our own century, it may be
difficult to disentwine cause and effect, or to say
from which particular bough of Igdrasil the pollen
was first wafted that touched the heart and petals
of every corolla with a new and more heavenly
colour. So little is this a question of mere
intellect, or eloquence, or solitary power, that we
find the same fragrant promise of advancing per-
189
OF
fectibility in such divergent names and utterances
as those of Wordsworth and Walt Whitman,
Carlyle and Pater, Ruskin and George Meredith ;
in the arch-destroyer of" Bumbledom who wrote
" Oliver Twist," and the writer of " The New-
comes " and of " The Book of Snobs " ; in Swin-
burne's "Songs before Sunrise" and Christina
Rossetti's " Royal Princess," Thomas Hardy's
" Gabriel Oak," George Gissing's " Thyrza " and
Miss Thackeray's " Reine " ; in the poets of
"The Earthly Paradise" and "The Burden of
Nineveh," and in that most Christian poet who
gave us the divine Pompilia, the child of the
gutter. We find it in Keble, who touched with
immortal grace " the trivial round, the common
task,'' and in Rudyard Kipling, who has written
of all tasks, national and individual, a consecration
earnest, versatile, and actual. It is as truly pre-
sent in the " Ecce Homo" of Professor Seeley
as in Robert Louis Stevenson's "Portraits and
Memories." And it is strikingly incarnate in the
early novels of Mrs. Gaskeil, in the songs and
social romances of " Parson Lot," in the demo-
cratic hexameters and the satirical " New Deca-
logue" of that Thyrsis who was commemorated
by the scourger of the Philistine ; and for there
is no question of great or little in George Eliot's
"Adam Bede," in Tennyson's "Enoch Arden,"
and in Miss Mulock's "John Halifax." Nor
must it be forgotten that, as a matter of fact,
"John Halifax" preceded that almost perfect
novel, George Eliot's masterpiece. Before either
" Adam Bede" or "Enoch Arden" had enriched
190
an unimaginative Church with studies of those
very callings of carpenter and fisherman which
that Church had professed to revere in her
Founder and chief Apostle, while she trampled
and patronised them among her own u common
people," Miss Mulock, in this beautiful and un-
affected story of one who, working with his hands,
was also the servant of a trade, had already
redeemed, from the accretions of the prim and
artificial eighteenth century,
"The grand old name of Gentleman."
There are novels, such as Mrs. Gaskell's " Cran-
ford " and " Wives and Daughters," or Thackeray's
" Philip," which, in a quite peculiar degree, win
the heart of the reader to the man or woman who
wrote them. Such a book is "John Halifax."
It cannot boast the inimitable pathos and humour
of " Cranford," nor the mastery of the hand that
wrote " Philip " ; but it has all the qualities of its
defects, and perhaps full justice has never yet been
done to that mingling of austerity and passion,
that single-minded economy of language, which of
themselves go far to justify its extraordinary and
lasting popularity. It is a fine and womanly bit
of work in the best sense of the words.
It may, indeed, be said to miss no essentially
feminine grace except the crowning grace of
humour, that surpassing and Shakespearian gift
of creative humour which has for ever given to
George Eliot her pre-eminent place. Its very
limitations are an intrinsic part of its success.
Only in work of the very highest quality, such
191
OF
work as the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of
Sir Walter Scott, can the bizarre incongruities and
ironies of life be amply included without disturb-
ing that sense of harmony and repose so necessary
to the highest art. From "John Halifax" it
may almost be said that humour, in the widest
sense of the word, is absent. The atmosphere
being more or less that of romance, the elements
are few and easily fused ; and so it comes to pass
that artistic unity is instinctively and lightly
attained, without that constant triumph over
obstacles which is the part of commanding
genius. Its charm is that of a noble and single-
minded sincerity, and of that untutored poetry
which, never seeking to pass its boundaries or to
strain after effect, has its own distinction of fine
and simple phrasing, and achieves what more
complicated and ambitious efforts could not have
touched. It is a pastel sketch in which the colours
are translucent and delicate, rather than an elabo-
rate oil-painting on a crowded canvas.
Yet it is significant that Miss Mulock, who as
a rule wrote with extreme ease and rapidity what
met the need of the moment, and, having fulfilled
its purpose, may be forgotten, spent much more
than her usual pains over this the most enduring
of her novels, and was content to write and re-
write again and again, rather than risk a blurred
or imperfect impression of the truth which she
desired to make concrete. Possibly this may
have been one reason, among others, why "John
Halifax " was always her own favourite among
her books. Dr. Garnett has spoken of it as " a
192
very noble presentation of the highest ideal of
English middle-class life," and that ideal has since
entered so closely into the very warp and woof
of customary thought and action that its truths
sometimes seem to us to have become truisms.
It has doubtless done its work the more inwardly
and irrevocably, because it was singularly free
from the one-sided cant that sometimes flaunts
itself under a democratic name. Miss Mulock
evidently agreed with Clough that many men and
women of lowly birth, and yet more lowly calling,
are sometimes the very " poets of courtesy," yet
she made Phineas Fletcher admit, with her evident
approval, what a writer merely playing to the
gallery would have been careful to ignore, though
it is a fact in which lies much of the deepest
pathos of poverty's daily restrictions. " My
father," said Phineas, " tanner as he was, and
pertinaciously jealous of the dignity of trade, yet
held strongly the common-sense doctrine of the
advantages of good descent ; at least, in degree.
For since it is a law of nature, admitting only
rare exceptions, that the qualities of the ancestors
should be transmitted to the race, the fact seems
patent enough, that even allowing equal advan-
tages, a gentleman's son has more chances of
growing up a gentleman than the son of a
working man."
Phineas was right when he said " common-
sense " ; a certain sweet reasonableness and sound
common sense were especially characteristic of the
author of this book. But to say that, is not by
any means to account entirely for its popularity
N 193
OF
and staying power. For may not as much be
said of many kindly souls who have written only
platitudes, and have quickly wearied their audi-
ence ? What then was the real reason why its
success was so rapid and so lasting ? If it be said
that the true explanation is twofold, and lies as
much in the terse poetic directness of expression
as in the power of the elemental truth expressed,
it may well be answered that such a twofold
answer is essentially one, since it is a common-
place, as true as it is trite, that language, if it be
not self-condemning in affectation, is always shaped
by that which lies beneath it ; and indeed the
exception is no exception, but only the most
glaring example of all, for who would not suspect a
pose under the garb of an attitudinising verbiage ?
There is in "John Halifax" no such histrionic
posing, but, on the contrary, a singular unity of
form and feeling. The appreciation of motive
and of style, therefore, in this instance necessarily
intermingle, though they must, in this as in every
careful analysis, be momentarily disentangled.
Without going so far as one recent critic, who
has even ventured to hint that the book might be
placed in the same category with the " Imitation "
of Thomas a Kempis and "The Pilgrim's Pro-
gress " of John Bunyan, it may at least be near
the truth to maintain that it endures by reason
of something more vital than mere choice and
mastery of words.
It accords with the fashion of our age to deny
that there is any reality above or beyond literature ;
but literature is the fruit of that covenanted effort,
194
which, though a part of the world's testament,
is not of itself the immortal heritage testified.
Sincerity and inevitableness give distinction to any
writing destined to live upon that record ; and
that this charming idyll of the tanner's apprentice
does bear the essential sign-manual can hardly be
doubted, except by a criticism so shallow and
supercilious as to overreach its own justification.
Its outward presentment has a certain classic
grace of unadorned plainness, not deficient either
in force or in sweetness, but the secret of its
immediate welcome and lasting charm lies in the
soul of the book, and is of its very substance.
It answers to those deepest needs of the human
heart which are the same everywhere and always.
It is a response to the question asked anew with
fuller and deeper meaning in each succeeding
generation : " How can I so obey the Master
as to live the eternal life of Love and Beauty,
amid all the thwarting elements of time and space
and mortality, and find in the divine brotherhood
of all men a daily fact which shall transfigure the
lowliest labour to the highest poetry, and shine
through the darkest grief with illuminating joy ? "
Here we touch the very heart of the world's
debt to the author of "John Halifax," and,
through her, to one in whose teaching she, like
Kingsley, delighted, one who, through his deep
influence on a chosen few, is influencing an ever-
widening multitude, and whose faith was as child-
like and practical as it was mystic and scholarly
that most catholic and chivalrous of prophets,
Frederick Denison Maurice, among whose disciples
195
OF
in Vere Street and Lincoln's Inn Miss Mulock
was frequently to be found.
But the story of John Halifax is very far indeed
from being merely didactic, It is as remarkable
for its simple passion as for the sanity and delicate
courage of its high and pure ideal.
From this verdict many will dissent. Much of
the criticism of to-day is so eager to be " modern "
that it makes the word " passion " a word of
high tradition and noble usage a mere synonym
for corruption and lawlessness ; but such a view
may almost be said to be Puritanism turned inside
out, and as narrow as the bigotry which mistakes
coldness for innocence and confounds negation
with divinity.
That emotion, the most profound and vital and
enduring, is also the simplest and the most reticent,
and that the silent Cordelia thrills to an intense
and heartrending tragedy, of which slighter and
more voluble natures are incapable, may or may
not be true ; but classic art has always leaned in
the direction of that belief, and to the faith that
such feeling is at once strong enough for renun-
ciation and vivid enough to strike the chords of
passion and of deathless hope.
There is a notable passage in " Modern Painters'*
in which Ruskin expounds that quality of chastened
art which touches the highest possibility of our
nature by a note of temperate self-restraint, im-
plying an infinite reserve of power and a rigor-
ous choice of expression. He reminds us that it
is perhaps akin to that hint of a divine refraining
from any monotony of splendour or reckless and
196
unvaried gorgeousness, whereby the lily-of-the-
valley may exceed in exquisite loveliness many
flowers more exuberant in their blossoming and
more magnificent in their tints.
And that the absence of complexity and of much
very vivid dramatic colour was in " John Halifax "
more or less deliberate, becomes strikingly evident
to any one who has any acquaintance with the
somewhat florid style of Miss Mulock's previous
novel, "The Ogilvies," published by Messrs.
Smith and Elder in 1849, and among the most
successful of her previous stories. The latter,
though full of warmth and vigour, is as rhetorical
as it is earnest, and even somewhat girlish in the
unchecked ardour of its rhapsodies and the appeals
to Heaven and to the reader in its unreserved
soliloquising. Interesting it undoubtedly is, and
to readers of "John Halifax" especially interest-
ing ; for it shows clearly that already the central
idea of the later novel was unconsciously shaping
itself in the mind of the writer, as, for instance,
when she speaks of Mr. Frederick Pennythorne as
" too ordinary and vulgar-minded for a gentleman,
and far oh, far too mean in heart and soul for
the noble title of a man." But the advance made
in the book by which she is mainly remembered,
and with which we are chiefly concerned, is little
short of amazing ; and it is an advance almost
entirely in the direction of self-restraint and
brevity.
It is just another instance of what Pater long
ago insisted upon, the fact that beauty of style is
simply the outcome of beauty in the thought
197
OF
to be expressed, such as includes high-minded
veracity, and a literary conscience pledged to regard
no scruple as too minute for consideration and no
faintest shade of difference as unimportant, in the
service of a many-sided truth. Tawdry language
or reckless elaboration would have been peculiarly
out of place in a literary venture which aimed at
the expression of a truth at once primitive and
fundamental. In claiming integrity for commerce,
and dignity for manual labour, it was a wise in-
stinct that opposed itself to all the facile wordiness
of the typical demagogue.
So quietly and successfully has the book done its
work in the forty-two years which have elapsed
since publication, that we at this day fail to realise
the strength of illogical and social prejudice which
in the preceding century so successfully ostracised
every form of trade. Jane Austen, who preceded
Miss Mulock by more than one generation, has
given us a vivid and convincing picture of the
society in which she moved. Her creations are
real men and women, and they are always either
amusing or interesting, but, whether they be as
silly and vulgar as Mrs. Bennet, or as sensible and
well-bred as the clear-headed and warm-hearted
Elizabeth, they all of them play their cards in polite
drawing-rooms to which the Apostle Peter himself
would never have been admitted as an equal guest
if he had happened to carry a few nets over his arm,
and where the angel who took the place of Theocrite
might for hours have knocked vainly for admission
if he had chanced to be seen mending shoes or
standing behind the counter.
198
VICTOR A3^ ^OFSL
Perhaps, to speak the whole truth, our appre-
ciation of Jane Austen's admirable workmanship
and delightful personality is so devout, and we
love her Anne Elliot, her Elizabeth Bennet, and
her Emma par excellence^ with so tender a regard,
she is herself at once so human and so refined, so
sensible and so high-minded, that we shrink with
an unconfessed cowardice from noting the limi-
tations of her horizon. In dramatic skill and
verisimilitude Miss Mulock cannot for a moment
compete with her ; but, though Jane Austen was
so good and sweet a woman, in spiritual imagina-
tation she stands easily surpassed ; and it may even
be doubted whether the excessive adulation that is
sometimes bestowed upon her may not be partly
the effect of our decadent fashion of regarding a
too definite idealism as priggish and obsolete.
The patronising air with which "John Halifax"
is handed over to Sunday schools does probably,
unconsciously, owe something of its supercilious-
ness to the influence of a literary clique, by whom
an anarchical pessimism is regarded as the hall-
mark of culture, and a too definite Christianity is
treated as the last resort of fools.
When this time of transition has passed, it is
possible that a more impartial justice will be done
to the precision and beauty of language which
mark the opening chapters of this fascinating
story. Here and there the conversations are
touched perhaps with a certain quaint bookishness
of which Ibsen has excellently rid the plays and
novels of our own time, but that was an occasional
characteristic which the writer shared with almost
199
s OF
all her contemporaries, and even Ethel Newcome
now and then " talked like a book " ; nor can it
be contended even to-day that we all scatter bril-
liant aphorisms in our ordinary talk quite so
frequently as the men and women in George
Meredith's romances. But this slightly self-
conscious correctness of conversation, though at
the very opposite extreme from the epigrams of
" The Egoist " or of " Diana," is not a very serious
fault, if it be indeed the worst that can be urged.
Though no one can accord to the second half of
the story the same degree of admiration that is
given to the first, it must be remembered that the
achievement at which it aimed was one of peculiar
difficulty. To express the beauty of Christianity
through all the complexities of social and of
family life, and, with all the details of an ordered
domesticity, to draw the ideal husband and father
and citizen without ever missing the note of
reality, on the one hand, or the canons of an
exacting art upon the other, was a task that might
well tax such commanding genius as Mrs. Craik's
best friends have never claimed for her. The
second part of " John Halifax " has not the ex-
quisite charm which in " Marius the Epicurean, "
for instance, irradiates every detail of life with a
beauty which is of itself a note of disciplined
idealism, and should be an especial note of Chris-
tianity, but it may well be borne in mind that "John
Halifax " has entered deeply into the life and work
of innumerable men and women who would have
turned with impatience from a single page of
Walter Pater. How wide and incalculable its
200
influence has been is suggested by the fact that
Americans who in visiting England make their first
pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, often make their
second to the home of John Halifax at Tewkesbury.
Mrs. Craik's own birthplace of Stoke-upon-
Trent was a much less delightful town. It is in
the heart of the "Potteries"--" the Black Country "
as it has sometimes been called, though it may
have been a little less black perhaps in those early
days of the century than in these. This so-called
" Black Country," however, which kindles grim
imaginings by its great furnaces, where the kilns
spit flames upon the darkness, has here and there
many fine bits of country, where wildflowers
grow lavishly in the intervening oases amid the
monotonous desolation.
Stoke is not very far from the beautiful grounds
of Trentham Hall, where such a practical and
necessary protest has been made against the
murderous and crippling lead-poisoning of the
neighbourhood ; the Duchess of Sutherland, with
a good sense worthy of John Halifax himself,
having led the movement in favour of earthenware
manufactured without the poisonous glaze which
has hitherto been eating into the brain-power and
nerve-power of the poor blinded pottery folk.
When " John Halifax " was written, this injury to
health and life had not yet been laid bare by the
advance of medical knowledge, nor had purchasers
to say nothingof employers of labour awakened
to a sense of their responsibility in such matters.
It was eleven years after the battle of Waterloo,
and six years before the passing of the Reform
201
OF
Bill, before Chartism had yet been heard of, when
hardly a decade had passed since Miss Austen's
death, and when Queen Victoria and George Eliot
were both little girls of seven years old, Charlotte
Bronte a child of ten, and Thackeray a boy of
fifteen, that, in the little town of Stoke-upon-
Trent, in the home of an obscure and somewhat
eccentric minister named Thomas Mulock, the
heart of a burdened and sorrowful wife was cheered
by the coming of a daughter, a little brown-haired,
grey-eyed daughter, who was named Dinah.
Thomas Mulock was a man of considerable gifts
and literary attainments, and he wrote and preached
with effect, but he had little idea of providing for
those of his own house. His daughter grew up
to be her mother's dauntless and tender protector,
at once nurse and breadwinner, and finally carried
that mother off, with her two boys, to make a new
home for her in London, where she faced honest
poverty with the pride and silence of the true
" gentylnesse '' and the high-spirited courage which
perhaps came to Dinah Mulock as a part of the
maternal heritage. It will be noted that the
writer who claimed for the tanner's apprentice a
refinement above all charlatanry, and pictured him
as the nobler for his honest trade, and as finding
his highest opportunities in the calling which was
his hardest daily sacrifice, could make her protest
with the better grace from the fact that she her-
self had never come under the silly coldness, or
vulgar patronage, with which it was in those days
too much the fashion to alienate mercantile
pursuits.
202
Mrs. Craik, then Dinah Mulock, seems to
belong so entirely to our own time that we are
a little apt to forget, perhaps, how different was
the England of her childhood from the England
of to-day.
She was already four years old before any rail-
way had yet cut into the heart of the leafy green
country or defiled that valley of the silver Trent
in which lay her home, and the canals which
intersected Stoke must have been the scene of
much peaceful coming and going of heavily laden
barges. She was only two or three years old when,
in two succeeding years, the Test and Corporation
Acts and Roman Catholic disabilities were repealed.
These were the days of Daniel O'Connell's agita-
tion for the repeal of the Union; and the passing
of the Reform Bill, the Abolition of Slavery, and
the new Poor Law, all came soon afterwards in
rapid succession, before Dinah was nine years
old, and probably were of more influence on her
environment than the accession of William IV.,
in 1830, when she was still a very little child, or
even the opening of the first railway in the same
year. She was thirteen when the penny post was
introduced, and still a girl of twenty when in the
year of the Irish Famine the Corn Laws were
abolished. Eleven years later came the horror of
the Indian Mutiny, close upon the heels of the
Crimean War ; and she lived through the ferment
of the second and third Reform Bills, the passing
of the Education Act, the Abolition of the
University Tests, and the proposal for Home
Rule made by Mr. Gladstone, in a word, it may
203
OF
be said that, with the one important exception of
the French Revolution, her life was touched by
almost all that was most eventful in that eventful
century, that Victorian Age which has been
summed up as "the age of sociology." Her own
life was not uneventful, and not wanting in the
practical poetry which is better than mere romance;
but it can only be given in barest outline, for she
held that the world at large had no right to cross
the threshold of a woman's home for any other
reason than that of personal friendship, and that
gratitude for her writing, if she happen to be a
writer, is best shown by respecting the modesty
of her reserve. To quote words lately spoken
by one who knew her intimately : " There never
was a more tender or domestic nature, or one that
would shrink more from anything like ' making a
life of her.' ' And perhaps at this point it may
be permissible to add the dictum of her friend
Dr. Garnett, who wrote in the " Dictionary of
National Biography" : " She was not a genius, and
she does not express the ideals and aspirations of
women of exceptional genius : but the tender and
philanthropic, and at the same time energetic and
practical, womanhood of ordinary life has never
had a more sufficient representative."
To those who know the difficulty of such a
career, it is amazing to think of a simple, untried
girl as coming up from the country to London
with three others dependent on her pen (her mother
and two young brothers), and facing the world
for them without any assured income, though one
of the three was an invalid and needing special care.
204
But from the first she wrote easily and rapidly,
and working not for fame but in the determination
to bear her own burden and the burden of those
she cared for, she won the reputation for which
there had been no petty struggle or selfish striving ;
and from a single-minded desire to deliver her own
earnest and unaffected message, she achieved a much
wider and more lasting recognition than many who
have aimed at distinction and toiled for immortality.
Mrs. Oliphant, who was her friend and con-
temporary, tells how Miss Mulock was only
twenty-three at the time of her first important
publication, and how it was long before that age
that her independent career had begun, and that,
having rescued the frail mother from the father
" of brilliant attainments," she had, as by a miracle,
in the great desert of London, managed to keep
the little household going, through magazine work
of various kinds, from the fashion-books upwards.
Another lifelong friend has whispered to the
writer of this article that the bread she was able
to win for them all at first was sometimes, very
literally, only bread. Perhaps that was one reason
why later in life, when after her marriage she had
her own spacious home and sufficent wealth, in all
her delicate generosities and endless piottings for
the pleasure of those less rich than herself, she
always knew just where the poverty pinched, and
used her carriage for the very people who needed
it most ; to the last using an omnibus for herself,
whenever that was possible, that she might the
oftener have the luxury of choosing for more
ailing people more luxurious chariots.
205
OF
Through all her life her generous kindness knew
no bounds, and often was the more touching from
the fact that it was not the careless giving of the
spendthrift but the hard-won privilege of economy,
foresight, self-denial. Like Mrs. Ewing's Madam
Liberality, she hoarded the plums in her cake for
other people, and managed her affairs with order
and precision that she might never be hampered
by sordid anxiety or petty selfishness.
Through a wise carefulness, she attained more
and more to what has been called <c the higher
carelessness," and, in her later years in the midst
of a methodically managed household which owed
its smoothness and comfort to her forethought,
never suffered herself to be fretted by trivial
worries or unforeseen details.
She was an excellent woman of business, and it
is interesting to learn, from the friends of her youth,
that these gifts of exactness and order and method
were developed gradually as life went on, and that
the very people who testified to them would, in
her girlhood, have described her as somewhat
" happy-go-lucky."
Her memories of her earliest home made any
form of debt seem to her the one impossible in-
dignity, and in her resolute unflinching avoidance
of it, through the first years of struggle for those
she loved, she attained the new powers and faculties
which eased the strain of existence, and the ad-
mirable poise and harmony of her life lent itself
more and more to all that surrounds a woman
with beauty and with peace.
But to go back for a moment to the days when
206
Mrs. Oliphant describes her as a " young heroic
creature writing her pretty juvenile nonsense of
love and lovers, in swift, unformed style, as fast
as the pen could fly, to get bread for the boys
and a little soup and wine for the invalid over
whose deathbed she watched with impassioned love
and care a tragic, tender picture, to be associated
by ever so distant a link with inane magazines of
the fashions and short-lived periodicals unknown
to fame." *
She lived then in Mornington Crescent, in the
north of London, towards Camden Town, until,
after her success as an author was assured, she
moved to Wildwood, a cottage at North End, on
the Golder's Hill side of Hampstead.
She was surrounded by friends, and one who
had known her from the time when she was herself
a girl of fifteen, Miss Mulock being a year or two
older, has pretended a little playful resentment at
what, to her thinking, was not quite accurate in
some of Mrs. Oliphant's allusions to the " bevy of
attendant maidens " who seemed to make a kind of
guard of honour about her. ' c Many friends indeed
she had," says this old friend, " but the friendship
was in many cases an equal one, ' the true reci-
procity,' implying no patronising airs on the one
hand, no excessive dependence on the other."
And then she went on to say that, at the time
when "John Halifax" was being written, she and
another of these old comrades, no longer then
in their first girlhood, were at that time sharing
a home with Miss Mulock, and teased and criticised
* Macmillan's Magazine, December 1887.
207
OF
her and "her dear John" most unmercifully as
the " proofs" of the book came in, themselves
helping with the corrections. No one knew then,
of course, whether it would succeed or not.
But what does seem to have been true in Mrs.
Oliphant's picture, and what, after all, dwells most
happily in the reader's mind, is that it was of the
" talents and accomplishments " " of other am-
bitious and admiring girls " that " Miss Mulock
had always tales to tell, with an enthusiasm not
excited by any success of her own." She was
always a centre of sympathy, of help, and of
counsel. And while her own talk was so full of
the charms and interests of others, Dr. Garnett
tells how charming she was herself, and how
her " simple cordiality, staunch friendliness, and
thorough goodness of heart perfected the fas-
cination." The sweetness of her singing was a
great pleasure to her friends, and her voice lasted
well. She was of the musical temperament, and
delighted in the best music, but the circumstances
of her life had prevented her from gaining the
accomplishment of finished playing. More than
one of her friends has noted that she had that
" taking " gift in a woman, a beautiful hand.
Very capable hands they were too, though it was
later in life that she became, like George Eliot and
many other able women, an exquisite needle-
woman ; in the early days of struggle there was
no time for that. Her handwriting was small and
delicate and neat. Like many others who have
written much, she never sat at a table to write.
She just held a little block in her hand, as near to
208
vfy^ SA^LT
her eyes as she could, and scribbled away in any
convenient corner. She was not among those who
make a fuss about their " work." In one sense it
came to her very easily, and always had done; but
she was untiringly diligent, as her very numerous
volumes of prose and verse will at once suggest.
There seems to have been in her character a certain
self-reliance and sureness of touch, a modest self-
dependence, or even self-confidence, which is cer-
tainly at the very opposite pole from egotism or
vanity. If she played or sang or entertained, she
merely did her best, and gave herself no petty
anxiety as to the effect produced. This may
have been one reason perhaps why, without being
a brilliant talker, when she did speak, what she
said was always neatly turned and to the point.
Possibly this attitude of mind was made the easier
from the fact that she had not that painfully quick
sense of the ridiculous which often makes a more
complicated nature self-critical and self-torturing.
This freedom from self-regarding regrets, together
with her constant consideration for others, and
thoughtful common sense, must have made her a
singularly restful companion.
She first came to London about 1846, and she
had been fortunate in the fact that one of her
friends, Charles Edward Mudie, came up at about
the same time, and another, Alexander Macmillan,
rather later. One created " Mudie's Library,"
and the other became the head of the great firm
which still bears his name, and in which Mr. Craik
was for many years a partner. Both, as Dr. Garnett
points out, were able to help her.
o 209
OF
It was, however, through another friend, no
other than Mrs. Oliphant herself, that, at a little
dinner-party given for that purpose, she was
introduced to Mr. Henry Blackett as a possible
publisher for "John Halifax." That novel was
published on generous terms by Messrs. Hurst
and Blackett in 1857, and proved an instantaneous
success. It was warmly welcomed throughout
England, and in America (as has been pointed
out in an appreciative introductory note to one
of the many editions) its "rare qualities and their
actual significance were more clearly understood
and appreciated than they have ever yet been in
England/'
In this " appreciation " we have a most interest-
ing and succinct account of how the book came
to be written. The success of the three previous
novels " The Ogilvies," " Olive," and "The
Head of the Family " had opened to the author
all doors " in all grades of English life," and,
though herself an earnest Churchwoman, it seemed
to her at that day that among the Quakers she
could best find that type of simple and ideal
Christianity lived " in the spirit of Paul the Tent-
maker," which was what she now wished to por-
tray. She had already " found her models and
sketched her characters, 5 ' " she always said that
Ursula was the only copy from nature she ever
made" when, while visiting some of her friends
in the neighbourhood of Cheltenham and Stroud,
she happened to drive over to Tewkesbury, and
of that eventful afternoon, as described by
Mrs. Oliphant from the notebook of one of the
2IO
friends in question, we are permitted by the cour-
tesy of Messrs. Macmillan to give the following
account :
"In the summer of 1852," said this friend,
" she one day drove over with me to see the quaint
old town of Tewkesbury. Directly she saw the
grand old Abbey and the mediaeval houses of the
High Street, she decided that this should form
the background of her story, and like a true artist
fell to work making mental sketches on the spot.
A sudden shower drove us into one of the old
covered alleys opposite the house, I believe, of
the then town clerk of Tewkesbury, and as we
stood there, a bright-looking but ragged boy
also took refuge at the mouth of the alley, and
from the town clerk's window a little girl gazed
with looks of sympathy at the ragged boy oppo-
site. Presently the door opened, and the girl
appeared on the steps, and beckoned to the boy
to take a piece of bread, exactly as the scene
is described in the opening chapters of c john
Halifax.' We had lunch at the Bell Inn, and
explored the bowling-green, which also is minutely
and accurately described, and the landlord's state-
ment that the house had once been used by a
tanner, and the smell of tan which filled the streets
from a tan-yard not far off, decided the trade
which her hero was to follow.
"She made one or two subsequent visits to
further identify her background, and the name of
her hero was decided by the discovery of an old
gravestone in the Abbey churchyard, on which
was inscribed 'John Halifax.' She had already
211
OF
decided that the hero's Christian name must be
John, but the surname had been hitherto doubtful."
It may be added that Longfield is drawn from
Detmore House, near Cheltenham ; and we are
assured that Rose Cottage and Enderley Flat were
" copied exactly from Amberley Common, near
Stroud."
In all talk with those who were intimate with
Mrs. Craik, such talks as have been a necessary
preparation for this slight introduction to " John
Halifax," always the most touching and beautiful
facts were those which might not be written of her,
though they have necessarily coloured the whole
tone of the article. One such fact especially has
impressed itself indelibly on the memory, an act
of tender and generous maternal thoughtfulness
for a young mother and child, involving detailed
effort on the part of Mrs. Craik, and of him who
was her other self in such matters, and continued
daily for many months. This was after her
marriage with Mr. Craik in 1865, when she was
living in her beautiful home at Shortlands and
had adopted a little daughter, so that her heart
was brimming over with ever-deepening affection
towards all mothers and all children.
It is a pity that because of her extreme reserve
in such matters, so many instances of her friendly
helpfulness can be only thus distantly alluded to,
and must be held as secret as though they were
crimes instead of the most gracious of deeds.
But an old friend, now a silver-haired grand-
father, though the youngest and most energetic
of men, has added a pretty touch to this paper
212
by telling, with due permission to use it, a little
incident of a much more trivial kind, which he has
long remembered as characteristic of Mrs. Craik's
kindliness, a kindliness always free from self-con-
sciousness, and almost maternal in its quick and
delicate consideration for others. She was no
longer a girl at the time when he knew her, but
full of charm not beautiful, yet of a haunting
delightfulness no hard angles in the softly sweep-
ing curves of the tall, slim, graciously rounded
figure, the face lighting up sweetly with every
passing thought or emotion that flashed its wild-
rose colour into the blonde fairness, or glowed in
the clear-shining, eagerly responsive eyes,
" Eyes too expressive to be blue,
Too lovely to be gray,"
and with a certain firmness in the moulding of the
warm red lips, and in the calm brow beneath the
soft brown hair just touched with silver.
He, the friend who tells the story, was much
younger than she was, and perhaps seemed to her
hardly more than a boy in those days, though he
admired her greatly. He used to meet her in the
house of a well-known novelist and poet, her friend
and his. She knew all about his wooing and the
betrothal that followed, though neither of them
could know then to what ever-deepening joy it
led through all his life. It was in the first flush
of that happiness that by chance he found himself
in the same railway carriage with her on the North
London Railway between Camden Road and
Richmond, each bound to the same wedding, to
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OF
which they were both invited guests not his own
wedding this time, though all weddings were of
extraordinary interest to him just then. He is
a prosperous man now, but he was then at the
beginning of life with his way still to make, as
no doubt she very well knew ; and lavender gloves
such gloves as he had bought for the occasion
did not hang on every hedge ; they were a shade
too small, and he was in danger of ruining them
by the plunging in of a good strong masculine
hand. Miss Mulock's own hands were not quite
so large as his, and she undertook, quite frankly
and simply, to try the gloves on herself first, and
thereby stretch them to the necessary width. She
was then in the heyday of her modest fame, and
the pretty good-nature with which it was done
made it all a bit of pride and pleasure to the young
man ; for even friendship has its " trifles light as
air " that cling long in the remembrance. When,
some years later, he heard of Miss Mulock's
own marriage in 1865 with Mr. George Lillie
Craik, one of the partners in the house of Mac-
millan and Co., every detail of the romance was
to him of vivid interest.
This marriage, which crowned her life with ever-
increasing happiness, made no break in Mrs. Craik's
relations with her own publishers, Messrs. Hurst
and Blackett, relations which seem to have consti-
tuted a very long and pleasant business connection,
an instance, as their common friend Mrs. Oliphant
has pointed out, of Mrs. Craik's " fidelity to every
bond."
In conversation with others of her old friends
214
VICTOR A^ 3(0 rSL
before writing this paper, two points were especially
and repeatedly touched upon. First, the modest
and businesslike way in which she treated her
writing, never talking about it, but when her house
was full of guests guests well cared for in every
detail just slipping out of their ken during the
mornings while she achieved her daily stint of
work, and then giving herself up to them wholly
in the afternoon and evening ; and secondly, the
endless delight she took in using her carriage for
the convenience of those who had no carriage of
their own, plotting and counter-plotting sometimes
to help three and four sets of people on the same
afternoon, till the intricacies of the arrangements
made it quite a triumph to bring all to a successful
conclusion.
In the possession of more than one of these
friends there is a portrait of Mrs. Craik, taken
not long before her death. It is a good, sensible,
trustworthy face, suggestive of a character entirely
free from anything tawdry or meretricious; the
hair under the soft lace she was very fond of
lace is parted smoothly above the wide, tranquil
forehead, and the eyes look straight onward with
a certain clear steadfastness. Nose, mouth, and
chin add to the impression of courage and
veracity, a forcible and well-balanced directness
of nature, and complete an aspect of gentle
dignity and repose.
One of her lifelong friends remarked lately:
" It was characteristic of her simplicity that she
used to say of the little girl adopted soon after her
marriage, and who lived to grow up and marry
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OF
into a home of her own : ' I love Dorothy more
even than if she were a child of my own ' ; just as
though," added the friend in question, " she could
possibly know what her love for a child of her
own would have been ! "
During all the time of her married life her
pension from the Queen was religiously and
silently set aside for the service of those who
needed it more than herself. For nearly twenty
years she lived at Shortlands, beloved and re-
spected by rich and poor.
Mrs. Oliphant, from whose article in their
magazine Messrs. Macmillan have kindly per-
mitted me to quote the following paragraph, has
written that in 1887 " her medical advisers had
enjoined a great deal of rest, with which the
pleasant cares of an approaching marriage in the
family, and all the necessary arrangements to make
the outset of her adopted daughter in life as bright
and delightful as possible, considerably interfered.
In one attack of breathlessness and faintness some
short time before, she had murmured forth an
entreaty that the marriage should not be delayed
by anything that could happen to her. But even
this did not frighten the fond and cheerful circle,
which was used to nothing but happiness. On
the morning of the twelfth of October, her
husband, before going off to his business, took a
loving leave of her, almost more loving than his
wont, though without any presentiment, pro-
voking a laughing remark from their daughter, to
which Mrs. Craik answered that though so long
married, they were still lovers. These were the
216
S^RLT
last words he heard from her lips, and no man
could have a more sweet assurance of the happiness
his tender care had procured. When he came
home cheerfully in the afternoon to his always
cheerful home, the sight of the doctor's carriage
at the door, and the coachman's incautious ex-
planation that ' the lady was dying,' were the only
preparations he had for the great and solemn
event which had already taken place. He found
her in her own room, lying on her sofa, with an
awestricken group standing round dead. She
had entertained various visitors in the afternoon.
Some time after they were gone, she had rung her
bell, saying she felt ill ; the servants, alarmed,
called for assistance, and she was laid upon the
sofa. A few minutes' struggle for breath, a
murmur, ' Oh, if I could live four weeks longer :
but no matter no matter,' and all was over.
Thus she died as she had lived her last thought
for others, for the bride whose festival day must
be overshadowed by so heavy a cloud, yet of
content and acquiescence in whatever the supreme
Arbiter of events thought right. An ideal ending,
such as God grant us all when our day comes."
One who has been already quoted in these
pages has himself quoted Claude de Saint-Martin,
" the great unknown philosopher," as saying :
" Have we advanced one step farther on the
radiant path of enlightenment that leads to the
simplicity of men ? ' We answer that it may
at least be claimed for the author of " John
Halifax " that her footprints led that way.
By public subscription a monument was placed
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OF
in Tewkesbury Abbey to commemorate her name.
Most appropriately, as indicating her reverence
and her faith, these words from the close of " John
Halifax "have been inscribed on the memorial:
" Each in his place is fulfilling his day and passing
away, just as that sun is passing only we know
not whither he passes : whither we go we know,
and the Way we know the same yesterday, to-
day, and for ever."
218
THE CHILDREN IN GEORGE
ELIOT'S STORIES
THERE are few more charming scenes in George
Eliot's novels than that in which little Job Tudge
plays an important part. " Job was a small fellow
about five, with a germinal nose, large round blue
eyes, and red hair that curled close to his head."
