THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 LX^vM^WUV^^v-l-^
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS

 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEFENSON 
 From a photograph taken at Honolulu
 
 ESSAYS 
 AND CRITICISMS 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS ^TEVENSON 
 
 
 JpSTON 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD S- CO. 
 ^' MCMVII
 
 EDITORIAL NOTE ^ll<,< 
 
 N Essays and Criticisms the publish- P-*]^ 
 ers present for the first time this col- \ Q r\r\ 
 lection of Stevenson's writings. Some 
 of them have heretofore appeared in the Ed- 
 inburgh and Thistle (subscription) editions, 
 but others do not appear in these editions 
 and are here collected for the first time. 
 
 All of them have heretofore appeared in 
 some periodical, due credit for which is given 
 on page viii. In addition the ptiblishers wish 
 to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. fohn 
 Lane, who gave them permission to here re- 
 produce the article entitled A Mountain 
 Town in France. 
 
 In many of these essays Stevenson is found 
 at his best, and the reader seems to be in 
 closer contact with the author than in many 
 of his more finished but less intimate writ- 
 ings. His walking tours are of especial in- 
 terest at this time when walking and out- 
 door sports are so much in vogue. 
 
 1561628
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITIC/SMS 
 
 The essay entitled The Morality of the 
 Profession of Letters is in reality his creed; 
 a noble creed it is and few preachers have 
 more conscientiously observed the rules laid 
 down for the regulation of their lives than 
 has Stevenson, in all his writings, observed 
 the rules that follow : 
 
 " There are two duties incumbent on any 
 man who enters on the business of writing: 
 truth to fact and a good spirit in treatment. 
 . . . Everything but prejudice should find a 
 voice through him; he should see the good 
 in all things; where he has even a fear that 
 he does not wholly understand, there should 
 he be wholly silent: and he should recognise 
 from the first that he has only one tool in 
 his workshop, and that tool is sympathy." 
 
 ^T
 
 TiO'BETiT LOUIS STEVEtJ^SOtH. 
 
 'Child of delight and heir of loveliness, 
 Great friend, whose followers would fain he true." 
 
 %ichard 'Burton
 
 FIRST COLLECTED EDITION 
 
 Herbert B. Turner & Co., Boston, 1903 
 
 Originally Published 
 
 I Portfolio December, 1875 
 
 II Portfolio November, 1874 
 
 III Portfolio April, May, 1875 
 
 IV Illustrated London News 
 
 Summer Number, 1896 
 
 V Cornhill Magazine May, 1876 
 
 VI The Studio Winter Number, 1896 
 
 I Fortnightly Review April, 1881 
 
 II Contemporary Review April. i88s 
 
 III Magazine of Art November, 1889 
 
 IV British Weekly May 13, 1887 
 
 I Pall Mall Gazette February 17, 1881 
 
 II Pall Mall Gazette February 21, 188 1 
 
 III Pall Mall Gazette February 26, 1881 
 
 IV Pall Mall Gazette March 5, 1881 
 
 Vlll
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 On the Road 
 
 I Roads i 
 
 II On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant 
 
 Places i 5 
 
 III An Autumn Effect 31 
 
 IV A Winter's Walk in Carrick and 
 
 Galloway 69 
 
 V Forest Notes 87 
 
 VI A Mountain Town in France 134 
 
 Literary Papers 
 
 I The Morality of the Profession 
 
 OF Letters I57 
 
 II On Some Technical Elements of 
 
 Style in Literature 178 
 
 III A Note on Realism 212 
 
 IV Books which have Influenced Me 224 
 
 Swiss Notes 
 
 I Health and Mountains 239 
 
 II Davos in Winter 247 
 
 III Alpine Diversions 254 
 
 IV The Stimulation of the Alps 261 
 
 ix
 
 ON THE ROAD
 
 ROADS 
 
 1873 
 
 \0 amateur will deny that he can find 
 more pleasure in a single drawing, 
 over which he can sit a whole quiet 
 forenoon, and so gradually study himself 
 into humour with the artist, than he can 
 ever extraft from the dazzle and accumula- 
 tion of incongruous impressions that send 
 him, weary and stupefied, out of some fa- 
 mous pifture-gallery. But what is thus ad- 
 mitted with regard to art is not extended to 
 the (so-called) natural beauties: no amount 
 of excess in sublime mountain outline or the 
 graces of cultivated lowland can do any- 
 thing, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade 
 the palate. We are not at all sure, however, 
 that moderation, and a regimen tolerably 
 austere, even in scenery, are not healthful 
 and strengthening to the taste; and that the 
 best school for a lover of nature is not to be
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 found in one of those countries where there 
 is no stage efifeft — nothing salient or sud- 
 den, — but a quiet spirit of orderly and har- 
 monious beauty pervades all the details, so 
 that we can patiently attend to each of the 
 little touches that strike in us, all of them to- 
 gether, the subdued note of the landscape. 
 it is in scenery such as this that we find our- 
 selves in the right temper to seek out small 
 sequestered loveliness. The constant recur- 
 rence of similar combinations of colour and 
 outline gradually forces upon us a sense of 
 how the harmony has been built up, and we 
 become familiar with something of nature's 
 mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your 
 "rural voluptuary," — not to remain awe- 
 stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to 
 sit deafened over the big drum in the or- 
 chestra, but day by day to teach himself 
 some new beauty — to experience some 
 new vague and tranquil sensation that has 
 before evaded him. It is not the people who 
 "have pined and hungered after nature 
 many a year, in the great city pent, "as Cole- 
 ridge said in the poem that made Charles 
 Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is not
 
 ROADS 
 
 those who make the greatest progress in 
 this intimacy with her, or who are most 
 quick to see and have the greatest gusto to 
 enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is 
 minute knowledge and long-continued lov- 
 ing industry that make the true dilettante. 
 A man must have thought much over scen- 
 ery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no 
 youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can 
 possess itself of the last essence of beauty. 
 Probably most people's heads are growing 
 bare before they can see all in a landscape 
 that they have the capability of seeing; and, 
 even then, it will be only for one little mo- 
 ment of consummation before the faculties 
 are again on the decline, and they that look 
 out of the windows begin to be darkened 
 and restrained in sight. Thus the study of 
 nature should be carried forward thoroughly 
 and with system. Every gratification should 
 be rolled long under the tongue, and we 
 should be always eager to analyse and com- 
 pare, in order that we may be able to give 
 some plausible reason for our admirations. 
 True, it is difficult to put even approximately 
 into words the kind of feelings thus called 
 
 3
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 into play. There is a dangerous vice inherent 
 in any such intelleftual refining upon vague 
 sensation. The analysis of such satisfadions 
 lends itself very readily to literary affeda- 
 tions ; and we can all think of instances where 
 it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid 
 influence, even upon an author's choice of 
 language and the turn of his sentences. And 
 yet there is much that makes the attempt 
 attradive; for any expression, however im- 
 perfe<^, once given to a cherished feeling, 
 seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure 
 we take in it. A common sentiment is one of 
 those great goods that make life palatable 
 and ever new. The knowledge that another 
 has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even 
 if they are little things, not much otherwise 
 than we have seen them, will continue to 
 the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures. 
 Let the reader, then, betake himself in the 
 spirit we have recommended to some of the 
 quieter kinds of English landscape. In those 
 homely and placid agricultural distrids, fa- 
 miliarity will bring into relief many things 
 worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly 
 home to him by a sort of loving repetition; 
 4
 
 ROADS 
 
 such as the wonderful life-giving speed of 
 windmill sails above the stationary country; 
 the occurrence and recurrence of the same 
 church tower at the end of one long vista 
 after another: and, conspicuous among 
 these sources of quiet pleasure, the chara6\er 
 and variety of the road itself, along which 
 he takes his way. Not only near at hand, in 
 the lithe contortions with which it adapts 
 itself to the interchanges of level and slope, 
 but far away also, when he sees a few hun- 
 dred feet of it upheaved against a hill and 
 shining in the afternoon sun, he will find it 
 an objeft so changeful and enlivening that 
 he can always pleasurably busy his mind 
 about it. He may leave the river-side, or fall 
 out of the way of villages, but the road he 
 has always with him; and, in the true hu- 
 mour of observation, will find in that suffi- 
 cient company. From its subtle windings 
 and changes of level there arises a keen and 
 continuous interest, that keeps the attention 
 ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive ad- 
 justment to the contour of the ground, every 
 little dip and swerve, seems instinft with 
 life and an exquisite sense of balance and 
 
 5
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 beauty. The road rolls upon the easy slopes 
 of the country, like a long ship in the hol- 
 lows of the sea. The very margins of waste 
 ground, as they trench a little farther on the 
 beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of 
 the hedge, have something of the same free 
 delicacy of line — of the same swing and 
 wilfulness. You might think for a whole 
 summer's day (and not have thought it any 
 nearer an end by evening) what concourse 
 and succession of circumstances has pro- 
 duced the least of these deflexions; and it 
 is, perhaps, just in this that we should look 
 for the secret of their interest. A foot-path 
 across a meadow — in all its human way- 
 wardness and unaccountability, in all the 
 grata protervitiis of its varying direction — 
 will always be more to us than a railroad 
 well engineered through a difficult country.' 
 No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our at- 
 tention: we seem to have slipped for one 
 lawless little moment out of the iron rule of 
 
 ' Compare Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and 
 Hell: "Improvement makes straight loads; but the 
 irooked roads, without improvement, are roads of Ge- 
 nius."
 
 ROADS 
 
 cause and effe£l ; and so we revert at once to 
 some of the pleasant old heresies of personi- 
 fication, always poetically orthodox, and at- 
 tribute a sort of free-will, an adive and 
 spontaneous life, to the white riband of road 
 that lengthens out, and bends, and cun- 
 ningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the 
 land before our eyes. We remember, as we 
 write, some miles of fine wide highway laid 
 out with conscious aesthetic artifice through 
 a broken and richly cultivated trad of coun- 
 try. It is said that the engineer had Hogarth's 
 line of beauty in his mind as he laid them 
 down. And the result is striking. One splen- 
 did satisfying sweep passes with easy tran- 
 sition into another, and there is nothing to 
 trouble or dislocate the strong continuous- 
 ness of the main line of the road. And yet 
 there is something wanting. There is here 
 no saving imperfedion, none of those sec- 
 ondary curves and little trepidations of di- 
 rection that carry, in natural roads, our 
 curiosity adively along with them. One feels 
 at once that this road has not grown like a 
 natural road, but has been laboriously made 
 to pattern; and that, while a model may be 
 
 7
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 academically correct in outline, it will al- 
 ways be inanimate and cold. The traveller is 
 also aware of a sympathy of mood between 
 himself and the road he travels. We have all 
 seen ways that have wandered into heavy 
 sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily 
 over the dunes like a trodden serpent: here 
 we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious 
 pace; and so a sympathy is preserved be- 
 tween our frame of mind and the expression 
 of the relaxed, heavy curves of the roadway. 
 Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason 
 might perhaps resolve with a little trouble. 
 We might refleft that the present road had 
 been developed out of a track spontaneously 
 followed by generations of primitive way- 
 farers; and might see in its expression a tes- 
 timony that those generations had been af- 
 feded at the same ground, one after another, 
 in the same manner as we are affeded to- 
 day. Or we might carry the reflection fur- 
 ther, and remind ourselves that where the 
 air is invigorating and the ground firm under 
 the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take 
 advantage of small undulations, and he will 
 turn carelessly aside from the dired way 
 8
 
 ROADS 
 
 wherever there is anything beautiful to ex- 
 amine or some promise of a wider view ; so 
 that even a bush of wild roses may perma- 
 nently bias and deform the straight path over 
 the meadow; whereas, where the soil is 
 heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of 
 mere progression, and goes with a bowed 
 head heavily and unobservantly forward. 
 Reason, however, will not carry us the 
 whole way; for the sentiment often recurs 
 in situations where it is very hard to imagine 
 any possible explanation; and indeed, if we 
 drive briskly along a good, well-made road 
 in an open vehicle, we shall experience this 
 sympathy almost at its fullest. We feel the 
 sharp settle of the springs at some curiously 
 twisted corner; after a steep ascent, the fresh 
 air dances in our faces as we rattle precipi- 
 tately down the other side, and we find it 
 difficult to avoid attributing something 
 headlong, a sort of abandon, to the road it- 
 self. 
 
 The mere winding of the path is enough 
 to enliven a long day's walk in even a com- 
 monplace or dreary country-side. Some- 
 thing that we have seen from miles back, 
 
 9
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 upon an eminence, is so long iiid from us, 
 as we wander through folded valleys or 
 among woods, that our expedation of see- 
 ing it again is sharpened into a violent ap- 
 petite, and as we draw nearer we impatient- 
 ly quicken our steps and turn every corner 
 with a beating heart. It is through these pro- 
 longations of expectancy, this succession of 
 one hope to another, that we live out long 
 seasons of pleasure in a few hours' walk. It 
 is in following these capricious sinuosities 
 that we learn, only bit by bit and through 
 one coquettish reticence after another, much 
 as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole 
 loveliness of the country. This disposition 
 always preserves something new to be seen, 
 and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many 
 different points of distant view before it al- 
 lows us finally to approach the hoped-for 
 destination. 
 
 In its connection with the traffic, and 
 whole friendly intercourse with the country, 
 there is something very pleasant in that suc- 
 cession of saunterers and brisk and busi- 
 ness-like passers-by, that peoples our ways 
 and helps to build up what Walt Whitman 
 
 lO
 
 ROADS 
 
 calls "the cheerful voice of the public road, 
 the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But 
 out of the great network of ways that binds 
 all life together from the hill-farm to the city, 
 there is something individual to most, and, 
 on the whole, nearly as much choice on the 
 score of company as on the score of beauty 
 or easy travel. On some we are never long 
 without the sound of wheels, and folk pass 
 us by so thickly that we lose the sense of 
 their number. But on others, about little- 
 frequented distrids, a meeting is an affair of 
 moment; we have the sight far off of some 
 one coming towards us, the growing defi- 
 niteness of the person, and then the brief 
 passage and salutation, and the road left 
 empty in front of us for perhaps a great 
 while to come. Such encounters have a wist- 
 ful interest that can hardly be understood by 
 the dweller in places more populous. We 
 remember standing beside a countryman 
 once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a 
 city that was more than ordinarily crowded 
 and bustling; he seemed stunned and be- 
 wildered by the continual passage of differ- 
 ent faces; and after a long pause, during
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 which he appeared to search for some suit- 
 able expression, he said timidly that there 
 seemed to be a great deal of meeting there- 
 abouts. The phrase is significant. It is the 
 expression of town-lite in the language of 
 the long, solitary country highways. A 
 meeting of one with one was what this man 
 had been used to in the pastoral uplands 
 from which he came; and the concourse of 
 the streets was in his eyes only an extraor- 
 dinary multiplication of such "meetings." 
 
 And now we come to that last and most 
 subtle quality of all, to that sense of pros- 
 pect, of outlook, that is brought so power- 
 fully to our minds by a road. In real nature 
 as well as in old landscapes, beneath that 
 impartial daylight in which a whole varie- 
 gated plain is plunged and saturated, the 
 line of the road leads the eye forth with the 
 vague sense of desire up to the green limit 
 of the horizon. Travel is brought home to 
 us, and we visit in spirit every grove and 
 hamlet that tempts us in the distance. Sehn- 
 sucht — the passion for what is ever beyond 
 — is livingly expressed in that white riband 
 of possible travel that severs the uneven 
 
 12
 
 ROADS 
 
 country ; not a ploughman following his 
 plough up the shining furrow, not the blue 
 smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is 
 brought to us with a sense of nearness and 
 attainability by this wavering line of junc- 
 tion. There is a passionate paragraph in 
 Werther that strikes the very key. " When 
 1 came hither," he writes, " how the beau- 
 tiful valley invited me on every side, as 1 
 gazed down into it from the hill-top ! There 
 the wood — ah, that 1 might mingle in its 
 shadows! there the mountain summits — 
 ah, that 1 might look down from them over 
 the broad country! the interlinked hills! the 
 secret valleys !0, to lose myself among their 
 mysteries ! 1 hurried into the midst, and came 
 back without finding aught 1 hoped for. 
 Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast 
 whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; 
 sight and feeling alike plunge and lose them- 
 selves in the prosped, and we yearn to sur- 
 render our whole being, and let it be filled 
 full with all the rapture of one single glori- 
 ous sensation; and alas! when we hasten to 
 the fruition, when there is changed to here, 
 all is afterwards as it was before, and we 
 
 '3
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 stand in our indigent and cramped estate, 
 and our soul tiiirsts after a still ebbing elix- 
 ir." It is to tills wandering and uneasy spirit 
 of anticipation that roads minister. Every 
 little vista, every little glimpse that we have 
 of what lies before us, gives the impatient 
 imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the 
 body and already plunge into the shadow 
 of the woods, and overlook from the hill- 
 top the plain beyond it, and wander in the 
 windings of the valleys that are still far in 
 front. The road is already there — we shall 
 not be long behind. It is as if we were 
 marching with the rear of a great army, and, 
 from far before, heard the acclamation of the 
 people as the vanguard entered some friend- 
 ly and jubilant city. Would not every man, 
 through all the long miles of march, feel as 
 if he also were within the gates? 
 
 14
 
 II 
 
 ON THE ENJOYMENT OF 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 1874 
 
 \1 is a difficult matter to make the 
 most of any given place, and we 
 have much in our own power. 
 Things looked at patiently from one side 
 after another generally end by showing a 
 side that is beautiful. A few months ago 
 some words were said in the Portfolio as to 
 an "austere regimen in scenery"; and such 
 a discipline was then recommended as 
 "healthful and strengthening to the taste." 
 That is the text, so to speak, of the present 
 essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be 
 understood, is something more than a mere 
 walk before breakfast to whet the appetite. 
 For when we are put down in some un- 
 sightly neighbourhood, and especially if we 
 have come to be more or less dependent on 
 what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 out beautiful things with all the ardour and 
 patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day 
 by day we perfed ourselves in the art of see- 
 ing nature more favourably. We learn to live 
 with her, as people learn to live with fretful 
 or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on 
 what is good, and shut our eyes against all 
 that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, 
 also, to come to each place in the right spirit. 
 The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 
 "fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir 
 en chemin" ; and into these discourses he 
 weaves something out of all that he sees and 
 suffers by the way; they take their tone 
 greatly from the varying charaAer of the 
 scene; a sharp ascent brings different 
 thoughts from a level road; and the man's 
 Hincies grow lighter as he comes out of the 
 wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery 
 any more affed the thoughts than the 
 thoughts affed the scenery. We see places 
 through our humours as through differently 
 coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term 
 in the equation, a note of the chord, and 
 make discord or harmony almost at will. 
 There is no fear for the result, if we can but 
 16
 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 surrender ourselves sufficiently to the coun- 
 try that surrounds and follows us, so that 
 we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or 
 telling ourselves some suitable sort of story 
 as we go. We become thus, in some sense, 
 a centre of beauty; we are provocative of 
 beauty, much as a gentle and sincere char- 
 ader is provocative of sincerity and gentle- 
 ness in others. And even where there is no 
 harmony to be elicited by the quickest and 
 most obedient of spirits, we may still em- 
 bellish a place with some attradion of ro- 
 mance. We may learn to go far afield for as- 
 sociations, and handle them lightly when we 
 have found them. Sometimes an old print 
 comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot 
 lit up at once with piduresque imaginations, 
 by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or 
 Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay 
 figure for many an English lane. And I sup- 
 pose the Trossachs would hardly be the 
 Trossachs for most tourists if a man of ad- 
 mirable romantic instind had not peopled 
 it for them with harmonious figures, and 
 brought them thither with minds rightly 
 prepared for the impression. There is half 
 
 • 7
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the battle in this preparation. For instance: 
 I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper 
 spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of 
 our own Highlands. I am happier where it 
 is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased 
 without trees. I understand that there are 
 some phases of mental trouble that harmo- 
 nise well with such surroundings, and that 
 some persons, by the dispensing power of 
 the imagination, can go back several centu- 
 ries in spirit, and put themselves into sym- 
 pathy with the hunted, houseless, unsocia- 
 ble way of life that was in its place upon 
 these savage hills. Now, when 1 am sad, 1 
 like nature to charm me out of my sadness, 
 like David before Saul; and the thought of 
 these past ages strikes nothing in me but an 
 unpleasant pity; so that 1 can never hit on 
 the right humour for this sort of landscape, 
 and lose much pleasure in consequence. 
 Still, even here, if 1 were only let alone, and 
 time enough were given, I should have all 
 manner of pleasures, and take many clear 
 and beautiful images away with me when I 
 left. When we cannot think ourselves into 
 sympathy with the great features of a coun-
 
 UNPLEASANT PL A CES 
 
 try, we learn to ignore them, and put our 
 head among the grass for flowers, or pore, 
 for long times together, over the changeful 
 current of a stream. We come down to the 
 sermon in stones, when we are shut out 
 from any poem in the spread landscape. We 
 begin to peep and botanise, we take an in- 
 terest in birds and insefts, we find many 
 things beautiful in miniature. The reader 
 will recollect the little summer scene in 
 Wiitheriiig Heights — the one warm scene, 
 perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable 
 novel — and the great feature that is made 
 therein by grasses and flowers and a little 
 sunshine : this is in the spirit of which 1 now 
 speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors; in- 
 teriors are sometimes as beautiful, often more 
 pifturesque, than the shows of the open air, 
 and they have thatquality of shelter of which 
 1 shall presently have more to say. 
 
 With all this in mind, 1 have often been 
 tempted to put forth the paradox that any 
 place is good enough to live a life in, while 
 it is only in a few, and those highly fa- 
 voured, that we can pass a few hours agree- 
 ably. For, if we only stay long enough we 
 
 19
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 become at home ii. the neighbourhood. 
 Reminiscences spring up, hke flowers, 
 about uninteresting corners. We forget to 
 some degree the superior lovehness of other 
 places, and f^ill into a tolerant and sympa- 
 thetic spirit which is its own reward and 
 justification. Looking back the other day on 
 some recollections of my own, I was aston- 
 ished to find how much I owed to such a 
 residence; six weeks in one unpleasant 
 country-side had done more, it seemed, to 
 quicken and educate my sensibilities than 
 many years in places that jumped more 
 nearly with my inclination. 
 
 The country to which I refer was a level 
 and treeless plateau, over which the winds 
 cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was 
 the same. A river, indeed, fell into the sea 
 near the town where I resided; but the val- 
 ley of the river was shallow and bald, for as 
 far up as ever 1 had the heart to follow it. 
 There were roads, certainly, but roads that 
 had no beauty or interest; for, as there was 
 no timber, and but little irregularity of sur- 
 face, you saw your whole walk exposed to 
 you from the beginning: there was nothing 
 20
 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 left to fancy, nothing to exped, nothing to 
 see by the wayside, save here and there an 
 unhomely-looking homestead, and here and 
 there a soHtary, spedacled stone-breaker; 
 and you were only accompanied, as you 
 went doggedly forward, by the gaunt tele- 
 graph-posts and the hum of the resonant 
 wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had 
 learned to know their song in warm pleas- 
 ant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed 
 to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker 
 by suggested contrast. Even the waste 
 places by the side of the road were not, as 
 Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to 
 Nature" by any decent covering of vegeta- 
 tion. Wherever the land had the chance, it 
 seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny 
 nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, 
 coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in 
 the blue transparent air; but this was of an- 
 other description — this was the nakedness 
 of the North; the earth seemed to know that 
 it was naked, and was ashamed and cold. 
 
 It seemed to be always blowing on that 
 coast. Indeed, this had passed into the speech 
 of the inhabitants, and they saluted each 
 
 ai
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 other when they met with "Breezy, breezy," 
 instead of the customary "Fine day" of far- 
 ther south. These continual winds were not 
 like the harvest breeze, that just keeps an 
 equable pressure against your face as you 
 walk, and serves to set all the trees talking 
 over your head, or bring round you the smell 
 of the wet surface of the country after a 
 shower. They were of the bitter, hard, per- 
 sistent sort, that interferes with sight and 
 respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even 
 such winds as these have their own merit in 
 proper time and place, it is pleasant to see 
 them brandish great masses of shadow. And 
 what a power they have over the colour of 
 the world ! How they ruffle the solid wood- 
 lands in their passage, and make them shud- 
 der and whiten like a single willow! There 
 is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like 
 this among the woods, with all its sights and 
 noises; and the effed gets between some 
 painters and their sober eyesight, so that, 
 even when the rest of their pidure is calm, 
 the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. 
 There was nothing, however, of this sort to 
 be noticed in a country where there were no 
 
 22
 
 UNPLEASANT PL A CES 
 
 trees and hardly any shadows, save the pas- 
 sive shadows of clouds or those of rigid 
 houses and walls. But the wind was never- 
 theless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere 
 could you taste more fully the pleasure of a 
 sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. 
 The reader knows what I mean; he must 
 remember how, when he has sat himself 
 down behind a dyke on a hill-side, he de- 
 lighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through 
 the crannies at his back; how his body 
 tingled all over with warmth, and it began 
 to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow sur- 
 prise, that the country was beautiful, the 
 heather purple, and the far-away hills all 
 marbled with sun and shadow. Words- 
 worth, in a beautiful passage of the "Pre- 
 lude," has used this as a figure for the feeling 
 struck in us by the quiet by-streets of Lon- 
 don after the uproar of the great thorough- 
 fares; and the comparison may be turned the 
 other way with as good effed: 
 
 " Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, 
 Escaped as from an enemy, we turn 
 Abruptly into some sequester'd nook, 
 Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud! " 
 
 23
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 I remember meeting a man once, in a 
 train, who told me of what must have been 
 quite the most perfed instance of this pleas- 
 ure of escape. He had gone up, one sunny, 
 windy morning, to the top of a great cathe- 
 dral somewhere abroad; 1 think it was Co- 
 logne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel 
 by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark 
 stairways, he issued atlast into thesunshine, 
 on a platform high above the town. At that 
 elevation it was quite still and warm ; the 
 gale was only in the lowerstrataofthe air, and 
 he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the 
 church and during his long ascent; and so 
 you may judge of his surprise when, resting 
 his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking 
 over into the Place far below him, he saw 
 the good people holding on their hats and 
 leaning hard against the wind as they 
 walked. There is something, to my fancy, 
 quite perfed in this little experience of my 
 fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem 
 always very trivial to us when we find our- 
 selves alone on a church-top, with the blue 
 sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far be- 
 low us the steep roofs and foreshortened
 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 buttresses, and the silent aftivity of the city 
 streets; but how much more must they not 
 have seemed so to him as he stood, not only 
 above other men's business, but above other 
 men's climate, in a golden zone like Apol- 
 lo's! 
 
 This was the sort of pleasure I found in 
 the country of which 1 write. The pleasure 
 was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in 
 memory all the time, and hug oneself upon 
 the shelter. And it was only by the sea that 
 any such sheltered places were to be found. 
 Between the black worm-eaten headlands 
 there are little bights and havens, well 
 screened from the wind and the commotion 
 of the external sea, where the sand and 
 weeds look up into the gazer's face from a 
 depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, 
 screaming and flickering from the ruined 
 crags, alone disturb the silence and the sun- 
 shine. One such place has impressed itself 
 on my memory beyond all others. On a rock 
 by the water's edge, old fighting men of the 
 Norse breed had planted a double castle; the 
 two stood wall to wall like semi-detached 
 villas; and yet feud had run so high between 
 
 25
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 their owners, that one, from out of a win- 
 dow, shot the other as he stood in his own 
 doorway. There is something in the juxta- 
 position of these two enemies full of tragic 
 irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and 
 bitter women taking hateful counsel together 
 about the two hall-fires at night, when the 
 sea boomed against the foundations and the 
 wild winter wind was loose over the battle- 
 ments. And in the study we may reconstruft 
 for ourselves some pale figure of what life 
 then was. Not so when we are there; when 
 we are there such thoughts come to us only 
 to intensify a contrary impression, and as- 
 sociation is turned against itself. I remem- 
 ber walking thither three afternoons in suc- 
 cession, my eyes weary with being set 
 against the wind, and how, dropping sud- 
 denly over the edgeof the down, 1 found my- 
 self in a new world of warmth and shelter. 
 The wind, from which 1 had escaped, "as 
 from an enemy," was seemingly quite local. 
 It carried no clouds with it, and came from 
 such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea 
 within view. The two castles, black and ru- 
 inous as the rocks about them, were still dis- 
 26
 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 tinguishable from these by something more 
 insecure and fantastic in the outline, some- 
 thing that the last storm had left imminent 
 and the next would demolish entirely. It 
 would be difficult to render in words the 
 sense of peace that took possession of me 
 on these three afternoons. It was helped out, 
 as I have said, by the contrast. The shore 
 was battered and bemauled by previous tem- 
 pests; I had the memory at heart of the in- 
 sane strife of the pigmies who had ereded 
 these two castles and lived in them in mu- 
 tual distrust and enmity, and knew 1 had 
 only to put my head out of this little cup of 
 shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my 
 eyes ; and yet there were the two great trails 
 of motionless blue air and peaceful sea look- 
 ing on, unconcerned and apart, at the tur- 
 moil of the present moment and the memo- 
 rials of the precarious past. There is ever 
 something transitory and fretful in the im- 
 pression of a high wind under a cloudless 
 sky; it seems to have no root in the consti- 
 tution of things; it must speedily begin to 
 faint and wither away like a cut flower. And 
 on those days the thought of the wind and 
 
 27
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the thought of human life came very near 
 together in my mind. Our noisy years did 
 indeed seem moments in the being of the 
 eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of 
 that great field of stationary blue, was as the 
 wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of 
 the sea was a thing likewise to be remem- 
 bered. Shelley speaks of the sea as "hun- 
 gering for calm," and in this place one 
 learned to understand the phrase. Looking 
 down into these green waters from the bro- 
 ken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely 
 in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they 
 were enjoying their own tranquillity; and 
 when now and again it was disturbed by a 
 wind ripple on the surface, or the quick 
 black passage of a fish far below, they set- 
 tled back again (one could fancy) with re- 
 lief. 
 
 On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, 
 everything was so subdued and still that the 
 least particular struck in me a pleasurable 
 surprise. The desultory crackling of the 
 whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the 
 ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that 
 had been saturated all day long with sun- 
 28
 
 UNPLEASANT PLACES 
 
 shine, and now exhaled it into my face, was 
 like the breath of a fellow-creature. I re- 
 member that 1 was haunted by two lines of 
 French verse; in some dumb way they 
 seemed to fit my surroundings and give ex- 
 pression to the contentment that was in me, 
 and I kept repeating to myself — 
 
 "Mon coeur est un luth suspendu, 
 Sitot qu'on le louche, il resonne." 
 
 I can give no reason why these lines came 
 to me at this time; and for that very cause 
 I repeat them here. For all I know, they may 
 serve to complete the impression in the mind 
 of the reader, as they were certainly a part 
 of it for me. 
 
