SELECTED WRITINGS OF WILLIAM SHARP UNIFORM EDITION ARRANGED BY MRS. WILLIAM SHARP VOLUME IV LITERARY GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL-SKETCHES BY WILLIAM SHARP SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY MRS. WILLIAM SHARP NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1912 TO GEORGE R. HALKETT MY DEAR HALKETT More years ago than either of us cares to recall, we were both, in the same dismal autumn for us, sent wandering from our native land in Scotland to the ends of the earth. I remember that each com- miserated the other because of that dpctor's-doom in which we both, being young and foolish, believed. Since then \ve have sailed many seas and traversed many lands, and I, at least, have the wayfaring fever too strong upon me ever to be cured now. At times, however, one not only returns to one's own country, but to the familiar lands of Literary Geography, where, since we were boys, we have so often fared with never-failing gladness and content. Some of these wayfarings, set in the steadfastness of print, are now chronicled in this book; and to whom better could I dedicate it than to you, who are at once editorially its godfather and the old-time and valued friend of THE AUTHOR 261177 CONTENTS PART I PAGE THE COUNTRY OF STEVENSON 3 THE COUNTRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH 31 AYLWIN-LAND: WALES AND EAST ANGLIA 62 THE COUNTRY OF CARLYLE 93 THE COUNTRY OF GEORGE ELIOT 115 THACKERAY-LAND 137 THE BRONTE COUNTRY 168 THE THAMES FROM OXFORD TO THE NORE 198 THE LAKE OF GENEVA 228 PART II THREE TRAVEL-SKETCHES THROUGH NELSON'S DUCHY 289 THE LAND OF THEOCRITUS 314 ROME IN AFRICA 335 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 389 PART I IV THE COUNTRY OF STEVENSON THE first time I saw Robert Louis Stevenson was at Waterloo Station. I did not at that time know him even by sight, and there was no speculation as to identity in my mind when my attention was attracted by a passenger, of a strangeness of appearance almost grotesque, emerging from a compart- ment in the Bournemouth train which had just arrived. I was at the station to meet a French friend coming by the Southampton route, but as I did not expect his arrival till by the express due some twenty minutes later, I allowed myself an idle and amused interest in the traveller who had just stepped on to the platform close by me. He was tall, thin, spare indeed, he struck me as almost fantastically spare : I remember thinking that the station draught caught him like a torn leaf flowing at the end of a branch. His clothes hung about him, as the clothes of a convalescent who has lost bulk and weight after long fever. He had on a jacket of black velveteen I cannot 3 Country of Stevenson swear to the colour, but that detail always comes back in the recalled picture a flannel shirt with a loose necktie negligently bundled into a sailor's -knot, somewhat fantastical trousers, though no doubt this effect was due in part to their limp amplitude about what seemed rather the thin green poles familiar in dahlia-pots than the legs of a human creature. He wore a straw hat, that in its rear rim suggested forgetfulness on the part of its wearer, who had appa- rently, in sleep or heedlessness, treated it as a cloth cap. These, however, were details in themselves trivial, and were not consciously noted till later. The long, narrow face, then almost sallow, with some- what long, loose, dark hair, that draggled from beneath the yellow straw hat well over the ears, along the dusky hollows of temple and cheek, was what immediately attracted attention. But the extraor dinar iness of the impression was of a man who had just been rescued from the sea or a river. Except for the fact that his clothes did not drip, that the long black locks hung limp but not moist, and that the short velveteen jacket was disreputable but not damp, this impres- sion of a man just come or taken from the water was overwhelming. That it was not 4 The Country of Stevenson merely an impression of my own was proved by the exclamation of a cabman, who was standing beside me expectant of a " fare " who had gone to look after his luggage : " Looks like a sooercide, don't he, sir ? one o' them chaps as takes their down-on-their- luck 'eaders inter the Thimes ! " And, truth to tell, my fancy was somewhat to the same measure. I looked again, seriously wondering if the unknown had really suffered a recent submersion, voluntary or involun- tary. Meanwhile he had stepped back into the compartment, and was now emerging again with a travelling rug and a book he had obviously forgotten. Our eyes met. I was struck by their dark luminousness below the peculiar eyebrows ; and, if not startled, which is perhaps too exaggerated a term, was certainly impressed by their sombre melancholy. Some poor fellow, I thought, on the last coasts of consumption, with Shadow-Ferry almost within hail. The next moment another and more pleasing variant of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde mystery was enacted. The stranger, who had been standing as if bewildered, certainly irresolute, had dropped his book, and with long, white, nervous fingers was 5 The Country of Stevenson with one hand crumpling and twisting the loose ends of his plaid or rug. Suddenly the friend whom he was expecting came forward. The whole man seemed to change. The impression of emaciation faded ; the " drowned " look passed ; even the damaged straw hat and the short velveteen jacket and the shank-inhabited wilderness of trouser shared in this unique " literary renascence." But the supreme change was in the face. The dark locks apparently receded, like weedy tangle in the ebb ; the long sallow oval grew rounder and less wan ; the sombre melancholy vanished like cloud-scud on a day of wind and sun, and the dark eyes lightened to a violet -blue and were filled with sunshine and laughter. An extra- ordinarily winsome smile invaded the face . . . pervaded the whole man, I .was about to say. The two friends were about to move away when I noticed the fallen book. I lifted and restored it, noticing as I did so that it was The Tragic Comedians. " Oh, a thousand thanks . . . how good of you ! " The manner was of France, the accent North -country, the intonation some- what strident that of the Lothians or perhaps of Fife. 6 The Country of Stevenson Who was this puzzling and interesting personality, I now wondered this stranger like a consumptive organ-grinder, with such charm of manner, perforce or voluntarily so heedless in apparel, and a lover of George Meredith ? This problem was solved for me by the sudden appearance on the scene of my French friend. After all he had come by this train, but, a traveller in an end carriage, had not seen me on arrival, and, too, had been immersed in that complicated jargon indulged in between foreigners and the British porter which is our Anglo -Franco variety of Pidgeon -English. We had hardly greeted each other, when he exclaimed, " Ah ! . . . so you know him ? " indicating, as he spoke, the retreat- ing fellow traveller in the velveteen jacket and straw hat. " No ? why ... I thought you would have known . . . why, it is your homme-de- lettres vraiment charmant, Robert Louis Stevenson ! I have met him more than once in France, and when he saw me at Ja station he jumped out and spoke to TTme and at Basingstoke he sent me by a porter this French volume, see, with a kind message that he had read it 7 The Country of Stevenson and desired me not to trouble about its return." Often, of course, in later years, I recalled that meeting. It was the more strange to encounter Robert Louis Stevenson, and to hear of him thus from a foreigner, at an English rail way -station, as only a few days earlier I had received a letter from him, apropos of something on a metrical point which I had written in the Academy. How glad I would have been to know to whom it was I handed back the dropped Tragic Comedians ! And as the outward man was, so was his genius, so is the country of his imagination. The lands of Stevenson -country know the same extremes : sombre, melancholy, stricken or radiant, picturesque, seductive ; full of life and infinite charm ; so great a range between the snow-serenities of Silverado and the lone Beach of Falesa, or between the dreary manse-lands of " Thrawn Janet " or the desolate sea -highlands of " The Merry Men " and the bright dance of waters round the Bass and beyond the Pavilion on the Links, or the dreamy peace of " Will o' the Mill," or the sunlit glades of Fontainebleau which hid the treasure of Franchard as, again, between Pew or Huish or other vivid 8 The Country of Stevenson villains of all degrees, from Long John Silver to James More, and the polished Prince Florizel, the Chevalier de Brisetout, the old French colonel in St. Ives, the dour David Balfour and the irrepressible Alan Breck, between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, between the Stevenson of Aes Triplex or Pulvis et Umbra, and the Stevenson of Travels with a Donkey or An Inland Voyage. And through all the countries of Stevenson, as through his genius, as ever with the man himself, the heart-warming, radiant smile is ever near or is suddenly come. The true Stevenson because nature and temperament concur in expression with dramatic selection and literary instinct is continually revealed when he writes of the open. The most ordinary statements have the leap of the wind and the dance of the sea in them : we are thrilled, as was the hero of Kidnapped, at the " first sight of the Firth lying like a blue floor." What intoxication certainly, at least, for those who know the country to read of that blithe, windy, East-Scotland coast that Stevenson loved so well, the country so lovingly depicted in The Pavilion on the Links, Catriona, and elsewhere, that tract of windy bent -grass, with its " bustle of 9 The Country of Stevenson down -popping rabbits and up -fly ing gulls," where Cassilis watched the Red Earl beyond the sea-wood of Graden, where Alan Breck and David Balfour so impatiently awaited the long-delaying boat of the sloop Thistle. But those down-popping rabbits and up- flying gulls are too seductive . . . one is mentally transported to the east -wind- bitten sea-sounding shores of the Lothians. The passage must be quoted in full for here we have the core of the country which Stevenson loved above all else, his own homelands, from Edinburgh and the Pent- lands on the north and west to the Lammer- muir and the coast of Lothian on the east : " As we had first made inland " (thus the sober David Balfour sets forth in Catriona) " so our road came in the end to be very near due north ; the old kirk of Aberlady for a landmark on the left ; on the right, the top of the Berwick Law ; and it was thus we struck the shore again, not far from Dirleton. From North Berwick east to Gullane Ness there runs a string of four small islets Craigleith, the Lamb, Fidra, and Eyebrough notable by their diversity of size and shape. Fidra is the most par- ticular, being a strange grey islet of two 10 The Country of Stevenson humps, made the more conspicuous by a piece of ruin ; and I mind that (as we drew closer to it) by some door or window of the ruins the sea peeped through like a man's eye. Under the lee of Fidra there is a good anchorage in westerly winds, and there, from a far way off, we could see the Thistle riding. . . . The shore in face of these islets is altogether waste. Here is no dwelling of man, and scarce any passage, or at most of vagabond children running at their play. Gullane is a small place on the far side of the Ness ; the folk of Dirleton go to their business in the inland fields, and those of North Berwick straight to the sea- fishing from their haven, so that few parts of the coast are lonelier. But I mind, as we crawled upon our bellies into that multi- plicity of heights and hollows, keeping a bright eye upon all sides, and our hearts hammering at our ribs, there was such a shining of the sun and the sea, such a stir of the wind in the bent -grass, and such a bustle of down -popping rabbits and up- flying gulls, that the desert seemed to me like a place that is alive." Certainly this brings us to the point as to what is Stevenson's country. If we were ii The Country of Stevenson to follow that wandering pen of his, it would lead us far afield : through the Scottish Lowlands and the Highland West by Ochil and Pentland to Corstorphine Height and the Braid Hills, with Edinburgh between them and the sea; from Arthur's Seat to Berwick Law and from the moorlands of Pomathorn and La Mancha to Lammermuir, where it breaks in vast grassy slopes and heath-tangled haughs to the wild shores between Tantallon and St. Abbs' ; from the lone Sol way shores, where the sorrows of Durrisdeer were enacted, to storm-swept Aros and the foam-edged Earraid of Mull, and thence by Morven and the Braes of Balquhidder ; and then, southward, through long tracts of England from Carlisle and winding Eden to Market Bos worth, in a field near which, it will be remembered, the hero of St. Ives and " the Major " buried the old French colonel a fit companion for Colonel Newcome, if they met, as surely they have done, at the Club of the Immortals. From the Midlands may be struck the Great North Road, whose name haunted Stevenson's imagination like music, so that he dreamed to weave around it one of his best romances ; and that in turn will lead to London and the scenic background of so many fantastic 12 The Country of Stevenson episodes, and above all (to the true Steven- sonian) to Rupert Street, off Leicester Square, where, it is understood, the ever delightfully urbane Prince Florizel of Bohe- mia kept a tobacconist's shop. Then would come Burford Bridge, in the heart of Surrey, so wed to a great personal association and to a famous passage in the Essay on Romance. Due south lies the English coast, with all its associations with the boyhood of the hero of Treasure Island . . . and its many personal associations with Stevenson himself, who lived awhile at Bournemouth West, in a pleasant house on the pine -lands to which he had given the name of " Skerryvore," in remembrance of that greatest achievement of his family "the lighthouse builders." But this covers only a small tract of the literary geography of the Stevenson -lands. Across the near seas are Flanders and the Dutch Netherlands, where David Balfour followed Catriona, and where James More intrigued and idly dreamed to the last : Paris, the background of so many fine episodes, from that of the Sire de Maletroit's Door and A Lodging for the Night to the famous scene where Prince Florizel throws the Rajah's Diamond into the Seine : Fon- tainebleau, with all its happy personal 13 The Country of Stevenson memories of " R. L. S." when resident at Barbizon with his cousin " R, A. M. S.,"* and all its associations with that delightful tale The Treasure of Franchard ; the lovely river scenery of An Inland Voyage, and the picturesque Cevennes Highlands of Travels with a Donkey ; and Marseilles and Hyeres, each of them " a paradise " till the Serpent soon or late (and generally, here as else- where, soon) entered in guise of a crafty landlord or servant -worry or relaxing climate or fever or other ailment. When I was last in the Hyeres neighbourhood I visited the charming villa where Stevenson declared he had at last found the ideal place " to live in, to work in, and to die in " and understood why, a little later, he alluded to it in terms more vigorous and unconventional than eulogistic ! Neverthe- less, his Hyeres home, and its garden that * The late Robert Allen Mowbray Stevenson was commonly known by his initials : one of the most lovable of men, an artist, and the most illuminating and suggestive of modern writers on art (his study of Velasquez and Fromentin's Mattres d'Autrefois are, I think, two of the most suggestive and fascinating of modern books on art), he lacked in creative power that energy and charm which in person he had to a degree not less than revealed in R. L. S. 14 The Country of Stevenson " thrilled all night with the flutes of silence," had ever a treasured place in his memory. Then across the wider seas there are the forests of New England, where Ticonderoga wandered, and where the Master of Ballan- trae came to his tragic end ; the green Adirondacks and the snow-clad heights where the Silverado squatters gained new life and hope ; the vast prairies across which the emigrant train wearily toiled ; and San Francisco, like a white condor from the Andes at her sea-eyrie by the Golden Horn the San Francisco whence sailed the Stevensonian schooners of fact and fancy, now bearing " R. L. S." to Pacific Isles, now carrying one or other of those adventurers whose very existence on earth was a wellspring of joy to Stevenson's romantic imagination the San Francisco where he married the lady who as " Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson " was afterwards to share with him the repute won by some of his most fantastic and delightful work. It is, however, pleasanter to turn from Cali- fornia, where, at an earlier period, at Los Angeles and elsewhere, " R. L. S." knew so much privation and disheartenment at a time when health, finances, and prospects ran a neck-and-neck race for final collapse, 15 The Country of Stevenson to that wide sunlit ocean where to the imagination Romance for ever sails in a white sloop before a south wind. The Samoan Islands here, above all, we may find ourselves at one of the least unstable of Stevenson's wandering homes ! His only home of late years, indeed, and where the desire of change and movement ceased to irritate the longing mind acutely, and where some of his finest work was achieved, and much that was delightful and fascinating sent out to an ever -widening circle of eager readers. Nor, to the lover of Stevenson, can any place be more sacred than that lonely island in the Pacific, and the lonely highland forest in the heart of it, at whose summit lies the mortal part of " Tusitala," the teller of tales, the singer of songs, whose lovely requiem is, in his own words, so un- forgettable in their restful music and in the inward cadence of the heart speaking : Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie ; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me : Here he lies where he longed to be ; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. 16 The Country of Stevenson A friend who saw Stevenson in Samoa told me that once, on half -jocularly asking him " what's your secret ? " " R. L. S." answered : " Oh, it's only that I've always known what I liked and what I wanted ; and that, with the power to convince yourself and others, is rarer than you think." And though that is only a facet of truth, it's an acute flash on life so far as it extends. In Samoa as elsewhere he knew what he liked, and why he liked, whether in life or litera- ture. Years before, in An Inland Voyage, he had said the same thing : "To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive." But the Stevenson country ! How are we to define that ? We cannot, in this instance, follow the wandering genius of the author whom we all love : a map of "Treasure Island " we can have, it is true, for who has forgotten that delightful chart which once set so many hearts a-beating ? but from the coral-circt isles of the Pacific round the long world of green and grey to the dark Water of Swift, by the wastes of Sol way, or to the lone House of Aros by the sea- facing hills of Argyll, to follow the devious track of " R. L. S." would be too extensive iv 17 B The Country of Stevenson a trip for us to overtake here. And then, too, there is the Land of Counterpane ! How is one to chart that delightful country ? We all know that it comes within the literary geography of the imagination, but then that rainbow-set continent itself is as difficult to reach as Atlantis, or the Isle of Avalon, or Hy Brasil, or any other of the Islands of Dreams. No, obviously we must take the more local sense, and by Stevenson's country mean the country of his birth and up- bringing " the lands that made him," as he said once. In his case, certainly, this does not mean dissociation from his work. The " literary geography of Rudyard Kip- ling," for instance, would be everywhere save the place where that distinguished writer's forbears dwelt ; nor does it matter to any one (be it said without impertinence) that Mr. Kipling lived and wrote at Rotting- dean, or wrote and lived in Manhattan. This is neither a compliment nor the reverse : simply a statement of a sentiment many feel ... a sentiment to which allusion is made in another article in this series, in connection with George Eliot. We are keenly interested in Gad's Hill, in Abbots- ford, in Vailima in Stevenson's instance, 18 The Country of Stevenson as in Dickens' and Scott's, in every place where he made or attempted to make a home. There are other writers, whose work perhaps we admire as much or more, who, for all we care, might have written their books in a Swiss hotel or a New York board- ing-house, or even inside a London 'bus. It is not a thing easily to be explained, perhaps is not explicable : it either is, or is not, to be felt. How would Stevenson himself define his country ? In one of his essays he alludes to youthful seductive avenues to romance as " Penny plain and twopence coloured." For all the multi-coloured shift and chance of foreign travel and life in South -sea climes, I think the " Twopence coloured " country to which his imagination and longing would have come for choice, had to choose one way been necessary, would have been those beloved home-lands between the links of Gullane and that old manse by Swanston in the Pentlands. The way would be by one of those old green drove -roads such as that by which David Balfour left Essendean after his father's death, when he set out for distant Cramond, a two-days,' long march till he should come upon the House of Shaws. It would wind through the Lothians, with 19 The Country of Stevenson many a glimpse of the sea leaning ashine across the green bar of the landward horizon, or of the Firth of Forth lying like " a blue floor." It would lead by the Braid Hills to Bristo and the Bruntsfield links whereby the hero of Catriona fought his fantastic duel with the touchy Highland officer, Lieutenant Hector Duncansby, who, as he informed David, was " ferry prave myself, and pold as a lions "and so "to the top of a hill," where still the sheep nibble the sweet grass save when the golfer's artillery drives them to the furze-garths, to where " all the country will fall away down to the sea, and, in the midst of the descent, on a long ridge, the city of Edinburgh smoking like a kiln." The green drove -road would end, and Edinburgh be entered by way of the white roads of Liberton or the Braid ; and the old picturesque city be traversed and retra versed this way and that, and of course, not unmindful of that Howard Place where, at No. 8, Robert Louis Stevenson was born to emerge beyond the Dean Bridge, or where Murray field leans over the Water of Leith and looks towards Corstorphine Hill, whose woods are now metropolitan at whose familiar landmark, the " Rest-and-Be-Thankful," Alan Breck 20 The Country of Stevenson and David Balfour parted when they had all but come upon Silvermills after that long perilous flight of theirs towards and hither- ward the Highland line. Then looping Cramond and the House of Shaws, the way would cross over the strath between Corstor- phine and Dreghorn, and mount by Colinton and Juniper Green, to embrace that pleasant isolated manse of Swanston, where Steven- son spent so many happy days of boyhood, and to which his thoughts so often lovingly wandered, and, further, the higher Pentland moorland region, to be for ever associated with Weir of Hermiston. One can, in a word, outline Stevenson's own country as all the region that on a clear day one may in the heart of Edinburgh descry from the Castle walls. Thence one may look down towards the climbing streets of the old town, with its many closes and wynds, where the young advocate pursued so many avocations to the detriment of his formal vocation ; one may think of all Stevenson's personal associations with Edinburgh, and of how St. Ives looked over these very walls, and how, within them, the French prisoners of war " ate their hearts out " : of yonder building, still the Bank of the British Linen Company, within whose doors David Balfour 21 The Country of Stevenson was to find fortune at last, and at whose portal, when the reader comes upon the closing words of Kidnapped, the young Laird of Shaws is left standing ; of that hidden close yonder, where Catriona Drum- /nond met her fate when she accepted the " saxpence " that had come " all the way from Balquhidder " ; of the gloomy house over against the Canongate and the Nether - bow where Prestongrange and Simon Fraser spun their webs of intrigue ; away down to where the Leith spires glitter against the glittering Forth, whence David and Catriona looked up that morning when Captain Sang brought his brigantine out of the Roads, and saw " Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills glinting above in a kind of smuisty brightness, now and again overcome with blots of cloud," with no more than the chimney-tops of Leith visible because of the haar ; or over westward to " the village of Dean lying in the hollow of a glen by the waterside," now a grey declivity by a ravine in the very body of the city ; or sheer down, where now are pleasant gardens and a continual business of hurried folk and idlers, but once was marish and thick undergrowth of gorse and bramble, to the most splendid street in Europe, changed 22 The Country of Stevenson indeed from the days of Kidnapped and Catriona and the final upbreak of all the broken families who held by the Stuart dynasty the Lang Dykes, as Princes Street was then called, when it was a broad walk by the water-edge to the north of the grey bristling lizard of the old town ; or due westward, past Corstorphine, round which the houses now gather like the clotted foam upon a rising tide, and over Colinton way to Swanston " in the green lap of the Pent- land Hills," and so to Cauldstaneslap and all the scenery of the history of the Weirs and Rutherfords and Black Elliotts, to where Archie and Kirstie met by night on the moor, and where Lord Hermiston's grim smile seems to be part of the often beautiful but oftener sombre landscape. From distant Berwick Law and the dim blur of the Bass Rock in certain pages concerning which, both as to the imprisonment there of David and as to how Black Andie entertained him with the awful tale of Tod Lapraik, Stevenson is at the same inimitable height of narrative as with a still broader hand- ling he attained in Weir of Hermiston to the Hawes Inn by the Queen's Ferry, there is hardly a mile of land which is not coloured by the life and romantic atmosphere 23 The Country of Stevenson of him whom we lovingly speak of as "R. L. S." Was he really " a changeling," as one of his friends half -seriously averred ? No, he was only one of those rare temperaments which gather to themselves the floating drift blowing upon every wind from every quarter ; one of those creative natures which, in their own incalculable seasons and upon their own shifting pastures, reveal again, in a new and fascinating texture and pageant of life, the innumerable flowers and weeds come to them in invisible seed from near and far. But, to many people, Steven- son had something of the elfish character. A bookseller's assistant, who knew him well in the early Edinburgh days, told me that "Mr. Stevenson often gave the im- pression he wasna quite canny " not in the sense that he was " wandering," but that " he had two ways wi' him, an' you never kenned which was Mr. Stevenson and which was the man who wasna listening, but was, as ye micht say, thinkin' and talkin' wi' some one else." Very likely " R. L. S." occasionally gave a fillip to any bewildered fancy of the kind. Some will recall how he himself at one time thought that the unfortunate Scottish poet Ferguson 24 The Country of Stevenson was reincarnate in himself. But others also " felt strangely " to him. There is that singular story, told by a friend of the family, Miss Blantyre Simpson, of how the late Sir Percy and Lady Shelley both believed that Shelley had been re-born in Robert Louis Stevenson, and how Lady Shelley went so far as to bear a deep re- sentment against Mrs. Stevenson as the mother of the child that ought to have been her own ! " Mrs. Stevenson told us, hearing Lady Shelley had called and was alone, she, glancing at herself in a glass to see there was no hair awry, went smiling into the room, ready, she said, to be adored as the mother of the man her visitor and Sir Percy flattered and praised. But when she introduced herself, Lady Shelley rose indignantly and turned from her proffered hand. She accused Mrs. Stevenson of having robbed her of a son, for she held Louis should have been sent to her, that he was the poet's grandson ; but by some perverse trickery, of which she judged Mrs. Stevenson guilty, this descendant of Percy Bysshe had come to a house in Howard Place, Edinburgh, instead of hers at Boscombe Manor." 25 The Country of Stevenson I do not know if Stevenson ever heard of this story. It might have touched his mind to some grotesque or tragic imaginative fancy. As for his elfin-country, it was not changeling-land ; but that country bordered by the shores of old Romance of which he traversed so many provinces, and even, as is the wont of explorers, gave a name to this or that virgin tract, as " The Land of Counterpane." It would be difficult indeed to say where Stevenson is at his best. By common consent Weir of Hermiston is held his most masterly achievement, so far as one may discern a finished masterpiece in a masterly fragment. If I had to name three pieces of descriptive writing, I think I should say the chapter on the Bass Rock in Catriona, the account of the wild Mull coast and desolate highlands in The Merry Men, and, in another kind, A Lodging for the Night. Probably no living writer unless it be Mr. Meredith has surpassed Stevenson here ; as few, if any, have equalled him in dramatic episode such as the quarrel of Alan Breck and David Balfour in Kidnapped (concerning which Mr. Henry James said once that he knew " few better examples of 26 The Country of Stevenson the way genius has ever a surprise in its pocket "), or the immortal duel between Henry Durrisdeer and the Master of Ballan- trae, or the outwardly more commonplace but not less dramatic and impressive final scene between Archie Weir and Lord Hermiston. Read these, and then consider how even a writer of the calibre of Mr. Rudyard Kipling can misjudge as when the author of Kim (a book itself commonly misjudged, I think, and one, surely, that Stevenson would have ranked among its writer's best) wrote in the unpleasing arro- gance of rivalry : " There is a writer called Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson who makes the most delicate inlay -work in black and white, and files out to the fraction of a hair." It is impossible in a short article to give adequate illustration by quotation. But even a few words may reveal the master's touch. Here is the passage where (in Catriona) the Bass is seen at dawn : " There began to fall a gray ness on the face of the sea ; little dabs of pink and red, like coals of slow fire, came in the east ; and at the same time the geese awakened, and began crying about the top of the Bass. It is just the one crag of rock, as 27 The Country of Stevenson everybody knows, but great enough to carve a city from. The sea was extremely little, but there went a hollow plowter round the base of it. With the growing of the dawn, I could see it clearer and clearer ; the straight crags painted with sea-birds' droppings like a morning frost, the sloping top of it green with grass, the clan of white geese that cried about the sides, and the black broken buildings of the prison sitting close on the sea's edge." Or, again, take the following from The Merry Men : " The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter blackness ; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man's nostrils ; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail ; and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross the wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea ; and God only knows the uproar that was raging round the head of Ben Kyaw. 28 The Country of Stevenson Sheets of mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round the isle of Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all this burly -burly I could hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of The Merry Men." How virile this is, how vivid and con- vincing ! That wonderful West described in The Merry Men and in the Highland chapters of Kidnapped is seized with extraordinary insight and sympathetic power by Stevenson, who, though a Lowlander and Edinburgh - born (and Edinburgh folk, it is said, are all born with a bit of North Sea ice in their veins and a touch of the grey east wind in their minds), wrote of the Gaelic lands with the love and understanding which so often beget essential intimacy. Stevenson complained sadly of Thoreau that he had no waste-lands in his " improved- and-sharpened-to-a-point nature," and added that he was " almost shockingly devoid of 29 The Country of Stevenson weaknesses." None could write so of " R. L. S." ; but it is the weaknesses in which he was so " shockingly " conspicuous that, along with high and rare qualities of mind and nature, as well as of imagination and art, have endeared to us, and surely will endear to those who come after us, the most winsome and most lovable of men of genius. THE COUNTRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH The day was a van-bird of summer ; the robin still piped, but the blue, A warm and dreamy palace with voices of larks ringing through, Looked down as if wistfully eyeing the blossoms that fell from its lap ; A day to sweeten the juices, a day to quicken the sap! All round the shadowy orchard sloped meadows in gold, and the dear Shy violets breathed their hearts out the maiden breath of the year ! ON just such a van -bird day as sung in those lines of the poet-romancist himself I take up my pen to write of " The Country of George Meredith." The country of George Meredith : a fascinating theme indeed ! For the true Meredithian, there is no living writer so saturated with the spirit of nature in England as this rare poet. What other has sung with so vibrant and exultant a note as this great analyst and portrayer of men and women ? who with all his Aristo- phanic laughter and keen Voltairian spirit The Country of George Meredith feels to the core what he has himself so finely expressed . . . that nothing but poetry makes romances passable, " for poetry is the everlastingly and embracingly human ; without it, your fictions are flat foolishness." But what a country it is how wide its domain, how evasive its frontiers ! I doubt if any living writer is as intimate with nature-life, with what we mean by " country -life." Certainly none can so flash manifold aspect into sudden revelation. Not even Richard Jeffries knew nature more intimately, though he gave his whole thought to what with Meredith is but a beautiful and ever-varying back- ground. I recollect Grant Allen, himself as keen a lover and accomplished a student of nature as England could show, speaking of this singular intimacy in one who had no pretension to be a man of science. And that recalls to me a delightful afternoon illustrative of what has just been said. Some twelve or fourteen years ago, when Grant Allen (whom I did not then know) was residing at The Nook, Dorking, I happened to be on a few days' visit to George Meredith at his cottage -home near Burford Bridge, a few miles away. On the Sunday morning I walked over the field- 32 The Country of George Meredith ways to Dorking, and found Grant Allen at home. It was a pleasant meeting. We had friends in common, were colleagues on the staff of two London literary " week- lies," and I had recently enjoyed favourably reviewing a new book by this prolific and always interesting and delightful writer. So, with these " credentials," enhanced by the fact that I came as a guest of his friend, I found a cordial welcome, and began there and then with that most winsome person- ality a friendship which I have always accounted one of the best things that literary life has brought me. After luncheon, Grant Allen said he would accompany me back by Box Hill ; as, apart from the pleasure of seeing Mr. Meredith, he particularly wanted to ask him about some disputed point in natural history (a botanical point of some kind, in connection, I think, with the lovely spring flower " Love-in-a-Mist " for which Meredith had a special affection, and had fine slips of it in his garden) which he had not been able to observe satisfactorily for himself. I frankly expressed my surprise that a specialist such as my host should wish to consult any other than a colleague on a matter of intimate knowledge and observation ; iv 33 c The Country of George Meredith but was assured that there were " not half a dozen men living to whom I would go in preference to George Meredith on a point of this kind. He knows the intimate facts of countryside life as very few of us do after the most specific training. I don't know whether he could describe that green- finch in the wild cherry yonder in the terms of an ornithologist and botanist in fact, I'm pretty sure he couldn't. But you may rest assured there is no ornithologist living who knows more about the finch of real life than George Meredith does its ap- pearance, male and female, its song, its habits, its dates of coming and going, the places where it builds, how its nest is made, how many eggs it lays and what -like they are, what it feeds on, what its song is like before and after mating, and when and where it may best be heard, and so forth. As for the wild cherry . . . perhaps he doesn't know much about it technically (very likely he does, I may add ! ... it's never safe with * our wily friend ' to take for granted that he doesn't know more about any subject than any one else does !) . . . but if any one could say when the first blossoms will appear and how long they will last, how many petals each blossom 34 The Country of George Meredith has, what variations in colour and what kind of smell they have, then it's he and no other better. And as for how he would describe that cherry-tree . . . well, you've read Richard Feverel and Love in a Valley, and that should tell you everything ! " But before we come to Meredith's own particular country the home-country so intimately described in much of his most distinctive poetry and prose, and endeared to all who love both by his long residence in its midst let us turn first to the wider aspects implied in the title of this article of our " Literary Geography " series. George Meredith as a writer of romance has annexed no particular region, as Mr. Hardy has annexed Wessex, as, among younger men, Mr. Eden Phillpotts has restricted his scope to the Devon wilds, or Mr. Murray Gilchrist to the Peakland region. In truth, he has no territorial acquisitiveness : it would matter nothing to him, I fancy, whether Richard Feverel, or Nevil Beauchamp, or Evan Harrington, or Rhoda or Dahlia Fleming, or Clara Middle- ton, or " Browny " Farrell, or any other of his men and women, played their parts in this or that country, in southern England or western or eastern, in Bath or Berlin, in 35 The Country of George Meredith London or Limburg. Although the natural background of his English stories is very subtly used by him, it is only occasionally the background of specific geographical region or of locality ; though at times we may find ourselves for a while at Bath, or Tunbridge Wells, or Wimbledon (if Wimbledon it be where General Ople had his " gentlemanly residence " and was appropriated out of widowerhood by the redoubtable Lady Camper), or by Thames - side, or at Felixstowe, or anywhere east or south of Waterloo Bridge as far as the dancing tide of that unforgettable off- Harwich swim in Lord Ormont and his Aminta, or that particular reach of " blue water " of the Channel betwixt the Isle of Wight and the coast of France where Jenny Denham, on board the Esperanza, wakes to the truth that she is to be the crowning personal factor in Nevil Beau- champ's diversified amorous career. In this series of " Literary Geography " it has ever been a puzzle how to treat specifically the country of a famous writer when that writer has wandered far afield, as Scott did, or as Stevenson did. It is rare that one finds a novelist so restricted in locality as George Eliot or Mr. Thomas 36 The Country of George Meredith Hardy. The former made one great and unconvincing venture abroad ; but in con- nection with the titular phrase " The Country of George Eliot " the Florence of Romola would not naturally be thought of. George Eliot made photographic Florentine studies : she did not herself re-create for us the country of Romola, as she re-created her own home -land for us in Adam Bede, or Silas Marner, or The Mill on the Floss. And Mr. Hardy is Wessex to the core. Little beyond is of account in what he has done, and we can no more readily imagine him writing a tale of Venice or of Switzer- land than we could readily imagine Dos- toievsky or Maxim Gorki emulating Samuel Lover or Charles Lever. But Meredith leaves one in face of an acuter difficulty. In a sense, he is English of the English : there is none living who more swiftly and poignantly conveys the very breath and bloom of nature as we know it in England above all in Surrey and the long continuous vale of the Thames. The titles of one or two books of his verse are significant : Poems of the English Roadside, Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. He is, before all, the poet of the joy of life, and none has more 37 The Country of George Meredith intimately brought us nearer in delight to the countryside. I know no more winsome book of verse, for the truly in love with nature, than The Nature Poems of George Meredith, with Mr. William Hyde's wholly delightful drawings : a volume containing little in quantity, but superlatively rich in quality. It is enough to add that its contents include the noble Hymn to Colour, Woods of Wester main, Love in a Valley, The South-Wester, The Thrush in February, The Lark Ascending, Night of Frost in May, the Dirge in Woods. Yet, while this is obvious, any lover of his writings will recall that much of what is most beautiful in description rather in evocation, for any- thing of detailed description, save on the broadest canvas with a swift and burning brush, is rare with this master of English prose is in connection with Italian, or French, or German, or Austrian, or Swiss scenery. He has made Venice and the Alpine regions more alive with unforgettable light and magic touch than any other has done since Ruskin, and in a way wholly his own, supremely the Tintoretto of the pen as he is. How, then, in speaking of " The Country of George Meredith," are we to limit ourselves to Surrey or the home- 38 The Country of George Meredith counties ? The most English of his novels is held to be The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ; but the finest piece of descriptive writing of nature in that book (and, as it happens, the longest of any in the books of Meredith) is not of nature as we know it on the Surrey downs or by the banks o' Thames, but among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland and by the clear flood of the Lahn where it calls to the forest not far from that old bridge at Limburg, " where the shadow of a stone bishop is thrown by the moonlight on the water crawling over slabs of slate." No one who has read (how many there must be who know it almost by heart !) the forty- second chapter of this book the chapter so aptly named, though with double mean- ing, "Nature speaks" will be ready to forego the author's right to have this riverland and f orestland of Nassau included in his " Country." If one of the most deep, vivid, and beautiful pieces of writing in modern literature is not to bring the region limned within the frontier of the author's literary geography, what value in the designation remains ? It is not isolated in beauty, that unforgettable scene . . . not even when set with its compeer in the same book, the familiar but never staled 39 The Country of George Meredith beauty of that finest prose-poem in English fiction, the famous Enchanted Islands chapter or wooing of Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough (with characteristic irony en- titled " A Diversion Played on a Penny Whistle "), or with the brief but mordant passage given to the tragically ineffective meeting of married Richard and Lucy in Kensington Gardens, " when the round of the red winter sun was behind the bare chestnuts." One could companion these with a score, with a hundred passages, from the Rhineland of the early Farina to the Alps of The Amazing Marriage. The literary geography of George Meredith, then, cannot be confined to a region or scattered regions with definite frontiers, still less to a mere county or two with ad- justable boundaries : it must be constructed, say, like the shire of Cromarty, which one finds in bits about the north of Scotland, or like that familiar " Empire " map where the red flaunt of our kinship is scattered over the world with what a famous humorist has called an impartial and inveterate zest for " dumping " on all the desirable and soft spots. Switzerland, from the Bernese Oberland to Monte Generoso ; Italy, from the Lom- 40 The Country of George Meredith bard Plain below Monte Motterone to Verona and Venice ; Austria, from the upper waters of Lago di Maggiore or from Friulian or Carinthian Alp, to hill -set Meran and imperial Vienna ; Germany, from the Harz to the hills of Nassau and the Rhinelands of Cologne (of the thousands who invest there in the " Farina " of commerce, one wonders how many indulge in or recall the " Farina " of literature, wherein the Triumph of Odour is so pic- turesquely set forth !) ; France, from the pleasant Vosges or old Touraine to the not unguessable " Tourdestelle " of the Norman coast are not these, with Solent waters and the open Channel and the Breton reaches of La Manche and " the blue " west and south of Ushant, even to distant Madeira ... are not all these to be brought within the compass of the literary geo- grapher ? True, it may be urged, these are but swallow-flights into poetry. " A series of kaleidoscopic views, however beautiful, is not enough to justify the claim of the literary geographer to this or that region," or words to that effect, might be adduced. But the secret of the vivid and abiding charm of Mr. Meredith's backgrounds to 41 The Country of George Meredith the tragi-comedy of his outstanding men and women is just in their aloofness from anything " kaleidoscopic," with its im- plication of the arbitrary and the accidental. He does not go to Venice or to Limburg to write about these places, or to note the bloom of local colour for literary decoration ; nor does he diverge by the Adriatic or by the winding ways of Lahn, so as to introduce this gondola-view of the sea-set city or that forest -vision which for English folk has given a touch of beauty to Nassau which before it hardly owned in literary remem- brance. His men and women are there, for a time, or passingly ; and so the beauty that is in the background closes round and upon them, or is flashed out for a moment, through the magic of the same power which gave themselves the breath of life. The same vision which has seen into a Renee's heart or the life -springs of a Nevil Beau- champ, or pierced the veils of personality in a Cecilia Halkett (or any of the long unequalled " studies " from Lucy Des- borough to beautiful Carinthia, from Rosa- mund Romfrey perhaps Mr. Meredith's subtlest portrait to Mrs. Berry) or in men of passionate life and action such as Richard Feverel, or " Matey " Weyburn, 42 The Country of George Meredith or the great Alvan (and here, too, what a gallery of living natures, between the almost grotesque extremes of Sir Willoughby Patterne of one great novel and the Dr. Shrapnel of another !) the same vision has noted the determining features and out- standing aspects of this or that scene, and, in flashing a single ray or flooding a long continuous beam, has revealed to us more than the most conscientious photographic or " pre-Raphaelite " method could ac- complish in ten times the space, or in ten times ten. It is, indeed, pre-eminently in these brief outlines of the country in which his imagination temporarily pursues its creative way that Meredith excels. A score of instances will doubtless occur to the reader, but here are one or two chosen almost at random. I do not allude to those, and they are many, which convey solely by awakening an emotion in the mind of the reader not by description but by a sudden terse expression of deep feeling in the midst of dialogue or direct narrative : as, for example, a couple of lines in that delightful romance Lord Ormont and his Aminta, which so charmed readers of the Pall Mall Magazine in the numbers issued from December 1893 to July 1894 : 43 The Country of George Meredith " Thus it happened that Lord Ormont and Philippa were on the famous Bernese Terrace, grandest of terrestrial theatres, where soul of man has fronting him earth's utmost majesty. ..." I allude, rather, to vivid " asides " such as : "... poor Blackburn Tuckham de- scended greenish to his cabin as soon as (the yacht) had crashed on the first wall- waves of the chalk-race, a throw beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting sea. . . ." (Beau- champ's Career.) or, " Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow, and the leap of the fish in the silver rolling rings com- posed the music." (Lord Ormont.) or that rapid impression of Venice, by Renee, in her brief Adriatic flight romance- ward with Nevil Beauchamp : 4 ... Green shutters, wet steps, bar- caroli, brown women, striped posts, a scarlet 44 The Country of George Meredith night-cap, a sick fig-tree, an old shawl, faded spots of colour, peeling walls. . . ." or, and finally, for one must make an end to what might be indefinitely prolonged and for the same reason, still to keep to Beauchamp's Career this of the fading of Venice from the gaze of Renee and Nevil : "... [Leaning thus], with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where the faint red Doge's palace was like the fadmg of another sunset north-westward of the glory along the hills. Venice dropped lower and lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air. The line was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on opal sky. At last the topmost cam- panile sank. Ren6e looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city. ' It is gone,' she said, ' as though a marvel had been worked ; and swiftly.' ' As for more detailed description of those regions Venetian, Lombardian, Alpine, Swiss, French, German, Austrian which must be included by the literary geographer of the country of George Meredith, that too might be made the pleasant task of a volume rather than the difficult coup d'ceil 45 The Country of George Meredith and impossible adequate representation of a magazine article. From Richard Fever el and Beauchamp's Career, the two deepest and tenderest and most winsome of the author's books, to the superb Vittoria, the brilliant and fascinating 'Diana of the Cross- ways ; from that intense study of the Teuton nature aflame, The Tragic Comedians, to Lord Ormont and his Aminta, and the best loved and most lovable of Meredith's later romances, The Amazing Marriage, there is not one which would not yield some long excerpt of treasurable beauty and distinction. Which would it be, if but a quotation or two at most could be given ? Shall it be just across the Channel, at Renee's Tourdestelle in Normandy, hidden behind that coast of interminable dunes, that coast seen by Nevil Beauchamp on his fateful visit " dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea ? " Or at Baden Baden and the high Alps with Carinthia ? Or with Richard Feverel in the woods at Nassau on the day when that " tragic failure " learns suddenly what has happened to poor Lucy ... that he is a father ? Or with beauti- ful and radiant Diana at Monte Generoso ? Or with superb Vittoria at Monte Motterone, overlooking Lombardy and Italy ? Or the 46 The Country of George Meredith Adriatic by night or the Alps beyond Venice at dawn or . . . but an end ! " The woman guides us." But which of the many beautiful women of Meredith's " House of Life " shall it be ? All are unforgettable portraits, from Lucy Des- borough and Renee de Croisnel to Clara Middleton, to Diana, to Carinthia ; all are of vital womanly nature at its vividest, from Vittoria to Clotilde, from Cecilia Halkett to " Browny " Aminta (perhaps, of all, the nearest to the most modern ideal of woman, she who of all this author's women-characters appeals most to men and women jointly, . . . and has not he who knows her best written of her, " All women were eclipsed by her. She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the night to look at it " ?) But let us choose another and less bewildering method. Nature is nature, whether viewed among the Alps, in Nassau forests, in Surrey woods or wealds. George Meredith writes with his bewitching mastery, not because he has travelled widely and seen much, but because from his cottage- home in the heart of Surrey, or wherever else he has lived, briefly or for long, he has observed with insatiable love and eagerness 47 The Country of George Meredith because he has the transmuting mind and the instinct of interpretation. " How did he learn to read at any moment right to the soul of a woman ? It must be because of his being in heart and mind the brother to the sister with women." So, if not thus articulately, thought " Browny " of " Matey " Weyburn in that keen -eyed and perturbing chapter, "Lovers Mated." And, it might be added of their creator, how did he learn to read at any moment right to the soul of any aspect of nature ? . . . it must be because of his being heart and mind the brother to the living soul that breathes and reveals itself in "the every- thing and the all " of Nature. Hidden in the midst of the two hundred and ninetieth page of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the clue-word of that book of all his work. The "auroral" air is that wherein his genius takes wing, whence it comes, whither it soars, though its pastures are of earth, and oftenest indeed of the earth earthy. This is the secret of his magnificent sanity : this undying youth with the wisdom of the sage and the auroral joy of life. What a wealth to draw from 1 One need not turn to the more familiar scenes, and can find the unsurpassable by the sand The Country of George Meredith country, marsh, and meadow of Bevisham, or by sea -set Felixstowe, as well as among the high Alps or where Venice lies "like a sleeping queen " on the Adriatic. What pictures innumerable, besides these the better known of Lucy and Renee, Sandra and Clotilde, Diana and Clara, Aminta and Carinthia, and their eager lovers . . . as, for example, that of the lovely episode ol Cecilia Halkett's voiceless wooing in the dawn " of a splendid day of the young Spring." So saturated with the sense of nature is all Meredith's work in prose or verse, so continually illumined is it with vivid allusion or revealing glance that not- withstanding the innumerable pages given to nature - background in foreign lands, from Norman Tourdestelle to Adriatic Chioggia, from Madeira in the Canary Sea to Meran in the Austrian Tyrol the pre- vailing impression on the habitual reader of his writings is that his " country " is our own familiar English country, and pre- eminently Surrey and Hants and Dorset, or all from Felixstowe (of the immortal swim) to Bevisham, south-west of the Isle of Wight and the dancing Solent. It is in his verse, however, that Meredith iv 49 D The Country of George Meredith has given most intimate and poignant as well as most personal expression to his deep love of and exceptional intimacy with nature. If we must make exception, let it be such a passage as that where Richard Feverel first sees Lucy Desborough, when on the dream-quest after his ideal " Clare Doria Forey " . . . " (name of) perfect melody ! . . . sliding with the tide, he heard it fluting in the bosom of the hills ; " or that ever-lifting passage be- ginning, " Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth ; "... or that (since Richard's romance holds one spell-bound) where Sir Austin Feverel and his son are together in a rail way -carriage, as they approach Bellingham at sundown, and the young man looks out over the pine -hills beyond to the last rosy streak in a green sky, and sees in " the sad beauty of that one spot in the heavens " the very symbol of the ache and wonder in his heart. For in these things is the very breath of poetry, if not the metrical semblance. 50 The Country of George Meredith But to begin now and quote from the poetry of George Meredith would keep us indefinitely. It is led to, often, by rough roads, and not infrequently rude and even unsightly and unwelcome banks, obscure dew-wet pasture and moonlit glade. But his " country " is always the country of Beauty, of the poet. One ever looks back across " the twilight wave,'* and sees there, as in a dream, remembered images of what has impassioned and inspired : We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, And in the oiser-isle we heard their noise. We had not to look back on summer joys, Or forward to a summer of bright dye. But in the largeness of the evening earth Our spirits grew as we went side by side. The hour became her husband, and my bride. Love that had robbed us so, thus bless' d our dearth ! The pilgrims of the year wax'd very loud In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood Full brown came from the west, and like pale blood Expanded to the upper crimson cloud. Love that had robbed us of immortal things, This little moment mercifully gave, And still I see across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings. Those who would be in closest touch with the veritable " country of George Meredith " will find it in his poetry. It is the country The Country of George Meredith of that Surrey where he has so long lived, so long watched the wild cherry in the hollow behind Box Hill blossom anew at the clarions of Spring, or the nightjar " spin his dark monotony " from the moonlit pine -branch each recurrent June ; where he has so often rejoiced in the south-west wind leaping bacchanalian across the hills and vales, or seen winter silence fall upon that winding Mole by whose still stream he has so often dreamed, or watched the reds and yellows of autumn glorify the woodland fastness behind the inn at Burford Bridge that inn of many memories, where Keats wrote part of his Endymion, which for Robert Louis Stevenson had so great a fascination (and has by him been snatched out of the dusk of passing things), where first the two greatest romancists of to-day met, " in the fellowship of Omar." In one or other of the small editions of the Selected Poems the reader will find the "life " of the author, as he lives it, and has for so long lived it, in his quiet home. This lies but a stone's -throw from what was till recently a lonely country road, though now a thorough- fare almost metropolitan in its continual business of coach and motor. It has still, however, at times, much of its old fascination 52 The Country of George Meredith for the diminishing few who go afoot, and the still rarer folk of the yellow van. The Lark Ascending, Woodland Peace, Seed-time, The South-Wester, The Thrush in February, Breath of the Briar, Love in a Valley, Hymn to Colour, Night of Frost in May, Woods of Wester main the very names are " breaths of the briar." Who has not thrilled over Love in a Valley, and to its lilting music ? . . . perhaps also to those four lines which Rossetti once quoted to the present writer as the most beautiful of their kind in the language, adding " if whiteness be the colour of poetry, then here is virgin white- ness " When from bed she rises, clothed from neck to ankle In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May, Beauteous she looks ! like a tall garden lily Pure from the night and perfect from the day ! There are such material differences in the two extant versions (Love in a Valley) as to constitute them two poems rather than variants of one. In that of 1851 there are eleven stanzas ; in that, thirty-two years later, of Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (or, rather, that of Macmillan's Magazine in 1878, twenty -seven years later), there are more than half as many again 53 The Country of George Meredith in all, twenty -six. Of the eleven stanzas of the earlier version only the first, second, fourth, eighth, and ninth reappear, though through the fourteenth of the later version rises the phantom of the original fifth stanza. In rhythmic beauty this four- teenth stanza is finer, but in the earlier the poetic note is as authentic, and one misses the lovely line (following the " white - necked swallows twittering of summer," and the jasmine and woodbine " breathing sweet "), Fill her with balm and nested peace from head to feet. Another lost beautiful line is that missing in the altered second stanza, Full of all the wilderness of the woodland creatures. To the cancelled stanzas one can but say " Ave atque vale," since the author's mature judgment wills them away ; and yet it is with reluctance we lose the lines just quoted, or these : . . . On a dewy eve-tide Whispering together beneath the listening moon I prayed till her cheek flush'd. . . . 54 The Country of George Meredith .... Show the bridal Heavens but one star ? . . . Is she a nightingale that will not be nested Till the A pril woodland has built her bridal bower ? April . . . with thy crescent brows . . . Come, merry month of cuckoo and the violet ! Come, weeping Loveliness in all thy blue delight ! Surely that exquisite last line might have been saved ! On the other hand, there is no music in the earlier to equal that of certain stanzas of the later version. . . . Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar. Darker grows the valley .... or the lovely " swaying whitebeam " music of the twenty-sixth stanza, or that even lovelier twenty-fourth stanza, beginning, " Soon will she lie like a white -frost sun- rise," and closing with green-winged Spring, Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing. In the retained stanzas the alterations are generally, but by no means always, to the good, both poetically and metrically. A single instance, that of the second stanza of each version, will suffice : 55 The Country of George Meredith (1851) Shy as the squirrel, and wayward as the swallow ; Swift as the swallow when athwart the western flood Circle ting the surface, he meets his mirror' dwinglets t 7s that dear one in her maiden bud. Shy as the squirrel whose nest is in the pine-tops ; Gentle ah ! that she were jealous as the dove ! Full of all the wildness of the woodland creatures, Happy in herself is the maiden that I love ! (1878-1883) Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, Swift as the swallow along the river's light Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her -flight. Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but the glory of the winning were she won! This oral citation of the poem by Rossetti must have been from two to three years before the publication of the revised and amplified Love in a Valley in book-form (Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, 1883). The poem as it is now known first appeared in Macmillari's Magazine (October 1878) ; but when Rossetti quoted the lines to me it was out of old remembrance . . . hence the epithet "perfect" for "splendid" in the last line. On the same occasion he showed me (after some search) a manuscript 56 The Country of George Meredith copy of it made if I remember his words exactly " more than twenty years ago " : and added that it was written in " Meredith's ' George Meredith Feverel ' days." I had not seen the poem in Macmillan's, and did not then know of the Poems of 1851 ; and am not likely to forget the impression of its beauty as read by Rossetti from the MS., or the delight I had in making a copy of it. Years afterwards I had the deeper pleasure of hearing Meredith himself read the later and nobler version, in that little Swiss chalet of his above Flint Cottage and its gardens, where so much of his later work in prose and verse has been written a little brown wooden house of the simplest, but to many friends richer in ardent memories than any palace in treasures . . . with its outlook down grassy terraces and pansied garden-rows across to the green thorn-stunted slope of Box Hill, and its glimpse leftward up that valley where still in nightingale -weather may be seen in a snow of bloom the wild white cherry which inspired the lines : Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry : Fair as an image my seraph love appears. . . . One wishes that, in his later poetry, Meredith 57 The Country of George Meredith had oftener sounded the simple and beau- tiful pastoral note which gave so lovely a beauty to his first volume of verse. We miss the music of the scenery and nature - life of his beloved Surrey ; the lilt of songs such as the Autumn Song, beginning : When nuts behind the hazel leaf A re brown as the squirrel that hunts them free, And the fields are rich with the sunburnt sheaf, 'Mid the blue cornflower and the yellowing tree . . . or this " Spring Song " : When buds of palm do burst and spread Their downy feathers in the lane, A nd orchard blossoms, white and red, Breathe Spring delight and Autumn gain, And the skylark shakes his wings in the rain ; Oh ! then is the season to look for a bride ! Choose her warily, woo her unseen ; For the choicest maids are those that hide Like dewy violets under the green. And, too, since he has proved himself of the few who can use the hexameter with effect, we lament that he has not again given us summer -music such as inhabits Pastoral VII. : Summer glows warm on the meadows, and speedwell and goldcups and daisies 58 The Country of George Meredith Darken 'mid deepening masses of sorrel, and shadowy grasses Show the ripe hue to the farmer, and summon the scythe and the haymakers Down from the village ; and now, even now, the air smells of the mowing, And the sharp song of the scythe whistles daily, from dawn till the gloaming Wears its cool star .... ***** Heavily weighs the hot season, and drowses the darkening foliage, Drooping with languor ; the white cloud floats, but sails not, for windless The blue heaven tents it, no lark singing up in its fleecy white valleys. . . . And would that he could sing again and oftener of the great Surrey rolling slopes he has known so well, and most his own close by, up and down and along which he has walked at all hours in all seasons for so many years : All day into the open sky, All night to the eternal stars, For ever both at morn and eve When mellow distances draw near, And shadows lengthen in the dusk, A thwart the heavens it rolls its glimmering line ! Among the ignorant and uncritical claims made for the poetry of the late W. E. 59 The Country of George Meredith Henley is that of his pioneer -use of un- rhymed lyrical verse, or, it may be, with admission of Matthew Arnold's priority. But other writers preceded Mr. Henley, and, as I think, with a mastery beyond his (as again I think) overrated rhythmical experi- ments. At his best he never approaches the dignity of Arnold's unrhymed lyrical verse, or the suave and supple loveliness of Coventry Pat more 's. Nor do I recollect any rhymeless lyrical verse of his finer in emotion and touch than the unrhymed stanza just quoted ; or than this, from the unrhymed lyric of Nightfall (Pastoral No. V.): Three short songs gives the clear-voiced throstle, Sweetening the twilight ere he fills the nest ; While the little bird upon the leafless branches Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note. Deeper the stillness hangs on every motion : Calmer the silence follows every call : Now all is quiet save the roosting pheasant, The bell-wether tinkle and the watchdog's bark. Softly shine the lights from the silent kindling homestead, Stars of the hearth to the shepherd in the fold. . . , In these and all such as these we have the true country of George Meredith that 60 The Country of George Meredith which is part of his daily life, which is morning and noon and evening comrade, in whose companionship all his work has grown and every poem taken wing, whose solace has been his deepest comfort in long seasons of sorrow, and is still his deepest happiness in the long days of old age if one can think of this blithe spirit other than as eternally young. " joy thus to revel all day in the grass of our own beloved country / " he sang, as a youth ; and to-day the solitary old poet, looking out still on his " beloved country " of mid-Surrey, finds the same joy, if sobered to the deeper emotion of happiness, in the warmth of human life around and human love radiating from near and far. How barren would this valley be Without the golden orb that gazes On it, broadening to hues Of rose, and spreading wings of amber ; Blessing it before it falls asleep ! How barren would this valley be Without the human lives now beating In it, or the throbbing hearts Far distant, who their flower of childhood Cherish here, and water it with tears ! 6l AYLWIN-LAND: WALES AND EAST ANGLIA To have two regions named in the terms of romantic geography, and each to bear the like name and to owe the same origin, is, unquestionably, a rare distinction for any author. In that map of the Literary Geography of Great Britain which the present writer outlined a year or so ago for his own amusement, before this series was begun and has hitherto refrained from sharing with an eager world on account of his radical inability to draw either a straight line or a proper curve, or even to arrange the counties and place the towns in re- cognisable proportion and exactitude there is a tract of East Anglia as well as a tract of North Wales which bears the legend Aylwin-land. The designation is not an arbitrary one of the literary geographer. The traveller in East Anglia learns speedily from local paper or guide-book that he is in a tract of coastland strangely ignored by the Ordnance -survey or, but known to all 62 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia cultivated people (such as you and I and the local chronicler) as " Aylwin-land " : and as " Aylwin-land " a still wider region of North Wales, with Snowdon as its centre, is now acclaimed by the district -her aids to all visitors to the Principality. " Facs are jist facs : ye ma' ca' them pairtridges if ye like, but they're jist facs, an' nae mair and nae less." And with Simon MacClucket we may agree at once to accept the three incontro- vertibles : (1) That Aylwin is the representative romance of East Anglia, and that along the East Anglian coast north of Lowestoft is " Aylwin-land." (2) That Aylwin is the representative romance of North Wales, and that Snowdon is the centre of (Welsh) " Aylwin-land." (3) That Aylwin is the representative romance of the East Anglian Gypsies, wherever they are, and is (in the sixpenny edition) largely indulged in by self-respect- ing Romany chals and chis, and is accepted by them as (so to say) " their official organ." (Further) The Registrar's baptismal statistics show a significant decrease in the popularity of Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia Gladys, Marie, Esme', &c. &c., and a con- current increase in the popularity of Sinfi, Rhona, Winnie, and even Videy. As to Rhona, indeed, there will soon not be a semi- detached villa replete with every home comfort without its Rhona. " Cyril," "Hal," and even " Panuel " too, have a good show : and rumour has it that " Duk- keripen " has been snatched by a Welsh pioneer unable to read English, but whether for a male or a female Welshlet I know not. I wonder if any other first romance has ever had so swift and so great a success. We all know the enormous vogue of David Copperfield, of Vanity Fair, of Endymion, of Middlemarch, though neither Dickens nor Thackeray nor Disraeli nor George Eliot came suddenly before the reading public with one or other of these books. Mr. Thomas Hardy had written much and long before the immense vogue of Far from the Madding Crowd ; the late William Black served a thorough apprenticeship before, as Edmund Yates had it, he danced the High- land Fling from Paternoster Row to Picca- dilly ; and even Lorna Doone took time to ripen in public taste. Perhaps the nearest comparison is with John Inglesant. But Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia even here the likenesses in destiny are super- ficial. J. Shorthouse's famous book had known no premonitory wagging of tongues : when it did leave the author's hands it evinced an apparently incurable tendency to emulate the home returning " strayed " cat ; and even when at last published, success came tardily, reluctantly almost, and the author found himself famous when much of the savour of fame was gone. Needless to point to the difference between the present supreme rank of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and its first reception and slow growth in general esteem. Now that I think of it, Trilby is the only contemporary instance I can remember of the immediate and vast success of a first romance by a new writer. However, we are not concerned here with the origins and literary history of Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous romance, but solely with its literary geography. In a sense The Coming of Love may be merged meanwhile in its prose compeer. Both books are faithful mirrors of the same spirit, the same individuality, the same experiences, the same outlook on the things of life and eternity. The Rhona Bos well of the one is the Rhona of the other : iv 65 E Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia dukkeripens and chals and Ms are un- stintedly common to both. In calculating the literary geography of any author one has to bear in mind the author's own natal place and early en- vironment. The colours seen in childhood are those with which in maturity whatever is enduring is depicted. It is sometimes stated that literature, that poetry in par- ticular, can and even should be independent of any knowledge on the reader's part of what influences shaped and what inward and extraneous things coloured the threads out of which the web is woven. : ' We have the web : that is enough," is, in effect, the plea. Perhaps, Kubla Khan or The Ancient Manner is cited, with the incon- trovertible comment that Coleridge never was in a Himalayan gorge or never saw a live albatross, either on an unsailed sea or any other. Here, it is argued, is proof that the landscape and seascape of the imagina- tion need have as little to do with actual knowledge or early familiarity as have the coasts of Elizabethan Bohemia with the frontiers of the Bohemia of Franz- Josef. The argument, however, is not to the point any more than the fact that Blake, who was never at sea, once miraculously 66 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia etched the desolation of tempestuous ocean. It will, I think, be found demonstrable that in by far the greater number of instances the early environment of a writer is what counts most in his mature expression of nature as a background to the play of human emotions and passions and life lived. The inward shaping force remembers better than the controlled function which we call memory. Perhaps, for example, when Mr. Swinburne was writing his Sea-Garden and kindred lyrics, or the sea-choruses of Tristram of Lyoncsse or By the North Sea, or In the Bay, or his ballads of Tynewater, he had no thought to strike the note of locality, which is accidental, but was more concerned to give us that greater utterance where locality is as unimportant, as indesiderate as in Blake's Ocean or Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. But when we know how so much of the poet's boyhood was spent by the then lonely, land-slipping shores of the Isle of Wight, by the Cornish headlands, by the grey tempestuous seas off the north-east coast, in the moorlands and wide solitudes of his ancestral Northumbrian home, we can discern not merely their reflex in the poems named, but recognise one fundamental Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia reason of the distinctive excellence of these particular poems . . . that accent of inti- mate familiarity which lifts them in him to our own more intimate regard, for the instinct of the reader knows the difference between what is merely depicted, however beautifully, and what is thought in to the very fibre of the thing created. It is to thinking in to the inmost fibre of what consciously and unconsciously Tennyson remembered of his Lincolnshire homeland that the most subtle and convincing natural image of In Memoriam is due. Ruskin's childhood and boyhood and early manhood was a kind of processional festival through highland and lakeland beauty, in Cumberland, in Scotland, in Switzerland, in Italy ; and from first to last in his work there is a processional festival of beauty wherein mountain and vale, Alp and hill -loch and sealike lake, cloud and wind and wave, continually transact their phantom life. It is almost jejune to cite the instance of Sir Walter Scott : from Waver ley to the Twa Drovers, from the lay of Thomas of Ercildoune to The Lay of the Last Minstrel ... in one and all of those poems and romances of Scotland, we discern anew the intimate features of that Scotland where as child and boy and man the great 68 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia captain of romance gathered both wittingly and unwittingly his inexhaustible store of pristine reminiscence. And, certainly, Watts-Dunton was for- tunate in his early environment, his early impressions, and his restricted wanderings. For him, as boy and youth, nature meant East Anglia, the sombre German Ocean, cloud-towered Fen-land, and the romantic beauty of North Wales. A fortune indeed for any imaginative youngster to have, as background for actual life and as scenic background to the life of dreams, that wonderful Fen-country which has all the aerial scope and majesty of Holland with a unique austerity of beauty all its own : that turbulent grey North Sea, which has in its habitual aspect so much of eternal menace, but whose beauty can also be so radiant : that lovely and romantic mountain land of Wales, where Snowdon, the ancient mountain of the Druids, rises in isolated grandeur. How deeply he was influenced, how fully he absorbed the inexhaustible beauty, how profoundly he was moved by this early familiarity with Nature in some of her most compelling aspects, is abun- dantly evident in The Coming of Love and in Aylwin. Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia The author's own country is, of course, East Anglia. Here he was born ; here his early life was spent ; here one of the chief events in his life occurred, afterwards to be of such potent influence in his life his intimacy with the better class of gypsies, the Gryengoes or horse-dealers (till recently a prosperous and reputable body of this migratory people, but now for the most part shifted to America), and in particular with the two types of Romany womanhood he has made so unforgettable in Rhona Boswell and Sinn Lovell ; and here, in later years, he wandered often with George Borrow, prince of literary gypsy dom. In a letter which Watts-Dunton wrote some time ago to the Lowestoft Standard . . . concerning some correspondence in that paper concerning the crypt below Pakefield Church (introduced with so much effect in Aylwin, but at which some critics demurred in the mistaken supposition that no East Anglian church, all in that region of England being in the Perpendicular style, had a crypt) ... is an interesting personal state- ment, which may aptly be quoted here. Having settled with the crypt-objectors, he adds : " With regard to the identification of the ' Raxton Hall ' of the story, I had, 70 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia at the time when Aylwin was written, many years ago, a reason for wishing it to remain unidentified. My one idea was to retain what I may call the peculiar ' atmosphere ' and the mysterious spectral charm of the East Anglian coast, which stands up and confronts the ravaging and insatiable sea. Hence I gave so much and no more of the actual local description of the various points of the coast as might enable me to secure that atmosphere and that charm. That I have been successful in this regard is pretty clear, judging from the enthusiastic letters from East Anglians that have been reaching me since Aylwin first appeared. This is very gratifying to me, for I love the coast ; it is associated with my first sight of the sea, my first swim in the sea, and my first meeting with Borrow, as described in my obituary notice of him in The Athenczum. And when I saw in the newspapers last year the word ' Aylwin-land ' applied to the locality in which Aylwin is laid, I felt a glow of pride which not all the kind words of the critics have been able to give me." Except in one masterly romance, Mr. Baring-Gould's Mehalah, and in certain chapters of David Copperfield, maritime East Anglia had not met with anything like Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia adequate recognition on the part of the romancists. It is a land of infinite charm, if that charm has little of the picturesque, as the picturesque is commonly understood, and still less of the grand, as the grand in nature is commonly understood. Of course " The Broads " are well known and loved, as are certain tracts of the Fen-country ; and from Skegness to the Wash there are towns and " resorts " so numerous and so populous that long reaches of solitude might appear as unlikely as on the curve of Kent from Herne Bay to Margate. But it is amazing what immense tracts of solitude are to be found both inland and on the seaboard of East Anglia. It is, to many people, not less amazing what a spell " the dark lands " of the Lincolnshire fens, the Norfolk marsh- lands, the sea-lands of Suffolk, can cast over them. One great charm for those who love waste places and solitude is the sense of something tragical in nature. That element is conspicuous in the powerful appeal of the wilder or more desolate regions of maritime East Anglia. When, with nothing visible but a vast level of seemingly unstable land, a land sombre in aspect and intricately interwoven with dark, still, sinuous canals 72 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia and blind water -alleys and spreading un- certain fens, with perhaps not a house or a human being in sight, and overhead the immense and almost oppressive dome of the sky . . . generally so grey or so cloud- strewn in the continual conflict of the winds, but sometimes of a prolonged and imposing serenity, and often, especially in autumn and winter, filled with the most marvellous emblazonry of radiant flame . . . the spirit may not be moved to blitheness, and may well be affected to melancholy ; but it is also habitually uplifted to those unpassing things of which great solitary spaces and still loneliness and all the sombre phantas- magoria of land and sky are symbolic. But, apart from this, it is impossible for an imaginative mind to confront such aspects in such a region, without a more or less painful recognition of the brevity and in- significance of the material world. Every- thing beneath and around one seems shift- ing, uncertain, unstable, phantasmal : a wavering image, to adapt Goethe's phrase. Everything beyond and above seems omi- nous, imminent, inevitable. For below this emotional impression is the knowledge that a tremendous duel has long been fought here, is still being fought, and that almost certainly 73 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia the land is fighting against implacable and stronger forces. Sea and land, these are the titanic protagonists in the gigantic natural drama that is being enacted all along the northlands from Finistere to Jutland, and nowhere more swiftly and surely than on the coasts of Holland, Denmark, and East Anglia. We hear often of the continual land- slipping along our eastern and southern coasts, and oftener of that along Norfolk and Suffolk, and of the persistent en- croachments of the sea. Few of us are moved to any anxiety, for to the inlander the peril is neither imminent nor obvious, and the ordinary mind is slow to apprehend what is not immediately obvious, or to be moved by what is not imminent. But even the general apathy is now being aroused. This is due in part to the deepening anxiety and emphatic warnings of many physical geo- graphers and other authoritative observers, but still more to the rapid and many evidences afforded during the last year or two . . . years of frequent storm and flood, with the water-loosened lands yet further disen- cumbered from their natural bonds and safeguards, with high and devastating tides and continually encroaching seas. When 74 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia that remarkable and enthralling little book, Mr. Beckles Willson's Story of Lost England, was published a year or two ago, many hasty critics assumed that its data were perturbing only to a few dwellers on our extreme coasts ; and stress was laid rather on the appalling devastations of ancient history than on the not less implacable duel that has been enacted ever since, and is now nearer to rather than more remote from tragical issues. It is deeply regrettable that there are no Parliamentary statistics concerning the present state of erosion : that there is no scientific and systematic observation of the coasts most affected. Even the concentrated item of knowledge that, within the modern period, we have lost by submersion many hundreds of square miles of territory and no fewer than thirty- four towns and villages, did not induce a Parliamentary inquiry. The authentic state- ment, with its menacing implication, was almost everywhere received with the idea that it was all in the past tense.* But even * So many readers will know Sheringham that it may be of interest to quote a single item of the long and convincing tale of evidence adduced by Mr. Beckles Willson, namely, that in 1829 a frigate could float (in 20 feet of water) where, only 75 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia the most casually remembered records of 1903 and the first months of 1904 show how futile is such unreasoning optimism. This very morning I read, in the five -days' -old papers that have just reached me where I write, of the alarming havoc wrought by floods, gales, and tidal seas, at the end of February and the beginning of March ; of torn beaches and snatched lands and sub- merged shores along our southern and eastern coasts, of the collapse, so long threatened, of Dunwich Cliff, and of in- calculable and in many cases irremediable damage, where not total loss, along the whole of maritime East Anglia. In the Fens, in the Broads, on the vast sombre East Anglian marshes and meadow- lands, an imaginative mind cannot but often become aware of this tragical duel. No- where in England is it so near and present a reality. Dunwich, Sidestrand, many another picturesque spot is doomed ; and, inland, many a pastoral track to-day will in a not distant morrow feel the salt tide sweeping irresistibly across it. Much of the tragical fascination, as well as of the charm, of the very real beauty of forty-eight years before, stood a cliff 50 feet high, with houses upon it ! 7 6 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia both inland and maritime Norfolk, is naturally to be found in Aylwin. The author himself has more than once witnessed one of those landslips which are the dread of the region, and readers of his famous romance may recall the description of the collapse of the cliff-front beyond the old church's ruins (The passage occurs, it should be borne in mind, in a scene of great dramatic intensity and profound emotion) : " My meditations were interrupted by a sound, and then by a sensation such as I cannot describe. Whence came that shriek ? It was like a shriek coming from a distance loud there, faint here, and yet it seemed to come from me ! It was as though I were witnessing some dreadful sight, unutterable and intolerable. ... At my feet spread the great churchyard, with its hundreds of little green hillocks and white gravestones, sprinkled here and there with square, box- like tombs. All quietly asleep in the moon- light ! Here and there an aged headstone seemed to nod to its neighbour, as though muttering in its dreams. The old church, bathed in the radiance, seemed larger than it had ever done in daylight, and incom- parably more grand and lovely. ... On 77 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia the left were the tall poplar trees, rustling and whispering among themselves. Still, there might be at the back of the church mischief working. I walked round thither. The ghostly shadows on the long grass might have been shadows thrown by the ruins of Tadmor, so quietly did they lie and dream. A weight was uplifted from my soul. A balm of sweet peace fell upon my heart. The noises I had heard had been imaginary, conjured up by love and fear ; or they might have been an echo of distant thunder. The windows of the church, no doubt, looked ghastly, as I peered in to see whether Wynne's lantern was moving about. But all was still. I lingered in the churchyard close by the spot where I had first seen the child Winifred and heard the Welsh song. . . . I went to look at the sea from the cliff. Here, however, there was something sensa- tional at last. The spot where years ago I had sat when Winifred's song had struck upon my ear and awoke me to a new life was gone ! ' This, then, was the noise I heard,' I said ; ' the rumbling was the falling of the earth ; the shriek was the tearing down of trees.' Another slice, a slice weighing thousands of tons, had slipped since the afternoon from the churchyard on Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia to the sands below. ' Perhaps the tread of the townspeople who came to witness the funeral may have given the last shake to the soil,' I said. I stood and looked over the newly-made gap at the great hungry water. Considering the little wind, the swell on the North Sea was tremendous. Far away there had been a storm somewhere. The moon was laying a band of living light across the vast bosom of the sea, like a girdle." Again, all readers of Ay twin will re- member the beautiful opening scene where the boy who is to be the hero of the romance is discovered sitting on the grassy cliff-edge by the sea : and how at once the author strikes that note of correspondence on which the present writer has just dwelt : "... sitting there as still as an image of a boy in stone, at the forbidden spot where the wooden fence proclaimed the crumbling hollow crust to be specially dangerous sitting and looking across the sheer deep gulf below. . . . The very gulls, wheeling as close to him as they dared, seemed to be frightened at the little boy's peril. Straight ahead he was gazing, how- ever gazing so intently that his eyes must 79 Aylwin-Land ; Wales and East Anglia have been seeing very much or else very little of that limitless world of light and coloured shade. . . . Moreover, there was a certain something in his eyes that was not gypsy -like a something which is not un- commonly seen in the eyes of boys born along that coast, whether those eyes be black or blue or grey ; a something which cannot be described, but which seems like a reflex of the daring gaze of that great land- conquering and daring sea." And it was through a landslip that Henry Ay 1 win became crippled for his later boy- hood and youth : " My punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic land- slips. These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by a further fall, called a ' settlement.' The word ' settlement ' explains itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land, and the tttbris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always, respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent shapes." 80 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia Watts-Dunton has recently communicated to more than one interviewer the answer to the doubtless often asked question as to /when he first formed his acquaintance with the gypsies : but to Mr. Blathwayt he was perhaps more explicit. From these, and his introduction to Sorrow's Lavengro in the " Minerva " series, his obituary articles in The Athenczum on George Borrow and Francis Hindes Groome, and his pre- faces to later editions of Aylwin, we know that the acquaintance began before " the Gypsy " became " seductive copy," before the author of Aylwin had thought of the literary aspect at all. One wonders what would have happened if some vivid romance had forestalled Aylwin during the many years it lay in a retirement as obscure, if not as wholly forgotten, as that in which Waverley lay for so long. Would the author have still pub- lished the cherished work of his maturity, or as I have an impression, possibly a wrong impression, that I have read in some interview or personal article would he have refrained from entering into the lists with any competitor ? It is known to a few that another equally authentic romance of gypsy life was written about iv 81 F Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia the time that Aylwin was published, but has never seen the light of print ; for, though distinct in style, locality, and indeed whole conception and treatment, it could not have appeared subsequent to Watts -Dunton's romance without the in- justice of allegations that it was following suit in what seemed a promising vogue. Well, fortunately no such misadventure happened for Watts-Dunton, and so he came unchallenged into his kingdom, a kingdom where his eminence is all the more marked because of pioneers such as George Borrow, Francis Hindes Groome, and God- frey Leland. " C I f shall never forget' (says Watts- Dunton, in his interview-reminiscences) ' my earliest recollections of the gypsies. My father used sometimes to drive in a dog-cart to see friends of his through about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him. Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is generally supposed. Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided by dykes : not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles. This gives an 82 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia importance to skies such as is observed nowhere else, except on the open sea.' ' Theodore Watts-Dunton's local partiality must be allowed for here, of course : the same effects with kindred conditions are to be seen, and sometimes even more impressively, in Holland, in Denmark, throughout Flanders, in much of Picardy, in the vast Yorkshire flats, along the immense level solitudes of Solway, in the bare dreary Cornish moorlands, on Exmoor, and else- where : " In the Fen country the level, monoto- nous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams and suggests a roof of rainbows ; and in cloudy weather it seems almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more magical still. And as to sunsets, I do not know any, either by land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen country. The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal to do with it. The sun frequently sets in a pageantry 83 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia of gauzy vapour of every colour, quite indescribable. . . . " The first evening, then, that I took one of these drives, while I was watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of twitch-grass, set burning by the farm labourers, and which stretched right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dog-cart, and pointed to a ruddy fire, glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a green grassy drove -way met the dark -looking high road some yards ahead. And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about. ' The gypsies ! ' I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle, and saw a lot of these dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the dog-cart. ' Will they kiU us, father ? ' I said. ' Kill us ? No,' he said, laughing ; ' they are friends of mine. They've only come to lead the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.' They came flocking up. So far from the mare starting, as she would have done at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia stroking her nose with their tawny but well- shaped fingers and caressing her neck. Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw. When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascin- ated by the charm of the picture. Outside the tents in front of the fire, over which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I afterwards knew as the kettle- prop, was spread a large dazzling white tablecloth covered with white crockery, among which glittered a goodly number of silver spoons. I afterwards learnt that to possess good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons was as * passionate a desire of the Romany chi as of the most ambitious farmer's wife in the Fen country.' It was from this little incident that my intimacy with the gypsies dated. I associated much with them in after life, and I have had more experience among them than I have yet had an opportunity of recording in print. Though they hail from India originally, and though their language is broken Sanscrit, yet they have none of the religions of the East. They are intensely conscientious as regards one another. They believe in the Romany ' sap,' that is, the snake which bites, or, as we should call it, * conscience.' 85 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia Perhaps the most interesting thing about the real gypsy is the way in which he speaks .Romany all over the world. It is, of course, greatly modified by the country in which he lives Spain, Wales, Hungary, Roumania, Roumelia ; but it is all broken Sanscrit. They are a very gifted people, very highly musical. They live a life that is utterly apart, a life with its own habits, its own customs, its own signs." " I need not describe the journey to North Wales," says Henry Ay 1 win at the beginning of the third part of the romance which bears his name : and we must be content to leave that much-tried but occa- sionally somewhat exasperating "hero" in the parlour of the Royal Oak at Bettws-y- Coed. It is a temptation, indeed, to follow him on the second morrow of his arrival in Wales despite " the rain and clouds and mist in a region of marshy and boggy hillocks " to that wayside inn where we first hear of Winifred Wynne's mysterious '* Dukkeripen "... which is not (as Punch explained) a species of waterfowl, but the dread fatality of a curse. For here it is that we first encounter Sinn Lovell ; and 86 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia than that first encounter with the real if not the nominal heroine of Ay twin, or than the vivid description of old Lovell's beautiful chavi, I know nothing in its kind more fascinating. It says much for the un- forgettable novelty and power of this chapter that it remains unaffected by the still more beautiful, dramatic, and infinitely pathetic chapter which follows that which describes the hero's coming upon poor distraught Winnie in the lonely cottage on the hillside. From this point onward the book is full of the mountain beauty of Wales. A score of lovely names come back upon one, besides the great name of Snowdon : Mynydd Pencoed, Llyn Llydaw (where Winifred was supposed to be drowned), Llyn Ogwen, Llanbeblig, and the Swallow Falls and the Fairy Glen, Llyn Idwal, sombre Llanberis, and so forth. In a book so full of the sentiment of the Welsh highlands, it is not easy to select an adequately representative descriptive passage. Perhaps none could be better than the beautiful finale of the closing Llanberis chapter ... a time by which every reader will be inclined to sympathise with, if not to endorse, the author's avowal Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia ..." other mountainous countries in Europe are beautiful . . . but for associa- tions romantic and poetic there is surely no land in the world equal to North Wales " : " The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on the cloud- pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a ruby -coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A horizontal bar of cloud, which, until the radiance of the sunset fell upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red -gold. But what Winnie was point- ing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs where the sun had disappeared, this shaft in- tersected the bar of clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose." But before we leave " Aylwin-land," east and west, a word should be said for a little outlying Thames-side parish. Every one 88 Aly win-Land ; Wales and East Anglia familiar with the life of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti knows of Kelmscott Manor, the delightful " old-world " river- side home on the upper reaches of the Thames, where so much of the verse of both poets was written, and of which the present writer has something to say in a later paper in this series that on the Literary Geography of the Thames. Here, too, certain chapters of Ay twin, certain poems of The Coming of Love volume, were written. It is to Kelmscott Manor, too, disguised as Hurstcote Manor (one recalls Rossetti's lyric, " Betwixt Holmscote and Hurstcote, the river-reaches wind ") that the heroine of Aylwin comes when at last in her right mind again and, needless almost to point out at this late date, the painter D'Arcy who there befriends her, and Sinn also, is no other than Rossetti. It is with regret that every reader must say good-bye to these three women, who are half of this world and half of the imagination Winifred, Sinn, and Rhona. Even Videy Lovell, indeed, for all her naughty ways, is too rare and delightful a vision in contemporary fiction to let go from our ken without regret. To those who have been in intimate touch with Aylwin- Land : Wales and East Anglia average gypsy -life she is, to say the least of it, as vividly real as either of her sisters, few as are the lines which are spared to her. Certainly their literary sponsor's first meeting with a Romany encampment is a matter of no little moment. It is in the fifth section of the first part of Aylwin that we first come upon that wonder- ful glimpse of (in literature) an all but wholly new gypsy life for though George Borrow preceded the author of Aylwin, and is still first of all who have re-created gypsy life for us, he has not revealed to us just what Sinn Lovell and Rhona Boswell reveal. It is true that neither of these can ever oust the perhaps more common- place but intensely real and human Isopel Berners. It is obvious, too, that Sinfi Lovell, though " real " both in the imaginative and the actual sense, is not (despite the enamoured claims of the author and even other gypsologists) a type i.e. is not distinctively typical of the gypsy girl . . . otherwise that wandering people would long ago have snared the hearts of all the poets of the world, have com- pelled all songs and all music to their service, and created a new order of ideals. 90 Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia It is nothing against the verisimilitude of her portraiture, against the fictional and directly personal statements of her limner, or the corroborative evidence that is now available, to aver that Sinfi is no more a representative gypsy woman than a re- presentative Welsh or English or any other racial type. Wherever or among whatso- ever people she lived she would be that outstanding and abstract beauty " the eternal phantom, Helen " which may have the external accident of period or of locality or of race, but is really independent of those, being far above the ordinary upper reaches of her own " type." We believe in her, not only as Sinfi Lovell, but as a real gypsy girl ; but we know that " Sinfis " must be as rare among the gypsy people as her like would be among any other people. Helen of Troy was a Greek woman, but was not " Greek women " ; Cleopatra was an Egyptian, but was not " Egyptian women " ; and certainly Sinfi Lovell, though a gypsy woman, is not " gypsy women." But it is Watts-Dunton's distinction to have given us two new women in that roll of what Blake calls "the wooers of dreams," that roll of beautiful women from Homer's to Shakespeare's, from Scott's to George Aylwin-Land : Wales and East Anglia Meredith's. As for Rhona Boswell, she is one of the freshest and brightest inspirations of modern writing : " the silver bells " of her laughter will long be heard both in poetic and prose literature, and in the vast and varied geography of literature itself there will always be a little woodland niche called " Gypsy Dell." 92 THE COUNTRY OF CARLYLE IT is no small fortune for a writer to have as his birthland a region of beautiful names, of old and romantic associations. The poetry of these enters the blood. Youth may not note, and manhood or womanhood may ignore, but in maturer years the very mention of an obscure hamlet, a running water, a field by the burnside, will flood the memory with light as wonderful as moonshine. Think of how Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Burns, Scott, have filled their verse with the quiet music of old places, old names. What charm in those pages of Stevenson, when, from some mountain solitude in Colorado or from the isles of Samoa, he recalls the manse at Swans ton, or the grey -green links opposite Fidra or the Bass, or the green hollows of Pentland ! To the* Devonian and the Cornishman what pleasure to come upon the fragrant old- world names in the romances of Charles Kingsley and Blackmore and Baring Gould ! Tennyson declared once, when passing 93 The Country of Carlyle through an ancient hamlet in West Sussex, " What good luck to be born in this county of quaint and lovely names ! Where else would one find a peasant called Oswald Paris or Stephen Songthrush ? and would any one but a Sussex yokel call the swallow a ' squeaker ' and the cuckoo a ' yaffer,' and ' transmogrify ' the wild arum into ' lamb-in-the-pulpit' ? " And I recall a like remark made to me many years ago by Matthew Arnold, from whom I first heard of that lovely Buckinghamshire region now made easy of reach by the railway extension from Rickmansworth . . . that valley of the Chess where he loved to angle, and where he composed so much in prose and verse : " What a happy fortune to be a native of a region like this, with such delightful names as Chenies and Latimer arid Chesham Bois and Chalfont St. Giles. . . . Norman roses in old Saxon home- steads ! " However, even a Northerner may not always be able to appreciate the beauty of certain names familiar north of the Tweed : Camlachie, the Gorbals, Drumsheugh, they are not euphonious. So, for their own sake, we must not expect Southron sympathy for the names of the two most famous places in 94 The Country of Carlyle the Carlyle country. Ecclefechan and Craigenputtock do not make a delicate music. The lyric poet would regard either with disgust. But for Thomas Carlyle there were no word-bells to ring a more home- sweet chime. He could dispense with these, however, when recalling the names of other native localities made musical to the ears and the memories of his countrymen : Kirkconnell Lea, wedded to deathless ballad- music ; Sol way Moss, with its echo of tramping hoofs and lost battle-cries ; Annan Water, and the dark Moor of Lochar, and solitary Cummer trees, lonely lands of The Red Gauntlet ; silent Caerlaverock, that once was Caerlaverock of the Bugles ; the dim Water of Urr ; Drumlanrig Woods ; Durisdeer among the hills ; the heaths of Sanquhar ; the Keir Hills, where the first cuckoo is heard ; the dark narrow water of Sark, bordered with yellow flag and tangled peat -moss, that once ran red with the blood of English thousands. Then there are Nithsdale and Eskdale, and Strathannan, in whose heart the Bruce was born and Burns died ; Repentance Hill, with its grey peel, where once the Lord Herries, Warden of the West March, stained his soul with the blood of hapless men, so 95 The Country of Carlyle that to this day the ballad-singer croons of how He sat him on Repentance Hicht An' glower' d upon the sea ; Tynedale Fell, overlooking the mountain - lands of Cumberland and Galloway ; Glen- esslin, where once the forbidden hymns of the Covenant rose on Sabbath morns ; Cluden Water, where the harps of Faery have been heard ; and Irongrey Kirkyard, where Helen Walker, immortal as Jeanie Deans, sleeps in peace. A score or more names of like beauty and import will come to the mind of the North -country man of the Marches, from Gretna Green to where shadowy Loch Urr sends her dark waters past Craigenputtock Hill (that long prow- shaped Crag of the Hawks where Carlyle and Emerson spent hours one summer day discussing the immortality of the soul) ; then southward beyond Glaisters, where " Teufelsdrockh " for long took his solitary " gloaming-shots," as, in a letter to his mother, he calls his twilight walks ; and at last to that grey water of Solway whose tidal flow farther east will wash Glencaple Quay that small haven whence seventy years ago the packet-boat was wont to sail with The Country of Carlyle south -faring passengers for the port of Liverpool, and that one August morning in 1831 carried Thomas Carlyle out of Scotland to seek fortune with the manuscript of Sartor Resartus. The country of Carlyle is an actual country. We do not seek it under the guidance of his imagination, either in the Sartor Resartus of a fictitious Germany, or in the turbulent Paris or the wild and distorted France of The French Revolution. It is certainly not to be found in the History of Frederick the Great, or in that of Oliver Cromwell. The Carlyle country is the native land, the native regions, where the great writer spent his boyhood and youth and so much of his early manhood ; where he returned whenever he could ; whither his remembrance and longing continually went ; the lands of his love, his people, his strength, his heart. There is, of course, one obvious exception London. The hackneyed phrase " the Sage of Chelsea " reveals the extent tv which, in the general mind, Carlyle has become supremely identified with one locality, and that in a city he did not love, and where his least happy if his most famous years were lived. As " the Sage iv 97 G The Country of Carlyle of Chelsea " he will doubtless long be remembered ; " like old china," as he remarked once, " however cracked and time worn, that is preserved because of the shibboleth of its name." Doubtless he would have much preferred to be known as the Sage of Annandale. Perhaps, if he could, he would very gladly have prevented any such nomenclature at all. He did not love labels, though an adept at affixing them. I recollect an amusing story told by the late Dr. George Bird (that delightful racon- teur, whose vivid memory embraced half a century of intimate acquaintance with many of the most distinguished men and women of the Victorian era), though it was not, I fancy, at first hand, and for all I know to the contrary may have already appeared, though I have not met with it. One day Carlyle was walking with a friend near the Marble Arch end of Hyde Park (" black-felt coat, whitey-grey trousers, wide whitey-grey felt hat, old-fashioned stock, a thick walking- stick, hair more grizzly than usual, beard still more so, face furrowed, a heavy frown "), and had stopped to listen to a stump orator addressing an indolent and indifferent crowd on the question of the The Country of Carlyle franchise. Suddenly a rough-hewn worthy detached himself from a group, and, without word of greeting or other preamble, ad- dressed himself to Carlyle in a broad Annan dale accent. " Whit, now, ye'll be Tarn Carlyle frae Ecclefechan ? " The great man nodded, his eyes twinkling. " An' they ca' ye the Sage o' Chelsea ? " " They do, puir buddies ! " (this in the same vernacularism). " Weel," said the man scornfully, " I've heard o' the wurrd applyit in connection wi' a burrd I'll no name, but never afore this wi' a self-respecting mon / " Carlyle laughed heartily, but remarked afterwards to his companion that his com- patriot's crude satire " had the gist o' guid common sense in 't," " for who am I," he added, " or who is any man, to be held above all his fellows as the Sage, and worse, as the Sage ? " But though it would be impossible to ignore Chelsea in connection with the " literary geography " of Carlyle's life, we will all agree doubtless as to his "country " being restricted to what he himself, in pride and love, would have called his own land. That land, of course, lies between the Water 99 The Country of Carlyle of Sark on the east the boundary between Cumberland and the Scottish border and the Water of Urr on the west, where Gallo- way lies against the farther highlands of Dumfries. It includes Dumfries town and Annan, where the boy " first learned the humanities " ; Mainhill Farm, where his parents lived, and that was so long a home to him ; the farms of Hoddam and Scots- brig ; Templand, where he and Jane Welsh were wedded ; Craigenputtock, where his happiest years were spent; and, "capital" of the Carlyle country, Ecclefechan, where he was born, and where at last he was brought again to rest in peace with his own people. It has been a moot point with many correspondents and commentators, in con- nection with this series of Literary Geo- graphy, whether regions where a famous author has spent time and which he has commemorated in his writings should be ranked as his " country." Some have thought that a writer's " country " should be the lands of or regions brought under the sway of his imagination, as Provence and Palestine in the instance of the author of Quentin Durward and The Talisman, as Samoa or Silverado or Fontainebleau in the 100 The Country of CarlyU instance of Stevenson. Others have held that the " country " should be the actual country of birth and upbringing and resi- dence. Others have gone further, and argued that wherever a great writer has sojourned and where he has thought out or actually composed romance or poem or other rare achievement, there is his land, or at least one of his outlying provinces. It might be pleasant to say that because Carlyle spent a time with Sir George Sinclair at Thurso Castle, and from the shores of Caithness dreamed across the North Sea towards Iceland of the Vikings, therefore Caithness has become part of his " country." Even so un-Carlylean a place as Mentone might be thus claimed for him. But, obviously the plea is fallacious. Can, for example, the Isle of Wight be considered as within Turgeniev's " country," because there the great Russian sojourned awhile and wrote one of his most famous romances ? Can Kensington Gardens be considered an appanage of Chateaubriand-land, because the great Frenchman composed Rene in the pleasant shadow of these Bayswater glades ? Or is Wimbledon (is it Wimble- don ? ) a section of the vast territories of the Rougon-Maquart clan because M. Zola 101 The Country of Carlyle dwelt there awhile in exile with Mr. Vizetelly, and on an epic scale pondered a London ? Imagine Voltaire's ironical smile if informed that the Voltaire country included certain parishes of Surrey and Middlesex ; or Heine's caustic comment if told that the hardly-by-him-beloved British capital was a section of Heine-land ? Perhaps the happiest compromise is in the instance of a writer like George Eliot, whose own country and whose most enduring country of the imagination are practically identical. In the instance of Carlyle there need not be much perplexity. His wanderings from Dumfriesshire in the north or from Chelsea in the south were few and unimportant. Little of his work was done abroad ; though the Reminiscences were begun at Mentone in 1867, whither Carlyle went in December with Professor Tyndall. More notable were the German wayfarings, when Carlyle was on the quest of Frederick's battlefields. He travelled in Flanders, in Holland, in Ireland : brief visits, and in his literature, unimportant. In East Anglia, of course, one would not forget his raid into Cromwell* land. Cromwell was begun in 1842, and in a letter to Thomas Erskine of Linlathen 102 The Country of Carlyle the author spoke of his " three days' riding excursion into Oliver Cromwell's country : where I smoked a cigar on his broken horse- block in the old city of Ely, under the stars, beside the graves of St. Mary's churchyard ; and almost wept to stand upon the flag- stones, under the setting sun, where he ordered the refractory parson ' Leave off your fooling, and come out, Sir ! ' " Between the Solway coast and that of far Caithness, there are few parts of Scotland, save the remoter Western Highlands and Isles, which at one time or another he had not visited. In Kirkcaldy, on the Fife coast, he lived a couple of years, school - mastering, when but a youth himself. Not much was done here in actual achievement ; but much reading and study were accom- plished ; and in his long walks with Irving, afterwards to become so famous, Carlyle learned much that he could not have found in books. Here, again, he stayed awhile in 1874 with his friend Provost Swan. I have seen an unpublished photograph of him at this time, taken in the garden of friends who lived near North Queensferry ; and cer- tainly, to judge by appearances, witty and winsome Jeanie Welsh " had her handful," as they say in Fife. As her husband remarked 103 The Country of Carlyle to Mr. Symington, when complaining once of the exaggerations of the photographer, " I'm revealed as an old, rascally, ruffian, obfus- cated goose." Kirkcaldy is hardly a place to suggest poetry, but there are few passages in Carlyle more haunting than that memory of " the lang toon " in the Reminiscences ; " the beach of Kirkcaldy, in summer twilights, a mile of the smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on, gently, steadily, and breaking in gradual explosion, accurately gradual, into harmless melodious white, at your hand, all the way (the break of it) rushing along like a mane of foam, beauti- fully sounding and advancing, ran from south to north. . . . We roved in the woods, too, sometimes, till all was dark." Again, and not least of his temporary homes away from his own " country," was Kinnaird House, in a glen near Dunkeld. Here, while a resident tutor, he "moped " much, saw his friend Irving on his honey- moon, wrote love-letters to Annandale, where Jane Welsh lived with her mother, and during his nine months' stay wrote most of his Life of Schiller and translated the greater part of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Once more, who of us happening to be in 104 The Country of Carlyle the desolate iron -country of Muirkirk of Ayr but would recall that day-long walk of Carlyle and Irving among the peat-hags of Drumclog Moss, when the younger confided to the other the secrets of his spiritual life ? " These peat-hags are still pictured in me : brown bog, all pitted, and broken into heathy remnants and bare abrupt wide holes, four or six feet deep, a flat wilderness of broken bog, of quagmire not to be trusted " [the scene of many a Covenanters' meeting, and immortalised by Scott as the locality of Claver'se (Claver- house) Skirmish] : "I know not that we talked much of this, but we did of many things ... a colloquy the sum of which is still mournfully beautiful to me, though the details are gone. I remember us sitting on a peat-hag, the sun shining, our own voices the one sound ; far, far away to westward, over our brown horizon, towered up, white and visible at the many miles of distance, a high irregular pyramid. Ailsa Craig / we at once guessed, and thought of the seas and oceans over yonder." Or there is that other walk by the lovely shores of Aberdour : " the summer afternoon was beautiful ; beautiful exceedingly our solitary walk by Burntisland and the sands and rocks to 105 The Country of Carlyle Inverkeithing " ; or Moffatdale with its green holms and hill -ranges ; or a score other such excursions, memorable in all ways, and for intimate associations above all. Many of my readers will know, some may have landed on that lonely isle of Inchkeith, and wandered among the coney- haunted grasses and over by the Russian graves, and from the same "wild stony little bay " where Carlyle landed have looked on that scene which, he tells us in his Reminiscences, seemed to him the " beauti- fullest he had ever beheld " . . . " Sun just about setting straight in face of us, behind Ben Lomond far away, Edinburgh with its towers, the great silver mirror of the Frith, girt by such a frame work of mountains, cities, rocks and fields and wavy landscape, on all hands of us ; and reaching right under- foot (as I remember) came a broad pillar as of gold from the just sinking sun ; burning axle, as it were, going down to the centre of the world ! " But we might traverse Scotland, highland and lowland, if we recall overmuch. After all, we must hark back to the Kir tie Water and the winding Mein, to moor-set Eccle- fechan, Mainhill and Scotsbrig and Hoddam, to remote Craigenputtock. 106 The Country of Carlyle As to Carlyle's town life, that was un- equally divided between London and Edin- burgh, for in the latter he spent far fewer months than the tale of years he spent in Chelsea. To Edinburgh he and his young wife went in 1826, and lived for eighteen months at 21 Comely Bank, then an isolated country -clasped suburb of Edin- burgh on its north-western side, with its back to the Forth and its front towards the Hill of Corstorphine and its deep woods : our " trim little cottage," he wrote at the time he was contributing his first essays to the Edinburgh and the Foreign Quarterly reviews, " far from the uproar and putres- cence (material and spiritual) of the reeky town, the sound of which we hear not, and only see over the knowe the reflection of its gaslights against the dusky sky." He had already had experience of Edinburgh, where, as a student at the University, he had lived in Simon Square, off Nicholson Street, then a poor and now a sordid region ; and, after one or two unfortunate experiments, at No. i Moray Street (now Spey Street), Leith Walk, of special interest to us, as it was here he first began in earnest that literary work which he was to carry to such a magnificent development. It is a street 107 The Country of Carlyle to be remembered of every reader of Sartor Resartus, all of whose Teutonically hued pages were coloured from home -dyes. Who does not know that the German realm " Weissnichtwo " is no other than the " Kennaquhair " of Annandale ; that " En- tepfuhl," that centre of the world, is the homely Scottish village of Ecclefechan ; and that even Blumine, that fair maiden of the famous " Romance of Clothes," was no Saxon fra^ile^n but a winsome lass o 5 Kirkcaldy ? For Spey Street or Moray Street, or in its ampler dignity as Leith Walk, is the "Rue Saint Thomas de PEnfer " of Sartor. In London, also, Carlyle resided, now here, now there, before he took the house in Cheyne Row where he lived from 1834 till his death forty-seven years later. Chief of these temporary metropolitan homes was 4 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Road. Here in the early summer of 1834 ne an d his wife came, after their burning of their ship of Craigenputtock behind them ; here again earlier, in mid-winter of 1831-2, they were staying, with Sartor Resartus (on which hung so many hopes) just started on its un- popular serial course through Fraser's, when the news came of the death of that " silent, 108 The Country of Carlyle strong man," Carlyle the elder, at the farm of Scotsbrig the famous writer's " last parental nest in beloved Annandale." All readers of the Reminiscences, and of Froude and Eliot and other biographers, know how nearly Bayswater or Bloomsbury was given preference over Chelsea. No. 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, however, carried the day. For long, even in Carlyle's lifetime, one of the chief literary shrines of the Metropolis, it is now more visited by thousands annually, from all parts of the world, than any other dwelling of the kind in London. Needless to write about a house and neighbourhood so widely familiar, or of what may now be seen there by the curious. It is still the chief jewel in the crown of Chelsea, But the unwary must not go thither expecting the pleasant quarters of the " thirties," when " dear Leigh Hunt was just round the corner." Carlyle, alas ! would not to-day write of this dull little street submerged in a part of Chelsea as now in any wise lovely : " We lie safe at a bend of the river, away from all the great roads, have an air and quiet hardly inferior to Craigenputtock, an outlook from the back windows into mere leafy regions, with here and there a red high-peaked old roof looking 109 The Country of Carlyle through ; and we see nothing of London except by day the summits of St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and by night the gleam of the great Babylon affronting the peaceful skies." " An air and quiet hardly inferior to Craigenputtock " . . . to that of remote Crag of the Hawks in far-off Nithsdale, where, across the Water of Urr, Galloway calls to the hills of Dumfries ... no, alas ! not now, nor for a long time past. Nor is it possible to dwell on Carlyle's life in London . . . the mere "literary geographical " part of it, I mean. He knew all West London, and much of every other region of the Metropolis, with a know- ledge gained through many years of con- tinual wayfarings afoot or on long 'bus -rides or on horseback. Of all the many hints and pictures of this London life in Froude's and other biographies and in his own Reminiscences I recall none so delightful as that glimpse afforded in one of Miss Martineau's few humour-touched pages. It is where she relates how Carlyle, dissatisfied with the house in Cheyne Row no longer " a London Eden," no longer as quiet as Craigenputtock went forth one morning on a black horse, with three maps of Great no The Country of Carlyle Britain and two of the World in his pocket, to explore the area within twenty miles of Chelsea ! But, as we all know, the house in Cheyne Row remained the Carlyle home. The first break was when Mrs. Carlyle died one April day in Hyde Park, when driving in her carriage, her husband then in Dum- fries ; the second, fifteen years later, when all that was left of London's greatest man who had refused a resting-place in West- minster Abbey (one remembers his scathing comment to Froude) was carried north to his straggling natal village of Ecclefechan, to be buried there among his own people. These North-country homes of Carlyle . . . how he loved them ! Of course, Ecclefechan and Craigenputtock rank first, but with each of the others there are many associa- tions for us, and for him there were many more. If in some regions bleak, if in certain districts sombre and for the greater part of the year repellent, the countryside as a whole is pleasant, is often winsome, and has sometimes a quiet beauty which is an excelling grace. It is far more diversified, more fertile, more human and kindly than Froude painted it in his famous Life. In a hundred passages in his books and letters Carlyle himself depicts it in part and whole in The Country of Carlyle with all the sincerity of deep-ingrained love. Even in the days of his wooing Jane Welsh, when he was impatient to be elsewhere in the great world, " to make his cast in the troubled waters of earthly fortune," he could write to her, and as truly as sincerely, thus [in an invitation to her to visit his parents and himself at Hoddam Hill farm . . . Repentance Hill, as it is commonly called] : " I will show you Kirkconnell churchyard and Fair Helen's grave. I will take you to the top of Burnswark, and wander with you up and down the woods and lanes and moors. Earth, sea, and air are open to us here as well as anywhere. The Water of Milk was flowing through its simple valley as early as the brook Siloa, and poor Repentance Hill is as old as Caucasus itself. There is a majesty and mystery in Nature, take her as you will. The essence of all poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels every province of her Empire." All these farm -homes lie near each other Mainhill and Scotsbrig and Hoddam and pleasant Templand all save Craigenputtock in Nithsdale, just across the Galloway border. There can be few pleasanter centres for the rambling " literary geographer " than Ecclefechan itself, unattractive and 112 The Country of Carlyle now " stranded " village though it be. The pleasant streamways and wandering glens up the Kirtle Water and shadowy Mein are full of charm, and are within easy reach ; so are the woods of Brownmoor and Woodcockair ; beautiful Hoddam Castle and ruined Bonshaw are but a pleasant walk. The walk to Mainhill itself is in all ways delightful ; that up the vale of Kirtle, from Kirkconnell to Springkill by way of Kir kpatrick -Fleming, is lovely enough to repay any wayfarer, apart from any associa- tion with Carlyle or with the moving old ballads of the Border Country or the wild and romantic history of the Marshes. From Criffel in the south to Sanquhar in the north, from Scotsbrig in the east to Craigenputtock in the west, there is almost every variety of lowland beauty and charm to be found. The wayfarer need not even go far from Ecclefechan. Let him cross the Meinfoot Bridge and go along the beautiful beech- shaded Annan road, and recall " the kind beech -rows of Entepfuhl." One may know loveliness and peace here, if not in straggling, curious, and now " disjaskit " Entepfuhl- Ecclefechan itself, where there is little for the stranger to see except the Arch House, where Carlyle was born and where Herr iv 113 H The Country of Carlyle Diogenes Teufelsdrockh saw the light, hard by " the gushing Kuhbach," as the pleasant Water of Mem was renamed in Sartor. Alas ! Sartor or aught else of Carlyle is little read in Ecclefechan or Annandale itself. A great name, a famous tradition survive ; but in the whole Anglo-Saxon world there are probably few places where " the Sage " is less read, less veritably known. Even in the so-called " Resartus Reading Room " there are (or were) no copies of Carlyle's books. So, another reason for not lingering in Ecclefechan, but to fare abroad through a country in itself fair and nobly planned, and often quietly beautiful, sacred for many associations of history and religion and romance, and for ever dear to all who love the great heart and reverence the powerful genius of Thomas Carlyle. " Whatever else they did, the old Northmen," he said once to a friend, " their swords did not smite the air." And he, this Viking of Anglo-Saxon writers, though he lies at rest among the dust of his own kith and kin in remote Annandale, still wields a mighty sword that does not idly smite air. So, here in his own Northland . . . Ave atque Vale ! 114 THE COUNTRY OF GEORGE ELIOT ONE day last spring, when I was travelling in Touraine, a literary gentleman from Rennes (as I discovered later) entered the compartment of which I was the sole occupant. A few casual words led to the offer on my part of one or two new issues of Parisian literary magazines which had reached me at breakfast ; and that ac- cepted offer led in turn to a chat about certain books and writers with which and whom more than one of the magazine articles were vehemently concerned. After a time my companion politely turned the conversation to the subject of contemporary English poetry, of which he showed a refreshingly complacent ignorance, apart from his acquaintance with Shelley and Mr. Swinburne through the free if sym- pathetic renderings of M. Rabbe and M. Mourey. Of "living" poets he thought " Keat " was the nearest in approach to the excellence of Verlaine : but " there was also beauty . . . yes, the unmistakable The Country of George Eliot touch in M. Wilde and in the fine Paterson, whose death so young was a scandal to the gross materialism of the London bourgeoisie" Whether Paterson preceded or succeeded " Keat " I do not know : his name and fame, with his unmerited sufferings and shameful Britannic neglect, are alike un- known to me. I have an idea that my friend had heard of Chatterton, whose name by a mysterious Gallic alchemy had known a resurrection in France as Paterson. I am sorry to confess, however, that I had not the moral courage to admit, then and there, that I was a degree lower even than the average Britannic bourgeois, in so far as I knew nothing either of the name or fate of a bard worthy to be ranked with " Keat." Naturally, therefore, when my Rennes friend alluded to his admiration for the " Georges Sand of England," and how " George Eliot " had also something of the quality of Balzac, I feared that a Parisian sparrow had but uttered a name on the housetops of Rennes. But no, my friend spoke of Adam Bede and Mid-le-Marche, of Felix 'Oltt and Le Moulin du Floss, of Seelas Marner and Romola, as if intimate with each of these masterpieces. He did 116 The Country of George Eliot really know something of the romances of the " Grand Magicien Sir Scott," and had read several tales of Dickens in their French translation, and a version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair ; and this (with his having wept over a prose rendering of In Memoriam), along with his more erudite acquaintance with " Keat " and Paterson, had apparently been his justifica- tion (alas ! unsuccessful) in a recent applica- tion for a Foreign Literature lectureship at Rennes University. With some of his views I agreed, from others I disagreed. Then I discovered that all these matured results of meditation had been culled from M. Brunettere's interesting study of the famous English novelist, and that the only Rennesesque addition was in the appellation of " the Georges Sand of England," a crudity for which M. Brunetiere would not have thanked his Breton colleague. Finally, 1 asked my companion who were his favourite personages in these fine romances of " Madame Eliot," and to my astonishment he specified Mrs. Poyser, la Tullivere (Maggie), and . . . George Henry Lewes ! Then, to finish my bewilderment, he gave me two Poyserisms in English one 117 The Country of George Eliot of which was (and is) as mysterious arid untraceable as the premature masterpiece and early death of Paterson ; while the second I at last disengaged from the maze of a weird originality of pronunication, having by a flash of insight or exacerbated memory discovered " Craig " (the gardener at Don- nithorne Chase, in Adam Bede) from " Lecraygue " and so arrived at " he's welly like a cock as thinks the sun's rose o' purpose to hear him crow." This witticism, in an Anglo -Franco dia- lect, was evidently a source of pure happiness to my friend. "Ah, the English humour ! " he exclaimed, chuckling. All this comes back to me when I take up my pen to write on the country of George Eliot. And much else . . . from Charles Reade's dictum that Adam Bede is " the finest thing since Shakespeare," to Mr. Parkinson's, who says it " pulsates from opening to finish." For (the con- fession must be made) even the Rennes enthusiast as to Mid-le-Marche and Felix ""Oltt would in point of enthusiasm be worthier to write this article. We have all our limitations ; and with genuine regret (for I find myself in an embarrassing isolation from the collective opinion of 118 The Country of George Eliot the wise and good) I have to admit my inability to become enthusiastic over the actual country of George Eliot in so far as I know it apart from its literary glamour and associations. Nor, apart from the dairy -passages and a few delightful pages in the earlier novels, am I "transported," as one critic has it, by the George Eliot country of the imagination. Of course, this is not an absolute statement. I have read (and can now read) with keen pleasure much of the descriptive parts of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, as, in another respect, I could at any time re-read with pleasure most of Silas Marner, and the whole of Mr. GilfiVs Love Story. There are pages in Middlemarch which must surely appeal to every mind and every heart. But I can't honestly say much more ; and, as Mark Twain suggests, it's better if one is a fool to say so and be done with it, than to leave the remark to others to make. Nothing would tempt me to read Daniel Deronda again, and, like a thundercloud above the vistas of my past, looms the memory of the weary travail through Romola / As for Theophrastus Such . . . well, if repeated perusal of it were introduced as a punishment in a 119 The Country of George Eliot revised penal code, crime among the cultured would certainly decrease. After all, the point of divergence is not one to interest most people. Abstract points in the eternal controversy as to what is and what is not art are like the diet of John the Baptist in the wilderness delectable, till introduced to the domestic table. " Remove your locust, your wild and sugary honey, and yourself, to the wilderness," is the reception to be expected ! Fortunately, critic and readers, and all who care in any degree for the genius, the humour, the pathos, and the charm of George Eliot, can get over into her country by one bridge at which is no gate where " Art " levies toll. For the rest, I am ready to admit, as Mrs. Poyser remarked of one of her antipathies, that I " ought to be hatched over again and hatched different." As for taking the part of that wilfully perverse creature, the critic with a theory, or his kind, I am of the persuasion of Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak in George Eliot's most popular tale, " Ay, sir, I've said it often, and I'll say it again, they're a poor lot i' this parish a poor lot, sir ; big and little " and Mr. Gedge, it will be remembered, hardened in 120 The Country of George Eliot his opinion with the change and chance of the unsteady planets, for when, in a dim hope of finding humanity worthy of his regard, he moved from Shepperton to the Saracen's Head in a neighbouring market town, he ceased not in iterating " A poor lot, sir, big and little ; and them as comes for a go o' gin are no better than them as comes for a pint o' twopenny a poor lot." There are some authors in connection with whom we are more interested to know where they dreamed and thought and wrote than to learn the geography of their imaginative inhabitings and excursions. It is not so with Balzac or Zola, for example. To know where the author of the Comedie Humaine plied his unwearying pen, or where the architect of the House of Rougon Maquart sedulously cemented, day by day, an allotted section of his patient edifice, is a matter of almost no sentimental interest. It is otherwise in the instances of, say, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot. One might find it rather difficult to demonstrate the point positively, or to explain the why and wherefore ; but probably most of my readers will concur with me in the conclusion. 121 The Country of George Eliot In the instance of George Eliot the personal interest is exceptionally dominant. Possibly this is because her personality, her strenuous life in the things of the mind and the spirit, the lamp of a continual excellence, win us more to the homes wherein she herself dreamed and thought and worked than to those of her imaginary personages. Perhaps, again, it is because she suffered " travailed in the spirit " as an old writer has it throughout her life, and that every domicile has its memories of things endured in the spirit and weighed with sadness in the mind. Taking it in its whole course, her life was a happy one, in so far as it is possible for us to make a general estimate of what constitutes happi- ness ; but her mind continually played the austere puritan to the very feminine nature, her intellect habitually stood by, throwing shadows across her naturally blithe and ardent temperament. Mr. Cross has given us a pleasant sketch of the cottage home in Warwickshire, Griff House, on the Arbury estate, near the village of Chilvers Coton and the town of Nuneaton, where Mary Ann Evans, the daughter of a Staffordshire man who had begun the working years of life as a car- 122 The Country of George Eliot penter and risen to be the land-agent of a wealthy Warwickshire county family, lived till she was twenty -one. She was not, however, as sometimes stated, born here : but at South Farm, Arbury, close by though Mr. Evans moved to Griff House while his little girl was still a baby. Here, in this quiet and rural district of the somewhat grimy coal region of War- wickshire, amid scenes and scenery which indelibly impressed themselves upon her mind, to be afterwards reproduced with a vivid and loving fidelity, Miss Evans grew to womanhood. Life, however, had become somewhat circumscribed and lacking in mental stimulus, and it was with pleasure she went with her father in the spring of 1841 shortly after she had come of age to a semi-rural house in Foleshill Road, outside Coventry. The event was of signal moment in her life, for it was now she formed a delightful acquaintanceship with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray of Rosehill, and Mrs. Bray's sister, Miss Sara Hennell an acquaintanceship which was not only the chief charm and stimulus of her early years of womanhood, but deepened into a friendship of the utmost value and happiness, which lasted nearly forty years. Rosehill 123 " The Country of George Eliot House and garden may still be seen in the outskirts of Coventry : the " other house," as she calls it, that from 1841 to 1849 was her "earthly paradise." It was here, apparently, that Mary Ann became " Marian " ; and here that the eager in- tellectual life first quickened in production, and that of a kind remarkable for a young woman in the England of the 'forties a translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, a task followed by English renderings of philoso- phico -religious writings by Spinoza and Feuerbach. It was a happy and fruitful time that came to a vital change with the death of Mr. Evans in 1849. Though the Foleshill Road home was broken up, and Marian Evans went abroad to break the spell of sorrow and prolonged associa- tion, she returned to the neighbourhood of Coventry and to her beloved Warwick- shire lanes and canals and flat, damp lands, and stayed with her friends the Brays till, at the age of thirty -two, she made her first definite change in life, and removed to London. The occasion was the assistant - editorship of the Westminster Review, but it was the beginning of the long and brilliant career in literature whereby the obscure Warwickshire Marian Evans became the 124 The Country of George Eliot world-famous " George Eliot." It will be easy for Londoners who wish to see the early London home of this celebrated novelist, to do so ; for it is no farther away than Richmond. Here, in rooms at No. 8 Park Street (close to the beautiful Park " George Eliot " so often frequented and so much loved, reminiscent to her as it was of Arbury Park, and of parts of the wooded districts of Warwickshire), were written, during the years of 1855-8, not only The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfirs Love Story, and Janet's Re- pentance collectively republished as Scenes of Clerical Life but also the most enduring in popularity of all the great writer's books, Adam Bede. In 1859 George Henry Lewes and George Eliot (for Marian Evans was now not only " George Eliot," but also had wedded her life to that of the brilliant and versatile man of letters to whom personally she owed so much, but also through whose influence her art was so often to know the blight of an essentially uncreative and unimaginative mind) moved to Wandsworth, where, at a house called Holly Lodge, in Wimbledon Park Road, they lived from February 1858 till March 1860, and where perhaps the 125 The Country of George Eliot most beautiful of all George Eliot's books was written, The Mill on the Floss. The next change was to the well-known home at The Priory, North Bank, St. John's Wood, where from November 1863 till after the death of G. H. Lewes and till shortly before her marriage early in 1880 with Mr. J. W. Cross, George Eliot had her London residence. Here she wrote some of her most discussed books Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and that brave and fine effort in dramatic poetry of one who was neither a dramatist nor a poet, The Spanish Gypsy. Far and away the best portrait of the famous novelist in her prime is that made in 1865 by Sir Frederick Burton, now in the National Portrait Gallery ; and friends who knew her well during her last years at The Priory have assured me that the likeness was as admirable then as when it was made. From 1876 till the year of her death George Eliot had also a delightful summer home near Godalming, in Surrey The Heights, Witley ; and here she passed some of her happiest days in late life, though even here not without a longing for the less interesting or beautiful, but more intimate, scenery of "her own country," Warwick- shire, North Stafford, and the southlands 126 The Country of George Eliot of Derby. It was neither in her own land, nor at The Heights, nor The Priory that, on December 22, 1880, the great writer died, but at No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a few doors from where Rossetti still dreamed and wrote and painted, a few minutes' walk from where Carlyle still worked and brooded. The country of George Eliot should, in a sense, be called the Four Counties. Of these, Warwickshire and North Staffordshire bulk the largest, in the map of our Imagina- tive Geography. Derbyshire leans against them from the north ; to the east are the winds and floods of Lincolnshire. Con- veniently this country may be said to extend from Gainsborough that old town on the Trent so familiar to readers of The Mill on the Floss as St. Oggs to Coventry and Nuneaton. In all her years spent in or near London (with her brief residings abroad), George Eliot was never in mind and spirit long away from this .country of her early life, love, and imagina- tive and sympathetic intimacy. She lived a dual mental life : intellectually with the remote and austere minds of the past ; reminiscently and recreatively with the people, episodes, and scenery of her beloved 127 The Country of George Eliot " Shepperton " (Chilvers Colon) and " Hay- slope " (Ellaston), her ever affectionately regarded " Snowfield " (Wirks worth), "Milby" (Nuneaton), and "St. Oggs" (Gainsborough) for the most part now dull and uninteresting tracts and localities of the shires of Stafford and Warwick and Lincoln, transferred henceforth by her genius to the more vivid and fascinating " Midlands map " of the Atlas of the Countries of the Imagination. It is rarely we come upon any revelation of " Mrs. Lewes " or " Mrs. Cross " in the domestic capacity of lady of the household as when she writes to her friend Mrs. Congreve, shortly after settlement at The Priory in St. John's Wood, that she is occupied with no imaginative work, but is renewing " a mind made up of old carpets fitted in new places, and new carpets suffering from accidents ; chairs, tables, and pieces, muslin curtains, and down-draughts in cold places " and this although, " before we began to move, I was swimming in Comte and Euripides and Latin Christianity." Whatever may have been the drift of opinion in the middle epoch of the nineteenth century, it is probably the all but general opinion to-day that the George Eliot of 128 The Country of George Eliot literature is the George Eliot who is "swimming" in memories of the people and episodes and places known so in- timately in her early life and ever recalled so vividly, and not the George Eliot who "swam" with " Comte and Euripides and Latin Christianity," or the abstract thinkers and philosophies for which the phrase may stand as a collective analogue. Frankly, of what worth are all the stately but un vivified pages of Romola, or the long and wearying digressions in Daniel Deronda, or the meandering and inconclusive speculations of Theophrastus Such, in com- parison with the rich human interest and loving and exquisite familiarity of books of a lived actuality such as Adam Bede and Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss ? Do we not recall the dairies of Donnithorne Hall Farm (and their presiding genius, Mrs. Poyser in the roll-call of George Eliot's personages as outstanding a figure as Mr. Micawber or Sam Weller in the roll-call of Dickens's personages, as Baillie Nicol Jar vie in that of Scott's, or Becky Sharp in that of Thackeray's, or Handy Andy in that of Lover's) with far keener pleasure, alike in imaginative realisation and in the sense of perfected and satisfying iv 129 I The Country of George Eliot art, than even the keenest pages of what in its day was considered the masterly philosophic thought of Middlemarch, the perturbing sociological questionings in Felix Holt, or the dignified intellectual display of erudition in Daniel Deronda and Romola ? Nor do I think that this change in stand- point is due solely to that contemporary intellectual deterioration in ideals and mental powers of which we hear so much. In some measure, at least, I take it, it is due to an ever developing sense of the true scope and true beauty and true limitations of literature, not as a pastime adaptable to every range of feebleness and capacity, but as an art, an art requiring as scrupulous observance on the part of the jealous reader as on that of the ambitious writer. Let us remember our friend Mr. Gedge, the landlord, and not get into the habit of dismissing our contemporaries as "a poor lot, sir, big and little a poor lot ! " If one were to take a census as to the literary capital of " George Eliot's Country," it would probably result in the election either of Chilvers Coton, near Nuneaton (the " Shepperton " of the early stories, and the novelist's home till she was of age), or, and the more likely, of Ellaston, 130 The Country of George Eliot the " Hayslope " of Adam Bede. Many years ago the present writer edited a popular periodical for young readers ; and on one occasion, in the literary page, the question was editorially proclaimed : " Who are the two most famous persons in George Eliot's novels, and what are the two best known localities ? " The answers were (for competitions of the kind) exceptionally personal, and by far the greater number declared, on the first count, for Mrs. Poyser and Maggie Tulliver (the latter run close by poor Hetty, by Dinah Morris, and by Adam Bede) ; and, on the second, for Donnithorne Hall Farm (Hayslope), and " Red Deeps," where Maggie Tulliver used to meet her lover Philip Wakem (though this choice was perhaps due in considerable part to a then recent article in the same periodical on the Griff Hollow of fact and fiction, apropos of Maggie's pathetic story). And probably this verdict would be returned from any like consensus to-day. It is difficult to imagine any heroine in George Eliot's novels and tales usurping the place of Maggie Tulliver : it is im- possible to think of Mrs. Poyser being dethroned from her pre-eminence. One great charm of George Eliot's The Country of George Eliot Country is that it is real country, loved and understood for itself as well as being the background of the humours and sorrows and joys of human life, loved for its own intimate charm as well for its real and imaginary dramatic associations. There is nothing of more winsome charm in George Eliot's writings than her description of this very real and intimate country of her love and knowledge. True, these are remembered more as one remembers last spring in Devon, or summer in Surrey, or autumn in Wales or the Highlands : as the sum of many lovely and delightful things, days, and hours. There are few descriptive passages for memory to isolate and recall, for George Eliot had little preoccupation with words for the sake of their own beauty an artistic lack more obvious, naturally, in her verse than in her prose.* But (perhaps in The * Since this article was written I have seen the late Sir Leslie Stephen's more recently published admirable monograph on George Eliot, and cannot refrain from a corroborative quotation on this point of the artistic sense of the value of words. Sir Leslie Stephen had too finely trained a taste to accept the high claim so often made for George Eliot as a poet. She lacked, he says, " that exquisite sense for the value of words which may transmute even common thought into poetry. Even her prose, 132 The Country of George Eliot Mill on the Floss especially) it would be easy to find many winsome collocations, de- lightful in themselves apart from the interest or charm of context. Turn to The Mill, and chance perhaps upon : " The rush of the water, and the booming of the mill, bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond." Or upon : " Maggie could sit in a grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash, stoop- ing aslant from the steep above her, and listen to the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence, or see the sunlight piercing the distant boughs, as if to chase and drive home the truant heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths." indeed, though often admirable, sometimes be- comes heavy, and gives the impression that, instead of finding the right word, she is accumulat- ing more or less complicated approximations." [In case of any confusion of issues, it may be added that no critic has ever more finely and sanely done justice to and interpreted all that made the genius, " all the mental, moral, and spiritual energy that went to make up the wonder- ful spirit whom we know as George Eliot."] 133 The Country of George Eliot But in all the George Eliot Country of fact there is no locality so fascinating as that immortalised (in Adam Bede) as Hay slope and its neighbourhood. The seeker will easily find it, under its actual name of Ellaston, whether in a map or if he be afoot or acycle in the Midlands on a George Eliot pilgrimage, by looking for the curving stream of the Dove where it divides Loam- shire and Stonyshire (as the novelist calls Staffordshire and Derbyshire), near Norbury railway station. Our one quotation from Adam Bede (whence one could delve so many beautiful passages and pages) must be of this Hayslope vicinage : "... From his station near the Green he had before him in one view nearly all the other typical features of this pleasant land. High up against the horizon were the huge conical hills, like giant mounds intended to fortify this region of corn and grass against the keen and hungry winds of the north ; not distant enough to be clothed in purple mystery, but with sombre greenish sides visibly specked with sheep, whose motion was only revealed by memory, not detected by sight ; wooed from day to day by the changing hours, but responding by no 134 The Country of George Eliot change in themselves left for ever grim and sullen after the flush of morning, the winged gleams of the April noonday, the parting crimson glory of the ripening summer sun. And directly below him the eye rested on a more advanced line of hang- ing woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deepened into the uniform leafy curtains of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash or lime. Then came the valley, where the woods grew thicker, as if they had rolled down and hurried together from the patches left smooth on the slope, that they might take the better care of the tall mansion which lifted its parapets and sent its faint blue summer smoke among them." Here we have not only typical English scenery of the North Midlands with heights and uplands, wood and valley, the oak or beech surrounded manor-house . . . and beyond it the hamlet of Hayslope and the grey square tower of the old church but are in the heart of the country of George Eliot. If, to-day, much of the pastoral quiet of Hayslope, much of the green loveliness of the regions now so intimately associated 135 The Country of George Eliot with Adam Bede and poor Hetty and Mrs. Poyser, with Amos Barton and Silas Marner, with Mr. Gilfil and Maggie Tulliver, exist only in the pages of a great writer, and seem dull and commonplace, fretted by the smoke of mines and the passage of coal-trains and the encroachment of the plague of bricks and stucco, the fault does not lie with George Eliot. We have the land as it is : she limned for us the country as it was. 136 THACKERAY-LAND THE lover of Thackeray will at once exclaim, and with some justice, " The literary geography of ' Thackeray ' . . . impos- sible ! " "George Eliot was easy for you," such a one may add "you had only to omit the Florence of Romola and restrict yourself to three counties : the Bronte country will be easy, for except in Villette you will not need to cross the Channel, nor even to linger long in London : Dickens himself was easy, for the ground covered by Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit in their beyond-London wanderings is almost as familiar as the home -circuit of Mr. Pickwick, or as the metropolitan background of Bleak House or Little Dorrit while as for what occurs across the water, the Tale of Two Cities is soon overtaken. Even Walter Scott and Steven- son, for all their pen -wanderings as far overseas as Syria and Samoa, could by skilful loops be lassoed to your service. But how are you to limn the literary 137 Thackeray -Land geography of Thackeray, unless you at once relinquish any attempt to go beyond Bath and Exeter, or even to stray from London . . . unless, at farthest, to those marine suburbs of Vanity Fair, Brighton and Boulogne ? " True, so far, on both counts. The polar centre of Thackeray -land is that Guest-room in the Reform Club in Pall Mall where the famous portrait by Lawrence still cheers and dignifies the lunching novelist of to-day, still benignly consoles the harassed scribe whose monotonously recurrent nocturne is in three movements to the Reform Club dinner, thence through the cigar-lit valley of dyspepsia, then to the leader-writer's room. The Thackeray an home -county is London . . . that London bounded by Holland Park on the west, by St. Paul's on the east, by Pimlico on the south : the London whose heart is Pall Mall, whose chief arteries are Piccadilly and St. James's Street, Regent Street, and all that mysterious entity ''the West End " from Jermyn Street to the " beyond Gadira " of those Metropolitan Pillars of Hercules, Tyburn Gate and Knightsbridge. Above all, Thackeray's London consists of Belgravia and Mayfair 138 Thackeray -Land with Piccadilly as Vanity Fair Avenue. If ever any great writer was a Londoner it was Thackeray. Not Dr. Johnson returning to the Mitre Tavern after those Hebridean experiences . . . wherefrom, after too much rain, and too much brose, and too much Bos well, he coined or set his seal upon the opprobrious term " Scotch " to the after satisfaction of all South-Britons and the resentment of all Scots ! nor Charles Lamb warming to the nocturnal glow of the Strand after one of his visits to the Lakeland of his great friends, with whose genius he sympathised, but not with their taste in exile nor Dickens, when at Broadstairs the sea and keen air lost their spell, and he would have bartered both with joy for the dirt and noise of Fleet Street none of these was more truly a Londoner than William Makepeace Thackeray, born in Calcutta, a student at Weimar, a newspaper correspondent and happy married man in Paris, a great novelist -in -the -making at a chateau in Picardy. We cannot imagine Thackeray country-wed, as was Marian Evans or Charlotte Bronte, or a country- man like Walter Scott, a Transatlantic or Samoan exile like Stevenson, a country - dweller like Thomas Hardy, a Surrey 139 Thackeray -Land recluse like George Meredith. One is apt to think of Charles Dickens as pre- eminently the Londoner among modern writers. But Dickens (as he said once), for all that he was as dependent on London as an orphan -suckling on its milk -bottle, lived a great part of his mature life in maritime or inland Kent. True, when he was writing Dombey and Son at Lausanne he yearned for London, not only with the nostalgia born of life -long affection and associations, but with all the longings of the creative artist for the living sources of the imagination. It was, however, the near approach, the intimate touch, that Dickens needed : not to work and sleep and wake in an urban home, nor to lunch regularly at the Reform, nor to dine often at the Garrick, nor enjoy or undergo the social round. But though Thackeray spent some early years in Paris, and travelled east and west, he was ever happiest in London ; in absence ever longed to return ; never wished to live beyond the frontiers of St. James's Street on the east, of Kensing- ton on the west. That he (or his penself) afrixed the cartoon of Punch to the great Pyramid . . . "at nineteen minutes past seven, by the clock of the great minaret 140 Thackeray -Land at Cairo," if we may take him literally . . . is by no means insignificant. In another sense, Thackeray, when abroad, was con- tinually affixing a cartoon of British superiority, or British badinage, or British indifference, on persons and things and episodes to him distasteful or uncongenial. Even in his maturity, in his most famous work, this tendency was continually in- dulged, and sometimes offensively, as, for example, in the remarks on foreign " Society " at Rome, in the episode of the final meeting of " Mme. de Rawdon " and Lord Steyne. It is this that more than any other reason makes so much of his early writings, more particularly his travel -papers, so wearisome now, often, alas ! so banal. There is no great writer of our time who has committed so much that is common- place in thought and observation, and commonplace and often jejune in style. Thackeray's name has become a fetish, and if one whisper a contrarious opinion it is to be snubbed with contumely. But the Thackeray of Vanity Fair, of The New- comes, of Esmond is one person, the Thackeray of a vast amount of indifferent -" pot -boiling " is another. If the present writer had not a deep admiration for the 141 Thackeray -Land author of the three great works named, he would be more chary of such expression of opinion as to so much else of Thackeray's work. A complete indifference could hardly mean other than a serious deficiency in oneself. But to say that one must accept as excellent in kind what one really finds commonplace and outworn, and often per- verse and in the worst bourgeois taste, simply because of a great reputation, is to range oneself with those fanatics who (in their infatuation for a name, and not for the achievement per se) would have us accept Count Robert of Paris as masterly because it bears one of the greatest of names as author, or would have us accept Titus Andronicus as great literature because it is (or is by many supposed to be) by Shakespeare, or would have us accept as treasurable all the dross and debris to be found along the starry path of Robert Burns. Doubtless many a reader will be moved to like reflections if he turn to these much- praised travel -sketches of the great author, whose fame by some singular irony seems to grow in proportion as the literary temper and taste of a later day slowly but steadily recede from all in his work related to the 142 Thackeray -Land occasional and accidental, the accent of the hour, the bygone and the crude. But the topographical Thackerayan will insist now on those two other delightful " Sketch-Books," which also appeared "under the travelling title of Mr. Tit marsh," to quote from the author's dedication of the later of the two to Charles Lever : The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book. Probably hundreds of Thackeray -admirers, unable to re -peruse with pleasure the long so much belauded, but surely wearisomely overdone and now less regarded Book of Snobs, can turn again with pleasure to these high-spirited and amusing records of days and hours, of persons and things : in Ireland, from the Giant's Causeway to Cork, and from Dublin to Gal way ; in Paris, from Heaven -knows -what -all, from Caricatures and Melodramas, to George Sand and the New Apocalypse. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to say that in these we have to seek the geography of Thackeray -land. He took his holiday thus once in a way ; but his own land, the true country ot Thackeray, lies elsewhere in so far as a novelist whose country is human nature can be restricted at all by the literary geographer. No, let there be peace among 143 Thackeray -Land the lovers of that immortal work not even is this land to seek in The Kickleburys on the Rhine, for all the Becky -Sharp-like little ways of " Miss Fanni, la belle Kickleburi," as the enamoured Adolphe spoke of " Miss K." to the philosophic Alphonse ; for all that is told of the maturing in wisdom of Lady Kicklebury, . . . who, it will be remembered, was finally brought to admit decisively, if incoherently, "that Shake- speare was very right in stating how much sharper than a thankless tooth it is to have a serpent child " ; for all that is set forth concerning Mr. Titmarsh (the real M. Angelo !), Captain Hicks, the mild Mr. Milliken, and " his soul's angel and his adored blessing " Lavinia and her chronic effort to be calm, and all other com- panions of pilgrimage in that celebrated Tour Abroad. And yet . . . who would will- ingly relinquish such a vignette of natural beauty as that of Deutz and the Drachen- fels ... a fragment radiant with that true Thackerayan light recognisable ever, whether playing on things or places or persons which we all love ? " [When I woke up it was Cologne, and it was not sunrise yet.] Deutz lay opposite, 144 Thackeray -Land and over Deutz the dusky sky was reddened. The hills were veiled in the mist and the grey. The grey river flowed underneath us ; the steamers were roosting along the quays, a light keeping watch in the cabins here and there, and its reflections quivering in the water. As I look, the skyline towards the east grows redder and redder. A long troop of grey horsemen winds down the river road, and passes over the bridge of boats. You might take them for ghosts, those grey horsemen, so shadowy do they look ; but you hear the trample of their horses' hoofs as they pass over the planks. Every minute the dawn twinkles up into the twilight ; and over Deutz the heaven blushes brighter. The quays begin to fill with men ; the carts began to creak and rattle, and wake the sleeping echoes. Ding, ding, ding, the steamers' bells begin to ring : the people on board to stir and wake : the lights may be extinguished, and take their turn of sleep : the active boats shake themselves and push out into the river : the great bridge opens, and gives them passage : the church bells of the city begin to clink : the cavalry trumpets blow from the opposite bank : the sailor is at the wheel, the porter at his burden, the soldier iv 145 K Thackeray -Land at his musket, and the priest at his prayers. . . . " And lo ! in a flash of crimson splendour, with blazing scarlet clouds running before his chariot, and heralding his majestic approach, God's sun rises upon the world, and all nature wakens and brightens." In this passage from an early work we have the real Thackeray. It is in all ways characteristic, and would appear still more convincingly so if quoted to its close : for it was Thackeray's liking to conclude even the lightest of his longer writings with a passage of personal emotion, of a sudden tidal eloquence, informed at the close with a note of deep religious feeling. But the actual lines quoted are interesting in that they reveal the author's favourite method in description . . . his aptitude for the salient feature, his instinct for the accumula- tion of images and facts in short intimately - related sentences, and oftenest with the use of the colon. It is interesting, too, as we have in this early developed method and manner of Thackeray in description a prelude to the method and manner of a still greater master of prose ; for George Meredith . . . the George Meredith of The 146 Thackeray -Land Ordeal of Richard Fever el, of Beauchamp^s Career, of Sandra Belloni and Vittoria and Diana of the Crossways . . . was in his youth an eager student of Thackeray, and unquestionably was influenced by him more than by any contemporary author except possibly Thomas Love Peacock. Not, however, that the reader of Thackeray will easily find many like passages, except in the Travel -Sketches French, Irish, " Corn- hill to Cairo," to the later " Little Sketches " from Richmond to Ghent, Brussels, and Waterloo. There is no other great novelist who indulges so seldom in descriptive detail, who so rarely limns his personages or relates their experiences against the background of nature, whether of scenic effect or of the great elemental forces. Thackeray's method is in this respect the extreme contrast to that of the greatest of his contemporaries, Victor Hugo. It is as inconceivable that he could have written any book even dimly approaching Les Travailleurs de la Mer, as it is inconceivable that Victor Hugo could have written such vast meandering tales as Pendennis or The Virginians in the minor key throughout, without a touch of melodrama, without the perpetual Thackeray -Land background of the natural world and all the elemental forces. Not that we need seek a foreign writer with whom to point the contrast. Thackeray had two great con- temporaries at home whose genius recognised and demonstrated the immense imaginative value of "background." Who that re- members some of the most impressive pages in Great Expectations or David Copperfield, or recalls all the mature achievement of the author of Shirley and Jane Eyre and Villette ... or, it may be added, that book of cloud and wind, of storm-swept moors and storm-tossed hearts, Wuthering Heights can fail to regret that Thackeray had not with his compeers Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, that larger vision and deeper intellectual and artistic senti- ment which has since been so distinguishing a feature of every great achievement in contemporary imaginative fiction ... in France from Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo to the author of Les Pecheurs d'lslande, in Russia from Turgeniev and Tolstoi to Maxim Gorki, in our own country from Walter Scott to Thomas Hardy ? It is in all probability, this lack in Thackeray that more than all else accounts for what a recent critic alludes to as " the growing 148 Thackeray -Land contemporary revolt against his vague discursiveness on the one hand, and his general newspaperiness of method on the other "... that is, the method of the journalist who considers the relation of facts and circumstance and conversation to be all in all or at best to need no more than circumstantial comment. A really intimate knowledge of his writings, however, would enable one, if not to refute, at any rate greatly to modify, any inference that Thackeray lacked the power to create in " the two worlds that are yet one world." That he can describe in beauty no reader of his earlier writings need be reminded ; that, and more and more as he grew older, he became (actually or apparently) artistically indifferent to all save action and motive and the general externals of human life, it would not be easy to disprove. In the writings of his final period, with the exception of a few passages in The Virginians and, consider- ing the inordinate length of that book, how few these passages are ! it is extra- ordinary how little stress is laid on or how little note is taken of natural environment or background. Let the reader turn to the three final novels, Lovel the Widower, The 149 Thackeray -Land Adventures of Philip, and the unfinished Denis Duval, and he will probably concur in this opinion. In Philip I remember that the charming wife of the hero on their honeymoon in Paris wrote that she and Philip walked home under " a hundred million blazing stars "and I honestly doubt if in the whole novel there is anything of the kind more detailed ! True, I have not looked at the novel in question for some years, till a rapid glance a little while ago in order to verify my quotation ; nevertheless, I still abide by my doubt. In this respect it is interesting to contrast three " last works " each left unfinished by acknowledged great writers : Denis Duval, Edwin Drood, and Weir of Hermiston. In Denis Duval we are never acutely aware of external nature and the elemental forces of nature ; in Edwin Drood the reader feels the influence of both at the outset ; in Stevenson's superb fragment we are ever aware of the great loneliness of the Pentland solitudes, of the coming of rain and storm and serene peace, of the magic of moonlight, of the subtle fascination of familiar and yet ever unfamiliar vistas, of the indescribable presence and secret influence of the hill- 150 Thackeray -Land wind and all this without for a moment hindering the movement of the drama, without once diverting the reader's rapt attention. No one would be so uncritical as to compare on any other ground two books so different in method, intention, and achievement as Denis Duval and Weir of Hermiston, except that they are thus linked in the accident of fragmentary finality. In any endeavour, then, to define the literary geography of Thackeray -land it would be necessary to relinquish the idea of a chart of all the divers parts, places, and remote regions between Palestine in the East and Virginia in the West touched upon by Thackeray's facile pen. From Jerusalem to the Rhine, from Athens to Gal way Bay, from Brussels to Baltimore, is too extensive for any topographer to attempt. The Thackerayan lover and student will find his time cut out for him, if he wish to make a chart of all his author's wanderings with the names of every place mentioned in the vast wilderness of his writings ! From 1840 to 1860 ... in these twenty years from Thackeray's thirtieth year to his fiftieth, from the days of the immortal Yellowplush and the first Thackeray -Land appearance of a Titmarsh and the tale of the Great Hoggarty Diamond, to the close of the great period that culminated in The Newcomes and the advent of the final period that began with The Virginians in the work of this score of years the would- be geographer will find ample material for a sufficiently bewildering place -puzzle, from the " London, E.G." of the early and re- pellent Catherine to the little town of Chur in the Grisons in the essay On a Lazy Idle Boy, untimately included in the author's latest completed work, the Roundabout Papers. But as this is one of the latest possibly the latest of Thackeray's few latter-day togographical passages, it must be quoted for the delectation of the present liter ary- geographers : " I had occasion to spend a week in the autumn in the little old town of Coire or Chur, in the Grisons, where lies buried that very ancient British king, saint, and martyr, Lucius, who founded the Church of St. Peter on Cornhill. . . . The pretty little city stands, so to speak, at the end of the world of the world of to-day, the world of rapid motion, and rushing railways, and 152 Thackeray -Land the commerce and intercourse of men. From the northern gate, the iron road stretches away to Zurich, to Basle, to Paris, to home. From the old southern barriers, before which a little river rushes, and around which stretch the crumbling battlements of the ancient town, the road bears the slow diligence or lagging vetturino by the shallow Rhine, through the awful gorges of the Via Mala, and presently over the Splugen to the shores of Como. ... I have seldom seen a place more quaint, pretty, calm, and pastoral than this remote little Chur. What need have the inhabitants for walls and ramparts, ex- cept to build summer-houses, to trail vines, and hang clothes to dry on them ? No enemies approach the great mouldering gates : only at morn and even the cows come lowing past them, the village maidens chatter merrily round the fountains, and babble like the ever voluble stream that flows under the old walls ... a quiet, quaint, pleasant, pretty, old town ! " * * This, the first of the Roundabout Papers, was originally the editorial prologue to the new Cornhillthe Cornhtll with Thackeray at the helm. Was there ever a more delightful set-off 153 Thackeray -Land How characteristic that touch early in this quotation . . . "to Zurich, &c., to home " / That is Thackeray speaking as to a circle of intimates. We can almost imagine him saying Hear, hear ! to the mocking adieux of a man whom he would have detested as mercilessly as he would have " scotched " the fantastic vogue of which he was the representative ... to the " soon we shall see once more the tender grey of the Piccadilly pavement ; and the subtle music of Old Bond Street will fall furtively upon our ears," of the " tragical buffoon" disguised for us as Esme Amarinth in the most brilliant satirical comedy given us since the vast drama of Vanity Fair . . . The Green Carnation. It is no use to think of following Mr. Tit marsh and the Kickleburys to the Rhine, or of tracking Joseph Sedley and Dobbin to Paris, or of " being in at " that famous episode of Miss Rebecca and the Pumper- nickel students still less to pursue that indomitable searcher after the Flesh-pots in her latter-day migrations throughout Europe, from Tours to Toplitz, from St. to a new magazine than this charming, sunny, and humorously winsome essay, with all its ingenious allusions to other novelists ? 154 Thackeray -Land Petersburg to Boulogne. Of course, if a Thackerayan reader find himself in Brussels he may, with a phantom Henry Esmond, seek the con vent -grave of the Sceur Marie Madeleine, once the gay and fashionable Lady Castle wood, and poor Esmond's un- happy mother or, with a phantom Amelia Sedley, will hold his breath while the darkness of an imaginary night of Waterloo follows the dull echo of the guns, and thousands of other praying or sobbing women await the dread coming of after- battle tidings. If a visitor to Boulogne - sur-Mer, could he possibly omit a stroll to the Chateau de Brequerecque, where in 1854 Thackeray lived for a time, thinking out and touch by touch creating the most lovable of all his characters, Colonel Thomas Newcome ? In Paris, of course, such an one could not possibly be without thought of the Hotel de la Terrasse, where Becky Sharp lived awhile ; without a reminiscence of Terra's Tavern in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, immortalised in the Ballad of Bouillabaisse. If perchance, again, such an one be a passing visitor to remoter Strasburg not a likely place, one would think, for Thackerayan associations ! would he not instinctively seek for some 155 Thackeray -Land prototype of heroic Mary Ancel, or watch a phantom Pierre Ancel riding wearily from the western gate, or feel inclined secretly to identify in some harmless passer- by the treacherous Schneider, that pro- vincial understudy for the great parts of Robespierre and Marat in the terrible Melodrama of the Revolution ? In Stras- burg of to-day, however, even such an one would look in vain for any possible counter- part to that other gentleman whom the good Pierre first saw in Schneider's room (Schneider, ex-abbe, ex-monk, ex-professor, quondam editor of the Songs of Anacreon, once Royal Chaplain and one of the Illuminati at the capital of Wurtemberg become at last a bloodhound to the blood- stained Directorate of France) the gentle- man with a red night -cap ornamented with " a tricolor cockade as large as a pancake," with a huge pigtail, seated at a greasy wine-stained table, moved to frequent ex- clamatory grief and bibulous tears by the book he is reading, The Sorrows of Werther, and ever and again ejaculating " O this poor Charlotte!" or "Ah, Brigand" . . . the sentimental gentleman whom Pierre Ancel thought to be a tender-hearted lamb for all his wolf's clothing, but whom 156 Thackeray -Land Schneider, on his abrupt entrance, thrusts from the room with the significant remark, " You drunken talking fool . . . fourteen people are cooling their heels yonder, waiting until you have finished your beer and your sentiment : " That fellow," continued Schneider, turn- ing to me, " is our public executioner : a capital hand too if he would but keep decent time : but the brute is always drunk, and blubbering over The Sorrows of Werther." These, and a score a hundred other instances, might be adduced ; but then a series of maps, not a precis of a London Thackeray-Directory, would be needed. Even in our own country the localities to be sought would be far apart . . . as Clevedon Court, in Somersetshire, the beauti- ful original of the " Castle wood " of Esmond ; as Larkbeare House, near Ottery St. Mary in Devon, the early home of Thackeray's mother, and where he spent his holidays as a boy a neighbourhood remembered by him later when he was writing Pendennis, where Ottery St. Mary, Sidmouth, and Exeter are alluded to as " Clavering St. Mary," " Baymouth," and " Chatteris " ; 157 Thackeray -Land as the scattered Irish and English county backgrounds in The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Vanity Fair, The Newcomes, Pen- dennis, Adventures of Philip, Lovel the Widower, &c. &c from Tunbridge Wells to Taunton, from Brighton to Bath. It would indeed be rash to assert of almost any fairly well-known place that, if not " brought in," it is at least unmentioned in Thackeray's writings. How few readers, for example, would have thought of Stras- burg in connection with any Thackerayan romance, long or short ? And only the other day, in an article about Thackeray's wide range, its writer stated in effect that Florence was perhaps the only English - frequented town, and Rome the only capital, with which Thackeray had no literary dealings in his fiction evidently oblivious, for one thing, of a certain famous heroine who in Florence kept house for awhile with the unattached Madame de Cruchecassee, or, at a later date, as Madame de Rawdon, met at the Polonia ball in Rome, and for the last time, the great Lord Steyne. Then, again, to take a still more detailed instance, what of the thirty -fifth chapter of The Newcomes ? Brighton, of course, is a place apart : Thackeray -Land a detached suburb, rather, for is it not Thackeray's " London-by-the-Sea " ? For the ardent Thackerayan to visit Brighton without a single reminiscence would be as out of the question as to lunch in the Strangers' Room at the Reform Club and not look at Lawrence's famous portrait of the great man, or dine at the Garrick and have no heed of Durham's massive " bust " or of Sir John Gilbert's charming posthumous portrait. Nowhere more than at Brighton was Thackeray "possessed" by his imaginary personages though, as he is reported to have said on one occasion, " in London they become almost too actual ! " It was from Brighton that (in 1849, when he was thirty -eight, and had suddenly become nationally famous by the publication in book-form of Vanity Fair) he wrote to his friend Mrs. Brookfield, " Being entirely occupied with my two new friends, Mrs. Pendennis and her son Arthur Pendennis, I got up very early again this morning. He is a very good- natured, generous young fellow, and I begin to like him considerably." It was to the same friend that he wrote on another occasion from Paris : "... I have been to the Hotel de la Terrasse, where Becky 159 Thackeray -Land used to live, and shall pass by Captain Osborne's lodgings. I believe perfectly in all these people, and feel quite an interest in the inn in which they lived." In London itself I suppose Thackeray enthusiasts were formerly wont to seek more than any other place (for now Godalm- ing claims what was once the glory of Smithfield) the Charterhouse the Grey Friars of The Newcomes, and for ever now associated with the beloved memory of incomparable Colonel Newcome. Others, perhaps, sought first those " dark alleys, archways, courts and backstairs " of the Middle Temple, so beloved by Thackeray ; and in particular Brick Court, and the stairs leading to the chambers once occupied by Goldsmith . . . visiting these no doubt for Thackeray's sake rather than for other associations, though remembering his "I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were his (Goldsmith's), and passed up the staircase, which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door." 160 Thackeray -Land For the many who prefer a " favourite- character association " than one more strictly personal, there is ample material indeed. Even the all but omniscient life- long " cabby " might be puzzled to make his way to all the addresses that could be given him. Even he might go astray in Suburbia if his " fare " directed him to drive from Russell Square (where the ever- to-be-remembered Sedleys of Vanity Fair once lived) to that familiar-sounding and yet postally unknown address whither they migrated ... St. Adelaide's Villas, Anna Maria Road, W. " where the houses look like baby -houses ; where the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must in- fallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlours ; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children's pinafores, little red socks, caps, &c. (polyandria polygynia) ; whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing ; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily. ..." Among the numberless houses, rooms, chambers, &c., connected with the person- ages of Vanity Fair, The Newcomes, Pen- dennis, The Adventures of Philip, and so IV 161 L Thackeray -Land many other writings down to Our Street and Mrs. Perkins* Ball, each Thackeray an reader must select for himself. He may wander as far west as the Brompton board- ing-house where Miss Bunion ate her daily breakfast chop, and spent the rest of the day in the composition of The Deadly Nightshade or other of its passionate suc- cessors ; or may wander into the City and in a counting-house and as a worthy dry- salter behold Poseidon Hicks in his im- passioned but highly respectable youth the author of The Death-Shriek and The Bastard of Lara, and later of Idiosyncrasy : in Forty Books, Marat : an Epic, and The Megatheria ("that magnificent contribution to our Pre-adamite literature ") and other delicate trifles a mere Mr. Hicks like one of our- selves, immersed in the commonplace task of checking figures or posting up his ledger. Or he may keep to Central London, and in Fitzroy Square look up at the house occupied by Colonel Newcome, its black door " cheer- fully ornamented in the style of the end of the last century with a funereal urn in the centre above the entry, with garlands and the skulls of rams at each corner " ; or may pass through Mayfair and take a glance at Gaunt House, with all its memories 162 Thackeray -Land of " the wicked mar kiss," en route to visit trim Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club, occupied as usual with a pile of letters from lords and ladies galore, and scowled at as usual by the envious and unfashionable Glowry. But if something less imposing than a morning club -visit to Major Pendennis, or more reputable than a stroll to the sponging-house in Cursitor Street where Rawdon Crawley " learned life " after the festivities at Gaunt House, be desired, is there not adjacent Curzon Street, where the same gentleman and the im- mortal Becky " demonstrated to the world the useful and interesting art of living on nothing a year "... that " narrow but respectable mansion " where Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, who was not given to superfluous admirations, and in whom familiarity ever bred contempt, for the first time had a brief aberration of admiration for her husband, when he suddenly abandoned himself to the bodily chastisement of the Right Honourable the Marquis of Steyne, Lord of the Powder Closet, &c. &c. &c., the event that the (for once) impulsive Becky con- sidered had " ruined " her life. The quest, as already hinted, might better befit the Wandering Jew, with Thackeray -Land unlimited time at his disposal ! To follow in every detail the vicissitudes of Becky alone would enable the enthusiast to qualify as a prince of European couriers. Where did not Mrs. Rawdon Crawley . . . whether so called, or Mrs. Rawdon, or Madame de Rawdon, or Madame Raudon, or Madame Rebecque &c., &c. . . . not set her wander- ing foot from far St. Petersburg and remote Toplitz to neighbouring Boulogne, where, with good Mrs. Newbright, it will be remembered that " Mrs. Becky " worked flannel petticoats for the Quashyboos and cotton night -caps for the Cocoanut Indians, and generally made heroic efforts to seem a spotless dove. Since Becky's wanderings would alone suffice to defeat the literary geographer, perhaps the wisest thing for the enthusiast in Thackeray -land is to content himself with visiting those places in his beloved London the great novelist himself most loved, and the homes where he lived. The Charterhouse, of wonderful memories, is gone ; but the Middle Temple remains, the " Garrick " and the " Reform " are as they were. One cannot " begin at the beginning " as children ask of a familiar story, in either sense ; for our hero was 164 Thackeray -Land born at far-away Calcutta, and as to his earliest manhood, with its unfortunate marriage that belongs to Paris.* But one may start with his first London home, No. 1 8 Albion Street, Hyde Park, where he came soon after his marriage (on the sudden collapse of The Constitutional) to his mother's house, in fact and began regular literary work as a contributor to Fraser's, and where his eldest daughter, so well known to all lovers of literature as Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, was born. Thackeray's first " own home " in London was at 13 Great Coram Street, Brunswick Square, where he resided from 1837 to 1840 (at. 26-29), and wrote The Paris Sketch-Book and other early efforts, and where was born his second daughter, who became the wife of the late Sir Leslie Stephen. Of greater literary interest is 13 (now 16) Young Street, Kensington, where Thackeray lived from 1846 to 1853, and wrote the greater part of Vanity Fair, * The apartments in the Rue Neuve St. Augustin, where Thackeray took Miss Shawe after their marriage at the British Embassy in August 1836, may still be seen, and much as they were when the young " English correspondent " of The Constitutional here took up home -life and (as he thought) journalism as a profession. 165 Thackeray -Land Pendennis, and Henry Esmond. A very famous seven years of his life were those when his home was at 36 Onslow Square, South Kensington " a pleasant, bowery sort of home, looking out upon elm-trees," as Mrs. Richmond Ritchie records. It was here that the new and, for his own sake, too famous Editor of the Cornhill Magazine became the target for many arrows of supplication, which ought to have been shot off against the editorial citadel at Messrs. Smith Elder's ; and it was here he wrote the closing chapters of The Newcomes, the famous Lectures on the Four Georges, The Virginians, part of The Adven- tures of Philip, and some of the Roundabout Papers. " His study," says his daughter, " was over the drawing-room, and looked out upon the elm -trees." Finally, there is the more imposing last home, No. 2 Palace Gardens, Kensington, which he had built for him in 1861 in accordance with his own designs and growing needs ; and here, on the day before Christmas of 1863, he died a man still young in years, as we now compute the average span, but aged by sorrow, prolonged strain, and the cease- less, nervous expenditure of an over -busy life. At his death Thackeray stood out 1 66 Thackeray -Land so great, at his best one can hardly yet say how great, a genius of laughter and tears, that few will deny the aptness of the tribute of one of the homage-bearing poets of a Sister Nation : And so Hie Jacet that is all That can be writ or said or sung Of him who held in such a thrall, With his melodious gift of pen and tongue, Both nations old and young. Honour's a hasty word to speak, But now I say it solemnly and slow To the one Englishman most like that Greek Who wrote The Clouds two thousand years ago. 167 THE BRONTE COUNTRY THE real Bronte country is to be sought in two regions : in and just beyond the West Riding of Yorkshire, in those windy uplands and wide reaches of sombre moor which lie away from Ha worth, away from the high- ways where excursion -drag and motor-car corrupt : and ... in the Bronte books. Broadly speaking, the Jane Eyre country is all round Kirkby Lonsdale : the Shirley country is south of Bradford, and may be said to be bounded by Gomersall, Birstal, Brighouse, Mirfield, Heckmondwike, and back to Gomer- sall ; while the Wuthering Heights country can only be indicated by the region around Haworth. " The Withens " is on the hill-top above Haworth, and is supposed to represent the situation of Wuthering Heights. The house itself, as detailed in Emily Bronte's famous romance, is a composite picture ; the interior having been suggested by Ponden Hall, near Haworth, and the exterior by High Sunder land, Law Hill, near Halifax. This, at least, is the opinion of those best 168 The Bronte Country acquainted with the topography of the subject. A friend, who has never been north of the great shoulder of Sir William in Upper Derbyshire, and who read this summer for the first time, at a remote moorland farm, Wuthering Heights and Shirley, told me that he knew the Bronte country as thoroughly as any one not a native " and a native in love with it, at that " could do. " For," he added, " a north-country moorland-track is the same wherever the whaup calls, the kestrel hovers, and the heather -bee hums, and it matters little whether 'tis in Peakland, or the West Riding, or where Carlyle first drew breath, or up by the Eildons or beyond Ochil." And, to no small extent, that is true, I think. Certainly one can understand Jane Eyre and Shirley and Wuthering Heights without even a glimpse of Haworth Par- sonage or Cowan Bridge School or any other of the much -visited buildings or sites or localities : certainly, for some at least, these books will seem far more near and intimate when dissociated from these and all the paraphernalia of tradition, when read or pondered with only wide dun or purple moorlands around, with cloud and 169 The Bronte Country wind, the lapwing, the floating kestrel, and the wild bee for company. Neither familiarity nor love blunted Charlotte Bronte's own perspicacity in this respect, where, if allowable to any, surely some exaggeration might be pardoned in her. She herself wrote of this home -tract of Haworth, " Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys ; it is only higher up, deep in among the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot, and even if she find it there, she must be a solitude -loving raven no gentle dove." Nevertheless, Haworth is still the goal of a number of wayfaring enthusiasts, drawn thither by a geniune love of or keen interest in the Bronte novels and their authors. Some quarter of a century ago, Sir Wemyss Reid, in his sympathetic monograph on Charlotte Bronte, wrote as follows : " No other land furnished so many eager and enthusiastic visitors to the Bronte shrine as the United States, and the number of Americans who found their way to Haworth during the ten years immediately 170 The Bronte Country following the death of the author of Jane Eyre would, if properly recorded, astonish the world. The bleak and lonely house by the side of the moors, with its dismal little garden stretching down to the church- yard, where the village dead of many a generation rest, and its dreary outlook upon the old tower rising from its bank of nettles, the squalid houses of the hamlet, and the bare moorlands beyond, received almost as many visitors from the other side of the Atlantic during those years as Abbotsford or Stratford-on-Avon." To-day the stream of visitors is greater than ever. Since the opening of the Bronte Museum in May 1895 over twenty-five thousand persons have paid for admission, and of course this number is far from representing the total of those who have made pilgrimage to Ha worth. Even the American element, though not what it was, is still largely represented. As, in reply to a comment, an old weaver caustically re- marked, " Aye, we Haw'rth folk doan't spake Yorkshire waay ony moar : 'tis awl gooid Lunnon an' ' Amurican ' naah, theysaay." Whether the cause is in greater railway facilities, in better roads and 171 The Bronte Country accommodation for bicyclists, or in the enchancement of public interest through the many Bronte essays, reminiscences, and other writings which have appeared of late, or in all three equally, multiplied by that great factor, a convenient and interest- ing goal for a fresh -air spin or week-end holiday, need not be disputed. By the way, let the unwary visitor not be allured by the many glowing descriptions of the moorland weather and moorland beauty at all seasons of the year and at all times. The West Riding moorland and most of the moorlands of Derbyshire are sombre beyond any other regions of the kind in England ; in stormy and cold weather they may be impressive, but in the prevailing dull greyness and ever recurring rains they have neither the spell of " lovely solitude " nor " a grave beauty all their own," but often are simply wide dreary stretches of waste land, without the wildness and glow and beauty of Exmoor, or of the high- lands of Wales and Cumberland, or of the great moors of Scotland, or even of the heath-covered rolling heights about Danby, between the York plain and Whitby above the sea. There are hours in spring, and many days in summer, and sometimes 172 The Bronte Country weeks in early autumn, when they are to be seen in beauty and enjoyed with deep delight by all who love solitude and great spaces and the breath and freedom of the desert. But ordinarily the country here is sombre and depressing, and all the more so (as in so many parts of Derbyshire) from the frequent signs of discarded or failing human industries, shafts of deserted mines, stacks of forsaken mills, smokeless cottages, and rude unkempt villages on their downward way to become still ruder and more unkempt hamlets. As to the spring climate, about which biographers who have not been at Haworth at that season are apt to become dithyrambic, here is one from many incidental allusions in Charlotte Bronte's delightful letters to Miss Ellen Nussey. It is in a letter from Haworth in the late spring of the year in which she was engaged upon Jane Eyre: " I wish to know whether about Whit- suntide would suit you for coming to Haworth. We often have fine weather just then. At least I remember last year it was very beautiful at that season. Winter seems to have returned with severity on us at present, consequently we are all in the full enjoyment of a cold. Much blowing 173 The Bronte Country of noses is heard, and much making of gruel goes on in the house." About the middle of May she writes again, " I pray for fine weather, that we may be able to get out while you stay." There we have the weather -burthen of many letters : the "just then " that so rarely comes off, the " at least I remember " that qualifies too flattering retrospection. In a word, if one were to spend nine months of the year at Haworth, one would soon come to under- stand the gloom and depression which often weighed so heavily on Charlotte and Emily Bronte, loving daughters of the moorlands though they were. But of course they of all people knew and loved the remoter regions of the West Riding as none who have written of the sisters can do. It is their love of the lonely moorlands, the understanding of their fascination, of their spell upon the imagination, which has given the most enduring beauty to certain pages of Shirley and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. If one remembers Charlotte's famous " Ne- cropolis " passage (that has so much of the monumental solemnity and slow impressive cadence of the De Quincey of the Suspiria), in The Professor, one will recollect how the 174 The Bronte Country writer took with her this phantom of Death, this image of Melancholia, out into the lonely solitudes. "... She lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her dear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree." If one remembers this, and a hundred kindred passages in Charlotte's books and vivid letters, one also will recall other passages in these and in her sister Emily's wonderful pages, as full of charm and loveliness seen and recreated as in this from Wuthering Heights : " He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness. Mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above ; and not only larks but throstles and blackbirds 175 The Bronte Country and linnets and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance broken into cool dusky dells ; but close by great swells of long grass un- dulating in waves to the breeze ; and woods and sounding water ; and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace. I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive ; and he said mine would be drunk. I said I should fall asleep in his ; and he said he could not breathe in mine." Or, again, this passage by Charlotte, wherein (as Lowood) she alludes to Cowan Bridge, where she was at school, when a terrible outbreak of typhus " transformed the seminary into a hospital " : " Pleasure in the prospect of noble summits, girdling a great hill -hollow, rich in verdure and shadow ; in a bright beck full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. . . . A bright, serene May it was : days of blue sky, placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled up its duration. And now vegetation matured with vigour ; 176 The Bronte Country Lowood shook loose its tresses ; it became all green, all flowery ; its great elm, ash and oak skeletons were restored to majestic life ; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its hollows ; and it made a strange ground- sunshine out of the wealth of its wild prim- rose-plants. . . . Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream ? As- suredly, pleasant enough ; but whether healthy or not is another question. The forest -dell where Lowood lay was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence, which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and dormitory, and ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital." Into all of Patrick Bronte's children something of the moorland character seems to have entered. Their note of wildness is in all, their note of stern silence, their aloofness. There is no " dying " tragedy in literature to surpass the slow indomitable decline of Emily Bronte, fearless, silent, almost unnaturally implacable to the end. IV 177 M The Bronte Country Even the gentle Anne shared this in- domitableness so characteristic of the whole family. Crude in knowledge of life and crude in art as is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, it was a heroic moral effort on the part of a sensitive and shrinking nature to depict what was, to that delicate self, in the last degree painful and indeed repulsive. It is said that some of frail physique will endure the mental and bodily torture of surgical operation far better than the more robust, and it has always seemed to me that Anne Bronte, in this pitiful and, it must be added, intolerably weary and superfluous fictitious rendering of the sordid tragedy of Branwell Bronte's life, showed the same dauntless courage as made Bran- well die standing ; as made Emily refuse all comfort or aid when day by day Death plucked at the tearing strings of her life ; as enabled Charlotte to endure in noble patience when, at Emily's death following Bran well's, and at Anne's following Emily's, and at her own failing health and broken hopes, and, above all, bitter suffering through her father's savage derision and driving away of the one lover to whom her own heart turned, that too familiar " horror of great darkness fell upon me." 178 The Bronte Country The proud aloofness, the almost arrogant independence, so characteristic of the moor- landers, was seen to the full in the Bronte family, and stands revealed in their published writings and letters. A single instance of an ordinary kind will suffice. Here is one, from Charlotte's correspondence in the spring of 1850, shortly after her return from London subsequent to the publication of Shirley : " I believe I should have written to you before, but I don't know what heaviness of spirit has beset me of late, made my faculties dull, made rest weariness, and occupation burdensome. Now and then the silence of the house, the solitude of the room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather. ... I have ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmo- sphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy mental sadness, which some would call presentiment. Presentiment in- deed it is, but not at all supernatural. . . . I have had no letters from London for a 179 The Bronte Country long time, and am very much ashamed of myself to find, now that that stimulus is withdrawn, how dependent upon it I had become. I cannot help feeling something of the excitement of expectation till post- hour comes, and when day after day it brings nothing I get low. This is a stupid, disgraceful, unmeaning state of things. I feel bitterly enraged at my own de- pendence and folly. However, I shall con- tend against the idiocy. ... I had rather a foolish letter from Miss the other day. Some things in it nettled me, especially an unnecessarily earnest assurance that in spite of all I had gone and done in the writing line I still retained a place in her esteem. My answer took strong and high ground at once. I said I had been troubled by no doubts on the subject, that I neither did myself nor her the injustice to suppose there was anything in what I had written to incur the just forfeiture of esteem. I was aware, I intimated, that some persons thought proper to take exceptions at Jane Eyre, and that for their own sakes I was sorry, as I invariably found them in- dividuals in whom the animal largely predominated over the intellectual, persons by nature coarse, by inclination sensual, 180 The Bronte Country whatever they might be by education and principle." Nor was Charlotte ever to be won by presumption or flattery. In that lonely Ha worth parsonage, where in their childhood she and Emily and Anne, and Bran well too in his own irregular way, as again in youth and maturity, had written so much and so significantly achieved, she ever preferred her obscurity and isolation. Had she been able, with due regard to herself and others, to maintain an absolute isolation from Currer Bell and that mysterious individual's writings, I do not doubt she would have so decided. To many, perhaps to most people, this has ever seemed, and seems a foolish and illogical attitude. There are, nevertheless, a few writers who share with Charlotte Bronte the deep desire to be left alone in their private life, and to be known and judged solely by their writings, irrespective of " the personal equation," of sex, or circumstance. " Of late," she writes on one occasion, " I have had many letters to answer ; and some very bothering ones from people who want opinions about their books, who seek acquaintance, and who flatter to get it ; people who utterly 181 The Bronte Country mistake all about me. They are most difficult to answer, put off, and appease, without offending ; for such characters are excessively touchy, and when affronted turn malignant. Their books are too often deplorable." There were fewer books deplorable and other and fewer autograph - scribes and would-be interviewers, in the Haworth days : did Charlotte Bronte write to-day she would probably, being Charlotte Bronte, take still " higher and stronger ground." What a wonderful family, this Bronte clan ! One wonders so potent was the strain transmitted to each of Patrick Bronte's children if the two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, had lived to woman- hood, what they too would have achieved. Certainly the elder, at any rate, showed herself in her short life " a true Bronte " " a true Prunty " might have been the more exact phrase, if Dr. J. A. Erskine Stuart, the latest and most thorough in- quirer into the subject, had not all but conclusively shown that the Rev. Patrick Bronte and his family had never been known as " Prunty " in County Down. Imagine for a moment if the Shakespeare family had been as united in genius as that 182 The Bronte Country of the Brontes, imagine the torch -flame at the close of the sixteenth century ! But neither Shakespeare's sister, Joan Hart, nor his daughter, Susanna Hall, nor Judith (who became Mistress Thomas Quiney in her thirty-first year, a month before her father's death), can for a moment wear the steady light of Charlotte Bronte or the tragic flare of Emily or the mild glow of Anne. As for Hamnet, Shakespeare's son, he died long before he could emulate either the youthful vices or other wandering fires which, later, were the death-lights of Bran well. But to the Bronte country. Where is really the literary geography we associate with this name ? It is not only around Haworth, of course, though that bleak place is its heart, because of all lived and suffered and done there, of so many ambitions and hopes come to naught there, of so much there achieved, of all the passion and energy of five strenuous lives confined to this bare, unattractive house, restricted to these horizon-meeting moors. Roughly, it may be said to extend from Thornton, four miles to the west of Bradford, to Scar- borough on the eastern sea. At the one, Branwell Bronte and three of his sisters 183 The Bronte Country were born ; at the other, and at Filey, Charlotte knew some of the darkest (and yet for literature some of the most memor- able) hours of her life days, too, of con- solation and peace, days wherein Villette matured ; and here, too, Emily came when nearing death, and here Anne died, and rests. Thornton is certainly worth a visit for any who would trace and imaginatively re-live the experiences of the Bronte sisters. It is easily reached by tram from Bradford, of which it is indeed practically a part- in fact, Thornton and Haworth can now both be visited easily in the space of a day, from and back to Haworth : though, almost needless to say, that is not the way to make the pilgrimage, nor any other of the kind. Charlotte and Emily were too young, when their father and his family of six moved from Thornton parsonage across the upland region between it and Haworth, to "leave us any literary association of direct experience in connection with this thriving little town in the Rev. Patrick's day a more hamlet of some fifty scattered cottages. It is not of much interest to look at a house where a noted person was born, unless 184 The Bronte Country thinking and significant experience began there, or events of import occurred. Pil- grims do go to visit the Old Bell Chapel (or what is left of it) ; but why, it is a little difficult to understand. There's an inscription : " This chapel was beautified, 1818. P. Bronte, incumbent." This might more appropriately have been adapted for an inscription at Haworth : " This house is beautified because of the genius of Char- lotte and Emily Bronte." In other respects times have not changed much. The old vehement note of religious bigotry is still emphatic in these regions of the West Riding. Not that bigotry is worse there than elsewhere. The Cornish Ply mouth -Brother, the Welsh Methodist, the Highland Free -Churchman might even consider the Haworth variety lax. But in the Rev. Patrick Bronte's day it was rigorous indeed. Dr. J. A. Erskine Stuart tells an anecdote sufficiently illustrative. One Sunday morning Mr. Bronte was descried at his bedroom window apparently in the dire act of shaving. A spiritual volcano shook Thornton. The incumbent was approached, and upbraided. The amazing thing is that a man of so violent and often uncontrollable temper did not 185 The Bronte Country by word or action show his contemptuous indignation : there could be no more convincing comment on the bitter religiosity of the period than the fact that he earnestly explained to a member of his congregation : " I never shaved in all my life, or was ever shaved by any one else. I have so little beard that a little clipping every three months is all that is necessary." Ah, that was in 1820 : such things do not happen now. Perhaps. A few years ago a Glasgow minister was seriously reproved by his elders because, in order to reach his church in time to conduct the service, he (having suddenly been summoned to the side of a dying parishioner, and so having left him- self no time to walk to the chuich) took a cab. This summer a friend of the writer was in Ross, and told him that in a par- ticular parish three members of the Free Kirk congregation were " refused the tokens " (i.e. prohibited from public par- ticipation in the Communion) for no other reason than that, during a holiday abroad, "they had stayed too long in Paris ! " The best way to see the Bronte country, the country of Jane Eyre and Shirley and Wuthering Heights, is to view it afoot, and to start from Thornton, either direct or 186 The Bronte Country by a detour to visit Cowan Bridge, a charm- ing neighbourhood, though associated with no little suffering on the part of the Bronte girls, and especially Charlotte. Mrs. Gas- kell's description is due either to the disillusioning effect of a visit in dull or wet weather at the wrong season, or to pre- judice derived from passages in Charlotte's writings, letters, or conversation. Perhaps the thing best worth remember- ing in Charlotte's childhood is the anecdote (by at least one biographer " located " at Thornton) to be found in the third chapter of Sir Wemyss Reid's delightful and sym- pathetic memoir, where, and with obvious exactitude, he says the Bronte family were already at Haworth : " There is a touching story of Charlotte at six years old, which gives us some notion of the ideal life led by the forlorn little girl at this time, when, her two elder sisters having been sent to school, she found herself living at home, the eldest of the motherless brood. She had read The Pilgrim's Progress, and had been fascinated, young as she was, by that wondrous allegory. Everything in it was to her true and real : her little heart had gone forth The Bronte Country with Christian on his pilgrimage to the Golden City, her bright young mind had been fired by the Bedford tinker's descrip- tion of the glories of the Celestial Place ; and she made up her mind that she too would escape from the City of Destruction, and gain the haven towards which the weary spirits of every age have turned with eager longing. But where was this glitter- ing city, with its streets of gold, its gates of pearl, its walls of precious stones, its streams of life and throne of light ? Poor little girl ! The only place which seemed to her to answer Bunyan's description of the celestial town was one which she had heard the servants discussing with en- thusiasm in the kitchen, and its name was Bradford ! So to Bradford little Charlotte Bronte, escaping from that Haworth Par- sonage which she believed to be a doomed spot, set off one day in 1822. Ingenious persons may speculate if they please upon the sore disappointment which awaited her when, like older people, reaching the place which she had imagined to be Heaven, she found that it was only Bradford. But she never even reached her imaginary Golden City. When her tender feet had carried her a mile along the road, she came 1 88 The Bronte Country to a spot where overhanging trees made the highway dark and gloomy ; she imagined that she had come to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and, fearing to go forward, was presently discovered by her nurse cowering by the roadside." The country between Thornton and Denholme, a slow ascent of about two miles, is dreary at all times save on a radiant day of spring, when every ditch is a glory, and the birds sing as though truly birds of Paradise. From waste -land Denholme to low-lying Potovens farm, and thence across a lonely and fascinating expanse of true moorland, the wayfarer (following the track of the Bronte family on their laborious migration, in 1820, from their first Yorkshire home across Thornton Heights) will pass Old Allen, Flappit Spring, and Braemoor, and will come at last upon Worth Valley, from which, by a steep street, Haworth climbs and lies like an exhausted lizard along the summit. As the comparison has struck several observers, it is no fanciful image. Cowan Bridge, it may be added, is not on the Bradford high road. It lies near Kirkby Lorisdale, on the Leeds and Kendal 189 The Bronte Country road ; and can most easily be reached by the cyclist via Keighley or Skipton. Thence on to Giggles wick and Ingleton, below the vast and bare rise of Ingleborough, till the banks of the little Leek are reached and Cowan Bridge is seen at the entrance to the pleasant valley of the Lune. Later, Charlotte went to Roe Head School, on the Leeds and Huddersfield road, and here we are in the heart of the Bronte country, and pre-eminently of the country of Shirley. If one had to choose any single tract at once for its own beauty and charm and its literary association, it might be that de- lightful reach of upland from Cowan Bridge to Tunstall, with its fine old battlemented church, where both Charlotte and Emily often worshipped, and its lonely ruin of Thurland. Though not true moorland, it is a lovely country a windy, grassy, tree- enlivened region such as the author of Wuthering Heights had her joy in. But it is not the Ha worth region, or the wider regions of Jane Eyre and Shirley, that is exclusively the Bronte country. It is there the two most famous of a truly remarkable family lived from childhood and wrote their books and spent the greater 190 The Bronte Country part of their days. But the greater had a genius which won other dominions. No lover of Villette would think of ex- cluding London from the country of Char- lotte Bronte. In a sense she made London uniquely her own on that night when Lucy Snowe for the first time slept in the great city alone, friendless, aimless, un- knowing even in what neighbourhood she was. " I wet the pillow, my arms, and my hair, with rushing tears. A dark interval of most bitter thought followed this burst [ . . . till at last I became sufficiently tranquil. . . . ] I had just ex- tinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not ; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said : ' 1 lie in the shadow of St. Paul's.' " The secret spell of London is there, more than in any elaborate phrasing of emotion and effect. How admirable, too, the re- ticence and the veracity of the brief account of her first impressions on that wet February night when, after a fifty mile run, the North coach left her at the old inn by Ludgate Hill ! " My reader, I know, is one who would not thank me for an elaborate 191 The Bronte Country reproduction of poetic first impressions ; and it is well, inasmuch as I had neither time nor mood to cherish such ; arriving as I did late, on a dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Bablyon and a wilderness, of which the vastness and the strange- ness tried to the utmost any powers of clear thought and steady self-possession with which, in the absence of more brilliant faculties, Nature might have gifted me. " When I left the coach, the strange speech of the cabmen and others waiting round seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue. . . . How difficult, how oppressive, how puzzling seemed my flight ! In London for the first time ; at an inn for the first time ; tired with travelling ; confused with dark- ness ; palsied with cold ; unfurnished with either experience or advice to tell me how to act, and yet ... to act obliged." After that, the deep colossal boom of the great cathedral's bell, and "I lie in the shadow of St. Paul's," come as with the sound of solemn benediction. That first night of London, Charlotte Bronte, as Lucy Snowe, has made her own. With the same powerful reserve she etches for us impressions of the first morning : 192 The Bronte Country " The next day was the first of March, and when I awoke, rose, and opened my curtain, I saw the risen sun struggling through fog. Above my head, above the housetops, co -elevate almost with the clouds, 1 saw a solemn, orbed mass, dark blue and dim THE DOME. While I looked, my inner self moved ; my spirit shook its always - fettered wings half loose ; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life. In that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's gourd." In truth, this first experience of London is that of an innumerable company of brave and fine youths and girls who, in hope or despair, come up alone to this Metropolis of Hopes and Despairs. It is not that of Lucy Snowe only, child of genius, but of her obscure brothers and sisters of actual life. Of these, many have come with literary aspirations, with young hearts astir with the foam of enthusiasm for names and places sacred by cherished associations. What young dreamer of literary fame has not thrilled when, knowingly or unknow- ingly, he has for the first time found himself suddenly in Paternoster Row ? But let Lucy Snowe stand for all of us : her iv 193 N The Bronte Country London -at -first -sight is that of the obscure many : "Having breakfasted, out I went. Ela- tion and pleasure were in my heart : to walk alone in London seemed of itself an adventure. Presently I found myself in Paternoster Row classic ground this. I entered a bookseller's shop, kept by one Jones ; I bought a little book a piece of extravagance I could ill afford. . . . Mr. Jones, a dried-in man of business, stood behind his desk : he seemed one of the greatest, and I one of the happiest of beings. " Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning. Finding myself before St. Paul's, I went in ; I mounted to the dome ; I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches ; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad blue sky of early spring above, and between them and it, not too dense, a cloud of haze. ." Descending, I went wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment ; and I got I know not how I got into the heart of city life. I saw and felt London at last : I 194 The Bronte Country got into the Strand ; I went up Cornhill ; I mixed with the life passing along ; I dared the perils of crossings. To do this, and to do it utterly alone, gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure. Since those days I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares ; but I love the city far better. The city seems so much more in earnest : its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, and sounds. The city is getting its living the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused, but in the city you are deeply excited." Both in its vividness and in its crudeness that stands for a multitude. As for that wonderful tiny etching of the Thames by night, which stands out in this famous " London " chapter of Villette, it is as unforgettable as anything in Bleak House or Great Expectations ; as " brazed and imperishable " as that horrible stew- ardess on board the Vivid, who made poor Lucy's first night on the river so miserable. And what a touch of the real Charlotte Bronte of the whole fearless, indomitable Bronte clan, from the upright and intolerant and sometimes all but intolerable incumbent 195 The Bronte Country of Haworth, to the broken Branwell, un- worthy brother of the dauntless Charlotte and the heroic Emily, who, despite all his sins and weakness, had yet strength to defy nature and die standing in the last words of this passage : " Down the sable flood we glided ; I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face and midnight clouds dropping rain above my head ; with two rude rowers for companions, whose insane oaths still tortured my ear, I asked myself if I was wretched or terrified. I was neither." Then is not Brussels for ever associated with Villette. . . . surely the greatest and most enduring of all the Bronte books ? My own last sojourn in the Bronte country was on a day of autumnal beauty, a day so serene amid so great a richness of earth-born purple and suspended rose and azure, that it almost reached unrest because of its radiant but poignant peace. It was at lonely Tunstall, under the shadow of the time -blackened walls of Thurland, and I was thinking, not of the elder and 196 The Bronte Country greater sister, but of that stormier, less controlled, less mature spirit who, from what all students of life would call an im- possible basis, and with architecture and ornament justly condemnable as unreal or trivial, reared in Withering Heights one of the great edifices in the realms of the imagination. But, as I rose to leave, and gave one farewell glance at the glowing solitudes beyond, the words that suddenly came upon me in a vivid remembrance were of the more powerful and steadfast genius of the author of Villette Villette, whose very name sounded so remote, here in this silent Westmorland upland. But they fitted the hour, the place, and the mood. 197 THE THAMES FROM OXFORD TO THE NORE THE literary geography of the Thames ! Is not this a more hazardous undertaking than would be an itinerary of the Lake Country, or of that which follows on the long waters of Geneva ? For who could number the many who have written about, or sung of, or dwelt beside, or had some abiding association with, our great river even if only unwilling baptism such as befell Mr. Verdant Green, or such undignified immersion as was the damp fate of Sir John Falstaff when, his huge bulk secured in the buck -basket, he was so ignominiously chucked into the deep flood by Datchet Mead ? Since Chaucer crossed " Thamesis " in the Tower ferry, or Shakespeare recrossed from Southwark to the reedy shore of silt and mud known as the Strand, till Samuel Pepys " took barge " (with pretty Mrs. Manuel singing all the way) to visit friends by the sequestered and rural hamlet of Putney, what a far cry ! What a far cry, 198 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore again, till, in Gravesend Reach, David Copperfield says good-bye to Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge ... or, on another occa- sion, Mr. Micawber and the twins pass from our ken ... or till Mr. William Black entertains us with his house -boat on the upper reaches ; or till we see William Morris, walking Hammersmith riverside in swift twilight travellings, as though to overtake some caravan beyond price, pondering ideal Thames scenes (alas, re- moter now even than then, for the desecra- tion of the jerry -builder is now on every wayside) to be limned in A Dream of John Ball, or in News from Nowhere ; or till, in a roomy old boat on the upper waters below Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade, we have a glimpse of Rossetti writing part at least of his lovely Stream's Secret ; or till, " by still Isis," Matthew Arnold wanders, conning the stanzas of The Scholar Gypsy, . . . in a word, from Chaucer to Milton, from Milton to Shelley, from Shelley to the latest true poet of the Thames, Mr. Robert Bridges, what a catalogue of sounding names ! That way, however, lies the scribe's dilemma. He must either strive to be inclusive (an impossibility in a volume, even, for some industrious idler would 199 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore always pounce upon something or some- body forgotten) and therefore relapse into a graceless chronicle as though one were to describe the National Gallery by a transcription from the catalogue of the names and birth-and-date particulars of all the artists represented ; or else he must deal so fragmentarily with a multifarious theme as to disappoint the reader who wants Thames statistics, or exasperate those who desire all the respectable old " tags " to be trotted out in good guide-book order. And there are some whom in any case it would be impossible to satisfy ... as that inquirer who wondered if Pope's Villa at Twickenham had ever been temporarily occupied by a Holy Father in exile. As nothing is to be gained by repetition of the hackneyed chronicle of Thames -side associations already so plentifully extant, will it not be better to relinquish any attempt to take reach by reach, parish by parish, village or town by town or village, 'twixt Gravesend and Oxford ? Books of all kinds, dealing with the subject literary, artistic, dramatic, political, com- mercial, aquatic, natural -historic, botanic, and scandalous can be more or less easily consulted. There is the voluminous tome 200 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore of Our Royal River, with its letterpress by several able " Thamesters " and many illustrations, or Mrs. S. C. Hall's likewise bulky and venerable " stand-by " ; there are the annual cheap volumes of Dickens' Dictionary of the Thames, and half a dozen booklets more or less interesting and more or less trustworthy issued by Penny Steamboat Companies or other enterprising publishing firms of the like unconventional kind. Between the gaudy pamphlet of inconvenient shape and the still more inconvenient but delightful edition-de-luxe of Our Royal River are numberless volumes, represented in fiction by, let us say, Mr. William Black's Adventures of a Houseboat, and in pictorial art (and nothing much else of moment) by pleasant book-making such as Mr. Leslie's Painter's Chronicle or Mr. and Mrs. Pennell's Stream of Pleasure. With these, and Baedeker and the local guide-books, one cannot vie. I propose, therefore, to take simply a rapid glance along the great watercourse, from where the herons rise from the reeds of of ten -looping Isis to where the seagulls scream about the Nore or beat up against the east wind from the bleak estuary shores where the gaunt Reculvers stand like 201 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore wardens of the Sea -Gate. Thereafter, to add in a more personal fashion some notes concerning two or three great names not yet exploited by the rout e-book or local manual ; trusting, in doing so, to be forgiven the egotism of reminiscence for the sake of the men and things remembered, and for the supplement of lesser -known literary associa- tions to the Literary Geography of the Thames. But just a word first about the river. No, not a dithyramb. Many have sung or magniloquently prosed its charms and beauty, and at all seasons. It has had laudation at every turn, from the Pool or Wapping Stairs at slimy ebb to the Bells of Ouseley in odoriferous drought, when a lamb could step across " Thames' onward- sweeping silent flood " in safety. If it can allure poetic minds then, it may well do so at happier times and at all points. To the true Thames -lover there is hardly a mile of it that has not its abiding spell. As for the Thames -lover who is also a familiar, has he not all the lovely and commonly ignored wintertide to delight in : the time when the forest -white boughs on eyot and hanger are lovely in their still beauty, and when in the backwaters the 202 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore coots shake the snow like dust from sprays of alder and willow ? Nor, Reader, shall you have to suffer from timeworn anecdotes of Pope and Horace Walpole such as our grandfathers endured as hoary acquaintances ; nay, what is more serious, not even of "Mr. Walton" as "Old Izaak " was recently named by an allusive reviewer. What microbe of " Nomenclatururia " is it, by the way, that makes some people invariably, in allusion to Shakespeare or Ben Jonson or Izaak Walton or Fitzgerald or Whitman, always speak of " The Swan of Avon," "Rare Ben," "Old Izaak," "Old Fitz," "Good Old Walt"? However, that's another story, as Mr. Kipling would say. As for one aspect of the Thames, the poets, from Spenser onwards, have been as superbly flattering as they are wont to be to their mistresses. Never trust a poet about his lady-love's beauty nor about the sea ; he is most conscious of the charms of each when he is remote from either. The folk- lorist of the future may take this as a wise saw among the common people of the Edwardian epoch. That aspect is the illusion conveyed in the familiar epithet silvery. There has been 203 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore enough epithetical silver lavished on the mud-saturated flood of Thames to have exhausted any other mint than that ad- jacent to the Fount of Eternal Ink. We love Spenser's " silver-streaming Thames/' and Herrick's " silver- f ooted Thamesis " is a de- lightful image ; but it is a pity that when every successive Mr. Brown brings out a new volume of sonnets, or every successive Miss Jones a new effusion of " miscellaneous pieces," there should not be some variation in this metallic cliche. Besides, it isn't true. The rain of sunshine and the ripple of wind would make the sluice of a maltster " silvery." Thames -water ceases from such refinement as soon as Isis, Churn, Coin, and Leach have travelled from the Cots wolds, and speed together east of Oxford en route to grasp the tired hand of the upreaching sea -tide that slips under Richmond Hill and wavers and falls away at Teddington. Some day, perhaps, a new Michael Dray ton or Water -Poet successor to Taylor will attempt the epic of Thames, as the great Provencal poet Mistral has achieved the epic of the Rhone. He will have to sing also the beauty and charm of the tributary waters that swell its flood, from pastoral Churn to the moist discharge that oozes 204 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore from Medway flats. There are some of us who love the Mole and the Loddon, the Kennet and the Windrush almost as we love their " eternal bourne." Let me, as parenthesis, remind such lovers that the Thames is not really entitled to the royal name till it reaches Dorchester, near which city the Thame joins the Isis -cum -Churn -cum -Coin - cum -Leach (or Lech). As for the name "Isis," the old idea that it is a survival of Thamesis is no longer admitted. Learned dwellers by the stream which laves Oxford's meadows tell us that " Isis " is a quasi - classical form of " Ouse." It is at least more reasonable than Mr. Verdant Green's idea that it had something to do with the great goddess of the Egyptians. The very names of these tributaries and upper reaches and backwaters, how they thrill one, at a distance, in remembrance ! And their associations especially by the banks of the Cher well, and the Isis meadows beyond Oxford. But Oxford ! . . . that would require an article to itself, merely to enumerate names. It is a task not to be attempted. Even a chronicle of modern days is impracticable. But all lovers of much of what is loveliest in our Victorian literature will think of how so many poets 205 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore walked and roamed by these waters, what vivid impulses arose or were discussed within sight of the towers of Oxford. Here was Matthew Arnold's " waterway to Eden." Here the two young undergradu- ates, William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones, went their first walk with a young poet and painter of whom they had heard much, Dante Gabriel Rossetti who had come to Oxford to paint those strange, crude, but potently new and significant frescoes for the " Union," which became the torch that set on fire the modern decorative movement, with all deeper and beyond what the phrase carries. Here the youthful Swinburne " the man who knows the Greek dramatists like an old Athenian, and has hair like flame blown upon by the wind," as a contemporary described him began, in his swift, impatient, solitary walks, the first working out in poetic drama of the tragical history of Mary Queen of Scots. Here the most famous of the Masters of Balliol was fond of walking with a friend, with his lips sweet with honey of old wisdom, and his eyes alert and smiling at the aspect of young and unwise life on the river -reaches. Here Walter Pater thought out many of his essays, composed many of 206 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore those sentences of amber and pale gold which link the flawless chain of Marius the Epicurean. But one might go on with name after name and besides, we are coming near the cohort of the living ! "Spenser and Sir John Denham and Pope are good enough as literary associa- tions," some may think. Well, for those who love the old just because it is the old, and never find the outworn other than the pleasanter for being threadbare and infirm with age, let joy be had where it can be obtained. For all the great authority of Dryden, who considered Sir John's Cooper Hill then, and for ever, " for the majesty of its style, the standard of exact writing," one degenerate at least must admit that, except as a sedative on a day of dull rain, when no riverine exercise is to be enjoyed, the famous masterpiece of the Caroline poet is a most deadly weariness. Every guide-book, every chronicler of " A Day on the River/' "Up the Thames," " Down the Thames/' " On the Thames," and so on in pre- positional accumulation, alludes at more or less length, and with more or less ample quo- tation, to this "great English poem " which probably not three in a score of the scribes alluded to have ever read. Admittedly the 207 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore finest lines in Cooper's Hill are those of a quatrain added after years of recovery from the giant effort of the original pro- duction. They appear to have won the worshipful regard of the eighteenth century, and to have maintained their spell till the present year of grace. O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme ! Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o'er flowing full. Excellent commonplace, and kindly good sense. But is it more than a rhymed copy- book tag ? As for its flawlessness, neither Mr. Gilbert nor Mr. Adrian Ross, these past masters in modern metrical flights, has ever tried to join in wedlock terminals as innocent of rhyme as " dull " and " full." There was (perhaps is) a bard of minor degree of whom Rossetti would never hear a word in favour, because in actual speech as well as in his written verse, he invariably (being Yorkshire - bred, 1 expect) pronounced " full " and " pull " and " push " as though rhyming to " hull " and " gull " and " hush." As inconsequential, perhaps, as Heine, when he delighted in a graceless acquaintance, whom he ever recalled with a glow of 208 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore pleasure, just because of the singular way in which he (or she) " turned over ! " the letter r. Well, 'tis a far cry now, back to Cooper's Hill written, it is strange to think, within a quarter of a century of Shakespeare's death. Nevertheless, the dweller in Egham and its neighbourhood, both on the Surrey bank and opposite, will find faithful portraiture in the " harmonious numbers " of this famous poem : Though sJiort, yet long, of gentle ennui full, Without a rival picturesquely dull ! But we have slipped past I know not how many miles, " without o'erflowing full " of literary associations and have not even delayed at Great Marlow, with its memories of Shelley, where the young poet, afterwards to become so great, wrote The Revolt of Islam, and pondered how best to assist the Almighty to reconstitute a mismanaged universe. Here Shelley spent so many happy days, sailing far up or down the winding river, or cloud-shadow hunting, or drifting under the lower trees of Cliveden woods, which " Alastor " loved so well, and William Morris thought of indifferently as "rather artificial." IV 209 o The Thames from Oxford to the Nore I remember hearing, but cannot recollect where or from whom possibly Dr. Furni- vall, whose father lived at Great Marlow, and was both friend and physician to the young poet an anecdote of Shelley akin to a delightful story given to the world on the authority of Mr. Andrew Carnegie. Two fishermen in a punt were drifting down stream, when they caught sight of a boat ahead of them, with a slim figure crouching at the bows and staring into the water as though spell-bound, and apparently by horror rather than by piscatorial frenzy. One angler thought the young gentleman intended suicide, while his companion fancied that the man's transfixed despair indicated the loss of his flask. But, when they came close, Shelley for it was he answered their inquiry blandly to the effect that he was simply watching his own corpse, as . " the thing in the water " un- questionably seemed to resemble him closely. The two anglers did not wait to drag " the thing " : before they got far, they saw Shelley hoist his little lateen sail and go off happily and imperturbably before the wind. However, for imperturbability, the story that Mr. Carnegie is fond of relating to his 210 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore friends is unsurpassable in kind. An American cyclist was skirting the shore of a solitary Highland loch, and noticed a boat in which was a man languidly examining the depths with a water -telescope. Now and again he would pause and chat with a friend who sat on the bank reading a newspaper ; or he would lay down the telescope and light his pipe. The American, who had dis- mounted, could not restrain his curiosity, and at last asked the idler on the bank, " What is your friend looking for ? Oysters ? " " No," was the matter-of-fact reply " my brother-in-law." Well, we must leave Great Mar low and Shelley, though both invite to tie-up awhile in beautiful Maidenhead Reach, or under Cliveden's gigantic green shadow. It was here, if I remember aright, that the poet of revolution and social -reformation, and other -tions and -isms, projected that ideal marital union whereto the consenting parties should be not two but three. Alas, we have fallen back again into our old ways, and the Revolt of the Married Poet is still in esse an unconstitutional performance ! As has been sagely remarked, moreover, the highest tides of feeling do not visit the coasts of triangular alliances ! Apropos, if any 211 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore reader has visited or should visit pleasant Bisham, a short way above Great Marlow, he may remember or newly note with gentle pleasure the touching tombstone - lines of a Mrs. Hoby, staunch upholder of the good old doctrine that Marriage is not a Failure : Give me, O God ! a husband like unto Thomas, Or else restore to me my husband Thomas. Hopeless, alas, to attempt even the most superficial exploitation of the Windsor neighbourhood. One place, in particular, however, is hallowed ground. At Horton, near Wraysbury, on the Colne, is where Milton lived for the first five or six years of his fruitful early manhood after he left Cambridge. Here he wrote that supreme threnody Lycidas, here also he wrote Comus and the Arcades, and possibly U Allegro and // Penseroso. As we drift down Windsor way, coming from Maidenhead, or whence westward we come, many must recall his : Towers and battlements . . . Bosom'd high in tufted trees. Then Chertsey, Hampton, Laleham, Datchet, with associations of Cowley, Garrick, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Sir Henry Wotton and 212 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore Izaak Walton places recalled at random, with names recollected at hazard : but what a wealth of association all down the waterway of this region of our love and pride ! Above all, when Eton meadows and the elms of Windsor Park come into view . . . who does not thrill then if perchance remember- ing that here some three hundred years ago (i.e. in 1593) because of the Plague in London The Merry Wives of Windsor was first acted before Queen Elizabeth ! What would one give to see that woodland cavalcade and laughing processional array, with Shakespeare, it may be, walking by the Queen's palfrey to the spot where the play was to be acted. It is said it is a legend only, but we can credit it that Elizabeth wanted to see the great Falstaff worsted in a new way, and thus (by command, as we should say now) Shake- speare wrote for the delectation of the royal lady and her court his delightful Merry Wives. After Windsor is left, the lower reaches simply swarm with " associations." But among the many famous names that need not be specified, as doubtless familiar, and certainly chronicled in full by river-manual or local guide-book, let the wayfarer recall 213 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore for a moment at Mortlake (which Turner so loved) that unfortunate Partridge (the astrologer, not " September's fowl ") whom Swift and Steele tormented so sorely. The poor man lies here at peace at last, after those exasperating later years when Steele would write his obituary, and on his in- dignant protest that he was alive and prophesying still, was informed that he must be dead, as his own almanac had foretold the event. The unfortunate man made a desperate final attempt not to be shelved to the shades while still in the portly flesh, but the attempt failed, and he had to endure a fresh obituary article about him- self with added picturesque details of the funeral. At Twickenham, as already promised, we shall not linger, though it was the Ferney of the eighteenth -century literary world, as Pope was the English Voltaire. As for Horace Walpole, was not he the artificial sinner who outraged every tradition of genuine English poetry or prose, from Chaucer to William Morris, by writing of " enamelled meadows with filigree hedges " ? And so we slip on down stream, past Richmond ... it, the Park, and the Star and Garter so " replete," with Georgian 214 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore anecdote and early Victorian reminiscence ! ... to Barn Elms. " Mighty pleasant," wrote Pepys, " the supping here under the trees by the waterside." Here that ever genial old youth came, on a memorable occasion, on a barge from the Tower, " a mighty long way," with Mistress Pepys and maid and page, and dames Corbet, Pierce, and Manuel, " singing all the way, and Mistress Manuel very finely." Here he and his strolled and scandalised and laughed under the elms by moonshine . . . " and then to barge again and more singing." 'Tis a Watteau picture. Would we could look on its like again ! Now the route is by the crowded excursion -steamer, and 'Arry and 'Arriet do the rest. Pepys and Evelyn and all of that blithe company would sniff " mightily " now, I fear, at all riverside resorts, from the Bells of Ouseley, fragrant of tea and buttered buns, down to remote Gravesend, where still, as of yore, at Mrs. Brambles' of Hogarth's day, tea and shrimps inevitably concur. As we pass Putney and Hammersmith and Chelsea, what memories of great names past and present ! Beyond the old bridge at Putney the great Gibbon was born and " had his schoolings " ; and a short way 215 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore up the Rise is the house where Swin- burne so long resided, and with him, at The Pines, Theodore Watts -Dunton. and close by is Putney Heath, where daily Swinburne took his solitary walk. At Hammersmith, as every one knows, William Morris had the London home of his later years. To a mean little house in a poor neighbourhood, here, the great American romancist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, made a pilgrimage, in order to pay homage to Leigh Hunt, when in his silver-haired, beautiful old age that sunny -hearted poet and prince of delicate things lived there in poverty and isolation.* As for Chelsea, is not " the sage of Chelsea " already a by- word and a phrase ? But fewer know that a short way from Cheyne Row, where the great philosopher -historian lived so long, is the house (16 Cheyne Walk) occupied during the latter part of his life by the poet- painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. To this house came, gladly and proudly, all who could win the privilege of entry ; here, as has been said, many of the most famous pictures and many of the most famous * Hawthorne contributed a long and interesting account of this visit to the A tlantic Monthly about thirty years ago (1874, I think). 216 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore books of our time were discussed in advance, and in some instances projected. Rossetti's house, in a word, was from 1871 till 1881 the Mecca of the "romantic" devotee in both pictorial and literary art. We are not dealing with the artistic associations of the Thames to use the word in its common significance or Whistler and others would delay us. The literary and artistic history of Chelsea, indeed, would be of more interest and importance than that of any other part of London, in connection with the study of the literary and artistic history of the later Victorian epoch. Well, down stream we go, past Black - friars, where once Rossetti and Mr. George Meredith in early days had rooms, and where both Dickens and Thackeray found a never-ceasing fascination ; below the vast new bridge and past the Tower, with a glimpse of Traitor's Gate, . . . through which before Went Essex, Raleigh, Sidney, Cranmer, More, and so through The Pool, the maelstrom heart of London. How painters, from Turner to Whistler, have loved this grimy but ever inspiring and wonderful water - 217 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore heart, whence all the countries of the world may bring tribute to London, and wherein London sees as in a crystal (alas ! that it is but a metaphor !) all lands and nations from California to Cathay. One modern painter has, in " Wapping Old Stairs," seized the poetry of The Pool, and for- tunately W. L. Wyllie's picture is now a national possession. It goes without say- ing that Dickens, Marryatt, Clark Russell, loved The Pool only this side of idolatry. Readers of this series of Literary Geography will recollect how the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Villette set off alone and friendless one wet and stormy night from here, and the strong, vivid etching of the scene. What lovers of Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations do not know intimately all this haunted region, from where The Pool becomes The Port, till the great tower of Westminster recedes from view, and the river with hoys swinging sideways, and barges veering wildly, and every kind of craft as seemingly at the mercy of malicious river -sprites sweeps on to the Isle of Dogs (once the Isle of Ducks . . . in days when the bittern was common in Plumstead Marshes, and when the curlew and the lapwing wailed over waste places 218 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore where now the electric tram screeches or the coster howls) ? But before the City is left, who will not remember that great sonnet of Wordsworth, composed at early morning upon West- minster Bridge, when This city now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning . . . . . . the very houses seem asleep; A nd all that mighty heart is lying still. As for Southwark, are not its associations among the greatest we have ? Chaucer, Shakespeare, these two names alone make this (now, alack, far from attractive) region supreme among all the boroughs of London. Here was the Globe Theatre, where, so to speak, the banner of the Elizabethan drama flew so gallantly at the peak. Many will recall the fact of the sudden conflagration of the Globe, three years before Shake- speare's death, during a performance of Henry VIII. Not far from the old theatre, in the High Street, was the Tabard Inn, whence adult English literature set forth upon its first high adventure. In the old church of St. Saviour's (anciently St. Mary Overies) lie the remains of learned John Gower, Chaucer's contemporary, and 219 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore those of Chaucer himself ; of Edmund Shakespeare, the brother of our great poet ; of Philip Massinger, not the least dramatist of that marvellous period ; and of John Fletcher, poet and dramatist, whose name, with that of his colleague Francis Beaumont, stands so high in the admiration of all who love the best literature of the great Elizabethans. Thence, to the meeting of the sea -wind coming over Plumstead Marshes, or slump- ing the tide-wash against the ebb at Tilbury Fort, or causing the famous " Thames Dance " at the Nore, or bearing inland the heavy booming of the guns of Shoeburyness, or making the grey-green seas surge like a mill-race across the eighteen-mile reach from Whitstable to Foulness Point . . . this is a journey in- deed ! And of Rotherhithe (where still are inns bearing the old heroic Elizabethan designations of The Ship Argo and The Swallow Galley) ; of Rosherville, of Green- wich and its park (Scots readers will recall a great scene in Sir Walter Scott's one London romance, The Fortunes of Nigel), of Gravesend and " Farewell Haven " (lovers of Dickens, Marry at t, Clark Russell, of many from Smollett to W. W. Jacobs, will 220 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore regret so cursory a mention) of these and of every mile from The Port and the great wilderness of the Docks, to where the solitary Reculvers watch the last dispersed flood of Thames swallowed up by the sea . . . what a chronicle might be written ! Truly, Thames -flood carries one on un- witting of the rapid flow. I am come almost to an end of my space, and yet have not even touched those more personal recollections which I had in mind to commit. Well, some other time, perhaps. Meanwhile, they can be but alluded to. And then, too, the many persons and episodes one has forgotten to chronicle ! Sheridan, for instance : how few think of him as "a literary association " of the Thames ! Yet what reader of that de- lightful comedy, The Critic, can have forgotten the inimitable scene at Tilbury Fort, where the Governor's daughter gen- teelly goes mad in white satin, and is accompanied into lunacy by the 'umble friend and companion who, as becomes her meaner condition, respectfully and discreetly goes out of her senses in ordinary white linen ! It is a far cry back from Tilbury to 221 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore remote Lechlade, and yet I would like to be there again, and starting with the sympa- thetic reader on a new waterway pilgrimage. How well I recollect the Trout Inn there, one May day, with its great sycamore rustling in the lightsome west wind ! In the sunny little garden and orchard behind, under the fragrant shadow of a great walnut-tree, a friend was seated, reading. Pale, some- what heavily built, a student and thinker (as the least observant could not but have discerned), low-voiced, sensitive as a leaf, and yet with a restful composure all his own, Walter Pater read a recently written and one of the loveliest chapters of a book, from the first conceived in beauty, and to the end in beauty achieved . . . the book now so surely gathered into English litera- ture and known to all who care for what is finest and rarest therein as Marius the Epicurean. Then as to Kelmscott Manor, a cuckoo's flight away : a whole article might well be given to this beautiful old riverside place and its many associations. The country home of William Morris for twenty -five years, it has also many associations with Rossetti, who for a year or two from 1871 was fellow tenant with and, as to occupancy, 222 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore preponderant partner with Morris ; as also with Swinburne, Theodore Watts - Dunton, Burne-Jones, and many others. " Kelmscott Manor," wrote Morris, and characteristically, in a letter in 1882, * has come to be to me the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, simple people not overburdened with the intricacies of life ; and as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, so I love the earth through that small space of it." That, of course, was long after the Rossetti -Morris days at this beautiful old riverside home : indeed, it was written in the sad year of that great poet and painter's death. There is a little island formed by the backwater close to the house, and in spring this was always an Eden of songbirds in a region which was and is the songbirds' paradise. Here, and at the Manor, Rossetti wrote many of his loveliest lyrics and sonnets, and the long and noble poem Rose Mary. Who has forgotten the music of Down Stream P : Between Holmscote and Hurstcote The river reaches wind, The whispering trees accept the breeze, The ripple's cool and kind. 223 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore At Kelmscott, also, he wrote (or rewrote from an earlier version) that lovely poem of some nine-score stanzas, The Bride's Prelude. I recall how once, at Kelmscott, Morris turned to me, after he had been speaking of Tennyson and Browning and Matthew Arnold, as also of the poetry of George Meredith and of Swinburne and, speak- ing generally, for the work of any of these poets he did not really at heart care much and said abruptly, " Poetry has spoken only once in absolute beauty since Keats." Then, turning a volume in his hand and glancing once in a way at the page he opened, he recited, in that strange sing-song sea -sounding chant of his, the following lines, which open the poem of The Bride's Chamber (as he called it, and as Rossetti had originally entitled it) : " Sister," said busy Amelotte To listless A loysee ; " Along the wedding-road the wheat Bends as to hear your horse 1 s feet, And the noonday stands still for heat." Amelotte laughed into the air With eyes that sought the sun : But where the walls in long brocade Were screened, as one who is afraid Sat A loysee within the shade. 224 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore And even in shade was gleam enough To shut out full repose From the bride's 'tiring chamber, which Was like the inner altar-niche Whose dimness worship has made rich. Within the window's heaped recess The light was counter changed In blent reflexes manifold From perfume caskets of wrought gold And gems the bride's hair could not hold All thrust together : and with these A slim-curved lute, which now, At Amelotte's sudden passing there, Was swept in somewise unaware, And shook to music the close air. " There," he said, " there you have the unadulterated article. That's poetry. As for the rest of us, for the most part we write verse poetically." Morris's likings in poetry were singular. Wordsworth he actually disliked : Milton, save in rare lines and on rarer occasions, had little appeal for him. For a little of Chaucer he would have relinquished all of Tennyson's work save his earlier verse : and Browning he considered " to have stopped climbing the hill " when he forsook the method and manner of his early man- hood though there was none whom he iv 225 P The Thames from Oxford to the Nore more loved to quote and extol in those far-off Oxford years, when, as one of his biographers has chronicled, the Morris of " the purple trousers of the Oxford days " had not matured to " the great simplicity and untidiness " of his middle age. The last time I saw Morris at Kelmscott Manor was just such a day as that on which a year or two later he was buried in the little churchyard close by : a day of chill October, with a rainy wind soughing among the alders, and the damp chrysanthemum - petals blown about the gar den -ways be- neath a low grey sky. I think this was in 1894 : at any rate, I recollect it was on a day when he had just received a welcome letter from Swinburne relative to the pub- lication by the Kelmscott Press of certain old thirteenth-century reprints of French prose. I remember the latest (or one of the later) volumes was lying on the table, near the window, against which a sleety rain pattered the Violier des Histoires romaines and in his letter about it Swinburne recalled their mutual delight in these old French prose -poems " in the days when we first foregathered in Oxford," . . . that is, forty years earlier, for it was in January 1856 that, there, 226 The Thames from Oxford to the Nore the young undergraduate Algernon Charles Swinburne first met Morris and Rossetti. It was not at his beloved Kelmscott Manor, however, that William Morris died, though buried in the village graveyard ; but at Kelmscott House, his London home in Hammersmith. With him passed away one of the most fervent of Thames -lovers and one of the greatest of those who have set their seal upon the Royal River. 227 THE LAKE OF GENEVA Toi, notre amour, vieille Geneve, Dont I'Acropole a double autel, Qui tiens la Bible et ceins le glaive, Cite du droit, temple immortel ; Toi, lac d'azur, dont I'eau profonde Baigne I'Eden cree pour nous, Sous quels deux trouver, en ce monde, A'ieux plus grands, berceau plus doux ? AMIEL. Hymne a Gen&ve. LET the travelled as well as the untravelled reader rest assured : I have not written of Lac Leman in order to describe Chillon and quote the deadly -familiar lines of Byron, nor to record the fact that a considerable change has come upon Lausanne since that innumerably chronicled hour, when, in an alley overlooking the lake, near midnight, Gibbon walked slowly to and fro alone, having just written the last lines of his great life-work " his monumental master- piece," as the guide-book writers call it, as though it were the chef d'ceuvre of an " artist in funereal stone," to quote the delightful designation of a proud Maryle- 228 The Lake of Geneva bonian. These things have been done to death. I am sure many tourists to the eastern end of the Lake of Geneva refrain at Vevey, or stand fast at Territet, because of this exploited Chillon, these exhausted associations, these paralysing quotations. It is a point of honour among residents at Montreux to ignore Bonnivard, and to become distant at any mention of Byron. Sometimes, on the steamer from Montreux to Villeneuve, or on the top of the electric Vevey -Territet car, when a group of tourists stare, some hungrily, some shamefacedly, upon Chillon, an uncontrolled mind breaks out in the time worn Byronic quotation. It is always done with an air of new dis- covery or of lightly carried erudition, with- out pity for the sufferings of others. Then there is that island, wedded hopelessly to an inane couplet. No, if one wish to " Byronise " (as a serious French writer has it), let it rather be at Ouchy, where, at the Anchor Inn, the poet spent pleasant days, or at the Villa Diodati on the Geneva shore, opposite Coppet, where Manfred was written, and where Byron the poet is much more interesting than Byron the sentimentalist. Of course they must be mentioned. As a 229 The Lake of Geneva matter of fact one could not sail eastern Geneva without a heard, read, or re- membered Byron quotation or association ; as a matter of surety one could not visit Lausanne without a real quickening at the thought of Gibbon as not last nor least among its " associations." True, the quickening slacks off considerably when one penetrates the Hotel Gibbon, and particularly if one stays or has a meal, when the bill is apt to suffer of a dropsy because the visitor is a Briton and because (as an imported cockney -Swiss waiter may confide): "'Ere sir, yessir, it was 'ere, sir, that the great Mr. Gibbon wrote 'is 'istory. View from the window, sir, when you 'ave your coffee. Wine list, sir ? " But the time is past to dwell upon them. Many scores, many hundreds belike, have, in connection with the Lake of Geneva, exploited these two great names. By Leman shores there is a contagious ailment to Byronise, to Gibbonate. To read most guide-books and kindred chronicles, one would think the Lake had no other associa- tions ; that at most these are shared, though in lesser degree, by Voltaire and Rousseau only. And what a deal of eloquence always accompanies those reminiscences ! I take 230 The Lake of Geneva up one familiar volume, and read that in the pleasant hotel-gardens are " the har- monious sounds of an almost invisible orchestra in the fleecy foliage of the glades, whose melodies mingle with, &c. &c. delicious rocking of the soul and the senses in an immaterial atmosphere." The same enthusiast states that Annecy is the nurse of passion. Alas ! my soul was never, along these lovely shores, deliciously rocked in an immaterial atmosphere ; and, a con- scientious St. Anthony en voyage, I avoided Annecy. The reader, therefore, must be content with little of Gibbon and less of Byron, and nothing of dithyrambic. A simple directness must be my humbler aim if not quite the same simple direct- ness as that of the American translator of Voltaire's Princesse de Babylon, who makes the Pharaoh of Egypt address the Princess Formosanta as " Miss, you are the lady I was in quest of " ; or, again, " Miss," re- plied the King of Egypt, " I know life too well," &c. This same Formosanta, by the way, has always struck me as a most delightful character and a veritable Princess Charming among the princesses lointaines of modern literature. Why is she not better known ? 231 The Lake of Geneva How nai've her continual delightful reverie as when she ponders profoundly on the certainly puzzling problem as to why the young man of her fancy should choose to ride a unicorn. Unicorns, it may be added, are for some singular reason as common in La Princesse de Babylon as are wicked baronets and dishonourable honourables in contemporary fiction. One is surprised that when the Pharaoh approaches For- mosanta with select wooing-gifts he omits this useful animal in his present of two crocodiles, two sea-horses, two zebras, two Nile rats, and two mummies in prime con- dition. On the other hand, those who have read the tale will remember that, in an emergency, the obliging Phoenix forthwith ordered a coach with six unicorns. And what a Phoenix ! What words of wisdom it communicates in and out of season ! How far from Maeterlinckian in its freedom from mysticism, as when it remarks "Re- surrection ? Why, resurrection is one of the most simple things in the world ; there is nothing more in being born twice than once." All which is not so inapposite as it may seem. For La Princesse de Babylon was written by the same waters where Calvin 232 The Lake of Geneva brooded, where Amiel sadly pondered, where Dumas laughed and Tartarin gas- conaded, &c. &c. &c. ; yes, where Gibbon historiographed, and where Byron immor- talised Bonnivard, and where Lady Rose's Daughter has been a recent visitor. It would be impracticable to give a complete list of all the famous folk in art and literature in one way or another associated with the shores and towns of Lac Leman.* It is a kind of shore -set Cosmopolis. Julius Caesar is a long way off, and Mrs. Humphry Ward is very much of to-day, but between these two scribes is an army of poets and novelists, essayists and philosophers, " Alpestriens " like De Saussure (and, let us add, Tartarin), " word- painters " like Rousseau and Amiel and our own John Ruskin. Switzerland itself gives many names, from the great Jean Jacques to the much-loved romancist Topffer and his confrere Victor Cherbuliez "this young conqueror," " this young wizard of erudition and charm," as Henri Frederic * I think it is Amiel who remonstrates some- where on the habitual foreign and even French misuse of Lac L&man for Lac du Leman ; but use and wont have now made the article obsolete, and even purists like M. Anatole France and M. Paul Bourget have concurred in the vulgarisation. 233 The Lake of Geneva Amiel wrote of him more than forty years ago in the famous Journal. But it is France, with Voltaire, De Senancour, Stend- hal, Mme. de Stael, George Sand, Dumas, Daudet, and others ; England, with Byron, Gibbon, Dickens, and a score more, from Ruskin, the literary high-priest of Switzer- land, to more than one eminent novelist of to-day ; America with Longfellow and Mark Twain, Russia with Turgeniev, Ger- many with a battalion led by Goethe, Italy with Edmondo de Amicis and others, which contribute collectively far more to the roll-call than does the Helvetian Republic. Indeed, the chief Swiss critics themselves recognise that their country does not excel in literature and the arts, though they can say with pride that the most influential of all modern authors, Jean Jacques Rousseau, was not only born a Swiss, but lived the better part of his years and wrote the better part of his immense achievement in his native country. "The one regret we have/' said a Freiburg professor whom I met on a " Nouvelle Heloi'se " pilgrimage in the pleasant hill-country between Montreux and Vevey, " is that Rousseau lies at Ermenonville, in France, instead of at Geneva or Lausanne, Vevey or Clarens, 234 The Lake of Geneva Neuchatel or Berne, or best perhaps at that He de la Motte, on the beautiful Lake of Bienne, where he spent some of his happiest days." For a moment I was puzzled, for I re- membered somewhat vaguely having read in the Confessions or elsewhere that Rousseau had recorded his happiest memories as connected with the Isle of Saint-Pierre. However, my companion of the hour in- formed me that the He de Saint-Pierre and the He de la Motte are one and the same, and obliged me further by quoting Jean Jacques' own words : " de toutes les habitations ou j'ai demeure, et fen ai eu de charmantes, aucune ne m'a rendu si veritablement heureux et ne m'a laisse de si tendres regrets que 1'ile de Saint-Pierre au milieu du lac de Bienne " (which I trust are correctly given ; if not, the fault is mine, not the good Freiburger's). But as it does not do for a foreigner to make sweeping statements about the litera- ture of another country, let me translate a passage from M. Joel Cherbuliez's excellent monograph Geneve* After recounting some * M. Joel Cherbuliez, one of the heads of the great Paris and Geneva publishing firm of the Cherbuliez, was (possibly is a still surviving) 235 The Lake of Geneva of the more or less celebrated Swiss names since Rousseau and Madame de Stael e.g. the publicist, Mallet Du Pan ; the historian Berenger ; the philosophic writer P. Prevost, who made known in France the works of Dugald Stewart, and had (according to the point of view) a good or bad influence as the French populariser of the doctrines of Malthus on the regulation of population ; Sismondi, the historian of the Italian Republics ; and Chr. V. de Bonstetter, a name once so familiar in the literary circles of Geneva, Lausanne, Paris, London, and Berlin, but now almost for- gotten, though to our disadvantage, I thought, after reading one day at Lausanne this spring his excellent Voyage dans le Latium, and suggestive UHomme du Midi et rHomme du Nord M. Cherbuliez adds : "As to light literature, it has never flourished among the Genevese. As yet Geneva has not been fertile in poets ; she can claim but a very small number of writers of- fiction, and not a single dramatic author of any renown. It is her weak side." It may be admitted, of course, on the principle of quality and importance rather brother of the famous novelist and art-writer Victor Cherbuliez, the most eminent modern Swiss . 236 The Lake of Geneva than quantity and promiscuity, that to have produced Rousseau and Madame de Stael the one a great writer, whose genius blew over the minds of men as an irresistible wind, and whose thought descended in fertilising rain upon waste regions, or upon places become or becoming arid ; the other, one of the few women who have shown the way and seized the passes of new regions for the curious mind and the eager imagina- tion is, perhaps, adequate distinction for a country so small and language -severed as Switzerland. Ah, that fatal handicap of the absence of a national language ! " Where am I," writes Mark Twain somewhere : " where am I, in this unhappy land, where one citizen speaks German, and the next fellow citizen speaks French, and the third speaks Italian to say nothing of the Swiss watier, who speaks everything from Chinese to Choc- taw ? " " Is there a Switzerland ! " wrote Dumas in one of his delightful reminiscences of travel : " or is it only a geographical expression for an international playground snipped off from France, Germany, and Italy ? " And lovers of the immortal Tartarin 237 The Lake of Geneva and Bompard will recall their pregnant summary : " ' What a queer country this Switzer- land is ! ' " exclaimed Tartarin. " Bompard began to laugh. " ' Ah, vai ! Switzerland ? In the first place there is nothing Swiss in it ! ' Every visitor to the Lake of Geneva will, en route or on the spot, have learned all that his " Baedeker " or " Joanne " or other guide-book has to tell, as to the physical geography of Lac Leman or Genfer- See, as French and Germans respectively call this mountain-circled inland sea, which stretches from Geneva along French shores by Yvoire and Thonon and Evian to Saint - Gingolph, a townlet in the valley of the Rhone where one may sleep in France, but at the post-office across the road is in Switzerland ; and from Eaux-vives, on the Genevese left bank, by Coppet to Lausanne and Vevey, to the three towns of Montreux, and to the final shores at Chillon and Villeneuve. There is not a locality on either side that has not some association of literary interest. In this respect, indeed, there is truth in Voltaire's verse, when in a moment of rare enthusiasm he exclaimed, " My lake ranks foremost." Even small 238 The Lake of Geneva unnoticed districts, as St. Saphorin on the north and Des Allinges on the south bank, have their added interests of association with Amiel and Saint Frangois de Sales. Also, he will read all the hackneyed particulars about Bonnivard at Chillon, and Byron's lines ; about Calvin at Geneva ; and the distinct waters of the Arve and the Rhone when they have become one river with the usual commentary that it is like life, like fate, like marriage, or like some- thing else to which it bears a painfully obvious symbolical or other resemblance. So, rather, let us seek other company, be content to linger or turn aside, and not hurry through from Geneva to Territet by boat, or let a glimpse of Geneva and Lausanne suffice for this section of the Canton de Vaud. It would be delightful to wander upon the mountain-lands with a De Saussure ; along the hill -pastures and lake -meadows with a De Candolle or Huber ; to study with Bouvet those unexpected aliens, descendants of a remote sea-an- cestry, the laughing -gull, the sea-swallow, and the wild swan, lovely habitants which give a note of wildness and strangeness to Geneva waters ; to stroll by shore -roads and highland ways with the often mournful 239 The Lake of Geneva but oftener eloquent and moving pages of the Journal Intime, for that is the way to realise to the full the subtle charm of Amiel ; to wake in a Vevey dawn, as De Senancour chronicles in that often beautiful but most triste of books, Obermann, " to the exquisite fragrance of new -mown hay, cut during the cool freshness of the falling dews, in the light of the moon " ; or to go to the scenes painted by Delacroix, to visit Chartran at his island-studio off Clarens, to watch this or that deft French artist paint- ing the picturesque felucca -rigged boats and sailing -barges which, inimitably grace- ful, inimitably lovely, are an untiring pleasure for the eyes, or watch this or that Swede or Norwegian (the Scandinavian and the Russ are almost as frequent now as the English and German, and in art have many more representatives) painting the seemingly motionless highlands and vast capes of cloudland reflected in the moveless blue depths ; to spend hours adrift in a sailing- boat, in hazy mornings, in dreamlike afternoons, in moonlit nights, sometimes dreaming, sometimes reading a few winged and lovely words of those beautiful pages where Ruskin's heart overflows in a grave ecstasy it would be delightful to do all 240 The Lake of Geneva this vicariously as well as directly to enjoy it, but, alack, the adequate chronicling of it would need a volume. These delights can only be indicated. And are they not, in truth, of the kind which the few will find out for themselves, if time and the occasions permit ? To the many, Calvin's pulpit in Geneva and Bonnivard's damp quarters in Chillon seem the paramount attraction of a visit to French-Switzerland. Besides, I should like to unburden all my accumulated lore ! Meanwhile, with the vagrant New Englander in A Tramp Abroad, I must perforce content myself with " I know more about this lake than the fishes in it ! " Most visitors approach by way of Geneva itself. And this is the right way. It is not to discredit the City of the Faith to say that other places along these shores will seem better after it ; that is, to go to other places on the Lake first and then to visit Geneva is to come upon disappointment. It is difficult to say why this is so ; and of course the impression may not be general, may for all I know be merely personal. With all its spaciousness, with its magnificent quays, its city divided into two beautiful towns, its many buildings of interest, its iv 241 Q The Lake of Geneva quick and active life, its whole-hearted eagerness to spoil the Egyptian, and every other admitted and unadmitted attraction, from Rousseau's Isle ("Who was he, any- way ? " remarked a Cook-conducted Ameri- can one day) to the Calvinium and the Model of Jerusalem, where the travelling evangelical mightily rejoiceth with all this, and all that Baedeker indicates and the local guide welters in, Geneva remains a dull place for other than a brief stay. Something of its old hard Calvinistic regime endures. It has no French gaiety, though it is so near France and is in many things so French. Nor, despite its size and impor- tance, does it vie with Lausanne as an intellectual centre, Perhaps one reason why the city is somewhat in disfavour with foreign residents now is conveyed in a remark made to me by a depressed hot el - proprietor : " Too many anarchists and such-like come here to live, and too few watchmakers go away. People nowadays think Geneva does nothing but turn out millions of watches, and then at odd times make bombs to meet the international demand." As for the anarchists, however, I think the Genevese have little affection for their company, though it is pleasant to 242 The Lake of Geneva be told at regular intervals that one's town is the true Cosmopolis, and that the Genevese are the " Birds o' Freedom " of Europe. " And then," said one expostulating res- taurateur indignantly, " they're teetotalers to a man. Why, the worst of the lot, that Russian what writes about a red dagger an' a bomb as his signature, he feeds on milk and sardines." The abiding attraction at Geneva is the magnificent outlook, from the superb rush of the azure Rhone between the two towns, to the ever-beautiful vicinage of hills and mountains and snow-white Alps, with the crowning glory of Mont Blanc visible from many a busy thoroughfare as well as from the fascinating quays, the Rhone -spanning bridges, and the lovely promenades and environs. In the town itself, visitors who combine a literary pilgrimage with the pursuit of pleasure commonly divide allegiance be- tween Rousseau and Calvin ..." those two disagreeable people," the remark with which Mr. Clemens casually introduces and summarily dismisses them, in that humorous classic of his. Certainly one should go and see (the somewhat moulty eagles of Geneva, like the bears of Berne, must be 243 The Lake of Geneva " done " first, I am told, if one would be in the run of popular taste so let one see, and then leave, the Place Bel Air) that venerable cathedral of St. Peter whose towers rise so impressively from old Geneva, where Calvin preached and whence John Knox went to Scotland. And one must visit, of course, the steep and somewhat malodorous Grande Rue, and look at the uninteresting house -block, on one floor of which the great Jean Jacques was born (for the drift of evidence is against the more picturesque house on the right bank of the Rhone, now known as No. 27 Rue Rousseau . . . where, certainly, Rousseau's grandfather lived). But perhaps for most visitors there is more significance in the simple chronicle that here, in Geneva, Calvin died and Rousseau was born ; the harvest was spent, the new seed was sown. Calvin made Geneva the Mecca of the Protestant world. But it is safe to say that if the Geneva of to-day were the least like the Geneva of the Calvinistic regime, Messrs. Thos. Cook and Co. might close their much- frequented office in the Rue du Rhone. For were not all citizens imperatively required by that regime to be out of bed at 4 A.M. in summer and at 6 in winter ? And was not 244 The Lake of Geneva the cuisine ordained to the hard-and-fast ex- treme of two dishes, "one of animal, one of vegetable food," and no pastry ? As for wine, it was anathema. Meanwhile, the " Consistoire " looked after " the other morals." To-day, however by way of re- venge, I suppose Geneva " rises later " than Paris or any other large French town, and is become gastronomic, not to say gourmandisiac in its tastes ; while as for pastry, that lyrical effervescence, the vers- de-societe, the exquisite poetry of the culinary art (mixed metaphor goes well with the mixed mysteries of the confectioner), one may seek and find none to surpass it between the Boulevard St. Germain of Paris and the Via Vittorio Emanuele of Milan. And this, the grateful visitor must recollect, is in great part due to Voltaire, who laughed away so many drear absurdities. " When I shake my wig," he wrote from Ferney, " its powder dusts the whole republic." And more powder fell at Geneva than anywhere else. Here, and in these respects at least, the most confirmed anti- Voltairian will admit the justice of that famous summing-up of his own achievement, " J'ai fait un peu de bien : c'est mon meilleur ouvrage" 245 The Lake of Geneva But before we take the electric car out beyond the pretty village of Grand Seconnex, close by which the French frontier runs, a mile or two from Ferney, to Voltaire's home, a reminiscence of two of another kind. The visitor will have had more than sufficient of Calvin ; there is little enough interest in seeing the more or less authentic house where " that impudent fellow, Jean Jacques," was born, or the square or place where " Candide " and the " Dictionnaire philosophique " of "the old devil of Ferney " were publicly burned ; and I doubt if there are many visitors who care to find out where Amiel was born some eighty years or more ago. One literary tourist, indeed, who was " working up Voltaire and that lot " (a rival, I thought at first, and imitated Brer Rabbit when Brer Fox was around), remarked to me in surprise that he thought Amiel was a book written by Stendhal or somebody, or perhaps (he added, as an afterthought) was " the pseu- donym of Obermann or Henri Beyle or one of those fellows." But in those lovely environs of Geneva one (if that way inclined) could not be better than take the Journal Intime as companion : much of it was written there, notably at Lancy and Van- 246 The Lake of Geneva dceuvres from which latter, I may add for music -lovers, Frederic Amiel went one May-day in 1857 to near tne fi rst P er ' formance of " Tannhauser " given out of Germany, performed at the Geneva theatre by a passing German company, and wrote that night perhaps the subtlest criticism of Wagner's music yet given in these ensuing five-and-forty-years. Either by the hill- pastures or on the calm waters of the lake, no " literary companion " wears so well as the Journal of this famous Swiss, who knew and could describe the mountains as well as De Saussure, and the Rhone - stretch and Rhone -lake as well as Ruskin, and the whole of " this symphony of mountains, this cantata of sunny Alps," as well as " our common ancestor in modern literature," Rousseau.* But if one's tastes * " Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who inaugurated the literary pilgrimage afoot before Topffer, reverie before Rene, literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin St. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure (and Ruskin). He formed a new French style, the close, chastened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nobody has had more influence 247 The Lake of Geneva are not that way, a delightful walk or sail along the right shore may be made from Geneva to the Villa Diodati, where, as well as Manfred (as already mentioned), Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. As for Geneva itself a ad its immediate vicinage I can think of nothing for the reader able to understand French comparable to the fifty -seven delightful stanzas which in an almost unknown book of verse Amiel himself calls Guide du Touriste a Geneve, where everything of interest is mentioned, from the Plainpalais to the site of La Tour Maitresse, from " nos quais, lignes de flamme et d'eau " to the Rocher du Niton, off the lake -em- bankment of the Eaux Vives, Ou I'on sacrifia, dit-on, Au dieu Neptune . . . , from the Saleve to the joining of the turbid Arve and the azure Rhone, . . . . le lieu Ou I' Arve gris, le Rhone bleu, than he upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, Mme. de Stae'l, and George Sand all descend from him." AMIEL : Journal Intime. 248 The Lake of Geneva Hymen etrange, Joignent, par un destin brutal, Sans les m$ler, I'un son cristal, L'autre sa fange. Of more modern and unfamiliar associa- tions than those connected with Calvin and Rousseau, with Voltaire and Byron, I recall none more interesting than those wed to the names of George Sand and Liszt. In the tenth of her published Lettres d'un Voyageur, George Sand gives us a delightful account of her sudden departure from Nohant, her rapid journey across Eastern France in August of 1837, m order to join the Abbe" Liszt and his sister at Geneva, who had arrived there a year before and ever since been daily awaiting her ! Arrived, astonishing people by her " blouse bleue et ses bottes crottees," she told the postillion to drive " chez M. Liszt," when ensued the following dialogue : " Liszt ? Who's he ? What does he do ? What's his business ? " "Artiste " (this shortly and conclusively). " Veterinary ? " " Bah, you must be in need of such yourself, animal ! " At this point, when France and Switzer- land were at loggerheads, a passer-by 249 The Lake of Geneva intervened, with the remark, " Ah, I know whom you're after. . . . He is a fiddle- merchant. ... I can show you where he lodges." The quest, however, was not at an end. At the first place the weary traveller was told that M. Liszt was in Paris ; at the next, London was specified ; at the next, Italy. Finally, at the latest place of call, the lady found a note from the musician's sister, la Comtesse d'Agoult (George Sand's " Princesse Mirabelle "), saying briefly : " We have long waited you ; you take your own time ; and now we're wearied out. It is now your turn to seek us out, for we're gone." The weary and disgusted traveller posted on as soon as possible, and ultimately found herself at the Hotel Union at Chamounix. This time, instead of asking for Liszt by name, she gave a description of the person she sought : "A man in a short blouse, with long and dishevelled hair, a cravat tied in a knot, more or less limping at present, and habitually humming the Dies IYCB in a light agreeable fashion ! " The description was unmistakable, and the fugitive was tracked. With all their mutual affection and 250 The Lake of Geneva admiration, each doubtless found the other somewhat trying at times : the lady, certainly, had her ways. For example, in her Impressions et Souvenirs there is an entry : " Midnight, January. A. has just raised a scene because of the open window. This excellent man cannot understand that it is better to have a cold in his head than to deprive his soul of a sublime joy (i.e. contemplation of the moon). I try in vain to describe to him this quiet enjoyment arising from contemplation. He is en- raged . . ." It was in this hotel that Liszt wrote in the visitors' book under the statutory headings : QUALITY : Musician-philosopher. PLACE OF BIRTH : On Parnassus. WHENCE COME : From Doubt. WHERE GOING : To Truth and that George Sand described herself and party as " lafamille Piffoels " in this fashion : NAME OF TRAVELLERS : The Piffle Family. DOMICILE : Nature. WHENCE COME : God. WHERE GOING : Heaven. PLACE OF BIRTH : Europe. 251 The Lake of Geneva QUALITY : Idlers. DATE OF PASSPORT : For Ever. (lit. Hire, meaning Voucher and Claim, as well as its other meanings.) BY WHOM GRANTED : Public Opinion. Neither, it will be seen, suffered from excessive modesty. At Geneva itself we may enjoy a de- lightful reminiscence of these two great ones when they lived in an hotel by the Rhone -side, which we owe to Mme. Lina Ramann. " Here," she chronicles, " the Abbe Liszt used often to extemporise, when his hands wandered over the white keys with that delicate mother-o' -pearl touch of his, while George Sand would sit near the fire, listening attentively, or turning with dreaming eyes and looking out on the magnificent landscape seen through the window, while her mind transformed the master's harmonies into her own poetic visions." It was here, and thus, that Liszt com- posed, on a Spanish air, his " Rondo Fantas- tique," which he dedicated to George Sand. " Shortly after he had composed it, the Abbe played it one autumn evening to George Sand, who was seated in the twilight 252 The Lake of Geneva at a couch by the window, smoking her cigarette. Moved by the music," adds Mme. Lina Ramann, " and by the mur- murous wash of the lake -water along its narrow beaches, she gradually let her mind weave other fantasies born of the 'Rondo,' and that night took up her pen and wrote Le Contrebandier : Conte lyrique. Para- phrase fantastique sur un Rondo fantastique de Franz Liszt" But now for Voltaire -land and the lake- side home of Mme. de Stael. The former means an expedition across the frontier. Ferney (or Fernex as generally printed in Switzerland) used to be somewhat inaccessible for the ordinary tourist ; now it can be reached swiftly and frequently by an electric car, which leaves Geneva from just off the Rue du Mont Blanc, opposite the new General Post Office. A pleasanter way still, however, is to drive, or, except in the summer heats, to walk. But to those unhurried, and with a preference for the unbeaten track, I would recommend that the morning or forenoon steamer be taken to Coppet, when, after a stroll through the sleepy, charming village -town and a visit to Mme. de StaeTs old home, one can 253 The Lake oj Geneva strike across a charming region, visit by a detour the Villa des Delices, where Voltaire had his first home in these parts, and so come upon Ferney. To the lover of French literature, and of genius that knows no geographical limit, a visit to Coppet cannot but give a moving pleasure. What a wonderful woman this Mme. de Stael was : so brilliant, so charm- ing, so great a captain of the intellectual forces of modern Europe ! One may turn to-day from Delphine and its fellows ; even Corinne may seem outworn now, with all the revelation become commonplace and the quick life gone away on the wind. But her influence, which was so great, endured as an awakening, a moulding, and even a directing force ; though it is, perhaps, only since Georg Brandes' fine study of the intellectual achievement of this princess of letters that, in this country at least, she has won anything like adequate recognition. To-day, the Coppet manor-house, with its two grey towers, and the near-by chapel where her impatient spirit knew rest at last, has relatively few pilgrims ; but these go in reverence and love. To some it may be new that Mme. de Stael's mother, when Suzanne Curchod, 254 The Lake of Geneva knew Gibbon well, fell in love with him indeed, and even fascinated that somewhat cold and irresponsive student. During his four years of absence in England, between his first and second sojourn in Lausanne, she remained constant ; but, on his return, not even Rousseau's mediation brought the callous historian " to reason " ; not even when the lady finally pleaded that at least they might remain friends did Gibbon relent, for he declined the compromise as " dangerous for both." We may deplore the gentleman's philo- sophic calm, but cannot regret the fair Suzanne's disappointment, for in a fit of the blues she married M. Necker, afterwards to become Louis XVI.'s famous Minister of Finance ; went to Coppet ; and bore to her husband and the literary world of Europe the beautiful girl and enchanted mind whom it was long the wont to allude to as " Corinne." There can be no doubt that in gaining a Mile. Germaine Necker by losing a Miss Gibbon we owe a big debt to the Destinies. She had her faults, of course, this brilliant woman, and in her work as in her life. Particularly in her earlier writings she is like her own heroine in the Histoire de 255 The Lake of Geneva Pauline, " apt to pour out the feelings of her young and tender soul in an incorrect but extraordinary style." On the other hand, I can recall no youthful critical effort more mature in thought and expression than her admirable Essay on Fiction, prefaced to the two volumes of Zulma, and Other Tales, all written before she was twenty. It was here, in Coppet, that, in the perilous days of the Revolution, Mme. de Stael was visited by so many famous people, from Sismondi to Byron. Here the brilliant Benjamin Constant first met Mme. Recamier, that woman so beautiful that at forty -three she had as ardent lovers as at twenty - three, and even when seventy and blind was found by the great Chateaubriand " still lovely and still charming." Mme. de Stael herself had this unpassing beauty, this undying youth and unfading charm ; and has herself chronicled her " passionate and inappeasable desire to be loved." She was forty -five when she fell in love with and married the successor to M. de Stael -Hoist ein M. Rocca, a handsome youth of three-and-twenty, who had first attracted her attention and admiration by pirouetting and leaping his black Andalusian 256 The Lake of Geneva stallion under the windows of the house in Geneva where she was then staying. But, poor thing, she was a mondaine, and longed ever for Paris and the excite- ments of life. To her, too often, this lovely view that we look at from Coppet to-day " oppressed her with its inexorable beauty and maddening calm." One wonders, though, if she was really happier in Paris or London, or here, Ou Corinne repose au bruit des eaux plaintives. For she was of those in whom life is in- tensified to the double. But Mme. de Stael and London ! . . . some will wonder. Yes, for a while, she had her salon here. It was in Argyll Place, Regent Street (No. 30, near the present Union Bank), that in her hour of exile she " received " such mixed if brilliant society, that Byron said it reminded him of the grave, as all dis- tinctions were levelled in it ! But what about " le vieux diable de Ferney . . . ou est cette ame infernale," as a contemporary chronicler politely alludes to Voltaire ? Well, Voltaire and Rousseau, Gibbon and Dickens, the gay Dumas and the irresistible iv 257 R The Lake of Geneva Tartarin, and company, must now be diligently sought. Besides, I bear in mind the apposite words of an anonymous scribe of 1785, writing upon " that singular man Rousseau": " There is scarcely any prejudice more general than that which inclines us to believe that whatever is pleasing to ourselves must necessarily be so to the rest of the world. This desire, improperly indulged, not only fails of producing the wished-for effect, but is often followed by one quite contrary." Again, I recollect the warning of that objectionable elderly Miss from Chicago, in A Tramp Abroad, who, on the Geneva steamer, remarked incidentally : " If a person starts in to jabber-jabber-jabber about scenery and history and all sorts of tiresome things, I get the fan-tods mighty soon." And no self-respecting writer would in- flict " the fan-tods " even on that most genial of collective beings, the Reader. Switzerland a crammed caravanserai in August ? Yes, no doubt. And yet it is constantly maintained that English visitors 258 The Lake of Geneva are not nearly so numerous as formerly, except perhaps at Easter and other popular holiday seasons. This, however, is partly because that seventy or a hundred years ago comparatively few " ordinary " people travelled for pleasure, except English ; to-day the German outnumbers the Britisher, not only in Switzerland but along the Italian Riviera and North Italy, and even as far south as Sicily. There is at least one gain in this : it is not " the inevitable English " one hears of now, but " these Germans " ; and it is some consolation to know that, in every country, the change is hailed with most sincere regret, for the Teuton, especially the Prussian variety, is nowhere loved, and for the most part is scrupulously avoided. " The English in- vasion " began with the freeing of Europe after Waterloo : once Napoleon was secure in St. Helena, the British tourist spread in a fertilising (if often exasperating) flood over Western Europe. It is amusing to find that even then " the superior people " resented the crowd. In the delightful record of the 1819 Journey of Earl -Spencer- All -the -Talents and his lively Lady Lavinia, recently given us from the dame's letters, we find the complaint, early in October, 259 The Lake of Geneva that " Geneva is as full as it can stick with English " ; while at the next stopping - place the sprightly correspondent writes : "... When we all arrived, extenuated with fatigue, we were favoured with a thunder- storm. . . . Quantities of English every- where. One family of nineteen, ten children, here yesterday." The lively Lady Lavinia must have been an amusing person to travel with, though she had her tempers (when her language was more emphatic than refined) and sometimes must have tried the patience of her courtly but pedantic lord. " L d S. has made some extraordinary acquisitions of curiosity s, which I have heard discussed over and over, with an eagerness which always surprises me, for the duce a bit can I recollect the name of one of these Treasures." And Rome found her no more amenable than Geneva. It was the time when " the antiquarian circles " were much excited over the excavations in the Forum, and the leading part taken by the Duchess of Devonshire ; but Lady Spencer showed as little respect for the first as for the second, writing of the lady as " that witch of Endor," and of the treasure trove as " old horrors." 260 The Lake of Geneva To adapt Gibbon, my readers will, I trust, excuse this short digression : " the practice of celebrated moralists is so often at variance with their precepts." For I had meant to begin this article with Voltaire, and to lead off with that admirable motto of his : " Precision in thought ; concision in style ; decision in life." Yes, it is time we were at Ferney. Not that the Voltaire associations with Geneva itself have been adequately touched upon : it would take a volume to exploit that theme. And then those lovely vicinage walks, especially that by the Saleve, Lamartine's " Saleve aux flancs azures," and its memo- ries of the great French poet, its association with those Thursday walks recorded by Edmond Scherer when he and Amiel and Victor Cherbuliez and others devoted them- selves to " debauches platoniciennes." Here it was that Amiel found those ceaseless metaphors of beauty which give so great a charm to his prose as this, at the tumul- tuous town -weir of the Rhone, where the river pours like a melted avalanche " This standpoint (of ideal vision) whence, as it were, one hears the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity," 261 The Lake of Geneva where he wrote so many of those lovely if almost wholly ignored poems, of which I give one, adventuring by its side a poor translation : APAISEMENT Partout le regret ou I'inquietude, Partout le souci : Toujours la tristesse et la solitude, Et le deuil aussi I Ou fteurit I'espoir ? ou verdit la palme ? Ou croit le bonheur ? Ou cueillir la joie ? Ou trouver le calme ? Ou poser son cceur ? L'or ni le savoir, le vin ni les roses, L'art ni le del bleu, N'emplissent le cceur ; et deux seules choses L'apaisent un peu : C'est d'abord un cceur fait pour lui, qui I'aime Et qu'il nomme sien, Et puis une voix au fond de lui-meme Qui lui dise : Bien ! SOLACE Regret, disquietude, And weary care : Grief, melancholy, solitude Everywhere ! Where blossoms Hope ? Where blooms Life's palm ? Happiness . . . joy . . . O heart . . . or calm ? 262 The Lake of Geneva Nor wine nor gold Nor art nor the blue sky Bring peace to this sad fold, Bring but this quiet sigh A heart to hold my love, A heart its love to tell ! . . . Then from the depths shall this low whisper move, " Soul, it is well." Well, when " Obermann " came back one July from Paris or Fontainebleau to Switzer- land, he begins his letter, " II n'y a pas 1'ombre de sens dans la maniere dont je vis ici " : and in like fashion, when I consider what extent of " literary geo- graphy " I have to cover in this article, I say to myself that there is no shadow of sense in the manner in which I hark back to Geneva ! As I wrote a few pages back, one may come upon Ferney either from Geneva by the frontier village of Grand Seconnex, or by the lake -steamer to Coppet, and thence afoot by way of Voltaire's earlier residence, the Villa des Delices, and Les Charmilles. To approach the home -farm, so to say, of this great agriculturist of the mind, this strenuous, mocking, earnest, laughing,- eager, jibing sower of good and evil seed, is indeed an experience for any one versed 263 The Lake of Geneva in the great ways of literature. Voltaire the man may no longer wear that aureole woven of the wonder and admiration of a startled, scandalised, but fascinated Europe : Voltaire the publicist may be ignored, Voltaire the romancist be spoken of rather than read, Voltaire the dramatist be (de- servedly) forgotten, Voltaire the historian be shelved, Voltaire the autocrat of letters be discredited. There is enough left to keep his fame alive, apart from the great, the unparalleled tradition of the supreme place and influence he won and so long held. If everything else of his perished, the volumes of his correspondence would suffice to justify the legend of his supremacy. What a wonderful old man, this, who laughed at everything, and yet had unselfish enthusiasms impossible to the Gibbon who decried him and the Napoleon who hated him ! And apart from all else, Voltaire lives as an abiding quality, as an in- tellectual tradition. He is the high -priest of irony. " Always walk laughing in the road of truth," he writes in one of his letters to D'Alembert. Once it was the fashion, and in this country in particular, to class him with MephistophelesT(" why drag in Mephistqpheles ? Voltaire is the original 264 The Lake of Geneva Satanic name," was doubtless the unex- pressed thought of many) ; but later and fuller knowledge reveals " le vieux diable de Ferney " as a man who wore a mocking smile as our forefathers wore a wig, and carried the air of the cynic and the infidel as the beau of that day carried a cane : at heart sound, a giant mind, a nature perverse but fundamentally fine. Among the innumerable books written about Voltaire, I doubt if any affords more revelation of the man than the little volume published in the Year X (i.e. 1802), entitled Soirees de Ferney. I re-read this delightful book one wet and stormy spring evening at Ferney, at the amusing if not particularly attractive Hotel de la Truite. As the rain came in sudden noisy whispers, with the wind-eddies abruptly rising or falling, I fancied I heard the ghosts of many old laughters, many cries of anger, and half-real, half-mocking la- mentations, many half-solemn, half-blas- phemous derisions. And looking in the leaping flame of the wood-fire I dreamed I saw a withered old face cynical, ironical, vain, great in intellect, and behind the mocking eyes a spirit of love and charity and good-will. 265 The Lake of Geneva "A good deal of it all was tomfoolery " (c'etait de la petite charlatanerie). There we have Voltaire. " Below all my raillery there has ever been the anger at evil, the cry for justice, the passion of an idea." There also we have Voltaire. And he sums up both when he says somewhere, " For all that, I was not born more wicked than any one else, and at bottom I'm not a bad fellow " (quoique je ne sois pas ne plus malin qu'un autre, et que dans le fond je suis bonhomme). But he would not be Voltaire if his last words were not, " For some thirty or forty years I took everything seriously, and was a fool for my pains. I have finished by laughing at everything." ' " What is the Voltairian spirit in ordinary life ? " some one asked me the other day. " Audacity that hits the mark," I answered. " Such as . . . ? " But not remembering at the moment " la phrase juste," and recollecting an apposite anecdote, I answered : "A great lady once replied to the third Napoleon, shortly before he appropriated the vacant throne of France, when he had with an ironical smile asked her to explain the difference she drew between ' an accident ' 266 The Lake of Geneva and ' a misfortune ' : ' If,' she said, 1 you were to fall into the Seine, that would be an accident ; if they pulled you out again, that would be a misfortune.' ' An American transcriber published a volume of the Humour of Voltaire. But humour, as we understand it, is no charac- teristic of his. His wit is keen, poignant, sometimes cruel, generally a lash even when it laughs it bites. When he is alluding somewhere to " the soul " and our hope of immortality, he adds, " I am persuaded that if the peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail." He is nearer humour when, in a well-known tale, he has : " ' A little wine, drunk in moderation, comforts the heart of God and man.' So reasoned Memnon the philo- sopher ; and he became intoxicated." Of wit his very spirit was made ; fun he had in plenty not of the Dumas or Dickens genial kind, not of Daudet's brilliant bur- lesque, not of Mark Twain's sly drollery, but a perverse, amusing, often convincing and always fascinating fun of his own. But he had nothing of that pawky humour which we consider so essentially northern, as, for example, that story of the unco' 267 The Lake of Geneva cautious Scot who always emptied his glass at a gulp because he " once had one knocked over." Not that "the ecstasy of the incongruous " did not appeal to him. One can imagine his sarcastic reticence if, in writing on heroism in modern life, he had lived long enough to be able to illustrate the narrative with that duel between Dumas and Jules Janin when Janin would not fight with swords because he knew an infallible thrust, and Dumas refused pistols because he could kill a fly at forty paces, and so the foes embraced ! Or his mocking delight if, in writing on the sincerity of ideals, he had lived long enough to supplement that wicked " Conversation " of his, concerning Ossian, between an Oxford professor, a Florentine, and a Scot, at Lord Chesterfield's, with the episode of how, under the Directory, persons near the Bois de Boulogne were one day alarmed to see a great blaze among the trees, and on coming close perceived some men " attired in Scandinavian fashion " endeavouring to set fire to a pine tree, and singing to the accompaniment of a guitar with an air of inspiration merely admirers, as it proved, of Ossian, who intended to sleep in the open air, and to set a tree 268 The Lake of Geneva alight in order to keep themselves warm, and thus emulate the people of Caledonia ! (Thus Mons. Texte, in his able and sug- gestive work on The Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature.) Voltaire had pre-eminently the genius of repartee. None more than he would have rejoiced in that cutting rejoinder of the elder Dumas to Balzac, when the two great men were brought together at the house of a well-meaning friend. After neither had spoken a word to the other, Balzac was about to leave, when he said viciously : " When I am written out I too shall take to writing dramas." To which Dumas at once replied : " You'd better begin at once, then ! " But . . . Well, no ; this has become a series of " buts," like that dialogue of " buts " between Don Inigo-y-Medroso-y-Comodios- y - Papalamiendos and the Englishman (whom the good Bachelor Don Papalami- endos imagined an anthropophagus) in our great man's tale of The Sage and the Atheist. Some time ago a doubtless worthy but certainly bigoted individual perpetrated a booklet on Voltaire. One of the deadly sins he adduced was that " this Scoffer incarnate " stole his name, " like all else." 269 The Lake of Geneva It is quite true that Fran 9013 Marie Arouet, in a crude anagram, evolved the name his genius adopted and made immortal. But to keep on speaking of Mons. Arouet is more pedantic than to allude invariably to Bacon as Lord Verulam. As for Voltaire's standing unique in this iniquity, it is enough to cite, among other famous instances, Montesquieu, whom no one knows now as Charles Secondat, Jean Chauvin, known to us as Calvin, or Moliere, whose actual name of Jean Baptist e Pocquelin is long for- gotten. When one thinks at Lausanne (Monrion), at Tournay, and still more at Aux Delices, and above all at Ferney of what Voltaire achieved merely in quantity of work, one stands amazed. Even at an age when most men are content to (or at least eager to) " cultivate their cabbages," Voltaire maintained lightly and set himself heroically to tasks overmuch for ninety-nine men out of a hundred in the fulness of youth. Some idea of this may be gathered from the fact that after he was sixty -four he published some forty volumes ; or, to put it another way, he issued in the last twenty years of his long life some twenty-eight works, apart from many long and short tales, 270 The Lake of Geneva pieces in verse, miscellanies.* However, we cannot dwell upon his achievements : we are but pilgrims to where he lived and worked. If one is alert to the irony of changing circumstance one may stand on the shore at Coppet, or on the high road to Grand Seconnex, and look over or back to Geneva, and recognise that the same town burned Voltaire's most famous books, and received him with adulation when he drove city-wards in his coach-and-six ; for long sedulously decried him as an evil, and now as sedulously cultivates him as an important commercial asset. The value of his work and the extent of his influence have been exaggerated by many who have written about both ; they have been more grossly underrated by the ignorant and the pre- judiced. In one direction, at least, I think no one has so keenly perceived and * The reader interested in Voltaire may care for these particulars : 8 vols. of the Dictionnaire philosophique, and 5^ of the 6 of the Philosophie ; more than a vol. of the Melanges litteraires, 2 vols. of the Mel. historiques, and 2 of the Dialogues ; i vol. of the Hist, de Parlements de Paris ; the several vols. of the Facetice ; 2% of the 3 of La Politique et la Legislation ; 3 vols. of Comments sur les (Euvres Dramatiques ; Peter the Great ; The Age of Louis XV.; 8 vols. Correspondence. 271 The Lake of Geneva tersely stated the relative distinctions as the great historian Michelet, when he wrote, " Montesquieu ecrit, interprete le droit ; Voltaire pleure et crie pour le droit ; et Rousseau le fonde." When 1 was at Coppet on a previous occasion I found in the salon-de-lecture of the Hotel du Lac the discarded or lost MS. diary of " a travelling miss." I copied one entry : " Madame de Stael was a dear. Her portrait as Sappho, by David, at the chateau, *s sweet. Voltaire is an old horror. He's always laughing at one, and looks a wicked old fright, and Dan says he's the same in his books." The effervescent miss and the more reserved Dan represent the great public. The sentiment alism of " Corinne " keeps her memory sweet, and there are tears and sighs at Coppet. The continual irony of Voltaire discomposes, and refuge is taken in the first available car back to Geneva. The Villa aux Dlices of Voltaire's day is not the Villa aux Delices of to-day. The beautiful site is the same, near the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve, with, as Voltaire wrote, twenty leagues of Alp beyond, and Geneva on the lake -side across the narrowing waters : " And I 272 The Lake of Geneva can see from my window, as I write, the quarters where Jean Chauvin, the Picard called Calvin, reigned, and the spot where he burned Soret for the good of his soul." Here and at Ferney Voltaire entertained royally : "for nearly a quarter of a century," he wrote, " I have been the aubergiste of Europe." Condorcet, D'Alembert, Diderot everybody visited him who was anybody : kings, princes, philosophers, poets, writers of all kinds and every nation, statesmen, women of genius, women with beauty, women without either genius or beauty but uplifted by this fad or that vogue, exiles, patriots, rogues, the sorrowful and hopeless, the hopeful and unprincipled : " All ways lead to Ferney, as to Rome." In his cor- respondence we see him in all his Protean changes, from modesty (rare) as when, from Tournay, he wrote to M. de Pregny, "I, a labourer, a shepherd, a rat retired from the world into a Swiss cheese " to fantastic grandiosity, as when he wrote to the Due de Richelieu, " I have succeeded in converting a miserable and unknown hamlet into a charming town, and in founding a commerce which embraces America, Africa, and Asia " ! All the same, iv 273 s The Lake of Geneva he worked wonders at Ferney. The place bloomed. Here Voltaire wrote, talked, read, posed, corresponded almost beyond credible limits ; but here also he lived the life of a country squire, interested in agriculture, forestry, breeding, dairy -produce, farm- produce. He desired to be a French Virgil, and wrote, " I enjoy my tranquil occupations, my ploughs, my bulls, my cows." Not a day passes, writes a friend, one Bachaumont, that M. Voltaire does not "put out children to nurse," which is his expression for plant- ing trees. He even bred horses, with the comment that "as so much has been written about population I will at least people the country with horses, not ex- pecting the honour of propagating my own species." " I am going to reside at Ferney a few weeks," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert in November 1758. The stay extended till February 1778, nearly twenty years. To- day Ferney is all Voltaire : his memory is its sustenance. The village -town is pleasant ; the environs are delightful, the near hills lovely, the lake and the Alps are within easy reach. But to enjoy Ferney one must be Voltairien. He smiles, mocks, 274 The Lake of Geneva allures, enchants, repels, amuses, wearies, at every step one cannot escape him. The kitchen wench and the boots at the Hotel de France or the Hotel de la Truite are in a Voltairian conspiracy. One has one's lake -trout a la Candide, chicken -legs au diable de Ferney, Rosbif au Pierre le Grand, Tarte aux Delices ; one goes to sleep with the murmur of The Sage and the Atheist one wakes to the whisper of Memnon the Philosopher. The chateau, where he lived and worked, the chapel (now, alack ! fallen from its holy estate) with its famous inscription, " Deo erexit Voltaire," the room where he slept, the study where he wrote so many of his twenty -eight tragedies and twelve or more comedies, the shrine which is said to enclose his heart (" His Spirit is everywhere, but his heart is here "), the avenues wherein he walked, the village church where once he appeared as Mahomet cursing the super- stitious Savoyards of the Rhone (as Pastor Gaberel relates), the garden, of which little remains now save his hedge of evergreens, where he strolled as the Autocrat of the Metropolis of Esprit, as the Public Exas- perator and the private good genius and generous benefactor, as the Thinker and 275 The Lake of Geneva Poet, as the Pope of Literature, and as (for a brief season, to the laughing amaze- ment of Paris) " Brother Frangois, unworthy Capuchin "one may see all these, and look at the quaint, old, smiling, ironical face of the bronze bust in the Place, or at that of Lambert's statue erected in 1890, and think one has " done it all." But there is no escape from Voltaire till one has fled from Ferney. " He is in the air," as Mark Twain remarks of the thousand-odoured smell of Cologne. True, much is gone. The chapel is in disuse, and the famous theatre (beyond Les Delices and Les Charmilles, at the hamlet of Chatelaine) is now a store. Neverthe- less we may draw the line at the remark of a Plymouth Brother, who by some wild irony of fate wrote an account of a visit to Ferney : " Ruin and desolation sit around, and we wondered how many Abels have fallen victims to this one bold, bad man." Well, Voltaire would have smiled genially, and we may follow his example. How could our Plymouth Brother understand an elderly gentleman, who, instead of being a pillar and a churchwarden, admitted, "It is true I laugh and quiz a good deal : 276 The Lake of Geneva it does one good, and holds a man up in his old age." And now for Lausanne, an hour or two away through a charming region. But having written so much of Voltaire I must say no more of his residence here and at Tournay ; nay, I find I must make pem- mican of the " as much and more " I had noted in connection with Rousseau. On the other hand, like Gibbon at Lausanne and Bonnivard at Chillon, Rousseau is the prey of the guidebooker. " La Nouvelle Heloi'se " is exploited by Baedeker, Joanne and Company with the methodical monotony of the chronicle of hotels and pensions, " objects of interest," and " walks in the neighbourhood." From Lausanne to Vevey, from Vevey to Montreux, and above all at Clarens, the unwary tourist is caught in a Rousseau net, wanders in a Heloi'sian maze. He hears (generally for the first time) of Saint Preux and Milord Edouard, of the heart -adventures of- Claire and Julie, and he makes pathetically arduous efforts to visit the scenes " immortalised " by these persons of whom he may never have heard, in whom he takes no interest, and of whom he hopes in his soul never to hear again. 277 The Lake of Geneva To know Rousseau aright one must know the history of modern literature. He is, above all other " moderns," " the sower of ideas, a discoverer of sources " " and observe," adds Amiel (that close and unprejudiced thinker), " that all the ideas sown by Rousseau have come to flower." But, with Amiel in the instance of Emile, one will often return to him or first come to him with dissappointment, for much that he wrote is bald and jejune, no grace, no distinction, the accent of good company wanting. Rousseau, of course, is king of the countryside from Lausanne to Montreux ; and with old or recent knowledge of his writings, and notably the Confessions and La Nouvelle Heloise, the visitors to this end of Geneva -lake may have many days of delightful hillside and shore -way rambles, and particularly in the lovely inlands reaching behind Vevey, Clarens, and Charnex. At Vevey, if the Rousseau-pilgrim will penetrate behind the Market, he will see a house known as "At the Sign of the Key " ("A la Clef") with the inscription that the great Jean Jacques resided here in 1732 ; while readers of the Confessions will remember his writing, " J'allai a Vevey, 278 The Lake of Geneva loger & la Clef. . . . Je pris pour cette ville un amour qui m'a suivi dans tous mes voyages." There may be many who agree with Jean Jacques in his love for this much- visited place ; for myself, if seems to me the least attractive of the Geneva -side resorts, for all its glorious views. " It is stuffy, dusty, and triste" wrote Turgeniev once, and I fancy a good many will endorse the " impression " of the great Russian writer. Perhaps the spirit of Obermann, triste enough in all conscience, has taken possession of the place ; for here and in the neighbourhood De Senancour wrote much of that famous but now practically -ignored book, remembered by English readers rather for Matthew Arnold's fine poem inspired by it than for itself. He, too, as Amiel, as Rousseau, found Vevey a place of charm : "It is at Vevey, Clarens, Chillon to Ville - neuve," he writes, " that I find the lake in all its charm and beauty." For one, I do not feel that the sadness of the author of Obermann was the controlled sadness of sanity, but an intellectual dyspepsia. His mind needed open windows, sunlight and fresh air, vistas ; his spirit like his body needed exercise, a variegated diet, a little dissipation perhaps. We are repelled by 279 The Lake of Geneva the incessancy of that " intolerable void " which in the fourth section of his most famous book he says he finds everywhere ; and surely most of his readers can have but half-hearted sympathy with one who of set purpose seeks " that condition of toler- able well-being mixed with sadness which I prefer to happiness." Obermann has been called " the brooding spirit of the Vaud." I do not think the Canton de Vaud would relish the compliment. It is the liveliest and brightest of the Swiss cantons, and though a learned philologist has demon- strated that Vaud is at the root identical with Wales and Walloon, it will generally be admitted that the Swiss claimant to the old Celtic name has more of Walloon light -heartedness and Welsh love of song and company than of Welsh gloom and Walloon melancholy. At Lausanne itself the chief literary association, of course for the Anglo-Saxon traveller at least is Gibbon. But, apart from what has been already written of him in this Geneva chronicle, is not every visitor " primed " with Gibbon before the train slides midway into the hillside town ? Does he not know all that he cares about the life of Gibbon there, and the whole 280 The Lake of Geneva story of " the closing scene " of the great history ? He can purchase a " Gibbon pen " or " Gibbon pipe," he can have coffee at the sign of the " Philosopher," or dine at the sign of the " Historian " ; the youngest generation of Lausannians (Lausonians, Lausanneges an ignorant outsider, I would not discriminate among these and others) have even a hard and perilous " lollipop " called, for some mysterious reason, boules-a-Gibbon. So, rather, let me guide a few to the pleasant eastern residential quarter, where there is now a Dickens Avenue or Street, and the house where our great novelist lived for a time, and wrote all or the greater part of Dombey and Son, longing the while for the life and movement and inspiration of the London streets, feeling, with an aching nostalgia, that a hundred hours of Cockaigne were better than a cycle of the Canton de Vaud. Coming to Lausanne by the waterway, one lands at Ouchy, its port a charming place, and, as many think, superior to Vevey, though each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Byron enjoyed his stay at the Anchor Inn here : and many a wit and poet and famous scribe, from Voltaire 281 The Lake of Geneva and Rousseau to Gibbon and Goethe, from Dumas, that great laugher, to our own genial Dickens and the smiling creator of Tartarin, have lingered at this out-of- the -season -delightful spot. There is a local legend that a great French wit died here in a feverish delirium induced by his own witticisms. I sought in vain the tomb of the great unknown ; in vain, even, for any authentic trace of the legend. But we all know the delightful floating foam of anony- mous wit on the wide sea of the French genius ; and who can affirm that a lord of irony did not take refuge here, and perished nobly (and unfortunately in silence) as indicated ? Many must have long desired to know the source of anonymous modern aphoristic wisdom such as, "Marriage is ennui felt by two persons instead of one." . . . ' ' There is a magic in the word duty, which sustains magistrates, inflames warriors, and cools married people." ..." For one Orpheus who went to Hell to seek his wife, how many widowers who would not even go to Paradise to find theirs !"..." Of all heavy bodies, the heaviest is the woman we have ceased to love." ..." The last Census of France embraced nearly twenty millions of women. Happy rascal ! " And perhaps 282 The Lake of Geneva the infamous wretch lies unhonoured and unsung at Ouchy ! Does the lover of the impressionable Dumas remember his pleasure when, on landing at Ouchy, with a touch of that home -sickness on arrival at new places so characteristic of the French, he was greeted with proud delight by a compatriot, in whom at last he recognised a young exile named Allier, who thenceforth acted as his cicerone at Lausanne and the neighbour- hood ? " Le grand et cher Alexandre " was welcome everywhere, and no wonder : he radiated good-humour wherever he went, was " bon camarade " with the host, the head waiter, the cook, the chambermaid, and the " boots " at every hotel he visited. Of his many experiences in this region but a single citation, however, can be made here. Scene, Martigny, across the lake beyond Villeneuve, up the Rhone valley. It was at the hotel here that he made those surprising economies of his, the thought of which beforehand made travel seem so feasible, the recollection of which after return to Paris made him re-echo the lament of Ecclesiastes, " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity." One plan was to economise with dinner, then at Swiss hotels usually 283 The Lake of Geneva four francs. He achieved this by invariably eating six francs worth, and so bringing the final outlay down to two francs ! And above all there is the famous episode of the bear- steak ! The landlord gave him a table apart, and solemnly informed him that he was to have all to himself " a beefsteak of bear." But even Dumas, after " preliminaries," was startled by the magnitude of the viand placed before him, and at first had a qualm or two. Then he set to, and, later, summoned the landlord to express his satisfaction. It was then he learned that the " bifsteck d'ours " ought to be even better than usual, for ... had it not been nourished by the huntsman Guillaume Mona, who had recently found his quiet grave in the interior of Bruin ! From that landlord and that table Dumas precipitately fled. But at the Vevey-Montreux side of the lake an even greater than Dumas the voyageur is to be remembered who but the immortal Tartarin ! Chillon is again a shrine for the pilgrims who follow in the steps of the mighty. Just as Bonnivard's damp cell was almost becoming " a devil without the tail," as the Spaniards say, and Byron's lines apt to be met by the 284 The Lake of Geneva same complacent smirk as greets the evidence of Rizzio's remaining blood-spot at Holy- rood, Alphonse Daudet came to the rescue with Monsieur Tartarin of Tarascon. Among the inimitable things of modern humour is the account of the arrest of " the killer of lions " and that Provencal Ananias, Bompard ; their imprisonment in Chillon, and how Tartarin conducted himself there ; and the subsequent adventures of the pair till the supreme irony of their unexpected meeting at Tarascon. But, alack ! there must be an end. And just as Dumas and Tartarin were a welcome relief after De Senancour and Obermann, so again it is a pleasure to recur to the graver note of that deepest and most abiding of all the modern influences associated with the Lake of Geneva the sometimes too saddening, the often melancholy, but always beautiful and fascinating master- piece of Amiel, written by these lovely shores during the long, outwardly silent life of one of the most remarkable of modern spiritual and intellectual types. His tomb is at Clarens, where perhaps it will be visited when the Nouvelle Heloise is at last faded from the minds of men. 285 The Lake of Geneva CE QUI SUFFIT. Paix et pen L' ombre et Dieu, Calme et reve, N'est ce pas, O mon cceur, N'est ce pas le bonheur, Et le bonheur sans treve ? There we have Amiel himself, in his lifelong desire. And in these closing words, also, as well as in the finer breath of this lovely lake, these sentinel Alps, a message for one and all : "A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. From the starry vault descends an invisible snow-shower of dreams. Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All is strong, austere, and pure. Good-night to all the world ! . . . to the unfortunate and to the happy. Rest and refreshment, renewal and hope : a day is dead vive le lendemain ! " 286 PART II THREE TRAVEL-SKETCHES THROUGH NELSON'S DUCHY 1903 THE great Sicilian estates of the Duchy of Bronte, which came to Lord Nelson along with the title of Duke just a hundred and four years ago, have a capital. This capital is not the mountain-town which gives the title, but the ancient castle of Maniace, standing in the hollow of a vast mount ain- surrounded plateau, covered with the im- memorial lavas of Etna, and watered by the Sime'to, the classic Symaithos. To write the history of the Castello di Maniace would be to undertake an arduous volume. Nine hundred years ago part of these time- worn walls leaned over Symaithos' grey- green rushing flood, and in the intervening ages they have seen much. To-day, the present Duke of Bronte in the English peerage, Viscount Bridport, Nelson's re- presentative through the female line owns these wide lands which Nelson won through a King's gratitude. Here Moor and Norman have ruled ; here the Norse Vikings under iv 289 T Through Nelson's Duchy Harold Hardradr, afterwards King of Norway, helped to defeat a Saracen host, and the Greek general Maniaces (from whom the castle derives its name) made his sword a terror to the Paynim. Here pilgrims from afar came to venerate St. Luke's legendary painting of the Madonna now replaced on the high altar of the beautiful Norman chapel at Maniace. Here, ages before, came and went the Roman armies, or, before these, the swift soldiery of Carthage, or the wandering legions of Hellas or Magna Grsecia or Greek travellers to the inland sanctuaries of Kentoripa (Centuripa, now Centorbi) or sacred Enna (now Castrogiovanni locally and more correctly Castr'janni from the Arabic Kasr-Yani, itself a corruption of Enna, the citadel of Enna) ; or Greek traders to the chain of Hellenic ^Etnean towns, from Tissa of whose very existence we know only from a chance allusion in Cicero to Hadranon or Hadranum, with its Fane of Hadranos guarded by a thousand hounds, and to Hybla Minor, ancient Sikelian strongholds before they became Graeco- Sicilian settlements, and now, as since the Middle Ages, known as the towns of Aderno and Paterno. 290 Through Nelson's Duchy One of the great landowners of England boasts that he has possessions which were once in the fee of Harold, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. What is that to the boast of a Duke of Bronte, who can say that Theocritus may have wandered thus far up the Symaithos ; that down from yonder hills came Demeter looking for her daughter Persephone ; that, according to a local legend Persephone herself dis- appeared in the high shallow lake between Maniace and Randazzo ; and that Empe- docles climbed this stupendous northern flank of Etna which towers over the region of inland Sicily with vast and menacing supremacy ? As a guest at the hospitable castle of Maniace, I have thrice visited these Sicilian highlands, and on two of these visits my stay was one of several weeks : and, again as these visits have been in autumn and winter and spring, I may claim to have some knowledge of that wonderful region in all its aspects save those of the blazing summer, when the encircling mountains are as the slopes of a brazen furnace, and along the whole vast serpentine strath, from the piana of Maletto to the Gates of the Sime'to, the malaria broods or stealthily 291 Through Nelson's Duchy climbs, more deadly than any dragon of ancient mythology. And now, as I write here, I find myself listening to three persistent sounds which reach me through the open window : though it is so still in the gardens below that I can hear the continuous indeterminate murmur of the bees in the dense borders of the large and fragrant Sicilian amaryl- lides, so still that the floating fumes of roses and violets, of heliotrope and the long clustered spires of medlar and lemon - cina, rise undrifted by the least eddy of air, an invisible smoke of sweet odours. The most compelling of these sounds is also the nearest. It is the monotonous rush of swift water over a stony bed sometimes broken and multitudinous, some- times fluent and swift as a mill-race. This is the Sime'to . . . that Symaithos so loved of the poets, and by whose goat -pastures, in the sunny regions south of the bat- haunted gorges a few miles below Maniace, many a Sicilian idyl has been lived as well as made and sung since Theocritus com- posed his musical Dirge on Daphnis, or wedded to poignant and unforgettable words the love -broken heart of poor Simaetha. 292 Through Nelson's Duchy The second sound is the sighing of the far-off wind among the mountain -forests of the Serraspina and Serra del Re, the vast woods of the Duchy, which swell over crests of four and six thousand feet ; or among the chestnuts and last olives in the hill and valley of the torrent of the Saracens, or the dwarfed oaks and tortured ilexes on precipitous and freaked Rapite a mountain rising to the west of the Bronte vinelands, with a general contour and serrated crest which would at once recall to any Scot of the west country the fantastic summit of Ben Arthur in Argyll (" The Cobbler "). The third sound is not so easy to describe. It is the refrain, vibrating a long way on the stilled air, of a chant of the vintagers, a mile or more down the Simto course, beyond the Boschetto with its droves of black pigs and gaunt sheep, where the immense Bronte vineyards flourish under the continual hawk-like vigil of Monsieur Fabre, the Provencal overlord of these wild Sicilian mountaineers, who gain their living by these multitudinous little stunted plants. It is impossible at this distance to say what this wailing, musically -monotonous chant is. Perhaps it is one of these Sicilian 293 Through Nelson's Duchy hymns of la Madunnuzza, with swelling chorus of Santa Matri, Santa Matri ! , , , Guarddti all' omu di la campia ; or, Cu la pad di Ddi' ! viva Maria / . . . Lu Pair' A ternu sempri arringrazziammu ! * or one of those characteristic folk-songs, as of the poor peasant who, when he finds things going from bad to worse, prays to Sant' Erasmo in his rude, stammering Sicilian, Aiu un franciullo, e un bbarduinu sulu, Lassdtimi lu sceccu, ca mi campa, E piggiativi 'scanciu lu figgiulu, Ca ppi tri ggiorna v'addumu 'na lampa. [I have a child, and only, now, this little ass : leave me, then, the beast that wins me my day's bread, and take in exchange my little son, and I vow that for three days a lamp shall burn at thy shrine !] * These couplets of invocation to the Virgin and of blessing on the Eternal Father are, I may add, far more legible than Sicilian generally is. Here, for example, are the first four lines of one of the popular sonnets of Alessio Di Giovanni (A Lu Passu di Giurgenti), which I may leave to readers who know Italian to puzzle out ! : Jira u mmiaggiu agghiiri a Bbillafranca 'Nzimmula cu 'n cumpagnu scappuccinu . . Ca ddd vidiatu sulu irvazza bbianca E rruvetta, e unni cc'era lu caminu. 294 Through Nelson's Duchy But more likely the wild cadence, that already has ceased, or floated away from here on ^some breath ^of wind, is that extraordinary chant of benediction which these Sicilian Highlanders, suddenly throwing down their spades or other implements and raising their arms, cry out in honour of the Duchino * whenever he happens to appear among them, either with M. Fabre, or by himself, lines that in effect run, O holy and Blessed Mary, Our Lady and Protectress in Heaven, Bless the hand, bless the hand, bless the hand That gives us food ! Down in the Sahara, and among the wild gorges of the Atlas, I have heard the Arab or Berber muleteer wailing a chant somewhat similar in sound, but in no European land have I heard anything more strange, barbaric, indescribably alien and remote. If I rise and go to the window, to the right I look out beyond the near gardens * The Duchino . . . the young Duke i.e. the Honble. Alex. Nelson Hood di Bronte, the son of Viscount Bridport, Duca di Bronte, who has given the best years of his life to the administration of the Duchy, and to whom so much of its pros- perity is due. 295 Through Nelson's Duchy and the great columnar poplars, beneath which winds the noisy Simto, splashing along its rock and boulder -strewn sinuous course, with, beyond, the fantastic peaks of Rapiti, and, northward, those " long ridges of the hills " of which Theocritus speaks in the eighth idyl. Or, better, I can go from my room into the great central corridor of Maniace (a museum of beautiful and interesting things, from lovely jars, antique Greek sculptures, rare Graeco- Sicilian casts, and a veritable Nelson museum of articles of all kinds besides every engraving, coloured print, and the like, associated with the great admiral) and from the balcony at this north end, overhanging the rushing grey-green flood (sometimes a thin swift stream, sometimes a raging torrent), look beyond the castellated walls on to the lonely hill -pastures, and see a Daphnis of to-day " following his kine," and a Menalcas of to-day " shepherding his flock " and one at any rate will have " a pipe with nine stops, fitted with white wax, and smoothed evenly." And among the almonds yonder, round the first steading beyond the water-course, " the birds that cry beautifully among the thick leaves " may, if it be spring, be heard now, as in the 296 Through Nelson's Duchy days of Moschus' lament for Bion ; or the cry of the quail or omnipresent magpie may be heard from the lentisk bushes, then as now " a plant of this land," as Theocritus wrote in his idyl of Pentheus, though then he had the Theban groves in his mind rather than these Sicilian highlands. Or I may walk to the other end of the long corridor, and through the drawing- room and music-room to the dark oak- wainscoted breakfast -room, and lean from one of its windows and look at Etna towering close by : may look on some such scene as limned in Empedocles on Etna : The track winds down to the clear stream, To cross the sparkling shallows : there The cattle love to gather, on their way To the high mountain-pastures, and to stay, Till the rough cow-herds drive them past, Knee-deep in the cool ford ; for 'tis the last Of all the woody, high, well-watered dells On Etna gla de, And stream, and sward, and chestnut trees, End here ; Etna beyond, in the broad glare Of the hot moon, without a shade, Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare ; The peak, round which the white clouds play. Only, to-day, Etna is dazzling white in 297 Through, Nelson's Duchy snow for the last four or five thousand of its eleven thousand feet, rising in a gradual, sweeping, majestic cone from the Syracusan shores and the Hyblaean Mount ; and these nothern flanks are filled with violet shadow, and not a cloud is visible there or anywhere in the immensity of down -swimming azure though from the four -mile -round cirque of the crater-sum- mit rises a vast slowly spiral columnar mass of steam, which I am told is not, as I think, merely hundreds of feet in height, but, at the least, probably over two thousand. The bell in the great courtyard clangs, and I know that it is time to start for the long drive to Bronte, where my host has one of his ever recurrent legal cases to attend to for in this still only half- civilised, Mafia-ridden, brigand-haunted country the people, individually, com- munally, and regionally, are extraordinarily combative both in aggression and in the defence of real and imaginary wrongs. I have driven this upper mountain road many times, and yet every time the scenery is different, and the marvellous region seems never staled either in the fascination of its impressive physiognomy of in its 298 Through Nelson's Duchy compelling charm, at once more singular and more variegated (especially in spring or in the marvellous golden St. Martin's Sleep, " the time of the south-flying cranes ") than anywhere else even in Sicily. There is an ancient chapel, which opens from the courtyard, just before the colonnade of the front exit. This church, dedicated to " the Mother of God " (but before the specific worship of the Virgin was ordained, not to "La Madre di Dio," but simply to " Santa Maria "), is not of as ancient foundation as the original building of what is now the Castello, though it dates back some seven centuries. The original fort and hamlet of Maniace date from about A.D. 1032, when the Greek general Maniaces " First Sword-Bearer and Master of the Palace of Michael, Emperor of Con- stantinople," and by that imperial prince created Overlord of Sicily gained his triumph over the Saracen host, on the slopes yonder on the north side of the Sime'to. To consecrate the town and com- memorate the victory, there was sent ^ from Byzantium the celebrated and much vene- rated painting of the Virgin by St. Luke the Apostle. The better to preserve this treasure, a Benedictine monastery was 299 Through Nelson's Duchy founded (now the Castello of to-day) in 11 73 by Queen Margaret, widow of William the Bad, and it was she who dedicated the chapel to Santa Maria. It was the son of this Queen, William the Good, who raised that most superb triumph of sacred art in all Sicily, the splendid cathedral of Monreale above Palermo, and so, naturally, he placed the lesser under the jurisdiction of the greater. To this day the people on the Maniace lands believe that the treasure of Queen Margaret's jewels lies buried " an arrow's flight " from the Castello. Last spring, when a flood washed away part of the north bank of the Simto, near the vine -lands, and disclosed a series of ancient tombs, it was hoped the treasure or a treasure ! might be found. Alas ! after days of exploration all we discovered was some skulls and bones which we could not tell to be Norman or Saracen or Greek or Sicilian (since adjudged earlier still, Sikelian), a number of very strong teeth, and one little gold earring ! The chapel is small and insignificant. The most interesting thing about it is the admirable fantastic carving on the capitals of the pillars which support the obtusely pointed arches of the fine old Norman 300 Through Nelson's Duchy portal. Inside it is bare, even for a Sicilian church : so bare that it has not even a " confessional " what serves that purpose being a small movable metal screen (like a potato-scraper) with half a yard of red cloth hanging down one side ! During the time that the much revered paint- ing by St. Luke certainly in any case a most interesting and fine example of the earliest Byzantine art had been removed to the Castello, the chief object of adoration for the hill peasants who assemble here for mass on Sunday mornings was the tomb of a famous Abbot of Maniace known to good Catholics as the Blessed William not Saint William, for, alack ! as I was informed, his friends are too poor to pay for his Sanctification ! This Blessed William won fame by adventuring, alone and unarmed, among a band of Saracens (probably Arab corsairs from Tunis) who happened to be raiding the region, in order to convert them there and then. The heathen proved obdurate, and added insult to this injury by mockery. The holy Abbot forthwith seized a peasant's donkey that was among the spoil, " removed " one of its hind-legs, and with this Sicilian substitute for the Samsonian jawbone put to rout the heathen 301 Through Nelson's Duchy marauders. Having accomplished this heroic deed, he performed the much more surprising feat of replacing the leg on the unfortunate donkey. In his haste he put it on askew, so that the donkey was practi- cally reduced thereafter to three legs ; but what did that matter, compared with the living testimony of the miracle thus afforded ? The Blessed William now lies at rest under the altar, and the Maniace peasants must comfort his soul, if he ever wakes, by the unswerving loyalty of their veneration. There was another Abbot of Maniace, who might more truly be called infamous than famous. Down beyond the Sime'to one of the vineyards is still called after him, the Vigneto Borgia. The ecclesiastic in question was Roger Borgia, who afterwards became the terrible Pope Alexander VI. When I first visited Maniace I hoped to find that a papal ghost haunted its ancient precincts, but though the Castello does boast a spectre it has nothing to do with the Borgias, being a kind of useless, un- legended creature, a sort of genius loci, somewhat eccentric in appearance and habit, but wholly unobtrusive and inoffensive. It is only a portion, however, of the 302 Through Nelson's Duchy ancient convent and court which stands to -day, for a terrible earthquake some two hundred and ten years ago brought the older Maniace to a heap of ruins. It is a lovely ascending drive along the fine road made by the " signori Inglese." To the left are the rocky but cultivated lava -lands, with a few sheep, donkeys, and wigwam -like huts to lift the scene to the semblance of inhabited country. Beyond, across the great valley, rise the mountain lands of the Serraspina, and, overtopping these, the vast beech-woods of the Serra del Re, one of the chief sources of revenue on the immense Bronte estates. In front, after a winding ascent, Etna again comes into view, majestic beyond all power of words to de- scribe, solemn in snow-white beauty for the last two or three thousand feet, and sombre with purple shadow in the huge bulk of its northern flank. In the nearer and lower foreground rises the conical shaft of the Rock of Maletto, which has saved the small town of the same name from slipping off the hillside, and also diverted from it the dreaded lava-torrents which at times have poured along these terrible volcanic courses. All the wild desolate country we see stretch- ing away to the left is buried in lava in 303 Through Nelson's Duchy spring lovely in a wilderness of yellow spurge and gold and purple crocus. Some idea of the prolonged disaster of a lava- eruption when it reaches the cultivated lands may be had from the fact that the great lava -flood of 1879, which swept this region, still emitted a heavy steam after a shower of rain some five years later, and ten years later was still hot a few yards from the surface. It was in this desolate region, lying between Maniace or Maletto and the mediaeval town of Randazzo, some fourteen miles eastward, that the Saracen host was routed by Maniaces and Harold Hardradr and his Norwegians. And that glittering space yonder is the malarious Lake of Gurrida, by which was once a lost Greek town, with a shrine of Demeter, and in whose waters, a local legend says, Persephone disappeared in the arms of the Lord of the Underworld. This stream that suddenly leaps from the lava comes from Gurrida, after falling away into subterranean passages. It is the land of Myth, and one realises easily here how the old legends arose. To-day, there is no " life " by the malarious shores of Gurrida, save the grey lizard, the drumming snipe, and the musically 304 Through Nelson's Duchy wailing cranes on their northward or south ward migrations. The road to Bronte ascends to a group of savage rocks of strange aspect a land- mark in all directions for many miles where Greek and Sicilian remains have been found, and whose precipitous hollows are still invested with supernatural terrors for the Brontese and Malettani. Through a lonely upland region, with northward and north-westward a most superb panorama of mountain scenery wherein one may discern isolated Troina, the highest town in Sicily (3650 feet) ; Centuripe generally (locally, at any rate) called Cen- tdrbi ; the winding Dittaino (the ancient Chrysas) in its vast valley ; Agira (which the hill folk prefer to call San Filippo d'Argiro), the ancient Agyrium, and a Sicilian city before ever the first Greeks landed in Sicily, remembered now because it was here that the historian Diodorus Siculus was born, and here that (as he tells us) Hercules came in his wander- ings and was honoured with a fane and long worshipped ; and even, in clear weather, " the navel of Sicily," ancient Enna, the home of Demeter and Persephone. It would be a useless catalogue to give a iv 305 u Through Nelson's Duchy summary of the picturesque hills and swelling mountain ridges, the vast shadowy valleys and clustered towns and villages visible from different points along this drive into Bronte : it must suffice to say that the scene is, in its kind, unsurpassable. Bronte itself is a semi -barbarous, mediaeval -looking town, of which the first impressions of innumerable black swine, swarming squalid children, and irredeem- able sordidness, give way afterwards to the qualified admission that the place has a wonderful situation, that the little town is not a citadel of cut -throats, and that a day may come when residence there may not seem to continental* one of the most dreadful of enforced exiles. There have been days, indeed, when the present writer spending a waiting hour or two on the tenazzo above the old formal garden at the back of the Palazzo Ducale has even found a certain charm in this lava- cirqued townlet of one of the least tractable or pleasing of Sicilian populations. But in truth, as once in the hill train at Lingua - glossa I heard an old gentleman of that town remark, after an eloquent outpouring about Paris and London and New York from a returned emigrant, " tutto relativo . . . 306 Through Nelson's Duchy it is all relative : a crowd of fifty in Lin- guaglossa is as big as five hundred in Catania, or five thousand in Rome, or fifty thousand in London or Paris. It is only a crowd after all. And so with all you hear, all you see, all that makes life hard or good : it is all a relative question si, si, I tutto relativo" And, doubtless, life in Bronte is, for the Brontese, by no means as terrible an affair as it would^seem to you or to me, while quite certainly the women who chat among the black pigs at the doors of the Street of Polyphemus, or the native dandies who patrol the Road of Timoleon, have pleasures and consolations of which we discern no trace. M Then there are the great orange -groves miles away south down the Simto valley, and the vast beech-woods of the Serraspina and the Serra del Re away yonder to the north ! These orange -groves, those beech -woods ! Both in their kind, are they not unique in extent, beauty, and interest ? There is no more fascinating excursion from Maniace in the spring than that through the lower part of the duchy to the celebrated orange -forest. This excur- sion is indeed a thing to be remembered 307 Through Nelson's Duchy with joy. From the start the day is a festival of beauty. First there is the drive past the immense valley wherein lie the vast vineyards, under the shadow of Rapiti, whence are won the famous Bronte wines and the super-excellent Bronte brandy ; then the road crosses, and ascends to a great height, through a wild pastoral region, with jEtna towering on the south, its lower flanks black with old lava -streams, or sombre with islanded forests of oak and chestnut, or here supporting a white village like a resting dove clinging to a rock, or here a town growing out of the wilderness of lava and landslip like some huge, uncanny flower. Then we come to the union of the Simto, or rather of the Giarretta as the peasants now call it when the confluent of several streams, with the rushing Fiume Salso in Greek days the Kyamosoros to be joined in the lower gorges (wild and precipitous depths where the surging flood becomes a green serpent writhing in a continual yeast of foam, and where in the obscurity above the maidenhair growing from jutting rocks bats continually flit, or the cliff -hawk shoots past on arrowy wing) by the Dittaino, the Chrysas * of * It has been denied that the Chrysas and the 308 Through Nelson's Duchy the poets, and by the Erykas. Near these, and at the junction of the rough hill roads for Bronte, we alight, and mount strong mules for the remaining five miles of the twelve -mile excursion. What a ride, along those picturesque banks and overhanging hills, through narrow lava lanes overgrown with giant cactus, past rude orchards filled with orange- and lemon-trees in full fruit and almonds in a dazzle of sunlit foam of blossom, meeting now a band of muleteers, now a solitary goatherd, now a wandering shepherd with his gaunt flock following him to the sound of the wailing monotonous bagpipe ! . . . But how to convey even the most dimly approximate idea of the beauty of the orange-groves when at last, after a descent of a thousand feet through a narrowing gorge, one smells the odours of paradise, and suddenly comes upon the advance-guard of three million oranges ! For that is the estimated crop of the twenty -six thousand trees in this forest of fragrance and beauty. Then there Symaethus were ever considered one river. The other day, in glancing through D'Orville's great Latin work, Sicula, I found several allusions to " Vagus Chrysas " and its more famous confluent, and also,' in connection, the quoted line from Silius, " Rapidique colunt vada flava Symaethi." 309 Through Nelson's Duchy are also hundreds of lemon- and citron- trees, and the lovely mandarin-orange with its delicious fruit. To camp under this green wilderness, with a multitude of yellow and ruddy globes of light around one, with the hum of bees among the violets and narcissus along the undergrass, and the flutter of white and sulphur butterflies over trailing rose or convolvulus (the magic hour the hour of the firefly and the rising moon is a joy apart), and there to eat and drink in a pleasure of appetite of mind and body, is to know one of the unforgettable experiences of life. These orange -groves are at the south- western end of the Duchy of Bronte, and it is a far cry back from them to the oak- woods of the Serraspina and the beech - woods of the Serra del Re, away in the Sicilian highlands to the north of Maniace. And to go there is a long day's excursion. One has to rise early, and drive many miles up the valley of the Saraceni, with detour by the resident agent's summer abode (some three thousand feet high, and so beyond reach of the malaria) and the picturesque saw-mills above the hamlet of mountaineers, which occupies an outlook of superb loveliness, where the carriage is 310 Through Nelson's Duchy left for the inevitable mule. Then begins the long and arduous climb, past wild and romantic mountain glens, up steep and sometimes seemingly inaccessible slopes, through disappearing olive -groves and in- creasing oaks, till the Serra della Spina is crossed, and then over stony plateaux swept by the hill winds, and with views of ceaseless change and exciting beauty, till at last, afoot, for there is mercy even for mules, one reaches the first outskirts of the beech- woods of the Serra del Re, some eight thousand feet above the sea nearly double the height of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Great Britain. To be viewed in their full glory these magnificent forests must be seen in late autumn. Never shall I forget their radiant splendour about the end of October or beginning of November. It was an ocean of majestically uplifted, miraculously suspended gold an illimitable Sahara of sun-flamed foliage. In these ancient un- disturbed recesses not only does the wolf lurk, but one may well believe the faun and the hamadryad still linger. Here, if in the remote forests of any country in the world, surely these lovely exiles from the Golden Age might be found ! Through Nelson's Duchy From the summit and at the extreme northern boundary of " Nelson's Duchy " a great part of all Sicily is to be seen. /Etna, seems higher, more wonderful, more terribly impressive than ever : the southern highlands reach by mountain slope and valley, by the hill -towns of isolated Cen- turipe and Troina, by the ^Etnean towns of Bronte and Aderno to the great sea- frontiered plain of Catania ; westward stands out the huge plateau crowned with " Enna, that holy city of the Kore and the Mother " ; north-westward are the moun- tains which guard Palermo ; northward and eastward the Tyrrhene Sea, the Lipari Isles, the smoking cone of Stromboli, and, nearer, the lovely northern coasts of Sicily westward from the promontory of Milazzo. Between this beech -covered range of the Serra del Re and the orange -forests, many thousand feet below, a score or more miles away, lies this wonderful duchy which the King of Naples gave to our great Nelson. In the Castello of Maniace may be seen, among innumerable relics, his will, signed " Nelson and Bronte " ; but he himself was never here. It was before Nelson's time, too, that the duchy extended up the slopes of ^Etna itself, 312 Through Nelson's Duchy past the upper precipices (from two to four thousand feet in height) which over- hang the black and awful abyss of the Valle del Bove, to the very edges of the crater of the central cone, down which, more than two thousand years ago, as legend tells us, the great philosopher Em- pedocles swung into the flames which then and since have never ceased in the heart of this Titan among volcanoes. 313 THE LAND OF THEOCRITUS IF there is no island in the world so famous alike for historical and literary associations and for unequalled beauty as Sicily, there is no part of Sicily so fascinating as that vast region which lies under the dominion of "la Madre Bianca," the White Mother, as the peasants call ^Etna, perhaps un- consciously reiterating Pindar's epithet for the greatest mountain of southern Europe, named also by him " The Pillar of Heaven " Nourisher of the Snow. It is a fascination that appeals to the poet and painter, to the student and archaeologist, to the lover of the beautiful, and to the ordinary visitor who wanders to the South chiefly for sunshine and the amusement of novel interest. Even when one has lived many weeks under the shadow of this Queen of Moun- tains, as Verga, the Sicilian novelist, justly calls the vast upheaval whose base cir- cumference is more than a hundred and fifty miles ; which rises two miles skyward in 314 The Land of Theocritus direct uplift from the lava plain ; whose head towers above the Ionian and Tyrrhene seas at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet ; whose final precipitous cone is itself a thousand feet in height ; whose extreme summit terrible caldron of smoke and flame has a circuit of three and a half miles ; and on whose flanks a score perilous towns, a hundred perilous villages, grow like stemless lilies or multitudinous lichen even in so brief a time the visitor gifted in any degree with imagination falls under a spell, the more irresistible as its magic is " in the air," is felt by all, is everywhere a potent force. But when one spends months in Sicily, when one comes one year and re- turns another and another^above all, for those who reside in southern Sicily for half the year " Madre Mia " becomes an actual personality, terrible or beautiful, and silently worshipped. The Sicilian peasants are pagans at heart in their regard for Mount ^Etna. All are sensible of its surpassing beauty, even those who could not put this sentiment into words, or wouid look upon such expression as idly superfluous, and whose morning and evening or hourly glance at the smoke-tufted summit is akin to that of the sailor at the uncertain way of 315 The Land of Theocritus the wind, or to that of the farmer at the shape and colour of the clouds beyond the top of his elms. But there are few^Etneans who have not a superstitious regard for the terrible and beautiful mountain as well they may. I do not know if the Polyphemus legend still survives, though I have heard that the peasants of Aci Reale, Mascali, Piedimonte, and other communes tell in story and chant in folk-song of the flaming one-eyed demon who guards the fires at the heart of the mountain, but whom weariness overcomes every ten years or so, and the result of whose sudden slumber is an outburst, at the vast cone, of furious flame and boiling floods of lava. Possibly one reason why the name is rarely if ever heard is because of superstition. A friend of the writer asked one of the peasants in his employ if he had ever heard of Polyphemus. " No : it is a name that has bad luck (mal 5 for- tuno)," the man answered, gravely. At Aci Castello the picturesque castle - guarded hamlet by the shore, with its fantastic sea-set rocks, the scene of the old myth of the mountain boulders hurled by the enraged Cyclops at the deriding Ulysses I asked an old neatherd if he had 316 The Land of Theocritus heard of Polyphemus. He shook his head ; but whether because the name does not survive in its Greek form, or because my foreign Italian was untranslatable in his Sicilian dialect, I could not say. When I pointed to the rocks and spoke of the " antico greco Ulisso," he understood, and unleaning from his long staff, pointed with it to the vast white mass of ^Etna towering above the near shelving terraces of lemon and olive, and said simply, " II vecchio questo ha fatto " The Old One up there did that. It is certain, however, whatever of Greek legend and nomenclature has perished, that many of the pagan Hellenic traditions have survived throughout inland Sicily corrupt and blent with Carthaginian, Latin, Norman, Saracenic, Iberian, and other strains and are reflected in the folk -tales and legendary songs and ballads of the unlettered and therefore unforgetting peasants. At Giardini (the ancient Naxos), for example, the patron saint is Santa Venere (Saint Venus) : behind Taormina rises the vast and precipitous Sicilian Venusberg, Monte Venere : the crags of Capo San Andrea and Isola Bella are called the Siren's Rocks, and the caverns the 317 The Land of Theocritus " Gallerie degli Greci antichi " ; one on Isola San Nicolo is called the " Letto di Olisso," the haven (lit. bed) of Ulysses, while the local name for the Aci rocks is (when not simply Pietri del' Mar) " Rocche del vecchio Capitano " i.e. Odysseus. There are two heights at Castrogiovanni (the ancient Enna, or Henna) called " The Sacred Women," whose names ages ago were Demeter and Persephone. The fascination of the whole ^Etnean region is threefold. There is the spell of the past. Perhaps no other region of the same extent can vie in this respect with the Sicilian coast from Messina and Taormina to Syracuse and Girgenti, from Porto Empedocle to Palermo, from Cefalu to where Scylla and Charybdis still watch the tormented waters of the once dreaded strait. The memory is strained with the multitude of reminiscence. A crowd of famous heroes and tyrants, deliverers and oppressors, poets and dramatists and his- torians, Greeks, Asiatics, Romans, and Normans from Hiero and Dionysius to King Roger, from Timoleon to Garibaldi, from Empedocles and Pythagoras and Pindar, Plato and -ZEschylus and Theo- critus compel, or rather tyrannise, the The Land of Theocritus imagination. Then there is the magic of omnipresent beauty of beauty in cease- less variety, but stranger, more picturesque, more barbarian, more fantastic, more vividly Southern, than is to be seen elsewhere. Finally there is the fascination of Mount ^Etna. This is the magnet which attracts everything in Sicily. As one of her poets (Rapisardi) says, " the very lemon boughs of Mascali, the orange branches of Aci, the roses and lilies on the breast? of Catania, rejoice when ^Etna is serene, shrink and darken when the great Mother frowns." In Sicilian poetry ^Etna plays as dominant a part as in Japanese painting and poetry " the peerless mountain, Fusiyama." Allu- sion to it is the natural culmination of any emotional expression as when in one of the famous Sicilian novelist Verga's stories a dying peasant is about to confess to a score of crimes, but suddenly, with radiant face, points to the white and terrible splendour of ytna, and sighing, " La Montagna" sinks back and says no more. Let me find room for one characteristic poem by a Sicilian, Giovanni Cesareo quoting, however, only the first and last Italian stanzas : * * " Occidental*." (Milan : 1887.) 319 The Land of Theocritus Io nacqui dove il del ride sereno Sopra I' isola bella, occhio de' mari ; Dove si mescon candide, Scintillando a mattini umidi e chiari, L' onde del lonio e I' onde del Tirreno. * * * * * O tu, che sei piu bianco, dell a spuma, Vieni : la vela dell' amor ci attende : I liti azzurri fremono Odorando ; dall' erta il gregge pende, E /' Etna immane air orizzonto fuma. I was born where the radiant sky domes the Beautiful Island, the eye of Ocean : where all lovely lights, by misty morns or clear, forever blend the Ionian and the Tyrrhene waves. In the sunflood the country-sides quiver with light, murmurous in the white dust of moontide : silent, on the barren rocks, the cactus -fronds sleep, outlined against green mountain-ranges. In the enchanted bays, curved crescents of moving light, are mirrored the marble walls of ancient towns ; and along the flower-starred slopes one may hear the forlorn sighing of old shores, by forgotten Moorish fragments, in the shadow of the orange-trees. O Thou, who art whiter than foam of the sea, come ! The veil of Love awaits us ! The azure shores quiver, fragrant : on the hill-pastures the flocks hang still as flowers : from Etna, leaning vast against the sky, a breath of smoke ! It is interesting to turn from the modern singer to the song of an earlier Sicilian, Theocritus, made perhaps on thyme-clad 320 The Land of Theocritus Hybla, or on an ^Etnean hill-pasture where once Galatea dreamed of her beloved Acis, or in the shadow of ancient olives, such as those which, near Syracuse, mark the legendary site of the grave of ^Eschylus, or as those in that orchard on the way to Euryelos called by a living Syracusan poet the Garden of Plato ; or, mayhap, under some such group of vast caruba -trees as those which, between Tauromenion the Taormina of to-day and the Hill of Venus, are still vaguely associated with a vanished marble seat whence Pythagoras dreamed across the Ionian Sea : DAPHNIS Ah, sweetly lows the calf, and sweetly the heifer, sweetly sounds the neatherd with his pipe, and sweetly also I ! My bed of leaves is strown by the cool water, and thereon are heaped fair skins from the white calves that were all browsing upon the arbutus. . . . MENALCAS Etna, mother mine, I too dwell in a beautiful cavern in the chamber of the rock, and, lo, all the wealth have I that we behold in dreams ; ewes in plenty and she-goats abundant, their fleeces are strown beneath my head and feet. Or to this, written perhaps by Syracusan waters, or by that beautiful shore where now the picturesque ruined castle of Roger IV 321 x The Land of Theocritus the Norman faces the Scogli de' Ciclopi, as the people often still call the seaward- hurled rocks of the Cyclops Polyphemus, or by the wild lava blocks of the Naxian promontory, where they lie piled beyond the orange groves of Alcantara, the ancient Alcesines : The halcyons will lull the waves, and lull the deep, and the south wind, and the east that stirs the seaweeds on the higher shores, the halcyons that are dearest to the green-haired mermaids, of all the birds that take their prey from the salt sea. Let all things smile on (my friend) Ageanax sailing to Mytilene, and may he come to a friendly haven. On that day I will go crowned with anise, or with a rosy wreath, or a garland of white violets, and the fine wine of Ptelea I will dip from the bowl as I lie by the fire, while one shall roast beans for me, in the embers . And elbow-deep shall the flowery bed be thickly strewn, with fragrant leaves and with asphodel, and with curled parsley ; and softly will I drink, toasting Ageanax with lips clinging to the cup, and draining it even to the lees. At every place on this haunted shore or by these inland hills and valleys of ^Etna one may hear the voice of Theocritus, whether it be disguised as Daphnis or Menalcas or Thyrsis. " Thyrsis of ^Etna am I, and this is the voice of Thyrsis . . . by the great stream of the river Anapus, 322 The Land of Theocritus on the height of ^Etna, by the sacred water of Acis." Certainly it ought to be on the lemon - fragrant heights above Aci Reale on the southern slope of ^Etna, or upon the shore facing the Cyclopean rocks themselves, that one should read the Sixth Idyl, where Daphnis and Damoetas sing of the one- eyed Cyclops and his love for Galatea. And lying there on an afternoon, with the Cyclopean isles rising out of the deep azure calm of one of the few still days of February, one reader of Theocritus realised to the full that the Sicilian poet must have had in mind not Polyphemus, but ^Etna the true one-eyed Cyclops of Sicily when he wrote the close of this idyl ; for deep in the blue Ionian sea was outlined beyond the farther rock the vast head of ^Etna, with his forest beard, his ridges of snow, his one eye browed with snow-white drifted smoke : For, in truth, I am not so hideous as they say ! But lately I was looking into the sea, when all was calm : beautiful seemed my beard, beautiful my one eye, and the sea reflected the gleam of my teeth whiter than the Parian stone. Or, again, high on the southern mountain slope above Belpasso, looking down upon the three azure but perilous meres of 323 The Land of Theocritus Paterno (the ancient Hybla Minor), Bian- ca villa (where, it is said, a rude Greek dialect informs the corrupt Sicilian-Italian), and Aderno (the ancient Hadranum, with its famous Temple of Hadranos guarded by a thousand hounds, and where the Greek Garibaldi, Timoleon, received his " sign from heaven ") with, to the north, Bronte between its malarious lake and the wild lands beyond, where, a thousand years ago, the Hellenic chieftain Maniaces and the Norwegian viking Harald Hardradr routed the Saracens ; and, to the west, the moun- tains of ancient Henna, the land of Demeter and Persephone : here, high on this sun- swept slope, where nature's green tides for ever struggle to overcome the inferno of black, tormented lava, is, surely, a fit place whereat to re-read with new delight that ever -charming Eleventh Idyl. This is the idyl which Theocritus himself tells us was to comfort the poet -physician Nicias, by reminding him that even Poly- phemus (the Theocritan Cyclops, truly a very different being from the Homeric monster) found surcease in song from the pain of love. It was on these slopes that, when young, the amorous Cyclops tended, as a gift for Galatea, eleven crescent - 324 The Land of Theocritus browed fawns. He sang his pain out on the wind of the west, while ignoring his own wisdom : Milk the ewe that thou hast ; why pursue the thing that shuns thee ? After reading this, one of the loveliest of the Theocritan poems, one may turn to a near spring pure from the days of the ancients, as the peasants say and drink of the clear water " that for me deep- wooded ^Etna sends down from the white snow a draught divine ! " But if the wild Libeccio or west wind should suddenly arise, or the gray scirocco come out of the south-east, then one, glancing at the terrible head of the great mountain, may quote rather, " He may love, not with apples, not roses, but with fatal frenzy." The other day I was in a garden amid which a fragmentary part of the ancient Naxian aqueduct lies, and a girl, who had been drawing water at a well, was turning aside, with her amphora poised delicately on her shapely head. I asked her name, which was a grandiloquent one, Pompilia. In the south, names such as Pompilia, Caesar, Pompeo, Ottaviano, Venus, &c., abound ; at Mola, for example, the hill-crest town that overhangs Taor- mina, there is a youth called Caesar Augustus 325 The Land of Theocritus and a muleteer named Timoleone, and at Taormina itself the forename of the mild young hair-dresser is Orestes ! But the peculiar Sicilian accent of the dark-eyed water-drawer had for a moment twisted the name in my too ready thought to Bombyca. It sufficed, however, to evoke a delightful memory of that charming idyl where the reaper Milon laughingly mocks his comrade Battus, love -worn "because of a slim girl," Bombyca, she who was wont to pipe to the reapers on the farm of one Hippocoon. Perhaps, I thought, this very garden may have been part of Hippocoon's farm : perhaps the old gardener, with his red flap-turned cap, was a descendant of Polybotas, Bombyca's father ; and the girl yonder, poising her amphora, Battus 's sweetheart herself. She was beautiful enough to suggest the thought, with her great dark eyes gleaming under her yellow- kerchiefed head, and her slender body swaying from the lithe hips as she ascended the little stony terrace that did duty as a road. " They call thee a gypsy, gracious Bombyca, and lean, and sunburnt ; 'tis only I that call thee honey-pale. Yea, and the violet is swart, and swart the lettered violet, but yet these flowers are chosen the 326 The Land of Theocritus first in garlands. Ah, gracious Bombyca, thy feet are fashioned like carven ivory, thy voice is drowsy sweet, and thy ways, I cannot tell of them." There are perhaps few more admired lines of Theocritus than those in the idyl addressed to his friend Diophantus, which describe so realistically the toilsome life of two old fishermen. But there are also as vivid lines in the famous first idyl of Thyrsis and Daphnis, and, again, in this connection there is a most interesting allusion in the fragment of the Berenice quoted by Athenaeus : And if any man that hath his livelihood from the salt sea, and whose nets serve him for ploughs, prays for wealth, and luck in fishing, let him sacrifice at midnight, to this goddess, the sacred fish that they call "silver-white," for that it is brightest of sheen of all then let the fisher set his nets, and he shall draw them full from the sea interesting because the fishermen on the Ionian coast of Sicily still call a fish of the mullet species " argente -bianco," " silver -white." One hot day at the end Df January the present writer and two friends rowed round the caverned cliffs of Capo San Andrea, below Taormina, past the Grotto della Sirena, or Cave of 327 The Land of Theocritus Ulysses, where a deep thunder revealed the force of the sea-swell, which in vast azure and green depths surged rhythmically in and out ; and as we rounded Isola San Nicolo and came into the purple azure calm and moored to the rocks close by the singular antique sea-wall which connects San Nicolo and the headland of San Andrea (beneath which the Ionian Sea surges with titanic force whenever the scirocco or the mezzogiorno blows, or when the ocean - swell predicts a coming storm a sea-wall about whose origin and even whose certain purpose no two authorities agree), we saw first a solitary figure, perched in an appar- ently unscalable and inescapable " coign of vantage," leaning with poised trident intent to spear one of the great palamiti (a kind of white salmon which fre- quents the Ionian waters, and especially near rocky coasts) swimming in the mar- vellously transparent depths just under- neath ; and then, as we came into the azure stillness of the little bay, behold, no other than Theocritus's old fisherman him- self, or his latter-day lineal descendant at least 1 Beyond, an ancient fisherman and a rock are 328 The Land of Theocritus fashioned, a rugged rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net for his cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldst say that he is fishing with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his neck, grey- haired though he be, but his strength is as the strength of youth. Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn old man is a vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the rough wall a little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there. The ancient fisherman, the rugged rock, the rock-set vineyard, a brown -legged lad sitting singing on the broken wall a popular Sicilian ballad about a villainous hero of the Mafia, one Musulino and the grey- haired old man struggling "might and main " with the intricacies and dragging weight of a huge net : every feature of the picture is repeated, as though Theocritus had been a Tauromenian, and had viewed this very scene at this very spot the spot, it is said, where the Ionian Greeks who were the pioneers of the Hellenic emigrants to Sicily first landed. Another great though less known poet a Latin, not a Greek may have looked often on a like scene ; for Cornelius Severus, the panegyrist of Cicero and author of Etna (a beautiful Sicilian poem inspired 329 The Land of Theocritus by the Mother Mountain, and long attributed to Virgil in some still extant editions of whose works, indeed, it appears as authen- tically the master's), was a native of Taormina, and is, indeed, her chief literary glory, though, strange to say, his memory remains unhonoured by any street dedica- tion amid the prolific classical nomenclature which aptly and inaptly distinguishes the ancient hill -town. Taormina has cause, certainly, to be proud of the imposing record of her great citizens and famous (or infamous) rulers and visitors, from Pythagoras and Pindar to Goethe and Freeman, from Andromachos to Humboldt, from Timoleon to Garibaldi. " All the world comes to Taormina " is quite as true to the patriotic Taorminesi as that all roads lead to Rome. Alas, the ancient Tauromenion is fallen into decay. The once proud city, raised on an older Sikelian town by migrant lonians from the despoiled city of Naxos far below, is now, both in extent and beauty, but the broken image of its past. From the lava -strewn promontory of Capo Schiso, the site of Naxos the shore, now lined with wild mulberry -trees, where was once the long approach to the beautiful Temple of Apollo 330 The Land of Theocritus Acragte"s one may indeed obtain a glimpse of how ancient Tauromenion must have appeared to the Greeks and Carthaginians, Romans and Saracens ; for rock and sea and sky do not change, and Taormina is pre-eminently a rock-set and sea-girt and sky-companioned town. The magnificent Theatre, too, crowning its eastern heights, has survived from age to age. Moreover, the greater Greek city overflowed down the eastern and south eastern slopes, and so would not be visible from Naxos. From Andromachos and Dionysius, the Tyrant of Syracuse who destroyed Naxos, from the infamous Agathocles and the great Timoleon, to Tyndarion, who induced Pyrrhus to come to Sicily and to land his Oriental host on the Tauromenion shore ; from Pythagoras, the wisest of men, who in the course of his long and extraordinary life, spent in all the known lands of anti- quity, visited Taormina and reformed its laws,* to Strabo, the famous peripatetic * It was while at Taormina that Pythagoras had the strange psychical experience of knowing himself to be in two places at once (the other was the ancient town in Magna Graecia, now known as Metaponto in Calabria), and here also that with his "subtle music " he cured the madness of a youth who had become frenzied through love 331 The Land of Theocritus geographer, and to Diodorus Siculus, the Pausanias of Sicily ; from Pindar to Theo- critus, who, according to an erudite if not very authentic Sicilian monographist, " loved well the black kids and singing shepherds and the rare Euganea of Taor- mina " ; * from Empedocles whose tra- ditional rude tower (at a height on ^Etna of 9600 feet) is still, as the "Torre del Filosofo," shown beyond the last ridges of that terrible Valle del Bove, a vast sombre wilderness which can be entered from the east only, " an abyss some three miles in width, and bounded on three sides by perpendicular cliffs from 2000 to 4000 feet high " to Cornelius Severus, born in the little hill-town itself, the Latin poet- celebrant of ^Etna, the younger brother of Virgil, as he is lovingly called by Cesareo, both because of his Virgilian music and from his long association with the great master : from the building of the famous Greek Theatre (little of which has survived in the magnificent Roman ruin which is (guarito per forza di musica i furori bestiali di un giovanetto innamorato, as his erudite Italian biographer relates). * The famous wine of Taormina, called Euganea, was praised by Pliny, and long selected for sacred festivals at Rome. 332 The Land of Theocritus now the universal attraction to Taormina) by Andromachos, whom Plutarch calls the greatest Greek prince of his day (the builder of the theatre and forum, the vast serpentine aqueduct and the temples of Apollo Archage'te's and Dionysius and also, it is said, the author of the old Sikelian town's extant name, from Mount Tauro behind), to the days when it was crowded with native and foreign Hellenes to witness the dramas of ^Eschylus who may well have " assisted," as the French say, for the ancient Naxos was but a brief coast voyage from Syracuse, where the greatest of tragedians spent so many years, and in a field close by which he met in his old age his strange death of Sophocles, and of Euripides. Alas, these great names are now but empty sounds in Sicily. No- where survives the spirit which prompted the Syracusans in the moment of their crushing triumph over the Athenian Armada and, with the ruin of Athens that followed, the passing of the Hellenic dominion of the world to grant freedom to the few famished captives, among the thousands perishing in the dreadful hollow pits of precipitous quarries, who could recite " scenes " of verses of Euripides. 333 The Land of Theocritus But there is no end to classical remini- scence, historic interest, and present charm in all this marvellous southern coast of Sicily, of which Taormina is the popular centre. From the roof-top terrace above the antique Naumachia where I write I see not only the whole of picturesque Taormina and Pindar's " ytna, Pillar of Heaven," but all that was ancient Tauro- menion ; eastward the coast mountains of Messina, the Straits, Calabria from Reggio to Cape Spartivento, forty miles away ; and southward Aci Reale, Catania, the long line of Mount Hybla, the promontory of Epipolyae, and Syracuse with flooding memories of a hundred familiar names, heroes and poets and historians. Above, Monte Venere, the Hill of Venus, has already a star ; flute-notes, like those of the shepherds of Pan, come floating from the lentisk thickets ; and I realise that this twentieth-century garment is but a dia- phanous robe wherethrough one beholds again the vanished pagan world. 334 ROME IN AFRICA I To write in full the story of the march of Rome in Africa would involve an under- taking on a Gibbonian scale. The record is a stirring one, even if read or heard far from where the war-boats of the triumphant Republic succeeded the Carthaginian galleys to be in turn ousted by the piratical rovers of the European littoral. The story has, in truth, an epic grandeur which would appeal to us even if the theme were not already illumined, now here, now there, by the genius of Livy and Sallust, of Strabo and Polybius. On the one side of the Mid-Sea a vast territory makes a landway between the Atlantic and the waters of the Orient. For generations this looming continent meant, to the young nation of Rome, Carthage only. From the Homeric Isle of the Lot os -Eaters to the huge shoulder of Atlas, that hid from the Romans they knew not what mysterious tract of virgin 335 Rome in Africa land or unoared sea, the shadow of the Great City lay, a shadow minatory as well as awe-inspiring. Then " the veil of the inviolate " was rent. Sicily, which Greece had peopled and the Sidonian trader had won, was the first tangled mesh of the net in which the glory of Carthage was caught and strangled. Then came that mighty struggle for the lordship of the sea. The greatest soldier whom the world has ever seen vowed that Rome should lie prostrate before her ancient enemy. Hannibal, as we know, triumphed over the ignorance and madness of the civic merchants and fathers, and accomplished an unparalleled feat in the transportation of an army of Numidian barbarians, Greek archers, Balearic slingers, His- panian spearmen, and Gaulish swordsmen across the thitherto impregnable barrier of the Alps. For years he lay like a night- mare on the breast of palpitating Italy. Yet even at the bloody rout at the Trebia, even by the shores of that Umbrian lake where the reeds were stained red in the gore of an exterminated army, even at Cannae, where Hannibal reached the pinnacle of his fame and Rome knew her lowest fall even then the wind bore the sigh 336 Rome in Africa of a terrible lamentation, Delenda est Carthago ! The ebb of this gigantic tide of war began after that appalling slaughter at dawn by the intricate windings of the Metaurus, when Claudius Nero threw into the camp of the Carthaginian the head of his brother Hasdrubal. The rumour of this ebb was heard all along the Latin coasts when, as Hannibal learned, with prescient dread of the inevitable, Cornelius Scipio Scipio Africanus had set sail for Africa from Lilybaeum, that old-time van- guard of the Sidonian Empire, and had landed unopposed at the Fair Promontory,* beyond which, but a few years before, no Roman galley had dared to show its prow. Had he prescience also of that little Bithy- nian town near the Sea of Marmora of which the Oracle had spoken, where, after long wanderings, and after many years, he should find release in that potent grain of poison which, even in the day of victory, he carried in his ring ? So at the last died Hannibal, son of Hamilcar, knowing that Punic Carthage was soon or late to fall * To the moderns known as Cape Bon. Again and again the Carthaginians stipulated to the Greeks and Romans : " Thus far and no farther ! " IV 337 Y Rome in Africa for ever, and that already the neck of his nation was under the heel of Rome. A memorable year, that hundred and eighty- third before our Christian era ; for then also died Scipio, Hannibal's conqueror, in exile and bitterness of heart. Within one year , again, nearly four decades later (B.C. 146), Carthage, after a final death- struggle, was razed to the ground by another Scipio, and Corinth, dragging with it the pride of Hellas, fell from her high estate. It was not till the third Punic war that North Africa became one of the greatest provinces of the Roman Empire, and was able to supply the suzerain power with mercenaries, innumerable horse, and vast stores of grain beyond all reckoning to become, in a word, the granary of Rome. Speedily, indeed, the African Province became indispensable as a source of grain - supply. Just as in Great Britain to-day the whole yield of grain would be utterly inadequate to the need of the nation, so, in the late republican and early imperial days of Rome, Italy could not do more than produce enough to feed her soldiers. So exigent was this need at all times that historians have agreed in saying that war 338 Rome in Africa in Africa meant famine in Rome. Even in the days of Julius Caesar the sovran power had its feet among the corn-fields of Ifrikia : without those corn-fields ruinous collapse of Rome's metropolitan sway might soon have happened. Most of us who remember our Livy will recollect how Pompey, in revolt against the dominant power, stopped the export of grain from the African ports, thus hoping to gain swifter and easier surrender on the part of Caesar. But though the Roman populace laughed at first, it soon whimpered. Bread became a luxury, and grain food of all kind threatened to discontinue. At the urgent prayers of the people, Caesar was at last forced to arrange a treaty with his rival. Even then the great city had begun that career of trust in accidental aid to her supremacy which in due time was to end so disastrously. When, later, Caesar brought the fratricidal war in Africa to a close, and punished the revolted towns, he imposed enormous indemnity demands demands which at that time no other country in the world could have met. From the small town of Leptis alone, that port where Hannibal had landed from Italy when he came in haste, but vainly, 339 Rome in Africa to the relief of Carthago, Plutarch tells us he obtained a fine of 2,500,000 pounds of oil. To the Roman citizens he declared on his return that they could depend on Africa for an annual contribution of 200,000 bushels of corn and 3,000,000 pounds' weight of oil. In the reign of the Emperor Commodus this transmarine traffic had become so vast as well as so increasingly important that two great fleets of ships were built for this carry ing -trade. It was in a ship of one of these fleets, a vessel named the Castor and Pollux, in which St. Paul embarked from Malta. In the time of Constantine the whole wheat -supply of Africa went to the Italian markets, while Byzantium was enriched with that of Egypt. What bitterness there must have been in all this to the broken Carthaginian nation ! The " Glory of the World " had sunk into " a granary for the Roman people, a hunting-ground for their amphi- theatres, and an emporium for slaves." * Generations after the last Punic war, when an obscure and persecuted faith had become the Church Militant, Africa, how- ever, was to give to her and to the world * Herder's Ideen. 34 Rome in Africa one of the greatest of her Fathers, one of the most treasured of her books, as to the pagan literature of all time it was to bring the poet -philosopher whose story of Cupidoro and Psyche is still loveliest of all tales to tell. St. Augustine, Apuleius great names these, though others there are to cherish likewise with gratitude or admiration. What a wonderful wave of new life that march of Rome across the northern extremity of what was then almost wholly the Dark Continent that steady, relent- less march from the Tripolitan coast across mountains and deserts, along town-studded shores where the Punic speech was para- mount, down the vast valleys of the Aures (Mons Aurasius), whither the fierce in- digenous folk had already begun to con- centrate, over interminable plains scorched by the sun, tortured by drought, haunted by miasma, round the gigantic slopes of the Altas, and so onward, till the great awe came upon all when there was no more land, but only the Atlantic surf blown upon the white walls of Tingis (Tangier), over against the Pillars of Hercules. No wonder that, to the Romans them- 341 Rome in Africa selves, the story was, as already said, of epic grandeur ! They had absorbed Greece, they had destroyed the Phoenician Empire, they had begun that unparalleled quest of the impossible which is still the most marvellous chapter in the chronicle of human history, and to them it seemed that they were not only invincible, but " the one people." The Roman Empire was that blind aristocrat among nations in whose ears was nothing but the be- wildering acclaim of its own deeds, in whose eyes the fine dust of its own way- faring. It had not yet had reason to know that Greece, in dying, had bequeathed her subtle but sure revenge ; that when, in Africa, Marius the Consul was permitted by the Senate to extend his power, that dreadful system of tyranny was involved which Rome's whole effort had been to render impossible ; that with her ever- growing congregation of slaves, from re- motest Asia to Ultima Thule, she was, as it were, building the walls of her great- ness with self -disintegrating mortar. This march of Rome in Africa was described by her historians with the one- sidedness characteristic of the Roman scribe in all epochs. They recorded with 342 Rome in Africa pride the rise of fair cities along that distant littoral, in the recesses of that remote land ; but, after all, Hippo Regius was already the offspring of Carthage, Julia Caesarea was but the Punic lol, and it was a Phoenician, not a Latin, folk who built Tapsus and Igilgilis. Far inland, Cirta had frowned from her mountain seat long before the Romans had ever heard of their first African ally, Masimssa and the dark-skinned traders at Sicca Veneris (Succoth-Benoth) had no need to know Latin to transact their business with the Phoenician merchants who fared to the City of the Rock. To-day the Bedouin wanders where of old the Roman walked in pride. To-day there is desolation, or but a new and often crude amelioration of Moorish undoing, where in that far yesterday a democratic civilisation prevailed. An immense wave of civilisation, indeed, must have spread inland from Carthage- south-eastward, westward, and along the Mediterranean coast. It was swept before the more potent wave of Rome as mys- teriously as its far greater counterpart in Etruria. The stronger power not only absorbed the weaker, but obliterated it. 343 Rome in Africa Nationality, language, nomenclature even, perished, or underwent as radical a change as the name of the Queen City itself.* Even before the Byzantine rule the trans- formation was complete. When the Van- dals came as a crowd of destroying locusts and settled upon the land, from the frontiers of Mauritania to Uthina of the Buried Treasure and to the Syrtean Gulf, there could hardly have been a trace of Punic domination left to add zest to the barbaric mining of the Roman dominion. So that while the Latin wanderer, at the time of the close of the second Punic war, would still have found the Carthaginian race, language, and manner throughout the African Province, he would have dis- covered a rapid ebb in this seven centuries' tide, even after the crowning triumph of the younger Scipio. His son might traverse the same road and see only the standards of Rome, salute only the proconsular authority instead of that of the Soffete of Carthage, and find that civis Romanus sum was the one passport for the orderly and safe faring forth to which he had set * The Punic name of Carthage was Kartha- Hadatha (Kart-Hadact), which on Greek lips became Carchedon, and, on Latin, Carthago. 344 Rome in Africa himself. It might even be that his grandson would seek in vain at Sicca Veneris itself for any acknowledged worshipper of the Sidonian Ashtoreth ; in vain ask at Ubbo for what the image -traders of Hippone no longer sold, Baal-Hammon having vanished before Jupiter ; and it might well be that along the whole seaboard, from Had- rumetum (Susa) to Icosium (Algiers), he would hear the children answer him in the same tongue that he himself as a child had heard by the Tiber-side. It was not till long after the destruction of Carthage by Scipio Africanus the Younger that the African Province was marked off into great colonies or states. The Roman domination, indeed, which really began during the sway of the Numidian potentate Masinissa, was not frankly dis- played till the accession of Micipsa. So frank was it that when the great Jugurtha succeeded his uncle, no Numidian rose against him because he had removed Hiempsal and Adherbal, the legitimate heirs, and this because he had declared war to the death against the rapacious power which had swallowed Carthage and now hungered for Numidia, because he had refused to bow, as Micipsa and his 345 Rome in Africa sons had done, before a Roman legate. In the seven years' struggle which ensued, the Republic spilt its blood freely, and, as though the Numidian prince were another Hannibal, sent against him her ablest generals. Perhaps even the conqueror Marius would not have achieved his crown- ing victory but for the treachery of Bocchus, King of Mauritania, who did not scruple to betray a champion who was at once the national hero and his son-in-law. With the fall of Jugurtha the dominion of Rome in Africa became supreme. The nations beyond the eastern Atlas, even the nomad peoples who had trafficked with the Car- thaginians, and brought rumours of the vanished glory of a still more ancient Semitic race which had penetrated the continent as far as the Mountains of the Moon, sent ambassadors to Tunis, to Cirta, to Hippone, with offers of alliance and service. Everywhere, in the inland cities as well as in the towns along the littoral, the proconsular authority was not only sovran but autocratic. Let us glance for a moment at the further achievement of Rome in Africa before the Caesarean division. When the third Punic war ended in the overthrow 346 Rome in Africa of Carthage, the Romans indulged in the mistake of believing that the city, as well as the Phoenician Empire, had been utterly destroyed. Almost certainly this ruin was not that complete annihilation which the orators of the Forum proclaimed to the populace. In any case, thirty years later the Punic city was thoroughly Romanised by Caius Gracchus. As Colonia Carthago, in the period of Julius Caesar and Augustus, it was one of the finest cities of the empire. Its utter destruction came later, when the Vandal overthrew its few remaining temples, when the Arab strode through its grass- grown ways, and when the Turkish horse stamped on the fallen marble and porphyry that are now to be sought in the byways of Tunis, or in the towns of Italy whither the Pisan and Genoese corsairs blithely conveyed them. It was in the proconsulate of Lucius Paulinus that the Romans overcame the whole of Mauritania, and lifted the eagles of Rome against the farther as well as the hither flanks of Atlas. Under Claudius, Roman Africa extended from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean. He it was who divided the vast province of Mauritania into Tingitana and Mauritania Caesariensis, 347 Rome in Africa the former with Tingis for its capital, the latter with ancient lol, renamed Julia Caesarea, as its queen city. The distinction has endured to this day, though Tangier is no longer the capital of the Empire of Morocco (Tingitana), and Cherchell is but a small sea- port in the great French colony of Algeria.* But, before this, proconsular Africa had been officially organised. Till Csesar annexed Numidia, on that momentous occasion when he fared over sea, not to fight with the mountain-king struggling for independence, but to quell the in- subordination of the Pompeiian faction, who would fain have wrested the ancient Carthaginian realm from his grasp till then, the African Province consisted of Tripolitana, Byzacium, and Zeugitana that is, the whole extent of what is now the Beylick of Tripoli and the Regency of Tunisia. But, with the absorption of Numidia, the frontier was extended so as to comprise the greater part of what is now the province of Constantine. Beyond Nu- midia the whole reach of country was known as Mauritania. * Mauritania Caesariensis comprised what is now the province of Oran and the greater part of that of Algeria. 348 Rome in Africa It was not till 74 B.C. that the vast tract to the east of Tripoli ceased to be a kingdom and became part of Roman Africa. With Cyrenaica, the proconsular dominion now extended from Egypt to the Atlantic. Caesar, a quarter of a century later, de- finitively partitioned the country into the provinces of Zeugitana, Numidia, Mauri- tania Orientalis, and Mauritania Occiden- talis broadly, Tunisia, the province of Constantine, Algeria (with the province of Oran), and the empire of Morocco, of to-day. It was at this time also that he placed Numidia under the rule of Sallust, who proved so excellent a historian and so merciless a viceroy. We owe too much to Sallust's brilliant record of Jugurtha and the Jugurthine war not to rejoice at Caesar's choice, though it was an ill day for the traders of Numidia when the cold, keen, cynical, implacable Roman aristocrat took over the government of the country, and bid it be tributary to him and to the state. By this time Utica, " the ancient town," as its name signifies, which was a flourish- ing Sidonian colony when Dido sailed to Africa from Tyre on that memorable expedition which ended in the creation of 349 Rome in Africa a new Phoenician town (Kartha-Hadatha, the New Town, in contradistinction to Utica, the old), had been made the metro- polis of Roman Africa. It had seen the outgoing of Hanno's world-famous armada to seek new lands (B.C. 446), the return of Hamilcar from his disastrous attempt to convert Sicily into a Sidonian colony (B.C. 481), and was itself the landing- place and captive stronghold of Agathocles the Greek, in the day when Hellas learned she was to have the empire of the world. It had watched Dido build Carthage ; it had witnessed the superb efflorescence of that city through seven centuries ; it had seen it utterly laid waste by Scipio. Here " New Rome " had its brief dream . . . to pass away with the suicide of Cato within these ancient walls. Like " the patient East," it had bowed before the storm, and it survived to see itself inherit the civic dignity of its sister city. But its triumph was a poor one, won as it was through wrong and meanness and treachery. Throughout its long life of a thousand years it never accomplished anything great. Nor does it seem ever to have been beautiful and a place of joy, as was Cyrene, across the gulf to the east ; though that the 350 Rome in Africa decorative arts flourished there has been proved beyond question. To-day it consists of the wretched Arab village of Bou-Chater, set in a waste and miasmic place. Few care to visit it, save archaeologists. Utica lived a thousand years or more ; Tunis is of an equal antiquity ; but an hour of the Athens of Pericles would be worth the lifetime of a Punic trader, and a day of imperial Rome would outweigh the petty chronicle of the dull aeon of the town which, Leo Africanus tells us, is no other than Sidonian Tarshish. Practically all North Africa was now in the grip of Rome. From desert Libya to the regions of the mysterious Troglo- dytae, from impenetrable ^Ethiopia north- westward to the Atlantic littoral, north- eastward to superbly fertile, inexhaustible Africa Propria, the whisper of Rome was heard. To have won this mighty conquest was, of itself, an imperial destiny. Rome was now inevitably the mistress of the Western World. With proconsular Africa as her base, with her maritime dominion estab- lished along the whole coast, from the prow of Sicily to ancient Massilia, and thence by subject Spain till Europe and 351 Rome in Africa Africa met face to face at the narrow strait " fretum nostri maris," Sallust writes, with pride in the possessive pronoun Rome might well scan with eagle eyes the wide vista of the ancient world, from the furthest Asian steppe to that remote hyper- borean region of which barbarian whispers had already reached her ears. II The traveller who would scrupulously examine the route of this great march of Rome in North Africa could not do so from any one locality on the Punic coast with intent to move thence undeviatingly westward ; for the feet of the conquerors fared now this way and now that. As we have seen, Cyrenai'ca became a Roman province long after the fires of Baal had ceased to flame on the Carthaginian gulf, and the south lands were accepted tribu- taries when Mauritania was still ruled in name only, and when the tribes of Zeugi- tana knew Rome more as a rumour than as a dread actuality. Uthina and Thysdrus, 352 Rome in Africa though to the south of Carthage, were occupied (if not created) by Rome later than Sicca, that lay under the eastward shadow of Numidia, and Cirta was still a Berber citadel when the Italian merchant galleys were moored in the roadstead of Hippone. But if this pilgrim would traverse the North African empire from end to end, not with too careful heed to the steps of Rome, as that power moved this way and that in her restless quest of dominion, but attentive only to the whole reach of the domain ultimately acquired by her, he would do well to start from that plateau of Barca which lies between the eastern Tripolitan frontier and the extreme of Egypt ; or, better still, from the hither side of the Djebel Akabah-el-Kebir. This was the Catabathmus Magnus of the Romans, and, as the skirt of Egypt was the re- cognised ancient limits of Asia and Africa. From the earliest times Cyrenai'ca was famous for its fertility and beauty. For hundreds of years Cyrene was, in the estimate of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman, what the Arab poets afterwards called Panormus (Palermo) the Gate of Paradise. Though Cyrenai'ca has been a region of iv 353 z Rome in Africa desolation since the Saracenic invasion, following on the ruin wrought upon it by the Persian satrap Chosroes, and though the five vanished cities of Pentapolis were for generations the haunts of the jackal and the wandering Bedouin, the traveller will be well repaid if he go thither. From the site of Cyrene itself is a vista of sur- passing beauty ; near the forlorn modern village are the marvellous stalactitic caves which gave rise to the once familiar tales of a petrified city. But, above all, what memories, what visions, of what here was once so real, of what befell here in that dim long ago ! Herodotus tells us that at so remote a date as the 37th Olympiad (about B.C. 628) a colony of Greeks was guided by a chief of the Libyan nomads to this garden of Africa, and that the Dorian leader, finding a spring of inexhaustible pure water, dedi- cated the fountain to Apollo, settled close by, and called the place Kyre whence probably Cyrene, though the name is claimed to have been given by Aristseus in memory of his mother, that " daughter of Peneus " of whom Apollo had become enamoured. To this day one may hear from Arab lips the echo of the old Dorian 354 Rome in Africa name in Kurin, as in the instance of the four other towns of Pentapolis, of Barca (Apollonia), Ptolemais, Berenice, and Tau- chira (Arsinoe), in Barca, Tollamata, Bernic, and Tanker a. Howsoever it was founded, and what- ever the vicissitudes the kingdom of which it formed part endured, Cyrene was a republic in the time of Aristotle, and, as Sallust has told us, was potent enough to dispute with Carthage the question of what would now be called a scientific frontier. Cyrenaica became, as already mentioned, a Roman province in B.C. 76, having been transferred from the empire of the Ptolemies to the custody of the Roman Senate as a free gift or bequest on the part of Apio the Tranquil. But the stranger, standing on the terraced uplands that overlook what was Penta- polis, and pondering what this ancient Libyan country might have become had Cyrene outvantaged Carthage in the struggle for supremacy ; had Cyrenaica, with Greece and Egypt behind her, risen as mistress of the Mediterranean, in despite of Phoenicia and in affront of Rome the visitor to this sun -scorched loneliness will also re- member that it was here the wise Aristippus 355 Rome in Africa preached his hedonistic doctrine, to the scandal of all Christian moralists ever since ; that here were born Eratosthenes the historian and Callimachus the poet ; and that hence went that nameless Jew whom the Roman soldiery compelled to bear one end of the cross whereon Christ was crucified. Strange indeed that the Jews resorted thither in such numbers, even before the Christian era ! Was this the reason why Cyrene lost its high estate ? Was it that the worshipper of Apollo would not bide the Hebrew fanatic ? Cyrenian Jews, as we know, were present at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost ; and are we not told in the Acts of the Apostles that Christian Jews of Cyrene, fleeing with their Cyprian comrades from the wrath of their countrymen and rulers, were the first preachers of Christianity to the Greeks of Antioch ? But before the Jews, before the Romans, Cyrenai'ca was the beautiful land of Apollo and Aphrodite, Cyrene the fair city whose fountains and proud steeds were immortalised by Pindar. It is a matter of choice whether the start in the footsteps of Rome be made from Susa or Tunis. From his own experience 356 Rome in Africa the present writer would suggest, for a trip limited to French Africa, and to exclude the pachalik of Tripoli, a visit to Tunis and Carthage first, and then to go by steamer to Susa, whence after some swallow- flights to the north and south, to strike westward. But, for convenience' sake, let us suppose that we are bound for Susa by the inland route, via Oudina, Zaghouan, and Kairouan, and that we have already visited Utica and Carthage and the Hermean Promontory. It is a beautiful as well as fascinating journey from Tunis as far as Zaghouan, and can be done in one day if an early start be made, so as to allow from three to five hours for tramping over the five or six mile area of ruined Uthina (Oudina). How well I remember that glorious spring day when, after having driven some fourteen kilometres from Tunis, leaving on the right the great salt lake called Sebka-es-Sedjoumi, and having passed through the desolate ruins of Mohammedia, I saw for the first time the great aqueduct which, in ancient days, carried along its sixty -mile reach from Mount Zaghouan seven million gallons of water a day into Carthage. There is nothing more impressive in the world 357 Rome in Africa than this vast creature, as it seems, that appears to move majestically along the plain, now so desolate and filled with the dust of oblivion, but once alive with Punic industry and the commerce of great and populous Roman cities. Even those tra- vellers who have seen the superb aqueduct near Nimes, in Provence, even those who have looked with wonder and admiration at the mighty ruins which serrate the Campagna as though they were impregnable barriers of reef in the grip of the sea, must admit that this Carthaginian aqueduct, perhaps the greatest work wrought by the Romans in North Africa, is a not less mighty achievement. Here, too, one may see the solitary goatherd standing beneath some giant arch, within his eyes the mystery of the great silence and greater loneliness ; but here he is of a race more ancient even than that of the Campagna shepherd, is clothed in a long grey-white robe instead of in goat -skins, and for austere greeting or response has only " Allah is great ! " * * Most of the shepherds employed in this part of Tunisia are Berbers from the eastern Aures, and are racially quite distinct from the nomad Arabs, whom they resemble so much in most respects, and with whom they are at one in religion. They are 358 Rome in Africa It is a common mistake in Tunis due largely to the ignorant misrepresentation of the so-called " guides," not one of whom is worth the five francs a day he is wont to demand for what he euphemistically calls his services that Punic Carthage benefited by this great aqueduct. Even when Caius Gracchus rebuilt the city that thirty years earlier had been laid in ruins by the younger Scipio, the inhabitants were dependent mainly upon their storage from rainfall ; largely in the primitive manner to be seen at this day at Sfax, where the innumerable gourd-shaped rain- receptacles at first puzzle the stranger. It was not till the indefatigable Hadrian (in A.D. 120) was induced by the wealthy citizens of New Carthage to bridge the distance between them and Mons Zeugi- tanus a gigantic undertaking, not ade- quately completed till the reign of Septimius Severus that the Carthaginian could stoop, as his Moorish or French fellow citizen of to-day can do, and drink the clear cold of that ancient race which inhabited Africa not only before the arrival of the Romans, but before Utica had a rival in Carthage, probably before the first Sidonian ever adventured beyond the Hermean Promontory. 359 Rome in Africa mountain water within the gates of the city. Alas ! this magnificent work was to share the fate which overtook its Campagna prototype. When Gilimer, the last of the Vandal kings, brought his hordes to besiege Carthage, he ordered its partial destruction, as a material aid in the investiture of the unfortunate city ; and though, later, it was restored by the Byzantine general Belisarius, its still more disastrous ruin was accomplished during the great Arab invasion which followed the heroic gallop across Africa of Mohammed's friend and fiery lieutenant, Okba-bin-Nafa. So mighty were the vast arches, so huge the span of their collective length, that there was even yet scope for barbaric havoc on the part of the Spaniards when Charles V. sent his enormous cosmopolitan armada to the undoing of the corsair stronghold. For gene- rations the broken skeleton was extant, though, indeed, even its de vertebrate parts bid fair to vanish altogether through fan- atical ignorance on the one hand and selfish folly on the other. Then the French engineering genius came to the rescue, and to-day any one who will visit the great cistern and fountain just within that south- eastern gate of Tunis known as the Bab 360 Rome in Africa Sidi Abdullah-esh-Sherif will see as copious and rejoicing a flood of pure mountain water as that which in Rome gushes forth from the conduits of the Acqua Paolo on the Janiculum, or whirls its spray over the doves which ceaselessly flit to and fro above the fount of Trevi. A mile or two from Oued, Melian (or Miliana, a common name for a stream, signifying " ample " or " full ") is crossed and the traveller will have already rightly guessed it to be the Catada of Ptolemy the rough path for Oudina breaks off to the left. The aqueduct is left behind, and one bears south-eastward through an ever- increasing number of megalithic and other ruins. I found the country of a singular desola- tion and wildness, though not without some faint-hearted signs of agricultural industry here and there. Only once on the way did we encounter a human being in motion, an Arab from Kairouan, mounted on a camel. I say in motion, for twice we caught sight of ragged Bedouin goat- herds prone among the dry reedy grass, as lifeless apparently as bronze statues, save for the watchful gleam in their dark eyes. 361 Rome in Africa I admit to a difficulty in speaking with- out undue enthusiasm about this wide- spread wilderness of ruins that once was Uthina. Carthage, though it is but a site, after all, with few external aids for the recreative imagination, has a lovelier view, seaward and across the great gulf, and inland by the mountain range, from cleft Bou-Kornein to the gigantic shadow of what to the Romans was Mons Zeugitanus ; Tebessa is more magnificent in her ruin ; Timgad has a more swift appeal to the eye ; the hundred other ruined towns, inland or by the sea, or high set among the hills, have each their own grandeur, beauty, or desolate impressiveness. But, as to every one there is one paramount loveliness, one particular mountain range or happy valley, one signally fortunate marriage of land and sea, or one rarest town, village, or homestead, so there is for most of us one place of ancient ruin of an incom- parable haunting charm. No association is to be held to account here, for almost nothing is known of this ancient city. No one can tell when Oudina grew up in the desert, or if the Roman town was super- imposed on a Phoenician site. One French authority has suggested its identity with the 362 Rome in Africa Tricamaron, where the hoarded treasure of Genseric was accumulated, till Belisarius and his Byzantine troops annihilated the Vandals under Gilimer ; but this is surmise only. It has no history, save that it rose, flourished, fell, and disappeared. "But it must have been an immense city, second perhaps only to Carthage itself. There is peril for the unwary explorer searching amidst the debris of the amphitheatre, the theatre, the huge reservoirs, the inchoate citadel, and that vast and nameless ruin further to the eastward ; for at any moment he may be precipitated into some obscure chasm, half hid by impending slabs of stone or by rank weeds. Indeed, anywhere within a radius of three or four miles he must perforce be vigilant, particularly if mounted on mule or horse back. What a superb view can be had from any point amid this voiceless, lifeless desolation ! To the west, the lonely plain with the serpentine aqueduct ; to the south and east, the Zeugitanian mountain range ; to the north the shine of the sea beyond the white splat ch that is Tunis, with, it may be, a gleam of golden light flashing upon Sidi- bou-Said, the Arab village on the summit of the headland immediately to the west 363 Rome in Africa of Carthage. Voiceless and lifeless only in the hot months ; for in winter and early spring one will be annoyed by a wild barking of shepherd dogs, as fretful and suspicious if not so malignant as those of the Campagna ; and will catch glimpses of the proud, resentful Bedouin Arabs, who have their gourbis among the boulder- like ruins on the citadel heights. I know not why those Oudina nomads struck me as more barbaric in mien than the Bedouin of other parts, and forlorn almost as the troglodyte Berbers whom ere this I had seen beyond Tlem^en, near the Morocco frontier, but so it was. What memorable hours these that we spent in silent Uthina ! For visible record I have but a little coin, found amidst a tangle of stone and weed. Alas ! I am no numismatist, and so learned little from my treasure -trove, though now I know it to be Byzantine money of the reign of Const antine the Great (circa A.D. 300). Twenty miles further south bring one to the ancient capital of Africa Propria. Zaghouan is, however, a disappointing place ; the few streets are insignificant and malodorous ; there is no inn where a European can lodge, or even obtain 364 Rome in Africa provision ; and the general air of the inhabitants seems equivalent to saying that all the infidels in the world are not worth one fez, the manufacture of which head- piece, or rather the dyeing of it, is the hereditary trade and sole occupation of the Zaghouanite. But the beautiful and romantically situated little Roman temple in the valley of Ain Ayah is, to the said infidels, worth all the fezzes betwixt Tangier and Stambool. There is a delicious fount, where one's mind may have iced fancies while the body cools. In Zaghouan itself nothing of ancient Zeugis is to be seen, except possibly the Roman Mauresque gate called Bab-el-Goos. In the long journey from Zaghouan to Kairouan the river has to be crossed, and then there is a dreary tract of desert to be traversed. As the Holy City of North Africa, ranking as it does before Sidi-bou- Medine, near Tlemcen, or even the Oasis of Sidi Okba, in the Sahara, it is of great interest ; but for the Roman enthusiast it has no immediate appeal. It has been claimed that this African Mecca was before Mohammed's day a ruined Roman city ; but in support of this no reputable authority can be cited, and the very significance of 365 Rome in Africa the name (caravanserai) has been held to indicate that it was an Arab town from the first. The only Roman remains in Kairouan, indeed, are the marble and porphyry columns of the Zaonia of Sidi Okba ; but these spoils of conquest did not even come from one place, fallen Uthina or ruined Zama, but were gathered from out the general dissolution of Roman Ifrikia. From Kairouan to Susa is an easy and monotonous journey. But when once the beautiful town is reached there is no more monotony, within or without its boundaries, for him who is on the track of Rome. Here he is in the fateful Hadrumetum (Adrumetum), near which Hannibal landed when he returned from Italy to save the tottering Carthaginian Empire, and whither erelong he fled after his crushing and final defeat on the field of Zama. Here, too, Caesar landed with his small army when he came to bind Africa indissolubly to Rome. From that day to this Hadrumetum Susa has never failed to be one of the chief places on the African littoral, regarded by the Turks as of supreme importance strategi- cally, coveted by the foiled Italians, and now being fortified by the French, as one 366 Rome in Africa of their most valuable seaports, though, as yet, Tunisia is French in fact only and not in name, for the fiction of the Beylik or Regency is still maintained. If the traveller will take his stand near the Old Sea-Gate (Bab-el-Bahr) he will not only be able to discover the remains of the Roman breakwater, but may also give his imagination free play. If it cannot picture stirring and dramatic visions at Hadrumetum, not for him is the joy of this Roman quest ! Older, however, it is than the date of the first Scipionic in- vasion ; older even than Carthage, we are told by Sallust. Possibly it was founded by colonists from Cyrenaica ; more likely by merchants from Tyre. Dido must have passed it on her westward voyage ; centuries later Genseric and his Vandals stared from its walls at the last Roman galleys sinking in the roadstead. And now when one is pleasantly quartered at the Hotel de France in Susa, one should plan out the of ten -vary ing but ever-converging route of the Roman march the route he would fain follow so as to see all there is really worth seeing. Few, alas, can have this good hap. Here, at any rate, I must perforce omit 367 Rome in Africa description, or even mention, of scores of interesting Roman sites, and still more interesting Roman remains. It would be an impossible task, in truth. As an eminent archaeologist has estimated, a complete list of Roman remains of towns and villages would extend to well over six hundred enumerations. Even the seventy colonies and thirty -one municipice are beyond my present scope. It may be as well to add here, however, that past importance is never to be measured by present extent. Thus Tunis was but the insignificant Tunes and Tlemsen the Athens, the Florence, the Cyrene, of Moorish Barbary was but the unimportant Pomaria, lovely then as now for its olive-trees and fruitful plenty, but held only for its gifts of fruit and grain, while the wretched nomad villages of Dougga and Chemtou and Madaourouch overlie Thysdrus and Simittu and Madaura. As only a few can be alluded to, then, let the most interesting only be chosen. Broadly the line of march, after some more or less abrupt divagations, at first will strike from royal Thysdrus (El Djem) across Tunisia to Zama. The battle-field of Zama, or Djama, is on the Tunisian frontier, and may most conveniently be reached from 368 Rome in Africa El Kef, though the nearest point is the place familiar to archaeologists as Narra- garra. No one knows exactly where this, one of the most momentous battles of history, was actually fought, though Sallust indicates it with approximate exactitude. El Kef itself can now easily be gained from Souk-el- Arba, which is also the best starting- place for the splendid ruins of ancient Bulla Regia, and for Simittu and its marble quarries, or from Souk-Ahras, whence it is easy to visit the majestic ruins of Khamisa, second only in archaeological value to those of Tebessa and Timgad. Though " Thurs- day's Market," as the name signifies (Souk- el-Khamis), ceased to be Thubursicum early in the history of Caesarean Africa, its name survived it eight centuries in the Arabic Teboursouk. In the dark ages since the fourteenth century even the mutilated name of this great and important city was utterly forgotten. Thubursicum became simply "Thursday-Market Ruins." It is only three miles from Teboursouk to Dugga, name almost identical with the Thugga of Ptolemy, with its lovely temple of the Corinthian order and fragmentary Punic mausoleum ; and thence it is an easy journey to upland Thignica (Tunga or iv 369 2 A Rome in Africa Dunga now), with its even more beautiful temple, and a glorious view scarcely inferior to that from Uthina. Near by is the wild picturesque glen of the Bachairet Essay oda, " the valley of lions," of which Sir Grenville Temple says that he had been informed by the Caid of Teboursouk that four evenings before he passed through it sixteen lions had been seen there together. The whole country hereabouts is wild and lonely, and the traveller, particularly if he be alone, will do well to be circumspect. When Dr. Davis entered Khamisa (Tebour- souk) he was assailed, he says, with such ejaculations from the Arabs as : " The fire is kindled for you ! " "Oh you unbelieving son of hell ! " " Despiser of the Prophet doomed to everlasting fire ! " and " Filth of the earth, your haughtiness will soon be brought low ! " Personally I encoun- tered little of this animosity in Africa. In fact, I heard really abusive terms nowhere save among the fanatics at the Holy Town of the Sahara, the Oasis of Sidi Okba. But Souk-Ahras touches us more, for this was the ancient Tagaste, whose chief claim to remembrance is that here, in the fourth century (A.D. 354), the wife of a decurion of the city named 370 Rome in Africa Patricius gave birth to a man child to become known throughout the Christian world as St. Augustine. Here the youth lived till he was sixteen, when he went as a student across the hills to Madaura, then a city of renown for its scholastic training. When here he must often have walked over the same hilly uplands as Apuleius (Madaura 's glory) had been wont to do, and pondered the Christian heresy while reading one of the sweet pagan "books" of The Golden Ass. He could not have left a laurel wreath on the tomb of the great African writer, for Apuleius was buried at (Ea (the modern Tripoli), of which place his wife was a native. From Madaura, no doubt with frequent visits to the large city of Tipasa (whose ruins as Tifesch can be seen in the magnificently fertile valley of that name, not far from Madaourouch), Augustine went to Carthage. Thence, in the year 373, and as a dis- tinguished scholar, he returned to Tagaste, where, despite his profession as a gram- marian, he lived, as he tells us in the Confessions, " in a manner to cause the most profound affliction to his mother." Thirteen years later he was converted to Christianity by the saintly Monica, and in A.D. 390 he 371 Rome in Africa was ordained a priest at Hippone (close to the modern Bona, the Ubbo of the Carthaginians, the Hippo Regius of the Romans, and then, as now, one of the most opulent towns of the African littoral), and here for thirty -five years he lived as priest and bishop. He had collected his famous library and written The City of God and his Confessions when the Vandals descended upon doomed Roman Africa. He died before the city fell, after its long fourteen months' siege, and it is enough to set against the ill name given to these Northmen that in the ruining of the town they spared the MSS. and the library of the far-famed Christian bishop. If, before leaving Tunisia, however, the traveller makes a southward journey from El Kef, so as to visit Hydra, the ancient Ammaedara, with its remarkable and beauti- ful triumphal arch, he can reach Tebessa, and thence make his way on mule -back or camel-back south-westerly to the Ziban and the Sahara, for Biskra and El Kantara ; or westerly, on horseback or in a light vehicle, by way of Ain-Khrenchela, Timgad, and Lambessa, to Batna and Constantine ; or, again, due north by the French military railway through the Madaourouch country, 372 Rome in Africa to Souk-Ahras, whence by rail westward to Const antine, northward to Bona, or eastward to Tunis. Tebessa the lordly Theveste of old, most splendid of all extinct Roman towns in Roman Africa, is entered from the west, past an ancient aqueduct, and through the Gate of Solomon. If ap- proached (and whether one enters by the Gate of Solomon or the Arch of Caracalla the Bab-el-Djedid it will be through a country literally studded with Roman remains, a country of great richness and beauty, notable for its ample water-supply and its innumerable gardens) on a market- day, one will wonder at the enormous quantity of sheep, goats, and cattle brought in by the neighbouring tribes. We are now at the important Roman junction to ancient Constantine, Hippone on the north, Lambessa on the west, and Tacape (Gabes) on the Syrtean Gulf, the goal of the great highway constructed in the reign of Hadrian to connect Africa Inferior with Carthage a road, as we learn from a Roman inscription, 191 miles 700 paces in length, and made by that famous Third Augustan Legion which has left so many traces in western Numidia. The Romans 373 Rome in Africa always had a keen eye for sites combining beauty, health, and utility, and, except Tlemcen, it is doubtful if there is any place in North Africa more fortunately situated than Tebessa. After Carthage and Constantine, moreover, it ranks next in point of historic interest. To the student of the rise of Christianity it will appeal as one of the first African cities to follow the example of Carthage, about A.D. 150, and as the place of martyrdom of St. Maximilian during the proconsulate of Dion, and of St. Crispin in the reign of Diocletian. By the student of the Vandal invasion of southern Europe and North Africa it will be remembered as one of the chief towns of the Vandal Kingdom, in accordance with the treaty in 443 between Genseric and Valentinian, Emperor of the West. But the Vandal genius was neither constructive nor conservative, even when not actively anarchic. Tebessa sank into a depopulated town of little importance till the coming of that regenerative Byzan- tine tide which succeeded the Vandalian scourge. The great Byzantine general Solomon, the successor of Belisarius, re- stored Theveste, though, after his four years' struggle with the widespread revolt 374 Rome in Africa which broke out after the departure of Belisarius, he was himself doomed to meet death in battle before the walls of his favourite town (A.D. 543) a disaster that was followed by the second and final collapse of Theveste. The only known record on stone concerning the Vandal in- vasion which has as yet been discovered in Africa is the inscription on the triumphal arch of Tebessa of singular value, there- fore. Though the town and neighbourhood are full of Roman remains of great interest and beauty, even in their mutilated con- dition, there are two buildings of paramount interest the Triumphal Arch of Caracalla and the Basilica. The splendid quadrifons arch is superior in every respect to that of Janus in Rome. It is built with large solid blocks of cut stone, and has many singular features which would attract the architect. The vast Basilica, a short dis- tance to the north-east of modern Tebessa, is one of the most interesting examples of the Roman genius to be found in Africa. Its immense size, its beauty, its manifold interest, make it worthy to be the goal of an enthusiastic archaeologist. The wealth of mosaics, many of great beauty, is extraordinary. Here, too, was found an 375 Rome in Africa instance of the remarkable embalming secrets which the Romans had learned from Egypt. When the sepulchral chamber was examined a few years ago the tomb of Palladius, Bishop of Idicia, was opened, and the shrivelled frame, with its undecayed brown hair resting on a bed of laurel leaves, was disclosed in perfect preservation, and this after the lapse of fourteen centuries. From Tebessa one may without serious difficulty make one's way across country to the Sahara by way of Seriana. Thence he will go to Biskra the Beautiful (ad Piscinam), which to the present writer seems an almost ideal winter resort for invalids needing a dry, rainless, and warm climate, and a place of endless charm and interest Queen Oasis of the Sahara, as it is deservedly called. Thence, again, northward by the upper Ziban to El Kantara, that magnificent gorge, the Foum- es -Sahara, the Mouth of the Desert, as it is called by the Arabs the ancient Calceus Herculis, and centre of innumerable Roman remains, and where there was a permanent station of the famous Third Augustan Legion. When, at the French occupation, Marshal St.-Arnaud led his small army through this wild and solitary defile, and 376 Rome in Africa beheld the desert stretching out before him, he cried to his troops, " We may flatter ourselves we are the first soldiers to pass through this region." Yet almost beside where he stood, graven imperishably in the rock, was an inscription setting forth that the Sixth Roman Legion, under Antonine, had made that very journey seventeen centuries before. For all we know, moreover, for all the Legionaries knew, the Punic trumpets may have re- sounded ages before against those high gaunt cliffs, which, northward, become of an incomparable desolation. The actual headquarters of the Third Legion was at Lambaesis (Lambessa), further north. But, interesting as Lambessa is, with its notable Praetorium and ruined temples and monu- mental buildings, Timgad (Thamugas) far surpasses it. It has been called the Pompeii of Africa, and not wholly inaptly, as is the wont in these arbitrary appellations. The Forum, the beautiful Triumphal Arch, the Temple to Jupiter Capitolinus, and a score of other objects, make Timgad a. place of singular interest and fascination. As it is much more conveniently reached (from the west and north) than almost any other ruined Roman town, it should be 377 Rome in Africa missed by no visitor to French Africa. The journey from Const antine to Biskra can pleasantly be broken at Batna, whence Timgad can be visited in one long day. Of Constantine itself what can one say in a limited space but that it is the grandest of hill-set towns, and has a history as romantic and stirring and momentous as any city in Africa after Carthage ? Numi- dian, Pagan Roman, Christian Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Turk, and the Gaul of to-day have successively ruled here. All have left their traces. Here Masinissa, Jugurtha, and Tacfarinas dreamed of an African empire wherein the Roman usurper would have no part ; here Sallust wandered in his lovely private domain, pondering his history of the Jugurthine war, or speculating on what further extor- tion he could impose on the unfortunate wealthy citizens ; here the exiled St. Cyprian moved through the narrow streets, singing his Christian hymns ; here the Turkish pasha laughed at the liberties of the Arab republic ; here the greatest of its Beys was strangled by treacherous soldiers ; and here the French army met with its most crushing disaster in Africa. The bugle of the Zouave is now heard in 378 Rome in Africa place of the Turkish clarion, as that succeeded the fanfare of the Roman trumpet, the shrill summons of the Punic herald, the rude cymbal of the Berber warrior, secure, as he thought, within his Numidian eyry. Setif, the best stopping-place between Algiers and Constantine, though so im- portant a Roman town has not now much of interest, but there are the remarkable ruins of Cuiculum, some twenty miles away. It was not far from here that were discovered those wonderful mosaics, drawings of which were exhibited in the Paris exhibition of 1878, one of the most notable having reference to that Crescens, a young Moor, who at the Hippodrome in Rome during the ten years A.D. 115-124, with his four horses, Accept us, Circus, Delicatus, and Cotynus, gained prizes to the value of over a million and a half sesterces. Thence that is, from Constantine or the neighbourhood it is easy to make a long sweep by the seaboard, westward by Philippe ville (the Roman Rusicada, the Punic Tapsus) on to Algiers and Cher- chell (Icosium and lol) : eastward by Bona, Bizerta (Hppo Zarytus or Diarrhy- tus), and Utica. 379 Rome in Africa There are, it may be added, Roman remains in Morocco, but there are few of which we have knowledge that are of any importance. It is doubtful if explora- tion, when once the western Moorish empire is open to all, will reveal much. Beyond Mauritania, Setifensis, and Julia Caesarea on the coast, the Roman settlements were rather temporary military stations than towns. Even in the province of Oran there is little. Tlemsen itself was never more than Pomaria municipia. If I had to select only three particular points of vantage in this great march of Rome, pre-eminently notable on their own account as well, I think they would be El Djem (Thysdrus), Tebessa, and Constantine. Cherchell, it is true, has an exceptional attraction ; and if it were possible to get a glimpse of Africa as it was in the time of Caligula, there is probably no city one would so gladly see as that Punic lol of which, as Julia Caesarea, Juba II. made an African Athens. This admirable scholar, noble gentleman, and kingly sovereign was one of the greatest men to whom Africa gave birth. As true a patriot as Jugurtha, he was all that that barbaric prince was not. To-day we remember him in connec- 380 Rome in Africa tion with the vast cenotaph on the Barbary coast known to the French colonists as the Tombeau de la Chretienne, to the Arabs as the Kbour-er-Roumia (Tomb of the Roman woman) ; and because he was the husband of Cleopatra Selene, the beautiful daughter of Mark Antony and his famed Egyptian queen. But even in his own day the Athenians raised a statue in his honour. The Numidians and Berbers worshipped him as divine : " Et Juba, Mauris volen- tibus, deus est" But with him the royal Numidian race came to an end ; for his only son rebelled against Rome, and died ignominiously. His daughter, Drusilla, it may be added, was that Drusilla, wife of Felix, Governor of Judaea, before whom Paul was arraigned. It is possible, as has been suggested, that it was she who, remembering her father's tolerant and beneficent reign, counselled her stern Roman husband to moderation, and even to inquiry into the strange tenets of those of whom Paul was so fearless a champion : so that he said, " Go thy way for this time ; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee." But to-day almost nothing Roman stands on the site of lol, " splendidissima colonia Cczsarensis." 381 Rome in Africa El Djem, the ancient Thysdrus, remote in the south-east of Tunisia, can be reached from either of the four coast towns, Susa, Monastir (Ruspina), Mahadia (Aphrodi- sium),* or Sfax. It is unlikely, however, that any ordinary African traveller will find himself in either of the two smaller towns, sans European inns, sans con- veniences of any kind, sans other means of transport than Sahara mules or small ragged horses. Susa, both with regard to distance and convenience, is a much better point of departure than Sfax a large and important town, the Liverpool of Tunisia, if the capital be considered the London of the regency. The triple -towered Sfax, the ancient Taphroura, is well worth a visit for itself ; but, except traders in sponges and oil, few are likely to find their way here, save as passengers by the French or Italian steamer to or from Tripoli, or those anxious to go hence to Gabes ; though not for Gabes's sake, Tacape of old though it be, but so as to visit Djerba, that island in the Gulf of * Also "Africa." This is the " city of Africa " alluded to in Froissart. It is supposed also to be the site of Turris Hannibalis the castle and farm of Hannibal. 382 Rome in Africa Syrtis Minor familiar to all lovers of Homer as the Isle of the Lotophagi. One important consideration in the choice of Susa is that a good carriage can be obtained here more easily a matter of real moment, as it is certainly better to make a caravanserai of one's vehicle than to deliver one's self over to the dirt and vermin of the fondouk in the Arab village near the Amphitheatre. The road hither, whether from the north, east, or south, is a dreary one. In the hot season it is a waste of sand and blinding shingle : a journey from which the horses suffer much, as there is only one good well on the track, and that only relatively good. But if the road be dreary, the mind can transform it with memories of the past. As Thysdrus the town was not so im- portant as its neighbour Thapsus, though as Thysdritana Colonia it must have risen to great dignity and beauty. Julius Caesar rated its worth somewhat scornfully when he rode into it in triumph after the fall of Thapsus, though doubtless to this deserved or undeserved clemency some- thing of its swift after-prosperity was due. Here it was that the octogenarian pro- consul Gordian reluctantly assumed, at 383 Rome in Africa his soldiers' bidding, the imperial purple, and after a few weeks of barren honour paid the penalty of that folly, and, childless now, throneless, an old man and dis- honoured, took with his own hands the life that would have been spared by his victor only out of contempt. One could not readily imagine a more impressive scene than that of El Djem when come upon under the spell of moon- light. From the vast waste around no sound is heard save the cry of the night wind moving across the sand steppes, the long wailing howl of disconsolate jackals, or the savage snarling of hyenas. Out of the gloom issues a vast and majestic structure. It is in some respects one of the finest of Roman amphitheatres. It has an unusual fascination in the fact that it seems to have risen in majesty in this African desert only to begin a long- protracted ruin, without ever having ful- filled its purpose, or for but a relatively brief season. All the labour of hosts of slaves and native bondsmen went for naught. For before completion of its walls and decorations the hand of fate stayed all ; we know not when or how, save that it was so, and that thenceforth neither 384 Rome in Africa Roman nor Greek nor Ifrikian could have there the delights of which he had dreamed. It is in bulk that this colossal amphitheatre is so impressive in bulk plus the advantage of its sombre environment. In detail it is of inferior workmanship, and often of perdurable material. But to see it " stand out gigantic " in that sun-swept solitary waste is a thing to remember, to wonder at with ever new wonder, admiration, and something of awe. It is difficult in the face of this universal ruin of Rome to accept the Arab proverb that " yesterday never existed " ; it is impossible to believe in their profoundly pessimistic alyoum khair min ghodwah, " to-day is better than to-morrow." A new era has surely dawned for North Africa with the French domination. To me this domination seems to make for nothing but good ; nor would any other nation than the French be so likely to attempt a valiant approach to the unattainable, and endeavour to walk where Rome walked, with her sovran dignity, her power, her imperial destiny. Alas, no nation now extant has the architectonic genius of the ancient mistress of the world. We are inheritors, IV 385 2 B Rome in Africa not usurpers. Once again North Africa may become the granary of an alien empire, perhaps of half Europe ; and who shall say that she may not evolve into a great and free and powerful republic when she will have won from the French dominion what Rome gained from Greece, what Greece learned from the very race which peopled this wonderful Afric shore ? For this is true : the greatest race of the ancient world learned from Phoenician lore, and even Plato himself, when he visited Cyre- naica, Hellene of a late day though he was, doubtless added to his knowledge of what were then the occult sciences from the lip of Egyptian exile or Sidonian mage. Homer, Herodotus, and Virgil have each borne witness to the art of Phoenicia. In the Iliad we read of the silver urn of unexcelled workmanship in its contours and reliefs, from the hands of " Sidonian artists " ; and again, in the Odyssey, of "the silver vase with living sculpture wrought." Lucan the scholar tells us that it was the Phoenicians who first introduced into Greece the mystery of letters, as it was they who first by carven hieroglyphs expressed what thitherto only the tongue could convey. Rome in Africa Thus, in turn, in the words of Horace, Greece allured her rude conqueror, Rome, and introduced her art into unpolished Latium : " Gratia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes Intulit agresti Latio. . , ." Nearly two thousand years ago the in- habitants of Thysdritana Colonia watched their vast and magnificent Amphitheatre grow towards completion. It was to be a place of pleasure for them and their children and their children's children, and to be a monument of Rome's eternal endurance, her irresistible sway, her invincible empire. Yet, ere a few generations had gone by after its first unremembered disaster, Thysdrus was already a wild and ruined spot, and a Libyan chief tainess made it her eyry and proud vantage. Vandal and Arab went over it as waves over low land where the dykes have given way. Thysdrus disappeared as though blotted from the earth. The Amphitheatre stood as magnifi- cent in its ruin as of yore, yet in ruin. To-day the heedless nomad makes his lair under its arches. For the rest, it knows the owl and the bat. In the fierce summer, when the wandering Bedouin has gone to 387 Rome in Africa the mountains or the coast, these nocturnal inheritors of the glory of Thysdrus share it with the hyena and the jackal. For the rune of Thysdrus is the rune of Rome in Africa, of " imperishable Rome." The noble music is dead. But only now is this drear silence being understood aright ; only now the ultimate cause and inevitable fulfilment of this colossal ruin of the mightiest empire the world has known. In the lesson of Rome we have a menace, an omen not to be gainsaid, an augury eloquent as death in the midst of life, as well as the stimulus of a supreme example. 388 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE IN the Foreword to the first Edition of Literary Geography (published by the Pall Mall Press, London, in 1904, and followed by a second edition in 1907) the author explained that : " The following papers on the distinctive features of the actual or delineated country of certain famous writers, and on certain regions which have many literary associa- tions, now collectively grouped under the title Literary Geography, have appeared at intervals during 1903 and 1904 in The Pall Mall Magazine. The order in which they appeared there has not been adhered to, and here and there a few passages or quotations or illustrations have been can- celled ; otherwise, save for the correction of one or two slips in nomenclature or other misstatements, the articles appear as they were written." 389 Bibliographical Note It is obvious that the choice of theme has been arbitrary. Where, for instance, is " The Country of Thomas Hardy " ? But " Wessex " has been so exploited that further writing on the subject seemed to be superfluous. It is, however, equally obvious that, to be adequately inclusive, not a single volume but a Cyclopaedia of Literary Geography would be necessary. The present volume aims at nothing more than to be a readable companion in times of leisure for those who are in sympathy with the author's choice of writers and localities ; and if they share his own pleasure in wandering through these "literary lands" he on his part will be well content. From the present volume three papers are omitted : Scott-Land, Dickens-Land, and The Literary Geography of the English Lakes. Of the three Travel Sketches which form Part II. Through Nelson's Duchy was written for. the Pall Mall Magazine of June 1903. The Land of Theocritus and Rome in Africa appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 39 Bibliographical Note the first in April 1903, the second in June 1895 ; and through the courtesy of the Editors of these Periodicals I am enabled to include them in Volume IV. of the Selected Writings of William Sharp. ELIZABETH A. SHARP. BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LTBBABV BERKELEY 261177 U N I > ,BRARY U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES