r B I 
 
 j ; '- - - ! :l INQU1R- 
 
 ] NDC i nto the WIT & Other 
 of HIS LATE MAJ- 
 ;G CHARLES the 
 .: - Written by 
 
 M NEY 
 
PATRINS 
 
 ro WHICH IS ADDED 
 
 An INQUIRENDO Into the WIT & 
 
 Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJ 
 ESTY KING CHARLES the Second 
 
 Br 
 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 Printed for Copeland and Day 
 69 Cornhill 1897 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA' 
 DAVIS 
 
SECOND THOUSAND 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY 
 
TO BLISS CARMAN 
 
 Apatrin, according to Romano Lavo-Lil, 
 is " a Gypsy trail : handfuls of leaves or 
 grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to 
 denote, to those behind, the way which 
 they have taken." Well, these wild dry 
 whims are patrins dropped now in the 
 open for our tribe ; but particularly for 
 you. They will greet you as you lazily 
 come up, and mean : Fare on, and good 
 luck love you to the end ! On each 
 have I put the date of its writing, as one 
 might make memoranda of little leisurely 
 adventures in prolonged fair weather; and 
 you will read, in between and all along, a 
 record of pleasant lonely paths never very 
 far from your own, biggest of^Romanys! 
 in the thought-country of our common 
 youth. 
 
 Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine, 
 October 19, 1896. 
 
Contents 
 
 Page 
 
 On the Rabid versus the Harmless Scholar 3 
 
 The Great Playground 13 
 
 On the Ethics of Descent 29 
 Some Impressions from the Tudor 
 
 Exhibition 39 
 
 On the Delights of an Incognito 63 
 
 The Puppy : A Portrait 73 
 On Dying Considered as a Dramatic 
 
 Situation 83 
 A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle 
 
 Reader 99 
 
 Animum non Coelum 109 
 
 The Precept of Peace 117 
 On a Pleasing Encounter with a 
 
 Pickpocket 131 
 
 Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman 139 
 
 Irish 153 
 
 An Open Letter to the Moon 169 
 
 The Under Dog 181 
 
 Quiet London 191 
 
 The Captives 205 
 On Teaching One's Grandmother How 
 
 to Suck Eggs 223 
 
 Wilful Sadness in Literature 233 
 
 v- 
 
 An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other 
 Good Parts of His Late Majesty, 
 
 King Charles the Second 247 
 
On the Rabid versus the Harmless 
 Scholar 
 
ON THE RABID VERSUS THE 
 HARMLESS SCHOLAR 
 
 A PHILOSOPHER now living, and 
 ./jL too deserving for any fate but 
 choice private oblivion, was in Paris, 
 for the first time, a dozen years ago ; 
 and having seen and heard there, in the 
 shops, parks, and omnibus stations, much 
 more baby than he found pleasing, he re 
 marked, upon his return, that it was a 
 great pity the French, who are so in love 
 with system, had never seen their way to 
 shutting up everything under ten years of 
 age ! Now, that was the remark of an 
 artist in human affairs, and may provoke 
 a number of analogies. What is in the 
 making is not a public spectacle. It ought 
 to be considered very outrageous, on the 
 death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit 
 those rough first drafts, which he, living, 
 had the acumen to conceal. And if, to an 
 
4 ON THE RABID VERSUS 
 
 impartial eye, in a foreign city, native in 
 nocents seem too aggressively to the fore, 
 why should not the seclusion desired for 
 them be visited a thousandfold upon the 
 heads, let us say, of students, who are also 
 in a crude transitional state, and under 
 going a growth much more distressing to 
 a sensitive observer than the physical ? 
 Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, 
 but not the best to let loose, especially 
 while it carries swaggeringly that most 
 dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge 
 at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more 
 melancholy condition than that of healthy 
 boys scowling over books, in an eternal 
 protest against their father Adam's fall 
 from a state of relative omniscience. Sir 
 Philip Sidney thought it was " a piece of 
 the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man 
 should be put to school to learn his 
 mother-tongue ! " The throes of educa 
 tion are as degrading and demoralizing 
 as a hanging, and, when the millennium 
 sets in, will be as carefully screened from 
 the laity. Around the master and the 
 pupil will be reared a portly and decorous 
 Chinese wall, which shall pen within their 
 proper precincts the din of hie, h#c, hoc, 
 
THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR 5 
 
 and the steam of suppers sacrificed to 
 Pallas. 
 
 The more noxious variety of student, 
 however, is not young. He is " in the 
 midway of this our mortal life " ; he is 
 fearfully foraging, with intent to found and 
 govern an academy ; he runs in squads 
 after Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, 
 Comparative Mythology ; he stops you 
 on 'change to ask if one has not good 
 grounds for believing that there was such 
 a person as Pope Joan. He can never 
 let well enough alone. Heine must be 
 translated and Junius must be identified. 
 The abodes of hereditary scholars are de 
 populated by the red flag of the nouveau 
 instruit. He infests every civilized coun 
 try; the army-worm is nothing to him. 
 He has either lacked early discipline alto 
 gether, or gets tainted, late in life, with 
 the notion that he has never shown suffi 
 ciently how intellectual he really is. In 
 every contemplative-looking person he 
 sees a worthy victim, and his kindling eye, 
 as he bears down upon you, precludes 
 escape : he can achieve no peace unless he 
 is driving you mad with all which you 
 fondly dreamed you had left behind in old 
 
6 ON THE RABID VERSUS 
 
 S.'s accursed lecture-room. You may 
 commend to him in vain the reminder 
 which Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that 
 it is the quality of what you know which 
 tells, and never its quantity. It is incon 
 ceivable to him that you should shut your 
 impious teeth against First Principles, and 
 fear greatly to displace in yourself the illi 
 teracies you have painfully acquired. 
 
 Judge, then, if the learner of this type 
 (and in a bitterer degree, the learneress) 
 could but be safely cloistered, how much 
 simpler would become the whole problem 
 of living ! How profoundly would it ben 
 efit both society and himself could the for- 
 mationary mind, destined, as like as not, to 
 no ultimate development, be sequestered 
 by legal statute in one imperative limbo, 
 along with babes, lovers, and training 
 athletes ! Quicquid ostendis mihi sic, in- 
 credulus odi. 
 
 For the true scholar's sign-manual is 
 not the midnight lamp on a folio. He 
 knows ; he is baked through ; all super 
 fluous effort and energy are over for him. 
 To converse consumedly upon the weather, 
 and compare notes as to "whether it is 
 likely to hold up for to-morrow," this, 
 
THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR 7 
 
 says Hazlitt, " is the end and privilege of 
 a life of study." Secretly, decently, pleas 
 antly, has he acquired his mental stock ; 
 insensibly he diffuses, not always knowl 
 edge, but sometimes the more needful 
 scorn of knowledge. Among folk who 
 break their worthy heads indoors over 
 Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, 
 he moves cheerful, incurious, and free, on 
 glorious good terms with arts and crafts 
 for which he has no use, with extraneous 
 languages which he will never pursue, with 
 vague Muses impossible to invite to din 
 ner. He is strictly non-educational : 
 
 "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! 
 No hungry generations tread thee down.*' 
 
 He loathes information and the givers and 
 takers thereof. Like Mr. Lang, he laments 
 bitterly that Oxford is now a place where 
 many things are being learned and taught 
 with great vigor. The main business to 
 him is to live gracefully, without mental 
 passion, and to get off alone into a corner 
 for an affectionate view of creation. A 
 mystery serves his turn better than a his 
 tory. It is to be remembered that had 
 the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gaze 
 
8 ON THE RABID VERSUS 
 
 upon the spandrils of Rouen Cathedral, 
 we should all have lost the///<? de chambre, 
 the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. 
 Any one of these is worth more than 
 hieroglyphics ; but who is to attain that 
 insight that these are so, except the man 
 of culture, who has the courage to forget 
 at times even his sole science, and fall 
 back with delight upon a choice assortment 
 of ignorances ? 
 
 The scholar's own research, from his 
 cradle, clothes him in privacy ; nor will 
 he ever invade the privacy of others. 
 It is not with a light heart that he con 
 templates the kindergarten system. He 
 himself, holding his tongue, and fleeing 
 from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic 
 roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, 
 must be an evil sight to Chautauquans, 
 albeit approved of the angels. By much 
 contact shine divers and sundry; he, not 
 inferior, fears lest it tarnish him. He has 
 little to utter which will sound wise, the 
 full-grown, finished soul ! If he had, he 
 would of his own volition seek a cell in 
 that asylum for protoplasms, which we 
 have made bold to recommend. 
 
 The truth is, very few can be trusted 
 
THE HARMLESS SCHOLAR 9 
 
 with an education. In the old days, 
 while this was a faith, boredom and ner 
 vous prostration were not common, and 
 social conditions were undeniably pictur 
 esque. Then, as now, quiet was the zenith 
 of power : the mellow mind was unexcur- 
 sive and shy. Then, as now, though 
 young clerical Masters of Arts went stag 
 gering abroad with heads lolling like 
 Sisyphus' stone, the ideal worth and 
 weight grew " lightly as a flower." 
 Sweetly wrote the good Sprat of his fa 
 mous friend Cowley : "His learning sat 
 exceedingly close and handsomely upon 
 him : it was not embossed on his mind, 
 but enamelled." The best to be said of 
 any knowing one among us, is that he 
 does not readily show what deeps are in 
 him ; that he is unformidable, and reminds 
 whomever he meets of a distant or de 
 ceased uncle. Initiation into noble facts 
 has not ruined him for this world nor the 
 other. It is a beautiful brag which James 
 Howell, on his first going beyond sea, 
 March the first, in the year sixteen 
 hundred and eighteen, makes to his 
 father. He gives thanks for cc that most 
 indulgent and costly Care you have 
 
io RABID VERSUS HARMLESS SCHOLAR 
 
 been pleased, in so extraordinary a manner, 
 to have had of my Breeding, (tho' but 
 one child of Fifteen) by placing me in a 
 choice Methodical School so far distant 
 from your dwelling, under a Learned (tho' 
 Lashing) Master; and by transplanting 
 me thence to Oxford to be graduated ; 
 and so holding me still up by the chin, 
 until I could swim without Bladders. 
 This patrimony of liberal Education you 
 have been pleased to endow me withal, I 
 now carry along with me abroad as a sure 
 inseparable Treasure ; nor do I feel it any 
 burden or incumbrance unto me at all ! " 
 
 There, in the closing phrase, spoke the 
 post-Elizabethan pluck. Marry, any man 
 does well since, who can describe the 
 aggregated agonies of his brain as no incum- 
 brance, as less, indeed, than a wife and 
 posterity ! To have come to this is to 
 earn the freedom of cities, and to sink 
 the schoolmaster as if he had never 
 been. 
 
 1889. 
 
The Great Playground 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 IT has seemed to many thoughtful 
 readers, within the last fifty or sixty 
 years, that Wordsworth's Ode on the In 
 timations is altogether mistaken in its 
 assumption that the open-air world is 
 dearer to the child than to the man : or 
 that the Heaven which so easily fuses 
 with it in our idea lies nearer to the 
 former than to the latter. Some abnor 
 mally perceptive child (like the infant 
 W. W. himself) may have a clear sense 
 of " glory in the grass, of splendor in the 
 flower." But the appreciation of natural 
 objects is infinitely stronger, let us say, 
 in the babe of thirty ; and so is even the 
 the appreciation of the diversions which 
 they provide. Were it not for the pros 
 pects of unforeseen and adventurous com 
 pany abroad, the child prefers to play in 
 the shed. But the post-meridian child, 
 
14 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 who is not a "grown-up," but only a 
 giant, desires " the house not made with 
 hands " : he gets a delicate madness in his 
 blood, the moment he breathes wild air. 
 
 Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save 
 them, from stone-skipping on the strand, 
 though they have come abroad for pur 
 poses of political conversation. Poets 
 and bookmen are famous escapers of this 
 sort. Surrey shooting his toy arrows at 
 lighted windows ; Shelley sailing his leaves 
 and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds ; 
 Dr. Johnson, of all persons, rolling down 
 the fragrant Lincolnshire hills ; Elizabeth 
 Inchbald (" a beauty and a virtue," as her 
 epitaph at Kensington prettily says) lift 
 ing knockers on April evenings and run 
 ning away, for the innocent deviltry of 
 it; these have discovered the fun and 
 the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and 
 with a conscious rapture impossible to 
 their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl 
 of Huntingdon, probably kept to his per 
 fectly exemplary brigandage because he 
 liked the " shaws shene," and objected to 
 going home at nightfall. No child ever 
 tastes certain romantic joys which come of 
 intimacies with creation. That he may 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 15 
 
 write a letter upon birchbark, that he may 
 eat a mushroom from the broken elm- 
 trunk and drink the blood of the maple, 
 that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, 
 a frog from the marsh, or even a twelve- 
 tined buck from his fastness, to be 
 caressed and fed, strikes him as an experi 
 ment, not as an honor. It will not do to 
 say that the worship of the natural world 
 is an adult passion : it is quite the con 
 trary; but only certain adults exemplify 
 it. Coleridge, in the Biographia Litera- 
 ria y has a very beautiful theory, and a 
 profoundly true one. " To carry on the 
 feelings of childhood into the powers of 
 manhood ; to combine the child's sense 
 of wonder and novelty with the appear 
 ances which every day, for perhaps forty 
 years, have made familiar : 
 
 ' With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, 
 And man and woman, ' 
 
 this is the character and privilege of 
 genius." The genuine faun-heart is the 
 child conscious and retrieved, the child 
 by law established in happy natures. I 
 knew one boy of six who met an ugly 
 gypsy in a lane, and who, on being asked 
 
1 6 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 whether he would like to go and live 
 with her, replied in Americanese, with 
 slow-breathed transports : " Oh-ee, yup ! " 
 In his mind was an instant vision of a 
 bed suspended among leaves ; and the 
 clatter and glitter of the sacred leaves had 
 nearly stolen his soul away. But he was 
 not a common boy. His nurse being 
 close behind, he was providentially saved, 
 that time, to be abducted later by much 
 more prosaic influences. Nor has the 
 love of Nature, of late so laboriously 
 instilled into the young, thanks to Froe- 
 bel's impetus, made much progress among 
 its small supposed votaries. The exam 
 ination-papers, which, in a lustier age, 
 began with "Who dragged Which 
 around the walls of What ? " now stoop 
 to other essentials : 
 
 f ' The wood-spurge has a cup of three. ' ' 
 
 Yet unless misled by the tender cant of 
 their elders, even the modern Master and 
 Missy would rather find and examine the 
 gas-metre than the wood-spurge. 
 
 In his best estate, the out-of-doorling 
 hunts not, neither fishes : he merely 
 moves or sits, in eternal amalgamation 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 17 
 
 with the eternal : an enchanted toper of 
 life and death, one with all that has ever 
 been, or shall ever be, convinced that 
 " there is a piece of divinity in us which 
 is older than the elements, and owes no 
 homage unto the sun." He is generally 
 silent, because his sincere speech cannot 
 be what we call sane. No one, however, 
 who is truly content in the sought pres 
 ence of Nature, can be sure that it is she 
 who gives him all, or even most, of his 
 comfort. It is only the poetic fashion 
 to say so. It is at least doubtful if 
 Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness, 
 for the man already independent of her. 
 There are those who may accost her, not 
 as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to 
 another in a congress of the Powers. 
 Moral poise is the true passport to her 
 favor, not a fine eye for " the leopard- 
 colored trees " in late autumn, nor an ear 
 for the bold diapasons of the surge. The 
 man of vanities and ambitions and agitated 
 fears may as well go to the football game : 
 for the woods are cold to him. The 
 lover, indeed, is notoriously rural while 
 his fit lasts ; he has been known to float 
 into a mosquito-marsh, obliviously reading 
 
1 8 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 Tristram of Lyonnesse. But so oblique a 
 cult as his can count for nothing with 
 the Mother. Her favorite spite is to 
 deepen melancholy, as her prayer and 
 purpose are to enhance joy. Not pri 
 mary in her functions, she waits upon 
 man's anterior dispositions, and gives her 
 delights, as Fortuna is said to do, to the 
 indifferent. But he shall not be indiffer 
 ent after : her praise drips, honey-bright, 
 from his lip. If any question him, re 
 membering Vaughan's 
 
 " O tell me whence that joy doth spring 
 Whose diet is divine and fair, 
 Which wears Heaven like a bridal ring? " 
 
 he may say that it is the possessing love 
 of Nature which makes his day so rich. 
 She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon 
 that plausible text. The order and peace 
 in him had first subjugated her terrible 
 heart. 
 
 No babe, indeed, is born other than 
 wild : he springs up on the farther border 
 of civilization. Happy for him, if he can 
 find his way back, with waking choice, even 
 once a year, in his maturity, to recap 
 ture the perfect condition, and subject to it 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 19 
 
 his own developed faculties. How many 
 have suffered the pure epic homesick 
 ness, the longing for decivilization, which 
 has drawn them " to discover islands 
 far away," or to roam without purpose 
 at all, like Alastor and the Scholar 
 Gypsy ! Observe, that in all tradition the 
 courtesies of the countryside are showered 
 on the race of the deliberately glad. 
 Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister- 
 garden, rapturously catching up the roses 
 to her face, and extolling Him who made 
 them fair, signifies much : not only that 
 she was dowered with the keen perception 
 of beauty, hardly that at all ; but that 
 she was at the apex of moral sanity, 
 which has as much right to be passionate 
 with beauty as the sun itself. It is incon 
 ceivable that barbarians should admire the 
 sunset : though it is not inconceivable 
 that barbarians in good society should say 
 that they do so. For one of the ear 
 marks of our latter-day culture is this 
 patronal relish of the works of the Most 
 High. Literature is over-ballasted with 
 "descriptive passages," which the reader 
 skips, but which no self-respecting author 
 can afford to do without. We talk inces- 
 
20 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 santly of the hills and the sea, and the 
 flora and fauna thereof; and insolently 
 take it for granted that we alone have ar 
 rived at the proper inwardness of these 
 subjects. In naught have we more wronged 
 the feudal ages than in denying to them 
 an intimate knowledge and love of scenic 
 detail. One glance at their cathedral 
 capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cob 
 webs, and shells, in stone carven since 
 the tenth century, should have been cor 
 rective of that foolish depreciation of a 
 people far nearer to the heart of things 
 than we. The common dislike of gypsies 
 is another revelation of jealousy : for we 
 are not the Mother's favored children. 
 Us she consigns to starched linen, and 
 roofs, retorts of carbonic acid gas : would 
 we sleep again on her naked breast, 
 we come home to endure gibes, and the 
 sniffles. 
 
 Well may the " sylvan " (a dear Eliza 
 bethan word gone into the dust-heap) 
 feel that he is manumitted and exempt. 
 He has no occasion to grow up. He 
 looks with affectionate strangeness on his 
 life past, as on his life to come, thinking 
 it a solecism to anticipate decay where 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 21 
 
 hitherto no decay has been, or where in 
 deed, if it have been, he " has had the wit 
 never to know it." The Heaven which 
 lies around us in our infancy is always 
 there afterwards, waiting in vain, for the 
 most part, for reciprocations. Symbol 
 isms, sacraments, abound in the natural 
 world, and to avail oneself of them is to 
 regain and retain fleeting good, and to 
 defy the time-dragon's tooth with a smile 
 as of immortality. Devotion to a black 
 berry pasture and a swimming-pool con 
 fers youth on the devotee, provided he 
 has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald 
 little boys for a living. A travelled man, 
 a man of the world, has a ripe expert 
 look : one says of him, admiring his talk 
 and his manners, that he bears his age 
 with grace. But nothing is so ageless as 
 a sailor : he can bear his age neither well 
 nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his 
 hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, 
 readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shy 
 ness, truth : all the fine wild qualities 
 which " they that sit in parlors never 
 dream of." It is not a physiological fact 
 alone, that for health's sake you must be 
 in league with the open. Whoever clings 
 
22 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 to it for love, is known by his superior 
 simplicity and balance. Many a coast- 
 guardsman, or scout in the Canadian for 
 est, has achieved the complete power 
 which is mistakenly supposed to come, 
 like an imposition of hands, upon the 
 educated ; and he gets this inestimable 
 accolade, mark you, merely by smelling 
 sea-kelp and sassafras, and welcoming a 
 rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow : by 
 the exercise of sheer natural piety, whose 
 processes turn about and hit back by 
 keeping him young. Would you per 
 petrate an elfin joke on such a one, pre 
 sent him with a calendar : the urban and 
 domestic accuser. To register time, and 
 consult its phases scientifically, is to give 
 it a deplorable advantage over you. A 
 brook scoffs at birthdays: and many a 
 violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth 
 at Martinmas. It is the shepherd-boy in 
 the Arcadia who " pipes as if he should 
 never grow old " : marry, it is not any 
 body in a theatre orchestra ! Which, 
 think you, died with her girlhood yet un- 
 consumed within her, Madame Recamier 
 or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory 
 is not with cosmetics. To the soirees of 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 23 
 
 the hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. 
 The " sylvan " is anti-chronological. He 
 who comes close to the heart-beat of 
 progress and dissolution in the wilderness, 
 the vicissitudes of the vegetable world, 
 must feel that, save in an allegory, these 
 things are not for him : they go under 
 him as a swimmer's wave. " Change 
 upon change : yet one change cries out to 
 another, like the alternate seraphim, in 
 praise and glory of their Maker." The 
 human atom gets into the mood of the 
 according leaf, caring not how long it has 
 hung there, how soon it may fall. God's 
 will, in short, is nowhere so plain and ac 
 ceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or 
 water. Who can feel it so keenly in the 
 town ? The town has never allowed man 
 to guess his superiority to it : creature of 
 his own exaggerations, it cows him, and 
 compels him to remember, in his unrest, 
 that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a 
 child. 
 
 At Hampton Court, in the Great Hall, 
 in the right lower corner of the rich pagan 
 borderings of one of the Old Testament 
 tapestries (that of the Circumcision of Abra 
 ham), there is a tiny delicate faded figure 
 
24 THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 
 
 of a lad, all in soft duns and dusty golds. 
 He wears curious sandals ; a green chap- 
 let is on his brows ; a hare hangs over his 
 shoulder ; he carries a stocked quiver, and 
 a spear. His look is one of sweet sensu 
 ous idleness and delight. He is centuries 
 old, but to him the same sun is shining in 
 the aromatic alleys of the forest. He 
 does not know that there is a very fine 
 Perpendicular roof over him, and he has 
 never noticed the kings and their courts 
 who have been blown away like smoke 
 from before his path. The parent and 
 the schoolmaster who sought him have 
 also fallen to dust. But for him the hunt 
 and the moist morning : for him the im 
 mortal pastoral life. We used to see him 
 often, and we saw him once again, after a 
 long interval. His charm was all that it 
 had ever been : but at the encounter, he 
 brought hot tears of envy to the eyes. 
 All those years, those years of ours and 
 the world's, wasted in prison on casuist 
 industries, he had been at large with the 
 wind, he had been playing ! How some 
 of us have always meant to do just that 
 for ever, and that only ! for why not do 
 the sole thing one can do perfectly ? But 
 
THE GREAT PLAYGROUND 25 
 
 an indoor demon, one Duty, a measly 
 Eden-debarring angel armed with plati 
 tudes, has somehow clogged our career. 
 Were it not for a cloud of responsibilities, 
 a downpour of Things to Do, one might 
 be ever at the other side of window-panes, 
 and see Pan twelve hours a day. Ah, lit 
 tle Vita Silvestris ! Blamelessly may we 
 feel that you have found the way, and that 
 we have missed it, growing gray at the 
 silly desk, and sure only of this : that 
 presently we shall indeed find ourselves 
 inside sycamore planks, so that all the 
 dryads in their boles, watching our very 
 best approximation to their coveted estate, 
 shall smile to see. But thereafter, at least, 
 and for good, we are where we belong, 
 " sub dioj under the canopy of Heaven," 
 and ready for the elemental game. 
 
 1895. 
 
On the Ethics of Descent 
 
ON THE ETHICS OF 
 DESCENT 
 
 if 
 
 IT will never do for a biographer to 
 look too narrowly into his hero's gen 
 ealogy ; for speculation is at all times fatal 
 to an accepted pedigree. Every man 
 is presumably deduced from male and 
 female, from generation to generation ; 
 and from these only. There is more of 
 superstition than of science in this mode 
 of reckoning : it has no great philosophic 
 bearing, and it is very illiberal. The 
 truth is, we belong, from the beginning, 
 to many masters, and are unspeakably 
 beholden to the forming hands of the 
 phenomena of the universe, rather than to 
 the ties of blood. What really makes 
 one live, gives him his charter of rights, 
 and clinches for him the significance with 
 out which he might as well be unborn, is, 
 often enough, no human agency at all. 
 
30 ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 
 
 Where it happens to be human, it is 
 glorious and attested : " I owe no more 
 to Philip, my father, than to Aristotle, 
 my preceptor." 
 
 But it may be debated that the climb 
 ing spider was considerably more to her 
 appointed observer, Robert the Bruce, 
 than his father ; inasmuch as she alone 
 put heart into his body, and revivified 
 him into the doer whose deeds we know. 
 A moral relation like that, at the critical 
 moment, establishes the ineffable bond ; 
 annuls, as it were, every cause but the 
 First, whereby the lesser causes arise ; 
 and makes men over new. No mere 
 soldiering Bruce, but the spider's Bruce, 
 the victor of Scotland ; no mere Newton, 
 but the dedicated heir of the falling apple 
 and her laws ; no mere young rhetorician 
 of Carthage, but Austin the saint, per 
 fected by the Tol/e, lege, from Heaven. 
 Many a word, many an event, has so, in 
 the fullest sense, started a career, and . set 
 up a sort of paternity and authority over 
 the soul. We are all "under influence," 
 both of the natural and the supernatural 
 kingdom. Far from being the domestic 
 product we take ourselves to be, we are 
 
ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 31 
 
 strangely begotten of the unacknowledged, 
 the fortuitous, and the impossible ; we 
 lead lives of astonishing adventure, con 
 sort with eternity, and owe the thing we 
 are to the most trivial things we touch. 
 We are poor relations of every conceiv 
 able circumstance, alike of our sister the 
 Feudal System, and of our sister the rain 
 bow. We are interwoven, ages before 
 our birth, and again and again after, with 
 what we are pleased to call our accidents 
 and our fates. 
 
 " For so the whole round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 
 
 There is real dutifulness in the recogni 
 tion of all this by the science of heraldry ; 
 for heraldry exists but to commemorate 
 some personal contact with marvels, and a 
 generative occasion without which the race 
 would not be itself; as if to reprove the 
 boy who believes himself descended from 
 Sir Magnifico, whose big shield hangs in 
 the hall, and from nothing else in partic 
 ular. Sir Magnifico's cat may, in reality, 
 account for the continuity of the house ; 
 and a spindle or a vesper-bell come to the 
 front in the history of its averted perils, 
 
32 ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 
 
 and get handsomely quartered upon the 
 baronial arms. But heraldry avails very 
 little ; for she was always limited to the 
 minority, and being old, has ceased to 
 watch to-day and design for to-morrow, as 
 she was wont. The best she can do is to 
 suggest how it depends upon trifles and 
 interferences whether we get here at all, or 
 whether we cut a figure in the crowd ; and 
 how foolish it is in us to scorn anything 
 that happens. The road is long from 
 Adam to his present estimable and innu 
 merable brood, and our past has been full 
 of rescuing events. What has preserved 
 us, under Providence, in the successive 
 persons of our progenitors ? Clearly, 
 more items than are easily numbered, or 
 could be set down in symbols and devices 
 on the escutcheon : so that it is well to 
 maintain an attitude of great and general 
 deference toward creation at large, for 
 fear of not honoring our father and our 
 mother. 
 
 Stradella's kinsfolk yet in Italy may 
 know, or may not know, the hymn which 
 once saved his life. They may pass over 
 the hymn as a tiresome affair, necessary 
 on holy-days, or they may look upon 
 
ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 33 
 
 it as a lucky omen how lucky ! for 
 them. But what they ought to do is to 
 pay it excessive ancestral honors ; and 
 canon law, the wide world over, would ac 
 quit them of the idolatry. Music, indeed, 
 has been potent, first and last, in the 
 crises of men. It becomes a factor of enor 
 mous importance in more than one history, 
 if you search for it. Never do some of us 
 hear that plaintive old song of Locke's, 
 My Lodging is on the Cold Ground r , with 
 out thinking of James Radcliffe, third Earl 
 of Derwentwater, who had apparently no 
 connection with it, but whom one finds 
 himself regarding as its very harmony 
 forwarded into another age, like Arethusa 
 stream returned from underground. Fresh 
 from the composer's meditations, it was 
 sung on the stage by the comely Moll 
 Davies (said to be daughter to the Earl 
 of Berkshire), before the notorious Per 
 sian person who then graced the English 
 throne, and who was struck immediately 
 with an excellence new as Locke's, and 
 hardly of a contrapuntal nature. Time 
 conjured up, from the bonnie comedian 
 and the bad king, the innocent figure of 
 a girl, Mary, who duly married a great 
 
34 ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 
 
 noble, and vanished into history as the 
 early-dying mother of the most stainless 
 knight outside of a romance. Derwent- 
 water was grandson, indeed, to vagabonds ; 
 but was he not great-grandson to the 
 sweetest of the fine arts ? His present 
 representative, Lord Petre, may not openly 
 refer one branch of his lineage to an origin 
 which might seem more frankly fabulous 
 than any divine descent of the ancients. 
 At any rate, here is music of the seven 
 teenth century, going its operative chan 
 nel through imperfect humanity, and 
 upspringing in the wild days of the 
 Jacobite '15, into corporate beauty again : 
 into a young life, dowered to the full with 
 the strange winning charm of the Stuarts, 
 and with a halo about it which they can 
 scarcely boast. And therefore, reverting 
 to " the source and spring of things/' one 
 is free to cry : " Well done, Master Mat 
 thew Locke, in F minor ! " which is in 
 deed reputed by tradition, the right heroic 
 key. But who, writing of the darling of 
 the legends of the North, will be bold 
 enough to set My Lodging is on the Cold 
 Ground in full song, on his genealogical 
 tree ? James the First and Charles the 
 
ON THE ETHICS OF DESCENT 35 
 
 First will be sure to show up there, and 
 so will a number of other Britons not 
 especially germane to the matter. This 
 is how we forge pedigrees, in our blunt 
 literal way, skipping over the vital forces, 
 and laboriously reckoning the mediums 
 and the tools of our own species. Any 
 hard-headed encyclopedia will accredit an 
 advocate of Ajaccio and his wife Letitia 
 with the introduction into the nineteenth 
 century of its most amazing man ; but to 
 William Hazlitt, an expert among para 
 doxes, Bonaparte was " the child and 
 champion " of the Revolution. 
 
 1888. 
 
Some Impressions from the Tudor 
 Exhibition 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 
 
 THE New Gallery on Regent Street, 
 filled, at this time last year, with 
 the memories of the Stuarts and with the 
 graded grace of Vandyke and Lely, has 
 taken a step backward into history to show 
 us a hardier and less enchanting society. 
 The luckless, weak, romantic race are 
 everlastingly dear, as Chopin cleverly said 
 of his own music, to " the cognoscenti and 
 the poets." But this present plunge into 
 the sixteenth century is excellent cold 
 water. The Stuarts are myths to these 
 hard facts of Tudors, these strong-minded 
 and dominant familiars, who destroyed, 
 annexed, altered, and were deposed from 
 nothing except from the Lord Pope's 
 opinion of some of them. Everything 
 here is wide-awake, matter-of-course, bra 
 cing : the spectator's mind tempers itself 
 
4 o SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 to the indicative present of Queen Bess, 
 
 " to trampling horses' feet, 
 More oft than to a chamber melody." 
 
 The men and women on the walls are 
 neither sophisticated nor complex. They 
 are vehement in oath as in compliment, 
 and hit at Fate straight from the shoulder. 
 The best among them has a certain fierce 
 zest of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas 
 More, each in his stainless soul, would have 
 put the other in the pillory for blunders 
 of piety. And such characters, with their 
 stormy circumstance, their distinct homo 
 geneous look and mien, get to be fully 
 understood. Nobody pretends to know 
 the involutions of James the Second ; but 
 bluff Hal is no riddle. Wolsey and 
 Drake, Archbishop Parker and Anne 
 Boleyn, even Shakespeare, are more com 
 prehensible units than, say, Dr. Donne, 
 or the Duke of Monmouth. They stand 
 in the red morning light, tangible as 
 trees. They are the bread-and-cheese 
 realities who have made English litera 
 ture, English policy and manners, Eng 
 lish religion. The heartbreak for Essex ; 
 that other heartbreak for Calais ; Wyatt's 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 41 
 
 succoring cat; Raleigh's cloak in the 
 mud ; Sidney's cup of water ; 
 
 " Battle nor song can from oblivion save, 
 But Fame upon a white deed loves to build : 
 From out that cup of water Sidney gave, 
 Not one drop has been spilled ! 
 
 Christina of Milan's reply to her suitor, 
 the asking and axeing monarch : C Had 
 I a second head in reserve, sire, I might 
 dare to become your wife ; " all these are 
 nursery tales, the very fibre of our earliest 
 memory, as of our adult speculation. Old 
 friends, these painted folk ! You look at 
 them on canvases which Evelyn admired 
 at Weybridge ; which Pepys longed to 
 buy ; to which Horace Walpole provided 
 a date and a name ; which brushed Ben 
 Jonson and Carew passing towards the 
 masques of Whitehall ; which have seen 
 change and the shadow of change, and are 
 themselves ever richer for the remembered 
 eyes which have looked up at them, dur 
 ing three hundred years. 
 
 As you glance from the entrance of the 
 New Gallery, this London January of 
 1890, the first thing to take the eye is a 
 loan from Hampton Court, the full-length 
 
42 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 of the pioneer poet, Henry Howard, Earl 
 of Surrey : a young powerful figure all in 
 red, poised on a hill-top above a vexed 
 white-and-blue sky. He steps forward 
 there, as if in dramatic confirmation of the 
 little known of his proud, obstinate, dis 
 interested career, straight through love, 
 scholarship, adventure, to the Tower axe. 
 One can hardly look at this stripling, with 
 his jewelled cap's white blown feather, and 
 hands laid airily but meaningly on hip and 
 hilt, without remembering the most jocose 
 and off-hand of his verses, written in the 
 spring : 
 
 " When I felt the air so pleasant round about, 
 Lord ! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten 
 out." 
 
 This is No. 73, the authorship of it 
 hanging undetermined between Holbein 
 and Gwillim Stretes. No. 51, a famous 
 and much-reproduced portrait of Surrey 
 under an archway, is certainly Stretes' ; 
 but you covet this other for " Hans the 
 Younger." Its vistas are not uncharac 
 teristic of him ; and what a daring bugle- 
 blast of color it is ! Masterfully does it 
 light the room, and call you into the 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 43 
 
 Tudor company, and make you glad, 
 likewise, that you have "gotten out." It 
 is great so to find a certain Howard, which 
 is a possible Holbein, the key-note of 
 this exhibition. And the race crops out 
 on the walls every here and there, mak 
 ing trouble in your thoughts, as once in 
 thoughts long quieted. They are shown 
 thus contemporaneously, from "Jocky of 
 Norfolk " to the Philip who died for con 
 science* sake in the Beauchamp Tower ; 
 and wherever they are, there is a free wind, 
 a rebel sunshine. Roam about a little ; 
 and you return with gratification to these 
 lean, tense, greyhound personalities. The 
 visitor wearies of the Fidei Defensor, the 
 much-connected-by-marriage, and of the 
 kinsmen and servants, the Brandons and 
 Cromwells, who flatter him by fat approxi 
 mate resemblance, and of the same dimly- 
 recurrent aspect in the timid burgess 
 noblewomen of the hour ; so that his first 
 and last impressions are fain to spring 
 from the spectacle of these firm -chinned 
 soldierly Howards, thin and bright as 
 their own swords, with the conscious look 
 of gentlemen among cads. From the 
 dazzle of history it is a bit difficult, at 
 
44 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 first, to turn the inward eye upon art 
 alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom 
 we have really come to see. And he is 
 here in his plenary pomp : in chalk draw 
 ings, miniatures in hone-stone, burnt 
 wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures 
 of every sort. 
 