 And this happened to me in the place of 
 all others where 1 liked least to stay. When 
 I think of it I grow ashamed of my own in- 
 gratitude. "Out of the strong came forth 
 sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty 
 North, I received, perhaps, my strongest im- 
 pression of peace. 1 saw the sea to be great 
 and calm ; and the earth, in that little corner, 
 was all alive and friendly to me. So, wher- 
 ever a man is, he will find something to 
 please and pacify him: in the town he will 
 
 29
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 meet pleasant faces of men and women, and 
 see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a 
 cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloom- 
 iest street; and for the country, there is no 
 country without some amenity — let him 
 only look for it in the right spirit, and he will 
 surely find. 
 
 30
 
 Ill 
 
 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 
 
 1873 
 
 " Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque 
 nous nous efforfons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement 
 I'impression que nous en avons refue. " — M. Andre Theu- 
 RiET, " L'Automne dans les bois," T^evue des "Deux 
 CMondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562.* 
 
 COUNTRY rapidly passed through 
 under favourable auspices may leave 
 upon us a unity of impression that 
 would only be disturbed and dissipated if we 
 stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the 
 quick foot. Things fall for us into a sort of 
 
 ' I had nearly finished the transcription of the following 
 pages, when I saw on a friend's table the number contain- 
 ing the piece from which this sentence is extraded, and, 
 struck with a similarity of title, took it home with me 
 and read it with indescribable satisfaction. 1 do not know 
 whether 1 more envy M. Theuriet the pleasure of having 
 written this delightful article, or the reader the pleasure, 
 which 1 hope he has still before him, of reading it once 
 and again, and lingering over the passages that please 
 him most. 
 
 31
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 natural perspedive when we see them for a 
 moment in going by; we generalise boldly 
 and simply, and are gone before the sun is 
 overcast, before the rain falls, before the sea- 
 son can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, 
 before the lights and shadows, shifting 
 round towards nightfall, can show us the 
 other side of things, and belie what they 
 showed us in the morning. We expose our 
 mind to the landscape (as we would expose 
 the prepared plate in the camera) for the mo- 
 ment only during which the efTed endures; 
 and we are away before the effeft can 
 change. Hence we shall have in our memo- 
 ries a long scroll of continuous wayside pic- 
 tures, all imbued already with the prevailing 
 sentiment of the season, the weather, and 
 the landscape, and certain to be unified more 
 and more, as time goes on, by the uncon- 
 scious processes of thought. So that we who 
 have only looked at a country over our shoul- 
 der, so to speak, as we went by, will have a 
 conception of it far more memorable and ar- 
 ticulate than a man who has lived there all 
 his life from a child upwards, and had his 
 impression of to-day modified by that of to- 
 32
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 morrow, and belied by that of the day after, 
 till at length the stable charaderistics of the 
 country are all blotted out from him behind 
 the confusion of variable effeft. 
 
 1 began my little pilgrimage in the most 
 enviable of all humours: that in which a per- 
 son, with asufficiency of money anda knap- 
 sack, turns his back on a town and walks 
 forward into a country of which he knows 
 only by the vague report of others. Such an 
 one has not surrendered his will and con- 
 traded for the next hundred miles, like a 
 man on a railway. He may change his mind 
 at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, 
 follow vague preferences freely and go the 
 low road or the high, choose the shadow or 
 the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by 
 the lane that turns immediately into the 
 woods, or the broad road that lies open be- 
 fore him into the distance, and shows him 
 the far-off spires of some city, or a range of 
 mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, 
 along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify 
 his every whim and fancy, without a pang 
 of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to 
 his self-respe6t. It is true, however, that most
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 men do not possess the faculty of free aftion, 
 the priceless gift of being able to live for the 
 moment only; and as they begin to go for- 
 ward on their journey, they will find that 
 they have made for themselves new fetters. 
 Slight projeds they may have entertained 
 for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws 
 to them, they know not why. They will be 
 led by the nose by these vague reports of 
 which 1 spoke above; and the mere faftthat 
 their informant mentioned one village and 
 not another will compel their footsteps with 
 inexplicable power. And yet a little while, 
 yet a few days of this fi(ftitious liberty, and 
 they will begin to hear imperious voices call- 
 ing on them to return; and some passion, 
 some duty, some worthy or unworthy ex- 
 pectation, will set its hand upon their shoul- 
 der and lead them back into the old paths. 
 Once and again we have all made the experi- 
 ment. We know the end of it right well. And 
 yet if we make it for the hundredth time to- 
 morrow, it will have the same charm as ever; 
 our heart will beat and our eyes will be 
 bright, as we leave the town behind us, and 
 we shall feel once again (as we have felt so 
 34
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 often before) that we are cutting ourselves 
 loose for ever from our whole past life, with 
 all its sins and follies and circumscriptions, 
 and go forward as a new creature into a new 
 world. 
 
 It was well, perhaps, that I had this first 
 enthusiasm to encourage me up the long hill 
 above High Wycombe; for the day was a 
 bad day for walking at best, and now began 
 to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and 
 lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, 
 and its colour read ed on the colour of the 
 landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedge- 
 row trees were still fairly green, shot 
 through with bright autumnal yellows, 
 bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the 
 solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely 
 on slope and hill-top were not green, but 
 russet and grey, and ever less russet and 
 more grey as they drew off into the distance. 
 As they drew off into the distance, also, the 
 woods seemed to mass themselves together, 
 and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon 
 the limit of one's view. Not that this mass- 
 ing was complete, or gave the idea of any 
 extent of forest, for every here and there the 
 
 35
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 trees would break up and go down into a 
 valley in open order, or stand in long Indian 
 file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, 
 foolishly enough, against the sky. 1 say fool- 
 ishly enough, although I have seen the eflfeft 
 employed cleverly in art, and such long line 
 of single trees thrown out against the cus- 
 tomary sunset of a Japanese pidure with a 
 certain fantastic effed that was not to be de- 
 spised; but this was over water and level 
 land, where it did not jar, as here, with the 
 soft contour of hills and valleys. The whole 
 scene had an indefinable look of being 
 painted, the colour was so abstrad and cor- 
 rect, and there was something so sketchy 
 and merely impressional about these distant 
 single trees on the horizon that one was 
 forced to think of it all as of a clever French 
 landscape. For it is rather in nature that we 
 see resemblance to art, than in art to nature; 
 and we say a hundred times, "How like a 
 pidure!" for once that we say, "How like 
 the truth! " The forms in which we learn to 
 think of landscape are forms that we have 
 got from painted canvas. Any man can see 
 and understand a pidure; it is reserved for 
 36
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 the few to separate anything out of the con- 
 fusion of nature, and see that distindly and 
 with intelligence. 
 
 The sun came out before I had been long 
 on my way; and as I had got by that time 
 to the top of the ascent, and was now tread- 
 ing a labyrinth of confined by-roads, my 
 whole view brightened considerably in col- 
 our, for it was the distance only that was 
 grey and cold, and the distance I could see 
 no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful 
 carolling of larks which seemed to follow me 
 as 1 went. Indeed, during all the time I was 
 in that country the larks did not desert me. 
 The air was alive with them from High Wy- 
 combe to Tring; and as, day after day, their 
 "shrill delight "fell upon me out of the va- 
 cant sky, they began to take such a prom- 
 inence over other conditions, and form so 
 integral a part of my conception of the coun- 
 try, that I could have baptised it "The Coun- 
 try of Larks." This, of course, might just as 
 well have been in early spring; but every- 
 thing else was deeply imbued with the senti- 
 ment of the later year. There was no stir of 
 inseds in the grass. The sunshine was more 
 
 37
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 golden, and gave less heat than summer sun- 
 shine; and the shadows under the hedge 
 were somewhat blue and misty. It was only 
 in autumn that you could have seen the min- 
 gled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and 
 the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and 
 covered the surface of wayside pools so 
 thickly that the sun was refleded only here 
 and there from little joints and pinholes in 
 that brown coat of proof; or that your ear 
 would have been troubled, as you went for- 
 ward, by the occasional report of fowling- 
 pieces from all diredions and all degrees of 
 distance. 
 
 For a long time this dropping fire was the 
 one sign of human adivity that came to dis- 
 turb me as I walked. The lanes were pro- 
 foundly still. They would have been sad but 
 for the sunshine and the singing of the larks. 
 And as it was, there came over me at times 
 a feeling of isolation that was not disagreea- 
 ble, and yet was enough to make me quicken 
 my steps eagerly when I saw some one be- 
 fore me on the road. This fellow-voyager 
 proved to be no less a person than the parish 
 constable. It had occurred to me that in a 
 38
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 distrid which was so little populous and so 
 well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence 
 might play hide-and-seek with the authori- 
 ties for months; and this idea was strength- 
 ened by the aspeft of the portly constable 
 as he walked by my side with deliberate dig- 
 nity and turned-out toes. But a few minutes' 
 converse set my heart at rest. These rural 
 criminals are very tame birds, it appeared. 
 If my informant did not immediately lay his 
 hand on an offender, he was content to 
 wait; some evening after nightfall there 
 would come a tap at his door, and the out- 
 law, weary of outlawry, would give himself 
 quietly up to undergo sentence, and resume 
 his position in the life of the country-side. 
 Married men caused him no disquietude 
 whatever; he had them fast by the foot. 
 Sooner or later they would come back to 
 see their wives, a peeping neighbour would 
 pass the word, and my portly constable 
 would walk quietly over and take the bird 
 sitting. And if there were a few who had no 
 particular ties in the neighbourhood, and pre- 
 ferred to shift into another county when they 
 fell into trouble, their departure moved the 
 
 ^9
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 placid constable in no degree. He was of 
 Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not 
 stand in the Prince's name, he took no note 
 of him, but let him go, and thanked God he 
 was rid of a knave. And surely the crime 
 and the law were in admirable keeping ; rus- 
 tic constable was well met with rustic of- 
 fender. The officer sitting at home over a bit 
 of fire until the criminal came to visit him, 
 and the criminal coming — it was a fair 
 match. One felt as if this must have been the 
 order in that delightful seaboard Bohemia 
 where Florizel and Perdita courted in such 
 sweet accents, and the Puritan sang psalms 
 to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shear- 
 ers danced with nosegays in their bosoms, 
 and chanted their three songs apiece at the 
 old shepherd's festival; and one could not 
 help piduring to oneself what havoc among 
 good people's purses, and tribulation for be- 
 nignant constables, might be worked here 
 by the arrival, over stile and footpath, of a 
 new Autolycus. 
 
 Bidding good-morning to my fellow-trav- 
 eller, I left the road and struck across coun- 
 try, it was rather a revelation to pass from 
 40
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 between the hedgerows and find quite a 
 bustle on the other side, a great coming and 
 goingofschool-children upon by-paths, and, 
 in every second field, lusty horses and stout 
 country-folk a-ploughing. The way I fol- 
 lowed took me through many fields thus oc- 
 cupied, and through many strips of planta- 
 tion, and then over a little space of smooth 
 turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with tall 
 fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making: 
 ready for the winter, and so back again into 
 the quiet road. I was now not far from the 
 end of my day's journey. A few hundred 
 yards farther, and, passing through a gap in 
 the hedge, 1 began to go down hill through 
 a pretty extensive trad of young beeches. 
 I was soon in shadow myself, but the after- 
 noon sun still coloured the upmost boughs 
 of the wood, and made a fire over my head 
 in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour 
 lay among the slim tree-stems in the bottom 
 of the hollow; and from farther up I heard 
 from time to time an outburst of gross laugh- 
 ter, as though clowns were making merry 
 in the bush. There was something about 
 the atmosphere that brought all sights and 
 
 4'
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 sounds home to one with a singular purity, 
 so that I felt as if my senses had been washed 
 with water. After I had crossed the little zone 
 of mist, the path began to remount the hill; 
 and just as 1, mounting along with it, had 
 got back again, from the head downwards, 
 into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front 
 of me a donkey tied to a tree. Now, 1 have 
 a certain liking for donkeys, principally, I 
 believe, because of the delightful things that 
 Sterne has written of them. But this was not 
 after the pattern of the ass at Lyons. He was 
 of a white colour, that seemed to fit him 
 rather for rare festal occasions than for con- 
 stant drudgery. Besides, he was very small, 
 and of the daintiest proportions you can im- 
 agine in a donkey. And so, sure enough, 
 you had only to look at him to see he had 
 never worked. There was something too 
 roguish and wanton in his f^ice, a look too 
 like that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to 
 have survived much cudgelling. It was plain 
 that these feet had kicked off sportive chil- 
 dren oftener than they had plodded with a 
 freight through miry lanes. He was alto- 
 gether a fine-weather, holiday sort of don- 
 
 42
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 key; and though he was just then somewhat 
 solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of 
 the levity of his disposition by impudently 
 wagging his ears at me as I drew near. I say 
 he was somewhat solemnised just then ; for, 
 with the admirable instinct of all men and 
 animals under restraint, he had so wound 
 and wound the halter about the tree that he 
 could go neither back nor forwards, nor so 
 much as put down his head to browse. There 
 he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, part 
 angry, part, 1 believe, amused. He had not 
 given up hope, and dully revolved the prob- 
 lem in his head, giving ever and again an- 
 other jerk at the few inches of free rope that 
 still remained unwound. A humorous sort of 
 sympathy for the creature took hold upon 
 me. I went up, and, not without some trou- 
 ble on my part, and much distrust and re- 
 sistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced 
 backwards until the whole length of the 
 halter was set loose, and he was once more 
 as free a donkey as I dared to make him. I 
 was pleased (as people are) with this friendly 
 adion to a fellow-creature in tribulation, and 
 glanced back over my shoulder to see how 
 
 43
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 he was profiting by his freedom. The brute 
 was looking after me; and no sooner did he 
 catch my eye than he put up his long white 
 face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth 
 at me, and began to bray derisively. If ever 
 any one person made a grimace at another, 
 that donkey made a grimace at me. The 
 hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and 
 the impertinence that inspired his whole 
 face as he curled up his lip, and showed his 
 teeth, and began to bray, so tickled me, and 
 was so much in keeping with what 1 had 
 imagined to myself about his charader, that 
 I could not find it in my heart to be angry, 
 and burst into a peal of hearty laughter. This 
 seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, so he 
 brayed at me again by way of rejoinder; and 
 we went on for a while, braying and laugh- 
 ing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and, 
 shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pur- 
 sue my way. In so doing — it was like go- 
 ing suddenly into cold water — I found my- 
 self face to face with a prim little old maid. 
 She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear ! 
 She had concluded beyond question that this 
 must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud 
 44
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. 
 I was sure, by her face, that she had already 
 recommended her spirit most religiously to 
 Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst. 
 And so, to reassure her, 1 uncovered and be- 
 sought her, after a very staid fashion, to put 
 me on my way to Great Missenden. Her 
 voice trembled a little, to be sure, but 1 think 
 her mind was set at rest; and she told me, 
 very explicitly, to foilow the path until I 
 came to the end of the wood, and then I 
 should see the village below me in the bot- 
 tom of the valley. And, with mutual courte- 
 sies, the little old maid and I went on our 
 respeftive ways. 
 
 Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden 
 was close at hand, as she had said, in the 
 trough of a gentle valley, with many great 
 elms about it. The smoke from its chimneys 
 went up pleasantly in the afternoon sun- 
 shine. The sleepy hum of a threshing-ma- 
 chine filled the neighbouring fields and hung 
 about the quaint street corners. A little 
 above, the church sits well back on its 
 haunches against the hill-side — an attitude 
 for a church, you know, that makes it look 
 
 45
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 as if it could be ever so much higher if it 
 liked ; and the trees grew about it thickly, so 
 as to make a density of shade in the church- 
 yard. A very quiet place it looks; and yet 1 
 saw many boards and posters about threat- 
 ening dire punishment against those who 
 broke the church windows or defaced the 
 precinft, and offering rewards for the appre- 
 hension of those who had done the like al- 
 ready, it was fair day in Great Missenden. 
 There were three stalls set up, sub jove, for 
 the sale of pastry and cheap toys ; and a great 
 number of holiday children thronged about 
 the stalls and noisily invaded every corner of 
 the straggling village. They came round me 
 by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon 
 penny trumpets as though they imagined I 
 should fall to pieces like the battlements of 
 Jericho. I noticed one among them who could 
 make a wheel of himself like a London boy, 
 and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence 
 upon the strength of the accomplishment. 
 By-and-by, however, the trumpets began to 
 weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the 
 fair, I fancy, at its height. 
 Night had fallen before I ventured forth 
 46
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 again. It was pitch-dark in the village street, 
 and the darkness seemed only the greater 
 for a light here and there in an uncurtained 
 window or from an open door. Into one such 
 window I was rude enough to peep, and 
 saw within a charming genre picture. In a 
 room, all white wainscot and crimson wall- 
 paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, 
 empty darkness inwhichl had been groping, 
 a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I 
 could make out, to an attentive child upon 
 her knee, while an old woman sat placidly 
 dozing over the fire. You may be sure I was 
 not behindhand with a story for myself — a 
 good old story after the manner of G. P, R. 
 James and the village melodramas, with a 
 wicked squire, and poachers, and an attor- 
 ney, and a virtuous young man with a ge- 
 nius for mechanics, who should love, and 
 proted, and uhimately marry the girl in the 
 crimson room. Baudelaire has a few dainty 
 sentences on the fancies that we are inspired 
 with when we look through a window into 
 other people's lives; and I think Dickens has 
 somewhere enlarged on the same text. The 
 subjed, at least, is one that I am seldom 
 
 47
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 weary of entertaining. 1 remember, night 
 after night, at Brussels, watching a good 
 family sup together, make merry, and retire 
 to rest; and night after night I waited to see 
 the candles lit, and the salad made, and the 
 last salutations dutifully exchanged, without 
 any abatement of interest. Night after night 
 I found the scene rivet my attention and keep 
 me awake in bed with all manner of quaint 
 imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the 
 Arabian N/ghtshmges upon this Asmodean 
 interest; and we are not weary of lifting 
 other people's roofs, and going about behind 
 the scenes of life with the Caliph and the 
 serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, 
 besides ; it is salutary to get out of ourselves 
 and see people living together in perfed un- 
 consciousness of our existence, as they will 
 live when we are gone. If to-morrow the 
 blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is 
 realised, the girl will none the less tell stories 
 to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great 
 Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their 
 candle, and mix their salad, and go orderly 
 
 to bed. 
 
 The next morning was sunny overhead 
 
 48
 
 AM A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 and damp underfoot, with a thrill in the air 
 like a reminiscence of frost. 1 went up into 
 the sloping garden behind the inn and 
 smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the 
 tune of my landlady's lamentations oversun- 
 dry cabbages and cauliflowers that had been 
 spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much 
 pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see 
 the garden all hovered over by white butter- 
 flies. And now, look at the end of it! She 
 could nowise reconcile this with her moral 
 sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies 
 are created with a side-look to the composi- 
 tion of improving apologues, it is not alto- 
 gether easy, even for people who have read 
 Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly 
 upon the issue raised. Then I fell into along 
 and abstruse calculation with my landlord; 
 having for objed to compare the distance 
 driven by him during eight years' service on 
 the box of the Wendover coach with the 
 girth of the round world itself. We tackled the 
 question most conscientiously, made all nec- 
 essary allowance for Sundays and leap-years, 
 and were just coming to a triumphant con- 
 clusion of our labours when we were stayed 
 
 49
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 by a small lacuna in my information. I did 
 not know the circumference of the earth. 
 The landlord knew it, to be sure — plainly 
 he had made the same calculation twice and 
 once before, — but he wanted confidence in 
 his own figures, and from the moment I 
 showed myself so poor a second seemed to 
 lose all interest in the result. 
 
 Wendover (which was my next stage) 
 lies in the same valley with Great Missenden, 
 but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off 
 on either hand like a coast-line, and a great 
 hemisphere of plain lies, like a sea, before 
 one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a 
 good outlook over the place. The vale, as it 
 opened out into the plain, was shallow, and 
 a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful con- 
 volutions. From the level to which 1 have 
 now attained the fields were exposed before 
 me like a map, and I could see all that bustle 
 of autumn field-work which had been hid 
 from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, 
 or shown to me only for a moment as 1 fol- 
 lowed the footpath. Wendover lay well 
 down in the midst, with mountains of foliage 
 about it. The great plain stretched away to 
 
 KO
 
 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 
 
 the northward, variegated near at hand with 
 the quaint pattern of the fields, but growing 
 ever more and more indistind, until it be- 
 came a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright 
 crescents of river, and snatches of slanting 
 road, and finally melted into the ambiguous 
 cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was 
 an opal-grey, touched here and there with 
 blue, and with certain faint russets that 
 looked as if they were refledions of the 
 colour of the autumnal woods below. I 
 could hear the ploughmen shouting to their 
 horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks in- 
 numerable overhead, and, from a field where 
 the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a 
 sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All 
 these noises came to me very thin and dis- 
 tinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful 
 sentiment of distance and atmosphere about 
 the day and the place. 
 
 1 mounted the hill yet farther by a rough 
 staircase of chalky footholds cut in the turf. 
 The hills about Wendover and, as far as I 
 could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, 
 wear a sort of hood of beech plantation ; but 
 in this particular case the hood had been suf- 
 
 5«
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 fered to extend itself into something more 
 like a cloak, and hung down about the 
 shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of 
 lying flatly along the summit. The trees 
 grew so close, and their boughs were so 
 matted together, that the whole wood 
 looked as dense as a bush of heather. The 
 prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering 
 red, touched here and there with vivid yel- 
 low. But the autumn had scarce advanced be- 
 yond the outworks; it was still almost sum- 
 mer in the heart of the wood ; and as soon as 
 I had scrambled through the hedge, I found 
 myself in a dim green forest atmosphere un- 
 der eaves of virgin foliage. In places where 
 the wood had itself for a background and 
 the trees were massed together thickly, the 
 colour became intensified and almost gem- 
 like : a perfect fire of green, that seemed none 
 the less green for a few specks of autumn 
 gold. None of the trees were of any con- 
 siderable age or stature; but they grew well 
 together, 1 have said; and as the road turned 
 and wound among them, they fell into 
 pleasant groupings and broke the light up 
 pleasantly. Sometimes there would be acol- 
 52
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 onnade of slim, straight tree-stems with the 
 light running down them as down the shafts 
 of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to 
 something, and led only to a corner of som- 
 bre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray 
 of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, 
 the light lying flatly along the top of it, so 
 that against a dark background it seemed 
 almost luminous. There was a great hush 
 over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of 
 a thicket than a wood) ; and the vague ru- 
 mours that went among the tree-tops, and 
 the occasional rustling of big birds or hares 
 among the undergrowth, had in them a note 
 of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put 
 the imagination on its guard and made me 
 walk warily on the russet carpeting of last 
 year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed 
 to be all attention; the wood listened as I 
 went, and held its breath to number my foot- 
 falls. One could not help feeling that there 
 ought to be some reason for this stillness; 
 whether, as the bright old legend goes, Pan 
 lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether, 
 perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, 
 and the first drops would soon come patter- 
 
 53
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ing through the leaves. It was not unpleas- 
 ant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever 
 and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. 
 This happened only where the path lay 
 much upon the slope, and there was a flaw 
 in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some 
 distance below the level at which 1 chanced 
 myself to be walking; then, indeed, little 
 scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature 
 fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow 
 trees would appear for a moment in the aper- 
 ture, and grow larger and smaller, and 
 change and melt one into another, as 1 con- 
 tinued to go forward, and so shift my point 
 of view. 
 
 For ten minutes, perhaps, 1 had heard from 
 somewhere before me in the wood a strange, 
 continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, 
 and gobbling, now and again interrupted by 
 a harsh scream. As 1 advanced towards this 
 noise, it began to grow lighter about me, 
 and I caught sight, through the trees, of 
 sundry gables and enclosure walls, and 
 something like the tops of a rickyard. And 
 sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and 
 a neat little farm-steading, with the beech- 
 54
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 woods growing almost to the door of it. Just 
 before me, however, as I came up the path, 
 the trees drew back and let in a wide flood 
 of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here 
 that the noises had their origin. More than a 
 score of peacocks (there are altogether thirty 
 at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, 
 and a great multitude that I could not num- 
 ber of more ordinary barn-door fowls, were 
 all feeding together on this little open lawn 
 among the beeches. They fed in a dense 
 crowd, which swayed to and fro, and came 
 hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of 
 which the surface was agitated like the sur- 
 face of a sea as each bird guzzled his head 
 along the ground after the scattered corn. 
 The clucking, cooing noise that had led me 
 thither was formed by the blending together 
 of countless expressions of individual con- 
 tentment into one colleftive expression of 
 contentment, or general grace during meat. 
 Every now and again a big peacock would 
 separate himself from the mob and take a 
 stately turn or two about the lawn, or per- 
 haps mount for a moment upon the rail, and 
 there shrilly publish to the world his satis- 
 
 55
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 fiidion with himself and what he had to eat. 
 It happened, for my sins, that none of these 
 admirable birds had anything beyond the 
 merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it seemed, 
 were out of season just then. But they had 
 their necks for all that; and by their necks 
 alone they do as much surpass all the other 
 birds of our grey climate as they fall in qual- 
 ity of song below the blackbird or the lark. 
 Surely the peacock, with its incomparable 
 parade of glorious colour and the scrannel 
 voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from 
 its painted throat, must, like my landlady's 
 butterflies at Great Missenden, have been 
 invented by some skilful fabulist for the con- 
 solation and support of homely virtue: or 
 rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so 
 skilful, who made points for the moment 
 without having a studious enough eye to the 
 complete effeft; for 1 thought these melting 
 greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, 
 that 1 would have given them my vote just 
 then before the sweetest pipe in all the 
 spring woods. For indeed there is no piece 
 of colour of the same extent in nature, that 
 will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man's
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 eyes; and to come upon so many of them, 
 after these acres of stone-coloured heavens 
 and russet woods, and grey-brown plough- 
 lands and white roads, was like going three 
 whole days' journey to the southward, or a 
 month back into the summer. 
 
 I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm — for 
 so the place is called, after the name of its 
 splendid pensioners — and go forwards 
 again in the quiet woods. It began to grow 
 both damp and dusk under the beeches; and 
 as the day declined the colour faded out of the 
 foliage ; and shadow, without form and void, 
 took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves 
 and delicate gradations of living green that 
 had before accompanied my walk. I had 
 been sorry to leave Peacock Farm, but 1 was 
 not sorry to find myself once more in the 
 open road, under a pale and somewhat 
 troubled-looking evening sky, and put my 
 best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover. 
 
 Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, pur- 
 poseless sort of place. Everybody seems to 
 have had his own opinion as to how the 
 street should go; or rather, every now and 
 then a man seems to have arisen with a new 
 
 57
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 idea on the subjed, and led away a little sed 
 of neighbours to join in his heresy. It would 
 have somewhat the look of an abortive 
 watering-place, such as we may now see 
 them here and there along the coast, but for 
 the age of the houses, the comely quiet de- 
 sign of some of them, and the look of long 
 habitation, of a life that is settled and rooted, 
 and makes it worth while to train flowers 
 about the windows, and otherwise shape the 
 dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. 
 The church, which might perhaps have 
 served as rallying-point for these loose 
 houses, and pulled the township into some- 
 thing like intelligible unity, stands some dis- 
 tance off among great trees; but the inn (to 
 take the public buildings in order of import- 
 ance) is in what I understand to be the prin- 
 cipal street: a pleasant old house, with bay- 
 windows, and three peaked gables, and 
 many swallows' nests plastered about the 
 eaves. 
 
 The interior of the inn was answerable to 
 
 the outside: indeed, 1 never saw any room 
 
 much more to be admired than the low 
 
 wainscoted parlour in which 1 spent the re- 
 
 58
 
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 AJVA UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 mainder ofthe evening. It was ashort oblong 
 in shape, save that the firephice was built 
 across one of the angles so as to cut it par- 
 tially off, and the opposite angle was simi- 
 larly truncated by a corner cupboard. The 
 wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey 
 carpet on the floor, so old that it might have 
 been imported by Walter Shandy before he 
 retired, worn almost through in some places, 
 but in others making a good show of blues 
 and oranges, none the less harmonious for 
 being somewhatfaded. The corner cupboard 
 was agreeable in design ; and there were just 
 the right things upon the shelves — decan- 
 ters and tumblers, and blue plates, and one 
 red rose in a glass of water. The furniture 
 was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was 
 in keeping, down to the ponderous leaden 
 inkstand on the round table. And you may 
 fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and 
 flickered over by the light of a brisk com- 
 panionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted 
 sort of perspective, in the three compart- 
 ments of the old mirror above the chimney. 
 As I sat reading in the great armchair, 1 kept 
 looking round with the tail of my eye at the 
 
 59
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 quaint, bright pifture that was about me, and 
 could not help some ple^isure and a certain 
 childish pride in forming part of it. The book 
 I read was about Italy in the early Renais- 
 sance, the pageantries and the light loves of 
 princes, the passion of men for learning, and 
 poetry, and art ; but it was written, by good 
 luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suit- 
 ed the room infinitely more nearly than the 
 matter; and the result was that I thought 
 less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lorenzo, or 
 Politian, than of the good Englishman who 
 had written in that volume what he knew 
 of them, and taken so much pleasure in his 
 solemn polysyllables. 
 
 I was not left without society. My landlord 
 had a very pretty little daughter, whom we 
 shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at 
 the time, I might be able to tell you some- 
 thing definite of her appearance. But faces 
 have a trick of growing more and more spir- 
 itualised and abstract in the memory, until 
 nothing remains of them but a look, a haunt- 
 ing expression; just that secret quality in a 
 face that is apt to slip out somehow under 
 the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the 
 60
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is 
 hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair 
 pencils, you may think how hopeless it must 
 be to pursue after it with clumsy words. If I 
 say, for instance, that this look, which I re- 
 member as Lizzie, was something wistful 
 that seemed partly to come of slyness and in 
 part of simplicity, and that I am inclined to 
 imagine it had something to do with the 
 daintiest suspicion of a cast in one of her 
 large eyes, I shall have said all that I can, and 
 the reader will not be much advanced to- 
 wards comprehension. I had struck up an 
 acquaintance with this little damsel in the 
 morning, and professed much interest in her 
 dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large 
 one which was kept locked away for great 
 occasions. And so I had not been very long 
 in the parlour before the door opened, and 
 in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked 
 clumsily under her arm. She was followed 
 by her brother John, a year or so younger 
 than herself, not simply to play propriety at 
 our interview, but to show his own two 
 whips in emulation of his sister's dolls. 1 did 
 my best to make myself agreeable to my 
 
 6i
 
 £SSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 visitors, showing much admiration for the 
 dolls and dolls' dresses, and, with a very 
 serious demeanour, asking many questions 
 about their age and character. 1 do not think 
 that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, but it 
 was evident that she was both bewildered 
 and a little contemptuous. Although she was 
 ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were 
 alive, she seemed to think rather poorly of 
 any grown person who could fall heartily 
 into the spirit of the fi<5tion. Sometimes she 
 would look at me with gravity and a sort of 
 disquietude, as though she really feared I 
 must be out of my wits. Sometimes, as when 
 I inquired too particularly into the question 
 of their names, she laughed at me so long 
 and heartily that 1 began to feel almost em- 
 barrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I 
 asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she 
 could keep herself no longer to herself. 
 Clambering down from the chair on which 
 she sat perched to show me, Cornelia-like, 
 her jewels, she ran straight out of the room 
 and into the bar — it was just across the pas- 
 sage, — and I could hear her telling her 
 mother in loud tones, but apparently more 
 62
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 in sorrow than in merriment, that the gentle- 
 man in the parlour wanted to kiss Dolly. I ' 
 fancy she was determined to save me from 
 this humiliating acftion, even in spite of my- 
 self, for she never gave me the desired per- 
 mission. She reminded me of an old dog I 
 once knew, who would never suffer the 
 master of the house to dance, out of an ex- 
 aggerated sense of the dignity of that mas- 
 ter's place and carriage. 
 
 After the young people were gone there 
 was but one more incident ere I went to bed. 
 I heard a party of children go up and down 
 the dark street for a while, singing together 
 sweetly. And the mystery of this little inci- 
 dent was so pleasant to me that I purposely 
 refrained from asking who they were, and 
 wherefore they went singing at so late an 
 hour. One can rarely be in a pleasant place 
 without meeting with some pleasant acci- 
 dent. I have a convidion that these children 
 would not have gone singing before the inn 
 unless the inn-parlour had been the delight- 
 ful place it was. At least, if I had been in the 
 customary public room of the modern hotel, 
 with all its disproportions and discomforts, 
 
 63
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 my ears would have been dull, and there 
 would have been some ugly temper or other 
 uppermost in my spirit, and so they would 
 have wasted their songs upon an unworthy 
 hearer. 
 
 Next morning I went along to visit the 
 church. It is a long-backed red-and-white 
 building, very much restored, and stands in 
 a pleasant graveyard among those great 
 trees of which I have spoken already. The 
 sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again 
 pulses of cold wind went about the enclo- 
 sure, and set the branches busy overhead, 
 and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles 
 of the church buttresses. Now and again, 
 also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a 
 chestnut among the grass — the dog would 
 bark before the re(ftory door — or there would 
 come a clinking of pails from the stable-yard 
 behind. But in spite of these occasional in- 
 terruptions — in spite, also, of the continu- 
 ous autumn twittering that filled the trees — 
 the chief impression somehow was one as of 
 utter silence, insomuch that the little green- 
 ish bell that peeped out of a window in the 
 tower disquieted me with a sense of some 
 64
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 possible and more inharmonious disturb- 
 ance. The grass was wet, as if with a hoar- 
 frost that had just been melted. I do not 
 know that ever I saw a morning more au- 
 tumnal. As I went to and fro among the 
 graves, I saw some flowers set reverently 
 before a recently ereded tomb, and drawing 
 near was almost startled to find they lay on 
 the grave of a man seventy-two years old 
 when he died. We are accustomed to strew 
 flowers only over the young, where love has 
 been cut short untimely, and great possibil- 
 ities have been restrained by death. We 
 strew them there in token that these possi- 
 bilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be 
 realised, and the touch of our dead loves re- 
 main with us and guide us to the end. And 
 yet there was more significance, perhaps, 
 and perhaps a greater consolation, in this 
 little nosegay on the grave of one who had 
 died old. We are apt to make so much of the 
 tragedy of death, and think so little of the 
 enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that 
 we see more to lament for in a life cut off in 
 the midst of usefulness and love, than in one 
 that miserably survives all love and useful- 
 
 65
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ness, and goes about the world the phantom 
 of itself, without hope, or joy, or any con- 
 solation. These tlowers seemed not so much 
 the token of love that survived death, as of 
 something yet more beautiful — of love that 
 had lived a man's life out to an end with 
 him, and been faithful and companionable, 
 and not weary of loving, throughout all 
 these years. 
 
 The morning cleared a little, and the sky 
 was once more the old stone-coloured vault 
 over the sallow meadows and the russet 
 woods, as 1 set forth on a dog-cart from 
 Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a good 
 distance along the side of the hills, with the 
 great plain below on one hand, and the 
 beech-woods above on the other. The fields 
 were busy with people ploughing and sow- 
 ing; every here and there a jug of ale stood 
 in the angle of the hedge, and 1 could see 
 many a team wait smoking in the furrow as 
 ploughman or sower stepped aside for a mo- 
 ment to take a draught. Over all the brown 
 ploughlands, and under all the leafless 
 hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour 
 abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic. 
 66
 
 AN A UTUMN EFFECT 
 
 The horses smoked and the men laboured 
 and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn 
 morning; so that one had a strong eflFe(ft of 
 large, open-air existence. The fellow who 
 drove me was something of a humourist; 
 and his conversation was all in praise of an 
 agricultural labourer's way of life. It was he 
 who called my attention to these jugs of ale 
 by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently 
 express the liberality of these men's wages; 
 he told me how sharp an appetite was given 
 by breaking up the earth in the morning air, 
 whether with plough or spade, and cordially 
 admired this provision of nature. He sang O 
 fortunatos agricoUu! indeed, in every possi- 
 ble key, and with many cunning infledions, 
 till 1 began to wonder what was the use of 
 such people as Mr. Arch, and to sing the 
 same air myself in a more diffident manner. 
 Tring was reached, and then Tring rail- 
 way-station ; for the two are not very near, 
 the good people of Tring having held the 
 railway, of old days, in extreme apprehen- 
 sion, lest some day it should break loose in 
 the town and work mischief. I had a last 
 walk, among russet beeches as usual, and 
 
 67
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of 
 larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and 
 saw, as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, 
 two horsemen exercising a pack of fox- 
 hounds. And then the train came and carried 
 me back to London. 
 
 68
 
 IV 
 
 A WINTER'S WALK IN CAR- 
 RICK AND GALLOWAY 
 
 A Fragment : i8']6 
 
 'T the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, 
 the central district of the shire of 
 Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most 
 southerly. On the Carrick side of the river 
 rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, 
 cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and 
 there with fiirms and tufts of wood. Inland, it 
 loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd 
 of similar hills that occupies the centre of the 
 Lowlands. Towards the sea, it swells out the 
 coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay- 
 window in a plan, and is fortified against the 
 surf behind bold crags. This hill is known as 
 the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly. 
 Brown Carrick. 
 
 It had snowed overnight. The fields were 
 all sheeted up; they were tucked in among 
 the snow, and their shape was modelled 
 
 60
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 through the pliant counterpane, like children 
 tucked in by a fond mother. The wind had 
 made ripples and folds upon the surf^ice, like 
 what the sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon 
 the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. 
 An effusion of coppery light on the summit 
 of Brown Carrick showed where the sun 
 was trying to look through; but along the 
 horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, 
 so that there was no distindion of sky and 
 sea. Over the white shoulders of the head- 
 lands, or in the opening of bays, there was 
 nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; 
 and the road as it drew near the edge of the 
 cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation 
 and void space. 
 
 The snow crunched under foot, and at 
 farms all the dogs broke out barking as they 
 smelt a passer-by upon the road. I met a fine 
 old fellow, who might have sat as the father 
 in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and who 
 swore most heathenishly at a cow he was 
 driving. And a little after 1 scraped acquaint- 
 ance with a poor body tramping out to 
 gather cockles. His face was wrinkled by ex- 
 posure; it was broken up into flakes and
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 channels, like mud beginning to dry, and 
 weathered in two colours, an incongruous 
 pink and grey. He had a faint air of being 
 surprised — which, God knows, he might 
 well be — that life had gone so ill with him. 
 The shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, 
 so strangely were they bagged and ravelled 
 about his knees; and his coat was all be- 
 daubed with clay as though he had lain in a 
 rain-dub during the New Year's festivity. I 
 will own 1 was not sorry to think he had had 
 a merry New Year, and been young again for 
 an evening; but 1 was sorry to see the mark 
 still there. One could not expert such an old 
 gentleman to be much of a dandy, or a great 
 student of respeftability in dress; but there 
 might have been a wife at home, who had 
 brushed out similar stains after fifty New 
 Years, now become old, or a round-armed 
 daughter, who would wish to have him 
 neat, were it only out of self-resped and for 
 the ploughman sweetheart when he looks 
 round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of 
 this in his life, and years and loneliness hung 
 heavily on his old arms. He was seventy-six, 
 he told me; and nobody would give a day's 
 
 7»
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 work to a man that age: they would think 
 he couldn't do it. "And, 'deed," he went on, 
 with a sad little chuckle, " 'deed, 1 doubt if! 
 could." He said good-bye to me at a foot- 
 path, and crippled wearily off to his work. 
 It will make your heart ache if you think of 
 his old fingers groping in the snow. 
 
 He told me I was to turn down beside the 
 school-house for Dunure. And so, when 1 
 found a lone house among the snow, and 
 heard a babble of childish voices from with- 
 in, I struck off into a steep road leading 
 downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close un- 
 der the steep hill : a haven among the rocks, a 
 breakwater in consummate disrepair, much 
 apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so 
 of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few shards of 
 ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, 
 and one tall gable honeycombed with win- 
 dows. The snow lay on the beach to the tide- 
 mark. It wasdaubed on to the sills of theruin : 
 it roosted in the crannies of the rock like 
 white sea-birds ; even on outlyingreefs there 
 wouldbea little cockofsnow,likea toy light- 
 house. Everything was grey and white in a 
 cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. 
 72
 
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 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 In the profound silence, broken only by the 
 noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded 
 twice ; and I saw the postman, girt with two 
 bags, pause a moment at the end of the cla- 
 chan for letters. It is, perhaps, charafteristic 
 of Dunure that none were brought him. 
 
 The people at the public-house did not 
 seem well pleased to see me, and though I 
 would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, 
 sent me "ben the hoose" into the guest- 
 room. This guest-room at Dunure was 
 painted in quite aesthetic fashion. There are 
 rooms in the same taste not a hundred miles 
 from London, where persons of an extreme 
 sensibility meet together without embar- 
 rassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green 
 and black; a grave harmonious piece of col- 
 ouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk 
 can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the 
 most exquisite purist. A cherry-red half 
 window-blindkept up animaginary warmth 
 in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on 
 the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- 
 penny china figure were ranged solemnly 
 along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon 
 was an original note, and instead of sawdust 
 
 73
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 contained sea-shells. And as for the hearth- 
 rug, it would merit an article to itself, and a 
 coloured diagram to help the text. It was 
 patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor: 
 no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chi- 
 nese silk, shaken together in the kaleido- 
 scope of some tasteful housewife's fancy; 
 but a work of art in its own way, and plainly 
 a labour of love. The patches came exclu- 
 sively from people's raiment. There was no 
 colour more brilliant than a heather mixture ; 
 " My Johnnie's grey breeks," well polished 
 over the oar on the boat's thwart, entered 
 largely into its composition. And the spoils 
 of an old black cloth coat, that had been 
 many a Sunday to church, added something 
 (save the mark !) of preciousness to the mate- 
 rial. 
 
 While 1 was at luncheon four carters came 
 in — long-limbed, muscular Ayrshire Scots, 
 with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of 
 stout were ordered; they kept filling the 
 tumbler with the other hand as they drank; 
 and in less time than it takes me to write 
 these words the four quarts were finished — 
 another round was proposed, discussed, and 
 74
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 negatived — and they were creaking out of 
 tile village witli their carts. 
 
 The ruins drew you towards them. You 
 never saw any place more desolate from a dis- 
 tance, nor one that less belied its promise 
 near at hand. Some crows and gulls flew 
 away croaking as I scrambled in. The snow 
 had drifted into the vaults. The clachan dab- 
 bled with snow, the white hills, the black 
 sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint 
 circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it 
 looked from a loophole in Dunure, was cold, 
 wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had 
 been a wicked baron and compelled to stay 
 there all the afternoon, you would have had 
 a rare fit of remorse. How you would have 
 heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers ! 
 I think it would have come to homicide be- 
 fore the evening — if it were only for the 
 pleasure of seeing something red! And the 
 masters of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were 
 remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of 
 these vaults where the snow had drifted was 
 that "blackvoute" where "Mr. Alane Stew- 
 art, Commendatour of Crossraguel," en- 
 dured his fiery trials. On the ist and 7th of 
 
 75
 
 BSSAVS A Am CRITICISMS 
 
 September, 1370 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!), 
 Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his 
 baker, his cook, his pantryman, and another 
 servant, boundthe poorCommendator "be- 
 twix an iron chimlay and afire," and there 
 cruelly roasted him until he signed away his 
 abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an 
 ugly period, but not, somehow, without 
 such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes it 
 hard to sympathise quite seriously with the 
 vidim. And it is consoling to remember that 
 he got away at last, and kept his abbacy, 
 and, over and above, had a pension from the 
 Earl until he died. 
 
 Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of 
 somewhat less unkindly aspeft, opened out. 
 Colzean plantations lay all along the steep 
 shore, and there was a wooded hill towards 
 the centre, where the trees made a sort of 
 shadowy etching over the snow. The road 
 went down and up, and past a blacksmith's 
 cottage that made fine music in the valley. 
 Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me 
 in a cart. They were all drunk, and asked me 
 jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. 1 
 told them it was; and my answer was re- 
 76
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 ceived with unfeigned merriment. One gen- 
 tleman was so much tickled he nearly fell 
 out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved by 
 a companion, who either had not so fine a 
 sense of humour or had drunken less. 
 
 "The toune of Mayboll," says the inimi- 
 table Abercrummie,^ "stands upon an as- 
 cending ground from east to west, and lyes 
 open to the south. It hath one principal! 
 street, with houses upon both sides, built of 
 freestone; and it is beautifyed with the sit- 
 uation of two castles, one at each end of this 
 street. That on the east belongs to the Erie 
 of Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, 
 which belonged sometime to the laird of 
 Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is 
 adorned with a pyremide [conical roof], and 
 a row of ballesters round it raised from the 
 top of the staircase, into which they have 
 mounted a fyne clock. There be four lanes 
 which pass from the principal! street ; one is 
 called the Black Vennel, which is steep, de- 
 clining to the south-west, and leads to a 
 lower street, which is far larger than the 
 
 ' William Abercrombie. See Fasti Ecclesice Scoticance, 
 under "Maybole" (Partiii.). 
 
 77
 
 £SSAyS AiVB CRITICISMS 
 
 high chiefe street, and it runs from the Kirk- 
 hind to the Well Trees, in which there have 
 been many pretty buildings, belonging to 
 the severall gentry of the countrey, who 
 were wont to resort thither in winter, and 
 divert themselves in converse together at 
 their owne houses, it was once the principall 
 street of the town ; but many of these houses 
 of the gentry having been decayed and 
 ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beau- 
 tie. Just opposite to this vennel, there is an- 
 other that leads north-west, from the chiefe 
 street to the green, which is a pleasant plott 
 of ground, enclosed round with an earthen 
 wall, wherein they were wont to play foot- 
 ball, but now at the Gowff and byasse-bowls. 
 The houses of this towne, on both sides of 
 the street, have their several gardens belong- 
 ing to them ; and in the lower street there be 
 some pretty orchards, that yield store of 
 good fruit." As Patterson says, this descrip- 
 tion is near enough even to-day, and is 
 mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound 
 to add, of my own experience, that Maybole 
 is tumbledown and dreary. Prosperous 
 enough in reality, it has an air of decay ; and 
 78
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 though the population has increased, a roof- 
 less house every here and there seems to 
 protest the contrary. The women are more 
 than well-favoured, and the men fine tall 
 fellows; but they look slipshod and dissi- 
 pated. As they slouched at street corners, or 
 stood about gossiping in the snow, it seemed 
 they would have been more at home in the 
 slums of a large city than here in a country 
 place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a 
 great deal about drinking, and a great deal 
 about religious revivals : two things in which 
 the Scottish charader is emphatic and most 
 unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen 
 who were employing their time in explain- 
 ing to a delighted audience the physics of 
 the Second Coming. It is not very likely any 
 of us will be asked to help. If we were, it is 
 likely we should receive instrudions for the 
 occasion, and that on more reliable authority. 
 And so I can only figure to myself a congre- 
 gation truly curious in such flights of theo- 
 logical fancy, as one of veteran and accom- 
 plished saints, who have fought the good 
 fight to an end and outlived all worldly pas- 
 sion, and are to be regarded rather as a part 
 
 79
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 of the Church Triumphant than the poor, 
 imperfeft company on earth. And yet I saw 
 some young fellows about the smoking- 
 room who seemed, in the eyes of one who 
 cannot count himself strait-laced, in need of 
 some more practical sort of teaching. They 
 seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do 
 so speedily, it was not much more than a 
 week after the New Year; and to hear them 
 return on their past bouts with a gusto un- 
 speakable was not altogether pleasing. Here 
 is one snatch of talk, for the accuracy of 
 which I can vouch — 
 
 "Ye had a spree here last Tuesday ?" 
 
 "We had that!" 
 
 " I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, 
 I was awful bad on Wednesday." 
 
 " Ay, ye were gey bad." 
 
 And you should have seen the bright eyes, 
 and heard the sensual accents! They recalled 
 their doings with devout gusto and a sort of 
 rational pride. Schoolboys, after their first 
 drunkenness, are not more boastful; a cock 
 does not plume himself with a more un- 
 mingled satisfaction as he paces forth among 
 his harem; and yet these were grown men, 
 80
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 and by no means short of wit. It was hard to 
 suppose they were very eager about the 
 Second Coming: it seemed as if some ele- 
 mentary notions of temperance for the men 
 and seemHness for the women would have 
 gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed 
 to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, 
 Maybole is also typical of much that is best. 
 Some of the factories, which have taken the 
 place of weaving in the town's economy, 
 were originally founded and are still pos- 
 sessed by self-made men of the sterling, 
 stout old breed — fellows who made some 
 little bit of an invention, borrowed some 
 little pocketful of capital, and then, step by 
 step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought 
 their way upwards to an assured position. 
 Abercrummie has told you enough of the 
 Tolbooth; but, as a bit of spelling, this in- 
 scription on the Tolbooth bell seems too de- 
 licious to withhold : ' ' This bell is founded at 
 Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman, the 6th 
 November, 1696, Bi appointment of the her- 
 itors of the parish of Maiyboll." The Castle 
 deserves more notice. It is a large and 
 shapely tower, plain from the ground up- 
 
 81
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 wards, but with a zone of ornamentation 
 running about the top. In a general way this 
 adornment is perched on the very summit of 
 the chimney-stacks; but there is one corner 
 more elaborate than the rest. A very heavy 
 string-course runs round the upper story, 
 and just above this, facing up the street, the 
 tower carries a small oriel window, fluted 
 and corbelled and carved about with stone 
 heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air 
 of a shrine. And it was, indeed, the casket of 
 a very precious jewel, for in the room to 
 which it gives light lay, for long years, the 
 heroine of the sweet old ballad of "Johnnie 
 Faa" — she who, at the call of the gipsies' 
 songs, "came tripping down the stair, and 
 all her maids before her." Some people say 
 the ballad has no basis in fad, and have 
 written, 1 believe, unanswerable papers to 
 the proof. But in the face of all that, the very 
 look of that high oriel window convinces the 
 imagination, and we enter into all the sor- 
 rows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive 
 the burthen of the long, lack-lustre days, 
 when she leaned her sick head against the 
 mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in 
 82
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 Maybole High Street, and the children at 
 play, and ruffling gallants riding by from 
 hunt or foray. We conceive the passion of 
 odd moments, when the wind threw up to 
 her some snatch of song, and her heart grew 
 hot within her, and her eyes overflowed at 
 the memory of the past. And even if the tale 
 be not true of this or that lady, or this or that 
 old tower, it is true in the essence of all men 
 and women: for all of us, sometime or other, 
 hear the gipsies singing ; over all of us is the 
 glamour cast. Some resist and sit resolutely 
 by the fire. Most go and are brought back 
 again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe 
 of Waring, go and are seen no more; only 
 now and again, at springtime, when the gip- 
 sies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, 
 we can catch their voices in the glee. 
 
 By night it was clearer, and Maybole more 
 visible than during the day. Clouds coursed 
 over the sky in great masses; the full moon 
 battled the other way, and lit up the snow 
 with gleams of flying silver; the town came 
 down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, 
 bestridden by smooth white roofs, and span- 
 gled here and there with lighted windows. 
 
 83
 
 BSSAVS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 At either end the snow stood high up in the 
 darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and 
 among the chimneys of the Castle. As the 
 moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the 
 town between the racing clouds, the white 
 roofs leaped into relief over the gables and 
 the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over 
 the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face 
 of the clock peered down the street; an hour 
 was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and 
 from behind the red curtains ofa public-house 
 some one trolled out — a compatriot of 
 Burns, again! — "Thesauttearblin'smye'e.'" 
 Next morning there was sun and a flapping 
 wind. From the street corners of Maybole I 
 could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. 
 The road underfoot was wet and heavy — 
 part ice, part snow, part water; and any one 
 I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 
 "Afmethowe" (thaw). My way lay among 
 rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and 
 dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the 
 Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald. It 
 has little claim to notice, save that Burns 
 came there to study surveying in the summer 
 of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the 
 84
 
 A WINTERS WALK 
 
 original of Tarn o' Shanter sleeps his last 
 sleep. It is worth noticing, however, that 
 this was the first place I thought ' ' Highland- 
 looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a 
 farm-road leads to the coast. As I came down 
 above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed 
 strangely different from the day before. The 
 cold fogs Were all blown away; and there 
 was Ailsa Craig, like a refradion, magnified 
 and deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there 
 were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran, 
 veined and tipped with snow; and behind, 
 and fainter, the low, blue land of Cantyre. 
 Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over 
 the top of Arran, and blew out in long 
 streamers to the south. The sea was bitten 
 all over with white; little ships, tacking up 
 and down the Firth, lay over at different 
 angles in the wind. On Shanter they were 
 ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by 
 himself, capered and whinnied as if the 
 spring were in him. 
 
 The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies 
 along the shore, among sand-hills and by 
 wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here 
 and there a few cottages stood together be- 
 
 85
 
 BSSAVS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 side a bridge. They had one odd feature, not 
 easy to describe in words : a triangular porch 
 projected from above the door, supported at 
 the apex by a single upright post; a second- 
 ary door was hinged to the post, and could 
 be hasped on either cheek of the real en- 
 trance; so, whether the wind was north or 
 south, the cotter could make himself a tri- 
 angular bight of shelter where to set his 
 chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is 
 one objedion to this device: for, as the post 
 stands in the middle of the fairway, any one 
 precipitately issuing from the cottage must 
 run his chance of a broken head. So far as 1 
 am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of 
 country about Girvan. And that corner is no- 
 ticeable for more reasons: it is certainly 
 one of the most characteristic districts in 
 Scotland. It has this movable porch by way 
 of architecture; it has, as we shall see, a sort 
 of remnant of provincial costume, and it 
 has the handsomest population in the Low- 
 lands. . . . 
 
 86
 
 V 
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 1875-6 
 
 ON THE TLAIN 
 
 ERHAPS the reader knows already 
 the aspeft of the great levels of the 
 Gatinais, where they border with 
 the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here and 
 there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest 
 as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few 
 apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The 
 quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small 
 fields dies out into the distance; the strips 
 blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies 
 forth open and empty, with no accident save 
 perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church 
 spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all 
 times, in spite of pettiness in the near detailr, 
 the impression becomes more solemn and 
 vast towards evening. The sun goes down, 
 a swollen orange, as it were into the sea, A 
 blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow 
 
 87
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 smoking behind him among the dry clods. 
 Another still works with his wife in their lit- 
 tle strip. An immense shadow fills the plain ; 
 these people stand in it up to their shoulders ; 
 and their heads, as they stoop over their 
 work and rise again, are relieved from time 
 to time against the golden sky. 
 
 These peasant farmers are well off now- 
 adays, and not by any means overworked; 
 but somehow you always see in them the 
 historical representative of the serf of yore, 
 and think not so much of present times, 
 which may be prosperous enough, as of the 
 old days when the peasant was taxed be- 
 yond possibility of payment, and lived, in 
 Michelet's image, like a hare between two 
 furrows. These very people now weeding 
 their patch under the broad sunset, that very 
 man and his wife, it seems to us, have suf- 
 fered all the wrongs of France. It is they 
 who have been their country's scapegoat for 
 long ages; they who, generation after gen- 
 eration, have sowed and not reaped, reaped 
 and another has garnered; and who have 
 now entered into their reward, and enjoy 
 their good things in their turn. For the 
 88
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled 
 and profited. " Le Seigneur," says the old 
 formula, "enfermeses manantscommesous 
 porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est 
 a lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans I'air, poisson 
 dans I'eau, bete au buisson, I'onde qui coule, 
 la cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such 
 was his old state of sovereignty, a local god 
 rather than a mere king. And now you may 
 ask yourself where he is, and look round for 
 vestiges of my late lord, and in all the coun- 
 try-side there is no trace of him but his for- 
 lorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long 
 avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst 
 of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks 
 and crowing chanticleers and droning bees, 
 the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and 
 peaked roofs and turning vanes into the 
 wind and sun. There is a glad spring bustle 
 in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in 
 flower, and the creepers green about the 
 broken balustrade; but no spring shall re- 
 vive the honour of the place. Old women of 
 the people, little children of the people, 
 saunter and gambol in the walled court or 
 feed the ducks in the negleded moat. Plough- 
 
 89
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long 
 stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits 
 for some better hour. Out on the plain, 
 where hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, 
 and the spade goes in deep and comes up 
 slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a 
 movement of joy at his heart when he thinks 
 that these spacious chimneys are now cold, 
 which have so often blazed and flickered 
 upon gay folk at supper, while he and his 
 hollow-eyed children watched through the 
 night with empty bellies and cold feet. And 
 perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the 
 forest lying like a coast-line of low hills 
 along the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps 
 forest and chateau hold no unsimilar place 
 in his affedions. 
 
 If the chateau was my lord's the forest was 
 my lord the king's; neither of them for this 
 poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his 
 meagre way of life by some petty theft of 
 wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he 
 found himself face to face with a whole de- 
 partment, from the Grand Master of the 
 Woods and Waters, who was a high-born 
 lord, down to the common sergeant, who 
 90
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes 
 or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For the 
 first offence, by the Salic law, there was a 
 fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be 
 taken more than once in fault, or circum- 
 stances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he 
 might be whipped, branded, or hanged. 
 There was a hangman over at Melun, and, 1 
 doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town 
 gate, where Jacques might see his fellows 
 dangle against the sky as he went to market. 
 And then, if he lived near to a cover, there 
 would be the more hares and rabbits to eat 
 out his harvest, and the more hunters to 
 trample it down. My lord has a new horn 
 from England. He has laid out seven francs 
 in decorating it with silver and gold, and 
 fitting it with a silken leash to hang about 
 his shoulder. The hounds have been on a 
 pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, 
 or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some 
 other holy intercessor who has made a spe- 
 cialty of the health of hunting-dogs. In the 
 grey dawn the game was turned and the 
 branch broken by our best piqueur. A rare 
 day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly 
 
 9»
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 flourish, sound the bien-aller with all your 
 lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, 
 while the quarry and hound and huntsman 
 sweep across his field, and a year's sparing 
 and labouring is as though it had not been. 
 If he can see the ruin with a good enough 
 grace, who knows but he may fall in favour 
 with my lord; who knows but his son may 
 become the last and least among the ser- 
 vants at his lordship's kennel — one of the 
 two poor varlets who get no wages and 
 sleep at night among the hounds ? ' 
 
 For all that, the forest has been of use to 
 Jacques, not only warming him with flillen 
 wood, but giving him shelter in days of 
 sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, 
 with all his troopers and trumpets, had been 
 beaten from field after field into some ulti- 
 mate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English 
 prison. In these dark days, when the watch 
 on the church steeple saw the smoke of 
 burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump 
 
 ' " Deux poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gis- 
 soient la nuit avec las chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's 
 Louis et Charles d'OiIeaiis, i. 6}, and for my lord's 
 English horn, ibid. 96. 
 
 92
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 of spears and fluttering pennons drawing 
 nigh across the plain, these good folk gat 
 them up, with ail their household gods, in- 
 to the wood, whence, from some high spur, 
 their timid scouts might overlook the com- 
 ing and going of the marauders, and see the 
 harvest ridden down, and church and cot- 
 tage go up to heaven all night in flame. It 
 was but an unhomely refuge that the woods 
 afforded, where they must abide all change 
 of weather and keep house with wolves and 
 vipers. Often there was none left alive, when 
 they returned, to show the old divisions of 
 field from field. And yet, as times went, 
 when the wolves entered at night into de- 
 populated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was 
 passing by with a company of demons like 
 himself, even in these caves and thickets 
 there were glad hearts and grateful prayers. 
 Once or twice, as I say, in the course of 
 the ages, the forest may have served the 
 peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, 
 and noble by old association. These woods 
 have rung to the horns of all the kings of 
 France, from Philip Augustus downwards. 
 They have seen Saint Louis exercise the 
 
 9^
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 dogs he brought with him from Egypt; 
 Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand 
 horses in his train; and Peter of Russia fol- 
 lowing his first stag. And so they are still 
 haunted for the imagination by royal hunts 
 and progresses, and peopled with the faces 
 of memorable men of yore. And this dis- 
 tindion is not only in virtue of the pastime 
 of dead monarchs. Great events, great rev- 
 olutions, great cycles in the affairs of men, 
 have here left their note, here taken shape 
 in some significant and dramatic situation. 
 It was hence that Guise and his leaguers led 
 Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, 
 booted and spurred, and with all his dogs 
 about him. Napoleon met the Pope beside a 
 woodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba 
 not so long after, he kissed the eagle of the 
 Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate 
 farewell to his soldiers. And here, after 
 Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign to the 
 new power, one of his faithful regiments 
 burned that memorial of so much toil and 
 glory on the Grand Master's table, and drank 
 its dust in brandy, as a devout priest con- 
 sumes the remnants of the Host. 
 
 94
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 IN THE SEASON 
 Close into the edge of the forest, so close 
 that the trees of the bornage stand pleasantly 
 about the last houses, sits a certain small and 
 very quiet village. There is but one street, 
 and that, not long ago, was a green lane, 
 where the cattle browsed between the door- 
 steps. As you go up this street, drawing ever 
 nearer the beginning of the wood, you will 
 arrive at last before an inn where artists 
 lodge. To the door (for 1 imagine it to be six 
 o'clock on some fine summer's even), half a 
 dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have 
 brought out chairs, and now sit sunning 
 themselves, and waiting the omnibus from 
 Melun. If you go on into the court you will 
 find as many more, somein the billiard-room 
 over absinthe and a match of corks, some 
 without over a last cigar and a vermouth. 
 The doves coo and flutter from the dovecote ; 
 Hortense is drawing water from the well; 
 and as all the rooms open into the court, you 
 can see the white-capped cook over the fur- 
 nace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, 
 who has stored his canvases and washed his 
 
 93
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, 
 tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger. 
 " Edmond, encore un -vermouth," cries a man 
 in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic 
 afterthought, "//// double, s'ilvous plait." 
 "Where are you working?" asks one in 
 pure white linen from top to toe. "At the 
 Carrefour de I'Epine," returns the other in 
 corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way). 
 "I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of 
 white. Where were you.?" "1 wasn't work- 
 ing, I was looking for motives." Here is an 
 outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clus- 
 tering together about some new-comer with 
 outstretched hands; perhaps the "corre- 
 spondence" has come in and brought So- 
 and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So- 
 and-so who has walked over from Chailly to 
 dinner. 
 
 "A table, {Messieurs/ " cries M. Siron, 
 bearing through the court the first tureen of 
 soup. And immediately the company begins 
 to settle down about the long tables in the 
 dining-room, framed all round with sketches 
 of all degrees of merit and demerit. There's 
 the big picture of the huntsman winding a 
 96
 
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 JO
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 horn with a dead boar between his legs, and 
 his legs — well, his legs in stockings. And 
 here is the little pidure of a raw mutton- 
 chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole 
 last summer with no worse a missile than a 
 plum from the dessert. And under all these 
 works of art so much eating goes forward, 
 so much drinking, so much jabbering in 
 French and English, that it would do your 
 heart good merely to peep and listen at the 
 door. One man is telling how they all went 
 last year to the fete at Fleury, and another 
 how well So-and-so would sing of an even- 
 ing; and here are a third and fourth making 
 plans for the whole future of their hves; and 
 there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and mak- 
 ing faces on his clenched fist, surely of all 
 arts the most difficult and admirable ! A sixth 
 has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and re- 
 signs himself to digestion. A seventh has 
 just dropped in, and calls for soup. Number 
 eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is 
 once more trampling the poor piano under 
 powerful and uncertain fingers. 
 
 Dinner over, peopledrop outside to smoke 
 and chat. Perhaps we go along to visit our 
 
 91
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 friends at the other end of the village, where 
 there is always a good welcome and a good 
 talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters and 
 white wine to close the evening. Or a dance 
 is organised in the dining-room, and the 
 piano exhibits all its paces under manful 
 jockeying, to the light of the three or four 
 candles and a lamp or two, while the waltz- 
 ers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, 
 and sober men, who are not given to such 
 light pleasures, get up on the table or the 
 sideboard, and sit there looking on approv- 
 ingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or 
 sometimes — suppose my lady moon looks 
 forth, and the court from out the half-lit 
 dining-room seems nearly as bright as by 
 day, and the light picks out the window- 
 panes, and makes a clear shadow under 
 every vine-leaf on the wall — sometimes a 
 picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready, 
 and a good procession formed in front of the 
 hotel. The two trumpeters in honour go be- 
 fore ; and as we file down the long alley, and 
 up through devious footpaths among rocks 
 and pine-trees, with every here and there a 
 dark passage of shadow, and every here 
 98
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 and there a spacious outlook over moonlit 
 woods, these two precede us and sound 
 many a jolly flourish as they walk. We 
 gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, 
 and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows 
 of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely 
 beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged 
 about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the 
 punch is burnt and sent round in scalding 
 thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may 
 pass with song and jest. And then we go 
 home in the moonlight morning, straggling 
 a good deal among the birch tufts and the 
 boulders, but ever called together again, as 
 one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps 
 some one of the party will not heed the 
 summons, but chooses out some by-way of 
 his own. As he follows the winding sandy 
 road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter 
 and fainter in the distance, and die finally 
 out, and still walks on in the strange cool- 
 ness and silence and between the crisp 
 lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, 
 until suddenly the bell rings out the hour 
 from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find 
 himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and 
 
 99
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 perilous shores, no passing knoll over the 
 busy market-place, can speak with a more 
 heavy and disconsolate tongue to human 
 ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly 
 reverberations in his mind. And as he stands 
 rooted, it has grown once more so utterly 
 silent that it seems to him he might hear 
 the church bells ring the hour out all the 
 world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, 
 and away in outlandish cities, and in the 
 village on the river, where his childhood 
 passed between the sun and flowers. 
 
 IDLE HOURS 
 The woods by night, in all their uncanny 
 effeft, are not rightly to be understood until 
 you can compare them with the woods by 
 day. The stillness of the medium, the floor 
 of glittering sand, these trees that go stream- 
 ing up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver 
 in the moving winds like the weeds in sub- 
 marine currents, all these set the mind work- 
 ing on the thought of what you may have 
 seen off a foreland or over the side of a boat, 
 and make you feel like a diver, down in the 
 quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, 
 
 lOO
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 transitory surface of the sea. And yet in it- 
 self, as I say, the strangeness of these noc- 
 turnal solitudes is not to be felt fully without 
 the sense of contrast. You must have risen 
 in the morning and seen the woods as they 
 are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's 
 light; you must have felt the odour of in- 
 numerable trees at even, the unsparing heat 
 along the forest roads, and the coolness of 
 the groves. 
 
 And on the first morning you will doubt- 
 less rise betimes. If you have not been wak- 
 ened before by the visit of some adventurous 
 pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the 
 sun can reach your window — for there are 
 no blinds or shutters to keep him out — and 
 the room, with its bare wood floor and bare 
 whitewashed walls, shines all round you in 
 a sort of glory of refleded lights. You may 
 doze a while longer by snatches, or lie awake 
 to study the charcoal men and dogs and 
 horses with which former occupants have 
 defiled the partitions : Thiers, with wily pro- 
 file; local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, may- 
 be, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. 
 Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the 
 
 lOI
 
 ESS A rs AND CRITICISMS 
 
 salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders 
 easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound 
 into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his 
 "motive." And artist after artist, as he goes 
 out of the village, carries with him a little fol- 
 lowing of dogs. For the dogs, who belong 
 only nominally to any special master, hang 
 about the gate of the forest all day long, and 
 whenever any one goes by who hits their 
 fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with 
 him to play an hour or two at hunting. They 
 would like to be under the trees all day. But 
 they cannot go alone. They require a pre- 
 text. And so they take the passing artist as 
 an excuse to go into the woods, as they 
 might take a walking-stick as an excuse to 
 bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and 
 bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound 
 and with a bulldog's head, this company of 
 mongrels will trot by your side all day and 
 come home with you at night, still showing 
 white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their 
 good humour is not to be exhausted. You 
 may pelt them with stones if you please, and 
 all they will do is to give you a wider berth. 
 If once they come out with you, to you they 
 
 1 02
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 will remain faithful, and with you return ; al- 
 though if you meet them next morning in 
 the street, it is as like as not they will cut 
 you with a countenance of brass. 
 
 The forest — a strange thing for an Eng- 
 lishman — is very destitute of birds. This is 
 no country where every patch of wood 
 among the meadows gives up an incense of 
 song, and every valley wandered through 
 by a streamlet rings and reverberates from 
 side to side with a profusion of clear notes. 
 And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted 
 on its own account only. For the inserts 
 prosper in their absence, and become as one 
 of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the 
 hot sand ; mosquitos drone their nasaldrone ; 
 wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of 
 the forest, you see a myriad transparent 
 creatures coming and going in the shaft of 
 light; and even between-whiles, even where 
 there is no incursion of sun-rays into the 
 dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious 
 of a continual drift of insefts, an ebb and 
 flow of infinitesimal living things between 
 the trees. Nor are inseds the only evil crea- 
 tures that haunt the forest. For you may 
 
 103
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 plump into a cave among the rocks, and find 
 yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see 
 a crooked viper slither across the road. 
 
 Perhaps you may set yourself down in the 
 bay between two spreading beech-roots 
 with a book on your lap, and be awakened 
 ail of a sudden by a friend: "1 say, just 
 keep where you are, will you? You make 
 the jolliest motive." And you reply: "Well, 
 1 don't mind, if I may smoke." And there- 
 after the hours go idly by. Your friend at 
 the easel labours doggedly a little way off, 
 in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet 
 farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, 
 you see another painter, encamped in the 
 shadow of another tree, and up to his waist 
 in the fern. You cannot watch your own 
 effigy growing out of the white trunk, and 
 the trunk beginning to stand forth from the 
 rest of the wood, and the whole pidure get- 
 ting dappled over with the flecks of sun that 
 slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a 
 wind goes by and sets the trees a-talking, 
 flicker hither and thither like butterflies of 
 light. But you know it is going forward; 
 and, out of emulation with the painter, get 
 104
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 ready your own palette, and lay out the col- 
 our for a woodland scene in words. 
 
 Your tree stands in a hollow paved with 
 fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills, 
 and scattered over with rocks and junipers. 
 All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. 
 Everything stands out as though it were cut 
 in cardboard, every colour is strained into 
 its highest key. The boulders are some of 
 them upright and dead like monolithic cas- 
 tles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. 
 The junipers — looking, in their soiled and 
 ragged mourning, like some funeral proces- 
 sion that has gone seeking the place of sep- 
 ulchre three hundred years and more in 
 wind and rain — are daubed in forcibly 
 against the glowing ferns and heather. Every 
 tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with 
 pre-Raphaehte minuteness. And a sorry fig- 
 ure they make out there in the sun, like mis- 
 begotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched 
 in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up 
 with such a discharge of violent sunlight, 
 as a man might live fifty years in England 
 and not see. 
 
 Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes 
 
 105
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic 
 tremulous air, of how the poet loved his 
 mistress long ago, and pressed on her the 
 flight of time, and told her how white and 
 quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how 
 the boat dipped and pitched as the shades 
 embarked for the passionless land. Yet a 
 little while, sang the poet, and there shall 
 be no more love; only to sit and remember 
 loves that might have been. There is a fall- 
 ing flourish in the air that remains in the 
 memory and comes back in incongruous 
 places, on the seat of hansoms or in the 
 warm bed at night, with something of a 
 forest savour. 
 
 " You can get up now," says the painter; 
 "I'm at the background." 
 
 And so up you get, stretching yourself, 
 and go your way into the wood, the daylight 
 becoming richer and more golden, and the 
 shadows stretching f^irther into the open. A 
 cool air comes along the highways, and the 
 scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad 
 their ozone. Out of unknown thickets comes 
 forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the 
 woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, 
 1 06
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 but as though court ladies, who had known 
 these paths in ages long gone by, still walked 
 in the summer evenings, and shed from their 
 brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon 
 the woodland winds. One side of the long 
 avenues is still kindled with the sun, the 
 other is plunged in transparent shadow. 
 Over the trees the west begins to burn like a 
 furnace; and the painters gather up their 
 chattels, and go down, by avenue or foot- 
 path, to the plain. 
 
 ^ PLEASURE PARTY 
 
 As this excursion is a matter of some 
 length, and, moreover, we go in force, we 
 have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony- 
 cart, and ordered a large wagonette from Le- 
 josne's. It has been waiting for near an hour, 
 while one went to pack a knapsack, and 
 t'other hurried over his toilette and coffee; 
 but now it is filled from end to end with 
 merry folk in summer attire, the coachman 
 cracks his whip, and amid much applause 
 from round the inn door off we rattle at a 
 spanking trot. The way lies through the for- 
 est, up hill and down dale, and by beech and 
 
 107
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 pine wood, in tiie cheerful morning sun- 
 shine. The English get down at all the as- 
 cents and walk on ahead for exercise; the 
 French are mightily entertained at this, and 
 keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we 
 carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter 
 and light speech, and some one will be al- 
 ways breaking out into a bar or two of opera 
 bouffe. Before we get to the Route Ronde 
 here comes Desprez, the colourman from 
 Fontainebleau, trudging across on his week- 
 ly peddle with a case of merchandise; and it 
 is "Desprez, leave me some malachite 
 green"; "Desprez, leave me so much can- 
 vas" ; "Desprez, leave me this, or leave me 
 that " ; M. Desprez standing the while in the 
 sunlight with grave face and many saluta- 
 tions. The next interruption is more impor- 
 tant. For some time back we have had the 
 sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a 
 little past Franchard, we find a mounted 
 trooper holding a led horse, who brings the 
 wagonette to a stand. The artillery is pradis- 
 ing in the Quadrilateral, it appears; passage 
 along the Route Ronde formally interdicted 
 for the moment. There is nothing for it but 
 108
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, and 
 get down to make fun with the notorious 
 Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred 
 dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of 
 Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. 
 And meanwhile the Doctor, with sun um- 
 brella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, 
 is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of 
 us know) bribing the too facile sentry. His 
 speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner 
 dignified and insinuating. It is not for noth- 
 ing that the Dodor has voyaged all the world 
 over, and speaks all languages from French 
 to Patagonian. He has not come home from 
 perilous journeys to be thwarted by a cor- 
 poral of horse. And so we soon see the sol- 
 dier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate 
 a relenting heart. " £"// voiture, Messieurs, 
 Mcsdames," sings the Dodor; and on we go 
 again at a good round pace, for black care fol- 
 lows hard after us, and discretion prevails not 
 a little over valour in sometimorous spirits of 
 the party. At any moment we may meet the 
 sergeant, who will send us back. At any mo- 
 ment we may encounter a flying shell, which 
 will send us somewhere farther off than Grez. 
 
 109
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Grez — for that is our destination — has 
 been highly recommended for its beauty. 
 " Ily a del'eau,'' people have said, with an 
 emphasis, as if that settled the question, 
 which, for a French mind, 1 am rather led 
 to think it does. And Grez, when we get 
 there, is indeed a place worthy of some 
 praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of 
 houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in 
 ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn gar- 
 den descends in terraces to the river; stable- 
 yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, 
 fringed with rushes and embellished with a 
 green arbour. On the opposite bank there is 
 a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly 
 with willows and poplars. And between the 
 two lies the river, clear and deep, and full of 
 reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster 
 about the starlings of the long low bridge, 
 and stand half-way up upon the piers in 
 green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar 
 with long antennae, and chequer the slimy 
 bottom with the shadow of their leaves. And 
 the river wanders hither and thither among 
 the islets, and is smothered and broken up 
 by the reeds, like an old building in the 
 
 I lO
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You 
 may watch the box where the good man of 
 the inn i^eeps fish alive for his kitchen, one 
 oily ripple following another over the top of 
 the yellow deal. And you can hear a splash- 
 ing and a prattle of voices from the shed 
 under the old kirk, where the village women 
 wash and wash all day among the fish and 
 water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there 
 should be specially cool and sweet. 
 
 We have come here for the river. And no 
 sooner have we all bathed than we board 
 the two shallops and push off gaily, and go 
 gliding under the trees and gathering a great 
 treasure of water-lilies. Some one sings; 
 some trail their hands in the cool water; 
 some lean over the gunwale to see the image 
 of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow 
 of the boat, with the balanced oars and their 
 own head protruded, glide smoothly over 
 the yellow floor of the stream. At last, the 
 day declining — all silent and happy, and up 
 to the knees in the wet lilies — we punt 
 slowly back again to the landing-place be- 
 side the bridge. There is a wish for solitude 
 on all. One hides himself in the arbour with 
 
 II I
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 a cigarette; another goes a walk in the 
 country with Cocardon; a third inspeds the 
 church. And it is not till dinner is on the 
 table, and the inn's best wine goes round 
 from glass to glass, that we begin to throw 
 off the restraint and fuse once more into a 
 jolly fellowship. 
 
 Half the party are to return to-night with 
 the wagonette ; and some of the others, loath 
 to break up good company, will go with 
 them a bit of the way and drink a stirrup- 
 cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the wagonette, 
 and not so merry as it might have been. The 
 coachman loses the road. So-and-so tries to 
 light fireworks with the most indifferent 
 success. Some sing, but the rest are too 
 weary to applaud ; and it seems as if the 
 festival were fiiirly at an end — 
 
 " Nous avons fait la noce, 
 Reutrons a nos foyers! " 
 
 And such is the burthen, even after we have 
 come to Marlotte and taken our places in the 
 court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch 
 on the long table out in the open air, where 
 the guests dine in summer weather. The 
 candles flare in the night wind, and the faces 
 
 112
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 round the punch are lit up, with shifting 
 emphasis, against a background of complete 
 and solid darkness. It is all picturesque 
 enough ; but the fad is, we are aweary. We 
 yawn; we are out of the vein; we have 
 made the wedding, as the song says, and 
 now, for pleasure's sake, let's make an end 
 on't. When here comes striding into the 
 court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and 
 splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the great, 
 famous, and redoubtable Blank; and in a 
 moment the fire kindles again, and the night 
 is witness of our laughter as he imitates 
 Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, pifture- 
 dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and 
 thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain 
 of mind and voice, that would rather sug- 
 gest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. 
 We are as merry as ever when the trap sets 
 forth again, and say farewell noisily to all 
 the good folk going farther. Then, as we are 
 far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit 
 Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour 
 or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with 
 furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit 
 up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a 
 
 II?
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 wood tire in a mediaeval chimney. And then 
 we plod back through the darkness to the 
 inn beside the river. 
 
 How quick bright things come to confu- 
 sion! When we arise next morning, the 
 grey showers fail steadily, the trees hang 
 limp, and the face of the stream is spoiled 
 with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies 
 encumber the garden walk, or begin, dis- 
 mally enough, their voyage towards the 
 Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies 
 upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the 
 colour is washed out of the green and golden 
 landscape of last night, as though an envi- 
 ous man had taken a water-colour sketch 
 and blotted it together with a sponge. We 
 go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the 
 roads about Grez have a trick of their own. 
 They go on for a while among clumps of 
 willows and patches of vine, and then, sud- 
 denly and without any warning, cease and 
 determine in some miry hollow or upon 
 some bald know; and you have a short 
 period of hope, then right-about face, and 
 back the way you came! So we draw about 
 the kitchen fire and play a round game of 
 114
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 cards for ha'pence, or go to the billiard-room 
 for a match at corks; and by one consent 
 a messenger is sent over for the wagonette 
 — Grez shall be left to-morrow. 
 
 To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the 
 party agree to walk back for exercise, and 
 let their knapsacks follow by the trap. 1 
 need hardly say they are neither of them 
 French; for, of all English phrases, the 
 phrase "for exercise" is the least compre- 
 hensible across the Straits of Dover. All 
 goes well for a while with the pedestrians. 
 The wet woods are full of scents in the 
 noontide. At a certain cross, where there is 
 a guardhouse, they make a halt, for the for- 
 ester's wife is the daughter of their good 
 host at Barbizon. And so there they are hos- 
 pitably received by the comely woman, 
 with one child in her arms and another prat- 
 tling and tottering at her gown, and drink 
 some syrup of quince in the back parlour, 
 with a map of the forest on the wall, and 
 some prints of love-affairs and the great 
 Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the 
 Quadrilateral, and hear once more the re- 
 port of the big guns, they take a by-road to 
 
 115
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITIC IS MS 
 
 avoid the sentries, and go on a wiiile some- 
 what vaguely, with the sound of the cannon 
 in their ears and the rain beginning to fall. 
 The ways grow wider and sandier; here and 
 there there are real sand-hills, as though by 
 the sea-shore; the fir-wood is open and 
 grows in clumps upon the hillocks, and the 
 race of sign-posts is no more. One begins to 
 look at the other doubtfully. "1 am sure we 
 should keep more to the right, " says one ; and 
 the other is just as certain they should hold 
 to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens 
 open, and the rain falls "sheer and strong 
 and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a mo- 
 ment they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. 
 They cannot see out of their eyes for the drift, 
 and the water churns and gurgles in their 
 boots. They leave the track and try across 
 country with a gambler's desperation, for it 
 seems as if it were impossible to make the 
 situation worse; and, for the next hour, go 
 scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod 
 along paths that are now no more than rivu- 
 lets, and across waste clearings where the 
 scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all 
 too plainly of the cannon in the distance. 
 ii6
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 And meantime the cannon grumble out re- 
 sponses to the grumbling thunder. There is 
 such a mixture of melodrama and sheer dis- 
 comfort about all this, it is at once so grey 
 and so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to 
 read and write about by the chimney-corner 
 than to suffer in the person. At last they 
 chance on the right path, and make Fran- 
 chard in the early evening, the sorriest pair 
 of wanderers that ever welcomed English 
 ale.Thence, by the Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes- 
 Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean 
 hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner. 
 
 THE WOODS IN SPRING 
 I think you will like the forest best in the 
 sharp early springtime, when it is just begin- 
 ning to reawaken, and innumerable violets 
 peep from among the fallen leaves ; when two 
 or three people at most sit down to dinner, 
 and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug 
 about your knees, for the nights are chill, and 
 the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There 
 is less to distrad the attention, for one thing, 
 and the forest is more itself, it is not be- 
 dotted with artists' sunshades as with un- 
 
 117
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 known mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the 
 remains of Enghsh picnics. The hunting still 
 goes on, and at any moment your heart may 
 be brought into your mouth as you hear far- 
 away horns; or you may be told by an agi- 
 tated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up 
 the avenue, not ten minutes since, "d fond 
 de train, monsieur, etavec douiepiqueiirs. 
 
 if you go up to some coign of vantage in 
 the system of low hills that permeates the 
 forest, you will see many different trads of 
 country, each of its own cold and melan- 
 choly neutral tint, and all mixed together 
 and mingled the one into the other at the 
 seams. You will see tracts of leafless beeches 
 of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a 
 little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine 
 of a solemn green; and, dotted among the 
 pines, or standing by themselves in rocky 
 clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks 
 of birches, spreading out into snow-white 
 branches yet more delicate, and crowned 
 and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. 
 And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled 
 boulders, with bright sand-breaks between 
 them, and wavering sandy roads among the 
 ii8
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 bracken and brown heather. It is all rather 
 cold and unhomely. It has not the perfed 
 beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the 
 wood in the later year, when it is no more 
 than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, 
 tremulous with inseds, intersected here and 
 there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heath- 
 er. The loveliness of the woods in March is 
 not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type. It 
 is made sharp with a grain of salt, with a 
 touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting 
 of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as 
 men acquire a taste for olives. And the won- 
 derful clear, pure air wells into your lungs 
 the while by voluptuous inhalations, and 
 makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart 
 tinkling to a new tune — or, rather, to an old 
 tune; for you remember in your boyhood 
 something akin to this spirit of adventure, 
 this thirst for exploration, that now takes 
 you masterfully by the hand, plunges you 
 into many a deep grove, and drags you over 
 many a stony crest. It is as if the whole wood 
 were full of friendly voices calling you farther 
 in, and you turn from one side to another, 
 like Buridan's donkey, in a maze of pleasure. 
 
 "9
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Comely beeches send up their white, 
 straight, clustered branches, barred with 
 green moss, like so many fingers from a 
 half-clenched hand. Mighty oaks stand to 
 the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; 
 thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the 
 great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out 
 into the golden evening sky, where therooks 
 are flying and calling. On the sward of the 
 Boisd'Hyverthe firs stand well asunder with 
 outspread arms, like fencers saluting; and 
 the air smells of resin all around, and the 
 ' sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest 
 of all, and in appearance oldest of all, are 
 the dim and wizard upland districts of young 
 wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, 
 and strewn with fir-apples and flakes of fall- 
 en bark. Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, 
 guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white 
 with years and the rigours of the changeful 
 seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are 
 sown and carried away again by the light 
 air — like thistledown. The loneliness of 
 these coverts is so excessive, that there are 
 moments when pleasure draws to the verge 
 of fear. You listen and listen for some noise 
 
 120
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 to break the silence, till you grow half mes- 
 merised by the intensity of the strain; your 
 sense of your own identity is troubled ; your 
 brain reels, like that of some gymnosophist 
 poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; 
 and should you see your own outspread 
 feet, you see them, not as anything of yours, 
 but as a feature of the scene around you. 
 
 Still the forest is always, but the stillness 
 is not always unbroken. You can hear the 
 wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops ; 
 sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; 
 sometimes with a long steady rush, like the 
 breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at 
 hand, the branches move, a moan goes 
 through the thicket, and the wood thrills to 
 its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage 
 on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a 
 dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle 
 underfoot, or you may time your steps to 
 the steady recurrent strokes of the wood- 
 man's axe. From time to time, over the low 
 grounds, a flight of rooks goes by ; and from 
 time to time the cooing of wild doves falls 
 upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near 
 at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of 
 
 121
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the woods, thin and far away, as fits these 
 solemn phices. Or you hear suddenly the 
 hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; 
 scared deer flit past you through the fringes 
 of the wood; then a man or two running, 
 in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on 
 a bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of 
 the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or 
 perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are 
 blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash 
 through the clearings, and the solid noise of 
 horses galloping passes below you, where 
 you sit perched among the rocks and heather. 
 The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, 
 and in all neighbouring villages, there is a 
 vague excitement and a vague hope; for 
 who knows whither the chase may lead ? 
 and even to have seen a single piqueur, or 
 spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man 
 of consequence for the night. 
 
 Besides men who shoot and men who 
 ride with the hounds, there are few people 
 in the forest, in the early spring, save wood- 
 cutters plying their axes steadily, and old 
 women and children gathering wood for the 
 fire. You may meet such a party coming 
 
 1 22
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 home in the twihght: the old woman laden 
 with a fagot of chips, and the little ones 
 hauling a long branch behind them in her 
 wake. That is the worst of what there is to 
 encounter; and if I tell you of what once 
 happened to a friend of mine, it is by no 
 means to tantalise you with false hopes; for 
 the adventure was unique. It was on a very 
 cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey 
 sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this 
 friend (who shall here be nameless) heard 
 the notes of a key-bugle played with much 
 hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire 
 spread out along the green pine-tops, in a 
 remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of 
 naked boulders. He drew near warily, and 
 beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in 
 an open. The old father knitted a sock, the 
 mother sat staring at the fire. The eldest 
 son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, 
 was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. 
 Two or three daughters lay in the neigh- 
 bourhood picking violets. And the whole 
 party as grave and silent as the woods 
 around them ! My friend watched for a long 
 time, he says; but all held their peace; not 
 
 123
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 one spoke or smiled ; only the dragoon kept 
 choosing out single notes upon the bugle, 
 and the father knitted away at his work and 
 made strange movements the while with 
 his flexible eyebrows. They took no notice 
 whatever of my friend's presence, which 
 was disquieting in itself, and increased the 
 resemblance of the whole party to mechani- 
 cal waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax 
 figure might have played the bugle with 
 more spirit'than that strange dragoon. And 
 as this hypothesis of his became more cer- 
 tain, the awful insolubility of why they 
 should be left out there in the woods with 
 nobody to wind them up again when they 
 ran down, and a growing disquietude as to 
 what might happen next, became too much 
 for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly 
 took to his heels. It might have been a sing- 
 ing in his ears, but he fiincies he was fol- 
 lowed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laugh- 
 ter. Nothing has ever transpired to clear up 
 the mystery ; it may be they were automata ; 
 or it may be (and this is the theory to which 
 I lean myself) that this is all another chap- 
 ter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the up- 
 124
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 right old man with the eyebrows was no 
 other than Father Jove, and the young dra- 
 goon with the taste for music either Apollo 
 or Mars. 
 
 MORALITY 
 
 Strange indeed is the attraction of the for- 
 est for the minds of men. Not one or two 
 only, but a great chorus of grateful voices 
 have arisen to spread abroad its fame. Half 
 the famous writers of modern France have 
 had their word to say about Fontainebleau. 
 Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George 
 Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the 
 brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, 
 each of these hasdone something to the eter- 
 nal praise and memory of these woods. 
 Even at the very worst of times, even when 
 the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of 
 all Persons of Taste, the forest still preserved 
 a certain reputation for beauty. It was in 
 1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his 
 Historical Description of the Palace, Town, 
 and Forest of Fontainebleau. And very droll 
 it is to see him, as he tries to set forth his ad- 
 miration in terms of what was then permis- 
 sible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the 
 
 125
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Abbe ' ' sont ndmirees avec surprise des voy- 
 ageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace : Ut 
 mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus mirari 
 libet." The good man is not exaftly lyrical in 
 his praise ; and you see how he sets his back 
 against Horace as against a trusty oak. Hor- 
 ace, at any rate, was classical. For the rest, 
 however, the Abbe likes places where many 
 alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-Etoile, 
 are kept up "by a special gardener," and 
 admires at the Table du Roi the labours of 
 the Grand Master of Woods and Waters, the 
 Sieur de la Falure, "qui a fait faire ce magni- 
 fique endroit." 
 
 But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty 
 that the forest makes a claim upon men's 
 hearts, as for that subtle something, that 
 quality of the air, that emanation from the 
 old trees, that so wonderfully changes and 
 renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, 
 sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand 
 Monarchs, time out of mind have come here 
 for consolation. Hither perplexed folk have 
 retired out of the press of life, as into a deep 
 bay-window on some night of masquerade, 
 and here found quiet and silence, and rest, 
 126
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 the mother of wisdom. It is the great moral 
 spa; this forest without a fountain is itself 
 the great fountain of Juventius. It is the best 
 place in the world to bring an old sorrow 
 that has been a long while your friend and 
 enemy; and if, like Beranger's, your gaiety 
 has run away from home and left open the 
 door for sorrow to come in, of all covers in 
 Europe, it is here you may expeft to find the 
 truant hid. With every hour you change. 
 The air penetrates through your clothes, 
 and nestles to your living body. You love 
 exercise and slumber, long fasting and full 
 meals. You forget all your scruples and live 
 a while in peace and freedom, and for the 
 moment only. For here, all is absent that can 
 stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as 
 you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; 
 but you see them framed in the forest, like 
 figures on a painted canvas; and for you, 
 they are not people in any living and kindly 
 sense. You forget the grim contrariety of 
 interests. You forget the narrow lane where 
 all men jostle together in unchivalrous con- 
 tention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, 
 that gapes on either hand for the defeated. 
 
 127
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Life is simple enough, it seems, and the very 
 idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy 
 out of a last night's dream. 
 
 Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is 
 plain and possible. You become enamoured 
 of a life of change and movement and the 
 open air, where the muscles shall be more 
 exercised than the affections. When you 
 have had your will of the forest, you may 
 visit the whole round world. You may 
 buckle on your knapsack and take the road 
 on foot. You may bestride a good nag, and 
 ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into 
 the enchanted East. You may cross the Black 
 Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before 
 you, like a map, dotted with old cities, 
 walled and spired, that dream all day on 
 their own retledions in the Rhine or Dan- 
 ube. You may pass the spinal cord of Europe 
 and go down from Alpine glaciers to where 
 Italy extends her marble moles and glasses 
 her marble palaces in the midland sea. You 
 may sleep in flying trains or wayside tav- 
 erns. You may be awakened at dawn by the 
 scream of the express or the small pipe of the 
 robin in the hedge. For you the rain should 
 128
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 allay the dust of the beaten road; the wind 
 dry your clothes upon you as you walked. 
 Autumn should hang out russet pears and 
 purple grapes along the lane; inn after inn 
 proffer you their cups of raw wine ; river by 
 river receive your body in the sultry noon. 
 Wherever you went warm valleys and high 
 trees and pleasant villages should compass 
 you about; and light fellowships should take 
 you by the arm, and walk with you an hour 
 upon your way. You may see from afar off 
 what it will come to in the end — the 
 weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, con- 
 sumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all 
 near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an 
 Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem 
 well — and yet, in the air of the forest, this 
 will seem the best — to break all the network 
 bound about your feet by birth and old com- 
 panionship and loyal love, and bear your 
 shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town 
 and country, until the hour of the great dis- 
 solvent. 
 
 Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. 
 For the forest is by itself, and forest life 
 owns small kinship with life in the dismal
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated 
 that they cannot take the world as it is given 
 to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only 
 what they see and hear, but what they know 
 to be behind, enter into their notion of a 
 place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across 
 the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at 
 intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from 
 time to time will suffer a sea-change. And 
 so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its 
 greatness is for much in the effeft produced. 
 You reckon up the miles that lie between 
 you and intrusion. You may walk before you 
 all day long, and not fear to touch the bar- 
 rier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland 
 into the land of gin and steam-hammers. 
 And there is an old tale enhances for the 
 imagination the grandeur of the woods of 
 France, and secures you in the thought of 
 your seclusion. When Charles VI. hunted 
 in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, 
 there was captured an old stag, having a 
 collar of bronze about his neck, and these 
 words engraved on the collar: "Caesar mihi 
 hoc donavit." It is no wonder if the minds 
 of men were moved at this occurrence and 
 no
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 they stood aghast to find themselves thus 
 touching hands with forgotten ages, and fol- 
 lowing an antiquity with hound and horn. 
 And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle 
 curiosity that you ponder how many cen- 
 turies this stag had carried its free antlers 
 through the wood, and how many summers 
 and winters had shone and snowed on the 
 imperial badge. If the extent of solemn 
 wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from 
 the hunters' hounds and horses, might not 
 you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, 
 with all the pangs and trepidations of man's 
 life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for 
 more than the span of human years.? Here, 
 also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest 
 glade, sounds the gallop of the pale horse. 
 But he does not hunt this cover with all his 
 hounds, for the game is thin and small: and 
 if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged 
 ever in the deepest thickets, you too might 
 live on into later generations and astonish 
 men by your stalwart age and the trophies 
 of an immemorial success. 
 
 For the forest takes away from you all ex- 
 cuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin 
 
 •3'
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 or thwart your free desires. Here all the im- 
 pudencies of the brawling world reach you 
 no more. You may count your hours, like 
 Endymion, by the strokes of the lone wood- 
 cutter, or by the progression of the lights 
 and shadows and the sun wheeling his 
 wide circuit through the naked heavens. 
 Here shall you see no enemies but winter 
 and rough weather. And if a pang comes to 
 you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hun- 
 ger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking 
 repentance, all this talk of duty that is no 
 duty, in the great peace, in the pure day- 
 light of these woods, fall away from you 
 like a garment. And if perchance you come 
 forth upon an eminence, where the wind 
 blows upon you large and fresh, and the 
 pines knock their long stems together, like 
 an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far 
 away over the plain a faftory chimney de- 
 fined against the pale horizon — it is for you, 
 as for the staid and simple peasant when, 
 with his plough, he upturns old arms and 
 harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, 
 sure enough, there was a battle there in the 
 old times ; and, sure enough, there is a world 
 132
 
 FOREST NOTES 
 
 out yonder where men strive together with 
 a noise of oaths and weeping and chmiorous 
 dispute. So much you apprehend by an ath- 
 letic aft of the imagination. A faint far-off 
 rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as 
 of some dead religion. 
 
 133
 
 VI 
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN 
 FRANCE' 
 
 A Fragment^ '8yp 
 
 Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of 
 " Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 
 
 fi MONASTIER is the chief place of 
 a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the 
 ancient Velay. As the name betok- 
 ens, the town is of monastic origin; and it 
 still contains a towered bulk of monastery 
 and a church of some architedural preten- 
 sions, the seat of an archpriest and several 
 vicars. It stands on the side of a hill above 
 the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from 
 Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves 
 sometimes pursue the diligence in winter. 
 The road, which is bound for Vivarais, 
 passes through the town from end to end 
 in a single narrow street; there you may see 
 the fountain where women fill their pitch- 
 ' Reprinted by permission of Joiin Lane. 
 134
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 ers, there also some old houses with carved 
 doors and pediments and ornamental work 
 in iron. For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayr- 
 shire, was a sort of country capital, where 
 the local aristocracy had their town mansions 
 for the winter; and there is a certain baron 
 still alive and, 1 am told, extremely penitent, 
 who found means to ruin himself by high 
 living in this village on the hills. He certainly 
 has claims to be considered the most re- 
 markable spendthrift on record. How he set 
 about it, in a place where there are no lux- 
 uries for sale, and where the board at the 
 best inn comes to little more than a shilling 
 a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, 
 ruined as the family was, went as far as 
 Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases 
 of father and son mark an epoch in the his- 
 tory of centralisation in France. Not until 
 the latter had got into the train was the 
 work of Richelieu complete. 
 
 it is a people of lace-makers. The women 
 sit in the streets by groups of five or six; 
 and the noise of the bobbins is audible from 
 one group to another. Now and then you 
 will hear one woman clattering off prayers 
 
 •35
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 for the edification of the others at their 
 work. They wear gaudy shawls, white caps 
 with a gay ribbon about the head, and some- 
 times a bhick felt brigand hat above the cap; 
 and so they give the street colour and bright- 
 ness and a foreign air. A while ago, when 
 England largely supplied herself from this 
 distrid with the lace called torihoii, it was 
 not unusual to earn five francs a day ; and 
 five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in 
 London. Now, from a change in the mar- 
 ket, it takes a clever and industrious work- 
 woman to earn from three to four in the 
 week, or less than an eighth of what she 
 made easily a few years ago. The tide of 
 prosperity came and went, as with our 
 northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer. 
 The women bravely squandered their gains, 
 kept the men in idleness, and gave them- 
 selves up, as 1 was told, to sweethearting 
 and a merry life. From week's end to week's 
 end it was one continuous gala in Monastier; 
 people spent the day in the wine-shops, and 
 the drum or the bagpipes led on the boiir- 
 rees up to ten at night. Now these dancing 
 days are over. "II n'y a plit^s de jetmesse," 
 136
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 said Victor the gar(;on. I hear of no great 
 advance in what are thought the essentials 
 of morality; but the bourree, with its ram- 
 bling, sweet, interminable music, and alert 
 and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, 
 and is mostly remembered as a custom of 
 the past. Only on the occasion of the fair 
 shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in 
 a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company 
 singing the measure while the others dance. 
 I am sorry at the change, and marvel once 
 more at the complicated scheme of things 
 upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion 
 in England can silence so much mountain 
 merriment in France. The lace-makers them- 
 selves have not entirely forgiven our coun- 
 trywomen; and 1 think they take a special 
 pleasure in the legend of the northern 
 quarter of the town, called L'Anglade, be- 
 cause there the English free-lances were ar- 
 rested and driven back by the potency of a 
 little Virgin Mary on the wall. 
 
 From time to time a market is held, and 
 the town has a season of revival; cattle and 
 pigs are stabled in the streets; and pick- 
 pockets have been known to come all the 
 
 '37
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 way from Lyons for the occasion. Every 
 Sunday the country folk throng in with day- 
 light to buy apples, to attend mass, and to 
 visit one of the wine-shops, of which there 
 are no fewer than fifty in this little town. 
 Sunday wear for the men is a green tailcoat 
 of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually 
 a complete suit to match. 1 have never set 
 eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it 
 clings, there bulges; and the human body, 
 with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned 
 into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another 
 piece of Sunday business with the peasants 
 is to take their ailments to the chemist for 
 advice, it is as much a matter for Sunday as 
 church-going. 1 have seen a woman who 
 had been unable to speak since the Monday 
 before, wheezing, catching her breath, end- 
 lessly and painfully coughing; and yet she 
 had waited upwards of a hundred hours be- 
 fore coming to seek help, and had the week 
 been twice as long, she would have waited 
 still. There was a canonical day for consulta- 
 tion ; such was the ancestral habit, to which 
 a respedable lady must study to conform. 
 Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, 
 138
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 but they rival each other in polite conces- 
 sions rather than in speed. Each will wait an 
 hour or two hours cheerfully while an old 
 lady does her marketing or a gentleman 
 finishes the papers in a cafe. The Conrrier 
 (such is the name of one) should leave Le 
 Puy by two in the afternoon on the return 
 voyage, and arrive at Monastier in good time 
 for a six-o'clock dinner. But the driver dares 
 not disoblige his customers. He will post- 
 pone his departure again and again, hour 
 after hour; and 1 have known the sun to go 
 down on his delay. These purely personal 
 favours, this consideration of men's fancies, 
 rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, 
 as marking the advance of the abstradion, 
 time, mak-^". a more humorous business of 
 stage-coaching than we are used to see it. 
 As far as the eye can reach, one swelling 
 line of hill top rises and falls behind another; 
 and if you climb an eminence, it is only to 
 see new and farther ranges behind these. 
 Many little rivers run from all sides in cliffy 
 valleys; and one of them, a few miles from 
 Monastier, bears the great name of Loire. 
 The mean level of the country is a little 
 
 139
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 more than three thousand feet above the sea, 
 which makes the atmosphere proportion- 
 ally brisk and wholesome. There is little tim- 
 ber except pines, and the greater part of the 
 country lies in moorland pasture. The coun- 
 try is wild and tumbled rather than com- 
 manding; an upland rather than a mountain 
 district ; and the most striking as well as the 
 most agreeable scenery lies low beside the 
 rivers. There, indeed, you will find many 
 corners that take the fancy; such as made 
 the English noble choose his grave by a 
 Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her 
 freshest, and looks as young as on the 
 seventh morning. Such a place is the course 
 of the Gazeille, where it waters the common 
 of Monastier and thence downwards till it 
 joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; 
 a place for lovers to frequent. The name of 
 the river was perhaps suggested by the 
 sound of its passage over the stones; for it 
 is a great warbler, and at night, after I was 
 in bed at Monastier, 1 could hear it go sing- 
 ing down the valley till I fell asleep. 
 
 On the whole, this is a Scottish land- 
 scape, although not so noble as the best in 
 140
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the 
 population is, in its way, as Scottish as the 
 country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fife- 
 shire manners, and accost you, as if you 
 were trespassing, with an "Oii'st-ce que 
 voiis alle^^ ? ' ' only translatable into the Low- 
 land " Whaur ye gaun ? " They keep the Scot- 
 tish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that 
 day but-to drive in and out the various pigs 
 and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant 
 a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers 
 have disappeared from the street. Not to at- 
 tend mass would involve social degradation ; 
 and you may find people reading Sunday 
 books, in particular a sort of Catholic Month- 
 ly Visitor on the doings of Our Lady of 
 Lourdes. I remember one Sunday, when 1 
 was walking in the country, that I fell on a 
 hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from 
 the patriarch to the baby, gathered in the 
 shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping 
 lass stood with her back to the wall and did 
 the solo part, the rest chiming in devoutly. 
 Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep 
 among some straw, to represent the worldly 
 element. 
 
 141
 
 2iSSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Again, this people is eager to proselytise; 
 and the postmaster's daughter used to argue 
 with me by the half-hour about my heresy, 
 until she grew quite Hushed. I have heard 
 the reverse process going on between a 
 Scotswoman and a French girl; and the ar- 
 guments in the two cases were identical. 
 Each apostle based her claim on the superior 
 virtue and attainments of her clergy, and 
 clenched the business with a threat of hell- 
 fire. "Pas boiigpretr&s ici," said the Presby- 
 terian, " bong pretrcs en Ecosse." And the 
 postmaster's daughter, taking up the same 
 weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the 
 butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a 
 hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded 
 for our good. One cheerful circumstance I 
 note in these guerilla missions, that each 
 side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catho- 
 lic alike address themselves to a supposed 
 misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I 
 call it cheerful, for faith is a more support- 
 ing quality than imagination. 
 
 Here, as in Scotland, many peasant fami- 
 lies boast a son in holy orders. And here 
 
 also, the young men have a tendency to 
 
 142
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 emigrate. It is certainly not poverty that 
 drives them to the great cities or across the 
 seas, for many peasant famihes, I was told, 
 have a fortune of at least 40,000 francs. The 
 lads go forth pricked with the spirit of ad- 
 venture and the desire to rise in Hfe, and 
 leave their homespun elders grumbling and 
 wondering over the event. Once, at a village 
 called Laussonne, I met one of these disap- 
 pointed parents: a drake who had fathered a 
 wild swan and seen it take wing and disap- 
 pear. The wild swan in question was now 
 an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by 
 way of Bordeaux, and first landed in Amer- 
 ica, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a 
 single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he 
 was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing 
 is an adventurous life! 1 thought he might as 
 well have stayed at home; but you never 
 can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in 
 what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, an- 
 other to marry, a third to write scurrilous 
 articles and be repeatedly caned in public, 
 and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an 
 apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, 
 he could conceive no reason for the lad's 
 
 14;
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 behaviour, "I had always bread for him," 
 he said; "he ran away to annoy me. He 
 loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." 
 But at heart he was swelling with pride 
 over his travelled offspring, and he produced 
 a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, 
 it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, 
 and waved it gloriously in the air. "This 
 comes from America," he cried, "six thou- 
 sand leagues away!" And the wine-shop 
 audience looked upon it with a certain thrill. 
 I soon became a popular figure, and was 
 known for miles in the country. Ou'st-ce 
 que vous alle^? was changed for me into 
 Qiioi,voiis reutre:{ an Monastier ce soir} and 
 in the town itself every urchin seemed to 
 know my name, although no living creature 
 could pronounce it. There was one particu- 
 lar group of lace-makers who brought out a 
 chair for me whenever I went by, and de- 
 tained me from my walk to gossip. They 
 were filled with curiosity about England, its 
 language, its religion, the dress of the wo- 
 men, and were never weary of seeing the 
 Queen's head on English postage-stamps or 
 seeking for French words in English Jour- 
 
 '44
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 nals. The language, in particular, filled them 
 with surprise. 
 
 "Do they speak^^7/o/5 in England?" I was 
 once asked ; and when I told them not, "Ah, 
 then, French?" said they. 
 
 "No, no," I said, "not French." 
 
 ' ' Then, " they concluded, ' ' they speak pa- 
 tois." 
 
 You must obviously either speak French 
 or patois. Talk of the force of logic — here it 
 was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, 
 but proceeding to give illustrations of my 
 native jargon, I was met with a new morti- 
 fication. Of all^7/o/5they declared that mine 
 was the most preposterous and the most 
 jocose in sound. At each new word there 
 was a new explosion of laughter, and some 
 of the younger ones were glad to rise from 
 their chairs and stamp about the street in 
 ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in 
 a faint and slightly disagreeable bewilder- 
 ment. "Bread," which sounds a common- 
 place, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, 
 was the word that most delighted these good 
 ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolic- 
 some and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and 
 
 •45
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand- 
 by, I presume, for winter evenings. 1 have 
 tried it since then with every sort of accent 
 and inflexion, but 1 seem to lack the sense 
 of humour. 
 
 They were of all ages: children at their 
 first web of lace, a stripling girl with a bash- 
 ful but encouraging play of eyes, solid mar- 
 ried women, and grandmothers, some on 
 thetopof their age and some falling towards 
 decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and 
 natural, ready to laugh and ready with a cer- 
 tain quiet solemnity when that was called 
 for by the subjed of our talk. Life, since the 
 fall in wages, had begun to appear to them 
 with a more serious air. The stripling girl 
 would sometimes laugh at me in a provoca- 
 tive and not unadmiring manner, if 1 judge 
 aright; and one of the grandmothers, who 
 was my great friend of the party, gave me 
 many a sharp word of judgment on my 
 sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, 
 and gave them with a wry mouth and a hu- 
 morous twinkle in her eye that were emi- 
 nently Scottish. But the rest used me with a 
 certain reverence, as something come from 
 146
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 afar and not entirely human. Nothing would 
 put them at their ease but the irresistible 
 gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old 
 lady and myself 1 think there was a real at- 
 tachment. She was never weary of sitting 
 to me for her portrait, in her best cap and 
 brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily 
 composed, and though she never failed to 
 repudiate the result, she would always insist 
 upon another trial. It was as good as a play 
 to see her sitting in judgment over the last. 
 "No, no," she would say, "that is not it. 1 
 am old, to be sure, but 1 am better-looking 
 than that. We must try again." When 1 was 
 about to leave she bade me good-bye for this 
 life in a somewhat touching manner. We 
 should not meet again, she said; it was a 
 long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is 
 so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows ? 
 I have said good-bye to people for greater 
 distances and times, and, please God, I mean 
 to see them yet again. 
 
 One thing was notable about these wo- 
 men, from the youngest to the oldest, and 
 with hardly an exception. In spite of their 
 piety, they could twang off an oath with Sir 
 
 '47
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITIC ISMS 
 
 Toby Belch in person. There was nothing so 
 high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the 
 human body, but a woman of this neighbour- 
 hood would whip out the name of it, fair and 
 square, by way of conversational adornment. 
 My landlady, who was pretty and young, 
 dressed like a lady and avoided patois like a 
 weakness, commonly addressed her child in 
 the languag£ of a drunken bully. And of all 
 the swearers that 1 ever heard, commend me 
 to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the 
 Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse 
 was not yet ended when 1 had finished it and 
 took my departure. It is true she had a right 
 to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking 
 fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the 
 day was well begun. But it was strange to 
 hear her unwearying flow of oaths and ob- 
 scenities, endless like a river, and now and 
 then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the 
 clear and silent air of the morning. In city 
 slums, the thing might have passed un- 
 noticed; but in a country valley, and from a 
 plain and honest countrywoman, this beast- 
 liness of speech surprised the ear. 
 
 The Condu^or, as he is called of Roads 
 148
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 and Bridges was my principal companion. 
 He was generally intelligent, and could have 
 spoken more or less falsetto on any of the 
 trite topics; but it was his specialty to have 
 a generous taste in eating. This was what 
 was most indigenous in the man; it was 
 here he was an artist; and 1 found in his 
 company what 1 had long suspeded, that 
 enthusiasm and special knowledge are the 
 great social qualities, and what they are 
 about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's 
 plays, an altogether secondary question. 
 
 1 used to accompany the CondiiSlor on 
 his professional rounds, and grew to believe 
 myself an expert in the business. I thought 
 I could make an entry in a stone-breaker's 
 time-book, or order manure off the way- 
 side with any living engineer in France. 
 Gondet was one of the places we visited to- 
 gether; and Laussonne, where I met the 
 apothecary's father, was another. There, at 
 Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while 
 she was gathering materials for the Marquis 
 de Villemer; and 1 have spoken with an old 
 man, who was then a child running about 
 the inn kitchen, and who still remembers 
 
 •49
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 her with a sort of reverence. It appears that 
 he spoke French imperfedly; for this reason 
 George Sand chose him for companion, and 
 whenever he let slip a broad and piduresque 
 phrase in patois, she would make him repeat 
 it again and again till it was graven in her 
 memory. The word for a frog particularly 
 pleased her fancy; and it would be curious 
 to know if she afterwards employed it in her 
 works. The peasants, who knew nothing of 
 letters and had never so much as heard of 
 local colour, could not explain her chatter- 
 ing with this backward child; and to them 
 she seemed a very homely lady and far from 
 beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the 
 age appealed so little to Velaisian swine- 
 herds! 
 
 On my first engineering excursion, which 
 lay up by Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc 
 and the borders of Ardeche, 1 began an im- 
 proving acquaintance with the foreman road- 
 mender. He was in great glee at having me 
 with him, passed me off among his subal- 
 terns as the supervising engineer, and in- 
 sisted on what he called "the gallantry " of 
 paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine- 
 150
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 shop. On the whole, he was a man of great 
 weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social 
 temper. But I am afraid he was superstitious. 
 When he was nine years old, he had seen 
 one night a company of bourgeois et dames 
 qui faisaient la manege avec des chaises, and 
 concluded that he was in the presence of a 
 witches' Sabbath. 1 suppose, but venture 
 with timidity on the suggestion, that this 
 may have been a romantic and nodurnal 
 picnic party. Again, coming from Pradelles 
 with his brother, they saw a great empty 
 cart drawn by six enormous horses before 
 them on the road. The driver cried aloud 
 and filled the mountains with the cracking 
 of his whip. He never seemed to go faster 
 than a walk, yet it was impossible to over- 
 take him; and at length, at the corner of a 
 hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily 
 into the night. At the time, people said it 
 was the devil qui s'amusait a f aire fa. 
 
 I suggested there was nothing more like- 
 ly, as he must have some amusement. 
 
 The foreman said it was odd, but there 
 was less of that sort of thing than formerly. 
 ■ ' C'est difficile, ' ' he added, " a expliquer. 
 
 15>
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 When we were well up on the moors and 
 the Conductor wds trying some road-metal 
 with the gauge — 
 
 ' ' Hark ! " said the foreman, ' ' do you hear 
 nothing?" 
 
 We listened, and the wind, which was 
 blowing chilly out of the east, brought a 
 faint, tangled jangling to our ears. 
 
 "It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he. 
 
 For every summer, the flocks out of all 
 Ardeche are brought up to pasture on these 
 grassy plateaux. 
 
 Here and there a little private flock was 
 being tended by a girl, one spinning with 
 a distaff, another seated on a wall and in- 
 tently making lace. This last, when we ad- 
 dressed her, leaped up in a panic and put 
 out her arms, like a person swimming, to 
 keep us at a distance, and it was some sec- 
 onds before we could persuade her of the 
 honesty of our intentions. 
 
 The Coudiidor told me of another herds- 
 woman from whom he had once asked his 
 road while he was yet new to the country, 
 and who fled from him, driving her beasts 
 before her, until he had given up the infor- 
 152
 
 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 
 
 mation in despair. A tale of old lawlessness 
 may yet be read in these uncouth timidities. 
 The winter in these uplands is a danger- 
 ous and melancholy time. Houses are snowed 
 up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail 
 oftheirown fireside. No man ventures abroad 
 without meat and a bottle of wine, which 
 he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even 
 thus equipped he takes the road with terror. 
 All day the family sits about the fire in a 
 foul and airless hovel, and equally without 
 work or diversion. The father may carve a 
 rude piece of furniture, but that is all that 
 will be dene until the spring sets in again, 
 and along with it the labours of the field. 
 It is not for nothing that you find a clock in 
 the meanest of these mountain habitations. 
 A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, 
 were indispensable in such a life. . . . 
 
 >5?
 
 LITERARY PAPERS
 
 I 
 
 THE MORALITY OF THE 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS' 
 
 JHE profession of letters has been 
 lately debated in the public prints; 
 and it has been debated, to put the 
 matter mildly, from a point of view that was 
 calculated to surprise high-minded men, and 
 bring a general contempt on books and read' 
 ing. Some time ago, in particular, a lively, 
 pleasant, popular writer^ devoted an essay, 
 lively and pleasant like himself, to a very en- 
 couraging view of the profession. We may 
 be glad that his experience is so cheering, 
 and we may hope that all others, who de- 
 serve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; 
 but I do not think we need be at all glad to 
 have this question, so important to the 
 public and ourselves, debated solely on the 
 
 'First published in tiie Fortnightly Review, April, 
 1881. 
 
 ^ Mr. James Payn. 
 
 1^7
 
 ESSA}'S AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ground of money. The salary in any business 
 under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the 
 first, question. That you should continue to 
 exist is a matter for your own consideration ; 
 but that your business should be first honest, 
 and second useful, are points in which hon- 
 our and morality are concerned. If the writer 
 to whom I refer succeeds in persuading a 
 number of young persons to adopt this way 
 of life with an eye set singly on the liveli- 
 hood, we must exped them in their works 
 to follow profit only, and we must exped in 
 consequence, if he will pardon me the epi- 
 thets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty 
 literature. Of that writer himself 1 am not 
 speaking: he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; 
 we all owe him periods of entertainment, 
 and he has achieved an amiable popularity 
 which he has adequately deserved. But the 
 truth is, he does not, or did not when he 
 first embraced it, regard his profession from 
 this purely mercenary side. He went into it, 
 1 shall venture to say, if not with any noble 
 design, at least in the ardour of a first love; 
 and he enjoyed its pradice long before he 
 paused to calculate the wage. The other day 
 158
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 an author was complimented on a piece of 
 work, good in itself and exceptionally good 
 for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of 
 a commercial traveller, that as the book was 
 not briskly selling he did not give a copper 
 farthing for its merit. It must not be sup- 
 posed that the person to whom this answer 
 was addressed received it as a profession of 
 faith; he knew, on the other hand, that it 
 was only a whiff of irritation; just as we 
 know, when a respedable writer talks of 
 literature as a way of life, like shoemaking, 
 but not so useful, that he is only debating 
 one aspeft of a question, and is still clearly 
 conscious of a dozen others more important 
 in themselves and more central to the matter 
 in hand. But while those who treat literature 
 in this penny-wise and virtue-foolish spirit 
 are themselves truly in possession of a better 
 light, it does not follow that the treatment is 
 decent or improving, whether for themselves 
 or others. To treat all subjeds in the high- 
 est, the most honourable, and the pluckiest 
 spirit, consistent with the faft, is the first 
 duty of a writer. If he be well paid, as I am 
 glad to hear he is this duty becomes the 
 
 •59
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 more urgent, the negled of it the more dis- 
 graceful. And perhaps there is no subjeft on 
 which a man should speak so gravely as that 
 industry, whatever it may be, which is the 
 occupation or delight of his life ; which is his 
 tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it 
 be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere in- 
 cubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the 
 shoulders of labouring humanity. On that 
 subject alone even to force the note might 
 lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a 
 numerous and enterprising generation of 
 writers will follow and surpass the present 
 one; but it would be better if the stream 
 were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest 
 English books were closed, than that esuri- 
 ent book-makers should continue and de- 
 base a brave tradition, and lower, in their 
 own eyes, a famous race. Better that our 
 serene temples were deserted than filled 
 with trafficking and juggling priests. 
 
 There are two just reasons for the choice 
 of any way of life: the first is inbred taste in 
 the chooser; the second some high utility 
 in the industry selefted. Literature, like any 
 other art, is singularly interesting to the ar- 
 i6o
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 tist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among 
 the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are 
 the sufficient justifications for any young 
 man or woman who adopts it as the busi- 
 ness of his life. I shall not say much about 
 the wages. A writer can live by his writ- 
 ing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, 
 then less luxuriously. The nature of the 
 work he does all day will more affed his 
 happiness than the quality of his dinner at 
 night. Whatever be your calling, and how- 
 ever much it brings you in the year, you 
 could still, you know, get more by cheating. 
 We all suffer ourselves to be too much con- 
 cerned about a little poverty; but such con- 
 siderations should not move us in the choice 
 of that which is to be the business and jus- 
 tification of so great a portion of our lives; 
 and like the missionary, the patriot, or the 
 philosopher, we should all choose that poor 
 and brave career in which we can do the 
 most and best for mankind. Now nature, 
 faithfully followed, proves herself a careful 
 mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle 
 of words, betakes himself to letters for his 
 life; by-and-by, when he learns more grav- 
 
 i6i
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ity, he finds that he has chosen better than 
 he knew ; that if he earns little, he is earning 
 it amply ; that if he receives a small wage, he 
 is in a position to do considerable services; 
 that it is in his power, in some small meas- 
 ure, to protect the oppressed and to defend 
 the truth. So kindly is the world arranged, 
 such great profit may arise from a small de- 
 gree of human reliance on oneself, and such, 
 in particular, is the happy star of this trade 
 of writing, that it should combine pleasure 
 and profit to both parties, and be at once 
 agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good 
 preaching. 
 
 This is to speak of literature at its high- 
 est; and with the four great elders who are 
 still spared to our respe(5l and admiration, 
 with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Ten- 
 nyson before us, it would be cowardly to 
 consider it at first in any lesser aspe(?t. But 
 while we cannot follow these athletes, 
 while we may none of us, perhaps, be very 
 vigorous, very original, or very wise, 1 still 
 contend that, in the humblest sort of liter- 
 ary work, we have it in our power either to 
 do great harm or great good. We may seek 
 162
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 merely to please; we may seek, having no 
 higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine 
 days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we 
 may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In 
 each of these we shall have to deal with that 
 remarkable art of words which, because it 
 is the dialeft of life, comes home so easily 
 and powerfully to the minds of men; and 
 since that is so, we contribute, in each of 
 these branches, to build up the sum of senti- 
 ments and appreciations which goes by the 
 name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. 
 The total of a nation's reading, in these days 
 of daily papers, greatly modifies the total 
 of the nation's speech; and the speech and 
 reading, taken together, form the efficient 
 educational medium of youth. A good man 
 or woman may keep a youth some little 
 while in clearer air; but the contemporary 
 atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the 
 average of mediocre charaders. The copious 
 Corinthian baseness of the American re- 
 porter or the Parisian chroniquear^ both so 
 lightly readable, must exercise an incalcula- 
 ble influence for ill ; they touch upon all sub- 
 jeds, and on all with the same ungenerous 
 
 163
 
 £SSAVS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 hand; they begin the consideration of all, in 
 young and unprepared minds, in an un- 
 worthy spirit; on all, they supply some 
 pungency for dull people to quote. The mere 
 body of this ugly matter overwhelms the 
 rare utterances of good men; the sneering, 
 the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered 
 in broad sheets on every table, while the 
 antidote, in small volumes, lies unread up- 
 on the shelf. I have spoken of the American 
 and the French, not because they are so 
 much baser, but so much more readable, 
 than the English; their evil is done more 
 effeftively, in America for the masses, in 
 French for the few that care to read; but 
 with us as with them, the duties of litera- 
 ture are daily negleded, truth daily per- 
 verted and suppressed, and grave subjects 
 daily degraded in the treatment. The jour- 
 nalist is not reckoned an important officer; 
 yet judge of the good he might do, the harm 
 he does; judge of it by one instance only: 
 that when we find two journals on the re- 
 verse sides of politics each, on the same day, 
 openly garbling a piece of news for the in- 
 terest of its own party, we smile at the dis- 
 164
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 covery (no discovery now!) as over a good 
 joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so 
 open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of 
 the things that we profess to teach our young 
 is a resped for truth ; and I cannot think this 
 piece of education will be crowned with any 
 great success, so long as some of us pradise 
 and the rest openly approve of public false- 
 hood. 
 
 There are two duties incumbent upon any 
 man who enters on the business of writing: 
 truth to the fad and a good spirit in the 
 treatment. In every department of literature, 
 though so low as hardly to deserve the name, 
 truth to the faft is of importance to the edu- 
 cation and comfort of mankind, and so hard 
 to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so 
 will lend some dignity to the man who 
 tries it. Our judgments are based upon two 
 things: first, upon the original preferences 
 of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of 
 testimony to the nature of God, man, and 
 the universe which reaches us, in divers 
 manners, from without. For the most part 
 these divers manners are reducible to one, 
 all that we learn of past times and much that 
 
 165
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 we learn of our own reaching us through 
 the medium of books or papers, and even 
 he who cannot read learning from the same 
 source at second-hand and by the report of 
 him who can. Thus the sum of the con- 
 temporary knowledge or ignorance of good 
 and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork 
 of those who write. Those who write have 
 to see that each man's knowledge is, as near 
 as they can make it, answerable to the fads 
 of life; that he shall not suppose himself an 
 angel or a monster; nor take this world for 
 a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all 
 rights are concentred in his own caste or 
 country, or all veracities in his own paro- 
 chial creed. Each man should learn what is 
 within him, that he may strive to mend; 
 he must be taught what is without him, 
 that he may be kind to others, it can never 
 be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his 
 disputable state, weaving as he goes his 
 theory of life steering himself, cheering 
 or reproving others, all fafts are of the first 
 importance to his condu(5l; and even if a 
 fa(5l shall discourage or corrupt him, it is 
 still best that he should know it; for it is in 
 166,
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 this world as it is, and not in a world made 
 easy by educational suppressions, that he 
 must win his way to shame or glory, in one 
 word, it must always be foul to tell what is 
 false ; and it can never be safe to suppress 
 what is true. The very fad that you omit 
 may be the faft which somebody was want- 
 ing, for one man's meat is another man's 
 poison, and 1 have known a person who 
 was cheered by the perusal of Candide. 
 Every faft is a part of that great puzzle we 
 must set together; and none that comes 
 diredly in a writer's path but has some nice 
 relations, unperceivable by him, to the to- 
 tality and bearing of the subjeft under hand. 
 Yet there are certain classes of fad eternally 
 more necessary than others, and it is with 
 these that literature must first bestir itself. 
 They are not hard to distinguish, nature 
 once more easily leading us; for the neces- 
 sary, because the efficacious, fafts are those 
 which are most interesting to the natural 
 mind of man. Those which are coloured, 
 pifturesque, human, and rooted in morality, 
 and those, on the other hand, which are 
 clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are 
 
 167
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 alone vital in importance, seizing by their 
 interest, or useful to communicate. So far as 
 the writer merely narrates, he should princi- 
 pally tell of these. He should tell of the kind 
 and wholesome and beautiful elements of 
 our life; he should tell unsparingly of the 
 evil and sorrow of the present, to move us 
 with instances; he should tell of wise and 
 good people in the past, to excite us by ex- 
 ample; and of these he should tell soberly 
 and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we 
 may neither grow discouraged with our- 
 selves nor exacting to our neighbours. So 
 thebodyof contemporary literature, ephem- 
 eral and feeble in itself, touches in the 
 minds of men the springs of thought and 
 kindness, and supports them (for those who 
 will go at all are easily supported) on their 
 way to what is true and right. And if, in any 
 degree, it does so now, how much more 
 might it do so if the writers chose! There is 
 not a life in all the records of the past but, 
 properly studied, might lend a hint and a 
 help to some contemporary. There is not a 
 junfture in to-day's affairs but some useful 
 word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter 
 168
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 has an office, and, with clear eyes and honest 
 language, may unveil injustices and point 
 the way to progress. And for a last word : in 
 all narration there is only one way to be 
 clever, and that is to be exaft. To be vivid is 
 a secondary quality which must presuppose 
 the first; for vividly to convey a wrong im- 
 pression is only to make failure conspicu- 
 ous. 
 
 But a facft maybe viewed on many sides; it 
 may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, 
 indifference, or admiration, and by each of 
 these the story will be transformed to some- 
 thing else. The newspapers that told of the 
 return of our representatives from Berlin, 
 even if they had not differed as to the fads, 
 would have sufficiently differed by their 
 spirits; so that the one description would 
 have been a second ovation, and the other a 
 prolonged insult. The subjed makes but a 
 triflingpart of any piece of literature, and the 
 view of the writer is itself a fad more impor- 
 tant because less disputable than the others. 
 Now this spirit in which a subjed is re- 
 garded, important in all kinds of literary 
 work, becomes all-important in works of 
 
 169
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 fiftion, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it 
 not only colours but itself chooses the fads ; 
 not only modifies but shapes the work. And 
 hence, over the far larger proportion of the 
 field of literature, the health or disease of the 
 writer's mind or momentary humour forms 
 not only the leading feature of his work, but 
 is, at bottom, the only thing he can commu- 
 nicate to others. In all works of art, widely 
 speaking, it is first of all the author's attitude 
 that is narrated, though in the attitude there 
 be implied a whole experience and a theory 
 of life. An author who has begged the ques- 
 tion and reposes in some narrow faith can- 
 not, if he would, express the whole or even 
 many of the sides of this various existence; 
 for, his own life being maim, some of them 
 are not admitted in his theory, and were 
 only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his 
 experience. Hence the smallness, the trite- 
 ness, and the inhumanity in works of merely 
 sedarian religion; and hence we find equal 
 although unsimilar limitation in works in- 
 spired by the spirit of the flesh or the despi- 
 cable taste for high society. So that the first 
 duty of any man who is to write is intellec- 
 170
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 tual. Designedly or not, he has so far set him- 
 self up for a leader of the minds of men; and 
 he must see that his own mind is kept supple, 
 charitable, and bright. Everything but preju- 
 dice should find a voice through him; he 
 should see the good in all things; where he 
 has even a fear that he does not wholly un- 
 derstand, there he should be wholly silent; 
 and he should recognise from the first that 
 he has only one tool in his workshop, and 
 that tool is sympathy.' 
 
 The second duty, far harder to define, is 
 moral. There are a thousand different hu- 
 mours in the mind, and about each of them, 
 when it is uppermost, some literature tends 
 to be deposited. Is this to be allowed ? Not 
 certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in 
 more than rigourists would fancy. It were 
 to be desired that all literary work, and 
 chiefly works of art, issued from sound, hu- 
 
 ' A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example 
 set before all young writers in the width of literary sym- 
 pathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to wel- 
 come merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in 
 Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude 
 we should all seek to preserve, not only in that, but in 
 every branch of literary work. 
 
 171
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 man, healthy, and potent impulses, whether 
 grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or 
 religious. Yet it cannot be denied that some 
 valuable books are partially insane; some, 
 mostly religious, partially inhuman; and 
 very many tainted with morbidity and im- 
 potence. We do not loathe a masterpiece 
 although we gird against its blemishes. We 
 are not, above all, to look for faults, but 
 merits. There is no book perfed, even in 
 design ; but there are many that will delight, 
 improve, or encourage the reader. On the 
 one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only 
 religious poetry on earth; yet they contain 
 sallies that savour rankly of the man of 
 blood. On the other hand, Alfred de Musset 
 had a poisoned and a contorted nature; 1 am 
 only quoting that generous and frivolous 
 giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him of a 
 bad heart; yet, when the impulse under 
 which he wrote was purely creative, he 
 could give us works like Carmosine or Fan- 
 ta$io, in which the last note of the romantic 
 comedy seems to have been found again to 
 touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote 
 Madame Bovary. I believe he thought chiefly 
 172
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 of a somewhat morbid realism ; and behold! 
 the book turned in his hands into a master- 
 piece of appalling morality. But the truth is, 
 when books are conceived under a great 
 stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine 
 times heated and eledrified by effort, the 
 conditions of our being are seized with such 
 an ample grasp, that, even should the main 
 design be trivial or base, some truth and 
 beauty cannot fail to be expressed. Out of 
 the strong comes forth sweetness; but an 
 ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and 
 bottom. And so this can be no encourage- 
 mentto knock-kneed, feeble-wristedscribes, 
 who must take their business conscientious- 
 ly or be ashamed to pradise it. 
 
 Man is imperfed; yet, in his literature, he 
 must express himself and his own views and 
 preferences; for to do anything else is to do 
 a far more perilous thing than to risk being 
 immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. 
 To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to 
 travesty a sentiment; that will not be help- 
 ful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure 
 you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. 
 There is probably no point of view possible 
 
 '73
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 to a sane man but contains some truth and, 
 in the true connexion, might be profitable to 
 the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any 
 one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts 
 of it impertinently uttered. There is a time 
 to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh 
 as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic 
 as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a 
 man were to combine all these extremes in- 
 to his work, each in its place and propor- 
 tion, that work would be the world's mas- 
 terpiece of morality as well as of art. Par- 
 tiality is immorality; for any book is wrong 
 that gives a misleading piifture of the world 
 and life. The trouble is that the weakling 
 must be partial; the work of one proving 
 dank and depressing; of another, cheap and 
 vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a 
 fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in 
 conduct, you can never hope to do exadly 
 right. All you can do is to make as sure as 
 possible; and for that there is but one rule. 
 Nothing should be done in a hurry that can 
 be done slowly. It is no use to write a book 
 and put it by for nine or even ninety years; 
 for in the writing you will have partly con- 
 '74
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 vinced yourself; the delay must precede any 
 beginning; and if you meditate a work of 
 art, you should first long roll the subjed 
 under the tongue to make sure you like the 
 flavour, before you brew a volume that shall 
 taste of it from end to end; or if you pro- 
 pose to enter on the field of controversy, 
 you should first have thought upon the 
 question under all conditions, in health as 
 well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in 
 joy. It is this nearness of examination nec- 
 essary for any true and kind writing, that 
 makes the pradice of the art a prolonged 
 and noble education for the writer. 
 
 There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to 
 say over again, in the meantime. Any liter- 
 ary work which conveys faithful fads or 
 pleasing impressions is a service to the pub- 
 lic. It is even a service to be thankfully proud 
 of having rendered. The slightest novels are 
 a blessing to those in distress, not chloro- 
 form itself a greater. Our fine old sea-cap- 
 tain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed 
 his mind with The Kings Own or Newton 
 Forster. To please is to serve; and so far 
 from its being difficult to instrud while you 
 
 •75
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 amuse, it is difficult to do the one thorough- 
 ly without the other. Some part of the 
 writer or his hfe will crop out in even a 
 vapid book; and to read a novel that was 
 conceived with any force is to multiply ex- 
 perience and to exercise the sympathies. 
 Every article, every piece of verse, every 
 essay, every entre-filet, is destined to pass, 
 however swiftly, through the minds of some 
 portion of the public, and to colour, how- 
 ever transiently, their thoughts. When any 
 subjed falls to be discussed, some scribbler 
 on a paper has the invaluable opportunity 
 of beginning its discussion in a dignified 
 and human spirit; and if there were enough 
 who did so in our public press, neither the 
 public nor the Parliament would find it in 
 their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. 
 The writer has the chance to stumble, by 
 the way, on something pleasing, something 
 interesting, something encouraging, were it 
 only to a single reader. He will be unfor- 
 tunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the 
 chance, besides, to stumble on something 
 that a dull person shall be able to compre- 
 hend; and for a dull person to have read 
 176
 
 PROFESSION OF LETTERS 
 
 anything and, for that once, comprehended 
 it, makes a marking epoch in his education. 
 Here, then, is work worth doing and 
 worth trying to do well. And so, if I were 
 minded to welcome any great accession to 
 our trade, it should not be from any reason 
 of a higher wage, but because it was a 
 trade which was useful in a very great and 
 in a very high degree; which every honest 
 tradesman could make more serviceable to 
 mankind in his single strength; which was 
 difficult to do well and possible to do better 
 every year; which called for scrupulous 
 thought on the part of all who pradised it, 
 and hence became a perpetual education to 
 their nobler natures; and which, pay it as 
 you please, in the large majority of the best 
 cases will still be underpaid. For surely, at 
 this time of day in the nineteenth century, 
 there is nothing that an honest man should 
 fear more timorously than gettingand spend- 
 ing more than he deserves. 
 
 177
 
 II 
 
 ON SOME TECHNICAL ELE- 
 MENTS OF STYLE IN 
 LITERATURE' 
 
 |HERE is nothing more disenchant- 
 ing to man than to be shown the 
 springs and mechanism of any art. 
 All our arts and occupations lie wholly on 
 the surface; it is on the surface that we per- 
 ceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; 
 and to pry below is to be appalled by their 
 emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of 
 the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, 
 psychology itself, when pushed to any nice- 
 ty, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but 
 rather from the fault of our analysis than 
 from any poverty native to the mind. And 
 perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: 
 those disclosures which seem fatal to the 
 dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the 
 
 ' First published in the Contemporary Review, April, 
 1885. 
 
 178
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 proportion of our ignorance; and those con- 
 scious and unconscious artifices whicii it 
 seems unworthy of the serious artist to em- 
 ploy were yet, if we had the power to trace 
 them to their springs, indications of a deli- 
 cacy of the sense finer than we conceive, 
 and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. 
 This ignorance at least is largely irremedi- 
 able. We shall never learn the affinities of 
 beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and 
 too far back in the mysterious history of 
 man. The amateur, in consequence, will al- 
 ways grudgingly receive details of method, 
 which can be stated but never can wholly 
 be explained ; nay, on the principle laid down 
 in "Hudibras," that 
 
 "Still the less they understand, 
 The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," 
 
 many are conscious at each new disclosure 
 of a diminution in the ardour of their pleas- 
 ure. 1 must therefore warn that well-known 
 character, the general reader, that 1 am here 
 embarked upon a most distasteful business: 
 taking down the pid;ure from the wall and 
 looking on the back; and, like the inquiring 
 child, pulling the musical cart to pieces. 
 
 '79
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 I. Choice of Words. — The art of litera- 
 ttrre stands apart from among its sisters, be- 
 cause the material in which the literary artist 
 works is the diale6t of life; hence, on the one 
 hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of 
 address to the public mind, which is ready 
 prepared to understand it; but hence, on the 
 other, a singular limitation. The sister arts 
 enjoy the use of a plastic and duftile ma- 
 terial, like the modeller's clay; literature 
 alone is condemned to work in mosaic with 
 finite and quite rigid words. You have seen 
 these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a 
 pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or 
 a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbi- 
 trary size and figure that the literary archi- 
 te(5l is condemned to design the palace of 
 his art. Nor is this all ; for since these blocks, 
 or words, are the acknowledged currency of 
 our daily affairs, there are here possible none 
 of those suppressions by which other arts 
 obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hie- 
 roglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no 
 inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank 
 wall, as in architedure; but every word, 
 phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move 
 180
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 in a logical progression, and convey a defi- 
 nite conventional import. 
 
 Now the first merit which attracts in the 
 pages of a good writer, or the talk of a bril- 
 liant conversationalist, is the apt choice and 
 contrast of the words employed. It is, in- 
 deed, a strange art to take these blocks, 
 rudely conceived for the purpose of the mar- 
 ket or the bar, and by taft of application 
 touch them to the finest meanings and dis- 
 tinftions, restore to them their primal en- 
 ergy, wittily shift them to another issue, or 
 make of them a drum to rouse the passions. 
 But though this form of merit is without 
 doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is far 
 from being equally present in all writers. 
 The eflfeft of words in Shakespeare, their 
 singular justice, significance, and poetic 
 charm, is different, indeed, from the efTed 
 of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to 
 take an example nearer home, the words in 
 Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of 
 lineament, like the faces of men furiously 
 moved; whilst the words in Macaulay, apt 
 enough to convey his meaning, harmonious 
 enough in sound, yet ghde from the mem- 
 
 181
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ory like undistinguished elements in a gen- 
 eral effed. But the first class of writers have 
 no monopoly of literary merit. There is a 
 sense in which Addison is superior to Car- 
 lyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than 
 Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne : 
 it certainly lies not in the choice of words; 
 it lies not in the interest or value of the mat- 
 ter; it lies not in force of intelled, of poetry, 
 or of humour. The three first are but infimts 
 to the three second; and yet each, in a par- 
 ticular point of literary art, excels his su- 
 perior in the whole. What is that point ? 
 
 2. The Web. — Literature, although it 
 stands apart by reason of the great destiny 
 and general use of its medium in the affairs 
 of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of 
 these we may distinguish two great classes : 
 those arts, like sculpture, painting, ading, 
 which are representative, or, as used to be 
 said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like 
 architecture, music, and the dance, which 
 are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. 
 Each class, in right of this distindion, obeys 
 principles apart; yet both may claim a com- 
 mon ground of existence, and it may be said 
 182
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 with sufficient justice that the motive and 
 end of any art whatever is to make a pat- 
 tern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of 
 sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical 
 figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. 
 That is the plane on which these sisters meet ; 
 it is by this that they are arts; and if it be 
 well they should at times forget their child- 
 ish origin, addressing their inteUigence to 
 virile tasks, and performing unconsciously 
 that necessary fundion of their life, to make 
 a pattern, it is still imperative that the pat- 
 tern shall be made. 
 
 Music and literature, the two temporal 
 arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in 
 time; or, in other words, of sounds and 
 pauses. Communication may be made in 
 broken words, the business of life be carried 
 on with substantives alone; but that is not 
 what we call literature; and the true busi- 
 ness of the literary artist is to plait or weave 
 his meaning, involving it around itself; so 
 that each sentence, by successive phrases, 
 shall first come into a kind of knot, and 
 then, after a moment of suspended mean- 
 ing, solve and clear itself In every properly 
 
 i8^
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 construded sentence there should be ob- 
 served this knot or hitch; so that (however 
 dehcately) we are led to foresee, to exped, 
 and then to welcome the successive phrases. 
 The pleasure may be heightened by an ele- 
 ment of surprise, as, very grossly, in the 
 common figure of the antithesis, or, with 
 much greater subtlety, where an antithesis 
 is first suggested and then deftly evaded. 
 Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in it- 
 self; and between the implication and the 
 evolution of the sentence there should be a 
 satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing 
 more often disappoints the ear than a sen- 
 tence solemnly and sonorously prepared, 
 and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should 
 the balance be too striking and exad, for 
 the one rule is to be infinitely various; to 
 interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet 
 still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it 
 were, the stitch, and yet still to give the 
 effed of an ingenious neatness. 
 
 The conjurer juggles with two oranges, 
 and our pleasure in beholding him springs 
 from this, that neither is for an instant over- 
 looked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His 
 184
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 pattern, which is to please the supersensual 
 ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first 
 of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever 
 be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies 
 of the argument, the neatness of the fabric 
 must not suffer, or the artist has been proved 
 unequal to his design. And, on the other 
 hand, no form of words must be selefted, 
 no knot must be tied among the phrases, 
 unless knot and word be precisely what is 
 wanted to forward and illuminate the argu- 
 ment; for to fail in this is to swindle in the 
 game. The genius of prose rejefts the che- 
 ville no less emphatically than the laws of 
 verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps ex- 
 plain to some of my readers, is any mean- 
 ingless or very watered phrase employed to 
 strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and 
 argument live in each other; and it is by the 
 brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the 
 second, that we judge the strength and fit- 
 ness of the first. 
 
 Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, 
 so to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up 
 at once two or more elements or two or 
 more views of the subjed; in hand; com- 
 
 185
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 bines, implicates, and contrasts them; and 
 while, in one sense, he was merely seeking 
 an occasion for the necessary knot, he will 
 be found, in the other, to have greatly en- 
 riched the meaning, or to have transaded 
 the work of two sentences in the space of 
 one. In the change from the successive shal- 
 low statements of the old chronicler to the 
 dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic 
 narrative, there is implied a vast amount of 
 both philosophy and wit. The philosophy 
 we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic 
 writer a far more deep and stimulating view 
 of life, and a far keener sense of the genera- 
 tion and affmity of events. The wit we might 
 imagine to be lost; but it is not so, for it is 
 just that wit, these perpetual nice contriv- 
 ances, these difficulties overcome, this double 
 purpose attained, these two oranges kept 
 simultaneously dancing in the air, that, con- 
 sciously or not, afford the reader his delight. 
 Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the 
 necessary organ of that philosophy which 
 we so much admire. That style is therefore 
 the most perfecft, not, as fools say, which is 
 the most natural, for the most natural is the 
 186
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 disjointed babble of the chronicler; but 
 which attains the highest degree of elegant 
 and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or 
 if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain 
 to sense and vigour. Even the derangement 
 of the phrases from their (so-called) natural 
 order is luminous for the mind; and it is by 
 the means of such designed reversal that the 
 elements of a judgment may be most per- 
 tinently marshalled, or the stages of a com- 
 plicated a(ftion most perspicuously bound 
 into one. 
 
 The web, then, or the pattern: a web at 
 once sensuous and logical, an elegant and 
 pregnant texture: that is style, that is the 
 foundation of the art of literature. Books in- 
 deed continue to be read, for the interest of 
 the fad or fable, in which this quality is 
 poorly represented, but still it will be there. 
 And, on the other hand, how many do we 
 continue to peruse and reperuse with pleas- 
 ure whose only merit is the elegance of tex- 
 ture.? 1 am tempted to mention Cicero; and 
 since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, 1 will. 
 It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colour- 
 less and toothless ' ' criticism of life " ; but we 
 
 187
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and 
 dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at 
 once of elegance and of good sense; and the 
 two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, 
 kept dancing with inimitable grace. 
 
 Up to this moment I have had my eye 
 mainly upon prose; for though in verse also 
 the implication of the logical texture is a 
 crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dis- 
 pensed with. You would think that here was 
 a death-blow to all I have been saying; and 
 far from that, it is but a new illustration of 
 the principle involved. For if the versifier is 
 not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it 
 is because another pattern has been formally 
 imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For 
 that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may 
 be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; 
 it may, like the French, depend wholly on 
 the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; 
 or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the 
 strangely fanciful device of repeating the 
 same idea. It does not matter on what prin- 
 ciple the law is based, so it be a law. It may 
 be pure convention ; it may have no inherent 
 beauty ; all that we have a right to ask of any 
 188
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern 
 for the writer, and that what it lays down 
 shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence 
 it comes that it is much easier for men of 
 equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse 
 than reasonably interesting prose; for in 
 prose the pattern itself has to be invented, 
 and the difficulties first created before they 
 can be solved. Hence, again, there follows 
 the peculiar greatness of the true versifier: 
 such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Vidor 
 Hugo, whom 1 place beside them as versifier 
 merely, not as poet. These not only knit and 
 knot the logical texture of the style with all 
 the dexterity and strength of prose ; they not 
 only fill up the pattern of the verse with in- 
 finite variety and sober wit; but they give 
 us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by 
 the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, 
 with which they follow at the same time, 
 and now contrast, and now combine, the 
 double pattern of the texture and the verse. 
 Here the sounding line concludes; a little 
 further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a 
 little further, and both will reach their solu- 
 tion on the same ringing syllable. The best 
 
 189
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 that can be offered by the best writer of 
 prose is to show us the development of the 
 idea and the styHstic pattern proceed hand 
 in hand, sometimes by an obvious and tri- 
 umphant effort, sometimes with a great air 
 of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by 
 virtue of conquering another difficulty, de- 
 lights us with a new series of triumphs. He 
 follows three purposes where his rival fol- 
 lowed only two; and the change is of pre- 
 cisely the same nature as that from melody 
 to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the 
 juggler, behold him now, to the vastly in- 
 creased enthusiasm of the spectators, jug- 
 gling with three oranges instead of two. 
 Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; 
 and the pattern, with every fresh element, 
 becoming more interesting in itself. 
 
 Yet it must not be thought that verse is 
 simply an addition; something is lost as 
 well as something gained; and there re- 
 mains plainly traceable, in comparing the 
 best prose with the best verse, a certain 
 broad distindion of method in the web. 
 Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of 
 logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue 
 
 100
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In 
 prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nice- 
 ly balanced, and fits into itself with an ob- 
 trusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear re- 
 marks and is singly gratified by this return 
 and balance; while in verse it is all diverted 
 to the measure. To find comparable pas- 
 sages is hard; foreither the versifier is hugely 
 the superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and 
 still persist in his more delicate enterprise, 
 he fails to be as widely his inferior. But let 
 us seled them from the pages of the same 
 writer, one who was ambidexter; let us 
 take, for instance. Rumour's Prologue to the 
 Second Part oi Henry IV., a fine flourish of 
 eloquence in Shakespeare's second manner, 
 and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise 
 of sherris, a(ft iv. scene i.; or let us com- 
 pare the beautiful prose spoken throughout 
 by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for ex- 
 ample, the first speech of all, Orlando's 
 speech to Adam, with what passage it shall 
 please you to seleft — the Seven Ages from 
 the same play, or even such a stave of no- 
 bility as Othello's farewell to war; and still 
 you will be able to perceive, if you have an 
 
 >9>
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ear for that class of music, a certain superior 
 degree of organisation in the prose; a com- 
 parer fitting of the parts; a balance in the 
 swing and the return as of a throbbing pen- 
 dulum. We must not, in things temporal, 
 take from those who have little, the little 
 that they have; the merits of prose are in- 
 ferior, but they are not the same; it is a little 
 kingdom, but an independent. 
 
 3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way 
 back, I used a word which still awaits an 
 application. Each phrase, I said, was to be 
 comely; but what is a comely phrase ? In all 
 ideal and material points, literature, being a 
 representative art, must look for analogies 
 to painting and the like ; but in what is tech- 
 nical and executive, being a temporal art, 
 it must seek for them in music. Each phrase 
 of each sentence, like an air or a recitative 
 in music, should be so artfully compounded 
 out of long and short, out of accented and 
 unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. 
 And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is 
 impossible to lay down laws. Even in our 
 accentual and rhythmic language no analysis 
 can find the secret of the beauty of a verse; 
 192
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 how much less, then, of those phrases, such 
 as prose is built of, which obey no law but 
 to be lawless and yet to please ? The little 
 that we know of verse (and for my part 1 
 owe it all to my friend Professor Fleeming 
 Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting 
 in the present connexion. We have been 
 accustomed to describe the heroic line as 
 five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain 
 and confusion whenever, as by the consci- 
 entious schoolboy, we have heard our own 
 description put in praftice. 
 
 "All night I the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,'" 
 goes the schoolboy; but though we close 
 our ears, we cling to our definition, in spite 
 of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. 
 Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily 
 discovered that the heroic line consists of 
 four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, 
 contains four pauses: 
 
 "All night I the dreadless | angel | unpursued." 
 Four groups, each pradically uttered as one 
 word: the first, in this case, an iamb; the 
 second, an amphibrachys; the third, a tro- 
 chee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and 
 
 ' Milton. 
 
 "93
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 yet our schoolboy, with no other hberty but 
 that of infliding pain, had triumphantly 
 scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this 
 fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this 
 fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but 
 still kept flying with the others. What had 
 seemed to be one thing it now appears is 
 two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, 
 the verse is made at the same time to read 
 in fives and to read in fours. 
 
 But again, four is not necessary. We do 
 not, indeed, find verses in six groups, be- 
 cause there is not room for six in the ten 
 syllables; and we do not find verses of two, 
 because one of the main distindions of verse 
 from prose resides in the comparative short- 
 ness of the group; but it is even common 
 to find verses of three. Five is the one for- 
 bidden number; because five is the number 
 of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two 
 patterns would coincide, and that opposi- 
 tion which is the life of verse would instant- 
 ly be lost. We have here a clue to the effed 
 of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where 
 they are so common and make so brave an 
 architedure in the verse; for the polysylla- 
 '94
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 ble is a group of Nature's making. If but 
 some Roman would return from Hades 
 (Martial, for ciioice), and tell me by what 
 condud of the voice these thundering verses 
 should be uttered — " Aiit Laced(V7nonium 
 Tarentiim," for a c?ise in point — 1 feel as 
 if I should enter at last into the full enjoy- 
 ment of the best of human verses. 
 
 But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or 
 supposed to be; by the mere count of syl- 
 lables the four groups cannot be all iambic; 
 as a question of elegance, I doubt if any one 
 of them requires to be so; and 1 am certain 
 that for choice no two of them should scan 
 the same. The singular beauty of the verse 
 analysed above is due, so far as analysis can 
 carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition 
 of L, D, and N, but part tothis variety of scan- 
 sion in the groups. The groups which, likethe 
 barin music, break upthe verse forutterance, 
 fall uniambically; and in declaiming a so- 
 callediambic verse, it may so happen that we 
 never utter one iambic foot. And yet to this 
 negleft of the original beat there is a limit. 
 
 "Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts," ' 
 ' Milton. 
 
 195
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic 
 hne ; for though it scarcely can be said to in- 
 dicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly sug- 
 gests no other measure to the ear. But begin 
 
 " Mother Athens, eye of Greece," 
 
 or merely " Mother Athens," and the game 
 is up, for the trochaic beat has been sug- 
 gested. The eccentric scansion of the groups 
 is an adornment; but as soon as the original 
 beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly 
 to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; 
 but if we destroy the original mould, one of 
 the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall 
 back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arith- 
 metical measure of the verse, and the degree 
 of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of 
 prosody to have one common purpose: to 
 keep alive the opposition of two schemes 
 simultaneously followed; to keep them not- 
 ably apart, though still coincident; and to 
 balance them with such judicial nicety be- 
 fore the reader, that neither shall be unper- 
 ceived and neither signally prevail. 
 
 The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intri- 
 cate. Here, too, we write in groups, or 
 phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose 
 196
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 phrase is greatly longer and is much more 
 nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse ; 
 so that not only is there a greater interval of 
 continuous sound between the pauses, but, 
 for that very reason, word is linked more 
 readily to word by a more summary enun- 
 ciation. Still, the phrase is the strift analogue 
 of the group, and successive phrases, like 
 successive groups, must differ openly in 
 length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in 
 verse is to suggest no measure but the one 
 in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at 
 all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be 
 as much so as you will; but it must not be 
 metrical. It may be anything, but it must not 
 be verse. A single heroic line may very well 
 pass and not disturb the somewhat larger 
 stride of the prose style; but one following 
 another will produce an instant impression 
 of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. 
 The same lines delivered with the measured 
 utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich 
 in variety. By themore summary enunciation 
 proper to prose, as to a more distant vision, 
 these niceties of difference are lost. A whole 
 verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is 
 
 197
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 soon wearied by a succession of groups 
 identical in length. The prose writer, in iah, 
 since he is allowed to be so much less har- 
 monious, is condemned to a perpetually 
 fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, 
 and must never disappoint the ear by the 
 trot of an accepted metre. And this obliga- 
 tion is the third orange with which he has 
 to juggle, the third quality which the prose 
 writer must work into his pattern of words. 
 It may be thought perhaps that this is a 
 quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; 
 but such is the inherently rhythmical strain 
 of the English language, that the bad writer 
 — and must 1 take for example that admired 
 friend of my boyhood, Captain Reid.?— the 
 inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his 
 earlier attempts to be impressive, and the 
 jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, 
 all tend to fall at once into the production of 
 bad blank verse. And here it may be perti- 
 nently asked, Why bad.? And 1 suppose it 
 might be enough to answer that no man ever 
 made good verse by accident, and that no 
 verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial 
 when uttered with the delivery of prose. But 
 198
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 we can go beyond such answers. The weak 
 side of verse is the regularity of the beat, 
 which in itself is decidedly less impressive 
 than the movement ofthe nobler prose; and it 
 is just into this weak side, and this alone, that 
 our careless writer falls. A peculiar density 
 and mass, consequent on the nearness ofthe 
 pauses, is one ofthe chief good qualities of 
 verse; but this our accidental versifier, still 
 following after the swift gait and large ges- 
 tures of prose, does not so much as aspire to 
 imitate. Lastly, since he remains uncon- 
 scious that he is making verse at all, it can 
 never occur to him to extraft those effects of 
 counterpoint and opposition which 1 have 
 referred to as the final grace and justification 
 of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in 
 particular. 
 
 4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a 
 great deal of talk about rhythm — and nat- 
 urally; for in our canorous language rhythm 
 is always at the door. But it must not be 
 forgotten that in some languages this ele- 
 ment is almost, if not quite, extind, and 
 that in our own it is probably decaying. 
 The even speech of many educated Ameri- 
 
 199
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 cans sounds the note of danger. 1 should see 
 it go with something as bitter as despair, 
 but I should not be desperate. As in verse 
 no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, 
 so, in prose also, other sorts of beauty will 
 arise and take the place and play the part of 
 those that we outlive. The beauty of the ex- 
 pefted beat in verse, the beauty in prose of 
 its larger and more lawless melody, patent 
 as they are to English hearing, are already 
 silent in the ears of our next neighbours ; for 
 in France the oratorical accent and the pat- 
 tern of the web have almost or altogether 
 succeeded to their places; and the French 
 prose writer would be astounded at the 
 labours of his brother across the Channel, 
 and how a good quarter of his toil, above 
 all invita Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. 
 So wonderfully far apart have races wan- 
 dered in spirit, and so hard it is to under- 
 stand the literature next door! 
 
 Yet French prose is distindly better than 
 English; and French verse, above all while 
 Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one 
 side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase 
 or a verse in French is easily distinguishable 
 200
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 as comely or uncomely. There is then an- 
 other element of comeliness hitherto over- 
 looked in this analysis: the contents of the 
 phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of 
 sounds, as each phrase in music consists of 
 notes. One sound suggests, echoes, de- 
 mands, and harmonises with another; and 
 the art of rightly using these concordances 
 is the final art in literature. It used to be a 
 piece of good advice to all young writers to 
 avoid alliteration ; and the advice was sound, 
 in so far as it prevented daubing. None the 
 less for that, was it abominable nonsense, 
 and the mere raving of those blindest of the 
 blind who will not see. The beauty of the 
 contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, de- 
 pends implicitly upon alliteration and upon 
 assonance. The vowel demands to be re- 
 peated; the consonant demands to be re- 
 peated ; and both cry aloud to be perpetually 
 varied. You may follow the adventures of a 
 letter through any passage that has particu- 
 larly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied 
 awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again 
 at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass 
 into congenerous sounds, one liquid or la- 
 
 20 1
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 bial melting away into another. And you 
 will find another and much stranger circum- 
 stance. Literature is written by and for two 
 senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to per- 
 ceive "unheard melodies"; and the eye, 
 which direds the pen and deciphers the 
 printed phrase. Well, even as there are 
 rhymes for the eye, so you will find that 
 there are assonances and alliterations; that 
 where an author is running the open A, de- 
 ceived by the eye and our strange English 
 spelling, he will often show a tenderness for 
 the flat A; and that where he is running a 
 particular consonant, he will not improbably 
 rejoice to write it down even when it is 
 mute or bears a different value. 
 
 Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a 
 pattern, to speak grossly, of letters — which 
 makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose 
 writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times 
 it is very delicate and hard to perceive, and 
 then perhaps most excellent and winning 
 (1 say perhaps) ; but at times again the ele- 
 ments of this literal melody stand more 
 boldly forward and usurp the ear. It be- 
 comes, therefore, somewhat a matter of 
 
 202
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 conscience to seled examples; and as I can- 
 not very well ask the reader to help me, I 
 shall do the next best by giving him the rea- 
 son or the history of each seleftion. The two 
 first, one in prose, one in verse, I chose 
 without previous analysis, simply as engag- 
 ing passages that had long re-echoed in my 
 ear. 
 
 " I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered 
 virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that 
 never sallies out and sees her adversary, but 
 slinks out of the race where that immortal 
 garland is to be run for, not without dust 
 and heat." ' Down to "virtue," the current 
 S and R are both announced and repeated 
 unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note 
 that almost inseparable group PVF is given 
 entire.^ The next phrase is a period of re- 
 pose, almost ugly in itself, both S and R 
 still audible, and B given as the last fulfil- 
 
 » Milton. 
 
 'As PVF will continue to haunt us through our Eng- 
 lish examples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin 
 verse, of which it forms a chief adornment, and do not 
 hold me answerable for the all too Roman freedom of 
 the sense : ' ' Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vaga- 
 tur." 
 
 203
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 ment of PVF. In the next four phrases, from 
 " that never" down to " run for," the mask 
 is thrown off, and, but for a slight repeti- 
 tion of the F and V, the whole matter turns, 
 almost too obtrusively, on S and R; first S 
 coming to the front, and then R. In the con- 
 cluding phrase all these favourite letters, and 
 even the flat A, a timid preference for which 
 is just perceptible, are discarded at a blow 
 and in a bundle; and to make the break 
 more obvious, every word ends with a den- 
 tal, and all but one with T, for which we 
 have been cautiously prepared since the be- 
 ginning. The singular dignity of the first 
 clause, and this hammer-stroke of the last, 
 go far to make the charm of this exquisite 
 sentence. But it is fair to own that S and R 
 are used a little coarsely. 
 
 " In Xanadv did Kubla Khan (KANDL) 
 
 A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) 
 
 Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) 
 
 Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) 
 
 Down to a sunless sea. " ' (NDLS) 
 
 Here I have put the analysis of the main 
 group alongside the lines; and the more it 
 
 ' Coleridge. 
 204
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 is looked at, the more interesting it will 
 seem. But there are further niceties. In lines 
 two and four, the current S is most delicately 
 varied with Z. In line three, the current flat 
 A is twice varied with the open A, already 
 suggested in line two, and both times 
 ("where" and "sacred") in conjundion 
 with the current R. In the same line F and 
 V (a harmony in themselves, even when 
 shorn of their comrade P) are admirably con- 
 trasted. And in line four there is a marked 
 subsidiary M, which again was announced 
 in line two. I stop from weariness, for more 
 might yet be said. 
 
 My next example was recently quoted 
 from Shakespeare as an example of the 
 poet's colour sense. Now, 1 do not think 
 literature has anything to do with colour, 
 or poets anyway the better of such a sense; 
 and I instantly attacked this passage, since 
 " purple " was the word that had so pleased 
 the writer of the article, to see if there might 
 not be some literary reason for its use. It 
 will be seen that I succeeded amply; and I 
 am bound to say I think the passage ex- 
 ceptional in Shakespeare — exceptional, in- 
 
 205
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 deed, in literature; but it was not I who 
 chose it. 
 
 " The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe 
 BURNt oN the water : the POOP was BeateN gold, 
 PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that *per 
 The wiNds were love-sick with them." ' 
 
 It may be asked why I have put the F of 
 "perfumed "in capitals; and I reply, because 
 this change from P to F is the completion of 
 that from B to P, already so adroitly carried 
 out. Indeed, the whole passage is a monu- 
 ment of curious ingenuity; and it seems 
 scarce worth while to indicate the subsidi- 
 ary S, L, and W. In the same article, a sec- 
 ond passage from Shakespeare was quoted, 
 once again as an example of his colour sense : 
 
 "A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops 
 r the bottom of a cowslip."* 
 
 It is very curious, very artificial, and not 
 worth while to analyse at length : I leave it 
 to the reader. But before 1 turn my back on 
 Shakespeare, 1 should like to quote a pas- 
 sage, for my own pleasure, and for a very 
 model of every technical art: 
 
 ^Antony and Cleopatra. 
 * Cfinbeline. 
 206
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 " But in the wind and tempest of her frown, 
 
 W. P. V.' F. (st) (ow) 
 DistinAion with a loud and powerful fan, 
 
 W. P. F. (st) (ow) L 
 Puffing at all, winnows the light away; 
 
 W. P. F. L 
 And what hath mass and matter by itself 
 
 W. F. L M. X. 
 Lies rich in virtue and unmingled." ^ 
 
 V. L. M. 
 
 From these delicate and choice writers I 
 turned with some curiosity to a player of 
 the big drum — Macaulay. 1 had in hand the 
 two-volume edition, and 1 opened at the 
 beginning of the second volume. Here was 
 what 1 read: 
 
 " The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned 
 to the degree of the maladministration which has pro- 
 duced them. It is therefore not strange that the govern- 
 ment of Scotland, having been during many years greatly 
 more corrupt than the government of England, should 
 have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement against 
 the last king of the house of Stuart was in England con- 
 servative, in Scotland destructive. The English complained 
 not of the law, but of the violation of the law." 
 
 This was plain-sailing enough; it was our 
 old friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a 
 
 'The Vis in "of" 
 
 " Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 207
 
 £SSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 body; but as I read on, and turned the page, 
 and still found PVF with his attendant liq- 
 uids, 1 confess my mind misgave me utter- 
 ly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it 
 must be the nature of the English tongue. In 
 a kind of despair, 1 turned half-way through 
 the volume; and coming upon his lordship 
 dealing with General Cannon, and fresh from 
 Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here, with 
 elucidative spelling, was my reward: 
 
 " Meanwhile the disorders of Kannoii's Kamp went on 
 inKreasing. He Railed a Kouncil of war to Konsider what 
 Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the 
 Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The 
 army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The re- 
 cent viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland 
 warriors. Great chie/s who had brought siKs or Seren hun- 
 dred /ighting men into the/ield did not think it /air that 
 they should be outt'oted by gentlemen /rom Ireland, and 
 /rom the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James's 
 Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonelsand Kaptains, but 
 who were Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains with- 
 out Kompanies. " 
 
 A moment of FV in all this world of K's ! 
 It was not the English language, then, that 
 was an instrument of one string, but Macau- 
 lay that was an incomparable dauber. 
 
 It was probably from this barbaric love of 
 208
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 repeating the same sound, rather than from 
 any design of clearness, that he acquired his 
 irritating habit of repeating words; I say the 
 one rather than the other, because such a 
 trick of the ear is deeper-seated and more 
 original in man than any logical considera- 
 tion. Few writers, indeed, are probably con- 
 scious of the length to which they push this 
 melody of letters. One, writing very dili- 
 gently, and only concerned about the mean- 
 ing of his words and the rhythm of his 
 phrases, was struck into amazement by the 
 eager triumph with which he cancelled one 
 expression to substitute another. Neither 
 changed the sense; both being monosylla- 
 bles, neither could affed the scansion; and 
 it was only by looking back on what he had 
 already written that the mystery was solved : 
 the second word contained an open A, and 
 for nearly half a page he had been riding that 
 vowel to the death. 
 
 In pradice, 1 should add, the ear is not al- 
 ways so exading; and ordinary writers, in 
 ordinary moments, content themselves with 
 avoiding what is harsh, and here and there, 
 upon a rare occasion, buttressing a phrase, 
 
 209
 
 £SSAVS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 or linking two together, with a patch of as- 
 sonance or a momentary jingle of allitera- 
 tion. To understand how constant is this 
 preoccupation of good writers, even where 
 its results are least obtrusive, it is only nec- 
 essary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you 
 will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of 
 incongruous consonants only relieved by the 
 jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not 
 to be articulated by the powers of man. 
 
 Conclusion. — We may now briefly enu- 
 merate the elements of style. We have, pe- 
 culiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping 
 his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing 
 to the ear, without ever allowing them to 
 fall into the stridly metrical: peculiar to the 
 versifier, the task of combining and contrast- 
 ing his double, treble, and quadruple pat- 
 tern, feet and groups, logic and metre — har- 
 monious in diversity: common to both, the 
 task of artfully combining the prime elements 
 of language into phrases that shall be musi- 
 cal in the mouth; the task of weaving their 
 argument into a texture of committed 
 phrases and of rounded periods — but this 
 particularlybinding in thecaseof prose: and, 
 
 2IO
 
 STYLE IN LITER A TURE 
 
 again common to both, the task of choosing 
 apt, explicit, and communicative words. 
 We begin to see now what an intricate affair 
 is any perfect passage; how many faculties, 
 whether of taste or pure reason, must be 
 held upon the stretch to make it; and why, 
 when it is made, it should afford us so com- 
 plete a pleasure. From the arrangement of 
 according letters, which is altogether ara- 
 besque and sensual, up to the architedure of 
 the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is 
 a vigorous aft of the pure intelled, there is 
 scarce a faculty in man but has been exer- 
 cised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect 
 sentences are rare, and perfe(ft pages rarer. 
 
 21 I
 
 Ill 
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM' 
 
 jTYLE is the invariable mark of any 
 master; and for the student who 
 does not aspire so high as to be 
 numbered with the giants, it is still the one 
 quality in which he may improve himself at 
 will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the 
 power of mystery or colour, are allotted in 
 the hour of birth, and can be neither learned 
 nor simulated. But the just and dexterous 
 use of what qualities we have, the propor- 
 tion of one part to another and to the whole, 
 the elision of the useless, the accentuation 
 of the important, and the preservation of a 
 uniform charader from end to end — these, 
 which taken together constitute technical 
 perfedion, are to some degree within the 
 reach of industry and intelledual courage. 
 What to put in and what to leave out; 
 whether some particular fad be organically 
 
 ' First published in the Magazine of Art in 1883. 
 
 312
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 necessary or purely ornamental; whether, 
 if it be purely ornamental, it may not weak- 
 en or obscure the general design; and final- 
 ly, whether, if we decide to use it, we should 
 do so grossly and notably, or in some con- 
 ventional disguise: are questions of plastic 
 style continually rearising. And the sphinx 
 that patrols the highways of executive art 
 has no more unanswerable riddle to pro- 
 pound. 
 
 In literature (from which I must draw my 
 instances) the great change of the past cen- 
 tury has been effected by the admission of 
 detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic 
 Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic 
 Balzac and his more or less wholly unro- 
 mantic followers, bound like a duty on the 
 novelist. For some time it signified and ex- 
 pressed a more ample contemplation of the 
 conditions of man's life; but it has recently 
 (at least in France) fallen into a merely tech- 
 nical and decorative stage, which it is, per- 
 haps, still too harsh to call survival. With a 
 movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid 
 begin to fall a little back from these extrem- 
 ities; they begin to aspire after a more 
 
 2U
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 naked, narrative articulation; after the suc- 
 cind, the dignified, and the poetic; and as 
 a means to this, after a general lightening of 
 this baggage of detail. After Scott we be- 
 held the starveling story — once, in the 
 hands of Voltaire, as abstrad as a parable 
 — begin to be pampered upon f^ifts. The in- 
 troduction of these details developed a par- 
 ticular ability of hand ; and that ability, child- 
 ishly indulged, has led to the works that 
 now amaze us on a railway journey. A man 
 of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends 
 himself on technical successes. To afford a 
 popular flavour and attrad the mob, he adds 
 a steady current of what 1 may be allowed 
 to call the rancid. That is exciting to the 
 moralist; but what more particularly inter- 
 ests the artist is this tendency of the ex- 
 treme of detail, when followed as a princi- 
 ple, to degenerate into mere fenx-de-joie of 
 literary tricking. The other day even M. 
 Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible 
 colours and visible sounds. 
 
 This odd suicide of one branch of the 
 realists may serve to remind us of the fad 
 which underlies a very dusty conflid of the 
 
 214
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 critics. All representative art, which can be 
 said to live, is both realistic and ideal; and 
 the realism about which we quarrel is a mat- 
 ter purely of externals. It is no especial cul- 
 tus of nature and veracity, but a mere whim 
 of veering fashion, that has made us turn 
 our back upon the larger, more various, and 
 more romantic art of yore. A photographic 
 exactitude in dialogue is now the exclusive 
 fashion; but even in the ablest hands it tells 
 us no more — 1 think it even tells us less — 
 than Moliere, wielding his artificial medium, 
 has told to us and to all time of Alceste or 
 Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical 
 novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions 
 of man's nature and the conditions of man's 
 life, the truth of literary art, is free of the 
 ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, 
 in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The 
 scene may be pitched in London, on the 
 sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the moun- 
 tains of Beulah. And by an odd and lumi- 
 nous accident, if there is any page of litera- 
 ture calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, 
 it must be that Troiliis and Crcssida which 
 Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger 
 
 215
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 with the world, grafted on the heroic story 
 of the siege of Troy. 
 
 This question of realism, let it then be 
 clearly understood, regards not in the least 
 degree the fundamental truth, but only the 
 technical method, of a work of art. Be as 
 ideal or as abstrad as you please, you will 
 be none the less veracious; but if you be 
 weak, you run the risk of being tedious and 
 inexpressive; and if you be very strong and 
 honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. 
 
 A work of art is first cloudily conceived 
 in the mind; during the period of gestation 
 it stands more clearly forward from these 
 swaddling mists, puts on expressive linea- 
 ments, and becomes at length that most 
 faultless, but also, alas! that incommunica- 
 ble product of the human mind, a perfeded 
 design. On the approach to execution all is 
 changed. The artist must now step down, 
 don his working clothes, and become the 
 artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy 
 conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch 
 of matter; he must decide, almost in a 
 breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the 
 particularity of execution of his whole design. 
 216
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 The engendering idea of some works is 
 stylistic; a technical preoccupation stands 
 them instead of some robuster principle of 
 life. And with these the execution is but 
 play; for the stylistic problem is resolved 
 beforehand, and all large originality of treat- 
 ment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, 
 intricately designed, which we have learnt 
 to admire, with a certain smiling admira- 
 tion, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dob- 
 son; such, too, are those canvases where 
 dexterity or even breadth of plastic style 
 takes the place of pi(?torial nobility of de- 
 sign. So, it may be remarked, it was easier 
 to begin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, 
 since, in the first, the style was didated by 
 the nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a 
 man probably of some indolence of mind, 
 enjoyed and got good profit of this economy 
 of effort. But the case is exceptional. Usual- 
 ly in all works of art that have been con- 
 ceived from within outwards, and gener- 
 ously nourished from the author's mind, the 
 moment in which he begins to execute is 
 one of extreme perplexity and strain. Art- 
 ists of indifferent energy and an imperfeft 
 
 217
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 devotion to their own ideal make this un- 
 grateful effort once for all; and, having 
 formed a style, adhere to it through life. But 
 those of a higher order cannot rest content 
 with a process which, as they continue to 
 employ it, must infallibly degenerate to- 
 wards the academic and the cut-and-dried. 
 Every fresh work in which they embark is 
 the signal for a fresh engagement of the 
 whole forces of their mind; and the chang- 
 ing views which accompany the growth of 
 their experience are marked by still more 
 sweeping alterations in the manner of their 
 art. So that criticism loves to dwell upon 
 and distinguish the varying periods of a 
 Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 
 
 It is, then, first of all, at this initial and 
 decisive moment when execution is begun, 
 and thenceforth only in a less degree, that 
 the ideal and the real do indeed, like good 
 and evil angels, contend for the dire(fl;ion of 
 the work. Marble, paint, and language, the 
 pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their 
 grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their 
 hours, if 1 may so express myself, of insub- 
 ordination. It is the work and it is a great 
 218
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 part of the delight of any artist to contend 
 with these unruly tools, and now by brute 
 energy, now by witty expedient, to drive 
 and coax them to effeft his will. Given these 
 means, so laughably inadequate, and given 
 the interest, the intensity, and the multi- 
 plicity of the adual sensation whose effeft 
 he is to render with their aid, the artist has 
 one main and necessary resource which he 
 must, in every case and upon any theory, 
 employ. He must, that is, suppress much 
 and omit more. He must omit what is tedi- 
 ous or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedi- 
 ous and necessary. But such fads as, in re- 
 gard to the main design, subserve a variety 
 of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly re- 
 tain. And it is the mark of the very highest 
 order of creative art to be woven exclusively 
 of such. There, any fad that is registered is 
 contrived a double or a treble debt to pay, 
 and is at once an ornament in its place, and 
 a pillar in the main design. Nothing would 
 find room in such a pidure that did not 
 serve, at once, to complete the composition, 
 to accentuate the scheme of colour, to dis- 
 tinguish the planes of distance, and to strike 
 
 219
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the note of the selected sentiment; nothing 
 would be allowed in such a story that did 
 not, at the same time, expedite the progress 
 of the fable, build up the charaders, and 
 strike home the moral or the philosophical 
 design. But this is unattainable. As a rule, 
 so far from building the f^ibric of our works 
 exclusively with these, we are thrown into 
 a rapture if we think we can muster a 
 dozen or a score of them, to be the plums 
 of our confedion. And hence, in order that 
 the canvas may be filled or the story pro- 
 ceed from point to point, other details must 
 be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! 
 upon a doubtful title; many without mar- 
 riage robes. Thus any work of art, as it pro- 
 ceeds towards completion, too often — 1 had 
 almost written always — loses in force and 
 poignancy of main design. Our little air is 
 swamped and dwarfed among hardly rele- 
 vant orchestration; our little passionate 
 story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive 
 eloquence or slipshod talk. 
 
 But again, we are rather more tempted to 
 admit those particulars which we know we 
 can describe; and hence those most of all 
 220
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 which, having been described very often, 
 have grown to be conventionally treated in 
 the practice of our art. These we choose, as 
 the mason chooses the acanthus to adorn his 
 capital, because they come naturally to the 
 accustomed hand. The old stock incidents 
 and accessories, tricks of workmanship and 
 schemes of composition (all being admirably 
 good, or they would long have been forgot- 
 ten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us 
 ready-made but not perfedly appropriate 
 solutions for any problem that arises, and 
 wean us from the study of nature and the 
 uncompromising pradice of art. To strug- 
 gle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, 
 and give expression to fads which have not 
 yet been adequately or not yet elegantly ex- 
 pressed, is to run a little upon the danger of 
 extreme self-love. Difficulty sets a high price 
 upon achievement; and the artist may easily 
 fall into the error of the French naturalists, 
 and consider any fad as welcome to admis- 
 sion if it be the ground of brilliant handi- 
 work ; or, again, into the error of the modern 
 landscape-painter, who is apt to think that 
 difficulty overcome and science well dis- 
 
 221
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 played can take the place of what is, after all, 
 the one excuse and breath of art — charm. A 
 little further, and he will regard charm in the 
 light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, 
 and the omission of a tedious passage as an 
 infidelity to art. 
 
 We have now the matter of this difference 
 before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed 
 upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill 
 up the interval with detail of the conven- 
 tional order, briefly touched, soberly sup- 
 pressed in tone, courting negled. But the 
 realist, with a fine intemperance, will not 
 suffer the presence of anything so dead as a 
 convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot- 
 pressed from nature, all charadered and 
 notable, seizing the eye. The style that be- 
 fits either of these extremes, once chosen, 
 brings with it its necessary disabilities and 
 dangers. The immediate danger of the realist 
 is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of 
 the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane 
 pursuit of completion, to immolate his read- 
 ers under fads; but he comes in the last re- 
 sort, and as his energy declines, to discard 
 all design, abjure all choice, and, with scien- 
 
 322
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM 
 
 tific thoroughness, steadily to communicate 
 matter which is not worth learning. The 
 danger of the idealist is, of course, to become 
 merely null and lose all grip of fad, particu- 
 larity, or passion. 
 
 We talk of bad and good. Everything, in- 
 deed, is good which is conceived with hon- 
 esty and executed with communicative ar- 
 dour. But though on neither side is dogma- 
 tism fitting, and though in every case the 
 artist must decide for himself, and decide 
 afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding 
 work and new creation; yet one thing may 
 be generally said, that we of the last quarter 
 of the nineteenth century, breathing as we 
 do the intelledual atmosphere of our age, 
 are more apt to err upon the side of realism 
 than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that 
 theory it may be well to watch and corred 
 our own decisions, always holding back the 
 hand from the least appearance of irrelevant 
 dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin no 
 work that is not philosophical, passionate, 
 dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last 
 and least, romantic in design. 
 
 223
 
 IV 
 
 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 
 INFLUENCED ME' 
 
 'HE Editor^ has somewhat insid- 
 iously laid a trap for his correspond- 
 ents, the question put appearing at 
 first so innocent, truly cutting so deep, it is 
 not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance 
 and review that the writer awakes to find 
 himself engaged upon something in the na- 
 ture of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, 
 upon a chapter in the life of that little, beau- 
 tiful brother whom we once all had, and 
 whom we have all lost and mourned, the 
 man we ought to have been, the man we 
 hoped to be. But when word has been passed 
 (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be 
 kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say 
 too little, and sometimes weak and say too 
 much, the blame must lie at the door of the 
 person who entrapped me. 
 
 ' First published in the British IVeekly, May 13, 1887. 
 ' Of the British IVeeklf.
 
 THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 The most influential books, and the truest 
 in their influence, are works of fi6lion. They 
 do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he 
 must afterwards discover to be inexaft ; they 
 do not teach him a lesson, which he must 
 afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rear- 
 range, they clarify the lessons of life; they 
 disengage us from ourselves, they constrain 
 us to the acquaintance of others; and they 
 show us the web of experience, not as we 
 can see it for ourselves, but with a singular 
 change — that monstrous, consuming ^^o of 
 ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be 
 so, they must be reasonably true to the hu- 
 man comedy ; and any work that is so serves 
 the turn of instrudion. But the course of our 
 education is answered best by those poems 
 and romances where we breathe a magnan- 
 imous atmosphere of thought and meet gen- 
 erous and pious characters. Shakespeare has 
 served me best. Few living friends have had 
 upon me an influence so strong for good as 
 Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, al- 
 ready well beloved in the reading, I had the 
 good fortune to see, I must think, in an im- 
 pressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Sid- 
 
 22S
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 dons. Nothing has ever more moved, more 
 delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the 
 influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
 speech over the dying Lear had a great effeft 
 upon my mind, and was the burthen of my 
 reflexions for long, so profoundly, so touch- 
 ingly generous did it appear in sense, so 
 overpowering in expression. Perhaps my 
 dearest and best friend outside of Shake- 
 speare is D'Artagnan — the elderly D'Artag- 
 nan of the l^icomte de Bragelonne. 1 know not 
 a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; 1 
 shall be very sorry for the man who is so 
 much of a pedant in morals that he cannot 
 learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, 
 1 must name the Pilgrim 's Progress, a book 
 that breathes of every beautiful and valuable 
 emotion. 
 
 But of works of art little can be said; their 
 influence is profound and silent, like the in- 
 fluence of nature; they mould by contad; 
 we drink them up like water, and are bet- 
 tered, yet know not how. It is in books more 
 specifically didadic that we can follow out 
 the effed, and distinguish and weigh and 
 compare. A book which has been very influ- 
 226
 
 THE I NFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 ential upon me fell early into my hands, and 
 so may stand first, though I think its influ- 
 ence was only sensible later on, and perhaps 
 still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily 
 outlived : the Essais of Montaigne. That tem- 
 perate and genial pidure of life is a great gift 
 to place in the hands of persons of to-day; 
 they will find in these smiling pages a maga- 
 zine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique 
 strain; they will have their "linen decen- 
 cies" and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and 
 will (if they have any gift of reading) per- 
 ceivethat these have not been fluttered with- 
 out some excuse and ground of reason ; and 
 (again if they have any gift of reading) they 
 will end by seeing that this old gentleman 
 was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held 
 in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than 
 they or their contemporaries. 
 
 The next book, in order of time, to influ- 
 ence me, was the New Testament, and in 
 particular the Gospel according to St. Mat- 
 thew. I believe it would startle and move 
 any one if they could make a certain effort of 
 imagination and read it freshly like a book, 
 
 not droningly and dully hke a portion of the 
 
 227
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 Bible. Any one would then be able to see in 
 it those truths which we are all courteously 
 supposed to know and all modestly refrain 
 from applying. But upon this subjed it is 
 perhaps better to be silent. 
 
 1 come next to Whitman's Leaves of 
 Gnus, a book of singular service, a book 
 which tumbled the world upside down for 
 me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs 
 of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having 
 thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me 
 back again upon a strong foundation of all 
 the original and manly virtues. But it is, 
 once more, only a book for those who have 
 the gift of reading. 1 will be very frank — I 
 believe it is so with all good books except, 
 perhaps, fidion. The average man lives, and 
 must live, so wholly in convention, that 
 gunpowder charges of the truth are more 
 apt to discompose than to invigorate his 
 creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy 
 and indecency, and crouches the closer 
 round that little idol of part-truths and part- 
 conveniences which is the contemporary 
 deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
 forgets what is old, and becomes truly blas- 
 328
 
 THE I NFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 phemous and indecent himself. New truth is 
 only useful to supplement the old; rough 
 truth is only wanted to expand, not to de- 
 stroy, our civil and often elegant conven- 
 tions. He who cannot judge had better stick 
 to fidion and the daily papers. There he will 
 get little harm, and, in the first at least, some 
 good. 
 
 Close upon the back of my discovery of 
 Whitman, 1 came under the influence of 
 Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi 
 exists, and few better. How much of his vast 
 strudure will bear the touch of time, how 
 much is clay and how much brass, it were 
 too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, 
 are always manly and honest; there dwells 
 in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, 
 plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but 
 still joyful; and the reader will find there a 
 caput mortiium of piety, with little indeed of 
 its loveliness, but with most of its essentials ; 
 and these two qualities make him a whole- 
 some, as his intelledual vigour makes him a 
 bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound 
 if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. 
 
 Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great im- 
 
 229
 
 ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 portance for me when it first fell into my 
 hands — a strange instance of the partiality 
 of man's good and man's evil. I know no 
 one whom I less admire than Goethe; he 
 seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, 
 breaking open the doors of private life, and 
 wantonly wounding friends, in that crown- 
 ing offence of Werther, and in his own char- 
 after a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, con- 
 scious of the rights and duties of superior 
 talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious 
 of the rights and duties of his office. And yet 
 in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest 
 and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what 
 lessons are contained! Biography, usually 
 so false to its office, does here for once per- 
 form for us some of the work of fidion, re- 
 minding us, that is, of the truly mingled tis- 
 sue of man's nature, and how huge faults 
 and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in 
 the same character. History serves us well 
 to this eflfeft, but in the originals, not in the 
 pages of the popular epitomiser, who is 
 bound, by the very nature of his task, to 
 make us feel the difference of epochs instead 
 of the essential identity of man, and even in 
 230
 
 THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 the originals only to tiiose wiio can recog- 
 nise tiieir own human virtues and defeats in 
 strange forms, often inverted and under 
 strange names, often interchanged. Martial 
 is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a 
 man new thoughts to read his works dispas- 
 sionately, and find in this unseemly jester's 
 serious passages the image of a kind, wise, 
 and self-respe6ting gentleman. It is custom- 
 ary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave 
 out these pleasant verses; 1 never heard of 
 them, at least, until 1 found them for myself; 
 and this partiality is one among a thousand 
 things that help to build up our distorted 
 and hysterical conception of the great Ro- 
 man Empire. 
 
 This brings us by a natural transition to a 
 very noble book — \\\t Meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the 
 noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of 
 others, that are there expressed and were 
 practised on so great a scale in the life of its 
 writer, make this book a book quite by it- 
 self. No one can read it and not be moved. 
 Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feel- 
 ings — those very mobile, those not very 
 
 231
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 trusty parts of man. Its address lies further 
 back: its lesson comes more deeply home; 
 when you have read, you carry away with 
 you a memory of the man himself; it is as 
 though you had touched a loyal hand, looked 
 into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; 
 there is another bond on you thenceforward, 
 binding you to life and to the love of virtue. 
 Wordsworth should perhaps come next. 
 Every one has been influenced by Words- 
 worth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A 
 certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, 
 a sight of the stars, "the silence that is in the 
 lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of 
 dawn, cling to his work and give it a partic- 
 ular address to what is best in us. 1 do not 
 know that you learn a lesson; you need not 
 — Mill did not — agree with any one of his 
 beliefs ; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the 
 best teachers : a dogma learned is only a new 
 error — the old one was perhaps as good; 
 but a spirit communicated is a perpetual 
 posisession. These best teachers climb be- 
 yond teaching to the plane of art ; it is them- 
 selves, and what is best in themselves, that 
 they communicate. 
 232
 
 THE I NFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 I should never forgive myself if I forgot 
 The Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it be- 
 longs purely to didadic art, and from all the 
 novels I have read (and I have read thou- 
 sands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a 
 Nathan for the modern David ; here is a book 
 to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the 
 angry pidure of human faults, is not great 
 art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; 
 what we want is to be shown, not his de- 
 feds, of which we are too conscious, but his 
 merits, to which we are too blind. And The 
 Egoist is a satire; so much must be allowed ; 
 but it is a satire of a singular quality, which 
 tells you nothing of that obvious mote, 
 which is engaged from first to last with that 
 invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted 
 down; these are your own faults that are 
 dragged into the day and numbered, with 
 lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- 
 cision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as 
 I have the story) came to him in an agony. 
 "This is too bad of you," he cried. "Will- 
 oughbyisme!" "No, my dear fellow," said 
 the author; " he is all of us." I have read The 
 Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to 
 
 233
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 read it again; for I am like the young friend 
 of the anecdote — I think Willoughby an un- 
 manly but a very serviceable exposure of 
 myself. 
 
 I suppose, when I am done, I shall find 
 that 1 have forgotten much that was most 
 influential, as 1 see already 1 have forgotten 
 Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the 
 Spirit of Obligations " was a turning-point in 
 my life, and Penn, whose little book of 
 aphorisms had a brief but strong effed on 
 me, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, 
 wherein I learned for the first time the proper 
 attitude of any rational man to his country's 
 laws — a secret found, and kept, in the Asi- 
 atic islands. That I should commemorate all 
 is more than 1 can hope or the Editor could 
 ask. It will be more to the point, after having 
 said so much upon improving books, to say 
 a word or two about the improvable reader. 
 The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not 
 very common, nor very generally under- 
 stood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intel- 
 ledual endowment — a free grace, 1 find I 
 must call it — by which a man rises to under- 
 stand that he is not pundually right, nor 
 234
 
 THE I NFL UENCE OF BOOKS 
 
 those from whom he differs absolutely 
 wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold 
 them passionately; and he may know that 
 others hold them but coldly, or hold them 
 differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if 
 he has the gift of reading, these others will 
 be full of meat for him. They will see the 
 other side of propositions and the other side 
 of virtues. He need not change his dogma 
 for that, but he may change his reading of 
 that dogma, and he must supplement and 
 corre(5l his dedudions from it. A human 
 truth, which is always very much a lie, hides 
 as much of life as it displays. It is men who 
 hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, 
 perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend 
 our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse 
 our drowsy consciences. Something that 
 seems quite new. or that seems insolently 
 false or very dangerous, is the test of a 
 reader. If he tries to see what it means, what 
 truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him 
 read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or ex- 
 claims upon his author's folly, he had better 
 take to the daily papers; he will never be a 
 reader. 
 
 235
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 And here, with the aptest iHustrative 
 force, after I have laid down my part-truth, 
 I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, 
 we are vessels of a very limited content. Not 
 all men can read all books; it is only in a 
 chosen few that any man will find his ap- 
 pointed food; and the fittest lessons are the 
 most palatable, and make themselves wel- 
 come to the mind. A writer learns this early, 
 and it is his chief support; he goes on un- 
 afraid, laying down the law; and he is sure 
 at heart that most of what he says is demon- 
 strably false, and much of a mingled strain, 
 and some hurtful, and very little good for 
 service; but he is sure besides that when his 
 words fall into the hands of any genuine 
 reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, 
 and only that which suits will be assimi- 
 lated; and when they fall into the hands of 
 one who cannot intelligently read, they 
 come there quite silent and inarticulate, fall- 
 ing upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as 
 if he had not written. 
 
 a)<5
 
 SWISS NOTES
 
 I 
 
 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 
 
 ^HERE has come a change in medi- 
 cal opinion, and a change has fol- 
 lowed in the lives of sick folk. A 
 year or two ago and the wounded soldiery 
 of mankind were all shut up together in 
 some basking angle of the Riviera, walking 
 a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive 
 yards within earshot of the interminable 
 and unchanging surf — idle among spirit- 
 less idlers; not perhaps dying, yet hardly 
 living either, and aspiring, sometimes 
 fiercely, after livelier weather and some 
 vivifying change. These were certainly 
 beautiful places to live in, and the climate 
 was wooing in its softness. Yet there was 
 a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not 
 certain whether you were being wooed; 
 and these mild shores would sometimes 
 seem to you to be the shores of death. There 
 was a lack of a manly element; the air was
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 not readive; you might write bits of poetry 
 and practise resignation, but you did not 
 feel that here was a good spot to repair your 
 tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, 
 after all, that there was something just in 
 these appreciations. The invalid is now 
 asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air 
 shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no 
 longer to be fled from, but bearded in his 
 den. For even Winter has his "dear domes- 
 tic cave ," and in those places where he may 
 be said to dwell for ever tempers his aus- 
 terities. 
 
 Any one who has travelled westward by 
 the great transcontinental railroad of Amer- 
 ica must remember the joy with which 
 he perceived, after the tedious prairies of 
 Nebraska and across the vast and dismal 
 moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy 
 mountain summits along the southern sky. 
 It is among these mountains in the new 
 State of Colorado, that the sick man 
 may find, not merely an alleviation of his 
 ailments, but the possibility of an adive 
 life and an honest livelihood. There, no 
 longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a 
 240
 
 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 
 
 working farmer, sweating at his work, he 
 may prolong and begin anew his life, in- 
 stead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead 
 of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the 
 forest, and the pure, rare air of the open 
 mountains for the miasma of the sick room 
 — these are the changes offered him, with 
 what promise of pleasure and of self-respedt^ 
 with what a revolution in all his hopes and 
 terrors, none but an invalid can know. Res- 
 ignation, the cowardice that apes a kind 
 of courage and that lives in the very air of 
 health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of 
 such a prospect. The man can open the 
 door; he can be up and doing; he can be a 
 kind of a man after all and not merely an 
 invalid. 
 
 But it is a far cry to the Rocky Moun- 
 tains. We cannot all of us go farming in 
 Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, 
 which combines the medical benefits of the 
 new system with the moral drawbacks of 
 the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside 
 from life and its wholesome duties; again 
 he has to be an idler among idlers; but this 
 time at a great altitude, far among the 
 
 241
 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 mountains, with the snow piled before his 
 door and the frost flowers every morning on 
 his window. The mere fad is tonic to his 
 nerves. His choice of a place of wintering 
 has somehow to his own eyes the air of an 
 a(5l of bold contrad; and, since he has wil- 
 fully sought low temperatures, he is not so 
 apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came 
 for that, he looked for it, and he throws it 
 from him with the thought. 
 
 A long straight reach of valley, wall-like 
 mountains upon either hand that rise higher 
 and higher and shoot up new summits the 
 higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen 
 even from the valley; a village of hotels; a 
 world of black and white — black pine- 
 woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, 
 and white snow flouring it, and papering it 
 between the pinewoods, and covering ail 
 the mountains with a dazzling curd; add ;i 
 few score invalids marching to and fro upon 
 the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks, 
 possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades 
 by the door of the hotel — and you have the 
 larger features of a mountain sanatorium. 
 A certain furious river runs curving down 
 242
 
 HEAL TH AND MO U NT AIMS 
 
 the valley; its pace never varies, it has not a 
 pool for as far as you can follow it; and its 
 unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely 
 tedious to witness, it is a river that a man 
 could grow to hate. Day after day breaks 
 with the rarest gold upon the mountain 
 spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, 
 down into the valley. From end to end the 
 snow reverberates the sunshine ; from end to 
 end the air tingles with the light, clear and 
 dry like crystal. Only along the course of the 
 river, but high above it, there hangs for into 
 the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It 
 were hard to fancy a more engaging feature 
 in a landscape ; perhaps it is harder to believe 
 that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the 
 atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent 
 stream whose course it follows. By noon 
 the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of 
 colour — mild and pale and melting in the 
 north, but towards the zenith, dark with an 
 intensity of purple blue. What with this 
 darkness of heaven and the intolerable lus- 
 tre of the snow, space is reduced again to 
 chaos. An English painter, coming to France 
 late in life, declared with natural anger that 
 
 243
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 "the values were all wrong." Had he got 
 among the Alps on a bright day he might 
 have lost his reason. And even to any one 
 who has looked at landscape with any care, 
 and in any way through the spectacles of 
 representative art, the scene has a character 
 of insanity. The distant shining mountain 
 peak is here beside your eye ; the neighbour- 
 ing dull coloured house in comparison is miles 
 away; the summit, which is all of splendid 
 snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, 
 which are black with pine trees, bear it no 
 relation, and might be in another sphere. 
 Here there are none of those delicate grada- 
 tions, those intimate, misty joinings-on and 
 spreadings-out into the distance, nothing 
 of that art of air and light by which the face 
 of nature explains and veils itself in climes 
 which we may be allowed to think more 
 lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where 
 everything that is not white is a solecism 
 and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a 
 scene of blinding definition; a parade of 
 daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more 
 than scenically trying, and yet hearty and 
 healthy, making the nerves to tighten and 
 244
 
 HEAL TH AND MO UN TAINS 
 
 the mouth to smile: such is the winter day- 
 time in the Alps. With the approach of even- 
 ing all is changed. A mountain will sudden- 
 ly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the 
 valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will 
 drop as many degrees; the peaks that are 
 no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; 
 and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be 
 rightly charaderistic of the place, the sky 
 fades toward night through a surprising key 
 of colours. The latest gold leaps from the 
 last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon 
 shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley 
 shall be mellowed and misted, and here and 
 there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, 
 and here and there a warmly glowing win- 
 dow in a house, between fire and starlight, 
 kind and homely in the fields of snow. 
 
 But the valley is not seated so high among 
 the clouds to be eternally exempt from 
 changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; 
 the wind bursts rudely in ; day after day the 
 mists drive overhead, the snow-flakes flut- 
 ter down in blinding disarray ; daily the mail 
 comes in later from the top of the pass ; peo- 
 ple peer through their windows and foresee 
 
 245
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, 
 and death by gradual dry-rot, each in his 
 indifferent inn; and when at last the storm 
 goes, and the sun comes again, behold a 
 world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, 
 bright like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs 
 and cheerful to the souls of men. Or per- 
 haps from across storied and malarious Italy, 
 a wind cunningly winds about the moun- 
 tains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon 
 our mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; 
 the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load 
 of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; 
 and the whole invalid world huddles into 
 its private chambers, and silently recognises 
 the empire of the Fohn. 
 
 246
 
 II 
 
 DAVOS IN WINTER 
 
 MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, 
 a certain prison-like effed on the 
 imagination, but a mountain valley, 
 an Alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness 
 make up among them a prison of the most 
 effeftive kind. The roads indeed are cleared, 
 and at least one footpath dodging up the 
 hill; but to these the health seeker is rigidly 
 confined. There are for him no cross cuts 
 over the field, no following of streams, no 
 unguided rambles in the wood. His walks 
 are cut and dry. In five or six different di- 
 rections he can push as far, and no farther, 
 than his strength permits; never deviating 
 from the line laid down for him and behold- 
 ing at each repetition the same field of 
 wood and snow from the same corner of the 
 road. This, of itself, would be a little trying 
 to the patience in the course of months; but 
 to this is added, by the heaped mantis • )f
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the snow, an almost utter absence of detail 
 and an almost unbroken identity of colour. 
 Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The 
 sun touches it with roseate and golden 
 lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, 
 its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, 
 when regarded near at hand, with wonder- 
 ful depths of coloured shadow, and, though 
 wintrily transformed, it is still water, and 
 has watery tones of blue. But, when all is 
 said, these fields of white and blots of crude 
 black forest are but a trite and staring sub- 
 stitute for the infinite variety and pleasant- 
 ness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, 
 whose front is too precipitous to have re- 
 tained the snow, seems, if you come upon 
 it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, re- 
 minds you almost painfully of other places, 
 and brings into your head the delights of 
 more Arcadian days — the path across the 
 meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the 
 stream, and the scents, the colours, and 
 the whisper of the woods. And scents here 
 are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust 
 of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall 
 smell nothing all day long but the faint and 
 248
 
 
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 C. 
 
 z 
 
 o 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 •r 
 
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 O 
 
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 > 
 
 •^. 
 
 < 
 
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 Q 
 
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 'ij 
 
 
 -o^ 
 
 CQ
 
 DA VOS IN WINTER 
 
 choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are 
 absent : not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, 
 in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh 
 goes by, the sleigh bells ring, and that is all ; 
 you work all winter through to no other ac- 
 companiment but the crunching of your 
 steps upon the frozen snow. 
 
 It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be 
 each one village from one end to the other. 
 Go where you please, houses will still be in 
 sight, before and behind you, and to the 
 right and left. Climb as high as an invalid is 
 able, and it is only to spy new habitations 
 nested in the wood. Nor is that all ; for about 
 the health resort the walks are besieged by 
 single people walking rapidly with plaids 
 about their shoulders, by sudden troops of 
 German boys trying to learn to jodel, and 
 by German couples silently and, as you 
 venture to fancy, not quite happily pursu- 
 ing love's young dream. You may perhaps 
 be an invalid who likes to make bad verses 
 as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suf- 
 fer this imminence of interruption — and at 
 the second stampede of jodellers you find 
 your modest inspiration fled. Or you may 
 
 249
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 only have a taste for solitude; it may try 
 your nerves to have some one always in 
 front whom you are visibly overtaking, and 
 some one always behind who is audibly 
 overtaking you, to say nothing of a score 
 or so who brush past you in an opposite 
 dire(flion. it may annoy you to take your 
 walks and seats in public view. Alas! there 
 is no help for it among the Alps. There are 
 no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil- 
 mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on 
 the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint 
 Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of 
 breakers, and fragrant with the threefold 
 sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-pines 
 and the sea. 
 
 For this publicity there is no cure, and no 
 alleviation; but the storms of which you 
 will complain so bitterly while they endure, 
 chequer and by their contrast brighten the 
 sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When 
 sun and storm contend together — when the 
 thick clouds are broken up and pierced by 
 arrows of golden daylight — there will be 
 startling rearrangements and transfigura- 
 tions of the mountain summits. A sun-daz- 
 
 210
 
 DA VOS IN WINTER 
 
 zling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid- 
 sky among awful glooms and blackness; or 
 perhaps the edge of some great mountain 
 shoulder will be designed in living gold, and 
 appear for the duration of a glance bright like 
 a constellation, and alone "in the unappar- 
 ent," You may think you know the figure 
 of these hills; but when they are thus re- 
 vealed, they belong no longer to the things 
 of earth — meteors we should rather call 
 them, appearances of sun and air that en- 
 dure but for a moment and return no more. 
 Other variations are more lasting, as when, 
 for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen 
 through some windless hours, and the thin, 
 spiry, mountain pine trees stand each stock- 
 still and loaded with a shining burthen. You 
 may drive through a forest so disguised, 
 the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently 
 in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except 
 the jingle of the sleigh bells and you shall 
 fancy yourself in some untrodden northern 
 territory — Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska. 
 
 Or, possibly, you arise very early in the 
 morning; totter down stairs in a state of 
 somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a 
 
 251
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 meal by the glimmer of one lamp in the de- 
 serted coffee-room; and find yourself by 
 seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight 
 and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes you 
 up and carries you on, and you reach the top 
 of the ascent in the first hour of the day. To 
 trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass 
 from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree- 
 tops stand out soberly against the lighted 
 sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonder- 
 land of clear, fading shadows, disappearing 
 vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half 
 glorified already with the day and still half 
 confounded with the greyness of the west- 
 ern heaven — these will seem to repay you 
 for the discomforts of that early start; but 
 as the hour proceeds, and these enchant- 
 ments vanish, you will find yourself upon 
 the further side in yet another Alpine valley, 
 snow white and coal black, with such an- 
 other long-drawn congeries of hamlets and 
 such another senseless watercourse bicker- 
 ing along the foot. You have had your mo- 
 ment; but you have not changed the scene. 
 The mountains are about you like a trap; 
 you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold 
 252
 
 DA VOS IN WINTER 
 
 the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and 
 corners, and can change only one for an- 
 other. 
 
 2'i3
 
 Ill 
 
 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 
 
 'HERE will be no lack of diversion 
 in an Alpine sanitarium. The place 
 is half English to be sure, the local 
 sheet appearing in double column, text and 
 translation ; but it still remains half German ; 
 and hence we have a band which is able to 
 play, and a company of aftors able, as you 
 will be told, to ad. This last you will take 
 on trust, for the players, unlike the local 
 sheet, confine themselves to German; and 
 though at the beginning of winter they 
 come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in 
 turn, long before Christmas they will have 
 given up the English for a bad job. There 
 will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between 
 the two races; the German element seeking, 
 in the interest of their adors, to raise a 
 mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which fig- 
 ures heavily enough already in the weekly 
 bills, the English element stoutly resisting.
 
 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 
 
 Meantime in the English hotels home- 
 piayed farces, t able an x-viv ants, and even 
 balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar 
 sheds genial consternation; Christmas and 
 New Year are solemnized with Pantagrue- 
 lian dinners, and from time to time the 
 young folks carol and revolve untunefully 
 enough through the figures of a singing 
 quadrille. A magazine club supplies you 
 with everything, from the Ojiarterly to the 
 Sunday at Home. Grand tournaments are 
 organized at chess, draughts, billiards and 
 whist. Once and again wandering artists 
 drop into our mountain valley, coming you 
 know not whence, going you cannot imag- 
 ine whither, and belonging to every degree 
 in the hierarchy of musical art, from the 
 recognized performer who announces a con- 
 cert for the evening, to the comic German 
 family or solitary long-haired German bar- 
 itone who surprises the guests at dinner- 
 time with songs and a colle(5lion. They are 
 all of them good to see; they, at least, are 
 moving; they bring with them the senti- 
 ment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, 
 they were in Tyrol, and next week they 
 
 255
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 will be for in Lombardy, while all we sick 
 folk still simmer in our mountain prison. 
 Some of them, too, are welcome as the 
 flowers in May for their own sake; some 
 of them may have a human voice; some 
 may have that magic which transforms a 
 wooden box into a song-bird, and what we 
 jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention 
 with respeft as a violin. From that grinding 
 lilt, with which the blind man, seeking 
 pence, accompanies the beat of paddle 
 wheels across the ferry, there is surely a 
 difference rather of kind than of degree to 
 that unearthly voice of singing that bewails 
 and praises the destiny of man at the touch 
 of the true virtuoso. Even that you may 
 perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you will 
 own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly 
 than here, im Schnee der Alpen. A hya- 
 cinth in a pot, a handful of primroses 
 packed in moss, or a piece of music by some 
 one who knows the way to the heart of a 
 violin, are things that, in this invariable 
 sameness of the snows and frosty air, sur- 
 prise you like an adventure. It is droll, more- 
 over, to compare the respedwith which the 
 256
 
 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 
 
 invalids attend a concert, and the ready con- 
 tempt witli wliicli they greet the dinner- 
 time performers. Singing which they would 
 hear with real enthusiasm — possibly with 
 tears — from a corner of a drawing-room, 
 is listened to with laughter when it is of- 
 fered by an unknown professional and no 
 money has been taken at the door. 
 
 Of skating little need be said ; in so snowy 
 a climate the rinks must be intelligently 
 managed; their mismanagement will lead 
 to many days of vexation and some petty 
 quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is 
 certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, 
 for the invalid to skate under a burning 
 sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, 
 through long trads of glare and passages of 
 freezing shadow. But the peculiar outdoor 
 sport of this distrid is tobogganing. A 
 Scotchman may remember the low flat 
 board, with the front wheels on a pivot, 
 which was called a hurlie ; he may re- 
 member this contrivance, laden with boys, 
 as, laboriously started, it ran rattling down 
 the brae, and was, now successfully, now 
 unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at 
 
 257
 
 ASSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 the foot; he may remember scented summer 
 evenings passed in this diversion, and many 
 a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neg- 
 leded lesson. The toboggan is to the hurlie 
 what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hur- 
 lie upon runners; and if for a grating road 
 you substitute a long declivity of beaten 
 snow you can imagine the giddy career of 
 the tobogganist. The corred position is to 
 sit ; but the fantastic will sometimes sit hind- 
 foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly 
 or their back. A few steer with a pair of 
 pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use 
 the feet. If the weight be heavy and the track 
 smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between 
 its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized 
 friends in safety requires not only judgment 
 but desperate exertion. On a very steep 
 track, with a keen evening frost, you may 
 have moments almost too appalling to be 
 called enjoyment; the head goes, the world 
 vanishes; your blind steed bounds below 
 your weight; you reach the foot, with all 
 the breath knocked out of your body, jarred 
 and bewildered as though you had just been 
 subje6led to a railway accident. Another
 
 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 
 
 element of joyful horror is added by the for- 
 mation of a train; one toboggan being tied 
 to another, perhaps to the number of half a 
 dozen, only the first rider being allowed to 
 steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their 
 feet and follow their leader, with heart in 
 mouth, down the mad descent. This, par- 
 ticularly if the track begins with a headlong 
 plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies 
 in the world, and the tobogganing invalid 
 is early reconciled to somersaults. 
 
 There is all manner of variety in the na- 
 ture of the tracks, some miles in length, 
 others but a few yards, and yet like some 
 short rivers, furious in their brevity. All de- 
 grees of skill and courage and taste may be 
 suited in your neighborhood. But perhaps 
 the true way to toboggan is alone and at 
 night. First comes the tedious climb, drag- 
 ging your instrument behind you. Next a 
 long breathing space, alone with snow and 
 pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the 
 heart. Then you push off; the toboggan 
 fetches way; she begins to feel the hill, to 
 glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you 
 are out from under the pine trees, and a 
 
 259
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes 
 overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for 
 by this time your wooden steed is speed- 
 ing like the wind, and you are spinning 
 round a corner, and the whole glittering 
 valley and all the lights in all the great hotels 
 lie for a moment at your feet; and the next 
 you are racing once more in the shadow of 
 the night with close-shut teeth and beating 
 heart. Yet a little while and you will be 
 landed on the highroad by the door of your 
 own hotel. This, in an atmosphere tingling 
 with forty degrees of frost, in a night made 
 luminous with stars and snow, and girt with 
 strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an 
 unaccustomed tune and adds a new excite- 
 ment to the life of man upon his planet. 
 
 260
 
 IV 
 
 THE STIMULATION OF THE 
 ALPS 
 
 ^O any one who should come from a 
 I southern sanitarium to the Alps, the 
 row of sun-burned faces round the 
 table would present the first surprise. He 
 would begin by looking for the invalids, and 
 he would lose his pains, for not one out of 
 five of even the bad cases bears the mark of 
 sickness on his face. The plump sunshine 
 from above and its strong reverberation from 
 below colour the skin like an Indian climate ; 
 the treatment, which consists mainly of the 
 open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, 
 and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month 
 or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters. 
 But although he may be thus surprised at the 
 first glance, his astonishment will grow 
 greater, as he experiences the effects of the 
 climate on himself. In many ways it is a try- 
 ing business to reside upon the Alps: the 
 
 261
 
 ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 f imach is exercised, the appetite often lan- 
 guishes; the liver may at times rebel; and 
 because you have come so far from metro- 
 politan advantages, it does not follow that 
 you shall recover. But one thing is undeni- 
 able — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and 
 blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes 
 a certain troubled delight in his existence 
 which can nowhere else be paralleled. He 
 is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly 
 alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of him 
 in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthu- 
 siasm of the blood unknown in more tem- 
 perate climates. It may not be health, but it 
 is fun. 
 
 There is nothing more difficult to com- 
 municate on paper than this baseless ardour, 
 this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joy- 
 ousness of spirits. You wake every morning, 
 see the gold upon the snow peaks, become 
 filled with courage, and bless God for your 
 prolonged existence. The valleys are but a 
 stride to you; you cast your shoe over the 
 hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in 
 the words of an unverified quotation from 
 the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit " on 
 
 202
 
 STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 
 
 the wings of all the winds " to " come fly- 
 ing all abroad." Europe and your mind are 
 too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it 
 is notable that you are hard to root out of 
 your bed; that you start forth, singing, in- 
 deed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready 
 to turn home again; that the best of you is 
 volatile; and that although the restlessness 
 remains till night, the strength is early at an 
 end. With all these heady jollities, you are 
 half conscious of an underlying languor in 
 the body; you prove not to be so well as 
 you had fancied; you weary before you have 
 well begun ; and though you mount at morn- 
 ing with the lark, that is not precisely a song 
 bird's heart that you bring back with you 
 when you return with aching limbs and 
 peevish temper to your inn. 
 
 it is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy 
 of Alpine winters is its own reward. Base- 
 less, in a sense, it is more than worth more 
 permanent improvements. The dream of 
 health is perfed while it lasts; and if, in 
 trying to realize it, you speedily wear out 
 the dear hallucination, still every day, and 
 many times a day, you are conscious of a 
 
 263
 
 ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 strength you scarce possess, and a delight 
 in living as merry as it proves to be transient. 
 The brightness — heaven and earth con- 
 spiring to be bright — the levity and quiet 
 of the air; the odd stirring silence — more 
 stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, 
 the enchanted landscape: all have their part 
 in the effect and on the memory, " torn 
 voits tapent stir la tete; " and yet when you 
 have enumerated all, you have gone no 
 nearer to explain or even to qualify the deli- 
 cate exhilaration that you feel — delicate, 
 you may say, and yet excessive, greater than 
 can be said in prose, almost greater than an 
 invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of 
 France known in England in some gaseous 
 disguise, but when drunk in the land of its 
 nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, 
 and as heady as verse. It is more than prob- 
 able that in its noble natural condition this 
 was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by 
 Athos in the "Musketeers." Now, if the 
 reader has ever washed down a liberal sec- 
 ond breakfast with the wine in question, and 
 gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, 
 into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will 
 264
 
 STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 
 
 have felt an influence almost as genial, al- 
 though strangely grosser, than this fairy 
 titillation of the nerves among the snow and 
 sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, 
 we need not say of intoxication, but of in- 
 sobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong 
 sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, 
 insubstantial meditations. And whether he 
 be really so clever or so strong as he sup- 
 poses, in either case he will enjoy his chi- 
 mera while it lasts. 
 
 The influence of this giddy air displays 
 itself in many secondary ways. A certain 
 sort of laboured pleasantry has already been 
 recognized, and may perhaps have been re- 
 marked in these papers, as a sort peculiar 
 to that climate. People utter their judgments 
 with a cannonade of syllables; a big word 
 is as good as a meal to them; and the turn 
 of a phrase goes further than humour or 
 wisdom. By the professional writer many 
 sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At 
 first, he cannot write at all. The heart, it 
 appears, is unequal to the pressure of busi- 
 ness, and the brain, left without nourish- 
 ment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some 
 
 265
 
 ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 power of work returns to him, accompanied 
 by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is 
 opened, and there pours at once from his 
 pen a world of blatant, hustling polysylla- 
 bles, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to 
 be positively offensive in hot weather. He 
 writes it in good faith and with a sense of 
 inspiration; it is only when he comes to 
 read what he has written that surprise and 
 disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he to 
 do, poor man ? All his little fishes talk like 
 whales. This yeasty inflation, this stiff and 
 strutting architefture of the sentence has 
 come upon him while he slept; and it is not 
 he, it is the Alps, who are to blame. He is 
 not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat com- 
 forts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. 
 Some day, when the spring returns, he shall 
 go down a little lower in this world, and 
 remember quieter infle6\ions and more mod- 
 est language. But here, in the meantime, 
 there seems to swim up some outline of a 
 new cerebral hygiene and a good time com- 
 ing, when experienced advisers shall send 
 a man to the proper measured level for the 
 ode, the biography, or the religious trad; 
 266
 
 STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 
 
 and a nook may be found, between the sea 
 and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne 
 shall be able to write more continently, and 
 Mr. Browning somewhat slower. 
 
 Is it a return of youth, or is it a conges- 
 tion of the brain ? It is a sort of congestion, 
 perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all 
 goes well, to face the new day with such a 
 bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly con- 
 gestion that makes night hideous with 
 visions, all the chambers of a many-storeyed 
 caravanserai, haunted with vociferous night- 
 mares, and many wakeful people come 
 down late for breakfast in the morning. 
 Upon that theory the cynic may explain the 
 whole affair — exhilaration, nightmares, 
 pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other 
 hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood 
 may itself be but a symptom of the same 
 complaint, for the two effeds are strangely 
 similar; and the frame of mind of the inva- 
 lid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent 
 youth, with periods of lassitude. The foun- 
 tain of Juventus does not play steadily in 
 these parts; but there it plays, and possibly 
 nowhere else. 
 
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