Wiltshire Essays 
 
 I 
 
 Maurice Hewlett" 

 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 WILTSHIRE 
 
 ESSAYS
 
 Essays by the same Writer 
 'IN A GREEN SHADE'
 
 WI LTSH I RE 
 " ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 OXFORD UNIVFRSriY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COI'KNHAGIvN 
 
 Ni:W YORK TORONTO MIvLUOURNK CAPR TOWN 
 
 IJOMHAY ( ALCIITTA MADRAS SHANGHAI TICKING
 
 
 PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 BY FREDERICK HALL
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 page 
 
 Preface : on Oneself ..... 7 
 
 Mascalls 
 
 
 i 
 
 »3 
 
 FiFiELD Ashes .... 
 
 
 
 17 
 
 The Great Affair 
 
 
 
 22 
 
 On Undressing in Public 
 
 
 
 27 
 
 Mark on Sir Walter 
 
 
 
 32 
 
 Our First, and Last 
 
 
 
 37 
 
 Misgivings about Labour 
 
 
 
 48 
 
 Clare's Derivations 
 
 
 
 58 
 
 The Collikd Night 
 
 
 
 69 
 
 Doors 
 
 
 
 7S 
 
 Manege 
 
 
 
 • 78 
 
 Prolegomena to the Ballads 
 
 
 
 . 84 
 
 A Si'RiN(; Miscellany 
 
 
 
 102 
 
 ' Pretty Witchcrafts' . 
 
 
 
 107 
 
 The Brothers' Tragedy . 
 
 
 
 . 114 
 
 The New Way 
 
 
 
 . 119 
 
 Old Style .... 
 
 
 
 123 
 
 .1. Lackington, Bookseller 
 
 
 
 128 
 
 Balladry 'over the Foam' 
 
 
 
 138 
 
 A Traveller's Talk 
 
 
 
 144 
 
 The One Thing Needful 
 
 
 
 1 49
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 The Remnant .... 
 
 Queen Victoria .... 
 On Translating Dante . 
 Select Conversations with a Blackbird 
 Good Saint Use .... 
 Painful Admission .... 
 The Children who Ran Away 
 Wk Commend our Dead . 
 l^ Faith and Works at Present . 
 Dilemmas for Mr. Monro 
 The Oyster King .... 
 
 I'AOE 
 
 • 154 
 
 • 159 
 
 . 166 
 
 . 179 
 
 . 188 
 
 193 
 
 . 198 
 
 210 
 
 . 214 
 
 . 224 
 
 . 228
 
 PREFACE 
 
 On Onesdf 
 
 I AM not able to conceive of anything, at first sight, 
 more uninteresting than discourse upon such a subject, 
 but if it can be done anywhere, where so well as in an essay ; 
 for what are essays but oneself written at length, oneself 
 draped about some fortuitous peg ? Where, then, better 
 than in the preface to a volume of them ? On the threshold 
 of oneself what can more usefully engage the visitor than 
 initiatory disquisition i A grace before self ; for what one 
 is about to receive ! Moreover, as it so happens that in the 
 course of the last thirty years 1 have done a variety of things 
 and received upon them every variety of comment, except 
 my own, it may be that the time has come for my contribu- 
 tion to be put in. 1 can raise some curious points ; and a 
 reviewer in the Nenv Statesman ot ihe other day {iS^\\ 
 January, 1 92 I) gives me the opportunity. Upon liis peg 
 then will 1 hang my egotistical drapery, and over those 
 whom lie designates will I cast my shoe. 
 
 In a review, extremely simpatka, and, as I please to be- 
 lieve, discerning, of a recent little book of mine, predecessor 
 of these presents, heading straight for his principal affair, he
 
 8 PREFACE 
 
 does mt- by the \v;iy the extra service whicli tempts me to 
 this commentary. He observes that : 
 
 ' Mr. Hewlett is still, for too many of the public, the 
 enamoured troubadour of the Italian sjjring ; it is not 
 sufficiently recognised how he has developed and what 
 striking proof he has given of his essential modernity in 
 his great poem on the English peasant.' 
 
 I am obliged to him. He is right, and a permanent 
 irritation of mine is much allayed by his observation. Not- 
 withstanding that full five-and-twenty years have coursed 
 over this frosted pow since I belauded the youth of Italy, 
 notwithstanding that I have published seven volumes of 
 poems, and scarcely a volume in prose which was not con- 
 ceived as a poem is conceived, it is still the fact that six 
 readers out of ten expect every new book of mine that 
 reaches them to be more or less of an echo of The Forest 
 Lovers. What am I to do ? It imputes to me incredible 
 stupidity, itself is incredibly stupid — and what can one do 
 with stupidity except foam at the mouth ? Somebody sent 
 me a specimen of his prowess in that kind only the other 
 day, a chuckle-headed ' K. K.' writing in I know not what 
 journal. ' Admirers of Mr. Hewlett's graceful pen ', he 
 said — or words to that effect — ' will be disappointed when 
 they open In a Green Shade and find that it is not a swash- 
 buckling romance, . . .' And so on. What are you to do ? 
 I don't think that I have ever swashed a buckler seriously, 
 though when the sort of thing has lent itself to my humour 
 I may have gone a part of the way with it, or even a little .
 
 ON ONESELF 9 
 
 further. But if I had, is one to swash them for ever, or 
 are one's readers to expect it ? Supposing I had done it, 
 what could the end have been but that I should have yawned 
 in my readers' faces, and had them yawning back ? Sol- 
 vuntur tabulae — oscitatione. I have been told, and believe, 
 that a man changes the entire habit of his body periodically, 
 in a term of years. May he not change that of his mind ? 
 Must he not, if he is to keep pace ? I don't say that he 
 should do it as often as Mr. Wells, who seems to change 
 his opinions with his shirt ; but in twenty-five or thirty years 
 he should have shifted, or a man is a limpet. 
 
 To a reviewer of that calibre, whose brain, if brain he 
 have, works in a groove of somebody else's trampling, or 
 who, in default of brains, will use other men's thoughts 
 ready-made, dabbing them down in blocks like draughts on 
 a board, Mr. Hardy remains, and will for ever remain, a 
 novelist. He has written poetry all his life ; every so-called 
 novel of his was conceived as a poet conceives things, written 
 as a poet writes. No matter. He published ' novels ' before 
 he published verse. Therefore he is a novelist, and admirers 
 of liis graceful pen, when they opened The Dynasts, must 
 have been disappointed to find that it was not a rustic romance. 
 I quite believe it; but if they were such asses as to read K.K's 
 reviews, what else could one ex})ect? 
 
 On my own understanding of the matter I have not 
 written a single novel. Tom Jones is a novel, IVar and Peace 
 is a novel, Fanity Fair is a novel, The Old Wives Tale is a 
 novel, and a very good one, too. In those things, and in
 
 lo PREFACE 
 
 things like those, observation begat a book ; in my own 
 things the book (that is, the idea in the book, which really 
 is the book) procured the requisite observation. A poet, 
 then, writes a priori, a novelist a posteriori. Having one's 
 theme, unconsciously or not, everything necessary to its 
 nourishment and ultimate truth goes its appointed and quite 
 unconscious course — not only the requisite observation, but 
 the requisite vesture too, the only possible style, that is, the 
 only way in which the thing can be done. The Forest Lovers, 
 if any one cares to know, began by my scribbling down in 
 an idle moment the first sentence in the book, on my blotting- 
 pad. I don't know why I did it — but I did it. There it 
 remained, a single short sentence, for how long I don't 
 recollect. But something had been going on within me 
 between the date of that scrawl and the appointed day when 
 I saw the evolution of the theme it had suggested set out 
 clear before me, like a Jack's beanstalk. The thing was born, 
 and any trouble there was after that was trouble of planning 
 and detail. I remember that whole pages of it at a time used 
 to come out of my pen in the early mornings, faster than I 
 could write them down. In my experience a poem comes 
 in exactly that way. The best poem I ever made, by far, 
 built itself upon the broken cry of a poor girl, mortally hurt 
 by war. A line (so given, or produced God knows how 
 or why else) sets the theme. After a period of gestation, 
 the thing is born whole, in outline. The detail comes un- 
 sought, mero motu eius, by degrees, but always whole and 
 self-sufficient. The work, the only conscious work, is dove-
 
 ON ONESELF ii 
 
 tailing the unsought fragments together, with the best you 
 can do, with that at least which won't stultify the unsought. 
 That, so far as I can speak, is how the thing becomes a 
 trumpet, or a penny whistle, as the case may be. 
 
 And whether it was in the beginning, is now, or ever 
 shall be any good, is not for me to say — luckily so, because 
 I cannot. What is more, I don't think I care two straws, 
 now. It all seems a long time ago, so long that I can only 
 recall with an effort the tremendous importance I used to 
 fasten on it all. But now — cosafatta capo ha. It is done 
 and done with. Now I shelter behind the Nenv Statesman, 
 to get out of the weather when my past is whirled about my 
 present. 
 
 ' Lord, what is man ? ' That is the cry when you are 
 sixty. ■ ■ 
 
 There is little to add, though it may as well be said 
 here as elsewhere. I call these chapters Wiltshire Essays, 
 because they were all written in my county, and many of 
 them are directly concerned with it. Some deal with the 
 doings of my neighbours as I view them from here ; some 
 deal with literature as I think about it here. All of them 
 have appeared in Reviews or Newspapers : The Forum, 
 Fortnightly, Nineteenth Century and After, London Mercury, 
 Cornhill; Manchester Guardian and Daily Chronicle; 
 Nation, Outlook ; I think that is a complete list of my 
 obligations for hospitality en route. 
 
 After that, 'Go, lytel boko'.
 
 Mascalls 
 
 WE cut out of the high road by a sunk lane between 
 dogwood hedges and ragged elms, I and a young 
 squire of my acquaintance who lives and reigns not far 
 from here. Beyond the trees there showed up the gable- 
 end and chimneys of a house, and anon we came to a flint- 
 and-stone wall, a blank space of masonry, wherein one 
 barred window. The place might have been a convent in 
 some Tuscan vico/o, so blind a look it had ; but in our 
 country, when a little house faces the sun, it has no use for 
 windows to the north. We reached a door in the wall, 
 tumbled down a flight of steps, and stood, as it were, upon 
 the shore of a lake of light, with nothing before us but sun- 
 shot air, and across that radiant emptiness the further hills 
 rolling away towards Somerset. Two great ilexes guard 
 the entry, and make so dry a shelter that the angle of the 
 wall with their covering serves as a wood-shed. A terrace- 
 walk runs along the rim of the vale, from which the garden, 
 enclosed in its white wall and red-tile coping, falls sharply 
 down to the river. The wall ends there in a freakish gazebo 
 overhanging the water, which once might have covered a 
 boat-house, but now has a homelier use. Upon the terrace 
 is Mascalls, the old stone house. 
 
 Mascalls has a quiet and seemly, plain face, much like that 
 of some old labourer which has been bleached and scorched 
 by the suns of fifty summers. It would be bald-looking, 
 almost too severely to the purpose, but for one ample bow- 
 window, the after-thought of some Mascall of the Regency. 
 That was alwut the date at which it took its present sha|K-,
 
 14 MASCALLS 
 
 for while the ashlar miglit be of any age, and no doubt had 
 served a much' older house, its windows were all sashed in 
 the way of l8io or so, and a line of billets had been set 
 under the eaves when a tile roof took the place of thatch. 
 But antiquity was below us and about us — a mullioned 
 window to the cellar, a huge tithe barn close by, built in 
 Pelasgian blocks. The front door, with a coquettish 
 stuccoed pediment which reminded me somehow of Jane 
 Austen, stood open ; and there, bowing, appealing with 
 her faded eyes, stood the wife of the last Mascall who 
 could be suffered to hold Mascalls, a patient, sad-faced 
 woman, rendered by cares rather than years to look any 
 age. She made us free of the place with a courtesy which 
 never fails her countrywomen, though one of us had decreed 
 that morning that she must leave. We made our rueful 
 survey. We saw the wreck of a sturdy old house. From 
 attic to cellar the tale was the same. Parting walls, 
 sagging ceilings, gaping floor-boards, dry-rotten joists, 
 damp-eaten, rat-gnawed, it was falling about the family's 
 heads. To put the place in order again would cost a small 
 fortune in these days, which could only be recovered by 
 rent. But rent was what the family could not find — so 
 what were you to do ? My friend was humane, but he had 
 to pay his way. His land was not a luxury, it was his 
 livelihood. He was in as mortgagee on a foreclosure. The 
 word had been spoken. Mascall could no longer hold 
 Mascalls. 
 
 Yet what a pleasant seat for an old house, on a ridge 
 above the eddying chalk-stream, full in the sun, with a view 
 over the valley into the heart of the West ! What a shady 
 orchard of cider-apples, what a sheltered, ripe old walled- 
 garden, what a green water-meadow edging the brook !
 
 MASCALLS 15 
 
 The place is so much ' seated in the mean ', as Shakespeare 
 says ; it has the homely comfort, the plainness, the gentle 
 every-dayness which makes our country beloved of all who 
 come to know it. A country of half-tones, of silver-greys 
 and amber-yellows, of mild wet winds, misted mornings 
 and temperate noons ; a country of Quaker habit. To be 
 driven from it, if you have lived there all your life, and 
 laboured its earth, and gone out and in ; brought your bride 
 there, got your children there, seen your old father die and 
 borne him thence to the churchyard, returning then to know 
 that you are Mascall of Mascalls ; as it was in the begin- 
 ing, is now . . . and then — to slip back and back, to feel 
 your hold loosening, to be shiftless to help, in your own 
 holding on sufferance, by squatter's right . . . and then — 
 bidden to go ! How can a man bear that ? 
 
 There is neither scn\)t nor memory in the parish whicli 
 does not recall a Mascall at Mascalls. The name there 
 goes back to the fifteenth century ; and if the house was 
 called so then it can only have been because there was then 
 a Mascall in it. And so you go back by allowable guess- 
 work to the first Mascall of all. They were yeomen, 
 free-holders, or as good, of belike a hundred acres ; and if 
 1 8 10 to 1820 siiw the house refaced, new-roofed and made 
 trim, you must reflect that tliose were great years for 
 farming, with corn at 160s. and other things according. 
 Then came lean years ; then temperament crept in ; the 
 Mascall blood ran thin ; the present man's grandfather 
 failed, perhaps in the hungry Forties ; he mortgaged, could 
 not pay his interest ; the squire's father foreclosed, and 
 since then Mascall's father and Mascall liiniself have been 
 labourers for hire. Liven so tliey could not keep afloat. 
 Mascall, an honest man, a steady, wcll-sjioken man, but,
 
 i6 MASCALLS 
 
 as I read him, a man with a temperament, lost way, could 
 not pick it up again. The house began to fall. And one 
 can't go on so for ever. 
 
 I can only guess what they feel about it, for, being what 
 they are, both of them, they will not contend with fate. 
 It is to be, they say, and wait for it to come. Unable 
 either to do or to say anything, it is almost impossible to 
 conceive lives so expressionless as theirs. Barely, you 
 would think, a human life — except that they have loved, 
 and had children, and worked. But something was 
 wanting besides expression. They never leave their work, 
 they never cease to work, and yet they can't get on. Year 
 by year they have worked the daylight through, debt 
 mounting, the old house falling flake by flake like a 
 November woodland. Dock and thistle choke their 
 tillage, mud and dill-cup and marsh-marigold choke their 
 gutters. Not only have they never complained, they have 
 done no hand's turn to stem the ruin. It would seem as 
 if the round of every day absorbed all the vital force they 
 have to spend, that any intervals from toil which they 
 might win went in vacant reverie. Mascall, I was told, 
 has been seen of a Sunday morning standing in the road, 
 doing nothing. Simply standing there. Not leaning over 
 a gate, not smoking a pipe ; but standing, doing nothing. 
 Whether any intervals come Mrs. Mascall's way I don't 
 know, but I doubt it. I saw a photograph in the house 
 of one of its daughters. A pretty girl in white muslin, a 
 sash round her waist, a flapping straw hat in her hand. 
 Fair, blue-eyed obviously, like her mother. A pretty girl, 
 but — temperament was in that vacant smile. 
 
 And so — Mascall of Mascalls no more; and the old 
 homestead must to it again.
 
 Fifield (^Ashes 
 
 THERE 'S a green road, which we call the Race 
 Plain out here, running along the top of the hills from 
 Harnham, close to Salisbury, to Whitesheet Hill, There, 
 over Berwick St. James, it picks up the Shaftesbury road, 
 of which once upon a time it formed a section. It was a 
 coach road in those days, and for evidence of that there 
 remains even yet, half-buried in the turf, a stone on 
 which you may read. From Hyde Park Corner, 98 
 rniles. Now its only wayfarers are the gypsy-folk, who 
 use it habitually, and whose fires you may see all along its 
 length wherever the furze affords them shelter from the 
 wind. A hatchet-faced, bleak-eycd people they are, 
 utterly alien from us, though using our speech and serving 
 themselves of our weaknesses ; very beautiful and free- 
 moving when young, but soon beaten out of colour by the 
 weather, bleached down to parchment, and dragged out of 
 shape by the burdens they must bear if they are women, or 
 the arts they follow if they are men. How truly bred thev 
 are by this time I don't know at all ; but it is certain thai 
 the gypsy blood is strong and persistent ; for though you 
 will see fair-haired girls and boys among them, and fair- 
 haired women too, I never yet saw one that showed not 
 the quick, wild-animal, foreign look in the eyes, the 
 hatchet-face, or the wheedling husky voice. They have 
 powerful attraction for our young men, those girls of theirs, 
 as they know very well, and use it for their occasions, 
 which are not always honest. I confess myself to the 
 attraction, tliougli not a young man by any means. 
 
 B
 
 i8 FIFIELD ASHES 
 
 Not far from where I live there is a spinney on the 
 green road, which we call Filield Ashes. Planted, no 
 doubt, in the beginning by birds, it is now a wood of 
 some pretension ; the ashes which give it name are trees 
 of sixty or more years ; and there are sycamores, too, and 
 dense undergrowth of dogwood and elder. It was there 
 on a sad autumn dusk of cloud and rain drifting fronj the 
 west that 1 saw tlie women whom I called the Fates — 
 for such they looked. They had a fire on the lew edge 
 of the wood, and sat about it, watching it sink. The 
 tripod stood over it, the pot was not slung. The meal 
 was done : they were settling down into the night, which 
 was coming on swiftly. With the end of the fire their 
 vigil, I thought, would be over. And what then i* 
 
 The glowing logs lit up their faces and forms. I stood 
 gazing. One was a very large woman, broad-browed, 
 broad-shouldered, deep-breasted. She had a lap like a 
 table, for her knees were raised and wide apart, and her 
 white apron stretched across them like a table-cloth. 
 Upon one knee she rested her elbow, over the other laid 
 her left arm. She had an expressionless flat face, a 
 Kalmuck fac&, with the high cheek-bones, squab nose and 
 void, cavernous eyes of the type. Her hair was coal-black, 
 braided and looped about her cheeks. The firelight caught 
 and danced in a large gold ring hanging from her ear. She 
 sat like a sphinx, motionless, staring into the fire. Beside 
 her was a younger woman, in a flowered cotton gown, her 
 iiead covered in a twisted red scarf. One of her knees 
 was raised, and I saw a bare foot under her skirt. The 
 sharp-chinned, tanned, true gypsy type, she was ; and she, 
 too, looked into the fire, her head drooped sideways to it, 
 as if she pitied what she saw there. The third woman
 
 FIFIELD ASHES 19 
 
 sat apart, in a stuff gown —black bodice, red skirt — with 
 a handkerchief wound in her hair. She had been pretty 
 in her day, and was still a shapely figure with youthful 
 curves. And what she read in the fire I couldn't make 
 out ; something which gave a sad twist to her mouth, 
 but told her nothing which she had not expected. She 
 watched it with no more than that interest you give to a 
 tale of which you know all the turns, to a certain end. It 
 was as if the tale was of her own making, so little did 
 she show of curiosity, so much of sad acquaintance. 
 
 So, after some moments of watching in secret, I left 
 them to their mystery at the falling of the night. 
 
 What were they thinking of, speechlessly brooding there 
 over the dying fire ? Think in your turn of what things 
 they could think ; of what they knew of earth-lore, beast- 
 lore, and man-lore. Abroad in all weather, what could 
 they not read in the face of the sky, in the troojjing of the 
 stars, in shapes and colours of clouds, their driving masses ; 
 in the shadows on the hills, in the volleying wind, 
 under the glare of the sun ? And of men and their ways, 
 with each other and with women, had they not stuff to 
 think of there ? Brutality and bestiality, one and the other 
 constant — how far does the squaw acquiesce ? What is 
 her judgment, with so little reason to think hopefully of 
 men, and little tnougli of women either ? 
 
 Mr. Hardy's Ime poem has the wind of the green road 
 blowing keenly througii it. 
 
 From Wynyard's Gaj) the livelong day, 
 
 'I'hf livflong day, 
 Wc iK-at afoot tiie nortliward way 
 
 We had travL-lled times before; 
 
 H 2
 
 20 FIFIELD ASHES 
 
 The sun-blaze burning on our backs, 
 Our shoulders sticking to our packs, 
 By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks 
 We skirted sad Si'dge-Moor. 
 
 The Trampivomans Tragedy is a tragedy indeed, the 
 more pitiful for turning on folly : fidelity of woman, hunger 
 and rage of man, and vanity like an abscess between them. 
 That is the curse of sex, that a by-blow of character can 
 poison the wells of desire. But the trampwoman was not 
 a gypsy, that is plain. The women of that race are faith- 
 ful to the pact which allots them to the men who choose 
 them. Borrow is right there. Ursula would go far, but 
 not over the line. What the like of her would bear was 
 written, I thought, in the inscrutable, sad. stoic faces of 
 those three silent women at Fifield Ashes. Wherever 
 their men may have been, on what nefarious commerce, had 
 one of them come back he would have found his woman 
 awaiting his pleasure, piepared for the pains to come. 
 They are often incredibly burdened with tlieir children, so 
 much so that one can't believe there are any joys for them 
 in motherhood. I remember a girl hawking brooms in the 
 market-place one day, a child pouched in her shawl, one 
 tugging at her gown, and another to come. I passed her 
 again when market was done, shuffling out of the town 
 towards the green road : the man walking alone and 
 unburdened in front, she beliind him with her triple load. 
 She looked a child herself, yet had keen, gray, hunting 
 eyes, and already the shaq) lines on her face which the 
 weather soon furrows there. A squaw, as often beaten as 
 loved, and finding, it is likely, the one handling no better 
 than the other. Yet she was faithful, and bore the triple 
 load. In such races instinct takes the j)lace of liabit :
 
 FIFIELD ASHES 21 
 
 morals don't obtain. Strange that in the heart of England 
 such a nation of folk should be. 
 
 As I grow old and watch life the closer, two things 
 strike me dumb, as two others struck the philosopher. 
 One is the blind blundering of men, the other the inex- 
 haustible bounty of women.
 
 The Great (LAffair 
 
 FANCY or superstition (and if they don't actually call 
 cousins, who is to tell them apart ?) led me to see on 
 the Feast of St. Valentine evident signs that it was what 
 we here believe it, the Birds' wedding-day. There are 
 those, too, who hail it the beginning of Spring ; and this 
 year they had reason on their side. // ver et Venus. . . . The 
 whole countryside lay, in Browning's jolly phrase, ' washed 
 in the morning's water-gold ' ; the mild air streamed in 
 from the west ; the little brooks coursing over the warped 
 meadows showed steel-blue. And the birds were full of 
 business. I met a bullfinch, deeply involved, dressed to 
 kill. The not impossible She was somewhere at hand, 
 though I could not see her. The moorfowl were playing 
 Pan and Syrinx in backwaters of the river, or through the 
 watercress-beds ; a starling whistled thoughtfully, with an 
 eye upon my chimney-stacks ; and the scattered clumps of 
 moss below the barn-eaves were evidence that building was 
 begun. But not the birds alone were upon the Great 
 Affair, Nature's only affair, when all 's said. There were 
 signs in the nutwalk, not to be mistaken, that the earth 
 was astir — an artless display indeed, which must have en- 
 raptured Dr. Erasmus Darwin in his day, and would have 
 titillated agreeably the Reverend Laurence Sterne if he had 
 been up to it. This annual amorous preoccupation fills me 
 with wonder and praise ; it is one of those every-day 
 miracles which seem much more miraculous than the most 
 burning pages of the ylcta Sanctorum. Duty and Delight
 
 THE GREAT AFFAIR 23 
 
 for once go handfastcd. He (whatever his degree in the 
 scale of creation) is bound to give, and She to take. Yet 
 he is glorious over it, she sleek. It is a blissful commerce, 
 worth waiting for, worth fighting for, and it happens once 
 (or maybe twice) a year ; and so it has been since earth 
 took form and body ; and so it will be until she lose them 
 again. Is our life but a sleep and a forgetting ? The birds 
 won't say so. A birth and a begetting, according to them. 
 
 They say that in the invisible country, which few have 
 had the chance to know so well as young Tamlane did, 
 love is a seasonal affair, as it is with the birds ; and I have 
 a notion or a memory that Moses did his best to establish 
 it so among his children of Israel. I don't think he suc- 
 ceeded — human nature beat him there, — but it is to be 
 observed that to this day that notable nation takes life more 
 nearly after bird-fashion tiian any one of the Gentiles. It 
 is proliferous, philoprogenitive ; the Great Affair still 
 absorbs the women ; and the men lend themselves to the 
 tradition with the seriousness, or some of it, which they 
 give to other objectives of theirs, making money, making 
 music, or browbeating the uncovenanted. In a word, they 
 arc obedient to the Law. I wish I could think the same 
 of our own nation, where the instinct, strong as it is, is 
 easily diverted, where even pleasure is swallowed up in 
 vanity, and the sanction is ignored because tlie duty is. 
 Love has uken over the prerogatives of desire of increase; 
 and of love vanity is first the humble servant, next the 
 overbearing master. Now, therefore, it has come about 
 that love itself cannot take itself seriously. Nothing matters 
 but the looking-glass. What will hapiK-n when that has 
 nothing interesting to report ? God knows.
 
 24 THE GREAT AFFAIR 
 
 I supj)Osc that Love's great usurpation took place here 
 when the British developed the inordinate scntimentalism 
 which still afflicts us. Broadly speaking, it was kept in its 
 proper place in domestic life until the nineteenth century 
 was thirty years old. You can almost date it by great 
 Victoria. From the Pastons to Pepys, from Pepys to 
 Walpole, from him to Jane Austen you may read how 
 the British people made marriage in all walks of life. 
 Liking, in the male, may have prompted the transaction, 
 but it was strictly regulated by convenience and the real end 
 of life. It was a matter of bargain, sometimes of bargain 
 and sale. The instinct followed was the true one, desire 
 of increase, not of possession of a person. Love as often 
 as not followed marriage, springing as often as not from 
 nearness and intimacy ; or if it did not, use and wont took 
 its place. I don't say it was ideal, but strongly maintain 
 that it was less ruinous to domestic economy than our 
 pres( nt custom, where lighthearted marriage involves light- 
 hearted divorce. If people choose for love without increase, 
 they flout Nature ; and when it comes to a choice between 
 flouting Nature or the Dean of St. Paul's, my vote is cast. 
 The people among whom my days are happily spent hold 
 mainly by the ancient ways, saying (with my sincere agree- 
 ment) that they are the best. You may think them, often, 
 strangely insensible to personal attractiveness. Not from 
 starlike eyes does the young peasant necessarily seek ' fuel 
 to maintain his fires'. Unless he is afflicted with a lues 
 his fires burn temperately. The pretty girls marry, but no 
 faster than the homely ones ; and if they are conscious of 
 themselves, inclined for tribute, making to themselves 
 looking-glasses of the young men, that wiiich they receive 
 is not that which they seek. Young men in these parts
 
 THE GREAT AFFAIR 25 
 
 may play the fool like young men in all parts, but not to the 
 tune of marriage-bells. ' A sober woman and no liigliflycr,' 
 old Pepys's desiderata for practical purposes, is also theirs. 
 That she have in addition rosy cheek or coral lip seems to 
 make no matter. Courtship may derive from walking-out, 
 but quite as often supplants it. In the best families of my 
 acquaintance walking-out, unchaperoned, is not allowed 
 until the maid is one-and-twenty, an age supposed of dis- 
 cretion. And betrothal is a serious business which must 
 be sought in all the forms. 
 
 It is not to be affirmed that love, even highly romantic 
 love, may not exist among the peasantry. It exists among 
 all the sons and daughters of men ; but with us it rarely, 
 of itself, leads to betrothal or is followed by marriage — 
 except wliere the boundary has been overstepped. There 
 and then, upon a decent man, that righting devolves which, 
 as we hold, only marriage can give. Yet I have known 
 a case where a passionate devotion has flamed in a girl s 
 breast after betrothal, although the coujjle had grown up 
 together from childhood without a thought of liking, and 
 the marriage had been as good as made by the parents. In 
 that case I should be ready to say that love flowed freely 
 and gladly at the call of duty, for she was, above any that 
 I iiave known, tlie truest to type, beautiful witliin and 
 without, at once innocent and passionate. The man, 
 however, was insensible and unresponsive. Unhap])iness 
 resulted. Such fite is the lot of women whose kindness 
 is to them both a glory and a snare. That was an ex- 
 ceptional thing. A very distinguished and touching 
 affection frequently follows upon marriage and the birth of 
 children ; of that there are shining examples all about me 
 down here. Childless marriages, again, are rare, and
 
 26 THE GREAT AFFAIR 
 
 rarclicr successes. The husband becomes estranged, takes 
 to drink or to playing the trombone ; the wife will be 
 hysterical, as often as not — and so should I be. 
 
 Rare as are childless marriages, rarer still are desecrated 
 marriages. You could almost count them in any rural 
 deanery. The laws of being, as use has made and tradition 
 hallowed them, still obtain. The men are monogamous, 
 the women keepers of the hearth. Hestia is their goddess. 
 And if our men have their god, his name is Terminus.
 
 On Undressing in Tublic 
 
 WE are slow in the country to pronounce on what 
 we hear, though it is a mistake on that account to 
 assume that there is anything which we don't hear. There 
 is very Httle ; but mostly we hope that it may blow over, 
 like a storm from the North-West. Our eyes may glitter ; 
 some one may say, ' Heard any one the like of that ? ' If 
 we are young enough we may guffaw, and say 'Cor!' which 
 is really an adjuration of the Cloud-Compeller. But we 
 don't pass judgment ; we revolve the news ; we chew it 
 like a cud. When we are ready we present the verdict of 
 the Assize. 
 
 There has been a plague of self-exhibition lately which 
 has run like a scurvy through the press. It is one of the 
 many war-diseases. That great gash in the body-politic 
 has provided a vent for our massed foul humours which 
 seem likely to suffocate the world. Do we owe it, with 
 so many other abominable things, to the Germans ? They 
 taught tiie Morning Post how to hate ; they taught our 
 army the uses of poison-gas. Now the memoir-writers 
 have learned of the military, and we arc being choked with 
 secrets — secrets of the bower as well as of the Cabinet. 
 
 Whether Colonel Repington or Mrs. Ascjuitli began it, 
 I am sure I don't know ; but now 1 come to think of it, I 
 believe the prize for the first corker goes to Mr. Wilfrid 
 Blunt. Luckily for us, and perhaps for him too, he simply 
 emptied his enormous diary into the printing-press with 
 a result so overwhelming that only a few hardy miners
 
 28 ON UNDRESSING IN PUBLIC 
 
 have ever succeeded in piercing the spoil-tip he made of it. 
 It doesn't matter how indiscreet you are if you are dull 
 enough. You can do no mischief if you cannot be read. 
 So Mr. Blunt doesn't count. Of the other two I have 
 only read the Colonel's exhibit. That, which throws into 
 the limelight the Colonel and his friends in their hours of 
 ease and intimacy, is vivacious enough, to say no more, and 
 I understand that Mrs. Asquith's knocks it, as they say, 
 out of time. The pair of them share adjectives. They are 
 called ' frank ' — a press-euphemism well understood in the 
 trade. One day, a few years hence, they will be in second- 
 hand book-catalogues, and there marked ' Curious ' in leaded 
 type. That is another accej)ted phrase. Under that title 
 you look for Tallemant des Rdaux when you want him, as 
 I did the other day. 
 
 We of the Quorum, at petty -sessions and elsewhere, 
 know something about the itch to discover oneself which 
 takes, very literally, that line of conduct. Lack of pence 
 apart, I am not sure that any other urges the premature 
 memoir-writer who is at the same time sincere. It 
 accounts, surely, for .Jean-Jacques, whose cerebration was 
 as morbid as you please. On the other hand, it does not 
 account for Casanova, who had the impudence to admire 
 himself as a rogue, nor for Bubb Dodington, who wrote 
 himself down knave without a suspicion of the fact. 
 Bubb, however, did not publish in his own lifetime, nor, 
 I believe, did Casanova. But vanity accounts for Casanova, 
 and vanity needs be neither morbid nor vicious. As for 
 money, the want of that will do almost anything ; but it is 
 safe to say that it won't lead to the publication of ' curious ' 
 revelations without either effrontery or arrogance to back 
 it. It needs the two ; for an arrogant man may know
 
 ON UNDRESSING IN PUBLIC 29 
 
 shame. But effrontery which has a face of brass, and 
 arrogance which says, 1 am outside the Law, those two in 
 alliance will be 'all the backing which poverty can ask. 
 
 Arrogance and effrontery, singly or combined, might 
 urge a man to undress himself in public ; but he would 
 hardly deal so with his friends unless they were like-minded 
 with him. Out here we judge it to be the fact that, in a 
 society whose memoirs make so uncommonly free, not only 
 witli the writers but with their intimates, a natural pre- 
 rogative to do just as you please is assumed. 
 
 I had a tale the other day from a clerical friend wlio 
 lives deeply in a woodland country. Six miles from his 
 parish there is a lord's great house in a park ; in which 
 also, so close to it that it is like a wing to the house, stands 
 a parish church. One Sunday in the summer, during 
 Morning Service, the house-party assembled on the steps, 
 not of the church, but of the house, turned on a gramo- 
 ])hone, and had a singsong, so loud and so outrageous that 
 the sacred office had to be stopped. Effrontery there, of 
 course ; but arrogance too : the behaviour of a great man 
 who happened to be a cad ; a man who desj)iscd the 
 Church, liked the gramophone, and had never been brought 
 u]» to see any reason why he should not do as he pleased. 
 Well, there 's no harm in not going to church (at least, 
 I hope not), and tiiere 's no harm in liking the gramophone 
 (at least, I suppose so); but there's great harm to be done 
 in annoying other people; and if you only annoy them 
 enough — particularly when they begin to notice such things 
 — the time is at hand when you will rue it. 
 
 It is re|)Orted down here, 1 don't know liow truly, from 
 Mrs. Asquith, that she and her young friends received
 
 30 ON UNDRESSING IN PUBLIC 
 
 acquaintance of both sexes duns la ruelle du lit. That is 
 mere Louis Treize, of course — and why not ? On the 
 other hand, why talk about it — unless you think it extra- 
 ordinary ? When you publish that kind of news, to people 
 who have never read Tallemant dcs R^aux or heard of 
 Louis XIII, first in a twopenny Sunday paper, then in a 
 penny morning paper, next in a book about which the buzz- 
 fly press settles in a swarm, you are guilty of a frivolity and 
 an arrogance combined every whit as dangerous as that 
 of the lord and his gramophone ; because, just as he did, 
 you are scraping and fretting into a raw one of the 
 tenderest places upon the peasant-won^ian's conscience. And 
 you will rue it. Next to public worship, which those who 
 use it take with a painful sincerity, comes, in men and 
 women of the country alike, personal modesty. To the 
 men of a class which your arrogance has led you to ignore 
 that is a matter of instinct. To the women it is of sacra- 
 mental observance. It is only the unsexed or abandoned 
 woman of that class who would show herself in bed. You 
 will see the girls walk embraced on a Sunday afternoon ; 
 very rarely you may see them kissed — but only ceremonially. 
 Intimacy induced by passion may, of course, go all lengths • 
 but a good peasant, girl or woman, is modest to hysterical 
 lengths. When I lived for a year or so in West Sussex 
 I had a double bathing-house on the shore, so that mixed 
 bathing could be had in comfort. I lent the use of it once 
 to two young women who had been schoolmates. They 
 went together ; but I found that they had emj)loyed both 
 houses. You may call that absurd, as I do. But you 
 can't be revolted by it, as they are by the ruelle du lit. 
 
 I am talking here of the real peasants, who all read the 
 newspapers now, and are tliercfoie your judges upon that
 
 ON UNDRESSING IN PUBLIC 31 
 
 vulgar assize. Don't imagine that you will emancipate them, 
 or that they will learn of you. All that they will learn is that 
 you arc no better than you should be. That is the kind of 
 thing which was happening in France — before 1789. 
 Gouverneur Morris paid a visit — about 1780 — to the Due 
 d'Orldans at Raincy, and went to Mass with the household. 
 M. de Segur and M. de Cubiferes ' amused the company 
 by tricks with a candle, which is put into the pockets of 
 various gentlemen while they are otherwise engaged. Im- 
 moderate laughter is the consequence. This scene ', he 
 goes on, ' must be edifying to the domestics who are 
 opposite, and the villagers wiio worship below '. There 
 again you have the lord and the gramoplione. The 
 edification of the villagers was shown in 1789-92. 
 
 It has been accurately observed that two classes of people 
 in this country will always be themselves : the rich, because 
 they don't care, the poor, because they don't dare, to be 
 otherwise. It is the middle class which needs the respect 
 of its neighbour, and can only keep its own by being sure 
 of it. So to epater U bourgeois is an easy game — so easy 
 as not to be worth while, unless, though born rich and 
 become thereby an aristocrat, you are by origin bourgeois 
 yourself; in which case you will no doubt relish the 
 flavours. But — beware of the poor. They are now on 
 the Assize. They read, and they judge, and tlieir word 
 for Arrogance is Impudince.
 
 dMark on Sir Walter 
 
 IN Mark Twain's Letters, lately published here, you 
 may see how, in writing to Mr. Brander Mattliews, 
 he lays out Sir Walter Scott. He takes off his coat to it, 
 lands him a right and left, and knocks the Shirra out of 
 time in about three rounds. 
 
 ' Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the 
 blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Roh 
 Roy, and as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Manner'tng, and 
 I can no longer hold my head up nor take any nourish- 
 ment ' — 
 
 And so on. You know his fighting style. It is pretty 
 work, great sport ; but it meant something. It meant that 
 he was in a rage with what he took to be some outrageous 
 bladder of pretence, put there for the old world to boast 
 of, and therefore for him to punch. So he jjunched in a 
 string of fighting letters, eacli more aggressive than the 
 one before it. What he did not see, and never did or 
 could see, was that with every punch at the enemy a reper- 
 cussion flattened himself, and that when Sir Walter lay 
 prone, far flatter than he and far more spent lay Mark 
 Twain. 
 
 There is a tale, I think in The Innocents Abroad, where 
 one of ' the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through 
 Palestine ' was shown a sacred flame which, he was told, 
 had been burning for a thousand years. The cavorter was 
 ready for that, as for most things. ' Well, I guess it 's out 
 now,' he said. And it was. To us who are familiar with
 
 MARK ON SIR WALTER 33 
 
 ruined symbols (in a world littered with them) and the 
 piety which first set them up, that is a disgustful tale ; but 
 it extinguishes the teller, as much as the lamp. To us it 
 seems that you might as well flout the dead body of an old 
 woman as the dead body of an old belief. What fun, on 
 those terms, has not been made of the Bible ? It is the 
 pecuHum of the parodist. Now one may make fun oi Hamlet to 
 any extent ; but it remains uncommonly difficult to produce 
 anything better than Hamlet. In the letter which I have 
 quoted there is a something at the end which shows that 
 Mark himself had a suspicion. Walter Scott, he says, 
 
 ' luas great, in his day, and to his proper audience ; 
 and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter ; but 
 why should cither of them rank high now ? And do 
 they ? Honest, now, do they ? Damn'd if I believe it.' 
 
 He may not have believed it, but he suspected it. Per- 
 haps as he wrote his letter, he remembered tliat Homer did 
 not cavort through the Troad, nor Milton through Eden, 
 nor Dante through Hell and Heaven, and yet were great, 
 even to him. But here's a singular thing in his next 
 letter to Mr. Matthews : 
 
 'I finished Guy Mannering — that cuiious, curious 
 book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around 
 a single flesh-and-blood Ixing — Dinmont . . . finished it 
 and took uj) Qjieritin Duriuard^ and finished that. It was 
 like leaving the dead to mingle with the living : it was like 
 withdrawing from the infant class in the College of 
 .lournalists to sit under the lecturer in l^nglish l^iterature 
 in Columbia University. I wonder who wrote Quent'm 
 Durivard ? 
 
 I don't hold a brief for Guy Mannering. It is not 
 a favourite of mine ; but what under the sun did he find 
 
 c
 
 34 MARK ON SIR WALTER 
 
 in Querilln Dtirzvnrtl \\\\\c\\ he could not ha\'e found theie a 
 thousand times better done? Tlicrc 's the wind on tlie heath, 
 there 's the sea, wild life, wild weather, and above all there 
 are the gypsies. They make the book, they are the book. 
 Qiienttn Durnvard is well enough ; the young man himself 
 is a real young man ; the Balafrl is a real fire-eater— but 
 France is not there, the fifteenth century is not there. 
 And how could he fmd Colonel Mannering 'squalid'? 
 He could not. ' Squalid ' is a punch. The Colonel may have 
 been a ' walking-gentleman ', but he was a gentleman ; and 
 a typical parent of the period. He is not at all more 
 arbitrary than Sii" Thomas Bertram, or Mr. Bennet. As 
 an astrologer you might find him comic ; but astrology 
 itself is rather comic nowadays. Trust Jane Austen, how- 
 ever. She knows about it all. The type existed. Sir 
 Walter was not far from it himself, highly-honoured 
 parent though he was. Read his letters in Lockhart, to his 
 son, a young Hussar in Dublin : ' These letters you will 
 not fail to deliver'; 'you will keep careful accounts of 
 your expenditure'. You will do this, do that — to a young 
 man handsomely of age. . 
 
 No — Mark Twain was in a rage, and like all men in 
 such a passion, undiscerning. He lit upon some big bow- 
 wow of Meg Merrilees', something of the Norna-of- 
 thc- Fitful- Head vein : * My post must be higli on yonder 
 headland, where never stood human foot save mine — or 
 I must sleep at the bottom of the unfathomable ocean, its 
 white billows booming over my senseless corpse.' That 
 is Ercles' vein, and the true Mrs. Siddons vein. It is 
 difficult to read, but not more impossible than Corneille 
 when you allow for the convention. If Mark had not been 
 so cross he would have been the first to know that in
 
 MARK ON SIR WALTER 
 
 35 
 
 imaginative writing the fact 's the thing. If he himself had 
 been a hunter for le mot juste he would not have chosen 
 ' squalid ' as a description of Colonel Mannering. 
 
 That easy line of attack, which would be equally deadly 
 against Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, was adopted the 
 other day by Mr. George Moore, who, in a published con- 
 versation with Mr. Gosse, tore into ribbons some such 
 rhetoric from the Waverley Novels. What he did not 
 choose to see, what Mark Twain probably was unable to 
 see, was that while Scott's drama is hardly ever less than 
 striking, hardly ever false to art or life, his language may 
 be as conventional as you please. You will find speech as 
 stilted and as insipid in Tom Jones, which Mr. Moore 
 professed to admire. You will find ten times worse in 
 Shakespare. If you cut out everytliing but the conversa- 
 tional style in literature, what have you left in, after 
 Chaucer? The inference, in Mr. Moore's criticism, obviously 
 was that you had Mr. Moore left in ; and I suspect that 
 Mark Twain had something of the sort at the back of his 
 mind. I am obliged to them, but 
 
 I have lately read through a number of the Waverley 
 Novels, as I do every year, never without local and tem- 
 porary annoyance — the sort of annoyance I get from the 
 Shakes])earian clowning — but never, all the sanu-, without 
 loving Walter Scott. Lockiiart says somewhere, very 
 truly, that they all smell sweet. So they do. They 
 smell of the country. And however ridiculous, j)rc- 
 postcrous, strained they may be, they deal with great things 
 in a great way. ' How few friends one has', he says him- 
 self, ' whose faults are only ridiculous.' The only f lult 
 of these books is that they are occasionally absurd. 'I'luy 
 are the conceptions, and in the robes, of a noble-minded 
 
 c 2
 
 36 MARK ON SIR WALTER 
 
 man. And he can scale the heights. Diana Vernon 
 might be a lieroine of Shakespeare's. Jeanie Deans is 
 beyond Shakespeare. Nicol Jarvie has Shakespearian 
 quaUty. .Jonathan Oldbuck is Hke a Don Quixote of 
 the East Coast. After Shakespeare, Cervantes was Scott's 
 master, for he invariably loved what he set out to ciiasten. 
 But what does it all come to ? Why, to this, that if a writer 
 is of noble mind, and can rise to the grand manner in his 
 argument, you can stomach a deal of infinitely poor manner 
 in the conduct of it. The fact is what life exacts and art 
 has to give ; the ' garment thou seest it by ' is of less 
 account. But let no one think that Scott cannot soar on 
 his quill. There is an image in The Pirate which will 
 wash out Noma's heroics. The Udaller is going down to 
 the fishing, his guests after him : 
 
 ' Without giving vent to observations which could not 
 but be disagreeable to their host, they followed his stately 
 step to the shore, as the herd of deer follows the leading 
 stag, with all manner of respectful observance.' 
 
 That is Homeric, and Scott is often Homeric. Like 
 Homer, he may be allowed to nod.
 
 Our First, and Last 
 
 MOMENTOUS as they may be, I must own the 
 theory and practice of Eugenics to be above my 
 force. Nor would I knowingly engage in debate witli 
 a dignitary. But when my little learning jumps with his 
 science, when the future of our nation hangs, according to 
 the pair of us, in the balance, I feel free to enlarge upon the 
 Lecture — Eugenics and Religion — recently uttered by the 
 Dean of St. Paul's, though I shall decidedly leave Religion 
 to him. The Dean, then, prophesying, says in effect, what 
 I took leave myself to foreshadow in a recent little book, 
 that we arc going to be poor, poor as a nation and 
 individually poor; and he goes on to say that unless the best 
 of our race choose to embrace poverty, with tiic changed 
 manner of life which that must ineviuibly compel, it must 
 needs be that only the worst of the stock will survive. For, 
 he says, whatever other classes may see fit to do, the degener- 
 ates will continue to bring forth. Thus — ' we are breeding 
 from the worst of our stocks '. If well-born people will 
 not have families, well-born people will die out. Obviously 
 he is right there. With that part of his subject, however, 
 my essay had nothing to do, thougii I shoulil not shirk 
 discussion of it, if there were anything to discuss. Granting 
 his hypothesis, the conclusion is indubital)lr. It is also 
 a necessary inference from my own conclusion, which was 
 that we are going to be poor, and that we shall be all the 
 better for it. 
 
 The Dean says that we, who in 1^14 were 'agoing
 
 38 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 
 
 concern ', are now ' a gone concern '. I agree with him. He 
 says that we must needs make default upon our obligations — 
 that is, go into bankruptcy. I agree. If wo fail to pay 
 interest on our borrowings, war-stock will be worthless, 
 and the middle class, which includes capitalists as well 
 as rentiers, will be on the rocks. Then the country will empty 
 itself, not only of the capitalists but of the artisans and 
 mechanics who live uj)on tlieir concerns. Side by side 
 with that the organized attack on ca])ital which has 
 already begun will run on amain. Ownership, whether of 
 land or of industry, will be crowded out. Between the 
 devil and the deep sea the rich will be extinguished, those 
 of them who have not earlier withdr.iwn themselves and 
 their money to some more congenial soil. And what of 
 those who stay behind ? There will be no army, no navy, 
 no manufactories, no great estates, no great farms. We 
 shall become, as I predicted and as the Dean seems to infer, 
 once more ' a small, hardy, fishing, and pastoral peoi)le . 
 One may add to that, pretty certainly, that we shall not be 
 alone in our ])light. All Europe may stand in with us. 
 
 Personally, I not only believe that, but (and there perhaps 
 I part company with tlie Dean) look forward to it. My 
 one regret is that I shall not be alive to see it. A Con- 
 federation of the size of ours will be a more unconscionable 
 time a-dying than King Charles was. I remember once 
 • writing that if a little England was good enough for Queen 
 Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh it was good enough 
 for me ; but what is perliaps more to the purpose is to 
 point out tliat, before the war, and I think also since, the 
 smallest nations of Europe have held the iiighest proportion 
 of happy and prosperous citizens : - Belgium, Holland, 
 Denmark, Switzerland. It is difficult also to see how it
 
 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 39^ 
 
 can be, if poverty makes contentment for an individual, 
 that it should not for a group of individuals, a nation. I, 
 who was once rich and now am poor, seriously declare that 
 I had not the gleam of a notion what contentment was 
 until I became as I am. Happiness, to be sure, is more 
 than contentment ; happiness implies a striving, an activity, 
 and an attainment, the reaching of a moral height. But 
 1 feel sure that if 1 am ever to be haj)i)y it will be when 
 I have travelled the full logical length of my present road, 
 see the height clear ahead, reach and touch it. To be rid 
 of top-and-bottom hamper, to be self-sufficing, to stand 
 square with otlicr men, to avail nothing by wliat I have, 
 but only and always by what I can — that is happiness, as 
 1 understand the matter. As for acliicvement, performance 
 in terms of avoirdupois, that is relative. Build a Taj 
 Mahal it you can, compose your Iliad; but don't expect 
 a thrill the more than may the carver of a cherry-stone or 
 the elegist of Rose /lyhinr. If that is the considered view 
 of a man, may it not come to be that of a nation of men ? 
 
 Those who are likeminded with me, then, will stay 
 where tiny are, among the ruins whicli the New Zealander 
 is to gajie at. If they do tliat, they will steer what is left 
 of the State into some workable form of government. I 
 don't think, with all ])roper respect for Mr. Bertiand 
 Russell and Mr, Webb, that it will be either Socialist or 
 Conmiunist. Character is for ever Destiny. W'e are 
 indiviilualists in grain, and such I believe we shall always 
 Ix". But! am digressing from a point to wliich I hope I have 
 carried the Dean of St. Paul's. Now, however, i find him 
 standing before the I'iugenics liducation Society with hiu 
 indictment of our biith-rate in his hand. The well-born,
 
 40 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 
 
 he says, will not have families for fear of being poorer ; 
 the low-born, degenerates, out-of-works, vicious, rickety, 
 and feeble-minded will go on adding to the population. The 
 result is race-suicide. I have now come to grips with him, 
 and must point out a serious, unaccountable omission from 
 his survey. 
 
 There is one class or nation of men, which he has lost 
 sight of altogether, and that is the Peasantry. So long 
 as that class can be contentedly settled here, with sons to 
 marry and daughters to be married, there is no fear of 
 degeneration. Tiiat brings me to a most curious con- 
 clusion ; for that nation of men, which may be our last, 
 was also our first. The Peasantry in this island has sur- 
 vived some two thousand years of servitude ; and though 
 it is now relatively small, it is not so small but that it 
 can replenish our country. The probability is that it 
 was always relatively small ; the certainty that it has 
 always replenished our country. The last ice-age may or 
 may not have obliterated the palaeolithic men. Whether it 
 did or not, it is a certainty that from first to last the 
 indigene has suffered two things from invading nations : 
 servitude for his males and mating for his females. Every 
 successive invasion of Britain has left its mark upon the 
 Peasantry ; but the slock was never exterminated, the 
 stock survives; and at this latest day the men of the 
 County Regiments who outstood the attempted invasion of 
 German hordes can trace their descent, through sire or dam, 
 to the people who were here before Stonehenge was raised 
 by Celtic colonists. I dare say it can be asserted of every 
 country in Europe, west of the Adriatic, that its peasantry 
 was the first of men there, and will be the last to go. They 
 are, as it were, the very stonecrop, the flowers of the field.
 
 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 41 
 
 The Dean deplores the approaching extinction of his own 
 class. It will not be extinguished if it once more mates 
 with the Peasantry. 
 
 Maxim Gorky is very much to the jjoint iiere ; or 
 rather Tolstoi, whom he reports in a beautiful little book, 
 not long since published in translation by the Hogarth 
 Press. Gorky says that he was walking one day with 
 Tolstoi in the Yussopor Park, in Moscow : 
 
 'He spoke superbly about the customs of the Moscow 
 aristocracy, A big Russian peasant woman was 
 working on the flower-bed, bent at right angles, showing 
 her ivory legs, shaking ten-pound breasts. He looked 
 at her attentively. 
 
 ' " It is those caryatids who have kept all that magni- 
 ficence and extravagance going. Not only by the labour 
 of peasant men and women, not only by the ta.xes they 
 pay, but in the literal sense by their blood. If tlie 
 aristocracy had not from time to time mated with such 
 horse-women as she, they would have died out long ago. 
 It is impossible with imjiunity to waste one's strength, 
 as the young men of my time did. But after sowing 
 their wild oats, many married serf-girls and produced 
 a good breed. In that way, too, the j)easant's strength 
 saved them. That strength is everywhere in j)lace. 
 Half the aristocracy always has to spend its strength on 
 itsL'If, and the other half to dilute itself with j)easant 
 blood, and thus diffuse the peasant blood a little. It's 
 useful."' 
 
 Useful indeed. Le mot n est pas r'uhe. My knowledge 
 of the Russian peasantry is got from reading; but that 
 leads me to think that they will prove to be the salvation 
 of Russia. So also I tliink tliat our piasant-girls may 
 s.ive Britain, and not alone in Tolstoi's meaning (wiiicli is 
 very much the Dean's), but in my meaning too. For the
 
 42 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 
 
 Peasants as a class, or a race if you please, are not only 
 strong, but in the main are good. By that T mean that 
 they observe the law of their being, which is more than can 
 be said for the main of any other class in this country. 
 The Quakers are neither a race nor a class, or they must 
 certainly be reckoned observers of that law. 
 
 I know the country folk of the South and West 
 intimately ; and they are probably of straighter descent^ 
 with less foreign addition, than any others of us. Least 
 of any have they the Danish or Norse element which, 
 whatever virtues it may have added, has taken from them 
 who have admitted it those good manners which they must 
 once have shared with the West. The Peasantry of 
 Northumberland I know ; and them of the middle West. 
 I lived in Kent as a boy, and in West Sussex only yester- 
 day. I made good friends there with village people. 
 Their faults are obvious, and most of them traceable to 
 their long experience of wretchedness and oppression. 
 Drinking, which used to be their standing vice, has died 
 down markedly of late years, since abstinence was made 
 an Eleventh Commandment by the Nonconformists. 
 The best of the Peasantry are dissenters, and who dissents 
 abstains. Drink, however, was never a vice of the women, 
 who indeed have rather failings than vices. They rail, 
 they scold, tliey gossip like the devil (but not like Colonel 
 Repington) ; they grudge, they are jealous, suspicious, 
 credulous, prone to believe the worse rather than the better ; 
 they will take your charity, as a matter of course, and 
 rather wait for it than shift to help themselves. They are 
 by no means more frivolous than the rest of their country- 
 women, and, when married, much less so tiuin any.
 
 OUR FIRST. AND LAST 43 
 
 I think their worst failing is their kindness, let us say 
 accessibility, to the niL-n who court them ; but that is a form 
 of charity which 1 cannot bring myself to condemn, even 
 while I know that notliing can be worse for the morale of 
 the man wlio receives it, and nothing more certain than that 
 she who bestows it will rue the day. ' Too much stiffness 
 in refusing ' can never be laid to peasant-girls, though, once 
 married, inlidelity is a blazing sin, excessively rare. But 
 the statistics of illegitimacy are curious reading. Statistics 
 will prove anything, and among other things those of 
 illegitimacy prove, I think, as you would expect, that where 
 the men drink most, and the housing is worst, there the 
 girls get most into trouble. Cumberland stands by itself. 
 The farmliands there ' live-in ', as it is called ; and mischief 
 is bound to follow so surely as imagination dogs the heels 
 of opportunity. In Norfolk, South Lincolnsiiire, and 
 Dorset, the houses have been scandalous, and drinking is 
 rife. Here in Wilts, where drinking is rare, incontinence 
 is not one of our great troubles. A serious evil of village 
 life throughout is tlie prevalence, at large, of feeble-minded 
 girls and boys, lirotomania is the common symptom, and 
 they are fatally feitile. 
 
 But for their virtues — let those of our village men stand 
 as they are written in the history of the l''our Years' War. 
 Nobody will ask more of a man than was given by the 
 County Regiments; yet tiiere are other qualities, not 
 periiaps called uj) by such a hateful business, wiiich 1 should 
 like to record ; and one is their moderation, ami another 
 their decency of conversation. Nothing could be more 
 untrue than the easy generalization of a young writer which 
 I saw tiie other day, which remarked as a matter of course 
 u|ion the obscene talk in village jiublic-houses. It is
 
 44 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 
 
 ridiculously untrue. I speak, of course, of grown men. 
 And so with moderation, or, if you will, temperateness of 
 outlook; and so, remarkably, with their sensibility to tlic 
 feelings of other jieople. In the West of England few 
 peasants are without that, and in Wilts, where good manners, 
 you may say, are invariable, there is added, when it is 
 needful, a repose and simplicity in address which makes 
 conversation not only easy but delightful. That again is 
 naturally not acquired until they are of settled estate. 
 They develop late, and remain gawkish until five- or six- 
 and-twenty. By then they are married, and parents, and 
 will show you, as Sir Walter Scott said of one of them, 
 ' all the good breeding which nature can teach '. They 
 treat you as their superior, no doubt ; whereby you know 
 that you are nothing of the sort. 
 
 As for the girls, who grow up to be the faithful wives, 
 punctual and devoted mothers which most of them prove, 
 it is a marvel to me how in all the circumstance of their 
 days and nights at home, with the knowledge of life which 
 they cannot but have, they should preserve — as they do — 
 their innocence of heart. When one of the commonest 
 excitements of children is to see a pig killed, how comes 
 it that they grow up to be humane, gentle, and pitiful ? 
 And how comes it that, with the decencies of life what 
 they must needs be, lodged, situated as these girls are, 
 they remain sweet-minded, clear-sighted, ignoring if not 
 ignorant of evil ? But so it is. That simplicity, it would 
 seem, which leads them sometimes to love too kindly, 
 saves them from the sour requital which is generally exacted 
 from the fond. They suck their honesty at their mothers' 
 breasts, they learn it at. their knees. It is a part of their 
 law,
 
 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 45 
 
 The nest-law that says, 
 
 Stray not far beyond the hearth, 
 
 Keep truth always. 
 
 And then the law of sup and bite : 
 
 Work, that there may be some 
 
 For you who crowd the board this night, 
 
 And the one which is to come. 
 
 That law has never been digested. There is no code. 
 Common law, it is got by rote by the village girl long 
 before she marries and must teach it in her turn. Never 
 deny Saint Use his canonization : he is the Patron of the 
 Poor. If the Dean of St. Paul's fears, as he has said, 
 that ' the tradition of culture and refined living will be 
 maintained at the heavy price of family suicide ', I recom- 
 mend him to consider the family life of a decent peasant- 
 woman in any village he cares to choose between Chichester 
 and Penzance. What culture besides obedience to the 
 laws of life, what refinement beyond wholesome vision and 
 temperate habit he may desiderate I cannot tell. But so 
 much he will find if he looks for it. 
 
 Exempli gratia: one young woman in particular I have 
 in mind, a wife and a mother of cliildien, herself of a family 
 of five girls of her same quality. Not only is she beautiful, 
 but she is also, I think, as entirely and naturally good as 
 a woman can be. I mean that she so acts that her goodness 
 seems innate and of her substance, though no doubt it is 
 due to her training by an atlmirable mother, like her 
 a peasant, daughter and wife of peasants. But so she really 
 is, that it a]ii)ears no effort to her to Ik- gooil. It is not 
 deliberate at all : it is the chastity of Artemis, not Athena's. 
 Sorrow, trial, dangers of the unsavoury sort due to herding 
 in j)Overty, have assailed her. Since her marriage she has 
 been driven to sec life, in the slums of towns, at its foulest ;
 
 46 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 
 
 but none of it has stained her radiance. She has passed 
 through it, and is as simply, merely good as if she had 
 spent her twenty-nine years in Eden. Little things often 
 reveal large things. I had an instance of her indifference 
 to the ugly under my own eyes the other day. It happened 
 that she had been ill, ami her mother had told me of it. 
 I went to see her, made immediate arrangements for tlie 
 care of her family, and took her off by train to stay here 
 with my people, peoj)le of her own kind, who knew her 
 and would be good to her. In the train I supplied her 
 with picture-i)a])ers, to amuse a long, slow journey, in one of 
 which, an expensive, shiny, vulgar thing, all actresses in 
 deshabilld and peeresses at race-meetings, there was a full- 
 length photograph of a saucy French chit dressed in literally 
 nothing but a bow of black ribbon. (No — she had shoes 
 on. I notice that however bare those ladies are they 
 always wear shoes. There must be a reason for that.) Well, 
 the thing was j)rovocative, indecent, vulgar — all that you 
 please ; but it was at least striking. The bow was so very 
 black, the lady so very white. My companion, when its 
 turn came uj), turned the pages of the thing, mildly 
 interested in this and that. 1 know what people are with 
 a picture-paper. Her thin hand — she had been very ill — 
 turned the pages, and presently opened upon the more than 
 nude, the expressive, quite impossible, she. It was as if 
 she had come to blank paper, or small print. There was 
 no pause for surprise or judgment. Her hand continued to 
 turn. There was not a flicker of the eyelids. The 
 thing wasn't there, it did not exist. Knowing what people 
 are — so well : a dull journey, a picture-paper ; that was 
 a revelation.
 
 OUR FIRST, AND LAST 47 
 
 Is she alone of her kind ? Far from that. There are 
 enough left who are ape-proof and goat-proof by instinct. 
 But they are not love-proof. They know passion, both as 
 wives and mothers. They are able for the heights. And 
 they know the law — the law which women of my own class 
 do not know : that is, the law of their being. And how 
 they keep that law, in the face of what difficulty, in what 
 hutches and hovels, in what proximity, in what squalor, 
 through what monotony of dark and fetid air, and endlong 
 work, those who know villages and villagers will know as 
 well as I. 
 
 There is much to be done for them, and no money with 
 whicli to do it ; but if a remnant is to be saved, let it be 
 the Peasantry. First, to come, last to leave, of them, 
 knowing what I am talking about, I have said thus much 
 and could say more. There are dangers behind them which 
 they have not been able to avoid, whose scars they still 
 carry. There are dangers before them which will be still 
 more difficult to deal with, because they attack the very 
 citadel, while the former were at the outworks. These 
 are the dangers of pros])erity, those were of adversity. 
 But I trust to two things : Usc-and-Wont, wliich is older 
 than Stonehenge by a great deal, and that moderation which 
 always tells them. Sleep on it. That, indeed, is already 
 working in the better sort. They know more alwut the 
 reaction of high wages than tiie young ones. And weiglit 
 will tell.
 
 zJMisgivings ahout Labour 
 
 ORGANIZED Labour makes large demands all the 
 world over, but in Great Britain, at least, made yet 
 larger ones a year or so ago. At the last Election 1 
 remember thinking it possible that the next one might 
 show a Labour majority in the House of Commons, and 
 I told myself to be ready for it. If I am not of the same 
 opinion now, it is because Labour is not of it either. I 
 have no pretensions to political science, still less to political 
 practice, and am so made that right theory seems to me to 
 involve a conduct to correspond. That, I suppose, is only 
 to say that I am an idealist pur sang. On broad jmnciples, 
 therefore, I was quite ready to see the persons who did the 
 main of the country's work obtain their due share, what- 
 ever that might prove to be, in the country's ordering. If 
 I must now add a proviso to that handsome view of things, 
 and say that I am ready nvhen they are, I must be allowed 
 to observe that I add it less because I have changed than 
 that they have changed themselves. I cannot now believe 
 that they are ready to deal with a majority at a near election ; 
 nor can I believe that they will get one. 
 
 It is the fact that well-wishers, the benevolently disposed 
 towards Labour, have been increasingly puzzled by its 
 proceedings. It has seemed to me, who am neither 
 prejudiced nor directly interested, to be going on the lines 
 of showing to the electorate how a political party should 
 not be formed. It professes Socialism, for instance, while 
 its njembers are of all persons known to my observation the
 
 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 49 
 
 most rootedly individualistic. It professes to be a Party, 
 yet none of its parts cohere. It will not choose a leader 
 for more than a session at a time ; and even so, as often as 
 not, those who have been chosen are not followed, are 
 hooted down, called names, flouted or disregarded. The 
 same thing is observable in Trade Unionism. There the 
 so-called leaders are often, in fact, the driven. I suppose 
 it was as plain to others as it was to me that in the latest 
 Railway Strike Mr. Thomas did what he did because he 
 saw that he must. And I cannot doubt that the colliers 
 gave their leaders to understand what their course was to be. 
 I know nothing more than what I read in the newspapers ; 
 and that was the impression I received. All that does 
 not indue a party with the respect which that party must 
 have which aspires to govern a State. It suggests that 
 the party is less a party than a horde, that the horde may 
 be composed of headstrong, light-hearted, irresponsible 
 units. When Dr. .lolmson was asked by a lady friend 
 why he had defined a word in his Dictionary in a certain 
 sense he replied ' Sheer ignorance, Madam '. That, the 
 hand being on the heart, would probably be the explanation 
 of some recent displays by organized Labour. Ignorance 
 may be excused ; but meantime it persists, and serious talk 
 of Labour government is wasted talk. 
 
 There are other tilings to amcnil Ix-sides ignorance, ami 
 the chief of them, I think, is this. The Labour Party, to 
 call it so, is not free. It is in a worse j)osition than that 
 of a delegate; it is taking hire, its employers are the 
 Trade Unions, who find, as I understand, all the funds of 
 campaigning and subsistence, and, ])aying the j)iper, not 
 unreasonably call the tune. If that is the true state of 
 affairs, benevolence may survive it, but idealism cannot. 
 
 I)
 
 so MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 
 
 For the Trade Unions, obviously, are business organizations 
 run in the interests of their members. Those interests 
 lamify, and travel very wide, I know ; nevertheless they 
 remain the interests of the trade unionists. If then the 
 trade unionists furnish the funds of the Labour Party, it 
 can only be in order that the Labour Party may work for 
 their interests, may represent them in Parliament as they 
 desire to be represented, and may not, without j)ermission, 
 work, still less vote, against them. It is difficult to 
 conceive of any relation between choosers and chosen more 
 in the way of a political party with aspirations towards 
 government than that relation. No conceivable political 
 theory, other than the narrowest oligarchy, will fit in with 
 it. I don't know whether the fact can be denied, but until 
 it is denied I see no chance for a Labour Party. And it 
 has to be remembered, as I found out the other day, that 
 organized Labour is by no means the whole of Labour. 
 It ha])i)ened that I was speaking in Manchester before an 
 audience in which there were many working people of both 
 sexes. I had an appeal to make in favour of what seemed 
 to me a duty of all reasonable, resj)onsibIe, conscientious 
 men and women, one which it lay eminently in the j)ower 
 of working people to undertake. I addressed myself, then, 
 to organized Labour, not as a political but as a social force, 
 and was sharply reminded by an objector that there was 
 equally present in the country unorganized Labour whose 
 duty might be equally involved in what I was urging. The 
 answer was easy — Yes, but I can't get at you, whereas at 
 the others I can get. The answer was easy, but the fact 
 remains : the Trade Unions do not represent all Labour, 
 The Labour Party, therefore, if I am right in supposing it 
 sent to Westminster and maintained there by the Trade
 
 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 51 
 
 Unions, does not represent even one section of the body 
 politic, but only a section of a section. That reduces any 
 claim it might have to the suffrages of the benevolent by at 
 least one half, and probably, if the women are to be reckoned 
 with (as they are), by a great deal more than half. 
 
 Those are some of the misgivings which non-party citizens 
 like myself are troubled with just now. We see vices 
 inherent in the Labour Party as it stands at this hour, in 
 the party as a body of electors, in the party as a bod^ of 
 delegates. But there are others, no less serious, of which 
 I must six^ak next. They are perhaps less vices than the 
 absence of virtues — of virtues, however, which are in- 
 dispensable in any vote-wielding citizen. There are, then, 
 three senses which Labour seems to me conspicuously to 
 lack, senses without which I don't see how a man is to be 
 a responsible citizen at all, nor a party a responsible factor 
 of government. Those senses are civic sense, common 
 sense, and moral sense. Without those a man, a fortiori 
 a party, is so much drift, swayed by washes of sentiment, 
 surges of herd-instinct, at the mercy of the gales of clamour, 
 rumour, ])anic, blind rage, fear, grudging, suspicion, danger- 
 ous to tratTic in the fairway, and in dangei himself. Those 
 are serious charges, but the implications of them are seriously 
 felt. I am not at all alone in my misgivings. 
 
 In case any working man should read what I am writing, 
 I should like to repeat that I believe myself to be really 
 disintercstetl, that I am neither master nor man, belong to 
 no political party, and tiiat if I have any ulterior motive it 
 is that I may help as many peo[)le as possible to be as happy 
 as possible. Lastly, to be done with myself, I ought to 
 say that I am on intimate and friendly terms with a number 
 of working men and women, village peojjle who live by 
 
 I) 2
 
 52 MISGIVINCxS ABOUT LABOUR 
 
 labour on the land. I like them, and I think they like me. 
 So far as they are working peojjle, I know what I am talk- 
 ing about ; and I don't mind saying at once that, as a class, 
 through little fault of their own, they lack as much as any 
 others the three senses which I have called the civic, the 
 common, and the moral sense. What is more, the best of 
 them know that they do, and deplore it. 
 
 The civic sense is obviously the consciousness of what 
 one owes to one's nation, as a member of it ; and its absence 
 in Labour has been conspicuous in the last six years, ever 
 since the state has been in real danger of collapse. No 
 doubt it was wanting before, has always been wanting in a 
 peojjle so light-minded as our own ; but circumstances have 
 forced it upon the attention lately. I need not, surely, say 
 that I am referring to the rej)eated and aggravated trade 
 strikes which have endangered the country during and since 
 the war. Perhaps the Police Strike was the most out- 
 rageous evidence of want of civic sense that has ever been 
 given. If a policeman does not know what he is there for, 
 who does ? Sujjpose the clergy were to strike and excom- 
 municate the faithful ? Or the doctors? Yet has a police- 
 man, has a railwayman, an ek>ctrician, a collier, no duty to 
 the state of which he is a citizen ? And is not, or may not, 
 that duty be such as to over-ride his own hardshii)s ? In a 
 time of national crisis is the state to be endangered because 
 a railwayman gets less per week than a docker, or a docker 
 less than somebody else ? If you have no civic sense you 
 will say so, and act according to wliat you conceive your 
 rights to be. Your country is on the edge of bankruptcy, 
 but you will hold up coal, or drive up freights, in order that, 
 whatever be the result, you at any rate shall receive more 
 pay. That is the line of the man witii no glimmering of
 
 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 53 
 
 civic sense. If, on the contrary, you have such a sense, it 
 may well appear to you that your present duties outweigh 
 your possible rights. Religion says so, but reason says so 
 too. The civic sense goes further. It insists upon it. 
 It may even say that in certain conjunctures you have no 
 rights at all — only duties. Until you see that, you are not 
 entitled to represent the state on the Government bench, 
 either yourself or your delegate. The thing is so elemen- 
 tary that one is shy of stating it — yet how has Labour con- 
 sidered it in the last six years ? Either not at all, or with 
 eyes frankly fixed upon revolutionary practice. Nationaliza- 
 tion of capital, of land, of industries, is held to be a 
 justification for acts which endanger the state. Revolution 
 may be a necessary resort in any state ; but it cannot possibly 
 be a resort while it remains an open question whether tlie 
 state is to survive or collapse. 
 
 In notliing has tiie lack of common sense been so 
 flagrantly displayed as in tlie great wages question ; and the 
 worst of that is that the intelligent in Labour circles know 
 all about it, yet can do nothing to stop the everlasting cry 
 for higher wages, and the inevitable rise in prices consequent 
 uj)on every advance. And while prices rise correspondent 
 with wages, almost in the same proportion cm])loynient 
 drops. That is inevitable, and the patriarclis of industry 
 know it very well ; yet the clamour goes on. The Union 
 thrives on the reputation it has for getting advances in wages. 
 It gets them, men fall out of work, and land goes out of 
 tillage. Where is the common sense ? There is none. 
 Still a greater folly, a heedlessness indeed which amounts 
 to a crime, is shown in the excessive wages paid to lads 
 and young unmarrieil nun. That is a thing not only hurt- 
 ful to the boys themselves and to the industry on which they
 
 54 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 
 
 live, but it threatens tlie moral liabit of the next generation. 
 If our young jjeople were by nature thrifty, if they were not 
 of all the European peoj)leb tlie most improvident, the least 
 inclined to work, the quickest to stray after pleasure and 
 the slowest to lelurn from it, there miglit be less to say 
 about the matter : but as their nature is, nothing could be 
 worse than to overpay them. It is working serious mischief : 
 the lads are set up above themselves, they give themselves 
 airs, they won't be told. Their interests follow their money, 
 to dances, to football, to cinemas, to motor excursions, to 
 the tailor's. They lose hold of their science, lose touch 
 with the soil, shake off the tradition of a thousand years. 
 Once broken, it cannot be resumed ; Saint Use's altar will 
 be untended, and the finest class in England, the oldest, the 
 steadiest, the best, will follow tlie others. Sheer ignorance, 
 again ; and sheer levity, too. I have said already that the 
 j)easantry, having survived ill-usage, have now a more potent 
 enemy to meet. Prosperity is his name. I greatly fear 
 that he will be too many for them, and certainly, if Labour 
 does not help labourers, he will be. For Labour to helj), 
 it must somehow find common sense. That saving grace 
 tells us, in its homely way, iliat a dog cannot live on his 
 own tail. But if prices are to rise with wages, and employ- 
 ment to fall ; if the young men are to go to seed, and raise 
 uj) marrowless offspring — wiiat else is the dog trying to do ? 
 Here again are elementary considerations ; yet if the 
 elements are being trilled with, how can one help raising 
 them ? Working jieoplc are acting like children and claim- 
 ing to be considered as men. The sum won't add up. 
 
 I have not yet seen any answer from Labour to a letter 
 written by Mr. Geoffrey Drage to 'Vhe Times the other day, 
 in which he jjointed out that twenty-eight millions of people
 
 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 55 
 
 in this country were subsidized by the remaining twelve 
 millions. The moral sense in the recipients of such bounty 
 is very inconspicuous at least. Whether you call the subsidy 
 alms or tribute, it is not to a man's credit that he lives 
 upon it. It makes him either a paujier or a blackmailer, 
 neither of them a respectable employment. But Labour 
 takes it as a matter of course, from old-age pensions provided 
 by the taxpayers, to houses which cost £1 000 to build and 
 are worth a bare iC300 directly the roof is on. A moral 
 sense would tell a man that he would be the better for con- 
 tributing to these provided necessaries ; a civic sense would 
 tell him that the state also would be the better ; common 
 sense would tell him that if lie did not contribute, the time 
 would come — must come — when he would not get them. 
 But Labour shows none of these senses, and allows hand- 
 to-mouth existence to go on. Indeed, it does more, for it 
 suggests further subsidies, and claims them as a right. 
 Mr. Clynes, the most considerable figure in the Labour 
 Party, a man of principle and courage, has been speaking 
 lately about ' the right to work ', demanding either provided 
 employment at the cost of the state, or out-of-work sub- 
 sistence at something like forty shillings a week. Has his 
 moral sense gone to sleep, that he thinks any man would be 
 the better for such doles? And by wiiat practicable check 
 docs he expect to ensure that a man who is paid forty 
 shillings a week for being out of work will cease to take it 
 when work is open to him ? With the best will in the 
 world I cannot see that the ' right to work ', which every- 
 body is born with, can be stretched to mean a right to have 
 work made for him. No such ' right' can inhere ; nor can 
 it be beneficial to tlie state to provide or to theemj>loyee to 
 serve a work not economically sound. Insurance against
 
 56 MISGIVlNGvS ABOUT LABOUR 
 
 loss of work is the only reasonable thing, just as insurance 
 for old-age pensions would have been a saving of money 
 to the state and of self-resj)ect to the insured. But Labour 
 lacks the moral sense as clearly, to my mind, as it lacks 
 the two other senses. 
 
 I have one more grief to impart, and I have done. One 
 cannot deal with the moral sense, and the lack of it just 
 now in the Labour Party, without referring to the proposals 
 for the employment of discharged soldiers, and the way in 
 which Trade L^nions have received them. The bricklayers 
 stand out against what is called dilution ; and with hardly 
 any disclaimer allow the explanation of their conduct 
 to be the fear of sharing wages with fellow-countrymen. 
 Really, it comes to that. Building at the taxpayer's expense 
 is going on all over the country. The houses are needed ; 
 they can never pay for their erection ; they will cost ;^looo 
 and be worth ^^300 apiece. Their provision, therefore, is 
 another of the subsidies to Labour which vex Mr. Drage. 
 Nevertheless the Bricklayers' Union will not admit new 
 hands into their mystery — for the reason stated. Docs 
 that show a moral sense ? Does it show a civic sense ? Or 
 any kind of sense ? What hope can there be for a political 
 party framed out of material of that sort ? But enough. 
 
 These are elementary matters — elementary, but also 
 fundamental — which puzzle every friend of working people, 
 except perhaps Mr. Sidney Webb. No, there is Mr. G. 
 D. H. Cole, a younger and a darker horse. Mr. Cole, 
 whose peculiar talent is for stating extraordinary propositions 
 as if they were ordinary ones, may or m.iy not be puzzled. 
 He gives no signs of it, and perhaps it docs not matter. 
 But Mr. Webb, I think, is not puzzled. Like an albatross, 
 he sails in an upper air of high and rare theory, scarcely
 
 MISGIVINGS ABOUT LABOUR 57 
 
 moving his great vans. He is well out of range of my 
 blunderbuss. But these things, as Homer says, ' are a 
 care ' to me, and I wish he would descend and walk this 
 distracted earth. How is Labour, I won't say to govern, 
 but even to claim to govern, wanting, in the general and the 
 particular, civic, common, and moral sense ? ' He knows 
 about it all, he knows, he knows ! ' I wish that he would 
 tell us.
 
 Clare ^ 'Der'ivntiotis 
 
 AN cxctllcnt article on Clare's Manuscripts in a 
 Review of .Inly, 1920 has been followed by a valuable 
 selection from theni.^ It is now possible to learn what 
 sort of a jjoet this peasant, son of j^easants, was. I 
 emphasize his degree in life because, to the best of my 
 knowledge, he is the only genuine peasant-poet we have. 
 He was not only the son of a farm-labourer, but brought 
 up to the calling himself, with all the hindrance to the 
 ripening of genius which such an upbringing involves, and 
 for the whole of his life at liberty, whenever he was not 
 trying to live by jjoetry he was making shift to do so by 
 farm labour. Tiiat sets him apart from such a man as 
 Robert Bloomfield, as the quality of his verse does also. 
 131oomficld was a bad poet, Clare was a good one ; but 
 Bloomfield at twelve years old was apprenticed to a shoe- 
 maker in London, and seems never to have lived in the 
 country again. It sets him apart also from Mr. Hardy, 
 who may have been of peasant origin, but scarcely served 
 the ordinary calling of his classj and received an education 
 which rapidly trained him, and fostered, not imjieded, his 
 genius. Clare's schooling was of the scantiest, his life 
 days were never prosperous, his work was exhausting, his 
 lodging as poor as you please. Yet he became the lion of 
 a season ; his first volume went into three editions in 
 
 ' Poems, chiefly from MSS., edited by Edmund Blunden and 
 Alan Porter. Cobden-Sanderson, 1920.
 
 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 59 
 
 a year ; he was patronized by peers, met and was familiar 
 with Lamb and Hazlitt, Haydon, and probably Keats. 
 He was able somehow to collect books about him, and to 
 read at large. The editors of the new Selection tell us 
 he ' reverenced ' Keats, that he admired Wordsworth, was 
 critical of Scott. He must then have read Coleridge and 
 Byron, perhaps even Shelley. I'liere are indeed signs 
 that he had read much. And from his reading, as may 
 be guessed, he derived much. 
 
 But he had tunes of his own to sing, and was rarely an 
 echo of other men. Here, from his early period, which 
 the editors put at before 1814, is the oj)ening of a ballad, 
 
 which is like nobody else : 
 
 « 
 
 A faithless bliej)herd courted me, 
 
 He stole away my liberty. 
 
 When my poor heart was strange to men, 
 
 He came and smiled and took it tlien. 
 
 When my a])ron would hang low. 
 Me he sought through trosl and snow. 
 When it puckered uj) with shame, 
 And I sought iiim, lie never came. 
 
 H I don't mistake the mailer, tlial ib the peasant vocal ot 
 his tribe. And so is the song which follows it : 
 
 Mary, leave tiiy lowly cot 
 When thy thickest jobs are done ; 
 When thy friends will miss thee not, 
 Mary, to the pastures run. 
 
 But how far Clare was indeed that rare creature, a peasant 
 articulate, can be seen best in ' The Flitting ', a poem which 
 shows his love of iiis birthplace fast like roots in the soil.
 
 6o CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 
 
 As a tree niiglit cry when torn from the bank, so tlie 
 pasant cries in his heart ; and so cried Clare in his verse : 
 
 I've left my own old home of homes, 
 Green fields and every pleasant place; 
 1 he summer like a stranger comes, 
 I pause and hardly know her face. 
 
 He was moving from a hovel to a house found for him by 
 Lord Milton ; as his editors say, ' Out of a small and 
 crowded cottage in a village street to a roon)y, romantic 
 farm-house standing in its own grounds.' Yes, but he was 
 rooted in Helpston, and must be dragged out. 
 
 I lean upon the window-sill, 
 The trees and summer happy seem ; 
 Green, sunny green they shine, but still 
 My heart goes far away to dream 
 Of hapj)iness, and thoughts arise 
 With home-bred pictures many a one. 
 Green lanes that shut out burning skies 
 And old crookt stiles to rest upon. 
 
 ' Nos patriae fines, ct dulcia linquimus arva ! ' There 
 speaks the peasant. 
 
 ' The Flitting ' is a good poem, and very near to the 
 bone; but Clare's particular excellence — that of close 
 description — docs not shine in it, and may have been 
 dulled by his tears. ' Summer Evening ' shows him at 
 his best, a longish lyric in rhymed couplets of eight, 
 interspersed with lines of seven, which may have been 
 inspired by speeches in Comus, or by L" Allegro — as 
 I think probable — but possesses what those works have 
 not, an eye on the object without losing an ear upon the 
 tune ;
 
 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 6i 
 
 The sinking sun is taking leave, 
 
 And sweetly gilds the edge of eve, 
 
 While huddling clouds of purple dye 
 
 Gloomy hang the Western sky.^ 
 
 Crows crowd croaking overhead, 
 
 Hastening to the woods to bed. 
 
 Cooing sits the lonely dove, 
 
 Calling home her absent love. 
 
 With ' Kirchup ! Kirchup ! ' 'mong the wheats 
 
 Partridge distant partridge greets. . . . 
 
 and so on : a catalogue, if you will ; but how closely 
 observed, how fresh and happy ! 
 
 Here he gets closer still : the plough-horse — 
 
 Eager blundeiing from the plough, 
 Wants no whip to drive him now ; 
 At the stable-door he stands. 
 Looking round for friendly hands 
 To loose the door its fastening ))in. 
 And let him with his corn begin. . . . 
 
 The geese : 
 
 From the rest, a blest release, 
 Gabbling home, the quarrelling geese 
 Seek their warm straw-littered slied. 
 And waddling, prate away to bed. . . . 
 
 Excellent. He runs thus through the farmyard, down to 
 the very cat at the door, the sparrows in the caves, and 
 the boys below waiting till they tuck themselves in. 
 
 As he settled into his stride he grew stronger and 
 better along his first line of minute observation and accurate 
 phrasing. Best sign of any, he threw his description into 
 
 > Unless I hugely mistake, tlic Shropshire Lad has a re- 
 miniscence of these lines.
 
 62 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 
 
 his verbs. Take his so-called sonnet, ' Signs of Winter ', 
 and mark the verbs in it : 
 
 The cat runs races with her tail. The dog 
 Leaps o'er the orchard hedge and knarls the grass. 
 The swine run round, and grunt,- and play with straw, 
 Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack. 
 Sudden upon the elm tree tops the crow, 
 Unceremonious visit jiays and croaks, 
 Then swops away. From mossy barn the owl 
 Bobs hasty out. . . . 
 
 Not one of those but does its work. ' Knarl ', as used in 
 Northamptonshire, has the meaning of querulous complaint : 
 its use here is onomatopoeic, probably from ' gnaw '. 
 'Swops away' is Nortliamptonshire dialect for 'swoops'. 
 Here are some more verbs, beautifully used : 
 
 The nuthatch rioises loud in wood and wild. 
 
 Like women turning skreeking to a child. 
 
 The schoolboy hears and brushes thro' the trees, 
 
 And runs about till drabbled to the knees. 
 
 The old hawk ivitwoius round the old crow's nest. . . 
 
 Wrens, according to Clare, ' chitter ', peewits ' flop ' in 
 flight ; the woodpecker * bounces,' and 
 
 Holloas as he buzzes by, ' Kew kew '. 
 
 But I had intended to write about his derivations, and will 
 turn to them now. 
 
 Oddly, perhaps, he did not begin with Thomson's 
 Seasons, as Bloomfield did, to his undoing, because he 
 never left it as long as he went on writing. The vague 
 idyllism, the obviousness and ])crsistent generality of 
 Thomson, are not to be found in Clare. On the other 
 hand, in his l8iO volume, you have Burns :
 
 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 63 
 
 Ay, little Larky ! what's the reason, 
 Singing thus in winter season ? 
 Nothing, surely, can be pleasing 
 
 To make thee sing ; 
 For I see nought but cold and freezing. 
 
 And feel its sting. 
 
 That is rather feeble, and though it improves as it goes on, 
 never for a moment catches the unapproachable sauciness 
 and raciness combined of its original. Clare had very little 
 humour — which that stanza demands. 
 
 He imitates Crabbe freely — in poems like ' The Gypsies ' 
 and 'The Parish: a Satire' — but lacks the antithesis of 
 Crabbe, and the sententiousness too. Crabbe must always 
 be moralizing. Clare, like a true peasant, is a fatalist to 
 the core. Let things be as they may, because they needs 
 must. That is the philosophy of the peasant — Sancho 
 Panza's ])hilosophy. One of his boldest derivations is 
 from the lovely ' Ode to Evening' of Collins. Clare's is 
 addressed to ' Autumn ' : 
 
 Sweet vision, with the wild dishevelled hair. 
 
 And raiment shadowy of eacli wind's embrace, 
 
 Fain would I win thine harp 
 
 To one accordant theme ; 
 
 Now not inaptly craved, communing thus. 
 
 Beneath the curdled arms of this stunt oak. 
 
 While pillowed in the grass. 
 
 We fondly ruminate 
 
 O'er the disordered scenes of woods and fields, 
 
 Plow^hed liinds, thln-lravflled luith hdlf-hungry sherp, 
 
 Pasturfs trachi-il detp ivith coivs, 
 
 IV here small l/irds setk for seeds. . . . 
 
 The voice is the voice of Collins, hut the eye is Clare's.
 
 64 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 
 
 I have spoken of his verbs. Certainly he did not get 
 those from Collins. Observe them here : 
 
 See ! from the rustling scythe the haunted hare 
 Scampers circuitous, with startled ears 
 Prickt up, then squat, as by 
 She brushes to the woods. 
 
 And 
 
 once more ; 
 
 And now the bickering storm, with sudden start, 
 \njlirting fits of anger carps aloud, 
 Thee urging to thine end, 
 Sore wept by troubled skies. 
 
 I suspect that distich to be fruit of Clare's * reverence ' for 
 Keats. 
 
 There are traces of Wordsworth, as in the following 
 * Impromptu ' : 
 
 ' Where art thou wandering, little child ? ' 
 I said to one I met to-day. 
 She jmshed her bonnet up and smiled, 
 ' I'm going upon the green to play. 
 Folks tell me that the May 's in flower, 
 That cowslip-peeps are fit to pull, 
 And I've got leave to spend an hour 
 To get this little basket full ! ' . . . 
 
 and there are others to be found ; but he did not a])prehend 
 anything more than the wrappings of the great poet, did 
 not touch his sudden and starry magic — those chance 
 gleams of unearthly light, unearthly insight which, in 
 Wordsworth, make us catch our breath. But there was 
 another Wordsworth who could make Dutch pictures, 
 from whom Clare could more happily borrow. I think he 
 gets near to that one in ' The Wood-cutter's Night Song ', 
 which begins :
 
 and ends : 
 
 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 65 
 
 Welcome, red and roundy sun, 
 Dropping lowly in the west ; 
 Now my hard day's work is done, 
 I'm as happy as the best, . . . 
 
 Joyful are the thoughts of home, 
 Now I'm ready for my chair, 
 So, till morrow-morning 's come, 
 Bill and mittens, lie ye there ! 
 
 The whole is a sweet and happy fireside picture. 
 
 The most curious derivation remains, rather more than 
 a derivation. The editors print (or, in this case, reprint) 
 a ballad called ' The Maid of Ocram, or Lord Gregory ', 
 which at first blush is not only remarkable as a poem, but 
 even more so as an imitation of a real folk-ballad. It 
 imitates not more the garb than the spirit of that beautiful 
 thing. This is the opening verse : 
 
 Fair was the maid of Ocram 
 And shining like the sun. 
 Ere her hoiver key ivas turned on tivo 
 IV here hride led lay for none. 
 
 If that is not a terse and graphic opening, I don't know 
 one. Then the tale begins. 
 
 f>Iow it is proper to say here that the tale is exactly the 
 subject of a ballad called ' Tiie Lass of Roch Royall ', 
 published for the first time in Child's great book ' from 
 a manuscript of the first half of the eighteenth century '. 
 It is there called ' Fair Isabell of Roch Royall ' ; but 
 there is a variant, 'The Lass of Ocram', which derived 
 itself in turn from an Irish version called 'The Lass of 
 Aughrim'. That is only half the story. Where did 
 Clare find the poem which, until it was printed in tlie 
 
 K
 
 66 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 
 
 Roxburgke Ballads, only existed in the British Museum ? 
 There can be little doubt of the answer. When he was 
 a boy, cow-tending on Heljjston Common, his present 
 editors tell us, * he made friends with a curious old lady 
 called Granny Baines, who taught him old songs and 
 ballads '. That is the answer ; but other questions arise. 
 What did Clare do with 'The Lass of Ocram' when he 
 had it ? The quatrain just quoted, at any rate, is not in 
 it. It will be found also that he has added an ending. 
 The tale shortly is that the lass was betrayed by Lord 
 Gregoi-y, and found herself with child and forsaken. She 
 went to plead witii her lover, who was asleep. His 
 mother answered for him and denied her the entry, failing 
 proof. Three ' tokens ' are demanded, which the lass 
 supplies. Finally, the mother drives her away, and at 
 her despairing cry Lord Gregory wakes. He has 
 dreamed of the lass, and questions liis mother : 
 
 Lie still, my dearest son. 
 And take thy sweet rest; 
 It is not half an hour ago 
 The maid passed this j)lace. 
 
 The ballad ends with Lord Gregory's remorse and 
 lamentation. Clare, after his masterly opening, plunges 
 into the tale : 
 
 And late at night she sought her love ; 
 The snow slept on her skin : 
 Get up, she cried, thou false young man. 
 And let thy true love in. 
 
 That is new, except for the matter of the second line, 
 which Clare has lifted and, I think, not imj)roved. The 
 original has :
 
 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 67 
 
 It rains upon my yellow locks, 
 And the dew falls on my skin. 
 
 He uses that also, but, since he was bothered by the snow 
 which he had invented, is forced to change it for : 
 
 The wind disturbs my yellow locks, 
 The snow sleeps on my skin. 
 
 In the revelation of the tokens he is not so simple as the 
 ballad, but his additions are to the good. The second 
 token : 
 
 O know you not, O know you not 
 'Twas in my father's park, 
 You led me out a mile too far. 
 And courted in the dark. 
 
 That is both original, and observed — from many a rustic 
 wooing. The third token was the betrayal, where, as he 
 cannot possibly better his model, he wisely conveys it. 
 The ending, which is Clare's own, is artless and rather 
 comic : 
 
 And then he took and burnt his will 
 
 Before his mother's face, 
 
 And tore his patents all in two, 
 
 While tears fell down apace. 
 
 Finally, ' He laid him on tlie bed. And ne'er got up 
 again.' 
 
 While we may be satisfied how much of ' The Maid of 
 Ocram ' is Clare's, we shall never know how mucii was 
 Granny liaines's. That is one of the secrets of folk-song 
 which is insoluble. The 'rain upon her yellow hair', 
 ' the dew sleejiing on lier skin ', are beautiful ailditions of 
 some unknown I'inglisli minstrel to 'The Lass of Roch 
 Royall '. A close collation of the two would be interesting, 
 
 E 2
 
 68 CLARE'S DERIVATIONS 
 
 if not fruitful. Clare's ' lay-out ' of the tragedy, in his 
 two opening octaves, is his only serious contribution. I 
 do not find that he did anything else of the kind. He 
 has plenty of narrative, but no other dramatic narrative, 
 and of liis many tales in verse none approaches tliis one 
 either for terseness or the real ballad touch of magic. 
 
 The present editors have done a real service to literature 
 as \vell as to Clare's memory by their new Selection ; and 
 it may be that they are not at the end of their discoveries. 
 By what they have put forward so far they have shown 
 Clare to be a considerable poet, more considerable than we 
 could j)Ossibly have supposed by the work published in his 
 lifetime. It is very much to me that the peasantry should 
 have produced a poet of such power and charm, who 
 interprets so faithfully the life of a race so old upon our 
 earth, and so close to it.
 
 "The Collied Night 
 
 THAT is a good term for a country niglit, lifted of 
 course from Shakespeare, who has a good term for 
 every thing. ' Brief as the lightning in the collied night ' 
 Lysander says in A M'ulstwwier Night's Dream. Colley 
 means no more than soot. After his habit he made 
 a verb of it : the collied night is therefore the sooted 
 night ; but to me it gives more than that. It gives the 
 envelopment of the world, as with some muffling, histling 
 stuff, by the vast and permeating web of soft dark. A 
 dark which can be felt, and a silence which can be heard, 
 softer than, but as permanent as, the sea-sound in a shell. 
 I lie much awake, unfortunately, and can hear the night-stuff 
 whispering thickly all round me. It mutes all the noises 
 of men and their jjarasites and toys — their carts and 
 motor-cycles and lorries, their dogs and padding nags ; 
 but not their cats, nor their cockerels. These remain, for 
 all our tyranny, wild creatures ; and wild creatures alone, 
 I find, have the power to rend the collied night. 
 
 There arc, to wit, three sorts of owls which break 
 through the stillness like menaces. One shudders as he 
 quests ; one shrills a hoarse whistle ; another sort yaps like 
 a pack of young beagles. The first only says ''I'u-whit 
 tu-whoo': he is the white owl. 'I'he second makes me 
 think of witches homing from a sabbath, spurring the air 
 and racing their broomsticks ; the third, I don't know why, 
 always reminds mc of something in the Injcrnn. 'I'his 
 kind barks by day also with a ventrilocjtiial power wliicli leads
 
 70 THE COLLIED NIGHT 
 
 you to think, them where they are not. I know them well. 
 They are very small owls, and live on beetles in the 
 summer. Even more startling in the way their ])ipe can stab 
 the night, arc the water birds^dab-chicks or moorhens, I 
 don't know wliich. Unless they are picking about on dry 
 land they are at least two hundred yards from where I lie ; 
 yet they sound directly under the window. Theirs is a 
 call which, once you have heard it, you wait for. 
 
 And so I do; and as I wait I speculate upon the 
 beasts busy out there in the secret garden. One never 
 hears a sound from them : mystery is their affair. Yet 
 one knows that they are there — field-mice eating crocuses, 
 confound them, and owls, luckily for me, eating field-mice ; 
 otters rippling like snakes among the reeds, questing from 
 pond to river and river to jjond ; hedgehogs bustling in the 
 shrubberies, moles for once in the open ; cats at their 
 cruel love-making ; a fox trotting over the meadow by 
 a short cut instead of stealing up a dry ditch ; a little way 
 off badgers nosing in a rooty bank. It is exciting to 
 think of all these creatures so noiseless and so busy — but 
 they don't last for ever, and the hours creep on. Some 
 people count imaginary sheep bundling through a gap, but 
 that 's quite as much of a boie as counting real ones would 
 be, and I nevei; applied myself to it. Limericks are 
 better. I once began a series upon all the stations on the 
 South Western Railway: 
 
 There was an old person of Exeter 
 
 Who hated his cook and threw bricks at her . . . 
 
 but that is as far as I have gone. Or you can make 
 speeches, address the assembled League of Nations at 
 Geneva, or a Congress of Zionists at Jaffa, and have
 
 THE COLLIED NIGHT 71 
 
 a row with Mr. Zangwill. I have tried those things, and 
 become so burningly eloquent as to make my head feel 
 incandescent. I was afraid I had set fire to tiie pillow — 
 and anyhow it didn't send me to sleep. Then I set myself 
 a problem, to this effect. A few days ago the Mayor of 
 Salisbury, to whom the War Memorial of his city was 
 a care, plotted out a measured hundred yards of a street 
 called Blue Boar Row with four parallels of white from 
 end to end. He next invited the citizens to place half- 
 crowns on the lines, touching each other, in the fond 
 belief that at the end of market day he would find four 
 parallels of touching half-crowns along Blue Boar Row. 
 Four times a hundred is four hundred — four hundred yards 
 of half-crowns — you follow ? I hope he did find them, 
 but as for the calculation, I shortly decided that it was far 
 better to lie awake and think of nothing but the weariness 
 of it than give my brain such a task. A peculiarly painful 
 affection, which I can only call swelled head, ensues on 
 exercises like tliat ; and one should beware even of entrance 
 upon them, because it is far easier to start thinking of them 
 than to leave off. You can rub out written arithmetic, not 
 mental. 
 
 At this j)oint, if you are lucky, you doze, and when you 
 awake there arc signs that human beings are abroad again. 
 Never do you so love your kind. You hear the carter 
 ciiumjjing down the street and know it is past four. Or 
 the milk lorry plowing through the wet, and the fritter of 
 the water from between its double wheels. That is six. 
 One hour to daylight, one hour and a half to tea and the post. 
 I have a jx-t position for legs and hands for that hour and 
 a half. I never use it, whatever the teni]italion, for any 
 other. Tile legs must be bent at a riglu angle, the hands
 
 72 THE COLLIED NIGHT 
 
 folded piayerwisc between the knees. Then, if it be not 
 a day chosen by the man of God for church at seven, you 
 may — It hardly ever fails. 
 
 Some read in bed, I know, but I never do. I suppose 
 I have never tried a dull enough book. But a dull book 
 makes me cross ; and if you are cross you cannot sleep. 
 Nor can you if you arc happy in your book. So what on 
 earth are you to do ? I have had Mr. Lucas's works 
 recommended to my bedside, but have never received them 
 there. No, I think it is better to shut one's eyes and slog 
 through with it. A last tip is to ask oneself why the 
 devil the eyes must be sliut when you are not asleep, and 
 to try to keep them open. That has come off sometimes. 
 There's a snag in it though. You find them shutting in 
 spite of yourself — but shutting upwards like a chicken's, 
 rolling up to meet the descending eyelid, instead of rolling 
 down before its advance. Awful. If that happens, there 's 
 nothing for it but a lighted candle and a cigarette.
 
 'Doors 
 
 • T T 7" HEN I had been in London a year or two,' a 
 V V friend of mine wrote the other day, a. propos de 
 bottes, 'and the place, with its hordes, was become less 
 strange and less formidable to me, I began to discover it 
 for myself. Gradually the towering cliffs resolved them- 
 selves into houses, and the houses into shrouded holds, 
 each with a character and each hiding a mystery. Childe 
 Roland to the Dark Tower came ! I knew one from the 
 other by sight. I read through the shut doors. I saw 
 through the blank windows. Not a house upon my daily 
 road but held a drama or promised a tragedy . . .' and 
 so on. 
 
 I quote him because he gives me the clue to an essential 
 distinction between town and country, town life and 
 country life, which is that in the one all the doors are shut, 
 in the other all are open. 
 
 That little fact in itself explains much ; it is also true 
 that something is needed to account for it. It drapes, at 
 once, the town in mystery ; it makes of it // biau discontius; 
 it provides a large measure of the attraction which it has 
 always had for our village young men and women. They 
 go up, ga))e about, drift from street to street among all 
 those blank, blind, dumb house-fronts — shut doors, with 
 grim knockers ; sometimes a whole cro|) of little bells 
 running up the doorj)Ost like brass toadstools ; and what 
 names to them, too — .lablonsky, Issii)ofr, Mme Cornclis,
 
 74 DOORS 
 
 Mulligan — names like those ! No wonder if we are 
 absorbed in such things. 
 
 All those people, with all the dependents of them, 
 revolving ])lanets, satellites, suns, moons of theirs — God 
 knows what may be going on ! Love, hate, murder, 
 despair, remorse — oli, God knows what they may be doing 
 to each oth(?r behind those immovable barriers ! 
 
 Why, I remember a play of M. Maeterlinck's whose 
 cardinal terror resided in notiiing but a shut door. To be 
 sure, a castle door, ironbound, massy and tall ; but that 
 matters nothing. What did matter was that it was shut. 
 On one side of it a child in the hands of some fatal 
 person of the poet's then fervid imagining ; on the other 
 an agonized mother beat and raved. It was horrible, it 
 wasn't cricket. I couldn't stand it, I remember, and 
 withdrew from the theatre. So I never knew whether she 
 was let in. Almost certainly not. Such a ruthless poet 
 was M. Maeterlinck in those early days of his, and such 
 was I. Such, too, were shut doors — and such they are 
 still to young men of sensibility u]) from the country. 
 
 And the case is not much bettered when by experience 
 they come to know not only what in general may be enact- 
 ing behind the doors, but what in particular. When the 
 curiosity which, remember, was Fatima's in the nursery- 
 tale, becomes an itch, a burning, a fever, and the oppor- 
 tunity comes at last, shaking, thrilling, they enter, and 
 up the stair on ti])toe. 
 
 Then it may be that the attraction of the door becomes 
 one of horror, a fascination, a witchery,, and sometimes a 
 torment. Remember the cry of one lacerated wretch : 
 
 lanua vel domina pcnitus crudelior ipsa. 
 Quid mihi iam duris clausa taces foribus ?
 
 DOORS 75 
 
 and the rest ; a cry so wrung and anguishful that you 
 must feel its truth even if you don't happen to know that 
 every word of it was true. 
 
 That is the aching of too much acquaintance. The 
 itch of too httle was the beginning of the spell. Some 
 enchanting vision at an upper window, it may have been some 
 whisking skirt and silken ankle slipping in with a latchkey — 
 and the door, the door that holds her fast ! Thus is 
 witchcraft of the town-door woven about ingenuous youth. 
 Propertius was not the fust or the last of them to be 
 caught and bound, then to be left confronted without, 
 tact lis cardin'tbus. 
 
 Village doorways have their enchantments, too ; cottage 
 doors open to the sun, with the dog asleep on the flagged 
 path and the cat tucked up on the door-mat. You may 
 go along an entire street of such hospitable, confiding 
 houses, and see j)ractically all that they have to show you. A 
 white-faced clock against the wall, two china zebras on the 
 mantelpiece, or a shining shepherdess in blue and lustre ; a 
 checked tablecloth with a loaf of bread on it ; an old 
 dame in a white caj) at her fingering, a barebreeched boy 
 sprawling at her feet ; wallflowers under the house-wall, a 
 lilac bush aflower in the garden ; meek magic, but it warms 
 the heart. 
 
 You think that you arc in a comic-opera village ; and if 
 you act accordingly, as some do, that means that the fairy 
 spell is working in you, and that you will be j)inched. 
 Perhaps Sir .lolin I-'aistafl' thought Windsor such a pastoral 
 place — a place wlicre pretty women's chins were to l)e 
 chucked at sight, and kisses had for the asking. The 
 town-dwillcr, free of the science of life as lie knows it 
 where he comes from, may be no less ingenuous than the
 
 76 DOORS 
 
 countryman up tlicre. We are hospitable in the country, 
 we are friendly, we plume ourselves upon our good manners, 
 but we have our conventions like other people — only they 
 are different. 
 
 One of them is tiiat we don't like to be seen at meals. 
 I have sometimes put that down to the survival of a genuine 
 wild instinct — it survives in dogs and cats — to a remote 
 antiquity of our race, when to be seen with a meal was to 
 be seen with the most valuable thing in the world. True, 
 that is going back to the First Stone Age, and allowing 
 a liberal span to tradition — nevertheless, it is as I say. We 
 don't like it. We sit distrait and uncomfortable. Conversa- 
 tion languishes ; we don't go on eating. We see fat 
 coagulating on the plate's edge; we leave the pudding 
 bubbling to rags in the pot. It is the height of bad manners 
 with us to intrude at such times. 
 
 Another thing : if you are so good as to call upon us, 
 we vastly prefer to see you in the afternoon. That, 
 we understand, is also the town custom ; yet in the 
 country how often do town people ignore it. If the 
 fish aren't rising, or there's too much dew for lawn 
 tennis, ' Let 's go and call on dear old Mrs. So-and-so ', or 
 ' that pretty girl who married the baker the other day '. 
 And they do it. 
 
 But we are busy in the morning, have a hundred things 
 to do. We are in aprons, our liair is not done ; we may 
 be washing, or hanging out clothes, scrubbing a floor, 
 nursing a baby. We are all alone ; the parlour chairs 
 want dusting. When the oj)en door tempts you, you 
 ought to remember these little things. 
 
 On Sundays, however, we shut our doors. That is 
 oui- one day of domestic privacy. The Englishman's
 
 DOORS 77 
 
 house is then his castle, with the portcullis down. There 
 are reasons. The good man is at home, in his shirt-sleeves, 
 with the paper ; the good wife is busy with dinner : the 
 daughter of the house has her hair in pins or curl-papers. 
 If it is she that you desire, she won't be presentable till 
 noon, and then she may descend, and perhaps stand at the 
 garden gate, as fresh as from a bandbox, to a weekday 
 acquaintance an unknown quantity. 
 
 I saw one such last Sunday morning, a maid of fifteen 
 or so, that dangerous age. Her liair stood out in an 
 aureole of pale crinkled gold : her muslin, or whatever it 
 was, was starched and ironed like Columbine's skirt in the 
 harlequinade. She was point-device from the black bow 
 on her head to the tips of her dainty shoes. A butterfly 
 vision — where do the things come from ? How do they 
 contrive it, find time and thought for it ? I don't know. 
 What I do know is that I much prefer them in the 
 pigtails and pinafores of Monday. But on Sundays they 
 are as unapproachable as their houses are, where sacred 
 rites are performed behind closed doors.
 
 zJManege 
 
 AM AN I know, something of a poet, with a pronounced 
 inclination towards living his poetry as well as 
 imagining it, married out of his caste, a village girl. When 
 I went to see him the other day he told me something 
 about his wife which I have taken the pains to confirm by 
 observation. He did the thing thoroughly, you must under- 
 stand, when, at the call of instinct or love, he decided to 
 step down — or up, as he claimed it; for he lived unaffectedly 
 in a cottage and did not concern himself to earn more 
 than was subsistence on or about the cottage scale for the 
 two of them, and what else their union might involve. He 
 had something, and he made something. I suppose, at the 
 outside, ^^300 a year came in. That don't go very far in 
 these days. He did his full share of household duty, ran 
 the garden, and an allotment, and would never suffer her 
 to undergo any of the heavy daily jobs. It was he who 
 wound up the bucket from tlie draw-well, carried the coals, 
 chopped the fire-wood, cleaned the boots. He was always 
 down before lier, to light the kitchen fire and make her a 
 cup of tea. In the intervals of these tasks he observed 
 nature, birds chiefly, and scribbled when the fancy invited. 
 But really nothing of that matters, except to point out the 
 brisk, conscientious, theoretical fellow he was, and is. 
 
 He said, ' My wife is a beautiful woman, as you will 
 allow,' — I did, and I do — ' and she is at the same time 
 the most innately good woman I have ever known ; but 
 the most beautiful feature she has, at once the most
 
 MANEGE 79 
 
 expressive of herself and beneficent to mankind, is her 
 hands. Have you ever noticed them ? Do, when you 
 can, without her finding you out. She knows that I 
 admire them, and it makes her shy. But watch her handle 
 a loaf of bread when she is cutting it ; observe how the 
 fingers travel and adjust themselves, each doing a definite 
 piece of work. Watch her sewing, and don't omit to 
 observe the play of the hand which is hidden In the work. 
 Watch her, above all, knitting. The hand-play then is 
 like the running of some exquisitely-timed engine. I can 
 sit and look at it for hours together, and gain thereby 
 higher hopes of our genus tlian I have ever been able to 
 afford myself until now. Some day there may be reared 
 in this place boys and girls with hands like their mother's 
 to carry on the tradition.' 
 
 I asked him, ' Do you allow so little for your share in 
 the transaction ? Does brain go for nothing ? ' 
 
 He faced it. ' You are confusing substance and accident ; 
 mental capacity with education. I am more educated than 
 she is, but my mental capacity is not necessarily higher. 
 Or, in any case, it is her hands against my head. I prefer 
 to look at final causes when I can ; and here the heart, or 
 the will, if you please, is the important thing. What are 
 we actually here for ? The scientists, the clergy, the 
 engineers and the grocers all say, Progress. Progress to 
 what end ? Each of them names a different end.' 
 
 'The scientists, at least,' I said, 'and very possibly the 
 clergymen also, would name Knowledge as the end.' 
 
 ' No doul)t they would. The engineer would put it at 
 case of production, and the grocer at wealth. My answer 
 to all of them would Ik- this : Wl- nr-" here in a world 
 which we did not make and cannot fundamentally alter.
 
 8o MANEGE 
 
 The utmost we can do is to make it more tolerable for 
 ourselves. I don't moan by that oneself: 1 mean for 
 our genus. Now the virtues which will do that are moral 
 rather than intellectual. If you wish for a tolerable world 
 it must be one in which you can be happy. To be happy, 
 ■you must be good. Happiness, in short, is an affair for the 
 heart and hands rather than for the mind. Quite certainly 
 you nourish the mind at tlie expense of the other two ; 
 and if you do that, you make the world in the long run a 
 less tolerable place. I don't say that pure science — 
 mathematics, metaphysics and such like — won't give 
 exquisite happiness to the qualified practitioner. But that 
 is incommunicable happiness — not like religion, or applied 
 art, or domestic labour, or agriculture, all bf which give 
 communicable happiness.' 
 
 ' Medicine ? ' I asked him. ' Surgery ? ' 
 ' Both altruistic,' he replied, ' and one at least an affair 
 of the hands.' I could have pressed him, but I let him 
 have his way. 
 
 ' My wife's virtues ', he resumed, ' are beneficial to man- 
 kind. She is happy in their exercise ; she makes happiness. 
 She is good, because her heart is good ; she is efficient 
 because her hands are perfectly trained. Her excellencies 
 are the result of traditional use which is aeons old ; custom 
 handed down v'l'vd voce, vivti manu, from the inconceivably 
 bygone age when this land was peopled by her ancestors. 
 She is of Iberian lineage ; you can see it in every line and 
 every hue. She herself, then, you may say, is an instance 
 of high specialization, infinite slow adjustment to a time 
 and place which have imperceptibly altered. You can't go 
 wrong when, as seems to have happened with her family, 
 no violence from outside has broken in, to shake the
 
 MANEGE 8i 
 
 tradition. Her hands and her heart are in pari materia. 
 One symbolizes the other. Both are the result of con- 
 tinuous exact adjustment to what has confronted them. It 
 would have been criminal folly if I, a parvenu, either spoilt 
 bourgeois, or strayed descendant of peasants who had lost 
 the tradition, had done anything to dislocate a sequence 
 which, in her case, has been so wonderfully preserved.' 
 
 His vehemence interested me. I said, ' You are indeed 
 a lover.' 
 
 ' Watch her hands,' he said. So I did. 
 
 She came in by-and-by from her village affairs, took off 
 her hat, put on her aj)ron, and busied herself with tea- 
 making. I watched her cut bread-and-butter, as Werthcr 
 watched Charlotte, and admired. It was deftly and 
 quickly done; and true enough the fingers travelled about 
 over the uneven surface of the loaf as stone-crop embraces 
 a boulder. She was tall for a woman, and had large, 
 capable hands, tanned by the sun to a warm brown on tlie 
 back, well-shaped certainly. The fingers were long and 
 flexible, narrow, but not pointed at the tips, which were as 
 sensitive, or seemed so, as the horns of a snail. They 
 worked and felt about for holding-ground just in a snail's 
 way. I saw that, as her husband had said, each had its 
 appointed ofTice ; that, as in a boat's crew, each pulled its 
 full weight ; and I wondered if that was not the case with 
 every child of Eve. Study afterwards convinced me that 
 indeed it was not. My own hands, to go no further 
 afield, are grotesquely clumsy. There seems to be no 
 Lictile virtue in my fingers at all. If I try to pick up 
 a postage-stani]) I niust claw it with my nails; if I want 
 to take an envelo|)c from ilu- rack 1 must always bring out 
 
 K
 
 82 MANAGE 
 
 two. As for cutting bread-and-butter — what a botchery, 
 what a butchery ! I am no doubt an extreme case : you 
 must compare like witli like. I am now observing the 
 ladies of my acquaintance, and their maids. I must say 
 that the maids suj)port my enamoured friend's argument. 
 
 With her knitting, which occupied her after tea, the 
 same activity of all the fingers was very noteworthy. The 
 ring-finger was j)articularly adept, and with most of us it 
 is the drone of the bunch. While she knitted she con- 
 versed with me, sitting at the open door of the cottage. 
 Like all beautiful women, she was sparing of speech, but 
 by no means tongue-tied. Her talk, like her movements, 
 was natural, unconscious, in harmony with herself. Though 
 she had no general ideas, she was not unwilling to receive 
 them, and was quick to give them particular application to 
 things and persons of her acquaintance. And presently 
 one thing struck me : her favourite word. It was 
 ' manage *. When I had offered to carry out the tea-things 
 to the scullery for her, she thanked me with a smile, and 
 said that she 'could manage. When it was a question of 
 a boy under a cloud, and the Vicar who was going to 
 discharge him from the choir, she looked shrewdly out 
 and thought that she could manage the Vicar. She dropped 
 a stitch in her knitting — and managed. She managed 
 any thing, and most bodies, so easily. No word was more 
 often on her lips. Then etymology threw a beam of light. 
 Manage — manege — handling ! I was hugely pleased with 
 my discovery. My friend took it as a matter of course. 
 But it was getting late, and the time had come for me 
 to go. 
 
 I had to walk round by the bridge in order to reach the 
 starting-place of the motor omnibus. In time, therefore,
 
 MANEGE 83 
 
 I was again in full view of my friend's cottage, removed 
 from me now by the width of the river and valley-bottom. 
 It stood up bravely on its high bank, radiant in the setting 
 sun. The stone was warm grey, the thatch pale gold. 
 The door waS'Still open, and as I locked across the water- 
 meadows towards it my recent hostess came out, a pannikin 
 of chicken-food propped against her hip, and stood for a 
 moment to look, shading her eyes from the sun. Presently 
 she saw me, and waved her hand — that strong, large, good 
 hand, so careful over many things, and so capable. It is 
 very possible my friend was right ; that tlie energy of her 
 handiwoik was a radiant energy. 
 
 K 2
 
 Prolegomena to the ballads 
 
 AS we have them now in Professor Child's vast repertory, 
 Jr\ the English and Scots Ballads are a quarry for more 
 than the pure gold of poetry. The antiquary will pick his 
 quartz from it, useful for building his curious house ; the 
 critic will be there, peeping and botanizing : the patriot will 
 picnic ; and the historian who passes by on the other side 
 will hurt his cause. I ought to own, and don't at all mind 
 owning, that my thoughts upon these often beautiful and 
 always interesting things have been much turned of late to 
 what underlies the poesy in them ; that is, to the men who 
 made them and the people for whom they were made. It 
 has seemed to me possible that one's feeling for literature, 
 and the instinct one has for the implications of self-utterance, 
 ought to be as good a guide about the ways of an old poem 
 as they may certainly be in those of a new one. Without 
 any pretensions to archaeological expertise in the matter, 
 I have a notion that literary tact and perhaps a certain 
 knowledge added of the habits of men may help us to find 
 out from the ballads what archaeology so far has not been 
 able to give us. It ought not, in fact, to be impossible to 
 be certified whether a ballad was written by a gentleman or 
 a peasant, whether it was written for gentlefolk or for the 
 peasants. That is my present line of attack. 
 
 The answer, if there is a chance of one, at any rate 
 should be of high interest and apt to enrich our opinions
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 85 
 
 of the peasantry, which are so exceedingly vague because 
 so exceedingly ill-formed. If we meet with a ballad plainly 
 written by a court-poet for a cultivated auditory, we may 
 leave it at that. We know as much as we need to know 
 about cultivated poets. One Mr. Monro, indeed, knows 
 too much for his own comfort, or theirs. And we know, 
 I think, more than we need to know about a cultivated 
 auditory. For the purpose of the real thing, of the great 
 thing, in art, such an auditory is of little avail. It will 
 seldom get the real or the great thing, partly because it does 
 not want it, partly because the poet does. The only 
 theatre — one example out of a hundred — which consistently 
 plays Shakespeare as Shakespeare wrote it is the 'Old Vic. , 
 which is supported by an uncultivated audience. But if 
 you can happen upon a ballad plainly composed by a peasant, 
 or for a jx^asant audience, not only are you made privy to 
 the kind of audience which will receive and support the 
 real thing, you are also taken immediately into the heart of 
 a deeply interesting and most unknown people — deeply 
 interesting because the peasantry in England by birth and 
 birthright is aboriginal ; most unknown owing to its con- 
 sistent ill-treatment or neglect by the ruling races here 
 throughout history. 
 
 God only knows the ancestry of any one of us, for 
 directly a young man leaves his village (and our forefathers 
 all left villages in their time) and mates in a city he is lost 
 to the country, and takes into his blood and brain the tainted 
 compost which he finds there ; but, leaving to Caesar the 
 things which are Caesar's, it is possible for imperfect man 
 at least to Ik sure that in the peasant, remote from a metro- 
 j)oIis, he has the fairly straigiit descendant of the Britisii 
 indigene. His rude forefathers, wc know, were made serfs
 
 86 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 by Kelt, Roman, Englishman, Norseman, Norman in turn. 
 Be sure that they mated with their kind. His forcmothers 
 in turn were concubines of tlie invaders, and the children 
 born to their possessors may have risen, or may have held 
 to their mother's degree. In either case they would 
 inevitably have mixed the blood : but the tradition is not 
 mixed. Those people, on the mother's side, have been 
 serfs for a thousand years, and are not much more than that 
 now. The tiadition — cradle-lore, lap-lore, mother's-milk- 
 instinct — has persisted ; and with very rare exceptions those 
 who are peasants to-day arc come of peasant ancestry. 
 There may have been — indeed there have been — peasants 
 who have risen to be yeomen, thence grown to be squires ; 
 but the cases are rare where men have sunk to be peasants. 
 Mr. Hardy pleaded Norman descent for Tess Uurbeyfield, 
 Mr. Halsham for Kitty Fairhall. They may be right: 
 but the D'Urbervilles sowed wild oats like other noble 
 families ; and some fell by the wayside. 
 
 It is necessary thus to place the peasant in order to see 
 that his tradition, whether interesting or not, must needs 
 be of high antiquity. Whatever it is or is not, it will be 
 authentic. For a thousand years, practically, he learned 
 all that he knew from his mother, his playmates and work- 
 xnates. He had no organized schooling until fifty years 
 ago ; he rarely moved from his ring-fence of five miles or 
 so. He worked all day long with no holiday but Sunday. 
 He had the recreations of an animal : rest, eating, drinking, 
 love, fighting or watching a fight. What higher pleasures 
 had he ? Did he use his mind, such as it was ? What 
 moved him to laughter or tears ? What thrilled his blood ? 
 Of what were his dreams ? How did he utter his emotions ? 
 What did he love, what did he fear, what hope for, what
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 87 
 
 believe ? Howsoever he expressed whatsoever of these 
 feelings, there is but one way to discover. He may have 
 carved or painted what he saw ; he may have made such 
 music as wind or string would suffer — all that 's as may be : 
 but he danced as he felt, and he sang what he loved and 
 believed. Singing and dancing moved together from the 
 beginning, close partners. If they separated, and verse 
 developed while the dance stood still, it was because the 
 tongue is more flexible tlian the feet, and thought has wider 
 wings than feeling. 
 
 The men of the Second Stone Age, the Iberians, to call 
 them so, from whom the best of our peasantry are lineally 
 descended, left no fictile art behind them (if, which is 
 doubtful, they had any to leave) and their descendants have 
 little or none to show. Their speech is clean gone. The 
 authorities can only positively help us to one known Iberian 
 root, and that is embedded in the word Britain. But, 
 relying as we may upon tradition, we have a respectable 
 body of folk-poetry, and here and there, though very 
 sparsely, the actual work of a folk-j)oet wlio can be named. 
 Such work will not, of course, be unadulterated. It will 
 be that of a ])easant who, having picked up letters, has 
 learned his versifying and jogged his invention out of other . 
 men's jjoems. The clearest folk-poet we have is John 
 Clare,' of whose verse a /lew and valuable selection has 
 recently been published. He was a genuine j)easant ; 
 son of a farm-labourer, and himself a farm-labourer when 
 he was anything else but a child of Nature. He was born 
 
 ' I leave I'.urns out for .several reasons. Firstly, lie was a 
 Scotchman ; secondly, he was not what we call a peasant — rather 
 a yeoman ; thirflly, he was a transcendent fjcnius and could do 
 wlial he pleased, and willi wliom he pleased.
 
 88 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 in 1793, three years before Burns died. So far, a clear 
 case; but only so far. He was published, lionized, 
 patronized ; he went to London and knew Charles Lamb ; 
 he had letters, he had books. Thereby, and to that extent, 
 he was sophisticated. But it is easy to pick out of his 
 work, very much of it of great excellence, what is innate 
 and what derived. I am not aware of any other undoubted 
 example of a peasant who was also a good poet, though 
 there is doggerel — and veiy good doggerel too — in many 
 a country churchyard which may belong to the peasants. 
 
 So we come back to the Ballads, and the dealings with 
 them of such literary tact as I may possess. 
 
 To explain just what I want to do there is nothing like 
 an example, and I have one ready in ' Glasgerion ', which 
 Child took from Percy's Reliques, and to which he a])pended 
 ' Glenkindie ', a Scots version from Jameson's Popular 
 Ballads. The story of ' Glasgerion ', which, if the name 
 be a corruption of Glas Keraint (the Blue Bard), may be 
 of Welsh origin, is this. Glasgerion was both king's son 
 and harper, and the king's daughter, having fallen in love, 
 made a tryst with him in her bower. Glasgerion told 
 ' Jacke his boy ' to wake him before cock-crow, and was 
 so ill-advised as to tell him the reason. Jack played him 
 false, sinning as D'Artagnan sinned with Miladi. Now 
 take this : 
 
 And when he came to that lady's chamber 
 • He thril'd upon a pinn ; 
 
 The lady was true of her promise. 
 Rose up and lett him in. 
 
 He did not take that lady gay 
 To boulster nor to bedd,
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 89 
 
 But downe upon her chanibre-floore 
 Full soon he hath her layd. 
 
 He did not kisse that lady gay 
 When he came nor when he goed ; 
 And sore mistrusted that lady gay 
 * He was of some churle's blood. 
 
 ' Glenkindie ' is not so clear, though ' Gib his man ' 
 plays the same trick as Glasgerion's Jack, and with like 
 success. But — 
 
 She kent he was nae gentle knicht 
 That she had latten in, 
 For neither when he gaed nor cam 
 Kist he her cheek or chin. 
 
 He neither kist her when he cam, 
 Nor clappit her when he gaed ; 
 And in and out at her bower window 
 The moon shone like the gleed. 
 
 The end in each is the same. The cheat is discovered, 
 the lady kills herself, and the knight kills the cheat. 
 
 Plainly, without further question, that ballad was com- 
 posed for a gentle auditory by a gentle poet. It is a case 
 of passion as against appetite. Gallantry is involved rather 
 than sentiment. The observation of that could only strike 
 an audience accustomed to look upon the manners of churls 
 de haul en bus. On these stanzas alone we may rule 
 out ' GJasgei ion ' when we arc looking for evidence of 
 aboriginal human nature. And 'Glasgcrion' may stand 
 as a test case. 
 
 On more general principles we may rule out as definitely 
 composed with an eye upon tlie dais all epical ballads which 
 have an unmistakable chivalric ring — such noble ])0cms as
 
 90 PROLEGOMRNA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 ' Ottcrburn ' and the ' Hunting of tlie Cheviot ' ; and at the 
 same time rule in all the 'Robin Hood' set, and such 
 ramping tales of outlaws as * Adam Bell ' and ' Sir Andrew 
 Barton '. These carry their evidence in their saucy faces. 
 There is a j)lain animus in them towards the poor and the 
 put-upon. I think, too, that we must admit as folk-ballad 
 all the dramatic pieces, and all which seem to have 
 originated in choric representation. Tiiat gives to the 
 peasantry such splendid things as ' Edward ' and ' 1/Ord 
 Randal ', ' The Two Magicians ', ' Binnory ', and ' The 
 Twa Sisters', 'The Cruel Brother', and ' Babylon' with 
 its crude burthen, ' Eh, wow, bonnie ! ' The ])robability 
 is that, with the peasantry, dancing came before singing, 
 singing before rhyming. Consequently, where you get 
 words obviously fitted to a dramatic game, you are getting 
 among the primitives in our civilization. There is no 
 question in these cases of internal evidence, rather of 
 evidence inherent in the form of the ballad. 
 
 There remain an infinity where one must judge by what 
 the poem says, or the way it says it. Take first ' Leesome 
 Brand', which with a plot, according to Child, common to 
 all Northern races, is only found with us in Scotland, and 
 there much corrupted. The king's daughter is got with 
 child by a stranger called Leesome Brand. When her time 
 is at hand she tells her lover that she dare not bide at home, 
 bids him to the stable to saddle two horses, has him take 
 her tocher — sixty thousand pounds, Scots, I suppose ; and 
 off they go. 
 
 When they had ridden about six mile 
 His true love then began to fayle. 
 ' O wae 's me,' said that gay ladye, 
 * I fear my back will gang in three.'
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 91 
 
 She cries for a midwife, the lover offers himself. That 
 in itself is a mark of origin ; but so is this : 
 
 ' For no, for no, tliis munna be,' 
 Wi' a sigh replied this gay ladye. 
 'When 1 endure my grief and pain, 
 My com))any you maun refrain.' 
 
 Tliat 's unmistakable. She bids him, rather, go hunting ; 
 
 but — 
 
 ' Be sure ye touch not the white hynde, 
 For she is o' the woman kind.' 
 
 He did not, as you might expect him to do, touch the 
 white hind. He saw it and returned to his lady. He 
 found her and her child both dead. Then lie went to his 
 mother's castle, where he forbade the welcome she was 
 ])rej)aring. Says he : 
 
 ' O I hac lost my golden knife ; 
 I rather had lost my ain sweet life ! 
 And I hae lost a better thing. 
 The gilded sheath that it was in ! ' 
 
 Motlier and child, gilded sheath and golden knife, may be 
 restored to him by ' three draps of Saint Paul's ain blude'. 
 And so they are. 
 
 It is pretty safe to say that wherever a ballad sets love 
 above Church law it is of po])uIar origin, for such is the 
 instinct of the i>casant to-day. But that is by no means 
 a conclusi\c argument — to that extent poets of all classes 
 sympathize with the j)easantry, and perhaj)s, in their hearts, 
 so do all women. The prudery of the woman here I think 
 an infallible sign ; and that particular motif is the ground- 
 work of ' Bonnie Annie' also, whicli is otherwise proved
 
 92 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 j)Oi)ular in origin by the superstition of the ill-starred 
 passenger on shipboard : 
 
 There's fey folk in our ship, 
 She winna sail for me. 
 
 There is magic in ' Lcesome Brand ' too, and the 
 symbolism of the sheath and knife. Observe that the 
 knife was golden and the sheath only gilt. 
 
 With a separate and distinct ballad called ' Sheath and 
 Knife ' we come to a difficult subject. This ballad has 
 a beautiful refrain : 
 
 It is talked the world all over — 
 
 The broom blooms bonnie and says it is Jair, 
 
 That the King's daughter goes with cliild to her brother : 
 
 And ivell never gang down to the broom onie mair. 
 
 It ends tragically. To be done with it shortly, I should 
 say that the motif is not uncommon. It is in the ' Bonny 
 Hind ' with its obviously popular lines : 
 
 Perhaps there may be bairns, kind sir, 
 Perhaps there may be nane ; 
 
 It is in ' Lizzie Wan ', an assured folk-ballad : 
 
 There is a child between my twa sides 
 Between my dear billy and me ; 
 
 It is in 'The King's Daughter, Lady Jean*. 
 
 The romantic treatment of incest is very rare in fme 
 literature. Ford's play is, I think, the first instance in 
 ours, and from that you must come down to Laon and 
 Cythna to find another. If ' Sheath and Knife ' and the 
 rest of them, then, are literary rather than popular ballads, 
 they must go in with Ford and Shelley. But I am sure 
 that they are not. The lines I have quoted have the
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 93 
 
 peasant ring in them ; the cadences, the locutions are all 
 of the folk. For all sorts of reasons, moreover, more was 
 known, and still is known, about the motif by the people 
 who lived as the peasantry have always had to live than by 
 the gentry. It will be observed that the matter is spoken 
 of simply, not under the breath ; and though death is always 
 the end, there's not much in that, for the greater part of 
 the love-narratives have tragic endings. Lastly, pity rather 
 than abhorrence is the note of them all. 
 
 Now I come to ' The Cruel Mother ', of which there 
 are numerous versions, all singing games with burthens. 
 The best of them is B(a). in Child, and is English. A 
 woman is delivered of a child in the green wood, and kills 
 and buries it. The C. variant, which gives the mother 
 twins, goes in this manner : 
 
 She leaned her back unto a thorn : 
 Three, three^ and three by three ; 
 And there she has her two babes born : 
 Three, three, and thirty-three. 
 
 In P. version, with a different refrain, the woman is 
 ' A duke's daughter lived in York ', who * secretly loved 
 her father's clerk' — that is, his chaplain or mass-j)riest. 
 She has twins too. B., though imperfect, is the best of 
 all: 
 
 She sat down below a thorn, 
 
 Fine Jloivers in the valley ; 
 
 And there she has her sweet babe born, 
 
 And the green leaves they groiv rarely. 
 
 When she is to kill the child she cries out to it : 
 
 Smile na sae sweet, my bonnie babe, 
 
 And ye smile so sweet, ye'll smile me dead.
 
 94 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 But: 
 
 She 's taken out her little pen-knife, 
 And twinn'd the sweet babe o' its life. 
 
 She 's howket a grave by the light o' the moon, 
 And there she's buried her sweet babe in. 
 
 And so on. Everything proves this a peasant ballad : the 
 subject — infanticide ; the gibberish refrain ; the sentimental 
 reiteration of ' sweet ' — it is in every verse. To me, tiiat 
 very beautiful outcry, ' Smile not so sweet, my bonny babe ', 
 is enough by itself to settle it. I have heard things like 
 it myself from peasant women. It is natural poetry. Unless 
 the unknown poet was a Burns or a Lady Ann Lindsay, 
 there can be no mistaking it. But Lady Ann Lindsays are 
 rare birds, not caught for singing-games every day. I con- 
 sider the B. version of 'The Cruel Mother' enough to 
 immortalize any peasant. 
 
 'Willy's Lykewake' is a folk-ballad — on two grounds. 
 It is a singing- game, to begin with ; but it has also a homely, 
 not to say coarse, touch upon its treatment which cannot be 
 mistaken. Willy is in love with a girl who will not have 
 anything to say to him. A friend tells him what to do ; 
 he must sham dead and be laid out. Then he must give 
 
 the bell-man his bell-groat, 
 To ring his dead-bell at his lover's gate. 
 
 So he does, and it answers. The girl goes to visit the 
 corpse, which shortly 
 
 took her by the waist sae sma'. 
 And threw her atween him and the wa'. 
 
 Then comes an appeal only too native :
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 95 
 
 O Willy, let me alane this nicht, 
 
 O let me alane till we're wedded licht ! 
 
 Says he : 
 
 Ye cam unto me sae meek and mild, 
 
 But I'll mak ye gae hame a wife wi' child. 
 
 That ought to allocate 'Willy's Lykewake '. 
 
 I should pass over the fine romantic ' Twa Corbies ' as 
 assuredly written for the ' gentrice ' but for the existence of 
 an English version, ' The Three Ravens ', with which to 
 compare it. The comparison is very instructive. This 
 ' Three Ravens ' was first printed in a collection callcil 
 Melismatn : Musicall Phaus'tes, fitting the Court, Ciltie and 
 Country Humours, London, 161 1, antl is as surely of peasant 
 origin as the 'Twa Corbies' surely is not. Firstly, it has 
 a rollicking chorus, neither to be desired nor approved by 
 the gentry ; secondly, instead of being romantic, it is senti- 
 mental. This is how it goes, with its burthen : 
 
 There were tlirce ravens sat on a tree, 
 
 Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe, 
 
 There were three ravens sat on a tree, 
 
 With a downe ; 
 
 There were three ravens sat on a tree, 
 
 They were as blacke as they might Ik* : 
 
 With a downe derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe. 
 
 Now consider the treatment of the dead knight. iMrstly, 
 his creatures defend him, instead of being away upon their 
 business, as in the ' Corbies ' : 
 
 His hounds they lie down at his feete, 
 So well they can their master keej)e. 
 
 His hawkes they flie so eagerly. 
 There *s no fowles dare tome nic
 
 96 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 In the ' Corbies ' the knight's lady had taken another mate. 
 Not so in the ' Ravens ', but — 
 
 Downe there comes a fallow doe, 
 
 As great with young as she might goe. 
 
 She lift up his bloudie head, 
 
 And kist his wounds that were so red. 
 
 She got him up upon her backe, 
 And carried him to earthen lake {sic). 
 
 She buried him before the prime, 
 
 She was dead herselfe ere evensong time. 
 
 God send every gentle man, 
 
 Such hawkcs, such hounds, and such a leman. 
 
 Note the genial conclusion. ' The Twa Corbies ' is a 
 finished literary product ; ' The Three Ravens ' the real 
 thing. 
 
 I cannot be sure of ' Kemp Owyne ', where a woman 
 turned into a monster is redeemed by three kisses. It is 
 not a good, and is in any case a corrupt, ballad ; but it has 
 this fine verse where Kemp Owen, or Kempion, as he should 
 be called, is wrestling with the sea-beast, to wit, the lady : 
 
 Her breath was Strang, her hair was lang, 
 And twisted was about a tree ; 
 And with a swing she came about : 
 Come to Craigys Lea and kiss ivUb me. 
 
 I suspect that great third line betrays both origin and audi- 
 ence, but there is no other internal evidence to swear by. A 
 rough and ugly fairy-tale, anyhow, by origin Icelandic, Child 
 
 says. 
 
 Now we must face ' Thomas Rymer ', which, if the folk 
 can claim it, is a great feather for their caps. Few nations,
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 97 
 
 indeed, could procure for themselves a wilder or nobler 
 poem. But 1 think there is great doubt about the best 
 version (A. in Child) : 
 
 For forty days and forty nights 
 He wade in red blude to the knee, 
 And he saw neither sun nor moon, 
 But heard the roaring of tlie sea. 
 
 Is not that ' literary ' verse ? I think so, but stand to correc- 
 tion. It is at any rate among the finest romantic narrations 
 in ballad literature; but surely rather high doctrine for a 
 peasant auditory. On the other hand, Child's Version C. 
 has a line which points to a rustic assembly. Thomas takes 
 the Queen of Faery forhcr of Heaven — as he does also in 
 A. In A. she denies it, thus : 
 
 no, O no, True Thomas, she says. 
 That name does not belong to me ; 
 
 1 am but the Queen of fair Elfland, 
 And I'm come here to visit tlice. 
 
 In C. she denies it ; but thus — 
 
 I'm no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas; 
 I never carried my head sae hie ; 
 For I am but a lady gay. 
 Come out to hunt in my follee. 
 
 A very rural ring there. And one other observation falls 
 to be made, which is that in A. the lady has no difilculty 
 in naming herself, whereas in C. she avoids doing so. To 
 this day the peasantry of the West are shy of naming the 
 Good People. In C. the fine verse, ' For forty days and 
 forty nights', is attenuated, in twootliers not nearly so gooil. 
 Child connects A. with the romance of Ogier the Dane and 
 Morgan Ic Fay, in which also the fairy was mistaken for 
 
 G
 
 98 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 the B.V.M. C, then, might either be a later adaptation of 
 A., for popular uses, or, equally well, older than either A. 
 or the romance. The peasants would have had no use for 
 Ogier the Dane. 
 
 I have referred to ' The Two Magicians ' already, a con- 
 test between magic and brawn, between an enchanted lady 
 and a very strenuous blacksmith. It is as much a singing- 
 game as * Here we go round the Mulberry Bush ', and much 
 more dramatic. A crude game, and a coarse, but full of 
 spirit. Halfway through the piece the refrain changes. It 
 is thoroughly rustic, and doubtless of high antiquity. ' 
 
 ' Young Andrew ' is a ruthless ballad charged with pity 
 and terror. A girl gives herself to him, then begs him to 
 marry her. So he will if she will steal her father's treasure 
 and follow him out on to the moors. These things she does. 
 Having brought her out there he makes her undress — gown, 
 kirtle, petticoat and smock — and sends her naked home. 
 Her father refuses her admittance, and she dies on the 
 doorstep. Compare with it ' May Collin ', wliere a girl 
 similarly used makes her ill-user turn his back upon her 
 while undressing. Both tales are of peasant birth. There 
 were no Lady Godivas among that caste, the last shame of 
 whose women was to be seen undressed. The girl's feelings 
 in ' Young Andrew ' are touchingly expressed : — 
 
 Says, O remember, young Andrew, 
 Once of a woman you were born ; 
 And for that birth that Mary bore 
 I pray you let my smock be upon. 
 
 In ' May Collin ' she was more summary, and scorned to 
 
 * Mr. Cecil Sharp has published this, with its traditional tune, 
 in County Songs.
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 99 
 
 beg such an obvious right. Characteristic of the peasant, 
 too, is the father's refusal to let his daughter come in, based 
 upon the theft of his ' gude red gold ' ; and that when he 
 finds her dead in the morning her state moves him more than 
 his own, and as much as her death : 
 
 His own deere daughter was dead, without clothes ; 
 The tears they trickled fast from his ee. 
 For all this, 'Young Andrew ' is not a very good ballad. 
 
 There follow, in Child, a number of chivalric things, of 
 courtly origin : ' Sir Patrick Spens ', ' Sir Aldingar ', ' King 
 Estmere *, and 'Sir Cauline ', one of the best of them. Then 
 comes 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annie', one of the best 
 ballads in the world. 
 
 Annie has borne seven sons to Lord Thomas, and is 
 about to bear him an eighth when he tells her that he is 
 going abroad to fetch home a braw and a brisk bride. But 
 who, he asks her, will brew his bridal ale for him, and 
 welcome the bride ? Annie, it appears ; but she must 
 ' gang like maiden fair ', if she is to satisfy Lord Thomas. 
 Her only complaint is upon that article. 
 
 But how can I gang maiden like 
 When maiden I am nane ? 
 Have I not borne seven sons to thee, 
 And am witii child again?' 
 
 The scene shifts: she is meeting Lord Thomas and the 
 bride, her seven sons about her. 
 
 You're welcome to your lia's, ladye. 
 You're welcome to your bowers; 
 You're welcome to your hame, ladye. 
 For a* that's here is yours. 
 
 • Not to be iiiatclitd, I think, except in llic ' Wife of Ublitr'a 
 Well ', for the beauty of simple and sincere statement. 
 
 G 2
 
 100 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS 
 
 The lady, in thanking her, reveals the plot: 
 
 I thank thee, Annie, I thank thee, Annie, 
 So dearly 's I thank thee ; 
 You're likcst to my sister Annie 
 That ever I did see. 
 
 That is to turn out the truth of it : meantime there is much 
 sad work for Annie. She must serve the tables ; but she 
 cries all the time. Lord Thomas is aware of that : 
 
 And he 's taken down the silk napkin 
 Hung on a silver pin, 
 And aye he wipes the tears trickling 
 A' down her cheek and chin. 
 
 But he remains the original brute : 
 
 And aye he turn'd him round about 
 And smiled among his men : 
 Says, like ye best the old ladye. 
 Or her that 's new come hame .'' 
 
 Now the bridegroom and the bride are gone to their chamber, 
 when Annie's lament is overheard : 
 
 Gin my seven sons were seven young rats 
 Running on the castle wa'. 
 And I were a grey cat mysell, 
 I soon would worry them a'. 
 
 The bride cannot abide it, and goes, dressed as she still is, 
 to see Annie. The truth comes out ; the bride does the 
 proper thing, with her 
 
 Thanks to a' the powers in heaven 
 That I gae maiden hame. 
 
 As Annie was indeed her stolen sister, it is to be hoped 
 that she went with her.
 
 PROLEGOMENA TO THE BALLADS loi 
 
 There are several versions, all Scots. B. is longer and 
 more elaborated, and has a stronger rat stanza ; but nobody 
 can doubt the folk-origin of the beautiful thing. It has all 
 the characteristics of the peasantry, naivete, mother-love, 
 sentimentalism, and realism. 
 
 I stop, gravelled for lack of space, not of matter. I am 
 not a quarter of the way through Child ; but enough has 
 been done, I hope, to initiate the Corpus Poet'tcum V'tllanum 
 which I should wish some day to be compiled. The first 
 requisite of such a book is elimination. One must rule out 
 the literary, the cooked, the faked, as well as the obviously 
 gentlemanly ballads. When you have your Corpus it will 
 be time enough for the ethnologist with his microscope.
 
 c^ spring dA'liscellany 
 
 I HAVE been excited by Mr. Eliot Howard's book 
 on Territory in Bird-Life, partly so I fear for the 
 egotistical reason that I have observed for myself much of 
 what he says. Briefly his argument is that courtship and 
 marriage in those nations depend upon the cock-bird's rent- 
 roll ; that the male neither proposes nor disposes, but the 
 female do,es both ; that bird-marriage in fact is de convenance. 
 I believe him. The cock of the walk (which is really the 
 hen) is generic, must not be confined to the farmyard bird. 
 It is a fact of simple, but prolonged, observation that the 
 same birds haunt the same tracts of garden year after year 
 — we have a stammering cuckoo, with four cucks to one coo 
 which has been here at least four years running ; and that 
 tliey are only concerned to drive ofTit members of their own 
 tribe. To do that is, at any rate, more important to them 
 than anything else. They will rather suffer a hawk. The 
 chief reason seems to be that birds arc strict endogamists, 
 and have no fear of the attentions of any other species to 
 their wives. Another may well turn upon the food-supply, 
 whicii differs from kind to kind. On that account a black- 
 bird will always chevy out a thrush. It is a matter of com- 
 missariat ; for though miscegenation has been known among 
 these two, and a hybrid ])roduced, it is very rare: not 
 practical politics. 
 
 By inference one can gather that, whereas the polygamous 
 birds observe the patriarchal tradition, the monogamous are
 
 A SPRING MISCELLANY 103 
 
 strict matriarchists. Outside those two great and venerable 
 economies come the house-sparrows whose loves are pro- 
 verbially flagrant, and the cuckoos, which are polyandrous. 
 I hate that bird, which furnishes the ugliest word in our 
 language, and the jolliest noise (at least for a week) which 
 the air can send us. The hen-cuckoo's call, not to say 
 solicitation, has been well described by a recent writer as 
 obscene. It is so, because it is cynical ; she appears at 
 once to crave, to gloat, and to say, ' I knew you would '. 
 It is on a par with her deplorable moral code. ' Manners, 
 none ; customs, disgusting .' Yet there 's no denying that 
 the cock-bird makes a jolly noise. The first of it is awaited 
 by the many with the interest which the few have for the 
 advent of swallows, which I personally have for that of the 
 swifts. We have a date — everybody has a date — for the 
 cuckoo. The day after Britford fair, we say. Sure enough, 
 it came thereabouts this year, though in the teeth of a wintry 
 gale. It is an odd thing that Gray, who kept careful records 
 of bird, flower, and leaf for his friend Thomas Warton, 
 never seems to have remarked the cuckoo at Cambridge. 
 He hears and notes the nightingale, observes his first 
 swallow, knows when the young rooks caw in the nest. 
 But when he names the cuckoo he has to fetch up a date 
 from a friend in Norfolk. 
 
 Talking of winter in April, wliich is now the rule, I am 
 confirmed by Gray in my conviction that the times are 
 changed. In 1755 the lime, he says, was in leaf at 
 Cambridge on tiie 1 6th April ; in 1 763 on the 9th. There 
 was not a sign of green upon mine this year until the first 
 week in May. And so with most things. I have taken 
 the trouble to study liis lists. In January, February, 
 March we arc neck and neck ; in sonie things fairly in
 
 I04 A SPRING MISCELLANY 
 
 advance. In April we drop behind, and never catch him 
 up again. He had his fruit three weeks earlier than we 
 ever do now. What is the meaning of that ? I feel sure — 
 and all the elderly weather-wise about here, shepherds, 
 gamekeepers, earners and the like, agree with me — that our 
 winters have become our springs, and our springs ourwinters. 
 A Christmas Number of the 'seventies, as I remember them, 
 is not in touch with life as we know it now. The Squire's 
 daughter, with her basket of buns and oranges for the 
 deserving poor, would never need that snug red cloak, that 
 muff of swansdown, those fur-edged boots. She would 
 want them now for Easter Sunday. What has happened ? 
 I speak as a fool, but suggest the eruption of Mount Pelde 
 in Martinique, throw it out like a bone for seismologists to 
 mumble. Suppose that the levels of the sea-floor had been 
 materially altered, might that not affect the Atlantic currents? 
 If it did, might not that vary the dispersal of icebergs ? I 
 have understood that our cold weather depends upon the 
 icebergs. That being so, the earlier those monsters come 
 out the better. 
 
 'May 5, 1761. . . I pass half the week at Strawberry, 
 where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full 
 bloom. I spent Sunday as if it was Apollo's birthday. 
 Gray and Mason were with me, and we listened to the 
 nightingales till one o'clock in the morning '. That was 
 Horace Walpole a hundred and sixty years ago. Et ego 
 In Arcadia. . . / Nightingales, it is true, shun this part of 
 Wilts, for they demand oak-trees as well as water, and there 
 is only one in the whole of this parish. But lilacs, poets 
 — if these delights the mind may move, then South Wilts 
 has as good a claim as South Middlesex, I hope. Nothing
 
 A SPRING MISCELLANY 105 
 
 excels the glory of the lilacs this year, except that of the 
 pear-trees. I had several in a smother of bloom, and I saw 
 them so in Lancashire at the end of February. But the 
 end of that was despondency and madness, for the icebergs 
 came out of the St. Lawrence in April ; the winds arose 
 and beat upon those pear-trees, aud barely a flower of them 
 has set in the open ground. It will not be credited what 
 havoc may be wrought by spring in February and winter in 
 April. I had a wistaria loaded with silk''purses,'all turned 
 into sows' ears, and the tree itself killed outright. One 
 night's work. I won't speak of magnolias, they are too 
 sore a subject, nor of the amelanchier, one of the loveliest of 
 trees and here a constant friend. It^has been apt, unlike 
 the Prisoner of Chillon, to grow white in a'single night — a 
 yearly miracle which I always await with suspense. This 
 year it grew brown within the same space of time. ' These 
 are my crosses, Mr. Wesley.' 
 
 The wise man is he who shuns the violent delights ot 
 blowth and concentrates on foliage. In that he will never 
 be disappointed. So here I turn from brown magnolias 
 and scorched spiroeas to tall taxodiums which are just now 
 like pillars of (ire-amber, and backed by a cumulus of silver 
 j>oplar ; to the satin-sheen of a beech hedge ; to the wine 
 colour of the young as|)ens, and the blue fire which ' illumes 
 tlie junijx.'r', as tlie j)oet says. These things must happen, 
 for the tree must breathe ; and if they provide but symphonies 
 of half tones instead of the flaunting show upon which the 
 senses may get drunk, I reasonably decide that it is better 
 to live soberly, in the mean. 
 
 ' If British oflicers shoot ])iacocks, natives will shoot 
 British officers ', was the notice put up in certain canton- 
 ments of India once upon a time. I have been forced to
 
 io6 A SPRING MISCELLANY 
 
 proclaim it to the nation of bullfinches. We had an inva- 
 sion of them this year, and I caught them in flagrante delicto. 
 Natives therefore sliot British bullfinches, and the host 
 retired, but not before they had stripped the plums, half 
 the peaches, and more flowering shrubs than I care to 
 rehearse. Mr. Massingham will be vexed ; but perhaps 
 Mr. Massingham has not got a peach-wall.
 
 ^ Tretty Witchcrafts ' 
 
 THE phrase is Henick's and, as lie uses it, ambigu- 
 ous ; for it is not certain whether the ' Witchcrafts ' 
 were of his own contriving, or contrived upon him by his 
 neiglibours, or his neighbours' wives. Inquiry into so 
 curious a matter is a thing which the editor of my edition 
 of the poet. Mr. A. W. Pollard, deprecates in his preface. 
 Fortunately, he says, we know just enough of Herrick to 
 make ' chatter about his relations with Julia' and Dianenie 
 impossible. In other words we know when he was born, 
 when dead, where buried ; we know that he wrote verses 
 sacred and profane ; but why he wrote them, how, where 
 when, to whom they were addressed, by whom inspired — 
 nothing : and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all 
 unless a poet is at least as interesting as his ])oetry. Wei' 
 I believe that he is, am indeed prejiared to maintain that he 
 is always more interesting than any amount of it. I would 
 ground myself uj)on the general axiom that, to a man, nothing 
 in the world is so momentous as mental process, and on 
 the more sjiecific inference that if the poet does attract one 
 more than his poem, it is because his jjocm is a good one — 
 or such a bad one as to be pre-eminent in that kinil. Why 
 is it that you always desire to climb a waterfall ? Either 
 that you may get as high as j)ossibIe — infirmity of noble 
 minds ; or that you may see how the thing works. So it 
 is with most of us confronted with a masterj)iecc.
 
 io8 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' 
 
 The little poem ' To his Mistresses ', in which Herrick 
 invokes the ladies as his ' pretty Witchcrafts all ', is neither 
 a masteq)iece nor a very pretty conceit. It is a whimsical 
 lament over his growing burden of years. Such, he tells 
 ces dames, is the deplorable fact. Old I am, he says, 
 
 and cannot do 
 That I was accustomed to. 
 
 He calls upon them for their ' magics, spells, and charms ', 
 reminding them that 
 
 iEson had, as poets feign. 
 
 Baths that made him young again ; 
 
 and then urges them 
 
 Find that medicine, if you can, 
 For your dry, decrepit man 
 Who would fain his strength renew. 
 Were it but to pleasure you. 
 
 Not the most gallant way of putting it, perhaps; but so 
 far, so good. There were ladies then whose bright eyes 
 and restorative arts were necessary to the poet. I hope it is 
 not indiscreet to inquire a little more particularly into them 
 and their therapeutic. 
 
 In another poem, still harping on mortality, Herrick 
 enumerates and names what, from the context, may be 
 considered a kind of harem. It is numbered thirty-nine 
 in the Hesperldes which contains well over a thousand 
 poems, and announces the loss of friends who are the 
 principal concern of those which follow it : but chronology 
 was not observed by the minstrel or his editor ; or if it 
 were, there were certainly pippins and cheese to come.
 
 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' 109 
 
 Here they are then : 
 
 I have lost, and lately, these 
 
 Many dainty mistresses ; 
 
 Stately Julia, prime of all ; 
 
 Sappho next, a principal ; 
 
 Smooth Anthea for a skin 
 
 White, and Heaven-like Chrystalline ; 
 
 Sweet Electra, and the choice 
 
 Myrrha for the lute and voice ; 
 
 Next Corinna, for her wit, 
 
 And the graceful use of it ; 
 
 With Perilla : all are gone ; 
 
 Only Herrick's left alone 
 
 For to number sorrow by 
 
 Their departures hence, and die. 
 
 To the bower here peopled, and to various annexes of 
 it — a Sylvia, a Mrs. Dorothy Kennedy (' his dearest '), a 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Wheeler, ' under the name of Amaryllis ', 
 a Dianeme in particular, a Mrs. Margaret Falconbridge, 
 and a notably ' most virtuous Mistress Pot ', perhaps 
 honorary or visiting members — Herrick's Hesper'nles of 
 eleven hundred and thirty-one poems is mainly devoted. 
 A goodly monument to the five senses indeed. He was 
 by no means alone in his day in the cultivation of those 
 organs, but few ceK-brated their satisfaction with a smoother 
 harmony or a more curious research of simile and imago. 
 He is not such a fine mtlrist as Campion, and in comj)arison 
 with that sweetest singer of our quire it must be owned 
 that he gloats overmuch. Perhaj)S the nightingale gloats : 
 it sounds like it. Herrick is fully as luscious ; and like 
 the nightingale he ends in a croak. His last, an italicized 
 hne, is 
 
 Jocund his muse was, but his life ivas chaste.
 
 no 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' 
 
 Come let crede ! Nobody is required to believe that his 
 occasionally preposterous proposals to Dianeme and others 
 should be taken seriously, or were so. And we arc all 
 meeserable sinners, of course. But even such a sinner 
 should have his proper pride. I greatly prefer Landor's 
 epitaph to Herrick's, holding it barely decent to publish 
 a close relation of your revellings and such-like, and in the 
 last line to protest that there was nothing in it. 
 
 What it precisely was which Herrick proposed to nearly 
 all of those ladies 1 can hardly record in my own tongue. 
 With one significant exception, ya/'r^ la no« is near enough. 
 In such a matter there is all the difference in the world 
 between proposal and acceptance ; and personally I don't 
 believe that he did, in every case, or necessarily in any, all 
 the pleasures prove. But to say, as I have heard it said, 
 that the ladies themselves were mental exercises, ' pretty 
 witchcrafts' of his own, is to blink the nature of man. 
 Cervantes knew better. Dulcinea existed, a blowsy wench 
 — but a peg. And so it was with the Vanessas and 
 Stellas, the Rosalinds and Cynthias of love-poetry. C}>er- 
 che% lafemme. There will always be a peg (or a Peggy). 
 She may be a square one, or a round one ; but trust the 
 poet to fit in. 
 
 Beyond saying that an examination of the Hesper'ides 
 will reveal a consistent character attached throughout to 
 each nymph named, I propose to dismiss all of them, 
 chacune a. sa chacun't'ere, but one. That one is 
 
 Stately Julia, prime of all, 
 
 who is worth a moment's notice for Herrick's sake ; for 
 as he loved her best, so he feared her most ; as he loved 
 her first, so he loved her last ; and there are clear signs,
 
 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' in 
 
 I think, that she was the only one of them who shared his 
 rustication in Devon. She is the heroine of at least forty- 
 nine poems ; and as her portraiture is tlie closest, so 
 evidently was her commerce, although, as I have said, she 
 was the only one to whom he never made proposals. 
 No. 342 contains her picture, and shows her to have been 
 after the Rubens manner of lady : 
 
 Will ye hear what I can say 
 Briefly of my Julia ? 
 Black and rolling is her eye, 
 Double-chinn'd and forehead high ; 
 Lips she has all ruby red, 
 Cheeks like cream enclareted ; 
 And a nose that is the grace 
 And proscenium of her face. 
 So that we may guess by these 
 The other parts will richly please. 
 
 They did. He expounds a great deal more of her passim, 
 not always with so much felicity as gusto. Her clothes 
 equally engage him. She had a style all her own, wore 
 the tempestuous petticoat. He celebrated, as everybody 
 knows, the liquefaction of her clothes. In No. 114 her 
 girdle engages him : 
 
 As shows tlie air when with a rainbow grac'd. 
 So smiles the riband 'bout my Julia's waist. 
 
 Unfortunately, in the very next piece, that became ' a frozen 
 zone'; for she was cross, and the poet quenched. A 
 high-coloured, full-breasted, buxom lady was Julia, beyond 
 doubt : ' strawberries half-drown'd in cream ', claret and 
 cream, cream and cheese, rubies, corals, scarlet, cherry 
 ripe, 'roses when they blow' — those are her ej)ithets. 
 Yet there was more to it than zest. He trusted her with 
 what he valued most, his fame:
 
 112 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' 
 
 Julia, if I chance to die 
 Ere I ])iint my poetry, 
 I most humbly thee desire 
 To commit it to tlic fire ; 
 Better 'twere my book were dead 
 Than to live unperfected. 
 
 In No. 1 50 she has quarrelled with him, not for the first 
 time : 
 
 When Julia chid I stood as mute the while 
 As is the fish or tonguelcss crocodile ; 
 
 and whether by accident or design his next poem to her 
 address is a proposal to separate : 
 
 Permit me, Julia, now to go away ; 
 Or by thy love decree me here to stay. 
 
 Apparently she did permit him. No. 157 begins, ' Love- 
 sick I am, and must endure '; and No. 159 : — 
 
 And cruel maid, because I see 
 You scornful of my love and me, 
 I'll trouble you no more; but go 
 My way where you shall never know 
 What is become of me . . . 
 
 But it was soon over. In No. 175 he is doting on her 
 petticoat, ' like a celestial canopy'; in No. 182 in ecstasies 
 over a bee which took honey from her lip. After that, in 
 No. 2O4, she was feverish, a serious matter. 
 
 As time, or the book, went on, she grew more deeply 
 into his intimacy. In No. 446 she was that valuable ally 
 of a clergyman, his congregation at the daily office : — 
 
 Besides us two i' th' temple here 's not one 
 To make up now a congregation — 
 
 but he trusted to her merits to bring saints in to fill the
 
 'PRETTY WITCHCRAFTS' 113 
 
 pews. Unless Herrick, when he was ousted by Cromwell's 
 Commissioners, took duty elsewhere (which is very unlikely) 
 that implies that Julia lived at Dean Prior. In No. 586 
 she seems to have been ill. He tells her that she should 
 be prayed for. No. 702 is this : 
 
 I press'd my Julia's lips, and in the kiss 
 Her soul and love were palpable . . . 
 
 It is the first time he says so much. In No. 807 he puts 
 upon her a domestic duty ; she is to make a wedding cake, 
 but obviously not her own. I think that she was married ; 
 at any rate, in No. 900, she was churched. In No. 959 
 she makes her offering ; in No. 976 there is a christening. 
 In No. 1092 there was a momentary quarrel, a question of 
 parting, repented of before the last line. In No. 1 097 he 
 makes his last request of her : 
 
 Beg for my pardon, Julia: he doth win 
 Grace with the gods who's sorry for his sin. 
 That done, my Julia, dearest Julia, come 
 And go with me to choose my burial room. 
 My fates are ended ; when thy Herrick dies 
 Clasj) thou his book, then close thou up his eyes. 
 
 That he really loved the handsome, flouncing, exuberant, 
 hot-tempered girl, one of his most j)assionate poems, ' The 
 night-piece to Julia,' is enough to prove. There is rarely 
 j)assion in Herrick's verse. That he respected her, will 
 be discovered by a comparison of his songs to her with 
 those to his otlier Witchcrafts. That he dejiended upon 
 her, I have shown by extract. It seems ccrUiin tiiat she, 
 of all of them, knew hini in the country. The rest of the 
 bevy may have been ladies of the town in any sense of the 
 term. Pegs anyhow ; but I doubt if they were much 
 more. Julia was a great deal more. 
 
 U
 
 The Brothers^ Tragedy 
 
 THIS Is a tale which I heard when I first settled in 
 Wilts. That was something like eighteen years 
 ago, and it may be two years older — not more. It is so 
 typical of the Western people, who, mind you, are as 
 nearly aboriginal as may be, that it may stand instead of 
 a lengthy chapter of exposition. There is a ballad in it 
 foi- who has the knack. Mr. Masefield, perhaps, if he 
 would not overlay it with ornament. Its outstanding 
 merit is its bare simplicity. Two brothers, who, if not 
 twins, were near in age, lived with their widowed mother 
 and sister Annie in an outlying cottage some half a mile 
 away from a village perhaps twelve miles from Sarum, 
 standing in a narrow valley, folded in the downs. Call 
 the brothers Steven and Robert, and know Robert as 
 Bob. Bob was a steady, plain fellow, who worked hard 
 and kept the household going. He was a shunter in the 
 goods yard at Sarum, and on night-duty as often as not. 
 I never saw him, but if he was as true to type in appearance 
 as he was in nature, he was short, sturdy, square-faced, 
 long-headed, with ruminating grey eyes and a gentle voice. 
 Steven his brother was a bad lot. In a village with 
 a drink-tradition (very rare here, but yet to be found 
 scattered about), he drank, and did worse. He spent 
 money, betting, and tried to find more by poaching. 
 Frequently he failed to find it, or to find enough ; and 
 then he learned that his old mother was afraid of him and
 
 THE BROTHERS' TRAGEDY 115 
 
 might be intimidated. She was. Bob's money was 
 handed out florin by florin ; and Bob must be deceived 
 with tales of unexpected charges, and Annie must lend 
 herself to the cheat. Whether Bob was in fact deceived 
 we are to learn ; at any rate he said nothing, had no speech 
 with his brother, and accepted skimped meals without 
 comment. The two men very seldom met, for Steven 
 was out all day and home late to bed, while Bob either 
 left before he returned, or long before he was up, as his 
 duty might be. It was perhaps as well. Bob was very 
 quiet, a still water, but stubborn like all his race, and 
 strong for his rights, once he was sure of them. Steven, 
 in his cups or out of them, freely expressed his scorn of 
 the ' mug ', as he called him ; yet it did not appear that 
 the two had ever conflicted publicly. It might have been 
 better if they had — who knows ? 
 
 Things went on badly, and worsened. Steven's levies 
 became more frequent, his threats more ferocious ; the 
 two women were terrorized. They at least dared say 
 nothing to Bob — and Bob said nothing to them. Then 
 one night the blow fell. 
 
 Steven came to the house at about eight o'clock in the 
 evening. He had been drinking, and was in a cold rage, 
 they said. He asked for money, all they had. It was 
 the second demand in a week, and there was nothing to 
 meet it. So they told him, trembling. He said, ' You 
 will have it for me at midnight, or you'll rue it. I shall 
 come back for it at midnight.' They lied to him in their 
 fear. ' You'll find Bob here, if you do come.' He 
 scorned them. ' 'Tis a lie. 1 know where Bob is. 
 Mind your business, have the money here, or I'll come 
 up and take it.' * You cannot take what I have not got.' 
 
 II 2
 
 ii6 THE BROTHERS' TRAGEDY 
 
 But he swore, ' I know what you've got. Have it ready, 
 or I'll do for the two of you.' Then he went out. 
 
 That was at eight o'clock. The two women ate their 
 cold supper, without comment, without any speech at all, 
 it was said. At ten o'clock they went upstairs. They 
 slept in the same bed. Annie was the quicklier undressed 
 and was about to get into bed when her mother turned to 
 her. ' You must wash your feet, Annie ; you must wash 
 your feet.' Annie said, ' Why, whatever do you mean, 
 Mother ? ' 
 
 Her mother showed her a white face and pair ot 
 looming eyes, all black. ' There's a man coming, will see 
 you in your bed. You would not be found with dirty 
 feet?' No comment at all, or further speech. The two 
 women washed their feet, and lay side by side in the 
 bed. 
 
 There they lay broad awake, without speaking, in that 
 intense silence of the downland country, where the shud- 
 dering cry of the great owl is the only noise at all, and 
 the dark seems to fold down over it like a great blanket 
 which has been lifted for a moment. It was said after- 
 wards that they had quaked for fear, and evident that they 
 did not doubt for an instant what was impending. One 
 may be amazed at the inertia, unless one knows the people. 
 I don't know that the question was put to either of them, 
 why they did not run to a neighbour's. If it had been it 
 would not have been understood. Who shall escape doom ? 
 And what is the respite of one night ? And how should 
 they reveal such a family secret as the villainy of a son and 
 brother? So the two hours passed, and there they lay 
 side by side, broad awake in the dark, quaking with cold 
 or apprehension. Then they heard a stejj on the flags of
 
 THE BROTHERS' TRAGEDY 117 
 
 the path ; and then the sudden discharge of a gun, a 
 shattering noise in that immense quiet. 
 
 They lay still, it was said, till dawn, which came 
 slowly up, for it was the early spring of the year. Which 
 oi them made so bold as to open the door I don't know. 
 But they found Steven lying out there, shot through the 
 head ; and Bob never came home to breakfast. 
 
 Bob had gone into Salisbury early in the morning, and 
 had given himself up to the police. He was cautioned, 
 but chose to make a statement, which was taken down. 
 It was very simple. He had been aware of everything 
 from the beginning, which was some years back. He had 
 watched, waited, said nothing ; he had seen how matters 
 were likely to go, had made his mind up what must be 
 done, and when the time came he had done it. It was 
 afterwards proved that Steven had boasted in his cups of 
 what he was going to do on the fatal night, both before 
 his eight o'clock visit and after it. Bob had liad intelli- 
 gence of that, and had stayed back from his night duty. 
 I did not hear whence he had had the gun, or whether it 
 was his own, or even his brother's. He was, of course, 
 committed to the Assizes, and in due course was tried at 
 Salisbury. He held to iiis story, and hid nothing. The 
 jury presented a verdict of Not Guilty. 
 
 I don't know whether such a virchct lias ever been 
 given before, but it made a sensation all over the county, 
 and two years or more later, when I came to live here, 
 was still in men's mouths. I was talking tlie otlier 
 day of the Italian verdict, Assassinu per amorc. This 
 resembles it, except that the love-crimes contemplated 
 with pity in Italy are not usually those ol family-Iove. 
 But, as 1 also had occasion to say, whni tlir law of Nature
 
 ii8 THE BROTHERS' TRAGEDY 
 
 conflicts with the law of the land, the peasant is always on 
 Nature's side. So heic. 
 
 Very much of the Wiltshire peasant is in that tale : his 
 vast patience, his counsel-keeping, his wary watchfulness, 
 his good shooting. And lastly his fatalism. Those two 
 women abed may stand for that, figures, to me, of Aeschy- 
 lean proportions. Hardy's peasant-mother comes to mind: 
 
 1 bore a daughter flower-fair. 
 
 In Pydel Vale, alas for me ; 
 
 I joyed to mother one so rare. 
 
 But dead and gone I now would be. 
 
 Men looked and loved her as she grew. 
 And she was won, alas for me; 
 She told me nothing, but I knew. 
 And saw that sorrow was to be. 
 
 They do see that, all too often. But they rarely attempt 
 to avoid it. 
 
 The man who told me the tale had been at the trial.
 
 The New JVay 
 
 I LEARN ED something yesterday which up to then 
 I had not known. I learned where we were. It is 
 curious how the mind will absorb a number of plain facts 
 and not relate or coordinate them, but let them stay where 
 they settle, like starlihgs on an elm, jostling each other, 
 crowding each other out. Presently some trivial incident 
 is taken into consciousness, which immediately, as by 
 a conjuring trick, settles all the others huddling in the 
 mind into relation and sequence. It is like the chemical 
 solvent which clears a muddy brew. 
 
 I knew, of course, tliat Lady Astor was a member of 
 Parliament, and inferred that Lady Rhondda, if she 
 pressed it, might be summoned to the House of Lords. 
 I knew that women could be called to the jury box, and 
 that I had a lady colleague, a sister magistrate, at Sarum. 
 I have in fact two such. All that I knew, and more ; and 
 ytt I had not realized, as I say, exactly wheie wc all 
 Were. Then came the solvent — such a still small thing — 
 and 1 knew. A visitor was announced to me sitting 
 where I now am, a lady, a Miss So-and-so. More people 
 know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows, especially when 
 Tom is ever so little in the public eye. Into the library 
 she came, a girl of, say, two-and-twcnty, trim in a belted 
 raincoat, good-looking, soft-sjjoken, with a pair of very 
 honest, cKar grey eyes. I did not know her from Eve, 
 and she was not of my village. Wc bowed, and then
 
 I20 THE NEW WAY 
 
 I asked her to what I was indebted for the honour — the 
 approved Walter Scott, Louis Stevenson manner of 
 approach. She produced from her bosom a folded paper, 
 which I recognized at a glance. Would I please to attest 
 a vaccination-paper. I blushed to remember to how many 
 staunch individualists I had opened a clear road to small- 
 pox ; but on this occasion I blushed for what was to come. 
 My man might, after all, have mis-heard the lady. It 
 was in any case my duty to point out to her that it was 
 the husband's declaration which I must record. I varied the 
 inquiry to meet the case by saying that it was tlie father's 
 affair. 'No, sir,' she said succinctly, 'the mother's.' 
 That unlocked the gate. ' You are not married ? ' ' No, 
 sir.' There was no more to say. The thing went by 
 common form. The child, with three romantic forenames 
 and its mother's surname, was laid out to be the battle- 
 ground of Providence and the small-pox, those inveterate 
 foes. The mother signed its warrant, and so did I. The 
 incident was closed. 
 
 Now you may say that there is nothing new here, and 
 in a sense be right. The young woman was not the first 
 in that condition to do such a piece of work ; but she was 
 the first to do it as she did. From others the facts must 
 be dragged by persistence, and admitted with tears or 
 shameful face. In this case — no such matter. Plain 
 statement ; neither tears, nor knocking of the breast, 
 neither shameful nor brazen face. This young girl, 
 whatever she ought to have been, was not ashamed, and 
 certainly not brazen. She was quiet and businesslike. 
 She had taken on the duties of motherhood seriously and 
 practically. One of these was the duty of citizenship, the 
 exercise of the Rigiits of Man as the West of England
 
 THE NEW WAY 121 
 
 conceives them and the law allows. If this child made 
 mother thought it well that her baby should take the risk, 
 she could declare it before a magistrate. And so she did, 
 witliout a quickening of the blood. 
 
 Tliat is where we arc now. There were none of the 
 makings of a Hetty Sorrel, a crazy Nell, or an Ertie 
 Deans to be had. Very fiir from that. However gotten, 
 in what passion of abandonment, in what tide, caught in 
 what eddy of surging instinct, or folly, or mere frivolity, 
 or worse — however gotten, gotten it was, and so much to 
 the good. It must be tended, provided for by its parent 
 in the house of her own parents, fancifully named, taken 
 to church, shown to the neighbours, freed from vaccination 
 like every true-born son of Wilts. Was its mother to 
 hide her shame ? She had none now to hide. That was 
 done with. She had done what she had, or suffered 
 what she must, folly or worse, in a world of foolish or 
 worse people. Did she love the father of her baby? 
 Apparently, not at all. They had been fools together, or 
 worse. Now there was come a sudden glory upon her, 
 and foolishness was put by. Her son made her a citizen, 
 and she must provide for his future as best she could, 
 seeing it was no business of anybody else. There is no 
 other way of reading her seIf-pos^ession, her high serious- 
 ness throughout our interview, or the ])urpose in her clear 
 grey eyes. Nothing in that ? There's history in it, tlie 
 Four Years' War, tin- Peasants' Union, and the Corn 
 Act, wliich is the peasants' Charter." If tliey are as good 
 as the rest of the woild, able to sit at council-board witii 
 squire and farmer, they will be able to cojie with parish- 
 • iVas so, Init now is not._ The CJovcrnraeiil in its exij^cncy 
 is repealing it as 1 write.
 
 122 THE NEW WAY 
 
 priest, and with Mrs. Grundy too. They are men, not 
 serfs, women, not chattels — men and women, not children 
 of adoption and grace. Nothing in it ? The New Age 
 is in it. 
 
 I don't approve, or disapprove, but I state it. In its way 
 I must respect it. It shows, for one thing, a discrimina- 
 tion between the fundamental and the surface things in 
 life. Parenthood is one thing, and marriage is another, 
 one a good deal the older relation. In my belief happiness 
 consists in the two — but who am I to say that either 
 without the other is not in itself a good ? A child is 
 a child, however begotten, and its mother a mother however 
 made so. It is something to see that much straight. 
 Then comes in the equality of sexes. If the man who 
 had transgressed could hold his head up — why was that ? 
 Plainly, they say now, because he carried no badge about 
 with him. But is a child to be held for a badge? A 
 badge of what? Not shame at least; for. whatever is 
 shameful, it is not child-birth. Let us look these things 
 in the face. That is where we are.
 
 Old Style 
 
 IF Time is, as the hymn says, an ever-roUing stream — 
 and the figure will serve me just now as well as any — 
 it carries down with it detritus of the monuments which wc 
 rear in the fond hope of defying it, which in turn buries the 
 successors of them. So imperial Caesar, given opportunity, 
 will obliterate the titles on Constantine's trophy, and dust 
 from Baalbec smotlicr Egyptian Thebes. Nothing liuly 
 survives but the negligible ; yet it is just that, the infinitely 
 little, which alone can restore to us the infinitely much. 
 Consider the Roman Wall crumbling down into mounds of 
 blown sand, the turf and moss and harebells making cushions 
 of what were once bastions : yet by and by we light upon 
 the rut worn in an old flagstone by a chariot-wheel, and 
 there rises up before us, like a mirage, the iron age. So 
 back and back you may be led, from trifle to trifle, till you 
 are landed somewhere upon the threshold of the fossils. 
 Here, in this country of grass hills, esi)ecially, you are 
 walking over vanished populations. 
 
 Underneath these folded downs, 
 Outposts of the long-spent wave. 
 
 Men are lying and their towns, 
 All one dust and in one grave. 
 
 in biiort, thick tuif wiiich springs up as your foot quits it, 
 over contours as soft and gracious as those of a woman, ail 
 that dead-and-gonc history is veiled out of mind — and then 
 in a moraine, half-buried in wild forget-me-nots, you kick
 
 124 OLD STYLE 
 
 up a flat stone blued by fire, and know that a woman, in 
 times so by-past as to belong rather to myth than story, 
 has kept the heartli hereabout, boiled water by tiiis means, 
 and stirred a pot for her man's supper. And as you go, 
 you can see her crouching there with fierce, bright, waiting 
 eyes, her hair all about her face like curtains, a brown babe 
 at nurse. So much will a pinch of science and a handful 
 of imaginative sympathy do for you with a fired flint-stone. 
 
 Like tradesmen's tokens, words also, or what is left of 
 them, preserve much lore of the evocative kind — such, for 
 instance, as the Basque word for a knife which is the same 
 as that for a little stone. That fact concerning the most 
 certainly neolithic people in Europe is an interesting thing. 
 And sure enough you may pick up such knives hereabout 
 by the score, if you once acquire the eye for them. Whether 
 it is worth acquiring at the price you have to pay for it may 
 well be doubtful : for it is certain that, once you have it, 
 you will see nothing else on your walks. There are better 
 things than wrought flints to be seen on a bright windy day 
 in the Wiltshire downs. 
 
 Words will tell you something, but traditions will tell 
 you more. They survive in little gestures, little rites, turns 
 of thought, and may be captured now and then in turns of 
 phrase. I had one at my discretion only the other day — 
 the survival revealed to me of a way of life, the whole 
 packed up succinctly in a phrase. 
 
 A friend of mine, a village wife, and not a happy one, 
 wrote to me of her aflfairs, and in the course of her letter 
 referred to a sister of hers much more fortunately placed. 
 Here is the phrase she used : ' She has a good husband,' 
 she said, 'one that looks out for her.' What does that do 
 for you but take you directly back from twentieth-century
 
 ' OLD STYLE 125 
 
 England to the scrub-grown hills and swampy bottoms of the 
 Stone Age ; from the railway and the factory-chimney and 
 rows of working-class dwellings to the vallum'and the fosse, 
 the borstal and the mistpool ? You see her (or I do) 
 crouched over the fire, her brood swarming about her : and 
 then you see him, the shaggy, broad-backed creature, re- 
 lieved against the sky-line, clasped hands on his staff, his 
 chin atop of them, scanning the hollows of the hills, as to- 
 day you may see the cloaked shepherd with his crook. 
 How has such a locution survived the chances and changes 
 of this mortal life ? It means something else, something 
 slightly different now ; but there it is, from Sussex, to be 
 understood by us of Wilts, where also the old style obtains. 
 The husband as sentinel, the husband as watch-dog ! 
 In Lancashire, no doubt, such a phrase applied to such an 
 one would have no connotation. There you might hear one 
 woman say of another, ' She has a good husband, one that 
 looks after her.' In whatever sense you take it, that 's a 
 very different thing. Whether it is New Style or not, 
 and by London standards I should say it was rather mid- 
 Victorian than new, it is much newer than we are in the 
 West. The Wiltshire woman expects to look after herself 
 and her children, but not to look out for them as well. 
 Her husband is not there to wait upon her, that 's certain. 
 She neither wants nor exjjects it. It is no mark of a 
 husband that he should be courtier. So he be provident 
 that is all she asks. Old Style ! But he must keej) his 
 eyes well open, and about. I think our women still see a 
 ])Ossible focman in any chance-comer on the village street. 
 As if they were Sabines ! 
 
 y'tr bonus ille, bonnm ham uxorem, as the Latin primer 
 used to demonstrate. As the good husband so the good
 
 126 OLD STYLE ' 
 
 wife. She will spoil her children, but work her fingers raw 
 for them. All the fond emotion pent up in her heart will 
 spend itself orf them — for to their father she will be as bleak 
 as one flintstone chipping at another. That laconism, depend 
 upon it, is traditional. To hear man and wife accost each 
 other you would think they were bare acquaintances : yet 
 the one is on the look-out, and the other toiling within 
 doors. And they will keep good faith to each other 
 though it was not love that brought them together, nor is 
 love that holds them so still. Rather reason, convenience, 
 proximity — one or any of those ; and if desire there 
 ever were, then desire of settlement. Love, I have more 
 than once said, does follow upon use, entirely undemonstra- 
 tive, inarticulate, taking everything for granted ; yet some- 
 times passionate, always faithful, very often a beautiful and 
 touching thing. 
 
 It is hard for an age like ours, which has come to base 
 marriage upon sexual attraction, to realize the old-style 
 union of which that chance-found phrase betrays the incon- 
 ceivable eld. You must leave the market-place and the 
 mill for the quieter vales of England to know and under- 
 stand it. And to do that, it is not enough to be there : 
 you must interpret as you record, for the peasant is unvocal, 
 and can tell you little or nothing. Even when he is gifted 
 with tongues it is rarely that he will reveal himself, or, as 
 it were, unveil his womenkind. 1 don't know where you 
 will get the hang of it better than in Carlyle's beautiful 
 eulogy of his father, written when the old man was but 
 newly dead. 'We had all to complain that we durst not 
 freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in ; he 
 had not the free means to unbosom himself. My mother 
 owned to me that she could never understand him ; that
 
 OLD STYLE 127 
 
 her affection and (with all their little strifes) her admiration 
 of him was obstructed.' Yet there came, in a time of 
 stress, a gushing-out of the well-spring. ' It Ayas when the 
 remains of my mother's fever hung upon her, in 1 81 7, ant! 
 seemed to threaten the extinction of her reason. We were 
 all of us nigh desperate, and ourselves mad. He burst at 
 last into quite a torrent of grief, cried piteously, and threw 
 himself on the floor, and lay moaning. . . It was as if a 
 rock of granite had melted, and was thawing into water. . .' 
 
 Carlyle too had that stone-gripped heart. And his 
 tragedy, and the tragedy of any one of different nation who 
 should mate with such as he, Hes in the dashing of a naked 
 heart to pieces against that one stone-encased ; and the 
 stone conscious of the horror, and unable to utter itself! 
 
 But Carlyle, genuine peasant from the bone outwards, 
 had another grief Non semper arcum ! He knew how 
 often he liad failed to keep the look-out for his wife.
 
 y. Lackington^ Bookseller 
 
 JAMES LAC KINGTON was a citizen of credit and 
 renown. He was a London bookseller, a cheap, ready- 
 money bookseller, probably the first of his kind. In 1 77 1 
 he started with five pounds' worth of stock; in 1 79 1 he 
 was making ;^4,ooo a year; and in that year he published 
 ' Memoirs of the first Forty Five Years of the Life of 
 James Lackington, the present bookseller in Chiswell Street, 
 Moorfields, London '. Such considerations should make 
 his book worth reading, and on the whole they justify it. 
 I don't say that he had his eye invariably on the object, 
 which should have been himself. I can't deny that he has 
 his rivals occasionally in the tail of it. There is crowing 
 to be detected by a nice ear, and sometimes the clapping of 
 wings. A man to read of, if he can write. Yes ; but un- 
 fortunately he cannot, and what makes it worse, he feels 
 sure that he can. He has all the faults of the unvocational 
 writer. He is desperate to be entertaining at all events ; 
 he must be elegant, he must be funny. He peppers his 
 pages with quotations from the poets— and such poets ! he 
 fetches up anecdotes from the deep with a dragnet. He 
 clowns it like Smollett, has the same keen eye for the 
 intimacies of the toilette, and the same keen nose. He 
 confounds humour with impropriety. It is nothing to him 
 if a woman is tipped out of a postchaise unless she show 
 her legs, nothing that a man sliould get drunk unless he be 
 inordinately sick. He disserts for chapters at a time — on
 
 .1. T.ACKINGTON, BOOKSELI.ER 129 
 
 Methodism, ghosts, authorship, visits to watering-places. 
 One has to be thankful that he spares us assorted epitaphs. 
 His worst quality is that of the turncoat. Methodism 
 started him, and he has nothing but scorn for it — and 
 worse than scorn, slander. Still, when all is said, he was 
 an honest, simple and decent-living man, who did some- 
 thing, and, given his time and place, something consider- 
 able. He made himself, and a tradition as well. He had 
 to fight it out with the trade, and he beat the trade. He 
 made a handsome income, who had begun the world as a 
 hawker of hot pies. And Methodism put him in the way 
 of good fortune. That he must needs allow. There was 
 much in Methodism, but there must have been something 
 in Lackington. 
 
 He was born at Wellington, Somerset, in 1746, the 
 eldest of eleven children of George Lackington, journey- 
 man shoemaker, and Joan Trott, a weaver's daughter. 
 While he was still a child his father was found drowned 
 in a ditch — ' drunk when he died ' says James ; whereupon 
 his mother, as they will, brought up her brood by working 
 nineteen hours out of twenty-four, her food being ' chiefly 
 broth (little better than water and oatmeal), turnips, potatoes, 
 cabbage, carrots, &c.' For two years she screwed out two- 
 pence a week to get her James schooling at a dame's ; but 
 she could not keep it up, and moreover needed him as nurse 
 to his brothers and sisters. So James forgot what little 
 he had learned. At twelve the boy was selling half- 
 penny apple pies and halfpenny 'plumb puddings' about 
 Willington ; then he was apprenticed to an Anabaptist 
 shoemaker at Taunton, and shortly after that ' founil 
 religion * with the Wesleyans. James, as he says, was 
 * born again * ; and though he sneers at it, it was true. 
 
 I
 
 I30 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 
 
 For he owns, without recognizing the implication, that he 
 was thereby inspired to ' relearn to read '. He did it by 
 moonHght, he says, no candles being allowed. In summer 
 he was on the bench from dawn till dark, in winter from 
 six till ten — and then read by moonlight ! A boy who 
 could teach himself anything after such hours must either 
 get on or go under. 
 
 He became an adept in Methody, advancing by swift 
 degrees to be one of the select bands. It is a thousand 
 pities that his account of it all is smeared by antipathy. 
 Enthusiasm had its inevitable reactions, no doubt ; yet it is 
 plain to be read beneath his grudging admission that it was 
 a beacon in the pitchy dark of thousands of lives, as indeed 
 it was in his own dark. It ran like wildfire through rural 
 Somerset — ploughboys, dairymaids, household drudges, 
 sweeps, wastrels, the slaves of two thousand years' tradition, 
 all huddling, praying, dreaming, singing, calling on God 
 together. Empty bellies and high hopes ; mud floors to 
 kneel upon, and the shining ramparts of Sion full in sight. 
 Nearly all their worship was stolen from the night, done in 
 the dark. Preachings were at five in the morning. .lames 
 used to turn out between three and four to attend them. 
 He didn't spend that waiting hour alone — how should he ? 
 — and if he and his companion escaped disaster, assuredly 
 many did not. In such cold, in such dark, with such 
 kindling, how should they ? Tlie Agapes were at nine or 
 ten of the night. Danger there too, as .James more than 
 infers. He says that the votaries came to grief, many of 
 them ; that the maids were overkind. They nearly 
 always are. Yet he has the impudence to call them ' fair 
 tempters '. I cannot say how much I dislike .James in this 
 vein. I hate his nods and winks, his ungraciousness, his
 
 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER i-,i 
 
 o' 
 
 want of charity. The fire is gone cold in him ; but it is 
 rank ingratitude not to remember the former glow, which 
 not only urged him to read, but gave him a good girl to 
 wife. That was ' a spiritual dairymaid ' called Nancy Smith, 
 whom he courted on and off for seven years, and married 
 in 1770. 
 
 Before that he had not only learned, but had begun, to 
 read ; at first, he says, only ' enthusiastic authors ', — those, 
 and Pomfret's Poems, which may also have been enthusias- 
 tic, but inspire little enthusiasm in me who, I am sorry to 
 say, know nothing about them or their Pomfret. Presently 
 — he was in Bristol — he lit upon ' Hobbes's Homer ' on 
 a bookstall, and ' Walker's Paraphrase of Epictetus '. He 
 found Hobbes obscure, as I dare say he was, not to say 
 chilling, but got on excellently with Epictetus. And then 
 he started book-buying — evidently predestined — confining 
 himself mainly to works of edification which, then as now, 
 were as cheap as they were abundant, and as enormous as 
 cheap. Here are his early choices, some of them : most 
 of Bunyan ; Polhill on the Decrees ; Pamble's Works 
 (Pamble !) ; Erskine's Gospel Sonnets ; Baxter's Shove 
 for a heavy-a — d Christian (that popular work) ; The 
 Sure Guide to Heaven ; Aristotle's Masterpiece. Then, 
 inconsequently, Gay's Fables, Paradise Lost, Plato on the 
 Immortality of the Soul, Plutarch's Morals, E])icurus's 
 Ditto, Confucius's Ditto. Gay seems overweighted in that 
 company. Having these, or wanting them, he liveil chief- 
 ly, he says, on bread and tea, and allowed himself three 
 hours' sleep pe-r diem. At Bristol he heard John Wesley 
 preach, and George Whitefield (whom he preferred) ; arul 
 at Bristol, after some amorous delays with Hannah Allen, 
 he married his Nancy Smith, and began the world with 
 
 I 2
 
 132 J. I.ACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 
 
 a halfpenny in addition to what he could earn. They made 
 four and sixpence a week between them, it seems, and lived 
 upon it until, not surprisingly, Nancy took ill. Lackington 
 thereupon left her with all the money he could find or 
 collect, and went adventuring to London. He obtained 
 work in Whitecross Street, established ' a Wcsleyan 
 connection ' in six months, sent for his Nancy, and never 
 turned back again. There was stuff in the young man. 
 
 Ten pounds under his grandfather's will set him up with 
 furniture for one room. Then in 1 774 came his chance, 
 and he took it. A fellow journeyman told him of a little 
 shop and parlour going in Featherstone Street, where he 
 could be his own master. He didn't hesitate. He would 
 be a master shoemaker, he said, and sell books too. 
 
 ' Mr. Boyd then asked me how I came to think of 
 selling books ? I informed him that until that moment 
 it had never once entered into my thoughts ; but that 
 when he proposed my taking the shop, it instantaneously 
 occurred to my mind that for several months past I had 
 observed a great increase in a certain old bookshoj) ; and 
 that I was persuaded I knew as much of old books as 
 the person who kept it. I farther observed that I loved 
 books, and that if I could but be a bookseller, I should 
 then have plenty of books to read, which was the great- 
 est motive I could conceive to induce me to make the 
 attempt.' 
 
 And so it was done ; and here is the ' library ' with 
 which he began to trade. Fletcher's Check to Antino- 
 mianism, 5 vols.; Watts 's Improvement of the Mind; 
 Young's Night Thoughts (he had bought that instead of 
 a Christmas dinner) ; Wake's Translation of the Aposto- 
 lical Epistles; Fleetwood's Life of Christ; Hinton's
 
 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 133 
 
 Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, twenty numbers ; some 
 of Wesley's Journals ; ' Pious Lives ' ; and some twelve 
 volumes of ' assorted trade ' — oddments. Not a promising 
 lot, one would say, for St. Luke's, though he values it at £^, 
 and seems to have been justified. In two years, according 
 to him, he moved on to Chiswell Street, which he had not 
 left at the time of writing, with his stock increased to £2$ 
 value — and that in spite of his neighbourhood. Few passed 
 down his street, he says, ' besides Spitalliclds weavers on 
 hanging days, and methodists on preaching nights '. 
 Among his ' oddments ' may have been some catnachery, 
 though he does not say so. 
 
 On the contrary, bookseller entire as he was now become, 
 he dealt almost wholly in divinity, yet did well. It was the 
 line of his connexion, and of his inclination too. ' Such was 
 my ignorance, bigotry, superstition (call it what you will), 
 that I conscientiously destroyed such books as fell into my 
 hands which were written by freethinkers.' So may have 
 l)erished Gay's Fables ; but that did not last. He fell ill 
 in 1775; 1^'s wife caught his fever of him, and 'contrary 
 to all ex|x.ctations died in enthusiastic rant on the 9th of 
 November, surrounded with mcthodist preachers '. A sad 
 end for his * spiritual dairymaid ' whom he seems to have 
 loved in his plain way. A Miss Dorcas Turton took her 
 place. He married her in 1776, thus, as he says, 'repair- 
 ing the loss of one very valuable woman by the acquisition 
 of another still more valuable '. It was not a romantic age, 
 though the time was getting on : you ac(]uire(l wives as you 
 did Iwoks ; yet I -ackington seems to have been kind to both 
 of his ; and who is to judge him ? Miss Turton had been 
 a schoolmistress, and always a reader. I think she was 
 free from 'enthusiastic rant ', which, there are indications.
 
 134 J- LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 
 
 had encumbered poor Nancy from an early age. I trace it 
 to the Turton influence that Lackington allowed freer play to 
 his own mind, and began to shake ofFmethodism. He him- 
 self attributes it to the chance that he one day ' took uj) the 
 Life of John Bunclc '. It is impossible, he says, ' to 
 imagine with what eagerness and pleasure I read through 
 the whole four volumes of this whimsical, sensible, pleas- 
 ing work. It was written by Thonias Amory, Esq. (who 
 was living in the year 1788, at the great age of 97) and I 
 know not of any work more pioper to be put in the hands 
 of a poor, ignorant, bigoted superstitious mettiodist '. 
 That 's as may be ; but he ' also received great benefit from 
 reading Coventry's Philemon to Hydaspes ; it consists ot 
 dialogues on false religion, extravagant devotion, &c. in 
 which are many very curious remarks on visionaries of 
 various ages and sects '. Then he becomes purely profes- 
 sional : ' The work is complete in five parts octavo. There 
 has also been a decent Scotch edition, published in twelves. 
 Both editions are now rather scarce. ' After those, 
 ' rational and moderate divines of all denominations ' ; and 
 once free, he scorned his late servitude, as he deemed it, 
 and coloured his whole book with his scorn. Between 
 that and his desire to startle, he goes so far as to print 
 letters alleged from Wesley, which obviously Wesley had 
 no hand in ; he goes so far, in fact, as to go too far, and 
 to become at once venomous and a bore. Luckily he writes 
 liis spleen out, and returns to the trade. In 1 779, eight 
 years after his beginning, he issued a catalogue of twelve 
 thousand volumes — very much to the credit, surely, of St. 
 Luke's. His second catalogue was of thirty thousand. 
 In 1 791 his sales were a hundred thousand volumes a year, 
 and his profits, he says, ;^4,000.
 
 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 135 
 
 It had been in 1780 that he had done two things which 
 no doubt made his fortune. He established a rigid system 
 of ready-money selling, and he undersold the trade. His 
 account of booksellers' customs in his day is worth reading : 
 
 'When I was first initiated into the various manoeuvres 
 practised by booksellers I found it customary among 
 them (which practice still continues) that when any 
 books liad not gone off so rapidly as expected or so fast 
 as to pay for keeping them in store, they would put what 
 remained of such articles into private sales, where only 
 booksellers are admitted, and of them only such as were 
 invited by having a catalogue sent them. At one of 
 these sales I have frequently seen seventy or eighty 
 thousand volumes sold after dinner, including books of 
 every description, good, bad, and indifferent ; by this 
 means they were distributed through the trade. ' 
 
 But that was not all : 
 
 ' When first invited to these trade sales, I was very 
 much surprised to learn that it was common for such as 
 purchased remainders to destroy one half or three fourths 
 of such books, and to charge the full publication price, 
 or nearly that, for such as they kept on hand ; and there 
 was a kind of standing order amongst tiie trade that in 
 case any one was known to sell articles under the publica- 
 tion prices, such a jjerson was to be excluded from trade 
 sales ; so blind were copyright holders to their own 
 interest. * 
 
 Lackington fought it out, refusing to destroy, insisting on 
 low prices ; ami he won. He does not record the fortunes 
 of the fray, though it is clear that he did not come off with- 
 out a knock or two. His narration of it all is oblique, to 
 be gathered partly from tlie prefaces to liis book. There 
 are three of them : the first to the I'ublic ; the second ' to 
 that ])art of the numerous body of Booksellers of Great
 
 136 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 
 
 Britain and Ireland whose conduct justly claims the addi- 
 tional title of Respectable ' ; the third ' To those sordid 
 and malevolent Booksellers whether they resplendent dwell 
 in stately mansions or in wretched huts of dark and grovell- 
 ing obscurity.* 
 
 '■ I'll give every one a smart lash in my way.' He 
 could afford, it is likely, to let it go at that. At any rate 
 the only lashes he deigns to give them, with the exhorta- 
 tion, ' Read this, ye covetous wretches ', are details of his 
 abounding prosperity ; and I don't know that he could by 
 any means have found shrewder ones. In 1 791, the year 
 of publishing, he had two shops in Chiswell Street, a villa 
 at Merton, a chariot and pair, with saddle horses in reason 
 for Mrs. Lackington and himself; and in that year also 
 afforded himself the proudest days of his life. His ' state 
 of health being indifferent, and Mrs. Lackington's still 
 worse ' he decided upon a sojourn in Lyme Regis. 
 ' Accordingly in July last, 1 791, we set out from Merton 
 where I now make my chief residence, taking Bath, Bristol, 
 &c., in our way to my native place Wellington. 
 
 ' In Bristol, Exbridge, Bridgewater, Taunton, Well- 
 ington, and other pjaces, I amused myself in calling on 
 some of my masters, with whom I had about twenty 
 years before worked as a journeyman shoemaker. I 
 addressed each witii ' Pray, Sir, have you got any occa- 
 sion ? ' which is the term made use of by journeymen in 
 that useful occupation, when seeking employment. Most 
 of those iionest men had quite forgot my person, as 
 many of them had not seen me since I worked for tliem : 
 so that it is not easy for you to conceive with what surj)rizi' 
 and astonishment they gazed on me. For you must 
 know that I had vanity (I call it humour) to do this in 
 my chariot, attended by my servants; And on telling
 
 J. LACKINGTON, BOOKSELLER 137 
 
 them who I was, all aj)pearcd to be very happy to see me. 
 And I assure you it afforded me much real pleasure to 
 see so many of my old acquaintances alive and well, and 
 tolerable happy. The following lines often occurred to 
 my mind: 
 
 Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, 
 Their sober wishes never learn 'd to stray : 
 Along the cool sequester 'd vale of life 
 They keep the noiseless tenor of their way. ' 
 
 A thoroughly inept quotation, seeing that the complacent 
 dog was aiming to prove them poor devils with every line 
 of the pen : but I am not one to grudge him liis hour of 
 triumph. I think he deserved it. He was a large book- 
 seller, a cheap bookseller, and, for aught that appears, an 
 honest bookseller. He had made himself and was not 
 ashamed of it. Incidentally, he was a man of courage too. 
 He very much disliked Doctor .lohnson, was not afraid to 
 say so, and gave his reasons for it, sound ones. 
 
 A portrait (flattered, I feel sure) in my copy of him 
 shows him a handsome, though fleshy, j)hilanthropist, witii 
 black, prominent eyebrows under a smooth brow, and with 
 rather a heavy jowl. He is beautifully dressed, beruffled 
 and btpowdercd. It is subscribed thus : 
 
 ./. Lackington 
 
 [lu/jo a feiu years since began Business 
 
 with five pounds, and noiv sells 
 
 one hundred thousand volumes 
 
 (innu/illy). 
 
 That was a lash which trade rivals could feel.
 
 Balladry ^ over the Foam ' 
 
 WHEN some of our ])eople, for reasons, exiled 
 themselves in ^\\e Mayjloiver and other bottoms they 
 took away among their household gear some fond im- 
 perishable stuff which was, in the most intimate way, 
 of their own make. I don't allude to their morals, 
 so much older than their Bibles, though they certainly 
 took those, a contributory cause of their going. Morals, or 
 the beginnings of them, are a more vexed question even 
 than mine, which is Ballads and the beginnings of them. 
 There have been volumes written upon that, and one would 
 not lightly embark upon it in an essay ; but except family 
 sayings, proverbs, household words, nicknames, weather- 
 lore, and suchlike, there can have been nothing in the 
 Mayjlonver more dee{)ly rooted in the hearts of the 
 Pilgrims than their songs. 
 
 'Twas in the merry month of May 
 When the green buds were a swelling, 
 Sweet William on his death-bed lay 
 
 For the love of Barbara Allen — 
 
 Heaven knows where that can have sprung from if not 
 from the heart of a village. Heaven alone knows, what 
 we shall never know, tlie age of the like of that. For all we 
 can tell, young men and maids may have sung it to each 
 other in the New Stone Age. As documents only, the
 
 BALLADRY 'OVER THE FOAM' 139 
 
 Ballads are without price. Closely read, those old unhappy 
 far-off things tell us more of the nature of our people than 
 all the history books. For History reads the world 
 scenically ; but the ballad-singer is off the stage. The 
 stuff of his rime is sown on the hearth, and blooms, as all 
 poetry does, in secret ; as all flowers do, in the night. So 
 the ballads are as close to the cottage as the houseleek on 
 the tiles, or the darnel which follows men about from garth 
 to garth. An emigrant might conceivably leave his cat 
 behind, but his songs arc himself and could never leave 
 him. 
 
 Nowadays, when the sound of them, their plain and 
 plangent words, their wailing beautiful winding airs are hard 
 to catch in the din of modern life, collectors go far afield 
 to find them. So it is that many of our best ballads have 
 revisited us from America. Mr. Cecil Sharp has gleaned 
 them by fifties in the Southern Appalachians. Few of 
 them, but a few, all the same, escaped the wide-ranging 
 scrutiny of Professor Child. Of his 305 British Ballads 
 the texts or fragments of eighty were recovered in the 
 United States. I learn that from Professor Louise Pound 
 of Nebraska, from whose Pottle Origins and the Ballads \ 
 take it for presentation to the reader. Only lately a kind 
 correspondent of my own has sent me two Kentucky versions 
 of another which had escaped the professorial eye. 
 
 Naturally they have suffered a sea-change, and in the 
 direction you would cx])ect. The ethos of them remains ; 
 the pathos has here and there shifted its angle of apprehen- 
 sion. Externally they have become democratizcti. The 
 Captiiins and the Kings have departed ; everybody steps 
 down a degree or two. The peerage is nearly extinct. 
 Lord Randal becomes .lohnny Randal, or .limniy. Little
 
 I40 BALLADRY 'OVER THE FOAM' 
 
 Musgravc, whose title of gentry has lost all meaning, is now 
 Little Matthew Grove — and so on. Little Sir Hugh of 
 Lincoln, who figures oversea as Little Harry Hughes, loses 
 also his city. Mr. Sharp tells us that the opening of that 
 tragedy, which goes with us : 
 
 It rains, it rains in merry Lincoln, 
 It rains both great and small, 
 
 has been heard in America, 
 
 Do rain, do rain, American corn. 
 Do rain both great and small — 
 
 whicii is patriotic, but nonsense. As for ' The Two 
 Brothers ', it has adopted American soil as well as idiom : 
 
 O what shall I tell your true love, John, 
 If she inquires for you ? 
 O tell her I'm dead and lying in my grave, 
 Way out in Idaho. 
 
 ' Little Musgrave ', one of our most romantic ballads, as 
 the peasantry understood romance, has kept its peer, but 
 suffered none the less one significant change. Everybody 
 knows the tale: how Lord Barnard's wife, for love of 
 young Musgrave, made an assignation with him, was over- 
 heard by a page-boy and betrayed to her absent lord. 
 Lord Barnard comes home at night and finds the sinful 
 pair. He bids Little Musgrave get up and fight, for 
 
 It shall nere be said in my country 
 I have killed a naked man. 
 
 The fight has its predestined end ; then Lord Barnard kills 
 the false lady. And then
 
 BALLADRY 'OVER THE FOAM' 141 
 
 * A grave, a grave, Lord Barnard cryd, 
 
 To put these lovers in ; 
 But lay my lady on the upper hand, 
 For she came of the better kin. 
 
 That last very characteristic sentiment has disappeared in 
 Kentucky. As my correspondent says, ' Montani semper 
 liberi '. Class-distinctions are not effective in the art of the 
 freeborn. Yet such is the force of language, in the Letcher 
 county variant, the balhid still ends on the key-word ' kin '. 
 Lord Daniel, as he is called there, duly kills ' J.ittle Matthew 
 Grove ' : 
 
 Little Matthew Grove struck the very first lick, 
 
 Lord Daniel struck the floor ; 
 
 Lord Daniel took the very next lick, 
 
 Little Matthew struck no more. 
 
 ' Lick' sounds to us very American, but is right old English. 
 But, having slain the lover. Lord Daniel is not so drastic 
 with the lady as his prototype. Lord Barnard, was. Not 
 so drastic, but not less cruel. 
 
 He took the lady all by the hand. 
 Says, Come sit on my knee. 
 Which of these men do you love the best. 
 Little Matthew Grove or me ? 
 
 How do you like his rosy cheek. 
 How do you like his chin, 
 How do you like little Matthew Grove 
 Who now lies dead for his sin ? 
 
 I lind the lady's answer lioth spirited and touching : 
 
 Very well I like his rosy check, 
 
 Very well I like his chin ; 
 
 Much better I love little Matthew Grove 
 
 Than you and all your kin.
 
 142 BALLADRY 'OVER THE FOAM' 
 
 An odd case of the accomodation of tradition to the demands 
 of one imperious word. 
 
 It can no more be said of the American people than of 
 our own that the ballad-habit has not degenerated. Professor 
 Pound seems inclined to lay that to our account, wliich is 
 unkind of her. If w<; had our Catnach, so did they. 
 
 On Bowery Street I did reside, 
 Where people did me know ; 
 I fell in love with a pretty girl, 
 She proved my overthrow. 
 
 I confess that, in that case, Professor Pound traces the 
 doggerel back to an original, English, ' Jack Williams ', 
 whose home was Chatton Street, and his jail Newgate 
 instead of Sing Sing. But ' Betsy Brown ', which, as she 
 says, is more interesting, seems to me purely home-grown. 
 ' A woman's son, Johnny, loves Betsy the servant. The 
 mother takes Betsy to the seaside, where she sells her 
 " across to Verginny ". Her son dies, and the mother 
 repents too late.' The following verse gives a taste of its 
 quality : 
 
 son, O son, your love's in vain, for I've sold Betsy 
 
 'cross the main 
 My son, my son, my son, says she, you bring scandal 
 on you and me. 
 
 1 would rather see your corpse lie dead, than marry 
 
 Betsy a servant maid. 
 
 When you come to work out the sentiment of that there 
 seems little difference between it and Lord Barnard's claim 
 of the upper berth for his wife's remains. But you don't 
 look for the fine flower of democracy in a broadside.
 
 BALLADRY 'OVER THE FOAM' 143 
 
 Lastly, here is unmitigated Catnach, of no longer ago 
 than yesterday, or the day before : 
 
 My sister came to prison to bid her last good-bye, 
 She threw her arms about me and wept most bitterly : 
 She said. My dearest brother, to-day you must die. 
 For the murder of James A.Garfield, upon the scafel high. 
 
 What is there about modern locutions which is so hope- 
 lessly incompatible with old forms ? ' James A. Garfield ' 
 rides as uneasily in a Catnach as a bishop in an aeroplane.
 
 'J 
 
 (Lyf Traveller s Tale 
 
 BEING returned to the mild and pastoral West after 
 an eight days' adventure in the energy and smoke of 
 the North, I am moved to relate something of my journey 
 and its fortunes, which is not at all the way of a provident 
 traveller. He, if he has fallen upon a good thing, hoards 
 it for his private comfort hereafter and will never impart 
 his luck for fear somebody else may get more good out of 
 it than he. My prompting is rather that of a man whose 
 heart is full to overflowing of surprising and happy dis- 
 covery. And if any reader of this essay should liken me 
 to the historic soldier who was found one day beating 
 a Jew and justified himself by explaining that it was on 
 account of the Crucifixion, I will reply as he did that I 
 only found it out yesterday. It is true that what moved 
 and exhilarated me so greatly might have done so, and with 
 better effect, long ago ; but we are what we are, and my 
 lines were cast otherwhere when I was young. 
 
 My business took me a round of official or semi-official 
 visits to a number of inter- related communities in Lanca- 
 shire and Yorkshire, brought me rather closely into inter- 
 course with them, and confined me exclusively to their 
 members. I moved from house to house, as my duties 
 called me, taking as I went the hospitality which was 
 offered me. I must have spoken to or with hundreds of 
 men and women of every variety of social degree and 
 opportunity, as we reckon such things down here, yet all
 
 A TRAVELLER'S TALE 145 
 
 of them were alike in this, that their outlook and moral 
 complexion were the same. That caused their effect upon 
 me to be cumulative. There was nothing to minimize it, 
 lessen its momentum or (if I may put it so) cause its im- 
 pact to swerve. I will not say that I was overwhelmed, 
 because after living an active life in all sorts of company for 
 a certain number of years one is prepared for most things ; 
 but I can certainly say that I was uplifted ; and again that 
 I was restored to hopes which the last few years had done 
 their wicked best to atrophy. I may even go so far as 
 to say that no picture I could make for myself of the daily 
 life lived long ago by certain poor men and women in 
 Galilee could fail of resembling that of the members of the 
 Community which received me so kindly. 
 
 I found myself then in the end to have been the guest 
 and, as far as might be, the intimate of a people in 
 possession of some secret store of knowledge which made 
 them not only serene and cjuictly happy, but even 
 indifferent to tlic rubs of the world so far as they ex- 
 perienced them. That of itself, with the world all about 
 them such as I knew it to have been and had felt it to 
 have been, was surjirising enough. My own peoi)le, whom 
 I had left behind me, were fretted to rags by six years' 
 mowing and aftermath of war. They were i)Oor, and hated 
 their poverty ; tired, and scorned themselves for feeling 
 so ; suspicious of each other and of their neighbours ; 
 hojK-less of anything better. Who will show us any good i' 
 was their outcry ; and the best of tlicm said it with 
 despair ; and the worst with a cynical lift of the eyebrow. 
 In the country and among the people of my sojourn there 
 was the same poverty, taken as a matter of course. If 
 they were tired, there were no signs of slackening. They 
 
 K
 
 i4^> A TRAVELLER'S TALE 
 
 suspected nobody, even if he was a German. And they 
 did not ask to be shown any good, because they could see 
 it for themselves, and never had their eyes off it for long 
 together. It became clear to me that this something good 
 was a thing which every one of them carried about within 
 himself, and sometimes I was apt to think them backward 
 in disclosing it. But on reflection I convinced myself of 
 one or another fact : either the good thing, whatever it was, 
 could not be imparted and must be individually sought and 
 found ; or it was impossible of disclosure to anybody not 
 prepared to receive it. And that may be why it was not 
 imparted to me. 
 
 My round began at Manchester, pushed out to Liverpool, 
 doubled back to SheflBeld, crossed Yorkshire to Scar- 
 borough, went North to Darlington, brought me again 
 to Pontefract, ended up at York ; and everywhere I 
 had the same simple geniality of reception, the same 
 candid intercourse, found the same innocence of heart, 
 quiet gaiety, fine temper ; and in all cases an ease, a leisure 
 of address which made of life a comfortable, prosperous 
 thing instead of what I had been finding it of late, 
 a journey in bare feet and corns upon a French pave. I 
 spoke just now of social standing — that was to describe 
 something to myself which to my late acquaintance would 
 have no meaning. To me, unfortunately, men are not 
 equal : to them, as it seems, they cannot be unequal. 
 Money and rank — how can they make men unequal when 
 ^ irtue and vice do not .'' I admit the reasoning ; yet 1 
 must also admit that they have every appearance of doing 
 so. De non apparentibus et cle non ex'tstentibus — most of us 
 put the maxim to daily use. Well, my hosts in the North 
 did not. They used no titles of difl^erence. Men and
 
 A TRAVELLER'S TALE 147 
 
 women alike are known by their names. Sex is marked, 
 but by first names alone. Age is not outwardly differ- 
 enced, nor quality. The ease which this gives to inter- 
 course, to the commerce of every day, can hardly be de- 
 scribed ; but that, of course, is by no means the whole of 
 the matter. The implications of it, not immediately 
 apparent, go deeply into the relations of men and women ; 
 and the greatest of those I suspect is a fundamental 
 temperance — so fundamental indeed as to be almost an 
 affair of instinct — which makes such delicate commerce as 
 that of the sexes of little difficulty to them — while to us, 
 how full of pitfalls and quicksands ! 
 
 With temperance for a hand upon the passions the way 
 is open to love ; and this people can love with open heart, 
 each other, their neighbours, their enemies, if they con- 
 fessed to any. Their boys and girls can be brought up 
 together without prejudice, afterthought, or what is worse, 
 aftertaste. Sometimes they love each other at school, and 
 thereafter ; but they keep innocency ; love is not a storm, 
 but a spring calm ; and when the summer comes to them 
 they go back to the school of their springtime and are 
 quietly married there. There may be unhaj)py marriages 
 among them — for they are mortal. I neither saw nor 
 heard of any, but on the contrary saw more happy couples 
 in that week I spent among them, than I could fmil in 
 London in five years. If that does not imply some great 
 possession — innocency, temperance, inner light, call it what 
 you will — then it im])lies su])ernatural beings. Yet they 
 are of all people I have ever met the most natural. Incredible 
 endowment, in an age grown old and rotten-rii)e witli 
 knowledge. 
 
 It is exceedingly difficult to say wliat comfort resides 
 
 K 2
 
 148 A TRAVELLER'S TALE 
 
 in life modelled upon the Sermon on the Mount, to put it 
 no higher ; yet since comfort is a thing we all want if it is 
 to be had, it is well worth finding out. Personally, I have 
 always believed poverty to be the secret of earthly 
 happiness ; and it is only another way of putting it, 
 perhaps, to say, that riches may be it. It is the riches 
 of my recent hosts which allow them their sincerity, their 
 equality, their liberty to love, their serene indifference to 
 the hammerings of circumstance. Knowing what they 
 know, they can afford these things. Since they learned 
 the secret which makes them thus rich, the time, I believe, 
 is three hundred years. Can they not put the rest of us 
 in the way of it : — ^will they not ? There is need enough, 
 God knows.
 
 The One Thing Needful 
 
 IT is strange to reflect that the complex of misery from 
 which the world is now suffering should be soluble by 
 one single thing ; strange that it should be true ; equally 
 strange jierhaps that I should have that solution on the tip 
 of this pen. I am not so fatuous as to pretend that I have 
 discovered it, nor so simple as to say that I am discovering 
 it now. Rather I am uncovering, or, if you please, 
 recovering, it. This time last year I announced it in the 
 jmblic Press, having borrowed it from the Quakers, whose 
 peculiar it is in these days. Nobody took any particular 
 notice, so far as I know. At least, nothing happened. 
 Therefore, being quite sure of my ground, I announce it 
 again. 
 
 And again 1 take it, with an impressive testimony added, 
 from the Quakers, who say, as they have always said, that 
 the one paramount necessary thing for the stability and 
 progress of man is that he should be moved to love rather 
 than to hate his neighbour. Surprising that, having tried 
 every form of hating that can be learned for two years 
 long, and found his world none the better for it, man 
 should still i)ursue that road to settlement. But he does. 
 Still the editor of the Morning Post begins his day by 
 wondering whom he shall denounce. Still Mrs. P.irting- 
 ton's nej)hew, once a month, grates his tusk against Mr. 
 Ascjuith, Lord Haldane, Sir Alfretl Mond's dead and 
 German grandfather. Still everybody who is not a 
 Russian desires another Russian Revolution. Still, lor
 
 I50 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 
 
 the sake of Unionism, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Law 
 make union out of the question. Mr. George cannot abide 
 Lord Northcliffe, nor Lord Northcliffe Mr. George. 
 Finally, as a new way of getting on with tilings, a foolish 
 young man explodes like a ginger-beer bottle in the Albert 
 Hall with suggestions for hanging Mr. Churchill on a 
 lamp-post. It is all ridiculous enough, or it would be if 
 it were not as mischievous as it is foolish, and useless as 
 wicked. 
 
 For all of this the Quakers are still insisting on their 
 remedy that men should love each other — English, Irish, 
 German, French, Jews, Gentiles, masters, men. The 
 remedy, it may be remarked incidentally, is Christ's 
 remedy ; and most of these people are still nominally 
 Christians, They are not perhaps, even nominally, so 
 Christian as they were a hundred years ago. But the 
 Quaker point, and my point, is that, however nominally 
 peoj)le have been Christian, they have never at any time 
 tried Christ's remedy for more than a bare fifty years at a 
 stretch, and for so long only some three times in the 
 world's history. Well, the Quakers have tried it for three 
 hundred years. It is true that they have not made much 
 headway until lately. Now, however, it does seem that 
 they are moving : and how far, and at what rate of speed, 
 they are moving, may be learned from the Germans, of all 
 people in the world : from the protagonists in the recent 
 War ujjon Earth to men of Ill-Will : that unhappy peojile 
 who taught Europeans how to hate and grudge, who are 
 now reaping what they sowed in the hatred and grudges of 
 us all. To that miserable nation the Quakers went 
 immediately after the Armistice, and there they have 
 remained, doing works of charity to the afflicted bodies,
 
 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 151 
 
 and exemplifying to the afflicted spirits of fallen and broken 
 Germany what remedy there lies in pure religion and 
 undefiled. I have a testimony to this work of theirs 
 before me now. I take the following from ' A Letter to 
 the Quakers ', written by the jjoet Willielm Schaefer, and 
 l)ublished in the Frankfurter Ztttung last July. Wilhelm 
 Schaefer is not, he says, ' one of the Germans for whom 
 extravagant ho])es were shattered by the outcome of the 
 war'. He was not then a Pan-German, nor is he now a 
 Bolshevist. On the contrary, he realizes ' that a drop of 
 hate sticks more tenaciously than all tlie love in the world ', 
 and knows 'only too well that a victorious proletariat could 
 help just as little as a victorious Germany '. On that 
 showing he writes to the Quakers as follows : 
 
 'You are Christians, as we call ourselves Christians — 
 although notwitlistanding our ostensible Christianity we 
 came into this world-war. We all know that love was 
 the fundamental idea of Christ's teaching, but you have 
 been able to remain faithful to this teaching in practice. 
 Before the stroke of fate came upon us, you were 
 among us an almost unknown sect ; now your presence 
 among us is overshadowing all the Churches. Neither 
 the Papal Bishops nor the Protestant Superintendents 
 have been able to keep themselves pure from tlic war's 
 hatred, nor can they now point to any fundamental 
 principle for life, as you can.' 
 
 True for you, "Herr Schaefer, the Christian Churches 
 dill not commend themselves, or their Master's iloctrinc, 
 remarkably from 1914 onwards. Nor are Catholic Church 
 and Protestant Church in Ireland distinguishing themselves 
 very Christianly now. There, at least, in the very vortex 
 of tlie maelstrom of world-liatred, is testimony to the one
 
 152 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 
 
 Cliristian Society which declares the one needful thing. 
 Here is another, again from the Frankfurter Zeitung, from 
 Herr Alfons Paquet ; 'We do not know,' he says, 
 ' whether in some ways the Quaker Embassies which 
 have settled in the chief cities in Europe may not become 
 more important for world-peace than the official Embassies 
 sent out by Governments with their costly and somewhat 
 outworn machinery '. He blurs his enthusiasm by his 
 ' somewhats ' and ' in some ways ', and is put in the shade 
 by the poet, with whom I agree in seeing no possible 
 qualification. If it is Swarthmore against the Foreign 
 Office, there can be no doubt on which side to rank. It 
 is a question of a human or a conventional relationship. 
 Whatever hereafter may come forth of the Foreign Office, 
 you may be sure it will not be the Sermon on the Mount. 
 Is it suggested here that the League of Nations has 
 received at least the countenance of the Foreign Office ? 
 Be it so ; and a word upon that. There is a tacit under- 
 standing, it would seem, in the Press solemnly to accept 
 the League of Nations on its face value, solemnly to take 
 for granted that it means something when in fact it means 
 j)recisely nothing. Such a line of conduct, even if it 
 proceed from mere vacuity of mind, is highly mischievous, 
 because it wastes time. Side by side with the discussions at 
 Geneva armaments are piling up again. The United States 
 has its programme, Japan has its j)rogramme, 77je Times is 
 filled every day with the bickerings of naval officers over the 
 best preparations for the next war. The chemists are 
 stooping over their toxic gases, their high exj)losives. And 
 all this while it is obvious to whoever thinks for a moment 
 of the last war what in logical extension the next one must 
 be. It will be upon a scale which defies thought ; it
 
 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 153 
 
 must be a thing which civiHzation cannot survive. Yet 
 just as certainly as the rival shipbuilding of England and 
 Germany, the rival army extensions of Germany and 
 France, induced the last war, so can these preparations 
 have but one end. Let me point out one aspect of that 
 end. // is notu accepted doctrine that ivar must be waged 
 against non-combatants ; from overhead, from gas-retorts. 
 Against this end the League of Nations as it stands 
 cannot afford any protection, for it contains in its consti- 
 tution the germ of all wars — that is to say, the principle 
 of nationality. Every war from the beginning of time has 
 arisen out of the suspicions, or the envy, or the suscepti- 
 bilities of nation and nation. Emphasize, perpetuate 
 nationality, you prepare warfare. 
 
 What then ? Has the world gone mad ? Or is it so 
 grafted in a stock of 111- Will that it cannot help itself.'' 
 There is only one thing that will help it. Man must learn 
 to love instead of hate. 
 
 Years ago, say tiie (Quakers, the palpable, breathing 
 Essence of divine and human love walked this earth, and 
 expressed itself there in the i)erson of Jesus Christ. How 
 literally they believe that, or intend us to take it, does not 
 matter. If they are no more literal than the lover who 
 believes that Beauty divine and human walks incarnate in his 
 beloved, that is literal enough for all purposes. When I 
 read Saint Matthew I believe them ; but when I read the 
 Morning Post 1 fmd it much more difficult. I suggest 
 then, once more, to my fellow men tliat they try Saint 
 Matthew's and tlie (Juaker sj)ecific for their sorrows 
 They have never tried it yet — and wiio knows whether it 
 may not be true ?
 
 The Remnant 
 
 THE Westminster Gazette^ in a leading article written 
 with a pen less broad than its ordinary, contemplates 
 a 'death-sentence' on our British greatness which it bases 
 upon tiie j)robability that, to live at all, ' we must live as a 
 self-contained island'. To live so, it says, 'a preliminary 
 will be the reduction of our population to one-half and the 
 acceptance by the remainder of a standard of life lower 
 than we have known for generations '. That is what the 
 Westminster believes the British peoj)le will not accept. 
 
 The answer to that, of course, is that if tiie population 
 is so reduced, and if the means of subsistence are such as 
 to exact a lowered standard, the British people will have 
 to accept them. Needs must when the devil drives ! But 
 is the devil driving ? Is it possible that Providence holds 
 the ribbons ? Is it possible that if the thing became an 
 affair of choice the British people might vote for self- 
 continence ? Not, I agree, in the mood in which the main 
 of them are to-day. But we are considering rather 
 to-morrow ; and some such choice seems to me the one 
 hope for British greatness to-morrow. If it is desired that 
 I explain myself, that is my desire also. But first I should 
 examine the Westminster ■-, premiss. Is there a chance 
 that the j)opulation and subsistence of our island will be 
 sensibly reduced ? According to the highest financial 
 advice I can command there is more than a chance.
 
 THE REMNANT 155 
 
 Two attacks are at this hour being directed against 
 Capital. The frontal attack is Labour's. Labour wants 
 to sweep it away. What it is proposed to substitute for 
 it, I am not clear ; but it is certain that the attack is both 
 spirited and determined, and, so far, successful. Outlying 
 positions liave been surrendered, others carried and held. 
 Others, notably the railway-position, are threatened. The 
 advance is sufficiently vigorous to cause commotion in the 
 defending host. That is clear enough ; one only has to read 
 The Times. But the attack in flank, which is the Govern- 
 ment's, is even more serious. The Government, being 
 unable to stop spending, must by all means have money, 
 first to placate its enemies, secondly to pay its debts. It 
 has abandoned Excess Profits Duty, chiefly because there 
 seemed to be no excess profits available. So far as can 
 be seen it must now increase the super-tax ^n income, 
 make a capital levy, or default upon its obligations. If it 
 elects one of the first two expedients it will shake Capital 
 to the core ; if it chooses for the last it will ruin us all. 
 What then is Capital to do but to retreat ? And that is 
 what it is doing now. It will withdraw oversea and leave 
 us alone. It will leave but a remnant of the ])opuIation 
 bc-hind it ; for with it must depart those who live upon it, 
 all the industrial workmen who, wliatever they may think 
 or say, cannot do without it — unless, of course, they seize 
 the assets of the State and put them into their business ; 
 and they are unlikely to do that because, if tlie country is 
 bankrupt, the assets available won't be worth the taking. 
 If there is anything at all in all tliis, the supposititious 
 shrinking of tlie ])0])iil.ifi()n dn-aded by tlie IVrstminster is 
 likely to Ix; actual. 
 
 Of what, of wiiom, will the renmant consist ? Of
 
 156 THE RliMNANT 
 
 those, firstly, so rooted in the soil of this England that they 
 cannot be torn out of it : our agricultural, fishing, sea- 
 faring, small-trading population, the first here, the last to 
 go, the soundest, healthiest, steadiest, most laborious, 
 most patient of our nation. They will be, as they have 
 generally been, the nucleus. Others will be added to whom 
 the call of tradition, ancestry, association, and what we 
 know as the heartstrings, outvails that of luxury and ease ; 
 others again who have religious, sentimental, philosophical 
 inklings of the blessings of poverty, chastity, and obedience. 
 Many of the adventurous will remain to probe a new life 
 which cannot fail of adventure, and of much more adven- 
 ture than the old ; for when you have everything there is 
 nothing to get ; and when you have nothing there is 
 everything. Scientists, artists, men of letters (but not 
 ' best-sellers') ; clergymen, lawyers, doctors, — all of these : 
 in fine, any class of men to which, when leisure of mind 
 is in the balance, easy money is not the prime good. 
 There 's for the remnant. 
 
 The remnant will make the best of it, in the absence of 
 what the IVestminster calls 'our greatness as a nation '. Is 
 it possible that the IVestminster has fallen into the common 
 confusion of ' greatness ' with ' bigness ' ? I fear that it 
 has, for I cannot for the life of me see how a people can 
 lose greatness by becoming a small nation, or in what 
 l)Ossible sense the moral quality of the British is diminished 
 by the positive loss of India, Egypt, Cyprus, Malta, 
 Gibraltar, Hong-Kong, St. Helena, and some West Indian 
 islands, by the titular loss of Canada, Australia, New 
 Zealand, South Africa, or by the abandonment of pleasantly 
 termed 'mandates' — 'convey the wise it call' — over 
 Mesopotamia and Palestine. You may say that if it was
 
 THE REMNANT 157 
 
 ' greatness ' which acquired those regions, it is ' smallness ' 
 to lose them. Well, I don't know about that. One 
 would have to inquire rather particularly into the details of 
 our acquisition before one could decide such a question ; 
 and it might possibly transpire that the acquisition, province 
 by province, of India was less morally 'great' than its 
 restitution, province by province, would be. But tiiat is 
 ethics. We will leave that to the schoolmen. It is 
 more pertinent to inquire just now whether the retention 
 of those Asiatic and other possessions would be a profit or 
 loss to a reduced and poor population. I shrewdly suspect 
 that at this moment every single one of them is a dead 
 loss. If so, or if only yielding a narrow margin of profit, 
 it is then certain tliat a bankrupt Britain with half its 
 jiresent population not only could not afford, but would not 
 be able, to keep them. 
 
 Then we should stand clear, to face the world and our 
 creditors, to pay our debts, I hope, out of the vast economies 
 we should be able to make. We should have neitlier army 
 nor navy. We should carry, as we once did, and as the 
 Dutch and Norwegians have done for three centuries, 
 without a guaranteed passage. We should be self-contained, 
 self-sufficient : we should fish, we should plough, we should 
 graze our sheep and cattle, we should take in each other's 
 washing. We should not fear invasion, for the possible 
 loot would not be tempting enough ; we should not want more 
 than a small militia for policing the land and the home- 
 waters, for the same reason. Tiiere would be such a chance 
 then for our national ' greatness ' as it has not had since 
 Queen Elizabeth lived and died ; and if those spacious days 
 do not begin all over again ; and if fivi- liuiulicd years 
 hence some man of letters from a green shade is not
 
 158 THE REMNANT 
 
 writing in precisely this strain, and to the same end — then 
 I wholly misread the greatness of my nation. 
 
 // faut cultlver tiotre jard'tn was Candide's conclusion, 
 and it is mine. We shall have time for that in a few years 
 from now. And time to be great rather than big. And 
 then — if contentment is anything to the matter — we may 
 perhaps be happy.
 
 ^een Kictor'ia 
 
 THE crisj) malicious touch which made Eminent 
 Victorians highly contentious matter to some of his 
 readers has not deserted Mr. Strachey ; but he has tempered 
 it very materially in his essay upon the most eminent Vic- 
 torian of them all. For more than half of iiis second book 
 his attitude to his subject is that of his first ; and I don't 
 pretend to say that 1 like it, while I admit that its irony 
 and sub-acid wit amuse me a great deal. But it is too 
 Olympian to be pleasant ; as it belittles the victim, so it 
 exalts the performer with the knife, until inexorable Nemesis 
 appears ujjon the scene of the operating-theatre and convinces 
 you that no one but a very young man could be so remark- 
 ably sujM.-rior. Towards the end, however, Mr. Strachey 
 is himself convinced that he is dealing with great matter. 
 Coming, 1 believe, to scoff, he remains to praise. The 
 last pages of the essay are serious and beautiful, the last 
 paragraph as evocative as poetry. 
 
 That great lady, subject of Mr. vStrachey's pungent and 
 suggestive monograj^h, was more than a symbol : she was 
 an emblem. It was her official business to stand as the 
 outward and visible sign of the British Empire ; it was 
 perhaps more than such an accident that fated her to be the 
 thing signified by Victorianism. But more than that, she 
 may show forth to the ages to come nearly everything — 
 the whole at le.ist of its moral outfit — which we connote 
 in the phrase 'Nineteenth Century*. With her it began, 
 with her it ended. What had passed before 1 837 was the
 
 i6o QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 fag-end of another age, the age of circumscribed interests, 
 short views, of hedonism and scepticism, of surface glitter, and 
 fundamental coarseness. With Victoria's accession, all that 
 disappeared, nobody can tell precisely how, or when, or why. 
 Life was real again, life was earnest ; up went the banner 
 of the ideal : what was called the ' Condition of England 
 Question ' became a perpetual itch. Lord Melbourne left 
 off drinking, and very nearly left off swearing; the Duke 
 of Wellington slipped into fogeydom ; Peel broke down tiie 
 Corn Laws. It must have been her doing ; there was no- 
 body else who could have done it. And yet — explain it 
 how you will — the little great lady herself was as true a 
 daughter of the eighteenth century as Lady Holland. 
 There 's a paradox ; and here 's another — herself: a Whig, 
 and yet as staunch for the prerogative as George III ; pious, 
 and yet so rank an Erastian that she considered herself, as 
 Mr. Strachey says, head of every church represented in her 
 Empire, and entitled to regulate one and all of them. That 
 is all true : she was from the beginning to the end a bundle 
 of opposites ; and Mr. Strachey never loses sight of it. 
 Who would have believed that the little round-faced girl 
 of eighteen, with her parted ingenuous lips and blue eyes, 
 meekly under the tiiumb of her German mother until the 
 eve of June the twentieth, would before noon on that event- 
 ful day quietly put the Duchess in her place ? But it seems 
 that she did it. Up to the moment of her going in to the 
 Privy Council she had practically never been alone in her life. 
 But when she came out 
 
 ' and found her mother waiting for her, she 
 said, " And now, Mamma, am 1 really and truly 
 Queen ? " " You see, my dear, that it is so." " Then, 
 dear Mamma, I hoi)e you will grant me the first request
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA i6i 
 
 I make to you, as Queen. Let me be by myself for an 
 hour." For an hour she remained in solitude. Then 
 she reappeared, and gave a significant order : her bed was 
 to be moved out of her mother's room. It was the doom 
 of the Duchess of Kent '. 
 
 Se non e vero, it ought to be.' It is admirably put, and 
 in substance at least perfectly true. She could do that, and 
 more, for as she disposed of her mother so she quenched 
 the hopes and quelled the high spirits of her Uncle Leopold, 
 and so she dared even greater than he. ' Le Roi Georges 
 en jupons ', was said of her as a child of Six, and so she 
 grew up to be, within and without, except that she was never 
 clownish, never in the least the buffoon. Her dignity is 
 admitted by everybody who ever had to do with her. When 
 Eugenie, Empress of the French, was by her side it was 
 Victoria who drew all eyes, ' very short, rather stout, quite 
 plain, in garish middle-class garments ' — 
 
 ' She was Queen of England, and was not that enough ? 
 It certainly seemed to be; true majesty was hers, and 
 she knew it. More than once when the two were to- 
 gether in ])ublic, it was the woman to whom, as it seemed, 
 nature and art had given so little, who, by sheer force of 
 an inherent grandeur, comjjlctely threw her adorned and 
 beautiful companion in the shade '. 
 
 She had enchanted old Melbourne as a girl, and enchanted 
 old Disraeli, herself an elderly woman. She inspired terror 
 in her eldest son, and was probably the only person in Europe 
 whom her grandson of Prussia really respected. But in 
 
 * The authority cited for this plausiWc talc is not so pood as 
 it might he. Witiiall respect to the late Mrs. Crawford, she had 
 no pretensions to l)e a (Jreville. I have not seen her Imok ; but 
 I understand that shg lived most of her life in I'aiis, remotely 
 cnoufjh from Kpnsinf;ton I'alace and ■f<37-
 
 1 62 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 her ineradicable pride, in her jealousy of her prerogative, in 
 her narrowness of view and obstinacy, in her insensibility 
 to art and letters or the intellectual life — in all this, as 
 well as in her pious and decent domestic habit, she was 
 Farmer George all over again : ' living symbol ', says 
 Mr. Strachey with truth, ' of the victory of the middle- 
 classes '. Very early in her reign she declared herself. 
 The famous question of the Household arose in 1 839. In 
 that she faced and beat Peel, faced and beat the Duke of 
 Wellington : more than that, she beat the setting and the 
 rising Cabinets, and dared a conflict with Parliament itself. 
 All that, and a bad mistake, for which Lord Melbourne 
 was responsible, brought over her a cold wave of unpopu- 
 larity within two years of her accession. ' Mrs. Melbourne ', 
 the mob called after her ; and she was hissed at Ascot. 
 But she had her own way. 
 
 Nevertheless — the paradox she was — in spite of her 
 self-sufficiency and rooted pride, she depended from first to 
 last upon some man or another. First of them were the 
 ministers, Melbourne and Peel. Mr. Strachey's portrait of 
 the former is humorous and exact, one of his very best, but 
 he does less than justice to the much greater man. The 
 Queen, when it came about that she must needs receive him, 
 learned how to value him. Next came the Prince, and very 
 soon no other man existed in her estimation. He is 
 decidedly Mr. Strachey's best study. It was time that 
 reasonable treatment should be given to the steady, capable, 
 serious German gentleman whom Carlyle, with the right 
 word as usual, found ' solid ', but Tennyson, his emotions 
 getting the better of him, portrayed either as transparent, 
 with no inside at all, a kind of Crystal Palace of a gentle- 
 man ; or as an inside and nothing else recognizable, a mere
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA 163 
 
 disembodied virtue — according as you look at Idylls of the 
 King. Mr. Strachey's two or three chapters upon him are 
 perspicacious and sympathetic, as serious and sincere as the 
 Prince was himself. Little as the English liked, or under- 
 stood, or cared to understand him, he was making way when 
 his career of statesman and father was cut prematurely short 
 — so much way that there 's no saying where we might have 
 been if he had lived, say, to 1870. More involved in 
 Prussianism than would have been convenient, no doubt. 
 He was indeed a solid man, a little more of whose German 
 seriousness would have done us no harm. Mr. Strachey 
 thinks that he was bored, and I don't doubt it— at lirst. 
 When he had felt his feet on hard ground, when he had begun 
 to be useful, above all when his children were coming out 
 of the nursery, I can imagine him happy enough in his quiet 
 way. The triviality of the Queen's leisure hours must 
 certainly have chafed him : intellectual activity was never 
 the strong side of the dynasty. He had to make tiie best 
 of it, 
 
 ' He hat] given up his double chess ! And so there 
 could be round games at the round table, or everyone could 
 spend the evening in the most amusing way imaginable — 
 spinning counters and rings.' 
 
 So says Mr. Strachey in his sub-acid way. Tiie Prince 
 scorned this kind of fun ; scorned all English pursuits ; 
 looked bleakly out and about him. Well, of course he did : 
 a good specimen himself of the most serious nation in Europe 
 confronted with the cream of the most frivolous of them. 
 He was naturally reserved, and sensitive withal. No one 
 knew better than he that we distrusted foreigners en bloc, 
 and him, as a king in petto, above all. 15ut he got to work 
 by degrees, reformed the Royal Household, built the 
 
 I. 2
 
 164 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Crystal Palace, established Osborne, became the Queen's 
 private secretary and, before he died, built Balmoral. That 
 was a castle after his own heart — 
 
 * built of granite in the Scotch baronial style, with a 
 tower 100 feet high, and minor turrets and castellated 
 gables. . . . The walls and floors were of pitch-pine, and 
 covered with specially manufactured tartans. The 
 Balmoral Tartan, in red and grey, designed by the Prince, 
 and the Victoria Tartan, with a white stri])e, designed by 
 the Queen, were to be seen in every room : there were 
 Tartan curtains and Tartan chair-covers, and everf Tartan 
 linoleums. ... In an alcove in the hall stood a life-sized 
 statue of Albert in Highland dress'. 
 
 It is almost as Pharisaic to quote that as it was to write 
 it ; yet impossible to help thanking God that one has neither 
 designed nor been fated to live in such a castle. All the 
 same, the painful fatuity is touching — and also, what are the 
 odds in the matter so long as you are happy ? In spite of 
 Mr. Strachey I believe that the excellent man was happy 
 during his last years, building his castle and hanging his 
 tartans. 
 
 After his death there followed a temporary eclipse. The 
 Queen gave way to her grief and withdrew herself — too 
 much. Mr. Strachey is quite riglit in saying that a strong 
 wave of republicanism beset the seventies. That, however, 
 was as much due to the too public performances of the 
 Prince of Wales as to the too private ones of his mother. 
 He does not mention what public event it was which saved 
 the two of them. I don't myself doubt that it was the 
 dangerous illness of Albert Edward and the Queen's pain- 
 ful anxiety and public thanksgiving. Last came the day 
 of Disraeli and his doting adulation of ' the Faery * (how
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA 165 
 
 like him are both name and spelling!). Doting is the 
 adjective ; for what began as flattery of the Queen ended 
 in flattery of the flatterer. It did harm to the Queen with 
 the public, and no good at all to the State. But when it 
 was over there was an end of her dependence on men. 
 From 1887 to the end she reigned easily and unapproach- 
 ably. She made no mistakes, she filled the scene, recovered 
 all her lost ground. It is not too much to say, as 
 Mr. Strachey says, that when she lay on her last bed, ' It 
 appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of 
 nature was about to take place'. 
 
 The last sentence of this able book is poetry, and I must 
 find room for it somehow. Mr. Strachey pictures Victoria 
 lying speechless and stricken, her long life floating before 
 her consciousness like hurrying clouds : 
 
 ' Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the 
 shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for 
 the last time, the vanished visions of that long liistory — 
 passing back and back, througli the cloud of years, to 
 older and ever older memories — to the sjjring woods at 
 Osborne, so full of j)rimroses for Lord Beaconsfield — to 
 Lord Palmcrston's queer clothes and high demeanour, 
 and Albert's first stag at Balmoral . . . and Lord M. 
 dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm- 
 trees, and the Archbishopof Canterbury on liis knees inthe 
 dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock ejaculations, ami 
 Uncle Leopold's soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen 
 with the globes, and her mother's feathers sweeping 
 down towards her, and a great old repealer-watcii of her 
 father's in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, ami 
 some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees 
 and the grass at Kensington '.
 
 On Translating Dante 
 
 MANY years ago — spare mc the tale of them — the 
 Poet Laureate, who was writing that essay on 
 Keats which remains the most temperate and fundamental 
 study ever published of the wonderful young man, did me 
 the honour of making mc in some sense accessory. He 
 asked me to look for traces of Dante in Hyperion, knowing 
 that at the time of its revision Keats had been studying 
 him. Looking for lines where suggestion and implication 
 were closely interwoven, I picked out some, most of which 
 I have forgotten, but remember two. One was : 
 
 No poison gender'd in close monkish cell, 
 To thin the scarlet conclave of old men, 
 
 where the first line is pure Keats, but the second very 
 Dantesque ; and the other : 
 
 All else who find a haven in the world, 
 
 ■ •••■•• 
 
 If by a chance into this fane they conic. 
 Rot on the pavement ivhere thou rottedst halj. 
 
 The terseness, the savage direction, and the indifference to 
 any rendering of the fact, given the right emphasis of it, 
 are Dante all over, as I think.' Mr. Bridges's own selec- 
 tions are as plain, and one of them even plainer than mine: 
 
 High prophetess, said I, purge off. 
 Benign, if so it please thee, my mind's film.
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 167 
 
 That is certainly Dante — and bad Dante ; but this is 
 beautiful : 
 
 When in mid-way the sickening east-wind 
 Shifts sudden to the South, the small warm rain 
 Melts out the frozen incense from all flowers. 
 
 There Keats came close to Dante in his excellence where 
 no poet but Homer has ever beaten him, though Tennyson, 
 who studied allusive description all his life long, sometimes 
 came near it. 
 
 As on a dull day in an ocean cave 
 
 The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
 
 In silence — 
 
 That is very near Dante ; and there arc others. But 
 Dante can go much higher than that: he can give you in 
 a single word scenes which depend upon the touching of 
 a heart-string. Of them, perhaps, the supreme example is 
 Nazareth : 
 
 Nazzarette, 
 Li dove Gabriello a])erse 1' ali — 
 
 a touch masterful and exquisite at once. To come within 
 the ambit of that you must go again to Keats ; to 
 
 Perhaps the self-san)u song that found a path 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn — 
 
 though he tiikes two lines to the master's one. But when 
 Dante to his allusiveness and felicity can add eloquence, 
 as in — 
 
 Piovcan di fuoco dilatate fiKlc, 
 Come di neve in alpc scnza vento ;
 
 1 68 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 or m- 
 
 La bocca mi bacio tutto tiemante : 
 Galcotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse : 
 Quel glorno piu non vi leggemmo avante ; 
 
 or in- 
 
 Poscia, piu che 'I dolor, pote '1 digiuno — 
 
 he seems to me so firmly rooted on a twin peak of 
 Parnassus (with Homer immovable on the other) that no 
 poet who was not an Italian or a Greek could ever expect 
 to dislodge him. 
 
 It is just there that you come brusquely against the 
 sharp edge of translation, where, if you have any ear at 
 all, you will be cut off in the very bud of your endeavour. 
 Neither French nor English can afford such vowel -sounds, 
 nor English at least afford the dissyllabic rimes, which, be 
 it observed, can be as lengthy or as crisp as you will. See, 
 for instance, in the first two of the verses just cited, the 
 difference in speed of their decisive endings. In alpe sen%a 
 venfo : that can hardly be too drawn-out. Non vi leggemmo 
 avante : that ends with a slam, the phrase really closing 
 down on a«/, and the final syllable nothing more than 
 a hissed aspirate. We can slam in English, none better ; 
 and poets of other tongues may well envy us our terrific 
 arsenal of monosyllables. 'That day we read no more* 
 will do well enough for the second phrase, if only you can 
 compass your other two rimes in ' ore '. Byron boggled 
 it badly when he chose that particular terzet for a set of 
 feminine endings, and found himself forced into such 
 a banality as : 
 
 That day no further leaf we did uncover — 
 
 as if any one out of a translation ever did uncover any leaf
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 169 
 
 of any book. But worse tlian that, he missed the whole 
 tremendous finality of avante by an unfortunate necessity 
 which he had done better to avoid by any circuit, however 
 wide. 
 
 I must lay down an axiom, I think, that no translation 
 of Dante can pretend to be adequate which does not render 
 him in terza rima. Matthew Arnold, if I remember, pre- 
 tended the same necessity for translations of Homer, and 
 with sound reasons behind him. I can therefore leave out 
 Cary with all the blank-versifiers, and Dr. Shadwell with 
 his Marvellisms. But even so the troubles of the translator 
 cannot be confined within the high moral limits which 
 Arnold reared about Homer. To Dante must be added 
 two more difficulties inherent in his metre : those of pace 
 and rime ; and one more inherent in his language. All 
 three of them interconnect ; for, as I have said, the 
 double-endings have tlie power of quickening and retarding 
 the pace at will ; and the fact that Italian is rich in 
 lK)lysyllabic words forces the poet to pack his lines, and 
 'to load his rifts with ore'. If, then, wc attempt to 
 render Dante in five-beat terza rima, we are deprived of 
 pace by at least two defects — the first that we cannot find 
 feminine rimes enough, and the second that we are forced to 
 choke up our lines with auxiliary verbs, conjugational jire- 
 positions, articles and what-not with which the Italian can 
 mainly dispense. Nevertheless, as we shall see, so rich 
 are we in monosyllables, in practice the five-beat line is 
 nearly always too long for what Dante puts into iiis, and we 
 are forced to fill it out with redundancies and augmentations 
 which in nine cases out of ten weaken the effect we aim at. 
 One other weailli tlie Italian enjoys — an abundance of 
 liquid consonants, by whose means extra syllables can be
 
 170 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 run into the line without dislocation, which serve to ripple 
 without hindering the pace. Take this, e. g. : 
 
 Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio 
 
 {Par. xxxiii, I.) 
 and compare with it : 
 
 Thow mayde and 'mooder, doghter of thy sone : 
 
 there Dante is able to endow his line with three extra 
 syllables without at all retarding the flow of his invocation. 
 Chaucer, who is speedy enough, must in that line go 
 without the enhancing. But not always. I believe that 
 Chaucer does a better copy out of Dante than any other 
 English poet has yet done, nearer at least to the spirit of 
 Dante's prosody (as he was nearer to Dante's own spirit) : 
 and that although he rejected terza rlma altogether, and 
 did not trouble himself to be literal. Judge him by his 
 first stanza : 
 
 Thow mayde and mooder, doghter of thy sone, 
 
 Thow welle of mercy, synful soule's cure, 
 
 In whom that God, for bountee, chces to wone, 
 
 Thow humble, and heigh over every creature, 
 
 Thou nobledest so ferforth oure nature, 
 
 That no desdeyn the Makere hadde of kynde 
 
 His sone in blood and flessh to clothe and wynde. 
 
 {Second Nun s Tale, 36 seq.) 
 
 In his fourth line, you will see, he picks up all the enrich- 
 ment of liquid redundancies which he lost in his first. 
 Well, we of to-day can never regain the advantages which 
 Chaucer had — advantages as much of the flesh, so to speak, 
 as of the spirit of his verse. For the spirit, sufficient 
 to remember the limpidity of belief; for texture, the 
 elasticity of a language which gave him ' soules ', if he
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 171 
 
 wanted it, and ' nobledest ', two or three syllables, which 
 he could shorten when he pleased. And then he could 
 use ' wone ' without going to Wardour Street to buy it. ' 
 Shelley's copy is much better than Byron's (which is 
 extremely bad), though it is loose as translation, and as 
 a rendering, I think, both too slow and too slack. He 
 manages his rimes without undue force, some of them 
 with a beautiful ease and simplicity — such as that of the 
 matin birds, which 
 
 With perfect joy received the early day, 
 Singing within the glancing leaves, whose sound 
 Kept a low burden to their roundelay. 
 
 He has taken the first fifty lines of the 28th Purgatorio, 
 which describe the Earthly Paradise, and Matilda there, 
 gathering flowers. These are the first three terzets : 
 
 And earnest to explore within — around — 
 The divine wood, whose thick green living woof 
 Tempered the young day to the sight — I wound 
 Up the green s!oj)e, beneath the forest's roof, 
 With slow, soft steps leaving the mountain's steep, 
 And sought those inmost labyrinths, motion-proof 
 Against the air, that in the stillness dee)) 
 And solemn struck u])on my forehead bare. 
 The slow, soft stroke of a continuous. . . , 
 
 Exactly ! Where would he get a rime ? He was dished ; 
 and, if he had |)ersevered with the thing, would have been 
 forced into a new scheme. The whole thing is doubtless 
 a draft. He would not have left ' slow, soft stejis ' in one 
 stanza and 'slow, soft stroke' in the next, lint 'motion- 
 proof is the only forced rime in the nine lines; anil he 
 improves as he goes on. Inevitably, as I have explained, 
 Shelley has to (ill out his lines with imjjorted ore. In
 
 172 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 line 2 he has four adjectives to Dante's three ; and in the 
 last terzet a number of them where Dante has scarcely any. 
 For ])ace, it must be compaied with the original ; so for 
 spontaneity, so for succinctness of expression. Dante's is 
 all agog for adventure. Shelley's is perfunctory, almost 
 languid. It is a copy of verses. Chaucer's is anything 
 but that. 
 
 There is a reason for much of that, whidi is that the 
 line is too long for us. Any translation, on those terms, 
 will appear slack and loose-limbed. I have, myself, always 
 believed that to pack the line as closely as Dante does, 
 and to get the pace out of it which is impossible in a five- 
 beat line without weak endings, it would answer us to 
 render Dante's five-footer by our four-footer. That, to 
 begin with, would make packing necessary. Also the pace 
 would be mended. When I was writing a road-book of 
 Tuscany, and had to quote freely from the Commedia, I 
 rendered him so as I wanted him. I have only scraps to 
 show for it, but they may be better than nothing as a fore- 
 shadowing of what a better poet than I could do with that 
 measure.' Take, for example, 
 
 * Whether he was Ijeltcr or worse, I ought to say that Count 
 Taaffe, that expansive Pisan friend of Byron and the Shelleys, 
 whom they called False Taaffe, for obvious reasons, put forth in 
 1822 a 'Comment on the Divine Comedy', with specimens of 
 a translation of the Inferno in octosyllabic terza rima. Of this 
 it may be sufficient to quote one line : 
 
 I Mantuan, capering, squalid, squalling. 
 
 'There', says Byron, 'is all alliteration and inversion enough, 
 surely ! I have advised him to frontispiece his book with his own 
 head, Capo di Tiaditorc, " the head of a traitor " ; then will come 
 the title-page comment — Hell ! ' I have not succeeded in finding 
 that line, however. Byron was very capable of inventing it.
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 173 
 
 Noi eravam lunghesso il mare ancora, 
 Come gente che pensa a suo cammino, 
 Che va col core, e col corpo dimora . . . 
 
 {Putj. ii, 10.) 
 That went — 
 
 So stayed we in that sea-bound spot, 
 Like folk who, thinking of the march, 
 Are all for going, yet go not. 
 Or for— 
 
 Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli ; 
 Montasi sii Bismantova in cacume 
 Con esso i pie . . . 
 
 (^Piirg. iv. 25.) 
 
 try- 
 To Sanleo up, to Noli down, 
 
 To steep Bismantova you must climb 
 On your two feet . . . 
 
 Then Pier delk- Vigne: 
 
 lo son colui che tcnni anibo le chiavi 
 Del cor di Federico, e che le volsi 
 Serrando e disserrando si soavi, 
 
 Che dal secreto suo quasi ogni uom tolsi. 
 
 {Ir,/. xiii. 58.) 
 
 the last line of which needs some skilful packing; but 
 
 I am that one who held both keys 
 
 Of Frederick's heart, whicli 1 dispensed, 
 Ojx^ning and shutting with such ease. 
 
 There was no man but found it fenced, 
 
 seems to me to be pretty well. To go on with Pier, here 
 is a serried verse which 1 think the four-footur can tackK- : 
 
 L'animo niio ])er disdegnoso gusto, 
 Creileiido col morir fuggir disdegno, 
 Ingiusto fcce me contra me giusto —
 
 174 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 In English : 
 
 My spirit, driven by scornful gust 
 To ease in death the sting of scorn, 
 To my just self made me unjust. 
 
 Dilution must have been the result of putting that into five 
 feet, since everything is there in four, and the pace main- 
 tained. Lastly, I will put forward a rather longer stretch, 
 from the l6th Paradiso, where Cacciaguida is moralizing 
 on cities in decay : 
 
 Se tu riguardi Luni ed Urbisaglia 
 Come son ite, e come se ne vanno 
 Diretro ad esse Chiusi e Sinigaglia : 
 
 Udir come le schiatte si disfanno, 
 Non ti parra nuova cosa ne forte, 
 Poscia che le cittadi termine hanno. 
 
 Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte, 
 Si come voi ; ma celasi in alcuna 
 Ciie dura molto, e le vite son corte. 
 
 E come il volger del ciel della luna 
 Copre e discopre i liti senza posa, 
 Cos! fa di Fiorenza la fortuna ; 
 
 Perche non dee parer mirabil cosa 
 Cid ch' io diro degli alti Fiorentini 
 Onde la fama nel tempo e nascosa ; 
 
 which one has a shot at, like this : 
 
 ' See Luni, Urbisaglia pass, 
 
 And after them how flicker and fade 
 Chiusi and Sinigaglia — alas! 
 
 When this house makes that house a shade, 
 There's no new thing nor hard in this, 
 That cities wreck the state they made ! 
 
 To all your gear a term there is 
 
 Even as to you ; but yours is soon. 
 And a town's death-bed what man sees.''
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 175 
 
 Lo, as the wheeling arc of the moon 
 Bares or engulphs the fretted coast, 
 So waxes, wanes of Florence the rune ; 
 
 Nor deem it marvel if I boast 
 
 Deeds of those great old Florentines 
 Whose ancient fame's forgotten and lost. 
 
 Even so, I have to own to two words to his one : ' flicker 
 and fade ', * waxes, wanes ', ' great old ', ' forgotten and 
 lost '. So much must one pay for a monosyllabic lan- 
 guage. 
 
 There are marvels of beauty in the Commedta, scrolls of 
 terror and horror, with which I have never felt myself able 
 to deal. One is what one is, and must bow to the 
 catechismal decree. Such a passage as that which begins 
 
 Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli 
 
 is unapproachable by my English. That noble scene of 
 the gathering of rain in the mountains — who that has ever 
 witnessed it can forget it, or fail to find it here ? — 
 
 Indi la valle, come il di fu spento, 
 
 Da Pratomagno al Gran Giogo copcrse 
 Di nc'bbia, e il ciel di sopra fcce intcnto. 
 
 That is true : and having read it, let the reader render it if 
 he has the courage. 
 
 The one English poet, after Chaucer, who could have 
 given Dante in our tongue, and to his readers a lively 
 sense of Dante's genius, was Dante Rossetti. He did 
 no more than the Franccsca episode — than which there is 
 notliing better in English, and the seven lines consecrated 
 to La Pia. The-^e are what translation should be ; the 
 idioms intcr])cnetr.ite ; you may read liere an Italian in 
 English. It remains to be observed, however, that
 
 176 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 Rossettl has chosen two episodes peculiarly sympathetic to 
 himself: therefore, as not all of Dante lies in the Comwedia, 
 and I cannot quit the matter without a remembrance of 
 Rossetti, let me close with something from the mystical, rapt, 
 and, con rhpetto parlando, slightly ridiculous Dante of the 
 Vita Nuova. All lovers are slightly ridiculous, and if they 
 are good ones glory in it. Dante Rossetti, always in love 
 with love, and consequently with anybody's mistress, dead 
 or alive, at a moment's notice, turned the Vita Nuova 
 (one of the highest compliments ever paid to a lady) into 
 an English love-poem. How original he was, how close 
 to his original at the same time, one specimen must suffice 
 me to demonstrate. I take the following stanza from the 
 canzone. Donna pietosa e di novella etate, and will give 
 Rossetti first, asking the reader to compare the two pieces, 
 and to observe how the genius of English, perhaps in sj)ite 
 of the poets, has heightened the effect of the Tuscan. 
 The stanza describes the skyey and other portents which 
 attended the death of Beatrice : 
 
 Then saw I many broken hinted sights 
 
 In the uncertain state I stepp'd into. 
 
 Meseem'd to be I know not in what place, 
 
 Where ladies through the streets, like mournful lights, 
 Ran with loose hair, and eyes that frighten'd you, 
 By their own terror, and a pale amaze : 
 The while, little by little, as I thought. 
 
 The sun ceas'd, and the stars began to gather, 
 
 And each wept at the other ; 
 
 And birds dropp'd in mid-flight out of the sky ; 
 
 And earth shook suddenly ; 
 
 And I was 'ware of one, hoarse and tired out. 
 
 Who asked of mc : ' Hast thou not heard it said ? . . . 
 • Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead ! '
 
 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 177 
 
 Follows the original : — 
 
 Poi vidi cose dubitose molte 
 
 nel vano immaginare, ov' io entrai ; 
 ed esser mi parca non so in qual loco, 
 e veder donne andar per via disciolte, 
 qual lagrimando, e qual traendo guai, 
 che di tristizia saettavan foco. 
 Poi mi parve vedere appoco appoco 
 turbar lo Sole ed apparir la stella, 
 e pianger egli ed ella ; 
 cader gli augelli volando per I'a're, 
 e la terra tremare ; 
 ed uom m' apparve scolorito e fioco, 
 dicendomi : Che fai ? non sai novella ? 
 Morta e la donna tua, ch' era si bella. 
 
 Rossetti has taken liberties, whose beauty justifies them, I 
 think : ' broken hinted sights ' is stronger than cose 
 dubitose ; clonne dtsc'tolte is enhanced by the particularity of 
 •loose hair'; I forgive ' eyes that frighten'd you '. The 
 force of the strong verb ' saettavan ' is lost ; but against 
 that, how beautiful is ' And each wept at the other ' ! 
 Lastly, consider if 
 
 And birds dropp'd in mid-flight out of the sky ; 
 And earth shook suddenly 
 
 be not more impressive than the more languid polysyllables 
 of 
 
 Cader gli augelli volando per 1' a're, 
 e la terra tremare. 
 
 It certainly seems so to me. 
 
 In the hands of a divinely a])pointed translator, therefore, 
 it seems to me that you would gain as much as you would 
 lose by the monosyllabic (juality of Lnglisli, provitk-d that 
 you used the shorter line. I see no other way of preserving 
 
 M
 
 178 ON TRANSLATING DANTE 
 
 the pace of terza rtma. But that matter must be left in 
 the air. 
 
 I am sorry that I cannot comjjletc my specimens with 
 one from Hayley, who, in an essay upon Epic Poetry, ])ut 
 forth the first three cantos of the Inferno in Dante's metre. 
 Southey praised them at the expense of everything else 
 Hayley had done. 1 am afraid that was the only way of 
 praising them. Yet I don't see liow they could possibly 
 have been worse than Byron's.
 
 Select Conversations with a 
 Blackbiy^d 
 
 I HAD known him, of course, for some years. We 
 were as friendly as any one can expect to be with a 
 blackbird ; always passed the time of day when we met, and 
 so on. But we never became what you could call really 
 intimate until a week or so ago. Coming upon him then 
 on the croquet-lawn, disengaged and seemingly in an open 
 humour, I went and sat down near him, asking him how 
 he did. 
 
 His eye twinkled, and he flicked his tail up briskly. 
 ' Well ', he said, ' purely well. After life's fitful fever . . . 
 We have got over the worst of it, I hope. She has settled 
 down now — to six. Pretty good, we think. But the 
 weather has been all against her. To-tlay, I assure you, is 
 the first easy, as you may say, wliich I have had since the 
 Day.' 
 
 ' Fourteenth of February ? ' 
 
 'That's right,' he said. 'We date from that.' 
 
 He had, at the moment, tin- intent, sidelong regard of 
 the turf beneath him which I knew well. Very shortly he 
 was decj)ly engaged in a momentous life-anil-death kind of 
 affair which made conversation impossible : and it was not 
 until he liad temporarily bestowed the spoils of victory that 
 I ventured to resume. 
 
 Wc got talking about Mr. I'.liot Howard's book on
 
 i8o SELTTCT CONVERSATIONS 
 
 Bird-Territory. He liad not heard of it, but was interested 
 — or polite enough to seem so — in what I had to say 
 about it. 
 
 ' Well, of course ! ' he said. ' Territory ? Yes, indeed 
 we have territory.' Here he cast his eye lightly over the 
 stretch of green grass which I knew for his. ' Haven't 
 you ? ' 
 
 I said that we had, the lucky ones amongst us. 
 
 ' And I suppose that you arrange your little affairs, 
 matrimonial and so on, upon the scale of your belongings ? ' 
 
 I pointed out a distinction between my nation's practice 
 and what Mr. Howard reported of his. * With us ', 
 I said, ' the funded man alone has complete freedom of 
 choice. He can claim the girl of his heart, whatever her 
 walk in life. It is the landless man who will choose 
 a woman of propeity — chiefly because he must. He sighs 
 as a lover ; he obeys as a man of sense.' 
 
 That set my friend chuckling. ' Excuse my smiling,' 
 he said. ' Your Mr. Howard will have instructed you 
 better than that, no doubt.' 
 
 ' He seems to think ' I began, but he stopped me. 
 
 ' A bird without territory ', he said, ' would not get a 
 ghost of an ofl^er. That is elementary. How should he ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, then with you ', I said, ' it is the lady who proposes 
 — and disposes as well ? ' 
 
 He fixed me Jwith a bright blank eye, really about as 
 expressive as a monocle. ' Well, seeing that she is the 
 beginning and end of the whole afl^air,' he said, ' it would 
 be very q|ld if she did not.' 
 
 'Matriarchy!' I exclaimed. 'I never knew that, but 
 of course ' 
 
 He took the charge easily. * I assure you that we have
 
 WITH A BLACKBIRD i8i 
 
 to work for our pleasures ! Not only must we stake out 
 our claim every year, but we must maintain it, and advertise 
 it. And that 's hard work. Morning and evening, in 
 season and out, I have been at it. Year after year ! ' 
 
 This was hard doctrine to me. ' But surely ', 1 urged 
 him, ' in your own case — a long alliance ? ' 
 
 He was astonished. ' What on earth do you mean ? 
 Long alliance ! If it is so, I can satisfy you that I have 
 earned it.' 
 
 'Do you mean that there is a discretion ?' 
 
 He whistled shrewdly. ' I should jolly well say so. 
 Every year my land is open to all comers, and must be 
 defended. Naturally, she never commits herself until the 
 thing is settled one way or another. How could she, poor 
 girl ? Look what depends upon it ! The whole duty of 
 bird, good Heavens ! I grant you that I have maintained 
 her — to put it so — for many years now — quite a number 
 of years : but I am getting on, of course, and sometimes 
 wonder how long I shall be able to keep it up. That 's a 
 warning in itself. Confound that chap — excuse me one 
 moment.' Three long leaps, a swift flight the length of 
 the lawn, and a trespasser was substantially warned off. 
 
 When he came back — ' Forgive my ignorance,' I said, 
 ' but it seems to me that your deeds of arms are only 
 performed on your own kind. Now, tiiere was a wagtail 
 perking about here a little while ago ' 
 
 ' Well,' he said, ' what about it ? He don't matter. 
 My wife couldn't look at ium. He 's of another race.' 
 
 I saw that ; but — ' Thrushes ? ' I asked him. ' How 
 about thrushes ? ' 
 
 He was slightly embarrassed. ' Ah, liirushes . . . yes, 
 that 's a delicate subject. 1 am afraid that cases have been
 
 i82 SELECT CONVERSATIONS 
 
 known — rare cases — nearly all of them in confinement, 
 where the morale is — but still, I must admit, the thing is 
 not unknown. After all, thrushes are, in a way, a kindred 
 race. But we don't like it. It is one of those things that 
 arent done. We need not pursue the matter. And anyhow, 
 wagtails, flycatchers, and that sort, don't exhaust the soil. 
 There 's no objection to them on that score.' 
 
 I saw that immediately. ' Apart from all that,' I said, 
 ' we have brought our conversation to a point where your 
 code and mine definitely separate. According to yours, 
 fighting, like marriage, can only be with your own nation.' 
 
 He threw up his iiead. ' Well, of course — since there 
 is nothing else to fight about.' 
 
 ' With us ', I said, ' the only people we do not (as a rule) 
 fight with is our own.' 
 
 He looked gravely at me. ' So I have understood from 
 a recent acquaintance who came over from France not long 
 ago. He had been compelled to leave his estates owing 
 to what I must be pardoned for calling the deplorable 
 proceedings of your and other nations. Incredible ! But 
 we must make allowances ' 
 
 ' 1 hope you will,' I said humbly, for I felt his rebuke. 
 ' Yet I believe that your race also would allow the 
 unfortunate necessity of defending your homes against 
 marauders, brigands, buccaneers, sea and land pirates.' 
 
 He admitted that freely, ' Of course, of course ! 
 Landless folk. There are enemies of the kind, one knows : 
 homophagists, cannibals, God knows what : crows, hawks, 
 jays — ! Naturally, one can't see one's children devoured 
 before one's eyes. But men of property, a settled nation 
 — did you think the Germans would eat your children, by 
 any chance ; '
 
 WITH A BLACKBIRD 183 
 
 'Well, we did think almost that at one time,' I con- 
 fessed. He laughed — quite pleasantly. ^ 
 
 ' How comical ! But one gets flustered now and again 
 — then one makes a fool of oneself.' I owned that one 
 did. He looked quizzically at me as he pursued his 
 advantage. 
 
 ' Supi)Osing that you really thought that the Germans 
 would kill your children, do you now think that they would 
 have killed as many as you yourselves caused to bt killed 
 in defence of them ? It seems unlikely. One would 
 suppose that the Germans would have other things to do 
 if they had come here.' 
 
 ' Britons ', I firmly said, ' never will be slaves.' 
 
 He lifted his beak, perhaps his eyebrows, but I could 
 see none. ' Slaves ! Well — that of course is a relative 
 term. The question should have been — our question 
 ivoultl have been — Would invasion, even occupation, by 
 the Germans interfere with the Great Affair ? ' 
 
 ' You mean ?' I said. 
 
 He replied severely, 'There is only one Great Affliir.' 
 He left it at that, and left me too. We did not meet 
 again for some days. 
 
 II 
 
 A warm, still evening after a day of sun-glare anil 
 blustering wind — the wind which we call a ' tucking wind ' 
 in these parts. I heard him pi])ing in the yew-hedge on 
 the border-line of his country, and presently found him, 
 high-perched upon one of the domes of the liugc clump 
 which we know as the Kremlin. ' Hulloa,' 1 said; he 
 lightly replied witii a ' Hulloa yourself,' and then diojipeil
 
 i84 SELECT CONVERSATIONS 
 
 down witliin chatting range. That made things easier for 
 me. I can nev^r talk up to a man on a ladder. 
 
 I said, to begin with, that he had given me a great deal 
 to think about ; that his point of view differed very much 
 from ours — in nothing more than in the exclusive impor- 
 tance he attached to what he called the Great Affair. 
 Knowing him touchy upon that subject, marking indeed a 
 premonitory ruffling of plumage, I hastened to suggest 
 other matters which seemed to us of perhaps equal weight. 
 I instanced Religion, Discovery, Art, as causes for which 
 a man might forswear father, mother, wife, and even 
 
 children. 'Love ' I began: he chuckled — then 
 
 checked himself 
 
 * Aren't you confusing ends and means, possibly ? ' he 
 asked. 'Just consider. What sort of a Religion is it 
 which moves you to neglect your duty ? What purpose is 
 there in Discovery which cannot better your race ? As 
 for Art — well, that is an embroidery of life. One does 
 not commit suicide for the sake of a pretty nest.' 
 
 ' Sacrifice — ' I murmured — ' pursuit of the ideal ' 
 
 He leapt hastily into the air. 
 
 ' Oh, sacrifice ! ' he cried : ' God knows what ive know 
 of sacrifice ! More, I believe, than you have begun to 
 understand. Nor can you hope to understand it until you 
 discern the ends of sacrifice. Let me ask you this : have 
 you a clear notion of what Validity means ? Think that 
 out if you wish to understand our religion. Ah, sacrifice, 
 for instance ! Pursuit of the ideal ! Just take the trouble 
 to consider the claims of Validity.' 
 
 ' Efficiency,' I said, ' is a term which has grown common 
 among us of late. I don't doubt that we include much of 
 what you cover by your " Validity ".'
 
 WITH A BLACKBIRD 185 
 
 He looked more than doubtful. ' We'll soon see about 
 that. Do you hold inefficiency to be a crime ? ' 
 
 ' A misfortune, rather,' I said. He laughed. 
 
 * So I thought. My dear Sir, we are a long way off 
 each other. I fear that I must trouble you to listen to me.' 
 
 I said that I was at his feet — which was literally true. 
 ' With us,' he said, ' the End of life is attained when we 
 have carried on the race to the limit of our forces. We 
 do not recognize any other commandment ; we do not 
 look to any future but that of the race. To ensure Validity 
 therefore is the whole duty of Bird. The greatest crime 
 I could commit would be to become in-valid ; the greatest 
 crime my neighbours could commit would be to suffer me 
 to exist, being in-valid.' 
 
 'Let me understand once for all,' I interposed. ' By 
 in- valid you mean incapable of the Great Affair ? ' 
 
 ' That only.' 
 
 ' And they would put you to death ! ' I cried, * If you 
 were ill, if you were maimed.'" 
 
 'Undoubtedly they would,' 
 
 ' Life, then, has no sanctity among you ? ' 
 
 ' It has so much sanctity,' he said j)lainly, ' that death 
 has none. Life insists on continuance at all costs — yours, 
 mine, or another's, it matters not a straw. When Validity 
 ceases, life is negligible, and an offence.' 
 
 ' I know,' I said slowly, tiiinking as 1 spoke. ' I 
 know that you take death very lightly. 1 have observed 
 that for myself. You seem to have no associations, no 
 memories ' 
 
 ' When you are dead,' he replied, ' you cease to exist, 
 for us. If you cease to exist you are not here. You may 
 be elsewhere. We say, you are in your race, which cannot
 
 i86 SELECT CONVERSATIONS 
 
 die. Certainly you are not in what you leave behind you, 
 stark on the <'round.' 
 
 o 
 
 ' We ', I said, ' reverence the dead for what they once 
 were.' 
 
 ' You seem foolish to me,' he answered. ' What you 
 once were is elsewhere. Reverence that.' 
 
 I felt the rebuke. My eyes sank before the unblinking 
 ring of one of his. Presently he resumed. 
 
 ' Reverence, rather, Life,' he said, ' and take example 
 from my nation. Don't you understand how far we carry 
 that principle ? Don't you know that to defend Life we 
 will cheerfully lose it ? ' I struck in. 
 
 ' Nobody can deny that virtue at least to us,' I said. 
 ' In our late war tens of thousands of our young men laid 
 down their lives without one look backward.' 
 
 ' And how many tens of thousand young Germans laid 
 down theirs ?' he asked me. ' I see I must be plainer yet 
 with you. Consider the enemy of all birds, whom we call 
 the Strumpet — and rightly so, for she alone in our genus 
 claims the services of many males, and she alone is care- 
 less of her own race. Think for a moment of what many 
 and many a poor couple will do in whose nest the Great 
 Strumpet spawns her lust-begotten egg. Day by day that 
 monstrous nakedness swells and spreads, hour by hour 
 from the yawning gullet comes howling for food. They 
 see their flesh and blood cast out, crushed, throttled, 
 suflx)cated. There is no more end to the tragedy than to 
 the clamour and inordinate desire. The world resounds 
 with them : death is abroad, with life in the midst of it — 
 evil, insatiate, enemy, alien ; but life. What do the parents 
 but spend themselves on the tyrant which is murdering 
 their young ? They feed the death-dealer even though by
 
 WITH A BLACKBIRD 187 
 
 that very act he be enabled to deal further death. More 
 than that, the country-side is under contribution, bringing 
 in provision to her who hereafter will levy more ruin and 
 death. You prate to nie of your religion — you to me? 
 Ah, when your people, who dread the Germans, for 
 religion's sake feed German children, then you may measure 
 religions witli mine. But that is not yet.' His neck 
 feathers stood dangerously out, liis golden beak remained 
 oi)cn. I feared the pip for him ; but he shook himself, 
 and made excuses. 
 
 ' Forgive me. I was warm. Naturally. I feel strongly 
 on these matters. The Cuckoo-peril is constantly before 
 us. Only lately a dear friend of ours was a victim.' 
 
 1 said that it must be particularly hateful to his own race, 
 considering the strictness of its views of the marriage-state. 
 Polygamy was a different matter, almost involved in 
 patriarchy. Tliat he allowed, but was struck by my 
 suggestion tliat polyandry was perhaps only an extension 
 of the matriarchal system. He could not allow it, how- 
 ever, on reflection. * No, no, it is promiscuity, neither 
 more nor less. It is no better than a house-sparrow. 
 But wc have wandered from the point. The subject is a 
 very painful one.' 
 
 The conversation, once broken off, was not resumed. 
 
 His wife callcil him, and he liastened away.
 
 Good Saint Use 
 
 SAINT GEORGE is for England, as we know very 
 well ; but his altars are served more in town than 
 country. In the villages we have another saint whose 
 worship dates from long before the Christian rule. An 
 endlong study of mine has been, and still is, to track him, 
 so to speak, to his cradle ; to find him in his insipient days 
 when, as the Primitives showed our Lord, or his friend 
 little St. John, he might be playing about with a goldfinch 
 in his fist, or cuddling the neck of a lamb. But Saint Use, 
 I think, was born wise, and slow, and old. 
 
 His altar is the lap of every village-wife who respects 
 herself. Upon it she oifers a daily oblation to the name 
 and fame of her house. Beside it — at its horns which are 
 her knees — the generations in turn are taught the rudiments 
 of his worship ; how to walk under his shrewd horny- 
 rimmed eyes, how to play with each other, how to face 
 school, and the school-yard discipline, which is the harder 
 of the two, how to meet (with what fine shades of difference) 
 the clergyman and the minister, the ladies, the owner of 
 the great house and the farmers ; which old men you may 
 call by their Christian names, and which never ; when to 
 put up your hair, if you are a girl, or to smoke, if you are 
 a boy ; the rules of acquaintance when playtime is done 
 with ; courtship, betrothal, the ritual of marriage, childbirth, 
 death and its dues — all tliese things you learn at Saint Use's 
 altar, and none of them anywhere else. The precepts 
 may never be varied, and never have been. But they are
 
 GOOD SAINT USE 189 
 
 strictly local. If a family leaves the village and settles in 
 a town ; if a young man goes for a policeman or a soldier, 
 or a motor-mechanic, and founds a family of his own in 
 London or Bristol, Glasgow or Liverpool, the lore departs 
 from him, and he won't pick it up again should he return. 
 But if he go farming to the States or to Canada, Saint Use 
 goes with him, chief of his Lares ; and the rite will persist 
 though the ritual may vary. 
 
 All that is to put the thing at its broadest : naturally 
 there are the slack, the indifferent, and the libertines to be 
 reckoned with. The point is that there are no infidels. 
 The rules may be relaxed ; faith may be without works ; 
 but the Faith is unquestioned. It is learned indirectly ; it 
 is imbibed rather than learned, taken in at the pores. Like 
 essential Christianity as the Quakers exhibit it, it is a Way 
 of Life. Occasionally, but the case is rare, it conflicts with 
 the more authorized religion. When it does so, it prevails ; 
 and the reason of that may be that dogmatic Christianity 
 has seldom been a Way of Life in England, and lacks tlie 
 basic strength which the oKler rule has. Nor need it seem 
 so very odd that Quakerism lias never-made much way with 
 village people, who, having an illumination of their own, 
 may feel instinctively that there cannot l>e two lamps 
 burning in one heart. I am not inclined to dogmatize about 
 that ; but this I know, that where the law of Clmrch or 
 Chai)cl conflicts with the earlier law, the followers of Saint 
 Use do not hesitate to pronounce 'under which King'. 
 Two common points of divergence present themselves at 
 once: Divorce and Illegitimacy, to name efltct for cause. 
 Marital infidelity, 1 should say, was the rarest of all village 
 trespasses, certainly on tlie woman's part ; I believe on 
 the man's also. I he Churches otier no remedy but sufkr
 
 190 GOOD SAINT USE 
 
 ance. All village people would stand clear for divorce. 
 On the other hand, illegitimacy — not profligacy, which is 
 high disgrace — is common ; yet it may always be righted 
 (they think) by marriage, not necessarily with the offending 
 party ; and the mother does not lose caste. In both cases 
 Church and Chapel would be stern in rebuke. Saint Use 
 has a milder rule. So also his ethic may conflict with that 
 of the State. Take poaching. Policeman and magistrate 
 condemn it ; but Saint Use says, Not at all. You will 
 never convince a peasant that a haie is not his for the 
 knocking over. 
 
 I daresay that I could name half a hundred families here- 
 about, sound Church or Chapel folk, Foresters or Rechabitcs, 
 some voting Tory at elections, some all for Labour, as the 
 case may be, who are none the less strict followers of Saint 
 Use. But whenever I begin to think them over I find my 
 thoughts falling upon one family in particular which I have 
 known intimately for many years, one in which I will not 
 deny that the weight of the full tradition has been supported 
 by force of character out of the common. But consider it, 
 you who would know what, between them, character and 
 tradition may do. Father, a farm-labourer, son, grandson, 
 descendant of such, earning when I first knew him fourteen 
 shillings a week. A man, at that time, of fifty, or rather 
 more. Mother, small, thin, wiry, near-sighted, troubled 
 with varicose veins ; incessantly at work in somebody's 
 house, any house (apparently) but her own ; never, so far 
 as one knew, with a clear day at home except Sunday. 
 Family, six daughters, ranging in age from thirty to half 
 as much. There had been a son, a fine young man, who 
 had died of an accident on the eve of his marriage. All 
 but one of those girls had been put to service at fifteen, and
 
 GOOD SAINT USE 191 
 
 all had done well. Five are married, all five have children ; 
 all are fortunate in them, and all but one have been fortunate 
 in their men. The youngest girl, out of what her mother 
 could earn, was sent to a High School, took a scholarship, 
 then a degree, and is now in full work as a teacher. Now, 
 the house in which they were all born, from which they went 
 out to be married, to which they all come back, as to home, 
 as often as they can, is one half of a thatched building, 
 shai)ed like a hencoop. It has one room down, two up — 
 iiutches, those, under the thatch, where you can barely 
 stand, and where, to look out of the window, you must 
 lie on the Hoor. In such a marten's nest that strong couple 
 reared six handsome girls to be as good as they are hand- 
 some. Now be jtleased to observe : those children were 
 never out of sight, except in school-hours. They might 
 never play in the village street : they never did. As they 
 grew up, and walking days came on, lads ot one sort or 
 anotlier came alx)ut them, and were welcomed or not, 
 acce])ted or not, as might be. But neither then, nor 
 afterwards when courting took its natural jilace, were 
 unaccompanied walks jH.Tmitted ; and neither at home nor 
 in service was that rule broken. I have it from two of 
 them that so it was until they were twenty-one. There 
 were betrothals, of course, before that age, rings exchanged, 
 fimily solemnities. No matter. The rule held. How it 
 could have been inculcated, how enforced, except ihrougli 
 the pores, I do not know. liut this I know, that that little 
 old woman, peering with dim blue eyes through sjjectacles 
 at the world as it j)asses, is still the centre and shrine of 
 fimily honour and love, th.ough the family itself is now 
 broken up into five, each with its hearth and donie^tic 
 ritual. One of the daughters is now a woman of forty with
 
 192 GOOD SAINT USE 
 
 children looking out into the world. The rule holds ; 
 they have been brought up by it, they will carry it on. 
 Great is Saint Use, By his fruits you shall know him. 
 
 They say that the roots of his altar are being sapped by 
 changes in the world beyond his pale. Prosperity, they 
 say, is slackening the knees of his sons ; vanity and 
 frivolity, and new approaches to them, are stinging the 
 blood of his daughters. I grant the danger. The lore 
 may fade, the altar sag in the middle, break all about us and 
 smother in dust the hearth — but I hope not. With Saint 
 Use will depart a something which has made the best of 
 us what we are, and England what it is. Myself, I trust 
 to Character.
 
 V awful Q^dmission 
 
 THE other night I drove, by invitation, some sixteen 
 miles south by west, through and beyond Cranbourn 
 Chace, from pastoral Wilts into woody Dorset. An open 
 car, a frosty night, and a keen wind. We climbed a bare 
 down, picked our way in and out of the unpeopled Chace, 
 and descended into our neighbour shire through foggy 
 woods tenanted by white owls, and haunted by their cries. 
 There may still have been deer harboured there : it would 
 not have seemed strange to me to hear the sudden howl of 
 a wolf, a signal for more dreadful music of a ])ack in full 
 cry. Anon we turned into the Blandford road — a road so 
 white under the moon that it looked to be new-fallen snow 
 — and ran a switchback course of some six miles between 
 hills as bare as picked bones. There too one expected 
 some revenant or other — say, the Weymouth mail spanking 
 into Handley, or a gibbet at the cross-roads, with a tattered 
 thing in chains, and a crow flacking oflT as we passed. 
 
 After we had turned once more we were in great woods, 
 and passed Eastbury, hidden up in forest trees, with the 
 stone pillars and j)ompous gates still standing which once 
 led the traveller to Buhb Dodington's enormous house. 
 There is little left of it now, I hear ; but what a house for 
 what a man that must have been ! Bubb himself was one 
 of the monunient'il rascals of our history, one too who made 
 his own monument without knowing it, in the imperishable 
 brass of literature. And that rem.iins ; while Eastbury, 
 having been a quarry for some half-do/.en villages and 
 
 N
 
 194 PAINFUL ADMISSION 
 
 farmhouses, has shrunk to but one wing of what Vanbrugh 
 built for him, at the price of £ 140,000. ' The approach 
 to the house was through a bcautitul lawn, whence you 
 passed through a grand arcade, on each side of which the 
 offices were ranged, and you landed on a flight of steps 
 eleven feet high, under a Doric portico, crowned with 
 a pediment extending sixty-two feet, the pillars whereof 
 were forty-six feet high, opening into a magnificent hall 
 adorned with statues and busts *. That was the kind of 
 thing : the House that Bubb built. But the house in which 
 he lives for aye, the other house that Bubb built is his 
 Diary, aere perennius. But I am astray. I wish to moral- 
 ize, but not upon Bubb. 
 
 Ji*.st beyond his great gates, thick in trees of his planting, 
 is the rectory-house of his village, Tarrant-Gunville by 
 name. There we stopped the engine and thawed ourselves ; 
 for there my business was to begin. 
 
 My business was to entertain the village people for an 
 hour — and I did it, or so it seemed. I suppose, as Charles 
 II said, that my nonsense suited their nonsense. The 
 room was full of them, broad-faced, low-browed, bright- 
 eyed people ; the young men ruddy and plain, some of the 
 girls very pretty in a delicate sort of way ; old chin-bearded 
 men with gnarled hands on sticks, who looked as if they 
 had left their smock-frocks at home ; the schoolmistress, as 
 you could tell in a moment ; the postmistress ; grooms from 
 Eastbury ; and a row of shock-headed boys banked against 
 the wall and swinging their feet rather ominously. But 
 that was a false alarm. They were as still as mice from 
 start to finish. 
 
 Before I dared to open my simple budget, however, 
 I felt bound to make the j)ainful admission which I here
 
 PAINFUL ADMISSION 195 
 
 record. I made it, but perfunctorily, not feeling its full 
 force until I had opened my book and begun to read to 
 them. I had been asked by the rector, you shall understand, 
 to 'give an address' to these people, and my admission had 
 to be that, such as I was, I was not possessed of exact 
 knowledge of any subject whatsoever, and that consequently 
 I did not feel entitled to ' address ' them. Amuse them 
 I might, thrill them, possibly ; but instruct them — no. 
 They laughed at me, thinking that the best way of taking 
 it : in Dorset they are as good-mannered as we are in Wilts, 
 and know by instinct how to set a man at his ease. F^ous 
 plaisantez, was the effect of their comment, and I left it at 
 that. But I meant it, and I felt it — I didn't know how 
 much until I was heavily engaged with my affair. 
 
 For just consider it. Exact knowledge was what 
 I owned to the want of; and I was facing an assembly of 
 experts ! Not a man, not a woman, boy or girl there but 
 was more valid in their world than myself. I say nothing 
 of the operations of husbandry — of plowing, dock-lioeing, 
 sowing, reaping, thrcsliing ; of warping the meadows, of 
 shepherding siieep, ringing jiigs' noses, or dealing witli 
 tom-cats. These things any one of my audience conld do 
 — but that is particular knowledge ; in that they specialized. 
 If I am to consider that, I might set off against it that 
 1 can read Homer in his own language or write a longish 
 |)Oem in lerzd rima. On that ground 1 miglit come upsides 
 witli tliem. liut, by Heaven! they could do much more than 
 that. Think only of this among the numberless trades 
 they had mastered : there was not one there, man or boy, 
 woman or maid, who, jmt down in a colUige and few luggs 
 of garden ground, could not within a moritli have In-en 
 keeping himself well, could not within three houis have 
 
 N 2
 
 196 PAINFUL ADMISSION 
 
 got some sort of a meal on the table. You say, were there 
 a pen and some ink at hand, so could you. I don't mean 
 that at all. Before I had sat down to my commerce with 
 the inkpot I should have been starved out. The cold 
 would have pinched me, the fire would not be drawing ; 
 there would be nothing in the pot, and nothing to put in 
 it. Could I keep a pig ? Good God, could I kill him ? 
 And even if I killed him — say, with a hand-grenade and 
 a slow match — what the deuce should I do next? I 
 shudder at the thought of what that might have to be. 
 Well then, could I set a hen, plant potatoes, dibble in my 
 cabbages, make a pudding and immediately eat it, take 
 a swarm of bees, sweep a chimney, draw a rabbit, skin it, 
 bake or boil it ? Not one of those things could I do to 
 save my life. And I had been asked to ' address ' those 
 experts in the art of living ! 
 
 Well, I read them my fairy-tale, and they seemed to like 
 it; but the fairy-tale I was involved in lay, I thought, out- 
 side my book. They seemed, God bless them, to look 
 upon me as a noticeable man, in Wordsworth's phrase. 
 I confess that I felt noticeably foolish. I felt indeed that 
 I and the now dusty Bubb made a pretty pair, and as I sped 
 again past shrouded Eastbury on my way home Gray's ode 
 came into my head : 
 
 How low, how little are the proud, 
 How indigent the great ! 
 
 There are implications in all this which can hardly be 
 avoided. There is this, for instance : that, so far, I have 
 been able, by my wits, to hire persons to do those things 
 for me which I cannot attain unto — specialists, experts in 
 the domestic arts. Yes, it has so far been so, and to my
 
 PAINFUL ADMISSION 197 
 
 mind there is a reproach for me in that also. How many 
 times have I not felt like saying to the maid who lent her 
 grace and nimblencss, her spirit and her youth, to waiting 
 at my table, making my bed, or brushing and folding my 
 clothes, 'My dear, you put me to shame, since surely it is 
 1 rather who ought to be waiting upon you ' ? Fifty, 
 a hundred times. But apart from that, which is perhaps 
 high doctrine, there is this also, that the maids are not now 
 to be had. Where shall I be, and where my sultanate, 
 then ? Down with sultans, by all means ; but perishing 
 is another affair ; and since I am to all intents an armless 
 man, somebody must be dug out who will kill my pigs for 
 me and put morsels into my mouth — or there's an end of 
 me. These are very serious reflections — but at least I have 
 made a clean breast of them.
 
 The Children who Ran o^way 
 
 NOl' in my youth, but in that of my cliildren, there 
 was a haj)])y little book, of that name which became 
 a lioiisehold bible. How many times I have read it through 
 aloud I could not possibly say. Miss Evelyn Sharj) (for 1 
 think it was hers) will forgive me for borrowing a title 
 which exactly fits the tale I am going to rehearse — a true 
 tale, and an old tale, all the people in it dead and gone ; 
 but a tale so comic, so tragic, so hapless, so little understood, 
 that even now it is worth getting at, on the ofF-chance that 
 by unravelling the clue may remain in our iiands. 
 
 Two things can be learned of Slielley — lv)w other people 
 affected him, and how he affected other people : but the 
 third thing, Shelley an sic/j, can only be guessed at from the 
 resultants of the two former. It will never be known to 
 any valuable extent and there 's a reason for that ; indeed, 
 there are several reasons — but one is enough. That one 
 is that he had the knack of appearing the most reasonable 
 of men. Grant him his premisses and he is perfectly 
 logical. So much so, so entirely so, that he iniposed his 
 reasonableness upon himself to start with, and thus was 
 able to state the extraordinary in terms of the ordinary 
 more convincingly than any other accepted poet, the super- 
 natural also in terms of the natural. Sometimes, however, 
 he is so reasonable in an outrageous position as to be 
 sus])icious to the intelligent student. His poems and the 
 content of them one accepts for what they are : Ep'tpsychid'ion, 
 for instance, and Ariel to Miranda. Love songs — one
 
 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 199 
 
 knows them and allows for them. But his letters of grave 
 and dignified expostulation to the bloodsucking Godwin ; 
 his serious efforts to convey sense into the head of Jane 
 Clairniont, and the fact which pervades his correspondence 
 with her that he never suspected her of being the mis- 
 chievous and insincere little parasite she was — here he is 
 so much ' more than usual calm ' as to force the sudden 
 inquiry, is this a man, or a seraph ? It is tempting to call 
 him an ass and be done with him ; it is also foolish, 
 because he was far from being one. You may shrug the 
 whole pack of him and his ladies away with the ' What a 
 set ! What a world ! ' of Mathew Arnold ; but you 
 explain nothing by that. To Southey he appeared a 
 scoundrel ; but Soutliey was a plain man much preoccupied 
 with his duty and much aware of it. Study by all means 
 Mary Shelley's account of the kind of creature to whom 
 she submitted herself and her ardour ; guess from that 
 what Harriet Shelley's miglit have been, lx.'forc you decide 
 what Shelley was, rather tiian ass or scoundrel. Both of 
 those children ran away with him, and each paid for it. 
 Each of them had a fairy husband. 
 
 Our knowledge — or my knowledge — of Mary Shelley 
 is grounded upon her Life and Letters edited by Mrs. 
 Julian Marshall, and published by Bentley in 1 889. 
 Mrs. Marshall tells us that she had access to all existing 
 material, and that Professor Dowdcn had had the same 
 liberty. They had then access, it i? ])lain, to much which 
 they have not used ; and that being so, it is surprising that 
 they shouhl both have missed the ])oint ; for if that is 
 apparent to me, reading what they print, how much more . 
 must it have buffeted them in their faces as they read what 
 they have not printed. But the fact, I am sure, is that
 
 200 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 
 
 they were both under the spell of Shelley as they studied 
 his wife's diaries, of his high seriousness and grave reason- 
 ableness. Those qualities imposed themselves upon them 
 — and no wonder, since they imposed upon Shelley himself. 
 They usurped in the minds of the biographers that place 
 which they had assumed also in Mary's mind, a place 
 which they only lost there for moments at a time even 
 while Shelley lived, and reassumed permanently the moment 
 after he was dead, when indeed, for that poor girl, 
 
 piii che '1 dolor, pote '1 digiuno. 
 
 Of the pair of them Mrs, Marshall i)ublishes rather 
 more and says rather less than Professor Dowden : but 
 neither of them sees the point. 
 
 Mary Godwin, a pretty, ardent, and serious girl, was 
 sixteen when Shelley fell in love with her, and seventeen 
 when he took her away. In spite of a railing and vulgar- 
 minded stepmother (as to whose character consult Charles 
 Lamb) she had lived a happy life, and was to all intents 
 and purposes a baby — not the less so for having been fed 
 upon the sour milk of the Philosopher her father, and 
 subject to his periodical serious alarums and not too 
 scrupulous excursions on the score of money. Her 
 knowledge of life and of the world were as entirely academic 
 as his own. She took him very seriously, never lost her 
 love, nor so far as appears, her reverence for him, and even 
 before she met her fate was doing her young best to be as 
 much of a prig as he was. An American, Aaron Burr, 
 in those days wandering in London, gives us glimpses of 
 her in 1 8 12. He dines, for instance, with Godwin and 
 hears his little son William read a lecture — in imitation of 
 Coleridge, of course — which Mary had written for him.
 
 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 201 
 
 Mary was fifteen. The subject was ' The influence of 
 Government on the Character of a People.' That is very 
 jolly ; but what follows is jollier. ' After the lecture we 
 had tea, and the girls danced and sang an hour '. Human 
 nature breaking in ! The girls were Fanny Imlay, Mary, 
 and Jane Clairmont, into'whose complicated relationships 
 to each other I need not enter. 
 
 Shelley, his wife Harriet, and sister-in-law, met her at 
 dinner in that year, but not again until 181 4. The next 
 meeting must have been the critical moment, for on June 8 
 occurred the pretty scene related by Hogg. Shelley and he 
 went into the philosopher's study, where the philosopher was 
 not. Hogg examined the bookshelves, Shelley padded uj) 
 and down like a caged panther, lightfooted and feverish. 
 ' The door was partially opened. A thrilling voice called 
 " Shelley ! " A thrilling voice answered " Mary ! " and 
 he darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the 
 far-shooting king. A very young female, fair, fair-haired, 
 pale indeed and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of 
 tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time, had called 
 him out of the room.' On June 20 he gave her a Quten 
 Mab, but by then the thing was done. She wrote in it a 
 month later, ' This book is sacred to me, and as no other 
 creature shall ever look in it, I may write what I please. 
 Yet what shall I write ? That I love the author beyond 
 all powers of expression, and that I am parted from him. 
 Dearest and only love, by tliat love we have promised to 
 each other, altliough I may not be yours, I can never be 
 another's. But I am thine, exclusively thine.' She quotes 
 Byron, on whose dangerous food [she had fed ; then, ' I 
 have ])ledged myself to thee, and sacred is tlie gift. 
 I remember your words, " You are now, Mary, going to
 
 202 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 
 
 mix witli many, and for a moment I shall depart, but in 
 the solitude of your chamber I shall be witii you." Yes, 
 you are ever with me, sacied vision.' Then Byron again. 
 That was the way of it. She was sixteen. On the zHth 
 of July she and Jane Clairmont left Skinner Street and, 
 with Shelley, posted to Dover. She was within a few 
 days of her seventeenth birthday. 
 
 With all respect to the biographers, Mrs. Marshall 
 and Professor Dowden, nothing is less certain than tiiat 
 Shelley believed Harriet unfaithful. It is obvious from 
 Mr. lngi)en's Letters that slie was nothing of the kind, 
 and that Shelley did not think her so. It is obvious that 
 he was simply and madly desirous of Mary ; Peacock's 
 reminiscence proves that. What is to the purpose is that 
 Mary was equally in love. It is not clear who was 
 responsible for .lane's, the little parasite's, being of the party, 
 though I don't doubt that it was herself. Shelley would 
 have made no objection, and did not. Indeed, when they 
 were half way through France on their way to Switzerland 
 he proposed to add one more girl to the two he had with 
 him, no less a girl than Harriet Shelley. His letter to 
 her from Troyes is not that of a human being. It is the 
 letter of a ' Young Visiter '. 
 
 ' I write to you from this detestable town ; I write 
 to show that I do not forget you ; I write to urge you 
 to come to Switzerland where you will at last (that 
 should surely be 'at least ')-find one lirm and constant 
 friend to whom your interests will always be dear — by 
 whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.' 
 
 The brain reels. He goes on to relate the incidents of 
 the journey, speaks of Mary, ' who has not been sufficiently 
 well to walk', describes the scenery, anticipates welcoming
 
 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 203 
 
 her ' to some sweet retreat I will procure for you among 
 the mountains ', sends love to his ' sweet little lanthe ', is 
 ever most affectionately hers, writes in great haste — 'we 
 depart directly '. Except on the only possible hypothesis, 
 that is a damnable letter, on which any man might be 
 described as a heartless rascal. Not a hint, you see, that 
 he suspected Harriet: on the contiary, he is her 'firm 
 and constant friend .' Not a sign that he suspected him- 
 self of anything out of the common way. It shows him 
 not only a non-moial young man, but a callous young man 
 beyond belief, and more obtuse than any mule. But we 
 must be calm. He was not non-moral, but subject to 
 another morality than ours. He was callous because he 
 could only think of one thing at a time, and what he 
 wanted he must have. At the moment it was Harriet. 
 A moment ago it had been Mary. Mrs. Marshall perti- 
 nently remarks here that Harriet did not go, and adds that 
 it was as well, for that, at about the time she would have 
 arrived in Switzerland, tlie excursionists would be entering 
 the Port of London. And Mr. Ingpen gives poor 
 Harriet's letter in which she, very naturally, and as 1 think 
 rather touchingly, lays the seduction at Mary's door. 
 Then she quotes : — ' Why could we not all live together? 
 1 as his sister, she as his wife ? He had tlie folly to 
 believe this |)Ossible, and sent for me, tiien residing at 
 Bath. You may suppose how I felt at the disclosure. I 
 was laid up for a fortnight after.' There is gallantry in 
 the counter-attack, but of course it won't ilo. The letter 
 from 'J'royes is Shelley's all over. He was the ' Young 
 Visiter '. 
 
 . The account of the whole tour would be delightful 
 reading if it did not involve so serious a thing as life and
 
 204 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 
 
 death, begetting and birth. It is a joint diary ; all three are 
 engaged in it. They buy a donkey for Mary, and start to 
 walk across France, ' dressed in black silk '. At every 
 town they reach one of them exclaims, generally Jane, ' Oh, 
 this is beautiful ! Let us live here ! ' Shelley twists his 
 ankle, and must ride the donkey ; the ladies walk ; they 
 are swindled right and left, with both hands — -how not ? 
 They reach Switzerland, and begin to write a romance. 
 They read Tacitus, Shakespeare, V Histoire du Jacohtnisme^ 
 run out of money, and make a bolt for home. They go 
 down the Rhine to Rotterdam. ' Mary begins Hate . . . 
 Shelley writes part of his romance ' ! They embark : 
 ' Mary writes mOre of her I/ate . . . the sea is horribly 
 tempestuous, and Mary is nearly sick, nor is Shelley much 
 better '. Next day : ' It is calm, . . . Mary recovers . . . 
 we dispute with one man upon the slave trade *. Delight- 
 ful children ; but the money was out, and more must be 
 found. They were now in a cold world, and Mary with 
 child. Shelley must call on Harriet for twenty pounds, 
 must go to Hookham for credit, get clothes, find a lodging. 
 ' Shelley calls on Harriet who is certainly an odd creature ', 
 Mary writes. It is little wonder. He himself called on 
 Hookham presently, and brought home Wordswoith's 
 Excursion, ' of which we read a part. Much disappointed. 
 He is a slave.' So much for Wordsworth anyhow. The 
 voice is the child's, but she is quoting her elf. 
 
 Godwin now comes into the tale again, with his drooping 
 nose and yet more drooping moral sense. He is very 
 indignant, and very intent on drawing money from his 
 offender. He refuses to see him, but will see the colour 
 of his money. He is given a cheque and professes himself 
 insulted that it is drawn in his name. What will the
 
 , THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 205 
 
 world think ? Even then the world knew more of its 
 Godwin than that esurient moralist believed. It was 
 rumoured to his discredit, Mrs. Marshall says, that he had 
 sold the two girls to Shelley for ;C8oo and iCyoo respec- 
 tively. Harriet put the figure at ;^3,ooo. . All that I need 
 add is that he did his best. 
 
 The three young visiters moved from lodging to lodging 
 — St. Pancras, Somers Town, Nelson Square, Hans Place 
 and so on. Shelley has to dodge the bailiffs, interview 
 Harriet, lawyers, bill-discounters and what not. All the 
 time Jane is with them, and much of the time Mary is 
 alone while those two are walking in Kensington Gardens 
 and being locked in, or sitting up late ' talking of oppres- 
 sion and reform ', of ' cutting squares of skin from the 
 soldiers' backs ', or hearing Jane state ' her conception of 
 the subterranean community of women '. Or they talk of 
 ghosts, and of Orra, the tragedy of Fear by Joanna Baillie. 
 Jane shrieks in the night, or walks in it, and has to be 
 calmed by news of Mary's pregnancy. Or .lane sulks with 
 Shelley and won't talk all day. Interspersed with all this, 
 Political Justice, tiie Empire of the Natrs, The Ancient 
 Mariner, fireworks, and ' sailing little boats ', Culture and 
 children's play. Much also of ' Shelley and Jane walk 
 as usual '. But through all, from end to end, culture is the 
 rule of the house. Mary reads, Shelley reads, Jane, appar- 
 ently, is read to. There are lists as long as from here to 
 Easter of the tomes demolished. Culture, usury, little 
 boats, breeding, hide-and-seek with Sheriffs' officers : the 
 most heart-breaking record of butterfly-racking, marionettes* 
 funerals, that exists in English, I think. The children 
 who ran away ! Yes, indeed. And now one of them is 
 to have a baby.
 
 2o6 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 
 
 It was born in February, in lodgings, barely a seven 
 months' child. Nine days after it was born they had to 
 move into new lodgings. On the night of its birth Hogg 
 was staying with them. ' Maie perfectly well and at ease,' 
 Shelley writes . . . 'the child not expected to live. Shelley 
 sits up with Maie, much exhausted' and agitated. Hogg 
 sleeps here '. Four days later Hogg was still there : ' Maie 
 rises to-day. Hogg comes ; talk ; she goes to bed at 
 six . . . ' ' Read Corinne (Mary is writmg tiiis diary) 
 Shelley and Clara (Jane) go to sleep. Hogg returns ; 
 talk with him till past eleven . . . Shelley and Clara go 
 down to tea. Just settling to sleep when a knock comes 
 at the door ; it is Fanny ; she came to see how we were ; 
 she stays talking till half-past three, and then leaves the 
 room that Shelley and Mary may sleep. Shelley has a 
 spasm '. It is to be wondered that he had a wife at this 
 rate. It was four days after confinement. 
 
 Here is March i. ' Nurse the baby, read Corinne, 
 and work. Shelley and Clara out all morning. In the 
 evening Peacock comes. Talk about types, editions, and 
 Greek letters all the evening. Hogg comes. They go 
 away at half-past eleven. Bonaparte invades France.' 
 O Heavens ! 
 
 Next day they changed lodgings. ' A bustle all 
 morning. Read Corinne. I and my baby go at three. 
 Shelley and Clara do not come till six. Hogg comes in 
 the evening.' Then comes this : 
 
 ' Monday, March 6. Find my baby dead. Send for 
 Hogg. A miserable day. In the evening read i^i// ©/"/Z**? 
 Jesuits. Hogg sleej)s here.' Comment fails me. The Fall 
 of the Jesuits ! And Hogg ! 
 
 Tuesday, March 7. Shelley and Clara go after break-
 
 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 207 
 
 fast to town. Write to Fanny. Hogg stays all day with 
 us ; talk to him, and read The Fall of the Jesuits and 
 Rinaldo Rinaldini. Not in good spirits. Hogg goes at 
 eleven. A fuss. To bed at three.' 
 
 On the 9th — ' read and talk. Still think about my little 
 baby. 'Tis hard indeed for a mother to lose a child. ^ 
 Hogg and Charles Clairmont come in the evening .... 
 Hogg stays all night. Read Fontenelle, Plurality of 
 Worlds \ 
 
 The picture haunts one, cannot be put away : the dead 
 baby on the bed, the Fall of the Jesuits ; Hogg ; the 
 fastening black-eyed parasite ; Plurality oj IVorlds ; Godwin 
 after money, Harriet somewhere" with another baby and 
 drowning in her eyes — little more than babies themselves, 
 the pair of them ; cliildren who ran away — with an elf! 
 
 But it goes on, this astounding record. A moment's 
 irritation escapes the poor girl on the I ith. ' Very unwell. 
 Hogg goes to town. Talk about Claia's going away ; 
 nothing settled ; I fear it is hopeless. Slic will not go to 
 Skinner Street ; then our house is the only remaining place, 
 I sec jilainly. What is to be done .' ' 
 
 And again, next day: 'Not well, but better. Very 
 
 ' When Mary lost her boy William, then her last surviviii<; 
 child, in Italy, Godwin took ' the privilcj^e of a father and a 
 l)hilos(>i>hcr' to expostulate with her in her depression. ' Wlial 
 is it you want thai you have not ? You have the husband of your 
 choice . . . you have all the ^oods of fortune, all the means of 
 being useful to others, and shining in your j.rojjcr spliere. Hut 
 you have lost a child : and all the rest of the world, all that is 
 beautiful, and all that lias a cl.nim upon your kindness is nothing, 
 because a child of two years old is dcid.' Then he goes on to 
 divide all the human species into two great classes. One would 
 like to h.ive met this philosopher.
 
 2o8 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 
 
 quiet all the morning, and happy, for Clara does not get 
 up till four '. On the day after that, however, the parasite 
 was up and about. ' Shelley and Clara go to town. 
 Stay at home ; net, and think of my little dead baby. 
 This is foolish, I suppose, yet whenever I am left alone 
 to my own thoughts, and do not read to avert them, they 
 always come back to the same point — that I was a mother, 
 and am so no longer '. She dreamed about it on the 19th, 
 that it ' came to life again ; that it had only been cold, and 
 that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake 
 and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day '. 
 
 On the 13th of May, however, the parasite really did 
 go, and the record ends, ' I begin a new journal with our 
 regeneration '. You can still hear the sigh of release. 
 Poor child, it was not for long. 
 
 Some insight into the martyrdom of two girls may be 
 gathered from this tragic farce ; for as Mary suffered from 
 Jane Clairmont so had Harriet from Mary, to say nothing 
 of Mrs. Boinville. So, as all readers know, was Mary to 
 go on suffering from Jane Clairmont, from Emilia Viviani, 
 from Jane Williams. There was, and could be no end to 
 the torment, except what happened in Lerici Bay. A 
 curious little ejaculation reported by Trelawny suggests 
 that the tragedy of the Bay was not too soon for Mary's 
 peace, perhaps also for Shelley's. Shelley was in the 
 Pineta, Trelawny and Mary went to find him there. 
 The heat exhausted her and she sat in the outskirts of the 
 wood, while Trelawny stalked Shelley. He found him, 
 books and papers scattered all about, rapt in the sighing of 
 the pine tree-tops. ' Their chorus ', he said, ' is the eternal 
 wailing of wretched men '. Trelawny suggested that they 
 were at the moment reinforced by the wailing of one
 
 THE CHILDREN WHO RAN AWAY 209 
 
 wretched woman — ' a forsaken lady. I left your wife, 
 Mary Shelley, at the entrance of this grove, in despair at 
 not finding you.' Shelley snatched up his books and 
 papers : ' Poor Mary ! hers is a sad fate. Come along ; 
 she can't bear solitude, nor I society^/Af quick coupled 
 iv'ith the dead^ If Shelley was getting bored Mary was 
 to be made unhappy. Trelawny, however, is not to be 
 relied upon. 
 
 No more of it. Nothing is gained by calling Shelley a 
 scoundrel, but much by realizing that he was not a human 
 creature and therefore not under our moral law. Southey 
 might lift his hands to Heaven, Sir Timothy foam at the 
 mouth, Harriet drown herself, Mary droop — all in vain. 
 Nobody who knows him in his correspondence can call 
 him a scoundrel. I say nothing of his poetry : poetry 
 doesn't count. When the robe is on, the man is enskied, 
 carried up by the incondite, shown the stars in their courses, 
 or the heart of the universe, and bidden, Write. 
 
 Ed io a lui : ' lo mi son un che, quando 
 Amor mi spira, noto,' . , . 
 
 No, poetry does not reveal a man, rather the creature 
 which is within, driving him, lifting, sinking him, to heights 
 too cold or depths too horrible for the likes of men. If 
 the thing within you is master and lord, and instils itself 
 into your deeds, then Heaven help your women. Shelley 
 was in the keeping of a fairy. And let us believe that 
 Heaven did help Mary, as it did not, or could not, help 
 Harriet.
 
 We Commend our^ T)ead 
 
 WE move slowly in the West ; but we get there 
 in the end. Labour troubles in the natural 
 hiving-place of such things, with which we had nothing 
 to do, held up our Memorial Cross, so that we unveiled 
 it only the other day, two and a half years after the piling 
 of arms, in some cases six years after the sacrifice had 
 been made. Eighteen out of ninety of our young men 
 did not come back; and now we have their names as 
 nearly imperishable as may be, and mucii more so than 
 the poor faithful dust strewn in France, or the gentle 
 memories which will last no longer than ourselves. Per- 
 haps not so long indeed ; for as we grow and age, our 
 hearts become a storehouse of such memories, columbaria 
 in which the last comer takes the front of the shelf and 
 obscures one or other of its forerunners. We have people, 
 still going to and fro on accustomed affairs, of ninety years 
 or more. Think what they must have to carry besides 
 their burden of age ! 
 
 Good names stand out there, on the base of the rough- 
 hewn cross, names which have been here as long as the 
 village ; very likely came witii it, and had to do with the 
 building of it when the river had dug itself a bed, and ran 
 swiftly between banks instead of oozily about mud-flats. 
 Gurd and Tryhorne, Penny and Emm, are there, still in 
 all our men's mouths : clan names of ours which go back 
 to the days before writing, perhaps to the days before
 
 WE COMMEND OUR DEAD 211 
 
 articulate speech. Remote ancestors of those clans, we 
 believe, huddled from the cold in pear-shaped pit-dwellings, 
 of which, on the surrounding grassy heights, we have 
 scores and four-scores. Or peihaps they kept the look-out 
 on the chalk ramp of Chesilbury, watching the passes from 
 Groveley, or from Bilbury, or from Winklebury to the 
 south-west. Plain, blunt, unadorned names they are — 
 what could be more uncompromising than Gurd, or Emm ? 
 — but with a respectable pedigree behind them if I am right. 
 Older than the village church, older than Stonehenge : 
 as old as Silbury itself. As good a pedigree as you can 
 ask for. It may well be that no men of those names have 
 ever left before the green end of Wilts in which their 
 village lies, a mere combe or pocket in the Downs. That 
 may very well be, given the place and the folk. And now 
 of late, for reason which seemed to them good, ruminating 
 over it afield, turning it about with little speech as they 
 passed each other in the lane leading homeward, or slipped 
 and slurred along the furrows, one at the plow's tail, one 
 at the horses' heads, on the side of the down — now they 
 leave their green shade and cross the sea : they go souse 
 into a storm of fire and stench, of darkness, and noise, 
 and hatred, and murder, such as would palsy their imagi- 
 nations if they had any : they ' stick it ', as they say, with 
 little or no comment, with no hint at all that it is out of the 
 day's work ; and for eighteen of our best — stat riomitiis 
 umbra ! 
 
 As they went out, without gesture, with little or nothing 
 to say, with simple farewells and sober cheer, so their 
 kindred received the news of their fate ; sighing, and 
 saying to each other, It was to be ; and so lately we 
 
 u 2
 
 2 12 WK COMMEND OUR DEAD 
 
 recorded their piety and devotion — without gesture, without 
 sign given that we were showing forth anything to the 
 world, with very little ostensible grief. What our mere 
 presence by the War- Cross, our wreaths of primrose, 
 polyanthus, and king-cup may have prefigured we neither 
 knew noi' cared greatly. Of transfiguration, either of our- 
 selves or of our dead, we had no notion in the world. 
 We wore our best clothes, for it was Sunday. We 
 uncovered at the moment of unveiling, remained so through 
 the prayers, and while the Last Post was "shrilling out. The 
 long indetermined note on which that call ends, the wild- 
 ness of self-committal it always sounds to have, made my 
 eyes wet. Those of my neighbours had hornier sheaths, 
 better acquainted, no doubt, with grief than mine, and less 
 wistful (I hope) of what that wail committed us to. When 
 all was over we laid our wreaths about the Cross, and went 
 our ways. 
 
 The thing which struck me chiefly and touched me 
 most, was the stoicism of the villagers. Death is the 
 same to all of us ; the severance when it comes is always 
 shocking, and rare is the faith which does not feel, what- 
 ever it may teach, a dreadful finality about it. 
 
 Fear no more the heat of the sun . . . 
 
 The poet and good friend of mine who came from six 
 miles off, over the hills, to commend our dead to us and 
 our betters, did not shrink from home truths. He suited 
 himself to our plain habit, speaking shortly, tersely, and 
 without ornament. He did not flinch the beastliness of 
 the work done, or fail to say how that enhanced the sacri- 
 fice. And he urged us to remember that names and deeds 
 alike are as negligible to Nature as we are ourselves. 
 
 \
 
 WE COMMEND OUR DEAD 213 
 
 ' Their names live for evermore ' is a hope rather than 
 a vaunt. It touches but does not convince. Nor should 
 it. Such a sacrifice as our young men (and how many 
 others !) made was offered up as part of the day's work. 
 But we did well to commend them. They laid down 
 their lives for their friends. You can do no more. 
 
 One other fact struck me. I don't say that it is peculiar 
 to our village, though when once before we did it, I 
 remarked its singularity. We made over our Memorial 
 to the authorities on high, as Captain Cuttle proposed to 
 make over his — 'jointly '. Church and chapel choirs stood 
 and sang together ; the Vicar prayed from his formulary, 
 the Minister from his inner consciousness ; and a dignitary 
 of the Cathedral, like a Homeric hero, ' drew all off'. 
 I iiope that good custom is universal.
 
 Faith and JVorhs at Tresent 
 
 A ST RAW will show whither the wind blew me. I 
 was the other day at a country meeting, a meeting 
 of protest against sometliing in particular which drifted, 
 as they often do, into protest against things in general, 
 where, one after anotlier, men with hurts to assuage jumped 
 up in their places and uttered harsh cries of injury, sure in 
 every case of the balm of cheers. Local taxation, naturally, 
 had its side-vortex of debate, about and into which many 
 a tempest-tossed citizen whirled and threw up his arms. 
 There was not so much heat as fine simulation of heat ; there 
 was sounding rhetoric none the worse for being familiar ; 
 there were appeals to catchwords, flourishings of party 
 banners. One man in particular I observed, a full-moon- 
 faced, shining, prosperous man, a true hunter of applause. 
 That was his meat and drink, worth lure after lure. Some 
 tax-gatherer's indiscretion, excess of zeal, Heaven knows 
 what not, made him sure of his audience. It was good 
 to see him leap upon his prey, hold it by the neck, shake the 
 cheers out of it. 'Gentlemen,' he cried, 'you know me 
 {We do, ive do .') ; you know me, as may be our friend in 
 his country's jiay did not. Gentlemen, I am not one of 
 
 those who turn the other cheek ' but there the assembly 
 
 rose at him, and drowned his utterance. He had touched 
 all hearts ; he was the hero of his moment. 
 
 The thing to be remarked was that the speaker was 
 precisely one of those who accepted every Sunday the 
 
 I
 
 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 215 
 
 doctrine, part of which here, on Monday, he so confidently 
 disclaimed. I knew him for a sound and hearty Non- 
 conformist, a buttress of his chapel. Those who heard 
 him were much of his own profession. Yet here he was, 
 not so much denying the teaching of his Master as deriding 
 it — and with no ghost of an idea of what he was doing. 
 The precept of the Gospel had become a signal for the 
 applause of its exact opposite. I have known many a 
 Christian who ignored his doctrine, but I do not recollect 
 that I was ever in a Christian assembly where any point 
 of it had become a standing joke. I do not forget, of 
 course, the eighteenth century, when conformity of public 
 profession was allowed to co-exist with extreme laxity of 
 private opinion. But that was another world. Horace 
 Walpole, George Selwyn, Old Q., with their friends across 
 the Channel, Madame du DefFand, the Due de Choiseul, 
 and the Princesse de Beauvau, were wits as well as sceptics. 
 Nothing is sacred to a wit ; and besides, they were safe 
 within the walls of Establishments which would never 
 quarrel with their bread and butter. My friends in council 
 were in a very different jiosition. Largely, they were out 
 because the others remained in. They were protesting tlie 
 F"aith ; and by their fruits they must be judged. 1 am not 
 able to say that their deeds outline their opinions more 
 closely than those of their Anglican and Latin fellow- 
 Christians. Ever since Christianity ceased to be a Way of 
 Life — which was immediately it became a world-belief — - 
 the discref)ancy between faitii and practice has been observ- 
 able. But it clofs show liow wide is the chasm when, 
 even among those protesting entire adherence to evangelical 
 doctrine, a portion of it should be treated as a comic j)ara- 
 dox. 1 think lliat that is highly symptomatic. Faith and
 
 2i6 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 
 
 Works may have often, possibly always, been at variance. 
 Christianity is a Council of Perfection for men who are 
 far from perfect. But Faith has stood nevertheless as 
 a kind of staple to which long measure or short could be 
 brought for assay. If that is now to fail, I do not say 
 that the world will cease to be Christian, because it has 
 never yet been so, but that the chance is before us that 
 Christianity itself will fade out. 
 
 Probably no body of doctrine with such high professions 
 as were made by Christianity ever became a widespread 
 religious belief. I have called it a Way of Life : it was 
 that, and more ; it was an illumination. It was not so 
 much a dispensation which could be codified ; it was 
 rather a garment which must shift, expand or contract, 
 with life itself. And if it could not be comprised within 
 a formula, neither could it be presented in a symbol. The 
 weakness of symbols and formulas is that they become 
 rapidly outdistanced by life. If they are not constantly 
 renewed, re-presented, re-translated, they become really 
 without meaning, as the hieratic liturgy of the Eastern 
 Church actually now is, presented in words which the 
 priests and monks themselves often do not understand. 
 Religion on those terms, sacramental, thaumaturgic, mys- 
 tery-making, emotional, may have a wide appeal. Men 
 niay die for it, and kill for it too. But it cannot be called 
 
 Way of Life, still less an illumination. The test of it 
 is Credo quia tmposs'tbile. 
 
 But Christendom, with the two ways before it, as we all 
 know, chose for dispensation, formula, and symbol. His- 
 tory shows that it then ceased to be a Way of Life for the 
 world in general, though here and there hermits and pious 
 communities maintained it in desert places as some such thing.
 
 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 217 
 
 The discrepancy between Doctrine and Conduct began at 
 that moment of choice, has gone on since, and has never 
 ceased to go on. As no other religion ever made so high 
 a claim, so no other ever fell so far away from the mind 
 and teaching of its founder. Islamism has lapsed in patches, 
 and Buddhism varied from climate to climate ; but Chris- 
 tianity has lapsed as a whole, and has never attempted to 
 be literal. The case is singular — so singular that one 
 miglit think the discrepancy had never been noticed until 
 to-day. Here, then, you have whole continents, peopled by 
 nations of men who all profess as nations, and mainly as 
 individuals, adherence to a Religion, idealistic, pacificist, 
 altruist, enthusiastic ; a religion which commands men to 
 love their enemies, bless them that persecute them, do good 
 to them that despitefully use them ; which inculcates poverty 
 as a means of grace, inferentially as the only means ; which 
 insists upon the negligibility of the things of this world ; 
 which posits the Kingdom of Heaven within the heart of 
 man, and can therefore promise inheritance to the meek, 
 joy to the peacemaker, and comfort to the mourner — all 
 this, as I say, for nearly two thousand years upon the lips 
 of nations of men who have never, as nations, for a year 
 together since the voice which enjoined it was still in death, 
 never for one year attempted to observe any of it. Chris- 
 tians have never ceased to make war on each other, never 
 ceased to hate their enemies, never decried the great pos- 
 sessions of this world as nothing worth, never considered 
 the lilies of the field, never turned the other cheek to the 
 smiter, never believed that the Kingdom of Heaven was 
 within them, never seriously considered where it was, if 
 not there. Is not that extraordinary ? It would be if wc 
 were not dealing with men.
 
 2i8 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 
 
 As the Christianity of Christ has never yet been put to 
 the test collectively, it is impossible to say what success it 
 might have had as a Way of Life. The nature of men 
 being what it is, it might easily have failed. Is it too hard a 
 saying for those who })rofess it that it should at least be tried ? 
 Could it not with probability be said that whatever kind of 
 failure it might make of life, it could not by any possibility 
 make a worse failure tiian we have made of life without it ? I 
 tliink that might certainly be said. Not only is humanity 
 going to pieces, but religion is going with it. The universal 
 complaint goes up that the Churches are emptying and the 
 Divorce Courts filling (to name only those) ; and it is a fair 
 inference that if people were more conscious of the tie 
 which binds them to each other in religion they would be 
 less impatient of that which binds them to each other in 
 life. The Way of Life which Christ offered to the world 
 was fairly a Career ; but tlie world, having other careers 
 then in being or in prospect, declined to exchange them, 
 sought rather to accommodate incompatibles, with the strik- 
 ing results which we see about us. Marriage, on the 
 other hand, was never intended to be a career, though it 
 might have helped to make one of religion. 
 
 The failure of marriage is a much less serious thing for 
 the world than the renegation of the Laws of Being which 
 we can remark on every hand. I need not, I hope, enlarge 
 upon them, the common lot of the whole of creation, so far 
 as we know it. Nothing that comes into the world can 
 escape the obligation of Work, Love, and Procreation : but 
 if just now men are not evading those duties then two plus 
 two do not make four. To what are Labour troubles due 
 but to evasion of the law to work by the men, of the law 
 to love by the masters ? To what else was the recent
 
 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 219 
 
 hideous war due f To what else are you to ascribe the 
 new post-bellum attitude of nearly all the peoples lately 
 engaged in sciontilic and wholesale murder ? The late 
 war made a ghastly wound in the social fabric ; but not 
 a clean wound. Instead, a moral gangrene seems to be 
 eating into the very bones of human kind. For those and 
 all such miseries the religion of Christ offers a remedy, at 
 least as much entitled to a trial as Soviet Government in 
 Russia, English Government (to call it so) in Ireland, 
 French handling of beaten Germany, American handling 
 of workmen and negroes. That teaching is to be found 
 in a book which is professed by millions of people as infal- 
 lible and of divine origin. Officially it is held to be so 
 by all the nations which will not test it by experience. 
 This is an extraordinary position of things. Crystallization 
 of dogma seems to have reached its term. 
 
 I have said that Christ's teaching has never been fol- 
 lowed. His way of life never attempted. That is true of 
 nations, with which so far I have been dealing. Obviously 
 it is not true of individuals, nor altogether so of groups 
 of individuals. Groups have attempted it : Cathari, Pat- 
 terini, Franciscans, Hussites, Wycliftites, Albigenses, 
 Friends of God, Port-Royalists, Doukhobors, and such- 
 like. Most of them have failed owing to internal weakness, 
 and tlie nature of men ; some, like the Albigenses, have been 
 crushed out or worn down by the hostility of governments. 
 One only, Englisli in origin, lias endured for tlin-r huiuhcd 
 years. That is a grou]) large enough to he c.ilKd sometliing 
 else. It does not claim to be a Churcii, and calls itseit 
 the Society of Friends. By a term of mockery, now 
 become one of affection, men outside call it the Ouakers.
 
 220 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 
 
 Founded by George Fox, an uninstructed man illuminated 
 by close and literal reading of the Gospels, outliving both 
 a time of persecution and one of moral collapse, that Society 
 has presented to tlie world for three hundred and more 
 years the nearest approacli to the Christlike way of life 
 which has ever been known. It is based upon neigh- 
 bourly love, is strictly pacificist ; in the face of Government 
 it is quietist. It is without formulary or sacrament. So 
 far the likeness is exact. It does not, however, observe 
 the counsel of Poverty, and is in no sense Communistic. 
 In those two points, and in the fact that it has not been 
 zealous to proselytize, it falls short of the teaching of Jesus 
 Christ. But essentially it resembles that teaching in being 
 an enthusiasm, an illumination, and a Way of Life where 
 permeation of body by spirit is complete both in the par- 
 ticular and in the whole. Its doctrine is idealistic and 
 undogmatic. It comes not to destroy, but to fulfil. It is 
 not, as Mr. Carl Heath says in a recent pamphlet,^ a ' Sect 
 obsessed with a theory of its own exclusive wisdom ' ; it 
 is ' no creed which alone brings salvation.' ' Whatever 
 else it is,' he goes on to say, ' it is always a movement of 
 spiritual seekers holding out hands of fellowship to all who 
 search for God, for Light and Truth, and for that way of 
 life where men can love God wholeheartedly, and their 
 fellows as themselves.' 
 
 So much for that. What is now extremely noteworthy 
 is that since the late war began, the Society of Friends 
 has broken down the defences which screened it from the 
 world, and definitely ranged itself in Europe as a Christian 
 body with work to do correspondent with the faith which 
 
 1 Quaker Thought in International Service. By Carl Heath 
 (Friends' Council of International Service).
 
 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 221 
 
 it holds. With no bridge-making to be done, with no gulf 
 between Belief and Conduct, the Quakers of America and 
 Britain, ever since the Armistice, have been steadily at 
 work throughout Europe, and particularly in Geimany and 
 Austria, mending the fortunes of broken people, feeding 
 the hungry, clothing the naked, showing forth Goodwill 
 among men who of late years have shown forth none of 
 their own. From reports delivered at a meeting held this 
 month I learn that in Germany something like a million 
 children are being fed, and that in Vienna and the Provinces 
 ' the largest number of children helped at any one time 
 has been 70,000 '. Of the sum of their activities at large 
 I have nothing before me but accounts of expenditure. 
 From these I learn that the American Friends' Service Com- 
 mittee have sj)ent during the year June iQig-.Iune 1920 — 
 
 In France 190,000, 
 
 In Germany 2,761,000, 
 
 In Serbia 
 
 In Austria 
 
 In Armenia 
 
 $3,031,529 
 The English Friends' Committee has spent in the year — 
 
 57,777, 
 18,881, 
 
 3,871 
 
 In France . 
 In Russia . 
 In Austria . 
 In Poland 
 In Germany 
 In Serbia 
 
 Ii7,i23> 
 
 33,276, 
 
 3i3>354, 
 86,432, 
 
 106,956, 
 
 1,607 
 
 £658,741 
 altogether (the English figures alone), with expenses of
 
 2 2Z FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 
 administration, matciial, and allowances to other funds, 
 
 These figures tell their own story ; and if we call the 
 work which they represent ' loving our enemies ', as we 
 well niay, it is not what tliey would call it ; for they say 
 that it takes two to make a quarrel, and that Quakers 
 quarrel with no sons of men. The matter for the concern 
 of Christendom is that it is a work which I believe I am 
 right in saying no other Church, no other society of 
 Christian people, as such, is doing. What individual ad- 
 herents to one Church or another may be at is not now 
 to the purpose. The point upon which I must insist is 
 that, professing the doctine of Christ, they keep it, as it 
 were, in an airtight compartment, not only unspotted from the 
 world, but with no chance of braving any spots at all. As 
 Churches, all of them are infected with the dread of import- 
 ing the affairs of the world into church — a disastrous dicho- 
 tomy (giving life two lobes, as if it were a brain) of which 
 the Church of England is the most notorious upholder. 
 
 What has happened ? What is the meaning of all this ? 
 To account for it is entirely beyond my powers, which only 
 enable me to report it. The wind bloweth where it listeth, 
 and if it has so far wafted the secret of Christ into one 
 small society of men only, there is, I suppose, nothing to 
 do but to ' wait still upon God '. Meantime, in the place 
 of Love towards men, upon which the whole Evangel is 
 founded, the nations of the world are waiting still upon 
 Hate towards them. Christian Irish still murder Christian 
 English, and English Irish. Russians, having broken 
 down a tyranny which levied war on one class, have set 
 up in its place a tyranny which wars upon another class.
 
 FAITH AND WORKS AT PRESENT 223 
 
 The French, having broken the Germans, hate and fear 
 them more than before. The Turks still massacre the 
 Armenians, the Greeks whatever Turks they can get at. 
 Masters and men have learned nothing by a war which at 
 least showed all men equal in fortune, except to grudge 
 each other their share in it. The very water-drinkers can- 
 not drink their water without having their stomachs turned 
 by the thought of the wine other men are drinking. Alone 
 in creation, it seems, humanity preys upon its own kind. 
 That is where we are in 192 1, that year of Our Lord. 
 In the background hangs Christ on the Cross who died 
 that Love might prevail.
 
 Dilemmas foy^ zJMy. zSMonro. 
 
 MR. MONRO has taken the unusual step of sitting 
 in banc while liis brother poets, one by one, are 
 brout'Jit up before liim to show cause Qjto JVarranto they 
 broke the close of one Apollo Mousagetes and took there- 
 from certain slirubs, to wit bays, to the damage of the said 
 Apollo, and against the peace of our Lord the King his 
 crown and dignity. The accused make no defence, and 
 only a remnant escape without severe reprimand. Some 
 receive such drastic treatment that the worst is to be feared. 
 Mr. Noyes was carried out of Court, it is understood, in 
 a state bordering on epilepsy. Mr. Drinkwater vehemently 
 questioned the jurisdiction. Mr. Belloc has bought a 
 charger, which Miss Sitwcll undertakes to get filled. 
 Mr. Squire walks about the darker entries with a club. 
 Mr. Chesterton has not been seen in his usual houses of call. 
 I will not pursue these tropes. They arise inevitably 
 from the digestion of a book called Some Contemporary Poets^ 
 lately published by Mr. Harold Monro, a book of which 
 the good taste is inconspicuous, seeing that Mr. Monro is 
 himself a poet, and a dealer in his own poetry and in that 
 of all those whom he arraigns. It is a sound convention 
 that dog dees not eat dog, even yellow dog. That is not 
 only a gentlemanly standard to have set up : it is also 
 a right business precept. Suppose that a large retail boot-
 
 DILEMMAS FOR MR. MONRO 225 
 
 shop, after some years' trading, were to issue what it would 
 certainly call a booklet, an illustrated booklet, not recom- 
 mending, but sternly criticizing soiie of the makes at that 
 moment in its windows ; in some cases condemning the 
 exhibits altogether — what would happen ? One thing would 
 happen immediately ; there would be large withdrawals 
 of stock by the injured makers. Another thiisg would 
 be visits of customers asking the dealer what the deuce he 
 meant by selling so-and-so's glace kids when he must have 
 had this belated information concerning their cut and quality 
 up his sleeve all the time. Mutate the mutanda, and see 
 what is going to happen to Mr. Monro. I must say that 
 he will deserve it. 
 
 Mr. Monro, I imagine, has been brooding upon this 
 clutch of his for many years before he hatched it out. 
 He cannot have read much else than contemporary minor 
 poetry ever since he made the dispensing of it the career of 
 a lifetime. Add what he has talked about it to what he 
 has read of it, and it is not difficult to guess that it has 
 played old Harry wit-h his taste, in every sense of that word. 
 Ginger is no longer hot in the mouth. Rime is a vicious 
 jingle, rhythm the maddening reiteration of some infernal 
 machine. He writes sourly of it all — or nearly all. He 
 likes Miss Mew — and so he ought ; 1 think he likes Mr. 
 Hodgson ; he likes Mr. Ford Madox Ilueffer very much 
 indeed ; and he seems to like Mr. Ezra Pound. But be- 
 yond those fortunate ones hardly any prospect pleases. Of 
 course I looked to see whether mine did. I cannot flatter 
 myself — though he has not taken leave to summon me to 
 his bar in so many words. He throws me an obiter (Itctum. 
 He says that I have historical interest. That 's all right, of 
 course. There's a Society for the Protection of such 
 
 P
 
 . 226 DILEMMAS FOR MR. MONRO 
 
 Monuments. I am writing to the Secretary. He doesn't 
 think th?.t Mr. Binyon has any interest at all. Alas, par- 
 tridge has no interest at all if you have it for breakfast, 
 luncheon, dinner, every day for several years. Naturally. 
 But one eats better meals when one is interested ; and one 
 writes better books in the same frame of mind. 
 
 I at least shall be interested to see how Mr. Monro 
 escapes impalement on the horns of the dilemma he has set 
 up. A dilemma ? There are two of them ; so he is 
 severely wedged. The first is what I may call- the trader's 
 dilemma. He has spent the better part of ten years per- 
 haps in selling minor poetry. He has read it and had it 
 read publicly, he has published it on his own account, and 
 exposed for sale the very books he handles so severely. He 
 now tells his old customers, and warns his new ones, that 
 much of the ' stuff' is so much spoiled paper and ink. 
 Either, then, it is worth its price, or it is worth what he 
 says of it. What will he do about it ? Will he present to 
 purchasers of Mr. Drinkwater, Mr. Noyes, Sir William 
 Watson, and Miss Sitwell a copy of his own book gratis ? 
 Will he refuse those bards the entry, or shut down the shop ? 
 Je me demande. 
 
 The literary dilemma is more serious for him, but only 
 because it is popularly supposed that men of letters are born 
 with finer taste and a keener sense of humour than traders. 
 The principal section of his book is entitled ' Poets and 
 Poetasters of our Time.' Now, is Mr. Monro, as poet, 
 entitled to call any modern poet a poetaster ? Pope did it, 
 and Pope was a poet. Mr. Monro is a poet — but is he 
 a Pope? He blesses and bans as if he were the Pope, but 
 that is not the present matter. The dilemma may be stated 
 thus : either Mr. Monro is a Pope and entitled to scourge
 
 DILEMMAS FOR MR. MONRO 227 
 
 dullness, or he is not, and dullness is entitled to scourge 
 Mr. Monro. Let us see what happens. 
 
 A light-hearted perusal of his pages has led me into this 
 train of thought ; a deeper one might tempt me to follow 
 his ill-considered steps. Whatever I do, I won't take upon 
 myself to condemn my brother-poets, though I will praise 
 whatever I find praiseworthy upon the well-tuned cymbals. 
 But I will be so bold as to advise Mr. Monro, a younger 
 man than I am, when he does this kind of thing again, not 
 to publish a man's worst verses without also publishing his 
 best; and if I might add one more counsel it would be — 
 not to do it again. 
 
 1 2
 
 The Oyster King 
 
 WE are all parasites, of course. It is Nature's little 
 plan that every creature should prey on some other 
 creature ; but in arranging that Man, alone of them, should 
 prey upon Man she has outdone her usual outdoings. It 
 is impossible, unfortunately, to imagine a more disgusting 
 way of life — but there it is. Nevertheless, if I were to 
 call Mr. Edward Bok, whose notable autobiography ' 
 suggests these remarks, a parasite of high development he 
 might be offended, even though I were to add that he is 
 no more so than the grocer round the corner, or than me, 
 except in being very much more efficient. However, I will 
 put him rather among the oyster-men. He shall be, for 
 he deserves to be, the Oyster King ; for the world has 
 truly been his oyster, and he has extracted from it not only 
 nourishment, but pearls of the rarest size and lustre. He 
 has edited the greatest magazine on earth ; and it is his, 
 for he made it. That is The Ladies' Home Journal of 
 Philadelphia, which at the time of his retirement had a 
 monthly circulation of a million and three quarters. Match 
 me this marvel from a Western clime. Tell me of a 
 greater magazine than that. 
 
 I have never seen a copy of it, but Mr. Bok enables me 
 to conceive it by the detailed account he gives of its 
 development at his hands. Its departments — ' Side Talks 
 with Girls ', by Ruth Ashmore (who was Mr. Bok himself 
 
 ' Edward Bok ; An Autobiography, Butterworth, 1921.
 
 THE OYSTER KING 229 
 
 until the correspondence bowled him over) ; ' Heart to 
 Heart Talks ', which was Mrs. Margaret Bottome's affair ; 
 its series — ' Unknown Wives of well-known Men ', leading 
 off with Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher ; ' Clever Daughters 
 of Clever Men ', with Charles Dickens's daughter up ; 
 then ' an entire number of his magazine written by Famous 
 Daughters of Famous Men ' ; then ' This Country of 
 Ours ', by the President of the United States ; and 
 ' Inside one Hundred Homes ', containing photographs of 
 the drawing-rooms, dining-rooms, and possibly bedrooms 
 of private citizens — these are tlie kind of irritants which 
 stimulated Mr. Bok's oysters to the production of pearls. 
 It is not at all hard to understand tliat Lord Noithcliffe in 
 an Introduction to this work considers it ' a tale of 
 romantic adventure ; the kind of adventure which I must 
 be pardoned for feeling, myself, to be the most romantic of 
 all.' To Lord Northcliffe, himself considerably an 
 oyster-man, the advance of the Ladiei Home Journal must 
 be a dream of Heaven upon earth. Interest in the man 
 must have been swallowed up in admiration of his triumph. 
 For me, other questions press for answer, some of which 
 Mr. Bok satisfies, but not all. 
 
 Although he is not American by birth, Nature seems to 
 have qualified him to become one at short notice. He 
 left his native country at six years old, when his parents 
 settled themselves in Brooklyn. Before he was thirteen 
 we find him thus engaged : 
 
 ' One evening Edward went to a party of young people, 
 and his latent journalistic sense whispered to him that 
 his young hostess might like to see her social affair in 
 print. He went home, wrote uj) the party, being care- 
 ful to include the name of every boy and girl present, and
 
 230 THE OYSTER KING 
 
 next morning took the account to the city editor of the 
 Brooklyn Eagle^ with the sage observation that every name 
 mentioned in that paragraph represented a buyer of the 
 paper, who would Hke to see his or her name in print, 
 and that if the editor had enough of these reports he 
 might very advantageously strengthen the circulation of 
 The Eagle. The editor was not slow to see the point, 
 and offered Edward three dollars a column for such 
 reports. On his way home, Edward calculated how 
 many parties he would have to attend a week to furnish 
 a column, and decided that he would organize a corps of 
 private reporters himself. Forthwith, he saw every boy 
 and girl he knew, got each to promise to write for him 
 an account of each party he or she attended or gave, and 
 laid great stress on a full recital of names. Within a 
 few weeks Edward was turning in to The Eagle from 
 two to three columns a week ; his pay was raised to 
 four dollars a column ; the editor was pleased in having 
 started a department that no other paper carried, and 
 the ' among those present ' at the parties all bought the 
 paper and were immensely gratified to see their names.' 
 
 There you are. That is how you stimulate the oyster. 
 The child was father to the man. What Mr. Bok did 
 before he reached his teens was what he has been doing 
 ever since. 
 
 At thirteen he began the exploitation of the Eminent ; 
 that is, he began to sort out among the oysters those of 
 the largest size. Reading biography in Appleton's 
 Encyclopaedia, 
 
 ' One day it occurred to him to test the accuracy of 
 the biographies he was reading. James A. Garfield was 
 then spoken of for the Presidency ; Edward wondered 
 whether it was true that the man who was likely to 
 be President of the United States had once been a boy on
 
 THE OYSTER KING 231 
 
 the tow-path, and, with a simple directness characteristic 
 of his Dutch training, wrote to General Garfield, asking 
 whether the boyhood episode was true, and explaining 
 why he asked. Of course any public man, no matter 
 how large his correspondence, is pleased to receive 
 an earnest letter from an information-seeking boy. 
 General Garfield answered warmly and fully. Edward 
 showed the letter to his father, who told the boy that it 
 was valuable and he should keep it. This was a new 
 idea. ... if one such letter was valuable, how much 
 more valuable would be a hundred. If General 
 Garfield answered him, would not other famous men ? 
 Why not begin a collection of autograph letters ? ' 
 
 He did. He studied ' the lives of successful men and 
 women ' ; then ' with boyish frankness ' he baited his 
 hooks, with leading questions I know not how artfully 
 concealed, or if concealed at all — anyhow with abundant 
 success. 
 
 ' General Grant sketched on an improvised map the 
 exjict spot where General Lee surrendered to him ; 
 Longfellow told him how he came to write ' Excelsior ' ; 
 Whittier told the story of ' The Barefoot Boy ' ; Tennyson 
 wrote out a stanza or two of ' The Brook ' — and so on. 
 From collection to publication was not far, as may be 
 imagined. The ' boyish frankness ' of this enterprise is 
 not the feature which strikes me most forcibly. 
 
 Interviewing followed as a matter of course. The 
 demon child took that in his stride. 
 
 'He began to note each day in the ntwspajjers the 
 ' distinguished arrivals ' at the New York iiotels ; and 
 when any one with whom he corresj)onded arrived, 
 Edward would, after business hours, go uptown, ])ay
 
 232 THE OYSTER KING 
 
 his respects, and thank him ifi person for his letters. 
 
 No person was too high for Edward's boyish approach.' 
 No person could be. His biggest day was when he 
 dined with General Grant, sat by the bedside of Mrs. 
 Lincoln, and wound up the evening with Jefferson Davis, 
 who promised him a letter written by each member of the 
 Confederate Cabinet. There must be something in the air 
 of America which makes this kind of thing possible — 
 possible to do, and possible to be endured. Obviously ; 
 since Mr. Bok still lives to tell the tale. 
 
 His next exploit is an attack upon the oyster from a 
 different side. An actress's portrait is thrown out of 
 a packet of cigarettes. He picks it up, looks at it, turns 
 it over, and discovers the reverse to be blank. Happy 
 thought : fill in the blank with biographical matter. He 
 explains his little idea to the publisher of the picture. 
 Upshot, ten dollars apiece for hundred-word biographies of 
 one hundred famous Americans, He starts in, finishes 
 his hundred ; another is called for, yet another. Mr. Bok 
 deputized. His brother was put on, at five dollars per 
 life ; then ' one or two journalists he knew '. He was 
 ' speedily convinced that merely to edit biographies written 
 by others, at one half the price paid to him was more 
 profitable than to write himself.' Sure thing. ' It was 
 commercial, if you will ', he says. It was commercial 
 whetiier we will or not. ' The important point,' he thinks, 
 ' is that Edward Bok was being led more and more to 
 writing and editorship.' To my mind that is not the 
 important point. That rather lies in the distinction which 
 exists between self-help and helping yourself. 
 
 He helped himself presently to New England and her 
 great men — to Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Miss 
 
 1
 
 THE OYSTER KING 
 
 ^33 
 
 Alcott, Emerson, Phillips Brooks. All of them were 
 astoundingly benevolent. The philosopher-poet was fail- 
 ing, and the chapter concerning him is painful to read: but 
 Mr. Bok got his autograph all right, and wrote out all his 
 interviews. Irritation of the kind, and even more of it, 
 produced pearls of price from his oysters. It was in 1884 
 (when he began to edit The Brooklyn Magazine) that, as 
 be says, ' Edward's autographic acquaintances stood him 
 in good stead.' It was so simple. 
 
 ' He went in turn to each noted person he had met, 
 explained his plight, and stated his ambitions, with the 
 result that very soon the magazine and the public were 
 surprised at the distinction of the contributors to T/je 
 Brooklyn Magazine. . . . Editors wondered how the . 
 publishers could afford it, whereas, in fact, not a single 
 name represented an honorarium. Each contributor had 
 come gratuitously to the aid of the editor.' 
 
 The young cuckoo dumped into some small bird's nest 
 thrives upon the same plan. He opens a cavernous beak 
 and fills the garden with raucous cries. Every bird in the 
 place hastens to fill him if by any means to ])rocure a 
 cessation. But the young cuckoo continues to shriek, and 
 the birds to supply nourishment. In America they have 
 no young cuckoos ; but they have young editors. 
 
 I must pass over his most candid account of how he 
 helped himself to Jay Gould, since that was only an 
 episode in the career wliich Lord Northcliffe finds so 
 romantic, and j)ause rather at liis newspaper syndicate 
 founded when he was still short of one-and-twenty. This 
 was a field — or shall I say a bed ? — comparatively un- 
 worked until ' the young syndicator ' as he calls himself, 
 took off his coat. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was
 
 234 THE OYSTER KING 
 
 the first oyster to be laid down ; his next was the writer 
 of a ' bright letter ' called ' Bab's Babble ' ; and his next 
 Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox. The result of all that was a 
 ' Bok Page ' in a hundred newspapers ; a ' Bok's Liter- 
 ary Leaves ' ; and in due course, no doubt (though it is 
 not mentioned), Bok's Hebdomadary Picnics. And so far 
 Mr. Bok was not twenty-one. A live wire. 
 
 I will not follow into the account of his riper years. 
 Comment fails me already, if comment be necessary ; but 
 I don't think it can be. Mr. Bok relates his rebuffs with the 
 same engaging candour that he shows over his successes. 
 Some of them, such as the stony front turned him by 
 ' Lewis Carroll ', would have abashed an ordinary oyster- 
 man. But Mr. Bok did not understand it, simply. 
 
 It is a sobering thought that any one of the autograph 
 hunters now up in America may be the Bok of the future. 
 It may well be so, but there is no escape. Shades of the 
 prison house begin to close — but not upon the growing 
 Bok.
 
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