 No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an im 
 mense cartoon with outlines pricked, made 
 for a fresco in the old Whitehall, com 
 prising a life-sized group of the two 
 Henries and their respective queens, the 
 estate of only one of whom, had, as the 
 modern world knows, finality. It dates 
 from the twenty-seventh year of the reign 
 of Henry the Eighth. His admirable 
 housekeeper of a father, long dead, is, as 
 in Lord Brave's comely picture (No. 33), 
 a white-haired, mild, austerely gracious 
 presence, at physical variance, at every 
 point, from his burly heir. The latter 
 stands a califourchon, well to the front, his 
 arms akimbo : a figure familiar to us as 
 the alphabet, and with the force and value 
 of spoken truth. There are many authen 
 tic Holbein portraits of the King in this 
 collection, and their unanimity is without 
 parallel. In the masterpiece labelled No. 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 45 
 
 126, Waagen "finds a brutal egotism, an 
 obstinacy and a harshness of feeling such 
 as I have never yet seen in any human 
 countenance. In the eyes, too, there is 
 the suspicious watchfulness of a wild beast; 
 so that I became quite uncomfortable from 
 looking at it." Holbein's greedy instinct 
 for form wreaks itself on Henry's charac 
 teristic contours : everywhere you recog 
 nize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady 
 eyes, the level close-shaven head ; and, 
 more than all, the round, protuberant, 
 malformed chin, like an onion set in the 
 thin growth of carroty beard. Other art 
 ists slur over that ugly little chin, but not 
 the man from Augsburg. Hardly do 
 the elaborations of embroidered doublets 
 and jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, 
 laughably misplaced on this hogshead 
 Majesty, give the great court-painter such 
 easy pleasure in the handling. Yet as 
 Vandyke, 
 
 " Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy," 
 
 is prone to temper the commonplace to 
 his chivalrous ideals ; as Sir Joshua " sees 
 partially, slightly, tenderly, catches the 
 flying lights of things, the momentary 
 
46 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 glooms, paints also partially, tenderly, 
 never with half his strength/' so here 
 is one too much bent on his accuracy 
 and his reporter's conscience. Nobody 
 who has seen these thirty or more versions 
 of the hero of matrimony according to 
 Holbein, will ever forget his power in 
 clinching an impression. High, low, 
 east, west, straddles the royal Harry : a 
 magnificent piece of pork, arrayed like 
 Solomon in all his glory. There is no 
 contradiction from first to last ; the testi 
 mony is not patched. No historiographer, 
 in face of them, has any option to think 
 of Henry but as Holbein's brush thought 
 of him. Mr. Froude is hereby check 
 mated : his idol crumbles. The perfectly 
 square florid countenance, the little crowded 
 features, the indomitable leer under the 
 flat hat and feather, the expanding velvets, 
 the sturdy calves of which their owner was 
 vain, the whole air of an aggressive and 
 successful personality, these are your 
 statistics, " State papers," as Hazlitt once 
 happily called them. They do not allege ; 
 they convict. This, they seem to say, is 
 he who celebrated his wedding on his old 
 love's burial-day, who sacrificed the truest 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 
 
 47 
 
 liegemen in his islands, and who made war 
 on the architecture of monastic England 
 in a maintained fit of crazy and vulgar 
 spite. The ornate No. 55 is also a terri 
 fic " human document." Yet the special 
 plea, for all that, is not fair; it is only as 
 fair as Holbein can make it. He had not 
 the centrifugal mind. To look before 
 and after is not his wont. The royal 
 sitter is impeached unjustly. 
 
 " Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus, 
 When for her sake I ran at tilt in France." 
 
 Was this the mirror of chivalry in his 
 youth ? the handsome Henry of joust 
 and debate, who walked by choice with 
 thinking men, in an atmosphere of Chris 
 tian statecraft and the fine arts ? he who 
 wrote devotional essays, and composed 
 winning music ? If so, that Henry has no 
 survival here. Something of him must 
 have lingered about the later aspect of the 
 tyrant King, as good is sure to do wherever 
 its shrine has been ; but Holbein failed 
 (for we cannot think he refused) to bear 
 it witness. 
 
 It is pleasant to find Holbein in person 
 looking from No. 52 : a noble portrait, in 
 
48 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 distemper, from his own hand, in his 
 prime. It makes one revert, however, to 
 the prior Holbein, also done by himself, 
 now in the Museum at Basle : a sweet 
 sketch, which, judged by the face alone, 
 could instantly be relegated to the era 
 where it belongs, that of the dawn of 
 humanism. There, the straight hair has 
 yet a soft ring or two over the brow ; the 
 mouth is sensitive, but ironic ; the young 
 neck full of power ; the eyebrows are di 
 versely arched, as if in passing press of 
 thought ; the whole mien already suggests, 
 as Woltman says, " seriousness and mental 
 superiority." This picture before us is 
 very splendid, but it is not so reassuring. 
 Holbein's body-color at Berlin, of the 
 chunk-headed, thick-bearded, small-eyed 
 Englishman, a miracle of a drawing, 
 may be accepted as the crass original John 
 Bull. With all manner of exception in 
 favor of the painter, Holbein was rather 
 that sort of a man. His work had the 
 warrant of his genius : what he saw was 
 what his whole habit fitted him to see. 
 Each century has its own casts of physiog 
 nomy, greatly accentuated once by the pas 
 sive individuality, now, alas, vanished, of 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 49 
 
 costume. There seem to have been, in 
 Holbein's day, but two physical values : 
 the grave, alert, " sunnily-ascetic " men, 
 who were dissatisfied with the time ; and 
 the able bold time-servers, who kept their 
 flesh upon them, and their peace. Henry 
 himself, at his best, was the second type, 
 as Erasmus was the first. It is with a 
 sigh of relief that one turns from the 
 imperious presence which chases you 
 through the West Gallery, and " lards the 
 lean earth as he walks along," to confront, 
 in another room, the memorials of his 
 little son. 
 
 Of these, there are some sixteen por 
 traits, exclusive of the drawings, and five 
 of them are from Holbein's hand. The 
 half-length lent by the Earl of Yarborough, 
 No. 174, shows a charming child with a 
 great hat tied under his chin; No. 182, 
 Lord Petre's, is a spirited bust on a misty 
 green ground ; in No. 190, a gem of the 
 first water, belonging to the Earl of Den 
 bigh's collection, the Prince stands, lovely 
 as a lily, habited in white and cloth-of- 
 gold, with a long fur-lined crimson sur- 
 coat, his slender beautifully-modelled hand 
 closed on a dagger. The family beauty 
 
50 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 begins and ends with Edward, in his grave 
 at sixteen ; there is no Edward, by Hol 
 bein, older than six. As usual, the master 
 draws you from his own art to the root 
 of the thing before you, even as he drew 
 Ruskin from counting his skeleton's clack 
 ing ribs in the Dance of Death : and 
 forthwith you begin speculating on the 
 moral qualities of the royal bud, " the 
 boy-patron of boys." There is no deny 
 ing that he looks like Another. Yes, 
 he is very Henry-the-Eighthy ! when 
 you study him at short range. And he 
 had a unique talent, you suddenly remem 
 ber, for signing the death-warrants of 
 uncles. Princess Mary, from the same 
 hand, is decorously dressed; she has flat 
 hair and brown eyes. Acid and dismal 
 as she is, you would say at once of her, 
 that she is sincere, sine cera, without 
 wax. She also resembles a parent : but it 
 is Katharine of Aragon. No. 94 (one 
 mentally thanks Mr. Huth for a sight of 
 it in the original !) is the warmest thing in 
 the room : the famous portrait of Sir 
 Thomas More. The nap of his claret 
 velvet sleeves appears never to have lost 
 a particle of its lustre. One knows not 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 51 
 
 which to admire the most in this picture : 
 the breadth of composition, the precision 
 and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity 
 and repose. Its mate, the half-length of 
 Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge 
 of the King's Bench, "homo civilis, suavis, 
 innocens" is very nearly as superb, though 
 it has less body. Both were done by 
 Holbein during his happy stay at Chelsea. 
 His presentation of More is always in 
 estimable : you recognize, by some little 
 accent ever and anon, that he painted 
 him with enjoyment and understanding 
 love. " Thy painter, dearest Erasmus," 
 wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It 
 was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that 
 Holbein went to England. When asked 
 there who had persuaded him to cross the 
 Channel, he could not remember the 
 nobleman's name, though he remembered 
 his face : one turn of the pen, and the 
 answer was apparent. But it was Erasmus 
 who gave him his letters of introduction, 
 who was in reality his patron ; for Erasmus 
 sent him to More, and from the Chan 
 cellor's roof he passed' to that of the King, 
 at an honorarium of three hundred pounds 
 a year. And as he painted these friends, 
 
52 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 so he painted their colleagues : with sym 
 pathy and authority. Our most intimate 
 knowledge of the finer spirits among the 
 publicists of the sixteenth century comes 
 from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail 
 to observe " the weight of thought and 
 care in these studious heads of the Refor 
 mation." Such a weight is in every Hol 
 bein of Colet and Warham and More, of 
 Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, 
 (borne in him, as in More, with an almost 
 whimsical sweetness), and of " the thor 
 oughly Erasmic being," Bonifacius Amer- 
 bach. Looking at them, and mindful of 
 their diverse sagacities, one must corrobo 
 rate the celebrated wish of Goethe that 
 the business of the Reformation, spoiled, 
 as a work of art, by Luther and Calvin, 
 and as a theological issue, by the popular 
 interference, had been left to the trained 
 leaders : to men like these in one gen 
 eration, and to men like Pole and Hugo 
 Grotius in the next ! 
 
 Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled 
 Archbishop Warham hang here together in 
 strange posthumous amity, parted only by 
 the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth 
 Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves to 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 53 
 
 paint. A very undistinguished person No. 
 1 08 must have been, quite worthy of her 
 safe suburban pensioner's life, and the 
 humorous commuting title of the King's 
 Sister. All her forerunners and successors 
 are here to the life, limned by Holbein's 
 brush and pencil. The dearth of female 
 beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly 
 extraordinary, if we are to believe the 
 believable pigments before us. The 
 women of the court have the fullest pos 
 sible representation, with the adjunct of 
 exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, 
 attire. But among them all, it would be 
 a hard task to bestow the apple upon the 
 belle,, for a reason quite other than any 
 known to Paris on Ida. Even Anne 
 Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an 
 upper-housemaid prettiness. It is small 
 compensation that most of them were 
 learned. The best female portrait, ad 
 mirably hung, is No. 92 : the young 
 Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest 
 and largest manner. The demure girl, 
 set in novel blacks and whites of her 
 widow's mourning, posed with consum 
 mate simplicity, has always an admiring 
 crowd in front of her. Wornum's critical 
 
54 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 last word echoes : it is " a stupendous 
 picture." But the Duchess might be 
 Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart, so far as 
 the actual bearing and expression are con 
 cerned. No wonder that the fright Glo- 
 riana passed for all that was comely and 
 thoroughbred ! Could it be that her sub 
 jects had no loftier criterion in the mem 
 ory of their own mothers ? 
 
 The fine flower of the picture depart 
 ment of the Tudor Exhibition is the 
 Queen's loan from Windsor Library : 
 eighty-nine drawings on tinted paper, 
 ranged on the screens of the West and 
 South Galleries. Queen Caroline, in 
 George the Second's time, found them 
 in a Kensington Palace cupboard, and 
 had them framed. (We know nothing 
 else so nice of that bore of a martyr.) 
 Behold Holbein's methods running free ! 
 In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a 
 mere suggestion of color, or a touch, here 
 and there, of India ink, he gives us his 
 English contemporaries : some in play 
 ful perfection commended to posterity, as 
 a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. 
 How he delights in a hollow cheek, a 
 short silken beard, an outstanding ear, 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 55 
 
 or the hair sprouting oddly on the 
 temples ! Despite his uncompromising 
 truth of locality, the result is often of 
 astounding delicacy : notably in the heads 
 of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of 
 Prince Edward. Most of these Windsor 
 sheets are studies for pictures ; and thus 
 we have Holbein's splendid roll of familiar 
 faces over again ; but that of Sir John 
 Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, 
 of grand breadth and tone. The cata 
 logue names were affixed much later, and 
 are not perfectly trustworthy : but those 
 indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the Rus- 
 sells, Earls of Bedford, the Howards, 
 Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas Eliott, and 
 John Poins (the latter overbrimming with 
 individual force), lead in interest and tech 
 nique. No. 514, the scholarly and lova 
 ble Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would 
 choose, of all here, to win Holbein the 
 admiration of those who have yet to ap 
 preciate him. Its refined finish and bold 
 conception are in unique balance. Sir 
 Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and 
 plain. But whoever likes to pay homage 
 to intelligent human goodness, will delight 
 in this report of him. You feel that 
 
56 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 Rembrandt would have turned from his 
 cloudless, treeless tableland of a counte 
 nance ; and that such as Sir Peter Lely 
 would have found him cryptic enough, 
 and so smothered him in ultramarine dra 
 peries. But among Holbein's men, after 
 the Jorg Gyze (1532) in the Museum at 
 Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden 
 Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with 
 a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery of the 
 Hague, after his immortal major achieve 
 ments, in short, one might rank this little 
 unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas 
 Eliott, a sitter placed forever on the hither 
 side of death. 
 
 But the ladies, again, in their close 
 bodices and triangular head-dresses, gen 
 erally come off second-best. Holbein's 
 elemental candor befitted them not. Fail 
 ing to be themselves in full, they are 
 more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy ! tinct 
 ured with reminiscences of the artist's 
 muddy-tempered Hausfrau at home in 
 Basle. The one quality they cannot con 
 vey is breeding, social distinction. Hol 
 bein's woman may have youth, goodness, 
 capacity, even authority ; but 
 
 " Was the lady such a lady ? " 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 57 
 
 You miss the aroma of manners. The 
 mystery of sex is absent, too : a thing 
 the Florentines never missed, and which 
 Gainsborough and Romney found it im 
 possible not to convey. When you see 
 Holbein's men, you wish you had known 
 them ; but his women merely remind you 
 that he was a very great painter. It is 
 well to remember, nevertheless, that he 
 had no very great woman to paint : no 
 such patroness, for instance, as " Anne, 
 Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." 
 His organ-hand does what it can for souls 
 frangible as lutes. Wherever there is sin 
 cerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever 
 there is sagacity or thought in these Tudor 
 faces, their delineator makes it tell. Did 
 the she-visionaries, if there were any rich 
 enough to engage Holbein, did the per 
 sons born in Hawthorne's " brown twilight 
 atmosphere," habitually avoid his stu 
 dio ? No kirtled aristocracy of any age 
 or country was ever so flat and dozy. 
 Surrey occupied himself in scorning " the 
 new men " of his day ; and it is conceiv 
 able that new men abounded, to fill the 
 places depopulated by the Wars of the 
 Roses, when all that was gallant and sig- 
 
58 SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM 
 
 nificant in the upper ranks, seemed, in 
 one way or another, to have gone under. 
 But the Wars of the Roses touched not 
 the female succession in the ducal and 
 baronial houses : and the wonder remains 
 that Honthorst and Vandyke just after 
 Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before 
 him, could have found, among English 
 maids and wives, the lofty graces which 
 he never saw. Exceptions might be 
 made, however, in favor of Elizabeth, 
 Lady Rich ; for " high-erected thought " 
 is bodily manifest in her, as in the dark- 
 eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, 
 a sweet patient good woman who had 
 known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly 
 modern. At what four-to-six has one 
 met her ? All the ladies of the More 
 family are alluring acquaintances ; and no 
 one is to be envied who does not declare 
 for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap 
 and feather, the big water-drop-shaped 
 pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and 
 that delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth ! 
 
 Our famous old friend, the great sov 
 ereign who saw fit to box the ears of 
 offending gentlemen, and make war upon 
 their wives, possesses the North Gallery. 
 
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 59 
 
 Pale, beaked, sinister ; amiably shrewd, 
 like Becky Sharp ; now as a priggish 
 infant with a huge watery head, anon as 
 a parrot-like old woman ; here with dogs 
 frisking about her, and there with a grim 
 ace which would scatter a pack of -dogs to 
 the four winds ; always swathed in inex 
 pressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia 
 Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. 
 Her vanities were fairly inherited from 
 her straddling sire. Any authentic por 
 trait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, 
 an elaborate cobweb several feet square, 
 in which, after much search and many 
 barricades of haberdashery surmounted, 
 you shall light upon the spectral spider 
 who inhabits them. There is nothing 
 much more entertaining in this world 
 than a study of the royal and virginal 
 wardrobe. Those were epic clothes ! 
 They defy analysis, from the geyser of 
 lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen 
 cross-currents, to the acute angles of the 
 diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the 
 stiff acre of petticoat. They brought 
 employment and money to artists, who 
 painted in the significant occupant as they 
 could, and they serve to illustrate for 
 
60 THE TUDOR EXHIBITION 
 
 ever the science of dress-making, whose 
 heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant 
 on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on 
 the other. In the balcony above is No. 
 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, 
 in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall 
 that, grown old, she had all her mirrors 
 broken, and all paintings of herself which 
 were not liars destroyed, what must have 
 been the terrors of that countenance for 
 which such a copy as this proved suffi 
 ciently flattering ! Despite Zucchero, 
 Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest 
 man alive who knows how that illustrious 
 lady really looked. And as you glance 
 about, be it on the first visit or the twen 
 tieth, full of optical and consequent his 
 torical bewilderment ; as you see how 
 to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts 
 of that wonderful reign have gathered 
 again, you become keenly aware that 
 one who died in the parish of S. Andrew 
 Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died 
 hereafter." Hunger for that bygone 
 genius is in your thought there : O for an 
 hour of Hans Ho. pinxit ! 
 
 1890. 
 
On the Delights of an Incognito 
 
ON THE DELIGHTS OF AN 
 INCOGNITO 
 
 PERFECT happiness, which we pre 
 tend is so difficult to get at, lies at 
 either end of our sentient pole : in be 
 ing intimately recognized, or else in evad 
 ing recognition altogether. An actor 
 finds it inspiring to step forth from the 
 wings, steeled cap-a-pie in self-conscious 
 ness, before a great houseful of enthusiastic 
 faces and hands ; but if he ever knows a 
 moment yet more ecstatic, it is when he 
 is alone in the hill-country, swimming in 
 a clear pool, and undemonstratable as 
 human save by his habiliments hanging 
 on a bush, and his dog, sitting on the 
 margin under, doubtfully eyeing now 
 these, now the unfamiliar large white fish 
 which has shed them. Thackeray once 
 said that the purest satisfaction he ever 
 took, was in hearing one woman name 
 
6 4 ON THE DELIGHTS 
 
 him to another as the author of Vanity 
 Fair, while he was going through a ragged 
 and unbookish London lane. It is at 
 least as likely that Aristides felt pleasure 
 in accosting his own ostracizer, and help 
 ing him to ruin the man whom he was 
 tired of hearing called The Just. And 
 the young Charles the Second, between 
 his defeat at Worcester, and his extraordi 
 nary escape over sea, was able to report, 
 with exquisite relish, the conduct of that 
 honest Hambletonian, who " dranke a 
 goode glass of beare to me, and called me 
 Brother Roundhead." To be indeed the 
 King, and to masquerade as Will Jones, 
 alias Jackson, " in a green cloth jump coat 
 and breeches worn to shreds," in Pepys' 
 sympathetic detail, with "little rolls of 
 paper between his toes," and "a long 
 thorn stick crooked three or four several 
 ways " in his artificially-browned hand, 
 has its dangers ; but it is the top, never 
 theless, of mundane romance and felicity. 
 In fact, there is no enjoyment compar 
 able to walking about " unwept, unhon- 
 ored, and unsung," once you have become, 
 through your misfortune rather than your 
 fault, ever so little of a public personage, 
 
OF AN INCOGNITO 65 
 
 Lucky was the good Haroun Al Rasch- 
 id, inasmuch as, being duly himself by 
 day, he could stroll abroad, and be im 
 measurably and magnificently himself by 
 night. Nothing but duty dragged him 
 back from his post of spectator and specu 
 lator at the street-corner, to the narrow 
 concrete humdrum of a throne. But 
 there are, and have always been, in every 
 age, men of genius who cling to the big 
 cloak and the dark lantern, and who 
 travel pseudonymously from the cradle 
 to the grave ; who keep apart, meddle 
 not at all, have only distant and general 
 dealings with their kind, and, in an inno 
 cent and endearing system of thieving, 
 come to understand and explain every 
 thing social, without being once under 
 stood or explained themselves, or once 
 breaking an inviolable privacy. 
 
 " Not even the tenderest heart and next our own, 
 Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh." 
 
 The arrangement is excellent : it induces 
 and maintains dignity. Most of us who 
 suffer keenly from the intolerable burden 
 of self, are grateful to have our fits of 
 sanity by the hour or the week, when we 
 
66 ON THE DELIGHTS 
 
 may eat lotos and fern-seed, and die out 
 of the ken of The Evening Bugaboo. To 
 be clean of mortal contact, to resolve into 
 grass and brooks, to be a royal nobody, 
 with the dim imbecile spectrum taken to 
 be you, by your acquaintanceship, tempo 
 rarily hooted out of existence, is the 
 privilege which the damned on a Saratoga 
 piazza are not even blest enough to groan 
 for. " Oh," cried Hazlitt, heartily inhal 
 ing liberty at the door of a country inn, 
 after a march, " Oh, it is great to shake 
 off the trammels of the world and public 
 opinion, to lose our importunate, tor 
 menting, everlasting personal identity in 
 the elements of Nature, and to become 
 the creature of the moment clear of all 
 ties ; to hold to the universe only by a 
 dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing 
 but the score of the evening; and, no 
 longer seeking for applause or meeting 
 with contempt, to be known by no other 
 title than The Gentleman in the Parlour." 
 Surely, surely, to be Anonymous is better 
 than to be Alexander, and to have no 
 care is a more sumptuous wealth than 
 to have sacked ten cities. Cowley said 
 it engagingly, in his little essay on 
 
OF AN INCOGNITO 67 
 
 Obscurity : " Eene qui latuit, bene vixit : 
 he lives well, that has lain well hidden ; 
 in which, if it be. a truth, I '11 swear the 
 world has been sufficiently deceived. For 
 my part, I think it is ; and that the pleas- 
 antest condition of life is in incognito. . . . 
 It is, in my mind, a very delightful pas 
 time for two good and agreeable friends 
 to travel up and down together, in places 
 where they are by nobody known, nor 
 know anybody. It was the case of ^Eneas 
 and his Achates, when they walked in 
 visibly about the fields and streets of 
 Carthage. Venus herself 
 
 " 'A veil of thickened air around them cast, 
 
 That none might know or see them as they passed.' ' 
 
 The atmosphere was so liberally allowed, 
 in the Middle Ages, to be thick with 
 spirits, that the subject arose in the de 
 bates of the schools whether more than a 
 thousand and fifty-seven of them could 
 execute a saraband on the point of a 
 needle. We are not informed by what 
 prior necessity they desired to dance ; but 
 something, after all, must be left to the 
 imagination. Dancing, in their case, must 
 be, as with lambs and children, the spon- 
 
68 ON THE DELIGHTS 
 
 taneous witness of light hearts ; and what 
 is half so likely to make a shade whimsi 
 cally frolicsome, as the sense of his own 
 absolute intangibility in our world of 
 wiseacres and mind-readers and myopic 
 Masters of Arts ? To watch, to listen, 
 to know the heretofore and the hereafter, 
 and to be at the same time dumb as a 
 nail, and skilful at dodging a collision 
 with flesh and blood, must be, when you 
 come to think of it, a delightful vocation 
 for ghosts. It is, then, in some sort, an 
 ticipatory of part of our business in the 
 twenty-sixth century of the Christian era, 
 to becloud now our name and nativity, 
 
 and > " Beholding, unbeheld of all," 
 
 to move musingly among strange scenes, 
 with the charity and cheerfulness of those 
 delivered from death. I am told that L. 
 R. had once an odd spiritual adventure, 
 agreeable and memorable, which demon 
 strated how much pleasure there is to be 
 had out of these moods of detachment 
 and non-individuality. He had spent 
 the day at a library desk, and had grown 
 hazy with no food and much reading. 
 As he walked homeward in the evening, 
 
OF AN INCOGNITO 69 
 
 he felt, for sheer buoyancy of mind, like 
 that thin Greek who had to fill his pock 
 ets with lead, for fear of being blown 
 away by the wind. It happened that he 
 was obliged to pass, on the way to his 
 solitary lodging of the night, the house 
 where he was eternally the expected guest : 
 the house of one with whom and with 
 whose family he was on a most open and 
 affectionate footing. Their window-shades 
 were drawn, not so low but that he could 
 see the shining dinner-table dressed in its 
 pomp, and the cosy ring of merry faces 
 closing it in. There was S., the bonniest 
 of wives, smiling, in her pansy-colored 
 gown, with a pearl comb in her hair : and 
 opposite her was little S., in white, busy 
 with the partridge ; and there was A. H., 
 the jolly artist cousin ; and, facing the 
 window at the head of his own conclave, 
 (quos inter Augustus recumbens purpureo 
 bibit ore nectar!), sat dear O., with his 
 fine serious genial head bobbing over 
 the poised carving-knife, as he demol 
 ished, perhaps, some quoted sophism of 
 Schopenhauer. There were welcome and 
 warmth inside there for R. : how well he 
 knew it! But the silent day just over 
 
70 DELIGHTS OF AN INCOGNITO 
 
 had laid a spell upon his will ; he looked 
 upon them all, in their bright lamplight, 
 like any vagrant stranger from the street, 
 and hurried on, never quite so paradoxi 
 cally happy in his life as when he quitted 
 that familiar pane without rapping, and 
 went back to the dark and the frost, un- 
 apprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit 
 among men. 
 
 1893. 
 
The Puppy : A Portrait 
 
THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 
 
 
 
 HE is the twenty-sixth in direct descent, 
 and his coat is like amber damask, 
 and his blue eyes are the most winning 
 that you ever saw. They seem to pro 
 claim him as much too good for the 
 vulgar world, and worthy of such zeal 
 and devotion as you, only you, could give 
 to his helpless infancy. And, with a bless 
 ing upon the Abbot of Clairvaux, who 
 is popularly supposed to have invented 
 his species, you carry him home from the 
 Bench show, and in the morning, when 
 you are told that he has eaten a yard and 
 a quarter of the new stair-carpet, you look 
 into those dreamy eyes again : no re 
 proach shall reach him, you swear, because 
 you stand forevermore between. And 
 he grows great in girth, and in character 
 the very chronicle and log-book of his 
 noble ancestry ; he may be erratic, but he 
 
74 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 
 
 puts charm and distinction into everything 
 he does. Your devotedness to his welfare 
 keeps him healthful and honest, and ab 
 surdly partial to the squeak of your boots, 
 or the imperceptible aroma which, as it 
 would seem, you dispense, a mile away. 
 The thing which pleases you most is his 
 ingenuous childishness. It is a fresh little 
 soul in the rogue's body : 
 
 " Him Nature giveth for defence 
 His formidable innocence.'* 
 
 You see him touch pitch every day, 
 associating with the sewer-building Italians, 
 with their strange oaths ; with affected 
 and cynical " sales-ladies " in shops (she 
 of the grape-stall being clearly his too- 
 seldom-relenting goddess) ; and with the 
 bony Thomas-cat down street, who is an 
 acknowledged anarchist, and whose infre 
 quent suppers have made him sour-com- 
 plexioned towards society, and " thereby 
 disallowed him," as dear Walton would 
 say, "to be a competent judge." But 
 Pup loses nothing of his sweet congenital 
 absent-mindedness ; your bringing-up sits 
 firmly upon him and keeps him young. 
 He expands into a giant, and such as meet 
 
THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 75 
 
 him on a lonely road have religion until 
 he has passed. Seven, nine, ten months 
 go over his white-hooded head; and 
 behold, he is nigh a year old, and still 
 Uranian. He begins to accumulate facts, 
 for his observation of late has not been 
 unscientific ; but he cannot generalize, 
 and on every first occasion he puts his 
 foot in it. A music-box transfixes him ; 
 the English language, proceeding from a 
 parrot in a cage, shakes his reason for days. 
 A rocking-horse on a piazza draws from 
 him the only bad word he knows. He 
 sees no obligation to respect persons with 
 mumps, or with very red beards, or with 
 tools and dinner-pails ; in the last instance, 
 he acts advisedly against honest labor, as 
 he perceives that most overalls have kicks 
 in them. Following Plato, he would 
 reserve his haughty demeanor for slaves 
 and servants. Moreover, before the un- 
 demonstrated he comes hourly to a pause. 
 If a wheelbarrow, unknown hitherto among 
 vehicles, approach him from his suburban 
 hill, he is aware of the supernatural ; but 
 he will not flinch, as he was wont to do 
 once ; rather will he stand four-square, 
 with eyebrows and crinkled ears vocal 
 
76 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 
 
 with wonder and horror. Then the man 
 back of the moving bulk speaks over his 
 truck to you, in the clear April evening : 
 " Begorra, 't is his furrust barry ! " and 
 you love the man for his accurate affec 
 tionate sense of the situation. When Pup 
 is too open-mouthed and curious, when he 
 dilates, in fact, with the wrong emotion, it 
 reflects upon you, and reveals the flaws in 
 your educational system. He blurts out 
 dire things before fine ladies. If he hear 
 one of them declaiming, with Delsarte ges 
 tures, in a drawing-room, he appears in the 
 doorway, undergoing symptoms of acutest 
 distress, and singing her down, professedly 
 for her own sake ; and afterward he pities 
 her so, and is so chivalrously drawn toward 
 her in her apparent aberration, that he lies 
 for hours on the flounce of her gown, eyeing 
 you, and calumniating you somewhat by 
 his vicarious groans and sighs. But ever 
 after, Pup admits the recitation of tragic 
 selections as one human folly more. 
 
 He is so big and so unsophisticated, 
 that you daily feel the incongruity, and 
 wish, in a vague sort of way, that there 
 was a street boarding-school in your town, 
 where he could rough it away from an 
 
THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 77 
 
 adoring family, and learn to be responsi 
 ble and self-opinionated, like other dogs. 
 He has a maternal uncle, on the estate 
 across the field : a double-chinned tawny 
 ogre, good-natured as a baby, and utterly 
 rash and improvident, whose society you 
 cannot covet for your tender charge. One 
 fine day, Pup is low with the distemper, 
 and evidence is forthcoming that he has 
 visited, under his uncle's guidance, the 
 much-deceased lobster thrown into hotel 
 tubs. After weeks of anxious nursing, 
 rubbings in oil, and steamings with vinegar, 
 during which time he coughs and wheezes 
 in a heartbreaking imitation of advanced 
 consumption, he is left alone a moment 
 on his warm rug, with the thermometer in 
 his special apartment steady at seventy- 
 eight degrees, and plunges out into the 
 winter blast. Hours later, he returns; and 
 the vision of his vagabond uncle, slinking 
 around the house, announces to you in 
 what companionship he has been. Plas 
 tered to the skull in mud and icicles, wet 
 to the bone, jaded, guilty, and doomed 
 now, of course, to die, Pup retires behind 
 the kitchen table. The next morning he 
 is well. The moral, to him at least, is 
 
78 THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 
 
 that our uncle is an astute and unappre 
 ciated person, and a genuine man of the 
 world. 
 
 Yet our uncle, with all his laxity, has 
 an honorable heart, and practises the 
 maxima reverentia puero. It is not from 
 him that Pup shall learn his little share of 
 iniquity. Meanwhile, illumination is near- 
 ing him in the shape of a little old white 
 bull-terrier of uncertain parentage, with 
 one ear, and a scar on his neck, and de 
 pravity in the very lift of his stumped tail. 
 This active imp, recently come to live in 
 the neighborhood, fills you with forebod 
 ings. You know that Pup must grow 
 up sometime, must take his chances, 
 must fight and be fooled, must err and 
 repent, must exhaust the dangerous knowl 
 edge of the great university for which his 
 age at last befits him. The ordeal will 
 harm neither him nor you : and yet you 
 cannot help an anxious look at him, full 
 four feet tall from crown to toe, and with 
 a leg like an obelisk, preserving unseason 
 ably his ambiguous early air of exagger 
 ated goodness. One day he follows you 
 from the station, and meets the small 
 Mephisto on the homeward path. They 
 
THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT 79 
 
 dig a bone together, and converse behind 
 trees ; and when you call Pup, he snorts 
 his initial defiance, and dances away in the 
 tempter's wake. Finally, your whistle 
 compels him, and he comes soberly for 
 ward. By this time the ringleader terrier 
 is departing, with a diabolical wink. You 
 remember that, a moment before, he stood 
 on a mound, whispering in your innocent's 
 beautiful dangling ear, and you glance 
 sharply at Pup. Yes, it has happened ! 
 He will never seem quite the same again, 
 with 
 
 " the contagion of the world's slow stain " 
 
 beginning in his candid eyes. He is a 
 dog now. He knows. 
 
 1893. 
 
On Dying Considered as a Dramatic 
 Situation 
 
ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 A DRAMATIC SITUATION 
 
 
 
 AM AN of thought wears himself out, 
 standing continually on the defen 
 sive. The more original a character, the 
 more it is at war with common conditions, 
 the more it wastes its substance scourging 
 the tides and charging windmills ; and this 
 being recognized, the exceptional person, 
 your poet or hero, is expected to show an 
 ascetic - pallor, to eat and sleep little, to 
 have a horrible temper, and to die at 
 thirty -seven. Has he an active brain, he 
 must pay for it by losing all the splendid 
 passivity, inner and outer, which belongs 
 to oxen and philosophers. Nor, on the 
 other hand, will stupidity and submission 
 promote longevity : for this is a bullying 
 world. A wight with no mind to end 
 himself by fretting and overdoing, is chari 
 tably ended by the action of his superiors, 
 
84 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 social or military. How many privates 
 had out of Balaklava but a poor posthu 
 mous satisfaction ! The Saxon soldier 
 does not shed his skin in times of peace : 
 he is the same in garrisons and barracks 
 as amid the roar of guns ; and his ruling 
 passion is still to stand in herds and be 
 killed. A few years ago, an infantry com 
 pany, in the south of England, were 
 marching into the fields for rifle-practice. 
 Filing through a narrow lane, they saw 
 two runaway horses, half-detached from 
 their carriage, round the bend and rush 
 towards them. The officer in charge 
 either did not perceive them so soon as 
 the others, or else he was slow to collect 
 his wits, and give the order to disperse 
 into the hedgerows for safety. As the 
 order, for whichever cause, was not uttered, 
 not a single recruit moved a muscle ; but 
 the ranks strode on, with as solid and 
 serene a front as if on dress-parade, straight 
 under those wild hoofs and wheels : and 
 afterwards, what was left of eleven men 
 was cheerfully packed off, not to the ceme 
 tery, by great luck, but to the hospital. 
 And in Germany, only the other day, the 
 sergeant who superintends the daily gym- 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 85 
 
 nastic exercises of a certain camp, marched 
 a small detachment of men, seven or eight 
 in number, into the lake to swim. In 
 went the men, up to their necks and over 
 their heads, and made an immediate and 
 unanimous disappearance. The sergeant, 
 impatient to have them finish their bath, 
 returned presently, and was shocked to 
 discover that they were all drowned ! 
 Now, it happened that the seven or eight 
 could not swim a stroke between them, 
 but they thought it unnecessary to make 
 any remark to that effect. Is it not evi 
 dent that these fine dumb fellows can beat 
 the world at a fight ? Yet their immense 
 practical value has no artistic significance. 
 They strike the unintelligent attitude. It 
 is no part of a private's business to exert 
 his choice, his volition ; and without these, 
 he loses pertinence. Therefore, to wear 
 the eternal " piece of purple " in a ballad, 
 you must be at least a corporal. 
 
 The mildest and sanest of us has a 
 sneaking admiration for a soldier : lo, it is 
 because his station implies a disregard of 
 what we call the essential. The only ele 
 gant, gratifying exit of such a one is in 
 artillery-smoke. A boy reads of Winkel- 
 
86 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 ried and d'Assas with a thrill of satisfac 
 tion. Hesitation, often most meritorious, 
 is unforgivable in those who have espoused 
 a duty and a risk. Courage is the most 
 ordinary of our virtues : it ought to win 
 no great plaudits ; but for one who with 
 holds it, and " dares not put it to the 
 touch," we have tremendous vituperations. 
 In short, that man makes but a poor show 
 thenceforward among his fellows, who hav 
 ing had an eligible chance to set up as a 
 haloed ghost, evades it, and forgets the 
 serviceable maxim of Marcus Aurelius, 
 that " part of the business of life is to lose 
 it handsomely." Of like mind was Mu- 
 sonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus : 
 " Take the first chance of dying nobly, 
 lest, soon after, dying indeed come to thee, 
 but noble dying nevermore." Once in a 
 while, such counsels stir a fellow-mortal 
 beyond reason, and persuade him " for a 
 small flash of honor to cast away himself." 
 And if so, it proves that at last the right 
 perception and application of what we are 
 has dawned upon him. 
 
 Though we get into this world by no 
 request of our own, we have a great will to 
 stay in it : our main desire, despite a 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 87 
 
 thousand buffets of the wind, is to hang 
 on to the branch. The very suicide-elect, 
 away from spectators, oftenest splashes 
 back to the wharf. Death is the one 
 visitor from whom we scurry like so many 
 children, and terrors thrice his size we 
 face with impunity at every turn. The 
 real hurt and end-all may be in the shape 
 of a fall, a fire, a gossamer-slight misunder 
 standing. Or " the catastrophe is a nup 
 tial," as Don Adriano says in the comedy. 
 But we can breast out all such venial 
 calamities, so that we are safe from that 
 which heals them. We have, too, an 
 unconscious compassion for the men of 
 antiquity. Few, if it came to the point, 
 would change day for day, and be Alex 
 ander, on the magnificent consideration 
 that, although Alexander was an incom 
 parable lion, Alexander is dead. Herrick's 
 ingenuous verse floats into memory : 
 
 " I joy to see 
 
 Myself alive : this age best pleaseth me." 
 
 Superfluous adorners of the nineteenth 
 century, we have no enthusiasm to be what 
 our doom makes us, mere gradators, little 
 mounting buttresses of a coral-reef, atoms 
 
88 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 atop of several layers, and presently buried 
 under several more. We would strut, live 
 insects for ever, working and waltzing 
 over our progenitors' bones. Seventy-five 
 flushing years are no boon to us, if at that 
 tender period's end, we must be pushed 
 aside from the wheel of the universe, and 
 swept up like so much dust and chaff. 
 Nor does it help us, when it comes to the 
 inevitable deposal, to recall that while 
 there were as yet no operas, menus, nor 
 puns, one Methusalem and his folk had 
 nine lazy centuries of it, and that their 
 polar day, which was our proper heritage, 
 vanished with them, and beggared the 
 almanac. Appreciation of life is a modern 
 art : it seems vexing enough that just in 
 inverse proportion to the growing capacity 
 of ladies and gentlemen, is the ever-dimin 
 ishing room allotted wherein to exhibit it 
 to " the scoffing stars." Time has stolen 
 from us our decades sacred to truancy and 
 the circus, to adventure and loafing. 
 Where is the age apiece in which to ex 
 plode shams, to do vast deeds, to general 
 ize, to learn a hawk from a hernshaw, to 
 be good O to be good ! an hour before 
 bedtime ? Evening for us should be a 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 89 
 
 dogma in abstracto ; seas and suns should 
 change ; horizons should stretch incal 
 culably, cities bulge over their bounda 
 ries, deserts thicken with carriages, polite 
 society increase and abound in caves and 
 balloons, and in starlit tavern doorways 
 on Matterhorn top : and still, crowded 
 and jostled by less favored humanity, 
 elbowing it through extinct and unborn 
 multitudes, we would live, live ! and there 
 should be no turf broken save by the 
 plough, and no urns except for roses. 
 
 It demonstrates what an amusing great 
 babe a man is, that his love of life is 
 usually equivalent to love of duration of 
 life. To be ninety, we take to mean that 
 one has had ninety years* worth out of the 
 venture : a calculation born of the hood 
 winking calendar, and of a piece with Dog 
 berry's deductions. But this estimable 
 existence of ours is measured by depths 
 and not by lengths ; it is not uncommon 
 for those who have compassed its greatest 
 reach to be translated young, and wept 
 over by perspicuous orators. And the 
 smug person who expires " full of years," 
 and empty, forsooth, of all things else, 
 whose life is indeed covered, in several 
 
9 o ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 senses, by a life-insurance, is thought to be 
 the enviable and successful citizen. It is 
 quite as well that the gods have allowed 
 us no vote concerning our own fates : it 
 would be too hard a riddle to guess 
 whether it be a dignified thing to continue, 
 or when it is a profitable hour to cease. 
 A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his 
 wish, like Endymion, between moonrise 
 and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a 
 bank-account and octogenarianism. Why 
 wouldst thou grow up, sirrah ? " To be a 
 philosopher ? a madman. An alchemist ? 
 a beggar. A poet ? esurit : an hungry 
 jack." Mere possibility of further sensa 
 tion is a curious object of worship and 
 desire. It has no meaning, save in rela 
 tion to its starry betters in whose courts 
 it is a slave, for whose good it may be 
 come a victim. A lover protesting to his 
 lady that she is dearer than his life, is pay 
 ing her, did he but consider it, a tricksy 
 trivial compliment : as if he had said that 
 she was more precious than a prejudice, 
 adorable beyond a speculation. On the 
 negative side only, in the subjective appli 
 cation, life is dear. Certainly, one can 
 conceive of no more monstrous wrong to 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 91 
 
 a breathing man than to announce his 
 demise. Swift's mortuary joke on Par 
 tridge is the supreme joke. A report that 
 you are extinct damages your reputation 
 beyond repair. We may picture a vision 
 of wrath bursting into the editor's office : 
 " I am told that yesterday you had my 
 name, sir, in your column of Deaths. I 
 demand contradiction." Unto whom the 
 editor : " The Evening Bugaboo never con 
 tradicts itself. But I will, with pleasure, 
 put you in, to-night, under the heading of 
 Births." Some considerations are to the 
 complainant a fiery phooka : strive as he 
 will to adjust them, he gets thrown, and 
 bruises his bones. 
 
 Life is legal tender, and individual char 
 acter stamps its value. We are from a 
 thousand mints, and all genuine ; despite 
 our infinitely diverse appraisements, we 
 " make change " for one another. So 
 many ideals planted are worth the great 
 gold of Socrates ; so many impious laws 
 broken are worth John Brown. We may 
 give ourselves in penny fees for horses, 
 social vogue, tobacco, books, a journey; 
 or be lavished at once for some good out 
 ranking them all. And of the two dan- 
 
92 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 gers of hoarding and spending, the former 
 seems a thousand times more imminent 
 and appalling. Our moralists, who have 
 done away with duels, and taught us the 
 high science of solidarity, have deflected 
 us from our collateral relative, the knight- 
 errant, who seemed to go about seeking 
 that which might devour him. But there 
 are times when a prince is called suddenly 
 to his coronation, and must throw largesses 
 as he rides ; when the commonest worka 
 day life hears a summons, and wins the 
 inalienable right to spill itself on the high 
 way, among the crowd. We make a mis 
 erable noisy farcical entry, one by one, on 
 the terrene stage ; it is a last dramatic 
 decency that we shall learn to bow our 
 selves out with gallantry, be it even among 
 the drugs and pillows of a too frequent lot. 
 But the enviable end is the other : some 
 situations have inherent dignity, and exist 
 already in the play. Death in battle is 
 (for the commissioned officer) a gracefully 
 effective mode of extinction ; so is any 
 execution for principle's sake. The men 
 who fill the historic imagination are the 
 men who strove and failed, and put into 
 port at Traitors' Gate. The political 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 
 
 93 
 
 scaffold, in fact, is an artistic creation. 
 When a scholar looks up, the first eyes 
 he meets are the eyes of those who stand 
 there, in cheerful acquiescence, " alive, 
 alert, immortal." " An axe," says Bishop 
 Jeremy Taylor, " is a much less affliction 
 than a strangury." While the headsman 
 awaited on every original inspiration, under 
 " hateful Henry " as under Nero, life cer 
 tainly had a romance and gusto unknown 
 to modern spirits. The rich possibilities 
 of any career got, at some time, congested 
 tragically into this. How readily any one 
 might see that, and welcome the folly and 
 ignominy which drove him to an illustri 
 ous early grave ! Raleigh, at the last, 
 kisses the yet bloodless blade "which 
 ends this strange eventful history," say 
 ing : " 'T is a sharp medicine, but a cure 
 for all diseases." Disguised and hunted, 
 Campion of S. John's, following his duty, 
 steals along the Harrow Road, by Tyburn 
 tree, and passing it, in a sort of awful love- 
 longing, and as if greeting the promised 
 and foreordained, smilingly raises his hat. 
 Not by grace only are men " so in love 
 with death," but by habit, by humor, 
 and through economic effort. Logic as 
 
94 ON DYING CONSIDERED AS 
 
 well as faith understands the evangel : 
 "Whoso loseth his life shall find it." 
 The hero can await, without a flutter, the 
 disarming of his hand and hope ; for he 
 can never be stolen upon unawares. His 
 prayer has always been for 
 
 " Life that dares send 
 A challenge to its end, 
 And when it comes, say, ' Welcome, friend ! ' ' 
 
 He must cease en gentilhomme, as he has 
 heretofore continued. To have Azrael 
 catch him by the leg, like a scampering 
 spider, is not agreeable to his ideas of 
 etiquette. At any age, after any fashion, 
 it is only the hero who dies ; the rest of 
 us are killed off. He resembles Cart- 
 right's "virtuous young gentlewoman" : 
 
 " Others are dragged away, or must be driven ; 
 She only saw her time, and stepped to Heaven." 
 
 We act out to its close our parable of the 
 great babe, who has clutched his little 
 treasure long and guardedly, unwilling to 
 share it, and from whom, for discipline's 
 sake, it must needs be taken. But the 
 martyr-mind, in conscious disposal, is like 
 the young Perseus, bargaining with Pallas 
 
A DRAMATIC SITUATION 95 
 
 Athene for a brief existence and glory. 
 The soul meets its final opportunity, as 
 at a masked ball ; if it cannot stand and 
 salute, to what end were its fair faculties 
 given ? Or, we are all pedestrians in a 
 city, hurrying towards our own firesides, 
 eager, preoccupied, mundane. Perhaps 
 at the turn of a steep street, there is the 
 beauty of sunset, " brightsome Apollo in 
 his richest pomp," the galleons of cloud- 
 land in full sail, every scarlet pennon 
 flying. One or two pause, as if from a 
 sharp call or reminder, and beholding 
 such a revelation, forget the walk and 
 the goal, and are rapt into infinitude. 
 Now, most of us crawl home to decease 
 respectably of " a surfeit of lampreys." 
 We keep the names, however, of those 
 who seem to make their exit to the sound 
 of spiritual trumpets, and who fling our 
 to-morrow's innocent gauds away, to 
 clothe themselves with immortality. 
 
 1887. 
 
A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle 
 Reader 
 
A BITTER COMPLAINT OF 
 THE UNGENTLE READER. 
 
 AN editor, a person of authority 
 and supposed discretion, requested 
 a friend of mine, the other day, to write 
 an essay with this weird title : "How to 
 Read a Book of Poems so as to Get the 
 Most Good out of It." My friend, 
 " more than usual calm," politely excused 
 himself, suffering the while from sup 
 pressed oratory. He felt that the dia 
 bolic suggestion, made in all 
 
 " Conscience and tendre herte," 
 
 amounted to a horrible implied doubt con 
 cerning the lucidity of himself and other 
 minor bards, publishing to-day and to 
 morrow. They have become difficult to 
 read, only because a too educational world 
 of readers is determined to find them so. 
 Now, eating is to eat, with variations in 
 
ioo A BITTER COMPLAINT 
 
 haste, order, quantity, quality, and noc 
 turnal visions : with -results, in short ; but 
 eating is to eat. Even thus, as it would 
 appear to a plain mind, reading is to 
 read. Can it be that any two or two 
 thousand can wish to be preached at, in 
 order that they may masticate a page cor 
 rectly, in squads ? that they may never 
 forget, like Mr. Gladstone's progeny, to 
 apportion thirty-two bites to every stanza, 
 with the blessing before, and the grace 
 after? No full-grown citizen is under 
 compulsion to read ; if he do so at all, let 
 him do it individually, by instinct and 
 favor, for wantonness, for private adven 
 ture's sake : and incidental profit be hanged, 
 drawn and quartered ! To enter a library 
 honorably, is not to go clam-digging after 
 useful information, nor even after emotions. 
 The income to be secured from any book 
 stands in exact disproportion to the pur 
 pose, as it were, of forcing the testator's 
 hand : a moral very finely pointed in The 
 Taming of the Shrew ^ and again in Aurora 
 Leigh. To read well is to make an im 
 palpable snatch at whatever item takes 
 your eye, and run. The schoolmaster 
 has a contradictory theory. He would 
 
OF THE UNGENTLE READER 101 
 
 have us in a chronic agony of inquisitive- 
 ness, and with minds gluttonously recep 
 tive, not of the little we need (which it is 
 the ideal end and aim of a university edu 
 cation, according to Newman, to perceive 
 and to assimilate) but of the much not 
 meant for us. Wherefore to the school 
 master there may be chanted softly in 
 chorus : Ah, mon pere, ce que vous dites la 
 est du dernier bourgeois. The Muse is 
 dying nowadays of over-interpretation. 
 Too many shepherd swains are trying to 
 Get the Most Good out of her. When 
 Caius Scriblerius prints his lyric about the 
 light of Amatoria's eyes, which disperses 
 his melancholy moods, the average public, 
 at least in Boston, cares nothing for it, 
 until somebody in lack of employment dis 
 covers that as Saint Patrick's snakes were 
 heathen rites, and as Beatrice Portinari 
 was a system of philosophy, so Amatoria's 
 eyes personify the sun-myth. And Caius 
 shoots into his eleventh edition. 
 
 Mr. Browning, perhaps, will continue 
 to bear this sort of enlargement and inter 
 fusion ; indeed, nothing proves his calibre 
 quite so happily as the fact that his capa 
 cious phantasmal figure, swollen with the 
 
102 A BITTER COMPLAINT 
 
 gas of much comment and expounding, 
 has a fair and manly look, and can still 
 carry off, as we say, its deplorable circum 
 ference. But at the present hour, there is 
 nothing strange in imagining less opaque 
 subjects being hauled in for their share of 
 dissection before Browning societies. Pic 
 ture, for instance, a conclave sitting from 
 four to six over the sensations of Mrs. 
 Boffkin, 
 
 " Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary 's 
 fits." 
 
 (For Mr. Kipling must be a stumbling- 
 block unto some, as unto many a scandal.) 
 Is there no fun left in Israel ? Have we 
 to endure, for our sins, that a super-civil 
 ization insists on being vaccinated by the 
 poor little poets, who have brought, alas, 
 no instrument but their lyre ? Can we 
 no longer sing, without the constraint of 
 doling out separately to the hearer, what 
 rhetoric is in us, what theory of vowel 
 color, what origin and sequences, what 
 occult because non-existent symbolism ? 
 without setting up for oracles of dark im 
 port, and posing romantically as " greater 
 than we know " ? To what a pass has the 
 
OF THE UNGENTLE READER 103 
 
 ascendant New England readeress brought 
 the harmless babes of Apollo ! She seeks 
 to master all that is, and to raise a com 
 placent creation out of its lowland wisdom 
 to her mountainous folly's level ; she 
 touches nothing that she does not adorn 
 with a problem ; she approves of 
 music and pictures whose reasonableness 
 is believed to be not apparent to the com 
 mon herd ; she sheds scholastic blight 
 upon " dear Matt Prior's easy jingle," 
 and unriddles for you the theological 
 applications of 
 
 " Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy : 
 'I am extremely hungaree.' " 
 
 She is forever waking the wrong passen 
 ger : forever falling upon the merely beau 
 tiful, and exacting of it what it was never 
 born to yield. The arts have a racial 
 shyness : the upshot of this scrutiny of 
 their innocent faces is that they will be 
 fain to get into a hole and hide away for 
 good. We lay it all to the ladies ; for 
 the old lazy unprovincialized world of 
 men was never so astute and excruciating. 
 There were no convenings for the pur 
 pose of illuminating the text of Dr. John 
 
io 4 A BITTER COMPLAINT 
 
 Donne, although the provocation was 
 unique. Poets were let alone, once upon 
 a time ; and all they did for their own 
 pleasure and sowed broadcast for the 
 pleasure of others, failed not, somehow, to 
 fulfil itself from the beginning unto the 
 end. What is meant for literature now, 
 begotten in simpleness and bred in delight, 
 arises as a quarrel between producer and 
 consumer, 
 
 " And thereof come in the end despondency and 
 madness. ' ' 
 
 The man's attitude, even yet, towards a 
 book of poetry which is tough to him, is 
 to drop it, even as the gods would have 
 him do ; the woman's is to smother it in 
 a sauce of spurious explanation, and gulp 
 it down. 
 
 In a sophisticating age, it is the nature 
 of poets to remain young. Their buyers 
 are always one remove nearer to the sick 
 end of the century, and being themselves 
 tainted with a sense of the importance of 
 the scientific, are in so much disqualified 
 to judge of the miracle, the phenomenon, 
 which poetry is. To whomever has an idle 
 and a fresh heart, there is great encourage- 
 
OF THE UNGENTLE READER 105 
 
 ment in the poetic outlook. The one 
 harassing dread is that modern readers 
 may scorch that hopeful field. They 
 refuse to take us for what we are: they 
 are of one blood with the mediaeval Nomi 
 nalists, who regarded not the existence of 
 the thing, but the name by which they 
 denoted it. They make our small gift 
 futile, and their own palates a torment. 
 We solemnly pronounce our wares, such 
 as they be, handsomer in the swallowing 
 than in the chewing : alas, so far, it is our 
 fate to be chewed. Who can help apply 
 ing to an adult magazine constituency 
 which yearns to be told How to Read a 
 Book of Poems, the " so help me God " 
 of dear Sir Thomas More ? " So help 
 me God, and none otherwise but as I 
 verily think, that many a man buyeth Hell 
 with so much pain, he might have Heaven 
 with less than the one-half." 
 
 1894. 
 
Animum non Coelum 
 
ANIMUM NON COELUM 
 
 HORACE was not often wrong, in 
 his habitual beautiful utterance of 
 commonplace ; but was he not altogether 
 wrong when he gave us the maxim that 
 the traveller may change the sky over 
 him, but not the mind within him ? that 
 the mood, the personal condition, is not 
 to be driven forth by any new sea or land, 
 but must cling to a man in his flight, like 
 the pollen under a bee's wing ? Sick 
 souls started out from the Rome of 
 Augustus, with intent to court adventure 
 and drown care, even as they do now 
 from Memphremagog and Kalamazoo, 
 U. S. A. These Horace noted, and dis 
 couraged with one of his best fatalisms. 
 Human trouble, nevertheless, has for its 
 sign-manual a packed valise and a steamer- 
 ticket. Broken hearts pay most of the 
 bills at European hotels. For they know, 
 better than the wounded in body, that the 
 
no ANIMUM NON COELUM 
 
 one august inevitable relief, the wizard 
 pill against stagnation, is, was, shall ever 
 be, " strange countries for to see." In 
 the long run, self cannot withstand the 
 overwhelming spectacle of other faces, and 
 the vista of other days than ours. Un 
 rest, however caused, must melt away in 
 sensibly in the glow of old art, and before 
 the thought, widening the breast, in cities 
 or on the Alpine slopes, of what has been. 
 The tourist, be he of right mettle, falls in 
 love with the world, and with the Will 
 which sustains it. As much solace or 
 exhilaration as comes into the eye and ear, 
 so much evil, in the form of sadness, re 
 bellion, ignorance, passes out from us, as 
 breathed breath into the purer air. Boast 
 as we may, we are not, immigrating, what 
 we were, emigrating. We come away be 
 witched from the great playhouse of our 
 forefathers ; no thorn in the flesh seems 
 so poignant now as it was, in that remem 
 brance. Time, master-workman that he 
 is, annuls and softens grief, and allows 
 joy to sink in and spread. What we 
 alter, surely, is not the same dumb blue 
 ether overhead, but the little carnal roof 
 and heaven domed between that and us. 
 
ANIMUM NON COELUM in 
 
 Travel, to the cheerful, is cheerful busi 
 ness ; to the overcast nature it is some 
 thing better. Upon the smoky and 
 clouded ceiling of his own consciousness, 
 darkened once despite him, but perhaps 
 kept wilfully dark since, " for very wanton 
 ness," travel lays her cunning ringer. Sud 
 den frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and 
 flush there, in gold and olive and rose, as 
 if Fra Angelico had been set loose with 
 his palette in a sequestered cloister. Your 
 Horace, be it known, was a home-keeper, 
 and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid 
 doing, " talks big of what does not con 
 
 cern him." 
 
 There is but one thing which can hon 
 orably draw the heart out of an American 
 in Europe. He has wrought for himself 
 the white ideal of government ; he be 
 longs to a growing, not a decaying soci 
 ety ; there is much without, upon which 
 he looks with wonder and even with pity ; 
 for he is, as the monkish chroniclers 
 would say,///#j hujus s<eculi, a child of 
 to-day and to-morrow. In " that state of 
 life to which it has pleased God to call " 
 him, he should be the proclaimed brother 
 of mankind, and the outrider of civiliza- 
 
ii2 ANIMUM NON COELUM 
 
 tion ; he has an heroic post and outlook, 
 and these bring their responsibilities : why 
 should he, how can he, forego them for 
 the accidental pleasure to be had in alien 
 capitals ? But one thing he sees far away 
 which he can never live to call his, in the 
 west; he cannot transfer hither the yes 
 terday of his own race, the dark charm of 
 London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty 
 and melancholy of Rome. If he has a 
 nature which looks deep and walks slowly, 
 he shall not pass the image of any old 
 kingdom unbeguiled ; either to his living 
 senses, or to his distant and hopeless 
 meditations, that world beyond wide waters 
 will seem to him the fairest of created 
 things, like the unbought lamp worth all 
 that Aladdin ever cherished in his nar 
 row youth. For yesterday is ours also, 
 to have and to hold, though it be an 
 oak which grows not within our own 
 garden walls, and is to be reached only 
 by a going forth, and a wrenching of the 
 heart-strings. And that which makes the 
 
 worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cos- 
 
 1- i 
 
 mopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no 
 
 mere restless energy : it is truly the love 
 of man which calleth over seas, and from 
 
ANIMUM NON COELUM 113 
 
 towers a great way off. His shrine is 
 some common and unregarded place, a 
 mediaeval stair, it may be, worn hollow as 
 a gourd by the long procession of mortal 
 ity. That concave stone touches him, 
 and makes his blood tingle : it has magic 
 in it, of itself, without a record; for it 
 speaks of the transit of human worth and 
 human vices, both of which Dante makes 
 his Ulysses long for, and seek to under 
 stand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere 
 we were born, while we were on forgotten 
 errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. 
 To have marked it, with perhaps the larg 
 est emotion of our lives, is to walk Broad 
 way or a Texan tow-path humbler and 
 better ever after. 
 
 Who is to be blamed if he do indeed 
 go " abroad," or stay abroad, so strangely 
 finding there, rather than here, the soul's 
 peace ? for the soul has rights which may 
 cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of 
 what avail is Americanism, unless it earn 
 for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap 
 him in a good dream, taking rancor from 
 him, and put him in harmony with all 
 master events gone by ? The young Re 
 public has children who come into the 
 8 
 
ii4 ANIMUM NON COELUM 
 
 field of historic Christendom, to bathe 
 themselves in the dignity and roominess 
 of life, and to walk gladly among the ever 
 green traditions, which surge like tall June 
 grass about their knees. What they never 
 had, natural piety teaches them to desire 
 and to worship, and their happy Parthian 
 faces are bright with the setting sun. 
 There are hundreds such, and blessed 
 are they; for they move meanwhile un 
 der an innocent spell, and ignobler visions 
 cannot touch them. It is their vocation 
 to make a thronged spiritual solitude of 
 their own. Under the self-same night of 
 stars, they are changed : they have found 
 other minds, more reverent, more chas 
 tened, more sensitized. Because they are 
 converts, they cannot always be judged 
 fairly. You shall meet them in summer 
 time at Bruges and Nuremberg, and 
 in the transept of Westminster Abbey, 
 elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but 
 ever rapt and mute : " whether in the 
 body, or out of the body, I know not; 
 God knoweth." 
 
 1892. 
 
The Precept of Peace 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 A CERTAIN sort of voluntary ab 
 straction is the oddest and choic 
 est of social attitudes. In France, where 
 all aesthetic discoveries are made, it was 
 crowned long ago : la sainte indifference is, 
 or may be, a cult, and le saint indifferent 
 an articled practitioner. For the Gallic 
 mind, brought up at the knee of a con 
 sistent paradox, has found that not to 
 appear concerned about a desired good is 
 the only method to possess it ; full happi 
 ness is given, in other words, to the very 
 man who will never sue for it. This is a 
 secret neat as that of the Sphinx : to " go 
 softly " among events, yet domineer them. 
 Without fear : not because we are brave, 
 but because we are exempt ; we bear so 
 charmed a life that not even Baldur's 
 mistletoe can touch us to harm us. 
 Without solicitude: for the essential 
 thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from 
 
n8 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 above upon our wrists, and it has become 
 with us an automatic motion to open the 
 hand, and drop what appertains to us no 
 longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the 
 shorter stick of celery, or 
 
 ' The friends to whom we had no natural right, 
 The homes that were not destined to be ours," 
 
 it is all one : let it fall away ! since only 
 so, by depletions, can we buy serenity 
 and a blithe mien. It is diverting to 
 study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of 
 Socrates his master, how many indispensa- 
 bles man can live without ; or how many 
 he can gather together, make over into 
 luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau 
 somewhere expresses himself as full of 
 divine pity for the " mover," who on 
 May-Day clouds city streets with his mel 
 ancholy household caravans : fatal impedi 
 menta for an immortal. No : furniture 
 is clearly a superstition. " I have little, 
 I want nothing; all my treasure is in 
 Minerva's tower." Not that the novice 
 may not accumulate. Rather, let him 
 collect beetles and Venetian interrogation- 
 marks ; if so be that he may distinguish 
 what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 119 
 
 these toys, eventually, on the children of 
 Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. 
 Of all his store, unconsciously increased, 
 he can always part with sixteen-seven- 
 teenths, by way of concession to his indi 
 viduality, and think the subtraction so 
 much concealing marble chipped from the 
 heroic figure of himself. He would be a 
 donor from the beginning ; before he can 
 be seen to own, he will disencumber, and 
 divide. Strange and fearful is his dis 
 covery, amid the bric-a-brac of the world, 
 that this knowledge, or this material bene 
 fit, is for him alone. He would fain beg 
 off from the acquisition, and shake the 
 touch of the tangible from his imperious 
 wings. It is not enough to cease to strive 
 for personal favor ; your true indifferent is 
 Early Franciscan : caring not to have, he 
 fears to hold. Things useful need never 
 become to him things desirable. Towards 
 all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears 
 the coldest front in Nature, like a magi 
 cian walking a maze, and scornful of its 
 flower-bordered detentions. " I enjoy 
 life," says Seneca, "because I am ready 
 to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act 
 with too jealous respect for their morrow of 
 
izo THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, 
 and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded 
 eye-corners. 
 
 Now nothing is farther from le saint 
 indifferent than cheap indifferentism, so- 
 called : the sickness of sophomores. His 
 business is to hide, not to display, his 
 lack of interest in fripperies. It is not 
 he who looks languid, and twiddles his 
 thumbs for sick misplacedness, like 
 Achilles among girls. On the contrary, 
 he is a smiling industrious elf, mon 
 strous attentive to the canons of polite 
 society. In relation to others, he shows 
 what passes for animation and enthusi 
 asm ; for at all times his character is 
 founded on control of these qualities, not 
 on the absence of them. It flatters his 
 sense of superiority that he may thus pull 
 wool about the ears of joint and several. 
 He has so strong a will that it can be 
 crossed and counter-crossed, as by him 
 self, so by a dozen outsiders, without a 
 break in his apparent phlegm. He has 
 gone through volition, and come out at 
 the other side of it ; everything with him 
 is a specific act : he has no habits. Le 
 saint indifferent is a dramatic wight: he 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 121 
 
 loves to refuse your proffered six per cent," 
 when, by a little haggling, he may obtain 
 three-and-a-half. For so he gets away 
 with his own mental processes virgin : it 
 is inconceivable to you that, being sane, 
 he should so comport himself. Amiable, 
 perhaps, only by painful propulsions and 
 sore vigilance, let him appear the mere 
 inheritor of easy good-nature. Unselfish 
 out of sheer pride, and ever eager to 
 claim the slippery side of the pavement, 
 or the end cut of the roast (on the secret 
 ground, be it understood, that he is not 
 as Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let 
 him have his ironic reward in passing 
 for one whose physical connoisseurship is 
 yet in the raw. That sympathy which 
 his rule forbids his devoting to the usual 
 objects, he expends, with some bravado, 
 upon their opposites ; for he would fain 
 seem a decent partisan of some sort, not 
 what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros 
 Tyriusque. He is known here and there, 
 for instance, as valorous in talk ; yet he is 
 by nature a solitary, and, for the most 
 part, somewhat less communicative than 
 
 " The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride, 
 Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height." 
 
122 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 Imagining nothing idler than words in 
 the face of grave events, he condoles 
 and congratulates with the genteelest air 
 in the world. In short, while there is 
 anything expected of him, while there are 
 spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of 
 the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only 
 when he is quite alone that he drops his 
 jaw, and stretches his legs ; then, heigho ! 
 arises like a smoke, and envelops him 
 becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred 
 torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, 
 of " the Oxford manner." 
 
 " How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable ! ' ' 
 
 sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. 
 As it came from him in the beginning, 
 that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only 
 from the man of culture, who feels about 
 him vast mental spaces and depths, and 
 to whom the face of creation is but com 
 parative and symbolic. Nor will he 
 breathe it in the common ear, where it 
 may woo misapprehensions, and breed 
 ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must 
 ever love or hate what is nearest him, 
 and, for lack of perspective, think his own 
 fist the size of the sun. The social 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 123 
 
 prizes, which, with mellowed observers, 
 rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of 
 desirability, such as wealth and a foot 
 hold in affairs, seem to him first and sole ; 
 and to them he clings like a barnacle. 
 But to our indifferent, nothing is so vul 
 gar as close suction. He will never 
 tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity ; 
 he is a gentleman, the hero of the habit 
 ually relaxed grasp. A light unpreju 
 diced hold on his profits strikes him as 
 decent and comely, though his true 
 artistic pleasure is still in " fallings from 
 us, vanishings." It costs him little to 
 loose and to forego, to unlace his tenta 
 cles, and from the many who push hard 
 behind, to retire, as it were, on a never- 
 guessed-at competency, " richer than 
 untempted kings." He would not be a 
 life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. 
 While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his de 
 light, well he knows that on the dark trail 
 ahead of him, even Sabine Farms are not 
 sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to 
 play the guest under his own cedars, and, 
 with disciplinary intent, goes often from 
 them ; and, hearing his heart-strings snap 
 the third night he is away, rejoices that 
 
124 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 he is again a freedman. Where his foot 
 is planted (though it root not anywhere), 
 he calls that spot home. No Unitarian 
 in locality, it follows that he is the best 
 of travellers, tangential merely, and pleased 
 with each new vista of the human Past. 
 He sometimes wishes his understanding 
 less, that he might itch deliciously with 
 a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, 
 great and general forces, he keeps, all 
 along, a tacit understanding, such as one 
 has with beloved relatives at a distance ; 
 and his finger, airily inserted in his outer 
 pocket, is really upon the pulse of eter 
 nity. His vocation, however, is to bury 
 himself in the minor and immediate task ; 
 and from his intent manner, he gets con 
 founded, promptly and permanently, with 
 the victims of commercial ambition. 
 
 The true use of the much-praised 
 Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland, has hardly 
 been apprehended : he is simply the 
 patron saint of indifferent s. From first 
 to last, almost alone in that discordant 
 time, he seems to have heard far-off re 
 solving harmonies, and to have been 
 rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to 
 which all knights were bred, was peniten- 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 125 
 
 tial to him. It was but a childish means : 
 and to what end ? He meanwhile, and 
 no man carried his will in better abeyance 
 to the scheme of the universe, wanted 
 no diligence in camp or council. Cares 
 sat handsomely on him who cared not at 
 all, who won small comfort from the cause 
 which his conscience finally espoused. He 
 labored to be a doer, to stand well with 
 observers ; and none save his intimate 
 friends read his agitation and profound 
 weariness. " I am so much taken notice 
 of," he writes, "for an impatient desire 
 for peace, that it is necessary I should 
 likewise make it appear how it is not out 
 of fear for the utmost hazard of war." 
 And so, driven from the ardor he had to 
 the simulation of the ardor he lacked, 
 loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two 
 transient opinions, and inly impartial as 
 a star, Lord Falkland fell : the young 
 never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newbury 
 field. The imminent deed he made a 
 work of art ; and the station of the moment 
 the only post of honor. Life and death 
 may be all one to such a man : but he 
 will at least take the noblest pains to 
 discriminate between Tweedledum and 
 
126 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 Tweedledee, if he has to write a book 
 about the variations of their antennae. 
 And like the Carolian exemplar is the 
 disciple. The indifferent is a good thinker, 
 or a good fighter. He is no " immartial 
 minion/' as dear old Chapman suffers 
 Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his 
 sign-manual is content with humble and 
 stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the 
 Himalayas of life affects him, very palpa 
 bly, as "tall talk." He deals not with 
 things, but with the impressions and 
 analogies of things. The material counts 
 for nothing with him : he has moulted it 
 away. Not so sure of the identity of the 
 higher course of action as he is of his con 
 secrating dispositions, he feels that he may 
 make heaven again, out of sundries, as he 
 goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, dis 
 charged with perfect temper, land him in 
 "the out-courts of Glory," quite as suc 
 cessfully as a grand Sunday-school excur 
 sion to front the cruel Paynim foe ? He 
 thinks so. Experts have thought so 
 before him. Francis Drake, with the 
 national alarum instant in his ears, desired 
 first to win at bowls, on the Devon sward, 
 " and afterwards to settle with the Don." 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 127 
 
 No one will claim a buccaneering hero 
 for an indifferent^ however. The Jesuit 
 novices were ball-playing almost at that 
 very time, three hundred years ago, when 
 some too speculative companion, figur 
 ing the end of the world in a few mo 
 ments (with just leisure enough, between, 
 to be shriven in chapel, according to his 
 own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gon- 
 zaga how he, on his part, should employ 
 the precious interval. " I should go on 
 with the game," said the most innocent 
 and most ascetic youth among them. 
 But to cite the behavior of any of the 
 saints is to step over the playful line 
 allotted. Indifference of the mundane 
 brand is not to be confounded with their 
 detachment, which is emancipation wrought 
 in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence 
 of the Christian spirit. Like most super 
 natural virtues, it has a laic shadow ; the 
 counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, 
 is one not only of perfection, but also of 
 polity. A very little non-adhesion to 
 common affairs, a little reserve of uncon 
 cern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, pro 
 vide the moral immunity which is the 
 only real estate. The indifferent believes 
 
128 THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 
 in storms : since tales of shipwreck en 
 compass him. But once among his own 
 kind, he wonders that folk should 
 be circumvented by merely extraneous 
 powers ! His favorite catch, woven in 
 among escaped dangers, rises through 
 the roughest weather, and daunts it : 
 
 " Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners, 
 For we be come into a quiet rode." 
 
 No slave to any vicissitude, his imagina 
 tion is, on the contrary, the cheerful obsti 
 nate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as 
 Keats once said of himself, " in a thousand 
 worlds/' withdrawing at will from one to 
 another, often curtailing his circumference 
 to enlarge his liberty. His universe is a 
 universe of balls, like those which the 
 cunning Oriental carvers make out of 
 ivory ; each entire surface perforated with 
 the same delicate pattern, each moving 
 prettily and inextricably within the other, 
 and all but the outer one impossible to 
 handle. In some such innermost asylum 
 the right sort of dare-devil sits smiling, 
 while men rage or weep. 
 
 1894. 
 
On a Pleasing Encounter with a 
 Pickpocket 
 
ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 
 WITH A PICKPOCKET. 
 
