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ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
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ADVENTURES
AMONG BOOKS
BV
ANDREW LANG
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1905
[All rights reserved]
* . ' •
• • a • « '
• • >
« • <
€ • « • •
A54
TO
C. M. FALCONER, Esq.,
Dear Mr. Falconer,
Among other " veniable parts
of things lost" you hoarded and preserved
these old records of old Adventures among
Books, which noiu recognise in you the
foster father of such literary '■^ da Its."
o
\
\
■IN
Sincerely yours,
A. LANG
)
St. Andrews,
V
February 9,
1905.
PREFACE
Of the Essays in this volume " Adventures
among Books," and " Rab's Friend," appeared
in Scribner s Magazine ; and " Recollections of
Robert Louis Stevenson " (to the best of the
author's memory) in The North American
Review. The Essay on "Smollett" was in the
Anglo-Saxon, which has ceased to appear ; and
the shorter papers, such as "The Confessions of
Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled Wit and
Wisdom. For " The Poems of William Morris "
the author has to thank the Editor of Longman's
Magazine; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's
Novels,"the Proprietors of The Comhill Magazine ;
for " Enchanted Cigarettes," and possibly for
"The Supernatural in Fiction," the Proprietors of
The Idler. The portrait, after Sir William
Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when
most of the Essays were written — and that
was not yesterday.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Adventures Among Books . . . . i
Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson . 39
Rab's Friend 57
Oliver Wendell Holmes ..... 79
v^Mr. Morris's Poems 97
Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels . , . . .119
A Scottish Romanticist of 1830 . . -139
\/The Confessions of Saint Augustine . -157
\^ Smollett . . . . . . • • i73
Nathaniel Hawthorne 211
The Paradise of Poets . . . .225
Paris and Helen ...... 235
Enchanted Cigarettes 249
Stories and Story-Telling .... 259
\/The Supernatural in Fiction . . . .271
An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher . 281
The Boy 295
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the
confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal
about books and very Httle about people ? I have often
wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom
been attempted — a biography or autobiography of a man
in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be
sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered
from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisi-
tions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to
the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading
has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced
as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study
of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is
the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent
than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks
to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found
in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching
(not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an autohiographia literaria, an account
of how, and in what order, books have appealed to a
mind, which books have ever above all things delighted,
4 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of
egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which
the author knows so much as of his own. On n'a que
soi, as the poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourget's
novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak
for himself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville,
retire into the convent of literature from the strife of the
world, rather he was born to be, from the first, a dweller
in the cloister of a library. Among the poems which I
remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's
song, in the "Bride of Lammermoor" : —
" Look not thou on beauty's charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory ; they
would sing themselves to me on the way to school, or
cricket-field, and, about the age of ten, probably without
quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind
of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the fallentis
semita vitce. This seems a queer idea for a small boy,
but it must be confessed.
" It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers
from the cradle, some merchants, some orators ; nothing
but a love of books was the gift given to me by the
fairies. It was probably derived from forebears on both
sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a con-
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 5
siderable collector of books which remained with us and
were all tried, persevered with, or abandoned in turn, by
a student who has not blanched before the Epigoniad,
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple
process. I had heard the elegy of Cock Robin till I
knew it by rote, and I picked out the letters and words
which compose that classic till I could read it for myself.
Earlier than that, " Robinson Crusoe " had been read
aloud to me, in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I re-
member the pictures of Robinson finding the footstep
in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and the parrot.
But, somehow, I have never read " Robinson " since :
it is a pleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were,
naturally, fairy tales, and chap-books about Robert
Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At that time
these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I
can still see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt,
discoursing across a burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the
soldier's horse into the stream. They did not then awaken
a precocious patriotism ; a boy of five is more at home
in Fairyland than in his own country. The sudden
appearance of the White Cat as a queen after her head
was cut off, the fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf,
the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seed which
the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy
of the Desert — these things, all fresh and astonishing,
but certainly to be credited, are my first memories of
romance. One story of a White Serpent, with a wood-
cut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to secure,
probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it
6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
ever since. One never sees those chap books now.
" The White Serpent," in spite of all research, remains
introtivable. It was a lost chance, and Fortune does
not forgive. Nobody ever interfered with these, or
indeed with any other studies of ours at that time, as
long as they were not prosecuted on Sundays. "The
fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha, and
stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical
literature, read in a huge old illustrated Bible. How
I advanced from the fairy tales to Shakespeare, what
stages there were on the way — for there must have been
stages — is a thing that memory cannot recover. A
nursery legend tells that I was wont to arrange six open
books on six chairs, and go from one to the others,
perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what
people call " desultory reading," but I did not hear the
criticism till later, and then too often for my comfort.
Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a
small boy reading the " Midsummer Night's Dream "
by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some
one touched the piano, and a young man and a girl
were playing chess. The Shakespeare was a volume of
Kenny Meadows' edition ; there are fairies in it, and
the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream
into the music and the firelight. At that moment I
think that I was happy ; it seemed an enchanted glimpse
of eternity in Paradise ; nothing resembling it remains
with me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England,
when the number of my years was six, and in England
we found another paradise, a circulating library with
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 7
brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare
and of the " Arabian Nights." How their stained pages
come before the eyes again — the pleasure and the puzzle
of them ! What did the lady in the Geni's glass box
want with the Merchants? what meant all these con-
versations between the Fat Knight and Ford, in the
" Merry Wives " ? It was delightful, but in parts it was
difficult. Fragments of " The Tempest," and of other
plays, remain stranded in my memory from these read-
ings : Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra
cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs,
the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian
walls, a vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her
hair down. People forbid children to read this or that.
I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy
the magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than
a world of beautiful visions, half realised. In the
Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink, only the pure can
see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror
children see only what is pure. Among other books
of that time I only recall a kind of Sunday novel,
"Naomi; or. The Last Days of Jerusalem." Who,
indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man
who cried on the battlements, "Woe, woe to myself
and to Jerusalem ! " I seem to hear him again when
boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest
" disaster."
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland,
and awoke, as it were, to know the glories of our
birth. We lived in Scott's country, within four miles
of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it.
8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I remember going with one of the maids into the cottage
of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter ; a delightful place,
where there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods
were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of
course, I found some cheap periodical with verses in
it. The lines began —
*' The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
He spurred his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
That leads to Brotherstone."
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and
honey, not to be neglected. But they were neglected
till we had learned how —
" The sable score of fingers four
Remains on that board impressed,
And for evermore that lady wore
A covering on her wrist."
We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children,
probably, say very little about what is in their minds ;
but that unhappy knight. Sir Richard of Coldinghame,
and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the
moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind
ever since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at
"The Eve of St. John."
Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how
great he was, how good, how, like Napoleon, his evil
destiny found him at last, and he wore his heart away
for honour's sake. And we were given the "Lay," and
"The Lady of the Lake." It was my father who first
read "Tarn o' Shanter " to me, for which I confess I
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 9
did not care at that time, preferring to take witches and
bogies with great seriousness. It seemed as if Burns
were trifling with a noble subject. But it was in a
summer sunset, beside a window looking out on Ettrick
and the hill cf the Three Brethren's Cairn, that I first
read, with the dearest of all friends, how —
" The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-
James we drove the chase, till —
" Few were the stragglers, following far,
That reached the lake of Vennachar,
And when the Brig of Turk was won,
The foremost horseman rode alone."
From that time, for months, there was usually a little
volume of Scott in one's pocket, in company with the
miscellaneous collection of a boy's treasures. Scott
certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth
Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small
boy in wakeful hours.^ After this kind of introduction
to Sir Walter, after learning one's first lessons in history
from the " Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, one hopes,
can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of
Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is.
not an author like another, but our earliest known
friend in letters ; for, of course, we did not ask who
1 " Mauth" is Manx for dog, I am told.
lo ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history
of Madame d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers
and burnsides with his reivers ; the Fairy Queen came
out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh ; at Newark
Tower we saw " the embattled portal arch " —
" Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war," —
just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very
roofless cottage whence Mungo Park went forth to trace
the waters of the Niger, and at Oakwood the tower of
the Wizard Michael Scott.
Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin,
and the story was "Jane Eyre." This tale was a creepy
one for a boy of nine, and Rochester was a mystery, St.
John a bore. But the lonely little girl in her despair,
when something came into the room, and her days of
starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester,
were not to be forgotten. They abide in one's recollec-
tion with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried a rusty
ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the
same time.
I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that
I had minded my lessons, and satisfied my teachers —
I know I was reading Pinnock's " History of Rome " for
pleasure — till "the wicked day of destiny" came, and
I felt a "call," and underwent a process which may be
described as the opposite of " conversion." The " call "
came from Dickens. " Pickwick " was brought into the
house. From that hour it was all over, for five or six
years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS ii
read " Pickwick " in convulsions of mirth. I dropped
Pinnock's "Rome" for good. I neglected everything
printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was under-
stood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither
I was now sent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a
rather lonely small boy in the house of an aged relation,
I found the Waverley Novels. The rest is transport.
A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin
grammar, and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on
the hands with a leather strap urged me to acquire a
certain amount of elementary erudition. But, for a
year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the
" Waverleys " and the " Border Minstrelsy," with Pope,
and Prior, and a translation of Ariosto, with Lever
and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley,
Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with
every kind of light literature that I could lay my hands
upon. Carlyle did not escape me ; I vividly remember
the helpless rage with which I read of the Flight to
Varennes. In his work on French novelists, Mr,
Saintsbury speaks of a disagreeable little boy, in a
French romance, who found Scott assommant, stun-
ningly stupid. This was a very odious little boy, it
seems (I have not read his adventures), and he came,
as he deserved, to a bad end. Other and better boys,
I learn, find Scott " slow." Extraordinary boys ! Per-
haps '* Ivanhoe " was first favourite of yore ; you cannot
beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the
tournament. No other tournament need apply. Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, has attempted to
enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller.
12 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Next, I think, in order of delight, came " Quentin
Durward," especially the hero of the scar, whose name
Thackeray could not remember, Quentin's uncle. Then
" The Black Dwarf," and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister.
I could not read " Rob Roy " then, nor lately ; nay, not
till I was forty. Now Di Vernon is the lady for me ; the
queen of fiction, the peerless, the brave, the tender, and
true.
The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was
to read no more novels, but, as an observer remarked,
" I don't see what is the use of preventing the boy
from reading novels, for he's just reading ' Don Juan '
instead." This was so manifestly no improvement, that
the ban on novels was tacitly withdrawn, or was per-
mitted to become a dead letter. They were far more
enjoyable than Byron. The worst that came of this
was the suggestion of a young friend, whose life had
been adventurous — indeed he had served in the Crimea
with the Bashi Bazouks — that I should master the
writings of Edgar Poe. I do not think that the
" Black Cat," and the " Fall of the House of Usher,"
and the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," are very good
reading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many
a bad hour they gave me, haunting me, especially, with
a fear of being prematurely buried, and of waking up
before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. Of all the
books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author
whom I wish I had reserved for later consideration,
and whom I cannot conscientiously recommend to
children.
I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 13
at a venture, in " Vanity Fair," about the Battle of
Waterloo. It was not like Lever's accounts of battles,
but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was
under a taboo. It is not easy to say why ; but Mr.
Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom he
found reading "Vanity Fair" under the table, that he
had better read something else. What harm can the
story do to a child ? He reads about Waterloo, about
fat Jos, about little George and the pony, about little
Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy and unharmed.
Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very dif-
ferent and very disagreeable world of a master's house,
I was lucky enough to find a charming library there.
Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and Thackeray
became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says,
a boy reads him and thinks he knows all about life.
I do not think that the mundane parts, about Lady
Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquis of
Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. Ethel
was a mystery, and not an interesting mystery, though
one used to copy Doyle's pictures of her, with the
straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossible waist.
It was not Ethel who captivated us ; it was Clive's
youth and art, it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly
F. B. and his address to the maid about the lobster.
" A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen."
Does not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters
are fish, in the French sense ? Then " The Rose and
the Ring " came out. It was worth while to be twelve
years old, when the Christmas books were written by
Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose
14 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and the Ring," I know, and of the " Christmas Carol,"
when they were damp from the press. King Valoroso,
and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful
than Scrooge, and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One
remembers the fairy monarch more vividly, and the
wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sipped
brandy — or was it right Nantes ? — still " going on sip-
ping, I am sorry to say," even after "Valoroso was
himself again."
But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose " Pen-
dennis " was the favourite. The delightful Marryat
had entertained us with Peter Simple and O'Brien
(how good their flight through France is !) with Mesty
and Mr. Midshipman Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr.
Thackeray's favourite), and with Snarleyyow ; but
Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That
did not seem to be one's vocation. But the story of
Pen made one wish to run away to literature, to the
Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous reviewer,
might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella.
The writing of poems "up to" pictures, the beer with
Warrington in the mornings, the suppers in the back-
kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society, and
Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has
run away to literature since, but where is the matutinal
beer ? Where is the back-kitchen ? Where are War-
rington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have never met
them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated
reviewer, is familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper,
of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Perhaps back-
kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale in the life
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 15
literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond.
But one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and
Bacon are no longer the innocent and ignorant rivals
whom Thackeray drew. They do not give those wonder-
ful parties ; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional ;
Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters ; Mr. Wenham does
not toady ; Mr. Wagg does not joke any more. The
literary life is very like any other, in London, or is it
that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of
genius? Well, a Hfe on the ocean wave, too, may not
be so desirable as it seems in Marryat's novels : so
many a lad whom he tempted into the navy has dis-
covered. The best part of the existence of a man of
letters is his looking forward to it through the spectacles
of Titmarsh.
One can never say how much one owes to a school-
master who was a friend of literature, who kept a house-
ful of books, and who was himself a graceful scholar,
and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the
" Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Went-
worth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I am glad to
confess my gratitude after all these many years. While
we were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also
being dragged through the Commentaries of Caius Julius
Caesar, through the Latin and Greek grammars, through
Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
play of Euripides, the " Phoeniss?e." I can never say
how much I detested these authors, who, taken in small
doses, are far, indeed, from being attractive. Horace,
to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing to
i6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious
manner. Then Cowper's " Task," or " Paradise Lost,"
as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a
school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper,
instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work.
His observations on public schools were not uninterest-
ing, but the whole English school-work of those days
was repugnant. One's English education was all got
out of school.
As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous
terror ; one invented for one's self all the current
arguments against " compulsory Greek." What was
the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find
any sense in it, or any interest? A language with
such cruel superfluities as a middle voice and a
dual ; a language whose verbs were so fantastically
irregular, looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague
and torment. So one thought till Homer was opened
before us. Elsewhere I have tried to describe the vivid
delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys
not wholly immersed in dulness felt it, I think ; to
myself, for one, Homer was the real beginning of study.
One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner,
his " fairs," and " swains." Homer seemed better read-
ing in the absurd " crib " which Mr. Buckley wrote for
Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the
younger Tarquin. Scott, by the way, must have made
one a furious and consistent Legitimist. In reading the
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 17
" Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies were with the
expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at
Lake Regillus : —
" Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
Too good for such a breed."
Where —
" Valerius struck at Titus,
And lopped off half his crest;
But Titus stabbed Valerius
A span deep in the breast," —
I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's
hand, the words "Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps
my politics have never gone much beyond this senti-
ment. But this is a digression from Homer. The very
sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the
most various music, was enough to win the heart, even
if the words were not understood. But the words
proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full as they
are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy,
and romance. The "Morte d' Arthur" itself, which
about this time fell into our hands, was not so dear as
the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir Thomas
Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to
enter haunted chapels where a light shines from the
Graal, to find by lonely mountain meres the magic boat
of Sir Galahad.
After once being initiated into the mysteries of
Greece by Homer, the work at Greek was no longer
tedious. Herodotus was a charming and humorous
story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of
£
i8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
the Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of
the very rare things in literature which almost, if not
quite, brought tears into one's eyes. Few passages,
indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discre-
pant. The first book that ever made me cry, of which
feat I was horribly ashamed, was " Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
with the death of Eva, Topsy's friend. Then it was
trying when Colonel Newcome said Adsum, and the
end of Socrates in the Phaedo moved one more than
seemed becoming — these, and a passage in the his-
tory of Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin
of the Athenians in the Syracusan Bay. I have read
these chapters in an old French version derived through
the Italian from a Latin translation of Thucydides.
Even in this far- descended form, the tale keeps its
pathos ; the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling
cannot be worn away by much handling, by long time,
by the many changes of human speech. " Others too,"
says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when —
" All was done that men may do.
And all was done in vain," —
" having achieved what men may, have borne what men
must." This is the very burden of life, and the last
word of tragedy. For now all is vain : courage,
wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the good-
ness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are
expended, all wasted, nothing of that brave venture
abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No play nor
poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin
of a people; no modern story can stir us, with all its
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 19
eloquence, like the brief gravity of this ancient history.
Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more wise
than that which bids us do what men may, and bear
what men must. Such are the lessons of the Greek,
of the people who tried all things, in the morning of
the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried
in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom,
of grief and triumph, hope and despair. The world,
since their day, has but followed in the same round,
which only seems new : has only made the same ex-
periments, and failed with the same failure, but less
gallantly and less gloriously.
One's school-boy adventures among books ended not
long after winning the friendship of Homer and Thucy-
dides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's application
was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate
scholar.
I confess to having learned the classical languages,
as it were by accident, for the sake of what is in them,
and with a provokingly imperfect accuracy. Cricket
and trout occupied far too much of my mind and my
time : Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas
Tod Stoddart, and "The Moor and the Loch," were
my holiday reading, and I do not regret it. Philologists
and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in
no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate
intelligence. The true scholar is one whom I envy,
almost as much as I respect him ; but there is a kind
of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal
niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into
true scholarship. Yet, even for those afflicted in this
20 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
way, and with the malady of being " idle, careless little
boys," the ancient classics have a value for which there
is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves
— our common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our
joys, in the writings of men severed from us by race,
religion, speech, and half the gulf of historical time —
which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there
is to be added, as the university preacher observed,
" the pleasure of despising our fellow-creatures who do
not know Greek." Doubtless in that there is great
consolation.
It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what
proportion of people really care for poetry, and how the
love of poetry came to them, and grew in them, and
where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom one
meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all.
Byron's Murray ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just
when Tennyson and Browning were striking their pre-
ludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.
But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are
attached to poetry, though they certainly do not buy
contemporary verse. How did the passion come to
them ? How long did it stay ? When did the Muse
say good-bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry
came with Sir Walter Scott, for one read Shakespeare
as a child, rather in a kind of dream of fairyland and
enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness
that one was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with
me, came Longfellow, who pleased one as more re-
flective and tenderly sentimental, while the reflections
were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 21
" Hiawatha " came out, when one was a boy, and how
delightful was the free forest life, and Minnehaha, and
Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not then know
that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it,
was to meet one later, in the " Kalewala." But, at that
time, one had no conscious pleasure in poetic style,
except in such ringing verse as Scott's, and Campbell's
in his patriotic pieces. The pleasure and enchantment
of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,
when one read for the first time —
" So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea ;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a
name. When a child I was told that a poet was coming
to a house in the Highlands where we chanced to be,
a poet named Tennyson. " Is he a poet like Sir Walter
Scott ? " I remember asking, and was told, " No, he was
not like Sir Walter Scott." Hearing no more of him, I
was prowling among the books in an ancient house, a
rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I found
Tupper, and could not get on with " Proverbial Philo-
sophy." Next I tried Tennyson, and instantly a new
light of poetry dawned, a new music was audible, a new
god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to
be dethroned. " Men scarcely know how beautiful fire
is," Shelley says. I am convinced that we scarcely know
how great a poet Lord Tennyson is ; use has made him
too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table
2 2 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Round again," that has written the sacred book of
friendship, that has lulled us with the magic of the
"Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus." He
has made us move, like his own Prince —
" Among a world of ghosts,
And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
He has enriched our world with conquests of romance ;
he has recut and reset a thousand ancient gems of
Greece and Rome ; he has roused our patriotism ; he has
stirred our pity ; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including " this of
love." Truly, the Laureate remains the most various,
the sweetest, the most exquisite, the most learned,
the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may
pity the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson
came.
Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory
bookish boyhood. It was not in nature that one
should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But those
exercises were seldom even written down ; they lived a
little while in a memory which has lost them long ago.
I do remember me that I tried some of my attempts
on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said
to "Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a
decision in which I straightway acquiesced. For to
rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite another. A good
deal of mortification would be avoided if young men
and maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in
front of their vanity and their ambition.
In these bookish memories I have said nothing about
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 23
religion and religious books, for various reasons. But,
unlike other Scots of the pen, I got no harm from " The
Shorter Catechism," of which I remember little, and
neither then nor now was or am able to understand a
single sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians com-
prehended and stood aghast at justification, sanctifica-
tion, adoption, and effectual calling. These, apparently,
were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life.
But we were not told what they meant, nor were we dis-
tressed by a sense that we had not passed through them.
From most children, one trusts, Calvinism ran like water
off a duck's back ; unlucky were they who first absorbed,
and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism ! "
One good thing, if no more, these memories may
accomplish. Young men, especially in America, write
to me and ask me to recommend " a course of reading."
Distrust a course of reading ! People who really care
for books read all of them. There is no other course.
Let this be a reply. No other answer shall they get
from me, the inquiring young men.
II
People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love.
One may venture to doubt whether everybody exactly
knows which was his, or her, first love, of men or
women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of
all ; after boyhood the bloom is off the literary rye.
24 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The first parcel of these garrulities ended when the
author left school, at about the age of seventeen. One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as
complete as it ever will be, one's tastes definitely formed,
one's favourites already chosen. As long as we live we
hope to read, but we " never can recapture the first fine
careless rapture." Besides, one begins to write, and
that is fatal. My own first essays were composed at
school — for other boys. Not long ago the gentleman
who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never
credited my younger brother with the essays which that
unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but brotherly") was
accustomed to present for his consideration.
On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's
Hall, in the University of St. Andrews. That is the
oldest of Scotch universities, and was founded by a
papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a
hospitiiim for pilgrims, a home for old ladies (about
1500), and a college in the University, was now a kind
of cross between a master's house at school, and, as
before 1750, a college. We had more liberty than
schoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the
Scotch universities the men live scattered, in lodgings,
and only recently, at St. Andrews, have they begun to
dine together in hall. We had a common roof, common
dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and
cricket clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly
magazine. It was only a manuscript affair, and was
profusely illustrated. For the only time in my life, I
was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 25
to my work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's
duty was to write most of the magazine — to write essays,
reviews (of books by the professors, very severe), novels,
short stories, poems, translations, also to illustrate these,
and to "fag" his friends for "copy" and drawings. A
deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, to
have been the chief characteristic of the periodical —
flippancy and an abundant use of the supernatural.
These were the days of Lord Lytton's " Strange Story,"
which I continue to think a most satisfactory romance.
Inspired by Lord Lytton, and aided by the University
library, I read Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, Petrus de
Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with lambHchus
and Plotinus.
These are really but disappointing writers. It soon
became evident enough that the devil was not to be
raised by their prescriptions, that the philosopher's
stone was beyond the reach of the amateur. lamblichus
is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young
beginner I would recommend Petrus de Abano, as
the most adequate and gruesome of the school, for
" real deevilry and pleesure," while in the wilderness of
Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and lofty
speculations. Two winters in the Northern University,
with the seamy side of school life left behind, among
the kindest of professors — Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier, Mr.
Shairp — in the society of the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and
of many dear old friends, are the happiest time in my
life. This was true literary leisure, even if it was not
too well employed, and the religio loci should be a
liberal education in itself. We had debating societies —
26 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I hope I am now forgiven for an attack on the character
of Sir WiUiam Wallace, latro quida?n, as the chronicler
calls him, "a certain brigand." But I am for ever
writing about St. Andrews — writing inaccurately, too,
the Scotch critics declare. " Farewell," we cried,
"dear city of youth and dream," eternally dear and
sacred.
Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning,
guided to his works by a parody which a lady wrote in
our little magazine. Mr. Browning was not a popular
poet in 1 86 1. His admirers were few, a little people,
but they were not then in the later mood of reverence,
they did not awfully question the oracles, as in after
years. They read, they admired, they applauded, on
occasion they mocked, good-humouredly. The book by
which Mr. Browning was best known was the two green
volumes of " Men and Women." In these, I still think,
is the heart of his genius beating most strenuously and
with an immortal vitality. Perhaps this, for its compass,
is the collection of poetry the most various and rich of
modern English times, almost of any English times.
But just as Mr. Fitzgerald cared little for what Lord
Tennyson wrote after 1842, so I have never been able
to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr. Browning's
work after " Men and Women." He seems to have
more influence, though that influence is vague, on
persons who chiefly care for thought, than on those who
chiefly care for poetry. I have met a lady who had
read "The Ring and the Book" often, the "Lotus
Eaters" not once. Among such students are Mr.
Browning's disciples of the Inner Court : I dwell but in
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 27
the Court of the Gentiles. While we all — all who
attempt rhyme — have more or less consciously imitated
the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncom-
monly scarce. He is lucky enough not to have had the
seed of his flower stolen and sown everywhere till —
"Once again the people
Called it but a weed."
The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough,
who has many undergraduate qualities. But his peculiar
wistful scepticism in religion had then no influence on
such of us as were still happily in the ages of faith.
Anything like doubt comes less of reading, perhaps,
than of the sudden necessity which, in almost every life,
puts belief on her trial, and cries for an examination of
the creeds hitherto held upon authority, and by dint of
use and wont. In a different way one can hardly care
for Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come
under the influence of Oxford. So Mr. Browning was
the only poet added to my pantheon at St. Andrews,
though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to
be more the true model of a prose writer than he seems
in the light of later reflection. Probably we all have a
period of admiring Carlyle almost exclusively. College
essays, when the essayist cares for his work, are
generally based on one or the other. Then they
recede into the background. As for their thought,
we cannot for ever remain disciples. We begin to
see how much that looks like thought is really the
expression of temperament, and how individual a
28 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
thing temperament is, how each of us must construct
his world for himself, or be content to wait for an
answer and a synthesis " in that far-off divine event
to which the whole creation moves." So, for one,
in these high matters, I must be content as a "master-
less man," swearing by no philosopher, unless he be
the imperial Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus.
Perhaps nothing in education encourages this in-
credulity about " masters " of thought like the history of
philosophy. The professor of moral philosophy, Mr.
Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar. His
lectures on " The History of Greek Philosophy " were
an admirable introduction to the subject, afterwards
pursued, in the original authorities, at Oxford. Mr.
Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas so fair and
persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had
discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales
and that pre-Socratic " company of gallant gentlemen "
for whom Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admira-
tion. We were now Empedocleans, now believers in
Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in
Aristotle. In each lecture our professor set up a new
master and gently disintegrated him in the next.
" Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T. H. Green
used to say at Oxford. He himself became an Amurath,
a sultan of thought, even before his apotheosis as the
guide of that bewildered clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere.
At Oxford, when one went there, one found Mr. Green
already in the position of a leader of thought, and of
young men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 29
Aristotle, and of him eager youth said, in the words of
Omar Khayyam, '■^ He knows I he knows/" What was
it that Mr. Green knew ? Where was the secret ? To
a mind already sceptical about masters, it seemed that
the secret (apart from the tutor's noble simplicity and
rare elevation of character) was a knack of translating
St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which
we then believed to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not
in the original German, but in lectures and in translations.
Reasoning from these inadequate premises, it seemed to
me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr.
Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit
at work in evolution, the something within the wheels.
But this was only a personal impression made on a
mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in
general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr. Green's
pupils could generally write in his own language, more
or less, and could " envisage " things, as we said then,
from his point of view. To do this was believed,
probably without cause, to be useful in examinations.
For one, I could never take it much more seriously,
never believed that "the Absolute," as the Oxford
Spectator said, had really been "got into a corner."
The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered,
too often has escaped from that situation. Somewhere
in an old notebook I believe I have a portrait in pencil
of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with Aristotle,
with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps he
was the last of that remarkable series of men, who may
have begun with Wycliffe, among whom Newman's is a
famous name, that were successively accepted at Oxford
30 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd
guess at the secret.
" None the less
I still came out no wiser than I went."
All of these masters and teachers made their mark,
probably won their hold, in the first place, by dint of
character, not of some peculiar views of theology and
philosophy. Doubtless it was the same with Socrates,
with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe with
them, is the thing needful. But the younger we are,
the less, perhaps, we see this clearly, and we persuade
ourselves that there is some mystery in these men's
possession, some piece of knowledge, some method of
thinking which will lead us to certainty and to peace.
Alas, their secret is incommunicable, and there is no
more a philosophic than there is a royal road to the
City.
This may seem a digression from Adventures among
Books into the Book of Human Life. But while much
of education is still orally communicated by lectures
and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found
in books, Greek or German, reach us through the hear-
ing. There are many pupils who can best be taught
in this way ; but, for one, if there be aught that is
desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if I could,
to go to the book for it.
Yet it is odd that one remembers so Httle of one's
undergraduate readings, apart from the constant study
of the ancient classics, which might not be escaped.
Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in moral thought
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 31
and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression.
Probably politicians are the last people who read
Aristotle's " Politics." The work is, indeed, apt to
disenchant one with political life. It is melancholy
to see the little Greek states running the regular round
— monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy in all its
degrees, the "ultimate democracy" of plunder, law-
lessness, license of women, children, and slaves, and
then tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power.
In politics, too, there is no secret of success, of the
happy life for all. There is no such road to the
City, either democratic or royal. This is the lesson
which Aristotle's " Politics " impresses on us, this and
the impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on
mankind.
" Whate'er is best administered is best." These are
some of the impressions made at Oxford by the studies
of the schools, the more or less inevitable " curricoolum,"
as the Scotch gentleman pronounced the word. But at
Oxford, for most men, the regular work of the schools
is only a small part of the literary education. People
read, in different degrees, according to their private
tastes. There are always a few men, at least, who love
literary studies for their own sake, regardless of lectures
and of "classes." In my own time I really believe you
could know nothing which might not " pay " in the
schools and prove serviceable in examinations. But a
good deal depended on being able to use your know-
ledge by way of literary illustration. Perhaps the
cleverest of my own juniors, since very well known in
letters, did not use his own special vein, even when he
32 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
had the chance, in writing answers to questions in ex-
aminations. Hence his academic success was much
below his deserts. For my own part, I remember my
tutor saying, " Don't write as if you were writing for a
penny paper." Alas, it was " a prediction, cruel, smart."
But, "as yet no sin was dreamed."
At my own college we had to write weekly essays,
alternately in English and Latin. This might have been
good literary training, but I fear the essays were not
taken very seriously. The chief object was to make the
late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes.
But nobody ever succeeded. He was experienced in
trash. As for what may be called unacademic literature,
there were not many essays in that art. There have
been very literary generations, as when Corydon and
Thyrsis "lived in Oxford as if it had been a great
country house ; " so Corydon confessed. Probably
many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many
of Mr. Swinburne's early works were undergraduate
poems. A later generation produced " Love in Idle-
ness," a very pleasing volume. But the gods had not
made us poetical. In those days I remember picking
up, in the Union Reading-room, a pretty white quarto,
" Atalanta in Calydon," by A. C. Swinburne. Only
once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name before, signing
a brief tale in Once a Week. " Atalanta " was a revela-
tion ; there was a new and original poet here, a Balliol
man, too. In my own mind "Atalanta" remains the
best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems. He instantly became the
easily parodied model of undergraduate versifiers.
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 33
Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted,
without success. As yet we had not seen Mr. Matthew
Arnold's verses. I fell in love with them, one long
vacation, and never fell out of love. He is not, and
cannot be, the poet of the wide world, but his charm is
all the more powerful over those whom he attracts and
subdues. He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford, and
his " Scholar Gypsy " is our " Lycidas." At this time he
was Professor of Poetry ; but, alas, he lectured just at
the hour when wickets were pitched on Cowley Marsh,
and I never was present at his discourses, at his humorous
prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too
true. So many weary lectures had to be attended, could
not be " cut," that we abstained from lectures of super-
erogation, so to speak. For the rest there was no
" literary movement " among contemporary under-
graduates. They read for the schools, and they rowed
and played cricket. We had no poets, except the stroke
of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he concealed his
courtship of the Muse. Corpus is a small college, but
Mr. Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second
on the river. B. N. C. was the head boat, and even
B. N. C. did Corpus bump. But the triumph was
brief. B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new
ship, drank the foaming grape, and bumped Corpus
back. I think they went head next year, but not that
year. Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was
doing noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.
There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse,
but nobody knew anybody who wrote in it. A comic
journal was started ; I remember the pride with which
c
34 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
when a freshman, I received an invitation to join its
councils as an artist. I was to do the caricatures of all
things. Now, methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits
of whom I have read. But the wits were unutterably
disappointing, and the whole thing died early and not
lamented. Only one piece of academic literature
obtained and deserved success. This was The Oxford
Spectator^ a most humorous little periodical, in shape
and size like Addison's famous journal. The authors
were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo,
Mr. Humphry Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete,
who died early. There have been good periodicals
since ; many amusing things occur in the Echoes from
the Oxford Magazine, but the Spectator was the flower
of academic journals. " When I look back to my own
experience," says the Spectator, " I find one scene, of
all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon ' the mindful
tablets of my soul.' And yet not a scene, but a fairy
compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought.
The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above
Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of
twenty boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out
from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous
cries of 'ten seconds more,' all down from the green
barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment
is only typical of all the term ; the various elements of
beauty and pleasure are concentrated there."
Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and
pleasure. Things go wrong somehow. Life drops her
happy mask. But this has nothing to do with books.
About books, however, I have not many more con-
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 35
fessions that I care to make. A man's old self is so far
away that he can speak about it and its adventures
almost as if he were speaking about another who is
dead. After taking one's degree, and beginning to
write a little for publication, the topic has a tendency
to become much more personal. My last undergraduate
literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance.
Accidentally finding out that I could read French, I
naturally betook myself to Balzac. If you read him
straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to learn a
good many words. The literature of France has been
much more popular in England lately, but thirty years
agone it was somewhat neglected. There does seem to
be something in French poetry which fails to please
" the German paste in our composition." Mr. Matthew
Arnold, a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appre-
ciate French poetry. A poet-critic has even remarked
that the French language is nearly incapable of poetry !
We cannot argue in such matters, where all depends on
the taste and the ear.
Our ancestors, like the author of the " Faery Queen,"
translated and admired Du Bellay and Ronsard ; to
some critics of our own time this taste seems a
modish affectation. For one, I have ever found an
original charm in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have
taken great delight in Hugo's amazing variety of
music, in the romance of Alfred de Musset, in the
beautiful cameos of Gautier. What is poetical, if
not the " Song of Roland," the only true national epic
since Homer? What is frank, natural verse, if not that
of the old Pasioureiles? Where is there naivete of
36 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
narrative and unconscious charm, if not in Aucasstn et
Nicolettel In the long normally developed literature
of France, so variously rich, we find the nearest analogy
to the literature of Greece, though that of England
contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more
winningly on the ear. France has no Shakespeare and
no Milton ; we have no Moliere and no " Song of
Roland." One star differs from another in glory, but
it is a fortunate moment when this planet of France
swims into our ken. Many of our generation saw it
first through Mr. Swinburne's telescope, heard of it in
his criticisms, and are grateful to that watcher of the
skies, even if we do not share all his transports. There
then arose at Oxford, out of old French, and old oak,
and old china, a "school" or "movement." It was
aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris's
wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the
public "caught on,'' as they say, to these delights. But
except one or two of the masters, the school were only
playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own perform-
ances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult,
which was later revived, developed, and gossiped about
more than enough.
To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am
specially bound in gratitude — the late Mr. J. F.
M'Lennan. Mr. M'Lennan had the most acute and
ingenious of minds which I have encountered. His
writings on early marriage and early religion were revela-
tions which led on to others. The topic of folk-lore,
and the development of custom and myths, is not
generally attractive, to be sure. Only a few people seem
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS 37
interested in that spectacle, so full of surprises — the
development of all human institutions, from fairy tales
to democracy. In beholding it we learn how we owe
all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to
genius. The natural people, the folk, has supplied us,
in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry,
law, ritual : and genius has selected from the mass, has
turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance,
myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery
into gorgeous ritual. The world has been educated, but
not as man would have trained and taught it. " He led
us by a way we knew not," led, and is leading us, we
know not whither ; we follow in fear.
The student of this lore can look back and see
the long trodden way behind him, the winding tracks
through marsh and forest and over burning sands.
He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns
where the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer,
strange places many of them, and strangely haunted,
desolate dwellings and inhospitable. But the scarce
visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the
ways to that city whither mankind is wandering, and
which it may never win. We have a foreboding of
a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will,
working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden
end.
This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folk-
lore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to
many seems dull. It may become the most attractive
and serious of the sciences ; certainly it is rich in strange
curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered
fs-.. 9.i,'~ '"■ .1,
38 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis.
I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me
up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me
to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the
poetry and the significance of them are apt to be hidden
by the enormous crowd of details. Only late we find
the true meaning of what seems like a mass of fantastic,
savage eccentricities. I very well remember the moment
when it occurred to me, soon after taking my degree,
that the usual ideas about some of these matters were
the reverse of the truth, that the common theory had to
be inverted. The notion was "in the air," it had
already flashed on Mannhardt, probably, but, like the
White Knight in " Alice," I claimed it for " my own
invention."
These reminiscences and reflections have now been
produced as far as 1872, or thereabouts, and it is
not my intention to pursue them further, nor to
speak of any living contemporaries who have not won
their way to the classical. In writing of friends and
teachers at Oxford, I have not ventured to express
gratitude to those who still live, still teach, still are the
wisest and kindest friends of the hurrying generations.
It is a silence not of thanklessness, but of respect and
devotion. About others — contemporaries, or juniors by
many years — who have instructed, consoled, strength-
ened, and amused us, we must also be silent.
RECOLLECTIONS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
RECOLLECTIONS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TUSITALA
We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he
Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of the west
Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,
Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaea crest.
Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales.
Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world's dehght,
Looks o'er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the sails
Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.
Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow.
Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,
Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,
Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.
Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea.
Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent tides
Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be.
When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.
Before attempting to give any "reminiscences" of
Mr. Stevenson, it is right to observe that reminiscences
of him can best be found in his own works. In his
essay on "Child's Play," and in his "Child's Garden
of Verse," he gave to the world his vivid recollections
of his imaginative infancy. In other essays he spoke
41
42 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of his boyhood, his health, his dreams, his methods of
work and study. " The Silverado Squatters " reveals
part of his experience in America. The Parisian scenes
in "The Wrecker "are inspired by his sojourn in French
Bohemia; his journeys are recorded in "Travels with
a Donkey " and " An Inland Voyage " ; while his South
Sea sketches, which appeared in periodicals, deal with
his Oceanic adventures. He was the most autobio-
graphical of authors, with an egoism nearly as complete,
and to us as delightful, as the egoism of Montaigne.
Thus, the proper sources of information about the author
of " Kidnapped " are in his delightful books.
"John's own John," as Dr. Holmes says, may be very
unlike his neighbour's John ; but in the case of Mr.
Stevenson, his Louis was very similar to my Louis ; I
mean that, as he presents his personality to the world
in his writings, even so did that personality appear to
me in our intercourse. The man I knew was always
a boy.
" Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,"
he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the
lad was never "gone." Like Keats and Shelley, he
was, and he looked, of the immortally young. He and
I were at school together, but I was an elderly boy of
seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of "gytes,"
as the members of the lowest form are called. Like
all Scotch people, we had a vague family connection ;
a great-uncle of his, I fancy, married an aunt of my
own, called for her beauty, " The Flower of Ettrick."
So we had both heard ; but these things were before
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 43
our day. A lady of my kindred remembers carrying
Stevenson about when he was " a rather peevish baby,"
and I have seen a beautiful photograph of him, like
one of Raffael's children, taken when his years were
three or four. But I never had heard of his existence
till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the interests
of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of
the British Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson.
He looked as, in my eyes, he always did look, more
like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth oval
face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common,
large lucid eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot
remember, if brown, certainly light brown. On appeal-
ing to the authority of a lady, I learn that brown was
the hue. His colour was a trifle hectic, as is not un-
usual at Mentone, but he seemed, under his big blue
cloak, to be of slender, yet agile frame. He was like
nobody else whom I ever met. There was a sort of un-
common celerity in changing expression, in thought and
speech. His cloak and Tyrolese hat (he would admit
the innocent impeachment) were decidedly dear to him.
On the frontier of Italy, why should he not do as the
Itahans do ? It would have been well for me if I could
have imitated the wearing of the cloak !
I shall not deny that my first impression was not
wholly favourable. " Here," I thought, " is one of your
aesthetic young men, though a very clever one." What
the talk was about, I do not remember; probably of
books. Mr. Stevenson afterwards told me that I had
spoken of Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, as a fine writer,
but added that " he was not a British sportsman." Mr.
44 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Stevenson himself, to my surprise, was unable to walk
beyond a very short distance, and, as it soon appeared,
he thought his thread of life was nearly spun. He had
just written his essay, " Ordered South," the first of his
published works, for his " Pentland Rising" pamphlet was
unknown, a boy's performance. On reading "Ordered
South," I saw, at once, that here was a new writer, a
writer indeed ; one who could do what none of us, nous
autres, could rival, or approach. I was instantly " sealed
of the Tribe of Louis," an admirer, a devotee, a fanatic,
if you please. At least my taste has never altered.
From this essay it is plain enough that the author (as
is so common in youth, but with better reason than
many have) thought himself doomed. Most of us have
gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else
has shown such a wise and gay acceptance of the
apparently inevitable ? We parted ; I remember little
of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of
encouragement given me by my junior, who already
knew so much more of life than his senior will ever do.
For he ran forth to embrace life like a lover : his motto
was never Lucy Ashton's —
" Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford.
I make no hand of reminiscences ; I remember nothing
about what we did or said, with one exception, which
is not going to be published. I heard of him, writing
essays in the Fort/olio and the Cornhiii, those delightful
views of life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid.
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 45
so wise, so exquisite, which all should know. How we
looked for "R. L. S." at the end of an article, and how
devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the
young one !
About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill
myself), I received a brief note from Mr. Stevenson,
introducing to me the person whom, in his essay on
his old college magazine, he called " Glasgow Brown."
What his real name was, whence he came, whence the
money came, I never knew. G. B. was going to start
a weekly Tory paper. Would I contribute? G. B.
came to see me. Mr. Stevenson has described him, 7iot
as I would have described him : like Mr. Bill Sikes's
dog, I have the Christian peculiarity of not liking dogs
"as are not of my breed." G. B.'s paper, London, was
to start next week. He had no writer of political leading
articles. Would I do a "leader"? But I was not in
favour of Lord Lytton's Afghan policy. How could I
do a Tory leader? Well, I did a neutral-tinted thing,
with citations from Aristophanes ! I found presently
some other scribes for G. B.
What a paper that was ! I have heard that G. B.
paid in handfuls of gold, in handfuls of bank-notes.
Nobody ever read London, or advertised in it, or
heard of it. It was full of the most wonderfully clever
verses in old French forms. They were (it afterwards
appeared) by Mr. W. E. Henley. Mr. Stevenson him-
self astonished and delighted the public of London (that
is, the contributors) by his " New Arabian Nights."
Nobody knew about them but ourselves, a fortunate
few. Poor G. B. died and Mr. Henley became the
46 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
editor. I may not name the contributors, the flower
of the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new
race. But one lion, a distinguished and learned lion,
said already that fiction, not essay, was Mr. Stevenson's
field. Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say
whether I would be more sorry to lose Virginibus
Puerisque and "Studies of Men and Books," or
"Treasure Island "and "Catriona." With the decease
of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources,
London struggled and disappeared.
Mr, Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old
Saville Club, in Saville Row, which had the tiniest and
blackest of smoking-rooms. Here, or somewhere, he
spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was Two
Men. I said " ' William Wilson ' by Edgar Poe," and
declared that it would never do. But his " Brownies,"
in a vision of the night, showed him a central scene,
and he wrote " Jekyll and Hyde." My " friend of these
days and of all days," Mr. Charles Longman, sent me
the manuscript. In a very common -place London
drawing-room, at 10.30 p.m., I began to read it. Arriv-
ing at the place where Utterson the lawyer, and the
butler wait outside the Doctor's room, I threw down the
manuscript and fled in a hurry. I had no taste for
solitude any more. The story won its great success,
partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be),
more by its terrible, lucid, visionary power. I remember
Mr. Stevenson telling me, at this time, that he was
doing some " regular crawlers," for this purist had a
boyish habit of slang, and I ihink it was he who called
Julius Caesar "the howlingest cheese who ever lived."
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 47
One of the " crawlers " was " Thrawn Janet " ; after
" Wandering Willie's Tale " (but certainly after it), to
my taste, it seems the most wonderful story of the
" supernatural " in our language.
Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey
Montepin, and, of course, Gaboriau. There was nothing
of the "cultured person" about him. Concerning a
novel dear to culture, he said that he would die by my
side, in the last ditch, proclaiming it the worst fiction
in the world. I make haste to add that I have only
known two men of letters as free as Mr. Stevenson,
not only from literary jealousy, but from the writer's
natural, if exaggerated, distaste for work which, though
in his own line, is very different in aim and method
from his own. I do not remember another case in
which he dispraised any book. I do remember his
observations on a novel then and now very popular,
but not to his taste, nor, indeed, by any means, impec-
cable, though stirring ; his censure and praise were both
just. From his occasional fine efforts, the author of this
romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of
brushwood, of ineffectual matter. It was so, no doubt,
as the writer spoken of would be ready to acknowledge.
But he was an improviser of genius, and Mr. Stevenson
was a conscious artist.
Of course we did by no means always agree in literary
estimates ; no two people do. But when certain works
— in his line in one way — were stupidly set up as rivals
of his, the person who was most irritated was not he,
but his equally magnanimous contemporary. There
was no thought of rivalry or competition in either mind.
48 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The younger romancists who arose after Mr. Stevenson
went to Samoa were his friends by correspondence ;
from them, who never saw his face, I hear of his
sympathy and encouragement. Every writer knows
the special temptations of his tribe : they were tempta-
tions not even felt, I do believe, by Mr. Stevenson.
His heart was far too high, his nature was in every
way as generous as his hand was open. It is in thinking
of these things that one feels afresh the greatness of
the world's loss ; for " a good heart is much more than
style," writes one who knew him only by way of letters.
It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a
Boisgobesque story together. There was a prisoner in
a Muscovite dungeon.
" We'll extract information from him," I said.
"How?"
" With corkscrews."
But the mere suggestion of such a process was terribly
distasteful to him ; not that I really meant to go to
these extreme lengths. We never, of course, 'could really
have worked together ; and, his maladies increasing, he
became more and more a wanderer, living at Bourne
mouth, at Davos, in the Orisons, finally, as all know,
in Samoa. Thus, though we corresponded, not un-
frequently, I never was of the inner circle of his friends.
Among men there were school or college companions,
or companions of Paris or Fontainebleau, cousins, like
Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, or a stray senior, like Mr.
Sidney Colvin. From some of them, or from Mr.
Stevenson himself, I have heard tales of " the wild
Prince and Poins." That he and a friend travelled
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 49
utterly without baggage, buying a shirt where a shirt
was needed, is a fact, and the incident is used in " The
Wrecker." Legend says that once he and a friend did
possess a bag, and also, nobody ever knew why, a large
bottle of scent. But there was no room for the bottle
in the bag, so Mr. Stevenson spilled the whole contents
over the other man's head, taking him unawares, that
nothing might be wasted. I think the tale of the
endless staircase, in "The Wrecker," is founded on
fact, so are the stories of the atelier, which I have heard
Mr. Stevenson narrate at the Oxford and Cambridge
Club. For a nocturnal adventure, in the manner of the
" New Arabian Nights," a learned critic already spoken
of must be consulted. It is not my story. In Paris, at
a cafe, I remember that Mr. Stevenson heard a French-
man say the English were cowards. He got up and
slapped the man's face.
"Monsieur, vous m' avez frappe ! " said the Gaul.
" A ce qu'il parait" said the Scot, and there it ended.
He also told me that years ago he was present at a play,
I forget what play, in Paris, where the moral hero
exposes a woman "with a history." He got up and
went out, saying to himself:
" What a play ! what a people ! "
^^ Ah, Monsieur, vous eies Men jeune/" said an old
French gentleman.
Like a right Scot, Mr. Stevenson was fond of " our
auld ally of France," to whom our country and our
exiled kings owed so much.
I rather vaguely remember another anecdote. He
missed his train from Edinburgh to London, and his
D
50 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
sole portable property was a return ticket, a meerschaum
pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne's poems. The
last he found unmarketable ; the pipe, I think, he made
merchandise of, but somehow his provender for the
day's journey consisted in one bath bun, which he could
not finish.
These trivial tales illustrate a period in his life and
adventures which I only know by rumour. Our own
acquaintance was, to a great degree, literary and bookish.
Perhaps it began " with a slight aversion," but it seemed,
like madeira, to be ripened and improved by his long
sea voyage; and the news of his death taught me, at
least, the true nature of the affection which he was
destined to win. Indeed, our acquaintance was like
the friendship of a wild singing bird and of a punctual,
domesticated barn-door fowl, laying its daily "article"
for the breakfast-table of the citizens. He often wrote
to me from Samoa, sometimes with news of native
manners and folklore. He sent me a devil-box, the
"luck" of some strange island, which he bought at a
great price. After parting with its " luck," or fetish (a
shell in a curious wooden box), the island was unfor-
tunate, and was ravaged by measles.
I occasionally sent out books needed for Mr. Steven-
son's studies, of which more will be said. But I must
make it plain that, in the body, we met but rarely. His
really intimate friends were Mr. Colvin and Mr. Baxter
(who managed the practical side of his literary business
between them) ; Mr. Henley (in partnership with whom
he wrote several plays) ; his cousin, Mr. R. A. M.
Stevenson ; and, among other literati^ Mr. Gosse, Mr.
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 51
Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr Walter Pollock,
knew him well. The best portrait of Mr. Stevenson
that I know is by Sir. W. B. Richmond, R.A., and
is in that gentleman's collection of contemporaries, with
the effigies of Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. William Morris,
Mr. Browning, and others. It is unfinished, owing to
an illness which stopped the sittings, and does not show
the subject at his best, physically speaking. There is
also a briUiant, slight sketch, almost a caricature, by
Mr. Sargent. It represents Mr. Stevenson walking about
the room in conversation.
The people I have named, or some of them, knew
Mr. Stevenson more intimately than I can boast of
doing. Unlike each other, opposites in a dozen ways,
we always were united by the love of letters, and of
Scotland, our dear country. He was a patriot, yet he
spoke his mind quite freely about Burns, about that
apparent want of heart in the poet's amours, which our
countrymen do not care to hear mentioned. Well,
perhaps, for some reasons, it had to be mentioned once,
and so no more of it.
Mr. Stevenson possessed, more than any man I ever
met, the power of making other men fall in love with
him. I mean that he excited a passionate admiration
and affection, so much so that I verily believe some
men were jealous of other men's place in his liking.
I once met a stranger who, having become acquainted
with him, spoke of him with a touching fondness and
pride, his fancy reposing, as it seemed, in a fond con-
templation of so much genius and charm. What was
so taking in him ? and how is one to analyse that
52 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
dazzling surface of pleasantry, that changeful shining
humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness ; beneath which beat
the most kind and tolerant of hearts ?
People were fond of him, and people were proud of
him : his achievements, as it were, sensibly raised their
pleasure in the world, and, to them, became parts of
themselves. They warmed their hands at that centre
of light and heat. It is not every success which has
these beneficent results. We see the successful sneered
at, decried, insulted, even when success is deserved.
Very little of all this, hardly aught of all this, I think,
came in Mr. Stevenson's way. After the beginning
(when the praises of his earliest admirers were irritating
to dull scribes) he found the critics fairly kind, I believe,
and often enthusiastic. He was so much his own
severest critic that he probably paid little heed to
professional reviewers. In addition to his " Rathillet,"
and other MSS. which he destroyed, he once, in the
Highlands, long ago, lost a portmanteau with a batch
of his writings. Alas, that he should have lost or burned
anything! "King's chaff," says our country proverb,
" is better than other folk's corn."
I have remembered very little, or very little that I
can write, and about our last meeting, when he was so
near death, in appearance, and so full of courage — how
can I speak ? His courage was a strong rock, not to be
taken or subdued. When unable to utter a single word,
his pencilled remarks to his attendants were pithy and
extremely characteristic. This courage and spiritual
vitality made one hope that he would, if he desired it,
live as long as Voltaire, that reed among oaks. There
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 53
were of course, in so rare a combination of characteristics,
some which were not equally to the liking of all. He
was highly original in costume, but, as his photographs
are familiar, the point does not need elucidation. Life
was a drama to him, and he delighted, like his own
British admirals, to do things with a certain air. He
observed himself, I used to think, as he observed others,
and " saw himself " in every part he played. There was
nothing of the cabotin in this self-consciousness ; it was
the unextinguished childish passion for " playing at
things " which remained with him. I have a theory
that all children possess genius, and that it dies out
in the generahty of mortals, abiding only with people
whose genius the world is forced to recognise. Mr.
Stevenson illustrates, and perhaps partly suggested, this
private philosophy of mine.
I have said very little ; I have no skill in reminiscences,
no art to bring the living aspect of the man before those
who never knew him. I faintly seem to see the eager
face, the light nervous figure, the fingers busy with roll-
ing cigarettes ; Mr. Stevenson talking, listening, often
rising from his seat, standing, walking to and fro, always
full of vivid intelligence, wearing a mysterious smile. I
remember one pleasant dark afternoon, when he told me
many tales of strange adventures, narratives which he had
heard about a murderous lonely inn, somewhere in the
States. He was as good to hear as to read. I do not
recollect much of that delight in discussion, in con-
troversy, which he shows in his essay on conversation,
where he describes, I believe, Mr. Henley as " Burley,"
and Mr. Symonds as " Opalstein." He had great
54 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
pleasure in the talk of the late Professor Fleeming Jenkyn,
which was both various and copious. But in these
nodes coefiaeque deum I was never a partaker. In many
topics, such as angling, golf, cricket, whereon I am
willingly diffuse, Mr. Stevenson took no interest. He
was very fond of boating and sailing in every kind ; he
hazarded his health by long expeditions among the fairy
isles of ocean, but he " was not a British sportsman,"
though for his measure of strength a good pedestrian, a
friend of the open air, and of all who live and toil
therein.
As to his literary likings, they appear in his own con-
fessions. He revelled in Dickens, but, about Thackeray
— well, I would rather have talked to somebody else !
To my amazement, he was of those (I think) who find
Thackeray " cynical." " He takes you into a garden,
and then pelts you with " — horrid things ! Mr.
Stevenson, on the other hand, had a free admiration
of Mr. George Meredith. He did not so easily forgive
the longueurs and lazinesses of Scott, as a Scot
should do. He read French much ; Greek only in
translations.
Literature was, of course, his first love, but he was
actually an advocate at the Scottish Bar, and, as such,
had his name on a brazen door-plate. Once he was a
competitor for a Chair of Modern History in Edinburgh
University ; he knew the romantic side of Scottish
history very well. In his novel, " Catriona," the character
of James Mohr Macgregor is wonderfully divined.
Once I read some unpublished letters of Catriona's
unworthy father, written when he was selling himself as
RECOLLECTIONS OF R. L. STEVENSON 55
a spy (and lying as he spied) to the Hanoverian usurper.
Mr. Stevenson might have written these letters for
James Mohr ; they might be extracts from " Catriona.'
In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a
forgotten romance of Prince Charles's hidden years, and
longed that Mr. Stevenson should retell it. There was
a treasure, an authentic treasure ; there were real spies,
a real assassin ; a real, or reported, rescue of a lovely
girl from a fire at Strasbourg, by the Prince. The tale
was to begin sur le pont d' Avignon : a young Scotch
exile watching the Rhone, thinking how much of it he
could cover with a salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or
Beauly. To him enter another shady tramping exile,
Blairthwaite, a murderer. And so it was to run on, as
the author's fancy might lead him, with Alan Breck and
the Master for characters. At last, in unpublished MSS.
I found an actual Master of Ballantrae, a Highland
chief — noble, majestically handsome — and a paid spy of
England ! All these papers I sent out to Samoa, too
late. The novel was to have been dedicated to me,
and that chance of immortality is gone, with so much
else.
Mr. Stevenson's last letters to myself were full of his
concern for a common friend of ours, who was very ill.
Depressed himself, Mr. Stevenson wrote to this gentle-
man — why should I not mention Mr. James Payn ? —
with consoling gaiety. I attributed his depression to
any cause but his own health, of which he rarely spoke.
He lamented the " ill-staged fifth act of life " ; he, at
least, had no long hopeless years of diminished force to
bear.
56 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I have known no man in whom the pre-eminently
manly virtues of kindness, courage, sympathy, generosity,
helpfulness, were more beautifully conspicuous than in
Mr. Stevenson, no man so much loved — it is not too
strong a word — by so many and such various people.
He was as unique in character as in literary genius.
RAB'S FRIEND
RAB'S FRIEND
To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John
Brown, a man should have known him well and long,
and should remember much of that old generation of
Scotchmen to whom the author of " Rab and his
Friends " belonged. But that generation has departed.
One by one these wits and scholars of the North,
these epigoni who were not, indeed, of the heroes,
but who had seen and remembered Scott and
Wilson, have passed away. Aytoun and Carlyle and
Dr. Burton, and last. Dr. Brown, are gone. Sir
Theodore Martin alone is left. In her memoir of
Dr. Burton — the historian of Scotland, and author of
" The Book-hunter " — Mrs. Burton remarks that, in her
husband's later days, only Dr. John Brown and Pro-
fessor Blackie remained of all her husband's ancient
friends and coevals, of all who remembered Lockhart,
and Hogg, and their times. But many are left who
knew Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than
the author of this notice. I can hardly say when I first
became acquainted with him, probably it was in my
childhood. Ever since I was a boy, certainly, I used to
see him at intervals, especially in the Christmas vaca-
tions. But he seldom moved from Edinburgh, except
in summer, which he frequently passed in the country
59
6o ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
house of certain friends of his, whose affection made
much of the happiness of his latest years, and whose
unfailing kindness attended him in his dying hours.
Living always in Scotland, Dr. Brown was seen but
rarely by his friends who resided in England. Thus,
though Dr. Brown's sweetness of disposition and charm
of manner, his humour, and his unfailing sympathy and
encouragement, made one feel toward him as to a
familiar friend, yet, of his actual life I saw but little,
and have few reminiscences to contribute. One can
only speak of that singular geniality of his, that temper
of goodness and natural tolerance and affection, which,
as Scotsmen best know, is not universal among the Scots.
Our race does not need to pray, like the mechanic in
the story, that Providence will give us " a good conceit
of ourselves." But we must acknowledge that the
Scotch temper is critical if not captious, argumentative,
inclined to look at the seamy side of men and of their
performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than
on merits and virtues. An example of these blemishes
of the Scotch disposition, carried to an extreme degree
in the nature of a man of genius, is offered to the world
in the writings and " Reminiscences " of Mr. Carlyle.
Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of
feeling. He had no mawkish toleration of things and
people intolerable, but he preferred not to turn his
mind that way. His thoughts were with the good, the
wise, the modest, the learned, the brave of times past,
and he was eager to catch a reflection of their qualities
in the characters of the living, of all with whom he came
into contact. He was, for example, almost optimistic
RAB'S FRIEND 6i
in his estimate of the work of young people in art or
literature. From everything that was beautiful or good,
from a summer day by the Tweed, or from the eyes of a
child, or from the humorous saying of a friend, or from
treasured memories of old Scotch worthies, from re-
collections of his own childhood, from experience of
the stoical heroism of the poor, he seemed to extract
matter for pleasant thoughts of men and the world, and
nourishment for his own great and gentle nature. I have
never known any man to whom other men seemed so
dear — men dead, and men living. He gave his genius to
knowing them, and to making them better known, and
his unselfishness thus became not only a great personal
virtue, but a great literary charm. When you met him,
he had some " good story " or some story of goodness
to tell — for both came alike to him, and his humour
was as unfailing as his kindness. There was in his face
a singular charm, blended, as it were, of the expressions
of mirth and of patience. Being most sensitive to pain,
as well as to pleasure, he was an exception to that rule
of Rochefoucauld's — " nous avons ious assez de force pour
supporter les maux d'auirui." ^
He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others,
and the evils of his own lot were heavy enough.
They saddened him ; but neither illness, nor his
poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so
unselfish. He appeared not to have lost that ano-
dyne and consolation of religious hope, which had
been the strength of his forefathers, and was his best
' It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others.
62 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen.
Wherever he came, he was welcome ; people felt glad
when they had encountered him in the streets — the
streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one knows
every one by sight — and he was at least as joyously
received by the children and the dogs as by the grown-
up people of every family. A friend has kindly shown
me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of
dogs, his interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was
attached to him, was evinced in the very last hours of
his life. But enough has been said, in general terms,
about the character of " the beloved physician," as Dr.
Brown was called in Edinburgh, and a brief account
may be given, in some detail, of his life and ways.
Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray,
slaty-looking little towns in the pastoral moorlands of
southern Scotland. These towns have no great beauty
that they should be admired by strangers, but the
natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached
to their " gray hills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful
where man's greed does not pollute it, that the Border
people are all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer, loved
the divine Enipeus. We hold it " far the fairest of the
floods that run upon the earth." How dear the border
scenery was to Dr. John Brown, and how well he knew
and could express its legendary magic, its charm woven
of countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the
sorcery of old stories, may be understood by readers of
his essay on " Minchmoor." ^ The father of Dr. Brown
1 In the third volume of his essays.
RAB'S FRIEND 63
was the third in a lineage of ministers of the sect called
Seceders. To explain who the Seceders were, it would
be necessary to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch
ecclesiastical history. The minister was proud of being
not only a " Seceder " but a " Burgher." He inherited,
to be brief, the traditions of a most spiritually-minded
and most spirited set of men, too much bent, it may
appear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of
opinions, but certainly most true to themselves and to
their own ideals of Hberty and of faith.
Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy,
who taught himself Greek that he might read the New
Testament ; who walked twenty-four miles — leaving his
folded sheep in the night — to buy the precious volume in
St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a teacher of much
repute among his own people. Of Dr. Brown's father, he
himself wrote a most touching and beautiful account in
his " Letter to John Cairns, D.D." This essay contains,
perhaps, the very finest passages that the author ever
penned. His sayings about his own childhood remind
one of the manner of Lamb, without that curious fan-
tastic touch which is of the essence of Lamb's style.
The following lines, for example, are a revelation of
childish psychology, and probably may be applied,
with almost as much truth, to the childhood of our
race : —
" Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at
what is above them ; they like the ground, and its flowers
and stones, its 'red sodgers' and lady- birds, and all its
queer things ; their world is aboict three feet high, and they
64 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
are more often stooping than gazing up. I know I was past
ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceiHngs of the rooms
in the manse at Biggar."
I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our
race, child-hke in so many ways, were child-Uke in this,
and worshipped, not the phenomena of the heavens, but
objects more on a level with their eyes — the " queer
things " of their low-lying world. In this essay on his
father, Dr. Brown has written lines about a child's first
knowledge of death, which seem as noteworthy as Steele's
famous passage about his father's death and his own
half-conscious grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a
Scottish funeral — the funeral of his own mother — as he
saw it with the eyes of a boy of five years old, while his
younger brother, a baby of a few months —
" leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight — the
crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes
of the hearse. . . . Then, to my surprise and alarm, the
coffin, resting on its bearers, was placed over the dark hole,
and I watched with curious eye the unrolling of those neat
black bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen
since. My father took the one at the head, and also
another much smaller, springing from the same point as
his, which he had caused to be placed there, and unrolling
it, put it into my hand. I twisted it firmly round my
fingers, and awaited the result ; the burial men with their
real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it rested at the
bottom it was too far down for me to see it. The grave
was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that
it might hold us all. My father first and abruptly let his
cord drop, followed by the rest. This was too much. I
now saw what was meant, and held on and fixed my fist
and feet, and I believe my father had some difficulty in
RAB'S FRIEND 65
forcing open my small fingers ; he let the little black cord
drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its
open end disappearing in the gloom." ^
The man who wrote this, and many another passage
as true and tender, might surely have been famous in
fiction, if he had turned his powers that way. He had
imagination, humour, pathos ; he was always studying
and observing life ; his last volume, especially, is like a
collection of fragments that might have gone toward
making a work, in some ways not inferior to the romances
of Scott. When the third volume of Essays was pub-
lished, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who
apparently had no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown,
asked why he did not write a novel. He was by that
time over seventy years of age, and, though none guessed
it, within a few weeks of his death. What he might
have done, had he given himself to literature only, it is
impossible to guess. But he caused so much happiness,
and did so much good, in that gentle profession of heal-
ing which he chose, and which brought him near to
many who needed consolation more than physic, that
we need not forget his deliberate choice. Literature
had only his horae subsecivae, as he said : Subseciva
quaedam tempoi-a quae ego perire non patior, as Cicero
writes, "shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer
not to be lost."
' " I remember I went into the room where my father's body lay,
and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my
hand, and fell a-beatingthe coffin and calling ' Papa,' for I know not
how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there." — Steele,
The Tatler, June 6, 1710.
E
66 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his
people lived at Biggar, the austere life of work, and of
thought intensely bent on the real aim of existence, on
God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps rare now,
even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient than
of old to the motto of that ring found on Magus
Moor, where Archbishop Shairp was murdered, Re-
membe? upon Dethe. If any reader has not yet made
the acquaintance of Dr. Brown's works, one might
counsel him to begin with the " Letter to John
Cairns, D.D.," the fragment of biography and auto-
biography, the description of the fountainheads from
which the genius of the author flowed. In his early
boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a
man who, from his . son's affectionate description, seems
to have confined a fiery and romantic genius within the
channels of Seceder and Burgher theology. When the
father received a call to the " Rose Street Secession
Church," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that
ancient Scottish seminary, the High School — the school
where Scott was taught not much Latin and no Greek
worth mentioning. Scott was still alive and strong in
those days, and Dr. Brown describes how he and his
school companions would take off their hats to the
Shirra as he passed in the streets.
" Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive
with power ; had you met him anywhere else, you would
say he was a Liddesdale store farmer, come of gentle blood
— ' a stout, blunt carle,' as he says of himself, with the
swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills — a
large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad
RAB'S FRIEND 67
and stooping shoulders was set that head which, with
Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all
the world." Scott was then Hving in 39 Castle Street. I
do not know whether the many pilgrims, whom one
meets moving constantly in the direction of Melrose and
Abbotsford, have thought of making pilgrimage to Castle
Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's "dear old
friend," — his dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy
days, one knows little — days when " Bob Ainslie and I
were coming up Infirmary Street from the High School,
our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only
lovers and boys know how or why." Concerning the
doctor's character, he has left it on record that he liked
a dog-fight. " ' A dog-fight,' shouted Bob, and was off,
and so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it might
not be over before we were up. . . . Dogs like fighting ;
old Isaac (Watts, not Walton) says they ' delight ' in it,
and for the best of all reasons ; and boys are not cruel
because they like to see the fight. This is a very
diflFerent thing from a love of making dogs fight." And
this was the most famous of all dog-fights — since the
old Irish Brehons settled the laws of that sport, and
gravely decided what was to be done if a child inter-
fered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man — for
this was the dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced
to his historian.
Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown
was a medical student and a clerk at Minto Hospital.
How he renewed his acquaintance there, and in what
sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it is
superfluous to tell, for every one who reads a:
68 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
all has read that story, and most readers not with-
out tears. As a medical student in Edinburgh,
Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the
famous surgeon — a friendship only closed by death.
I only saw them once together, a very long time
ago, and then from the point of view of a patient.
These occasions are not agreeable, and patients, like
the old cock which did not crow when plucked, are apt
to be "very much absorbed" ; but Dr. Brown's attitude ,
toward the man whom he regarded with the reverence
of a disciple, as well as with the affection of a friend,
was very remarkable.
When his studies were over. Dr. Brown practised
for a year as assistant to a surgeon in Chatham. It
must have been when he was at Chatham that a
curious event occurred. Many years later, Charles
Dickens was in Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, ,
and was dining with some Edinburgh people. Dickens [
began to speak about the panic which the cholera had
caused in England : how ill some people had behaved.
As a contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor
woman had died, deserted by every one except a young ]
physician. Some one, however, ventured to open the
door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor
asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on
his patient's death, but quite untouched by the general
panic. " Why, that was^Dr. John Brown," one of the guests I
observed ; and it seems that, thus early in his career, the
doctor had been setting an example of the courage and j
charity of his profession. After a year spent in Chatham, j
he returned to Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of i
RAB'S FRIEND 69
his life, busy partly with his art of healing, partly with
literature. He lived in Rutland Street, near the railway
station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the
west, and close to Princes Street, the chief street of the
town, separated by a green valley, once a loch, from
the high Castle Rock. It was the room in which
his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and
a room full of interest it was. In his long life,
the doctor had gathered round him many curious
relics of artists and men of letters ; a drawing of a
dog by Turner I remember particularly, and a copy
of " Don Juan," in the first edition, with Byron's manu-
script notes. Dr. Brown had a great love and knowledge
of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech ; and he had
very many friends among men of letters, such as Mr.
Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray. Dr. Brown himself was a
clever designer of rapid little grotesques, rough sketches
of dogs and men. One or two of them are engraved in
the little paper-covered booklets in which some of
his essays were separately published — booklets which
he was used to present to people who came to see
him and who were interested in all that he did. I
remember some vivacious grotesques which he drew for
one of my brothers when we were schoolboys. These
little things were carefully treasured by boys who knew
Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of
sustaining a conversation on the points of a Dandy
Dinmont terrier and other mysteries important to youth.
He was a bibliophile — a taste which he inherited from
his father, who "began collecting books when he was
twelve, and was collecting to his last hours."
70 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his
death, he was kind enough to lend me one of the rarest of
his treasures, " Poems," by Mr. Ruskin. Probably Mr.
Ruskin had presented the book to his old friend ; in no
other way were it easy to procure writings which the author
withdrew from publication, if, indeed, they ever were,
properly speaking, published. Thus Dr. Brown was all
things to all men, and to all boys. He " had a word for
every one," as poor people say, and a word to the point,
for he was as much at home with the shepherd on the
hills, or with the angler between Hollylea and Cloven-
fords, as with the dusty book-hunter, or the doggy young
Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to " draw her
a picture," or the friend of genius famous through all the
world, Thackeray, when he " spoke, as he seldom did, of
divine things."
Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has
left in the way of compositions : a light, but imperishable
literary baggage. His studies are usually derived from
personal experience, which he reproduced with singular
geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the
tradition of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived
Scotch people, who, themselves, had listened attentively
to those who went before them. Since Scott, these
ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no
such attentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr.
Brown. His paper called " Mystifications," a narrative
of the pranks of Miss Stirling Graham, is a brief, vivid
record of the clever and quaint society of Scotland sixty
years ago. Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is now
only English society — a little narrower, a little prouder,
RAB'S FRIEND 71
sometimes even a little duller. But old people of
position spoke the old Scotch tongue sixty years ago,
and were full of wonderful genealogies, full of reminis-
cences of the " '45," and the adventures of the Jacobites.
The very last echoes of that ancient world are dying
now from memory, like the wide reverberations of that gun
which Miss Nelly Mac William heard on the day when
Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely
all through Scotland.
The children of this generation, one fears, will
hardly hear of these old raids and duels, risings and
rebellions, by oral tradition handed down, unbroken,
through aunts and grandmothers. Scott reaped a
full, late harvest of the memories of clannish and
feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came as a later gleaner,
and gathered these stirring tales of " A Jacobite Family "
which are published in the last volume of his essays.
When he was an observer, not a hearer only. Dr. Brown
chiefly studied and best wrote of the following topics :
passages and characters of humour and pathos which he
encountered in his life and profession ; children, dogs.
Border scenery, and fellow- workers in life and science.
Under one or other of these categories all his best
compositions might be arranged. The most famous and
most exquisite of all his works in the first class is the
unrivalled " Rab and his Friends" — a study of the
stoicism and tenderness of the Lowland character
worthy of Scott. In a minor way the little paper on
" Jeems," the door-keeper in a Dissenting house of the
Lord, is interesting to Scotch people, though it must
seem a rather curious revelation to all others. " Her
72 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
last Half-crown" is another study of the honesty that
survived in a starving and outcast Scotch girl, when all
other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue, had gone
before her character to some place where, let us hope,
they may rejoin her ; for if we are to suffer for the vices
which have abandoned us, may we not get some credit
for the virtues that we have abandoned, but that once
were ours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions
unfulfilled ? " The Black Dwarf's Bones " is a sketch
of the misshapen creature from whom Scott borrowed
the character that gives a name to one of his minor
Border stories. The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie
he was called among men) was fond of poetry, but hated
Burns. He was polite to the fair, but classed mankind
at large with his favourite aversions : ghosts, fairies, and
robbers. There was this of human about the Black
Dwarf, that "he hated folk that are aye gaun to dee,
and never do't." The village beauties were wont to
come to him for a Judgment of Paris on their charms,
and he presented each with a flower, which was of a
fixed value in his standard of things beautiful. One
kind of rose, the prize of the most fair, he only gave
thrice. Paris could not have done his dooms more
courteously, and, if he had but made judicious use of
rose, lily, and lotus, as prizes, he might have pleased all
the three Goddesses ; Troy still might be standing, and
the lofty house of King Priam.
Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called
" Pet Marjorie " holds the highest place. Perhaps
certain passages are " wrote too sentimentally," as
Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice
RAB'S FRIEND 73
of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly
composed when speaking of this wonderful fairy-like
little girl, whose affection was as warm as her humour
and genius were precocious. " Infant phenomena " are
seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so
quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease to regard her
as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her memory remains
sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little
Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir
Joshua painted, and who died very soon after she was
thus made immortal.
It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie
Fleming ; every one knows about her and her studies :
" Isabella is teaching me to make simme colings, nots of
interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c." Here is a Shake-
spearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness :
" ' Macbeth ' is a pretty composition, but awful one."
Again, "I never read sermons of any kind, but I read
novelettes and my Bible." " ' Tom Jones ' and Gray's
•Elegy in a Country Churchyard' are both excellent,
and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the
men." Her Calvinistic belief in '■'■unquestionable fire
and brimston " is unhesitating, but the young theologian
appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for "un-
quenchable." There is something humorous in the
alteration, as if Marjorie refused to be put off with an
" excellent family substitute " for fire and brimstone, and
demanded the " unquestionable " article, no other being
genuine, please observe trade mark.
Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous
study of dogs, " Rab," of course, holds the same place
74 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
as Marjorie among his sketches of children. But if his
" Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the
little garden in which Mary Stuart did not play when a
child, is second to " Marjorie," so " Our Dogs " is a good
second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brown never wrote
anything more mirthful than his description of the
sudden birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic
but cowardly mongrel, a cur of low degree.
" Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the
small gardens before his own and the neighbouring doors.
Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced
man — torvo vultu — was, by law of contrast, a great culti-
vator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but
non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye.
One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge
bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two
minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name
of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light
of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or
thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose,
when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was
out upon him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific gowl. I
watched them. Instantly Toby made at him with a roar
too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreat-
ing without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe,
in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming
his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone-
planting at his leisure ; the enemy, who had scuttled behind
the glass door, glared at him. From this moment Toby was
an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all. . . .
That very evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door's dog,
a big tyrannical bully and coward. . . . To him Toby paid
RAB'S FRIEND 75
a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked
about, as much as to say, ' Come on, Macduff' ; but Macduff
did not come on."
This story is one of the most amazing examples of
instant change of character on record, and disproves the
sceptical remark that "no one was ever converted,
except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army." I am
sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be
very much attached to cats. I never heard him say
anything against cats, or, indeed, against anybody ; but
there are passages in his writings which tend to show
that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far from
regarding cats as " the higher vermin." He tells a story
of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a victorious cat, which,
entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs with severe
loss, and finally escaped unharmed from her enemies.
Dr. Brown's family gloried in the possession of a Dandy
Dinmont named John Pym, whose cousin (Auld Pepper)
belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was much
interested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only
matched by that of the mother of Candide, and, at one
time, threatened to result in the extinction of this branch
of the House of Pepper. Dr. Brown had remarked, and
my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is
not game, his apparent lack of courage arises " from
kindness of heart."
Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his
descriptions of scenery, and of the ancient historical
associations with Scotch scenery, " Minchmoor " is the
most important. He had always been a great lover of
76 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
the Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in
" Minchmoor " was taken, if I am not mistaken, in com-
pany with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in the
University of Oxford, and author of one of the most
beautiful of Tweedside songs, a modern " Bush aboon
Traquair : " —
" And what saw ye there,
At the bush aboon Traquair ;
Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
I heard the cushie croon
Thro' the gowden afternoon,
And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."
There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk
than that which Dr. Brown took in the summer after-
noon. Within a few miles, many places famous in
history and ballad may be visited : the road by which
Montrose's men fled from Philiphaugh fight ; Traquair
House, with the bears on its gates, as on the portals of
the Baron of Bradwardine; Williamhope, where Scott
and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted and
went their several ways. From the crest of the road
you see all the Border hills, the Maiden Paps, the
Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg,
and so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower,
where Scott lay when a child, and clapped his hands at
the flashes of the lightning, hand sine Dis animosus
infans, like Horace.
From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown
into the valley of Yarrow, and the deep black pools,
now called the "dowie dens," and so, "through the
RAB'S FRIEND 77
pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to
the railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet
won back Tamlane from the queen of the fairies.
All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown, and on
one of the last occasions when I met him, he was
living at HoUylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel,
Scott's home while he was happy and prosperous, before
he had the unhappy thought of building Abbotsford.
At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to
write, and his health suffered from attacks of melan-
choly, in which the world seemed very dark to him. I
have been allowed to read some letters which he wrote
in one of these intervals of depression. With his
habitual unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to him-
self, and, though he did not care for society at such
times, he said nothing of his own condition that could
distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten : he was
unusually well, he even returned to his literary work,
and saw his last volume of collected essays through the
press. They were most favourably received, and the
last letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure
which this success gave him. Three editions of his
book ("John Leech, and Other Essays") were published
in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, and one
might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he
would take up his pen again. But his strength was less
than we had hoped. A cold settled on his lungs,
and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he grew
rapidly weaker. He had Uttle suffering at the end, and
his mind remained unclouded. No man of letters could
78 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
be more widely regretted, for he was the friend of all
who read his books, as, even to people who only met
him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear
and familiar.
In one of his very latest writings, "' On Thackeray's
Death," Dr. Brown told people (what some of them
needed, and still need to be told) how good, kind, and
thoughtful for others was our great writer — our greatest
master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some
of the lines Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be
applied to himself: "He looked always fresh, with that
abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost infantile
face " — a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last
years, and mildly lit up with eyes full of kindness, and
softened by sorrow. In his last year, Mr. Swinburne
wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in which there seems
something of the poet's prophetic gift, and a voice
sounds as of a welcome home : — '
" Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,
Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed
With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread, —
The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold.
None there might wear about his brows enrolled
A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,
Whose lovesome love of children and the dead
All men give thanks for ; I, far off, behold
A dear dead hand that links us, and a light
The blithest and benignest of the night, —
The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be
A star to show your spirit in present sight
Some happier isle in the Elysian sea
Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Never but once did I enjoy the privilege of meeting
the author of " Elsie Venner " — Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It was at a dinner given by Mr. Lowell, and of conver-
sation with Dr. Holmes I had very little. He struck
me as being wonderfully erect, active, and vivacious for
his great age. He spoke (perhaps I should not chronicle
this impression) — he spoke much, and freely, but rather
as if he were wound up to speak, so to say — wound up,
I mean, by a sense of duty to himself and kindness
to strangers, who were naturally curious about so well-
known a man. In his aspect there was a certain dryness,
and, altogether, his vivacity, his ceaselessness, and a
kind of equability of tone in his voice, reminded me of
what Homer says concerning the old men around Priam,
above the gate of Troy, how they " chirped like cicalas
on a summer day." About the matter of his talk I
remember nothing, only the manner remains with me,
and mine may have been a false impression, or the
manner may have been accidental, and of the moment :
or, again, a manner appropriate for conversation with
strangers, each coming up one after the other, to view
respectfully so great a lion. Among his friends and
intimates he was probably a different man, with a tone
other and more reposeful.
8i J.
82 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
He had a long, weary task before him, then, to talk
his way, ever courteous, alert, attentive, through part
of a London season. Yet, when it was all over, he
seems to have enjoyed it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect
me, for that one time, with such a sense of pleasure as
Mr. Lowell did — Mr. Lowell, whom I knew so much
better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind,
learned, friendly, and delightfully natural.
Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and
I have merely tried to make a sort of photographic
" snap-shot " at him, in a single casual moment, one of
myriads of such moments. Turning to Dr. Holmes's
popular, as distinct from his professional writings, one
is reminded, as one often is, of the change which seems
to come over some books as the reader grows older.
Many books are to one now what they always were ;
some, like the Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow
better on every fresh reading. There are books which
filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their
novelty, their strangeness, freshness, greatness. Thus
Homer, and the best novels of Thackeray, and of
Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of — well, of all the real poets, moved this
astonishment of admiration, and being read again, they
move it still. On a different level, one may say as much
about books so unlike each other, as those of Poe and
of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.
There are, again, other books which caused this happy
emotion of wonder, when first perused, long since, but
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES St,
which do so no longer. I am not much surprised to find
Charles Kingsley's novels among them.
In the case of Dr. Holmes's books, I am very sensible
of this disenchanting effect of time and experience.
" The Professor at the Breakfast Table " and the novels
came into my hands when I was very young, in "green,
unknowing youth." They seemed extraordinary, new,
fantasies of wisdom and wit ; the reflections were such
as surprised me by their depth, the illustrations dazzled
by their novelty and brilliance. Probably they will still
be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to be
pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the
wise blackbird —
" Recapture
The first fine careless rapture."
By this time, of course, one understands many of the
constituents of Dr. Holmes's genius, the social, historical,
ancestral, and professional elements thereof. Now, it is
the business of criticism to search out and illustrate
these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky
thing, that the results of this knowledge when acquired,
should sometimes be a partial disenchantment. But we
are not disenchanted at all by this kind of science, when
the author whom we are examining is a great natural
genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott. Such
natures bring to the world far more than they receive,
as far as our means of knowing what they receive are
concerned. The wind of the spirit that is not of this
earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through
their words, and thoughts, and deeds. They are not
mere combinations, however deft and subtle, of known
84 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
atoms. They must continually delight, and continually
surprise ; custom cannot stale them ; like the heaven-
born Laws in Sophocles, age can never lull them to
sleep. Their works, when they are authors, never lose
hold on our fancy and our interest.
As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform
me. Dr. Holmes, though a most interesting and amiable
and kindly man and writer, was not of this class. As
an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, an un-
assuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he
certainly does not hold one as, for example, Addison
does. The old Spectator makes me smile, pleases,
tickles, diverts me now, even more than when I lay on
the grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the
trout were sluggish, in the early afternoon. It is only
a personal fact that Dr. Holmes, read in the same old
seasons, with so much pleasure and admiration and
surprise, no longer affects me in the old way. Carlyle,
on the other hand, in his " Frederick," which used to
seem rather long, now entertains me far more than ever.
But I am well aware that this is a mere subjective
estimate; that Dr. Holmes may really be as great a
genius as I was wont to think him, for criticism is only
a part of our impressions. The opinion of mature
experience, as a rule, ought to be sounder than that of
youth ; in this case I cannot but think that it is sounder.
Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what
he calls " the Brahmin caste," the class which, in England,
before the sailing of the May Flower, and ever since,
had always been literary and highly educated. " I like
books ; I was born and bred among them," he says.
OLIVER Wr<:NDELL HOLMES 85
"and have the easy feeling, when I get into their
presence, that a stable-boy has among horses." He is
fond of books, and, above all, of old books— strange,
old medical works, for example — full of portents and
prodigies, such as those of Wierus.
New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard,
and its steady maintenance of the literary and learned
tradition among the clergy, was, naturally, the home of
the earliest great American school of writers. These
men — Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Haw-
thorne, and so many others— had all received the same
sort of education as Europeans of letters used to receive.
They had not started as printers' devils, or newspaper
reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic.
It does not matter much how a genius begins — as a
rural butcher, or an apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer
to the Signet. Still, the New Englanders were academic
and classical. New England has, by this time, estab-
lished a tradition of its literary origin and character.
Her children are sons of the Puritans, with their inde-
pendence, their narrowness, their appreciation of comfort,
their hardiness in doing without it, their singular scruples
of conscience, their sense of the awfulness of sin, their
accessibility to superstition. We can read of the later
New Englanders in the making, among the works of
Cotton Mather, his father Increase INIather, and the witch-
burning, periwig-hating, doctrinal Judge Sewall, who
so manfully confessed and atoned for his mistake about
the Salem witches. These men, or many of them, were
deeply-learned Calvinists, according to the standard of
their day, a day lasting from, say, the Restoration to
86 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is erudite, literary —
nay, full of literary vanity — mystical, visionary, credulous
to an amusing degree.
But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish
correspondent and counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or
grandsons of these men gained the War of Independence.
Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance is
not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works. Their
democracy is not roaring modern democracy, but that
of the cultivated middle classes. Their stern Calvinism
slackened into many " isms," but left a kind of religi-
osity behind it. One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums
up his whole creed in the two words Pater Noster. All
these hereditary influences are consciously made con-
spicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in Hawthorne's.
In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old
terror of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the
old concern about conduct, converted into aesthetic
sources of literary pleasure, of literary effects.
As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes
added abundant knowledge of the new sort ; and apt,
unexpected bits of science made popular, analogies and
illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his
works. Thus, in " Elsie Venner," and in " The Guardian
Angel," "heredity" is his theme. He is always brood-
ing over the thought that each of us is so much made
up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us
so many disagreeable things — vice, madness, disease,
emotions, tricks of gesture. No doubt these things are
bequeathed, but all in such new proportions and rela-
tions, that each of us is himself and nobody else, and
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 87
therefore had better make up his mind to be himself,
and for himself responsible.
All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly under-
stood, Dr. Holmes derives from science. But, in
passing through his mind, that of a New Englander
conscious of New England's past, science takes a
stain of romance and superstition. Elsie Venner,
through an experience of her mother's, inherits the
nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from
common life as the tale of " Melusine," or any other
echidna. The fantasy has its setting in a commonplace
New England environment, and thus recalls a Haw-
thorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more
humorous. The heroine of the " Guardian Angel,"
again, exposes a character in layers, as it were, each
stratum of consciousness being inherited from a different
ancestor — among others, a red Indian. She has many
personalities, like the queer women we read about in
French treatises on hysterics and nervous diseases.
These stories are "fairy tales of science," by a man of
science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch of the
poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches.
The "blend" is singular enough, and not without its
originality of fascination.
Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently
took an imaginative pleasure in all shapes of supersti-
tion that he could muster. I must quote a passage
from " The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as pecu-
liarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half
accepting the abnormally romantic — accepting just
88 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter Scott. Connected
with the extract is a curious anecdote.
" I think I am a little superstitious. There were two
things, when I was a boy, that diabolised my imagina-
tion, — I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of
a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first
was a series of marks called the ' Devil's footsteps.'
These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no
grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the
" dewberry," as our Southern neighbours call it, in
prettier and more Shakespearian language, did not
spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry,
sadly-sweet ' everlasting ' could not grow, but all was
bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of
the public buildings near my home, — the college dormi-
tory named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think
many persons are aware of the existence of this mark, —
little having been said about the story in print, as it
was considered very desirable, for the sake of the
Institution, to hush it up. In the north-west corner,
and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there
are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well,
but not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of
that corner must have been carried away, from within
outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not
care to repeat the particulars ; but some young men
had been using sacred things in a profane and unlawful
way, when the occurrence, which was variously ex-
plained, took place. The story of the Appearance in
the chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards ; but
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 89
of the injury to the building there could be no question ;
and the zigzag line, where the mortar is a little thicker
than before, is still distinctly visible.
"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,'
had never attracted attention before this time, though
there is no evidence that they had not existed previously,
except that of the late Miss M., a ' Goody,' so called,
who was positive on the subject, but had a strange horror
of referring to an affair of which she was thought to
know something. ... I tell you it was not so pleasant
for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed
in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted locked
upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret, — with
' Devil's footsteps ' in the fields behind the house, and
in front of it the patched dormitory, where the unex-
plained occurrence had taken place which startled those
godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of
them was epileptic from that day forward, and another,
after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took to re-
ligion, and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity."
It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole
story, instead of hinting at it, for a similar tale is told at
Brazenose College, and elsewhere. Now take, along
with Dr. Holmes's confession to a grain of superstition,
this remark on, and explanation of, the curious coinci-
dences which thrust themselves on the notice of most
people.
" Excuse me, — I return to my story of the Commons-
table. Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and
dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it
was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of meat
90 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding
it, beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time.
The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides
found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for
missing forks ; — they knew where to find one, if it was
not in its place. Now the odd thing was, that, after
waiting so many years to hear of this College trick, I
should hear it mentioned a second time within the same
twenty-four hours by a College youth of the present
generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened
to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in
rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as
if they were linked like chain-shot.
"I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder
over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think,
however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The
explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts
there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly
arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have
the least idea of the enormous number of impressions
which pass through our consciousness, until in some
future life we see the photographic record of our
thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
" Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands
to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel
a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things
began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you
do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I
have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to
come ? Listen, then. The number of these living ele-
ments in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multi-
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 91
tude of our thoughts ; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
these coincidences in the Avorld of thought illustrate
those which we constantly observe in the world of
outward events."
Now for the anecdote — one of Mark Twain's.
Some years ago, Mark Twain published in Harper's
Magazine an article on " Mental Telegraphy." He
illustrated his meaning by a story of how he once
wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had
popped into his head between asleep and awake, to a
friend on the other side of America. He did not send
the letter, but, by return of post, received one from his
friend. " Now, I'll tell you what he is going to say,"
said Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud,
and then, opening his friend's despatch, proved that
they were essentially identical. This is what he calls
" Mental Telegraphy " ; others call it " Telepathy," and
the term is merely descriptive.
Now, on his own showing, in our second extract. Dr.
Holmes should have explained coincidences like this as
purely the work of chance, and I rather incline to think
that he would have been right. But Mark Twain, in
his article on "Mental Telegraphy," cites Dr. Holmes
for a story of how he once, after dinner, as his letters
came in, felt constrained to tell, a propos des bottes, the
story of the last challenge to judicial combat in England
(18x7). He then opened a newspaper directed to him
from England, the Sporting Times, and therein his eyes
lighted on an account of this very affair — Abraham
Thornton's challenge to battle when he was accused
92 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of murder, in 1817. According to Mark Twain, Dr.
Holmes was disposed to accept " Mental Telegraphy "
rather than mere chance as the cause of this coinci-
dence. Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to
have been a favourite of his. It occurs in "The
Professor," in the fifth section. Perhaps he told it
pretty frequently; probably that is why the printed
version was sent to him ; still, he was a little staggered
by the coincidence. There was enough of Cotton Mather
in the man of science to give him pause.
The form of Dr. Holmes's best known books, the set
concerned with the breakfast-table and " Over the Tea-
cups," is not very fortunate. Much conversation at
breakfast is a weariness of the flesh. We want to eat
what is necessary, and then to go about our work or play.
If American citizens in a boarding-house could endure
these long palavers, they must have been very unlike
the hasty feeders caricatured in "Martin Chuzzlewit."
Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast
parties in the Albany ; but breakfast parties are obsolete
— an unregrettable parcel of things lost. The mono-
logues, or dialogues, were published serially in the
Atlantic Monthly, but they have had a vitality and
a vogue far beyond those of the magazine causerie.
Some of their popularity they may owe to the descrip-
tion of the other boarders, and to the kind of novel
which connects the fortunes of these personages.
But it is impossible for an Englishman to know
whether these American types are exactly drawn or
not. Their fortunes do not strongly interest one,
though the "Sculpin" — the patriotic, deformed Bos-
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 93
tonian, with his great-great-grandmother's ring (she
was hanged for a witch) — is a very original and
singular creation. The real interest lies in the wit,
wisdom, and learning. The wit, now and then, seems
to-day rather in the nature of a " goak." One might
give examples, but to do so seems ill-natured and
ungrateful.
There are some very perishable puns. The learning
is not so recherche as it appeared when we knew nothing
of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef, the author of a
book against the persecution of witches. Calef, of
course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive him for
refusing to see a lady, known to Mr. Mather, who
floated about in the air. That she did so was no good
reason for hanging or burning a number of parishioners ;
but, did she float, and, if so, how ? Mr. Calef said it
would be a miracle, so he declined to view the perform-
ance. His logic was thin, though of a familiar descrip-
tion. Of all old things, at all events. Dr. Holmes was
fond. He found America scarcely aired, new and raw,
devoid of history and of associations. " The Tiber has
a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons
^Hus, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved
Charles, eddying round the piles of West Boston
Bridge." No doubt this is a common sentiment
among Americans.
Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an
historical atmosphere, and then, when they come to
Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think
Schenectady, New York, "a better place." It is not
easy to understand what ailed Hawthorne with Europe;
94 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
he was extremely caustic in his writings about that con-
tinent, and discontented. Our matrons were so stout
and placid that they irritated him. Indeed, they are a
little heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable
slimness, even in this poor old country. Fond as he
was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes remained loyal
to the historical present. He was not one of those
Americans who are always censuring England, and
always hankering after her. He had none of that
irritable feeling, which made a great contemporary of
his angrily declare that he could endure to hear "Ye
Mariners of England " sung, because of his own
country's successes, some time ago. They were gallant
and conspicuous victories of the American frigates ; we
do not grudge them. A fair fight should leave no
rancour, above all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes's
withers would have been unwrung by Campbell's
ditty.
He visited England in youth, and fifty years later.
On the anniversary of the American defeat at Bunker's
Hill (June 17), Dr. Holmes got his degree in the old
Cambridge. He received degrees at Edinburgh and at
Oxford ; in his " Hundred Days in Europe " he says
very little about these historic cities. The men at
Oxford asked, "Did he come in the 'One HossShay'?"
the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein.
The whole visit to England pleased and wearied him.
He likened it to the shass caffy of Mr. Henry Foker —
the fillip at the end of the long banquet of life. He
went to see the Derby, for he was fond of horses, of
racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing. He had
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 95
the great boldness once, audax Juvefita, to write a song
in praise of that comfortable creature — wine. The
prudery of many Americans about the juice of the
grape is a thing very astonishing to a temperate Briton.
An admirable author, who wrote an account of the old
convivial days of an American city, found that repu-
table magazines could not accept such a degrading
historical record. There was no nonsense about Dr.
Holmes. His poems were mainly "occasional" verses
for friendly meetings ; or humorous, like the celebrated
" One Horse Shay." Of his serious verses, the " Nau-
tilus " is probably too familiar to need quotation ; a
noble fancy is nobly and tunefully " moralised." Pleas-
ing, cultivated, and so forth, are adjectives not dear to
poets. To say "sublime," or "magical," or "strenuous,"
of Dr. Holmes's muse, would be to exaggerate. How
far he maintained his scholarship, I am not certain ; but
it is odd that, in his preface to "The Guardian Angel,"
he should quote from "Jonathan Edwards the younger,"
a story for which he might have cited Aristotle.
Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes's
creations as my favourite, it would be "a frequent corre-
spondent of his," and of mine — the immortal Gifted
Hopkins. Never was minor poet more kindly and
genially portrayed. And if one had to pick out three
of his books, as the best worth reading, they would be
"The Professor," "Elsie Venner," and "The Guardian
Angel." They have not the impeccable art and dis-
tinction of " The House of the Seven Gables " and
"The Scarlet Letter," but they combine fantasy with
living human interest, and with humour. With Sir
96 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and — may we
not add Dr. Weir Mitchell? — Dr. Holmes excellently
represents the physician in humane letters. He has left
a blameless and most amiable memory, unspotted by the
world. His works are full of the savour of his native
soil, naturally, without straining after " Americanism ; "
and they are national, not local or provincial. He
crossed the great gulf of years, between the central
age of American literary production — the time of Haw-
thorne and Poe — to our own time, and, like Nestor, he
reigned among the third generation. As far as the
world knows, the shadow of a literary quarrel never fell
on him ; he was without envy or jealousy, incurious of
his own place, never vain, petulant, or severe. He was
even too good-humoured, and the worst thing I have
heard of him is that he could never say "no" to an
autograph hunter.
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS
"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you
have convinced me that no man can be a poet." The
study of Mr. WiUiam Morris's poems, in the new
collected edition,^ has convinced me that no man, or,
at least, no middle-aged man, can be a critic. I read
Mr. Morris's poems (thanks to the knightly honours
conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no
ambiguity as to ' Mr. Morris '), but it is not the book
only that I read. The scroll of my youth is unfolded.
I see the dear place where first I perused "The Blue
Closet"; the old faces of old friends flock around
me ; old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and
revive. St. Andrews, Oxford, come before the mind's
eye, with
" Many a place
That's in sad case
Where joy was wont afore, oh ! "
as Minstrel Burne sings. These voices, faces, land-
scapes mingle with the music and blur the pictures
of the poet who enchanted for us certain hours passed
in the paradise of youth. A reviewer who finds him-
self in this case may as well frankly confess that he
can no more criticise Mr. Morris dispassionately than
1 Longmans.
99
loo ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
he could criticise his old self and the friends whom he
shall never see again, till he meets them
" Beyond the sphere of time,
And sin, and griefs control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul. "
To write of one's own "adventures among books" may
be to provide anecdotage more or less trivial, more or
less futile, but, at least, it is to write historically. We
know how books have affected, and do affect ourselves,
our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions
and revived sensations. To judge books dispassion-
ately and impersonally, is much more difficult — indeed,
it is practically impossible, for our own tastes and
experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts,
do what we will. However, the effort must be made,
for to say that, at a certain age, in certain circumstances,
an individual took much pleasure in "The Life and
Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is cer-
tainly not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."
There have been three blossoming times in the
English poetry of the nineteenth century. The first
dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and, later,
from Shelley, Byron, Keats. By 1822 the blossoming
time was over, and the second blossoming time
began in 1 830-1 833, with young Mr. Tennyson and
Mr. Browning. It broke forth again in 1842 and did
not practically cease till England's greatest laureate
sang of the " Crossing of the Bar." But while Tenny-
son put out his full strength in 1842, and Mr. Browning
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS loi
rather later, in " Bells and Pomegranates " (" Men and
Women"), the third spring came in 1858, with Mr.
Morris's " Defence of Guinevere," and flowered till
Mr. Swinburne's " Atalanta in Calydon " appeared in
1865, followed by his poems of 1866. Mr. Rossetti's
book of 1870 belonged, in date of composition, mainly
to this period.
In 1858, when "The Defence of Guinevere" came
out, Mr. Morris must have been but a year or two
from his undergraduateship. Every one has heard
enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr.
Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old
Oxford and Cajtibridge Magazine, where Mr. Morris's
wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should
they not be revived, these strangely coloured and
magical dreams? As literature, I prefer them vastly
above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose — " The
Hollow Land " above " News from Nowhere ! " Mr.
Morris and his friends were active in the fresh dawn
of a new romanticism, a mediceval and Catholic revival,
with very little Catholicism in it for the most part.
This revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say,
more intimate, more " earnest " than the larger and
more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott.
The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith,
the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury,
no less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's
first poems. The fourteenth and the early fifteenth
century is his " period." In " The Defence of Guine-
vere " he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose
narrative manner, without one grain of his humour,
I02 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
inspires "The Life and Death of Jason" and
"The Earthly Paradise." In the early book the
rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. There
are cockney rhymes, too, such as "short" rhyming to
"thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's early
manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to
it. In the first poem, " The Queen's Apology," is this
passage : —
" Listen : suppose your time were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak ;
Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily
" The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well :
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak :
" ' One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell
" ' Of your own strength and mightiness ; here, see !'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see
" A great God's angel standing, with such dyes.
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands.
Held out two ways, light from the inner skies
" Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands ;
" And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red ;
No man could tell the better of the two.
" After a shivering half-hour you said,
' God help ! heaven's colour, the blue ; ' and he said, ' Hell.'
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 103
" And cry to all good men that loved you well,
' Ah, Christ ! if only I had known, known, known.' "
There was nothing like that before in EngUsh poetry ;
it has the bizarrerie of a new thing in beauty. How far
it is really beautiful how can I tell ? How can I dis-
count the " personal bias " ? Only I know that it is
unforgettable. Again (Galahad speaks) : —
" I saw
One sitting on the altar as a throne,
Whose face no man could say he did not know,
And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow."
Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.
Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on
his especially sympathetic period — the gloom and sad
sunset glory of the late fourteenth century, the age of
Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars. To Froissart it all
seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly
fortunes; he only murmurs a "great pity" for the death
of a knight or the massacre of a town. It is rather the
pity of it that Mr. Morris sees : the hearts broken in a
corner, as in " Sir Peter Harpedon's End," or beside
"The Haystack in the Floods." Here is a picture
like life of what befell a hundred times. Lady Alice
de la Barde hears of the death of her knight : —
"Alice
"Can you talk faster, sir?
Get over all this quicker ? fix your eyes
On mine, I pray you, and whate'er you see
Still go on talking fast, unless I fall.
Or bid you stop.
I04 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
"Squire
' ' I pray your pardon then,
And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
I am unhappy that your knight is dead.
Take heart, and listen ! let me tell you all.
We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
And scant five hundred had he in that hold ;
His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit ;
Yet for three days about the barriers there
The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
And push'd and puU'd ; the fourth our engines came ;
But still amid the crash of falling walls.
And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts.
The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
St. George's banner, and the seven swords.
And still they cried, ' St. George Guienne,' until
Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."
The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in
" Geffray Teste Noire " is like that of a vision in a
magic mirror or a crystal ball, rather than like a picture
suggested by printed words. " Shameful Death " has
the same enchanted kind of presentment. We look
through a " magic casement opening on the foam " of
the old waves of war. Poems of a pure fantasy, un-
equalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind"
and " The Blue Closet." Each only lives in fantasy.
Motives, and facts, and " story " are unimportant and out
of view. The pictures arise distinct, unsummoned, spon-
taneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on our
eyes between sleeping and waking. Fantastic, too, but
with more of a recognisable human setting, is " Golden
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 105
Wings," which to a slight degree reminds one of
Theophile Gautier's Chateau de Soiivenir.
" The apples now grow green and sour
Upon the mouldering castle wall,
Before they ripen there they fall :
There are no banners on the tower,
The draggled swans most eagerly eat
The green weeds trailing in the moat ;
Inside the rotting leaky boat
You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."
These, with "The Sailing of the Sword," are my own
old favourites. There was nothing like them before,
nor will be again, for Mr. Morris, after several years of
silence, abandoned his early manner. No doubt it was
not a manner to persevere in, but happily, in a mood
and a moment never to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris
did fill a fresh page in English poetry with these im-
perishable fantasies. They were absolutely neglected
by " the reading public," but they found a few staunch
friends. Indeed, I think of " Guinevere " as Fitzgerald
did of Tennyson's poems before 1842. But this, of
course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capri-
cious, estimate. Criticism may aver that the influence
of Mr. Rossetti was strong on Mr. Morris before 1858.
Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris first (as the world
read the "Lay" before " Christabel "), and my own
preference is for Mr. Morris.
It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr.
Morris produced, in 1866 or 1867, " The Life and Death
of Jason." Young men who had read "Guinevere"
io6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
hastened to purchase it, and, of course, found them-
selves in contact with something very unHke their old
favourite. Mr. Morris had told a classical tale in deca-
syllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort, and he regarded
the heroic age from a mediaeval point of view ; at all
events, not from an historical and archaeological point of
view. It was natural in Mr. Morris to " envisage " the
Greek heroic age in this way, but it would not be natural
in most other writers. The poem is not much shorter
than the " Odyssey," and long narrative poems had been
out of fashion since "The Lord of the Isles " (1814).
All this was a little disconcerting. We read " Jason,"
and read it with pleasure, but without much of the more
essential pleasure which comes from magic and distinc-
tion of style. The peculiar qualities of Keats, and Tenny-
son, and Virgil are not among the gifts of Mr. Morris.
As people say of Scott in his long poems, so it may be
said of Mr. Morris — that he does not furnish many
quotations, does not glitter in " jewels five words long."
In " Jason " he entered on his long career as a
narrator ; a poet retelling the immortal primeval stories
of the human race. In one guise or another the legend
of Jason is the most widely distributed of romances ;
the North American Indians have it, and the Samoans
and the Samoyeds, as well as all Indo-European peoples.
This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at greater length by
ApoUonius Rhodius, and in the " Orphica," Mr. Morris
took up and handled in a single and objective way.
His art was always pictorial, but, in " Jason " and later,
he described more, and was less apt, as it were, to flash
a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable way.
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 107
In the covers of the first edition were announcements
of the " Earthly Paradise " : that vast collection of the
world's old tales retold. One might almost conjecture
that "Jason" had originally been intended for a part
of the " Earthly Paradise," and had outgrown its limits.
The tone is much the same, though the "criticism of
life " is less formally and explicitly stated.
For Mr. Morris came at last to a " criticism of life."
It would not have satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and
it did not satisfy Mr. Morris ! The burden of these
long narrative poems is vanitas vattitatum : the fleeting,
perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the
dream " rounded by a sleep." The lesson drawn is to
make life as full and as beautiful as may be, by love,
and adventure, and art. The hideousness of modern
industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris ; that hideous-
ness he was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by
poetry, and by all the many arts and crafts in which
he was a master. His narrative poems are, indeed, part
of his industry in this field. He was not born to slay
monsters, he says, "the idle singer of an empty day."
Later, he set about slaying monsters, like Jason, or
unlike Jason, scattering dragon's teeth to raise forces
which he could not lay, and could not direct.
I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say
this much only to prove that Mr. Morris's " criticism of
life," and prolonged, wistful dwelling on the thought of
death, ceased to satisfy himself. His own later part, as a
poet and an ally of SociaUsm, proved this to be true. It
seems to follow that the peculiarly level, lifeless, decora-
tive effect of his narratives, which remind us rather of
s/
(
I
io8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
glorious tapestries than of pictures, was no longer wholly
satisfactory to himself. There is plenty of charmed and
delightful reading — " Jason " and the "Earthly Paradise "
are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we
do miss a strenuous rendering of action and passion.
These Mr. Morris had rendered in "The Defence of
Guinevere " : now he gave us something different, some-
thing beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic
vigour. ApoUonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a
pedant, a literary writer of epic, in an age of Criticism.
He dealt with the tale of "Jason," and conceivably he
may have borrowed from older minstrels. But the
Medea of ApoUonius Rhodius, in her love, her tender-
ness, her regret for home, in all her maiden words and
ways, is undeniably a character more living, more
human, more passionate, and more sympathetic, than
the Medea of Mr. Morris. I could almost wish that he
had closely followed that classical original, the first true
love story in literature. In the same way I prefer
Apollonius's spell for soothing the dragon, as much
terser and more somniferous than the spell put by Mr.
Morris into the lips of Medea. Scholars will find it
pleasant to compare these passages of the Alexandrine
and of the London poets. As a brick out of the vast
palace of " Jason " we may select the song of the Nereid
to Hylas — Mr. Morris is always happy with his Nymphs
and Nereids : —
" I know a little garden-close
Set thick with lily and with rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 109
And have one with me wandering.
And though within it no birds sing,
And though no pillared house is there,
And though the apple boughs are bare
Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
Her feet upon the green grass trod.
And I beheld them as before.
There comes a murmur from the shore.
And in the place two fair streams are.
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea ;
The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
The shore no ship has ever seen,
Still beaten by the billows green,
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.
For which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight.
That maketh me both deaf and blind.
Careless to win, unskilled to find.
And quick to lose what all men seek.
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place,
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea."
"Jason" is, practically, a very long tale from the
" Earthly Paradise," as the " Earthly Paradise " is an
immense treasure of shorter tales in the manner of
" Jason." Mr. Morris reverted for an hour to his four-
teenth century, a period when London was " clean."
This is a poetic license ; many a plague found mediaeval
London abominably dirty'! A Celt himself, no doubt,
with the Celt's proverbial way of being impossibiliuni
no ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
cupitor, Mr. Morris was in full sympathy with his Breton
Squire, who, in the reign of Edward III., sets forth to seek
the Earthly Paradise, and the land where Death never
comes. Much more dramatic, I venture to think, than any
passage of "Jason," is that where the dreamy seekers of
dreamland, Breton and Northman, encounter the stout
King Edward III., whose kingdom is of this world.
Action and fantasy are met, and the wanderers explain
the nature of their quest. One of them speaks of death
in many a form, and of the flight from death : —
" His words nigh made me weep, but while he spoke
I noted how a mocking smile just broke
The thin line of the Prince's lips, and he
Who carried the afore-named armoury
Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low :
But the King smiled, and said, ' Can it be so ?
I know not, and ye twain are such as find
The things whereto old kings must needs be blind.
For you the world is wide — but not for me,
Who once had dreams of one great victory
Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,
And now, the victor in so many an one,
Find that in Asia Alexander died
And will not live again ; the world is wide
For you I say, — for me a narrow space
Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.
Poor man, why should I stay thee ? live thy fill
Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill
But fear of that fair rest I hope to win
One day, when I have purged me of my sin.
Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king
Shall be remembered but by this one thing.
That on the morn before ye crossed the sea
Ye gave and took in common talk with me ;
But with this ring keep memory with the morn,
O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.' "
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS in
All this encounter is a passage of high invention.
The adventures in Anahuac are such as Bishop Eric
may have achieved when he set out to find Vinland the
Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was
not remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. The
tale of the wanderers was Mr. Morris's own ; all the rest
are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming
to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the
Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole
performance is astonishingly equable ; we move on a high
tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be
climbed. Once more literature has a narrator, on the
whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer,
Homer, or Sir Walter. Humour and action are not so
prominent as contemplation of a pageant reflected in a
fairy mirror. But Mr. Morris has said himself, about
his poem, what I am trying to say : —
" Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant ;
Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
Though still the less we knew of its intent ;
The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
Hung round about a little room, where play
Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."
Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength
of his sympathy with the heroic sagas of Iceland. He
had rendered one into verse, in "The Earthly Paradise,"
above all, "Grettir the Strong" and "The Volsunga"
he had done into English prose. His next great poem
was "The Story of Sigurd," a poetic rendering of the
theme which is, to the North, what the Tale of Troy
112 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
is to Greece, and to all the world. Mr. Morris took the
form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most
birthmarks of its savage origin — the version of the
*' Volsunga," not the German shape of the " Nibelungen-
lied." He showed extraordinary skill, especially in
making human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter,
Fafnir, and the Dwarf Andvari's Hoard.
" It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen
old.
And a covetous man and a king ; and he bade, and I built him a
hall,
And a golden glorious house ; and thereto his sons did he call,
And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them
might be wrought.
Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,
And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never
fail,
And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.
" But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net.
And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the
highways wet ;
And the foot that never resteth, while aught he left alive
That hath cunning to match man's cunning or might with his
might to strive.
•' And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying
of ease ?
Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the
future sees ;
And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;
And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's
desire ;
And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is
never done ;
And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that
is won.
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 113
" Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again ;
Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better
than men.
But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still :
We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our
will
Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold ;
For belike no fixed semblance we had in the days of old,
Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must
take
That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make."
But when we turn to the passage of the eclaircissement
between Sigurd and Brynhild, that most dramatic and
most modern moment in the ancient tragedy, the
moment where the clouds of savage fancy scatter in the
light of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, I
prefer the simple, brief prose of Mr. Morris's translation
of the "Volsunga" to his rather periphrastic paraphrase.
Every student of poetry may make the comparison for
himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the
new is better. Again, in the final fight and massacre
in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the Slaying of
the Wooers, at the close of the " Odyssey," or the last
fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version
of the "Volsunga." All these are the work of men who
were war-smiths as well as song-smiths. Here is a
passage from the "murder grim and great": —
" So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared
on high,
But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry
From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel
Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel
H
114 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Behind the steadfast Gunnar : but lo, have ye seen the corn,
While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne
When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth
black,
And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-
wrack ?
So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the
East
As his great voice shook the timbers in the hal) of Atli's feast,
There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were
his edges stopped ;
He smote and the dead were thrust from him ; a hand with its
shield he lopped ;
There met him Atli's marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he
shred ;
Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of
the dead ;
And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through
a throat he thrust,
But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the
ruddy dust,
And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet :
Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he
set ;
Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and
fell ;
Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,
And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew.
And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood
through ;
And man 'gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,
. And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,
And there ran a river of death 'twixt the Niblung and his foes,
And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods
arose."
I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure
of Odysseus raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 115
of Roland when the blinded Oliver smites him by mis-
chance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair by Um-
slopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous
picture of war. To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give
his rendering of part of the Slaying of the Wooers, from
his translation of the " Odyssey " : —
" And e'en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword out
Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout
Rushed on him ; but Odysseus that very while let fly
And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,
And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground
fell the sword
From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,
And staggered ; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered
around,
And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the
ground ;
And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet
spurning he smote
The high-seat ; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.
" And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword
And fell on, making his onrush 'gainst Odysseus the glorious
lord.
If perchance he might get him out-doors : but Telemachus him
forewent,
And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith
sent
Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,
And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his fore-
head smote."
There is no need to say more of Mr. Morris's
" Odysseus." Close to the letter of the Greek he usually
keeps, but where are the surge and thunder of Homer ?
Apparently we must accent the penultimate in " Amphi-
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nomus" if the line is to scan. I select a passage of
peaceful beauty from Book V. : —
" But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming wood,
Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good ;
And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,
For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the
sea,
And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a care
But round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fair
A vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad ;
And four wells of the white water their heads together had,
And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get ;
And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.
Yea. if thither indeed had come e'en one of the Deathless, e'en he
Had wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there
to see.
And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.
But when o'er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled
amain,
Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead's Grace,
Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face ;
For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though
they
Apart from one another may be dwelling far away.
But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there.
Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear
His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping ; yea, and he
As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o'er the un-
tilled sea."
This is close enough to the Greek, but
" And flowing 071 in order four -ways they thejice did get"
is not precisely musical. Why is Hermes "The Flitter"?
But I have often ventured to remonstrate against these
archaistic peculiarities, which to some extent mar our
MR. MORRIS'S POEMS 117
pleasure in Mr. Morris's translations. In his version of
the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out of
place. The "^neid" is rendered with a roughness
which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus
the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical translations has in his
hands versions of almost literal closeness, and (what is
extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet. But his
acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has
added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his
English in the " Odyssey," still more in the " ^neid,"
is occasionally more archaic than the Greek of 900 B.C.
So at least it seems to a reader not unversed in attempts
to fit the classical poets with an English rendering.
But the true test is in the appreciation of the lovers of
poetry in general.
To them, as to all who desire the restoration of beauty
in modern life, Mr. Morris has been a benefactor almost
without example. Indeed, were adequate knowledge
mine, Mr. Morris's poetry should have been criticised
as only a part of the vast industry of his life in many
crafts and many arts. His place in English life and
literature is unique as it is honourable. He did what
he desired to do — he made vast additions to simple and
stainless pleasures.
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS
Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only
wanderer in her windy corridors, listening timidly to
groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a
lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave
me in darkness? People know the name of "The
Mysteries of Udolpho ; " they know that boys would say
to Thackeray, at school, "Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi
in the Inquisition." But have they penetrated into the
chill galleries of the Castle, of Udolpho ? Have they
shuddered for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and
masked Inquisition ? Certainly Mrs. Radcliffe, within
the memory of man, has been extremely popular. The
thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the
works of the Enchantress belongs to a public library.
It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog's-eared, and
most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the
books have remained, during the last hundred years,
uncut, even to this day, and I have had to apply the
paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790)
to Mr. Max MuUer, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of
Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson." But Mrs. Radcliffe
has been read diligently, and copiously annotated.
This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the
122 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
sire of Evelina, he cast her off", the daughter of Horace
Walpole. Just when King Romance seemed as dead as
Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, " The
Castle of Otranto," in 1764. In that very year was born
Anne Ward, who, in 1787, married William RadcliffCj
Esq., M.A., Oxon. In 1789 she published "The Castles
of Athlin and Dunbayne." The scene, she tells us, is
laid in " the most romantic part of the Highlands, the
north-east coast of Scotland." On castles, anywhere,
she doted. Walpole, not Smollett or Miss Burney,
inspired her with a passion for these homes of old
romance. But the north-east coast of Scotland is
hardly part of the Highlands at all, and is far from
being very romantic. The period is " the dark ages "
in general. Yet the captive Earl, when "the sweet
tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy
over his mind . . . composed the following sonnet,
which (having committed it to paper) he the next even
ing dropped upon the terrace. He had the pleasure
to observe that the paper was taken up by the ladies,
who immediately retired into the castle." These were
not the manners of the local Mackays, of the Sinclairs,
and of "the small but fierce clan of Gunn," in the dark
ages.
But this was Mrs. Radclifife's way. She delighted in
descriptions of scenery, the more romantic the better,
and usually drawn entirely from her inner consciousness.
Her heroines write sonnets (which never but once are
sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion. With his
usual generosity Scott praised her landscape and her
lyrics, but, indeed, they are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs.
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 123
Hemans, "too poetical," and probably they were skipped,
even by her contemporary devotees. " The Castles of
Athlin and Dunbayne " frankly do not permit themselves
to be read, and it was not till 1790, with "A Sicilian
Romance," that Mrs. Radcliffe "found herself," and her
public. After reading, with breathless haste, through
" A Sicilian Romance," and " The Romance of the
Forest," in a single day, it would ill become me to
speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe. Like Catherine Mor-
land, I love this lady's tender yet terrific fancy.
Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest
level, but we must remember that her last romance,
"The Italian," is by far her best. She had been feel-
ing her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she
had attained to it, she published no more. The reason
is uncertain. She became a Woman's Rights woman,
and wrote " The Female Advocate," not a novel !
Scott thinks that she may have been annoyed by her
imitators, or by her critics, against whom he defends
her in an admirable passage, to be cited later. Mean-
while let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward course.
The "Sicihan Romance " appeared in 1790, when the
author's age was twenty-six. The book has a treble
attraction, for it contains the germ of " Northanger
Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and — the germ
of Byron! Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger
Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs. Radcliffe) and
developed into a real novel of character. So too
Byron's gloomy scowling adventurers, with their dark-
ling past, are mere repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Rad-
cliffe's Schedoni. This is so obvious that, when discuss-
124 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
ing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note,
parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour." Sir Walter
did not mean to mock, he merely compared two kin-
dred spirits. " The noble poet " " kept on the business
still," and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott,
his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs.
Radcliffe.
" A Sicilian Romance " has its scene in the palace of
Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern
coast of Sicily. The time is about 1580, but there is
nothing in the manners or costume to indicate that, or
any other period. Such "local colour " was unknown
to Mrs. Radcliffe, as to Clara Reeve. In Horace Wal-
pole, however, a character goes so far in the mediaeval
way as to say " by my halidome."
The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters
by his first amiable consort, supposed to be long dead
when the story opens. The son is the original of Henry
Tilney in " Northanger Abbey," and in General Tilney
does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis of
Mazzini. But the Marquis's wife, to be sure, is not
dead ; like the first Mrs. Rochester she is concealed
about the back premises, and, as in " Jane Eyre," it is
her movements, and those of her gaolers, that produce
mystery, and make the reader suppose that "the place
is haunted." It is, of course, only the mystery and the
" machinery " of Mrs. Radcliffe that Miss Bronte
adapted. These passages in " Jane Eyre " have been
censured, but it is not easy to see how the novel could
do without them. Mrs. Radcliffe's tale entirely depends
on its machinery. Her wicked Marquis, having secretly
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 125
immured Number One, has now a new and beautiful
Number Two, whose character does not bear inspection.
This domestic position, as Number Two, we know, was
declined by the austere virtue of Jane Eyre.
"Phenomena" begin in the first chapter of "A
Sicihan Romance," mysterious lights wander about
uninhabited parts of the castle, and are vainly investi-
gated by young Ferdinand, son of the Marquis.
This Hippolytus the Chaste, loved all in vain by the
reigning Marchioness, is adored by, and adores, her
stepdaughter, Julia. Jealousy and revenge are clearly
indicated. But, in chasing mysterious lights and figures
through mouldering towers, Ferdinand gets into the very
undesirable position of David Balfour, when he climbs,
in the dark, the broken turret stair in his uncle's house
of Shaws (in " Kidnapped "). Here is a fourth author
indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe : her disciples are Miss
Austen, Byron, Miss Bronte, and Mr. Louis Stevenson !
Ferdinand " began the ascent. He had not proceeded
very far, when the stones of a step which his foot had
just quitted gave way, and, dragging with them those
adjoining, formed a chasm in the staircase that terrified
even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on the sus-
pended half of the steps, in momentary expectation of
falling to the bottom with the stone on which he rested.
In the terror which this occasioned, he attempted to
save himself by catching at a kind of beam which sus-
pended over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from
his hand, and he was left in total darkness."
Can anything be more "amazing horrid," above all
as there are mysterious figures in and about the tower ?
126 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Mrs. Radcliffe's lamps always fall, or are blown out, in
the nick of time, an expedient already used by Clara
Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost story,
"The Old English Baron" (1777). All authors have
such favourite devices, and I wonder how many fights
Mr. Stanley Weyman's heroes have fought, from the
cellar to their favourite tilting ground, the roof of a
strange house !
Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when
the ladies came with a light, and he scrambled back to
solid earth. In his next nocturnal research, "a sullen
groan arose from beneath where he stood," and when
he tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird
doors in Mrs. Radcliffe) " a groan was repeated, more
hollow and dreadful than the first. His courage for-
sook him " — and no wonder ! Of course he could not
know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his
long-lost mother, immured by his father, the wicked
Marquis. We need not follow the narrative through the
darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this terrible
castle on the north coast of Sicily. Everybody is always
"gazing in silent terror," and all the locks are rusty.
" A savage and dexterous banditti " play a prominent
part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand "did not hesitate
to believe that the moans he heard came from the rest-
less spirit of the murdered della Campo." No working
hypothesis could seem more plausible, but it was erro-
neous. Mrs. Radcliffe does not deal in a single
avowed ghost. She finally explains away, by normal
causes, everything that she does not forget to explain.
At the most, she indulges herself in a premonitory
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 127
dream. On this point she is true to common sense,
without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume.
" I do not say that spirits have appeared," she re-
marks, "but if several discreet unprejudiced persons
were to assure me that they had seen one — I should
not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible ! "
But Hume was bold and proud enough : he went
further than Mrs. Radcliffe.
Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe's employment of ex-
planations. He is in favour of "boldly avowing the
use of supernatural machinery," or of leaving the matter
in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith of the
dying Alice to Ravenswood. But, in Mrs. RadcHffe's
day, common sense was so tyrannical, that the poor
lady's romances would have been excluded from families,
if she had not provided normal explanations of her
groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures.
The ghost -hunt in the castle finally brings Julia to a
door, whose bolts, "strengthened by desperation, she
forced back." There was a middle-aged lady in the
room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, "suddenly
exclaimed, ' My daughter ! ' and fainted away." Julia
being about seventeen, and Madame Mazzini, her
mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we
observe, in this recognition, the force of the maternal
instinct.
The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of
his iniquities, who anon stabbed herself with a poniard.
The virtuous Julia marries the chaste Hippolytus, and,
says the author, " in reviewing this story, we perceive
a singular and striking instance of moral retribution."
128 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
We also remark the futility of locking up an incon-
venient wife, fabled to be defunct, in one's own country
house. Had Mr. Rochester, in "Jane Eyre," studied
the "Sicilian Romance," he would have shunned an
obsolete system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the
long run, to be disastrous.
In the "Romance of the Forest" (1791), Mrs. Rad-
cliffe remained true to Mr. Stanley Weyman's favourite
period, the end of the sixteenth century. But there are
no historical characters or costumes in the story, and all
the persons, as far as language and dress go, might have
been alive in 1791.
The story runs thus : one de la Motte, who appears
to have fallen from dissipation to swindling, is, on the
first page, discovered flying from Paris and the law, with
his wife, in a carriage. Lost in the dark on a moor, he
follows a light, and enters an old lonely house. He is
seized by ruffians, locked in, and expects to be murdered,
which he knows that he cannot stand, for he is timid by
nature. In fact, a ruffian puts a pistol to La Motte's
breast with one hand, while with the other he drags
along a beautiful girl of eighteen. "Swear that you
will convey this girl where I may never see her more,"
exclaims the bully, and La Motte, with the young lady,
is taken back to his carriage. " If you return within an
hour you will be welcomed with a brace of bullets," is
the ruffian's parting threat.
So La Motte, Madame La Motte, and the beautiful
girl drive away. La Motte's one desire being to find a
retreat safe from the police of an offended justice.
Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 129
situation ; provocative, too, of the utmost curiosity ? A
fugitive from justice, in a strange, small, dark, ancient
house, is seized, threatened, and presented with a young
and lovely female stranger. In this opening we recognise
the hand of a master genius. There must be an explana-
tion of proceedings so highly unconventional, and what
can the reason be ? The reader is enipoigne in the first
page, and eagerly follows the flight of La Motte, also of
Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar
domestic. After a few days, the party observe, in the
recesses of a gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic
abbey. They enter; by the light of a flickering lamp
they penetrate " horrible recesses," discover a room
handsomely provided with a trapdoor, and determine
to reside in a dwelling so congenial, though, as La
Motte judiciously remarks, "not in all respects strictly
Gothic." After a few days, La Motte finds that some-
body is inquiring for him in the nearest town. He
seeks for a hiding-place, and explores the chambers
under the trapdoor. Here he finds, in a large chest
— what do you suppose he finds? It was a human
skeleton ! Yet in this awful vicinity he and his wife,
with Adeline (the fair stranger) conceal themselves.
The brave AdeHne, when footsteps are heard, and a
figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger.
His keen eye presently detects the practicable trapdoor,
he raises it, and the cowering La Motte recognises in
the dreaded visitor — his own son, who had sought him
out of filial affection.
Already Madame La ^Nlotte has become jealous of
Adeline, especially as her husband is oddly melancholy,
I
I30 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and apt to withdraw into a glade, where he mysteriously
disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic
sepulchre. This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is
proof of faithlessness on the part of a husband. As
the son, Louis, really falls in love with Adeline,
Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and
Adeline now composes quantities of poems to Night,
to Sunset, to the Nocturnal Gale, and so on.
In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive
in a terrific thunderstorm. One is young, the other is
a Marquis. On seeing this nobleman, " La Motte's
limbs trembled, and a ghastly paleness overspread his
countenance. The Marquis was little less agitated," and
was, at first, decidedly hostile. La Motte implored
forgiveness — for what ? — and the Marquis (who, in fact,
owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not far off)
was mollified. They all became rather friendly, and
Adeline asked La Motte about the stories of hauntings,
and a murder said to have been, at some time, com-
mitted in the Abbey. La Motte said that the Marquis
could have no connection with such fables ; still, there
was the skeleton.
Meanwhile, Adeline had conceived a flame for
Theodore, the young officer who accompanied his
colonel, the Marquis, on their first visit to the family.
Theodore, who returned her passion, had vaguely
warned her of an impending danger, and then had
failed to keep tryst with her, one evening, and had
mysteriously disappeared. Then unhappy Adeline
dreamed about a prisoner, a dying man, a coffin, a
voice from the coffin, and the appearance within it
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 131
of the dying man, amidst torrents of blood. The
chamber in which she saw these visions was most
vividly represented. Next day the Marquis came to
dinner, and, though rehictantly, consented to pass the
night : Adeline, therefore, was put in a new bedroom-
Disturbed by the wind shaking the mouldering tapestry,
she found a concealed door behind the arras and a suite
of rooms, one of which was the chamber of her drea/n !
On the floor lay a rusty dagger ! The bedstead, being
touched, crumbled, and disclosed a small roll of manu-
scripts. They were not washing bills, like those dis-
covered by Catherine Morland in "Northanger Abbey."
Returning to her own chamber, Adeline heard the
Marquis professing to La Motte a passion for herself.
Conceive her horror ! Silence then reigned, till all was
sudden noise and confusion ; the Marquis flying in
terror from his room, and insisting on instant departure.
His emotion was powerfully displayed.
What had occurred? Mrs. Radcliffe does not say,
but horror, whether caused by a conscience ill at ease,
or by events of a terrific and supernatural kind, is
plainly indicated. In daylight, the Marquis audaciously
pressed his unholy suit, and even offered marriage, a
hollow mockery, for he was well known to be already
a married man. The scenes of Adeline's flight, capture,
retention in an elegant villa of the licentious noble,
renewed flight, rescue by Theodore, with Theodore's
arrest, and wounding of the tyrannical Marquis, are all
of breathless interest. Mrs. Radcliffe excels in narra-
tives of romantic escapes, a topic always thrilling when
well handled. Adeline herself is carried back to the
132 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Abbey, but La Motte, who had rather not be a villain
if he could avoid it, enables her again to secure her
freedom. He is clearly in the power of the Marquis,
and his life has been unscrupulous, but he retains traces
of better things. Adeline is now secretly conveyed to a
peaceful valley in Savoy, the home of the honest Peter
(the coachman), who accompanies her. Here she learns
to know and value the family of La Luc, the kindred of
her Theodore (by a romantic coincidence), and, in the
adorable scenery of Savoy, she throws many a ballad to
the Moon.
La Motte, on the discovery of Adeline's flight, was
cast into prison by the revengeful Marquis, for, in fact,
soon after settling in the Abbey, it had occurred to
La Motte to commence highwayman. His very first
victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious
retreats to a tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in
short, been contemplating his booty, jewels which he
could not convert into ready money. Consequently,
when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, La Motte
had every reason for alarm, and only pacified the vin-
dictive aristocrat by yielding to his cruel schemes against
the virtue of Adeline.
Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial,
who cast a lurid light on the character of the Marquis.
That villain, to be plain, had murdered his elder brother
(the skeleton of the Abbey), and had been anxious to
murder, it was added, his own natural daughter — that is,
Adeline ! His hired felons, however, placed her in a
convent, and, later (rather than kill her, on which the
Marquis insisted), simply thrust her into the hands of
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 133
La Motte, who happened to pass by that way, as we saw
in the opening of this romance. Thus, in making love
to Adeline, his daughter, the Marquis was, uncon-
sciously, in an awkward position. On further examina-
tion of evidence, however, things proved otherwise.
Adeline was tiot the natural daughter of the Marquis,
but his niece, the legitimate daughter and heiress of
his brother (the skeleton of the Abbey). The MS.
found by Adeline in the room of the rusty dagger
added documentary evidence, for it was a narrative of
the sufferings of her father (later the skeleton), written
by him in the Abbey where he was imprisoned and
stabbed, and where his bones were discovered by La
Motte. The hasty nocturnal flight of the Marquis
from the Abbey is thus accounted for : he had pro-
bably been the victim of a terrific hallucination repre-
senting his murdered brother ; whether it was veridical
or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe does not decide.
Rather than face the outraged justice of his country,
the Marquis, after these revelations, took poison. La
Motte was banished ; and Adeline, now mistress of the
Abbey, removed the paternal skeleton to " the vault
of his ancestors." Theodore and Adeline were united,
and virtuously resided in a villa on the beautiful banks
of the Lake of Geneva.
Such is the " Romance of the Forest," a fiction in
which character is subordinate to plot and incident.
There is an attempt at character drawing in La Motte,
and in his wife ; the hero and heroine are not dis-
tinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus. But Mrs.
Radcliffe does not aim at psychological niceties, and
134 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
we must not blame her for withholding what it was no
part of her purpose to give. "The Romance of the
Forest " was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of
modern English works of fiction. "Every reader felt
the force," says Scott, " from the sage in his study, to
the family group in middle life," and nobody felt it more
than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen,
who, when asked how his time was employed, answered,
" I read no Civil Law." He did read Mrs. Radcliffe,
and, in " The Betrothed," followed her example in the
story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces
the spectre attached to her ancient family.
"The Mysteries of Udolpho," Mrs. Radcliffe's next
and most celebrated work, is not (in the judgment of
this reader, at least) her masterpiece. The booksellers
paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls "the unprece-
dented sum of ;^5oo" for the romance, and they must
have made a profitable bargain. " The public," says
Scott, " rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity,
and rose from it with unsated appetite." I arise with
a thoroughly sated appetite from the " Mysteries of
Udolpho." The book, as Sir Walter saw, is "The
Romance of the Forest " raised to a higher power. We
have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly
detached from her young man, and immured in a howl-
ing wilderness of a brigand castle in the Apennines. In
place of the Marquis is a miscreant on a larger and more
ferocious scale. The usual mysteries of voices, lights,
secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided
regardless of economy. The great question, which I
shall not answer, is, what did the Black Veil conceal 1
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 135
iV<?/"the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine Morland
supposed.
Here is Emily's adventure with the veil. "She
paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the
veil ; but instantly let it fall — perceiving that what it
had concealed was no picture, and before she could
leave the chamber she dropped senseless on the floor.
When she recovered her recollection, . . . horror occu-
pied her mind." Countless mysteries coagulate around
this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when
the awful curtain is withdrawn. But he has enjoyed,
for several hundred pages, the pleasures of anticipation.
A pedantic censor may remark that, while the date of
the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an
idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing solely
for landscape and the affections, writing poetry on
Nature, animate and inanimate, including the common
Bat, and drawing in water colours. In those elegant
avocations began, and in these, after an interval of
adventures "amazing horrid," concluded the career of
Emily.
Mrs. Radclifife keeps the many entangled threads of
her complex web well in hand, and incidents which
puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally into place
before the end. The character of the heroine's silly,
vain, unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed
(that Emily should mistake the corse of a moustached
bandit for that of her aunt is an incident hard to defend)-
Valancourt is not an ordinary spotless hero, but sows
his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest ; and Annette
is a good sample of the usual soubrette. When one has
136 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
said that the landscapes and bandits of this romance are
worthy of Poussin and Salvator Rosa, from whom they
were probably translated into words, not much remains
to be added. Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, con-
sidered " Udolpho " " a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe's
former work, high as that had justly advanced her."
But he admits that "persons of no mean judgment"
preferred " The Romance of the Forest." With these
amateurs I would be ranked. The ingenuity and origin-
ality of the " Romance " are greater : our friend the
skeleton is better than that Thing which was behind
the Black Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling
than the escape of Emily, and the " Romance " is not
nearly so long, not nearly so prolix as " Udolpho."
The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe's work is " The
Italian" (1797), for which she received ^800.^ The
scene is Naples, the date about 1764; the topic is the
thwarted loves of Vivaldi and Ellena ; the villain is the
admirable Schedoni, the prototype of Byron's lurid
characters.
"The Italian" is an excellent novel. The Prelude,
" the dark and vaulted gateway," is not unworthy of
Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs. Radcliffe.
The theme is more like a theme of this world than
usual. The parents of a young noble might well try
to prevent him from marrying an unknown and penniless
girl. The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the ordinary
paternal measures ; the Marchesa, and her confessor,
the dark-souled Schedoni, go farther — as far as assassina-
1 I like to know what the author got.
MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS 137
tion. The casuistry by which Schedoni brings the lady
to this pass, while representing her as the originator of
the scheme, is really subtle, and the scenes between the
pair show an extraordinary advance on Mrs. Radcliffe's
earlier art. The mysterious Monk who counteracts
Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery to me, but of
that I do not complain. He is as good as the Dweller
in the Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne's
" Marble Faun." The Inquisition, its cells, and its
tribunals are coloured
"As when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."
The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up
in the dungeons of the Inquisition merely because his
master is there, reminds one of Samuel Weller, he is a
Neapolitan Samivel. The escapes are Mrs. Radcliffe's
most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a good
deal. Poetry is not written, or not often, by the heroine.
The scene in which Schedoni has his dagger raised to
murder EUena, when he discovers that she is his
daughter, " is of a new, grand, and powerful character "
(Scott), while it is even more satisfactory to learn later
that EUena was not Schedoni's daughter after all.
Why Mrs. Radclifife, having reached such a pitch of
success, never again published a novel, remains more
mysterious than any of her Mysteries. Scott justly
remarks that her censors attacked her " by showing that
she does not possess the excellences proper to a style
of composition totally different from that which she has
attempted." This is the usual way of reviewers. Tales
138 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, " which possess
charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and
gay, the gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be
dismissed with a sneer by people who have never read
them. Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs.
Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin,
Lewis, and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled
the gap between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs.
Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance burning
much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels,
are always blown out, in the moment of excited appre-
hension, by the night wind walking in the dank corridors
of haunted abbeys. But mark the cruelty of an in-
tellectual parent ! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794, he
wrote to Lady Ossory : " I have read some of the de-
scriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship says I
was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I
do not think my concubines have produced issue more
natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous."
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST
OF 1830
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830
The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long
is one of the happier moments in life. Whatever we
may think of life when we contemplate it as a whole, it
is a delight to discover what one has sought for years,
especially if the book be a book which you really want
to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the
fashion of collecting. Perhaps nobody ever collected
before
THE
DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
A NECROMAUNT
In Three Chimeras
By Thomas T. Stoddart.
" Is't like that lead contains her ?—
It were too gross
To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."—
Sliakespeare.
Edinburgh :
Printed for Henry Constable, Edinburgh,
And Hurst, Chance, & Co., London.
MDCCCXXXI.
141
142 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent
good reason, as will be shown. But first of the author.
Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was born in 1810. He died
in 1880. Through all his pilgrimage of three-score years
and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the
Scottish version of the Psalms has it ; nay, his staff was
his rod. He "was an angler," as he remarked when
a friend asked : " Well, Tom, what are you doing now."
He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish
fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like
Scott, within hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, pub-
lished, by his daughter, in "Stoddart's AngUng Songs"
(Blackwood), is an admirable biography, quo fit ut omiiis
Votiva pateat vclutt descripta tabella Vita senis.
But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet
of twenty, not with the old angling sage, that we have
to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly republished only
the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being
classical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold writes : —
• ' Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood,
One drives him to the world without.
And one to solitude."
The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fish-
ing. He began with poetry. " At the age of ten his
whole desire was to produce an immortal tragedy. . . .
Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked,
and with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic form
he despised." It is curious to think of the schoolboy,
the born Romanticist, labouring at these things, while
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 143
Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also — boys of
the same ambitions, and with much the same romantic
tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love besides the
Muse: "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger
dipped in gore paled before the supple rod, and the
dainty midge." Finally, the rod and midge prevailed.
" Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing."
But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing
ditties, he wrote and published the volume whose title-
page we have printed, " The Death Wake." The lad
who drove home from an angling expedition in a hearse
had an odd way of combining his amusements. He
lived among poets and critics who were anglers — Hogg,
the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line, they
say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De
Quincey —
" No fisher
But a well-wisher
To the game,"
as Scott has it — these were his companions, older or
younger. None of these, certainly not Wilson, nor
Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the Romantic school,
as illustrated by Keats and Shelley. None of them
probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le
lycanthrope, and the other boys in that boyish move-
ment of 1830. It was only Stoddart, unconsciously
in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his literary
friends, who produced the one British Romantic work
144 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of 1830. The title itself shows that he was partly
laughing at his own performance ; he has the mockery
of Les Jeunes France in him, as well as the wormy and
obituary joys of La Comedie de la Mort. The little
book came out, inspired by " all the poetasters."
Christopher North wrote, four years later, in Black-
wood's Magazine, a tardy review. He styled it " an
ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd
title, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style,
between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of
Barry Cornwall." The book " fell dead from the Press,"
far more dead than " Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfor-
tune pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and
it was doomed to the flames. The "remainder," the
bulk of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets,
and by him was deposited in a garret. The family had
a cook, one Betty, a descendant, perhaps, of " that
unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook of Mr. War-
burton, Somerset Herald," who burned, among other
quartos, Shakespeare's " Henry I.," " Henry H.," and
" King Stephen." True to her inherited instincts, Mr.
Stoddart's Betty, slowly, relentlessly, through forty years,
used " The Death Wake " for the needs and processes
of her art. The whole of the edition, except probably
a few "presentation copies," perished in the kitchen.
As for that fell cook, let us hope that
" The Biblioclastic Dead
Have diverse pains to brook,
They break Affliction's bread
With Betty Barnes, the Cook,"
as the author of " The Bird Bride " sings.
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 145
Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster,
which left one almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of
"The Death Wake," when I found a brown paper parcel
among many that contained to-day's minor poetry " with
the author's compliments," and lo, in this unpromising
parcel was the long-sought volume ! Ever since
one was a small boy, reading Stoddart's " Scottish
Angler," and old Blackwood' s^ one had pined for a
sight of " The Necromaunt," and here, clean in its
" pure purple mantle " of smooth cloth, lay the desired
one !
"Like Diaii's kiss, unasked, unsought,
It gave itself, and was not bought,"
being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who
fishes and studies the Lacustrine Muses.
The copy has a peculiar interest ; it once belonged to
Aytoun, the writer of " The Scottish Cavaliers," of " The
Bon Gaultier Ballads," and of "Firmilian," the scourge
of the Spasmodic School. Mr. Aytoun has adorned the
margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and
cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the
author, and a lyric in doggerel. Surely this is, indeed,
a literary curiosity. The sonnet runs thus : —
" O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritesl
Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,
Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest
And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?
Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity
With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think
That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink ?
Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity ?
K
146 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Here is enough of genius to convert
Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,
Then why transform the diamond into dirt,
And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,
Into a medley of creations foul.
As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul ? "
No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other passion for angling,
in which he used a Scottish latitude concerning bait,^
impelled him to search for " worms and maggots " : —
" Fire and faggots,
Worms and maggots,"
as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the
matter of " The Death Wake."
Then, why, some one may ask, write about " The
Death Wake " at all ? Why rouse again the nightmare
of a boy of twenty ? Certainly I am not to say that
" The Death Wake " is a pearl of great price, but it does
contain passages of poetry — of poetry very curious
because it is full of the new note, the new melody which
young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken. It
anticipates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and Les
Chwieres of Gerard, it answers the accents, then
unheard in England, of Poe. Some American who
read out of the way things, and was not too scrupu-
lous, recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart.
Eleven years after " The Death Wake " appeared in
England, it was published in Graham's Magazine, as
" Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras,'' by
Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro." Now Poe was closely con-
nected with Graham's Magazine, and after " Arthur
1 Salmon roe, I am sorry to say.
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 147
Gordon Pym," " Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro " does suggest
Edgar Allen Poe. But Poe was not Tasistro.
So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.
The poem begins — Chimera I. begins : —
"An anthem of a sister choristry !
And, like a windward murmur of the sea,
O'er silver shells, so solemnly it falls ! "
The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers
towards a bier ;
"Agathe
Was on the lid — a name. And who ? No more !
'Twas only Agathe."
A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit
cathedral; he has a brow of stony marble, he has
raven hair, and he falters out the name of Agathe. He
has said adieu to that fair one, and to her sister Peace,
that lieth in her grave. He has loved, and loves, the
silent Agathe. He was the son of a Crusader,
' ' And Julio had fain
Have been a warrior, but his very brain
Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death.
And to be stricken with a want of breath."
On the whole he did well not to enter the service.
Mr. Aytoun has here written — "A rum Cove for a
hussar."
" And he would say
A curse be on their laurels.
And anon
Was Julio forgotten and his line —
No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine."
148 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
How ? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma
yet been unriddled.
" Oh ! he was wearied of this passing scene !
But loved not Death ; his purpose was between
Life and the grave ; and it would vibrate there
Like a wild bird that floated far and fair
Betwixt the sun and sea ! "
So " he became monk," and was sorry he had done so,
especially when he met a pretty maid,
" And this was Agathe, young Agathe,
A motherless fair girl,"
whose father was a kind of Dombey, for
" When she smiled
He bade no father's welcome to the child,
But even told his wish, and will'd it done.
For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun ! "
So she " took the dreary veil."
They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo :
" They met many a time
In the lone chapels after vesper chime,
They met in love and fear."
Then, one day,
" He heard it said :
Poor Julio, thy Agathe is dead."
She died
" Like to a star within the twilight hours
Of morning, and she was not ! Some have thought
The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught."
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 149
Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes " Damn her ! "
(the Ladyi Abbess, that is) and suggests that thought
must be read "thaft."
Through " the arras of the gloom " (arras is good),
the pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars
unseen for paleness. However, he lifts the tombstone
"as it were lightsome as a summer gladness." "A
summer gladness," remarks Mr. Aytoun, "may possibly
weigh about half-an-ounce." Julio came on a skull, a
haggard one, in the grave, and Mr. Aytoun kindly
designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying " Dust ho !"
Now go, and give your poems to your friends !
Finally Julio unburies Agathe : —
" Thou must go,
My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,
Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,
But where is light, and life, and one to brood
Above thee, till thou wakest. Ha, I fear
Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,
Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.
And Convent fathers, and a choristry
Of sisters saying Hush ! But I will sing
Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering
Down on the dews to hear me ; I will tune
The instrument of the ethereal moon.
And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall
In harmony and beauty musical."
Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture
of the distraught priest, setting forth to sail the seas
with his dead lady, not an invention that Nanteuil
might have illustrated, and the clan of Bousingots
approved ?
I50 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The Second Chimera opens nobly : —
" A curse ! a curse ! ^ the beautiful pale wing
Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering,
And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,
It stood, the golden waters gazing o'er ;
And they were nearing a brown amber flow
Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below ! "
JuHo appears with Agathe in his arms, and what
ensues is excellent of its kind : —
" He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,
Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste.
The silent ladye, and he mutter'd wild,
Strange words about a mother and no child.
"And I shall wed thee, Agathe! although
Ours be no God-blest bridal — even so I "
And from the sand he took a silver shell,
That had been wasted by the fall and swell
Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring —
A rude, rude ring ; it was a snow-white thing.
Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died
In ages far away. ' Thou art a bride,
Sweet Agathe ! Wake up ; we must not linger 1 '
He press'd the ring upon her chilly finger,
And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone
Shouted, ' Pale priest that liest all alone
Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away
To our glad bridal ! ' and its wings of gray
All lazily it spread, and hover'd by
With a wild shriek — a melancholy cry !
Then, swooping slowly o'er the heaving breast
Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west."
1 "Why and Wherefore," Aytoun.
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 151
Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead
maid : —
" A rosary of stars, love ! a prayer as we glide,
And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide,
And we'll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen,
With shells of silver sown in radiancy between.
* ' A rosary of stars, love ! the purest they shall be,
Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea ;
Now help thee,^ Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go,
Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below."
One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical
sad song, if, indeed, he ever saw the poem.
One may give too many extracts, and there is scant
room for the extraordinary witchery of the midnight
sea and sky, where the dead and the distraught drift
wandering,
" And the great ocean, like the holy hall,
Where slept a Seraph host maritimal,
Was gorgeous with wings of diamond " —
it was a sea
" Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald."
There follows another song —
" 'Tis light to love thee living, girl, when hope is full and fair,
In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow there ;
No sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart,
When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art.
" But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide,
And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside.
It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,
When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest."
1 Forsitan legendiim, " Help Thou."
152 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is
rare, odd, novel to us, found by us in a sense, and
especially one must distrust one's liking for the verses
of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears lie
in the green kirkyard of Yarrow. But, allowing for
all this, I cannot but think these very musical, accom-
plished, and, in their place, appropriate verses, to have
been written by a boy of twenty. Nor is it a common
imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors,
that lifts the pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the
sea —
" And bids her gaze into the startled sea,
And says, ' Thine image, from eternity,
Hath come to meet thee, ladye ! ' and anon
He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one
That shook amid the waters."
The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the
disease of the brain, is extremely powerful, the delirious
monk tells the salt sea waves
" That ye have power, and passion, and a sound
As of the flying of an angel round
The mighty world ; that ye are one with time ! "
Here, I can't but think, is imagination.
Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages,
nor that where, in tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked
sailor swims to the strange boat, sees the Living Love
and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the
wave. But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier
approves the passage where an isle rises above the sea,
and the boat is lightly stranded on the shore of pure
and silver shells. The horrors of corruption, in the
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 153
Third Chimera, may be left unquoted. x^ytoun
parodies —
'• The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,
And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses."
Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride,
and feeds on limpets, " by the mass, he feasteth well ! "
There was a holy hermit on the isle,
" I ween like other hermits, so was he."
He is Agathe's father, and he has retired to an eligible
island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter.
Julio tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe
to Lunacy which follows is marked "Beautiful" by
Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb's remark
that madness has pleasures unknown to the sane.
" Thou art, thou art alone,
A pure, pure being, but the God on high
Is with thee ever as thou goest by."
Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes,
bringing
" A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
Within the great encampment of the sea."
The tide sweeps the mad and the dead down the shores.
" He perished in a dream." As for the Hermit, he
buried them, not knowing who they were, but on a
later day found and recognised the golden cross of
Agathe,
" For long ago he gave that blessed cross
To his fair girl, and knew the relic still."
154 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say,
with Walton, "and I hope the reader is sorry."
The " other poems " are vague memories of Shelley,
or anticipations of Poe. One of them is curiously styled
" Her, a Statue," and contains a passage that reminds us
of a rubaiyat of Omar's,
" She might see
A love-wing'd Seraph glide in glory by,
Striking the tent of its mortality.
" But that is but a tent wherein may rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest ;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."
Most akin to Poe is the " Hymn to Orion,"
" Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail
Arcturus on his chariot pale,
Leading him with a fiery flight —
Over the hollow hill of night ? "
This, then, is a hasty sketch, and incomplete, of a
book which, perhaps, is only a curiosity, but which,
I venture to think, gave promise of a poet. Where is
the lad of twenty who has written as well to-day — nay,
where is the mature person of forty ? There was a wind
of poetry abroad in 1830, blowing over the barricades of
Paris, breathing by the sedges of Cam, stirring the
heather on the hills of Yarrow. Hugo, Mr. Browning,
Lord Tennyson, caught the breeze in their sails, and
were borne adown the Tigris of romance. But the
breath that stirred the loch where Tom Stoddart lay and
mused in his boat, soon became to him merely the curl
A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST 155
on the waters of lone St. Mary's or Loch Skene, and he
began casting over the great uneducated trout of a
happier time, forgetful of the Muse. He wrote another
piece, with a sonorous and delightful title, "Ajalon of
the Winds." Where is "Ajalon of the Winds"? Miss
Stoddart knows nothing of it, but I fancy that the thrice-
loathed Betty could have told a tale.
MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.
We need not, perhaps, regret that Mr. Stoddart with-
drew from the struggles and competitions of poetic
literature. No very high place, no very glorious crown,
one fancies, would have been his. His would have
been anxiety, doubt of self, disappointment, or, if he
succeeded, the hatred, and envyings, and lies which even
then dogged the steps of the victor. It was better to be
quiet and go a-fishing.
" Sorrow, sorrow speed away
To our angler's quiet mound,
With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,
Enter through the holy ground ;
There he sleeps whose heart is twined
With wild stream and wandering burn,
Wooer of the western wind
Watcher of the April morn ! "
THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT
AUGUSTINE
THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT
AUGUSTINE
My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book, "a
size uncumbersome to the nicest hand," in the format of
an Elzevir, bound in black morocco, and adorned with
" blind-tooled," that is ungilt, skulls and crossbones. It
has lost the title-page with the date, but retains the
frontispiece, engraved by Huret. Saint Augustine, in
his mitre and other episcopal array, with a quill in his
hand, sits under a flood of inspiring sunshine. The
dumpy book has been much read, was at some time
the property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one touch-
ing manuscript note, of which more hereafter. It is, I
presume, a copy of the translation by Sir Toby Matthew.
The author of the Preface declares, with truth, that the
translator " hath consulted so closely and earnestly with
the saint that he seemeth to have lighted his torch att
his fire, and to speak in the best and most significant
English, what and how he would have done had he
understood our language."
There can be no better English version of this famous
book, in which Saint Augustine tells the story of his
eager and passionate youth — a youth tossed about by
the contending tides of Love, human and divine. Read-
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i6o ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
ing it to-day, with a mundane curiosity, we may half
regret the space which he gives to theological meta-
physics, and his brief tantalising glimpses of what most
interests us now — the common life of men when the
Church was becoming mistress of the world, when the
old Religions were dying of allegory and moral inter-
pretations and occult dreams. But, even so. Saint
Augustine's interest in himself, in the very obscure
origins of each human existence, in the psychology of
infancy and youth, in school disputes, and magical pre-
tensions ; his ardent affections, his exultations, and his
faults, make his memoirs immortal among the unveilings
of the spirit. He has studied babies, that he may know
his dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil.
" Then, by degrees, I began to find where I was ; and I
had certain desires to declare my will to those by whom
it might be executed. But I could not do it, . . .
therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out
certain cryes, . . . and when they obeyed me not . . .
I would fall into a rage, and that not against such as
were my subjects or servants, but against my Elders and
my betters, and I would revenge myself upon them by
crying." He has observed that infants " begin to laugh,
first sleeping, and then shortly waking ; " a curious note,
but he does not ask wherefore the sense of humour, or
the expression of it, comes to children first in their
slumber. Of what do babies dream? And what do
the nested swallows chirrup to each other in their sleep?
"Such have I understood that such infants are as I could
know, and such have I been told that I was by them who
brought me up, though even they may rather be accounted
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE i6i
not to know, than to know these things." One thing he
knows, "that even infancy is subject to sin." From the
womb we are touched with evil. "Myselfe have scene
and observed some little child, who could not speake ;
and yet he was all in an envious kind of wrath, looking
pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother."
In an envious kind of wrath ! Is it not the motive of
half our politics, and too much of our criticism ? Such
is man's inborn nature, not to be cured by laws or
reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though
"blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist." For
" an infant cannot endure a companion to feed with him
in a fountain of milk which is richly abounding and
overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute,
and can take no other food but that." This is the
Original Sin, inherited, innate, unacquired ; for this are
" babes span-long " to suffer, as the famous or infamous
preacher declared. " Where, or at what time, was I
ever innocent ? " he cries, and hears no answer from
"the dark backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.
Then the Saint describes a child's learning to speak ;
how he amasses verbal tokens of things, "having tamed,
and, as it were, broken my mouth to the pronouncing of
them." " And so I began to launch out more deeply
into the tempestuous traffique and society of mankind."
Tempestuous enough he found or made it — this child of
a Pagan father and a Christian saint, Monica, the saint
of Motherhood. The past generations had " chalked
out certain laborious ways of learning," and, perhaps.
Saint Augustine never forgave the flogging pedagogue —
the plagosus Orbilius of his boyhood. Long before his
I.
i62 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
day he had found out that the sorrows of children, and
their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows of mature
age. "Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind that
he can think lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other
torments, for the avoiding whereof men pray unto Thee
with great fear from one end of the world to the other,
as that he can make sport at such as doe most sharply
inflict these things upon them, as our parents laughed
at the torments which we children susteyned at our
master's hands ? " Can we suppose that Monica laughed,
or was it only the heathtn father who approved of
" roughing it ? " " Being yet a childe, I began to beg
Thy ayde and succour ; and I did loosen the knots of
my tongue in praying Thee ; and I begged, being yet a
little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be
beaten at the schoole." One is reminded of Tom
TuUiver, who gave up even praying that he might
learn one part of his work : " Please make Mr.
say that I am not to do mathematics."
The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor
wit, "but he took delight in playing." "The plays and
toys of men are called business, yet, when children fall
unto them, the same men punish them." Yet the
schoolmaster was " more fed upon by rage," if beaten
in any little question of learning, than the boy; "if in
any match at Ball I had been maistered by one of my
playfellows." He "aspired proudly to be victorious in
the matches which he made," and I seriously regret to
say that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent
to lose when he could not win fairly. He liked
romances also, " to have myne eares scratched with
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE i6
o
lying fables " — a " lazy, idle boy," like him who dallied
with Rebecca and Rowena in the holidays of Charter
House.
Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh, was " The Greek Dunce." Both
of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely
and totally declined to learn Greek. "But what the
reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I
was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand."
The Saint was far from being alone in that distaste, and
he who writes loathed Greek like poison — till he came
to Homer. Latin the Saint loved, except *' when read-
ing, writing, and casting of accounts was taught in Latin,
which I held not for lesse paynefuU or penal than the
very Greeke. I wept for Dido's death, who made her-
selfe away with the sword," he declares, "and even so,
the saying that two and two makes foure was an un-
grateful song in mine ears; whereas the wooden horse full
of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very Ghost
of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity."
In short, the Saint was a regular Boy — a high-spirited,
clever, sportive, and wilful creature. He was as fond as
most boys of the mythical tales, "and for that I was
accounted to be a towardly boy." Meanwhile he does
not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish
dear old heathen fables — " that flood of hell ! "
Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the
vanity of self-accusation, there can be little doubt that
the youth of Saint Augustine was une j'eutiesse orageuse.
" And what was that wherein I took delight but to love
and to be beloved." There was ever much sentiment
i64 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and affection in his amours, but his soul "could not
distinguish the beauty of chast love from the muddy
darkness of lust. Streams of them did confusedly
boyl in me" — in his African veins. "With a restless
kind of weariness" he pursued that Other Self of the
Platonic dream, neglecting the Love of God :
" Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy ! "
The course of his education — for the Bar, as we should
say — carried him from home to Carthage, where he
rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his mother " as old
wife's consailes." " And we delighted in doing ill, not
only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the
affection of prayse." Even Monica, it seems, justified
the saying :
" Every woman is at heart a Rake."
Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine
says, " but she desired not even that so very much, lest
the cloggs of a wife might have hindered her hopes of
me. ... In the meantime the reins were loosed to me
beyond reason." Yet the sin which he regrets most
bitterly was nothing more dreadful than the robbery of
an orchard ! Pears he had in plenty, none the less he
went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged another
man's pear tree. " I loved the sin, not that which I
obtained by the same, but I loved the sin itself." There
lay the sting of it ! They were not even unusually
excellent pears. "A Peare tree ther was, neere our
vineyard, heavy loaden with fruite, which tempted not
greatly either the sight or tast. To the shaking and
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE 165
robbing thereof, certaine most wicked youthes (whereof
I was one) went late at night. We carried away huge
burthens of fruit from thence, not for our owne eating,
but to be cast before the hoggs."
Oh, moonHt night of Africa, and orchard by these
wild seabanks where once Dido stood ; oh, laughter of
boys among the shaken leaves, and sound of falling
fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights
that no man remembers? For Carthage is destroyed,
indeed, and forsaken of the sea, yet that one hour of
summer is to be unforgotten while man has memory of
the story of his past.
Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the
Saint, but a long remorse for this great sin, which he
earnestly analyses. Nor is he so penitent but that
he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-doing
in the Sense of Humour ! " It was a delight and laughter
which tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we
were upon the point of deceiving them who feared no
such thing from us, and who, if they had known it,
would earnestly have procured the contrary."
Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set,
as people say now — " the Depravers "or " Destroyers " ;
though he loved them little, " whose actions I ever did
abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst
whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness."
In short, the " Hell-Fire Club " of that day numbered
a reluctant Saint among its members ! It was no
Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which
won him from this perilous society. "It altered my
affection, and made me address my prayers to Thee,
i66 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Lord, and gave me other desires and purposes than
1 had before. All vain hopes did instantly grow base
in myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart,
aspire towards the Immortality of Wisdom." Thus it
was really "Saint Tully," and not the mystic call of
Tolle ! Lege! that "converted" Augustine, diverting
the current of his life into the channel of Righteousness.
" How was I kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire
to fly from earthly things towards Thee."
There now remained only the choice of a Road.
Saint Augustine dates his own conversion from the
day of his turning to the strait Christian orthodoxy.
Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek,
would not have satisfied his desire. " For where was
that Charity that buildeth upon the foundation of
Humility, which is Christ Jesus ? . . . These pages "
(of the Platonists) "carried not in them this counte-
nance of piety — the tears of confession, and that sacrifice
of Thine which is an afflicted spirit, a contrite and
humbled heart, the salvation of Thy people, the Spouse,
the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of our
Redemption. No man doth there thus express himself.
Shall not my soul be subject to God, for of Him is my
salvation? For He is my God, and my salvation, my
protectour ; I shall never be moved. No man doth there
once call and say to him : ' Come unto me all you that
labour.' "
The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint
Augustine instinctively knew he lacked — the grace of
Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from within but
from without. To these he aspired ; let us follow him
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE 167
on the path by which he came within their influence ;
but let us not forget that the guide on the way to the
City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus Tullius
Cicero. It is to the City that all our faces should be
set, if we knew what belongs to our peace ; thither we
cast fond, hopeless, backward glances, even if we be of
those whom Tertullian calls " Saint Satan's Penitents."
Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the path
— one of the few who have found it, of the few who
have won that Love which is our only rest. It may be
worth while to follow him to the journey's end.
The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine " to
the loving and seeking and finding and holding and
inseparably embracing of wisdom itself, wheresoever it
was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the Christian
Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him,
was repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without
going further than Mr. Pater's book, " Marius, the
Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an English
reader may learn what kind of style a learned African
of that date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather
than Apuleius, was Augustine's ideal ; that verbose and
sonorous eloquence captivated him, as it did the early
scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied
a little with the sect of the Manichees, which ap-
pears to have grieved his mother more than his wild
life.
But she was comforted by a vision, when she found
herself in a wood, and met "a glorious young man," who
informed her that " where she was there should her son
be also." Curious it is to think that this very semblance
i68 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of
heathen Red Indians, advising them where they shall
find game, and was beheld in such ecstasies by John
Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians,
and adopted their religion. The Greeks would have
called this appearance Hermes, even in this guise Odys-
seus met him in the oak wood of Circe's Isle. But
Augustine was not yet in his mother's faith ; he still
taught and studied rhetoric, contending for its prizes,
but declining to be aided by a certain wizard of his
acquaintance. He had entered as a competitor for a
" Tragicall poeme," but was too sportsmanlike to seek
victory by art necromantic. Yet he followed after
Astrologers, because they used no sacrifices, and did not
pretend to consult spirits. Even the derision of his
dear friend Nebridius could not then move him from
those absurd speculations. His friend died, and " his
whole heart was darkened ; " " mine eyes would be
looking for him in all places, but they found him not,
and I hated all things because they told me no news of
him." He fell into an extreme weariness of life, and no
less fear of death. He lived but by halves ; having lost
dimidunn afiimae suae, and yet dreaded death, " Lest
he might chance to have wholy dyed whome I extremely
loved." So he returned to Carthage for change, and
sought pleasure in other friendships; but "Blessed is
the man that loves Thee and his friend in Thee and
his enemy for Thee. For he only never loseth a dear
friend to whom all men are dear, for His sake, who is
never lost."
Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE 169
thoughts, so beautiful if so helpless, like all words, to
console, some reader long dead has written : —
" Pray for your poor servant, J. M."
And again,
" Pray for your poor friend."
Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved,
is imploring the prayers of a dear friend dead; and
sure we need their petitions more than they need ours,
who have left this world of temptation, and are at peace.
After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his
ambition urging him, perhaps, but more his disgust
with the violent and riotous life of students in Carthage.
To leave his mother was difficult, but " I lyed to my
mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from her."
And now he had a dangerous sickness, and afterwards
betook himself to converse with the orthodox, for
example at Milan with Saint Ambrose. In Milan his
mother would willingly have continued in the African
ritual — a Pagan survival — carrying wine and food to
the graves of the dead ; but this Saint Ambrose forbade,
and she obeyed him for him " she did extremely affect
for the regard of my spirituall good."
From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome,
and there "was damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial
combats, being "made drunk with a delight in blood."
Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the girl
of his heart, " so that my heart was wounded, as that the
very blood did follow." The lady had made a vow of
eternal chastity, "having left me with a son by her."
170 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
But he fell to a new love as the old one was departed,
and yet the ancient wound pained him still " after a more
desperate and dogged manner."
Haeret letalis arundo !
By these passions his conversion was delayed, the
carnal and spiritual wills fighting against each other within
him. "Give me chastity and continency, O Lord," he
would pray, "but do not give it yet," and perhaps this
is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine. In
the midst of this war of the spirit and the flesh, " Behold
I heard a voyce, as if it had been of some boy or girl
from some house not farre off, uttering and often repeat-
ing these words in a kind of singing voice,
" Tolle, Lege ; Tolle, Lege,
Take up and read, take up and read."
So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random,
after the manner of his Virgilian lots, read : —
" Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in carnality
and uncleanness," with what follows. " Neither would
I read any further, neither was there any cause why I
should." Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us
to understand (as his translator does), that he was
" miraculously called." He knew what was right per-
fectly well before ; the text only clinched a resolve
which he has found it very hard to make. Perhaps
there was a trifle of superstition in the matter. We
never know how superstitious we are. At all events,
henceforth " I neither desired a wife, nor had I any
ambitious care of any worldly thing." He told his
mother, and Monica rejoiced, believing that now her
prayers were answered.
CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE 171
Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine.
It was the maturing of an old purpose, and long de-
ferred. Much stranger stories are told of Bunyan and
Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric ; another man
was engaged " to sell words " to the students of Milan.
Being now converted, the Saint becomes less interesting,
except for his account of his mother's death, and of that
ecstatic converse they held "she and I alone, leaning
against a window, which had a prospect upon the
garden of our lodging at Ostia." They
" Came on that which is, and heard
The vast pulsations of the world."
" And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the
divine, we grew able to take a little taste thereof, with
the whole strife of our hearts, and we sighed profoundly,
and left there, confined, the very top and flower of our
souls and spirits ; and we returned to the noyse of
language again, where words are begun and ended."
Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had
ever wished to lie beside her husband in Africa, she
said : " Lay this Body where you will. Let not any care
of it disquiet you ; only this I entreat, that you will re-
member me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you
be." " But upon the ninth day of her sickness, in the
six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and the three-and-
thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."
The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems,
than it had been at the death of his friend. But he
could remember how " she related with great dearness
172 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind
word to be darted out of my mouth against her." And
to this consolation was added who knows what of con-
fidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a kind of
deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart
very often tried and inured to every pain. For it is
certain that " this green wound " was green and grievous
for a briefer time than the agony of his earlier sorrows.
He himself, so earnest in analysing his own emotions, is
perplexed by the short date of his tears, and his sharpest
grief: "Let him read it who will, and interpret it as it
pleaseth him."
So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint
Augustine. The most human of books, the " Confes-
sions," now strays into theology. Of all books that
which it most oddly resembles, to my fancy at least, is
the poems of Catullus. The passion and the tender
heart they have in common, and in common the war of
flesh and spirit ; the shameful inappeasable love of
Lesbia, or of the worldly life ; so delightful and dear
to the poet and to the saint, so despised in other moods,
conquered and victorious again, among the battles of
the war in our members. The very words in which
the Veronese and the Bishop of Hippo described the
pleasure and gaiety of an early friendship are almost the
same, and we feel that, born four hundred years later,
the lover of Lesbia, the singer of Sirmio might actually
have found peace in religion, and exchanged the earthly
for the heavenly love.
SMOLLETT
SMOLLETT
The great English novelists of the eighteenth century
turned the course of English Literature out of its older
channel. Her streams had descended from the double
peaks of Parnassus to irrigate the enamelled fields and
elegant parterres of poetry and the drama, as the critics
of the period might have said. But Richardson, Field-
ing, Smollett, and Sterne, diverted the waters, from poetry
and plays, into the region of the novel, whither they
have brought down a copious alluvial deposit. Modern
authors do little but till this fertile Delta : the drama is
now in the desert, poetry is a drug, and fiction is
literature. Among the writers who made this revolution,
Smollett is, personally, the least well known to the
world, despite the great part which autobiography and
confessions play in his work. He is always talking about
himself, and introducing his own experiences. But there
is little evidence from without ; his extant correspond-
ence is scanty ; he was not in Dr. Johnson's circle,
much less was he in that of Horace Walpole. He was
not a popular man, and probably he has long ceased to
be a popular author. About 1780 the vendors of chil-
dren's books issued abridgments of "Tom Jones" and
"Pamela," "Clarissa" and "Joseph Andrews," adapted
175
176 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
to the needs of infant minds. It was a curious enter-
prise, certainly, but the booksellers do not seem to have
produced " Every Boy's Roderick Random," or " Pere-
grine Pickle for the Young." Smollett, in short, is less
known than Fielding and Sterne, even Thackeray says
but a word about him, in the " English Humorists," and
he has no place in the series of "English Men of
Letters."
What we know of Smollett reveals a thoroughly typical
Scot of his period ; a Scot of the species absolutely
opposed to Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, and rather akin
to the species of Robert Burns. "Rather akin," we
may say, for Smollett, like Burns, was a humorist,
and in his humour far from dainty ; he was a personal
satirist, and a satirist far from chivalrous. Like Burns,
too, he was a poet of independence; like Burns, and
even more than Burns, in a time of patronage he was
recalcitrant against patrons. But, unlike Burns, he was
farouche to an extreme degree; and, unlike Burns, he
carried very far his prejudices about his "gentrice," his
gentle birth. Herein he is at the opposite pole from
the great peasant poet.
Two potent characteristics of his country were at war
within him. There was, first, the beUef in "gentrice,"
in a natural difference of kind between men of coat
armour and men without it. Thus Roderick Random,
the starving cadet of a line of small lairds, accepts
the almost incredible self-denial and devotion of
Strap as merely his due. Prince Charles could not
have taken the devotion of Henry Goring, or of Neil
MacEachain, more entirely as a ma^tter of course, in-
SMOLLETT 177
volving no consideration in return, than Roderick
took the unparalleled self-sacrifice of his barber
friend and school-mate. Scott has remarked on this
contemptuous and ungrateful selfishness, and has con-
trasted it with the relations of Tom Jones and
Partridge. Of course, it is not to be assumed that
Smollett would have behaved like Roderick, when,
'' finding the fire in my apartment almost extinguished,
I vented my fury upon poor Strap, whose ear I pinched
with such violence that he roared hideously with
pain. . . ." To be sure Roderick presently "felt un-
speakable remorse . . . foamed at the mouth, and kicked
the chairs about the room." Now Strap had rescued
Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hun-
dreds of pounds, and had carried his baggage, and
dined on his leavings. But Strap was not gently born !
Smollett would not, probably, have acted thus, but he
did not consider such conduct a thing out of nature.
On the other side was Smollett's Scottish spirit of
independence. As early as 15 15, James Ingles, chap-
lain of Margaret Tudor, wrote to Adam Williamson,
" You know the use of this country. . . . The man hath
more words than the master, and will not be content
except he know the master's counsel. There is no
order among us." Strap had the instinct of feudal
loyalty to a descendant of a laird. But Smollett boasts
that, being at the time about twenty, and having bur-
dened a nobleman with his impossible play, " The
Regicide," " I resolved to punish his barbarous in-
difference, and actually discarded my Patron." He
was not given to " booing " (in the sense of bowing),
M .
1 78 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
but had, of all known Scots, the most "canty conceit
o' himsel'." These qualities, with a violence of temper
which took the form of beating people when on his
travels, cannot have made Smollett a popular character.
He knew his faults, as he shows in the dedication of
" Ferdinand, Count Fathom," to himself. " I have
known you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute ;
meanly jealous and awkwardly reserved ; rash and
haughty in your resentment ; and coarse and lowly in
your connections."
He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even
where he had not been wronged), and could com-
pensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks
made in hours when he was " meanly jealous." Yet,
in early life at least, he regarded his own Roderick
Random as " modest and meritorious," struggling nobly
with the difficulties which beset a "friendless orphan,"
especially from the " selfishness, envy, malice, and base
indifference of mankind." Roderick himself is, in fact,
the incarnation of the basest selfishness. In one of his
adventures he is guilty of that extreme infamy which the
d'Artagnan of " The Three Musketeers " and of the
" Memoirs " committed, and for which the d'Artagnan
of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne took shame to himself.
While engaged in a virtuous passion, Roderick not
only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the
meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry
any woman for her money. Such is the modest and
meritorious orphan, and mankind now carries its " base
indifference " so far, that Smollett's biographer, Mr.
Hannay, says, " if Roderick had been hanged, I, for
SMOLLETT 179
my part, should have heard the tidings unmoved. . . .
Smollett obviously died without realising how nearly the
hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came
to being a ruffian."
Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett
"much of a humorist, and not to be put out of his
way." A "humorist," here, means an overbearingly
eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in
a society of literary dependants, was apt to become.
But Dr. Carlyle also found that, though Smollett
"described so well the characters of ruffians and
profligates," he did not resemble them. Dr. Robert-
son, the historian, "expressed great surprise at his
polished and agreeable manners, and the great urbanity
of his conversation." He was handsome in person, as
his portrait shows, but his " nervous system was exceed-
ingly irritable and subject to passion," as he says in the
Latin account of his health which, in 1763, he drew up
for the physician at Montpellier. Though, when he
chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and
though he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife
and daughter, he did not always choose to behave well.
Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems to have
had few real friends during most of his career.
As to persons whom he chose to regard as his ene-
mies, he was beyond measure rancorous and dangerous.
From his first patron. Lord Lyttelton, to his last,
he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity. If he
did not mean actually to draw portraits of his grand-
father, his cousins, his school-master, and the apothecary
whose gallipots he attended — in " Roderick Random," —
i8o ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
yet he left the originals who suggested his characters in
a very awkward situation. For assuredly he did enter-
tain a spite against his grandfather : and as many of the
incidents in " Roderick Random " were autobiographical,
the public readily inferred that others were founded on
fact.
The outlines of Smollett's career are familiar, though
gaps in our knowledge occur. Perhaps they may partly
be filled up by the aid of passages in his novels, plays,
and poems : in these, at all events, he describes condi-
tions and situations through which he himself may, or
must, have passed.
Born in 172 1, he was a younger son of Archibald,
a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a house
on the now polluted Leven, between Loch Lomond and
the estuary of the Clyde. Smollett's father made an
imprudent marriage : the grandfather provided a small,
but competent provision for him and his family, during
his own life. The father, Archibald, died ; the grand-
father left nothing to the mother of Tobias and her
children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by
the heirs. Hence the attacks on the grandfather and
cousins of Roderick Random : but, later, Smollett re-
turned to kinder feelings.
In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire.
About 17 10 that gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own
life. Hence we learn that he, in childhood, like Roderick
Random, was regarded as "a clog and burden," and was
neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother.
Thus Tobias had not only his own early poverty to
resent, but had a hereditary grudge against fortune.
SMOLLETT i8i
and "the base indifference of mankind." The old
gentleman was lodged "with very hard and penurious
people," at Glasgow University. He rose in the world,
and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but " had no liberty "
to help to forfeit James IL "The puir child, his son"
(James IIL and VIIL), "if he was really such, was
innocent, and it were hard to do anything that would
touch the son for the father's fault." The old gentle-
man, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded
attending the first Parliament after the Union : " I had
no freedom to do it, because I understood that the
great business to be agitated therein was to make laws
for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in
with, being always of opinion that it was hard to impose
oaths on people who had not freedom to take them."
This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig,
and our Smollett, though no Jacobite, was in distinct and
courageous sympathy with Jacobite Scotland. Indeed,
he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own Lismahago.
These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish
patriotism was more than a mere historical sentiment.
Scotland was inconceivably poor, and Scots, in Eng-
land, were therefore ridiculous. The country had, so
far, gained very little by the Union, and the Union was
detested even by Scottish Whig Earls. It is recorded
by Moore that, while at the Dumbarton Grammar
School, Smollett wrote "verses to the memory of
Wallace, of whom he became an early admirer," having
read " Blind Harry's translation of the Latin poems of
John Blair," chaplain to that hero. There probably
never were any such Latin poems, but Smollett began
i82 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
with the same hero-worship as Burns. He had the
attachment of a Scot to his native stream, the Leven,
which later he was to celebrate. Now if Smollett had
credited Roderick Random with these rural, poetical,
and patriotic tastes, his hero would have been much
more human and amiable. There was much good in
Smollett which is absent in Random. But for some
reason, probably because Scotland was unpopular after
the Forty-Five, Smollett merely describes the woes, ill
usage, and retaliations of Roderick. That he suffered as
Random did is to the last degree improbable. He had
a fair knowledge of Latin, and was not destitute of
Greek, while his master, a Mr. Love, bore a good
character both for humanity and scholarship. He must
have studied the classics at Glasgow University, where
he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon,
again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett
himself in after days, and the odious Potion of" Roderick
Random " must, like his rival. Crab, have been merely a
fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and profligacy.
Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that
" one continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such
as Mr. Colquhoun told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett
used to play off on his companions, " for which no
talents could compensate." Judging by Dr. Carlyle's
Memoirs this intolerable kind of display was not unusual
in Caledonian conversation : but it was not likely to make
Tobias popular in England.
Thither he went in 1739, with very little money, ''and
a very large assortment of letters of recommendation :
whether his relatives intended to compensate for the
SMOLLETT 183
scantiness of the one by their profusion in the other is
uncertain ; but he has often been heard to declare that
their liberality in the last article was prodigious." The
SmoUetts were not " kinless loons " ; they had connec-
tions : but who, in Scotland, had money ? Tobias had
passed his medical examinations, but he rather trusted
in his MS. tragedy, " The Regicide." Tragical were its
results for the author. Inspired by George Buchanan's
Latin history of Scotland, Smollett had produced a play,
in blank verse, on the murder of James L That a boy,
even a Scottish boy, should have an overweening
passion for this unlucky piece, that he should expect by
such a work to climb a step on fortune's ladder, is
nowadays amazing. For ten years he clung to it, modi-
fied it, polished, improved it, and then published it in
1749, after the success of " Roderick Random." Twice
he told the story of his theatrical mishaps and dis-
appointments, which were such as occur to every writer
for the stage. He wailed over them in " Roderick
Random," in the story of Mr. Melopoyn ; he prolonged
his cry, in the preface to " The Regicide," and probably
the noble whom he " lashed " (very indecently) in his
two satires ("Advice," 1746, "Reproof," 1747, and in
" Roderick Random ") was the patron who could not
get the tragedy acted. First, in 1739, he had a patron
whom he "discarded." Then he went to the West
Indies, and, returning in 1744, he lugged out his tragedy
again, and fell foul again of patrons, actors, and mana-
gers. What befell him was the common fate. People
did not, probably, hasten to read his play : managers
and " supercilious peers " postponed that entertainment.
i84 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
or, at least, the noblemen could not make the managers
accept it if they did not want it. Our taste differs so
much from that of the time which admired Home's
"Douglas," and "The Regicide" was so often altered
to meet objections, that we can scarcely criticise it. Of
course it is absolutely unhistorical ; of course it is empty
of character, and replete with fustian, and ineffably
tedious; but perhaps it is not much worse than other
luckier tragedies of the age. Naturally a lover calls
his wounded lady "the bleeding fair." Naturally she
exclaims —
" Celestial powers
Protect my father, shower upon his — oh ! " {Dies).
Naturally her adorer answers with —
" So may our mingling souls
To bliss supernal wing our happy — oh ! " {Dies).
We are reminded of —
" Alas, my Bom ! " {Dies).
" ' Bastes ' he would have said I "
The piece, if presented, must have been damned.
But Smollett was so angry with one patron. Lord
Lyttelton, that he burlesqued the poor man's dirge on
the death of his wife. He was so angry with Garrick that
he dragged him into " Roderick Random " as Marmozet.
Later, obliged by Garrick, and forgiving Lyttelton, he
wrote respectfully about both. But, in 1746 (in "Advice"),
he had assailed the " proud lord, who smiles a gracious
lie," and " the varnished ruffians of the State." Because
Tobias's play was unacted, people who tried to aid him
SMOLLETT 185
were liars and ruffians, and a great deal worse, for in
his satire, as in his first novel, Smollett charges men
of high rank with the worst of unnamable crimes.
Pollio and Lord Strutwell, whoever they may have been,
were probably recognisable then, and were undeniably
libelled, though they did not appeal to a jury. It is
improbable that Sir John Cope had ever tried to oblige
Smollett. His ignoble attack on Cope, after that un-
fortunate General had been fairly and honourably ac-
quitted of incompetence and cowardice, was, then, wholly
disinterested. Cope is "a courtier Ape, appointed
General."
" Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,
Nor deign'd, in three-score miles, to look behind ;
While every band for orders bleat in vain,
And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain," —
of Preston Pans.
Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or
more unjustly cruel. Smollett had not here even the
excuse of patriotism. Sir John Cope was no Butcher
Cumberland. In fact the poet's friend is not wrong,
when, in "Reproof," iie calls Smollett "a flagrant mis-
anthrope." The world was out of joint for the cadet of
Bonhill : both before and after his very trying experi-
ences as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept
" The Regicide." This was reason good why Smollett
should try to make a little money and notoriety by
penning satires. They are fierce, foul-mouthed, and
pointless. But Smollett was poor, and he was angry;
he had the examples of Pope and Swift before him ;
1 86 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
which, as far as truculence went, he could imitate.
Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of letters
that some peer or other ought to aid and support them ;
and, as no peer did support Smollett, obviously they
were "varnished ruffians." He erred as he would not
err now, for times, and ways of going wrong, are
changed. But, at best, how different are his angry
couplets from the lofty melancholy of Johnson's satires !
Smollett's "small sum of money " did not permit him
long to push the fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and
as for his "very large assortment of letters of recom-
mendation," they only procured for him the post of
surgeon's mate in the Cumberland of the line. Here
he saw enough of the horrors of naval life, enough of
misery, brutality, and mismanagement, at Carthagena
{1741), to supply materials for the salutary and sicken-
ing pages on that theme in " Roderick Random." He
also saw and appreciated the sterling qualities of cour-
age, simplicity, and generosity, which he has made
immortal in his Bowlings and Trunnions.
It is part of a novelist's business to make one half of
the world know how the other half lives; and in this
province Smollett anticipated Dickens. He left the
service as soon as he could, when the beaten fleet was
refitting at Jamaica. In that isle he seems to have
practised as a doctor ; and he married, or was betrothed
to, a Miss Lascelles, who had a small and far from
valuable property. The real date of his marriage is
obscure : more obscure are Smollett's resources on his
return to London, in 1744. Houses in Downing Street
can never have been cheap, but we find " Mr. Smollett,
SMOLLETT 187
surgeon in Downing Street, Westminster," and, in 1746,
he was living in May Fair, not a region for slender
purses. His tragedy was now bringing in nothing but
trouble, to himself and others. His satires cannot have
been lucrative. As a dweller in May Fair he could not
support himself, like his Mr. Melopoyn, by writing
ballads for street singers. Probably he practised in
his profession. In "Count Fathom" he makes his
adventurer "purchase an old chariot, which was new
painted for the occasion, and likewise hire a footman.
. . . This equipage, though much more expensive than
his finances could bear, he found absolutely necessary
to give him a chance of employment. ... A walking
physician was considered as an obscure pedlar." A
chariot, Smollett insists, was necessary to "every raw
surgeon"; while Bob Sawyer's expedient of "being
called from church" was already vieux Jeu, in the way
of advertisement. Such things had been " injudiciously
hackneyed." In this passage of Fathom's adventures,
Smollett proclaims his insight into methods of getting
practice. A physician must ingratiate himself with
apothecaries and ladies' maids, or "acquire interest
enough " to have an infirmary erected " by the voluntary
subscriptions of his friends." Here Smollett denounces
hospitals, which "encourage the vulgar to be idle and
dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and their
families, from the diseases of poverty and intemperance."
This is odd morality for one who suffered from "the
base indifference of mankind." He ought to have
known that poverty is not a vice for which the poor
are to be blamed ; and that intemperance is not the
i88 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
only other cause of their diseases. Perhaps the unfeel-
ing passage is a mere paradox in the style of his own
Lismahago.
With or without a chariot, it is probable that Tobias
had not an insinuating style, or "a good bedside
manner " ; friends to support a hospital for his renown
he had none; but, somehow, he could live in May
Fair, and, in 1 746, could meet Dr. Carlyle and Stewart,
son of the Provost of Edinburgh, and other Scots,
at the Golden Ball in Cockspur Street. There they
were enjoying "a frugal supper and a little punch," when
the news of Culloden arrived. Carlyle had been
a Whig volunteer : he, probably, was happy enough ;
but Stewart, whose father was in prison, grew pale, and
left the room. Smollett and Carlyle then walked home
through secluded streets, and were silent, lest their
speech should bewray them for Scots. "John Bull,"
quoth Smollett, "is as haughty and valiant to-day, as
he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday
when the Highlanders were at Derby."
" Weep, Caledonia, weep ! " he had written in his
tragedy. Now he wrote " Mourn, hapless Caledonia,
mourn." Scott has quoted, from Graham of Gartmore,
the story of Smollett's writing verses, while Gartmore
and others were playing cards. He read them what he
had written, "The Tears of Scotland," and added the
last verse on the spot, when warned that his opinions
might give offence.
" Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow."
SMOLLETT 189
The "Tears "are better than the " Ode to Blue-Eyed
Ann," probably Mrs. Smollett. But the courageous
author of "The Tears of Scotland," had manifestly
broken with patrons. He also broke with Rich, the
manager at Covent Garden, for whom he had written
an opera libretto. He had failed as doctor, and as
dramatist ; nor, as satirist, had he succeeded. Yet he
managed to wear wig and sword, and to be seen in
good men's company. Perhaps his wife's little fortune
supported him, till, in 1748, he produced "Roderick
Random." It is certain that we never find Smollett in
the deep distresses of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith.
Novels were now in vogue ; " Pamela " was recent,
"Joseph Andrews" was yet more recent, "Clarissa
Harlowe " had just appeared, and Fielding was publishing
"Tom Jones." Smollett, too, tried his hand, and, at
last, he succeeded.
His ideas of the novel are offered in his preface.
The Novel, for him, is a department of Satire; "the
most entertaining and universally improving." To
Smollett, " Roderick Random " seemed an " improv-
ing " work ! On le didacticisme va fil se nicker ?
Romance, he declares, "arose in ignorance, vanity,
and superstition," and declined into "the ludicrous
and unnatural." Then Cervantes " converted romance
to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by
making it assume the sock, and point out the follies
of ordinary life." Romance was to revive again some
twenty years after its funeral oration was thus delivered.
As for Smollett himself, he professedly "follows the
plan" of Le Sage, in "Gil Bias" (a plan as old as
igo ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Petronius Arbiter, and the " Golden Ass " of Apuleius) ;
but he gives more place to "compassion," so as not
to interfere with " generous indignation, which ought to
animate the reader against the sordid and vicious dis-
position of the world." As a contrast to sordid vice,
we are to admire " modest merit " in that exemplary
orphan, Mr. Random. This gentlem.an is a North
Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor orphan
get such an education as Roderick's " birth and character
require," and for other reasons. Now, as for Roderick,
the schoolmaster "gave himself no concern about the
progress I made," but, "should endeavour, with God's
help, to prevent my future improvement." It must
have been at Glasgow University, then, that Roderick
learned " Greek very well, and was pretty far advanced
in the mathematics," and here he must have used his
genius for the belles lettres, in the interest of his " amorous
complexion," by " lampooning the rivals " of the young
ladies who admired him.
Such are the the happy beginnings, accompanied by
practical jokes, of this interesting model. Smollett's
heroes, one conceives, were intended to be fine, though not
faultless young fellows ; men, not plaster images ; brave,
generous, free-living, but, as Roderick finds once, when
examining his conscience, pure from serious stains on
that important faculty. To us these heroes often appear
no better than ruffians ; Peregrine Pickle, for example,
rather excels the infamy of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,
in certain respects ; though Ferdinand is professedly
"often the object of our detestation and abhorrence,"
and is left in a very bad, but, as " Humphrey Clinker "
SMOLLETT 191
shows, in by no means a hopeless way. Yet, throughout,
Smollett regarded himself as a moralist, a writer of
improving tendencies; one who "lashed the vices of
the age." He was by no means wholly mistaken, but
we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we
accepted all Smollett's censures as entirely deserved.
The vices which he lashed are those which he detected,
or fancied that he detected, in people who regarded a
modest and meritorious Scottish orphan with base indif-
ference. Unluckily the greater part of mankind was guilty
of this crime, and consequently was capable of everything.
Enough has probably been said about the utterly
distasteful figure of Smollett's hero. In Chapter LX.
we find him living on the resources of Strap, then
losing all Strap's money at play, and then " I bilk my
taylor." That is, Roderick orders several suits of new
clothes, and sells them for what they will fetch. Mean-
while Strap can live honestly anywhere, while he has
his ten fingers. Roderick rescues himself from poverty
by engaging, with his uncle, in the slave trade. We are
apt to consider this commerce infamous. But, in 1763,
the Evangelical director who helped to make Cowper
"a castaway," wrote, as to the slaver's profession: "It
is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment, and is
usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove
so, the Lord seeing that a large increase of wealth could
not be good for me." The reverend gentleman had,
doubtless, often sung —
" Time for us to go.
Time for us to go.
And when we'd got the hatches down,
' 7 was time for us to go ! "
192 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Roderick, apart from "black ivory," is aided by his
uncle and his long lost father. The base world, in the
persons of Strap, Thompson, the uncle, Mr. Sagely, and
other people, treats him infinitely better than he deserves.
His very love (as always in Smollett) is only an animal
appetite, vigorously insisted upon by the author. By
a natural reaction, Scott, much as he admired Smollett,
introduced his own blameless heroes, and even Thackeray
could only hint at the defects of youth, in " Esmond."
Thackeray is accused of making his good people stupid,
or too simple, or eccentric, and otherwise contemptible.
Smollett went further : Strap, a model of benevolence,
is ludicrous and a coward ; even Bowling has the stage
eccentricities of the sailor. Mankind was certain, in the
long run, to demand heroes more amiable and worthy
of respect. Our inclinations, as Scott says, are with
"the open-hearted, good-humoured, and noble-minded
Tom Jones, whose libertinism (one particular omitted) is
perhaps rendered but too amiable by his good quaUties."
To be sure Roderick does befriend " a reclaimed street-
walker" in her worst need, but why make her the con-
fidante of the virginal Narcissa? Why reward Strap
with her hand? Fielding decidedly, as Scott insists,
"places before us heroes, and especially heroines, of a
much higher as well as more pleasing character, than
Smollett was able to present."
" But the deep and fertile genius of Smollett afforded
resources sufficient to make up for these deficiencies. . . .
If Fielding had superior taste, the palm of more bril-
liancy of genius, more inexhaustible richness of inven-
tion, must in justice be awarded to Smollett. In
SMOLLETT 193
comparison with his sphere, that in which Fielding
walked was limited. ..." The second part of Scott's
parallel between the men whom he considered the
greatest of our novelists, qualifies the first. Smollett's
invention was not richer than Fielding's, but the sphere
in which he walked, the circle of his experience, was
much wider. One division of life they knew about
equally well ; the category of rakes, adventurers, card-
sharpers, unhappy authors, people of the stage, and
ladies without reputations, in every degree. There were
conditions of higher society, of English rural society,
and of clerical society, which Fielding, by birth and
education, knew much better than Smollett. But
Smollett had the advantage of his early years in
Scotland, then as little known as Japan ; with the
"nauticaj multitude," from captain to loblolly boy, he
was intimately familiar ; with the West Indies he was
acquainted ; and he later resided in Paris, and travelled
in Flanders, so that he had more experience, certainly,
if not more invention, than Fielding.
In " Roderick Random " he used Scottish " local
colour " very little, but his life had furnished him with
a surprising wealth of " strange experiences." Inns
were, we must believe, the favourite home of adven-
tures, and Smollett could ring endless changes on
mistakes about bedrooms. None of them is so inno-
cently diverting as the affair of Mr. Pickwick and the
lady in yellow curl-papers ; but the absence of that
innocence which heightens Mr. Pickwick's distresses
was welcome to admirers of what Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu calls "gay reading."
194 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
She wrote from abroad, in 1752, "There is something
humorous in R. Random, that makes me believe that
the author is H. Fielding " — her kinsman. Her lady-
ship did her cousin little justice. She did not com-
plain of the morals of " R. Random," but thought
"Pamela" and "Clarissa" "likely to do more general
mischief than the works of Lord Rochester." Probably
" R. Random " did little harm. His career is too
obviously ideal. Too many ups and downs occur to
him, and few orphans of merit could set before them-
selves the ideal of bilking their tailors, gambling by way
of a profession, dealing in the slave trade, and wheedling
heiresses.
The variety of character in the book is vast ; in
Morgan we have an excellent, fiery, Welshman, of the
stage type ; the different minor miscreants are all vividly
designed ; the eccentric lady author may have had a
real original ; Miss Snapper has much vivacity as a wit ;
the French adventures in the army are, in their rude
barbaric way, a forecast of Barry Lyndon's ; and,
generally, both Scott and Thackeray owe a good deal
to Smollett in the way of suggestions. Smollett's ex-
traordinary love of dilating on noisome smells and
noisome sights, that intense affection for the physically
nauseous, which he shared with Swift, is rather less
marked in " Roderick " than in " Humphrey Clinker,"
and "The Adventures of an Atom." The scenes in
the Marshalsea must have been familiar to Dickens.
The terrible history of Miss Williams is Hogarth's
Harlot's Progress done into unsparing prose. Smollett
guides us at a brisk pace through the shady and brutal
SMOLLETT 195
side of the eighteenth century; his vivacity is as un-
flagging as that of his disagreeable rattle of a hero.
The passion usually understood as love is, to be sure,
one of which he seems to have no conception ; he
regards a woman much as a greedy person might
regard a sirloin of beef, or, at least, a plate of ortolans.
At her marriage a bride is " dished up ; " that is all.
Thus this "gay writing" no longer makes us gay.
In reading "Peregrine Pickle" and "Humphrey
Clinker," a man may find himself laughing aloud, but
hardly in reading " Roderick Random." The fun is of
the cruel primitive sort, arising merely from the con-
templation of somebody's painful discomfiture.
Bowling and Rattlin may be regarded with affec-
tionate respect ; but Roderick has only physical courage
and vivacity to recommend him. Whether Smollett,
in Flaubert's deliberate way, purposely abstained
from moralising on the many scenes of physical distress
which he painted ; or whether he merely regarded them
without emotion, has been debated. It seems more
probable that he thought they carried their own moral.
It is the most sympathetic touch in Roderick's character,
that he writes thus of his miserable crew of slaves :
" Our ship being freed from the disagreeable lading of
negroes, to whom indeed I had been a jniserable slave
since our leaving the coast of Guinea^ I began to
enjoy myself." Smollett was a physician, and had the
pitifulness of his profession ; though we see how
casually he makes Random touch on his own unwonted
benevolence.
People had not begun to know the extent of their
196 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
own brutality in the slave trade, but Smollett pro-
bably did know it. If a curious prophetic letter
attributed to him, and published more than twenty
years after his death, be genuine ; he had the strongest
opinions about this form of commercial enterprise. But
he did not wear his heart on his sleeve, where he wore
his irritable nervous system. It is probable enough
that he felt for the victims of poverty, neglect, and
oppression (despite his remarks on hospitals) as keenly
as Dickens. -We might regard his offensively ungrate-
ful Roderick as a purely dramatic exhibition of a young
man, if his other heroes were not as bad, or worse ;
if their few redeeming qualities were not stuck on in
patches ; and if he had omitted his remark about
Roderick's "modest merit." On the other hand, the
good side of Matthew Bramble seems to be drawn from
Smollett's own character, and, if that be the case, he
can have had little sympathy with his own humorous
Barry Lyndons. Scott and Thackeray leaned to the
favourable view : Smollett, his nervous system apart,
was manly and kindly.
As regards plot, " Roderick Random " is a mere string
of picturesque adventures. It is at the opposite pole
from " Tom Jones " in the matter of construction.
There is no reason why it should ever stop except
the convenience of printers and binders. Perhaps we
lay too much stress on the somewhat mechanical art
of plot-building. Fielding was then setting the first
and best English example of a craft in which the very
greatest authors have been weak, or of which they were
careless. Smollett was always rather more incapable,
SMOLLETT 197
or rather more indifferent, in plot-weaving, than greater
men.
In our day of royalties, and gossip about the gains of
authors, it would be interesting to know what manner
and size of a cheque Smollett received from his pub-
lisher, the celebrated Mr. Osborne. We do not know,
but Smollett published his next novel "on commis-
sion," "printed for the Author"; so probably he was
not well satisfied with the pecuniary result of " Roderick
Random." Thereby, says Dr. Moore, he "acquired
much more reputation than money." So he now pub-
lished "The Regicide" "by subscription, that method
of publication being then more reputable than it has
been thought since " (1797). Of "The Regicide," and
its unlucky preface, enough, or more, has been said.
The pubUc sided with the managers, not with the meri-
torious orphan.
For the sake of pleasure, or of new experiences, or
of economy, Smollett went to Paris in' 1750, where he
met Dr. Moore, later his biographer, the poetical Dr.
Akenside, and an affected painter. He introduced the
poet and painter into " Peregrine Pickle " ; and makes
slight use of a group of exiled Jacobites, including Mr.
Hunter of Burnside. In 1750, there were Jacobites
enough in the French capital, all wondering very much
where Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious
that he was their neighbour in a convent in the Rue St.
Dominique. Though Moore does not say so (he is pro-
vokingly economical of detail), we may presume that
Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine
Pickle. It is curious that he should introduce a
198 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Capucin, a Jew, and a black-eyed damsel, all in the
Ghent diligence, when we know that Prince Charles
did live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walken-
shaw, did go about disguised as a Capucin, and was
tracked by a Jewish spy, while the other spy, Young
Glengarry, styled himself " Pickle." But all those
events occurred about a year after the novel was
published in 1751.
Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree
from Aberdeen University, and, after returning from
France, he practised for a year or two at Bath.
But he could not expect to be successful among
fashionable invalids, and, in " Humphrey Clinker,"
he make Matthew Bramble give such an account of
the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. He was still
trying to gain ground in his profession, when, in March
1 75 1, Mr. D. Wilson published the first edition of
" Peregrine Pickle " " for the Author," unnamed. I
have never seen this first edition, which was "very
curious and disgusting." Smollett, in his preface to the
second edition, talks of " the art and industry that were
used to stifle him in the birth, by certain booksellers
and others." He now " reformed the manners, and
corrected the expressions," removed or modified some
passages of personal satire, and held himself exempt
from " the numerous shafts of envy, rancour, and revenge,
that have lately, both in private and public, been levelled
at his reputation." Who were these base and pitiless
dastards ? Probably every one who did not write
favourably about the book. Perhaps Smollett suspected
Fielding, whom he attacks in several parts of his works,
SMOLLETT 199
treating him as a kind of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker,
and an associate with thieves. Why Smollett thus
misconducted himself is a problem, unless he was
either " meanly jealous," or had taken offence at some
remarks in Fielding's newspaper. Smollett certainly
began the war, in the first edition of " Peregrine
Pickle." He made a kind of palinode to the " trading
justice " later, as other people of his kind have done.
A point in " Peregrine Pickle " easily assailed was
the long episode about a Lady of Quality : the beautiful
Lady Vane, whose memoirs Smollett introduced into his
tale. Horace Walpole found that she had omitted the
only feature in her career of which she had just reason
to be proud : the number of her lovers. Nobody
doubted that Smollett was paid for casting his mantle
over Lady Vane : moreover, he might expect a success
of scandal. The rotnan a clef is always popular with
scandal-mongers, but its authors can hardly hope to
escape rebuke.
It^was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
in Italy, received " Peregrine," with other fashionable
romances — "Pompey the Little," "The Parish Girl,"
" Eleanora's Adventures," " The Life of Mrs. Theresa
Constantia Phipps," "The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil,"
and so on. Most of them contained portraits of real
people, and, no doubt, most of them were therefore
successful. But where are they now? Lady Mary
thought Lady Vane's part of "Peregrine" "more in-
structive to young women than any sermon that I
know." She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the
only " original " of her age, but Fielding had to write
200 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
for bread, and that is " the most contemptible way of
getting bread." She did not, at this time, even know
Smollett's name, but she admired him, and, later, calls
him " my dear Smollett." This lady thought that
Fielding did not know what sorry fellows his Tom
Jones and Captain Booth were. Not near so sorry
as Peregine Pickle were they, for this gentleman is a
far more atrocious rufifian than Roderick Random.
None the less " Peregrine " is Smollett's greatest work.
Nothing is so rich in variety of character, scene, and
adventure. We are carried along by the swift and
copious volume of the current, carried into very queer
places, and into the oddest miscellaneous company, but
we cannot escape from Smollett's vigorous grasp. Sir
Walter thought that " Roderick " excelled its successor
in " ease and simplicity," and that Smollett's sailors, in
"Pickle," "border on caricature." No doubt they do: the
eccentricities of Hawser Trunnion, Esq., are exaggerated,
and Pipes is less subdued than Rattlin, though always
delightful. But Trunnion absolutely makes one laugh
out aloud : whether he is criticising the sister of Mr.
Gamaliel Pickle in that gentleman's presence, at a pot-
house ; or riding to the altar with his squadron of
sailors, tacking in an unfavourable gale; or being run
away into a pack of hounds, and clearing a hollow road
over a waggoner, who views him with " unspeakable
terror and amazement." Mr. Winkle as an equestrian is
not more entirely acceptable to the mind than Trunnion.
We may speak of "caricature," but if an author can
make us sob with laughter, to criticise him solemnly is
ungrateful.
SMOLLETT 201
Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift,
and Sheridan, and the authors of "The Rovers," one
does not remember any writers of the eighteenth century
who quite upset the gravity of the reader. The scene of
the pedant's dinner after the manner of the ancients,
does not seem to myself so comic as the adventures of
Trunnion, while the bride is at the altar, and the bride-
groom is tacking and veering with his convoy about the
fields. One sees how the dinner is done : with a know-
ledge of Athenaeus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace,
many men could have written this set piece. But
Trunnion is quite inimitable : he is a child of humour
and of the highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder.
Till Scott created Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had
ever produced anything except " Tam o' Shanter," that
could be a pendant to Trunnion. His pathos is pos-
sibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my own
opinion. Dear Trunnion ! he makes me overlook the
gambols of his detestable protege^ the hero.
That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an
obstinate, vain, cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely
the man to fall in love with Emilia pour le bon motif,
and then attempt to ruin her, though she was the sister
of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last
and lowest stage. Peregrine's overwhelming vanity,
swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have
degraded him to this abyss. The intrigue was only
the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in
which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight.
Peregrine, in fact, is a hero of naturalisme, except
that his fits of generosity are mere patches daubed on,
r
202 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern
naturaliste would have disdained to indulge. Emilia,
in her scene with Peregrine in the botige to which he has
carried her, rises much above Smollett's heroines, and
we could like her, if she had never forgiven behaviour
which was beneath pardon.
Peregrine's education at Winchester bears out Lord
Elcho's description of that academy in his unpublished
Memoirs. It was apt to develop Peregrines ; and Lord
Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with suit-
able adventures. There can be no doubt that Cad-
wallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther
to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their
abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to
Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the
same abode. That " Peregrine " " does far excel ' Joseph
Andrews ' and ' Amelia,' " as Scott declares, few modern
readers will admit. The world could do much better
without "Peregrine" than without "Joseph"; while
Amelia herself alone is a study greatly preferable to the
whole works of Smollett : such, at least, is the opinion
of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady. Yet
" Peregrine " is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth
century : an epic of humour and of adventure.
In February 1753, Smollett "obliged the town"
with his "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,"
a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The book
is Smollett's " Barry Lyndon," yet as his hero does not
tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a
" dreadful example," there is none of Thackeray's irony,
none of his subtlety. "Here is a really bad man, a
SMOLLETT 203
foreigner too," Smollett seems to say, " do not be
misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count !
Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset,
or gleek. Fathers, on such a rogue shut your doors :
collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques. Let all
avoid the path and shun the example of Ferdinand,
Count Fathom !"
Such is Smollett's sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is
hardly worse than Roderick or Peregrine. The son of
a terrible old sutler and camp-follower, a robber and
slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had to live by his
wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than
Peregrine and Roderick. The daubs of casual gene-
rosity were not laid on, and that is all the difference.
As Sophia Western was mistaken for Miss Jenny
Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince Charles,
who, in fact, caused much inconvenience to harmless
travellers. People were often arrested as "The Pre-
tender's son " abroad as well as in England.
The life and death of Ferdinand's mother, shot by
a wounded hussar in her moment of victory, make
perhaps the most original and interesting part of this
hero's adventures. The rest is much akin to his earlier
novels, but the history of Rinaldo and Monimia has a
passage not quite alien to the vein of Mrs. Radcliffe.
Some remarks in the first chapter show that Smollett
felt the censures on his brutality and " lowness," and
he promises to seek "that goal of perfection, where
nature is castigated almost even to still life . . . where
decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a
fantastic shadow."
204 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Smollett never reached that goal, and even the shadow
of decency never haunted him so as to make him afraid
with any amazement. Smollett avers that he " has had
the courage to call in question the talents of a pseudo-
patron," and so is charged with " insolence, rancour, and
scurrility." Of all these things, and of worse, he had
been guilty; his offence had never been Hmited to
" calling in question the talents " of persons who had
been unsuccessful in getting his play represented. Re-
monstrance merely irritated Tobias. His new novel
was but a fainter echo of his old novels, a panorama
of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the
virtuous Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read
as a sketch of manners, or want of manners. The
scene in which the bumpkin squire rooks the accom-
plished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived,
and Smollett's indignation at the British system of pews
in church is edifying. But when Monimia appears to
her lover as he weeps at her tomb, and proves to be no
phantom, but a " warm and substantial " Monimia,
capable of being "dished up," like any other Smollettian
heroine, the reader is sensibly annoyed. Tobias as un
roviantique is absolutely too absurd; "not here, oh
Tobias, are haunts meet for thee."
Smollett's next novel, " Sir Launcelot Greaves," was
not published till 1761, after it had appeared in numbers,
in The British Magazine. This was a sixpenny serial,
published by Newbery. The years between 1753 and
1760 had been occupied by Smollett in quarrelling,
getting imprisoned for libel, editing the Critical Revieiv^
writing his " History of England," translating (or adapt-
SMOLLETT 205
ing old translations of) " Don Quixote," and driving a
team of literary hacks, whose labours he superintended,
and to whom he gave a weekly dinner. These exploits
are described by Dr. Carlyle, and by Smollett himself,
in " Humphrey Clinker." He did not treat his vassals
with much courtesy or consideration ; but then they
expected no such treatment. We have no right to
talk of his doings as " a blood-sucking method, literary
sweating," like a recent biographer of Smollett. Not to
speak of the oddly mixed metaphor, we do not know
what Smollett's relations to his retainers really were.
As an editor he had to see his contributors. The work
of others he may have recommended, as " reader " to
publishers. Others may have made transcripts for him,
or translations. That Smollett "sweated" men, or
sucked their blood, or both, seems a crude way of saying
that he found them employment. Nobody says that
Johnson "sweated" the persons who helped him in
compiling his Dictionary ; or that Mr. Jowett " sweated "
the friends and pupils who aided him in his translation
of Plato. Authors have a perfect right to procure
literary assistance, especially in learned books, if they
pay for it, and acknowledge their debt to their allies.
On the second point, Smollett was probably not in
advance of his age.
" Sir Launcelot Greaves " is, according to Chambers,
" a sorry specimen of the genius of the author," and Mr.
Oliphant Smeaton calls it " decidedly the least popular "
of his novels, while Scott astonishes us by preferring
it to "Jonathan Wild." Certainly it is inferior to
"Roderick Random" and to "Peregrine Pickle," but
2o6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
it cannot be so utterly unreal as " The Adventures of
an Atom." I, for one, venture to prefer " Sir Launcelot "
to " Ferdinand, Count Fathom." Smollett was really
trying an experiment in the fantastic. Just as Mr. Anstey
Guthrie transfers the mediaeval myth of Venus and the
Ring, or the Arabian tale of the bottled-up geni (or
djinn) into modern life, so Smollett transferred Don
Quixote. His hero, a young baronet of wealth, and of
a benevolent and generous temper, is crossed in love.
Though not mad, he is eccentric, and commences
knight-errant. Scott, and others, object to his armour,
and say that, in his ordinary clothes, and with his well-
filled purse, he would have been more successful in
righting wrongs. Certainly, but then the comic fantasy
of the armed knight arriving at the ale-house, and
jangling about the rose-hung lanes among the astonished
folk of town and country, would have been lost.
Smollett is certainly less unsuccessful in wild fantasy,
than in the ridiculous romantic scenes where the sub-
stantial phantom of Monimia disports itself. The
imitation of the knight by the nautical Captain Crowe
(an excellent Smollettian mariner) is entertaining, and
Sir Launcelot's crusty Sancho is a pleasant variety in
squires. The various forms of oppression which the
knight resists are of historical interest, as also is the
contested election between a rustic Tory and a smooth
Ministerialist : " sincerely attached to the Protestant
succession, in detestation of a popish, an abjured, and
an outlawed Pretender." The heroine, Aurelia Darrel,
is more of a lady, and less of a luxury, than perhaps
any other of Smollett's women. But how Smollett
SMOLLETT 207
makes love ! " Tea was called. The lovers were
seated ; he looked and languished ; she flushed and
faltered ; all was doubt and delirium, fondness and
flutter."
"All was gas and gaiters," said the insane lover of
Mrs. Nickleby, with equal delicacy and point.
Scott says that Smollett, when on a visit to Scotland,
used to write his chapter of "copy" in the half-hour
before the post went out. Scott was very capable of
having the same thing happen to himself. " Sir Launce-
lot " is hurriedly, but vigorously written : the fantasy was
not understood as Smollett intended it to be, and the
book is blotted, as usual, with loathsome medical details.
But people in Madame du Deffand's circle used openly
to discuss the same topics, to the confusion of Horace
Walpole. As the hero of this book is a generous gentle-
man, as the most of it is kind and manly, and the
humour provocative of an honest laugh, it is by no
means to be despised, while the manners, if caricatured,
are based on fact.
It is curious to note that in "Sir Launcelot Greaves,"
we find a character. Ferret, who frankly poses as a
strugforlifeur. M. Daudet's strugforlifeur had heard of
Darwin. Mr. Ferret had read Hobbes, learned that
man was in a state of nature, and inferred that we ought
to prey upon each other, as a pike eats trout. Miss
Burney, too, at Bath, about 1780, met a perfectly
emancipated young "New Woman." She had read
Bolingbroke and Hume, believed in nothing, and was
ready to be a " Woman who Did." Our ancestors could
be just as advanced as we are.
2o8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Smollett went on compiling, and supporting himself
by his compilations, and those of his vassals. In 1762
he unluckily edited a paper called The Briton in the
interests of Lord Bute. The Briton was silenced by
Wilkes's North Briton. Smollett lost his last patron;
he fell ill ; his daughter died ; he travelled angrily in
France and Italy. His "Travels" show the choleric
nature of the man, and he was especially blamed for not
admiring the Venus de Medici. Modern taste, en-
lightened by the works of a better period of Greek art,
has come round to Smollett's opinions. But, in his own
day, he was regarded as a Vandal and a heretic.
In 1764, he visited Scotland, and was warmly wel-
comed by his kinsman, the laird of Bonhill. In 1769,
he published "The Adventures of an Atom," a stupid,
foul, and scurrilous political satire, in which Lord Bute,
having been his patron, was "lashed" in Smollett's
usual style. In 1768, Smollett left England for ever.
He desired a consulship, but no consulship was found
for him, which is not surprising. He died at Monte
Nova, near Leghorn, in September (others say October)
177 1. He had finished "Humphrey Clinker," which
appeared a day or two before his death.
Thackeray thought "Humphrey Clinker" the most
laughable book that ever was written. Certainly nobody
is to be envied who does not laugh over the epistles of
Winifred Jenkins. The book is too well known for
analysis. The family of Matthew Bramble, Esq., are
on their travels, with his nephew and niece, young Mel-
ford and Lydia Melford, with Miss Jenkins, and the
squire's tart, greedy, and amorous old maid of a sister,
SMOLLETT 209
Tabitha Bramble. This lady's persistent amours and
mean avarice scarcely strike modern readers as amusing.
Smollett gave aspects of his own character in the
choleric, kind, benevolent Matthew Bramble, and in
the patriotic and paradoxical Lieutenant Lismahago.
Bramble, a gouty invalid, is as full of medical abomi-
nations as Smollett himself, as ready to fight, and as
generous and open-handed. Probably the author shared
Lismahago's contempt of trade, his dislike of the Union
(1707), his fieryindependence (yet he^ic^i- marry Tabitha!),
and those opinions in which Lismahago heralds some of
the social notions of Mr. Ruskin.
Melford is an honourable kind of "walking gentle-
man " ; Lydia, though enamoured, is modest and
dignified ; Clinker is a worthy son of Bramble, with
abundant good humour, and a pleasing vein of Wesleyan
Methodism. But the grotesque spelling, rural vanity,
and fidivete of Winifred Jenkins, with her affection for
her kitten, make her the most delightful of this
wandering company. After beholding the humours and
partaking of the waters of Bath, they follow Smollett's
own Scottish tour, and each character gives his picture
of the country which Smollett had left at its lowest ebb
of industry and comfort, and found so much more
prosperous. The book is a mine for the historian of
manners and customs : the novel-reader finds Count
Fathom metamorphosed into Mr. Grieve, an exemplary
apothecary, "a sincere convert to virtue," and "un-
affectedly pious."
Apparently a wave of good-nature came over Smollett :
he forgave everybody, his own relations even, and he
o
2IO ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
reclaimed his villain. A patron might have played
\vith him. He mellowed in Scotland : Matthew there
became less tart, and more tolerant; an actual English
Matthew would have behaved quite otherwise. " Hum-
phrey Clinker " is an astonishing book, as the work of
an exiled, poor, and dying man. None of his works
leaves so admirable an impression of Smollett's virtues :
none has so few of his less amiable qualities.
With the cadet of Bonhill, outworn with living, and
with labour, died the burly, brawling, picturesque old
English novel of humour and of the road. We have
nothing notable in this manner, before the arrival of Mr.
Pickwick. An exception will scarcely be made in the
interest of Richard Cumberland, who, as Scott says,
" has occasionally . . . become disgusting, when he
meant to be humorous." Already Walpole had begun
the new "Gothic romance," and the "Castle of Otrarito,"
with Miss Burney's novels, was to lead up to Mrs.
Radcliffe and Scott, to Miss Edgeworth and Miss
Austen.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Sainte-Beuve says somewhere that it is impossible to
speak of "The German Classics." Perhaps he would
not have allowed us to talk of the American classics.
American literature is too nearly contemporary : Time
has not tried it. But, if America possesses a classic
author (and I am not denying that she may have
several), that author is decidedly Hawthorne. His
renown is unimpeached : his greatness is probably per-
manent, because he is at once such an original and
personal genius, and such a judicious and determined
artist.
Hawthorne did not set himself to "compete with
life." He did not make the effort — the proverbially
tedious effort — to say everything. To his mind, fiction
was not a mirror of commonplace persons, and he was
not the analyst of the minutest among their ordinary
emotions. Nor did he make a moral, or social, or politi-
cal purpose the end and aim of his art. Moral as many
of his pieces naturally are, we cannot call them didactic.
He did not expect, nor intend, to better people by them.
He drew the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale without hoping
that his Awful Example would persuade readers to
"make a clean breast" of their iniquities and their
213
214 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
secrets. It was the moral situation that interested him,
not the edifying effect of his picture of that situation
upon the minds of novel-readers.
He set himself to write Romance, with a definite idea
of what Romance-writing should be ; "to dream strange
things, and make them look like truth." Nothing can be
more remote from the modern system of reporting com-
monplace things, in the hope that they will read like truth.
As all painters must do, according to good traditions, he
selected a subject, and then placed it in a deliberately
arranged light — not in the full glare of the noonday sun,
and in the disturbances of wind, and weather, and cloud.
Moonshine filling a familiar chamber, and making it un-
familiar, moonshine mixed with the " faint ruddiness on
walls and ceiling " of fire, was the light, or a clear brown
twilight was the light by which he chose to work. So
he tells us in the preface to "The Scarlet Letter." The
room could be filled with the ghosts of old dwellers in
it ; faint, yet distinct, all the life that had passed through
it came back, and spoke with him, and inspired him.
He kept his eyes on these figures, tangled in some rare
knot of Fate, and of Desire : these he painted, not
attending much to the bustle of existence that surrounded
them, not permitting superfluous elements to mingle
with them, and to distract him.
The method of Hawthorne can be more easily traced
than that of most artists as great as himself. Pope's
brilliant passages and disconnected trains of thought are
explained when we remember that " paper-sparing," as
he says, he wrote two, or four, or six couplets on odd,
stray bits of casual writing material. These he had to
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 215
join together, somehow, and between his " Orient Pearls
at Random Strung " there is occasionally " too much
string," as Dickens once said on another opportunity.
Hawthorne's method is revealed in his published note-
books. In these he jotted the germ of an idea, the first
notion of a singular, perhaps supernatural moral situa-
tion. Many of these he never used at all, on others he
would dream, and dream, till the persons in the situa-
tions became characters, and the thing was evolved into
a story. Thus he may have invented such a problem
as this : " The effect of a great, sudden sin on a simple
and joyous nature," and thence came all the substance of
" The Marble Faun " (" Transformation "). The original
and germinal idea would naturally divide itself into an-
other, as the protozoa reproduce themselves. Another
idea was the effect of nearness to the great crime on a
pure and spotless nature : hence the character of Hilda.
In the preface to "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne
shows us how he tried, by reflection and dream, to warm
the vague persons of the first mere notion or hint into
such life as characters in romance inherit. While he
was in the Civil Service of his country, in the Custom
House at Salem, he could not do this ; he needed free-
dom. He was dismissed by political opponents from
office, and instantly he was himself again, and wrote his
most popular and, perhaps, his best book. The evolu-
tion of his work was from the prime notion (which he
confessed that he loved best when "strange") to the
short story, and thence to the full and rounded novel.
All his work was leisurely. All his language was picked,
though not with affectation. He did not strive to make
2i6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
a style out of the use of odd words, or of familiar words
in odd places. Almost always he looked for " a kind of
spiritual medium, seen through which" his romances,
like the Old Manse in which he dwelt, "had not quite
the aspect of belonging to the material world."
The spiritual medium which he liked, he was partly
born into, and partly he created it. The child of a race
which came from England, robust and Puritanic, he had
in his veins the blood of judges — of those judges who
burned witches and persecuted Quakers. His fancy is
as much inflenced by the old fanciful traditions of Pro-
vidence, of Witchcraft, of haunting Indian magic, as
Scott's is influenced by legends of foray and feud, by
ballad, and song, and old wives' tales, and records of
conspiracies, fire-raisings, tragic love - adventures, and
border wars. Like Scott, Hawthorne lived in phantasy
— in phantasy which returned to the romantic past,
wherein his ancestors had been notable men. It is a
commonplace, but an inevitable commonplace, to add
that he was filled with the idea of Heredity, with the
belief that we are all only new combinations of our
fathers that were before us. This has been made into a
kind of pseudo-scientific doctrine by M. Zola, in the
long series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. Hawthorne
treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in " The
House of the Seven Gables."
It is curious to mark Hawthorne's attempts to break
away from himself — from the man that heredity, and
circumstance, and the divine gift of genius had made
him. He naturally " haunts the mouldering lodges of
the past " ; but when he came to England (where such
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 217
lodges are abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-
grained. He knew that a long past, with mysteries,
dark places, malisons, curses, historic wrongs, was the
proper atmosphere of his art. But a kind of con-
scientious desire to be something other than himself —
something more ordinary and popular — make him thank
Heaven that his chosen atmosphere was rare in his
native land. He grumbled at it, when he was in the
midst of it ; he grumbled in England ; and how he
grumbled in Rome! He permitted the American
Eagle to make her nest in his bosom, "with the cus-
tomary infirmity of temper that characterises this un-
happy fowl," as he says in his essay "The Custom
House." "The general truculency of her attitude"
seems to " threaten mischief to the inoffensive com-
munity" of Europe, and especially of England and
Italy.
Perhaps Hawthorne travelled too late, when his
habits were too much fixed. It does not become
Englishmen to be angry because a voyager is annoyed
at not finding everything familiar and customary in
lands which he only visits because they are strange.
This is an inconsistency to which English travellers
are particularly prone. But it is, in Hawthorne's case,
perhaps, another instance of his conscientious attempts
to be, what he was not, very much like other people.
His unexpected explosions of Puritanism, perhaps, are
caused by the sense of being too much himself. He
speaks of " the Squeamish love of the Beautiful " as if
the love of the Beautiful were something unworthy of
an able-bodied citizen. In some arts, as in painting
2i8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
and sculpture, his taste was very far from being at home,
as his Italian journals especially prove. In short, he
was an artist in a community for long most inartistic.
He could not do what many of us find very difficult —
he could not take Beauty with gladness as it comes,
neither shrinking from it as immoral, nor getting girlishly
drunk upon it, in the aesthetic fashion, and screaming
over it in an intoxication of surprise. His tendency
was to be rather shy and afraid of Beauty, as a pleasant
but not immaculately respectable acquaintance. Or,
perhaps, he was merely deferring to Anglo-Saxon public
opinion.
Possibly he was trying to wean himself from him-
self, and from his own genius, when he consorted
with odd amateur socialists in farm-work, and when he
mixed, at Concord, with the " queer, strangely-dressed,
oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon them-
selves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet
were simple bores of a very intense water." They
haunted Mr. Emerson as they haunted Shelley, and
Hawthorne had to see much of them. But they neither
made a convert of him, nor irritated him into resent-
ment. His long-enduring kindness to the unfortunate
Miss Delia Bacon, an early believer in the nonsense
about Bacon and Shakespeare, was a model of manly
and generous conduct. He was, indeed, an admirable
character, and his goodness had the bloom on it of
a courteous and kindly nature that loved the Muses.
But, as one has ventured to hint, the development of
his genius and taste was hampered now and then,
apparently, by a desire to put himself on the level of
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 219
the general public, and of their ideas. This, at least,
is how one explains to oneself various remarks in his
prefaces, journals, and note-books. This may account
for the moral allegories which too weirdly haunt some
of his short, early pieces. Edgar Poe, in a passage
full of very honest and well-chosen praise, found fault
with the allegorical business.
Mr. Hutton, from whose " Literary Essays " I borrow
Poe's opinion, says : " Poe boldly asserted that the con-
spicuously ideal scaffoldings of Hawthorne's stories were
but the monstrous fruits of the bad transcendental atmos-
phere which he breathed so long." But I hope this way
of putting it is not Poe's. " Ideal scaffoldings," are odd
enough, but when scaffoldings turn out to be "fruits" of
an "atmosphere," and monstrous fruits of a "bad tran-
scendental atmosphere," the brain reels in the fumes
of mixed metaphors. " Let him mend his pen," cried
Poe, "get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the
Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott," and, in fact, write about
things less impalpable, as Mr. Mallock's heroine pre-
ferred to be loved, " in a more human sort of way."
Hawthorne's way was never too ruddily and robustly
human. Perhaps, even in "The Scarlet Letter," we
feel too distinctly that certain characters are moral con-
ceptions, not warmed and wakened out of the allegorical
into the real. The persons in an allegory may be real
enough, as Bunyan has proved by examples. But that
culpable clergyman, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale, with his
large, white brow, his melancholy eyes, his hand on
his heart, and his general resemblance to the High
Church Curate in Thackeray's " Our Street," is he
220 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
real? To me he seems very unworthy to be
Hester's lover, for she is a beautiful woman of flesh
and blood. Mr. Dimmesdale was not only immoral ;
he was unsportsmanlike. He had no more pluck than
a church-mouse. His miserable passion was degraded
by its brevity ; how could he see this woman's disgrace
for seven long years, and never pluck up heart either
to share her shame or peccare fortiterl He is a lay
figure, very cleverly, but somewhat conventionally made
and painted. The vengeful husband of Hester, Roger
Chillingworth, is a Mr. Casaubon stung into jealous
anger. But his attitude, watching ever by Dimmesdale,
tormenting him, and yet in his confidence, and ever
unsuspected, reminds one of a conception dear to
Dickens. He uses it in "David Copperfield," where
Mr. Micawber (of all people !) plays this trick on Uriah
Heep; he uses it in "Hunted Down"; he was about
using it in " Edwin Drood " ; he used it (old Martin
and Pecksniff) in "Martin Chuzzlewit." The person
of Roger Chillingworth and his conduct are a little too
melodramatic for Hawthorne's genius.
In Dickens's manner, too, is Hawthorne's long
sarcastic address to Judge Pyncheon (in "The House
of the Seven Gables"), as the judge sits dead in
his chair, with his watch ticking in his hand.
Occasionally a chance remark reminds one of Dickens ;
this for example: He is talking of large, black
old books of divinity, and of their successors, tiny
books, Elzevirs perhaps. " These little old volumes
impressed me as if they had been intended for very
large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted at an
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 221
early stage of their growth." This might almost deceive
the elect as a piece of the true Boz. Their widely
different talents did really intersect each other where
the perverse, the grotesque, and the terrible dwell.
To myself "The House of the Seven Gables" has
always appeared the most beautiful and attractive of
Hawthorne's novels. He actually gives us a love story,
and condescends to a pretty heroine. The curse of
" Maule's Blood " is a good old romantic idea, terribly
handled. There is more of lightness, and of a cob-
webby dusty humour in Hepzibah Pyncheon, the de-
cayed lady shopkeeper, than Hawthorne commonly cares
to display. Do you care for the " first lover," the
Photographer's Young Man? It may be conventional
prejudice, but I seem to see him going about on a
tricycle, and I don't think him the right person for
Phoebe. Perhaps it is really the beautiful, gentle,
oppressed Clifford who haunts one's memory most, a
kind of tragic and thwarted Harold Skimpole. " How
pleasant, how delightful," he murmured, but not as if
addressing any one. "Will it last? How balmy the
atmosphere through that open window ! An open
window ! How beautiful that play of sunshine. Those
flowers, how very fragrant ! That young girl's face, how
cheerful, how blooming. A flower with the dew on it,
and sunbeams in the dewdrops. . . ." This comparison
with Skimpole may sound like an unkind criticism of
Clifford's character and place in the story — it is only a
chance note of a chance resemblance.
Indeed, it may be that Hawthorne himself was
aware of the resemblance. "An individual of Clif-
222 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
ford's character," he remarks, " can always be pricked
more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and
harmonious than through his heart." And he suggests
that, if Clifford had not been so long in prison, his
aesthetic zeal " might have eaten out or filed away his
affections." This was what befell Harold Skimpole —
himself "in prisons often" — at Coavinses ! The Judge
Pyncheon of the tale is also a masterly study of swag-
gering black-hearted respectability, and then, in addition
to all the poetry of his style, and the charm of his
haunted air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave con-
clusion of the good sort, the old sort. They come into
money, they marry, they are happy ever after. This is
doing things handsomely, though some of our modern
novelists think it coarse and degrading, Hawthorne
did not think so, and they are not exactly better artists
than Hawthorne.
Yet he, too, had his economies, which we resent. I
do not mean his not telling us what it was that Roger
Chillingworth saw on Arthur Dimmesdale's bare breast.
To leave that vague is quite legitimate. But what had
Miriam and the spectre of the Catacombs done ? Who
was the spectre ? What did he want ? To have told
all this would have been better than to fill the novel
with padding about Rome, sculpture, and the Ethics of
Art. As the silly saying runs : " the people has a right
to know " about Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance.^
But the "Marble Faun" is not of Hawthorne's best
1 I know, now, who Miriam was and who was the haunter of the
Catacombs. But perhaps the people is as well without the knowledge
of an old and ' ' ower true tale " that shook a throne.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 223
period, beautiful as are a hundred passages in the
tale.
Beautiful passages are as common in his prose as gold
in the richest quartz. How excellent are his words on
the first faint but certain breath of Autumn in the air,
felt, perhaps, early in July. " And then came Autumn,
with his immense burthen of apples, dropping them
continually from his overladen shoulders as he trudged
along." Keats might have written so of Autumn in the
orchards — if Keats had been writing prose.
There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than
Hawthorne's, none more original, more surefooted, in
his own realm of moonlight and twilight.
THE PARADISE OF POETS
THE PARADISE OF POETS
We were talking of Love, Constancy, the Ideal. " Who
ever loved like the poets ? " cried Lady Violet Lebas,
her pure, pale cheek flushing. " Ah, if ever I am to
love, he shall be a singer ! "
" Tenors are popular, very," said Lord Walter.
" I mean a poet," she answered witheringly.
Near them stood Mr. Witham, the author of " Heart's
Chords Tangled."
" Ah," said he, " that reminds me. I have been
trying to catch it all the morning. That reminds me
of my dream."
" Tell us your dream," murmured Lady Violet Lebas,
and he told it.
" It was through an unfortunate but pardonable
blunder," said Mr. Witham, " that I died, and reached
the Paradise of Poets. I had, indeed, published volumes
of verse, but with the most blameless motives. Other
poets were continually sending me theirs, and, as I
could not admire them, and did not like to reply by
critical remarks, I simply printed some rhymes for the
purpose of sending them to the gentlemen who favoured
me with theirs. I always wrote on the fly-leaf a quota-
tion from the " Iliad," about giving copper in exchange
for gold ; and the few poets who could read Greek
were gratified, while the others, probably, thought a
227
228 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
compliment was intended. Nothing could be less
culpable or pretentious, but, through some mistake
on the part of Charon, I was drafted off to the Paradise
of Poets.
" Outside the Golden Gate a number of Shadows
were waiting, in different attitudes of depression and
languor. Bavius and Maevius were there, still com-
plaining of 'cliques,' railing at Horace for a mere
rhymer of society, and at Virgil as a plagiarist. 'Take
away his cribs from Homer and Apollonius Rhodius,'
quoth honest Maevius, 'and what is there left of him?'
I also met a society of gentlemen, in Greek costume,
of various ages, from a half-naked minstrel with a
tortoiseshell lyre in his hand to an elegant of the age
of Pericles. They all consorted together, talking various
dialects of Aeolic, Ionian, Attic Greek, and so forth,
which were plainly not intelligible to each other. I
ventured to ask one of the company who he was, but
he, with a sweep of his hand, said, ' We are Homer ! '
When I expressed my regret and surprise that the
Golden Gate had not yet opened for so distinguished,
though collective, an artist, my friend answered that,
according to Fick, Peppmiiller, and many other learned
men, they were Homer. ' But an impostor from Chios
has got in somehow,' he said ; ' they don't pay the least
attention to the Germans in the Paradise of Poets.'
"At this moment the Golden Gates were thrown
apart, and a fair lady, in an early Italian costume, carrying
a laurel in her hand, appeared at the entrance. All
the Shadows looked up with an air of weary expectation,
like people waiting for their turn in a doctor's consulting-
room. She beckoned to me, however, and I made
THE PARADISE OF POETS 229
haste to follow her. The words ' Charlatan ! ' ' You a
poet ! ' in a variety of languages, greeted me by way
of farewell from the Shadows.
" ' The renowned Laura, if I am not mistaken,' I
ventured to remark, recognising her, indeed, from the
miniature in the Laurentian library at Florence.
"She bowed, and I began to ask for her adorer, Petrarch.
" ' Excuse me,' said Laura, as we glided down a
mossy path, under the shade of trees particularly dear
to poets, 'excuse me, but the sonneteer of whom you
speak is one whose name I cannot bear to mention.
His conduct with Burns's Clarinda, his heartless in-
fatuation for Stella '
"'You astonish me,' I said. 'In the Paradise of
Poets '
"'They are poets still — incorrigible!' answered the
lady; then slightly raising her voice of silver, as a
beautiful appearance in a toga drew near, she cried
' Catullo inio ! '
"The greeting between these accomplished ghosts
was too kindly to leave room for doubt as to the ardour
of their affections.
" 'Will you, my Catullus,' murmured Laura, 'explain
to this poet from the land of fogs, any matters which,
to him, may seem puzzling and unfamiliar in our
Paradise ? '
"The Veronese, with a charming smile, took my
hand, and led me to a shadowy arbour, whence we
enjoyed a prospect of many rivers and mountains in
the poets' heaven. Among these I recognised the
triple crest of the Eildons, Grongar Hill, Cithaeron
and Etna ; while the reed-fringed waters of the Mincius
230 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
flowed musically between the banks and braes o' bonny
Doon to join the Tweed. Blithe ghosts were wander-
ing by, in all varieties of apparel, and I distinctly
observed Dante's Beatrice, leaning loving on the arm
of Sir Philip Sidney, while Dante was closely engaged
in conversation with the lost Lenore, celebrated by
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.
" ' In what can my knowledge of the Paradise of Poets
be serviceable to you, sir ? ' said Catullus, as he flung
himself at the feet of Laura, on the velvet grass.
"'I am disinclined to seem impertinently curious,'
I answered, ' but the ladies in this fair, smiling country —
have the gods made them poetical ? '
" ' Not generally,' replied Catullus. ' Indeed, if you
would be well with them, I may warn you never to mention
poetry in their hearing. They never cared for it while
on earth, and in this place it is a topic which the
prudent carefully avoid among ladies. To tell the truth,
they have had to listen to far too much poetry, and
too many discussions on the caesura. There are, indeed,
a few lady poets — very few. Sappho, for example ;
indeed I cannot recall any other at this moment. The
result is that Phaon, of all the shadows here, is the most
distinguished by the fair. He was not a poet, you
know; he got in on account of Sappho, who adored
him. They are estranged now, of course.'
" ' You interest me deeply,' I answered. ' And now,
will you kindly tell me why these ladies are here, if they
were not poets ? '
" ' The women that were our ideals while we dwelt
on earth, the women we loved but never won, or, at all
events, never wedded, they for whom we sighed while
THE PARADISE OF POETS 231
in the arms of a recognised and legitimate affection, have
been chosen by the Olympians to keep us company in
Paradise ! '
" ' Then wherefore,' I interrupted, ' do I see Robert
Burns loitering with that lady in a ruff, — Cassandra,
I make no doubt — Ronsard's Cassandra ? And why is
the incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch ;
and Miss Patty Blount, Pope's flame, from the Syrian
Meleager, while his Heliodore is manifestly devoted to
Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am delighted, if
rather surprised, to see here ? '
" ' Ah,' said Catullus, ' you are a new-comer among us.
Poets will be poets, and no sooner have they attained
their desire, and dwelt in the company of their earthly
Ideals, than they feel strangely, yet irresistibly drawn to
Another. So it was in Hfe, so it will ever be. No Ideal
can survive a daily companionship, and fortunate is the
poet who did not marry his first love ! '
** ' As far as that goes,' I answered, ' most of you were
highly favoured ; indeed, I do not remember any poet
whose Ideal was his wife, or whose first love led him to
the altar.'
" ' I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the
Veronese ; ' few of us were. Myself, Horace, Virgil —
we were all bachelors.'
" ' And Lesbia ! '
" I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving
bay into a chaplet, and inattentive to our conversation.
•"Poor Lesbia!' said Catullus, with a suppressed
sigh. ' How I misjudged that girl ! How cruel, how
causeless were my reproaches,' and wildly rending his
curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket,
232 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
whence there soon arose the melancholy notes of the
Ausonian lyre.'
" ' He is incorrigible,' said Laura, very coldly ; and
she deliberately began to tear and toss away the frag-
ments of the chaplet she had been weaving. ' I shall
never break him of that habit of versifying. But they
are all alike.'
"'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with
his Ideal — nobody but has exchanged Ideals with some
other poet ? '
" ' There is one,' she said. ' He comes of a northern
tribe ; and in his life-time he never rhymed upon his
unattainable lady, or if rhyme he did, the accents never
carried her name to the ears of the vulgar. Look there.'
"She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew
the mounted figure that was riding the ford, with a green-
mantled lady beside him like the Fairy Queen.
" Surely I had read of her, and knew her —
" ' She whose blue eyes their secret told,
Though shaded by her locks of gold.'
" ' They are different ; I know not why. They are
constant,' said Laura, and rising with an air of chagrin,
she disappeared among the boughs of the trees that bear
her name.
" ' Unhappy hearts of poets,' I mused. ' Light things
and sacred they are, but even in their Paradise, and
among their chosen, with every wish fulfilled, and united
to their beloved, they cannot be at rest ! '
" Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence
there was a wide prospect. Certain poets were stand-
ing there, looking down into an abyss, and to them
I joined myself.
THE PARADISE OF POETS 233
" ' Ah, I cannot bear it ! ' said a voice, and, as he
turned away, his brow already clearing, his pain already
forgotten, I beheld the august form of Shakespeare.
" Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he
answered the unuttered question.
" ' That is a sight for Pagans,' he said, ' and may give
them pleasure. But my Paradise were embittered if I
had to watch the sorrows of others, and their torments,
however well deserved. The others are gazing on the
purgatory of critics and commentators.'
" He passed from me, and I joined the ' Ionian father
of the rest' — Homer, who, with a countenance of un-
speakable majesty, was seated on a throne of rock,
between the Mantuan Virgil of the laurel crown, Hugo,
Sophocles, Milton, Lovelace, Tennyson, and Shelley.
"At their feet I beheld, in a vast and gloomy hall,
many an honest critic, many an erudite commentator, an
army of reviewers. Some were condemned to roll logs
up insuperable heights, whence they descended thundering
to the plain. Others were set to impositions, and I
particularly observed that the Homeric commentators
v/ere obliged to write out the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " in
their complete shape, and were always driven by fiends to
the task when they prayed for the bare charity of being
permitted to leave out the ' interpolations.' Others, fearful
to narrate, were torn into as many fragments as they had
made of these immortal epics. Others, such as Aristar-
chus, were spitted on their own critical signs of dis-
approval. Many reviewers were compelled to read the
books which they had criticised without perusal, and it was
terrible to watch the agonies of the worthy pressmen
who were set to this unwonted task. ' May we not
234 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
be let off with the preface ? ' they cried in piteous accents.
* May we not glance at the table of contents and be done
with it?' But the presiding demons (who had been
Examiners in the bodily life) drove them remorseless to
their toils.
"Among the condemned I could not but witness,
with sympathy, the punishment reserved for translators.
The translators of Virgil, in particular, were a vast and
motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops
were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards ; Judges,
in their ermine ; professors, clergymen, civil servants,
writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the
anapaestic measure, the metre of the " Lay of the Last
Minstrel," the heroic couplet and similar devices can
inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not
wisely : and now their penance was to hear each other
read their own translations."
"That must have been more than they could bear,"
said Lady Violet.
" Yes," said Mr. Witham ; " I should know, for down
I fell into Tartarus with a crash, and writhed among the
Translators."
"Why?" asked Lady Violet.
*' Because I have translated Theocritus ! "
" Mr. Witham," said Lady Violet, " did you meet your
ideal woman when you were in the Paradise of Poets ? "
"She yet walks this earth," said the bard, with a too
significant bow.
Lady Violet turned coldly away.
Mr. Witham was never invited to the Blues again — the
name of Lord Azure's place in Kent.
The Poet is shut out of Paradise.
PARIS AND HELEN
PARIS AND HELEN
The first name in romance, the most ancient and the
most enduring, is that of Argive Helen. During three
thousand years fair women have been born, have lived,
and been loved, " that there might be a song in the ears
of men of later time," but, compared to the renown of
Helen, their glory is dim. Cleopatra, who held the
world's fate in her hands, and lay in the arms of Caesar ;
Mary Stuart {Maria Verticordia), for whose sake, as a
northern novelist tells, peasants have lain awake, sorrow-
ing that she is dead ; Agnes Sorel, Fair Rosamond, la
belle Stuart, "the Pompadour and the Parabere," can
still enchant us from the page of history and 'chronicle.
"Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules even
strength itself," to quote the Greek orator on the mistress
of them all, of her who, having never lived, can never
die, the Daughter of the Swan.
While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal
of beauty upon earth, it is curious to reflect on the
modernite of her story, the oldest of the love stories of
the world. In Homer we first meet her, the fairest of
women in the song of the greatest of poets. It might
almost seem as if Homer meant to justify, by his deal-
ing with Helen, some of the most recent theories of
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238 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
literary art. In the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " the tale of
Helen is without a beginning and without an end, like a
frieze on a Greek temple. She crosses the stage as a figure
familiar to all, the poet's audience clearly did not need
to be told who Helen was, nor anything about her
youth.
The famous judgment of Paris, the beginning of
evil to Achaeans and Ilian men, is only mentioned
once by Homer, late, and in a passage of doubtful
authenticity. Of her reconciliation to her wedded lord,
Menelaus, not a word is said ; of her end we are told
no more than that for her and him a mansion in
Elysium is prepared—
" Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow."
We leave her happy in Argos, a smile on her lips,
a gift in her hands, as we met her in Troy, beautiful,
adored despite her guilt, as sweet in her repentance as
in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom mention
her, in the epic, but with horror and anger; men
never address her but in gentle courtesy. What is
her secret? How did she leave her home with Paris —
beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable
Aphrodite ? Homer is silent on all of these things ;
these things, doubtless, were known by his audience.
In his poem Helen moves as a thing of simple grace,
courtesy, and kindness, save when she rebels against her
doom, after seeing her lover fly from her husband's
spear. Had we only Homer, by far our earliest literary
source, we should know little of the romance of Helen ;
should only know that a lawless love brought ruin on
PARIS AND HELEN 239
Troy and sorrow on the Achaeans ; and this is thrown
out, with no moral comment, without praise or blame.
The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty was recon-
ciled to life. There is no explanation, no denouement ;
and we know how much denouements and explanations
hampered Scott and Shakespeare. From these trammels
Homer is free, as a god is free from mortal limitations.
All this manner of telling a tale — a manner so ancient,
so original — is akin, in practice, to recent theories of
what art should be, and what art seldom is, perhaps
never is, in modern hands.
Modem enough, again, is the choice of a married
woman for the heroine of the earliest love tale. Apol-
lonius Rhodius sings (and no man has ever sung so
well) of a maiden's love ; Virgil, of a widow's ; Homer,
of love that has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny,
which dominates even Zeus. Once again, Helen is not
a very young girl ; ungallant chronologists have attri-
buted to her I know not what age. We think of her
as about the age of the Venus of Milo ; in truth, she
was "ageless and immortal." Homer never describes
her beauty ; we only see it reflected in the eyes of the
old men, white and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas : but
hers is a loveliness " to turn an old man young." " It
is no marvel," they say, "that for her sake Trojans and
Achaeans slay each other."
She was embroidering at a vast web, working in
gold and scarlet the sorrows that for her sake befell
mankind, when they called her to the walls to see Paris
fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. There she
stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for
240 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
her old love and her own city. Already her thought is
far from Paris. Was her heart ever with Paris ? That
is her secret. A very old legend, mentioned by the
Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris
magically beguiled her, disguised in the form of Mene-
laus, her lord, as Uther beguiled Ygerne. She sees the
son of Priam play the dastard in the fight ; she turns in
wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to his
arms ; but to his arms she must go, " for the daughter
of Zeus was afraid." Violence is put upon beauty ; it is
soiled, or seems soiled, in its way through the world.
Helen urges Paris again into the war. He has a heart
invincibly light and gay ; shame does not weigh on him.
" Not every man is valiant every day," he says ; yet
once engaged in battle, he bears him bravely, and his
arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.
What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess. His
beauty is the bane of Ilios ; but Homer forgives so
much to beauty. In the end of the " Iliad," Helen sings
the immortal dirge over Hector, the stainless knight,
" with thy loving kindness and thy gentle speech."
In the "Odyssey," she is at home again, playing the
gracious part of hostess to Odysseus's wandering son,
pouring into the bowl the magic herb of Egypt, "which
brings forgetfulness of sorrow." The wandering son of
Odysseus departs with a gift for his bride, "to wear
upon the day of her desire, a memorial of the hands
of Helen," the beautiful hands, that in Troy or Argos
were never idle.
Of Helen, from Homer, we know no more. Grace,
penitence in exile, peace at home, these are the portion
PARIS AND HELEN 241
of her who set East and West at war and ruined the
city of Priam of the ashen spear. As in the strange
legend preserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil,
who tells us that Helen wore a red " star-stone," whence
fell gouts of blood that vanished ere they touched her
swan's neck ; so all the blood shed for her sake leaves
Helen stainless. Of Homer's Helen we know no more.
The later Greek fancy, playing about this form of
beauty, wove a myriad of new fancies, or disinterred
from legend old beliefs untouched by Homer. Helen
was the daughter of the Swan — that is, as was later
explained, of Zeus in the shape of a swan. Her
loveUness, even in childhood, plunged her in many
adventures. Theseus carried her off; her brothers
rescued her. All the princes of Achaea competed for
her hand, having first taken an oath to avenge whom-
soever she might choose for her husband. The choice
fell on the correct and honourable, but rather incon-
spicuous, Menelaus, and they dwelt in Sparta, beside the
Eurotas, "in a hollow of the rifted hills." Then, from
across the sea, came the beautiful and fatal Paris, son of
of Priam, King of Troy. As a child, Paris had been
exposed on the mountains, because his mother dreamed
that she brought forth a firebrand. He was rescued
and fostered by a shepherd ; he tended the flocks ; he
loved the daughter of a river god, CEnone. Then came
the naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most
beautiful of mortals the prize of beauty. Aphrodite won
the golden apple from the queen of heaven, Hera, and
from the Goddess of war and wisdom, Athena, bribing
the judge by the promise of the fairest wife in the world.
Q
242 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
No incident is more frequently celebrated in poetry
and art, to which it lends such gracious opportunities.
Paris was later recognised as of the royal blood of Troy.
He came to Lacedaemon on an embassy, he saw Helen,
and destiny had its way.
Concerning the details in this most ancient love-
story, we learn nothing from Homer, who merely makes
Paris remind Helen of their bridal night in the isle of
Cranae. But from Homer we learn that Paris carried
off not only the wife of Menelaus, but many of his
treasures. To the poet of the " Iliad," the psychology
of the wooing would have seemed a simple matter.
Like the later vase-painters, he would have shown us
Paris beside Helen, Aphrodite standing near, accom-
panied by the figure of Peitho — Persuasion.
Homer always escapes our psychological problems by
throwing the weight of our deeds and misdeeds on a
God or a Goddess, or on destiny. To have fled from
her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in
keeping with the character of Helen as Homer draws
it. Her repentance is almost Christian in its expres-
sion, and repentance indicates a consciousness of sin
and of shame, which Helen frequently professes. Thus
she, at least, does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous
way, throw all the blame on the Immortals and on
destiny. The cheerful acquiescence of Helen in destiny
makes part of the comic element in La Belle Helene,
but the mirth only arises out of the incongruity between
Parisian ideas and those of ancient Greece.
Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the "Odyssey"
by Penelope, chiefly because of the ruinous conse-
PARIS AND HELEN 243
quences which followed her flight. Still, there is one
passage, when Penelope prudently hesitates about recog-
nising her returned lord, which makes it just possible
that a legend chronicled by Eustathius was known to
Homer, — namely, the tale already mentioned, that Paris
beguiled her in the shape of Menelaus. The incident
is very old, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon,
and might be used whenever a lady's character needed
to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, is in-
consistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not
in Homer's manner.
The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have
written harshly against Helen. She punished him by
blindness, and he indited a palinode, explaining that
it was not she who went to Troy, but a woman
fashioned in her likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light.
The real Helen remained safely and with honour in
Egypt. Euripides has made this idea, which was calcu-
lated to please him, the groundwork of his " Helena,"
but it never had a strong hold on the Greek imagination.
Modern fancy is pleased by the picture of the cloud-
bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a phantasm.
" Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue."
Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris,
Homer says very little. He slew Achilles by an arrow-
shot in the Scaean gate, and prophecy was fulfilled. He
himself fell by another shaft, perhaps the poisoned shaft
of Philoctetes. In the fourth or fifth century of our
era a late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris's
journey, in quest of a healing spell, to the forsaken
CEnone, and her refusal to aid him ; her death on his
244 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
funeral pyre. Quintus is a poet of extraordinary merit
for his age, and scarcely deserves the reproach of lazi-
ness affixed on him by Lord Tennyson.
On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-
contemptuous liking for the beautiful Paris. Later art
represents him as a bowman of girlish charms, wearing
a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend that he had
a son, Corythus, by Q^none, and that he killed the lad
in a moment of jealousy, finding him with Helen and
failing to recognise him. On the death of Paris, per-
haps by virtue of the custom of the Levirate, Helen
became the wife of his brother, Deiphobus.
How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought
about we do not learn from Homer, who, in the
" Odyssey," accepts it as a fact. The earliest traditional
hint on the subject is given by the famous " Coffer of
Cypselus," a work of the seventh century, B.C., which
Pausanias saw at Olympia, in a.d. 174. Here, on a
band of ivory, was represented, among other scenes
from the tale of Troy, Menelaus rushing, sword in
hand, to slay Helen. According to Stesichorus, the
army was about to stone her after the fall of Ilios, but
relented, amazed by her beauty.
Of her later life in Lacedaemon, nothing is known on
really ancient authority, and later traditions vary. The
Spartans showed her sepulchre and her shrine at
Therapnae, where she was worshipped. Herodotus
tells us how Helen, as a Goddess, appeared in her
temple and healed a deformed child, making her the
fairest woman in Sparta, in the reign of Ariston. It
may, perhaps, be conjectured that in Sparta, Helen
PARIS AND HELEN 245
occupied the place of a local Aphrodite. In another
late story she dwells in the isle of Leuke, a shadowy
bride of the shadowy Achilles. The mocking Lucian,
in his Vera Bistoria, meets Helen in the Fortunate
Islands, whence she elopes with one of his companions.
Again, the sons of Menelaus, by a concubine, were said
to have driven Helen from Sparta on the death of her
lord, and she was murdered in Rhodes, by the vengeance
of Polyxo, whose husband fell at Troy. But, among all
these inventions, that of Homer stands out pre-eminent.
Helen and Menelaus do not die, they are too near akin
to Zeus ; they dwell immortal, not among the shadows
of heroes and of famous ladies dead and gone, but in
Elysium, the paradise at the world's end, unvisited by
storms.
"Beyond these voices there is peace."
It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and
Helen must to modern readers seem meagre. To
Greece, in every age, the main interest lay not in the
passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wide con-
sequences : the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths
of kings, the ruin wrought in their homes, the con-
sequent fall of the great and ancient Achaean civilisa-
tion. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what the
Crusades are in later history. As in the Crusades,
the West assailed the East for an ideal, not to recover
the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, but to win back the
living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, ere the
sun grows cold, men will no more believe in the
Crusades, as an historical fact, than we do in the siege
246 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of Troy. In a sense, a very obvious sense, the myth of
Helen is a parable of Hellenic history. They sought
beauty, and they found it ; they bore it home, and, with
beauty, their bane. Wherever Helen went " she brought
calamity," in this a type of all the famous and peerless
ladies of old days, of Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart.
Romance and poetry have nothing less plausible than
the part which Cleopatra actually played in the history
of the world, a world well lost by Mark Antony for
her sake. The flight from Actium might seem as
much a mere poet's dream as the gathering of the
Achaeans at Aulis, if we were not certain that it is
truly chronicled.
From the earliest times, even from times before
Homer (whose audience is supposed to know all about
Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later, the ima-
gination of the civilised world, has played around
Helen, devising about her all that possibly could be
devised. She was the daughter of Zeus by Nemesis, or
by Leda ; or the daughter of the swan, or a child of the
changeful moon, brooding on " the formless and multi-
form waters." She could speak in the voices of all
women, hence she was named " Echo," and we might
fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could
appear to every man in the likeness of his own first
love. The ancient Egyptians either knew her, or
invented legends of her to amuse the inquiring Greeks.
She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only
her Sidonian name. Whatever could be told of
beauty, in its charm, its perils, the dangers with which
it surrounds its lovers, the purity which it retains, un-
PARIS AND HELEN 247
smirched by all the sins that are done for beauty's sake,
could be told of Helen.
Like a golden cup, as M. Paul de St. Victor says,
she was carried from lips to lips of heroes, but the gold
remains unsullied and unalloyed. To heaven she re-
turns again, to heaven which is her own, and looks
down serenely on men slain, and women widowed,
and sinking ships, and burning towns. Yet with
death she gives immortality by her kiss, and Paris and
Menelaus live, because they have touched the lips of
Helen. Through the grace of Helen, for whom he fell,
Sarpedon's memory endures, and Achilles and Memnon,
the son of the Morning, and Troy is more imperishable
than Carthage, or Rome, or Corinth, though Helen
" Burnt the topless towers of Ilium."
In one brief passage, Marlowe did more than all
poets since Stesichorus, or, at least since the epitha-
lamium of Theocritus, for the glory of Helen. Roman
poets knew her best as an enemy of their fabulous
ancestors, and in the " ALneid," Virgil's hero draws his
sword to slay her. Through the Middle Ages, in the
romances of Troy, she wanders as a shining shadow
of the ideally fair, like Guinevere, who so often recalls
her in the Arthurian romances. The chivalrous
mediaeval poets and the Celts could understand better
than the Romans the philosophy of " the world well lost "
for love. Modern poetry, even in Goethe's " Second
part of Faust," has not been very fortunately inspired
by Helen, except in the few lines which she speaks in
" The Dream of Fair Women."
" I had great beauty ; ask thou not my name."
2 48 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Mr. William Morris's Helen, in the " Earthly Para-
dise," charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves
little abiding memory. The Helen of "Troilus and
Cressida " is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women,
and Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat
false in tone — a romantic pastiche. Where Euripides
twice failed, in the " Troades " and the " Helena," it
can be given to few to succeed. Helen is best left
to her earliest known minstrel, for who can recapture the
grace, the tenderness, the melancholy, and the charm
of the daughter of Zeus in the " Odyssey " and " Iliad " ?
The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, and Helen
was best understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning
simplicity.
As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands
paltered with her legend, Helen is Homer's alone, there
remains no great or typical work of Greek art which
represents her beauty, and the breasts from which were
modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We
have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which,
though graceful, is conventional and might represent
any other heroine, Polyxena, or Eriphyle. No Helen
from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to
our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae
over the shattered remains of her only statue.
As Stesichorus fabled that only an eidolon of Helen
went to Troy, so, except in the " Iliad" and "Odyssey,"
we meet but shadows of her loveliness, phantasms
woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns.
ENCHANTED CIGARETTES
ENCHANTED CIGARETTES
To dream over literary projects, Balzac says, is like
"smoking enchanted cigarettes," but when we try to
tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment
disappears. We have to till the soil, to sow the seed, to
gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manu-
factured, while there may be no market for them after all.
Probably most people have enjoyed the fragrance of these
enchanted cigarettes, and have brooded over much
which they will never put on paper. Here are some of
" the ashes of the weeds of my delight " — memories of
romances whereof no single line is written, or is likely to
be written.
Of my earliest novel I remember but little. I know
there had been a wreck, and that the villain, who was
believed to be drowned, came home and made himself
disagreeable. I know that the heroine's mouth was not
" too large for regular beauty." In that respect she was
original. All heroines are " muckle-mou'd," I know
not why. It is expected of them. I know she was
melancholy and merry ; it would not surprise me to learn
that she drowned herself from a canoe. But the villain
never descended to crime, the first lover would not fall
in love, the heroine's own affections were provokingly
251
252 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
disengaged, and the whole affair came to a dead stop for
want of a plot. Perhaps, considering modern canons of
fiction, this might have been a very successful novel. It
was entirely devoid of incident or interest, and, con-
sequently, was a good deal like real life, as real life
appears to many cultivated authors. On the other hand,
all the characters were flippant. This would never have
done, and I do not regret novel No. I., which had not
even a name.
The second story had a plot, quantities of plot, nothing
but plot. It was to have been written in collaboration
with a very great novelist, who, as far as we went, con-
fined himself to making objections. This novel was
stopped (not that my friend would ever have gone on)
by " Called Back," which anticipated part of the idea.
The story was entitled " Where is Rose ? " and the motto
was —
" Hosa quo locoru7n
Sera i/ioratur.'"
The characters were — (i) Rose, a young lady of quality.
(2) The Russian Princess, her friend (need I add that,
to meet a public demand, her name was Vera?). (3)
Young man engaged to Rose. (4) Charles, his friend.
(5) An enterprising person named "The Whiteley of
Crime," the universal Provider of Iniquity. In fact, he
anticipated Sir Arthur Doyle's Professor Moriarty. The
rest were detectives, old ladies, mob, and a wealthy
young Colonial larrikin. Neither my friend nor I was
fond of describing love scenes, so we made the heroine
disappear in the second chapter, and she never turned
ENCHANTED CIGARETTES 253
up again till chapter the last. After playing in a comedy
at the house of an earl, Rosa and Vera entered her
brougham. Soon afterwards the brougham drew up,
empty ^ at Rose's own door. Where tvas Rose ? Traces
of her were found, of all places, in the Haunted House
in Berkeley Square, which is not haunted any longer.
After that Rose was long sought in vain.
This, briefly, is what had occurred. A Russian de-
tective " wanted " Vera, who, to be sure, was a Nihilist.
To catch Vera he made an alliance with " The Whiteley
of Crime." He was a man who would destroy a parish
register, or forge a will, or crack a crib, or break up a Pro-
Boer meeting, or burn a house, or kidnap a rightful heir,
or manage a personation, or issue amateur bank-notes, or
what you please. Thinking to kill two birds with one
stone, he carried ofif Rose for her diamonds and Vera for
his friend, the Muscovite police official, lodging them both
in the Haunted House. But there he and the Russian
came to blows, and, in the confusion, Vera made her
escape, while Rose was conveyed, as Vera, to Siberia.
Not knowing how to dispose of her, the Russian police
consigned her to a nunnery at the mouth of the Obi.
Her lover, in a yacht, found her hiding-place, and got a
friendly nun to give her some narcotic known to the
Samoyeds. It was the old true of the Friar in " Romeo
and Juliet." At the mouth of the Obi they do not bury
the dead, but lay them down on platforms in the open
air. Rose was picked up there by her lover (accom-
panied by a chaperon, of course), was got on board the
steam yacht, and all went well. I forget what happened
to " The Whiteley of Crime." After him I still rather
254 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
hanker — he was a humorous ruffian. Something could
be made of " The Whiteley of Crime." Something has
been made, by the author of "Sherlock Holmes."
In yet another romance, a gentleman takes his friend,
in a country place, to see his betrothed. The friend,
who had only come into the neighbourhood that day, is
found dead, next morning, hanging to a tree. Gipsies
and others are suspected. But the lover was the mur-
derer. He had been a priest, in South America, and the
lady was a Catholic (who knew not of his Orders). Now
the friend fell in love with the lady at first sight, on
being introduced to her by the lover. As the two men
walked home, the friend threatened to reveal the lover's
secret — his tonsure — which would be fatal to his hopes.
They quarrelled, parted, and the ex-priest lassoed his
friend. The motive, I think, is an original one, and not
likely to occur to the first comer. The inventor is open
to offers.
The next novel, based on a dream, \vas called " In
Search of Qrart."
What is Qrart 1 I decline to divulge this secret
beyond saying that Qrart was a product of the civilisa-
tion which now sleeps under the snows of the pole. It
was an article of the utmost value to humanity. Farther
I do not intend to commit myself. The Bride of a God
was one of the characters.
The next novel is, at present, my favourite cigarette.
The scene is partly in Greece, partly at the Parthian
Court, about 80-60 B.C. Crassus is the villain. The
heroine was an actress in one of the wandering Greek
companies, splendid strollers, who played at the Indian
ENCHANTED CIGARETTES 255
and Asiatic Courts. The story ends with the repre-
sentation of the "Bacchae," in Parthia. The head of
Pentheus is carried by one.of the Bacchae in that drama.
Behold, it is not a mask, but the head of Crassus, and
thus conveys the first news of the Roman defeat. Ob-
viously, this is a novel that needs a great deal of pre-
Hminary study, as much, indeed, as " Salammbo."
Another story will deal with the Icelandic discoverers
of America. Mr. Kipling, however, has taken the wind
out of its sails with his sketch, " The Finest Story in the
World." There are all the marvels and portents of the
Eyrbyggja Saga to draw upon, there are Skraelings to
fight, and why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last
mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded
god of the Aztecs? After that a romance on the in-
trigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds
commonplace. But much might be made of that, too,
if the right man took it in hand. Believe me, there are
plenty of stories left, waiting for the man who can tell
them. I have said it before, but I say it again, if I
were king I would keep court officials, Mr. Stanley
Weyman, Mr. Mason, Mr. Kipling, and others, to tell
me my own stories. I know the kind of thing which I
like, from the discovery of Qrart to that of the French
gold in the burn at Loch Arkaig, or in " the wood by
the lochside " that Murray of Broughton mentions.
Another cigarette I have, the adventures of a Poet, a
Poet born in a Puritan village of Massachusetts about
1670. Hawthorne could have told me my story, and
how my friend was driven into the wilderness and lived
among the Red Men. I think he was killed in an
256 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
attempt to warn his countrymen of an Indian raid ; I
think his MS. poems have a bullet-hole through them,
and blood on the leaves. They were in Carew's best
manner, these poems.
Another tale Hawthorne might have told me, the tale
of an excellent man, whose very virtues, by some bane-
ful moral chemistry, corrupt and ruin the people with
whom he comes in contact. I do not mean by goading
them into the opposite extremes, but rather something
like a moral jettahira. This needs a great deal of
subtlety, and what is to become of the hero? Is he
to plunge into vice till everybody is virtuous again?
It wants working out. I have omitted, after all, a
schoolboy historical romance, explaining why Queen
Elizabeth was never married. A Scottish paper offered
a prize for a story of Queen Mary Stuart's reign. I did
not get the prize — perhaps did not deserve it, but my
story ran thus : You must know that Queen Elizabeth
was singularly like Darnley in personal appearance.
What so natural as that, disguised as a page, her Majesty
should come spying about the Court of Holyrood ?
Darnley sees her walking out of Queen Mary's room, he
thinks her an hallucination, discovers that she is real,
challenges her, and they fight at Faldonside, by the
Tweed, Shakespeare holding Elizabeth's horse. Eliza-
beth is wounded, and is carried to the Kirk of Field,
and laid in Darnley's chamber, while Darnley goes out
and makes love to my rural heroine, the lady of Fernilee,
a Kerr. That night Bothwell blows up the Kirk of
Field, Elizabeth and all. Darnley has only one resource.
Borrowing the riding habit of the rural heroine, the lady
ENCHANTED CIGARETTES 257
of Fernilee, he flees across the Border, and, for the rest
of his life, personates Queen Elizabeth. That is why
Elizabeth, who was Darnley, hated Mary so bitterly (on
account of the Kirk of Field affair), and that is why
Queett Elizabeth was never married. Side-lights on
Shakespeare's Sonnets were obviously cast. The young
man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to marry,
was — Darnley. This romance did not get the prize (the
anachronism about Shakespeare is worthy of Scott),
but I am conceited enough to think it deserved an
honourable mention.
Enough of my own cigarettes. But there are others
of a more fragrant weed. Who will end for me the
novel of which Byron only wrote a chapter ; who, as
Bulwer Lytton is dead ? A finer opening, one more
mysteriously stirring, you can nowhere read. And the
novel in letters, which Scott began in 1819, who shall
finish it, or tell us what he did with his fair Venetian
courtezan, a character so much out of Sir Walter's way ?
He tossed it aside — it was but an enchanted cigarette —
and gave us "The Fortunes of Nigel" in its place. I
want both. We cannot call up those who " left half told "
these stories. In a happier world we shall listen to
their endings, and all our dreams shall be coherent and
concluded. Meanwhile, without trouble, and expense,
and disappointment, and reviews, we can all smoke our
cigarettes of fairyland. Would that many people were
content to smoke them peacefully, and did not rush
on pen, paper, and ink !
R
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING
{From Strath Naver)
We have had a drought for three weeks. During a
whole week this northern strath has been as sunny as
the Riviera is expected to be. The streams can be
crossed dry-shod, kelts are plunging in the pools, but
even kelts will not look at a fly. Now, by way of a
pleasant change, an icy north wind is blowing, with
gusts of snow, not snow enough to swell the loch that
feeds the river, but just enough snow (as the tourist
said of the water in the River Styx) " to swear by," or
at ! The Field announces that a duke, who rents three
rods on a neighbouring river, has not yet caught one
salmon. The acrimoniously democratic mind may take
comfort in that intelligence, but, if the weather will not
improve for a duke, it is not likely to change for a mere
person of letters. Thus the devotee of the Muses is
driven back, by stress of climate, upon literature, and
as there is nothing in the lodge to read he is compelled
to write.
Now certainly one would not lack material, if only
one were capable of the art of fiction. The genesis of
novels and stories is a topic little studied, but I am
inclined to believe that, Uke the pearls in the mussels of
261
262 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
the river, fiction is a beautiful disease of the brain.
Something, an incident or an experience, or a reflection,
gets imbedded, incrusted, in the properly constituted
mind, and becomes the nucleus of a pearl of romance.
Mr. Marion Crawford, in a recent work, describes his
hero, who is a novelist, at work. This young gentleman,
by a series of faults or misfortunes, has himself become
a centre of harrowing emotion. Two young ladies, to
each of whom he has been betrothed, are weeping out
their eyes for him, or are kneeling to heaven with
despairing cries, or are hardening their hearts to marry
men for whom they " do not care a bawbee." The
hero's aunt has committed a crime ; everybody, in fact,
is in despair, when an idea occurs to the hero. In-
different to the sorrows of his nearest and dearest, he
sits down with his notion and writes a novel — writes
like a person possessed.
He has the proper kind of brain, the nucleus has
been dropped into it, the pearl begins to grow, and
to assume prismatic hues. So he is happy, and even
the frozen -out angler might be happy if he could
write a novel in the absence of salmon. Unluckily,
my brain is not capable of this aesthetic malady,
and to save my life, or to " milk a fine warm cow
rain," as the Zulus say, I could not write a novel, or
even a short story. About The Short Story, as they call
it, with capital letters, our critical American cousins
have much to say. Its germ, one fancies, is usually
an incident, or a mere anecdote, according to the
nature of the author's brain ; this germ becomes either
the pearl of a brief conte^ or the seed of a stately tree, in
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING 263
three volumes. An author of experience soon finds out
how he should treat his material. One writer informs
me that, given the idea, the germinal idea, it is as easy
for him to make a novel out of it as a tale — as easy,
and much more satisfactory and remunerative. Others,
like M. Guy de Maupassant, for example, seem to find
their strength in brevity, in cutting down, not in ampli-
fying ; in selecting and reducing, not in allowing other
ideas to group themselves round the first, other
characters to assemble about those who are essential.
That seems to be really the whole philosophy of this
matter, concerning which so many words are expended.
The growth of the germinal idea depends on the nature
of an author's talent — he may excel in expansion, or in
reduction; he may be economical, and out of an
anecdote may spin the whole cocoon of a romance ; or
he may be extravagant, and give a capable idea away
in the briefest form possible.
These ideas may come to a man in many ways, as we
said, from a dream, from a fragmentary experience (as
most experiences in life are fragmentary), from a hint
in a newspaper, from a tale told in conversation. Not
long ago, for example, I heard an anecdote out of
which M. Guy de Maupassant could have made the most
ghastly, the most squalid, and the most supernaturally
moving of all his contes. Indeed, that is not saying
much, as he did not excel in the supernatural. Were it
written in French, it might lie in my lady's chamber,
and, as times go, nobody would be shocked. But, by
our curious British conventions, this tale cannot be told
in an English book or magazine. It was not, in its
264 x\DVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
tendency, immoral ; those terrible tales never are. The
events were rather calculated to frighten the hearer into
the paths of virtue. When Mr. Richard Cameron, the
founder of the Cameronians, and the godfather of the
Cameronian Regiment, was sent to his parish, he was
bidden by Mr. Peden to " put hell-fire to the tails " of
his congregation. This vigorous expression was well
fitted to describe the conte which I have in my mind (I
rather wish I had it not), and which is not to be
narrated here, nor in English.
For a combination of pity and terror, it seemed to
me unmatched in the works of the modern fancy, or in
the horrors of modern experience ; whether in experi-
ence or in imagination it had its original source. But
even the EngUsh authors, who plume themselves on
their audacity, or their realism, or their contempt for
" the young person," would not venture this little
romance, much less, then, is a timidly uncorrect pen-
man likely to tempt Mr. Mudie with the conte. It is
one of two tales, both told as true, which one would
like to be able to narrate in the language of Moliere.
The other is also very good, and has a wonderful scene
with a corpse and a chapelle ardente, and a young lady ;
it is historical, and of the last generation but one.
Even our frozen strath here has its modern legend,
which may be told in English, and out of which, I
am sure, a novelist could make a good short story, or
a pleasant opening chapter of a romance. What is the
mysterious art by which these things are done ? What
makes the well-told story seem real, rich with life, actual,
engrossing ? It is the secret of genius, of the novelist's
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING 265
art, and the writer who cannot practise the art might
as well try to discover the Philosopher's Stone, or to
"harp fish out of the water." However, let me tell
the legend as simply as may be, and as it was told
to me.
The strath runs due north, the river flowing from a
great loch to the Northern sea. All around are low,
undulating hills, brown with heather, and as lonely
almost as the Sahara. On the horizon to the south
rise the mountains, Ben this and Ben that, real moun-
tains of beautiful outline, though no higher than some
three thousand feet. Before the country was divided
into moors and forests, tenanted by makers of patent
corkscrews, and boilers of patent soap, before the rivers
were distributed into beats, marked off by white and
red posts, there lived over to the south, under the
mountains, a sportsman of athletic frame and adven-
turous disposition. His name I have forgotten, but we
may call him Dick Lindsay. It is told of him that he
once found a poacher in the forest, and, being unable
to catch the intruder, fired his rifle, not at him, but
in his neighbourhood, whereon the poacher, deliberately
kneeling down, took a long shot at Dick. How the
duel ended, and whether either party flew a flag of
truce, history does not record.
At all events, one stormy day in late September, Dick
had stalked and wounded a stag on the hills to the south-
east of the strath. Here, if only one were a novelist,
one could weave several pages of valuable copy out of
the stalk. The stag made for the strath here, and Dick,
who had no gillie, but was an independent sportsman
266 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
of the old school, pursued on foot. Plunging down the
low, birch -clad hills, the stag found the flooded river
before him, black and swollen with rain. He took the
water, crossing by the big pool, which looked almost
like a little loch, tempestuous under a north wind blow-
ing up stream, and covered with small white, vicious
crests. The stag crossed and staggered up the bank,
where he stood panting. It is not a humane thing
to leave a deer to die slowly of a rifle bullet, and Dick,
reaching the pool, hesitated not, but threw off" his
clothes, took his skene between his teeth, plunged in,
and swam the river.
All naked as he was he cut the stag's throat in the
usual manner, and gralloched him with all the skill of
Bucklaw. This was very well, and very well it would
be to add a description of the stag at bay; but as I
never happened to see a stag at bay, I omit all that.
Dick had achieved success, but his clothes were on one
side of a roaring river in spate, and he and the dead
stag were on the other. There was no chance of ford-
ing the stream, and there was then no bridge. He did
not care to swim back, for the excitement was out of
him. He was trembling with cold, and afraid of cramp.
" A mother-naked man," in a wilderness, with a flood
between him and his raiment, was in a pitiable position.
It did not occur to him to flay the stag, and dress in
the hide, and, indeed, he would have been frozen before
he could have accomplished that task. So he recon-
noitred.
There was nobody within sight but one girl, who
was herding cows. Now for a naked man, with a
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING 267
knife, and bedabbled with blood, to address a young
woman on a lonely moor is a delicate business. The
chances were that the girl would flee like a startled fawn,
and leave Dick to walk, just as he was, to the nearest
farmhouse, about a mile away. However, Dick had to
risk it; he lay down so that only his face appeared
above the bank, and he shouted to the maiden. When
he had caught her attention he briefly explained the
unusual situation. Then the young woman behaved
like a trump, or like a Highland Nausicaa, for students
of the "Odyssey" will remember how Odysseus, simply
clad in a leafy bough of a tree, made supplication to
the sea-king's daughter, and how she befriended him.
Even if Dick had been a reader of Homer, which is
not probable, there were no trees within convenient
reach, and he could not adopt the leafy covering of
Odysseus.
" You sit still ; if you move an inch before I give
you the word, I'll leave you where you are ! " said Miss
Mary. She then cast her plaid over her face, marched
up to the bank where Dick was crouching and shiver-
ing, dropped her ample plaid over him, and sped away
towards the farmhouse. When she had reached its
shelter, and was giving an account of the adventure,
Dick set forth, like a primeval Highlander, the covering
doing duty both for plaid and kilt. Clothes of some
kind were .provided for him at the cottage, a rickety
old boat was fetched, and he and his stag were rowed
across the river to the place where his clothes lay.
That is all, but if one were a dealer in romance, much
play might be made with the future fortunes of the
268 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
sportsman and the maiden, happy fortunes or unhappy.
In real life, the lassie "drew up with" a shepherd lad, as
Miss Jenny Denison has it, married him, and helped
to populate the strath. As for Dick, history tells no
more of his adventures, nor is it alleged that he ever
again visited the distant valley, or beheld the face of his
Highland Nausicaa.
Now, if one were a romancer, this mere anecdote
probably would "rest, lovely pearl, in the brain, and
slowly mature in the oyster," till it became a novel.
Properly handled, the incident would make a very
agreeable first chapter, with the aid of scenery, botany,
climate, and remarks on the manners and customs of
the red deer stolen from St. John, or the Stuarts
d'Albanie. Then, probably, one would reflect on the
characters of Mary and of Richard; Mary must have
parents, of course, and one would make them talk in
Scottish. Probably she already had a lover ; how should
she behave to that lover? There is plenty of room for
speculation in that problem. As to Dick, is he to be
a Lothario, or a lover pour le bon motifi ^Vhat are his
distinguished family to think of the love affair, which
would certainly ensue in fiction, though in real life
nobody thought of it at all ? Are we to end happily,
with a marriage or marriages, or are we to wind all up
in the pleasant, pessimistic, realistic, fashionable modern
way ? Is Mary to drown the baby in the Muckle Pool ?
Is she to suffer the penalty of her crime at Inverness ?
Or, happy thought, shall we not make her discarded
rival lover meet Dick in the hills on a sunny day and
then — are they not (taking a hint from facts) to fight a
duel with rifles ? I see Dick lying, with a bullet in his
STORIES AND STORY-TELLING 269
brow, on the side of a corrie ; his blood crimsons the
snow, an eagle stoops from the sky. That makes a
pretty picturesque conclusion to the unwritten romance
of the strath.
Another anecdote occurs to me ; good, I think, for a
short story, but capable, also, of being dumped down in
the middle of a long novel. It was in the old coaching
days. A Border squire was going north, in the coach,
alone. At a village he was joined by a man and a young
lady : their purpose was manifest, they were a runaway
couple, bound for Gretna Green. They had not travelled
long together before the young lady, turning to the
squire, said, " Voas parlez franfais, Alonsieur ? " He
did speak French — it was plain that the bridegroom did
not — and, to the end of the journey, that remarkable
lady conducted a lively and affectionate conversation with
the squire in French ! Manifestly, he had only to ask
and receive, but, alas ! he was an unadventurous, plain
gentleman ; he alighted at his own village ; he drove
home in his own dogcart ; the fugitive pair went
forward, and the Gretna blacksmith united them in holy
matrimony. The rest is silence.
I would give much to know what that young person's
previous history and adventures had been, to learn what
befell her after her wedding, to understand, in brief,
her conduct and her motives. Were I a novelist, a
Maupassant, or a Meredith, the Muse, " from whatsoever
quarter she chose," would enlighten me about all, and
I would enlighten you. But I can only marvel, only
throw out the hint, only deposit the grain of sand, the
nucleus of romance, in some more fertile brain. Indeed,
the topic is much more puzzling than the right conclu-
2 70 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
sion for my Highland romance. In that case fancy
could find certain obvious channels, into one or other of
which it must flow. But I see no channels for the lives
of these three queerly met people in the coach.
As a rule, fancies are capable of being arranged in but
a few familiar patterns, so that it seems hardly worth
while to make the arrangement. But he who looks at
things thus will never be a writer of stories. Nay, even
of the slowly unfolding tale of his own existence he may
weary, for the combinations therein have all occurred
before ; it is in a hackneyed old story that he is living,
and you, and I. Yet to act on this knowledge is to
make a bad affair of our little life : we must try our best
to take it seriously. And so of story-writing. As Mr.
Stevenson says, a man must view "his very trifling
enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of
empire, and think the smallest improvement worth
accomplishing at any expense of time and industry.
The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon
with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging
spirit of children at their play."
That is true, that is the worst of it. The man, the
writer, over whom the irresistible desire to mock at
himself, his work, his puppets and their fortunes has
power, will never be a novelist. The novelist must
" make believe very much " ; he must be in earnest with
his characters. But how to be in earnest, how to keep
the note of disbelief and derision "out of the memo-
rial " ? Ah, there is the difficulty, but it is a difficulty of
which many authors appear to be insensible. Perhaps
they suffer from no such temptations.
THE SUPERNATURAL IN
FICTION
THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION
It is a truism that the supernatural in fiction should,
as a general rule, be left in the vague. In the creepiest
tale I ever read, the horror lay in this — there ivas no
ghost! You may describe a ghost with all the most
hideous features that fancy can suggest — saucer eyes,
red staring hair, a forked tail, and what you please —
but the reader only laughs. It is wiser to make as if you
were going to describe the spectre, and then break off,
exclaiming, " But no ! No pen can describe, no memory,
thank Heaven, can recall, the horror of that hour ! "
So writers, as a rule, prefer to leave their terror (usually
styled " The Thing ") entirely in the dark, and to the
frightened fancy of the student. Thus, on the whole,
the treatment of the supernaturally terrible in fiction is
achieved in two ways, ifther by actual description, or
by adroit suggestion, the author saying, like cabmen,
" I leave it to yourself, sir." There are dangers in both
methods ; the description, if attempted, is usually over-
done and incredible : the suggestion is apt to prepare us
too anxiously for something that never becomes real,
and to leave us disappointed.
Examples of both methods may be selected from
poetry and prose. The examples in verse are rare
273 s
2 74 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
enough ; the first and best that occurs in the way of sug-
gestion is, of course, the mysterious lady in " Christabel."
" She was most beautiful to see,
Like a lady of a far countree."
Who was she? What did she want? Whence did
she come? What was the horror she revealed to the
niaiht in the bower of Christabel ?
'tD*
" Then drawing in her breath aloud
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast.
Her silken robe and inner vest
Dropt to her feet, and full in view
Behold her bosom and half her side —
A sight to dream of, not to tell !
O shield her ! shield sweet Christabel ! "
And then what do her words mean ?
" Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow."
What was it — the " sight to dream of, not to tell " ?
Coleridge never did tell, and, though he and Mr.
Oilman said he knew, Wordsworth thought he did not
know. He raised a spirit that he had not the spell to
lay. In the Paradise of Poets has he discovered the
secret? We only know that the mischief, whatever it
may have been, was wrought.
" O sorrow and shame 1 Can this be she —
'I'he lady who knelt at the old oak tree ? "
THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 275
*' A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine, since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine, one hour was thine." ^
If Coleridge knew, why did he never tell ? And yet
he maintains that "in the very first conception of the
tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the
wholeness no less than with the liveliness of a vision,"
and he expected to finish the three remaining parts
within the year. The year was 181 6, the poem was
begun in 1797, and finished, as far as it goes, in 1800.
If Coleridge ever knew what he meant, he had time to
forget. The chances are that his indolence, or his for-
getfulness, was the making of " Christabel," which
remains a masterpiece of supernatural suggestion.
For description it suffices to read the " Ancient
Mariner." These marvels, truly, are speciosa miracula,
and, unlike Southey, we believe as we read. "You
have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles,"
Lamb wrote to Southey (1798), "but have passed by
fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they cele-
brate." Lamb appears to have been almost alone in
appreciating this masterpiece of supernatural description.
Coleridge himself shrank from his own wonders, and
wanted to call the piece " A Poet's Reverie." " It is as
bad as Bottom the weaver's declaration that he is not a
lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion.
What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive
of all credit — which the tale should force upon us — of its
truth?" Lamb himself was forced, by the temper of
J Cannot the reader guess ? I am afraid that I can !
276 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
the time, to declare that he "disliked all the miraculous
part of it," as if it were not all miraculous ! Words-
worth wanted the Mariner "to have a character and a
profession," perhaps would have liked him to be a
gardener, or a butler, with " an excellent character ! "
In fact, the love of the supernatural was then at so low
an ebb that a certain Mr. Marshall " went to sleep while
the ' Ancient Mariner ' was reading," and the book was
mainly bought by seafaring men, deceived by the title,
and supposing that the "Ancient Mariner" was a
nautical treatise.
In verse, then, Coleridge succeeds with the super-
natural, both by way of description in detail, and of
suggestion. If you wish to see a failure, try the ghost,
the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth's " Lao-
damia." It is blasphemy to ask the question, but is the
ghost in " Hamlet " quite a success ? Do we not see
and hear a little too much of him ? Macbeth 's airy and
viewless dagger is really much more successful by way
of suggestion. The stage makes a ghost visible and
familiar, and this is one great danger of the supernatural
in art. It is apt to insist on being too conspicuous.
Did the ghost of Darius, in " ^schylus," frighten the
Athenians? Probably they smiled at the imperial
spectre. There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost —
" I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition,"
says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the
brief visit of the appearance. For want of this dis-
cretion, Alexandre Dumas's ghosts, as in " The Corsican
THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 277
Brothers," are failures. They make themselves too
common and too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs.
Oliphant's novel, "The Wizard's Son." This, indeed,
is the crux of the whole adventure. If you paint your
ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not
fear. If you touch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied
curiosity, not fear. It may be easy to shudder, but it is
difficult to teach shuddering.
In prose, a good example of the over vague is
Miriam's mysterious visitor — the shadow of the cata-
combs — in "Transformation; or. The Marble Faun."
Hawthorne should have told us more or less ; to be
sure his contemporaries knew what he meant, knew who
Miriam and the Spectre were. The dweller in the
catacombs now powerfully excites curiosity, and when
that curiosity is unsatisfied, we feel aggrieved, vexed,
and suspect that Hawthorne himself was puzzled, and
knew no more than his readers. He has not — as in
other tales he has — managed to throw the right atmos-
phere about this being. He is vague in the wrong way,
whereas George Sand, in Les Datnes Veries, is vague in
the right way. We are left in Les Dames Vertes with
that kind of curiosity which persons really engaged in
the adventure might have felt, not with the irritation of
having a secret kept from us, as in " Transforma-
tion."
In "Wandering Willie's Tale " (in " Redgauntlet "), the
right atmosphere is found, the right note is struck. All
is vividly real, and yet, if you close the book, all melts
into a dream again. Scott was almost equally successful
with a described horror in " The Tapestried Chamber."
278 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The idea is the commonplace of haunted houses, the
apparition is described as minutely as a burglar might
have been ; and yet we do not mock, but shudder as
we read. Then, on the other side — the side of antici-
pation — take the scene outside the closed door of the
vanished Dr. Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known
apologue :
They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber
whence the doctor has disappeared — the chamber
tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room.
" Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes,
" was that my master's voice ? "
A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused
of being fanciful, told me that he read through the book
to that point in a lonely Highland chateau, at night, and
that he did not think it well to finish the story till next
morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems
" well-found " and successful by dint of suggestion. On
the other side, perhaps, only Scotsmen brought up in
country places, familiar from childhood with the terrors
of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt
the lonely churchyards, never stirred since the year of
the great Plague choked the soil with the dead, perhaps
they only know how much shudder may be found in Mr.
Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering
heat in the hills and glens that are commonly so fresh,
the aspect of the Man, the Tempter of the Brethren, we
know them, and we have enough of the old blood in us
to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the described
supernatural. It may be only a local success, it may
not much affect the English reader, but it is of sure
THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 279
appeal to the Lowland Scot. The ancestral Covenanter
within us awakens, and is terrified by his ancient
fears.
Perhaps it may die out in a positive age — this power
of learning to shudder. To us it descends from very
long ago, from the far-off forefathers who dreaded the
dark, and who, half starved and all untaught, saw spirits
everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience
from dreams. When we are all perfect positivist
philosophers, when a thousand generations of nurses
that never heard of ghosts have educated the thousand
and first generation of children, then the supernatural
may fade out of fiction. But has it not grown and
increased since Wordsworth wanted the " Ancient
Mariner" to have "a profession and a character,"
since Southey called that poem a Dutch piece of work,
since Lamb had to pretend to dislike its " miracles " ?
Why, as science becomes more cock-sure, have men and
women become more and more fond of old follies, and
more pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within
their veins ?
As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested,
weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a
world of invisible romance may not be far from us, or,
at least, we care more and more to follow fancy into
these airy regions, et mania regna. The supernatural
has not ceased to tempt romancers, like Alexandre
Dumas, usually to their destruction ; more rarely, as
in Mrs. Oliphant's " Beleaguered City," to such success
as they do not find in the world of daily occupation.
The ordinary shilling tales of " hypnotism " and mes-
28o ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
merism are vulgar trash enough, and yet I can believe
that an impossible romance, if the right man wrote it in
the right mood, might still win us from the newspapers,
and the stories of shabby love, and cheap remorses, and
commonplace failures.
" But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill."
AN OLD SCOTTISH PSYCHICAL
RESEARCHER
AN OLD SCOTTISH PSYCHICAL
RESEARCHER
ADVERTISEMENT
" If any Gentlemen, and others, will be pleased to send
me any relations about Spirits, Witches, and
Apparitions, In any part of the Kingdom ; or any
Information about the Second Sight, Charms,
Spells, Magic, and the like, They shall oblige
the Author, and have them publisht to their
satisfaction.
" Direct your Relations to Alexander Ogstouns, Shop
Stationer, at the foot of the Plain-stones, at
Edinburgh, on the North-side of the Street."
Is this not a pleasing opportunity for Gentlemen, and
Others, whose Aunts have beheld wraiths, doubles, and
fetches ? It answers very closely to the requests of
the Society for Psychical Research, who publish, as
some one disparagingly says, " the dreams of the middle
classes." Thanks to Freedom, Progress, and the decline
of Superstition, it is now quite safe to see apparitions,
and even to publish the narrative of their appearance.
But when Mr. George Sinclair, sometime Professor of
283
284 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Philosophy in Glasgow, issued the invitation which I
have copied, at the end of his "Satan's Invisible World
Discovered," ^ the vocation of a seer was not so secure
from harm. He, or she, might just as probably be
burned as not, on the charge of sorcery, in the year
of grace, 1685. However, Professor Sinclair managed
to rake together an odd enough set of legends, " proving
clearly that there are Devils," a desirable matter to have
certainty about. "Satan's Invisible World Discovered"
is a very rare little book ; I think Scott says in a MS.
note that he had great difficulty in procuring it, when
he was at work on his "infernal demonology." As a
copy fell in my way, or rather as I fell in its way, a
helpless victim to its charms and its blue morocco
binding, I take this chance of telling again the old tales
of 1685.
Mr. Sinclair began with a long dedicatory Epistle
about nothing at all, to the Lord Winton of the period.
The Earl dug coal-mines, and constructed "a molimi-
nous rampier for a harbour." A " moliminous rampier "
is a choice phrase, and may be envied by novelists
who aim at distinction of style. "Your defending
the salt pans against the imperious waves of the raging
sea from the NE. is singular," adds the Professor,
addressing "the greatest coal and salt-master in Scot-
land, who is a nobleman, and the greatest nobleman
who is a Coal and Salt Merchant." Perhaps it is already
plain to the modern mind that Mr. George Sinclair,
though a Professor of Philosophy, was not a very
sagacious character.
i Edinburgh, 1685.
AN OLD PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 285
Mr. Sinclair professes that his proofs of the existence
of Devils " are no old wife's trattles about the fire, but
such as may bide the test." He lived, one should
remember, in an age when faith was really seeking
aid from ghost stories. Glanvil's books — and, in
America, those of Cotton Mather — show the hospitality
to anecdotes of an edifying sort, which we admire in
Mr. Sinclair. Indeed, Sinclair borrows from Glanvil
and Henry More, authors who, like himself, wished to
establish the existence of the supernatural on the strange
incidents which still perplex us, but which are scarcely,
regarded as safe matter to argue upon. The testimony
for a Ghost would seldom go to a jury in our days,
though amply sufficient in the time of Mr. Sinclair.
About " The Devil of Glenluce " he took particular
care to be well informed, and first gave it to the world
in a volume on — you will never guess what subject —
Hydrostatics ! In the present work he offers us
"The Devil of Glenluce Enlarged
With several Remarkable Additions
from an Eye and Ear Witness,
A Person of undoubted
Honesty."
Mr.. Sinclair recommends its "usefulness for refuting
Atheism." Probably Mr. Sinclair got the story, or had
it put off on him rather, through one Campbell, a
student of philosophy in Glasgow, the son of Gilbert
Campbell, a weaver of Glenluce, in Galloway ; the
scene in our own time, of a mysterious murder.
Campbell had refused alms to Alexander Agnew. a
286 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
bold and sturdy beggar, who, when asked by the Judge
whether he beUeved in a God, answered : " He knew
no God but Salt, Meal, and Water." In consequence
of the refusal of alms, "The Stirs first began," The
"Stirs" are ghostly disturbances. They commenced
with whistling in the house and out of it, "such as
children use to make with their small, slender glass
whistles." "About the Middle of November," says
Mr. Sinclair, "the Foul Fiend came on with his extra-
ordinary assaults." Observe that he takes the Foul
Fiend entirely for granted, and that he never tells us
the date of the original quarrel, and the early agitation.
Stones were thrown down the chimney and in at the
windows, but nobody was hurt.
Naturally Gilbert Campbell carried his tale of sorrow to
the parish Minister. This did not avail him. His warp
and threads were cut on his loom, and even the clothes
of his family were cut while they were wearing them.
At night something tugged the blankets off their beds,
a favourite old spiritual trick, which was played, if I
remember well, on a Roman Emperor, according to
Suetonius. Poor Campbell had to remove his stock-
in-trade, and send his children to board out, "to try
whom the trouble did most follow." After this, all
was quiet (as perhaps might be expected), and quiet
all remained, till a son named Thomas was brought
home again. Then the house was twice set on fire,
and it might have been enough to give Thomas a
beating. On the other hand, Campbell sent Thomas
to stay with the Minister. But the troubles continued
in the old way. At last the family became so accus-
AN OLD PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 287
tomed to the Devil, "that they were no more afraid
to keep up the Clash" (chatter) "with the Foul Fiend
than to speak to each other." They were like the
Wesleys, who were so familiar with the fiend Jeffrey,
that haunted their home.
The Minister, with a few of the gentry, heard of their
unholy friendship, and paid Campbell a visit. "At
their first coming in the Devil says : ' Qmi77i Literarum
is good Latin.' " These are the first words of the Latin
rudiments which scholars are taught when they go to
the Grammar School. Then they all prayed, and a
Voice came from under the bed: "Would you know
the Witches of Glenluce?" The Voice named a few,
including one long dead. But the Minister, with rare
good sense, remarked that what Satan said was not
evidence.
Let it be remarked that " the lad Tom " had that very
day " come back with the Minister." The Fiend then
offered terms. "Give me a spade and shovel, and
depart from the house for seven days, and I will make
a grave, and lie down in it, and trouble you no more."
Hereon Campbell, with Scottish caution, declined to
crive the Devil the value of a straw. The visitors then
hunted after the voice, observing that some of the chil-
dren were in bed. They found nothing, and then, as
the novelists say, " a strange thing happened."
There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the
elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did
shake again. " The Fiend next exclaimed that if the
candle were put out he would appear in the shape of
Fireballs."
288 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we
learn that all the scene occurred in candle-light. The
appearance of floating balls of fire is frequent (if we
may believe the current reports) at spiritualistic seances.
But what a strange, ill-digested tale is Mr. Sinclair's !
He lets slip an expression which shows that the in-
vestigators were in one room, the But, while the Fiend
was diverting himself in the other room, the Ben ! The
Fiend (nobody going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman
who wore a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, "where-
upon he presently imagined that he felt a pair of shears
going about his hat," but there was no such matter.
The voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others
were eating, and said the maid gave him a crust in the
morning. This she denied, but admitted that some-
thing had " clicked " a piece of bread out of her hand.
The seance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion
of the children's bodies, with a sound resembling ap-
plause. After many months of this really annoying
conduct, poor Campbell laid his case before the Presby-
ters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of pubUcation.
So a " solemn humiliation " was actually held all through
the bounds of the synod. But to little purpose did
Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes. The good wife's
plate was snatched away before her very eyes, and then
thrown back at her. In similar " stirs," described by
a Catholic missionary in Peru soon after Pizarro's con-
quest, the cup of an Indian chief was lifted up by an
invisible hand, and set down empty. In that case, too,
stones were thrown, as by the Devil of Glenluce.
And what was the end of it all ? Mr. Sinclair has not
AN OLD PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 289
even taken the trouble to inquire. It seems by some
conjuration or other, the Devil suffered himself to be
put away, and gave the weaver a habitation. The
weaver " has been a very Odd man that endured so long
these marvellous disturbances."
This is the tale which Mr. Sinclair offers, without
mentioning his authority. He complains that Dr.
Henry More had plagiarised it, from his book of
Hydrostatics. Two points may be remarked. First :
modern Psychical Inquirers are more particular about
evidence than Mr. Sinclair. Not for nothing do we
live in an age of science. Next : the stories of these
"stirs" are always much the same everywhere, in Glen-
luce, at Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru,
in Wesley's house, in heroic Iceland, when Glam, the
vampire, " rode the roofs." It is curious to speculate
on how the tradition of making themselves little
nuisances in this particular manner has been handed
down among children, if we are to suppose that chil-
dren do the trick. Last autumn a farmer's house in
Scotland was annoyed exactly as the weaver's home
was, and that within a quarter of a mile of a well-known
man of science. The mattress of the father was ten-
anted by something that wriggled like a snake. The
mattress was opened, nothing was found, and the dis-
turbance began again as soon as the bed was restored
to its place. This occurred when the farmer's children
had been sent to a distance.
One cannot but be perplexed by the problem which
these tales suggest. Almost bare of evidence as they
are, their great number, their wide diffusion, in many
T
290 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
countries and in times ancient and modern, may estab-
lish some substratum of truth. Scott mentions a case
in which the imposture was detected by a sheriffs
officer. But a recent anecdote makes me almost dis-
trust the detection.
Some EngUsh people, having taken a country house
in Ireland, were vexed by the usual rappings, stone-
throwings, and all the rest of the business. They sent
to Dublin for two detectives, who arrived. On their
first night, the lady of the house went into a room,
where she found one of the policemen asleep in his
chair. Being a lively person, she rapped twice or thrice
on the table. He awakened, and said : " Ah, so I
suspected. It was hardly worth while, madam, to bring
us so far for this." And next day the worthy men with-
drew in dudgeon, but quite convinced that they had
discovered the agent in the hauntings.
But they had not !
On the other hand, Scott (who had seen one ghost,
if not two, and had heard a " warning ") states that Miss
Anne Robinson managed the Stockwell disturbances by
tying horsehairs to plates and light articles, which then
demeaned themselves as if possessed.
Here we have vera causa, a demonstrable cause of
" stirs," and it may be inferred that all the other his-
torical occurrences had a similar origin. We have, then,
only to be interested in the persistent tradition, in
accordance with which mischievous persons always do
exactly the same sort of thing. But this is a mere
example of the identity of human nature.
It is curious to see how Mr. Sinclair plumes himself
on this Devil of Glenluce as a " moliminous rampier "
AN OLD PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 291
against irreligion. " This one Relation is worth all the
price that can be given for the Book." The price I
have given for the volume is Ten Golden Guineas, and
perhaps the Foul Thief of Glenluce is hardly worth
the money.
" I believe if the Obdurest Atheist among men would
seriously and in good earnest consider that relation,
and ponder all the circumstances thereof, he would
presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing a
story less considerable, 'I believe I have been in the
wrong all the time — if this be true.'"
Mr. Sinclair is also a believer in the Woodstock
devils, on which Scott founded his novel. He does
not give the explanation that Giles Sharp, aHas Joseph
Collins of Oxford, alias Funny Joe, was all the Devil in
that affair. Scott had read the story of Funny Joe,
but could never remember " whether it exists in a
separate collection, or where it is to be looked for."
Indifferent to evidence, Mr. Sinclair confutes the
Obdurest Atheists with the Pied Piper of HameUn, with
the young lady from Howells' " Letters," whose house,
like Rahab's, was "on the city wall," and with the
ghost of the Major who appeared to the Captain (as he
had promised), and scolded him for not keeping his
sword clean. He also gives us Major Weir, at full
length, convincing us that, as William Erskine said,
" The Major was a disgusting fellow, a most ungentle-
manlike character." Scott, on the other hand, re-
marked, long before " Waverley," " if I ever were to
become a writer of prose romances, I think I would
choose Major Weir, if not for my hero, at least for an
agent and a leading one, in my production." He
292 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
admitted that the street where the Major lived was
haunted by a woman " twice the common length," " but
why should we set him down for an ungentlemanly
fellow?" Readers of Mr. Sinclair . will understand the
reason very well, and it is not necessary, nor here even
possible, to justify Erskine's opinion by quotations.
Suffice it that, by virtue of his enchanted staff, which
was burned with him, the Major was enabled "to com-
mit evil not to be named, yea, even to reconcile man
and wife when at variance." His sister, who was hanged,
had Redgauntlet's horse-shoe mark on her brow, and one
may marvel that Scott does not seem to have remembered
this coincidence. "There was seen an exact Horse-
shoe, shaped for nails, in her wrinkles. Terrible enough,
I assure you, to the stoutest beholder ! "
Most modern readers will believe that both the
luckless Major and his sister were religious maniacs.
Poverty, solitude, and the superstition of their time were
the true demon of Major AVeir, burned at the stake in
April 1670. Perhaps the most singular impression
made by " Satan's Invisible World Discovered " is that
in Sinclair's day, people who did not believe in bogies
believed in nothing, while people who shared the
common creed of Christendom were capable of believing
in everything.
Atheists are as common as ghosts in his marvellous
relations, and the very wizards themselves were often
Atheists.
Note. — I have said that Scott himself had seen one ghost, if not
two, and heard a " warning." The ghost was seen near Ashestiel, on
an open spot of hillside, "please to observe it was before dinner,"
AN OLD PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER 293
The anecdote is in Gillis's " Recollections of Sir Walter Scott," p. 170.
The vision of Lord Byron standing in the great hall of Abbotsford
is described in the " Demonology and Witchcraft." Scott alleges
that it resolved itself into "great coats, shawls, and plaids "—a
hallucination. But Lockhart remarks (" Life," ix. p. 141) that he
did not care to have the circumstance discussed in general. The
" stirs " in Abbotsford during the night when his architect, Bullock,
died in London, are in Lockhart, v. pp. 309-315. "The noise re-
sembled half-a-dozen men hard at work putting up boards and
furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was
nobody on the premises at the time." The noise, unluckily, occurred
twice, April 28 and 29, 1818, and Lockhart does not tell us on
which of these two nights Mr. Bullock died. Such is the casualness
of ghost story-tellers. Lockhart adds that the coincidence made a
strong impression on Sir Walter's mind. He did not care to ascertain
the point in his own mental constitution " where incredulity began to
waver," according to his friend, Mr. J. L. Adolphus.
THE BOY
THE BOY
As a humble student of savage life, I have found it
necessary to make researches into the manners and
customs of boys. Boys are not what a vain people
supposes. If you meet them in the holidays, you find
them affable and full of kindness and good qualities.
They vv-ill condescend to your weakness at lawn-tennis,
they Avill aid you in your selection of fly-hooks, and, to
be brief, will behave with much more than the civility of
tame Zulus or Red Men on a missionary settlement.
But boys at school and among themselves, left to the
wild justice and traditional laws which many generations
of boys have evolved, are entirely different beings.
They resemble that Polynesian prince who had rejected
the errors of polytheism for those of an extreme sect
of Primitive Seceders. For weeks at a time this prince
was known to be " steady," but every month or so he
disappeared, and his subjects said he vas" lying off."
To adopt an American idiom, he " felt like brandy and
\\ ater " ; he also " felt like " wearing no clothes, and
generally rejecting his new conceptions of duty and
decency. In fact, he had a good bout of savagery, and
then he returned to his tall hat, his varnished boots, his
hymn-book, and his edifying principles. The life of
297
298 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
small boys at school (before they get into long-tailed
coats and the upper-fifth) is often a mere course of
"lying-off" — of relapse into native savagery with its
laws and customs.
If any one has so far forgotten his own boyhood as to
think this description exaggerated, let him just fancy
what our comfortable civilised life would be, if we could
become boys in character and custom. Let us suppose
that you are elected to a new club, of which most of
the members are strangers to you. You enter the
doors for the first time, when two older members, who
have been gossiping in the hall, pounce upon you with
the exclamation, " Hullo, here's a new fellow ! You
fellow, what's your name?" You reply, let us say,
"Johnson." "I don't believe it, it's such a rum name.
What's your father?" Perhaps you are constrained to
answer " a Duke " or (more probably) " a solicitor."
In the former case your friends bound up into the
smoking-room, howling, " Here's a new fellow says his
father is a Duke. Let's take the cheek out of him."
And they " take it out " with umbrellas, slippers, and
other surgical instruments. Or, in the latter case (your
parent being a solicitor) they reply, "Then your father
must be a beastly cad. All solicitors are sharks. My
father says so, and he knows. How many sisters have
you?" The new member answers, "Four." "Any of
them married?" "No." "How awfully awkward for
you."
By this time, perhaps, luncheon is ready, or the
evening papers come in, and you are released for a
moment. You sneak up into the library, where you
THE BOY 299
naturally expect to be entirely alone, and you settle on
a sofa with a novel. But an old member bursts into
the room, spies a new fellow, and puts him through the
usual catechism. He ends with, " How much tin have
you got ? " You answer " twenty pounds," or whatever
the sum may be, for perhaps you had contemplated
playing whist. " Very well, fork it out ; you must give
a dinner, all new fellows must, and you are not going to
begin by being a stingy beast?" Thus addressed, as
your friend is a big bald man, who looks mischievous,
you do "fork out" all your ready money, and your new
friend goes off to consult the cook. Meanwhile you
" shed a blooming tear," as Homer says, and go home
heart-broken. Now, does any grown-up man call this
state of society civilisation ? Would life be worth living
(whatever one's religious consolations) on these terms ?
Of course not, and yet this picture is a not overdrawn
sketch of the career of some new boy, at some schools
new or old. The existence of a small schoolboy is, in
other respects, not unlike that of an outsider in a lawless
" Brotherhood," as the Irish playfully call their murder
clubs.
The small boy is in the society, but not of it, as
far as any benefits go. He has to field out (and I
admit that the discipline is salutary) while other boys
bat. Other boys commit the faults, and compel him to
copy out the impositions — say five hundred lines of
Virgil — with which their sins are visited. Other boys
enjoy the pleasures of football, while the small boy has
to run vaguely about, never within five yards of the ball.
Big boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small boy
300 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
gets lost in the bitter weather, on the open moorsj or
perhaps (as in one historical case) is frozen to death
within a measurable distance of the school playground.
And the worst of it is that, as a member of the great
school secret society, the small boy can never complain of
his wrongs, or divulge the name of his tormentors. It is
in this respect that he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged
into the coils of an Anarchist " Inner Brotherhood."
He is exposed to all sorts of wrongs from his neigh-
bours, and he can only escape by turning "informer,"
by breaking the most sacred law of his society, losing
all social status, and, probably, obliging his parents to
remove him from school. Life at school, as among the
Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that law and authority
are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.
The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which
a man enters with reluctance. Boys are, on the whole,
such good fellows, and so full of fine unsophisticated
qualities, that the mature mind would gladly turn away
its eyes from beholding their iniquities. Even a cruel
bully does not inevitably and invariably develop into a
bad man. He is, let us hope, only passing through the
savage stage, in which the torture of prisoners is a recog-
nised institution. He has, perhaps, too little imagina-
tion to understand the pain he causes. Very often
bullying is not physically cruel, but only a perverted
sort of humour, such as Kingsley, in " Hypatia," recog-
nised among his favourite Goths. 1 remember a feeble
foolish boy at school (feeble he certainly was, and was
thought foolish) who became the subject of much
humorous bullying. His companions used to tie a
THE BOY 3or
thin thread round his ear, and attach this to a bar at
such a height that he could only avoid breaking it by
standing on tiptoe. But he was told that he must not
break the thread. To avoid infringing this command-
ment, he put himself to considerable inconvenience
and afforded much enjoyment to the spectators.
Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remem-
ber the two following species of bullying to which
they were subjected, and which, perhaps, are obso-
lescent. Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and
the victim was seated on the top, near the roof of the
room. The other savages brought him down from this
bad eminence by hurling other stools at those which
supported him. Or the victim was made to place his
hands against the door, with the fingers outstretched,
while the young tormentors played at the Chinese knife-
trick. They threw knives, that is to say, at the door
between the apertures of the fingers, and, as a rule,
they hit the fingers and not the door. These diversions
I know to be correctly reported, but the following pretty
story is, perhaps, a myth. At one of the most famous
public schools, a praepostor, or monitor, or sixth-form
boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot in the room
above his own. He went up and found a big boy and
a little boy. They denied having any pistol. The
monitor returned to his studies, again was sure he
heard a shot, went up, and found the little boy dead.
The big boy had been playing the William Tell trick
with him, and had hit his head instead of the apple.
That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all
boys will agree that the little victim could not have
302 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
escaped by complaining to the monitor. No. Death
before dishonour. But the side not so seamy of this
picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour
among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society
might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment
of honour is even more strong than fear, and will pro-
bably outlast the very disagreeable circumstances in
which it was developed.
People say bullying is not what it used to be. The
much abused monitorial system has this in it of good,
that it enables a clever and kindly boy who is high up in
the school to stop the cruelties (if he hears of them) of
a much bigger boy who is low in the school. But he
seldom hears of them. Habitual bullies are very cunning,
and I am acquainted with instances in which they carry
their victims off to lonely torture cells (so to speak) and
deserted places fit for the sport. Some years ago a
small boy, after a long course of rope's-ending in out-of-
the-way dens, revealed the abominations of some naval
cadets. There was not much sympathy with him in the
public mind, and perhaps his case was not well managed.
But it was made clear that whereas among men an un-
popular person is only spoken evil of behind his back,
an unpopular small boy among boys is made to suffer in
a more direct and very unpleasant way.
Most of us leave school with the impression that there
was a good deal of bullying when we were little, but
that the institution has died out. The truth is that we
have grown too big to be bullied, and too good-natured
to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought bully-
ing was an extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was
THE BOY 303
rediscovered by Sir William Richmond). But a distin-
guished writer, who was a small boy when I was a big
one, has since revealed to me the most abominable
cruelties which were being practised at the very moment
when I supposed bullying to have had its day and
ceased to be. Now, the small boy need only have
mentioned the circumstances to any one of a score of
big boys, and the tormentor would have been first
thrashed, and then, probably, expelled.
A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild
and hilly region on the other side of the world,
let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. In
a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the
society of the cook, a very useless young man, who
astonished him by references to one of our univer-
sities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning.
This youth (who was made cook, and a very bad cook
too, because he could do nothing else) had been expelled
from a large English school. And he was expelled
because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and
had expressed his readiness to do it again. Now, there
was no doubt that this cook in the mountain inn was a
very unserviceable young fellow. But I wish more boys
who have suffered things literally unspeakable from
bullies would try whether force (in the form of a paving
stone) is really no remedy.
The Catholic author of a recent book ( " Schools," by
Lieut.-Col. Raleigh Chichester), is very hard on "Pro-
testant Schools," and thinks that the Catholic system of
constant watching is a remedy for bullying and other
evils. "Swing-doors with their upper half glazed, might
304 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
have their uses," he says, and he does not see why a boy
should not be permitted to complain, if he is roasted,
like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The boys at
one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh
Chichester, "are never without surveillance of some sort."
This is true of most French schools, and any one who
wishes to understand the consequences (there) may
read the published confessions of a pioti — an usher, or
" spy." K more degraded and degrading life than that of
the wretched pion^ it is impossible to imagine. In an
English private school, the system of espionnage and tale-
bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr.
Anstey describes in Vice Versa. But in the Catholic
schools spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the
surveillance may be, as he says, " that of a parent ; an
aid to the boys in their games rather than a check."
The religious question as between Catholics and Pro-
testants has no essential connection with the subject.
A Protestant school might, and Grimstone's did, have
tale-bearers ; possibly a Catholic school might exist
without parental surveillance. That system is called by
its foes a "police," by its friends a "paternal" system.
But fathers don't exercise the " paternal " system them-
selves in this country, and we may take it for granted
that, while English society and religion are as they are,
surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If
any one regrets this, let him read the descriptions of
French schools and schooldays, in Balzac's Louis
Lambert^ in the "Memoirs" of M. Maxime du Camp, in
any book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his
youth. He will find spying (of course) among the ushers,
THE BOY 305
contempt and hatred on the side of the boys, unwhole-
some and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy
exercise ; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature
excursions into forbidden and shady quarters of the
town.
No doubt the best security against bullying is in con-
stant occupation. There can hardly (in spite of Master
George Osborne's experience in "Vanity Fair") be
much bullying in an open cricket-field. Big boys, too,
with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when
they come across it, but make it their business to find
out where it exists. Exist it will, more or less, despite
all precautions, while boys are boys — that is, are passing
through a modified form of the savage state.
There is a curious fact in the boyish character which
seems, at first sight, to make good the opinion that
private education, at home, is the true method. Before
they go out into school life, many little fellows of nine,
or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost
poetical. They are fond of books, fond of nature, and,
if you can win their confidence, will tell you all sorts
of pretty thoughts and fancies which lie about them
in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked
to lie on the grass and to people the alleys and glades
of that miniature forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom
he seemed actually to see in a kind of vision. But
he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards
race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young
barbarian, interested in "the theory of touch" (at
football), curious in the art of bowling, and no more
capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green meadow.
u
3o6 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and
his imagination was in abeyance for a season.
This is a common enough thing, and rather a melan-
choly spectacle to behold. One is tempted to believe
that school causes the loss of a good deal of genius, and
that the small boys who leave home poets, and come back
barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand,
if they had been kept at home and encouraged, the
chances are that they would have blossomed into infant
phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of
Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill
would probably have been a much happier and wiser
man if he had not been a precocious linguist, economist,
and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy stage
of indifference to learning and speculation at a public
school. Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirl-
wall. His Primitiae were published (by Samuel Tipper,
London, 1808), when young Connop was but eleven
years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this
slender bark," as he says, and it sailed through three
editions between 1808 and 1809. Young Thirlwall
was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four
read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished
all who heard him." At seven he composed an essay
" On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but " his taste
for poetry was not discovered till a later period." His
sermons, some forty, occupy most of the little volume
in which these Primitiae were collected.
He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecra-
tion. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I
look upon the present and past state of our public
THE BOY 307
morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dis-
sipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue,
I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of
terror, for the result of the change." " The late
Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a
remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a
State, and that from a deficiency on that head arise
the chief evils which can befall society." He then
bids us " remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may
destroy our Israel is near at hand," though it might
be difficult to show how Nebuchadnezzar destroyed
Israel.
As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that
" Edward VI. died in his minority, and disappointed
his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy reign."
Of this infant's thirty-nine sermons (just as many as
the Articles), it may be said that they are in no way
inferior to other examples of this class of literature.
But sermons are among the least " scarce " and " rare "
of human essays, and many parents would rather see
their boy patiently acquiring the art of wicket-keeping
at school than moralising on the uncertainty of life at
home. Some one " having presented to the young
author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar subject
of the Ploughboy," he replied with an ode on " The
Potboy."
" Bliss is not always join'd to wealth,
Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof,
For poverty is bliss with health,
Of that my potboy stands a proof."
3o8 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
The volume ends with this determination,
" Still shall I seek Apollo's shelt'ring ray,
To cheer my spirits and inspire my lay."
If any parent or guardian desires any further infor-
mation about Les Enfans deveniis cclcbres par leurs ecrits,
he will find it in a work of that name, published in
Paris in 1688. The learned Scioppius published works
at sixteen, " which deserved " (and perhaps obtained)
"the admiration of dotards." M. Du Maurier asserts
that, at the age of fifteen, Grotius pleaded causes at
the Bar. At eleven Meursius made orations and
harangues which were much admired. At fifteen,
Alexandre le Jeune wrote anacreontic verses, and (less
excusably) a commentary on the Institutions of Gaius.
Grevin published a tragedy and two comedies at the
age of thirteen, and at fifteen Louis Stella was a pro-
fessor of Greek. But no one reads Grevin now, nor
Stella, nor Alexandre le Jeune, and perhaps their time
might have been better occupied in being "soaring
human boys" than in composing tragedies and com-
mentaries. Monsieur le Due de Maine published, in
1678, his (Euvres d'un Auteur de Sept Ans, a royal
example to be avoided by all boys. These and
several score of other examples may perhaps reconcile
us to the spectacle of puerile genius fading away in
the existence of the common British schoolboy, who is
nothing of a poet, and still less of a jurisconsult.
The British authors who understand boys best are
not those who have written books exclusively about
boys. There is Canon Farrar, for example, whose
THE BOY 309
romances of boyish life appear to be very popular, but
whose boys, somehow, are not real boys. They are too
good when they are good, and when they are bad, they
are not perhaps too bad (that is impossible), but they
are bad in the wrong way. They are bad with a man-
nish and conscious vice, whereas even bad boys seem
to sin less consciously and after a ferocious fashion of
their own. Of the boys in " Tom Brown " it is difificult
to speak, because the Rugby boy under Arnold seems
to have been of a peculiar species. A contemporary
pupil was asked, when an undergraduate, what he con-
ceived to be the peculiar characteristic of Rugby boys.
He said, after mature reflection, that " the differetitia of
the Rugby boy was his moral thoughtfulness." Now the
characteristic of the ordinary boy is his want of what
is called moral thoughtfulness.
He lives in simple obedience to school traditions.
These may compel him, at one school, to speak in a
peculiar language, and to persecute and beat all boys
who are slow at learning this language. At another
school he may regard dislike of the manly game of foot-
ball as the sin with which " heaven heads the count
of crimes." On the whole this notion seems a useful
protest against the prematurely artistic beings who fill
their studies with photographs of Greek fragments, vases,
etchings by the newest etcher, bits of China, Oriental
rugs, and very curious old brass candlesticks. The
" challenge cup " soon passes away from the keeping
of any house in a public school where Bunthorne is a
popular and imitated character. But when we reach
aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into
o
lo ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools
are often terribly " advanced," and when they are not at
work or play, they are vexing themselves with the riddle
of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, and all that kind
of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives
fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said,
become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are
better than precocious freethinking and sacrifice on the
altar of the Beautiful.
A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing
virelais in playtime is doing himself no good, and
is worse than useless to the society of which he is a
member. The small boys, who are the most ardent
of hero-worshippers, either despise him or they allow
him to address them in chansons royaux, and respond
with trebles in triolets. At present a great many boys
leave school, pass three years or four at the universities,
and go back as masters to the place where some of their
old schoolfellows are still pupils. It is through these
very young masters, perhaps, that "advanced" specula-
tions and tastes get into schools, where, however excel-
lent in themselves, they are rather out of place. Indeed,
the very young master, though usually earnest in his
work, must be a sage indeed if he can avoid talking
to the elder boys about the problems that interest him,
and so forcing their minds into precocious attitudes.
The advantage of Eton boys used to be, perhaps is still,
that they came up to college absolutely destitute of
" ideas," and guiltless of reading anything more modern
than Virgil. Thus their intellects were quite fallow, and
they made astonishing progress when they bent their
THE BOY 311
fresh and unwearied minds to study. But too many
boys now leave school with settled opinions derived
from the very latest thing out, from the newest German
pessimist or American socialist. It may, however, be
argued that ideas of these sorts are like measles, and
that it is better to take them early and be done with
them for ever.
While schools are reformed and Latin grammars of
the utmost ingenuity and difficulty are published, boys
on the whole change very little. They remain the beings
whom Thackeray understood better than any other
writer : Thackeray, who liked boys so much and was
so little blind to their defects. I think he exaggerates
their habit of lying to masters, or, if they lied in his
day, their character has altered in that respect, and they
are more truthful than many men find it expedient to be.
And they have given up fighting ; the old battles between
Berry and Biggs, or Dobbin and Cuff (major) are things
of the glorious past. Big boys don't fight, and there
is a whisper that little boys kick each other's shins
when in wrath. That practice can hardly be called an
improvement, even if we do not care for fisticuffs.
Perhaps the gloves are the best peacemakers at school.
When all the boys, by practice in boxing, know pretty
well whom they can in a friendly way lick, they are
less tempted to more crucial experiments " without the
gloves."
But even the ascertainment of one's relative merits
with the gloves hurts a good deal, and one may thank
heaven that the fountain of youth (as described by Pontus
de Tyarde) is not a common beverage. By drinking
312 ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
this liquid, says the old Frenchman, one is insensibly
brought back from old to middle age, and to youth and
boyhood. But one would prefer to stop drinking of the
fountain before actually being reduced to boy's estate,
and passing once more through the tumultuous ex-
periences of that period. And of these, not having
enough to eat is by no means the least common. The
evidence as to execrable dinners is rather dispiriting,
and one may end by saying that if there is a worse
fellow than a bully, it is a master who does not see
that his boys are supplied with plenty of wholesome
food. He, at least, could not venture, like a distin-
guished headmaster, to preach and publish sermons on
" Boys' Life : its Fulness." A schoolmaster who has
boarders is a hotel-keeper, and thereby makes his in-
come, but he need not keep a hotel which would be
dispraised in guide books. Dinners are a branch of
school economy which should not be left to the wives
of schoolmasters. They have never been boys.
THE END
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson <5r^ Co.
Edinburgh £r^ London
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