Having wept copiously over his own cut finger,
and been taught that such was not the part of a
brave Briton, he relieves the tension of that
sweetly difficult moment for the two lovers, who
have not yet learned how dear they are to one
another, when Felix Holt's strong hand has been
laid in unspoken comfort on Esther Lyon's
delicate fingers, while she tries to falter forth
her sense of what has seemed to her his forgetful
aloofness
The graceful, self-centred Miss Lyon was
trembling with tears in the presence of Felix
Holt's smothered stress of feeling and calm re-
straint, when little Job looked up by way of
attracting attention to himself, exclaiming, " She's
tut her finger," and, amid the laughter and with-
drawal of hands that followed, re aied to Esther's
confession that she was a coward : " Zoo souldn't
kuy."
Job is only one out of the many delightful
children who are found in George Eliot's novels.
Either by accident or design, they are often in the
near distance in some critical scene, even when, as
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OF
in this instance, they do not actually occupy the
foreground.
Milly Barton's children are drawn with such
delicate realism, so chary a touch upon the deep
well-springs of sacred emotion, that the story
leaves in the mind of the reader such an imprint
as only a great artist could have achieved. And
the same master-hand has drawn for us Marty
and Tommy and Tottie in "Adam Bede," who,
despite the knee-breeches of the period, are just
such children as may be found in country farm-
houses to-day.
c< ' Mind what the parson says, mind what the
parson says, my lads/ said Grandfather to the
black-eyed youngsters in knee-breeches, conscious
of a marble or two in their pockets which they
looked forward to handling a little, secretly,
during the sermon.
" 'Dood-bye, dandad,' said Totty ; f me doin*
to church, me dot my netlace on. Dive me a
peppermint.' . . .
" And when they were all gone, the old man
leaned on the gate again, watching them across
the lane along the Home Close, and through the
far gate, till they disappeared behind a bend in the
hedge. For the hedgerows in those days shut out
one's view, even on the better-managed farms ;
and this afternoon the dog-roses were tossing out
their pink wreaths, the nightshade was in its
yellow and purple glory, the pale honeysuckle
grew out of reach, peeping high up out of a
holly-bush, and over all an ash or a sycamore
220
SLiors
every now and then threw its shadow across the
path. . . .
" The fact was that this Sunday walk through
the fields was fraught with great excitement to
Marty and Tommy, who saw a perpetual drama
going on in the hedgerows, and could no more
refrain from stopping and peeping than if they
had been a couple of spaniels or terriers. Marty
was quite sure he saw a yellow-hammer on the
boughs of the great ash, and while he was peep-
ing, he missed the sight of a white-throated stoat,
which had run across the path and was described
with much fervour by the junior Tommy. Then
there was a little green-finch, just fledged, flutter-
ing along the ground, and it seemed quite possible
to catch it till it managed to flutter under the
blackberry bush. . . ."
And then there is Tommy Bond, who had
" recently quitted frocks and trousers for the severe
simplicity of a tight suit of corduroys, relieved by
numerous brass buttons. Tommy was a saucy
boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence,
and excessively addicted to humming-tops and
marbles, with which recreative resources he was in
the habit of immoderately distending the pockets
of his corduroys. One day, spinning his top on
the garden walk, and seeing the vicar advance
directly towards it, at that exciting moment when
it was beginning to ' sleep ' magnificently, he
shouted out with all the force of his lungs
' Stop ! don't knock my top down, now ! '
From that day ' little Corduroys ' had been an
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OF
especial favourite with Mr. Gilfil, who delighted
to provoke his ready scorn and wonder by putting
questions which gave Tommy the meanest opinion
of his intellect.
" < Well, little Corduroys, have they milked the
geese to-day ? '
" ' Milked the geese ? Why, they don't milk
the geese, you silly ! '
" ' No ? dear heart ? Why, how do the goslings
live, then ? '
" The nutriment of goslings rather transcend-
ing Tommy's observations in natural history, he
feigned to understand this question in an ex-
clamatory rather than an interrogatory sense, and
became absorbed in winding up his top.
" * Ah, I see you don't know how the goslings
live. But did you notice how it rained sugar-
plums yesterday ? ' (Here Tommy's face be-
came attentive.) 'Why, they fell into my
pocket as I rode along. You look in my pocket
and see if they didn't.'
" Tommy, without waiting to discuss the
alleged antecedent, lost no time in ascertaining the
presence of the agreeable consequence, for he had
a well-founded belief in the advantages of diving
into the vicar's pocket. Mr. Gilfil called it his
wonderful pocket, because, as he delighted to tell
the c young shavers ' and ' two shoes ' so he
called all little boys and girls whenever he put
pennies into it, they turned into sugar-plums or
ginger-bread, or some other nice thing. Indeed,
little Bessie Parrot, a flaxen-headed ' two shoes,'
very white and fat as to her neck, always had the
222
SLIOTS sroi^res
admirable directness and sincerity to salute him
with the question, ' What zoo dot in zoo pottet?"
Tina, the heroine of " Mr. GilnTs Love-story,"
and that enchanting sprig of apple-blossom, the
Hetty Sorrel of Adam Bede's earlier love, before
sin had darkened and awakened in her the con-
sciousness of a soul within, are both almost as
truly children in their dawning and dangerous
womanhood as was the immortal Maggie Tulliver
herself, in those early days when she inquired
anxiously whether Mrs. Stelling was "a cross
woman/ 1
Tessa's children are remembered for the wise
words they drew from Romola about the happi-
ness that sometimes lies in a difficult choice, and
the Garths are altogether normal and delightful
children, but it is in the exquisite skill with which
George Eliot brings home to us the charm of such
everyday babies as Mrs. Poyser's Tottie, and the
little grandchild of the Jeromes, in " Janet's
Repentance," that this author herself childless
stands indisputably supreme.
223
THE WORDS AND WAYS
OF CHILDREN
A HARD-WORKED London artist told his friends
with great glee one evening that he had had three
pieces of luck that day : he had sat opposite to a
beautiful face in the Underground Railway ; he had
been assured by a stranger that he was a good-
hearted fellow ; and, best of all, he had overheard
a little ragged girl saying to herself, over and over
again, " Two silver shillings ! Two silver shil-
lings ! " having come into possession of that magic
treasure.
No one was commonplace enough to ask him
why the little girl's words should have so tickled his
fancy. Silver shillings are common enough, but
they may, like other current coin, be transmuted
by the glamour of childhood into symbols of
happiness itself.
Children have no language which will adequately
describe the slowly moving miraculous panorama
of their inward visions. Walter Bagehot has
expressed this with delightful humour, where he
says of this interior existence : " You have war-
like ideas, but you cannot say to a sinewy relative :
' My dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the
garden will begin to walk about ; I'm sure it's a
Crusader, and I was cutting it all day long with
my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt ?
for I'm puzzled about its legs, because, you see,
aunt, it has only one stalk ; and besides, aunt,
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OF
the leaves.' You cannot remark this in secular
life, but you hack at the invincible bush till you
do not wholly reject the idea that your small garden
is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of
knights."
The sense of humour in boys is only equalled
by their healthy hatred of all cant and affectation.
But perhaps the morbid desire of the senti-
mentalists to "dee and do nought ava " is begin-
ning to taint even the childhood of this artificial
age, for a little boy, lately promoted to knicker-
bockers, professed at last to have found something
to live for. "Nurse," he said, "I don't want to
die now"
4 'No, Master Frank, I suppose not; but what
makes you say that ? "
" Why, Nursie, because of my braces ! "
Even to healthy-minded children, death, so long
as it leaves their own immediate circle untouched,
is not seldom an attractive mystery, though I know
of one child of five who wept bitterly when the
trees in the park near her home were blown down
by the wind, and from whom the death of birds
and other favourites had to be carefully hidden.
Perhaps the loneliness of her childhood increased
this sensibility. It was natural that so loving a
heart should long for brothers and sisters. She
was overheard on one occasion praying : " O
God, give me a little brother if it is necessary ! "
"necessity" being to her commensurate with
the Divine will.
There are beautiful touches in the religion of
children. A certain little dark-eyed boy was stay-
p 225
OF
ing, a while ago, in the same house with a little
fair-haired girl called Beatrice, who was several
years older than he. She, in her superior wisdom,
was to him as a guardian angel, and he, with
watchful chivalry, made himself her most patient
and lowly servant. He was one of a Sunday class
where the children were asked one day what things
they should ask God for, the mistress expecting,
of course, that they would reply : "For bread, for
raiment, for a roof to cover us." A great light
came into this boy's black eyes and flashed over his
pale face. " For Beatrices," he said.
A well-known writer, who had a special sym-
pathy with children, quotes with approval an
essayist, of whom she says : " He considers that
children are defective in sensation, that all their
perceptions of outward things are far less vivid
than those of a grown person, and that they live
almost altogether in a world of phantasmagoria,
which is much more important to them than any-
thing outward, and which cuts them off from the
grown-up people's world."
There is one strong believer in this doctrine
who can still remember vaguely now that she is
a child no longer how, one day, when she had
begun to make pot-hooks and round O's, there
came over her a dumb, passionate desire to embody
in these hieroglyphic signs, which she had seen
her elders use on paper, though she was quite
unable to express it in spoken words, some record
of a lovely pastoral vision which was haunting
her. Whether it had come to her in a dream or
as a peculiarly vivid waking phantasy, or whether
226
OF
it was the memory of some previous existence
before the " shades of the prison-house " had begun
to close about her, she cannot to this day feel
sure. But she can still see in imagination the long,
somewhat bare upper room, with its three little
white beds, where there came to her the desperate
impulse to dash down in lines and circles what she
was too shy to express in audible speech, and what,
indeed, altogether transcended such possibilities of
language as were within her reach. And this
shyness was mixed with a scarcely defined belief
that this peaceful other-world vision, which was so
far removed from her daily experience that it
would be treated as idle tales if uttered in her
blundering child-language, might possibly gain
credence if it could only get itself embodied in
written symbols ; and then how surprised the
elders would be who had not shared with her the
fair sights and sounds, and had no idea of the
secret treasure which was locked within her
memory !
It is all vague and dim to her, like those recol-
lections gathered from yet earlier babyhood, of
how one day, when she was crying over a midday
siesta, which was at that time prescribed to all
children, a companion child, some years older than
herself, advised her, in a tone of gentle patronage,
to suck her thumb, an anodyne for all troubles,
which the young counsellor had found unfailing ;
or how, on a like melancholy occasion, a kind hand
dropped into a little wooden crib, where she lay
sobbing, a lovely cowslip ball, its golden blossoms,
in their pale green setting, all cool and sweet, and
227
OF
smelling of the meadows ; or how, when she was
nearly three years old, a neighbour made an epoch
in her history by giving her, over the low iron
railing which divided the two grass plots, a bright
blue corncockle from her own garden.
This love of flowers was a strong bond of
sympathy between the child and her father. It
was he who took her in the early spring-time to
the one field down by the river where the wood-
anemones grew. It is not often that they are
found away from the woodlands, but Twilight's
father (that was the nickname he gave her once,
though it quickly dropped into disuse) knew one
such magical spot where they were as common as
cuckoo-flowers. And later more joyous adven-
ture still ! down by the brown canal, with its
endless locks and fairy waterfalls, were found the
first dog-roses. Before Twilight could pluck
them she must cross a narrow plank over the
foaming water ; but all was safe in her father's
presence ; and then there followed the delight of
gathering with her own hands, out of the hedge,
one of the sweet pale pink buds.
Twilight and her brothers and sisters were not
taught theology, but I have heard that when she
was asked one day who would take care of her doll
while she was away on a visit she replied quite
simply : " Oh, dear God, of course."
This doll seems to have been a very lively
personage ; for Twilight, who had once been
dosed with homoeopathic medicine, when she was
restless in her sleep, is said to have knocked at
her mother's bedroom door one morning, and
228
OF
when asked what was the matter, said Dolly had
been kicking so all night that she must have
some " tamomilla." It was only as Dolly grew
older that her beautiful blue satin gown was cut
up to make a banner for the rifle corps in which
her mistress was a volunteer.
It is to be feared that in those days the said
mistress was a very boisterous and rather domi-
neering little person, and had to be constantly
admonished that she was " not a little boy." She
must have been an odd mingling of the mystic
and the torn-boy, for about the time when she was
given to dressing up as Masterman Ready, playing
at pirates, performing circus tricks, and other
various and indescribable naughtiness, she em-
ployed her quieter moments in drawing imaginary
portraits of the fairies who dwelt in the diverse
flowers, and on one occasion, when she was un-
happy, she comforted herself with the idea that
she was visited by an angel. Her parents would
scarcely have approved had they known of the
elaborate system of penances which she drew up
for herself.
She had been reading " Settlers at Home," and
she seldom went up and down stairs without a
terrible feeling that " Roger," the bad genius of
the book, was at her heels. Her self-ordained
punishments, therefore, were chiefly journeys up
and down the house : for one offence ten runs
upstairs, for two faults twenty, and so on.
The first memory of pain in her childhood is
of a very curious kind, and may remind us how
absurd it is to expect children to appreciate
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OF
the importance of the more serious events of
life.
A near relative, who had been very kind to the
child, had suddenly died. But the word " death "
was only a name to her, and gave no pain. In-
stead of realising that she would never see again
the face she loved, or hear the dear familiar voice,
that life would thenceforth be a poorer, blanker
thing to her, she felt an odd kind of excitement,
and almost elation, at having come in contact
with one of the "grown-up" experiences of this
troublesome world. But when she rushed into
the drawing-room with some trivial remark about
black clothes, she perceived, with a pang which
has left its memory to this day, that she appeared
to her elders to be guilty of a strange heartless-
ness. The news that her friend was dead the
bright lad who gave her her first book, and was
always ready to play with her that caused her
no real suffering ; it was not until long afterwards
that she understood the sorrow of death. But
the discovery that she had wounded and dis-
appointed those she loved by her want of feeling
that gave her unspeakable pain.
To most people the self of to-day is no very
ideal person. They realise painfully enough its
ignorance and folly. But the self of childhood
that is quite a different matter.
That dream- haunted, high-spirited little romp,
far away among the shadows and the blossoms of
the past, that is the soul to laugh and cry over
an altogether absurd, loving, grotesque little
figure. As we look back, half doubting our own
230
OF
identity, we are like a rough workman I know of,
who, meeting a mother and child in the streets
one day, whispered audibly : " I wish I was as
innocent as yon child looks ! " We wish we
were as free from the hard and selfish spirit of the
world as those earnest little souls seem to us to
have been.
231
IN EARLY AUTUMN
AT summer dawn, that makes the world anew
In primal loveliness of Eden's birth,
And bathes the blossoms with the heavenly dew
That gives a daily childhood to the earth,
When beauty pierces like a beckoning cry,
Oh, let the children share the earth and sky !
Oh, send them here before it is too late,
While still the swallows dip their wings in light
And every day the sunset's golden gate
Throws wide the splendours of the summer
night !
Ok, send the children here : the days go by ;
Oh 9 send the frailest quickly y ere they die !
Snapdragons now are laughing in the hedge,
And thrush to fellow-thrush is jargoning ;
The little river running through the sedge
Sings on, while reeds bend over, answering :
Earth garners loveliness ; the days go by :
Leave death for age ; the young buds must not
die.
The harebell leans upon the passing breeze,
And honeysuckles weave their fairy bowers ;
Oh, think what joy, among the leafy trees,
For London waifs to pluck the lavish flowers !
Oh, send the children here : the days go by ;
Oh, sena the frailest quickly, ere they die !
232
The pine-tree, bathed in sunshine, softly sways
A fragrant censer that will scatter health
To strengthen wanderers in the woodland ways,
And give them store of Nature's living wealth :
Oh, send the children here : the moments fly ;
And, while you pause to think, some child may
die.
The corn has fallen now in sheaves of gold ;
The noonday spaces melt in sapphire deeps :
The distant hills are dreaming, fold on fold,
In dim blue distance where a young moon sleeps.
Oh, send, the children here : the days go by ;
Oh, send the frailest quickly, ere they die !
At eve yon moon, a drifting snowflake yet,
Will rise a silver sickle o'er the Rose
That scatters petals when the sun hath set ;
And then a million flowers in sleep will close.
Oh, send the frail flowers here who tossing lie
In crowded cities ! Save them, ere they die !
233
THE OPEN WINDOW
LET us by all means build sanatoria for the con-
sumptive patients whose health we have ruined,
and found schools of hygiene for teachers whose
constitutions we have undermined ! So long as
there is still hope of cure or of reform, we shall at
least have improved a little on the time-honoured
practice of giving handsome burial to the prophets
conveniently done to death. But, setting aside the
patent fact that consumption and degeneration are
likely to claim their victims, so long as thousands
of overworked people are denied a living wage,
there is, even in the present distress, one initial life-
saving reform which costs nothing except common
sense and courage, and need not be delayed for the
reconstruction of society. The atmosphere of
many of our offices, shops, and churches, is often
so fetid that any one with a keen sense of smell,
entering from the pure air outside, experiences a
sense of foulness indescribable ; and still more is
this true of overcrowded, unventilated trains and
omnibuses. Such a person, if he has an even
elementary knowledge of the conditions favour-
able to disease, feels no longer any wonder at the
authorised computation in 1906 that, in London
alone, no fewer than 80,000 people are stricken with
one form or another of tuberculosis, and u 16,000
persons die every year whose valuable lives might be
saved with proper treatment, to say nothing of the
thousands who are slowly moving to their doom."
234
The grim humour of it all is beyond words.
The one means of life which can be neither taxed
nor paid for, the one pure element which makes
for beauty and vigour and longevity, is treated on
all hands as a dangerous enemy to be shut out at
all costs throughout the whole of our long winter.
Everybody poses on occasion as a devotee of fresh
air, but the man, or the woman either, who dares
boldly to open a window wide in any public place
of resort, is eyed askance and treated with a
smothered resentment, a polite hostility, which
opens fire with significantly conscious sneezes and
coughs, the pulling up of coat-collars and drawing
on of mantles, and usually ends by a determined
raid upon the offending window which, with an air
of virtuous and collective indignation, is too often
hastily and decisively closed again. Yet, even
apart from the extreme danger to health involved
in this worship of stuffiness, had the worshippers
only enough knowledge and imagination to picture
for an instant the nature of the filth they are
swallowing, their disgust would be so overwnelm-
ing that they would probably not only open every
window, but in many cases make an instinctive
rush for the door.
There is tragedy in the accusation so lightly
thrown at " the great Unwashed '' ; for those who
make it forget to ask themselves how many of the
very poor, in their day-long scramble for bare
bread and roof and raiment for their children,
have, under existing social conditions, either suffi-
cient bath-rooms or sufficient leisure for civilised
grooming. But many of their so-called " supe-
235
OF
riors," who plume themselves on their continual
tubbing and general devotion to external soap and
water, are content to swallow unboiled, not only
water from a sewage-polluted river, but air from
other people's polluted lungs. Whether or no
John Bull continues, with an air of bravado, to
drink, without any sufficient precaution, the milk
and the water which are seldom technically clean,
it is certain that his first step towards the prevention
of tuberculosis ought to be a reform of his dirty
habits in relation to unclean and noxious air. Such
air is almost always germ-laden, but what is em-
phasised here is not so much its danger to life as
its loathsome impurity. Yet at the same time it
cannot be wholly forgotten that, for reasons not far
to seek, our national scourge of tuberculosis feeds
upon the filth of bad air.
236
YOUNG ART AND MY LITTLE
RED RIDING-HOOD
I HAVE seen " Young Art " again to-day, after
a long interval, and there was a look in his grave
little face that seemed as appropriate as a Christmas
carol to the inner meaning of our great festival.
There is usually a kind of holy joy about Young
Art, even when, as to-day, he has evidently the
cares or sorrows of his family much on his mind.
I am not sure of his exact age, but it is somewhere
between seven and eight, I take it, and even in his
" old-fashionedness " he is essentially a child, one
of the little ones to whom the " Christ-masse '' is
especially dedicated. His father " Art," without
the prefix is beyond the region of my acquaint-
ance, and his mother, who was like the Old
Woman who lived in a Shoe, is also outside my
circle. With daily work to do it is impossible to
know every one, even among the very poor, who
have certainly a deeper claim upon time and
attention than many of their fortunate neighbours,
and perhaps also more vital lessons to teach to
those of us who trade mainly in words. Young
Art that is the name by which I hear his family
designate him, though I divine that his true
patronymic is that of the great Pendragon of the
Round Table Young Art has been bred from
babyhood in that saddest, deepest poverty of all
which is the result of some one else's wasteful self-
indulgence. Already it is plain that he tries to
237
OF
guard and cherish his heroic young foster-mother,
a woman with a face that in its first youthful
contour must have resembled the pure outline of
Dinah Morris's gentle countenance. She is his
father's sister, and her married life has been one
long martyrdom in the cause of ideal womanhood,
the continual kindler of the faggots about her
burning feet being tied to her by the law of
wedlock, and tied equally fast to his own favourite
and money-squandering vice. She has no children
of her own ; Young Art, who was begged from
" the Old Woman who lived in a Shoe " one or
a family of fourteen, I think he told me is the
idol of her affections. At her poor, well-brushed
hearth, there has always been a welcome also for
his brave, handsome young cousin, who has been
starving of late in silence with her baby and her
" unemployed " husband at a fireless hearth of her
own, as I discovered by accident, this bitter cold
day ; to say naught of the feckless ne'er-do-well
nephew, to whom every other door except that
of the prison has long since been closed. To these
last she is pathetically, unwearyingly kind ; but
Young Art is the one joy of her meagre and other-
wise joyless treadmill. For him she slaves early
and late, spending long hours at the wash-tub and
the ironing-board, to earn the wherewithal, and
keeping the child himself exquisitely neat and, like
herself, looking always " clean as a snowdrop.''
He is never fantastically or gaudily dressed, yet
his quaint, smiling gravity and elderly daintiness of
perfectly mended apparel, give him somehow the
air of a child out of a picture-book, even apart
238
from the singular home-made barrow on which,
out of school hours, he is so often wheeling home
a modest burden of carefully got-up lingerie. His
manners are distinguished, and quite unlike those
of the small rabble with whom he mixes at the
Board school, whither, with the other child
inhabitants of this hamlet, he daily wends his way.
His foster-mother's love is so great that it is itself
an education and gives him a kind of royalty, so
that he has all the fearless, quiet savoir-faire of a
gentleman, and, without analysing it to himself,
feels somehow that his attentions are welcome.
When all the children in our lane, some sixty of
them, came for tea in our little backyard, and
adjourned with me to the pine-woods afterwards, it
was Young Art who quietly managed to reach
high enough to slip his little arm through mine
and tow me along protectively.
My other guard-of-honour on that occasion was
my Little Red Riding-Hood. I think of her as
that, because, though she does not wear scarlet,
her exquisite beauty would be so perfectly set off
by a red cloak and hood, and even more than
Young Art she suggests a child out of a Christmas
volume. The liquid dark eyes look forth from a
little white face, like a delicately cut cameo, where
the only touch of colour is in the pretty red lips
that are always bravely smiling. The black hair
that frames this charming vision is itself a charm,
and the child seems to be one of those whose
pinafores are always clean. It is her wonderful
smile that wins the heart ; it seems to bubble up
perpetually from some hidden fountain of love and
239
OF
light. Even on that saddest morning, when Red
Riding-Hood's own hunger was forgotten in that
of her starving little gray dog, her smile had not
quite vanished. By a happy chance I espied them
together, that bitter day, the child and the dog,
lingering a moment in wistful silence outside my
garden railing. It was then that our real friend-
ship began. Dogs and I are almost always on
more or less comradely terms, and when I clapped
eyes on the poor little four-legged gray skeleton
that piercing winter morning last year, it was for
the dog's sake even more than the child's that I
rushed away for a bone. Oh, the joy of that bone
to all three of us ! The poor half-perishing dog
never forgot it, nor did the child, nor did I.
When the hard time was over, and the poor little
bag of skin and bone began to look a real dog
once more, he came back again and again alone,
without his mistress, to thank me. You say it
was for more bones ? I shall not be believed, but
when I fetched food he withdrew in a dignified
manner as much as to say, " You quite mistake
me!"
Red Riding-Hood told me soon afterwards, in
reply to persistent questioning, that she had had to
part with him a great sorrow, poor little maid !
She has many brothers and sisters, and even dogs
have mouths when the weekly wage is hardly a
" living " one for a family. And the next I heard
of him was his death. Only with tears in her eyes
could Red Riding-Hood tell me of the horrid
disease that compelled his new owners to shoot
him, and this tragic explanation of his disease I
240
had supposed at first that he died a natural death
she did not give me until we attained to the
intimacy of afternoon tea in my own little study,
after she had brought me dahlias, velvet dark and
golden bright, in a carefully arranged posy of
alternating tints from her own cottage garden.
I had met her a few days earlier carrying a basket
of cabbages that looked half as big as herself.
When I took it out of her hand and accompanied
her to her gate she merely seemed amused, smiling
more rapturously than ever. At our parting I
rather fished for a " Thank you " ; but she re-
served that till the afternoon, when she brought
the flowers to accompany her sweet dimples and
shining eyes as an expression of what she felt.
The labouring people in our lane occasionally
make me feel, as this child did, that in matters of
neighbourly friendship my methods are coarse in
comparison with their delicacy of feeling.
241
CHILDREN OF THE LONDON AND
SOUTH-WESTERN RAILWAY
" HE just said good-night to me, and he gave me
a kiss, and said he was coming back to do the
garden. But when he got to work an express
train came along the line and knocked him over,
and I never saw him again alive." A grave, fair-
haired little girl it was who, sitting beside me in
the matron's bright, cosy sitting-room at the orphan-
age our orphanage par excellence at Woking thus
summed up the epoch in her own history which
had opened to her the doors of orphanage hospi-
tality. It was told quite simply, and without any
emotional pose, though by no means without a
sense of its heartrending pathos, a certain quiet
dignity, as of those who have passed through deep
sorrow without being embittered. The little
garden had sweet-peas in it, I learned- one of the
small gardens on the edge of the line near the
child's home at Andover and there leaped to
the eyes visions of the home-life, the mother and
children watching eagerly for the return of one
whose poor broken body was to be carried back
by his mates, but never again to come striding up
the staircase of the little house to kiss his small
daughter good-night. The child was one of six
little girls, of whom two were at the orphanage.
I had been interested in hearing about one of the
boys in another family, whose father had been run
down by an express, when hastening to help a young
242
porter in difficulties with a truck of luggage which
had overbalanced ; therefore the matron had sent
for this child and her sister, and also for another girl,
one of ten children, whose breadwinner had been
killed in like manner while cleaning down a truck.
We think much of the great catastrophes that
swallow up passengers, but too little perhaps of
the yearly toll of lives among brave and faithful
public servants of the rank and file, who meet
their summons as a matter of course in the
ordinary round of their daily tasks.
Some of the children here lost their fathers in
the wrecks of the St. Hilda and the Stella, both in
the company's service; others in ways less striking
to the imagination, but not less sad for those who
are left behind.
The men themselves understand well enough
the uncertainties and perils of their chosen work,
and it is by them that the orphanage is mainly
supported and managed,
It is interesting to see that the Archbishop of
Canterbury and Lord Meath are among the vice-
presidents, and that Lord Aberdeen heads the lists
of life-governors, for these are all names which
carry with them a guarantee of efficiency and good
faith, as apart from mere title ; but it is more
interesting still to glance through the names on
local committees throughout that part of the
country which is served by the London and South-
Western, and to note that they consist largely of
very lowly workers engaged in the actual drudgery
of the railway. In making this honourable pro-
vision for their children, it was perhaps hardly
243
s OF
surprising that they had to concentrate upon
obvious necessities rather than on the thought of
their playtime. The excellent bath-rooms, first-
rate sanitation, and abundant space and air in the
sleeping-rooms, might well put to shame many a
public school. The wise arrangements for edu-
cation and the apparent capacity and humanity of
the staff may account for the individuality and
vigour of the children, and the happy absence of
that deadened institutionalised air which is often
so depressing where children are herded together
in a large " home." Nevertheless, until recently,
there had been one serious gap in the beneficent
plan of life the children did not know how to
play. In their spare time they sat within four
walls in their spacious rooms, without books or
toys or occupations, until one day Mr. Cecil Smith
opened the door upon them, and stood aghast. at
the deadly dulness of the scene before him.
His visit inaugurated a new era, for he never
rested until he had not only collected a varied and
delightful "children's library" and provided out-
door and indoor games, but had also organised the
Children's Fund, of which the working expenses
are privately met, with the happy result that every
penny subscribed goes to benefit these orphan boys
and girls.
I found it a very pretty sight to watch the
children drilling, and I hear that Mr. Cecil Smith,
" the Children's Friend," as their annual report
names him, is already dreaming of a gymnasium,
where such training will be extended and amplified
directly the fund allows of it. I need hardly say
244
-WSSrSRat <I(AILW<Ar CHILD^SN
how glad he will be to give full particulars of all
the work of the fund to any one who writes to him
at the orphanage, where he is continually in and
out. This fund maintains and equips the orphanage
boy scouts' and lads' brigade, arranges small enter-
tainments and lantern lectures given monthly
throughout the winter, keeps library and games up
to the mark, making good the necessary wear and
tear, and providing the children with stationery,
magazines, and prize awards. We read that it is
proving of the utmost value, and is sensibly and
carefully administered. It has, moreover, given
to rooms that were somewhat bare and formal a
touch of home and of the varied interests in which
happy school-fellows and comrades may take part.
Perhaps as we whiz by on the railway lines, looking
out on the orphanage and remembering that it is a
solid monument of co-operative thrift on the part
of the railway-men to whom we constantly entrust
our lives, we may well ask ourselves whether we
owe no debt either to the children of our hard-
worked brothers or to Him who said : " Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these,
my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
245
FROM A COTTAGE WINDOW
STRAY oak-leaves, brown, and light as a feather,
still now and then whirl one by one past my
window, but for the most part the trees have
already lost all their foliage and attained to the
beauty of " glorious nakedness." The ivied bank,
that overleans the other side of the lane opposite
my little sitting-room, still casts a shadow, but
the two ancient trees that stand guard beside it
are now already bare, except for their ivied stems,
and the unclothed boughs begin to leave the over-
shadowed rooms more air and light. The swing-
ing sign of the little inn is already visible in the
distance, and, beyond it, the silvery birches and
black pines, and a space of south-western sky,
whence the golden sunsets are mirrored from the
west on " soft " evenings and the stars look down
in blessing.
The dahlias are all gone, and the chrysanthemums
which have done finely this year will soon be
following them.
By strange chance, just as that sentence was set
down on paper there came a rhythmic rat-tat on
the cottage door, and a messenger from Hoe Place
brought accompanied by a basket of apples,
themselves a picture as though to tell me that
chrysanthemums must not be banished before their
time, a great bunch of the beautiful creatures,
more perfect, in their air of stately quietude and
lavish yet delicate tints, than any that have entered
246
FROM <A corr^fge
my room this season; whole sprays of snowy-
white, and pink things of paler hue on the under-
side of the lovely curling petals all with that
graceful drooping curve so different from the
rigidity of their old-fashioned forerunners and
others of pale yellow, a clever effect in the colour-
scheme, leading up to what is the crowning note
of the harmony, an upright blossom, in the vivid
gold of its plume-like aspect much like a colt's-
foot, side by side with a cluster of prim daisy-
shaped beauties with wide yellow bosses rayed
round with petals of sea-shell pink, a sort of
glorified Michaelmas daisies. There they all are,
looking at me now from the great blue and white
pot that was the gift of a friend just come back
from the edge of the " Undiscovered Country."
And if they were not grown out of doors, they
are still unmistakable chrysanthemums. Against
my whitewashed walls and the black-brown of my
stained deal bookshelves they are superb. There
seems to have been a convergence of gift-bringing
influences upon this spot of earth to-day, for only
half an hour before, the village policeman, our
chief gardening enthusiast of the neighbourhood,
whose fairy triangle at the road-corner is bare at
last of all its fiery blooms and has been patiently
dug over for the winter, came modestly to the
back door on the other side of the cottage with
a great handful of precious bulbs, and we had a
little talk about the slips of sweet-briar that had
withered in the summer sun through being set too
early : November, this learned man tells me, is
the right month.
247
OF
The gardens just now have a very appealing
aspect ; poor Psyche has come to the long trial of
sorting the seeds, and soon will be falling asleep.
But the skies of evening look down with miraculous
beauty. Never are sunsets more mystically glorious
than when the golden light looks through the bare
tree-branches, as through the bars of some heavenly
window, only to be flashed back again by the
depths of a brimming stream brown and tranquil
after the autumn rains. Down at Hoe Place, two
days ago, just such a sunset as that looked in
through the wide drawing-room windows as I
ceased reading that fine passage from Lord Lytton's
" Letters " in which he sums up the meaning of
tragedy as " the highest expression in art of that
which in life itself . . . compels us to understand,
not as an abstract proposition, but as a truth
delivered through our strongest emotions, that
Divine justice is not concerned about bringing
things to a comfortable conclusion at the end of
this poor little five-act play of ours that its theatre
is Infinity, and its last word here ' Beyond.' "
It is a good message to have by heart before
those benumbing days come of which Mr. Robert
Bridges writes :
" The long dark night, that lengthens slow,
Deepening with Winter to starve grass and tree,
And soon to bury in snow
The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole,
Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole
Of how her end shall be."
But in the darkening days the birds just now
248
FROM c/f corr^ge
are full of charm to eye and ear. We are only
twenty-four miles from London. In the morning
yesterday I watched the quiet little grey-bosomed
bird that was tame enough to sit on the leafless
topmost twig of my little plum-tree, looking in
through my upper window, about half a yard from
my observing eyes, as I listened to the fluting,
Mozart-like melodies of a hidden robin ; and in
the afternoon, as I crossed Waterloo Bridge, I
gazed on the restless sea-gulls, making poetry with
their great white wings, hovering and sweeping
above the dark river. On the return journey the
birds had gone, but a new token of hope had taken
their place, for the lights above the Southern Wharf
were golden in the autumn mist and made a glowing,
burning radiance in the Thames below. And there
came back to me the words of a brave symbolist
whom I knew in my youth, an arch-heretic whose
fame is now blazoned by the orthodox forces that
cursed him before they built his tomb, and I
murmured to myself those lines of Thomas Toke
Lynch that are welcome with the coming of winter :
" While the root, locked in slumber fast,
Rests through the weary winter-tide,
The world speeds on, that God at last
His summer's heartsease may provide,
And all love's tender prophecies
In tenderer blooms may realise."
249
HIS SOLILOQUY
(A "Dramatic Lyric)
HUSH ! it is night,
And the stars
Look down thro' the prison-bars
That hold us a world apart
You in the infinite light, I in my darkened heart.
Is there a gulf we may cross
To win a moment again,
You to your terrible loss, I to my exquisite pain ?
Is there a gulf we may cross,
Or has our love been in vain ?
I live for you, die for you, daily, you who are
pure and good !
But not with a touch will I stain
Your flower-white womanhood,
I who have soiled my life, soiled and spoiled my
life,
While you, in the sun and rain
The joy, the sorrow, the strife
Unfolded your lily-bloom
With its midmost golden dart.
Ah, no ! We are worlds apart.
Yet even here in the night,
In a life that's a prison-room ;
You, the child of the light,
You dwell in my darkened heart,
Heaven in the hell of my doom.
250
CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI
IN a candid and deeply interesting memoir Mr.
William Michael Rossetti has brought home
to us with added tenderness and reality the
vision of " a soul as pure, duteous, concentrated,
loving, and devoted as ever uttered itself in prose
or verse." These words, from the closing sentence
in which Mr. Rossetti sums up his tribute to that
sister of whom he had such intimate and lifelong
knowledge, come as a relief to the pent-up admira-
tion of his readers at the end of this memoir, a
finished and impressive monograph, beautiful with
such homely and untold reverence as forbids any
language not simple, any overstrained or self-
conscious adornment.
These pages enhance our knowledge of Christina
Rossetti's devotion to her kindred most of all to
her mother and in all the details of her daily life,
as well as in the moving story of her earthly love,
here for the first time fully told a love not with-
out its heavenly joys and qualities even in re-
nouncement they are a continual attestation, an
attestation not needed and yet delightful, to the
profound sincerity of her devotional poems.
Built in the Living Rock and smitten to the inner-
most depths, her life was " hid with Christ in
God," and that which she gave so freely to the
world was itself a Divine gift, an overflowing
energy of faith and love, sometimes thrilled through
and through with the very bitterness of grief, yet
251
OF
quick with praise through all suffering, and spring-
ing ever from that Source of joy which she knew
to be at the heart of pain. It is sometimes
childlike in its rippling happiness of kinship with
birds and beasts and children, but at other times,
and much more frequently, it is dazzling in its
leaping purity and rainbow-tinted sacrificial passion
as it triumphs over all obstacles on its way to the
great deep, and not seldom it is when touched with
sorrow that it is most full of mystic healing and
cleansing power. Do we not all come thirsting to
dip our tiny cups in it and bless this well-spring of
living water springing up unto eternal life ?
Christina Rossetti's deep and fastidious veracity
added the final note of distinction to her most
enduring verse, verse of which the word " dis-
tinction " may be used in a special and primary
sense, for she is so " distinct in individualities"
that to class her with others, even the greatest,
would be to lose sight of one of her most striking
attributes ; and especially, perhaps, of her religious
poems is this true. Here and there we may be
reminded of her in Richard Crashaw's " Shepherds'
Hymn " and his " Saint Teresa " poems, or in
Christopher Smart's splendid " Song to David,"
and to name her with Henry Vaughan, George
Herbert, and William Blake, is to do honour to
them as truly as to her ; but no one who is in-
timate with her singing is likely to mistake it for
theirs, or for any but her own. To take rank
with such poets as these on the one hand, and
with the greatest singers of the nineteenth century
on the other, is to hold a high and immortal place ;
252
yet the absolute spontaneity of Christina Rossetti's
symbolism, the sense of sweet surprise and in-
evitableness in her cadences, as of a nightingale's
improvisation, with nevertheless that just economy
of language and metaphor characteristic of what is
final and unfathomable in feeling, must make her
appeal a wider and more varied one than that of
the Silurist or the author of " The Temple " ;
while for melody and passion, so married as to be
absolutely one, in such poems as " The Convent
Threshold," "A Royal Princess," and "The
Prince's Progress," it would not be easy to find a
lyrist beside whom one need fear to name her,
whether among living writers or the mighty dead
who preceded them.
In criticising this volume of her " poetical works "
from childhood upwards, no one can fail to ad-
mit that its contents are extraordinarily unequal,
both in outward music and in inward quality ; but
to say that she numbers among her enthusias-
tic admirers that great master of melody, who
wrote that "consummate mastery of [the poet's]
instrument " is " the one indispensable test of
poetic triumph," is to give a high authority indeed
for the perfection of her workmanship at its best.
Yet for her work the word " workmanship " seems
misleading; when that work is most perfect it
bears rather the impress of a transcendent and
irresistible creation than of any clumsier process.
Take, for instance, the two brief lyrics by which
she is perhaps most widely known " When I am
dead, my dearest," and " Does the road wind up-
hill all the way ? " who shall analyse their haunt-
253
OF
ing and satisfying beauty, except to say that their
soul and body are absolutely one, and their bareness
of redundant loveliness, in word or image, the
crowning loveliness of all ? In contradistinction
from these in its flowing wealth of measure and
imagery, though less inscrutable in charm, is the
" Amor Mundi." It is interwoven throughout
with echoing rhymes and cunning assonances and
timely roughnesses of deterrent sound ; all breath-
ing the symbolism of a deeper music than that of
any audible human voices. It is almost trite to
say that Christina Rossetti had her limitations, but
it may be added that, by a kind of proud humility
if the paradox be permitted she seems to have
recognised them, and never attempted to pass
beyond them into regions not her own. Be that as
it may, her brother at once arrests our attention and
probably wins our acquiescence, when in writing
elsewhere of Augusta Webster's finest play, which
was greatly admired by Christina Rossetti, he says
of the latter : " The very suggestion of her writing
any tragedy, much more any such tragedy as ' The
Sentence/ would be preposterous."
" Goblin Market " is a marvel of subtle music
and of outpoured sunshine and colour, its " fine
fairy-lore " all brimming with such stuff as goes
to the making of mortal suffering and heroic
tenderness ; but it may well indicate something of
the width of the poet's range to compare its un-
fettered methods, as of some heavenly intuition,
with the very diverse rhythms of her other and
even greater poems more restricted in form, such
as " The Convent Threshold " already named, of
254
which Mrs. Meynell has said the supreme and
incomparable word of uttermost praise.
No woman who is familiar with Christina
Rossetti's poems can read her life, without a con-
viction that the agony of renunciation, to so
intense and passionate a nature, deepened the
inspiration of what was highest and most searching
in her power.
Among her Christmas verses it is impossible
not to love the childlike gladness and exquisite
simplicity of such carols as the one beginning
" The Shepherds had an Angel," and the still more
beautiful one which includes the lines :
" What can I give Him,
Poor as I am ?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb."
Yet it is probably not to these carols that a sorrow-
ful world will turn most often, but rather to the
delicate reserve and divine hope of such lyrics as
tc My love whose heart is tender," the pleading of
the Man of Sorrows in " Despised and Rejected,''
the glorious inspiration of "Advent," the humility
and trust of " Sursum Corda," and of that wonder-
ful double " Sonnet of Sonnets," " Later Life," or
to such poems as the one which holds the lines :
" Not in this world of hope deferred,
This world of perishable stuff."
If space were less limited, it would be interesting
to compare the widely varying genius of women
already gone from our midst who have written
255
OF
enduring poetry in the bygone century all lifting
their gift high above stain, all strong in their fervour
of womanliness, brave with the plain-spoken courage
of a holy and untarnished goodness ; all, in their
life as well as in their song, " true to the kindred
points of Heaven and Home." In their art they
differed widely, but the greatest of them have at
least one memorable gift in common, inasmuch as
they have left us sonnets not easily to be surpassed.
With one such sonnet by Christina Rossetti, cha-
racteristic in its white fire of love and faith, this
short causerie must end. It is one of the " Monna
Innominata " series :
" If I could trust mine own self with your fate,
Shall not I rather trust it in God's hand,
Without Whose Will one lily doth not stand,
Nor sparrow fall at his appointed date ;
Who numbereth the innumerable sand,
Who weighs the wind and water with a weight,
To Whom the world is neither small nor great,
Whose knowledge foreknew every plan we
planned.
Searching my heart for all that touches you,
I find there only love and love's goodwill
Helpless to help and impotent to do,
Of understanding dull, of sight most dim ;
And therefore I commend you back to Him
Whose love your love's capacity can fill."
256
THE IDEAL WOMAN AS
WORDSWORTH AND
SHELLEY SAW HER
IT is not surprising that poets of such opposite
temperament and divergent ethics as W<~vdsworth
and Shelley should both alike have drawn for us a
vision of womanhood in which each poet is com-
pletely in accord with the other. There are truths
so fundamental and convincing in their primary
importance that, although they may be coloured
by the mind that reflects them, as though one
showed the rose-coloured and the other the violet
or the gold, they appeal to all alike in proportion
to the vividness with which they are presented.
And in moments of transient agitation or political
stress, it is salutary to turn to such primary realities,
on a day of party conflict to think the more of
Imperial responsibilities, and duties in which wider
issues are involved, and in the clamour between
suffragists and anti-suffragists to look for an instant
at those high aims and ideals which both alike
recognise and acclaim to forget for an hour what
women should do and have, in the thought of what
women should be. That one prosaic couplet in
Wordsworth's beautiful poem to his wife in which
he tells us,
" And now I see, with eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine,"
is finely suggestive of that inner power and
R 257
OF
guidance which befit a being described in the two
lines which follow as " a traveller between life and
death," and is at one with Shelley's more quietistic
image of a " well of sealed and secret happiness."
In neither is the source of beauty and of joy to
remain unshared, though its inmost sanctity lie deep
and unrevealed. That " pulse " of radiant being
which controls and inspires
" The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill,"
is in Wordsworth's poem the very pivot on which
turn all holy and tender activities, all patient and
lowly domestic joys is, indeed, the very mainspring
of life in
" A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort and command."
That " well of sealed and secret happiness " of
which Shelley sings in "Episychidion" is no treasure
of self-centred brooding ; for he tells us in the very
next line that it "vanquishes dissonance and gloom,"
and, lest even that should not be clear enough, he
adds that his ideal is not a Star which moves alone
in the moving heavens, but is as a smile among
frowns, a gentle tone amid rude voices ; and then
he crowns the whole passage with that consummate
line, still descriptive of all that a restless world
should find in the sanctuary of a woman's soul :
" A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight."
That " well " is to be filled with the sunbeams of
the eternal
258
rne
" The sunbeams of those wells which ever leap
Under the lightnings of the soul too deep
For the brief fathom-line of thought or sense."
Sidney Dobell said that goodness in a woman was
not enough it must be beautiful goodness. This
is not the place to discuss that* wonderful inter-
mingling in our day of the religious traditions of
the East and of the West which reveal beneath the
ancient symbols of both the same everlasting
mysteries, but there is one part of the teaching
which he who runs may read teaching which is
confirmed by the discoveries of the scientist, as
well as by the experience of the obedient spirit in
man. It is the simple fact that the vital force
which shapes the universe and moulds the lives of
men has entrusted to Woman the first pre-natal
guardianship of the highest form of perceptible life
upon this planet. And it may be that, as compen-
sation to the many women to whom this highest
grace is not accorded, the privilege of sacrificial
service may make of them also, in Shelley's words,
"A lute, which those whom love has taught to
play
Make music on, to soothe the roughest day."
The world has advanced beyond that barbarous day
in which those who preferred the hardships of lone-
liness to the second best of a marriage imperfectly
mated, were ridiculed as the wastrels of womanly
ambition, and the great army of women-workers
grows yearly happier in the honest comradeship of
earnest-minded men. In this world of joy and
259
OF
sorrow and continual combat, voluntary and
efficient work stands second only to love, as a
means of strength and solace, if only it be not
work so mechanical or brutalising, or beyond the
powers of the worker, as to involve on the one
hand the deadening of faculty or on the other the
overstrain of nervous power.
Men desire to save women from both these
extremes, but under present conditions it is often
beyond a possibility.
They desire also with a passion, not the less deep
because it is often inarticulate, to find in women a
breath of the spiritual repose and intellectual
quietude, which can only be attained by those who
determinately secure, in the midst of a bustling
and overcrowded age, a practice of inward medita-
tion with its enshrining silence, in which the Truth
can be heard and character be calmed and
strengthened, for that daily ordeal in which it may
be said of every noble life, as Wordsworth said of
Milton, that its soul " the lowliest duties on itself
doth lay."
260
FOR THE COMMON CAUSE
[A Dramatic Study]
NOT for ourselves, O God, but those poor things
Who have no time or strength to grow their wings
And needs must crawl in dust the whole day long
To make their fellow-creatures rich and strong
For women fair as flowers, all choked in filth
That will enrich some other's garden-tilth !
Give us a voice, ten thousand voices, God,
That we may be for them Thy staff and rod,
And never rest in helping Thy brave men
To cleanse the sins of this Augean den,
Till all the Empire, whereof we are part,
Holds no more hells, but is love's Home and
Heart !
Help us to help the children, give us grace
To adorn all workrooms, light each darkened place,
And, by the shrewdness of a woman's wit,
Helping the forces of all manly grit,
Unlock the doors that now are shut so fast
Till law and liberty join hands at last.
On us, on us, is laid the heavy load
Of standing by to see a cruel goad
Plunged deep each day in other women's flesh
To see Thy wounds bleed every day afresh !
Increase our humbleness, increase our powers,
That we may fill the wilderness with flowers
261
OF
That all the desert where thy millions lie
Half choked with earth and toiling lest they die,
May wake and blossom like one heavenly rose
That shall its sweetness out of earth unclose,
And all the world's unutterable pain
At last, at last, O God, be not in vain !
This do we ask, tho' we thereby be slain.
262
A RECURRENT QUESTION
IF we mistake not, it was Sir John Cockburn,
whose views upon one aspect of the fiscal question
have recently been much quoted, who, some years
ago, opened a discussion in London Opinion on a
subject hardly less complicated, though at the first
glance perhaps less controversial and more ob-
viously suited to these pages : the question whether
emigration is desirable for women. Excellent
common sense distinguished many of the letters
contributed.
" Youth and health and capacity ot endurance
they should have as capital to start with," wrote
one of those who entered on the debate. In this
she agreed with another and even more forcible
correspondent, who, unlike herself, believed that
the outlook for middle-aged women in England
promised a severe struggle for existence, much
more severe competitively than in Canada and the
States, but who added that
44 The Englishwoman who thinks of emigrating
should have at least ^50 as capital ; but, above all,
she should satisfy herself that she has the three
essential qualities for Canadian and American life.
She must have : (i) A sound physique to stand the
strain of extremes in climate and the c rush ' of
American business life ; (2) an adaptable tempera-
ment which will not fret and fume because things in
Kansas or Winnipeg are not as they are in Clapham
263
OF
or Nottingham ; and (3) a plucky soul to help her
to face any initial adversities."
Mr. Havelock Ellis wrote that in the four years
which he spent in " one of the most prosperous of
our colonies " he knew
" many women who had come out from the
Home Country; some were happy, others not. It
may be said of women," he observed, " as of
men, that those who succeed here will probably
succeed still better in the Colonies ; those who fail
here will fail still worse there."
He summed up a cogent and illuminating letter
with a reminder that
"As regards the Colonies as a cure for moral
infirmities, [we must] not forget the saying of the
wise Roman that they who run across the sea
change their climate, but do not change their souls."
In this he was at one with the correspondent
quoted above, who said bluntly and sensibly :
" Girls who contemplate emigrating merely in
search of husbands, girls who are afraid of genuine
hard work, girls who fancy that life was meant for
pleasure only, girls who have merely a smattering
of music or a capacity for giggling as their social
accomplishments all these girls ought to stay at
home. They are better off in England, not
because England needs them or appreciates them,
but because young and rapidly developing countries
will not harbour deadheads."
264
It may be mere platitudinarian commonplace to
labour the point that happiness in the highest
sense of the word is dependent upon character
rather than environment. That is self-evident.
But it would also be a very shallow and dangerous
touch of cant to ignore the equally self-evident fact
that in many environments such happiness will
always include a large element of conquered pain.
Mere exercise of faculty, for instance, is often
a legitimate delight which in some directions
many women have to renounce, and those of us to
whom this source of enjoyment lies open would be
Pharisaical indeed if, being unshackled ourselves, we
were to write or speak in such a way as to bind on
the shoulders of others burdens too heavy to be
borne. We shall do well to remember that even
in the twentieth century there are many homes where
the strongest capabilities and gifts, possessed by
one or more of those who dwell about the hearth,
are quietly stifled or surrendered, in the spirit of
a noble loyalty and obedience, and sometimes also,
it must be confessed, through a weak desire to
give to those most loved, not so much what they
need or what is good for them, as what they
exactingly and unjustifiably claim.
How can the women we have in mind be best
helped to freedom and usefulness by release from
those cramping grooves and circles, in which there
is a wasteful sacrifice of faculty, even though their
initial readiness to waste themselves in a moral
treadmill has had in it elements of great nobleness
and supreme love ? There are homes where four
or five daughters, all middle-aged women, will
265
OF 3*3088
continue to starve themselves in body and soul
rather than grieve some near and dear relation
father or mother, or elder brother, it may be by
breaking the family tradition and saying frankly,
" We are poor, we must divide. Our parents shall
be tenderly cared for always, but that can in reality
be better done if we do not all herd together ; there
must be division of labour ; some of us will stay,
some of us will go."
In some such cases the suggestion of emigration
may undoubtedly lessen the difficulty of such a
rupture, for there are many parents and guardians
who will listen to that particular appeal, but who
would be deaf to the idea of an independent pro-
fessional career for their daughters or their wards
in England. And, indeed, it does appear that
emigration may in some instances offer a healthier
and more natural field for women than much of
the over-strenuous tension of our great English
towns. Only there is always the question, " Who
is the woman and where does she purpose going ? "
If she is unhandy, vacillating, prejudiced, weak, the
most ignorant of us can perceive that she may cross
the seas only to deepen her own misery and create
new misery for others. If, on the other hand, she
is capable, prompt, and in the deepest and widest
sense of the word womanly, then, if she be
equipped also with health and abundant vitality,
it is not difficult to imagine for her a wide and
delightful kingdom. Yet even for such a woman
as this, and granting that she goes forth unpledged
and free of soul without which proviso there may
be good material for tragedy yet even for her
266
the outlook is more complicated than might at first
be supposed. It may be true that she will command
a higher income than in the British Islands, though
frequently expenses will be higher also ; but, as
regards marriage, the risks may be multiplied rather
than lessened, for the mere fact of a superfluity of
men in the Colonies is but one factor in the problem,
and occasionally a very deceptive one ; it does not
by any means follow that the woman who has grown
up under quite other surroundings, and suddenly
comes into their midst, will find among them her
true mate. They have been educated, perhaps,
under conditions quite alien to her own life, these
men, and the noblest of them so weak is human
nature may fail to touch her heart, even if they
wish to win her a wish that the mere fact of their
majority in point of numbers does not always make
a foregone conclusion. The comradeship offered
may be healthy, inspiriting, delightful ; but, because
wives are needed, it by no means follows that the
emigrant's own small round of acquaintance a
round limited, in some instances, by the isolation
of " up-country" life, or of a small provincial
settlement will include the man who can uplift
her that one individual woman in particular to
the ideal wifehood and motherhood which might
seem likely best to complete and ripen all that is
finest in her. There are men in our colonies who
are strong, chivalrous, upright the very salt of
the earth. But is it not equally true that the
wastrel and the hollow-hearted, the tinsel that is
not gold, may not seldom have been shipped there
as a last resource ? Good and bad, coarse and fine,
267
OF
will be found there, as here, among the men as well
as among the women, and many, doubtless, all the
world over, who are a little of both.
If it were certain that a happy marriage or a
successful career would await even nine-tenths ot
the women likely to emigrate, then, indeed, who is
there among us who would not hurry her sisters
down to the ships ? But it is not so simple, though
doubtless the risks may often be amply worth taking.
In other words, the question of emigration for
women is one which cannot be answered in general
terms, but must be carefully weighed and inquired
into in each particular instance. And as for the
deep, underlying joy and peace which may make
any woman's life beautiful, whether in youth or
age, these are not dependent on latitude and longi-
tude, or even on social and professional liberty, but
on surrender, moment by moment, to the guidance
of the Highest.
268
SNOW-WHITE
AMID the dazzling whiteness now surrounding my
cottage, weighing down the branches of the tall
pines that make a charming bit of woodland across
the roadway, I think of the magic wrought on far-
away buildings, transmuting all grimy and squalid
outlines to peaceful splendour, and I turn to those
wondrous lines of Mr. Robert Bridges which
describe a snowfall in London :
" When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy
town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing ;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down :
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof, and railing ;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and
sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty
heaven ;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed
brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly
glare :
269
OF
The eye marvelled marvelled at the dazzling
whiteness ;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn
air."
The outward universe is, as man knows it, one
vast symbolic scroll, of meaning too deep to be
uttered ; and if we turn symbols to hackneyed uses,
that is the fault of our platitudes and not of the
great original. The '" stillness of the solemn air,"
that almost always accompanies the newly fallen
snow, is one attraction of that particular hiero-
glyph, as though it were the stainless peace of
an unutterable purity, and when the sky overhead
is of that radiant, unfathomable blueness, which,
to our cousins across the Atlantic, is the familiar
background to such a foreground as this, and
even here in England is now and again vouch-
safed, then the great page of the illuminated
missal is easy to read. If there be added, in lady's
redingote or the " pink " of a huntsman, that
touch of scarlet that the Queen in the old fairy-
tale of Snowdrop beheld in the white snow when
she pricked her thimble-finger, then indeed the
supremacy of contrast is a splendour not easily for-
gotten. But even without the blue and the scarlet,
the celestial whiteness of the untrodden snow has,
like the first brave snowdrop, a message for every
childlike heart, a message that is only less moving
than the sight of a snowy cloud sailing silently
across the midsummer sky, or the fragrant star of
a Mary-lily in the June sunshine.
Is it not a priceless symbol and possession, a bit
270
of knowledge which every man may hug with joy, to
have learned that whiteness is not a negation, but
the sum of all those delicate and brilliant hues which
are the very ecstacy of art, the very language of
rapture, that
" Pure light unbroken by the prism "
of which Browning wrote in a lyric of self-effacing
passion ? Ah, Browning, the great optimist, under-
stood sorrow and bitterness, though he saw through
the agony of darkness to the light behind it all.
He never ignored ugly facts. It was in a sordid
and hideous murder trial that he found and limned
for all time that beautiful soul u perfect in white-
ness " of whom he makes the old Pope say :
" Yet if in purity and patience, if
In faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,
Safe like the signet stone with the new name
That saints are known by, if in right returned
For wrong, most pardon for worst injury,
If there be any virtue, any praise,
Then will this woman-child have proved who
knows ?
Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me."
It was an awful story in which the child of an
outcast played her part, and the poet who drew
Pompilia in all the beauty of immortality knew
well that this, which is " not our continuing city,"
is full of tragedy as well as of redeeming love, and
that, as he wrote elsewhere,
27 1
OF
" It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins
issue with death ! "
It is part of our debt to him that, like many
another great poet, he has brought home to us the
mystic reality of that unfathomable love, which
utters to all the agony of the world, from the heart
of God, what we mean when we say to some beloved
and sorrowing friend, " My heart bleeds for you,"
and our friend bathes in the warm tide of outpoured
sympathy and strength.
Between Christmas and the New Year many a
North-Country shepherd out in the snow will have
thought of Him who thus gave Himself for us,
and of whom Henry Vaughan has reminded us
that there were many reasons why He should call
the shepherds to Him first
" To see their soul's great shepheard who was come,
To bring all stragglers home ;
Where now they find him out, and, taught before,
That Lamb of God adore,
That Lamb whose days great Kings and Prophets
wish'd
And long'd to see, but miss'd.
The first light they beheld was bright and gay,
And turn'd their night to day ;
But to this later light they saw in him,
Their day was dark and dim.
Ah, why fret that there be graves beneath the
snow, as well as snowdrops, when Love that
" beareth all things " is omnipresent, and all souls
272
not only the souls of the righteous are " in the
hand of God " !
" Eternal Father, who didst all create,
In whom we live, and to whose bosom move,
To all men be Thy name known, which is Love.
By Thee in paths of peace Thy sheep be led,
And in the vale of terror comforted/'
It is fitting that the lines with which this little
snow-reverie ends should be from that great living
poet with whose description of London snow it
began, but to realise their beauty and their mean-
ing to the full, not only should the entire sonnet
be read, but also the whole series, entitled "The
Growth of Love," of which it is the culmination.
2 73
IN PRAISE OF "ADAM BEDE "
[Reprinted from the " Temple Classics " by the courtesy
of the publishers]
GEORGE ELIOT was far too great an artist to stoop
to that kind of obvious, yet superficial, portraiture
in fiction which lends itself to precise identification :
she is known to have disliked extremely that vulgar
spirit of trite misapprehension which attributes to
creative genius a kind of mental snapshot, scatter-
ing photographs of places and people, to which the
would-be critics give large-type labels. We know,
from what she has herself told us, how far re-
moved from any cheap reduplication of that sort
was her presentment of "Adam Bede," and she
has warned us that, though there were, in her
sketch of him, traits of her own father, and, in his
story, two incidents connected with the latter, yet
he was by no means to be regarded as a portrait,
any more than Dinah is a portrait of that " Aunt
Samuel " whose visit to a condemned prisoner, " a
very ignorant girl, who had murdered her child,"
did, as a matter of fact, suggest the germ out of
which the story of " Adam Bede " arose. But all
this is best told in the author's own words, and will
be found on pp. 254 and 255 of the one- volume
edition of Mr. Cross's " Life of George Eliot."
To annotate a work of art is always a perilous
undertaking, and especially would that be true of
so supreme an achievement as " Adam Bede " at
once an idyll and a tragedy, absolute in its simple
274
OF
unity and self-restraint, most moving in its beauty,
passionate in its suffering, yet calm and uplifting
as a great symphony or a fine sunset. There is
nothing to explain, nothing to add ; for hardly
anything is more striking to a careful and sympa-
thetic reader than the perfect critical judgment with
which everything likely to mar artistic unity and
clearness has, by a kind of divine instinct, been
avoided, while everything vital to the drama, even
to the smallest detail, unfolds with the inevitable-
ness of fate.
It may satisfy a transient curiosity to know that
Mr. Irwine's " Foulis ./Eschylus," alluded to on
p. 214, was published at Glasgow in 179 5, and that
there was a handsome edition from the text of
Stanley, corrected by Professor Person, and illus-
trated with Flaxman's designs. And although it
in no way affects our enjoyment of that inimitable
description of Mr. Casson, on p. 13, and the sleek
healthiness of the small upper sphere in his genial
and rotund person, it may possibly please some
stray lover of English verse to note that it was in
the first book of " Paradise Lost" (line 291) that
" Milton has irreverently called the moon " " a
spotty globe."
In classic verse there are many descriptions of
English landscape which would finely companion
the noble prose in which, by half a dozen masterly
lines, George Eliot has again and again given us the
very poetry of Midland scenery. Without attempt-
ing any elaborate reference to these, it may be
permissible to recall the words of another great
Englishwoman of the nineteenth century :
275
OF
" (As if God's finger touched but did not press
In making England) such an up and down
Of verdure, nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land ; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb ;
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams ;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being my Shakspeare's."
The oak and the elm here have the pre-eminence ;
but the beech-tree unsurpassed for symmetry of
line and translucent beauty of colour is more
frequent in Adam Bede's country, and, in organic
unity of force and grace, might stand as no unfitting
symbol of the form and endurance given to his
story.
George Eliot has not been afraid to give an exact
date to the novel. It was published in 1859, and
the story opens in 1799, sixty years earlier. But,
just as she has avoided any lessening of charm
which would have resulted from mere multiplicity
of detail, in those pretty touches of bygone costume
which make the final spell of grace, of colour, of
vividly picturesque reality, in her descriptions of
Hetty, or Arthur, or the Irwines ; so also in the
more important features of her background, while
the setting of the story is found to be strikingly
accurate and appropriate, yet jarring amplification
276
OF <ADtAM BSVS
and sentimental embroidering have throughout
been skilfully excluded.
1799 was a critical and eventful year, and with
admirable art George Eliot makes use of the dis-
turbed condition of Ireland as an occasion for
Arthur Donnithorne's absence from England with
his regiment when Hetty arrives at Windsor
admirable art, because the point is taken for granted
and not even explained, lest the idyllic setting of
the tragedy a setting which can only enhance its
inexorable pathos and terror should be diverted
to political controversy or detailed national history.
It is the year in which " the Moving Finger " of
a self-made destiny wrote the frightful nay, out-
rageous story of the abuse of the Indemnity Acts,
upon a page of Irish history blotted by torture and
corruption, and in which the Irish Parliament signed
its own death-warrant in its proceedings against
suspected rebels; a year in which the bigotry
against Irish Roman Catholics seems to have
equalled in spirit the worst stories of the Spanish
Inquisition, since there are many men and women
to whom torture and brutal flogging would be a
worse kind of suffering than death at the stake.
Any one interested in the subject may find it worth
while to turn to the fourth volume of Massey's
" History of England." The stirring history, that
was a-making in the wider European story of
Buonaparte's increasing power and Nelson's vic-
tories, is indicated, with the same incidental brevity,
in the remarks of the villagers. Any writer less
inspired might have been inclined to labour the
point, but never once in " Adam Bede " did
277
OF
George Eliot swerve from the austere self-discipline
and economy of the highest achievement.
Again, it is impossible not to admire the critical
instinct which forbade any dissertation on the
history of Dinah's co-religionists. There is no
mention of them, beyond what was necessarily and
dramatically included in the story. Perhaps the
keenest temptation to impertinent digression likely
to assail the writer of this note is the inclination to
touch on Dinah's divinely simple re-statement of
eternal truths. It can scarcely be doubted that,
precisely through the absence of all polemical in-
tention, all weak sentimentalism, all inclination to
" improve the occasion," the story of " Adam
Bede " must have entered deeply into that widen-
ing and regenerating of religious thought so
characteristic of the nineteenth century, and that
the music of thousands of toiling lives may owe
much to that thrilling chord, struck by the hand of
her who gave to our heart and imagination so fair
an ideal in this gentle servant of the poor, of whom
Adam said that she had "a face like a lily," and
whom his mother likened to the angel in his Bible
that had rolled away the stone from the tomb.
Herself following in the steps of Charles Wesley,
Dinah Morris holds the memory with the same
warm, white radiance as that other unlettered girl
whose presence has transfigured the dark atmo-
sphere of the " Ring and the Book " with a halo of
purity and grace.
There is an incense of the Morn to which some
are more alive than others. George Eliot was very
sensitive to odours, and has used their influence in
278
OF
61 Adam Bede " with as penetrating a magic as
Milton has done in " Paradise Lost." Twice is
Dinah associated with the fragrance of sweet-brier :
what could better haunt the recollection of such a
presence than this exquisite dewy sweetness, un-
sullied as the clear, fresh air of a world beyond our
mortal dust, yet equally suggestive of the village
altar and the village hearth ?
Certain it must be that this tragic idyll, of which
Dinah is the life and soul, will not only last as long
as the English language lasts, but will purify, uplift,
and strengthen, every heart and mind into which it
enters, and the more lastingly because the author
has never once obtruded her own personality ; she
has simply held up the mirror to life, and this no
great artist can do without reflecting something of
the ineffable Presence. The sacredness of work,
the sense of the God-given inspiration which should
inform and transfigure handicraft, the subtle rela-
tion between thoroughness in duty and solidity of
character, the divine value of lowly tasks ; seldom
indeed have these struck more warmly and con-
vincingly on the listening mind than in this en-
thralling story of human love and passion. But
this sterling philosophy of life, this unflinching
ideal of ardent obedience and uncalculating self-
surrender to the command that lies nearest, could
hardly have made so poignant and salutary a mark
upon the memory, had they left their legitimate
everyday drama and descended to self-conscious
teaching, or had they missed their converse in that
self-delighting, easy benevolence which, in the slowly
grinding mill of Life, learned its own desolating
279
s OF
possibilities, and spoke its own bitter loss of youth
and joy, in Arthur's last recorded words.
Looking at " Silas Marner " and "Scenes of
Clerical Life," to say nothing of " The Mill on the
Floss '' and the later novels, it is a bold thing to
say that " Adam Bede " is George Eliot's master-
piece, yet the more it is studied, the more likely is
that belief to be confirmed. The story hardly seems
to be fold it lives. So inspired is its intuitive
perfection that even the few out-of-the-way words
of Midland dialect seem to make no passing ob-
scurity, their meaning being intervoven with the
context in such a way as to be implicitly obvious.
And with what mastery of genius has the novelist
given us the simple poetry of peasant imagery and
peasant speech ! There is a beautiful passage in
dough's " Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich/' in which
Elspie says to her lover :
" I have been building myself up, up, and toilfully
raising,
Just like as if the bridge were to do it itself
without masons,
Painfully getting myself upraised one stone on
another,
All one side I mean ; and now I see on the other
Just such another fabric uprising, better and
stronger,
Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand
coming down, and
Dropping the great keystone in the middle : there
in my dreaming,
280
OF
Feel the other part all the other stones of the
archway,
Joined into mine with a strange happy sense of
completeness. . . ."
In a single phrase, pathetic in its bare simplicity,
Lisbeth Bede, Adam's mother, the narrow, queru-
lous old woman, "clean as a snowdrop," and one
of the most vivid of the minor creations in literature,
gives that image its complement of grief. " When
one end o* th' bridge tumbles down,' 1 she says,
" where's th' use o' th' other stannin' ?" Mrs.
Poyser's renown has overshadowed that of Lisbeth,
but the latter is quite as epigrammatic as the
other notable housewife ; and what a true touch
it is to make these two most " practical " women
the most daringly poetic in their turns of speech !
It is Mrs. Poyser who says of Dinah that she is
''one o' them things as looks the brightest on a
rainy day, and loves you the best when you're most
in need on't," and Lisbeth who describes herself
after her husband's death as being " no better nor
an old haft when the blade is gone."
Language, as George Eliot herself uses it in
" Adam Bede," has become so finished and flexible
a medium of thought that it may be said to have
attained to that highest perfection which effaces
itself, so that the reader forgets that there is any
medium at all, in his active and immediate realisa-
tion of that which it conveys.
As for the humour that breathes through the
whole novel, Shakespeare himself has not surpassed
it in unaffected actuality. The drama unfolds
281
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itself in all its terrible beauty and pathos with the
awful inevitableness and naturalness of life itself.
" The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ,
Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
But for the sense of encircling and redeeming
Love, which comes home to the reader, not only
through the words and deeds of Dinah, but in
every passing heart-throb, every obscure footstep,
throughout the whole story, the burden of fate
would become too overwhelming a load, so insistent
throughout is the passionate verification of Adam's
words, " Life's a reckoning we can't make twice
over," and those earlier words of his, already
referred to, as having been quoted by Arthur at the
close of all, " There's a sort of wrong that can
never be made up for."
282
ST. PAUL'S CHIMES
IN London's heart, the home of toil and love,
Where, round the cross, the silver- breasted dove
Is circling to the music of your chime
Or brooding in the golden mist above
The docks and shipping and unresting river,
A little height beyond the smoke and grime
That veil the haunts of love and grief and crime
Still, day and night, your message you deliver,
To point the record of unpausing time :
Reflecting on your dial,
For watchful man's espial,
Earth's tale of hourly movement on through space ;
On, round her axis turning,
About a splendour burning,
With punctual inexorable pace :
While, daily, like some bird on slanting wing,
She holds incessantly the wondrous poise
That will secure recurrent vernal joys ;
The perfume, colour, music of the Spring !
Still drawn to him she never will embrace,
Who warms her winter into summer grace,
As if reluctant, yet persistent, goes
Repelled and drawn enriched with human freight,
Made glad with winged and footed fellowship
Of beast and bird, and finny-ocean deep,
And fair wild things, from holly-berry to rose
Nor out of her ellipse with random slip
Has ever fallen, nor flown with random leap
To swift destruction and abysmal fate !
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OF
Still dost thou mark unerring, how she moves
In that vast cosmic order where she proves
One influence, small and incommensurate,
In that wide universe whereof man knows
No certain boundary, where the mystery glows
Magnetic with unseen, unknown vibrations
Of ancient stars and ever- new creations,
The sanctities of endless constellations,
Which human thought can never violate.
For what are days and hours and months and years,
While seasons come and go
And lives move to and fro,
But rhythmic interwheeling of the spheres
Whose balanced flight in everlasting chase,
Which man recalls upon your homely face,
Are no true measure of his hopes and fears,
His joys divine, his agonies and tears ;
Though you, two-handed, made to measure time,
Through day and night the mystic numbers chime !
Yet man, while onward faring
Through many an age and clime
From light to darkness, back through dark to light,
With dawn forever following after night
Will note your solemn chime,
And set his clocks to rhyme
With our small earthly wheel
In that most wondrous, universal Clock,
Whereon the Source of Law has set His seal
Through darkness, light preparing,
For life, through death, still caring,
That timepiece none may alter or unlock
Save One Who made it.
284
ST. TvtUUS CHIMSS
Men may gaze and mock
Its pendulum will rock
Through all aeonian change and temporal shock,
'Mid cycling evolution,
Or sequent devolution
And starry revolution,
On to the end of time !
And when the Master shall the heavens roll
At last together, like a finished scroll.
To give us welcome at the " Marriage-feast"
Which will the dual riddle perchance resolve
That man has ever vainly yearned to solve
Beyond the caravanserai of earth,
With all its dream of human death and birth,
Love having slain the dragon and the beast !
Then, if we see no more the Clock august
That shall have vanished with the starry dust
And all the bodies breathing mortal breath,
We shall not much remember it, nor care,
When hope's fruition faltering memory shrives !
Oh, then at last, when all division's over
And joy has come to every faithful lover,
While those " twice-born," beyond the reach of
death,
Gaze on the Face they longed for all their lives,
All earthly love immortal, bright or dim
Fulfilled and found again in finding Him ;
Unless their heaven be hell because they read,
In one long answering look that will not spare,
Of strength they wasted whereof love had need,
They will be thankful Life of time is bare !
285
TWO STUDIES
BY MAY SINCLAIR
A SERVANT OF THE EARTH
BY MAY SINCLAIR
His name was Elisha Bole, and he lived in the
little village of Harford, in South Devon. He was
a farm-labourer, fallen in his old age on evil days
and the parish. With him these things had come
ten years before their time, for Bole was a young
man that is to say, not much more than sixty
at the time of the great trouble. Bole was out
hedging with the best of them, when he slipped
from a high bank, and the stake he had just planted
went through his ribs, doing incurable hurt to his
lungs.
That was how Bole came to embrace the con-
templative life. Not willingly. It may seem hard
to believe it of a Devonshire man, but Bole, with
only breath enough to take him to the end of his
garden and back, panted for the life of action.
Yesterday he had range of the soil for at least
seven miles round his village. To-day a garden
and a cottage were all his world.
A pleasant place enough, that garden, when it
was not scourged by rain from heaven, or hidden
under mist from the river, or blotted out by fog
from the sea. There the year rang its changes in
a happy sequence of scents, violets, roses, chrysan-
themums, and the rich earthy smell dear to a son
of the soil. There the slow movement of the
seasons stirred his intelligence to processes more
slow.
T 289
OF
A porch of trellis-work, flanked by tall bushes
of chrysanthemums, led straight from the open air
into the dwelling-place, an inner world where all
was vague, indistinguishable. At first you saw
nothing there but layers upon layers of darkness
and the figure of Bole moving on the face of the
darkness like a shadow. Then gradually, because
of a certain light and movement in them, his eyes
and his smile detached themselves from the sur-
rounding gloom . Presently, after stumbling against
it, perhaps, you made out a table heaped with dark
objects (I never knew what these were till long
afterwards), or, guided by its furious ticking, an
eight-day clock in the far corner, and in the
twilight of the window pots of geraniums half
buried under primeval dirt. At least, you may
call it dirt I would rather think of it as a gentle
fusion of Bole and his geraniums with the earth
from which they came.
After all, when you got used to it, there was
something restful in these obscurities which made
Bole so profoundly one with his world. It was a
shock when I found one warm Sunday that Bole
had developed a sudden individuality by washing
his face. It seemed to disturb that serene, abiding
sense of unity. How often have I found him
crouching over his low fire, or seated at his table,
motionless, staring into the darkness. Then he
seemed to me not so much Bole the labourer as
Bole the dreamer, the philosopher, the mystic.
Who knows whether in that lapse of all sensation,
all idea, Bole may not have touched the supreme
Nothingness ? I used to ask myself whether I did
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OF
well to rouse him from those beatitudes of vacuity
to the painful life of thought, whether our friend-
ship might not have interfered with some merging
of Bole in the Infinite.
For it came on him suddenly, when he was un-
ready for anything of the kind. Bole had not
learned the uses of friendship, and strange faces
annoyed him. His life had been split in two :
there was the time before and the time after his
accident, and one knew nothing of the other.
And if Bole was morose as well as unsociable,
circumstances had helped to make him so. He
lived alone, having neither friends nor kindred in
the village, save Radley, his brother-in-law, and
Radley he hated. Radley, once a policeman, was
a sordid man who lived on a pension in obtrusive
affluence. Fortune, who had smiled on Radley,
had treated Bole with feminine malignity. Many
years before the accident some of the villagers
had formed themselves into a club for support in
times of sickness. This club was looked on by
the greater part with extreme disfavour, and only
a few of the more revolutionary spirits belonged
to it, Bole, among their number, risking all his
little savings. The club might have flourished to
this day, but for the inconsiderate behaviour of
one of its members, whose ill-timed sickness and
death broke the bank. Of him Bole always spoke
as of one who had indeed greatly erred, but had
not therefore forfeited all claim to pity and forgive-
ness. But Radley well, Bole was the creature of
prejudice.
Bole being as he was, his friendship was not
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OF
to be won without infinite sleight and cunning.
Many a time my hand was on the latch of his
garden gate before I could bring myself to open
it. I had thought out a plan, bold, but somewhat
crude. Attracted by his fame as a gardener, I
was to come to him and humbly beg for advice as
to the best way of preserving crocuses from field-
mice. A custard pudding was then to be offered him
as an informal acknowledgment of his services.
But at our first meeting if it could be called a
meeting when Bole's back was immovably pre-
sented to me on his threshold my courage for-
sook me, and I fled, bearing the pudding.
Our second meeting was happier. This time I
had come to buy of his parsley. It was cut and
handed to me in silence, and I tendered a shilling
in exchange. He looked at it darkly.
" That bain't tiipence," said he.
"N-no. It's no matter."
He held out the coin shining in the palm of his
grimy hand.
" Tiipence, I zaid. There's no chailnge i' my
plaace."
And I had no pennies, so I had to take a
shilling's worth of parsley ; his flowers he would
not sell.
On my third visit I turned again to my original
plan. I laid my difficulty before him. For full
five minutes Bole looked at his hands as if to
bring back a sense of the earth they had worked
in ; he seemed to plunge and lose himself in depths
of thought, of memory. He rose darkling to the
surface.
292
OF rue
" Crocusses, crocusses yii diggies a ring mebbe
one voot round, mebbe tii. Yii vills 'em wi'
zinder. Yii zets the crocuss i' the midst. They
zay the mouse wunnut win droo the zinder."
He smiled, and by that smile I came to know
him. I took heart from it, and asked if I might
come again. He answered me with an air of
extreme abstraction : " Zo dii, zo dii, ef yii plaze,
nuzz."
I went again. We had not much to say, so
many subjects were delicate.
In time I learned to know his ways, and steered
clear of the more prominent rocks of offence ; but
to this day I blush with shame to think of the
mistake I made almost at the very outset, thereby-
undoing the work of many weeks. I offered to
read aloud to him. It is very terrible to look
back upon, but I was young, and so many of his
neighbours liked being read to that I thought he
would be sure to share this taste. Not a bit of it.
The very suggestion was an insult to his sense of
scholarship. From that moment I often came upon
him with a book in his hand (generally the Bible
or the Book of Common Prayer), when he would
detain me, filling up the pauses in the conversation
by reading to himself in a slow, soft whisper, lay-
ing firm hold on each word with his thumb-nail.
A lengthy process ; but why should he care for
time who was so sure of a blessed eternity ?
His tongue once loosened, Bole gradually un-
bent. We talked topics ranging from the
weather and the crops to the more intimate deal-
ings of Providence with his creatures. No gossip.
2 93
OF
Bole did not care enough for his neighbours to
talk about them ; the little world of the village
had ceased to exist for him. But there were
still difficulties, limitations. For instance, on the
subject of Bole's health there was a certain etiquette
against which you gravely sinned by telling him
that he <c looked better." The right thing was to
begin thus :
" You seem to be wheezing a great deal to-day ;
I'm sure your chest must be worse."
" I be tur'ble bad wi' the whazing, as yii zee.
Doctor never comes nigh me." He chuckled
maliciously. " Like as not my complaint's a bit
tii masterful fur 'e." No discomfort could subdue
his pride in a disorder that had outwitted the
faculty. And Bole knew how to return a compli-
ment. This visit was my first after being kept
indoors with some illness ; suddenly remembering
this, he exclaimed with well-feigned horror : " My !
Zit yii down on thiccy cheer. Yii be green i' the
faace ! " (This was a polite fiction.)
I waived the delicate flattery. " I'm all right
now."
" Don't yii tell me. Better or wuss, yii be
tur'ble bad still, I can zee, sure 'miff."
Once launched on personalities, Bole grew
rapidly intimate. He went back to the days
before the accident ; his voice softened, and he
told of his dead wife dead seventeen years.
" 'Tis strange. Somehows I zeems t' remember
her now better'n ever I dii. 'Er wur a good
'ooman. 'Er couldn't bide long wi' that Radley
Arr-r-r ! "
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OF
His brother-in-law naturally suggesting his
brother, whom he had not seen since they were boys
together, Bole wandered further afield. " 'Er be
gone tu Canada this zixty year 'tis a laa'ge plaace
they zay. 'Er be varmer there, gotten's ownvarm
and's own land." A visionary look stole over
his face as he spoke of that brother who had
realised the labourer's eternal dream. " 'Is zon
writes and tells me's vather's growed se vat, er
'ad t' 'ave a special cheer carpenter-maade vur
en tu zit down in."
This was said with pride, as a convincing proof
that his brother was a man of substance. That I
too had a brother in Canada was thought by Bole
to be something more than a startling coincidence.
After that day I was free to come and go as I
pleased, till, if I let a fortnight pass without seeing
him, he would receive me with mild reproach and
always the same saying :
" I wur veared as yii wur tuk bad again."
As if nothing but illness or death could have
excused such neglect !
But if this delightful footing had only been won
by cunning, it needed still greater art to make
Bole accept the smallest offering. Bole did not
want chanty ; he wanted to get to work u i' the
vields the vields again ! " Moreover, he deemed
that it is more blessed to give than to receive. He
never let me go now without a bunch of flowers
or cuttings from his best geraniums. He would
approach mysteriously a certain gloomy drawer,
and, opening it in a large and leisurely manner,
show me stowed away in a corner an apple which
295
s OF
he had saved for me on account of its preternatural
size. Never shall I forget the smile of underhand
delight with which, in the first winter of our ac-
quaintance, he announced, " I've got a Chrizmizz
box for yu," displaying a huge cauliflower carefully
wrapped in the most abandoned of red pocket-
handkerchiefs. And when it was put to him that
as he delighted in giving, so it might be that what
he called " charity J) was also a form of self-
indulgence on my part, he accepted the gloss.
He confessed that barley-water and lemon-juice
was an excellent thing for " the whazing." On
this new drink Bole experimented in all the spirit
of a natural philosopher. He would hide it for
days in dark places ; anon he would set it in the
sun till it fermented and exploded in his face, to
his perpetual surprise and delight, when he would
maintain against all argument that the effervescent
state was the only right and proper one for barley-
water.
Happily Bole seemed aware that a man who
has once accepted barley-water cannot consistently
refuse any other trifle you may wish to offer him.
And now his strength revived, but only for a
season. Worse than parish fare were the darkness
and the dirt of Bole's dwelling. Even stocks and
oak-leaved geraniums were powerless against the
ungovernable smells that rose from the ground
where the damp oozed through the imperfect
concrete. In stormy weather I have seen the rain
beat in from the threshold and form a small pool
in the middle of the floor. And when a cholera
scare came upon us I felt that steps must be taken.
296
OF me
Therefore I sought out a woman with strong arms,
and stronger nerves, fit for the Herculean labour,
and broke it very gently to Bole that, with his
leave, it would please me to have his cottage
thoroughly cleaned and whitewashed.
He refused politely but firmly : " Let en bide,
let en bide." Still more gently I touched on the
kinship of disease and darkness (you couldn't say
*' dirt " for fear of hurting his feelings). Still
more politely he rebuked my impiety. " I've no
vaith i' zoap an 1 water. I puts my trust Else-
where."
All the same he looked furtively at my gown as
I got up to go. It had been fresh when I started ;
now, sure enough, there were dark streaks on its
freshness. To my sorrow he whipped out the
red pocket-handkerchief, sought to remove them,
and shrank back appalled by his own deed.
4< My ! I've maade en worser'n 'twas. 'Tis
the dirt. But there yii know what 'tis ! "
Not many days afterwards I found him sunning
himself at his door and smiling softly. He laid a
detaining hand on the latch, saying, with a look of
indescribable slyness: "I've got a surprise vur
yii." He then threw open the door.
It was a surprise, not to say a shock. The
room had been whitewashed from floor to ceiling,
and everything in it thoroughly scoured and
cleaned. The tin canisters on the chimney-piece
gleamed like silver. A brass warming-pan flashed
from the wall. On the table by the door shone a
white and gold tea set. This was the collection of
dark objects which had excited my curiosity in the
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OF
beginning. Bole broke into a low but triumphant
chuckle. In a fit of remorse he had planned this
scene for my delight, even employing a friend of
Radley's for the job.
I remember I was pleased with the transforma-
tion. But I have wondered since whether, Bole
being so one with that familiar darkness, its re-
moval may not have helped to loosen his hold on
life. A day or two later I found him for the first
time busy and in high favour with himself.
" Yii'll be surprised to see what I be a-doing of.
I be tailoring I be ! "
I was invited to sit down and watch him. He
was patching his old fustian coat on an entirely new
plan. His way was beset with difficulty. First
there was the thread. Bole held it like a lance in
rest, and, pursing his mouth with determination,
tilted blindly at the needle's eye. Then there was
the stuff. Bole was cutting out pieces the exact
size of the hole, fitting each into the other, and
sewing the raw edges together. When I tried to
explain the superior advantages of legitimate
patching he shook his head with grave dis-
approval, and went on in his own fashion, looking
up nervously from time to time as the stitches
perpetually gave way and the patch fell out. In
silence I handed him a large patch, cut out when
he was not looking. There was a moment of
suspense. At last in silence he took it, and applied
it according to instructions, which he pretended not
to hear, putting his head very much on one side,
like one liberally indulgent to a doubtful innova-
tion. He completed his task with wonderful
OF THS
success, but the triumph left him trembling and
exhausted.
And now, though it was yet six weeks from
Christmas, the weather was unusually bitter, and I
brought him a warm Cardigan jacket. It was a
thought too tight ; and though he insisted on try-
ing it on, he was much shaken by the effort.
Politely he denied the misfit. " Er'll dii vinely,
er'll dii vinely, mizz '' ; but there was disappoint-
ment somewhere. On being implored to unburden
his mind, he confessed that the desire of his heart
was for a new white coat. " Zlops, some calls 'em
zame as yii zee me a-tailoring at."
I was ashamed at not having anticipated this
obvious want, and a white coat was procured with
all possible speed. But when I saw him next he
still wore the tailored garment, and I asked
anxiously if his new one was a misfit too. He
shook his head. No, he was "zaving 'er till th'
owld en wur dirty 'nuff to be laaid tii-zide."
Only one who had seen " th' owld en " could
appreciate the ideal nature of his ambition.
Strangely enough it was on this day that Bole
showed the first sign of any interest in his neigh-
bours. One half of Harford is virtuous, the other
half is not. I had told him I had just come from
the house of one Martha Pile, where a young girl
was dying of a terrible form of consumption. He
shook his head gravely. " Martha Piles's is no
plaace fur yii, mizz. They zaay 'tis a bad house."
" I don't know what they say Lizzie's dying. ''
" Dying ? Dying ? " He crouched closer to the
fire. " Well, Martha's a bad en, but I never knew
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OF
no harm to the pore maaid. Dying, be 'er ? " He
shivered.
It was but a week later when a message came
up from the village that my friend was very ill.
I hurried down to the cottage. The droop-
ing chrysanthemums, bitter-sweet on the keen
November air, the hoarse ticking of the eight-day
clock, had a hint of dissolution in them, and my
heart was heavy as 1 passed through the dwelling-
place, so strangely bright and clean, to the low
room above.
He did not know me. Radley was with him ;
he did not know Radley. Radley was grieved at
his painful discourtesy in not recognising me
through the mist of death : he explained many
times over that he was " a bit light i' th' 'ead,
like." And all the time Bole moved his head from
side to side, and babbled of I know not what ; but
it seemed that even now, on the borderland of
death, he was lost in some shadowy struggle for
the means of life. Earth-bound ? Who knows ?
A little while and he had done with earth ; the
servant was freed from his master. As I left the
room I saw the new white coat lying neatly folded
on a chair. It had never been worn.
300
GEORGE MEREDITH
BY MAY SINCLAIR
GEORGE MEREDITH was born before his time, and
he has died before it, as a young man dies. For
fifty-five years he laboured, bringing forth the long
and splendid procession of his masterpieces, from
"The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," a novel of
absolute and incomparable greatness, to " The
Amazing Marriage," which would alone have
proved greatness in a lesser man. And he has not
yet come into his own. He is king to the kings and
the great lords of literature, but he can in no way
be said to reign by the voice of the sovran people.
After a long period of obscurity he has passed into
the eternal possession of the few. But although
by a dreadful fate he became for a time the prey of
the cultured, who are fairly numerous, the great,
heavy mass of people who read, or think they read,
cannot stand Meredith.
And to-day, among the cultured and the critical
who do read him, there is a reaction against him.
Nobody doubts his greatness nor the divinity of it.
Nobody dares suggest that he did not produce great
literature. The tendency is to complain that it
was literature that he insisted on reproducing, and
not life. Some of us deny that he was either a
great novelist or a great poet.
The younger generation of novelists are all for
a conscientious realism, and we have a few young
critics who are conscientious too. And Meredith
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s OF
is peculiarly baffling to these. He eludes all their
attempts to catch and label him. He seems to
them now a realist of considerable piety, and now
a romanticist of the kind they most abhor. Al-
ready before his death they were trying to place
him. They are painfully anxious, elaborately care-
ful, not to place him wrong. And he refuses to
be placed.
He did away with their preposterous labels once
for all twenty-three years ago, when, in the first
chapter of " Diana of the Crossways," he pro-
claimed himself a prophet of " the Real," and
at the same time told us that our Realists were
our " castigators for not having yet embraced
Philosophy."
He defined fiction as " the summary of actual
Life, the within and the without of us." It was
as a novelist that he came forward for judgment,
and it is as a novelist that they arraign him to-day,
allowing him to be a philosopher, and, perhaps, as
it were by the skin of his teeth, a poet.
Now, to measure his greatness, not as a philo-
sopher, nor yet as a poet, but as a novelist, we
must remember the position of the novelist in the
Victorian age. He found himself between the
devil of realism and the deep sea of sentiment, a
horrible position. It distorted his whole attitude
to life and his view of the Real. Meredith was
the first to deliver the English novel from that
degradation. He was the first to see that it is
sentiment and not conscience that makes novelists
cowards. He recognised Sentimentalism for what
it is, the u fine flower of sensualism," and through
302
its very fineness the subtlest source of spiritual
corruption. He knew that Sentiment early
Victorian Sentiment piled to its height topples
over into the mire. He saw it as the mother of
all shams and all hypocrisies, the nurse of mon-
strous illusions. Thackeray, the greatest novelist
of his time, who stood nearest to Meredith in
sincerity and fearlessness and hatred of shams,
Thackeray was afraid, and put it on record that he
was afraid, to tell the truth about a man. He
said it in his preface to " Pendennis," and he laid
his cowardice to the account of the Society which
had brought fiction to this pass.
Meredith knew nothing of that fear. " Imagine,"
he said, " the celestial refreshment of having a pure
decency in the place of sham ; real flesh ; a soul
born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honour-
able will fiction then appear ; honourable, a fount
of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why,
when you behold it you love it and you will not
encourage it or only when presented by dead
hands ! "
His message to his generation was : " Follow the
Real. Do not be led by the tainted sentimental
lure. Trust yourselves to Nature, though she
make havoc of your sentiment.'' For at the heart
of Nature he discerned the fiery spiritual pulse,
through and beyond Nature the purifying, libera-
ting flame. Thus he escapes his captors who would
hold him to pure paganism.
The unity of Nature and Spirit and the return to
Spirit through Nature is Meredith's philosophy.
He found his generation sickly, and for the cure
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OF
of its sickliness he prescribed Philosophy. By
Philosophy he did not mean anything abstract,
anything the least metaphysical, anything really
incomprehensible to our arbiter of letters, the man
in the street. Meredith's philosophy is brain-stuff,
thought that makes up half of the fabric of the
world. " Idea," he said, " is vital." He was an
idealist only to that extent. Brains, to be any good,
must have blood in them, and that is where the heart
comes in. No man, no writer, had a greater and
a fierier heart at the service of his brain. And so
again he escapes the grasp of those who would
place him among the unhumanised, inaccessible
exponents of the cold Idea, who say that his appeal
was not to the universal human heart, but to the
by no means universal human intellect.
Now our conscientious young critics have no
quarrel with Meredith's philosophy as a philosophy.
Their contention is that, as a novelist, he had no
right to have any philosophy at all. They resent
it as an unwarrantable interference with his drama,
an irritating interruption to his story. They
attack it on artistic grounds, and because of it they
persuade themselves that Meredith was not a great
novelist. Which only proves that they have
forgotten their Meredith. Nobody who reads his
novels with any care will find his philosophy
intruding where it can do harm. You will not
come across it at any of the intenser psychological
moments, in any of the great dramatic scenes, or
in any of his inspired passages. It is at its height
in " Diana " and " The Egoist," but even there it
is confined to the prologue and the interludes.
304
Except by way of comment it is almost entirely
absent from "Richard Feverel," "Rhoda Fleming,"
" Evan Harrington," " Harry Richmond," and
" Beauchamp's Career."
For Meredith was before all things a great
dramatist and a great psychologist, if he was not
always a straightforward teller of his tale. And
to be those two things is, I take it, to be a great
novelist, even if a man happens to have at the
same time an irritating philosophy.
Other and more serious charges have been
brought against him by our cautious and yet
irritable young men. We are all tired of hearing
that Meredith is obscure, that he sins by excess,
by a vice of temperament, by all sorts of exuber-
ance and eccentricity. It tires us and it annoys us
too, for we feel that there is a certain truth in it.
But we are also told that he is not a great novelist,
not a novelist at all, for the simple reason that he
is a poet. And that is interesting. To be a poet,
it would seem, is even more disastrous than to be
a philosopher. For, after all, Meredith's philo-
sophy embraced the real. But his poetry, they
tell us, spoils all that. Because, you see, his lyrical
passages express his own emotions, and not the
emotions of his characters, and this is why he fails
to produce the " illusion of reality."
It sounds plausible ; it looks as if there might
be a certain amount of truth in it. But that is
only at first sight. Meredith's lyric passages are
there precisely because they do express, as nothing
else could, the emotion of his characters. For
emotion, at its climax, is powerless to express
u 305
OF
itself or anything. Lucy in love, Richard in love,
are dumb, but all heaven is sounding through
them, and it is that sound of all heaven which
Meredith's prose gives us. True, his method
destroys the spectacular illusion for a moment, but
it does so that it may preserve the illusion of emo-
tion, of passion, of reality at its highest intensity.
Compare him with Dickens in this matter of emo-
tion. Dickens, working himself up into blank
verse over the death of Little Nell, is Dickens
feeling something about Little Nell and trying to
express his feeling. But Meredith in his " Diversion
Played on a Penny Whistle " is rendering the song
of the souls of Richard and Lucy. They, poor
dears, can only say :
" ' Lucy, my beloved ! '
" < Oh, Richard ! > "
It is all part of his art, his very perfect art.
And it is the same with the " Comic Spirit."
The Comic Spirit is not Meredith. It is the Spirit
immanent in the world and akin to Mr. Hardy's
immortal Ironies. It is part-creative. Even in
" The Egoist," where it is rampant, its play is not
the play of the author intoxicated by his own wit,
making merry over the behaviour of Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is not doing anything over or about
or around Sir Willoughby. It is really in him,
though he knows it not. The Comic Spirit is an
aspect of the cosmic reality in which Sir Willoughby
has his being. For the essence of Sir Willoughby
is to be absurd, and the Comic Spirit, exposing his
absurdity, is the revealer of the eternal verity in him.
306
Meredith never destroys the IC illusion of reality."
It is the illusion of actuality that he tampers with.
It may be conceded at once that he had not a
very keen sense of the actual, or of local atmo-
sphere and surroundings. His characters appear to
be surrounded only by the cosmic spaces. He
does not present them circumscribed by any
parochial or urban or suburban boundary. He
seldom, if ever, paints an interior. His scenic
effects we remember best are always of the open
air. At the same time he has a profound sense of
the bonds, restrictions, distinctions of society and
race and class. For these things work in the flesh
and blood of a man, they are part of the drama of
his soul. That is what Meredith shows us in
" Rhoda Fleming," in u Beauchamp's Career," in
" Harry Richmond," and in " Evan Harrington,"
all masterly reproductions of English social and
provincial life in the Victorian age.
But they tell us that it is not Meredith's method
only that is all wrong. Art, they say, is concerned
only with the average, the normal (let it pass), and
Meredith wrote of extraordinary people in an ex-
traordinary way. This, we are to believe, applies
especially to his women. They are all goddesses,
or, if not goddesses, all women six feet high. In
this, they tell us, his art is inferior to that of Mr.
Hardy. If he desired immortality, he should have
written about simple people in a simple way. He
should have chosen for his tragedies the elemental
passions and treated them elementally. He should
have written, in short, like Mr. Hardy.
On the other hand, we also hear that, setting
307
OF
out as he does to be subtle, he is not half subtle
enough. He should, to produce the perfect
illusion of reality, have written more like Mr.
Henry James. As it is, he is a victim to the
fallacy of the master passion, the dominant note
in character, and thus he gives us bare types in-
stead of the rich, intricate web of inconsistencies,
the splendid irrelevances and surprises which make
up individuality in real life. Sir Willoughby
Patterne, for instance, is an egoist, always an
egoist, and nothing but an egoist ; and no man
ever was nothing but one thing.
This is a strange criticism of a man who knew
more than any other how to reproduce the very
accent and gesture of the soul. What justice there
is in it applies only to " The Egoist." There
Meredith comes perilously near to the artificial
comedy of Moliere, where the Misanthrope is
always a Misanthrope, and Tartuffe forever
Tartuffe. In real life that is to say, in the eyes
of the Omniscient or of Mr. Henry James Sir
Willoughby Patterne would not, perhaps, appear so
manifestly and invariably the Egoist he is. It is
equally true that in real life if a man is an egoist
he will behave and he will feel remarkably like
Sir Willoughby Patterne.
And our critics have forgotten Clara Middleton,
Cecilia, and all the irrelevances and inconsistencies
of the divine Diana. Mr. Henry James would be
the first to take off his hat to them.
As for the everlasting comparison with Mr.
Hardy, it is futile as any comparison must be
between two masters equally supreme in their
308
separate territories. But it raises interesting
questions : Are their territories, after all, so
separate? Is it true that Meredith did not under-
stand elemental men and women ? It is certainly
true that he wrote mostly about people in whom
either breeding or education or the possession of
a restless intellect obscures the working of the
large tragic passions. The modern world is full
of such, full, above all, of such women. And
Meredith claimed to have discovered the modern
woman, u animated . . . with the fires of positive
brain-stuff.'* He was the first to see that the
sentimentalism (again !) of his time was degradation
to its women.
Even Thackeray, with his exceeding tenderness
and chivalry, Thackeray, who owned himself afraid
to tell the truth about a man, did not know, as
Meredith knew, the truth about a woman. Or
perhaps he knew it and was still more afraid.
Meredith knew the truth and the whole truth and
dared to tell it, dared to give the leading role to
those large-brained, large-hearted women of his
Diana and Clara and Ottilia and Cecilia Halkett
and Rose Jocelyn, Aminta and Carinthia Jane.
Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and the great women of
George Eliot Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke,
and Dinah Morris are small beside them. They
are modern women, and we cannot complain of
their stature as abnormal, for modern women are
often six feet high.
These are his extraordinary women. But when
he chose he could draw very ordinary women, and
men too, and draw them as the masters draw.
309
OF
Look at Ripton Thompson, Algernon Blancove,
Mrs. Lovell, " Emmy '' and Sir Lukin, Jenny
Denham ; even Nevil Beauchamp is not extra-
ordinary in our critics' sense ; and the list could
be extended indefinitely.
As for the elemental and the simple people,
Tess is not more elemental in her tragedy than
Claire Doria Forey or Dahlia Fleming, or even poor
Juliana in "Evan Harrington." And Thomasin
Yeobright is not more divinely simple than Lucy
Feverel, nor is Rhoda Fleming less captivating in
her moral beauty than Marty South. For the rest,
Hardy's women and Meredith's women are " sisters
under their skin."
Still, it is inevitable to place Hardy and Mere-
dith side by side, for they are the last of the great
Victorian novelists, and in many ways they are akin.
Both are philosophers, both poets, and in both philo-
sophy is, like their poetry, the result of tempera-
ment. Mr. Hardy's genius is bound to make for
the simpler and the larger tragedy, seeing that he
regards the lives of men and women as so many
sacrifices to the eternal, insatiable lust of Nature,
and they themselves as the playthings of an im-
placably ironic Destiny.
But, to George Meredith, Nature, for all her
darkness and austerity, is the mother of all joy, of
all the sanities and sanctities. The natural love of
men and women was to him of all things the sanest
and most sacred. Their tragedy is not their sub-
servience to Nature, but their falling from her,
their sins against her immanent deity.
His poems sprang from this joy of his genius in
310
Nature, its adoration of all the robust and splendid
energies of life. Our young critics, more con-
scientious than ever as they approach this divinest
side of him, have suggested that his philosophy
spoils his poems as it spoils his novels. They cite
" The Reading of Earth " and The " Woods of
Westermain." To be sure, in all his great Nature
poems, there are aisles and dells of darkness, inter-
minable secret mazes, lost ways of " The Questions"
traversing the Enchanted Woods. Yet every way,
faithfully followed, leads us into almost intolerable
light. Something happens, and we find the Mere-
dithian philosophy (which was, after all, more an
instinct than a philosophy) transmuted into the
Meredithian mysticism as by fire. His message
rings clear :
" Then your spirit will perceive
Fleshly seed of fleshly sins
Where the passions interweave.
How the serpent tangle spins
Of the sense of Earth misprised,
Brainlessly unrecognised,
She being Spirit in her clods,
Footway to the God of Gods."
But besides " The Woods of Westermain " and
" The Reading of Earth " Meredith wrote " The
Lark Ascending," that continuous, lucid, liquid
song of rapture :
" Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical."
3"
OF
He wrote " Love in the Valley," and that pro-
foundest, subtlest, most concentrated of human
tragedies, " Modern Love." There are lines there
that gleam and cut like steel, dividing the intri-
cate web of soul and body. It is the dissection of
heart-nerves and brain-cells, a lacerating psychology
masquerading in a procession of linked quatrains.
Yet the same genius, so delicately analytic,
brought forth with a stupendous and Titanic energy
the " Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life." Among
these is " The Nuptials of Attila," where the
verse rushes downwards in tumult and in torrent
like the hosts of the armoured Huns, a poem
barbaric, superb, resonant with the clangour of
battle. There is " King Harold's Trance," a
masterpiece of grim and terrible simplicity. And
there is " The Song of Theodolinda," that
supreme hymn of the passion of martyrdom, of
divine ecstasy in torture, of torture perishing in
ecstasy.
The most perfervid passages of Crashaw's Hymn
to St. Teresa are cold beside Meredith's fire.
And the art of it is transcendent. Every line
glows with furnace-heat, and beats in its terrible
assonances with the strokes of the hammer :
" This that killed Thee, kissed Thee, Lord !
Touched Thee, and we touch it : dear,
Dark it is ; adored, abhorred,
Vilest, yet most sainted here.
Red of heat, O white of heat,
In it hell and heaven meet.
312
" Brand me, bite me, bitter thing !
Thus He felt, and thus I am
One with Him in suffering,
One with Him in bliss, the Lamb.
Red of heat, O white of heat,
This is bitterness made sweet.
" Now am I who bear that stamp
Scorched in me, the living sign
Sole on earth the lighted lamp
Of the dreadful day divine.
White of heat, beat on it fast,
Red of heat, its shape has passed,
" Kindle me to constant fire,
Lest the nail be but a nail !
Give me wings of great desire,
Lest I look within and fail !
Red of heat, the furnace light,
White of heat, fix on my sight.
" Never for the chosen peace !
Know, by me tormented know,
Never shall the wrestling cease
Till with our outlasting Foe
Red of heat to white of heat,
Roll we to the Godhead's feet !
Beat, beat ! White of heat,
Red of heat, beat, beat ! "
If he had written nothing else, that one poem
would be enough to ensure his immortality.
And some of the younger generation, which is
so conscientious and so cautious, are wondering
whether Meredith will live. Posterity, they think,
OF
is hardly likely to tolerate what his contemporaries
cannot endure. There is much in him, they say,
which is intolerable.
Well, there is much in Fielding, in Scott, in
Thackeray, which is intolerable. And yet they
live. We still read Fielding, in spite of his per-
petual digressions, and the essays with which he
dislocates his chapters. We read Scott, in spite
of his interminable descriptive passages ; and
Thackeray, in spite of his digressions, and of his
mortal tendency to moralise in all places of his
narrative. It is only reasonable to suppose that
Meredith will be read in spite of everything, even
of his obscurity. For nothing can kill the novelist
if the novelist is there ; and in all Meredith's novels
the novelist is supreme. Who, when he thinks of
" The Egoist," really remembers anything but the
sublime performances of Sir Willoughby Patterne
or the ways of Clara Middleton ? Who would
dream of judging the terrible and poignant tragedy
of Richard Feverel by fragments from " The
Pilgrim's Scrip"? Who, as he sees Diana keeping
her watch by her dead friend, or kneeling by the
hearth of Crossways House, will be unchivalrous
enough to remember her as a woman who
attempted more epigrams than she ever brought
to perfection ? And there is Emmy under the
surgeon's knife, and Sir Lukin raving in his
remorse. There is Emilia forsaken and Dahlia
betrayed, and they are flesh and blood that no
a Idea," no philosophy, can destroy. And flesh
and blood they had need be to stand in the presence
of their creator. Meredith's personality is so over-
3?4
powering that at times it comes between us and
his creations. He has not, as lesser men have had,
the habit of detachment. No novelist has it com-
pletely, nor can have it. He betrays his own
nature more subtly or more inevitably than any
other artist, for he handles directly the stuff of life,
and we know him by the manner of his handling.
It is impossible to read Meredith without seeing
him to be before all things clean-souled and
courageous and passionately sincere. We divine
that there is no greatness and no splendour in his
work that had not its match in him. His powers
were finely mingled. His intellect was blood-
warm and had a heart in it, beating like a pulse of
flame, and emotion in him was a spiritual thing,
as if the courses of his blood flashed light. To
feel, with him, was to see more and not less clearly.
It is not conceivable that he will not live, he
who had more life, more virile, fertilising energy,
than any writer of the two generations that he saw
rise round him and pass away before him. Our
own generation will return to him, weary of the
lucid excellences of the lesser men, their finished
perfection within the limits of the little. He was
too great for us. If some of us have lost sight of
him, it is not because they have left him behind
them with the Victorian era ; it is because they
have not yet " caught up." He was too swift
for us. He has passed us by, and only thus
can we conceive of him as passing. He has not
yielded up his fire to any one of us. He is on far
ahead with his torch, holding high for us the
inextinguishable flame.
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INDEX TO TITLES OF
SWIFT BOOKS
/ THAT COMPEL
PAGE
PAGE
Bosbury People, The .
20
Modern Mysticism
25
British Battle Books .
4
More Peers
28
Caricatures
II
Motley and Tinsel .
17
Celtic Temperament, The ,
27
New Psychology, A ,
10
Civil War.
30
Parisian Portraits
27
Daughters of Ishmael
21
Party System, The . 24,
28
Eight Centuries of Portu-
Passing of the American, The
5
guese Monarchy .
31
Philosophy of a Don, The .
3i
Englishman in New York,
Poems ....
16
An . .
12
Prince Azreel .
'3
Eye-Witness, The
32
Rector of St Jacob's, The .
29
Gordon at Khartoum .
8
Revoke of Jean Raymond,
Humour of the Underman,
The .
22
The .
6
Roll of the Seasons, The .
14
In a German Pension
15
Sir Edward
30
La Vie et les Hommes
7
Some Neighbours
2 9
Lonely England
3i
Tory Democracy
23
Love in Manitoba
19
Triumphant Vulgarity
30
Maids' Comedy, The
29
Valley of Shadows, The .
26
Mastery of Life,' The
9
Woman without Sin, The .
18
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INDEX TO AUTHORS OF
SWIFT BOOKS
THAT COMPEL
PAGE
ABBOTT, G. F.
The Philosophy of a Don 31
BEERBOHM, MAX
PACK
GRIERSON, FRANCIS
Parisian Portraits . . 27
The Celtic Temperament 27
The Valley of Shadows . 26
Caricatures
ii
Modern Mysticism . 25
BELLOC, HILAIRE, and
The Humour of the
CECIL CHESTERTON
Underman ... 6
The Party System . 24,
28
La Vie et les Hommes . 7
BELLOC, HILAIRE
More Peers .
28
JUVENAL
An Englishman in New
British Battle Books-
York .... 12
Blenheim .
4
KAUFFMAN, REGINALD
Malplaquet
4
WRIGHT
Tourcoing .
4
Daughters of Ishmael . 21
Waterloo .
4
KENNEDY, J. M.
The Eye- Witness .
32
Tory Democracy . . 23
BLUNT, WILFRED SCAWEN
LYNCH, ARTHUR, M.P.
Gordon at Khartoum
8
Prince Azreel . 13
BRAGANC.A CUNHA, V. DE
Eight Centuries of Portu-
guese Monarchy .
3i
A New Psychology . 10
Maids' Comedy, The . . 29
MANSFIELD, KATHERINE
In a German Pension . 15
DESMOND, G. G.
The Roll of the Seasons .
M
PROTHERO, J. K.
Motley and Tinsel . .17
DUKES, ASHLEY
RANSOM, ARTHUR
Civil War
FORD, MAY
30
The Bosbury People . 20
The Rector of St Jacob's 29
The Revoke of Jean
ROYCE, MUNROE
Raymond .
22
The Passing of the Ameri-
GILL, E. A. WHARTON
can .... 5
Love in Manitoba .
IQ
Sir Edward . . . 30
SMITH, PHARALL
COLORING, MAUDE
The Woman without Sin 18
Lonely England
31
WHITBY, CHARLES J., M.D.
GRANVILLE, CHARLES
Triumphant Vulgarity . 30
Some Neighbours .
29
WRENCH, G. T., M.D.
Poems ....
16
The Mastery of Life . 9
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MOTLEY A
AND TINSEL thetage
BY
J. K. PROTHERO
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THE
PARTY SYSTEM
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
AND
CECIL CHESTERTON
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MODERN
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BY HILAIRE BELLOC
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THE
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PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH.
USE
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AN DEPT.
This
is due on the last date stamped below, or
on the date to which renewed.
Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.
'
AUG 18 1967
T
INTER
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SENT ON ILL
DEC 8 1998
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