 1WAS in town the other evening, walk 
 ing by myself, at my usual rapid 
 pace, and ruminating, in all likelihood, on 
 the military affairs of the Scythians, when, 
 at a lonely street corner not adorned by a 
 gas-lamp, I suddenly felt a delicate stir 
 in my upper pocket. There is a sort of 
 mechanical intelligence in a well-drilled 
 and well-treated body, which can act, in 
 an emergency, without orders from head 
 quarters. My mind, certainly, was a thou 
 sand years away, and is at best drowsy 
 and indifferent. It had besides, no ex 
 perience, nor even hearsay, which would 
 have directed it what to do at this thrilling 
 little crisis. Before it was aware what had 
 happened, and in the beat of a swallow's 
 wing, my fingers had brushed the flying 
 thief, my eyes saw him, and my legs 
 (retired race-horses, but still great at a 
 
1 32 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 
 
 spurt) flew madly after him. I protest 
 that from the first, though I knew he had 
 under his wicked thumb the hard-earned 
 wealth of a notoriously poor poet (let the 
 double-faced phrase, which I did not mean 
 to write, stand there, under my hand, to 
 all posterity), yet I never felt one yearning 
 towards it, nor conceived the hope of re 
 venge. No : I was fired by the exquisite 
 dramatic situation; I felt my blood up, 
 like a charger 
 
 " that sees 
 The battle over distances. " 
 
 I was in for the chase in the keen winter 
 air, with the moon just rising over the city 
 roofs, as rapturously as if I were a very 
 young dog again. My able bandit, clearly 
 viewed the instant of his assault, was a 
 tiger-lily of the genus " tough " : short, 
 pallid, sullen, with coat-collar up and hat- 
 brim down, and a general air of mute and 
 violent executive ability. My business 
 in devoting this chapter to reminiscences 
 of my only enemy, is to relate frankly 
 what were my contemporaneous sensa 
 tions. As I wheeled about, neatly losing 
 the chance of confronting him, and fa 
 vored with a hasty survey, in the dark, 
 
WITH A PICKPOCKET 133 
 
 of his strategic mouth and chin, the one 
 sentiment in me, if translated into English, 
 would have uttered itself in this wise : 
 " After years of dulness and decorum, 
 O soul, here is some one come to play 
 with thee ; here is Fun, sent of the immor 
 tal gods ! " 
 
 The divine emissary, it was evident, 
 had studied his ground, and awaited no 
 activity on the part of the preoccupied 
 victim, in a hostile and unfamiliar neigh 
 borhood. He suffered a shock when, 
 remembering my ancient prowess in the 
 
 fields of E , I took up a gallop within 
 
 an inch of his nimble heels. Silently, as 
 he ran, he lifted his right arm. We were 
 soon in the blackness of an empty lot 
 across the road, among coal-sheds and 
 broken tins, with the far lights of the 
 thoroughfare full in our faces. Quick 
 as kobolds summoned up from earth, air, 
 and nowhere, four fellows, about twenty 
 years old, swarmed at my side, as like the 
 first in every detail as foresight and art 
 could make them ; and these darting, 
 dodging, criss-crossing, quadrilling, and 
 incessantly interchanging as they ad 
 vanced, covering the expert one's flight, 
 
134 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 
 
 and multiplying his identity, shot sepa 
 rately down a labyrinth of narrow alleys, 
 leaving me confused and checkmated, 
 after a brief and unequal game, but over 
 come, nay, transported with admiration 
 and unholy sympathy ! It was the pretti 
 est trick imaginable. 
 
 It was near Christmas ; and, brought to 
 bay, and still alone, I conjured up a vision 
 of a roaring cellar-fire, and the snow whist 
 ling at the bulkhead, as the elect press in, 
 with great slapping of hands and stamping 
 of shoes, to a superfine night-long and 
 month-long bowl of grog, MY grog, dealt 
 out by Master Villon, with an ironic toast 
 to the generous founder. I might have 
 followed the trail, as I was neither breath 
 less nor afraid, but it struck me that the 
 swee symmetry of the thing ought not 
 to be spoiled; that I was serving a new 
 use and approximating a new experience ; 
 that it would be a stroke of genius, in 
 short, almost equal to the king pick 
 pocket's own, to make love to the inevi 
 table. Whereupon, bolstered against an 
 aged fence, I laughed the laugh of Dr. 
 Johnson, " heard, in the silence of the 
 night, from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar." 
 
WITH A PICKPOCKET 135 
 
 I thought of the good greenbacks won 
 by my siren singing in the Hodgepodge 
 Monthly ; I thought of my family, who 
 would harbor in their memories the 
 inexplicable date when the munificent 
 church-mouse waxed stingy. I thought 
 even of the commandment broken and 
 of the social pact defied, gave my collapsed 
 pocket a friendly dig, and laughed again. 
 The police arrived, with queries, and in 
 effective note-books. I went home, a 
 shorn lamb, conscious of my exalted 
 financial standing; for had I not been 
 robbed ? All the way I walked with 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who came to 
 mind promptly as my corporeal blessings 
 departed. He intoned no requiem for the 
 lost, but poured a known philosophy, in 
 which I had now taken my degree, into 
 my liberal ear : 
 
 " Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that 
 never willingly vexed anybody ? " 
 
 " A man has but two concerns in life : 
 to be honorable in what he does, and 
 resigned under what happens to him." 
 
 " If any one misconduct himself towards 
 thee, what is that to thee ? The deed is 
 his ; and therefore let him look to it." 
 
136 ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER 
 
 " Welcome everything that happens as 
 necessary and familiar." 
 
 Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction 
 is cheaply traded for a wad of current 
 specie, and an inkling into the ways of a 
 bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have 
 " arrived " ; I have attained a courteous 
 composure proof against mortal hurricanes. 
 Life is no longer a rude and trivial com 
 edy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who 
 feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, 
 and even to cry, " Pray, madam, don't 
 mention it," to an apologizing lady in a 
 gig, who drives over him and kills him, 
 and does so, moreover, in the most bung 
 ling manner in the world. 
 
 1892. 
 
Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman 
 
REMINISCENCES OF A FINE 
 GENTLEMAN 
 
 MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. 
 While so many trace their life- 
 stream to pirates or usurpers who shed 
 their brothers* blood to possess their 
 brothers' power, it is a distinction worth 
 recording, that this Fine Gentleman was 
 descended from a princely person in 
 Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, 
 and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like 
 a French marshal's, with the ribbons and 
 medals of recognition. Though of foreign 
 origin, he did an American thing at my 
 introduction to him : he shook hands. I 
 dropped the white pebble of the Cretans 
 to mark the day he arrived. It is need 
 less to say I loved and understood him, 
 blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. 
 He had then, despite his extreme youth, 
 the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking 
 swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the 
 
140 REMINISCENCES OF 
 
 open door : the look of one who has 
 character, and a defined part to play, and 
 whose career can never reach a common 
 nor ignoble end. Comely in the full 
 sense he was not ; but impressive he was, 
 despite the precocious leanness and alert 
 ness which come of too rapid growth. 
 
 He had every opportunity, during his 
 babyhood and later, of gratifying his ab 
 normal love of travel ; he managed to 
 see more of city life than was good for 
 him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. 
 His golden curiosity covered everything 
 mundane, and he continued his private 
 studies in topography until he was kid 
 napped, and restored by the police : an 
 abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy 
 with conscience, irresponsive to any wel 
 comes, who sidled into his abandoned 
 residence, and forswore from that day 
 his unholy peregrinations. But he had 
 a roaming housemate, and grew to be 
 supremely happy, journeying under 
 guidance. 
 
 His temper, at the beginning, was none 
 of the best, and took hard to the idea of 
 moral governance ; he overcame obstacles 
 after the fashion of a catapult. His sense 
 
A FINE GENTLEMAN 141 
 
 of humor was always grim : he had a 
 smile, wide and significant, like a ko- 
 bold's ; but a mere snicker, or a wink, was 
 foreign to his nature. With certain people 
 he was sheer clown ; yet he discriminated, 
 and never wore his habitual air of swag 
 gering consequence before any save those 
 he was pleased to consider his inferiors. 
 The sagacious and protective instincts 
 were strong in him. For children he had 
 the most marked indulgence and affec 
 tion, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he 
 found the only statecraft he could respect 
 among them. For their delight he made 
 himself into a horse, and rode many a 
 screaming elf astride of his back for a 
 half-mile through the meadow, before 
 coming to the heart of the business, which 
 was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast 
 poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet 
 grass : a proceeding hailed with shouts of 
 acclaim from the accompanying crowd of 
 playfellows. And again, in winter, he 
 became an otter, and placing himself upon 
 his worthy back at the summit of a hill, 
 rolled repeatedly to the bottom, drenched 
 in snow, and buried under a coasting 
 avalanche of boys. 
 
142 REMINISCENCES OF 
 
 He never found time, in so short a life, 
 to love many. Outside his own house 
 hold and his charming cat, he was very 
 loyal to one lady whose conversation was 
 pleasingly ironical, and to one gentleman 
 whose character was said to resemble his 
 own. Several others were acceptable, but 
 for these two visitors he had the voice and 
 gesture of joyful greeting. He had so 
 arrant an individuality that folk loved or 
 hated him. One could not look with 
 indifference on that assertive splendid 
 bearing, or on the mighty muscles as of a 
 Norse ship. A civil address from you 
 made him your liegeman. But the merest 
 disregard or slight, no less than open hos 
 tility, sealed him your foe. And there 
 were no stages of vacillation. A grudge 
 stood a grudge, and a fondness a fond 
 ness. He was a famous retaliator ; none 
 ever knew him to ride first into the lists. 
 Battle he loved, but he had a gentlemanly 
 dislike of cc scenes " : when a crisis came, 
 he preferred to box or wrestle ; and what 
 he preferred he could do, for no opponent 
 ever left a scar upon him. A rival less in 
 size, or impudent solely, he took by the 
 nape of the neck and tossed over the near- 
 
A FINE GENTLEMAN 143 
 
 est fence, resuming his walk with compo 
 sure. Training and education helped him 
 to the pacific solving of many problems. 
 His good dispositions, all but established, 
 were once badly shaken by a country 
 sojourn ; for he had been taught there a 
 bit of cabalistic boys' Latin whose slight 
 est whisper would send him tiptoeing to 
 every window in the house, scanning the 
 horizon for a likely enemy, with a rapture 
 worthy of another cause. 
 
 He was rich in enemies, most of them 
 of the gentler sex. Upon a civic holiday, 
 three villageous women were seen to bear 
 down upon him, as he was calmly inspect 
 ing the outposts of their property, laden 
 with weapons (timor arma ministrat I ) no 
 less classic than a pail, a broom, and an 
 axe. Not Swift's self could have added 
 to the look of withering comment with 
 which he turned and confronted his as 
 sailants : a single glance which dispersed 
 the troops, and held in itself the eloquence 
 of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal 
 warfare lay between him and the man who 
 had peevishly flapped that haughty nose 
 with a glove, before his first birthday-anni 
 versary, and revenge boiled in his eye, 
 
144 REMINISCENCES OF 
 
 long after, at sight of a citizen who had once 
 addressed to him a word unheard in good 
 society. A loud tone, a practical joke, a 
 teasing reminder of a bygone fault, dis 
 concerted him wholly. Sensitive and 
 conservative of mood, my Fine Gentle 
 man could never forget a rudeness, nor 
 account satisfactorily for such a thing as 
 a condescension. All his culture and his 
 thinking had not taught him to allow for 
 the divers conditions and dispositions of 
 mankind. To the last he looked for 
 courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for 
 fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the 
 Fine Gentleman was a snob. Hunger 
 and nakedness, even honest labor, had for 
 him no occult charm. Throughout his 
 youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, 
 and on the very highway ached to make 
 worse rags yet of the floating rags of a 
 beggar's coat ; but the experience of 
 friendship with a kindly butcher-lad made 
 inroads upon his exclusiveness ; and I 
 know that, had he outlived his years, 
 there would have been one more convert 
 democrat. His own personal appearance 
 was of the nicest ; by scrupulous superin 
 tendence of his laundry, chiefly by night, 
 
A FINE GENTLEMAN 145 
 
 he kept himself immaculate and imposing. 
 His colors were those of the fallen leaves 
 and the snow ; the November auburn fall 
 ing away on either side from the magnifi 
 cent brow and eyes, and from the neck in 
 its triple white fold : a head to remind 
 you of Raleigh in his ruff. 
 
 He must have been patriotic, for he 
 revelled in the horns, gunpowder, rock 
 ets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. 
 Archery and rifle-practice seemed to strike 
 him as uncommonly pleasant devices to 
 kill time. In all games which had noise 
 and motion, he took the same strong 
 vicarious interest. He had heard much 
 music, and learned something of it ; he 
 was once known to hum over an august 
 recitative of the late Herr Wagner. Sin 
 gular to relate, he had an insuperable 
 objection to books, and protested often 
 against the continued use of the pen by 
 one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed 
 greatly to relish the recital of a tribute 
 of personal verse from a United States 
 Senator, and the still more elaborate lines 
 of a delightful professional satirist. 
 
 His health, aside from his great size, 
 his spirit and nervous vigor, was never 
 
 10 
 
146 REMINISCENCES OF 
 
 steady nor sound. Every chapter of the 
 Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed 
 with events, perils, excitements, catas 
 trophes, and blunders, due in great part, 
 by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous 
 vitality balancing on too narrow a base. 
 With years, there began to come the 
 " philosophic mind." His sweetness and 
 submission grew with his strength ; never 
 was there a sinner so tender of conscience, 
 so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, 
 after, in the good works of amended ways. 
 New virtues seemed to shoot on all sides, 
 and the old ones abided and flourished. 
 He had never tried to deceive, nor to 
 shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was 
 not his, nor to appear other than he was. 
 In the country town where he had many 
 a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found 
 congenial circumstances. There were no 
 gardens there, no timid neighbors ; he 
 had opportunity, being allowed to inspect 
 everything that stirred in air, or upon the 
 earth, or in the waters under, for the pur 
 suit of natural history, which was his pas 
 sion ; he ate what he pleased, he lorded 
 it as he liked, he shifted his responsi 
 bilities, he won endless flattery from the 
 
A FINE GENTLEMAN 147 
 
 inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment 
 of all this was unique. On his return, 
 while his escort was still in the room, the 
 Fine Gentleman was asked whether he 
 would rather remain now at home, or 
 spend a week longer in the fascinating 
 precincts of Cambrook. He arose briskly, 
 bestowed on the questioner, whom he 
 professed to adore, his warmest embrace 
 (a thing unusual with him), and imme 
 diately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, 
 placed himself at the door-knob which led 
 into the more immoral world. His last 
 accomplishment was to acquire an accurate 
 sense of time, to make his quarter-hour 
 calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out 
 alone : " as wise as a Christian," an honest 
 acquaintance was wont to say of him, per 
 haps on the suspicion that the Fine Gen 
 tleman, after he reached his majority, was 
 a free-thinker. 
 
 He was in his perfect prime when a 
 slight seeming disgrace fell upon him, 
 though an incident never clearly under 
 stood. His believers believed in him 
 still ; but, for the need of quiet and im 
 partial adjustment of matters, persuaded 
 him to stay an indefinite while in the be- 
 
148 REMINISCENCES OF 
 
 loved farming district where many of his 
 earlier vacations were spent. So that, after 
 all his tender rearing, he was at last abroad 
 and divorced : with a mist, such as we 
 recognized immortals call sin, upon his 
 spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and 
 a doubt upon mine, answerable for much 
 of what he was. Before the eventual 
 proof came that he was clear of blame, 
 there were thoughts even of an impera 
 tive parting, and a reaching for the 
 rectification towards the Happy Hunt 
 ing-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we 
 could be joyous together ; and where un 
 der the old guiding then never unskilful, 
 the old sympathy then never erring, the 
 Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's 
 full, and in no misapprehending air, his 
 innocent, upright, loving self again. But 
 instantly, as if to wipe out forever that 
 possible evil of which men could dream 
 him guilty, came the moving and memor 
 able end. Amid the tears of a whole 
 town, and the thanksgiving of some for 
 a greater grief averted, very quietly and 
 consciously, under the most painful con 
 ditions, the Fine Gentleman laid down 
 his life for a little child's sake. The fifth 
 
A FINE GENTLEMAN 149 
 
 act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic con 
 sistency, to those who knew him ; it was 
 in line with his odd, inborn, unconven 
 tional ways : the fate one would have 
 chosen for him, and the fittest with which 
 to associate his soldierly memory. In 
 exile and cashiered, he had overturned 
 his defamers at a stroke. 
 
 It is not too proud a sentence to write 
 over him, that this world, for the most 
 part, was jealous of his nobility. Human 
 society was some sort of huge jest to him ; 
 he did not always do his best there, as if 
 the second-best were the shrewder policy, 
 and the neater adaptation to the codes of 
 honor he found established. His main 
 concern was certainly the study of man 
 kind, and he stood to it, a free and un 
 bookish philosopher, looking on and not 
 partaking, with his reticent tongue, his 
 singularly soft foot-fall, his "eye like a 
 wild Indian's, but cordial and full of 
 smothered glee." To his own race he 
 must be an epic figure and a precedent, 
 and to ours something not undeserving 
 of applause. 
 
 " Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find, 
 Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good 
 a mind." 
 
1 50 REMINISCENCES 
 
 Such are the only annals of the Fine 
 Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog, faithful 
 and forgotten, who bore a great Bostoni- 
 an's name nearly five years without a stain, 
 and who is, to one or two of us, not alone 
 a friend lost, but an ideal set up : Perseus 
 become a star. 
 
 1889. 
 
Irish 
 
T 
 
 IRISH 
 
 
 
 HEY say the Celt is passing away, 
 
 " Encompassed all his hours 
 By fearfullest powers 
 Inflexible to him." 
 
 For he represents yesterday, and its 
 ideals : legendry, ritual, the heroic and 
 indignant joy of life, belong to him ; and 
 he can establish no manner of connection 
 with modern science and the subjugating 
 of the material universe ; with the spirit 
 of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic 
 countries, Ireland has the richest back 
 ground ; with so varied and exciting a 
 past, it may well be that she has difficulty 
 in concentrating herself on the new, and 
 hangs to her own consistencies in a world of 
 compromise. Every one save herself has 
 forgotten what she was, and how her pre 
 cedents, rather than any outer considera 
 tion, must still govern her, and keep her 
 antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to 
 
154 IRISH 
 
 be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. 
 She says to the powers, in charming futile 
 bravado, what a Howard once said to a 
 Spencer : " My ancestors were plotting 
 treason, while yours were keeping sheep ! " 
 The word warms her heart like wine. 
 " Le moyen age enorme et delicat" in Ver- 
 laine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase 
 made for Irish medievalism. It was the 
 watershed of European knowledge and 
 moral culture : the watershed truly, which, 
 sending streams down and out and far 
 away, can never call them back. It gave 
 Scotland her " naked knee " and her 
 kingly line ; it gave England its Chris 
 tian creed ; it gave Austria, France, and 
 Spain the noble enrichment of its banished 
 and stainless gentry, Jacobite Wild Geese. 
 It has been in America, from the Revolu 
 tion on, an influence incalculable. It 
 won the perfect understanding sympathy 
 of De Beaumont, Renan, Kuno Meyer, 
 and Matthew Arnold : men of antipodal 
 judgments. It has an intangible throne 
 in every mind which loves scholarship, 
 and imaginings more beautiful than any 
 folk-lore in the world. " See you this 
 skull ? " Lucian makes Hermes say to 
 
IRISH 155 
 
 Menippus, in the shades : " this is Helen." 
 Great is the gulf between happy Innis- 
 fail, sovereign and wise, with her own 
 laws, language, sports, and dress, and the 
 wrecked Ireland we know : a country of 
 untended flax-fields, unworked marble- 
 quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little 
 collapsing baronies whose landlords are 
 absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly 
 houses are given over, since the Union, 
 to neglect and decay. 
 
 Yet of her glory there are glorious wit 
 nesses. Her rough and winding historic 
 roads are open all along. The country is 
 full of ruins and traditions and snatches of 
 strange song, to " tease us out of thought." 
 A gander off on a holiday, with his white 
 spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his 
 paternal hiss at the passer-by from a 
 Druid's altar ; and where young lambs 
 lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their 
 mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lom- 
 bardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, 
 arch in arch, with its broken inscription, 
 an Orate for immemorial kings. At well- 
 sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, 
 and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, 
 even as they were " before the advent of 
 
156 IRISH 
 
 the Desii into the County Waterford." 
 By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest 
 ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled 
 centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, 
 displaying David with his harp, or Peter 
 with his keys, set up by a monastic hand 
 twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet 
 away, is something dearer to the archae 
 ologist : a kitchen of the primeval hunt 
 ers, its wall and hearth and calcined 
 lime-stones bedded among laughing blue 
 bells. A brook's freshet, any March, 
 may bring ashore a strange staff or neck 
 lace ; a rock is overturned under a yew- 
 tree, and discloses horns and knives elder 
 than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Car- 
 low garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler 
 fortress, put up at the time when Richard 
 the Lionheart was looking with tears of 
 envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed 
 urns were found in vaults, each with its 
 shining dust : a tenantry long anterior to 
 Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of 
 Christian goings-on overhead, when The 
 MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to 
 dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, 
 and slain among his followers at the 
 pouring of the wine. There can be no 
 
IRISH 157 
 
 other country so fatal to the antiqua 
 rian : for zest and labor are superfluous, 
 and a long course of incomparable luck 
 must drive him, for very satiety, from the 
 field. 
 
 Venerable Ireland has failed, as the 
 world reckons failure. She cannot take 
 prettily to her role of subjugated province. 
 
 JT J */ O L 
 
 Abominably misruled, without a senate, 
 without commerce, she has fallen back 
 into the sullen interior life, into the deep 
 night of reverie. From that brooding dark 
 she has let leap no modern flame supremely 
 great. For the great artist is not Irish, 
 as yet, though with warm exaggerations, 
 uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encour 
 agements, her own exalt her own. As 
 Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, 
 she lets her little fishes talk like whales. 
 And this, of course, tends to no good : 
 it only blunts the ideals of the populace, 
 lowers the mark of achievement, and 
 makes it difficult indeed for the true 
 prince to be recognized in the hubbub of 
 mistaken acclaim. The constituency of 
 Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sove 
 reign poet : a lack apparent enough to 
 all but itself. Verse, from of old, is per- 
 
158 IRISH 
 
 vasive as dew or showers : but nowhere 
 is it in process of crystallization. The per 
 secution of age-long ignorance, imposed 
 upon a most intellectual people, is a mias 
 matic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. 
 Only in the best is Ireland perfect : in he 
 roes and in saints. In life, if not in art, 
 we can sometimes do away with economy, 
 restraint, equipose. We can hardly judge 
 the epic figures of antiquity : but from 
 Columba to "J. K. L.," from Hugh 
 O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord 
 Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing 
 family likeness : scorn, pity, sweetness, 
 disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill 
 luck, in them all. Most of these are 
 rebels ; their names are under the baffling 
 shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, 
 alas, count for naught save in their 
 mother's memory. 
 
 " Where be thy gods, O Israel ? " The 
 gibe comes with ill grace from the Eng 
 lish. England has, by the world's cor- 
 roboration, her divine sons, whose names 
 are in benediction. But she has also a 
 Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty 
 folk in the universe : the sapless, rootless, 
 flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for 
 
IRISH 159 
 
 Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and 
 Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, 
 is it not, for the superlative quality to form 
 and act, in fullest power here and there, 
 in a nation where no smallest grain of it 
 is ever wasted on the common mortal ? 
 But Ireland reeks with genius impartially 
 distributed. It is infectious ; every one 
 suffers from it, in its various stages and 
 manifestations. " The superior race " 
 makes the superior individual impossible. 
 There is no situation open to him ; he is 
 notoriously superfluous : a coal brought 
 to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake con 
 tradiction, and to be made to feel that he 
 has no nominating committee behind him. 
 He may be a great man in theory : but 
 where every other man is demonstrably 
 quite as great as he, he may be excused if 
 he fail to move mountains. Eccentricity 
 is in your Irishman's blood ; and organi 
 zation he hates and fears, perhaps through 
 a dim consciousness that in organizations 
 mental activities must be left to the lead 
 ers. If Celticism, with its insuperable 
 charm, has never led the world in trade or 
 war, can never so lead it, the cause is only 
 that the units, which can hardly be said to 
 
i6o IRISH 
 
 compose it, use their brains with unhal 
 lowed persistence. The most dashing 
 spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are 
 natural critics even of authority. Their 
 successes are everywhere spasmodic : they 
 juggle with success, they do not woo it 
 to wife. In a career dramatically check 
 ered, it happens that their onset wins 
 Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits 
 Culloden. 
 
 It has been well said that the cultured 
 classes are everywhere much the same, and 
 that the true range of observation lies 
 among the lowly and the poor. Now, no 
 peasantry in the world furnishes such 
 marked examples as does the Irish, of 
 original speculation, accessibility to ideas. 
 Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep 
 you in amused astonishment, and in an 
 attitude of impious doubt towards the 
 precedency of the trained thinker. You 
 fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement 
 with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the 
 Ensign, " that it is as possible for a man 
 to know something without having been at 
 school, as it is to have been at school and 
 to know nothing ! " To handle the in 
 scrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn, 
 
IRISH 161 
 
 or at least to apprehend, the secret of a 
 live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a 
 power almost wearied out with maintaining 
 mastery. The sense of equity, the sense 
 of humor itself, in the humblest and 
 silentest Irishman, is armor enough against 
 fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensa 
 tions which the law-makers wot not of, in 
 his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells 
 big with dreams. In his native village, 
 he is rated sympathetically by the dream's 
 size and duration, rather than, as in grosser 
 communities, by the deed. The man is 
 a trafficker in visions ; he becomes a 
 cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires 
 him for his madness, and has heard of 
 fairy influences : " satis est, it suffices," as 
 old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the 
 poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland 
 car, when the rent comes due, and the 
 crops are rotting in the rain ! He has no 
 turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise ; 
 yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of 
 God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks 
 unique and illustrious. It is a memorable 
 sight, this monstrous average and aggre 
 gate of whim. Nowhere the lonely plane 
 tary effulgence : everywhere the jovial 
 ii 
 
1 6z IRISH 
 
 defiant twinkle of little stars ! According 
 to Emerson's sweet prediction, 
 
 " As half- gods go, 
 The gods arrive.'* 
 
 But in Ireland no clever half-god ever 
 gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel. 
 Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, 
 noting the extreme nationalism of Cho 
 pin's genius, would have us mark that the 
 same force of patriotism in an Italian, 
 Frenchman, German, or Englishman, 
 could not have promoted a similar result. 
 Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial 
 traits remain intact, and uninfluenced 
 from without : she is more esoterical than 
 any state can be which is on the highway 
 of Continental progress, in touch with 
 to-morrow; and therefore her expression 
 in the arts is sure to be more individual, 
 distinct, and striking. Ireland is such 
 another spiritually isolated country. Her 
 best utterance, or her least, is alike betray- 
 ingly hers, to be scented among a thou 
 sand. And this homogeneity, in her case, 
 is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as 
 its explanation, the magnetic and absorb 
 ent quality in the strange isle itself, which 
 
IRISH 163 
 
 has blended a dozen alien strains in one, 
 and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iber 
 ian, the Norman, the Dane, the English 
 of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde 
 of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, 
 something "more Irish than the Irish." 
 And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, 
 though malcontent and impoverished, for 
 honor's sake, maintains its own traditions 
 in its own station, as the feudal vassals 
 maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish 
 gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, 
 on its ancient acres. The original peasant 
 stock has all but perished from famines 
 and immigrations. Most significant of all, 
 what remains of the two, blends as in no 
 other European territory. The peasants 
 were long ago driven from the estate of 
 free clansmen ; the gentry, who would 
 neither conform nor flee, were crushed 
 into the estate of peasants, by the penal 
 laws of the Protestant victor, which made 
 education treason ; by the most hateful 
 code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge 
 named it, framed since the beginning of 
 the world : and one class impacted on the 
 other, as mortar among stones, became 
 
1 64 IRISH 
 
 indistinguishable in a generation. Time, 
 which was expected to bring about No 
 Ireland, has in reality engendered a na 
 tional life more intense than ever. The 
 physical strength, the patience and pas 
 sion, of the common people; the grace, 
 loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, 
 have in that national life come together. 
 Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, 
 knightly courtesy, have run out of their 
 allotted conduits, and they color the speech 
 of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts 
 in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin 
 produces ever and anon the gentlest phil 
 osopher; recluse Erin sends forth the 
 consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and 
 jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk 
 the open lily of liberality, 
 
 " courteous, facile, sweet, 
 Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride." 
 
 Ireland is at work in every department 
 of every civilization : it is a seed-shed 
 ding, an aroma, intangible as April. No 
 pioneer post, no remote wave, no human 
 enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can 
 answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know 
 
IRISH 165 
 
 whether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere 
 menace of terrible import, like Samson, 
 or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off 
 disguises, and draw, at home, " in Tara's 
 halls," the once familiar bow. Its own 
 future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. 
 The tragic cloud hangs there. Forebod 
 ing, unrest, are stamped on the very water 
 and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It 
 was on a day in spring, in sight of Wick- 
 low headlands, the Golden Spears of long 
 ago ; a day when primroses and celan 
 dine and prodigal furze splashed the hill 
 sides, down to the rocks where fishers 
 sat mending nets, and stitching tawny 
 sails ; when there was a sense of over 
 hanging heights, and green inlands, and 
 ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep 
 in hearing of the surf, and of huge crom 
 lech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long 
 and low, looking sadly down ; when the 
 shadows in that cold enchanted air at 
 sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased 
 from silver through carmine to purple, 
 and back again ; on such a day of ca 
 price and romance, the true day of the 
 Gael, a woman beautiful as the young 
 
1 66 IRISH 
 
 Deirdre said to a stranger, walking the 
 cliff-path at her side : " No : we have 
 never been conquered : we are unconquer 
 able. But we are without hope." 
 
 1889. 
 
An Open Letter to the Moon 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE 
 MOON 
 
 
 
 u To THE CELESTIAL AND MY SOUL'S IDOL, 
 THE MOST BEAUTIFIED " : 
 
 IT might appear to us an imperative, 
 though agreeable duty, most high and 
 serene Madame, to waft towards you, 
 occasionally, a transcript of our humble 
 doings on this nether planet, were we not 
 sure, in the matter of friendly understand 
 ing, that we opened correspondence long 
 ago. You were one of our earliest fami 
 liars. You stood in that same office to 
 our fathers and mothers, back to your 
 sometime contemporary, Adam of the ' 
 Garden ; and while we are worried into 
 acquiescence with the inevitable design of 
 age, we are more pleased than envious to 
 discover that you grow never old to the 
 outward eye, and that you appear the 
 same "lovesome ladie bright," as when 
 
1 70 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 
 
 we first stared at you from a babe's pillow. 
 You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but 
 by actual evidence, with the family history, 
 having seen what sort of figure our ances 
 tors cut, and being infinitely better aware 
 of the peculiarities of the genealogical 
 shrub than we can ever be. Therefore 
 we make no reference to a matter so 
 devoid of novelty. But we do mean 
 to free our minds frankly on the subject 
 of your Ladyship's own behavior. We 
 take this resolve to be no breach of that 
 exalted courtesy which befits us, no less 
 than you, in your skyey station. 
 
 We have in part, lost our ancient re 
 spect for you : a sorry fact to chronicle. 
 There were once various statements float 
 ing about our cradle, complimentary to your 
 supposed virtues. You were Phoebe, twin 
 to Phoebus : a queen, having a separate es 
 tablishment, coming into a deserted court 
 by night, and kindling it into more than 
 daytime revelry. You were an enchant 
 ress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites 
 and greensward fairies. Your presence was 
 indispensable for felicitous dreams. To 
 be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed 
 inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet. 
 
OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 171 
 
 Now, we allow that you have suffered 
 by misrepresentation, or else are we right 
 in detecting your arts ; for, by all your 
 starry handmaidens, you are not what we 
 took you to be ! We are informed (our 
 quondam faith in you beshrews the day 
 we learned to read ! ) that you are a timid 
 dependent only of the sun, afraid to show 
 yourself while he is on his peregrinations ; 
 that you slyly steal the garb of his splen 
 dor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith 
 in your borrowed finery. That you are 
 no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor 
 to housebreakers ; conspirator in many 
 direful deeds, attending base nocturnal 
 councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself 
 against the law. " Let us be Diana's for 
 esters, gentlemen of the shade, . . . gov 
 erned, as the sea is, by our noble and 
 chaste mistress, the moon, under whose 
 countenance we steal." That your gos 
 sip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. 
 Your inconstancy, to come on delicate 
 ground, shineth above your other charac 
 teristics. Since we have seen your color 
 come and go, we surmise that there is no 
 dearth of intrigue and repartee up there ; 
 and in a red or a grey veil, you masquer- 
 
172 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 
 
 ade periodically, at unseasonable hours. 
 Of painting your complexion we are dis 
 posed to acquit you ; yet it is a severe 
 blow to us to learn, from the most trust 
 worthy sources, that you wax. 
 
 Selene, Artemis ! you are worldly be 
 yond worldlings. We hear that you have 
 quarters, and that you jingle them trium 
 phantly in the ears of Orion, who is no 
 body but a poor hunter. Beware of the 
 exasperation of the lower classes ! whose 
 awakening is what we call below a French 
 Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a 
 mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge 
 beam in yours ? Have you no resident 
 missionary ? for you persist in obstinate 
 schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orien 
 talism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christ 
 endom. You are much more distant and 
 reserved, O beguiler ! than you pretend. 
 Your temper is said to be volcanic. 
 
 You that were Diana ! who is the Fal- 
 staffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish 
 person to be seen about your premises ? 
 He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable 
 phiz out of your casements, and holdeth 
 it sidewise with a wink or a leer, hav 
 ing never yet found his rhyming way to 
 
OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 173 
 
 Norwich. We look on him as an offi 
 cious rascal. He peereth where you only, 
 by privilege, have permission to enter. He 
 hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a 
 proper substitute for you, and King of the 
 Illuminari ; he reproduceth your smile, 
 and scattereth your largesses ; he maketh 
 faces (we say it shudderingly) at your 
 worshippers below. Frequently hath he 
 appropriated kisses that were blown to you 
 personally, or consigned to you for de 
 livery, from one sweetheart to another. 
 
 O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we 
 hereby beseech you, of the danger of his 
 being taken for you ! Picture the discom 
 fiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a 
 rapturous recital of your charms, and cast 
 ing about for a sight of your delectable 
 loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that 
 broad ingenuous vagabond ! In some 
 such despairing rage as the minstrel's, 
 must have been the inventor of the Ger 
 man tongue, who discarded all other 
 chances of observation after once behold 
 ing this thing, ycleped your Man, and 
 angrily insisted on " Der Mond," the 
 Moon, he as the proper mode of 
 speech. I cite you this from old John 
 
174 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 
 
 Lyly : " There liveth none under the 
 sunne that know what to make of the 
 man in the moon." We clamor at you 
 from the throats of the five races : Abol 
 ish him, or at least, depose the present 
 incumbent, and get you straightway some 
 acceptable minion, one of more chivalric 
 habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior ! 
 Your credit and our comfort demand it. 
 " Pray you, remember." 
 
 What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavi 
 gator, Universalist, have you beheld : 
 what joy, what plenty, what riot and 
 desolation ! You are the arch-spectator. 
 Death sees not half so widely. He lurk- 
 eth like an anxious thief in the crowd, 
 seeking what he may take away. But 
 your bland leisurely eye looketh down 
 disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested 
 thrice a thousand years ago beneath you 
 in the desert ; Assyrian shepherds chanted 
 to you with their long-hushed voices ; the 
 south wind, while the infant world fell 
 into its first slumber, leaped up and played 
 with you in Paradise. You have known 
 the chaos before man, and yet we saw you 
 laugh upon last April's rain. Are there 
 none for whom you are lonely through 
 
OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 175 
 
 the ages ? Are there not centuries of old 
 delight in your memory, unequalled now ? 
 faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose 
 you still yearn to shine? Do you miss 
 the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten 
 the beginners of the " star-ypointing pyra 
 mid " ? Can you not tell us a tale of the 
 Visigoth ? How sang Blondel against the 
 prison door? How brawny was Bajazet ? 
 How fair was Helen ; Semiramis, how 
 cruel? Moon ! where be the treasures 
 of the doughty Kidd ? 
 
 You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady 
 of Ghosts and guardian of the under 
 world, have been fed upon the homage of 
 mortal lips : you have had praises from 
 the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. 
 Many a time have we rehearsed before 
 you such as we recall, from the sigh of 
 Enobarbus : 
 
 ' ' O sovereign mistress of true melancholy ! ' ' 
 to the hymnal 
 
 "Orbed maiden, with white fire laden," 
 
 of the noble salutation of a mirthful- 
 mournful spirit : 
 
1 76 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 
 
 " Oh ! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be, 
 Huntress or Dian, or whatever named ; 
 And he the veriest pagan, that first framed 
 His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee." 
 
 Have we not sung oft that strophe of 
 Ben Jonson's, full of inexpressible music 
 to our ear ? 
 
 ' Lay thy bow of pearl apart 
 And thy crystal shining quiver ; 
 Give unto the flying hart 
 Space to breathe, how short soever, 
 Thou that mak' st a day of night, 
 Goddess excellently bright ! ' ' 
 
 and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old 
 Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning: 
 
 "Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep, 
 Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer." 
 
 Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your 
 wanderings. And your truest votary, one 
 John Keats, spake out boldly that 
 
 " the oldest shade midst oldest trees 
 Feels palpitations when thou lookest in." 
 
 You are an incorrigible charmer : but as 
 he reports you likewise as 
 
 "a relief 
 
 To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps 
 Within his pearly house," 
 
OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 177 
 
 we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that 
 you have set up as a humanitarian. 
 
 Now, we venture to assert that you 
 remember compliments meant to be of 
 the same Orphic strain, and inscribed 
 to you, of which we are not wholly guilt 
 less. We have all but knelt to you, with 
 the Libyan. The primeval heathen has 
 stirred within us. We have been under 
 the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be 
 a Moonshee, rather than any potentate 
 of this universe. Have we not followed 
 you, O " planet of progression ! " all our 
 bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? 
 We wound you not with the analytic 
 eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The 
 scepticisms of astronomy enter not into 
 our rubric. Are you not comely ? Do 
 you not spiritualize the darkness with one 
 touch of your pale garment ? Then what 
 are they to us, your dimensions and your 
 distances ? Gross vanity of knowledge ! 
 Mere abuse of privilege ! 
 
 If we affect the abusive, shy of more 
 ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, 
 Luna. We make recantation, and disown 
 our banter. We extend the hand of cor 
 diality even to your month-old Man. 
 
 12 
 
1 78 OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 
 
 How blithe and beauteous he is ! He is 
 embodied Gentility. We bow to him as 
 your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious 
 Nuncio. You know our immemorial 
 loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you 
 so late to doubt it. 
 
 " Da Luna proper ~e nova, 
 Da noctis mediae, da, puer ! " 
 
 Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, 
 propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor 
 lunatic, nor lover ; " but that we love thee 
 best, O Most Best ! believe it." 
 
 1885. 
 
The Under Dog 
 
THE UNDER DOG 
 
 WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be 
 written without regard to its alleged 
 incidents ! Annalists are naturally the 
 slaves of what happens ; and that glows 
 between them and the eternal, like gor 
 geous-colored minster glass, a spurious 
 man-made heaven. A written Life may 
 be true to fact and false to law, even as a 
 lived life may be so. It is utterly impos 
 sible for the most philosophic among us 
 to know, to judge, or even to speculate, 
 in behalf of any but himself. A word, a 
 risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the 
 difference betwixt the two Kings of Brent 
 ford, lifts the obscure into apparent great 
 ness, or forbids the potentially greater to 
 descend to that table-land where there is 
 no mist, where human senses come into 
 play, and where he may become a sub 
 ject for the approbation of history. In 
 whatsoever degree a creature is burdened 
 
1 82 THE UNDER DOG 
 
 with conscience and stiffened with will, his 
 course must be continuously deflected by 
 countless little secret interior collisions 
 and readjustments, which have final cumu 
 lative influence on what we call his char 
 acter and his achievement. The means to 
 this end are nowhere discoverable, unless 
 in a perfect autobiography, and under the 
 eye of the perfect reader. Fate must 
 have her joke sometimes, as well as the 
 least of us, and she suffers cheap energy 
 to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and 
 genius to await identification at the 
 morgue. These are truisms, but here is 
 truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine 
 instances out of a thousand, it is folly to 
 name any success or failure as such ; for 
 either is a mystery, and the fairest evi 
 dences by which we can form an opinion of 
 it are altogether and irremediably fallacious. 
 Now, what has often used up and ended 
 a man's vital force, is some constraint 
 much more significant than that of early 
 death, a constraint sought and willingly 
 undergone. His own moral weakness 
 stopped Coleridge ; but Erasmus might 
 have uttered with Sidney : 
 
 " My life melts with too much thinking." 
 
THE UNDER DOG 183 
 
 Socrates, it will be remembered " cor 
 rupted the Athenian youth." Not one of 
 them he moulded or breathed upon, except 
 the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his 
 hand cordially to the practical, or ramped 
 in the civic china-shop. What ghost is 
 it which certain minds see upon the way, 
 and which lessens their destined momen 
 tum? Something extra-rational, we may 
 be sure : something with an august en 
 chantment. They act under the impulse 
 of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a 
 known and very good result for " the 
 things that are more excellent." The 
 spectators can only wonder; the crucial 
 third act has passed swiftly and in silence 
 behind the curtain, and the rest of the 
 drama sounds perverted and confused. 
 A mere secular enthusiasm may have the 
 power to draw a career to itself, absorb 
 and devour it, and keep it shut forever 
 from the chance of distinction in selfish 
 and pleasant ways. But what shall be 
 said for those who have become impas 
 sioned of the supernatural, beholding it in 
 amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the 
 holy sign between the antlered brows in 
 the Aquitanian forest : a sight enough to 
 
i8 4 THE UNDER DOG 
 
 stay them and carry them out of them 
 selves, and change what was their pros 
 pect, because " the former things are 
 passed away ? " What of the allegiance 
 to a cause, the espousal of hunger and 
 thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in 
 the hope, never ultimately in vain, of 
 awakening and bettering the world ? " If 
 the law require you to be the agent of in 
 justice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his 
 good manful essay on John Brown, " then 
 I say to you, break the law. Let your 
 life be a friction to stop the machine." 
 Even thus have many gone under, of 
 whom no audiences have heard, but whose 
 love and wisdom feed the race, century 
 after century. In our reckoning of the 
 saints, we lose sight of half their meaning ; 
 for we cannot guess accurately which of 
 them has lost most, humanly and aestheti 
 cally, nor how much any one individual 
 has lost, by his chosen concentration on 
 matters in which there is no general com 
 petition, and where there can be no estab 
 lished canons of criticism. Some saints, 
 in a double sense, follow their vocations ; 
 they attain their only legitimate develop 
 ment in the cloister. But others are 
 
THE UNDER DOG 185 
 
 saints at a sacrifice. An infinite number 
 of men and women, painfully approxi 
 mating moral perfection, lose, either grad 
 ually, or at once and forever, in that 
 supreme compensation, their aptitude for 
 common affairs. " Ejiciebas eas, et intrabas 
 fro eis, omne voluptate dulcior" says the 
 son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously 
 stricken out from the pagan roll of 
 honor. 
 
 Such as these have outgrown their own 
 existence ; they become impalpable to the 
 general apprehension ; they have sold the 
 mess of pottage again for the birthright of 
 the sons of God. And God, in the auda 
 cious old phrase, has " destroyed " them. 
 What they bade fair to be, or what they 
 could have done, before they were crippled 
 by vigils and visions, rolls back into the 
 impossible and the unimagined. We 
 have no clue to alienated souls : we can 
 compute with those solely, who, as we 
 say, get along and amount to something ; 
 and we seldom perceive what purely for 
 tuitous reputations, wkat mere bright flot 
 sam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, 
 are those whom we set first in a fixed 
 place, and cry up as exemplars in art, 
 
1 86 THE UNDER DOG 
 
 trade, and policy. For what might have 
 been is not this crass world's concern : 
 her absent have no rights. The spiritual 
 man is likely to be possessed of a divine 
 indolence ; would he strive, he is hamp 
 ered and thwarted by the remembrance, 
 or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Para 
 dise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach 
 against the courteous Latin nations that 
 they lag behind in modern progressive- 
 ness ; that they do not, like the Border 
 lads, " march forward in order." The 
 reproach is, at bottom, a delicate and ex 
 quisite compliment. With genius in their 
 blood, and beauty never far from their 
 hand, what wonder if they continue to 
 be careless about rapid transit? 
 
 " I have seen higher, holier things than these, 
 And therefore must to these refuse my heart." 
 
 The endearing fable of elf-shot or be 
 witched children, little goose-girls waylaid 
 on the hillside by fairies in green and 
 silver, and enticed away, and set free 
 after a while, though, with the dream and 
 the blight ever upon them, is, like most 
 fables, deep as immortality. The mystic 
 has already gone too far, and seen too 
 
THE UNDER DOG 187 
 
 much ; he is useless at the plough : he is, 
 as it were, one citizen less. The fine 
 lines just quoted are from an expert in 
 inaction, the poet who, among all others 
 with an equal equipment in English 
 letters, may be named pre-eminently as 
 a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let 
 his lovers proclaim as much with gentle 
 irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes 
 spoiled ; they know somewhat of the un 
 known, and suffer from it ; the usual 
 measure of their esoteric worth must still 
 be the measure of their mundane imprac 
 ticability : like Hamlet, they have seen 
 spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. 
 Artists and thinkers, in fact, must out 
 wardly follow the profession of the queen 
 bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general 
 request. But they are omens ; they are, 
 let us hope, the type and the race, the 
 segregated non-cohesive thing, the pro 
 test which counts. The noblest of them 
 is least in love with civilization and its 
 awards ; but what they have not hoarded 
 for themselves, strangers hoard for them ; 
 and because success is most truly to them 
 a thing foregone, therefore they prevail 
 forever. If they have not " made a liv- 
 
1 88 THE UNDER DOG 
 
 ing," they have, in the opinion of a young 
 Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher 
 not of the Franklin breed, "made a 
 life." 
 
 1893. 
 
Quiet London 
 
QUIET LONDON 
 
 IF one had to try his hand at the eternal 
 parallel of London and Paris (next 
 weariest, in the scale of human compa 
 risons, to that between D - s and 
 T - y), or, indeed, of London with any 
 city of known size, it might be said, in a 
 word, that the chief variance between them 
 is a variance of sound : and that under 
 this, and expressed by it, " alas, how 
 told to them who felt it never ? " as 
 Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness 
 of his lady, is a profound spiritual dif 
 ference. Whatever tradition may say of 
 
 "the chargeable noise of this great town," 
 
 its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange 
 whispers, meek undertones. Conceive 
 anything more diverting than that a mon 
 strous awe-engendering institution like the 
 'bus should be almost as deft and as still 
 as a humming-bird ! Monosyllables, and 
 
192 QUIET LONDON 
 
 pipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of 
 fares make up the rolling van masculine ; 
 ever and anon the less certain step and 
 the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, 
 announce to the heroes of the serene 
 height that 
 
 " Helen is come upon the wall to see." 
 
 With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, 
 the wheels slide over surfaces smooth as 
 an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle 
 and rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by 
 day, and glowworms by night : they dart, 
 noiseless, from north to west. Even the 
 tuft-footed dray-horses vanish with such 
 reverberation as might follow Cinderella's 
 coach. Exquisite voices of children, soft 
 and shy, fall like the plash of water on 
 the open paths of the Parks. In the vis 
 cid openings of alleys off the Strand, in 
 the ancient astonishing tinkerdom of 
 Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha 
 torches light up the green lettuce on 
 peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden 
 balls significant above, and a knot of 
 Hogarth faces in the Saturday evening 
 flare, there also, are the cockney gamins 
 with honey-bright hair : profiles which cor- 
 
QUIET LONDON 193 
 
 roborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a 
 lovely phrase of Mistral in Mireio, "cou- 
 leur de joue ; " flushed little legs in ragged 
 socks, which have piteously set out on the 
 dark thoroughfares of life ; voices, above 
 all, which have often a low harp-like tone 
 not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing- 
 rooms. It is as if tremendous London, 
 her teeming thoughts troubling her, said 
 " Hush ! " in the ear of all her own. 
 Hyde Park orators are seldom brawlers ; 
 immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are 
 controlled by the gentlest of police, who 
 say " Please," and are obeyed. Few stop 
 to salute or exchange a word at the shel 
 ters. This is no experimental or village- 
 ous world: one man's affairs are in India, 
 another's on the deep sea, and a third's in 
 a cradle three stories up. Sidneys and 
 pickpockets intermingle, each on a non- 
 communicated errand. Here whisks a 
 Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed 
 dress ; and yonder, a sprout of a man who 
 might have been bow-legged, had he any 
 legs at all : nothing new goes at its value, 
 nothing strange begets comment. The 
 long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz 
 of street-life in New York, where folk go 
 13 
 
194 QUIET LONDON 
 
 two and two, are here foreign and trans 
 atlantic indeed. The even pavements 
 drink in all that might mean concussion, 
 the soft golden air deadens it, the preoc 
 cupied seriousness of the human element 
 contradicts and forbids it. An awful, en 
 dearing, melancholy stillness broods over 
 the red roofs of High Holborn, and 
 hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of 
 the Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane 
 tree of Cheapside : gigantic forces seem 
 trooping by, like the boy-god Harpo- 
 crates, finger on lip. The hushing rain, 
 from a windless sky, falls in sheets of 
 silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on 
 smouldering purple, and anon makes 
 whole what it had hardly riven : the veil 
 spun of nameless analogic tints, which 
 brings up the perspective of every road, 
 the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Theo- 
 phile Gautier admired once with all his 
 eye. The town wears the very color of 
 silence. No one can say of S. Paul's that 
 it is a talking dome, despite the ironic 
 accident of the whispering gallery in the 
 interior. Like Wordsworth upon Hel- 
 vellyn, in Haydon's odd memorable por 
 trait, it sees with drooped eyes, and exhorts 
 
QUIET LONDON 195 
 
 with grand reticences and abstractions. 
 Mighty stone broods above, on either 
 hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of 
 soot furled over the brow, in the posture 
 of the speechless martyrs of Attic tragedy. 
 There is an alchemic atmosphere in Lon 
 don, which interdicts one's perception of 
 ugliness. At the angles of the grimiest 
 places, choked with trade, we stumble on 
 little old bearded graveyards, pools of 
 ancestral sleep ; or low-lying leafy gardens 
 where monks and guildsmen have had 
 their dream : closes inexpressibly preg 
 nant with peace, the caesural pauses of our 
 loud to-day. Nothing in the world is so 
 remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of 
 long ago, as the antique City churches 
 where the dead are the only congregation ; 
 where the effigies of Rahere the founder, 
 Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, John Gower, 
 and our old friend Stow are awake, in their 
 scattered neighborhoods, to make the re 
 sponses ; and where the voices of the daily 
 choir, disembodied by the unfilled space 
 about, breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to 
 waver like bubbles up and down the aisles. 
 And to go thence into the highway creates 
 no great jar. The tide there is always at 
 
196 QUIET LONDON 
 
 the flood, and frets not. The perfectly 
 ordered traffic, its want of blockade and 
 altercation, the sad-colored, civil-mannered 
 throng, the dim light and the wet gleam, 
 make it as natural to be absent-minded at 
 Charing Cross as in the Abbey. Shelley 
 must have found it so ; else whence his 
 simile, 
 
 "The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's." 
 
 There is no congestion of the populace ; 
 yet the creeks and coves of that ancient 
 sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour 
 after hour, century after century, as if in 
 subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very 
 poise of energy, the aggregation of so 
 much force that all force is at a standstill ; 
 the miraculous moment, indefinitely pro 
 longed, when fruition becalms itself at 
 the full, and satiety hesitates to set in. 
 A certain subdued mighty hum, as of 
 " the loom of time," London lacks not ; 
 but a crass explosion never breaks it. 
 The imponderable quiet of the vast capi 
 tal completes her inscrutable charm. She 
 has the effect of a muted orchestra on ears 
 driven mad with the horrible din of new 
 America. As still as her deep history on 
 
QUIET LONDON '197 
 
 library shelves, so still are her pace and her 
 purpose to-day : her grave passing, would, 
 like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause. 
 Everywhere is the acoustically perfect 
 standpoint. The cosmic currents ripple 
 audibly along. 
 
 " Therein I hear the Parcae reel 
 The threads of life at the spinning-wheel, 
 The threads of life and power and pain." 
 
 Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the 
 humanist. They build his priory cell, 
 where he can sit and work on his illumi 
 nations, and know that he lays his colors 
 true. " The man, sir, who is tired of 
 London," said the great Doctor, in one 
 of his profound generalities, " is tired of 
 life." 
 
 At certain hours, the City is tenantless, 
 and sunrise or sunset, touching the vidual 
 tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the 
 pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At 
 such a time you may wander in the very 
 luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge 
 to Lambeth, watching the long yards 
 swing at their moorings by the palace wall, 
 and Thames running tiger-coated to sea ; 
 and from the Gray's Inn limes pass on 
 
198 QUIET LONDON 
 
 to an unvisited and noble old bronze of 
 an inconsiderable Stuart, lustrous from 
 the late shower, beyond whom are the 
 forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above 
 whom is his own starlit weather-vane, 
 with " the Protestant wind still blowing." 
 Where the Boar's Head was, where the 
 Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of 
 chronology, where, in a twinkle, the mer 
 chants and journalists shall be, are the de 
 populated presence-halls in which you are 
 
 " In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter." 
 
 All that was temporal in them has been 
 swallowed by the wave of the generations 
 of men who are no more. Poet by poet, 
 from the beginning, has known the look 
 of London's void heart at night, and has 
 had, next it, his keenest gust of sover 
 eignty, on jealous marches when his own 
 footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for 
 fear of man and of mortal interruption. 
 The living are gone for the moment : 
 the dead and their greatness are " nearer 
 than hands and feet." The divinest 
 quality of this colossal calm, " mirk miles 
 broad," is that, to the sensitive mind, it is 
 a magic glass for musings. In such a 
 
QUIET LONDON 199 
 
 mysterious private depth Narcissus saw 
 himself, and died of his own beauty. 
 The few who have had eternity most in 
 mind, have worshipped London most ; 
 and their passion, read of in biographies, 
 has expanded, insensibly, the imagination 
 of the many. The terror of the vast 
 town lies on any thoughtful spirit; but 
 without some touch or other of golden 
 casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sin 
 cerely adore her. For the adorable in her 
 is man's old adoration itself, breathed 
 forth and crystallized. That indeed, is 
 the everlasting delight : London has noth 
 ing so simple in her bosom as instinctive 
 charm. She is the dear echo, the dear 
 mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb 
 who was wont to relieve his tender over 
 burdened nature by a plunge in the surging 
 crowd, and who was not ashamed that he 
 had wept there, " for fulness of joy at so 
 much life/' might be the first to apply to the 
 majestic and bitter mother who bred him, 
 the illumining line of Alfred de Musset : 
 
 " Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle" 
 
 She gives us freedom, recollection, rever 
 ence ; and we attribute to her the sweet- 
 
200 QUIET LONDON 
 
 ness of our own dispositions at her knee. 
 Blessing us with her silence, the glad in 
 credible thing, she lets us believe we have 
 discovered it, as a fresh secret between 
 lover and lover. 
 
 On Sundays, too, the dreary English 
 Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic 
 opportunity wastes itself at the door ! 
 Hampstead and Blackheath are efflores 
 cent with the populace, but dark London 
 wears her troth-plight ring of meditation. 
 Her church-bells, indeed, speak : there is 
 a new one at every turning, like the suc 
 cession of perfumes as you cross a con 
 servatory, and felt as a discord no more 
 than these. Good to hear are the chimes 
 of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. 
 Helen, with their grace-notes and falling 
 thirds, the great octave-clash of Wren's 
 cathedral, which booms and sprays like 
 the sea on the chalk-cliffs almost within 
 its sight. And the ghosts are out again 
 under the eaves of Little Britain and 
 Soho. It is usually on Sundays, or at 
 night, that you may view the young Cow- 
 ley (curled up, among the geraniums, on 
 the window-ledge of an Elizabethan house 
 near S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) reading 
 
QUIET LONDON 201 
 
 Spenser, his light bronze curls curtaining 
 the folio page ; and a figure of uncon- 
 temporaneous look, coming heavily from 
 the Temple gateway, almost opposite, 
 with a black band on his sleeve, is saying 
 brokenly to himself: "Poor Goldy was 
 wild, very wild ; but he is so no more." 
 
 The elective London of choicest com 
 panionship, of invited sights and sounds, 
 of imperial privacy, is always open to the 
 explorer : " London small and white and 
 clean," walled and moated, fairer than she 
 ever was at any one time, warless, religious, 
 pastoral, where hares may course along 
 the friendly highway, and swans breast the 
 unpolluted Fleet. Like the gods, you 
 may, if you will, apprehend all that has 
 ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, 
 seize the little which is perfect and durable, 
 and live in it : " in the central calm at the 
 heart of agitation." By so much as Lon 
 don and her draggled outer precincts are 
 bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, 
 cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger 
 for having found here a spiritual parterre 
 of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, 
 owing to respect towards those who yet 
 believe in her, whose presence imposes 
 
202 QUIET LONDON 
 
 upon her, in romantic tyranny, the re 
 membrance of what she has been to her 
 saints, that she does, in reality, walk 
 softly, speak low, as if her life-long orgies 
 were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful 
 lover, the happy innocent look becoming 
 the young Republic of Selected Peace. 
 Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his 
 ear : 
 
 " O stay heere ! for to thee 
 England is only a worthy gallerie 
 To walk in Expectation: till from thence 
 Our greatest King call thee to His presence." 
 
 O stay here ! Who would not be such a 
 city's citizen ? 
 
 1890. 
 
The Captives 
 
THE CAPTIVES 
 
 THE lions at the Zoo " bring sad 
 thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, 
 for they are the most impressive figures 
 among our poor hostages. The pretty 
 moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsat 
 ing along their tawny sides, seem but so 
 many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle 
 enough to move your own. Couchant, 
 with a droop of the bearded chest, or 
 erect, with an eternal restless four steps 
 and back again, they drag through, in 
 public, their defeated days. It is incon 
 ceivable that we should attach the idea of 
 depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count 
 against him that he can kill those of us 
 who are adjacent, and juicy ! In the 
 roomy name of reciprocity, why not? 
 Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. 
 A second glance at him corrects inherited 
 opinion : 
 
 "I trow that countenance cannot lie." 
 
206 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 Benignity sits there, and forbearance ; else 
 we know not what such things mean. 
 Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, 
 make one remember no blood-curdling 
 hap ; but rather the gracious legendry of 
 long ago : how a lion buried the Chris 
 tian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, 
 and another gambolled in the thronged 
 Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Chris 
 tian youth, when the task laid upon him, 
 in his hunger, was to rend his body in 
 twain. Something about the lion reminds 
 one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. 
 This great intellectual mildness, when 
 blended with enormous power (power 
 which in him must be expressed physi 
 cally, or we were too dull to feel it), 
 appears to some merely sly and sinister. 
 Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. 
 For the ultimate quality in the expression 
 of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, 
 as one hears him called, the king of brutes, 
 but the gentleman among brutes he is, 
 beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dig 
 nity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With 
 passing accuracy, Landor or William Mor 
 ris, is often described as " leonine " ; but 
 the real lion-men of England are the thin 
 
THE CAPTIVES 207 
 
 and mild dynamos : Pitt, Newman, Nel 
 son. In these are the long austere lines 
 of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, 
 the look of inscrutable purpose and 
 patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon 
 his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque 
 of the Midsummer Night's Dream : " A very 
 gentle beast, and of a good conscience." 
 
 Year after year, so long as the splen 
 did creatures are cheapened " to make a 
 Roman holiday," they move not so much 
 under protest as with black sullen fatalism. 
 We have all seen them rise to the lash in 
 the hands of a spangled circus female, who 
 must end, forsooth, by inserting her po 
 matumed head in their too-enduring jaws ; 
 and it is not unusual for them to spring 
 at the just-closed door, with the fell 
 strength of that soft and terrible left fore- 
 paw. Their action is, of course, perfunc 
 tory ; and since they are notoriously 
 brave, and not to be cowed, obedience 
 in them has a strange pathos. They are 
 trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and 
 fire cannon, and jump hoops ; yes, even 
 to scowl and swear, to the terror of 
 "men, women and Herveys," between 
 the scenes of their bitter comedy ; yet the 
 
208 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 clown's circumstance cannot touch a hair 
 of those mournful magnific heads. Their 
 sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and 
 a patter of foolish nuts and cookies ; and, 
 from a dream of the fragrant jungles and 
 the torrents of home, they come anew 
 upon the cyclorama of human faces, and 
 the babble of foreign tongues. They live 
 no longer from hand to mouth, as they do 
 in their native haunts ; their needs, nay, 
 their whims, are studied and gratified; 
 they serve painters, naturalists, school 
 boys ; they give employment ; they call 
 forth thought, love, courage. And many 
 sympathizers and well-wishers are short 
 sighted enough to congratulate caged 
 animals, and think them happily circum 
 stanced. Your point of view depends, 
 perhaps, on how much passion for out- 
 of-doors, for solitude, is in your own 
 blood ; and on your sense of the 
 lengths to which human interference may 
 go with the works of God. We give these 
 lives subjected to our laudable curiosity, 
 strange exchanges : for moss knee-deep, 
 and the dews and aroma of the woody 
 ground, a raised sawdust floor; and for 
 an outlook through craggy glens, 
 
THE CAPTIVES 209 
 
 " Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras 
 
 of leaves,' ' 
 
 a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a 
 stucco sky which has not the look of 
 Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any 
 more. 
 
 Our father Adam is said to have dwelt 
 in peace with all the beasts in his Garden. 
 And there is no evidence in the Mosaic 
 annals that it was they who became per 
 verted, and broke faith with man ! Marry, 
 man himself, in the birth of his moral 
 ugliness, set up the hateful division, es 
 tranged these inestimable friends, and 
 then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, 
 subjugates, and kills the beings braver, 
 shrewder, and more innocent than he. 
 He has wrested from its beautiful meaning 
 his " dominion over them." Power made 
 him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its 
 victims hate and revenge and fear, and 
 from the footfall of man all creation flees 
 away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most 
 telling allegory, where the cultured Hou- 
 yhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the 
 Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen 
 angel of the lower order : 
 
 " The King, from height of all his painted glory," 
 14 ( 
 
210 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, 
 breathing dual impiety against his Maker 
 and his mates. Save him, there is no 
 other perverted animal ; not one clad 
 otherwise, or minded otherwise, than his 
 archetype. Men in sealskins ; women 
 in swansdown, with heron-aigrettes ; chil 
 dren in cocoon-spun silk, their hands 
 and feet in strange sheathings torn from 
 the young of the goat and the cow ; 
 what are these but ludicrous violators 
 of the decencies of the universe ? If there 
 be beasts in Heaven " with eye down- 
 dropt " upon the temperate and polar 
 zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is, 
 moreover, part of our plot to deny them 
 immortality, and to attempt to interpose 
 our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, 
 between them and their Author, towards 
 whom they yet bear an unshamed front. 
 For man the animal is but a beggarly 
 lump. He has never shown himself so 
 provident as the ant, so ingenious as the 
 beaver, so faithful as the dove, so forgiving 
 as the hound. His senses are eternally 
 below par; his artistic faculties are be 
 fogged. The humblest thrush is an archi 
 tect and musician by eldest family tradition, 
 
THE CAPTIVES 211 
 
 while it takes him a thousand years to 
 conceive an ogee arch and a viol d' amore. 
 And having driven from his pestilential 
 company the whole retinue of dear es 
 quires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim 
 them to his service. The horse came 
 back, generously hiding his apprehensions ; 
 the pig and the hen mechanically, at the 
 prospect of free bed and board ; the dog 
 with his glad conciliation, the cat with her 
 aristocrat reserves. These abide with us, 
 suffer through us, are persuasive and vol 
 uble, and endeavor to reconcile us with 
 the great majority of wild livers, from 
 whom we are divorced. In vain do they 
 so press upon us our own lack of logic. 
 We address them individually : " You, 
 O immigrant, are personally pleasing unto 
 me ; but your fellows, your blood-relations, 
 your customs in your own country, ach 
 Himmel ! " Our popular speech insults 
 them at every turn : " as silly as a goose," 
 " as vain as a peacock," " as ugly as a rat," 
 " as obstinate as a mule," " as cross as a 
 bear," " as dirty as a dog," " as sick as a 
 dog," "to be hanged like a dog," "a dog's 
 life," " Cur!" "Puppy!" Surely, no class 
 of creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth cen- 
 
212 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 tury, have ever undergone such ground 
 less contumely. Every word of Shylock's 
 famous plea stands good for them, as also 
 its close. " If you prick us, do we not 
 bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ? 
 if you poison us, do we not die ? and, if 
 you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If 
 we are like you in the rest, we will resem 
 ble you in that." When we hear of a 
 writer who advises the practice of " cour 
 tesy " towards animals, and of a little girl 
 who hoarded up wisdom from the speech 
 of a turtle, our memories couple them as 
 Alice and Sir Arthur Helps in Won 
 derland. If it be in Utopia alone that 
 murderous "sport" is impossible, and 
 that only there it can breed a rational pity 
 when after a run, " a harmless and fearfull 
 Hare should be devour' d by strong, fierce, 
 and cruell Dogges," how far are we not 
 from the time when modern conscien 
 tiousness shall make us just even to the 
 exiles pent in a menagerie ? Our laws 
 deal with these in a spirit of the most 
 flagrant injustice. While every jury 
 allows for reprisals, when dealing with 
 human crime, no biped else, and no quad 
 ruped, with however blameless a record, 
 
THE CAPTIVES 213 
 
 under whatever provocation, can be allowed 
 an instant's hearing, when so much as sus 
 pected of a transgression. A leopard here 
 at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific 
 cause. He is tired of being enslaved, and 
 would resume sincerity. He offends ; he 
 is executed, leaving ineradicable influences 
 among the cages, as if their Danton had 
 gone by, audible again : " )ue mon nom soit 
 fletri ; que la France soit libre ! " Or the 
 keeper abominably abuses a certain ele 
 phant, a very saint for patience, a genius 
 for cleverness, a hero for humor ; and six 
 years after, the same elephant, in another 
 duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his 
 lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly 
 cracks him against a wall. A dozen in 
 fluential persons plead, as defence for the 
 assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of 
 character ; but the public blood is up : he 
 has to die. To some reforms we shall 
 never come, for thought about them is 
 deadened in us by the operation of our 
 accursed generic pride. Our codes ap 
 proximate too painfully to the largeness of 
 the universal plan. We have, indeed, 
 conceived of other suns, other systems, 
 than ours ; but the hope is slight that 
 
214 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 we can ever admit beasts, not to certain 
 terms of equality with our own esteemed 
 species, but even to their relative pro 
 noun, and a place in the divine economy. 
 Arrogance is bad for us, and bad for 
 them. The very bliss of power is to 
 protect and forbear ; could we learn it, we 
 might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the 
 jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, 
 in the maintenance of penal laws against 
 our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that, 
 as yet, we know no better. As we are 
 drowned in ignorance, it is inconceivable 
 that we shall be hanged for sacrilege ! 
 Could we analyze the impressions of un 
 cultivated persons, received from the cen 
 taurs in the Parthenon frieze, or the 
 Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should prob 
 ably discover that these are looked upon 
 as mere monsters : a compound of man 
 and horse, or of woman and lioness, the 
 conception of which is abhorrent and dis 
 tressing to the mind. (It is to be hoped 
 that there are snobbish horses and lion 
 esses to take the corresponsive view). 
 But the artists of the race, from the world's 
 beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have 
 gone on creating these mythic <c monsters." 
 
THE CAPTIVES 215 
 
 Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids 
 with silver and vermilion scales, and an 
 gels borne on vast white gull-like wings : 
 dear non-anatomical shapes, for the most 
 part, full of odd charm, and of an appli 
 cation which will last out until we become 
 humble and humorous enough to read it. 
 Nor, on second thought, can we fail to 
 see gravest changes adumbrating the sub 
 ject. The Latin nations lag behind in 
 conciliations, and England leads. There 
 were not many, long ago, who passed the 
 fraternal word to beasts : those who did 
 so, Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the 
 flower of their kind, and not without sus 
 picion of " queerness." Lord Erskine, 
 less than three generations back, suffered 
 great obloquy for his championship of 
 what we are almost ready to concede as 
 the " rights " of animals. Coleridge was 
 well laughed at for saluting the ass's little 
 foal as his brother. But Burns was not 
 laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake 
 for his fly. And there is no single char 
 acteristic of modern life so novel, so sig 
 nificant, as the yearning affectionateness 
 with which our youngest poets allude to 
 fauna, and so adorn a moral. The habit 
 
216 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 has grown with them, until every Pan's 
 pipe breathes sweet pieties to the less 
 articulate world. A line of Celia Thax- 
 ter, addressed to a mussel on the stormy 
 Maine strand, has struck their uncon 
 scious key-note. 
 
 " Thou thought of God ! . . . what more than 
 thou am I ! " 
 
 For Darwin has come and gone, and cut 
 our boast from under us. 
 
 On their own part, how benevolent are 
 the estranged allies far away ! how ready 
 to resume " the league of heart to heart " 
 with some soul a little primal ! Any one, 
 indeed, may tame a wild thing, by no deeper 
 necromancy than a succession of suppers 
 and of kind words. Animals are disin 
 terested also, and ready to serve without 
 rewards. Ravens are gentle marketers for 
 Elijah ; the lions purr about the prophet 
 Daniel ; the shyest fish swim into Tho- 
 reau's hand ; S. Francis, in the tenderest 
 of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and 
 reasons with the wicked wolf who sacks 
 the Umbrian villages. He offers him free 
 and ample maintenance, promises him im 
 munity from the hunters, and brings him 
 
THE CAPTIVES 217 
 
 down among the women and children, to 
 pledge himself to better behavior on his 
 apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a 
 very great fool : he was only Adam sane 
 again, and interharmonized with the phy 
 sical universe. The majority of infants 
 still show pleasure at the sight of a beetle, 
 or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills it ; 
 but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure 
 is. The fatuous parents, however, are 
 certain to change all that : toads, be it 
 known, produce warts, and beetles sting. 
 A lizard on a tree-trunk, a mink in the 
 creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone 
 wall, (charming persons exclusively mind 
 ing their own business,) are at all times 
 providentially provided for our sweet little 
 boys to kill. Strange that, whereas, by 
 Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures had 
 our communication with creatures in one 
 kindly language, we should now roam over 
 the face of the earth, everywhere accosting 
 our demonstrable superiors with a gun ! 
 Mr. Bryan, candidate for the Presidency 
 of the United States, went into the forest, 
 the other day, for rest and recreation, and 
 had a stroke of luck : he shot something. 
 It was a beautiful doe. We learn from 
 
2i 8 THE CAPTIVES 
 
 the newspapers that she had cc stood look 
 ing at him, without any fear." Here is 
 your typical high treason in these nice 
 matters. Who will say but that the doe 
 was about to give some sign ? fa donne 
 furieusement a penser. Blind bullies, sod 
 den usurpers that we are ! It is our dense 
 policy to rebuff the touching advances 
 of our old allies and kindred. Not 
 Rhoecus only instinctively bruises the 
 ambassador bee, and stifles the immortal 
 message. 
 
 If the Oriental religions have any mis 
 sion to discharge in our behalf, let them 
 teach us speedily, through any gracious 
 superstition whatsoever, their grave respect 
 for animal life. When we are thoroughly 
 converted, we shall not only cease to vivi 
 sect, but manumit our slaves of the ex 
 hibition-hall and the Zoo : we shall hear 
 no longer from the lion-house the fell 
 foreboding sound, as of Vercingetorix, 
 Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring 
 the gods for vengeance upon Rome. The 
 captives have borne their fate, yet not quite 
 dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, 
 day by day, something of themselves hard 
 to part with ; and they know it : but they 
 
THE CAPTIVES 219 
 
 are no atheists. Outside is the hateful 
 city, but the sun also, bringing strange 
 fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. 
 So much lies back of them, in that cell of 
 humiliation, where they were not born ! 
 What if there should be freedom again 
 for them, beyond death ? Some thought 
 as profound surges this morning in a vast 
 antiphonal cry among the tanks and cages, 
 and shakes, in passing, the soul of man. 
 
 " O comrades of mine, we are not igno 
 rant of previous sorrow ; and O ye who 
 have outlived yet greater ills ! behold, the 
 god unto these also will put an end." 
 
 1896. 
 
 
On Teaching One's Grandmother How 
 to Suck Eggs 
 

 ON TEACHING ONE'S GRAND 
 MOTHER HOW TO SUCK 
 EGGS. 
 
 IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no 
 vexed question went without its fair 
 showing, it seems incredible that the im 
 portant thesis hereto affixed as a title 
 went a-begging among those hair-split 
 ting philosophers. Since Aristotle him 
 self overlooked it, Duns Scotus and the 
 noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theo- 
 phrastus Bombast de Hohenheim, were 
 quite content to repeat his sin of omission. 
 Even Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon 
 of whose understanding was much larger 
 than the hemisphere of this world," 
 neither unearthed the origin of this sin 
 gular implied practice, nor attempted in 
 any way to uphold or depreciate it. The 
 phrase hath scarce the grace of an Orien 
 tal precept, and scarce the dignity of 
 Rome. It might sooner appertain to 
 
224 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 
 
 Sparta, where the old were held in rever 
 ence, and where their education, in a 
 burst of filial anxiety, might be pro 
 longed beyond the usual term of mental 
 receptivity. 
 
 It is reserved therefore, for some 
 modern inquirer to establish, whether the 
 strange accomplishment in mind was at 
 any time, in any nation, barbarous or en 
 lightened, in universal repute among ven 
 erable females ; or else especially imparted, 
 under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, 
 to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, 
 sibyls, and such secretive and oracular 
 folk ; whether the initiatory lessons were 
 theoretical merely ; and at what age the 
 grandams (for the condition of hyper- 
 maternity was at least imperative) were 
 allowed to begin operations. 
 
 It is a partial argument against the 
 antiquity of the custom, and against the 
 supposition of its having prevailed among 
 old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several 
 of these are accused by historians of 
 having destroyed their progenitors so 
 soon as the latter became idle and en 
 feebled : whereas it is reasonably to be 
 inferred that the gentle process of ovi- 
 
HOW TO SUCK EGGS 225 
 
 sugescence, had such then been invented, 
 would have kept the savage fireside peopled 
 with happy and industrious centenarians. 
 After the arduous labor of their long 
 lives, this new, leisurely, mild, and genteel 
 trade could be acquired with impercepti 
 ble trouble. Cato mastering Greek at 
 eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past 
 his October, are kittenish and irreverend 
 figures beside that of a toothless Goth 
 grandmother, learning, with melancholy 
 energy, to suck eggs. 
 
 We know not why the privilege of 
 education, if granted to them without 
 question, should have been withheld from 
 their gray spouses, who certainly would 
 have preferred so sociable an industry to 
 whetting the knives of the hunters, or 
 tending watch-fires by night. But no one 
 of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking 
 eggs. The gentle art was apparently 
 sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld 
 from the shaggy lords of creation, by 
 whom the innutritious properties of the 
 shell were happily unsuspected. 
 
 By what means was the race of hens, 
 for instance, preserved ? Statistics might 
 be proffered concerning the ante-natal 
 13 
 
226 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 
 
 consumption of fledglings, which would 
 edify students of natural history. One 
 bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage 
 under consideration permanently settles ; 
 a quibble which ought to have 
 
 " staggered that stout Stagy rite,'* 
 
 and which has come even to the notice 
 of grave inductive theologians : vide 
 licet, that the bird, and not the egg, may 
 claim the priority of existence. For had 
 it been otherwise, one's grandmother 
 would been early acquainted with the 
 very article which her posterity recom 
 mended to her as a novelty, and which, 
 with respectful care, they taught her to 
 utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her 
 time of life. 
 
 Fallen into desuetude is this judicious 
 and salutary custom. There must have 
 been a time when a yellowish stain about 
 the mouth denoted an age, a vocation, a 
 limitation, effectually as did the bulla of 
 the lad, the maiden's girdle, " the mar 
 shal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or 
 any of the picturesque distinctions now 
 crushed out of the social code. But the 
 orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, 
 
HOW TO SUCK EGGS 227 
 
 austere, meditative pastime, is no more, 
 and the glory of grandams is extinguished 
 forever. 
 
 The dreadful civility of our western 
 woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice 
 alike of the theatre and of the political 
 meeting, the casting of eggs wherefrom 
 the element of youth is wholly eliminated, 
 affords a speculation on heredity, and ap 
 pears to be a faint echo of some traditional 
 squabble in the morning of the world, 
 among disagreeing kinswomen ; the very 
 primordial battle, where reloading was 
 superfluous, where every shell told, whose 
 blackest spite was spent in a golden rain 
 and hail. What havoc over the face of 
 young creation ; what coloring of pools, 
 and of errant butterflies ! What distress 
 amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose 
 shady haunts trickled unwelcome mois 
 ture : a terror not unshared in the re 
 cesses of the coast : 
 
 " Intus aqua dukes, vivoque sedilia saxo, 
 Nympbarum domus." 
 
 One can fancy the younglings of the vast 
 human family, the success of whose lesson 
 to their elders was thus over-well demon 
 strated, marking the ebb and flow of hos- 
 
228 TEACHING GRANDMOTHER 
 
 tilities, like the superb spirits of Richelieu 
 and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the 
 great Revolution. What marvel, if, 
 struck with remorse at the senile strife 
 of the "she-citizens," they vowed never, 
 never to teach another grandmother to 
 suck eggs ! So it was, maybe, that the 
 abused custom was lost from the earth. 
 
 Nay, more ; its remembrance is per 
 verted into a taunt more scorching than 
 lightning, more silencing than the bolt of 
 Jove. Sus Minervam is Cicero* s elegant 
 equivalent; and Partridge says to Tom 
 Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster : 
 " Polly Matete cry town is my daska- 
 lon " : the English whereof runneth : 
 Teach your grandmother how to suck 
 eggs ! Is not the phrase the cream of 
 scorn, the catchword of insubordination, 
 the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken 
 as a one-year's colt ? It grated strangely 
 on our ear. We grieved over the trans 
 formation of a favorite saw, innocuous 
 once, and conveying a meek educational 
 suggestion. We came to admit that the 
 Academe where the old sat at the feet of 
 their descendants, to be ingratiated into 
 the most amiable of professions, was 
 
HOW TO SUCK EGGS 229 
 
 nothing better, in memory, than an im 
 pertinence. And we sadly avowed, in 
 the underground chamber of our private 
 heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it 
 would be fairly suicidal, all things con 
 sidered, to aspire now to the chair of 
 that professorship. 
 
 Let some reformer, who cherishes his 
 ancestress, and who is not averse to break 
 his fast on an omelet, dissuade either 
 object of his regard from longer lending 
 name and countenance to a vulgar sneer 
 Shall such be thy mission, reader? We 
 would wish the extended acquaintance 
 with that mysterious small cosmos which 
 suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing 
 and giblets in posse ; and joy for many 
 a year of thy parent's parent, who is in 
 some sort thy reference and means of 
 identification, the hub of thy far-reaching 
 and more active life ; but, prithee, wrench 
 apart their sorry association in our Eng 
 lish speech. Purists shall forgive thee 
 if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy 
 sleeve at the fantastic text which brought 
 them together. 
 
 1885. 
 
Wilful Sadness in Literature 
 
WILFUL SADNESS IN LIT 
 ERATURE. 
 
 " Leave things so prostitute, 
 And take the Alcaic lute! " 
 
 BEN JONSON. 
 
 MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in 
 the preface to the first edition of 
 his collected poems (1853) withdrew from 
 circulation, and gave reasons for with 
 drawing, his splendid Empedocles on Etna. 
 Nothing in Mr. Arnold's career did him 
 more honor than that fine scrupulousness 
 leading him to decry his dramatic mas 
 terpiece as too mournful, too introspec 
 tive, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage 
 which it is the business of poets to give 
 to the world. He says of it, that it be 
 longs to a class of faulty representations 
 "in which suffering finds no vent in 
 action ; in which a continuous state of 
 mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved 
 
234 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 by incident, hope, or resistance ; in which 
 there is everything to be endured, noth 
 ing to be done. In such situations there 
 is inevitably something morbid, in the 
 description of them something monoto 
 nous. When they occur in actual life, 
 they are painful, not tragic: the repre 
 sentation of them in poetry is painful 
 also." The same verdict that con 
 demns the stagnant sadness of Empedo- 
 cles y reacts upon dough's Dipsychus, to 
 some of us the most attractive of modern 
 monodies, on Marlowe's Faustus y and on 
 Hamlet itself. But every one of these is 
 an inestimable experience to the happy 
 and the virtuous who love the intimate 
 study of humanity, and are made, by 
 the perusal, more thoughtful and tender. 
 On none but general considerations, could 
 Mr. Arnold have attempted to suppress 
 Empedocles. The great rules of aesthetics, 
 as for ethics, must be for the many, not 
 for the few ; and the many are neither 
 happy nor virtuous : and it may well seem 
 a sort of treachery in a man of genius to 
 speak aloud at all, in our vast society of 
 the desponding and the unspiritual, un 
 less he can speak the helping word. This 
 
SADNESS IN LITERATURE 235 
 
 cannot be sufficiently insisted upon before 
 young writers, who are too ready to burst 
 in upon us with their Ahs and Wella- 
 days, and to set up, at twenty, for jaded 
 cynics, and lovers who have loved, accord 
 ing to their own pinched measure, too 
 well. Some public censor, a Stoic hav 
 ing a heart, and perfect control of it, 
 should be appointed, in every township, 
 to kill off in the egg, whatever is uselessly 
 doleful, and spread abroad the right 
 idea of what is fit to be uttered in this 
 valley of tears. The elect should be 
 supplied with Empedocleian extras : but 
 the multitude which can be impressed by 
 their intrinsic evil should never be incited 
 to approach their extrinsic beauty. 
 
 The play which leaves us miserable 
 and bewildered, the harrowing social les 
 son leading nowhere, the transcript from 
 commonplace life in which nothing is ad 
 mirable but the faithful skill of the au 
 thor, these are bad morals because they 
 are bad art. With them ranks the in 
 vertebrate poetry of two and three gene 
 rations ago, which has bequeathed its 
 sickly taint to its successor in popular 
 favor, our modern minor fiction. Au- 
 
236 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 thors are, in a sense, the universal bur 
 den-bearers : those who can carry much 
 vicariously, without posing or complain 
 ing. Mr. Arnold's penance for his mel 
 ancholy is a noble spectacle ; and it will 
 always do what he feared Empedocles 
 would fail to do, " inspirit and rejoice the 
 reader." The ancients stepped securely 
 in this matter of sadness ; for piety, re 
 tribution, awe, spring from every agony 
 of CEdipus and Orestes. Many of the 
 Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible ; 
 but they compel men to think, and teach 
 more humanities than a university course. 
 Mr. Meredith's influence, in our own day, 
 is not such as will induce you to sit shak 
 ing your maudlin head over yourself and 
 all creation ; neither need it be added ? 
 is Mr. Stevenson's. Mr. Henry James 
 has just said of Mr. Lowell : " He is an 
 erect fighting figure on the side of opti 
 mism and beauty." What made Brown 
 ing exceedingly popular at last, was his 
 courage in overthrowing blue devils. 
 
 " What had I on earth to do 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ?" 
 
 His many and unique merits have small 
 share in the result. 
 
SADNESS IN LITERATURE 237 
 
 Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, 
 as the School-men heartily thought after 
 him, is nothing less than an actual crime. 
 Sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly 
 uttered, and adjusted, in the utterance, to 
 the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to 
 conceal the merely painful, as did the 
 Greek audiences and the masters of their 
 drama. That critic would be crazy, or 
 excessively sybaritic, who would bar out 
 the tragic from the stage, the studio, the 
 orchestra, or the library shelf. Melan 
 choly, indeed, is inseparable from the 
 highest art. We cannot wish it away ; 
 but we can demand a mastery over it in 
 the least, as well as in the greatest : a mel 
 ancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, 
 native dignity itself; or the Virgilian mel 
 ancholy of Tennyson, in his sweet brood- 
 ings over the abysses of our unblest life, 
 and the turn of his not hopeless thought 
 and phrase. We can demand, in these 
 matters, the insincerity of the too-little, 
 rather than the cant of the too-much. 
 The danger of expressing despondency is 
 extreme. The maudlin shoots like a para 
 site from the most moving themes, and 
 laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It 
 
238 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 was not without reason that Thackeray 
 made fun of Werther. What Sidney 
 sweetly calls 
 
 " Poore Petrarch's long-deceased woes," 
 
 stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh 
 Hunt, and of the indelicate public after 
 him. No poet can put fully into words 
 the ache and stress of human passion : no 
 very wise poet will ever try to do so, save 
 by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. 
 The pathos which goes deep is generally a 
 plain statement, not a reflection. The 
 old ballad, Waly, Waly, for instance, is a 
 hard thing to get away from, dry-eyed. 
 Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, 
 as a mere obituary announcement. Hear 
 the long throbbing lines of the old elegy 
 supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord 
 Brooke : 
 
 " Learning her light hath lost, Valor hath slain her 
 
 knight : 
 Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's 
 
 delight." 
 
 Or Chapman : 
 
 " For now no more of ^Eneus* race survived : they 
 
 all were gone. 
 
 No more his royal self did live ; no more his noble son, 
 The golden Meleager now : their glasses all were run." 
 
SADNESS IN LITERATURE 239 
 
 The heart-breaking climax of Lear, the 
 bursting-point of so much grandeur and so 
 much suffering, is a dying commonplace 
 almost grotesque : " Pray you, undo this 
 button." But to harrow us is another 
 affair altogether. Plato could never for 
 give a subject not inevitable, chosen simply 
 because it is in itself piteous or startling, 
 and invites the rhetorical gabble which its 
 creator, after one fashion or another, can 
 spend upon it. 
 
 The French and their followers have 
 driven us into a demand for decency, and 
 unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent 
 than the things oftener named and con 
 tested by our worthiest critics. What use 
 have we for any Muse, be she the most 
 accomplished in the world, who lives but 
 to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, 
 " soothed with delicious sorrow " ? Art 
 has little to do with her : for art is made 
 of seemly abstinences. The moment it 
 speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases 
 to represent a choice and a control of its 
 own material, ceases to be, in short, an 
 authority and a mystery, and prefers to 
 set up for a mere Chinese copy of life, 
 just so soon its birthright is transferred. 
 
240 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 " I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think 
 truly," that even Beauty has her respon 
 sibilities, and Art her ideals of conduct. 
 Nay, she has her definite dogma. " Our 
 only chance/' says Addington Symonds in 
 a private letter to Robert Louis Steven 
 son, " seems to me to maintain, against all 
 appearances, that evil can never, and in no 
 way, be victorious." 
 
 We owe our gratitude to the men of 
 letters who deliberately undertake to be 
 gay : for nobody expects unconscious and 
 spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. 
 The modern spirit has seen to that. No 
 thanks of ours are too good even for the 
 bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid 
 towards Americans : for he is the one 
 living poet already famous, who has struck, 
 and means to strike, the very note of 
 cc How happy is he born and taught," 
 and " Shall I, wasting in despair." But 
 if our dilettantes lament a withered wild- 
 flower, or praise a young face, they feel 
 that they have done enough towards clear 
 ing the air, and justifying " the ways of 
 God to man." It is inconvenient to have 
 the large old fundamental feelings : to be 
 energetic, or scornful, or believing. The 
 
SADNESS IN LITERATURE 241 
 
 fashionable poetic utterance is dejected, 
 and of consummate refinement ; le besoin 
 de sentir is about it like a strange fragrance. 
 We have had disheartening modern music, 
 and of the highest order, too long. 
 Beginning with Byron, and, in a far differ 
 ent manner, with Shelley, we may count 
 those problems of our life few indeed 
 which have lacked the poor solution of a 
 protest or a tear. Wordsworth was the 
 last great man 
 
 " contented if he might enjoy 
 The things that others understand." 
 
 Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this 
 case, since he had no marked constitu 
 tional sensitiveness. The lyres of " Par- 
 naso mount " have grown passive and 
 unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse 
 us, and we have ceased to wonder at them 
 because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to 
 whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in 
 the magazines ; of the three, whimpering 
 is the favorite. Now, to " make a scene " 
 is not mannerly, even on paper. Before 
 the implacable Fates we may as well be 
 collected. It seems less than edifying to 
 ask the cold one, though in enchanting 
 
 16 
 
242 SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 numbers, whether her bosom be of marble, 
 or of her ghost whether it will not visit 
 us in the garden. Yet such attitudinizing 
 pathos, impossible so long as faith was 
 general, and true emotion therefore unex 
 hausted, the pathos of the decadence, the 
 exaggeration of normal moods and affec 
 tation of more than is felt, P expression 
 forte des sentiments faibles^ is the prevail 
 ing feature of current verse. Rather, to 
 be quite accurate, it was the prevailing 
 feature a moment ago. There are, in the 
 east, other portents more significant. It 
 is indicative not only of his middle age, 
 but of something touching ourselves and 
 our to-morrow, that Mr. Swinburne, let 
 us say, is less .stormy and less maledictory, 
 and longs not so incessantly to be laid in 
 the exquisite burial-places of his imagina 
 tion. They that wail well in duodecimo 
 may presently be accused of giddiness and 
 shallow thought. For literature, at last, 
 is picking up heart : health and spring and 
 fight are re-establishing themselves. Out 
 of the alcoves of time, certain sunny faces 
 of old look fatherly and smiling, as the 
 vapors disperse. Hail also, young meek 
 out-riders, morning-colored contempora- 
 
SADNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 243 
 
 ries ! At least, you are of excellent cheer. 
 You have done with sourness, and 
 
 " hear it sweep 
 In distance down the dark and savage vale." 
 
 Change is at hand. The Maypole is up 
 in Bookland. 
 
 1892. 
 
An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other 
 
 Good Parts of His Late Majesty, 
 
 KING CHARLES THE 
 
 SECOND 
 
 
 
AN INQUIRENDO INTO THE 
 
 WIT AND OTHER GOOD 
 
 PARTS OF HIS LATE 
 
 MAJESTY, KING 
 
 CHARLES THE 
 
 SECOND 
 
 SCENE : Saint James's Park, on the after 
 noon of the twenty-ninth of May. 
 Edward Clay, with a twig of oak stuck 
 in his hat is on the bank of the little 
 lake, feeding the water-fowl. Percy 
 Wetherell, a fellow-author, and Rhoda, 
 his wife, who are crossing the bridge, 
 perceive him. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 See ! there's our dear Mr. Clay. What 
 is he doing that for ? 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 The motive must be pure benevolence. 
 Give me a little start, and I will run him 
 down. [Followed by Rhoda, he goes down 
 
248 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 the steps, close to his friend's shoulder, ob 
 serves the decoration, and utters in a sepul 
 chral tone : " Long live Oliver ! " Clay 
 looks up, and smiles, still breaking his biscuit. 
 Finally he speaks :] 
 
 CLAY 
 
 You have guessed it : I am keeping 
 Restoration Day. It struck me as a 
 pleasing rite to come up here and feast the 
 descendants of King Charles the Second's 
 water-fowl. I have to lecture on him 
 to-night. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 King Charles the Second ! Why, Mr. 
 Clay, I thought he was the dreadfullest 
 person ! 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Easy now, my only love : don't hurt 
 Edward's little feelings. He is a notor 
 ious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, 
 a pre-Jacobite, a seventeenth-centurion, 
 and all that. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Oh ! a Royalist, a White Rose man ? 
 I never dreamed it. 
 CLAY 
 
 Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. 
 Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue ; 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 249 
 
 people don't understand him. If I had 
 your husband's leisure, I should never 
 rest until I had moused in the archives at 
 first hand, and said the authentic last good 
 word for him. There would be no end of 
 fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine 
 pair. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 That green bird on your boot will 
 choke himself. It is wonderful how 
 tame they are ! I thought you knew 
 more than anybody alive, on that subject, 
 these ten years. 
 CLAY 
 
 I might say with Margaret, Duchess of 
 Newcastle : " I have thought more than I 
 have read, and read more than I have 
 written." 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Do you really mean to make people 
 like him ? They taught us in the school- 
 books that he was a bad good-for-nothing 
 king. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, 
 he did not choose to consider himself as 
 being in "the king business." He was 
 a choice wag, at any rate. 
 
250 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Yes : though not much worse than you. 
 And he was the last Mind we have seen, 
 or shall ever see, on the throne. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Owch ! Treason ! She is all she should 
 be, God bless her. 
 CLAY 
 
 [Laughing."] Allowed. I was contending 
 that Charles the Second had wit, and a 
 keen survey of men and things : he had 
 the literary-philosophic turn, in short. 
 He was n't good, he was n't beautiful, he 
 was n't much of a Protestant, or a Consti 
 tutional Sovereign ; but it is my long 
 standing theory that he was an indolent 
 original genius of the first water, and a fine 
 character spoiled. Here, billy, quack, 
 quack, quack ! 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Your indolent original point of view ! 
 I don't deny we have some pretty valu 
 able bequests from that bacchanalian reign : 
 the Habeas Corpus Act, for instance. But 
 Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket 
 Compendium of all the vices ? How are 
 you going to excuse him? Because he 
 was weak ? 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 251 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Why do you think he must be excused ? 
 My pious intention is only to extra-illus 
 trate him : " nothing extenuate, and set 
 down naught in malice." I mean to pro 
 vide the ordinary listener at the Institute 
 with a little dispassionate extra acquaint 
 anceship, pleasant in its nature, with the gen 
 tleman in question ; and I distinctly mean 
 not to tamper with what knowledge of him 
 he may have acquired on other themes, and 
 from other sources. You see how sly a 
 plan of campaign it is. But your adjective, 
 Wetherell, will never do. Weak ? Where 
 did you hear that fiddle-faddle ? He had 
 the most tremendous will. Repeatedly, 
 and with the greatest severity and de 
 spatch, he took matters over into his own 
 hands ; and very often he was right, and 
 ahead of contemporary policy. Look at 
 the way he prorogued Parliament, in the 
 May of 1679, a ^ ter tne famous quarrel 
 over the trial of the five lords ; the way 
 he rejected the application of the Roos 
 divorce bill, shaped so as to give himself 
 latitude and precedent ; his speech in the 
 Upper House, insisting on holding to the 
 terms of pardon which he had offered 
 
252 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 from Breda ; his letters to the young Duke 
 of Gloucester, when there was rumor of a 
 change of religion ; or, to come to smaller 
 and uglier matters, look at his obstinate 
 maintenance of his right to appoint the 
 ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his 
 whole inexcusable treatment of the great 
 Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read 
 Green ? Green, who comes down hard 
 on him, would sooner have you think him 
 an accomplished tyrant, and so should I. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful 
 to the very people who brought about 
 the Restoration, was n't he ? Rhoda, 
 these swans are actually fatter than Lord 
 Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay 
 talk ? I am egging him on ; it does me 
 good.) 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to 
 atone for you. Yes : it is great to find so 
 much animation expended on dead issues. 
 CLAY 
 
 Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can 
 see. Think of the times, think of the hue 
 and cry after indemnities and offices ; 
 think of the million million services, little 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 253 
 
 and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, 
 and real, all being urged together, on the 
 day when fortune first smiled on the King. 
 Could any one man satisfy such greed ? 
 Might not any one man get confused in 
 such a muddle of beseeching hungry 
 hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, 
 save with the few he knew and remem 
 bered ? And those he never forgot : not 
 the least Penderell among them. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 How about the epigram, Barrow's, 
 was n't it ? A very good hit : let me see. 
 Te magis^ that 's it : 
 Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole^ nemo : 
 
 Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus. 
 CLAY 
 
 That is just the sort of dig Charles 
 enjoyed. It is n't malicious. He was 
 immensely amused by the protestations 
 of the realm which, according to its own 
 tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, 
 and labored to bring him to his own again. 
 He said ironically : " The fault is plainly 
 mine that I came not before." How did 
 he keep his patience through the incessant 
 begging? He must have suffered more 
 than a newly-elected president in America. 
 
254 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, 
 and restitutions, and awards, " hearing 
 anybody against anybody," and sure to be 
 of propitious bent when petitions forced 
 their way into his own hand. But he 
 kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, 
 Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, 
 " he never would break his Head with 
 Business." Long before there was much 
 chance of his securing his succession to 
 the crown, the hints of his adherents fell 
 about him as thick as snow-flakes. Has n't 
 he told us how the country innkeeper, 
 alone with him a moment, during his 
 fugitive days, read him through his dis 
 guise ? " He kissed my hand that was 
 upon the back of the chair, and said to 
 me : c God bless you wherever you go, for 
 I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, 
 and my wife a lady/ So I laughed and 
 went away. . . . He proved very honest." 
 That same innkeeper must have turned 
 up, two hundred strong at least, at White 
 hall. Again, you know how poor the 
 King was, and how estates and emoluments 
 had been parcelled out, and tied up, dur 
 ing the Protectorate. He had actually 
 nothing, at first, to give. 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 255 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Except scandal. 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Irrelevant ! 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 And, of course, the immortal house- 
 warming : a gift to the imaginations of all 
 Englishmen forever. I am sorry I was n't 
 there myself. 
 CLAY 
 
 O that day! What a wonderful pro 
 cession it must have been, from London 
 Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, 
 in his Diary, so beautifully calls " a lane of 
 happy faces," and troops pressing to their 
 lips the hilts of their weapons, and waving 
 them overhead, in a unique salutation ; the 
 King, whom the Speaker of the House of 
 Commons was about to address as King of 
 Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth birthday, 
 between his brothers of York and Glou 
 cester, past the long waving of scarfs and 
 glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right, 
 like a dark pine in the wind ; the saddle 
 cloths of purple and gold, the salvos, the 
 tears, " the ways strewn all with flowers, 
 bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, 
 fountains running with wine, trumpets, 
 
256 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 music, and myriads of people flocking ; 
 and two hundred thousand horse and foot 
 brandishing their swords, and shouting 
 with inexpressible joy." 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. Eng 
 land clamored against the Judges, and for 
 the King ; and, like Saul, he came : tall, 
 robust, keen, suave, comely, with the 
 curse of retrogression behind him. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Hear the magnificent phrases ! 
 CLAY 
 
 But they are true. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Our collaborated Prose Works, speci 
 men sheets. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 And to think you are all out of 
 practice ! 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Of what, shepherdess ? Of truth ? 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Mr. Clay, have n't you some more nice 
 Charles-Secondy things to tell me ? I am 
 so interested. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 More of your ingenious charities, Clay, 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 257 
 
 by all means. Those faithless ducks of 
 yours are seceding to the children, and 
 Rhoda and I are out for a walk. Come, 
 let us sink to the occasion. We might 
 pace up and down awhile, under the trees 
 beyond, at the edge of the old tilt-yard. 
 Then let us all go together to the Abbey. 
 We have promised to meet two Ameri 
 can relatives of Rhoda's, at half after 
 three. They wrote us that they arrived 
 only yesterday ; but your homing pigeon 
 of a Yankee always must make straight 
 for the Abbey. Meanwhile, can't you 
 give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture ? 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 He will, he will ! 
 
 CLAY 
 
 I have n't all my notes with me. You 
 are sure it won't tire you ? 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Never. I love the aesthetic point of 
 view. If any man remind me now that 
 my father was a Whig, I shall bray at 
 him. 
 CLAY 
 
 Well, well, nice of you, I J m sure. You 
 know my idea is just to present a special 
 plea. How will you have me begin ? I 
 '7 
 
258 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 can't go on automatically, as if you were 
 the Public Eye. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Oh, anecdotes : or his witticisms. 
 There must be scores of them running 
 wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. 
 Cut me no sirloin, sirrah ; starve me no 
 Nellies. 
 
 CLAY 
 
 I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It 
 belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb 
 puns, sayable enough, only not said by 
 the sayer. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 There is n't much chance for a king 
 who has a genius for concise conversation. 
 CLAY 
 
 No. He does n't get reported correctly, 
 for one thing. How could Sir Walter, 
 weighted as he was, as writers of his time 
 were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of dic 
 tion, reproduce, in Peveril or Woodstock^ 
 this light super-civilized fashion of speech, 
 supple and stinging as a whip ? And no 
 writer of fiction since, has quite captured 
 it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You 
 remember that episode in Galloping Dick ? 
 Exquisite ! Charles the Second's talk is 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 259 
 
 altogether the most admirable thing about 
 him : though courtly, it had none of the 
 circumlocutions of courtliness ; it was ex 
 clusive and pertinent. " All this," as 
 Walton sweetly says of Donne, " with a 
 most particular grace, and an inexpressible 
 addition of comeliness." The King's only 
 long story, which for years he was always 
 ready to tell from the beginning, " ever 
 embellished," says mischievous Bucking 
 ham, "with some new circumstance," and 
 which was wont to gather a knot of lis 
 teners old and new, was the story of his 
 adventures after the battle of Worcester, 
 in 1650. No heartier romance exists of 
 pluck and patience, save the later record, 
 so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, 
 and his heroism under them ; and its 
 author's attachment to his only novel is 
 simply a connoisseurship, a piece of 
 esoteric appreciation : he took and gave 
 delight with such thrilling biographical 
 details as might have come from the 
 mouth of Odysseus himself. His short 
 sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames 
 stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, after 
 wards Earl of Arlington, the grave and 
 too inductive gentleman who so moved 
 
2 6o AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 the mirth of Miss Frances Stewart, was 
 " Whereas " to his royal master ; the 
 yacht named after the stout Duchess of 
 Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great 
 sheets the King and the Duke of York 
 sprang " like common seamen," in a ter 
 rible storm once, off the Kentish coast, 
 was known far and wide as " The Fubbs." 
 Another joke about " Hans in Keldar," 
 patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, 
 and inscribing his name there among the 
 visitors, one need not recall too circum 
 stantially. The Queen Dowager, Henri 
 etta Maria, was always " Mam/' to her 
 perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest 
 son ; in an alliteration like an early Eng 
 lish poet's, he congratulated his sister on 
 her recovery from a grave illness, " be 
 tween Mam's Masses, and M. de May- 
 erne's pills." His little portraitures of 
 people, his given reason for a human like 
 or dislike, his insight into character, and 
 his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in ex 
 pressing it, are they not all superior 
 things of their kind ? He felt it impos 
 sible to marry a princess out of Germany : 
 she would be " so dull and foggy." Of 
 Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic, 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 261 
 
 Charles said : " Voss refuses to believe 
 nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated 
 man of affairs, then a deft page at court, 
 won this neat encomium : " Sidney Godol- 
 phin is never in the way, and never out 
 of the way/' Sedley, shining Sedley, 
 whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed 
 " Apollo's viceroy." His " Save the Earl 
 of Burford ! " when riding under the win 
 dow whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne 
 ironically offered to throw her small son, 
 since she had no name to call him by, is 
 like the very finest coup de theatre, and too 
 like him not to be true. This climate he 
 rated as the best climate, " because it gives 
 the greatest number of out-of-door days." 
 Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long 
 before him, arraigning English weather 
 from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, 
 as at all times " prejudicial to the human 
 frame." And every one knows the inimi 
 table apology of Charles to his watchers, 
 for " being so unconscionably long a- 
 dying." 
 
 Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue 
 to monologue. His gravity and authority 
 were so fixed, his merriment so obviously 
 local and temporal, that repartee was part 
 
z6z AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 of his game ; he winced at nothing, and 
 often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper 
 thrusts than his own. It is sometimes 
 repeated that he was angered by Roches 
 ter's incomparable epigram, pinned to his 
 chamber door : 
 
 " Here lies our sovereign lord the King, 
 
 Whose word no man relies on ; 
 Who never said a foolish thing, 
 Nor ever did a wise one." 
 
 But we have on record his amusing and 
 sufficient footnote, that his sayings were 
 his own, and his doings were his min 
 isters'. This answer, by the way, must 
 have been made to fit the occasion, and 
 the gay exigency of it, for he was exceed 
 ingly jealous of his unused prerogative. 
 " I assure you," he writes to one of his 
 family, about 1668, "that my lord of 
 Buckingham does not govern affairs 
 here." And Clarendon attests later, that 
 " he abhorred to be thought to be gov 
 erned by any single person." At White 
 hall, as the gentlemen-in-waiting laid the 
 plates before the King, they bent a knee. 
 "You see how they serve me," Charles 
 said pleasantly to his guest, the Chevalier 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 263 
 
 de Grammont. " I thank your Majesty 
 for the explanation," that accomplished 
 wag replied, "for I thought they were 
 begging your Majesty's pardon for so 
 bad a dinner." No reply at all, were it 
 but pungent, offended him. " Shaftes- 
 bury, Shaftesbury, I do believe thou art 
 the wickedest fellow in my dominions ! " 
 " Of a subject, Sire, mayhap I am." 
 " Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted 
 and spurred?" "To Hell, to fetch up 
 Oliver to look after the welfare of the 
 English." As a monitor, this same lewd, 
 lying, scribbling, kindly, music-loving 
 Killigrew was almost as successful with 
 Charles as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp 
 sensible comment went home to him ; he 
 saw a point none the less because it told 
 against him. " Such ability and under 
 standing has Charles Stuart," growled the 
 man who was called his jester, " that I do 
 long to see him employed as King of 
 England." Libels and satires had small 
 sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young 
 lady of the court, seated in her own 
 apartment, warbles Old Rowley ', the ballad 
 of close but inelegant libel, at the top 
 of her silvery voice. A rap comes at 
 
264 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 the outer door, from one strolling by. 
 " Who 's there ? " she asks, with uncon 
 cern. " Old Rowley himself, Madam ! " 
 in the " plump bass " of Carolus Se- 
 cundus. Nothing much more diverting 
 ever happened to him than the inverted 
 salute of a worthy citizen, who once ran 
 along in the street, beside his coach, with 
 a half-formed fervent " God bless your 
 Majesty ! " upon his lips : the spaniel 
 pup on his Majesty's knee, suddenly 
 reaching out, gave the man a nip, and 
 caused the ready benison to blurt forth in 
 continently as " God bl amn your dogs ! " 
 The well-worn tradition of Master Busby 
 of Westminster School reversing condi 
 tions with the King, is characteristic on 
 both sides : Charles all humor and tol 
 eration, the little man stiffened with 
 conscious reputation, to be upheld at all 
 costs, and heroically wearing his cap be 
 fore the face of visiting royalty, cc lest the 
 boys should think there lived a greater 
 than myself." And was it not a prettier 
 pass yet, between the monarch and his im 
 pregnable Quaker who wanted a charter ? 
 Penn came to his first audience with his 
 hat, on the principle of unconvention and 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 265 
 
 equality, firmly fixed upon his brows. 
 Presently the King, having moved apart 
 from the attendants, in his gleaming dress, 
 slowly and ceremoniously bared his head. 
 Penn interrupted his own plea. " Friend 
 Charles, why hast taken off thy hat ? " 
 " Because it has so long been the custom 
 here/' said the other, with that peculiar 
 lenient smile of his, " for but one person 
 to remain covered at a time." (It strikes 
 one that a little of this humor would have 
 saved his father from much woe on a not 
 dissimilar occasion in the Commons ; and, 
 indeed, throughout.) Equally charming 
 was his behavior, on being laid hold of, 
 by the hiccoughing Lord Mayor, Vy- 
 ner, was n't that his name ? who insisted 
 that he should come back and " finish 
 t' other bottle." Charles, instead of 
 glowering, hummed a line of an old song, 
 a synopsis of the difficult situation to the 
 company, which none other but he could 
 have given with any grace : 
 
 " The man that is Drunke is as good as a King ! ' ' 
 
 and sat again. He never became, as his 
 tutor, the loyal Duke of Newcastle, feared, 
 "seared with majestic." 
 
z66 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 The Lord's Anointed liked to forego 
 his authority, and come as a mere specta 
 tor into a session of Parliament. " ' Tis as 
 good as a play," the provoking creature 
 said. He would get down from his throne 
 in the Lords, to stand with folded arms 
 by the hearth, drawing a group around 
 him, and breaking up the order and im- 
 pressiveness of the place. Those really 
 interested in statecraft, whose fond incuba 
 tions he so overturned, must have found 
 him an enfant terrible to an incorrigible 
 degree. A memorandum-book, to be 
 seen in one of the cases at the Bodleian, 
 lies open at a bit of scribbled correspond 
 ence between himself and his Chancellor, 
 passed from one to the other in the mid 
 dle of debate. The King's share is as 
 wayward and roguish as Sterne could have 
 made it. 
 
 " I would willingly make a visite to 
 my sister at tunbridge, for a night or two 
 at farthest. When do you thinke I can 
 best spare that time ? " 
 
 "I know no reason why you may 
 not, for such a tyme (two nights) go the 
 next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, 
 and return tyme enough for the adiourne- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 267 
 
 merit, which you ought to do the weeke 
 following. I suppose you will goe with 
 a light Trayne." 
 
 "I intend to take nothing but my 
 night-bag." 
 
 " God, you will not go without forty 
 or fifty horses ? " 
 
 "I counte that part of my night- 
 bag." 
 
 The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more 
 willing Alfred, insisted on preparing sup 
 per, and produced "Scots collops," with 
 Colonel Careless for under-cook. His 
 minute solicitude for others, at this time 
 and after, in the stress of his own troubles, 
 left indelible impress on many hearts. 
 He was at his bravest on the open road, 
 and in the secret manor and the oak 
 tree : the odd situations became him as 
 if he were King of the Romany. For 
 ceremony and trammels of all kinds he 
 had a thorough disrelish, and passed his 
 time but resignedly amid " the pomp 
 of music and a host of bowing heads." 
 Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
 relates, in his book of travels, that at 
 a state banquet at Whitehall, the host 
 privily requested that his chair be re- 
 
268 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 moved and changed, because it was con 
 spicuously the most comfortable in the 
 room. Could informality farther go ? But 
 Charles maintained his gay grace and easy 
 simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction 
 with decisive dignity. With mere stand- 
 offishness he had nothing to do. Sir 
 Walter Besant tells us in his London : 
 " The palace was accessible to all ; the 
 guard stood at the gate, but everybody 
 was admitted, as to a town ; the King 
 moved freely about the courts, in the mall, 
 in the parks, sometimes unattended. The 
 people drove their packhorses or their wag 
 gons up and down the road, and hardly 
 noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood 
 under the shade of a tree, watching the 
 players along the mall. This easy and 
 fearless familiarity vanished with the 
 Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might 
 see his sovereign dance the brantle, per 
 haps with the young delicate-footed Italian 
 Duchess, his brother's wife ; or hear him 
 tell over the " grouse-in-the-gunroom " 
 stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at 
 home he went his way, with a nod, a 
 smile, and a word for all : " a far more 
 successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 269 
 
 " than any his father or grandfather had 
 practised." In the beginning, Charles had 
 a beggarly income, and whimsically com 
 plained of it. " What troubles me most, 
 is to see so many of you come to me to 
 Whitehall, and to think that you must go 
 somewhere else to seek your dinner ! " 
 He was hostile only to " fuss and feath 
 ers," the dry husk of social laws. He 
 had his father's instinct for what was beau 
 tiful and imposing. At his coronation, 
 he revived for the last time, and with its 
 most august splendors, the ancient cus 
 tom of procession from the Tower to the 
 Abbey : a personal revelation, moreover, 
 of that generous kindness towards the 
 common people, which made them adore 
 him. He also endeavored, though in 
 vain, to re-establish the masque, the most 
 charming form of court entertainment, in 
 tertwined with all manner of old fragrant 
 poetic associations. At his coming, he 
 found the Maypoles down, the shows 
 over, races, dances, and merry-hearted 
 sports cut short; the theatres were dis 
 mantled, and the sole appreciation that 
 actors got, or hoped for, was at the whip 
 ping-post. His first thought was for the 
 
270 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 London parks and drives ; his second, for 
 the London stage. The way was soon 
 cleared for those dramas which managers 
 must now handle, as Thoreau handled a 
 certain newspaper, " with cuffs turned 
 up " ; but these, despite their build and 
 basis, have never been surpassed for wit, 
 vitality, and mastery of incident. The 
 plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. 
 Pepys from the middle gallery, were 
 nearly all equipped at the expense of the 
 King and the gentry, and were brought 
 out with nice details of costly scenery and 
 costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, 
 and the Duke of York even gave their 
 coronation suits to the actors. When 
 Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, 
 before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, 
 young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loos 
 ened the jewelled sword and belt which he 
 wore, and enthusiastically clasped them 
 upon the comedian, proud of both to his 
 dying day. Charles originated the plot of 
 Crowne's sprightly production, Sir Courtly 
 Nice (the King died the night of its final 
 rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's Secret 
 Love : he was very vain of the latter when 
 it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 271 
 
 delighted to have it called his play. He 
 was responsible, in the same degree, for 
 Oronokoo : for it was he who first dis 
 cerned, in the affecting tale of the West 
 Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an 
 enslaved prince, choice material for a 
 tragedy. 
 
 He was no reader, no student, in the 
 usual sense : he read folk, and not folios. 
 Newcastle had written him, then the child 
 Prince of Wales : " Whensoever you are 
 too studious, your contemplation will spoil 
 your government ; for you cannot be a 
 good contemplative man, and a good com 
 monwealth's man. Therefore take heed 
 of too much book." Never was tutor 
 eventually better obeyed. Charles was a 
 shrewd observer ; he could sift ambassa 
 dors, ministers, and " persons of quality," 
 as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, 
 the while, impervious as rock. His early 
 education was neglected : he was forced 
 too soon into active life. Fortunately, he 
 had the aesthetic bent of his race : thought 
 and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy 
 processes, all he knew. He became a 
 good mathematician, and a good draughts 
 man ; he was something of an expert in 
 
272 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 anatomy ; he perfectly understood the 
 sciences of fortification and shipping. He 
 once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to 
 race " the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, 
 which have my invention in them." (It 
 is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of 
 the Rhine did not command his crew, as 
 Monk did, to wheel to the left !) Charles 
 was as thorough a sailor as his brother, 
 and would have made as fair a record 
 on deck, had his lines been cast there. 
 Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred 
 that he directed the course better than 
 himself. It was this King who gave the 
 charter to the Royal Society, and founded 
 the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as 
 the Mathematical School at Christ Hos 
 pital. Nor were these things done per 
 functorily, but from close personal interest. 
 Charles could gossip in several languages. 
 His taste for chemistry was almost as 
 marked as his cousin Rupert's ; and in 
 the month he died, he was running a pro 
 cess for fixing mercury. Cowley, before 
 that period, had lapsed into a pretty con 
 ceit about his liege lord in the laboratory. 
 
 " Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost ? 
 How is your toil, how is your labor lost! 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 273 
 
 Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho* strange, 
 Believe it, future times ! ) did change 
 The Iron Age of old 
 Into this Age of Gold." 
 
 Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with jus 
 tice, that the King seems never to have 
 considered music as anything but an in 
 centive to gayety. Catherine of Braganza 
 had a genuine passion for the art, and was 
 its munificent patron so long as she re 
 mained in England. It is well to remem 
 ber, when Charles is accused of developing 
 only the newly-imported French music, 
 that in his day cathedral organs were re 
 established, and the way was opened for the 
 return of those beautiful choral services 
 which had a potent successive influence 
 over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and 
 which have forever enriched themselves 
 through association with these dedicated 
 talents. The King had examined the 
 principles of Romanesque architecture 
 with some enthusiasm. No one followed 
 Wren's great labor, after the Fire, espe 
 cially in S. Paul's, with closer attention ; 
 and when he had a practical suggestion in 
 mind, no one could have offered it more 
 modestly. It was not Charles the Second 
 
 18 
 
274 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 who hampered that great man, and vexed 
 his heart with mean conditions. He had 
 a rational admiration for Wren ; it did 
 not prevent him, however, from jesting on 
 occasion. The architect was a very little 
 man, and the King a very tall one. They 
 had an amiable dispute at Winchester. 
 " I think the middle vault not high 
 enough. " " It is high enough, your 
 Majesty." With the same air, no doubt, 
 the young Mozart contradicted his Arch 
 duke : " The number of notes is not at 
 all too many, but exactly sufficient/' In 
 this case, the critic looked at the roof, and 
 then he looked at Wren. Presently, he 
 crumpled himself up, and brought his 
 anointed person erect, within four feet of 
 the floor, as if from the other's illiberal 
 point of view. " High enough, then, Sir 
 Christopher ! " he said. 
 
 His relation to literary men was one of 
 ample appreciation and no pay. He is 
 reported to have wished to buy the favor 
 of George Wither, and especially of An 
 drew Marvell : yet he never approximately 
 endeavored to discharge his long-standing 
 debts to his own choir. Sedley, Edmund 
 Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 275 
 
 of " unspotted lays/' were in no need of 
 encouragement ; but it would have befitted 
 Charles to do something for the others, 
 before it was too late. It seems to have 
 been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor 
 to the Duke of Richmond, at fifteen hun 
 dred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, 
 in the nick of time, snubbed the King by 
 marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted 
 into the Fleet prison. The poets always 
 returned his liking. Though he was an 
 entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, 
 even Marvell touched him gently. 
 
 "I'll wholly abandon all public affairs, 
 And pass all my time with buffoons and with 
 
 players, 
 And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers. 
 
 I '11 have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy, 
 Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy, 
 And still in their language quack Vive le roy." 
 
 Charles, at his birth, came into the 
 poetic atmosphere of his more poetic 
 father. When the latter set out, at the 
 head of a triumphant train, to return 
 thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the 
 planet Venus (absit omen !) was clearly 
 shining in the May-noon sky. The 
 
276 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 people saw it, and were wild with super 
 stitious delight; and they recalled it at 
 the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of 
 it, were struck with redoubled zest. 
 " Bright Charles," Crashaw began ; and 
 old Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting : 
 
 " Blest be thy birth 
 
 That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our 
 earth. " 
 
 And Francis Quarles, not long after, 
 quaintly offered his Divine Fancies to 
 the " royall budde," " acknowledging my 
 self thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself 
 my Prince." Again, no sooner was 
 Charles the Second laid in his grave, than 
 the flood of seventeenth-century pane 
 gyric, which he had never invited, but 
 held back considerably while he lived, 
 burst forth over England : unstemmed by 
 any compensating welcomes for the as 
 cendant Duke of York. Dryden, in his 
 Threnodia August alls, Otway, Montagu, 
 Earl of Halifax, and a hundred lesser 
 bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this 
 prosody is pretty flat : but it has feeling. 
 One of Richard Duke's stanzas is ques 
 tionable enough ; only the shortsighted- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 277 
 
 ness of genuine grief can save it from 
 worse than audacity. Following Dryden 
 in his quasi-invocation, he named the dead 
 King as " Charles the Saint " ; and wher 
 ever the poor ghost chanced to be, that 
 surely hurt him like an arrow. 
 
 If he was not so protective as he might 
 have been to his poets, it was not owing 
 to any parsimony on his part. He was 
 by nature a giver. The thrifty Teutons 
 who inherited the throne and the royal 
 bric-a-brac have long begrudged divers 
 treasures scattered by Charles among per 
 sons and corporations of his individual 
 fancy. While in exile, he had sold his 
 favorite horses, to provide comforts for 
 his suite ; and in 1666, when he was in 
 need of all he had, he allowed nothing to 
 interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed 
 donations to the houseless City. Perhaps 
 he neglected the fees of literature, as he 
 neglected to put up a monument to his 
 father's memory : not because he failed to 
 know his duties, but because he must 
 have held your true procrastinator's creed, 
 and discovered, in the end, that what can 
 be done at any time gets done at no time. 
 Dryden helps us to think, however, that 
 
278 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 the King was not wholly oblivious of his 
 bookmen : 
 
 " Tho' little was their hive and light their gain, 
 Yet somewhat to their share he threw. " 
 
 Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his 
 gaping pocket allowed. Long-headed 
 sirens, too, were battening on the national 
 revenues, and Charles had no strength of 
 purpose left to withstand them. He had 
 bartered that for rose-leaves and musk 
 and mandragora : eternal quackeries which 
 had never for an instant eased him of his 
 sore conscience. For downright hypo 
 crisy (to which, with whatever wry faces, 
 he had to come), nothing in the snuffling 
 deeps of Puritanism can beat the wording 
 of a clause in the grant made to Barbara, 
 Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when 
 she received her magnificent domains, 
 titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as 
 the patent states, " of her noble descent, 
 her father's death in the service of the 
 crown, and by reason of her personal 
 virtues." This lady " hectored the King's 
 wits out of him." The reason is not far to 
 seek why Butler went hungry, and delici<e 
 decus desiderium <evi suL otherwise Abra- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 279 
 
 ham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity 
 was at a discount. Royalty occasionally 
 tossed gold to its admired Dryden, in the 
 shape of several capital suggestions, which 
 availed, as we know. " Now, were I a 
 poet (and I think I am poor enough to 
 be one), I should make a satire upon 
 sedition." The parenthesis is sympa 
 thetic. The knights of the ink-bottle 
 were very welcome to Whitehall ; there 
 was no class with which Charles, who was 
 not a promiscuous friend, liked better to 
 surround himself. It is a pity he did not 
 have illustrious opportunity to associate 
 with the best of these altogether and for 
 ever, as his cousin of France did, as he 
 himself seemed born to do ; for he had the 
 patronal temperament. There is a beau 
 tiful expression in Montesquieu, which 
 might be applied as sanctioning as a virtue 
 the passive intellectual perception of the 
 Stuarts : " Que le prince ne craint point 
 ses rivaux qu'on appelle les hommes de 
 merite : il est leur egal des qu'il les aime." 
 This is the principle of faith without 
 good works. Charles the Second, inter 
 preted by it, ought to cut a rather fair 
 figure before posterity. 
 
280 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 He was no stranger to a pen. How 
 well he could employ it, his speeches, 
 letters, and despatches show. Grace and 
 point are in every line. He had, in fact, 
 a curious neat mastery of words, not to 
 be excelled by most trained hands. Good 
 pithy prose came easy to him : which is a 
 phenomenon, since nobody expects King's 
 English from a king. He had much to 
 write, " and often in odd situations," as 
 Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. 
 His performances in rhyme seem to have 
 been discredited by himself, and are, per 
 haps happily, irrecoverable. Excellent 
 David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions " several 
 majestick Poems " of Charles's youth. He 
 does not quote them. " Majestick " re 
 minds one of the reputed Muse paternal, 
 pontificating from Carisbrooke : 
 
 "And teach my soul, that ever did confine 
 Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line, 
 To track the treason of Thy foes and mine. ' ' 
 
 The son's productions were not quite of 
 this order, if we may judge from a speci 
 men given by Burney, in the appendix to 
 his History of Music. It is an artificial 
 pastoral, in singable numbers, which Pel- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 281 
 
 ham Humphrey took pains to set in D 
 major. 
 
 Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy 
 then newly come back from over seas, to 
 be " mighty thick with the King " ; bring 
 ing with him French heresies of time and 
 tune. Charles had musical theories of his 
 own ; and would sit absently in chapel, 
 swaying his head to Master Humphrey's 
 rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in 
 the anthem before the singers themselves 
 were half-conscious of the slip. When 
 he was not sleeping there, he seems to 
 have done a deal of laughing in chapel. 
 On one classic occasion, his father felt 
 called upon to " hit him over the head 
 with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, 
 Oxford, " for laughing at sermon-time 
 upon the ladies that sat against him." 
 He sang tenor to Gostling's great bass : 
 the Duke of York (afterwards James the 
 Second) accompanying them upon the 
 guitar. His favorite song was an English 
 one, and a very grave one : Shirley's beau 
 tiful dirge in The Contention of Ajax and 
 Ulysses : 
 
 tf The glories of our birth and state 
 Are shadows, not substantial things." 
 
282 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 Many a time young Bowman was bid 
 den to the solitary king, and chanted 
 those austere measures. The true sem 
 blance of the Merry Monarch, undreamed 
 of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his 
 portrait as he sat listening, in a tapestried 
 alcove, to the touching text on the vanity 
 of mortal pride, and the ever-during fra 
 grance of " the actions of the just " : his 
 little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on 
 the unconscious lad ; the motley somehow 
 fallen from him, and a momentary truce 
 set up between him and his defrauded 
 thinking soul. How the court which he 
 had taught, the court with its sarcasms and 
 sallies, would have laughed at the prepos 
 terous situation ! Yet, if he had any 
 outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was 
 precisely this love for serious and worthy 
 things. His perception of human excel 
 lence was never clouded. We all know 
 his reputed saying, which must have been 
 more than half in jest, and unallowable 
 even so, that the " honor " of every man 
 and of every woman has its price. Yet 
 this furious cynic was a tender believer in 
 disinterestedness, wherever he found it. 
 Not once or twice alone did he yield 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 283 
 
 applause to a life which followed virtue 
 " higher than the sphery chime/' though 
 his cue lay not in that part, though he 
 went back on the morrow to the Horsel- 
 berg. From the middle of the revelry 
 which rilled his opening years in London, 
 he stole away privately to Richmond, to 
 kneel beside the dying Bishop Duppa, 
 and beg a blessing. He had a most 
 deferent regard for Sir William Coventry. 
 Towards the close of his life, he was 
 troubled with memories of the fate of 
 Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking 
 of intellectual achievement when he said : 
 " I hear that Mr. Cowley is dead. He 
 hath left no better man behind him." 
 He appreciated something else beside the 
 comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Gram- 
 mont (la belle Hamilton), when he wrote 
 to his favorite sister in Paris : " Be kinde 
 to her : for besides the meritt her family 
 has, she is as good a creature as ever 
 lived." That young lily of perfection, 
 Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of 
 her own in never speaking to the King. 
 How prudent, to be sure, and how 
 obtuse ! And it will be admitted by 
 every reader of historical gossip that, to 
 
284 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 whatever humiliations Charles subjected 
 his poor queen (who ceased not to love 
 him, and to love his memory) he would 
 at no time hear her disparaged, were she 
 even so disparaged ostensibly for his own 
 political advantage. For he respected in 
 her the abstract unprofanable woman. 
 He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first 
 sight of Catherine, who had been described 
 to him as an ugly princess : " Her face is 
 not so exact as to be called a beauty, 
 though her eyes are excellent good ; and 
 not anything on her face that can in the 
 least shoque one. On the contrary, she 
 has as much agreebleness altogether in 
 her look as ever I saw, and if I have any 
 skill in Physiognomy (which I think I 
 have !) she must be as good a woman as 
 ever was born." And again : " I must 
 be the worst man living, (which I hope I 
 am not,) if I be not a good husband." In 
 Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to 
 the patron who recommended Dr. Sud- 
 bury to the Deanery of Durham, and 
 Dr. Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King 
 said, after some years of that attentive 
 observation of his saints which no one 
 would suspect in him : " My lord, recom- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 285 
 
 mend two more such to me, and I will 
 return you any four I have for them." 
 Most pertinent of all such cases, was that 
 of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the 
 King went to Winchester, in 1681, to 
 superintend Wren's building of his palace, 
 he put up at the Deanery, and sent word 
 to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to 
 resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken 
 stoutly refused, to the fear and amazement 
 of the time-servers. Three years later, 
 the last year of the King's life, there was 
 a great scramble for a rich vacant see. 
 Charles did not lack a dramatic inspira 
 tion. Od's fish ! " he cried : " who shall 
 have Bath and Wells but the little fellow 
 that would not give poor Nelly a lodg 
 ing ! " In 1679, tne King did his best to 
 keep in their high offices the many useful 
 and loyal magistrates whom his councillors 
 voted to supplant on account of their 
 being " favourable to Popery." His more 
 general plea having been passed by, he 
 read the list of names over again, before 
 placing the signature which he could no 
 longer refuse; and since his opposition 
 was then as strenuous as ever, took leave 
 of the subject in some remembered oblique 
 
286 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 remarks. Why depose Such-a-one ? He 
 had peerless beef in his larder, and no 
 kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, 
 that he should be removed ? Surely, no 
 man kept better foxhounds ! And he 
 could not only thus discern and prefer 
 goodness, but he submitted himself to it, 
 and bore reproofs from it with boyish 
 humbleness. There is no reminiscence 
 of the Prince's comic catechumen experi 
 ences in Scotland, in the accents of " your 
 affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed 
 to the admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, 
 a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint 
 Germain. " Yours of the 26th May 
 was very welcome to me, and I give you 
 hearty thanks for all your good counsel, 
 which I hope God will enable me the 
 better to follow through your prayers : 
 and I conjure you still to use the same 
 old freedom with me, which I shall always 
 love." But his instinct was sharp : his 
 sarcasms were forth in a moment against 
 mere bullies and meddlers. Checked 
 once for employing a light oath, he had 
 ready a shockingly brusque though legiti 
 mate retaliation : " Your Martyr swore 
 twice more than ever I did ! " 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 287 
 
 As we have seen, he had no appetite 
 whatever for compliments. He probably 
 thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the 
 silly adulations lavished on a certain Janu 
 ary tennis-playing. " Indeed, he did play 
 very well, and deserved to be commended ; 
 but such open flattery is beastly." Charles 
 fils habitually " kept his head," as we say 
 in one of the most telling of our English 
 idioms. It was difficult indeed so to do, 
 through the highest known fever of na 
 tional enthusiasm, while he was fed every 
 hour of every day with praises out of 
 all proportion to the deeds of an Alex 
 ander. Virtuous men like Cowley went 
 into frenzies of approbation at the outset 
 of the reign ; sensible men like Evelyn 
 thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion 
 for each execution and exhumation where 
 with the King, or rather the wild popu 
 lar will, to which he was no breakwater, 
 signalized his entry. Hear the same 
 temperate Evelyn, in a dedication : " Your 
 Majesty was designed of God for a bless 
 ing to this nation in all that can render it 
 happy ; if we can have the grace but to 
 discover it, and be thankful for it." Gen 
 uine toadies had small countenance from 
 
288 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 this acute Majesty. When he propounded 
 his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, 
 concerning a dead fish, /'. e., that a pail of 
 water receiving one would weigh no more 
 than before, and when he watched the 
 wiseacres all solemnly conferring, it can 
 not have been that they were unanimously 
 caught by the impish query he had put 
 upon them, but rather that they would 
 avoid correcting the Crown : fain would 
 they humor it with an acquiescent reason 
 why. But one little hero of science, far 
 down the table, greatly daring, spake : " I 
 I I do believe the pail would weigh 
 heavier ! " and was acquitted by a peal of 
 the royal laughter : " You are right, my 
 honest man." Waller's clever excuse, 
 when rallied on his fine Cromwellian 
 strophes, and on their superiority to those 
 written for the King's home-coming, that 
 " poets succeed better in fiction than in 
 truth," must have been met with the 
 appreciative smile due to so exquisite a 
 casuistry. Persons chosen to preach 
 before Charles, bored him, long after his 
 accession, with superfluous abuse of the 
 regicides and of the mighty Protectorate 
 in general. One bishop, squarely asked 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 289 
 
 why he read his sermons instead of deliver 
 ing them extempore, made the elegant re 
 sponse to his questioner, that it was for awe 
 of such august assemblies, and of so wise 
 a prince. Charles instantly rejoined that 
 it was a monstrous pity no such consider 
 ation weighed with himself, in reading his 
 speeches in the House : for the truth was, 
 he had prayed for money so often, he 
 could no longer look his hearers in the 
 face ! To the Earls of Carlisle and 
 Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Pro 
 testant succession, who announced them 
 selves as able to prove Monmouth's legi 
 timacy, to the satisfaction of the nation, 
 the King replied : " Dearly as I love the 
 Duke, rather than acknowledge him 
 will I see him hanged on Tyburn tree." 
 Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hall 
 mark of the loose and conniving time. 
 When a clergyman of the Establishment 
 was called to see the Duke of Bucking 
 ham, and inquired, by way of the Usual pre 
 liminary, in what religion he had lived, 
 the dying firefly answered gallantly : "In 
 none, I am well pleased to say ; for I 
 should have been a disgrace to any. Can 
 you do me any good now, bestir your- 
 
 '9 
 
290 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 self." It was this engaging reprobate, 
 (remembered rather through Pope and 
 Dryden than through his own extraordi 
 nary talent) to whom the King once gave 
 a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his 
 atheistic talk. It is possible that on that 
 occasion fastidiousness, and not reverence, 
 was the motive power in Charles. 
 
 For it was his humor to disarm all 
 moral questions by applying to them the 
 measure of mere good taste. We know 
 the characteristic exception he took to 
 Nonconformity, as being " no religion for 
 a gentleman." He had, in the perfect 
 degree, what Mr. James Russell Lowell 
 calls " that urbane discipline of man 
 ners, which is so agreeable a substitute 
 for discipline of mind." As in Prince 
 Charlie, (whose career was so closely to 
 resemble his own, much in its heyday, 
 and more in its decline), winning courtesy 
 was founded on genuine sweetness of 
 nature. He brought back into storm- 
 beaten England the vision of the Cava 
 lier : a vision like a rainbow, which made 
 beholders giddy. The very first things 
 he did, on his triumphant entry into Lon 
 don, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 291 
 
 grand-opera things : he singled out the 
 pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the 
 Poultry, kissing his hand to her, as he 
 passed ; and he brought the tears to the 
 eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at 
 the head of his troop of horse raised for 
 the Restoration, by drawing off his rich 
 leather gauntlets then and there, as a 
 memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. 
 Such a carriage was sure to establish him 
 in the popular heart : he might light his 
 fire with Magna Charta ! His tact and 
 his evenness of deportment stood forth 
 like moral perfections. Addison, who, as 
 a child, had seen the King humming 
 lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and knew 
 all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years' 
 reign, must surely have been thinking of 
 him, when he painted this picture of " one 
 of Sir Roger's ancestors." " He was a 
 man of no justice, but great good man 
 ners. He ruined everybody that had 
 anything to do with him, but never said 
 a rude thing in his life ; the most in 
 dolent person in the world, he would 
 sign a deed that passed away half his 
 estate, with his gloves on, but would not 
 put on his hat before a lady, if it were 
 
292 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 to save his country." All this enchant 
 ing punctilio was but the velvet sheathing 
 of uncommon power and purpose. Charles 
 was never off his guard. No contingency 
 ever got the better of him. He had rea 
 sons for being gentle and affable, for be 
 ing, as the peerless Lady Derby thought 
 him, on her own staircase, " the most 
 charming prince in the world," for keep 
 ing his extremely happy chivalry of 
 speech, equal to that of his cousin Louis 
 the Fourteenth : the speech " which gives 
 delight and hurts not." " Civility can 
 not unprince you," was another saying of 
 the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, 
 who seems to have had a strong influence 
 over him. The gay address and gentle 
 bearing, deliberate as we now perceive 
 them to have been, had the highest ex 
 trinsic value in that severe masculine per 
 sonality. "These advantages," says a 
 contemporary writer, " were not born with 
 him, for he was too reserved in his 
 youth." It is ludicrous that we should 
 speak of him as The Merry Monarch. 
 He was, in sober truth, under his beau 
 tiful mask of manners, a morose, tor 
 mented, unhappy man. It was part of 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 293 
 
 his perfect courage that he had learned 
 small talk, banter, puns, games, and 
 dances : they were so many weapons to 
 keep the blue devils at bay. He had to 
 beguile the thing he was with perpetual 
 cap and bells. Before he became a dis 
 tinguished actor, he was not " merry." 
 The gilded courtiers of France, during his 
 exile, found him a serious and awkward 
 figure of a lad ; his admired Mademoiselle 
 Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial 
 Mademoiselle, trailing her new satin 
 gowns back and forth under Henrietta 
 Maria's knowing eye, looked on Henri 
 etta Maria's son, standing reticent the 
 while, lamp in hand, with girlish derision. 
 Nothing in human history is plainer, I 
 think, than this double personality of 
 Charles the Second, evoked by the in 
 escapable situation in which he lived and 
 died. He had the benefit of parental 
 example, and he started life as a sweet, 
 slow, attractive, thoughtful child, the sad- 
 eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits 
 between 1632 and 1642. He was not 
 strong of frame then. " His Highness* 
 particular grief," we smile to read in the 
 pages of the good Lloyd, " is thought to 
 
294 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 be a consumption." From that house 
 where all the children were fondly meas 
 ured and painted and chronicled from 
 year to year, his mother wrote of him to 
 Madame Saint George, and to Marie de 
 Medicis. " He has no ordinary mien . . . 
 he is so full of gravity." Prince James, 
 however, was her favorite. At four years 
 old, Charles staggered some Oxford dons 
 with a display of infant philosophy. A 
 twelvemonth before that, as we learn from 
 a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS., 
 he had been condemned to take a certain 
 drug; and his attempts to get off, his 
 retaliating talk afterward, are already very 
 much of a piece with the makeshifts of 
 the Charles the Second we know. But in 
 general, he cannot be said to have been 
 in the bud what he was in the flower. 
 Besides his seriousness, he had other 
 apparently exotic qualities : piety and 
 candor among them. Lord Capel de 
 clared on the scaffold : " For certainly, I 
 have been a counsellor to him, and have 
 lived long with him, and in a time when 
 discovery is easily enough made ; (he was 
 about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and six 
 teen years of age, those years I was with 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 295 
 
 him,) and truly I never saw greater hopes 
 of virtue in any young person than in 
 him : great judgment, great understand 
 ing, great apprehension ; much honor in 
 his nature, and truly a very perfect 
 Englishman in his inclination. And I 
 pray God restore him to this kingdom." 
 Montrose, on the scaffold, in his turn, 
 "exceedingly commended," says Claren 
 don, in his History, " the understanding 
 of the present King." The glorious 
 Marquis bore less testimony to Charles's 
 ethic make-up : but that could have 
 lacked no lustre in his eyes, since the 
 January of the preceding year, when the 
 heir to the crown twice offered his life, or 
 the acceptance of any conditions imposed 
 upon himself, in exchange for his father's 
 safety. Madame de Motteville assures 
 us that " the greatest heroes and sages of 
 antiquity did not rule their lives by higher 
 principles than this young Prince at the 
 opening of his career." 
 
 The poverty and inaction of his eleven 
 years' exile, the sickness of hope deferred, 
 the temporizing, the misery of his faithful 
 friends, the wretched worry and privation 
 of the sojourn at Brussels and Breda, he 
 
296 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 bore passing well : but they spoiled him. 
 He grew recklessly indifferent ; at thirty 
 he could have said his diu viximus, for the 
 savor of life was gone. An innate patrician, 
 he could never have been ruined, as most 
 men are all too ready to be, by " success 
 and champagne." Hardship, which heart 
 ens the weak, was a needless ordeal for him : 
 yet he had nothing else from his fourteenth 
 to his thirty-first year. In him, endur 
 ance and courage were already proven, 
 and the " mild, easy, humble " tempera 
 ment which, long after, was to be allotted 
 to him in Absalom and Achitophel. His 
 chief diversions, while abroad, were the 
 single military campaign in Spain, the 
 reading and staging of amateur plays, 
 the ever-welcome associations with his 
 brothers and sisters. When Grenville 
 brought thirty thousand pounds, and the 
 invitation from the Parliamentary Com 
 missioners, to the ragged royalties at the 
 Hague, Charles called his dear Mary and 
 James to look at the wonder, jingling it 
 well before he emptied it from the port 
 manteau : a more innocent satisfaction than 
 he was able to take later when, as Bussy 
 de Rabutin remarked, " the King of Eng- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 297 
 
 land turned shopkeeper, and sold Dun 
 kirk," and rode to the Tower to see the 
 first three million livres rolled into his 
 coffers. That he managed to fight beset 
 ting trouble may be inferred from his 
 letters to Mr. Henry Bennet. " Do not 
 forget to send me the Gazette Burlesque 
 every week. . . . My cloaths at last 
 came, and I like them very well, all but 
 the sword, which is the worst that ever I 
 saw. . . . We pass our time as well as 
 people can do, that have no more money, 
 for we dance and play as if we had taken 
 the Plate Fleet. . . . Pray get me pricked 
 down as many new corrants and sarre- 
 bands, and other little dances, as you can, 
 and bring them with you ; for I have got 
 a small fiddler that does not play ill on 
 the fiddle." King Charles the First, in his 
 affecting last advices to his eldest son, had 
 apprehended nothing but good results for 
 him from the difficult circumstances of his 
 minority. " This advantage of wisdom 
 have you above most Princes, that you 
 have begun and now spent some years of 
 discretion in the experience of trouble and 
 the exercise of patience. . . . You have 
 already tasted of that cup whereof I have 
 
298 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 liberally drunk, which I look upon as 
 God's physic, having that in healthfulness 
 which it lacks in pleasure." But too 
 much trial is enervating, as well as too 
 little. Could the spirited Prince have 
 had, ever and again, through those dark 
 seasons, a pittance of the abounding pros 
 perity which befell him after he had given 
 up self-discipline, and had almost given 
 up hope, it might have saved from fatal 
 torpor " the only genius of the Stuart 
 line." 
 
 So perverted grew his habit of mind, 
 that eventually the strongest incentives 
 could barely move, anger, or rouse him. 
 To act like a man awake, he needed 
 a shock, an emergency. He was of 
 the greatest possible use at the Fire ; 
 he was of no use at all during the 
 Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking 
 of it beforehand, came to be intolerable 
 to him. He who feared nothing else, 
 feared communion with himself. " For 
 he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sen 
 tence in the Warwick Memoirs, touching 
 Charles the First, which looks as if it were 
 intended for an oblique comment on his 
 son. As it was, even at the worst, he 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 299 
 
 prided himself on certain temperances. 
 He liked good wine, but he kept his 
 brain clear of hard drinking. "It is a 
 custom your soul abhors/' said the 
 Speaker of the Commons before him, 
 in the August of 1660. He liked a 
 game of chance, but he never won or 
 lost a pound at dice. In a time of the 
 silliest superstition, when my lord and 
 my lady conferred mysteriously with M. 
 le Voisin or the Abbe Pregnani over in 
 France, to whom the casting of horo 
 scopes and the concocting of philters were 
 " easy as lying," Charles held his own 
 strong-minded attitude, and was delighted 
 to see some applauded predictions quite 
 overturned in the Newmarket races. " I 
 give little credit to such kind of cattle," 
 he writes to Henrietta, " and the less you 
 do it, the better; for if they could tell 
 anything, 't is inconvenient to know one's 
 fortune beforehand, whether good or 
 bad." Yet he amused himself with the 
 psychological, when it suited him. " Sir 
 A. H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end 
 in Matrimony : I conclude it the rather 
 because I have observed a cloud in his 
 face, any time these two months, which 
 
300 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his Phy- 
 sionomia^ says, foretells misfortune." He 
 frowned on irreligion, and stopped reli 
 gious controversy with a wave of his 
 hand. " No man," says Roger North, 
 " kept more decorum in his expression 
 and behavior in regard to things truly 
 sacred than the King. . . . And amongst 
 his libertines, he had one bigot, at least, 
 (Mr. Robert Spencer) whom he called 
 Godly Robin, and who used to reprove 
 the rest for profane talking." 
 
 " Until near twenty," we learn from an 
 anonymous pamphleteer who claims to 
 have been eighteen years in the Prince's 
 friendship and service, " until near twenty, 
 the figure of his face was very lovely. 
 But he is since grown leaner, and now 
 the majesty of his countenance supplies 
 the lines of beauty." " Majesty " sounds 
 euphemistic ; yet there was a great deal 
 of genuine majesty in Charles the Second. 
 Black armor was always wonderfully be 
 coming to him, as we see in at least one 
 Cooper miniature, in the print by Faith- 
 orne, and the rarer one by Moncornet. 
 The lines of his cheek and mouth were 
 very marked; when he needlessly began 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 301 
 
 to wear a wig, their seventy became in 
 tensified. He had the shadowy Stuart 
 eyes, red-brown, full of soft light; but 
 his look, in all of his portraits, is some 
 thing so sombre that we have no Eng 
 lish word for it : it is morne, it is macabre. 
 Leigh Hunt well implies, in The Town, 
 that such an appearance, linked with such 
 a character, was a witticism in itself. He 
 says : c< If the assembled world could 
 have called out to have a specimen of 
 f the man of pleasure ' brought before it, 
 and Charles the Second could have been 
 presented, we know not which would 
 have been greater, the laughter or the 
 groans." His face was brown as a 
 Moor's, and singularly reserved and 
 forbidding ; though " very, very much 
 softened whensoever he speaks." One 
 hardly knows why it was thought neces 
 sary to blacken it further with walnut- 
 juice, for disguise, to provide the " reechy " 
 appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narra 
 tive, when he set out from Boscobel. 
 His long hair had been of raven hue, 
 thick and glossy, " naturally curling in 
 great rings " ; but at the Restoration he 
 was already becoming " irreverendly gray." 
 
302 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 When he turned suddenly upon you, 
 we read, in Ralph Esber (Hunt, first and 
 last, shows a Rembrandtesque preoccupa 
 tion with this dusky King), " it was as if 
 a black lion had thrust his head through 
 a hedge in winter." To the Rye House 
 conspirators he was known as "the 
 Blackbird," as they named the Duke of 
 York, who was blonde, " the Goldfinch." 
 It is a little curious that a Jacobite ballad, 
 very familiar in Ireland, dating from 
 before the Fifteen, bestows the same 
 secret name (as a love-name, it need 
 hardly be added) on James the Third, 
 called the Pretender. James Howell, in 
 a dedication to Charles the child, says : 
 
 " Wales had one glorious Prince of haire and hue 
 (Which colour sticks unto him still!) like you." 
 
 Howell had in mind the Black Prince, 
 when he set out so to compliment his 
 swarthy little successor ; but he must have 
 forgotten that the hero had his sobriquet 
 from his dread prowess, or his armor, not 
 from his complexion. Charles was well- 
 made. " Le roi ne cedait a personne, ni 
 pour la taille ni pour la mine." But he 
 was too grim and gaunt to be handsome. 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 303 
 
 Burnet, who had no regard for him, tells 
 us that he resembled the Emperor Tibe 
 rius : " a statue of the latter at Rome 
 looks like a statue made for him." Any 
 reader of Tacitus knows that the parallel 
 could be maintained throughout. But 
 it would be unfair. Tiberius, with all his 
 high handed capability, was jealous and 
 perfidious ; Tiberius, this is the core 
 of the matter, could not take a joke ! 
 Standing before the portrait of himself 
 by Riley, Charles sighed sympathetically : 
 " Od's fish ! but I 'm the ugly fellow." 
 Vanity was not in him, and he left the 
 last refinements of the fashions, the creve- 
 cceur locks and the passagere, and the 
 venez-a-moi, to his retainers, to the men 
 of great personal beauty, like the Villiers, 
 Wilmots, and Sidneys, whom they be 
 came. He turned dress-reformer in 1666, 
 and brought the whole court to habits of 
 simplicity. No better and manlier cloth 
 ing ever was devised : the silk doublet 
 and breeches, the collar, shoes and sword- 
 belt of the time, without the slashes or 
 the furbelows. But he was driven out 
 of his model costume by the bantering 
 motion of the French monarch, who im- 
 
3 o 4 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 mediately arrayed his footmen in it. This 
 is a fine historic instance of the truth of 
 Hazlitt's epigram : " Fashion is gentility 
 running away from vulgarity, and afraid 
 of being overtaken by it." At White- 
 ladies, in old days, the young King was 
 eager to get into his leathern doublet and 
 white and green yarn stockings, " his 
 Majesty refusing to have any gloves," 
 though his hands were of tell-tale shape 
 and slenderness. His fellow-fugitive, 
 Lord Wilmot, was not so enchanted at 
 the prospect of a peasant disguise ; " he 
 saying that he should look frightfully in 
 it." " Wilmot also endeavored to go on 
 horseback," continues the playful King's 
 own animated dictation to Pepys, "in 
 regard, as I think, of his being too big to 
 go on foot." Charles himself was a hard 
 rider, though he preferred, whenever he 
 could, to walk. His little suite had 
 every reason to remember his posting 
 through France and Spain, in 1659, when 
 his energy tired them all out. His long 
 legs always went at a tremendous pace. " I 
 walked nine miles this morning with the 
 King," Claverhouse writes wearily in 
 1683, "besides cockfighting and courses." 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 305 
 
 (He was waiting, in vain, to catch his sov 
 ereign in a humor for business.) Charles 
 was fond of foot-racing, tennis, pall-mall, 
 and all out-of-door sports. According to 
 Reresby, he would have preferred re 
 tirement, angling, and hearty country 
 life, to his thorny throne. But who, ex 
 cept a tyrant, would not ? Most of the 
 Stuarts were excellent marksmen, and he 
 among them. He took intelligent care 
 of his health, and liked to weigh himself 
 after exercise. We learn that his lonely 
 leisure was sometimes invaded by afflicted 
 but admiring subjects. " Mr. Avise 
 Evans," writes dear garrulous Aubrey, 
 "had a fungous nose; and said it was 
 revealed unto him that the King's hand 
 would cure him ; so at the first coming 
 of King Charles Second into S. James's 
 Park, he kissed the royal hand and 
 rubbed his nose with it. Which did 
 disturb the King, but cured him." 
 
 Charles's physical activity set in early ; 
 he succeeded, at nine, in breaking his 
 arm. All his life, he was up with the 
 lark : it was almost the only circumstance 
 in which he differed from Le Roi d'Tvetot, 
 in Beranger's biting ballad, which did so 
 
306 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 take Mr. Thackeray ; and he played all 
 morning and every morning. Early- 
 risen Londoners, like the child Colley 
 Gibber, used to watch him romping with 
 his hounds and spaniels, stroking the 
 deer, feeding the wooden-legged Balearic 
 crane, or visiting the old lion in the 
 Tower, not the least of his pets, whose 
 death, accepted as a portent, was soon 
 almost to coincide with his own. For 
 birds he had a passion ; he was an un 
 exampled dog-lover. He squandered 
 much of his professional time in the 
 society, innocent at least, of these favorite 
 animals, and much of his professional 
 money, in seeking and reclaiming such of 
 them as were lost. There is a funny 
 little advertisement in Mercurius Publius 
 for June 28th, 1660, the sly good-humor 
 of which marks it as having been written 
 out by none but the King himself. The 
 advertisement was a renewed one. " We 
 must call upon you again for a Black 
 Dog, between a greyhound and a spaniel ; 
 no white about him, onely a streak on his 
 Brest, and Tayl a little bobbed. It is 
 His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless 
 was stoln, for the Dog was not born or 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 307 
 
 bred in England, and would never for 
 sake his Master. Whosoever findes him, 
 may acquaint any at Whitehall, for the 
 Dog was better known at Court than 
 those who stole him. Will they never 
 leave robbing His Majesty ? Must he 
 not keep a Dog? This Dog's place, 
 (though better than some imagine) is 
 the onely place which nobody offers to 
 Beg." 
 
 It is not uncharacteristic of his hatred 
 of suffering, that it was Charles the Sec 
 ond who abolished the statute which had 
 thoughtfully provided for the roasting of 
 heretics. He might quite as well have 
 abolished " cockfighting and courses," but 
 he did not. On a certain 22nd of July, 
 he wrote to his "deare, deare Sister" 
 Henrietta : " I am one of those Bigotts 
 who thinke that malice is a much greater 
 sinn than a poore frailty of nature." And 
 Burnet has assured us that the same remark 
 was made, by the same moralist, to him, 
 " that cruelty and falsehood are the worst 
 vices " : an opinion of pedigree, antedated 
 by Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, in the 
 sixth century. It would seem an irresis 
 tible inference that Butler must have heard 
 
308 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 of the royal speculation when he penned 
 his immortal couplet : 
 
 " Compound for sins they are inclined to, 
 By damning those they have no mind to." 
 
 Charles used to carry in his pocket a 
 copy of Hudibras which Buckhurst gave 
 him. Cruelty, especially, was very far 
 from this indulgent King. His first offi 
 cial appearance had been on an errand of 
 mercy. As a spectator of ten, he had sat 
 through the first session of Stafford's trial, 
 " in his little chair beside the throne " ; 
 but he was sent as Prince of Wales, to 
 carry his father's letter to the Peers, urg 
 ing them to forbear or delay Strafford's 
 execution. As the young nominal leader 
 of the army in the west, he was full of 
 compassion. "There's a child," said the 
 Earl of Lindsay, " born to end this war 
 we now begin. How gravely doth he pity 
 the dead, the sick, the maimed ! " His 
 nature was thoroughly humane ; and 
 more : it was affectionate. It is the 
 modern fashion to say he had no feeling. 
 In this regard he has never been fairly 
 appraised, and no wonder ! He affected 
 cynicism, and disclaimed sensitiveness ; 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 309 
 
 he made no confidences ; he avoided 
 " scenes." Yet he originated at least two 
 scenes, which may be worth something to 
 those who recognize true emotion, from 
 whatever unexpected source, and honor it. 
 One was in 1663, when the good Queen 
 fell very ill, and Charles, more and more 
 conscience-stricken, threw himself beside 
 the bed, and begged her, with tears, to 
 live for his sake. The other was when 
 he himself lay dying, in his fifty-fifth 
 year; when his old friend, the Benedictine 
 monk, John Huddleston, came into the 
 room before the lords, physicians, and gay 
 gentlemen, to reconcile him to the Catho 
 lic Church, and give him the Holy Com 
 munion. The King was extremely weak, 
 and in the greatest pain ; but he was with 
 difficulty kept in his recumbent position. 
 " I would kneel," he said aloud several 
 times, endeavoring to rise : " I would kneel 
 to my Heavenly Lord." What if by such 
 touching demonstrations, rather than by 
 his miserable stifling stoicism, his taint of 
 drugged indifference, he were to be 
 judged ? But to some he had always 
 shown his heart. The dearest to him 
 were those longest about him : even his 
 
3 io AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 old nurse, Mrs. Wyndham, had an extra 
 ordinary hold upon him. He was kind 
 ness itself to his sister-in-law, Anne Hyde, 
 the first Duchess of York, at the very 
 time when she was exposed to ridicule, 
 and most needed a powerful friend ; and 
 he was no less kind to her successor, Mary 
 of Modena, who never forgot him. His 
 attachment to Monmouth is beyond ques 
 tion ; yet it was no greater than his at 
 tachment to James, whose succession he 
 safeguarded, with whom he had few quali 
 ties in common. For besides being the 
 perfect companion Hume allows him to 
 have been, he was a perfect brother. 
 Mrs. Ady (Julia Cartright) justly ob 
 serves, in the preface to Madame, her 
 valuable memoir of Charles the First's 
 youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess 
 of Orleans, that the private letters from 
 the French archives, there first printed, 
 written by Charles the Second, establish 
 two novel points greatly in his favor : 
 " the courage and spirit with which he 
 could defend the privileges of his subjects 
 and the rights of the British flag," and 
 the extreme love and concern he had for 
 his only surviving sister. Patriotism and 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 311 
 
 affection are about the last things of which 
 historians seem even yet likely to accuse 
 him. Let us have a few of these episto 
 lary extracts, at random ; they are delight 
 ful, and worded with a careless idiomatic 
 force equal to that of any correspondence 
 of the time. Moreover, they make one 
 surmise that a volume of Charles's less 
 accessible letters to his mother and Prince 
 Rupert, those to his sister Mary, not ex 
 cluding the beautiful one on the occasion 
 of their father's death, those to Clarendon, 
 Lord Jermyn and others, would make, 
 if collected from the private packets or 
 state papers where they lie unread, in his 
 own delicate, clear, whimsical hand, an 
 uncommonly pleasant publication. 
 
 " To my deare, deare Sister. 
 
 Pour Pavenir, je vous prie, ne me traitez pas 
 avec tant de ceremonie, en me donnant tant de 
 c majestes,' car je ne veux pas qu'il y ait autre 
 chose entre nous deux, qu'amitie." 
 
 u I will not now write to you in French, for 
 my head is dosed with business ! " 
 
 " Pray send me some images, to put in 
 prayer-books : they are for my wife, who can ' 
 gett none heere. I assure you it will b'e a great 
 present to her, and she will looke upon them 
 
3 I2 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 often ; for she is not onlie content to say the 
 greate office in the breviere every day, but like 
 wise that of Our Lady too ; and this is besides 
 goeing to chapell, where she makes use of none 
 of these. I am iust now goeing to see a new 
 play; so I shall say no more but that I am 
 intierly yours." (These are " the pretty pious 
 pictures " which Pepys saw and admired.) 
 
 u They who will not beleeve anything to be 
 reasonably designed unless it be successfully 
 executed, have neede of a less difficult game to 
 play than mine ; and I hope friends will thinke 
 I am now too old, and have had too much 
 experience of things and persons to be grossly 
 imposed upon ; and therefore they who would 
 seem to pity me so for being so often deceeved, 
 do upon the matter declare what opinion they 
 have of my understanding and judgment. And 
 I pray you, discountenance those kind of 
 people. " 
 
 " I hope it is but in a compliment to me, 
 when you say my niece " (the little Marie- 
 Louise d' Orleans, afterwards Queen of Spain) 
 " is so like me : for I never thought my face was 
 even so much as intended for a beauty ! I wish 
 with all my heart I could see her ; for at this 
 distance I love her." 
 
 " Sir George Downing is come out of Hol 
 land, and I shall now be very busy upon that 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 313 
 
 matter. The States keepe a great braying and 
 noise, but I beleeve, when it comes to it, they 
 will looke twise before they leape. I never saw 
 so great an appetite to a warre as is in both this 
 towne and country, espetially in the parlament- 
 men, who, I am confident, would pawne there 
 estates to maintaine a warre. But all this shall 
 not governe me, for I will look meerly to what 
 is just, and best for the honour and goode of 
 England, and will be very steady in what I 
 resolve : and if I be forsed to a warre, I shall 
 be ready with as good ships and men as ever 
 was seen, and leave the successe to God." 
 (Here we have a sort of original for the modern 
 chant : 
 
 " We don't want to fight : 
 But, by Jingo, if we do, 
 We've got the ships, we've got the men, 
 We 've got the money, too.") 
 
 (Of Harry Killigrew.) " I am glad the poore 
 wrech has gott a meanes of subsistence ; but 
 have one caution of him, that you beleeve not 
 one worde he sayes of us heere j for he is a 
 most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to 
 sett forth his storyes pleasantly enough." 
 
 " There is nobody desires more to have a 
 strict frindship with the King of France than I 
 do ; but I will never buy it upon dishonourable 
 termes; and I thanke God my condition is not 
 
3H AN INgUIRENDO 
 
 so ill but that I can stande upon my own legges, 
 and beleeve that my frindship is as valuable to 
 my neighbours as theirs is to me." 
 
 " I have sent, this post, the extracts of the 
 letters to my Ld. Hollis, by which you will see 
 how much reason I have to stande upon the 
 right my father had, touching the precedency of 
 my ambassador's coach before those of the 
 princes of the blood there. I do assure you, I 
 would not insist upon it, if I had not cleerely 
 the right on my side ; for there is nobody that 
 hates disputes so much as I do, and will never 
 create new ones, espetially with one whose 
 frindship I desire so much as that of the King 
 of France. But, on the other side, when I have 
 reason, and when I am to yeelde in a point by 
 which I must goe less than my predesessours 
 have done, I must confesse that consernes me 
 so much as no frindship shall make me consent 
 unto." 
 
 " Your kindnesse I will strive to diserve by 
 all the endeavours of my life, as the thing in the 
 worlde I value most." 
 
 Charles was dear to the masses, as any 
 ruler of his unimperious humor is sure 
 to be. When the King and Queen came 
 down from Hampton Court in their 
 barge, the Thames watermen shouted 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 315 
 
 cheerfully at him : " God bless thee, 
 King Charles, and thy good woman there. 
 Go thy ways for a wag ! " Among his 
 inferior subjects he never lacked parti 
 sans and apologists. He was something 
 of a hero even to his valet : faithful 
 Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes, 
 spent a fortune in putting up statues, at 
 Chelsea and Windsor, " domino suo cle- 
 mentissimo." The Roundheads whom 
 Charles had released, chiefly men of no 
 rank or influence, watched him after, with 
 friendliest longing and regret ; never 
 without extenuations, and certain hope 
 of change. " By enlarging us," they 
 said in their message of thanks, "you 
 have multiplied our captivity, and made 
 us more your prisoners than we could be 
 in the Tower." When Death gave him 
 his abrupt summons, " amid inexpressible 
 luxury and profaneness," on a wintry 
 Monday in his town palace, the poor 
 crowded the churches, for the whole six 
 days, " sobs and tears interrupting the 
 prayers of the congregations." Joy-bells 
 and bonfires bespoke their relief at the 
 mistaken report that he was convalescent. 
 Every schoolboy, prentice, and serv- 
 
316 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 ing-maid in London wore mourning for 
 him ; although he had been buried 
 secretly by night, and there was no 
 pageant at Westminster to memorialize 
 their grief. Always, and despite all, he 
 was sure of the loyalty of the people. 
 " Fret not that I go unattended," he 
 would tell his brother: "for they will 
 never kill me, James, to make you 
 king." "The horrid plot" found him 
 the coolest head in England. But towards 
 the end, it began to tell upon him and 
 dash his spirits. He closed his doors 
 for the first time, and went abroad with 
 a guard, hurt and dejected. This was 
 but an incident in a life as free from sus 
 picion as a tree's. The folk who came to 
 see Charles at his masques and fairs and 
 Twelfth-Night dice-throwings and Easter 
 alms-givings ; the two hundred and forty 
 thousand whom, with great boredom and 
 greater patience, he touched for the King's 
 Evil ; the multitudes who had experienced 
 his concern and practical energy during the 
 Fire, when he had done them all manner 
 of personal service, these were his 
 vassals to the last. Nor had he ever a 
 private enemy. He was popular in the 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 317 
 
 extreme; and might be commemorated 
 as an admirable prince, if tested by the 
 measure of Martial's epigram, that a 
 prince's main virtue is intimate knowl 
 edge of his subjects. Tradition does not 
 aver that he made integrity of living con 
 tagious among them, though society 
 copied his tolerance and affability, his 
 sense, spirit, and gracefulness. But 
 nothing ever broke their faith in him. 
 Says Lingard : " During his reign the 
 arts improved, trade met with encourage 
 ment, the wealth and comforts of the 
 people increased. To this flourishing 
 state of the nation we must attribute the 
 acknowledged fact, that whatever the per 
 sonal failings or vices of the King, he 
 never forfeited the love of his subjects. 
 Men are always ready to idolize the sov 
 ereign under whose sway they feel them 
 selves happy." Charles might have 
 confessed with Elia : " How I like to 
 be liked, and what don't I do to be 
 liked ! " His wheedling charm was irre 
 sistible. He was an adept, when he 
 willed, in the science of honeyed suasion. 
 Like the Florentine painters, he could 
 suffer no slovenly detail, nor a convention 
 
3 i 8 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 to pass him without some individualizing 
 touch. Before he had contracted the 
 Portuguese alliance. Count Da Ponte had 
 taken his letter to Lisbon : " To the 
 Queen of Great Britain, my wife and 
 lady, whom God preserve." The blood 
 royal has a pretty etiquette of its own ; 
 not quite this, however. How beauti 
 fully, again, was it said to the Commons, 
 shortly after the accession : " I know 
 most of your faces and names, and can 
 never hope to find better men in your 
 places." And this intimate conciliatory 
 tone, which it was Charles's pleasure to em 
 ploy towards others, others used in speak 
 ing of him. There is a fatherly pang in 
 some of the little messages plying between 
 the noble colleagues, Clarendon and Or 
 monde. "The King is as decomposed 
 as ever : which breaks my heart. ... He 
 seeks for his satisfaction and delight in 
 other company, which do not love him so 
 well as you and I do." And there is 
 nothing tenderer in all history than the 
 narration of Charles's leave-taking from 
 his hushed Whitehall, written at the time 
 by the Reverend Francis Roper, chaplain 
 to the Bishop of Ely, unless it be an ac- 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 319 
 
 count of the same strange and moving 
 scene, sent later by the Catholic Earl of 
 Perth to the Catholic Countess of Kin 
 cardine, on the tenth of December, 1685. 
 Every street-corner evangelist may 
 harp on the rottenness of the Restoration : 
 what concerns us is its human sparkle. 
 There was an astonishing dearth of dull 
 people ; the bad and bright were in full 
 blossom, and the good and stupid were 
 pruned away. The company reminds one 
 of Aucassin's hell, which, on a certain 
 occasion, he chose with such gusto, for its 
 superior social qualities. " Charles the 
 Second ! " exclaims William Hazlitt, in 
 his most enjoying mood: "what an air 
 breathes from the name ! What a rustle 
 of silks and waving of plumes ! What a 
 sparkle of diamond earrings and shoe- 
 buckles ! What bright eyes ! (Ah, 
 those were Waller's Sacharissa's, as she 
 passed.) What killing looks and graceful 
 motions ! How the faces of the whole 
 ring are dressed in smiles ! How the 
 repartee goes round ; how wit and folly, 
 elegance, and awkward imitation of it, set 
 one another off!" These are the days 
 when young Henry Purcell bends for hours 
 
320 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 over the Westminster Abbey organ, alone ; 
 and Child, Locke, Lawes, and Gibbons 
 are setting ballads to entrancing cadences, 
 and conveying them to Master W. Thack 
 eray, the music-printer, at The Angel, in 
 Duck Lane ; when another Gibbons, 
 rival of the spring, carving on wood, makes 
 miraculous foliage indoors, to cheat the 
 longing wind ; when a diligent Clerk of 
 the Acts of the Navy, curiously scanning 
 the jugglers and gymnasts on his leisurely 
 way, trots by in " a camlett coat with 
 silver buttons " ; when Robert Herrick, 
 the aged town-loving country vicar, order 
 ing his glass, stands watching through the 
 tavern window-pane the King gravely 
 pacing the greensward with Hobbes and 
 Evelyn, or bantering Nell Gwynne over 
 her garden wall ; when Walton angles 
 with his son Cotton in the Dove, and 
 Claude Duval exquisitely relieves travel 
 lers' bags of specie; when the musical 
 street-cries run like intersecting brooks : 
 " Rosemary and sweetbrier : who'll buy 
 my lavender ? " cc Fresh cheese and cream 
 for you ! " <c Oranges and citrons, fair 
 citrons and oranges ! " when Richardson, 
 the eater of glass and fire, is bidden to 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 321 
 
 entertain in drawing-rooms, broiling an 
 oyster on a live coal held in his mouth, 
 and the instant he departs, hears the com 
 pany fall to playing blind-man's buff, and 
 " I love my love with an A " ; when the 
 click of duelling swords is heard in the 
 parks at sundown, and groups of affec 
 tionate gentlemen sway homewards by the 
 fainter morning ray, and coaches roll along 
 lending glimpses of pliant fans, and of 
 Lely's languishing faces. In and out of 
 this whirl of thoughtless life move the 
 august figures of Sir Thomas Browne and 
 " that Milton that wrote for the regicides," 
 and, later, of Sir Isaac Newton ; the golden 
 shadow of Jeremy Taylor, and the childish 
 footsteps of Steele and his head boy Addi- 
 son, regenerators to be ; the vanishing 
 presence of Clarendon, and the patriots, 
 Russell, Vane, Algernon Sydney, good 
 hearts in the dungeon and at the block ; 
 of Bunyan the tinker, and the fighters 
 Fairfax and Rupert, and the scholar poets 
 who prodigally strew their delicate num 
 bers on the wind. Execrable ministries, 
 Dutch defiances and insults, French pen 
 sions, pestilence and plot : but still the 
 moth-hunts go on. " At all which I am 
 
 21 
 
322 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 sorry, but it is the effect of idleness " (who 
 should it be but Pepys, making this deep 
 elemental excuse ?) " and having nothing 
 else to employ their great spirits upon." 
 The irised bubbles were soon to scatter, 
 and the Hanoverian super-solids to come 
 and stay. The great change is germinal, 
 as all great changes are, and more visible 
 in its processes than most. The reign of 
 Charles the Second is full of supplements 
 and reserves ; nothing is so lawless as it 
 seems ; the genius ever unemployed, the 
 virtue in arrest, " tease us out of thought," 
 and change color under our eyes. Horn 
 pipes turn to misereres ; masks, one by 
 one, fall away. Mrs. Aphra Behn, be it 
 remembered, was, off the printed page, 
 nothing more unspeakable than a decent 
 industrious woman. That bygone Eng 
 land played at having no moral sense : on 
 a subtle argument of Browning's, one may 
 quarrel with it that it did not play equally 
 well to the end. Neither was it the minor 
 actor of the Restoration who, near the exit, 
 flagged, saw visions, and spoke strange 
 words out of his part : it was Rochester, 
 it was Louise de Querouailles, it was the 
 King. " Without desire of renown," 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 323 
 
 Macaulay finds him, " without sensibility 
 to reproach." Why arraign the King ? 
 He will agree with Macaulay or another, 
 charge by charge : which is damaging to 
 the arraigner. As for accusations not per 
 sonal, his retorts might be less gentle. 
 Great Britain sued for him : and he never 
 posed for a moment as other than he was. 
 His coming hastened a reparative holiday ; 
 itself but the breath of reaction. That 
 inevitable abuses should be ranked among 
 the laws of Nature, is one of Vauvenargues* 
 fine profound inferences. If, in some of his 
 inspirational moments, the King exceeded 
 his prerogative (by endeavoring, for in 
 stance, to abrogate the code bearing so 
 cruelly upon all persons of other religious 
 opinions than those of the State), Parlia 
 ment and the people had foregone their 
 right of complaint : they had deliberately 
 chosen to make him an autocrat. No 
 fanatic on any point, Charles would have 
 bound himself readily to reasonable condi 
 tions, while his fortunes were pending ; 
 yet no pledges were exacted. Moderate 
 precautions and safeguards, suggested in 
 the Commons by Hale and Prynne, had 
 been set aside by Monk, and overruled. 
 
324 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 Monk was but a dial's shadow, "the 
 hand to the heart of the nation." He 
 brought in not only the monarchy, but a 
 potent individuality : one not led hither 
 and thither, but a maker and marrer of 
 his time. That melancholy figure was the 
 axis of fast-flying and eccentric revelry. 
 To some of us he is one of the most com- 
 
 flex and interesting men in history, 
 udge him by old report and general 
 current belief, and he is " dead body and 
 damned soul " ; examine his own speech 
 and script, and the testimony of those who 
 had him at close range from his boyhood : 
 and lo, he has heights and distances, as 
 well as abysses; he is self-possessed, not 
 possessed of the devil ; he is dangerous, 
 if you will, but not despicable. Following 
 an evil star, he, at least, after Ovid, per 
 ceived and approved the highest. Until 
 the Georgian succession, his was a popular 
 memory. But with the Stuart decadence, 
 and the consummation of what The Royalist 
 smartly labels as "the great Protestant 
 Swindle," down went his name with better 
 names : all, from Laud to Claverhouse, 
 doomed to share a long obloquy and 
 calumny, from which they are singly being 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 325 
 
 rescued at last, as from the political pit. 
 I know nothing so illustrious of Charles 
 the Playgoer as that he was able to win 
 the strong attachment of Dr. Samuel John 
 son, albeit a century of ill repute lay 
 between. Our wise critic, though he 
 formulated it not, must have seen clearly 
 the duplex cause of the King's failure in 
 life. For half of that failure there is a 
 theological term. Permit me to use it, 
 and to illumine the whole subject by it : 
 no flash-light is keener. Charles the 
 Second was unfaithful to Divine Grace. 
 Again, no man, endowed with so exquisite 
 a sense of humor in over-development, 
 can, of his own volition alone, escape lassi 
 tude, errancy, and frivolity founded on 
 scorn. Humor, as a corrective, is well : 
 
 " the little more, and how much it is ! ' ' 
 
 To have been born with a surplus of it 
 is to be elf-struck and incapacitated. 
 Nothing is worth while, nothing is here 
 nor there ; the only way to cut short the 
 torture of self-observation and the infamy 
 of not being able to form a prejudice, is to 
 abandon ideals. Pass over, in the King, 
 this too mordant and too solvent intelli- 
 
326 AN INgUIRENDO 
 
 gence, and you lose the key to a strange 
 career. Perhaps two of his ancestors, 
 two of the Haroun-al-Raschid temper, 
 dominated him : the gallant Gudeman of 
 Ballangleich, and as a nearer influence on 
 Charles, that gay, beloved, fickle, easily- 
 masterful man, his grandsire of Navarre. 
 He was like these, and in harmony with 
 their adventurous soldier-world : naturally, 
 he was incurably out of joint with his own 
 isle, her confused introspective moods 
 hardly subsided. He was a philosopher, 
 and above all, an artist : such a king, in 
 England, can never be the trump card. 
 He seems to have thought out the situa 
 tion, and to have capitulated with all his 
 heart. We need not tell each other that 
 he might have been different. Let us 
 mend our tenses, and agree that he would 
 and must have been different, in Scotland 
 or in France. 
 
 Yet Lord Capel's dying word was 
 right : his King, though a traitor, and 
 intellectually as homesick for France as 
 Mary Stuart before him, was " a very per 
 fect Englishman " : he had, in some degree, 
 every quality which goes to make up the 
 lovableness of English character ; and his 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 327 
 
 Latin vices, large to the eye, are festooned 
 around him, rather than rooted in him. 
 One who knows the second Charles, all in 
 all, and still preserves a great kindness for 
 him, might do worse than borrow for his 
 epitaph what Mr. Henley has written of 
 Lovelace, Richardson's Lovelace, "the 
 completest hero of fiction." " He has 
 wit, humor, grace, brilliance, charm : he 
 is a scoundrel and a ruffian ; and he is a 
 gentleman, and a man." 
 
 CLAY 
 
 (After a pause, shyly.} That's all. 
 Will it do, Wetherell ? 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Why, yes ; on the whole. It is well, 
 lopsided ; and so mortal serious, you 
 know. Not that it is n't great fun, too. 
 You will carry the audience. You really 
 ought not to : it is a sort of abduction ! 
 (They stroll out through the Horse Guards, 
 and towards Parliament Square?) 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 I thought you might say something 
 about Chelsea Hospital. It is a good 
 thing, I am sure ; and Charles the Second 
 was the founder. 
 
328 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 No, Nell Gwynne: she put him up 
 to it. I am told the old war-dogs over 
 there will eat you, Lord love 'em, if you 
 say a word against either of these. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 What was she like ? 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Oh, wild honey. Just such a one as 
 Mr. Du Maurier's Trilby. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Quite true, quite true ! (They laugh.) 
 A capital comparison : thank you for it. 
 And comparisons, being odorous, remind 
 me of my dinner. Rhoda very much 
 wishes you to come home with us. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Please do, Mr. Clay, and quite as you 
 are. No one but ourselves and my nice 
 New York cousins, whom we are going to 
 meet. We shall dine early, so that you may 
 have time afterwards, before your lecture. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 To repent. 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Aye, quicksilver creature ! to re-dress. 
 There ! Mrs. Wetherell, have I not 
 understood you and avenged you, too ? 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 329 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Indeed, you always do. Will you 
 come? 
 CLAY 
 
 Many thanks to you ; I should like 
 nothing better. Shall you mind if we go 
 directly into the Abbey ? It is early yet 
 for your appointment; but I should 
 delight in showing you the effigy. I '11 
 wager a full farthing Percy never saw it. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 The effigy ? 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Yes ; King Charles the Second's. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Heigho ! it would seem that we have 
 not buried the biographee, after all. But 
 I am sceptical. I remember no effigy. 
 Unfold. 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Here we are at the porch. Just follow 
 me. . . . (They go quietly in file through 
 the north transept and ambulatory, and up 
 the great steps of Henry the Seventh's 
 Chapel?) There : to the right ; inside, 
 east end. How dark it is ! 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Are n't you coming ? 
 
330 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 CLAY 
 
 No ; if you will excuse me. Conceive 
 of me as sentimental ; I hate to step over 
 that slab, or go by it, somehow. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 (Farther up.) Not a soul here, to 
 adore this surpassing tomb of Lady Rich 
 mond. There 's art for you ! But no 
 effigy of yours visible. Your infallibility 
 waneth. Animus vester ego, Argilla mea ! 
 the which is choice Schoolboy for 
 Mind your eye, O Clay. 
 CLAY 
 
 Of course there 's none now. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Avaunt, then, deceiving monster! 
 CLAY 
 
 But it used to stand, with Anne, 
 William and Mary, and with Monk be 
 hind it, there on the site of the old altar- 
 stone ; his name is cut over the vault. 
 That is where Dr. Johnson visited it 
 often. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 I had forgotten. What were you say 
 ing about stepping over the slab ? 
 CLAY 
 
 Not that slab. I meant the other, 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 331 
 
 where Mrs. Wetherell is standing. The 
 tragic names are all together there : Mary 
 Queen of Scots, Rupert, and the lovely 
 and dear Queen of Bohemia, and young 
 Henry of Gloucester, and poor Arabella 
 Stuart, and 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 (Slowly reading) ten infant children of 
 King James the Second, and eighteen 
 infant children of Queen 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Tee-hee ! 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Percy ! 
 
 CLAY 
 
 Sure enough, it does sound ticklish ! 
 But hush, Wetherell : people will hear. 
 (They descend.) That verger in the dim 
 amber light, standing in the dear little 
 doorway of S. John's, will let us see the 
 cases in the chantry. You have to show 
 the Dean's pass. Wait a moment: I must 
 get mine. (He draws a card from his 
 pocket and approaches the verger, who im 
 mediately leads the way to the stair of the 
 Islip Chapel.) 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 (First on the stair, Jive minutes after.) 
 
332 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 Ghastly things ! Truly, are n't they per 
 fectly appalling ? 
 
 THE VERGER 
 
 Oh, it 's wax, you know, is rit it ? 
 We think them uncommonly precious. 
 So ancient, ma'am. Carried at their own 
 funerals, and dressed in their own clothes. 
 King Charles the Second, this is : he 's 
 the oldest genuine one of those we show. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Can it be possible that this lace all 
 black with age, this beautiful lace ? Yes, 
 it is point ! (Hangs enraptured?) 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 The head is surprisingly fine, for any 
 thing of the half-spook, half-dolly order. 
 You say it was modelled on the death- 
 mask ? 
 CLAY 
 
 Yes ; you have seen it in the Museum. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 I like it better than any of the por 
 traits. It gives one a gentler impression, 
 somehow. Who are these ? (He and his 
 wife move on to the Duchess of Bucking 
 hamshire and Queen Anne?) 
 
 CLAY 
 
 As for me, I shall stay with you, of 
 
AN INQUIRENDO 333 
 
 course, my poor old never-obsolete Most 
 Sacred Majesty. What a pity you shirked 
 your work so ! 
 
 " gu'as-tu fait, 6 toi que voila, 
 De ta jeunesse ? ' ' 
 
 Ah, well ! It is not beyond my right to 
 say that to you, since I am the only one 
 alive who loves you. 
 
 TWO FEMALE VOICES BELOW 
 
 Cousin Rhoda! Rhoda ! Percy! We 
 saw you come up, from where the Coro 
 nation Chair is ; and the little door was 
 left open. Oh, is n't this splendid to 
 find you ? How DO you do ? 
 
 THE VERGER 
 
 I beg your pardon, gentlemen ; Even 
 song is just about to begin. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Thank you ; then we the heathen must 
 go at once. Clay, let me present you to 
 See : he 's in dreamland. 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 I wonder if thoughts of dinner can 
 rouse him. 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 Not unless you can provide the suit 
 ably archaic wild boar, and the flask of 
 canary. 
 
334 AN INQUIRENDO 
 
 THE MISSES FRANEY 
 
 You both look so well ! Dreadful, 
 Percy, if you '11 believe it. The steward 
 ess said there had not been such a passage 
 for 
 
 MRS. WETHERELL 
 
 Hurry, Cornelia. The service is 
 beginning. 
 
 (A strain from the organ wakes Clay. He 
 follows them down, tiptoeing past the filling 
 pews, covering the oak-twig still in his hat.) 
 
 WETHERELL 
 
 (In an undertone, on the threshold.) 
 The air is good, again. Lo, I perceive 
 the genial 'bus yonder, also several nimble 
 cabs. Come, ladies fair ; come, Clay. 
 You shall eat posthumously in the nine 
 teenth century, and make us all drink the 
 health of " the Blackbird " ; as the old 
 song has it, 
 
 t T A ~ =====1 ^ T T A 
 
 Id, la-la, la-la, la la Id, with a fa la la, la-la, Id, Id.' 
 
 (Clay smile s y and they pass out into the 
 Square.) 
 
 1886. \ 
 1896.1 
 
THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED BY 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, AT 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAM 
 BRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 These essays have appeared, during the 
 last ten years, in The Contributor's Club 
 of The Atlantic Monthly, The Chap-Book, 
 The Independent, The Catholic World, and 
 The Providence Journal. An Open Letter 
 to the Moon, and On Teaching One s Grand 
 mother to Suck Eggs, are reprinted, by per 
 mission, from Goosequill Papers, Roberts 
 Brothers, Boston, 1885. 
 
BOOK 15 DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 RENEWED BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE 
 RECALL 
 
 LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS 
 
 Book Slip-50m-8,'66(G5530s4)458 
 
PS1767 
 
 Guiney, L.I. 
 Patrins. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA