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Title: Through the Magic Door

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5317]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 30, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***




Transcribed by Anders Thulin.
Adapted for Project Gutenberg by Andrew Sly.





THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR

BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE




I.


I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room
which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off
with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the
soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the
magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can
follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is
sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting
in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man.
And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go
together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about
a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense
of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron
of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the
concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have
faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable
dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.

It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the
miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were
suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that
he would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How
eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him--the very best of
him--at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves
to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man
may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can
summon the world's greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be
thoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here
are the masters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can
signal to any one of the world's great story-tellers, and out comes
the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such
good company that one may come to think too little of the living.
It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should
never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed
by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are
surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings
to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man's
wisdom and strength in the living of our own strenuous days.

Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green
settee, where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of
volumes. Smoking is not forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of
them? Well, I ask nothing better, for there is no volume there which
is not a dear, personal friend, and what can a man talk of more
pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but these are
my own favourites--the ones I care to re-read and to have near my
elbow. There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow
memories to me.

Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a
possession dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the
bottom? Every one of those represents a lunch. They were bought in
my student days, when times were not too affluent. Threepence was
my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and glass of beer; but,
as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the most
fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a
large tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books,
with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be
purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I
approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful
body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of
six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an
entrancing five minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes
of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found
something which made it all worth while. If you will look over these
titles, you will see that I did not do so very badly. Four volumes
of Gordon's "Tacitus" (life is too short to read originals, so
long as there are good translations), Sir William Temple's Essays,
Addison's works, Swift's "Tale of a Tub," Clarendon's "History,"
"Gil Blas," Buckingham's Poems, Churchill's Poems, "Life of
Bacon"--not so bad for the old threepenny tub.

They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness
of the rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering.
Once they adorned the shelves of some noble library, and even among
the odd almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces of their
former greatness, like the faded silk dress of the reduced
gentlewoman, a present pathos but a glory of the past.

Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and
free libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the
thing that comes to him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill
which Carlyle felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of
Gibbon's "History" under his arm, his mind just starving for want
of food, to devour them at the rate of one a day? A book should be
your very own before you can really get the taste of it, and unless
you have worked for it, you will never have the true inward pride
of possession.

If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I
have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder
stained copy of Macaulay's "Essays." It seems entwined into my whole
life as I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it
has been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part
of my humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch
harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see
the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick
the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound
volume could ever take its place for me.

What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach
the study either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli,
Hallam, Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive,
Hastings, Chatham--what nuclei for thought! With a good grip of each
how pleasant and easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they
all throw a glamour round the subject and should make the least
studious of readers desire to go further. If Macaulay's hand cannot
lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
all hope of ever finding them.

When I was a senior schoolboy this book--not this very volume, for
it had an even more tattered predecessor--opened up a new world to
me. History had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and
the drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a land of
colour and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path. In
that great style of his I loved even the faults--indeed, now that
I come to think of it, it was the faults which I loved best. No
sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis
too flowery. It pleased me to read that "a universal shout of
laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the
days of the crusades were past," and I was delighted to learn that
"Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses,
and Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady
Jerningham's vase." Those were the kind of sentences which used to
fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger
in the musician's ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as he
grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with
admiration and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great
subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail--just a bold sweep
of the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. As he leads you
down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which
branch away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
literary and historical education night be effected by working
through every book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be
curious, however, to know the exact age of the youth when he came
to the end of his studies.

I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that
it would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power
of drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift
of reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look
at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his
atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter
space--

  "As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table
  on which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for
  Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever
  on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke,
  and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of
  Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping
  his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear.
  In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
  to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought
  up--the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the
  scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings,
  the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the
  nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth
  moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling;
  we hear it puffing, and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the
  'What then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see
  your way through the question, sir!'"

It is etched into your memory for ever.

I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
to Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under
the shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he had
loved so well. It was the one great object of interest which London
held for me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe
him. It is not merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh
interests, but it is the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad,
liberal outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of prejudice.
My judgment now confirms all that I felt for him then.

My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the
right of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that
work--the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth
century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of
Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact
and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of
commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder
and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could
have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself
to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact
that a Londoner in the country, or a countryman in London, felt
equally out of place in those days of difficult travel, would seem
to hardly require stating, and to afford no opportunity of leaving
a strong impression upon the reader's mind. See what Macaulay makes
of it, though it is no more than a hundred other paragraphs which
discuss a hundred various points--

  "A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he
  had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand,
  when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared
  in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the
  resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait,
  his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled
  into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the
  waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the
  operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into
  the kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
  thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his
  horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of
  the Lord Mayor's Show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's
  tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the
  most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted
  women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
  themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he
  asked his way to St. James', his informants sent him to Mile
  End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be
  a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of
  second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would
  not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he
  became a mark for the insolent derision of fops, and the grave
  waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned
  to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and
  the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for
  the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There
  he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself
  except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near
  the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the
  Lord Lieutenant."

On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at
the very head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another
volume. The History as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach
the same level as the shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it
is a brilliant piece of special pleading from a fervid Whig, and
that there must be more to be said for the other side than is there
set forth. Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his own
political and religious limitations. The best are those which get
right away into the broad fields of literature and philosophy.
Johnson, Walpole, Madame D'Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian
ones, Clive and Warren Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick
the Great, too, must surely stand in the first rank. Only one would
I wish to eliminate. It is the diabolically clever criticism upon
Montgomery. One would have wished to think that Macaulay's heart was
too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter an attack. Bad
work will sink of its own weight. It is not necessary to souse the
author as well. One would think more highly of the man if he had not
done that savage bit of work.

I don't know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott,
whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of
their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence,
and woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity
in the minds and characters of the two men. You don't see it, you
say? Well, just think of Scott's "Border Ballads," and then of
Macaulay's "Lays." The machines must be alike, when the products are
so similar. Each was the only man who could possibly have written
the poems of the other. What swing and dash in both of them! What
a love of all that is and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so
strong. But there are minds on which strength and simplicity are
thrown away. They think that unless a thing is obscure it must be
superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which is turbid,
and the deep which is clear. Do you remember the fatuous criticism
of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious "Lays," where he calls out "is
this poetry?" after quoting--

   "And how can man die better
      Than facing fearful odds
    For the ashes of his fathers
      And the Temples of his Gods?"

In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was
really showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The
baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended him.
But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving
the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals
to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines
are, I think, taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and
have just the dramatic quality and sense which a ballad poet must
have. That opinion of Arnold's shook my faith in his judgment, and
yet I would forgive a good deal to the man who wrote--

   "One more charge and then be dumb,
      When the forts of Folly fall,
    May the victors when they come
      Find my body near the wall."

Not a bad verse that for one's life aspiration.

This is one of the things which human society has not yet
understood--the value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does
we shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate places, and
our progress through the streets will be brightened and ennobled
by one continual series of beautiful mental impulses and images,
reflected into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our
eyes. To think that we should walk with empty, listless minds while
all this splendid material is running to waste. I do not mean mere
Scriptural texts, for they do not bear the same meaning to all,
though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work
while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I
mean those beautiful thoughts--who can say that they are uninspired
thoughts?--which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a
hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious
jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and
ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a horse-trough across
the road from my house, a plain stone trough, and no man could pass
it with any feelings save vague discontent at its ugliness. But
suppose that on its front slab you print the verse of Coleridge--

   "He prayeth best who loveth best
      All things, both great and small
    For the dear Lord who fashioned him
      He knows and loveth all."

I fear I may misquote, for I have not "The Ancient Mariner" at my
elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?
We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There
are few men who have not some chosen quotations printed on their
study mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. Carlyle's
transcription of "Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all Eternity to rest
in!" is a pretty good spur to a weary man. But what we need is a
more general application of the same thing for public and not for
private use, until people understand that a graven thought is as
beautiful an ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye
right deep down into the soul.

However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay's glorious lays,
save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you
can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to
learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it
stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off
almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was
like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not
compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So
the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf
which waits for reference. But I want you now to move your eye a
little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green volumes.
That is my edition of Scott. But surely I must give you a little
breathing space before I venture upon them.



II.


It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.
You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull
days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to
fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait
so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which
marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see,
like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for
literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities,
but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your
mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually
the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with
your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at
last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for
all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green
line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were
the first books I ever owned--long, long before I could appreciate
or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they
were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the
dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the
story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different
edition from the others. The first copy was left in the grass by the
side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually picked up
three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I think I
may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
breaking fresh ground.

I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar.
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great
masters to make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay
it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who described the prosaic man, who
enters a drawing-room with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned
bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose on any play of
fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives
a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack--well, it was so, and that's an end
of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an
editor to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author;
and he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers'
conviction with him.

But this is a digression from "Ivanhoe." What a book it is! The
second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott's
soldiers are always as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak;
but here, while the soldiers are at their very best, the romantic
figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of the story from the
usual commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he was a
manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.

He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he
had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for
a dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat--in the long
stretch, for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the
end of the Friar Tuck incident--that we realize the height of
continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I don't
think in the whole range of our literature we have a finer
sustained flight than that.

There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order
are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how
to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin
telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse
phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when
the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim
Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or
a bed of heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also:
"The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there!
But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few
stern words, which haunt your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the
actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn
day when they fought under the "Red Dragon of Wessex" on the low
ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic--the very genius of the
race was in the cry.

Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they
are damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as
a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson's famous message from
the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship's company. The
officers were impressed. The men were not. "Duty!" they muttered.
"We've always done it. Why not?" Anything in the least highfalutin'
would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the under
statement which delights them. German troops can march to battle
singing Luther's hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets need not
trouble to imitate--or at least need not imagine that if they do
so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: "Here's another lump of
sugar for the Bird." I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain
of "A little bit off the top." The martial poet aforesaid, unless
he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a
good deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The
Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I remember reading of
some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to
finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest
with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous chant
it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found
that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was "Ivan
is in the garden picking cabbages." The fact is, I suppose, that a
mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.

Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched
to their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp,
tramp," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a
playful humour running through them. Only one exception do I know,
and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an
outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I
mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with
the choral opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord." If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the
effect must have been terrific.

A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts
at the other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I
was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical,
no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps, that the world
has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of
the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister
of Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in "Quentin
Durward"?

In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men
who during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also
the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from
the sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling
cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular
veteran, with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as
Dugald Dalgetty from the German wars. But then no man ever does
realize the true interest of the age in which he happens to live.
All sense of proportion is lost, and the little thing hard-by
obscures the great thing at a distance. It is easy in the dark to
confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the Old
Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St. Sebastians,
while Columbus was discovering America before their very faces.

I have said that I think "Ivanhoe" the best of Scott's novels. I
suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the
second best? It speaks well for their general average that there is
hardly one among them which might not find some admirers who would
vote it to a place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels
which deal with Scottish life and character have a quality of
raciness which gives them a place apart. There is a rich humour of
the soil in such books as "Old Mortality," "The Antiquary," and "Rob
Roy," which puts them in a different class from the others. His old
Scottish women are, next to his soldiers, the best series of types
that he has drawn. At the same time it must be admitted that merit
which is associated with dialect has such limitations that it can
never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to all
the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin Durward," on account of
its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
importance of the events and people described, would have my vote
for the second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape
novels which have formed so numerous an addition to the light
literature of the last century. The pictures of Charles the Bold and
of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I can see those
two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the herald, and
clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.

The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and
is the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
rival. It is not often that historical characters work out in their
actual physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the
High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles
which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It
is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas,
when, for example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man
with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read
beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally,
however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have
before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which
represents Queen Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark
the big head, fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face,
made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful
features--the mouth with a suggestion of wild boars' tusks behind
it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the whole man and his
life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder if Scott had
ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family seat?

Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which
the critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the
last from his tired pen. I mean "Count Robert of Paris." I am
convinced that if it had been the first, instead of the last, of
the series it would have attracted as much attention as "Waverley."
I can understand the state of mind of the expert, who cried out in
mingled admiration and despair: "I have studied the conditions of
Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who
makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw
with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but
to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with
such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think,
a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself
before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the
first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading
aloud her father's exploits, or of such majesty as the account of
the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
front rank of the novels.

I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse
of the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was
ever anything in the world's history like it? It had what historical
incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from
the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.
Those leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice.
Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous
and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy
the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is
not worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve
anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical
facts?

But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life
in "The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England
in "Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above
all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a
coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car,
and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter
Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and
for humanity.

For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the
same shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law
and his admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly
impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to
tell the absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a
man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world
was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen
eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would
have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us
feel that they were men and brothers. They need not go the length
of the lady who began a biography of her deceased husband with the
words--"D--- was a dirty man," but the books certainly would be
more readable, and the subjects more lovable too, if we had greater
light and shade in the picture.

But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would
have admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking
country, and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of
toddy occasionally of an evening which would have laid his feeble
successors under the table. His last years, at least, poor fellow,
were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while
the others passed the decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of honour, translating
itself not into empty phrases, but into years of labour and denial!
You remember how he became sleeping partner in a printing house,
and so involved himself in its failure. There was a legal, but very
little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him
had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled
him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took the
whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort
to save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly
a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the
creditors--a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
life thrown in.

And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single
year. I remember reading in some book of reminiscences--on second
thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged
in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the
opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer could
see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to
the pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still
the hand was moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the
rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.

A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction
is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books--good ones,
too--at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards
remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read
to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently
the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were
in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
faculty--imagination in its supreme form--was absolutely unimpaired.
It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives
some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work
must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way
from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon
the paper. The creative thought--the germ thought from which a
larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.
He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of
the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the
least sense of personal effort.

And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail
physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's
materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these
spiritual uses? It is an old tag that

   "Great Genius is to madness close allied,
    And thin partitions do those rooms divide."

But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the
body.

Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns,
Shelley, Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band,
yet Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed away, "burned out,"
as his brother terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died
by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a
sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost
a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards.
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age
of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late
years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled
with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the
really shocking case of the young Americans, for example. What a
band of promising young writers have in a few years been swept away!
There was the author of that admirable book, "David Harum"; there
was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I think, the seeds of
greatness more than almost any living writer. His "Pit" seemed to me
one of the finest American novels. He also died a premature death.
Then there was Stephen Crane--a man who had also done most brilliant
work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman. Is
there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers
could show such losses as that? In the meantime, out of our own men
Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many
another.

Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had
rounded off their career were really premature in their end.
Thackeray, for example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52;
Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his
61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was
over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career
than most of his brethren.

He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is
as much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who
were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous
disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his
signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special
scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more,
were its victims. As to the tradition, first mentioned long after
his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout,
it is absurd on the face of it, since no such fever is known to
science. But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.

One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account
of his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met
him day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the
whole of Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his
pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told
her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A
psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the
numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep
their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of
his novels.

It's a sad book, Lockhart's "Life." It leaves gloom in the mind.
The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is
the memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but
faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper.
He sampled every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his
success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the
sons of men I don't think there are many greater than he who lies
under the great slab at Dryburgh.



III.


We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and
Lockhart's "Life" which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the
four big grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print
edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I emphasize the large print,
for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English
Classics which come now into the market. With subjects which are in
the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you
on your way. The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your
temper. Better pay a little more and have a book that is made for
use.

That book interests me--fascinates me--and yet I wish I could join
heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully
has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to "clear
one's mind of cant" upon the subject, for when you have been
accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of
Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one's
eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one's own account at the
man's actual words, deeds, and limitations. If you try it you are
left with the oddest mixture of impressions. How could one express
it save that this is John Bull taken to literature--the exaggerated
John Bull of the caricaturists--with every quality, good or evil,
at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the
explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of
sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness,
the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle,
and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who
was the great grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.

If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a
safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met,
Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth
year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent
and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation
with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was
bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made
unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between
ordinary father and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken
relation between them.

It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but
it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the
language. He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was
a clear and vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his
great model. Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once
permitted a fault of taste in this whole enormous book where he must
have had to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They
say that he was a fool and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so
with a pen in his hand. Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson,
where he ventured some little squeak of remonstrance, before the
roaring "No, sir!" came to silence him, there are few in which his
views were not, as experience proved, the wiser. On the question
of slavery he was in the wrong. But I could quote from memory at
least a dozen cases, including such vital subjects as the American
Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and so on,
where Boswell's views were those which survived.

But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those
little things that you want to know. How often you read the life of
a man and are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It
is not so here. The man lives again. There is a short description
of Johnson's person--it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the
Hebrides, the very next book upon the shelf, which is typical of
his vivid portraiture. May I take it down, and read you a paragraph
of it?--

  "His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the
  gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance
  was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat
  disfigured by the scars of King's evil. He was now in his
  sixty-fourth year and was become a little dull of hearing. His
  sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind
  govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that his
  perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
  sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like
  the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed
  by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that
  distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of
  plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same
  colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted
  stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
  wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets
  which might almost have held the two volumes of his folio
  dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large English oak
  stick."

You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
that it is not Mr. Boswell's fault--and it is but one of a dozen
equally vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just
these pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts
and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and
his tricks with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate
the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than
his writings could have done.

For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely--that stilted romance. "The Lives of
the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of
ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary,
a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable
to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to
the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political
and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it
must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant
place in English literature, and that we must turn to his humble,
much-ridiculed biographer for the real explanation.

And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this
is a sign of a narrow finality--impossible to the man of sympathy
and of imagination, who sees the other side of every question and
understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must
be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at
the results. Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the race,
stand convicted of so many incredible blunders? It recalls the
remark of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned
could be stamped upon the whole human race the result would be
to propagate the most absurd errors. He was asked what became of
swallows in the winter. Rolling and wheezing, the oracle answered:
"Swallows," said he, "certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all
in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a
river." Boswell gravely dockets the information. However, if I
remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne
had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson's
misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would
have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said,
"never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit
two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad
ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's
"Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything
good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was
a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be
honest men.

And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I
suppose even in those days they were reactionary. "A poor man has no
honour." "Charles the Second was a good King." "Governments should
turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side."
"Judges in India should be encouraged to trade." "No country is the
richer on account of trade." (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the
company when this proposition was laid down!) "A landed proprietor
should turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished." "It is
not good for a labourer to have his wages raised." "When the balance
of trade is against a country, the margin must be paid in current
coin." Those were a few of his convictions.

And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion.
In our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider
those of Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so
very much left. He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested
Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was "an odious wench").
He loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire
and fury at everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay's
posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in life
Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly
everything that Johnson abominated.

It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record.
In his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by
which the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the
unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable
contingency, but when George III., either through policy or charity,
offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting
it. One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his
convictions represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts
in this instance seem against it.

He was a great talker--but his talk was more properly a monologue.
It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from
his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man
who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most
vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views,
or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common
ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he
could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his
pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."
In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of gentle
argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say "Ouf!"
when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that the
older men of Johnson's circle must have given a sigh of relief when
at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
without the danger of a scene where "Why, no, sir!" was very likely
to ripen into "Let us have no more on't!" Certainly one would like
to get behind Boswell's account, and to hear a chat between such
men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and
atmosphere of the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was
not there, as compared to one when he was.

No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not
make due allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and
early middle age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was
fifty-three when the pension was given him, and up to then his
existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first
necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed. He had
seen his comrades of letters die of actual privation. From childhood
he had known no happiness. The half blind gawky youth, with dirty
linen and twitching limbs, had always, whether in the streets of
Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the coffee-houses of
London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement. With a proud
and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some
bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a man's
spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
caused Boswell's father to christen him "Ursa Major." If his nature
was in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had
gone to the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result
of a dreadful experience.

And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He
had read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not
merely in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read,
but with every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he
could quote it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its
enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect.
With the mind so crammed with other people's goods, how can you have
room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I
think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other
exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing
upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when
did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light
upon those enigmas with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the
past, he had space for nothing else. Modern developments of every
sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France
a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever
known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once
responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible
around him. We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him
over his brewery and supplied him with statistics as to his output
of beer. It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the
drums to drown Louis' voice at the scaffold. The association shows
how near the unconscious sage was to the edge of that precipice and
how little his learning availed him in discerning it.

He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would
think, could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In
either case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent
sense of piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top.
His brain, working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There
is no more wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of
Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the
Scotch judges. That an outsider with no special training should at
short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and
reason, is, I think, as remarkable a tour de force as literature can
show.

Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must
count for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small
purse. The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge
in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings.
There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams,
and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing--a trying
group amid which to spend one's days. His guinea was always ready
for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might
not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous
sentences bore the hall-mark of their maker. It is the rough,
kindly man, the man who bore the poor street-walker home upon his
shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least forgive, the dogmatic
pedantic Doctor of the Club.

There is always to me something of interest in the view which a
great man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of
how far the philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw
death afar, and met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson's mind
flinched from that dread opponent. His letters and his talk during
his latter years are one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for
physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived.
There were no limits to his courage. It was spiritual diffidence,
coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other
world, which a more humane and liberal theology has done something
to soften. How strange to see him cling so desperately to that crazy
body, with its gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus' dance, and its six
gallons of dropsy! What could be the attraction of an existence
where eight hours of every day were spent groaning in a chair, and
sixteen wheezing in a bed? "I would give one of these legs," said
he, "for another year of life." None the less, when the hour did
at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more simple
dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent him how
you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting
some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight
into human learning or character, which should leave you a better
and a wiser man.



IV.


Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons--two editions, if you please,
for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could
not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the
History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in
any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You
are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and
keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a
note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now
and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what
follows. There are no thrills in it. You won't be kept out of your
bed at night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day,
but you will feel a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and
when it is done you will have gained something which you can never
lose--something solid, something definite, something that will make
you broader and deeper than before.

Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed
only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should
choose. For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for
thought is contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand
years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its
standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our
more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he
lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our
literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A
paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe
the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You
are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side
upholding and instructing you. Beneath you are warring nations, the
clash of races, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflict of
creeds. Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama
flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the true
meaning of the scene into your ear.

It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description
of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass
down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of
greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal
lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it
took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a
religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of
Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood. The new
creed had only added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the
many which already existed, and the wars of angry nations were mild
compared to those of excited sectaries.

Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the
waste places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly
through the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally
cleansing and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A
storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it
may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off, and
Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is
that it was not the conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it
was the terrified fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle,
blundered over everything which barred their way. It was a wild,
dramatic time--the time of the formation of the modern races of
Europe. The nations came whirling in out of the north and east like
dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was blended with its
neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul
got his steadying from the Franks, the steady Saxon got his touch of
refinement from the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life
from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt Greek made way for
the manly and earnest Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a
great hand blending the seeds. And so one can now, save only that
emigration has taken the place of war. It does not, for example,
take much prophetic power to say that something very great is being
built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic
basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian being
added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
thereby evolved.

But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its
centre some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is
the whole strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the
south, submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to
India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing
right over the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced European fortress
of the Moslem. Such is the tremendous narrative covering half the
world's known history, which can all be acquired and made part of
yourself by the aid of that humble atlas, pencil, and note-book
already recommended.

When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me
there has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in
the first entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has
something of the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a
great man. You remember how the Russians made their debut--came
down the great rivers and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred
canoes, from which they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys.
Singular that a thousand years have passed and that the ambition
of the Russians is still to carry out the task at which their
skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the Turks again; you may recall the
characteristic ferocity with which they opened their career. A
handful of them were on some mission to the Emperor. The town was
besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and the Asiatics
obtained leave to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk galloped
out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside
him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man's
comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived
at the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the
ambition of the other for so many centuries.

And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are
those that disappear. There is something there which appeals most
powerfully to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those
Vandals who conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe,
blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country.
Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness
which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of least
resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to
west. South-west was the course of the Vandals--a course which must
have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the
thousands of miles which they traversed there were many fair
resting-places, if that were only their quest.

They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the
old Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much
as the English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some
hundreds of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those
flickers which showed that there was still some fire among the
ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The
Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they
carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated
by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid
race with light eyes and hair. Is it possible that here we have some
trace of the vanished Germans?

It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland.
That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic
questions in history--the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my
eyes to see across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point
(or near it) where the old "Eyrbyggia" must have stood. That was the
Scandinavian city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to
be a considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a
bishop. That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming
out to his see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a
climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait
between Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been
able to say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were
at the time, be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced
race in Europe. They may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux,
the despised Skroeling--or they may have amalgamated with them--or
conceivably they might have held their own. Very little is known yet
of that portion of the coast. It would be strange if some Nansen or
Peary were to stumble upon the remains of the old colony, and find
possibly in that antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of some
bygone civilization.

But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been
which first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty
years, carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author
so little known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish
chronicle so crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into
their appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application,
great perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all
this, but the coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in
the heart of his own creation the individuality of the man himself
becomes as insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the
little creature that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon's work
for one who cares anything for Gibbon.

And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are
greater than their work. Their work only represents one facet of
their character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable,
and uniting to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so
with Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to
have grown at the expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life
one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics.
His excellent judgment was never clouded by the haze of human
emotion--or, at least, it was such an emotion as was well under
the control of his will. Could anything be more laudable--or less
lovable? He abandons his girl at the order of his father, and sums
it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father
dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of
a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French
Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because
his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just
as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all
the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon--often without even
mentioning his name--and one cannot read the great historian's life
without understanding why.

I should think that few men have been born with the material for
self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than
Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have,
an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry,
a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked
upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but
his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days.
Turn him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is
upon his contentions. "Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth
chapters it is not necessary to dwell," says the biographer,
"because at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams of
denying the substantial truth of any of the more important
allegations of Gibbon. Christians may complain of the suppression
of some circumstances which might influence the general result, and
they must remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case.
But they no longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to
show that persecution was less severe than had been once believed,
and they have slowly learned that they can afford to concede the
validity of all the secondary causes assigned by Gibbon and even of
others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the historian has
again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary causes
which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity
leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of
Christianity practically untouched." This is all very well, but in
that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
for.

Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was
a curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth,
was ulcerated and tortured by the king's evil, in spite of the Royal
touch. Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own
boyhood.

  "I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by
  opposite tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit,
  by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the
  bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness. Every
  practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors
  were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons.
  There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
  my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets,
  issues, and caustics."

Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that
day seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far
the hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had
anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection
between struma and learning; but one has only to compare this
account of Gibbon with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred face
and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that these, the two most solid
English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same
gruesome inheritance.

I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character
of subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame,
his huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform,
he must have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so
round a peg in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different
type, held a commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a
soldier in spite of himself. War had broken out, the regiment was
mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was
kept under arms until the conclusion of hostilities. For three years
he was divorced from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he
resent it. The South Hampshire Militia never saw the enemy, which is
perhaps as well for them. Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but
after three years under canvas it is probable that his men had more
cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his men. His
hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt.
In his lament, one of the items is that his colonel's example
encouraged the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking,
which gave him the gout. "The loss of so many busy and idle hours
were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure," says he; "and my
temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic officers, who
were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners
of gentlemen." The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must
certainly have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he
found consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering.
It made him an Englishman once more, it improved his health, it
changed the current of his thoughts. It was even useful to him as
an historian. In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says,
"The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a
clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of
the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of
the Roman Empire."

If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote
no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from
the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and
soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most
difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact,
discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend.
Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical
Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and
self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever
been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been
good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of
all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national
genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a
British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the
race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our neighbours
we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress
its publication.

There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke's)
of Pepys' Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in
our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When
Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought
which came into his head he would have been very much surprised
had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our
literature. Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some
obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant
for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature
as Boswell's book among biographies or Gibbon's among histories.

As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce
a good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy,
and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own
emotions--especially on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the
heart, for example, which are such an index to a man's character,
and so profoundly modify his life--what space do they fill in any
man's autobiography? Perhaps in Gibbon's case the omission matters
little, for, save in the instance of his well-controlled passion
for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an organ which
gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author
tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the
more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become.
Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand
self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not respectable
they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.

The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been
a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess
it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what
he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences--all the more
interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is
of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious,
blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud,
trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed
always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man,
the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil
servant, an eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable
musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated 3000 volumes--a large
private library in those days--and had the public spirit to leave
them all to his University. You can forgive old Pepys a good deal of
his philandering when you remember that he was the only official of
the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst days of the
Plague. He may have been--indeed, he assuredly was--a coward, but
the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
is the most truly brave of mankind.

But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys
is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of
writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of
his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other
man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for
about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes
of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as
easily as he did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour
to compile these books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to
leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all
the countless sons of men? In such a case he would assuredly have
left directions in somebody's care with a reference to it in the
deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In that way
he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had
not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar
the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not his object. What could it
have been? The only alternative is reference and self-information.
You will observe in his character a curious vein of method and
order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions. It is
conceivable that this systematic recording of his deeds--even of his
misdeeds--was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness
of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to
advance another one.

One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical
a nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one
seems to have had command of some instrument, many of several.
Part-singing was common. There is not much of Charles the Second's
days which we need envy, but there, at least, they seem to have
had the advantage of us. It was real music, too--music of dignity
and tenderness--with words which were worthy of such treatment.
This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval
pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have
read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange thing this for
a land which in the whole of last century has produced no single
master of the first rank!

What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
England, alas, the sound of a poor man's voice raised in song means
only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know
that the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout
forth if they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs
were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I
believe, that our orchestral associations are now the best in
Europe. So, at least, the German papers said on the occasion of the
recent visit of a north of England choir. But one cannot read Pepys
without knowing that the general musical habit is much less
cultivated now than of old.



V.


It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow--from one pole
of the human character to the other--and yet they are in contact on
the shelf of my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I
think, about the land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out
into the ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things, and
has held them there in isolation until they have woven themselves
into the texture of the Cornish race. What is this strange strain
which lurks down yonder and every now and then throws up a great
man with singular un-English ways and features for all the world to
marvel at? It is not Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further
and deeper lie the springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving
men of Tyre, with noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations,
who have in far-off days forgotten their blue Mediterranean and
settled on the granite shores of the Northern Sea?

Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry
Irving? How strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know
that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing
imagination of the Brontes--so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm
of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a
Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow,
with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced,
white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable
face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in
literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is
something strange, and weird, and great, lurking down yonder in the
great peninsula which juts into the western sea. Borrow may, if he
so pleases, call himself an East Anglian--"an English Englishman,"
as he loved to term it--but is it a coincidence that the one East
Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one who showed these strange
qualities? The birth was accidental. The qualities throw back to the
twilight of the world.

There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so
voluminous that I feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be
well read in their works. Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them
altogether. There is Balzac, for example, with his hundred odd
volumes. I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest
pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an
author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal years.
Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all.
Dumas, too! I stand on the edge of him, and look at that huge crop,
and content myself with a sample here and there. But no one could
raise this objection to Borrow. A month's reading--even for a
leisurely reader--will master all that he has written. There are
"Lavengro," "The Bible in Spain," "Romany Rye," and, finally, if you
wish to go further, "Wild Wales." Only four books--not much to
found a great reputation upon--but, then, there are no other four
books quite like them in the language.

He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined
to be sulky, as wayward as a man could be. So far his catalogue of
qualities does not seem to pick him as a winner. But he had one
great and rare gift. He preserved through all his days a sense of
the great wonder and mystery of life--the child sense which is so
quickly dulled. Not only did he retain it himself, but he was
word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he
writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which
his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was
all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to
the light. If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman
there was something arresting in the words he said, something
singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house one felt,
after reading his account, that one would wish to know more of
that man. If he approached a town he saw and made you see--not a
collection of commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but something
very strange and wonderful, the winding river, the noble bridge,
the old castle, the shadows of the dead. Every human being, every
object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol and reminder
of the past. He looked through a man at that which the man
represented. Was his name Welsh? Then in an instant the individual
is forgotten and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient
Britons, intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower,
mountain raiders and a thousand fascinating things. Or is it a
Danish name? He leaves the individual in all his modern commonplace
while he flies off to huge skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may
remark that I have examined the said skulls with some care, and they
seemed to me to be rather below the human average), to Vikings,
Berserkers, Varangians, Harald Haardraada, and the innate wickedness
of the Pope. To Borrow all roads lead to Rome.

But, my word, what English the fellow could write! What an
organ-roll he could get into his sentences! How nervous and vital
and vivid it all is!

There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an
ear for the music of prose. Take the chapter in "Lavengro" of how
the screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped
in the Dingle. The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle
of Bunyan and Defoe. And, observe the art of it, under all the
simplicity--notice, for example, the curious weird effect produced
by the studied repetition of the word "dingle" coming ever round and
round like the master-note in a chime. Or take the passage about
Britain towards the end of "The Bible in Spain." I hate quoting from
these masterpieces, if only for the very selfish reason that my poor
setting cannot afford to show up brilliants. None the less, cost
what it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of impassioned
prose--

  "O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink
  beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous
  clouds are now gathering rapidly around thee, still, still
  may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee
  a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown
  than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be
  a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled the Old
  Queen of the waters! May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst
  blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one
  nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it
  please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a
  slow decay; becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for
  those self-same foes who now, though they envy and abhor thee,
  still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and
  respect thee.... Remove from thee the false prophets, who
  have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall
  with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions
  of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the
  hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad.
  Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall
  thy end be a majestic and an enviable one; or God shall
  perpetuate thy reign upon the waters, thou Old Queen!"

Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. It's too long for
quotation--but read it, read every word of it. Where in the language
can you find a stronger, more condensed and more restrained
narrative? I have seen with my own eyes many a noble fight, more
than one international battle, where the best of two great countries
have been pitted against each other--yet the second-hand impression
of Borrow's description leaves a more vivid remembrance upon my mind
than any of them. This is the real witchcraft of letters.

He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in
other than literary circles--circles which would have been amazed to
learn that he was a writer of books. With his natural advantages,
his six foot three of height and his staglike agility, he could
hardly fail to be formidable. But he was a scientific sparrer as
well, though he had, I have been told, a curious sprawling fashion
of his own. And how his heart was in it--how he loved the fighting
men! You remember his thumb-nail sketches of his heroes. If you
don't I must quote one, and if you do you will be glad to read
it again--

  "There's Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best
  man in England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure,
  and face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher,
  the younger, not the mighty one, who is gone to his place,
  but the Teucer Belcher, the most scientific pugilist that
  ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to be I won't say
  what. He appears to walk before me now, as he did that
  evening, with his white hat, white great coat, thin genteel
  figure, springy step, and keen determined eye. Crosses him,
  what a contrast! Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word
  for nobody, and a hard blow for anybody. Hard! One blow
  given with the proper play of his athletic arm will unsense
  a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands
  behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized,
  and who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the
  light-weights, so-called--Randall! The terrible Randall,
  who has Irish blood in his veins; not the better for that,
  nor the worse; and not far from him is his last antagonist,
  Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself
  as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was
  a near thing. But how shall I name them all? They were
  there by dozens, and all tremendous in their way. There
  was Bulldog Hudson, and fearless Scroggins, who beat the
  conqueror of Sam the Jew. There was Black Richmond--no,
  he was not there, but I knew him well; he was the most
  dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was
  Purcell, who could never conquer until all seemed over with
  him. There was--what! shall I name thee last? Ay, why not?
  I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family
  still above the sod, where mayst thou long continue--true
  piece of English stuff--Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee, Tom
  of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be
  called, Spring or Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman
  of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at
  Flodden, where England's yeomen triumphed over Scotland's
  King, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee, last of English
  bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast
  achieved--true English victories, unbought by yellow gold."

Those are words from the heart. Long may it be before we lose the
fighting blood which has come to us from of old! In a world of peace
we shall at last be able to root it from our natures. In a world
which is armed to the teeth it is the last and only guarantee of our
future. Neither our numbers, nor our wealth, nor the waters which
guard us can hold us safe if once the old iron passes from our
spirit. Barbarous, perhaps--but there are possibilities for
barbarism, and none in this wide world for effeminacy.

Borrow's views of literature and of literary men were curious.
Publisher and brother author, he hated them with a fine
comprehensive hatred. In all his books I cannot recall a word of
commendation to any living writer, nor has he posthumous praise for
those of the generation immediately preceding. Southey, indeed, he
commends with what most would regard as exaggerated warmth, but for
the rest he who lived when Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all
in their glorious prime, looks fixedly past them at some obscure
Dane or forgotten Welshman. The reason was, I expect, that his
proud soul was bitterly wounded by his own early failures and slow
recognition. He knew himself to be a chief in the clan, and when the
clan heeded him not he withdrew in haughty disdain. Look at his
proud, sensitive face and you hold the key to his life.

Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which
gave me pleasure. A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called
"Rodney Stone" to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon
a bed of mortal sickness. The dying gladiator listened with intent
interest but keen, professional criticism to the combats of the
novel. The reader had got to the point where the young amateur
fights the brutal Berks. Berks is winded, but holds his adversary
off with a stiff left arm. The amateur's second in the story, an old
prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal with the
situation. "That's right. By --- he's got him!" yelled the stricken
man in the bed. Who cares for critics after that?

You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown
volumes which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow.
They are the three volumes of "Pugilistica," given me years ago by
my old friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for
half an hour without striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang
of those days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and
its fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing
a word or two in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate
encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become
dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. You have to tum to
Hazlitt's account of the encounter between the Gasman and the
Bristol Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is a
hardened reader who does not wince even in print before that
frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and left him in "red
ruin" from eyebrow to jaw. But even if there be no Hazlitt present
to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination which is not
fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly
upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these
little-read pages. They were picturesque creatures, men of great
force of character and will, who reached the limits of human bravery
and endurance. There is Jackson on the cover, gold upon brown,
"gentleman Jackson," Jackson of the balustrade calf and the noble
head, who wrote his name with an 88-pound weight dangling from his
little finger.

Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well--

  "I can see him now as I saw him in '84 walking down Holborn
  Hill, towards Smithfield. He had on a scarlet coat worked
  in gold at the buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace,
  a small white stock, no collar (they were not then invented),
  a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches
  and long silk strings, striped white silk stockings, pumps
  and paste buckles; his waistcoat was pale blue satin,
  sprigged with white. It was impossible to look on his fine
  ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything
  too small), his large but not too large hips, his balustrade
  calf and beautifully turned but not over delicate ankle,
  his firm foot and peculiarly small hand, without thinking
  that nature had sent him on earth as a model. On he went
  at a good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all
  men and the admiration of all women."

Now, that is a discriminating portrait--a portrait which really
helps you to see that which the writer sets out to describe. After
reading it one can understand why even in reminiscent sporting
descriptions of those old days, amid all the Tonis and Bills
and Jacks, it is always Mr. John Jackson. He was the friend and
instructor of Byron and of half the bloods in town. Jackson it was
who, in the heat of combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair,
and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a
close-cropped race. Inside you see the square face of old Broughton,
the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose
humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian
Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had a chronicler,
the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would
take some beating. How about this passage?--

  "He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows
  truly in the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself,
  to stop a blow, and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided
  by his body, producing but fly-flap blows. No! Broughton steps
  boldly and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow;
  receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general
  summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body seconding
  his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the
  pile-driving force upon his man."

One would like a little more from the gallant Captain. Poor
Broughton! He fought once too often. "Why, damn you, you're beat!"
cried the Royal Duke. "Not beat, your highness, but I can't see my
man!" cried the blinded old hero. Alas, there is the tragedy of the
ring as it is of life! The wave of youth surges ever upwards, and
the wave that went before is swept sobbing on to the shingle. "Youth
will be served," said the terse old pugs. But what so sad as the
downfall of the old champion! Wise Tom Spring--Tom of Bedford, as
Borrow calls him--had the wit to leave the ring unconquered in
the prime of his fame. Cribb also stood out as a champion. But
Broughton, Slack, Belcher, and the rest--their end was one common
tragedy.

The latter days of the fighting men were often curious and
unexpected, though as a rule they were short-lived, for the
alternation of the excess of their normal existence and the
asceticism of their training undermined their constitution. Their
popularity among both men and women was their undoing, and the
king of the ring went down at last before that deadliest of
light-weights, the microbe of tubercle, or some equally fatal and
perhaps less reputable bacillus. The crockiest of spectators had a
better chance of life than the magnificent young athlete whom he
had come to admire. Jem Belcher died at 30, Hooper at 31, Pearce,
the Game Chicken, at 32, Turner at 35, Hudson at 38, Randall, the
Nonpareil, at 34. Occasionally, when they did reach mature age,
their lives took the strangest turns. Gully, as is well known,
became a wealthy man, and Member for Pontefract in the Reform
Parliament. Humphries developed into a successful coal merchant.
Jack Martin became a convinced teetotaller and vegetarian. Jem Ward,
the Black Diamond, developed considerable powers as an artist.
Cribb, Spring, Langan, and many others, were successful publicans.
Strangest of all, perhaps, was Broughton, who spent his old age
haunting every sale of old pictures and bric-a-brac. One who saw
him has recorded his impression of the silent old gentleman, clad in
old-fashioned garb, with his catalogue in his hand--Broughton, once
the terror of England, and now the harmless and gentle collector.

Many of them, as was but natural, died violent deaths, some by
accident and a few by their own hands. No man of the first class
ever died in the ring. The nearest approach to it was the singular
and mournful fate which befell Simon Byrne, the brave Irishman,
who had the misfortune to cause the death of his antagonist, Angus
Mackay, and afterwards met his own end at the hands of Deaf Burke.
Neither Byrne nor Mackay could, however, be said to be boxers of the
very first rank. It certainly would appear, if we may argue from the
prize-ring, that the human machine becomes more delicate and is more
sensitive to jar or shock. In the early days a fatal end to a fight
was exceedingly rare. Gradually such tragedies became rather more
common, until now even with the gloves they have shocked us by their
frequency, and we feel that the rude play of our forefathers is
indeed too rough for a more highly organized generation. Still, it
may help us to clear our minds of cant if we remember that within
two or three years the hunting-field and the steeple-chase claim
more victims than the prize-ring has done in two centuries.

Many of these men had served their country well with that strength
and courage which brought them fame. Cribb was, if I mistake not, in
the Royal Navy. So was the terrible dwarf Scroggins, all chest and
shoulders, whose springing hits for many a year carried all before
them until the canny Welshman, Ned Turner, stopped his career, only
to be stopped in turn by the brilliant Irishman, Jack Randall. Shaw,
who stood high among the heavy-weights, was cut to pieces by the
French Cuirassiers in the first charge at Waterloo. The brutal Berks
died greatly in the breach of Badajos. The lives of these men stood
for something, and that was just the one supreme thing which the
times called for--an unflinching endurance which could bear up
against a world in arms. Look at Jem Belcher--beautiful, heroic
Jem, a manlier Byron--but there, this is not an essay on the old
prize-ring, and one man's lore is another man's bore. Let us pass
those three low-down, unjustifiable, fascinating volumes, and on to
nobler topics beyond!



VI.


Which are the great short stories of the English language? Not a
bad basis for a debate! This I am sure of: that there are far fewer
supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long
books. It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the
statue. But the strangest thing is that the two excellences seem
to be separate and even antagonistic. Skill in the one by no means
ensures skill in the other. The great masters of our literature,
Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, have left no single
short story of outstanding merit behind them, with the possible
exception of Wandering Willie's Tale in "Red Gauntlet." On the other
hand, men who have been very great in the short story, Stevenson,
Poe, and Bret Harte, have written no great book. The champion
sprinter is seldom a five-miler as well.

Well, now, if you had to choose your team whom would you put in? You
have not really a large choice. What are the points by which you
judge them? You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of
interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the
master of all. I may remark by the way that it is the sight of his
green cover, the next in order upon my favourite shelf, which has
started this train of thought. Poe is, to my mind, the supreme
original short story writer of all time. His brain was like a
seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which
have sprung nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of
what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to
repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him
must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection
of crime--"quorum pars parva fui!" Each may find some little
development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those
admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful
force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point. After all,
mental acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed to the
ideal detective, and when that has once been admirably done,
succeeding writers must necessarily be content for all time to
follow in the same main track. But not only is Poe the originator
of the detective story; all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving
yarns trace back to his "Gold Bug," just as all pseudo-scientific
Verne-and-Wells stories have their prototypes in the "Voyage to
the Moon," and the "Case of Monsieur Valdemar." If every man who
receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to
pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as
big as that of Cheops.

And yet I could only give him two places in my team. One would be
for the "Gold Bug," the other for the "Murder in the Rue Morgue." I
do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not
admit _perfect_ excellence to any other of his stories. These two
have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others,
the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of
the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and
Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one
of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of
a longer flight. He was always like one of his own gold-miners who
struck a rich pocket, but found no continuous reef. The pocket was,
alas, a very limited one, but the gold was of the best. "The Luck of
Roaring Camp" and "Tennessee's Partner" are both, I think, worthy
of a place among my immortals. They are, it is true, so tinged with
Dickens as to be almost parodies of the master, but they have a
symmetry and satisfying completeness as short stories to which
Dickens himself never attained. The man who can read those two
stories without a gulp in the throat is not a man I envy.

And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two places also, for where
is a finer sense of what the short story can do? He wrote, in
my judgment, two masterpieces in his life, and each of them is
essentially a short story, though the one happened to be published
as a volume. The one is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which, whether
you take it as a vivid narrative or as a wonderfully deep and true
allegory, is a supremely fine bit of work. The other story of my
choice would be "The Pavilion on the Links"--the very model of
dramatic narrative. That story stamped itself so clearly on my brain
when I read it in Cornhill that when I came across it again many
years afterwards in volume form, I was able instantly to recognize
two small modifications of the text--each very much for the
worse--from the original form. They were small things, but they
seemed somehow like a chip on a perfect statue. Surely it is only a
very fine work, of art which could leave so definite an impression
as that. Of course, there are a dozen other of his stories which
would put the average writer's best work to shame, all with the
strange Stevenson glamour upon them, of which I may discourse later,
but only to those two would I be disposed to admit that complete
excellence which would pass them into such a team as this.

And who else? If it be not an impertinence to mention a
contemporary, I should certainly have a brace from Rudyard Kipling.
His power, his compression, his dramatic sense, his way of glowing
suddenly into a vivid flame, all mark him as a great master. But
which are we to choose from that long and varied collection, many of
which have claims to the highest? Speaking from memory, I should say
that the stories of his which have impressed me most are "The Drums
of the Fore and Aft," "The Man who Would be King," "The Man who
Was," and "The Brushwood Boy." Perhaps, on the whole, it is the
first two which I should choose to add to my list of masterpieces.

They are stories which invite criticism and yet defy it. The great
batsman at cricket is the man who can play an unorthodox game, take
every liberty which is denied to inferior players, and yet succeed
brilliantly in the face of his disregard of law. So it is here. I
should think the model of these stories is the most dangerous that
any young writer could follow. There is digression, that most deadly
fault in the short narrative; there is incoherence, there is want
of proportion which makes the story stand still for pages and bound
forward in a few sentences. But genius overrides all that, just as
the great cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the straight one
to leg. There is a dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded, confident
mastery which carries everything before it. Yes, no team of
immortals would be complete which did not contain at least two
representatives of Kipling.

And now whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest
degree to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed
to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too
elusive, for effect. Indeed, I have been more affected by some of
the short work of his son Julian, though I can quite understand the
high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the delicate
charm of his style. There is Bulwer Lytton as a claimant. His
"Haunted and the Haunters" is the very best ghost story that I know.
As such I should include it in my list. There was a story, too, in
one of the old Blackwoods--"Metempsychosis" it was called, which
left so deep an impression upon my mind that I should be inclined,
though it is many years since I read it, to number it with the best.
Another story which has the characteristics of great work is Grant
Allen's "John Creedy." So good a story upon so philosophic a basis
deserves a place among the best. There is some first-class work
to be picked also from the contemporary work of Wells and of
Quiller-Couch which reaches a high standard. One little sketch--"Old
Oeson" in "Noughts and Crosses"--is, in my opinion, as good as
anything of the kind which I have ever read.

And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green
cover of Poe. I am sure that if I had to name the few books which
have really influenced my own life I should have to put this one
second only to Macaulay's Essays. I read it young when my mind was
plastic. It stimulated my imagination and set before me a supreme
example of dignity and force in the methods of telling a story.
It is not altogether a healthy influence, perhaps. It turns the
thoughts too forcibly to the morbid and the strange.

He was a saturnine creature, devoid of humour and geniality, with
a love for the grotesque and the terrible. The reader must himself
furnish the counteracting qualities or Poe may become a dangerous
comrade. We know along what perilous tracks and into what deadly
quagmires his strange mind led him, down to that grey October Sunday
morning when he was picked up, a dying man, on the side-walk at
Baltimore, at an age which should have seen him at the very prime
of his strength and his manhood.

I have said that I look upon Poe as the world's supreme short story
writer. His nearest rival, I should say, was Maupassant. The great
Norman never rose to the extreme force and originality of the
American, but he had a natural inherited power, an inborn instinct
towards the right way of making his effects, which mark him as a
great master. He produced stories because it was in him to do so, as
naturally and as perfectly as an apple tree produces apples. What a
fine, sensitive, artistic touch it is! How easily and delicately the
points are made! How clear and nervous is his style, and how free
from that redundancy which disfigures so much of our English work!
He pares it down to the quick all the time.

I cannot write the name of Maupassant without recalling what was
either a spiritual interposition or an extraordinary coincidence in
my own life. I had been travelling in Switzerland and had visited,
among other places, that Gemmi Pass, where a huge cliff separates
a French from a German canton. On the summit of this cliff was a
small inn, where we broke our journey. It was explained to us that,
although the inn was inhabited all the year round, still for about
three months in winter it was utterly isolated, because it could at
any time only be approached by winding paths on the mountain side,
and when these became obliterated by snow it was impossible either
to come up or to descend. They could see the lights in the valley
beneath them, but were as lonely as if they lived in the moon. So
curious a situation naturally appealed to one's imagination, and I
speedily began to build up a short story in my own mind, depending
upon a group of strong antagonistic characters being penned up in
this inn, loathing each other and yet utterly unable to get away
from each other's society, every day bringing them nearer to
tragedy. For a week or so, as I travelled, I was turning over
the idea.

At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to
read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant's Tales which I had
never seen before. The first story was called "L'Auberge" (The
Inn)--and as I ran my eye down the printed page I was amazed to see
the two words, "Kandersteg" and "Gemmi Pass." I settled down and
read it with ever-growing amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I
had visited. The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people
through the snowfall. Everything that I imagined was there, save
that Maupassant had brought in a savage hound.

Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced
to visit the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same
train of thought. All that is quite intelligible. But what is
perfectly marvellous is that in that short journey I should have
chanced to buy the one book in all the world which would prevent
me from making a public fool of myself, for who would ever have
believed that my work was not an imitation? I do not think that
the hypothesis of coincidence can cover the facts. It is one of
several incidents in my life which have convinced me of spiritual
interposition--of the promptings of some beneficent force outside
ourselves, which tries to help us where it can. The old Catholic
doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a beautiful one, but
has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.

Or is it that our subliminal ego, to use the jargon of the new
psychology, or our astral, in the terms of the new theology, can
learn and convey to the mind that which our own known senses are
unable to apprehend? But that is too long a side track for us to
turn down it.

When Maupassant chose he could run Poe close in that domain of the
strange and weird which the American had made so entirely his own.
Have you read Maupassant's story called "Le Horla"? That is as good
a bit of diablerie as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has,
of course, far the broader range. He has a keen sense of humour,
breaking out beyond all decorum in some of his stories, but giving
a pleasant sub-flavour to all of them. And yet, when all is said,
who can doubt that the austere and dreadful American is far the
greater and more original mind of the two?

Talking of weird American stories, have you ever read any of the
works of Ambrose Bierce? I have one of his works there, "In the
Midst of Life." This man had a flavour quite his own, and was a
great artist in his way. It is not cheering reading, but it leaves
its mark upon you, and that is the proof of good work.

I have often wondered where Poe got his style. There is a sombre
majesty about his best work, as if it were carved from polished jet,
which is peculiarly his own. I dare say if I took down that volume
I could light anywhere upon a paragraph which would show you what I
mean. This is the kind of thing--

  "Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi--in the
  iron-bound melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say,
  are glorious histories of the heaven and of the earth, and
  of the mighty sea--and of the genius that overruled the sea,
  and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There were much lore,
  too, in the sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy,
  holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled
  round Dodona, but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon
  told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I
  hold to be the most wonderful of all." Or this sentence:
  "And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror,
  and stand trembling and aghast, for the tones in the voice
  of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of
  a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from
  syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the
  well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed
  friends."

Is there not a sense of austere dignity? No man invents a style. It
always derives back from some influence, or, as is more usual, it is
a compromise between several influences. I cannot trace Poe's. And
yet if Hazlitt and De Quincey had set forth to tell weird stories
they might have developed something of the kind.

Now, by your leave, we will pass on to my noble edition of "The
Cloister and the Hearth," the next volume on the left.

I notice, in glancing over my rambling remarks, that I classed
"Ivanhoe" as the second historical novel of the century. I dare
say there are many who would give "Esmond" the first place, and I
can quite understand their position, although it is not my own.
I recognize the beauty of the style, the consistency of the
character-drawing, the absolutely perfect Queen Anne atmosphere.
There was never an historical novel written by a man who knew his
period so thoroughly. But, great as these virtues are, they are not
the essential in a novel. The essential in a novel is interest,
though Addison unkindly remarked that the real essential was that
the pastrycooks should never run short of paper. Now "Esmond" is,
in my opinion, exceedingly interesting during the campaigns in the
Lowlands, and when our Machiavelian hero, the Duke, comes in, and
also whenever Lord Mohun shows his ill-omened face; but there are
long stretches of the story which are heavy reading. A pre-eminently
good novel must always advance and never mark time. "Ivanhoe" never
halts for an instant, and that just makes its superiority as a novel
over "Esmond," though as a piece of literature I think the latter is
the more perfect.

No, if I had three votes, I should plump them all for "The Cloister
and the Hearth," as being our greatest historical novel, and,
indeed, as being our greatest novel of any sort. I think I may claim
to have read most of the more famous foreign novels of last century,
and (speaking only for myself and within the limits of my reading)
I have been more impressed by that book of Reade's and by Tolstoi's
"Peace and War" than by any others. They seem to me to stand at the
very top of the century's fiction. There is a certain resemblance
in the two--the sense of space, the number of figures, the way in
which characters drop in and drop out. The Englishman is the more
romantic. The Russian is the more real and earnest. But they are
both great.

Think of what Reade does in that one book. He takes the reader by
the hand, and he leads him away into the Middle Ages, and not a
conventional study-built Middle Age, but a period quivering with
life, full of folk who are as human and real as a 'bus-load in
Oxford Street. He takes him through Holland, he shows him the
painters, the dykes, the life. He leads him down the long line of
the Rhine, the spinal marrow of Mediaeval Europe. He shows him
the dawn of printing, the beginnings of freedom, the life of the
great mercantile cities of South Germany, the state of Italy, the
artist-life of Rome, the monastic institutions on the eve of the
Reformation. And all this between the covers of one book, so
naturally introduced, too, and told with such vividness and spirit.
Apart from the huge scope of it, the mere study of Gerard's own
nature, his rise, his fall, his regeneration, the whole pitiable
tragedy at the end, make the book a great one. It contains, I think,
a blending of knowledge with imagination, which makes it stand alone
in our literature. Let any one read the "Autobiography of Benvenuto
Cellini," and then Charles Reade's picture of Mediaeval Roman life,
if he wishes to appreciate the way in which Reade has collected his
rough ore and has then smelted it all down in his fiery imagination.
It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a
greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them
when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough
without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer of
historical romance.

Reade is one of the most perplexing figures in our literature. Never
was there a man so hard to place. At his best he is the best we
have. At his worst he is below the level of Surreyside melodrama.
But his best have weak pieces, and his worst have good. There is
always silk among his cotton, and cotton among his silk. But, for
all his flaws, the man who, in addition to the great book, of which
I have already spoken, wrote "It is Never Too Late to Mend," "Hard
Cash," "Foul Play," and "Griffith Gaunt," must always stand in the
very first rank of our novelists.

There is a quality of heart about his work which I recognize nowhere
else. He so absolutely loves his own heroes and heroines, while he
so cordially detests his own villains, that he sweeps your emotions
along with his own. No one has ever spoken warmly enough of the
humanity and the lovability of his women. It is a rare gift--very
rare for a man--this power of drawing a human and delightful girl.
If there is a better one in nineteenth-century fiction than Julia
Dodd I have never had the pleasure of meeting her. A man who could
draw a character so delicate and so delightful, and yet could write
such an episode as that of the Robber Inn in "The Cloister and the
Hearth," adventurous romance in its highest form, has such a range
of power as is granted to few men. My hat is always ready to come
off to Charles Reade.



VII.


It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other
side of that door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears,
headaches and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments; but within,
as you lie back on the green settee, and face the long lines of your
silent soothing comrades, there is only peace of spirit and rest
of mind in the company of the great dead. Learn to love, learn to
admire them; learn to know what their comradeship means; for until
you have done so the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to
man have not yet shed their blessing upon you. Here behind this
magic door is the rest house, where you may forget the past, enjoy
the present, and prepare for the future.

You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar
with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon,
the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all
the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one
wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each
other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would
have thought that noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed
the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter for the
younger man to use towards the elder. The fact is that Borrow had
one dangerous virus in him--a poison which distorts the whole
vision--for he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue
outside his own interpretation of the great riddle. Downright
heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the chaunting Druid,
appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the man of his
own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of ritual, or
in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil to the
bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott
therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once
hateful in his eyes. In any case he was a disappointed man, the big
Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was
good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the
Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though
it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of
informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we
must not be unkind behind the magic door--and yet to be charitable
to the uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.

So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped
for six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as
you see there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to
my heart, and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and
to my memory. Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old
friends, and tell you why I love them, and all that they have meant
to me in the past. If you picked any book from that line you would
be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small, no doubt,
and yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself.
Hereditary impulses, personal experiences, books--those are the
three forces which go to the making of man. These are the books.

This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the
eighteenth century, or those of them whom I regard as essential.
After all, putting aside single books, such as Sterne's "Tristram
Shandy," Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and Miss Burney's
"Evelina," there are only three authors who count, and they in turn
wrote only three books each, of first-rate importance, so that by
the mastery of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad
view of this most important and distinctive branch of English
literature. The three men are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and
Smollett. The books are: Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," "Pamela,"
and "Sir Charles Grandison"; Fielding's "Tom Jones", "Joseph
Andrews," and "Amelia"; Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," "Humphrey
Clinker," and "Roderick Random." There we have the real work of
the three great contemporaries who illuminated the middle of
the eighteenth century--only nine volumes in all. Let us walk
round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a
hundred and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far
they have justified them by the permanent value of their work. A fat
little bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and
a rugged Scotch surgeon from the navy--those are the three strange
immortals who now challenge a comparison--the three men who dominate
the fiction of their century, and to whom we owe it that the life
and the types of that century are familiar to us, their fifth
generation.

It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that
these three writers would appeal quite differently to every
temperament, and that whichever one might desire to champion one
could find arguments to sustain one's choice. Yet I cannot think
that any large section of the critical public could maintain that
Smollett was on the same level as the other two. Ethically he is
gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour
which is more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his
rivals. I can remember in callow boyhood--puris omnia pura--reading
"Peregrine Pickle," and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in
the Fashion of the Ancients. I read it again in my manhood with the
same effect, though with a greater appreciation of its inherent
bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive merit, he has in a high
degree, but in no other respect can he challenge comparison with
either Fielding or Richardson. His view of life is far more limited,
his characters less varied, his incidents less distinctive, and his
thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one, should award him the third
place in the trio.

But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition
of giants. Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare
them with each other.

There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which
each of them had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most
delightful women--the most perfect women, I think, in the whole
range of our literature. If the eighteenth-century women were like
that, then the eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than
they ever deserved. They had such a charming little dignity of their
own, such good sense, and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so
human and so charming, that even now they become our ideals. One
cannot come to know them without a double emotion, one of respectful
devotion towards themselves, and the other of abhorrence for the
herd of swine who surrounded them. Pamela, Harriet Byron, Clarissa,
Amelia, and Sophia Western were all equally delightful, and it was
not the negative charm of the innocent and colourless woman, the
amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it was a beauty of
nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong principles,
true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this respect
our rival authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a preference
to one set of these perfect creatures over another. The plump little
printer and the worn-out man-about-town had each a supreme woman in
his mind.

But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all
capable of doing what Tom Jones did--as I have seen stated--is the
worst form of inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than
we are. It is a libel on mankind to say that a man who truly loves
a woman is usually false to her, and, above all, a libel that he
should be false in the vile fashion which aroused good Tom Newcome's
indignation. Tom Jones was no more fit to touch the hem of Sophia's
dress than Captain Booth was to be the mate of Amelia. Never once
has Fielding drawn a gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A
lusty, brawling, good-hearted, material creature was the best that
he could fashion. Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of
distinction, of spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the
plebeian printer has done very much better than the aristocrat.
Sir Charles Grandison is a very noble type--spoiled a little by
over-coddling on the part of his creator, perhaps, but a very
high-souled and exquisite gentleman all the same. Had _he_ married
Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden the banns. Even the
persevering Mr. B--- and the too amorous Lovelace were, in spite of
their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had possibilities of
greatness and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot doubt that
Richardson drew the higher type of man--and that in Grandison he
has done what has seldom or never been bettered.

Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He
concerns himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a
very searching analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily,
and in such simple English, that the depth and truth of it only
come upon reflection. He condescends to none of those scuffles and
buffetings and pantomime rallies which enliven, but cheapen, many
of Fielding's pages. The latter has, it may be granted, a broader
view of life. He had personal acquaintance of circles far above, and
also far below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival, had
ever been able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London
life, the prison scenes in "Amelia," the thieves' kitchens in
"Jonathan Wild," the sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid
and as complete as those of his friend Hogarth--the most British
of artists, even as Fielding was the most British of writers. But
the greatest and most permanent facts of life are to be found in
the smallest circles. Two men and a woman may furnish either the
tragedian or the comedian with the most satisfying theme. And so,
although his range was limited, Richardson knew very clearly and
very thoroughly just that knowledge which was essential for his
purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life, Clarissa, the
perfect lady, Grandison the ideal gentleman--these were the three
figures on which he lavished his most loving art. And now, after
one hundred and fifty years, I do not know where we may find more
satisfying types.

He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him
cut? He loved to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of
letters for his narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First
_he_ writes and he tells all that passed. You have his letter. _She_
at the same time writes to her friend, and also states her views.
This also you see. The friends in each case reply, and you have the
advantage of their comments and advice. You really do know all about
it before you finish. It may be a little wearisome at first, if you
have been accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in
every chapter. But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you
live, and you come to know these people, with their characters and
their troubles, as you know no others of the dream-folk of fiction.
Three times as long as an ordinary book, no doubt, but why grudge
the time? What is the hurry? Surely it is better to read one
masterpiece than three books which will leave no permanent
impression on the mind.

It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet
centuries. In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer
papers, do you suppose that the readers ever complained of the
length of a book, or could have too much of the happy Pamela or of
the unhappy Clarissa? It is only under extraordinary circumstances
that one can now get into that receptive frame of mind which was
normal then. Such an occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells
how in some Indian hill station, where books were rare, he let loose
a copy of "Clarissa." The effect was what might have been expected.
Richardson in a suitable environment went through the community
like a mild fever. They lived him, and dreamed him, until the whole
episode passed into literary history, never to be forgotten by those
who experienced it. It is tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style
is so correct and yet so simple that there is no page which a
scholar may not applaud nor a servant-maid understand.

Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told
in letters. Scott reverted to it in "Guy Mannering," and there are
other conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the
expense of a strain upon the reader's good-nature and credulity. One
feels that these constant details, these long conversations, could
not possibly have been recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and
dishevelled heroine could not sit down and record her escape with
such cool minuteness of description. Richardson does it as well as
it could be done, but it remains intrinsically faulty. Fielding,
using the third person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival,
and gave a freedom and personal authority to the novel which it had
never before enjoyed. There at least he is the master.

And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson,
though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of
all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme
credit of having been the first. Surely the originator should have
a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should
also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding who is
the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without
romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling
stories may be made from everyday life, told in everyday language.
This was his great new departure. So entirely was Fielding his
imitator, or rather perhaps his parodist, that with supreme audacity
(some would say brazen impudence) he used poor Richardson's own
characters, taken from "Pamela," in his own first novel, "Joseph
Andrews," and used them too for the unkind purpose of ridiculing
them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if Thackeray wrote
a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to show what
faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the gentle
little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a somewhat
unscrupulous man.

And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking
of this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain
class of critics. The inference appears to be that there is some
subtle connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of
the lewd, or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of
the true artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict. On the
contrary, it is so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its
forms, that the temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the
easiest and cheapest of all methods of creating a spurious effect.
The difficulty does not lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in
avoiding it. But one tries to avoid it because on the face of it
there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a gentleman,
or that he should write for a woman's eyes that which he would be
justly knocked down for having said in a woman's ears. But "you
must draw the world as it is." Why must you? Surely it is just in
selection and restraint that the artist is shown. It is true that in
a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself
had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and must live
up to it.

But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means.
Our decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit
in which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various
spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals,
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with
some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a
moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it
is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation,
but simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and
such was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order
to extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and
such was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to
show sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked man, and there were
many among the writers of the Restoration. But of all reasons that
exist for treating this side of life, Richardson's were the best,
and nowhere do we find it more deftly done.

Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble
about Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew.
Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the
most dangerous and lawless of European capitals. Hogarth's pictures
give some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs,
the high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves'
kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is
thrust. This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and
poor Hercules was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a
sick-room than for such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at
47, worn out with his own exertions. It might well have cost him his
life in more dramatic fashion, for he had become a marked man to
the criminal classes, and he headed his own search-parties when, on
the information of some bribed rascal, a new den of villainy was
exposed. But he carried his point. In little more than a year the
thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to what it has
ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals. Has
any man ever left a finer monument behind him?

If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the
novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock
cynicism, but in his "Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon." He knew
that his health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were
numbered. Those are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he
has no longer a motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate
presence of the most tremendous of all realities. Yet, sitting in
the shadow of death, Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and
constancy of mind, which show how splendid a nature had been
shrouded by his earlier frailties.

Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish
this somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed
so much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage
it. I skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky
methods. And I skip Miss Burney's novels, as being feminine
reflections of the great masters who had just preceded her. But
Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" surely deserves one paragraph to
itself. There is a book which is tinged throughout, as was all
Goldsmith's work, with a beautiful nature. No one who had not a fine
heart could have written it, just as no one without a fine heart
could have written "The Deserted Village." How strange it is to
think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the shrinking Irishman,
when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama the latter has
proved himself far the greater man. But here is an object-lesson of
how the facts of life may be treated without offence. Nothing is
shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded. Yet if I wished to set
before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would prepare
her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as "The
Vicar of Wakefield."

So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of
their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For
years you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word
or train of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them
and love them, and rejoice that you know them. But let us pass to
something which may interest you more.

If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the
kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists
with the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George
Meredith would come out very low indeed. If, on the other hand,
a number of authors were convened to determine which of their
fellow-craftsmen they considered the greatest and the most
stimulating to their own minds, I am equally confident that Mr.
Meredith would have a vast preponderance of votes. Indeed, his only
conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy. It becomes an interesting
study, therefore, why there should be such a divergence of opinion
as to his merits, and what the qualities are which have repelled
so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose opinion must
be allowed to have a special weight.

The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The
public read to be amused. The novelist reads to have new light
thrown upon his art. To read Meredith is not a mere amusement; it is
an intellectual exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you
develop your thinking powers. Your mind is in a state of tension the
whole time that you are reading him.

If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his
pointer, you will observe that these remarks are excited by the
presence of my beloved "Richard Feverel," which lurks in yonder
corner. What a great book it is, how wise and how witty! Others of
the master's novels may be more characteristic or more profound, but
for my own part it is the one which I would always present to the
new-comer who had not yet come under the influence. I think that I
should put it third after "Vanity Fair" and "The Cloister and the
Hearth" if I had to name the three novels which I admire most in the
Victorian era. The book was published, I believe, in 1859, and it is
almost incredible, and says little for the discrimination of critics
or public, that it was nearly twenty years before a second edition
was needed.

But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate
the cause may be. What was it that stood in the way of the book's
success? Undoubtedly it was the style. And yet it is subdued and
tempered here with little of the luxuriance and exuberance which
it attained in the later works. But it was an innovation, and it
stalled off both the public and the critics. They regarded it, no
doubt, as an affectation, as Carlyle's had been considered twenty
years before, forgetting that in the case of an original genius
style is an organic thing, part of the man as much as the colour of
his eyes. It is not, to quote Carlyle, a shirt to be taken on and
off at pleasure, but a skin, eternally fixed. And this strange,
powerful style, how is it to be described? Best, perhaps, in his
own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with perhaps the arriere
pensee that the words would apply as strongly to himself.

"His favourite author," says he, "was one writing on heroes in a
style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so
loose and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled
down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster,
sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke,
like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a
hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like
slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole
book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints."

What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid
is the impression left by such expressions as "all the pages in a
breeze." As a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the
passage is equally perfect.

Well, "Richard Feverel" has come into its own at last. I confess to
having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I
do not think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water,
finds its true level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at
last. I am sure that if the critics were to unite to praise a bad
book or to damn a good one they could (and continually do) have
a five-year influence, but it would in no wise affect the final
result. Sheridan said that if all the fleas in his bed had been
unanimous, they could have pushed him out of it. I do not think
that any unanimity of critics has ever pushed a good book out of
literature.

Among the minor excellences of "Richard Feverel"--excuse the
prolixity of an enthusiast--are the scattered aphorisms which are
worthy of a place among our British proverbs. What could be more
exquisite than this, "Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer
is answered"; or this, "Expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right is
God's"; or, "All great thoughts come from the heart"? Good are the
words "The coward amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of
humanity," and a healthy optimism rings in the phrase "There is for
the mind but one grasp of happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle
of wisdom whence we see that this world is well designed." In more
playful mood is "Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by
man." Let us hurry away abruptly, for he who starts quotation from
"Richard Feverel" is lost.

He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There
are the Italian ones, "Sandra Belloni," and "Vittoria"; there is
"Rhoda Fleming," which carried Stevenson off his critical feet;
"Beauchamp's Career," too, dealing with obsolete politics. No great
writer should spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the
beauty who is painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends
to become obsolete along with her frame. Here also is the dainty
"Diana," the egoist with immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type
of masculine selfishness, and "Harry Richmond," the first chapters
of which are, in my opinion, among the finest pieces of narrative
prose in the language. That great mind would have worked in any form
which his age had favoured. He is a novelist by accident. As an
Elizabethan he would have been a great dramatist; under Queen Anne
a great essayist. But whatever medium he worked in, he must equally
have thrown the image of a great brain and a great soul.



VIII.


We have left our eighteenth-century novelists--Fielding, Richardson,
and Smollett--safely behind us, with all their solidity and their
audacity, their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre. They have
brought us, as you perceive, to the end of the shelf. What, not
wearied? Ready for yet another? Let us run down this next row, then,
and I will tell you a few things which may be of interest, though
they will be dull enough if you have not been born with that love of
books in your heart which is among the choicest gifts of the gods.
If that is wanting, then one might as well play music to the deaf,
or walk round the Academy with the colour-blind, as appeal to the
book-sense of an unfortunate who has it not.

There is this old brown volume in the corner. How it got there I
cannot imagine, for it is one of those which I bought for threepence
out of the remnant box in Edinburgh, and its weather-beaten comrades
are up yonder in the back gallery, while this one has elbowed its
way among the quality in the stalls. But it is worth a word or two.
Take it out and handle it! See how swarthy it is, how squat, with
how bullet-proof a cover of scaling leather. Now open the fly-leaf
"Ex libris Guilielmi Whyte. 1672" in faded yellow ink. I wonder who
William Whyte may have been, and what he did upon earth in the reign
of the merry monarch. A pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I
should judge, by that hard, angular writing. The date of issue is
1642, so it was printed just about the time when the Pilgrim Fathers
were settling down into their new American home, and the first
Charles's head was still firm upon his shoulders, though a little
puzzled, no doubt, at what was going on around it. The book is in
Latin--though Cicero might not have admitted it--and it treats of
the laws of warfare.

I picture some pedantic Dugald Dalgetty bearing it about under his
buff coat, or down in his holster, and turning up the reference for
every fresh emergency which occurred. "Hullo! here's a well!" says
he. "I wonder if I may poison it?" Out comes the book, and he runs a
dirty forefinger down the index. "Ob fas est aquam hostis venere,"
etc. "Tut, tut, it's not allowed. But here are some of the enemy in
a barn? What about that?" "Ob fas est hostem incendio," etc. "Yes;
he says we may. Quick, Ambrose, up with the straw and the tinder
box." Warfare was no child's play about the time when Tilly sacked
Magdeburg, and Cromwell turned his hand from the mash tub to the
sword. It might not be much better now in a long campaign, when men
were hardened and embittered. Many of these laws are unrepealed, and
it is less than a century since highly disciplined British troops
claimed their dreadful rights at Badajos and Rodrigo. Recent
European wars have been so short that discipline and humanity have
not had time to go to pieces, but a long war would show that man is
ever the same, and that civilization is the thinnest of veneers.

Now you see that whole row of books which takes you at one sweep
nearly across the shelf? I am rather proud of those, for they are
my collection of Napoleonic military memoirs. There is a story told
of an illiterate millionaire who gave a wholesale dealer an order
for a copy of all books in any language treating of any aspect of
Napoleon's career. He thought it would fill a case in his library.
He was somewhat taken aback, however, when in a few weeks he
received a message from the dealer that he had got 40,000 volumes,
and awaited instructions as to whether he should send them on as
an instalment, or wait for a complete set. The figures may not be
exact, but at least they bring home the impossibility of exhausting
the subject, and the danger of losing one's self for years in a huge
labyrinth of reading, which may end by leaving no very definite
impression upon your mind. But one might, perhaps, take a corner of
it, as I have done here in the military memoirs, and there one might
hope to get some finality.

Here is Marbot at this end--the first of all soldier books in the
world. This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red
and gold cover, smart and debonnaire like its author. Here he is
in one frontispiece with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a
Captain of his beloved Chasseurs. And here in the other is the
grizzled old bull-dog as a full general, looking as full of fight as
ever. It was a real blow to me when some one began to throw doubts
upon the authenticity of Marbot's memoirs. Homer may be dissolved
into a crowd of skin-clad bards. Even Shakespeare may be jostled
in his throne of honour by plausible Baconians; but the human, the
gallant, the inimitable Marbot! His book is that which gives us the
best picture by far of the Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are
even more interesting than their great leader, though his must ever
be the most singular figure in history. But those soldiers, with
their huge shakoes, their hairy knapsacks, and their hearts of
steel--what men they were! And what a latent power there must be
in this French nation which could go on pouring out the blood of
its sons for twenty-three years with hardly a pause!

It took all that time to work off the hot ferment which the
Revolution had left in men's veins. And they were not exhausted, for
the very last fight which the French fought was the finest of all.
Proud as we are of our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the
French cavalry that the greenest laurels of that great epic rested.
They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our guns again
and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field,
and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever.
Read Gronow's "Memoirs," that chatty little yellow volume yonder
which brings all that age back to us more vividly than any more
pretentious work, and you will find the chivalrous admiration which
our officers expressed at the fine performance of the French
horsemen.

It must be admitted that, looking back upon history, we have not
always been good allies, nor yet generous co-partners in the
battlefield. The first is the fault of our politics, where one party
rejoices to break what the other has bound. The makers of the Treaty
are staunch enough, as the Tories were under Pitt and Castlereagh,
or the Whigs at the time of Queen Anne, but sooner or later the
others must come in. At the end of the Marlborough wars we suddenly
vamped up a peace and, left our allies in the lurch, on account
of a change in domestic politics. We did the same with Frederick
the Great, and would have done it in the Napoleonic days if Fox
could have controlled the country. And as to our partners of the
battlefield, how little we have ever said that is hearty as to the
splendid staunchness of the Prussians at Waterloo. You have to read
the Frenchman, Houssaye, to get a central view and to understand
the part they played. Think of old Blucher, seventy years old, and
ridden over by a regiment of charging cavalry the day before, yet
swearing that he would come to Wellington if he had to be strapped
to his horse. He nobly redeemed his promise.

The loss of the Prussians at Waterloo was not far short of our own.
You would not know it, to read our historians. And then the abuse
of our Belgian allies has been overdone. Some of them fought
splendidly, and one brigade of infantry had a share in the critical
instant when the battle was turned. This also you would not learn
from British sources. Look at our Portuguese allies also! They
trained into magnificent troops, and one of Wellington's earnest
desires was to have ten thousand of them for his Waterloo campaign.
It was a Portuguese who first topped the rampart of Badajos. They
have never had their due credit, nor have the Spaniards either, for,
though often defeated, it was their unconquerable pertinacity which
played a great part in the struggle. No; I do not think that we are
very amiable partners, but I suppose that all national history may
be open to a similar charge.

It must be confessed that Marbot's details are occasionally a little
hard to believe. Never in the pages of Lever has there been such a
series of hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits. Surely he
stretched it a little sometimes. You may remember his adventure at
Eylau--I think it was Eylau--how a cannon-ball, striking the top of
his helmet, paralyzed him by the concussion of his spine; and how,
on a Russian officer running forward to cut him down, his horse bit
the man's face nearly off. This was the famous charger which savaged
everything until Marbot, having bought it for next to nothing, cured
it by thrusting a boiling leg of mutton into its mouth when it tried
to bite him. It certainly does need a robust faith to get over these
incidents. And yet, when one reflects upon the hundreds of battles
and skirmishes which a Napoleonic officer must have endured--how
they must have been the uninterrupted routine of his life from the
first dark hair upon his lip to the first grey one upon his head,
it is presumptuous to say what may or may not have been possible in
such unparalleled careers. At any rate, be it fact or fiction--fact
it is, in my opinion, with some artistic touching up of the high
lights--there are few books which I could not spare from my shelves
better than the memoirs of the gallant Marbot.

I dwell upon this particular book because it is the best; but take
the whole line, and there is not one which is not full of interest.
Marbot gives you the point of view of the officer. So does De
Segur and De Fezensac and Colonel Gonville, each in some different
branch of the service. But some are from the pens of the men in the
ranks, and they are even more graphic than the others. Here, for
example, are the papers of good old Cogniet, who was a grenadier of
the Guard, and could neither read nor write until after the great
wars were over. A tougher soldier never went into battle. Here is
Sergeant Bourgogne, also with his dreadful account of that nightmare
campaign in Russia, and the gallant Chevillet, trumpeter of
Chasseurs, with his matter-of-fact account of all that he saw, where
the daily "combat" is sandwiched in betwixt the real business of the
day, which was foraging for his frugal breakfast and supper. There
is no better writing, and no easier reading, than the records of
these men of action.

A Briton cannot help asking himself, as he realizes what men these
were, what would have happened if 150,000 Cogniets and Bourgognes,
with Marbots to lead them, and the great captain of all time in the
prime of his vigour at their head, had made their landing in Kent?
For months it was touch-and-go. A single naval slip which left
the Channel clear would have been followed by an embarkation
from Boulogne, which had been brought by constant practice to so
incredibly fine a point that the last horse was aboard within two
hours of the start. Any evening might have seen the whole host
upon the Pevensey Flats. What then? We know what Humbert did with
a handful of men in Ireland, and the story is not reassuring.
Conquest, of course, is unthinkable. The world in arms could not do
that. But Napoleon never thought of the conquest of Britain. He has
expressly disclaimed it. What he did contemplate was a gigantic raid
in which he would do so much damage that for years to come England
would be occupied at home in picking up the pieces, instead of
having energy to spend abroad in thwarting his Continental plans.

Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Sheerness in flames, with London either
levelled to the ground or ransomed at his own figure--that was a
more feasible programme. Then, with the united fleets of conquered
Europe at his back, enormous armies and an inexhaustible treasury,
swollen with the ransom of Britain, he could turn to that conquest
of America which would win back the old colonies of France and leave
him master of the world. If the worst happened and he had met his
Waterloo upon the South Downs, he would have done again what he
did in Egypt and once more in Russia: hurried back to France in a
swift vessel, and still had force enough to hold his own upon the
Continent. It would, no doubt, have been a big stake to lay upon
the table--150,000 of his best--but he could play again if he lost;
while, if he won, he cleared the board. A fine game--if little
Nelson had not stopped it, and with one blow fixed the edge of salt
water as the limit of Napoleon's power.

There's the cast of a medal on the top of that cabinet which will
bring it all close home to you. It is taken from the die of the
medal which Napoleon had arranged to issue on the day that he
reached London. It serves, at any rate, to show that his great
muster was not a bluff, but that he really did mean serious
business. On one side is his head. On the other France is engaged
in strangling and throwing to earth a curious fish-tailed creature,
which stands for perfidious Albion. "Frappe a Londres" is
printed on one part of it, and "La Descente dans Angleterre" upon
another. Struck to commemorate a conquest, it remains now as a
souvenir of a fiasco. But it was a close call.

By the way, talking of Napoleon's flight from Egypt, did you ever
see a curious little book called, if I remember right, "Intercepted
Letters"? No; I have no copy upon this shelf, but a friend is more
fortunate. It shows the almost incredible hatred which existed
at the end of the eighteenth century between the two nations,
descending even to the most petty personal annoyance. On this
occasion the British Government intercepted a mail-bag of letters
coming from French officers in Egypt to their friends at home,
and they either published them, or at least allowed them to be
published, in the hope, no doubt, of causing domestic complications.
Was ever a more despicable action? But who knows what other injuries
had been inflicted to draw forth such a retaliation? I have myself
seen a burned and mutilated British mail lying where De Wet had left
it; but suppose the refinement of his vengeance had gone so far as
to publish it, what a thunder-bolt it might have been!

As to the French officers, I have read their letters, though even
after a century one had a feeling of guilt when one did so. But, on
the whole, they are a credit to the writers, and give the impression
of a noble and chivalrous set of men. Whether they were all
addressed to the right people is another matter, and therein lay the
poisoned sting of this most un-British affair. As to the monstrous
things which were done upon the other side, remember the arrest of
all the poor British tourists and commercials who chanced to be in
France when the war was renewed in 1803. They had run over in all
trust and confidence for a little outing and change of air. They
certainly got it, for Napoleon's steel grip fell upon them, and they
rejoined their families in 1814. He must have had a heart of adamant
and a will of iron. Look at his conduct over the naval prisoners.
The natural proceeding would have been to exchange them. For some
reason he did not think it good policy to do so. All representations
from the British Government were set aside, save in the case of the
higher officers. Hence the miseries of the hulks and the dreadful
prison barracks in England. Hence also the unhappy idlers of Verdun.
What splendid loyalty there must have been in those humble Frenchmen
which never allowed them for one instant to turn bitterly upon the
author of all their great misfortunes. It is all brought vividly
home by the description of their prisons given by Borrow in
"Lavengro." This is the passage--

  "What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with
  their blank, blind walls, without windows or grating, and
  their slanting roofs, out of which, through orifices where
  the tiles had been removed, would be protruded dozens of
  grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide
  expanse of country unfolded from their airy height. Ah!
  there was much misery in those casernes; and from those
  roofs, doubtless, many a wistful look was turned in the
  direction of lovely France. Much had the poor inmates to
  endure, and much to complain of, to the disgrace of England
  be it said--of England, in general so kind and bountiful.
  Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I have seen
  the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy
  entertainment even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless
  and captive; and such, alas! was the fare in those casernes.
  And then, those visits, or rather ruthless inroads, called
  in the slang of the place 'straw-plait hunts,' when in
  pursuit of a contraband article, which the prisoners,
  in order to procure themselves a few of the necessaries
  and comforts of existence, were in the habit of making,
  red-coated battalions were marched into the prisons, who,
  with the bayonet's point, carried havoc and ruin into every
  poor convenience which ingenious wretchedness had been
  endeavouring to raise around it; and then the triumphant
  exit with the miserable booty, and worst of all, the accursed
  bonfire, on the barrack parade of the plait contraband,
  beneath the view of glaring eyeballs from those lofty roofs,
  amid the hurrahs of the troops frequently drowned in the
  curses poured down from above like a tempest-shower, or in
  the terrific war-whoop of 'Vive l'Empereur!'"

There is a little vignette of Napoleon's men in captivity. Here is
another which is worth preserving of the bearing of his veterans
when wounded on the field of battle. It is from Mercer's
recollections of the Battle of Waterloo. Mercer had spent the day
firing case into the French cavalry at ranges from fifty to two
hundred yards, losing two-thirds of his own battery in the process.
In the evening he had a look at some of his own grim handiwork.

  "I had satisfied my curiosity at Hougoumont, and was retracing
  my steps up the hill when my attention was called to a group
  of wounded Frenchmen by the calm, dignified, and soldier-like
  oration addressed by one of them to the rest. I cannot, like
  Livy, compose a fine harangue for my hero, and, of course, I
  could not retain the precise words, but the import of them was
  to exhort them to bear their sufferings with fortitude; not
  to repine, like women or children, at what every soldier
  should have made up his mind to suffer as the fortune of
  war, but above all, to remember that they were surrounded by
  Englishmen, before whom they ought to be doubly careful not
  to disgrace themselves by displaying such an unsoldier-like
  want of fortitude.

  "The speaker was sitting on the ground with his lance stuck
  upright beside him--an old veteran with thick bushy, grizzly
  beard, countenance like a lion--a lancer of the old guard,
  and no doubt had fought in many a field. One hand was
  flourished in the air as he spoke, the other, severed at the
  wrist, lay on the earth beside him; one ball (case-shot,
  probably) had entered his body, another had broken his leg.
  His suffering, after a night of exposure so mangled, must
  have been great; yet he betrayed it not. His bearing was
  that of a Roman, or perhaps an Indian warrior, and I could
  fancy him concluding appropriately his speech in the words
  of the Mexican king, 'And I too; am I on a bed of roses?'"

What a load of moral responsibility upon one man! But his mind was
insensible to moral responsibility. Surely if it had not been it
must have been crushed beneath it. Now, if you want to understand
the character of Napoleon--but surely I must take a fresh start
before I launch on so portentous a subject as that.

But before I leave the military men let me, for the credit of my own
country, after that infamous incident of the letters, indicate these
six well-thumbed volumes of "Napier's History." This is the story of
the great Peninsular War, by one who fought through it himself, and
in no history has a more chivalrous and manly account been given of
one's enemy. Indeed, Napier seems to me to push it too far, for his
admiration appears to extend not only to the gallant soldiers who
opposed him, but to the character and to the ultimate aims of their
leader. He was, in fact, a political follower of Charles James Fox,
and his heart seems to have been with the enemy even at the moment
when he led his men most desperately against them. In the verdict
of history the action of those men who, in their honest zeal for
freedom, inflamed somewhat by political strife, turned against their
own country, when it was in truth the Champion of Freedom, and
approved of a military despot of the most uncompromising kind, seems
wildly foolish.

But if Napier's politics may seem strange, his soldiering was
splendid, and his prose among the very best that I know. There
are passages in that work--the one which describes the breach of
Badajos, that of the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera, and that
of the French advance at Fuentes d'Onoro--which once read haunt the
mind for ever. The book is a worthy monument of a great national
epic. Alas! for the pregnant sentence with which it closes, "So
ended the great war, and with it all memory of the services of the
veterans." Was there ever a British war of which the same might not
have been written?

The quotation which I have given from Mercer's book turns my
thoughts in the direction of the British military reminiscences of
that period, less numerous, less varied, and less central than the
French, but full of character and interest all the same. I have
found that if I am turned loose in a large library, after hesitating
over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier
memoirs which I take down. Man is never so interesting as when he is
thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is
at stake upon the event. But of all types of soldier the best is
the man who is keen upon his work, and yet has general culture
which enables him to see that work in its due perspective, and to
sympathize with the gentler aspirations of mankind. Such a man is
Mercer, an ice-cool fighter, with a sense of discipline and decorum
which prevented him from moving when a bombshell was fizzing between
his feet, and yet a man of thoughtful and philosophic temperament,
with a weakness for solitary musings, for children, and for flowers.
He has written for all time the classic account of a great battle,
seen from the point of view of a battery commander. Many others of
Wellington's soldiers wrote their personal reminiscences. You can
get them, as I have them there, in the pleasant abridgement of
"Wellington's Men" (admirably edited by Dr. Fitchett)--Anton the
Highlander, Harris the rifleman, and Kincaid of the same corps. It
is a most singular fate which has made an Australian nonconformist
clergyman the most sympathetic and eloquent reconstructor of those
old heroes, but it is a noble example of that unity of the British
race, which in fifty scattered lands still mourns or rejoices over
the same historic record.

And just one word, before I close down this over-long and too
discursive chatter, on the subject of yonder twin red volumes which
flank the shelf. They are Maxwell's "History of Wellington," and I
do not think you will find a better or more readable one. The reader
must ever feel towards the great soldier what his own immediate
followers felt, respect rather than affection. One's failure to
attain a more affectionate emotion is alleviated by the knowledge
that it was the last thing which he invited or desired. "Don't be a
damned fool, sir!" was his exhortation to the good citizen who had
paid him a compliment. It was a curious, callous nature, brusque
and limited. The hardest huntsman learns to love his hounds, but he
showed no affection and a good deal of contempt for the men who had
been his instruments. "They are the scum of the earth," said he.
"All English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink. That
is the plain fact--they have all enlisted for drink." His general
orders were full of undeserved reproaches at a time when the most
lavish praise could hardly have met the real deserts of his army.
When the wars were done he saw little, save in his official
capacity, of his old comrades-in-arms. And yet, from major-general
to drummer-boy, he was the man whom they would all have elected to
serve under, had the work to be done once more. As one of them said,
"The sight of his long nose was worth ten thousand men on a field of
battle." They were themselves a leathery breed, and cared little for
the gentler amenities so long as the French were well drubbed.

His mind, which was comprehensive and alert in warfare, was
singularly limited in civil affairs. As a statesman he was so
constant an example of devotion to duty, self-sacrifice, and high
disinterested character, that the country was the better for his
presence. But he fiercely opposed Catholic Emancipation, the Reform
Bill, and everything upon which our modern life is founded. He could
never be brought to see that a pyramid should stand on its base and
not on its apex, and that the larger the pyramid, the broader should
be the base. Even in military affairs he was averse from every
change, and I know of no improvements which came from his initiative
during all those years when his authority was supreme. The floggings
which broke a man's spirit and self-respect, the leathern stock
which hampered his movements, all the old traditional regime
found a champion in him. On the other hand, he strongly opposed the
introduction of the percussion cap as opposed to the flint and steel
in the musket. Neither in war nor in politics did he rightly judge
the future.

And yet in reading his letters and dispatches, one is surprised
sometimes at the incisive thought and its vigorous expression. There
is a passage in which he describes the way in which his soldiers
would occasionally desert into some town which he was besieging.
"They knew," he writes, "that they must be taken, for when we lay
our bloody hands upon a place we are sure to take it, sooner or
later; but they liked being dry and under cover, and then that
extraordinary caprice which always pervades the English character!
Our deserters are very badly treated by the enemy; those who
deserted in France were treated as the lowest of mortals, slaves and
scavengers. Nothing but English caprice can account for it; just
what makes our noblemen associate with stage-coach drivers, and
become stage-coach drivers themselves." After reading that passage,
how often does the phrase "the extraordinary caprice which always
pervades the English character" come back as one observes some fresh
manifestation of it!

But let not my last note upon the great duke be a carping one.
Rather let my final sentence be one which will remind you of his
frugal and abstemious life, his carpetless floor and little camp
bed, his precise courtesy which left no humblest letter unanswered,
his courage which never flinched, his tenacity which never faltered,
his sense of duty which made his life one long unselfish effort
on behalf of what seemed to him to be the highest interest of the
State. Go down and stand by the huge granite sarcophagus in the dim
light of the crypt of St. Paul's, and in the hush of that austere
spot, cast back your mind to the days when little England alone
stood firm against the greatest soldier and the greatest army that
the world has ever known. Then you feel what this dead man stood
for, and you pray that we may still find such another amongst us
when the clouds gather once again.

You see that the literature of Waterloo is well represented in my
small military library. Of all books dealing with the personal
view of the matter, I think that "Siborne's Letters," which is a
collection of the narratives of surviving officers made by Siborne
in the year 1827, is the most interesting. Gronow's account is
also very vivid and interesting. Of the strategical narratives,
Houssaye's book is my favourite. Taken from the French point of
view, it gets the actions of the allies in truer perspective than
any English or German account can do; but there is a fascination
about that great combat which makes every narrative that bears upon
it of enthralling interest.

Wellington used to say that too much was made of it, and that one
would imagine that the British Army had never fought a battle
before. It was a characteristic speech, but it must be admitted that
the British Army never had, as a matter of fact, for many centuries
fought a battle which was finally decisive of a great European war.
There lies the perennial interest of the incident, that it was the
last act of that long-drawn drama, and that to the very fall of the
curtain no man could tell how the play would end--"the nearest run
thing that ever you saw"--that was the victor's description. It is
a singular thing that during those twenty-five years of incessant
fighting the material and methods of warfare made so little
progress. So far as I know, there was no great change in either
between 1789 and 1805. The breech-loader, heavy artillery, the
ironclad, all great advances in the art of war, have been invented
in time of peace. There are some improvements so obvious, and at
the same time so valuable, that it is extraordinary that they were
not adopted. Signalling, for example, whether by heliograph or by
flag-waving, would have made an immense difference in the Napoleonic
campaigns. The principle of the semaphore was well known, and
Belgium, with its numerous windmills, would seem to be furnished
with natural semaphores. Yet in the four days during which the
campaign of Waterloo was fought, the whole scheme of military
operations on both sides was again and again imperilled, and finally
in the case of the French brought to utter ruin by lack of that
intelligence which could so easily have been conveyed. June 18th was
at intervals a sunshiny day--a four-inch glass mirror would have
put Napoleon in communication with Gruchy, and the whole history
of Europe might have been altered. Wellington himself suffered
dreadfully from defective information which might have been easily
supplied. The unexpected presence of the French army was first
discovered at four in the morning of June 15. It was of enormous
importance to get the news rapidly to Wellington at Brussels that he
might instantly concentrate his scattered forces on the best line
of resistance--yet, through the folly of sending only a single
messenger, this vital information did not reach him until three in
the afternoon, the distance being thirty miles. Again, when Blucher
was defeated at Ligny on the 16th, it was of enormous importance
that Wellington should know at once the line of his retreat so as
to prevent the French from driving a wedge between them. The single
Prussian officer who was despatched with this information was
wounded, and never reached his destination, and it was only next
day that Wellington learned the Prussian plans. On what tiny things
does History depend!



IX.


The contemplation of my fine little regiment of French military
memoirs had brought me to the question of Napoleon himself, and you
see that I have a very fair line dealing with him also. There is
Scott's life, which is not entirely a success. His ink was too
precious to be shed in such a venture. But here are the three
volumes of the physician Bourrienne--that Bourrienne who knew him so
well. Does any one ever know a man so well as his doctor? They are
quite excellent and admirably translated. Meneval also--the patient
Meneval--who wrote for untold hours to dictation at ordinary talking
speed, and yet was expected to be legible and to make no mistakes.
At least his master could not fairly criticize his legibility, for
is it not on record that when Napoleon's holograph account of an
engagement was laid before the President of the Senate, the worthy
man thought that it was a drawn plan of the battle? Meneval survived
his master and has left an excellent and intimate account of him.
There is Constant's account, also written from that point of view in
which it is proverbial that no man is a hero. But of all the vivid
terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who
never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him. I
mean Taine's account of him, in the first volume of "Les Origines de
la France Contemporaine." You can never forget it when once you have
read it. He produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel,
way. He does not, for example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon
had a more than mediaeval Italian cunning. He presents a succession
of documents--gives a series of contemporary instances to prove
it. Then, having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow,
he passes on to another phase of his character, his coldhearted
amorousness, his power of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or
some other quality, and piles up his illustrations of that. Instead,
for example, of saying that the Emperor had a marvellous memory for
detail, we have the account of the head of Artillery laying the list
of all the guns in France before his master, who looked over it and
remarked, "Yes, but you have omitted two in a fort near Dieppe." So
the man is gradually etched in with indelible ink. It is a wonderful
figure of which you are conscious in the end, the figure of an
archangel, but surely of an archangel of darkness.

We will, after Taine's method, take one fact and let it speak for
itself. Napoleon left a legacy in a codicil to his will to a man
who tried to assassinate Wellington. There is the mediaeval Italian
again! He was no more a Corsican than the Englishman born in India
is a Hindoo. Read the lives of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the
Medicis, and of all the lustful, cruel, broad-minded, art-loving,
talented despots of the little Italian States, including Genoa,
from which the Buonapartes migrated. There at once you get the
real descent of the man, with all the stigmata clear upon him--the
outward calm, the inward passion, the layer of snow above the
volcano, everything which characterized the old despots of his
native land, the pupils of Machiavelli, but all raised to the
dimensions of genius. You can whitewash him as you may, but you
will never get a layer thick enough to cover the stain of that
cold-blooded deliberate endorsement of his noble adversary's
assassination.

Another book which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the
man is this one--the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat. She was in daily
contact with him at the Court, and she studied him with those quick
critical eyes of a clever woman, the most unerring things in life
when they are not blinded by love. If you have read those pages, you
feel that you know him as if you had yourself seen and talked with
him. His singular mixture of the small and the great, his huge sweep
of imagination, his very limited knowledge, his intense egotism, his
impatience of obstacles, his boorishness, his gross impertinence to
women, his diabolical playing upon the weak side of every one with
whom he came in contact--they make up among them one of the most
striking of historical portraits.

Most of my books deal with the days of his greatness, but here, you
see, is a three-volume account of those weary years at St. Helena.
Who can help pitying the mewed eagle? And yet if you play the great
game you must pay a stake. This was the same man who had a royal
duke shot in a ditch because he was a danger to his throne. Was
not he himself a danger to every throne in Europe? Why so harsh a
retreat as St. Helena, you say? Remember that he had been put in a
milder one before, that he had broken away from it, and that the
lives of fifty thousand men had paid for the mistaken leniency.
All this is forgotten now, and the pathetic picture of the modern
Prometheus chained to his rock and devoured by the vultures of his
own bitter thoughts, is the one impression which the world has
retained. It is always so much easier to follow the emotions than
the reason, especially where a cheap magnanimity and second-hand
generosity are involved. But reason must still insist that Europe's
treatment of Napoleon was not vindictive, and that Hudson Lowe was
a man who tried to live up to the trust which had been committed to
him by his country.

It was certainly not a post from which any one would hope for
credit. If he were slack and easy-going all would be well. But there
would be the chance of a second flight with its consequences. If he
were strict and assiduous he would be assuredly represented as a
petty tyrant. "I am glad when you are on outpost," said Lowe's
general in some campaign, "for then I am sure of a sound rest." He
was on outpost at St. Helena, and because he was true to his duties
Europe (France included) had a sound rest. But he purchased it at
the price of his own reputation. The greatest schemer in the world,
having nothing else on which to vent his energies, turned them all
to the task of vilifying his guardian. It was natural enough that he
who had never known control should not brook it now. It is natural
also that sentimentalists who have not thought of the details should
take the Emperor's point of view. What is deplorable, however, is
that our own people should be misled by one-sided accounts, and that
they should throw to the wolves a man who was serving his country in
a post of anxiety and danger, with such responsibility upon him as
few could ever have endured. Let them remember Montholon's remark:
"An angel from heaven would not have satisfied us." Let them recall
also that Lowe with ample material never once troubled to state his
own case. "Je fais mon devoir et suis indifferent pour le reste,"
said he, in his interview with the Emperor. They were no idle words.

Apart from this particular epoch, French literature, which is so
rich in all its branches, is richest of all in its memoirs. Whenever
there was anything of interest going forward there was always some
kindly gossip who knew all about it, and was ready to set it down
for the benefit of posterity. Our own history has not nearly enough
of these charming sidelights. Look at our sailors in the Napoleonic
wars, for example. They played an epoch-making part. For nearly
twenty years Freedom was a Refugee upon the seas. Had our navy been
swept away, then all Europe would have been one organized despotism.
At times everybody was against us, fighting against their own direct
interests under the pressure of that terrible hand. We fought on the
waters with the French, with the Spaniards, with the Danes, with the
Russians, with the Turks, even with our American kinsmen. Middies
grew into post-captains, and admirals into dotards during that
prolonged struggle. And what have we in literature to show for it
all? Marryat's novels, many of which are founded upon personal
experience, Nelson's and Collingwood's letters, Lord Cochrane's
biography--that is about all. I wish we had more of Collingwood,
for he wielded a fine pen. Do you remember the sonorous opening of
his Trafalgar message to his captains?--

  "The ever to be lamented death of Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke
  of Bronte, the Commander-in-Chief, who fell in the action of
  the 21st, in the arms of Victory, covered with glory, whose
  memory will be ever dear to the British Navy and the British
  Nation; whose zeal for the honour of his king and for the
  interests of his country will be ever held up as a shining
  example for a British seaman--leaves to me a duty to return
  thanks, etc., etc."

It was a worthy sentence to carry such a message, written too in a
raging tempest, with sinking vessels all around him. But in the main
it is a poor crop from such a soil. No doubt our sailors were too
busy to do much writing, but none the less one wonders that among
so many thousands there were not some to understand what a treasure
their experiences would be to their descendants. I can call to mind
the old three-deckers which used to rot in Portsmouth Harbour, and
I have often thought, could they tell their tales, what a missing
chapter in our literature they could supply.

It is not only in Napoleonic memoirs that the French are so
fortunate. The almost equally interesting age of Louis XIV. produced
an even more wonderful series. If you go deeply into the subject
you are amazed by their number, and you feel as if every one at the
Court of the Roi Soleil had done what he (or she) could to give
away their neighbours. Just to take the more obvious, there are St.
Simon's Memoirs--those in themselves give us a more comprehensive
and intimate view of the age than anything I know of which treats
of the times of Queen Victoria. Then there is St. Evremond, who is
nearly as complete. Do you want the view of a woman of quality?
There are the letters of Madame de Sevigne (eight volumes of
them), perhaps the most wonderful series of letters that any woman
has ever penned. Do you want the confessions of a rake of the
period? Here are the too salacious memoirs of the mischievous Duc
de Roquelaure, not reading for the nursery certainly, not even for
the boudoir, but a strange and very intimate picture of the times.
All these books fit into each other, for the characters of the one
reappear in the others. You come to know them quite familiarly
before you have finished, their loves and their hates, their duels,
their intrigues, and their ultimate fortunes. If you do not care
to go so deeply into it you have only to put Julia Pardoe's
four-volumed "Court of Louis XIV." upon your shelf, and you will
find a very admirable condensation--or a distillation rather, for
most of the salt is left behind. There is another book too--that
big one on the bottom shelf--which holds it all between its brown
and gold covers. An extravagance that--for it cost me some
sovereigns--but it is something to have the portraits of all that
wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the devout Maintenon, of the frail
Montespan, of Bossuet, Fenelon, Moliere, Racine, Pascal, Conde,
Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age. If you want to
make yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of "The Court and
Times of Louis XIV.," you will never think that your money has
been wasted.

Well, I have bored you unduly, my patient friend, with my love of
memoirs, Napoleonic and otherwise, which give a touch of human
interest to the arid records of history. Not that history should
be arid. It ought to be the most interesting subject upon earth,
the story of ourselves, of our forefathers, of the human race, the
events which made us what we are, and wherein, if Weismann's views
hold the field, some microscopic fraction of this very body which
for the instant we chance to inhabit may have borne a part. But
unfortunately the power of accumulating knowledge and that of
imparting it are two very different things, and the uninspired
historian becomes merely the dignified compiler of an enlarged
almanac. Worst of all, when a man does come along with fancy and
imagination, who can breathe the breath of life into the dry bones,
it is the fashion for the dryasdusts to belabour him, as one who
has wandered away from the orthodox path and must necessarily be
inaccurate. So Froude was attacked. So also Macaulay in his day. But
both will be read when the pedants are forgotten. If I were asked
my very ideal of how history should be written, I think I should
point to those two rows on yonder shelf, the one M'Carthy's "History
of Our Own Times," the other Lecky's "History of England in the
Eighteenth Century." Curious that each should have been written by
an Irishman, and that though of opposite politics and living in an
age when Irish affairs have caused such bitterness, both should be
conspicuous not merely for all literary graces, but for that broad
toleration which sees every side of a question, and handles every
problem from the point of view of the philosophic observer and never
of the sectarian partisan.

By the way, talking of history, have you read Parkman's works? He
was, I think, among the very greatest of the historians, and yet
one seldom hears his name. A New England man by birth, and writing
principally of the early history of the American Settlements and of
French Canada, it is perhaps excusable that he should have no great
vogue in England, but even among Americans I have found many who
have not read him. There are four of his volumes in green and gold
down yonder, "The Jesuits in Canada," and "Frontenac," but there
are others, all of them well worth reading, "Pioneers of France,"
"Montcalm and Wolfe," "Discovery of the Great West," etc. Some day
I hope to have a complete set.

Taking only that one book, "The Jesuits in Canada," it is worth a
reputation in itself. And how noble a tribute is this which a man
of Puritan blood pays to that wonderful Order! He shows how in the
heyday of their enthusiasm these brave soldiers of the Cross invaded
Canada as they did China and every other place where danger was to
be faced, and a horrible death to be found. I don't care what faith
a man may profess, or whether he be a Christian at all, but he
cannot read these true records without feeling that the very highest
that man has ever evolved in sanctity and devotion was to be found
among these marvellous men. They were indeed the pioneers of
civilization, for apart from doctrines they brought among the
savages the highest European culture, and in their own deportment an
object-lesson of how chastely, austerely, and nobly men could live.
France has sent myriads of brave men on to her battlefields, but in
all her long record of glory I do not think that she can point to
any courage so steadfast and so absolutely heroic as that of the
men of the Iroquois Mission.

How nobly they lived makes the body of the book, how serenely they
died forms the end to it. It is a tale which cannot even now be read
without a shudder--a nightmare of horrors. Fanaticism may brace a
man to hurl himself into oblivion, as the Mahdi's hordes did before
Khartoum, but one feels that it is at least a higher development of
such emotion, where men slowly and in cold blood endure so thankless
a life, and welcome so dreadful an end. Every faith can equally
boast its martyrs--a painful thought, since it shows how many
thousands must have given their blood for error--but in testifying
to their faith these brave men have testified to something more
important still, to the subjugation of the body and to the absolute
supremacy of the dominating spirit.

The story of Father Jogue is but one of many, and yet it is worth
recounting, as showing the spirit of the men. He also was on the
Iroquois Mission, and was so tortured and mutilated by his sweet
parishioners that the very dogs used to howl at his distorted
figure. He made his way back to France, not for any reason of
personal rest or recuperation, but because he needed a special
dispensation to say Mass. The Catholic Church has a regulation
that a priest shall not be deformed, so that the savages with
their knives had wrought better than they knew. He received his
dispensation and was sent for by Louis XIV., who asked him what he
could do for him. No doubt the assembled courtiers expected to hear
him ask for the next vacant Bishopric. What he did actually ask for,
as the highest favour, was to be sent back to the Iroquois Mission,
where the savages signalized his arrival by burning him alive.

Parkman is worth reading, if it were only for his account of the
Indians. Perhaps the very strangest thing about them, and the most
unaccountable, is their small numbers. The Iroquois were one of the
most formidable of tribes. They were of the Five Nations, whose
scalping-parties wandered over an expanse of thousands of square
miles. Yet there is good reason to doubt whether the whole five
nations could have put as many thousand warriors in the field. It
was the same with all the other tribes of Northern Americans, both
in the east, the north, and the west. Their numbers were always
insignificant. And yet they had that huge country to themselves,
the best of climates, and plenty of food. Why was it that they did
not people it thickly? It may be taken as a striking example of the
purpose and design which run through the affairs of men, that at the
very moment when the old world was ready to overflow the new world
was empty to receive it. Had North America been peopled as China
is peopled, the Europeans might have founded some settlements, but
could never have taken possession of the continent. Buffon has made
the striking remark that the creative power appeared to have never
had great vigour in America. He alluded to the abundance of the
flora and fauna as compared with that of other great divisions of
the earth's surface. Whether the numbers of the Indians are an
illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special
cause, is beyond my very modest scientific attainments. When one
reflects upon the countless herds of bison which used to cover the
Western plains, or marks in the present day the race statistics
of the French Canadians at one end of the continent, and of the
Southern negro at the other, it seems absurd to suppose that there
is any geographical reason against Nature being as prolific here
as elsewhere. However, these be deeper waters, and with your leave
we will get back into my usual six-inch wading-depth once more.



X.


I don't know how those two little books got in there. They are
Henley's "Song of the Sword" and "Book of Verses." They ought to be
over yonder in the rather limited Poetry Section. Perhaps it is that
I like his work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put
them ready to my hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was very
much greater than his work, great as some of his work was. I have
seldom known a personality more magnetic and stimulating. You left
his presence, as a battery leaves a generating station, charged up
and full. He made you feel what a lot of work there was to be done,
and how glorious it was to be able to do it, and how needful to get
started upon it that very hour. With the frame and the vitality of
a giant he was cruelly bereft of all outlet for his strength, and
so distilled it off in hot words, in warm sympathy, in strong
prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating emotions. Much
of the time and energy which might have built an imperishable name
for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it was not waste,
for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed beneath it.
A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature to-day.

Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best
was the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive
lines more noble and more strong than those which begin with the
well-known quatrain--

   "Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,
    I thank whatever Gods there be
      For my unconquerable soul."

It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from
a man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned
again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon's knife. When he
said--

   "In the fell clutch of Circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud,
    Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance
      My head is bloody but unbowed."

It was not what Lady Byron called "the mimic woe" of the poet, but
it was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake,
whose proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.

There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the
very extreme from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running
to large sweeping images and thundering words. Such are the "Song of
the Sword" and much more that he has written, like the wild singing
of some Northern scald. The other, and to my mind both the more
characteristic and the finer side of his work, is delicate, precise,
finely etched, with extraordinarily vivid little pictures drawn
in carefully phrased and balanced English. Such are the "Hospital
Verses," while the "London Voluntaries" stand midway between the two
styles. What! you have not read the "Hospital Verses!" Then get the
"Book of Verses" and read them without delay. You will surely find
something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name--or
at least I can name--nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and
Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if
majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied,
so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly
journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a
man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five booklets
behind him!

However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no
business in this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles
of various sorts. Here are three in a line, which carry you over a
splendid stretch of French (which usually means European) history,
each, as luck would have it, beginning just about the time when the
other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de Monstrelet,
and the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the
best contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a
century--a fair slice out of the total written record of the human
race.

Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval
French, which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get
Lord Berners' almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English,
or you can turn to a modern translation, such as this one of Johnes.
A single page of Lord Berners is delightful; but it is a strain,
I think, to read bulky volumes in an archaic style. Personally, I
prefer the modern, and even with that you have shown some patience
before you have reached the end of that big second tome.

I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea
of what he was doing--whether it ever flashed across his mind that
the day might come when his book would be the one great authority,
not only about the times in which he lived, but about the whole
institution of chivalry? I fear that it is far more likely that his
whole object was to gain some mundane advantage from the various
barons and knights whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left it
on record, for example, that when he visited the Court of England he
took with him a handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless,
if one could follow the good Canon one would find his journeys
littered with similar copies which were probably expensive gifts to
the recipient, for what return would a knightly soul make for a book
which enshrined his own valour?

But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be
admitted that the work could not have been done more thoroughly.
There is something of Herodotus in the Canon's cheery, chatty,
garrulous, take-it-or-leave-it manner. But he has the advantage
of the old Greek in accuracy. Considering that he belonged to the
same age which gravely accepted the travellers' tales of Sir John
Maundeville, it is, I think, remarkable how careful and accurate
the chronicler is. Take, for example, his description of Scotland
and the Scotch. Some would give the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that
is another matter. Scotch descriptions are a subject over which a
fourteenth-century Hainaulter might fairly be allowed a little scope
for his imagination. Yet we can see that the account must on the
whole have been very correct. The Galloway nags, the girdle-cakes,
the bagpipes--every little detail rings true. Jean-le-Bel was
actually present in a Border campaign, and from him Froissart got
his material; but he has never attempted to embroider it, and its
accuracy, where we can to some extent test it, must predispose us
to accept his accounts where they are beyond our confirmation.

But the most interesting portion of old Froissart's work is that
which deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time,
their deeds, their habits, their methods of talking. It is true that
he lived himself just a little after the true heyday of chivalry;
but he was quite early enough to have met many of the men who had
been looked upon as the flower of knighthood of the time. His book
was read too, and commented on by these very men (as many of them as
could read), and so we may take it that it was no fancy portrait,
but a correct picture of these soldiers which is to be found in it.
The accounts are always consistent. If you collate the remarks and
speeches of the knights (as I have had occasion to do) you will find
a remarkable uniformity running through them. We may believe then
that this really does represent the kind of men who fought at Crecy
and at Poictiers, in the age when both the French and the Scottish
kings were prisoners in London, and England reached a pitch of
military glory which has perhaps never been equalled in her history.

In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had
presented to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme
romancer, you will find that Scott's mediaeval knights were
usually muscular athletes in the prime of life: Bois-Guilbert,
Front-de-Boeuf, Richard, Ivanhoe, Count Robert--they all were
such. But occasionally the most famous of Froissart's knights were
old, crippled and blinded. Chandos, the best lance of his day, must
have been over seventy when he lost his life through being charged
upon the side on which he had already lost an eye. He was well on to
that age when he rode out from the English army and slew the Spanish
champion, big Marten Ferrara, upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth
and strength were very useful, no doubt, especially where heavy
armour had to be carried, but once on the horse's back the gallant
steed supplied the muscles. In an English hunting-field many a
doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated in his familiar
saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game. So it was
among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could still
carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms, and,
above all, their cool and undaunted courage.

Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the
knight was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little
quarter in his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed. But with
all his savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable
boy playing a dreadful game. He was true also to his own curious
code, and, so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial
and sympathetic, even in warfare. There was no personal feeling or
bitterness as there might be now in a war between Frenchmen and
Germans. On the contrary, the opponents were very softspoken and
polite to each other. "Is there any small vow of which I may relieve
you?" "Would you desire to attempt some small deed of arms upon me?"
And in the midst of a fight they would stop for a breather, and
converse amicably the while, with many compliments upon each other's
prowess. When Seaton the Scotsman had exchanged as many blows as
he wished with a company of French knights, he said, "Thank you,
gentlemen, thank you!" and galloped away. An English knight made a
vow, "for his own advancement and the exaltation of his lady," that
he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and touch with his
lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most characteristic of
the times. As he galloped up, the French knights around the barrier,
seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon him, and called
out to him that he had carried himself well. As he returned,
however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe upon the
side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him. Here ends
the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher had
a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not
stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy,
meet so plebeian an end.

De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional
than Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones
out of that quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course
Quentin Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The
whole history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold,
the strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the
barber and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage
cruelty and of slavish superstition--it is all set forth here. One
would imagine that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of
strange qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and
yet like causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski's
"Life of Ivan the Terrible," and you will find that more than a
century later Russia produced a monarch even more diabolical,
but working exactly on the same lines as Louis, even down to
small details. The same cruelty, the same superstition, the same
astrologers, the same low-born associates, the same residence
outside the influence of the great cities--a parallel could hardly
be more complete. If you have not supped too full of horrors when
you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author's account of
Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of monarchs! Blood
and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons. And
there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which
gives it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the
Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent
rule in Russia.

Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder
has as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It
is Washington Irving's "Conquest of Granada." I do not know where
he got his material for this book--from Spanish Chronicles, I
presume--but the wars between the Moors and the Christian knights
must have been among the most chivalrous of exploits. I could not
name a book which gets the beauty and the glamour of it better than
this one, the lance-heads gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale
fires glowing on the crags, the stern devotion of the mail-clad
Christians, the debonnaire and courtly courage of the dashing
Moslem. Had Washington Irving written nothing else, that book alone
should have forced the door of every library. I love all his books,
for no man wrote fresher English with a purer style; but of them all
it is still "The Conquest of Granada" to which I turn most often.

To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are
two exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are
a brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has
only two books. This green-and-gold volume contains both the works
of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady
Wilde. The first is "Sidonia the Sorceress," the second, "The Amber
Witch." I don't know where one may turn for a stranger view of
the Middle Ages, the quaint details of simple life, with sudden
intervals of grotesque savagery. The most weird and barbarous things
are made human and comprehensible. There is one incident which
haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers
with the villagers as to what price they will give him for putting
some young witch to the torture, running them up from a barrel of
apples to a barrel and a half, on the grounds that he is now old and
rheumatic, and that the stooping and straining is bad for his back.
It should be done on a sloping hill, he explains, so that the "dear
little children" may see it easily. Both "Sidonia" and "The Amber
Witch" give such a picture of old Germany as I have never seen
elsewhere.

But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in
whom I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who
is, if I mistake not, young and with his career still before him.
"The Forerunner" and "The Death of the Gods" are the only two
books of his which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of
Renaissance Italy in the one, and of declining Rome in the other,
are in my opinion among the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that
as I read them I was pleased to find how open my mind was to new
impressions, for one of the greatest mental dangers which comes upon
a man as he grows older is that he should become so attached to old
favourites that he has no room for the new-comer, and persuades
himself that the days of great things are at an end because his own
poor brain is getting ossified. You have but to open any critical
paper to see how common is the disease, but a knowledge of literary
history assures us that it has always been the same, and that if the
young writer is discouraged by adverse comparisons it has been the
common lot from the beginning. He has but one resource, which is
to pay no heed to criticism, but to try to satisfy his own highest
standard and leave the rest to time and the public. Here is a little
bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see, beside my bookcase, which may
in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to some younger brother--

   "Critics kind--never mind!
    Critics flatter--no matter!
    Critics blame--all the same!
    Critics curse--none the worse!
    Do your best-- ---- the rest!"



XI.


I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants,
but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been
explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon
has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken
virtue and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to
our age, and will idealize our romance and--our courage, even as we
do that of our distant forbears. "It is wonderful what these people
did with their rude implements and their limited appliances!" That
is what they will say when they read of our explorations, our
voyages, and our wars.

Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight's "Cruise
of the Falcon." Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul
into a body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there
is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen--solicitors,
if I remember right--go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a
long-shore youth, and they embark in a tiny boat in which they put
to sea. Where do they turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they
penetrate to Paraquay, return to the West Indies, sell their little
boat there, and so home. What could the Elizabethan mariners have
done more? There are no Spanish galleons now to vary the monotony of
such a voyage, but had there been I am very certain our adventurers
would have had their share of the doubloons. But surely it was the
nobler when done out of the pure lust of adventure and in answer to
the call of the sea, with no golden bait to draw them on. The old
spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with top hats, frock
coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also will seem
romantic when centuries have blurred them.

Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still
linger upon earth is that large copy of the "Voyage of the Discovery
in the Antarctic" by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion
with no attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or
perhaps all the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one
reads it, and reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear
view of just those qualities which make the best kind of Briton.
Every nation produces brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But
there is a certain type which mixes its bravery and its energy with
a gentle modesty and a boyish good-humour, and it is just this
type which is the highest. Here the whole expedition seem to have
been imbued with the spirit of their commander. No flinching, no
grumbling, every discomfort taken as a jest, no thought of self,
each working only for the success of the enterprise. When you have
read of such privations so endured and so chronicled, it makes one
ashamed to show emotion over the small annoyances of daily life.
Read of Scott's blinded, scurvy-struck party staggering on to their
goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat of a northern sun,
or the dust of a country road.

That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too
much. We are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was
otherwise--when it was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman
should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected
by the small troubles of life. "You look cold, sir," said an English
sympathizer to a French emigre. The fallen noble drew himself up
in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold."
One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect
should check the grumble. This self-suppression, and also
the concealment of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige
characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public
opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop because
his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are
bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity,
but of contempt.

The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans
as well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is
Greely's "Arctic Service," and it is a worthy shelf-companion
to Scott's "Account of the Voyage of the Discovery." There are
incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of
those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one
a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our
puny tragedies of romance. And the gallant starving leader giving
lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of
the dying men away from their sufferings--what a picture! It is bad
to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live
in the dark; but that men could do all these things for six months
on end, and that some should live to tell the tale, is, indeed, a
marvel. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation of the poor
dying lieutenant: "Well, this _is_ wretched," he groaned, as he
turned his face to the wall.

The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there
is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer
ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals,
not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more
sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the
British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And
this expedition of Greely's gave rise to another example which seems
to me hardly less remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the
book, that even when there were only about eight unfortunates still
left, hardly able to move for weakness and hunger, the seven took
the odd man out upon the ice, and shot him dead for breach of
discipline. The whole grim proceeding was carried out with as much
method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight of
the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as
I can remember, of stealing and eating the thong which bound two
portions of the sledge together, something about as appetizing as a
bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to say, however, that it
was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the thong of a sledge
might mean life or death to the whole party.

Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas
is always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within
the borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most
lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain
something of its glamour. Standing on the confines of known
geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have taken
from their gizzards pebbles which they have swallowed in some
land whose shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that
inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water,
of the cloudless sky shading away into a light green and then into
a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy companionable birds, of
the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the slug-like seals,
startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice--all of
it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more
than some fantastic dream itself, go removed is it from the main
stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in
weight, and worth two thousand pounds--but what in the world has
all this to do with my bookcase?

Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me
straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen's "Cruise of the
Cachelot," a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of
the sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it
in ships. This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and
very different from that Greenland ice groping in which I served
a seven-months' apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the
past--certainly the northern fishing is so, for why should men
risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a pipe in the
ground. It is the more fortunate then that it should have been
handled by one of the most virile writers who has described a
sailor's life. Bullen's English at its best rises to a great height.
If I wished to show how high, I would take that next book down,
"Sea Idylls."

How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose?
It is a simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a
long calm in the tropics.

  "A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue
  of the sea. No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror,
  the splendour of the sun, the sweet silvery glow of the
  moon, or the coruscating clusters of countless stars. Like
  the ashen-grey hue that bedims the countenance of the dying,
  a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread the recent
  loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant,
  and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour
  like a breath of decay, which clung clammily to the palate
  and dulled all the senses. Drawn by some strange force,
  from the unfathomable depths below, eerie shapes sought the
  surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar glare they had
  exchanged for their native gloom--uncouth creatures bedight
  with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them,
  fathom-long, medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering
  all over their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like
  forms of such elusive matter that the smallest exposure to
  the sun melted them, and they were not. Lower down, vast pale
  shadows creep sluggishly along, happily undistinguishable
  as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the strange,
  faint smell that hung about us."

Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics,
or take the other one "Sunrise as seen from the Crow's-nest," and
you must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive
English in our time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a
dozen volumes I should certainly give Bullen two places. The others?
Well, it is so much a matter of individual taste. "Tom Cringle's
Log" should have one for certain. I hope boys respond now as they
once did to the sharks and the pirates, the planters, and all the
rollicking high spirits of that splendid book. Then there is Dana's
"Two Years before the Mast." I should find room also for Stevenson's
"Wrecker" and "Ebb Tide." Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf
for himself, but anyhow you could not miss out "The Wreck of the
Grosvenor." Marryat, of course, must be represented, and I should
pick "Midshipman Easy" and "Peter Simple" as his samples. Then
throw in one of Melville's Otaheite books--now far too completely
forgotten--"Typee" or "Omoo," and as a quite modern flavour
Kipling's "Captains Courageous" and Jack London's "Sea Wolf," with
Conrad's "Nigger of the Narcissus." Then you will have enough to
turn your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your
cars, if written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes
when life grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to
stir! Surely it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in
an island but had an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more
must the salt drop tingle in the blood of an American when you
reflect that in all that broad continent there is not one whose
forefather did not cross 3000 miles of ocean. And yet there are in
the Central States millions and millions of their descendants who
have never seen the sea.

I have said that "Omoo" and "Typee," the books in which the sailor
Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too
rapidly into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there
is for some critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment
to undertake rescue work among the lost books which would repay
salvage! A small volume setting forth their names and their claims
to attention would be interesting in itself, and more interesting
in the material to which it would serve as an introduction. I am
sure there are many good books, possibly there are some great ones,
which have been swept away for a time in the rush. What chance, for
example, has any book by an unknown author which is published at a
moment of great national excitement, when some public crisis arrests
the popular mind? Hundreds have been still-born in this fashion,
and are there none which should have lived among them? Now, there
is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth under thirty. It
is Snaith's "Broke of Covenden," and it scarce attained a second
edition. I do not say that it is a Classic--I should not like to
be positive that it is not--but I am perfectly sure that the man
who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here
is another novel--"Eight Days," by Forrest. You can't buy it. You
are lucky even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever
written will bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book
will do. Here's another which I will warrant you never heard of.
It is Powell's "Animal Episodes." No, it is not a collection of
dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it is a series of very singularly told
stories which deal with the animal side of the human, and which you
will feel have an entirely new flavour if you have a discriminating
palate. The book came out ten years ago, and is utterly unknown.
If I can point to three in one small shelf, how many lost lights
must be flitting in the outer darkness!

Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the
romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have
two books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these
qualities as strongly as any I know. I could not choose two better
books to put into a young man's hands if you wished to train him
first in a gentle and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a
great love for and interest in all that pertains to Nature. The one
is Darwin's "Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle." Any discerning
eye must have detected long before the "Origin of Species" appeared,
simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a brain of the
first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had
arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too
small and nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is
occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute
spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of
a continent and the extinction of a myriad animals. And his sweep of
knowledge was so great--botany, geology, zoology, each lending its
corroborative aid to the other. How a youth of Darwin's age--he was
only twenty-three when in the year 1831 he started round the world
on the surveying ship Beagle--could have acquired such a mass of
information fills one with the same wonder, and is perhaps of the
same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the touch
of the master. Another quality which one would be less disposed
to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger, which is
veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in order
to detect it. When he was in the Argentina, the country outside the
Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who gave
no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles
between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused
to accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small
things to him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.

The second book to which I alluded is Wallace's "Malay Archipelago."
There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same
courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the
same catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion
for the observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition
understood and described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the
Origin of Species at the very time when the latter was publishing
a book founded upon twenty years' labour to prove the same thesis.
What must have been his feelings when he read that letter? And yet
he had nothing to fear, for his book found no more enthusiastic
admirer than the man who had in a sense anticipated it. Here also
one sees that Science has its heroes no less than Religion. One of
Wallace's missions in Papua was to examine the nature and species
of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of the years of his
wanderings through those islands he made a complete investigation
of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that the Papuans
who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed cannibals.
Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a young
fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his
mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.



XII.


Here we are at the final seance. For the last time, my patient
comrade, I ask you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green
settee, to look up at the oaken shelves, and to bear with me as best
you may while I preach about their contents. The last time! And yet,
as I look along the lines of the volumes, I have not mentioned one
out of ten of those to which I owe a debt of gratitude, nor one in
a hundred of the thoughts which course through my brain as I look
at them. As well perhaps, for the man who has said all that he has
to say has invariably said too much.

Let me be didactic for a moment! I assume this solemn--oh, call it
not pedantic!--attitude because my eye catches the small but select
corner which constitutes my library of Science. I wanted to say that
if I were advising a young man who was beginning life, I should
counsel him to devote one evening a week to scientific reading. Had
he the perseverance to adhere to his resolution, and if he began
it at twenty, he would certainly find himself with an unusually
well-furnished mind at thirty, which would stand him in right good
stead in whatever line of life he might walk. When I advise him to
read science, I do not mean that he should choke himself with the
dust of the pedants, and lose himself in the subdivisions of the
Lepidoptera, or the classifications of the dicotyledonous plants.
These dreary details are the prickly bushes in that enchanted
garden, and you are foolish indeed if you begin your walks by
butting your head into one. Keep very clear of them until you have
explored the open beds and wandered down every easy path. For this
reason avoid the text-books, which repel, and cultivate that popular
science which attracts. You cannot hope to be a specialist upon all
these varied subjects. Better far to have a broad idea of general
results, and to understand their relations to each other. A very
little reading will give a man such a knowledge of geology, for
example, as will make every quarry and railway cutting an object
of interest. A very little zoology will enable you to satisfy
your curiosity as to what is the proper name and style of this
buff-ermine moth which at the present instant is buzzing round the
lamp. A very little botany will enable you to recognize every flower
you are likely to meet in your walks abroad, and to give you a tiny
thrill of interest when you chance upon one which is beyond your
ken. A very little archaeology will tell you all about yonder
British tumulus, or help you to fill in the outline of the broken
Roman camp upon the downs. A very little astronomy will cause you
to look more intently at the heavens, to pick out your brothers the
planets, who move in your own circles, from the stranger stars,
and to appreciate the order, beauty, and majesty of that material
universe which is most surely the outward sign of the spiritual
force behind it. How a man of science can be a materialist is as
amazing to me as how a sectarian can limit the possibilities of the
Creator. Show me a picture without an artist, show me a bust without
a sculptor, show me music without a musician, and then you may begin
to talk to me of a universe without a Universe-maker, call Him by
what name you will.

Here is Flammarion's "L'Atmosphere"--a very gorgeous though
weather-stained copy in faded scarlet and gold. The book has a small
history, and I value it. A young Frenchman, dying of fever on the
west coast of Africa, gave it to me as a professional fee. The sight
of it takes me back to a little ship's bunk, and a sallow face with
large, sad eyes looking out at me. Poor boy, I fear that he never
saw his beloved Marseilles again!

Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a
man's first interest, and giving a broad general view of the
subject, than these of Samuel Laing. Who would have imagined that
the wise savant and gentle dreamer of these volumes was also the
energetic secretary of a railway company? Many men of the highest
scientific eminence have begun in prosaic lines of life. Herbert
Spencer was a railway engineer. Wallace was a land surveyor. But
that a man with so pronounced a scientific brain as Laing should
continue all his life to devote his time to dull routine work,
remaining in harness until extreme old age, with his soul still
open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring new concretions
of knowledge, is indeed a remarkable fact. Read those books, and
you will be a fuller man.

It is an excellent device to talk about what you have recently read.
Rather hard upon your audience, you may say; but without wishing to
be personal, I dare bet it is more interesting than your usual small
talk. It must, of course, be done with some tact and discretion. It
is the mention of Laing's works which awoke the train of thought
which led to these remarks. I had met some one at a table d'hote
or elsewhere who made some remark about the prehistoric remains in
the valley of the Somme. I knew all about those, and showed him
that I did. I then threw out some allusion to the rock temples of
Yucatan, which he instantly picked up and enlarged upon. He spoke
of ancient Peruvian civilization, and I kept well abreast of him.
I cited the Titicaca image, and he knew all about that. He spoke of
Quaternary man, and I was with him all the time. Each was more and
more amazed at the fulness and the accuracy of the information of
the other, until like a flash the explanation crossed my mind. "You
are reading Samuel Laing's 'Human Origins'!" I cried. So he was, and
so by a coincidence was I. We were pouring water over each other,
but it was all new-drawn from the spring.

There is a big two-volumed book at the end of my science shelf which
would, even now, have its right to be called scientific disputed
by some of the pedants. It is Myers' "Human Personality." My own
opinion, for what it is worth, is that it will be recognized a
century hence as a great root book, one from which a whole new
branch of science will have sprung. Where between four covers will
you find greater evidence of patience, of industry, of thought,
of discrimination, of that sweep of mind which can gather up a
thousand separate facts and bind them all in the meshes of a single
consistent system? Darwin has not been a more ardent collector in
zoology than Myers in the dim regions of psychic research, and his
whole hypothesis, so new that a new nomenclature and terminology
had to be invented to express it, telepathy, the subliminal, and
the rest of it, will always be a monument of acute reasoning,
expressed in fine prose and founded upon ascertained fact.

The mere suspicion of scientific thought or scientific methods has
a great charm in any branch of literature, however far it may be
removed from actual research. Poe's tales, for example, owe much to
this effect, though in his case it was a pure illusion. Jules Verne
also produces a charmingly credible effect for the most incredible
things by an adept use of a considerable amount of real knowledge
of nature. But most gracefully of all does it shine in the lighter
form of essay, where playful thoughts draw their analogies and
illustrations from actual fact, each showing up the other, and the
combination presenting a peculiar piquancy to the reader.

Where could I get better illustration of what I mean than in those
three little volumes which make up Wendell Holmes' immortal series,
"The Autocrat," "The Poet," and "The Professor at the Breakfast
Table"? Here the subtle, dainty, delicate thought is continually
reinforced by the allusion or the analogy which shows the wide,
accurate knowledge behind it. What work it is! how wise, how witty,
how large-hearted and tolerant! Could one choose one's philosopher
in the Elysian fields, as once in Athens, I would surely join the
smiling group who listened to the human, kindly words of the Sage
of Boston. I suppose it is just that continual leaven of science,
especially of medical science, which has from my early student days
given those books so strong an attraction for me. Never have I
so known and loved a man whom I had never seen. It was one of the
ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his face, but by the irony of
Fate I arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath upon
his newly-turned grave. Read his books again, and see if you are not
especially struck by the up-to-dateness of them. Like Tennyson's "In
Memoriam," it seems to me to be work which sprang into full flower
fifty years before its time. One can hardly open a page haphazard
without lighting upon some passage which illustrates the breadth of
view, the felicity of phrase, and the singular power of playful but
most suggestive analogy. Here, for example, is a paragraph--no
better than a dozen others--which combines all the rare qualities:--

  "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
  Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and
  levers, if anything is thrust upon them suddenly which tends
  to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not
  accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves
  a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane
  hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called
  religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better
  of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep
  their wits and enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums.
  Any decent person ought to go mad if he really holds such
  and such opinions.... Anything that is brutal, cruel,
  heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind,
  and perhaps for entire races--anything that assumes the
  necessity for the extermination of instincts which were
  given to be regulated--no matter by what name you call
  it--no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon
  believes it--if received, ought to produce insanity in
  every well-regulated mind."

There's a fine bit of breezy polemics for the dreary fifties--a fine
bit of moral courage too for the University professor who ventured
to say it.

I put him above Lamb as an essayist, because there is a flavour of
actual knowledge and of practical acquaintance with the problems and
affairs of life, which is lacking in the elfin Londoner. I do not
say that the latter is not the rarer quality. There are my "Essays
of Elia," and they are well-thumbed as you see, so it is not because
I love Lamb less that I love this other more. Both are exquisite,
but Wendell Holmes is for ever touching some note which awakens an
answering vibration within my own mind.

The essay must always be a somewhat repellent form of literature,
unless it be handled with the lightest and deftest touch. It is too
reminiscent of the school themes of our boyhood--to put a heading
and then to show what you can get under it. Even Stevenson, for whom
I have the most profound admiration, finds it difficult to carry the
reader through a series of such papers, adorned with his original
thought and quaint turn of phrase. Yet his "Men and Books" and
"Virginibus Puerisque" are high examples of what may be done in
spite of the inherent unavoidable difficulty of the task.

But his style! Ah, if Stevenson had only realized how beautiful and
nervous was his own natural God-given style, he would never have
been at pains to acquire another! It is sad to read the much-lauded
anecdote of his imitating this author and that, picking up and
dropping, in search of the best. The best is always the most
natural. When Stevenson becomes a conscious stylist, applauded by
so many critics, he seems to me like a man who, having most natural
curls, will still conceal them under a wig. The moment he is
precious he loses his grip. But when he will abide by his own
sterling Lowland Saxon, with the direct word and the short, cutting
sentence, I know not where in recent years we may find his mate. In
this strong, plain setting the occasional happy word shines like a
cut jewel. A really good stylist is like Beau Brummell's description
of a well-dressed man--so dressed that no one would ever observe
him. The moment you begin to remark a man's style the odds are that
there is something the matter with it. It is a clouding of the
crystal--a diversion of the reader's mind from the matter to the
manner, from the author's subject to the author himself.

No, I have not the Edinburgh edition. If you think of a
presentation--but I should be the last to suggest it. Perhaps on the
whole I would prefer to have him in scattered books, rather than in
a complete set. The half is more than the whole of most authors, and
not the least of him. I am sure that his friends who reverenced his
memory had good warrant and express instructions to publish this
complete edition--very possibly it was arranged before his lamented
end. Yet, speaking generally, I would say that an author was best
served by being very carefully pruned before being exposed to the
winds of time. Let every weak twig, every immature shoot be shorn
away, and nothing but strong, sturdy, well-seasoned branches left.
So shall the whole tree stand strong for years to come. How false
an impression of the true Stevenson would our critical grandchild
acquire if he chanced to pick down any one of half a dozen of these
volumes! As we watched his hand stray down the rank, how we would
pray that it might alight upon the ones we love, on the "New Arabian
Nights" "The Ebb-tide," "The Wrecker," "Kidnapped," or "Treasure
Island." These can surely never lose their charm.

What noble books of their class are those last, "Kidnapped" and
"Treasure Island"! both, as you see, shining forth upon my lower
shelf. "Treasure Island" is the better story, while I could imagine
that "Kidnapped" might have the more permanent value as being an
excellent and graphic sketch of the state of the Highlands after the
last Jacobite insurrection. Each contains one novel and admirable
character, Alan Breck in the one, and Long John in the other.
Surely John Silver, with his face the size of a ham, and his little
gleaming eyes like crumbs of glass in the centre of it, is the king
of all seafaring desperadoes. Observe how the strong effect is
produced in his case: seldom by direct assertion on the part of
the story-teller, but usually by comparison, innuendo, or indirect
reference. The objectionable Billy Bones is haunted by the dread of
"a seafaring man with one leg." Captain Flint, we are told, was a
brave man; "he was afraid of none, not he, only Silver--Silver was
that genteel." Or, again, where John himself says, "there was some
that was feared of Pew, and some that was feared of Flint; but Flint
his own self was feared of me. Feared he was, and proud. They was
the roughest crew afloat was Flint's. The devil himself would have
been feared to go to sea with them. Well, now, I will tell you. I'm
not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy I keep company;
but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasn't the word for Flint's old
buccaneers." So, by a touch here and a hint there, there grows upon
us the individuality of the smooth-tongued, ruthless, masterful,
one-legged devil. He is to us not a creation of fiction, but an
organic living reality with whom we have come in contact; such is
the effect of the fine suggestive strokes with which he is drawn.
And the buccaneers themselves, how simple and yet how effective are
the little touches which indicate their ways of thinking and of
acting. "I want to go in that cabin, I do; I want their pickles and
wine and that." "Now, if you had sailed along o' Bill you wouldn't
have stood there to be spoke twice--not you. That was never Bill's
way, not the way of sich as sailed with him." Scott's buccaneers in
"The Pirate" are admirable, but they lack something human which we
find here. It will be long before John Silver loses his place in
sea fiction, "and you may lay to that."

Stevenson was deeply influenced by Meredith, and even in these books
the influence of the master is apparent. There is the apt use of an
occasional archaic or unusual word, the short, strong descriptions,
the striking metaphors, the somewhat staccato fashion of speech.
Yet, in spite of this flavour, they have quite individuality enough
to constitute a school of their own. Their faults, or rather perhaps
their limitations, lie never in the execution, but entirely in the
original conception. They picture only one side of life, and that a
strange and exceptional one. There is no female interest. We feel
that it is an apotheosis of the boy-story--the penny number of our
youth in excelsis. But it is all so good, so fresh, so picturesque,
that, however limited its scope, it still retains a definite and
well-assured place in literature. There is no reason why "Treasure
Island" should not be to the rising generation of the twenty-first
century what "Robinson Crusoe" has been to that of the nineteenth.
The balance of probability is all in that direction.

The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the
rougher, more stirring side of life, with the objective rather than
the subjective, marks the reaction against the abuse of love in
fiction. This one phase of life in its orthodox aspect, and ending
in the conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed and worn to a
shadow, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency
sometimes to swing to the other extreme, and to give it less than
its fair share in the affairs of men. In British fiction nine books
out of ten have held up love and marriage as the be-all and end-all
of life. Yet we know, in actual practice, that this may not be so.
In the career of the average man his marriage is an incident, and a
momentous incident; but it is only one of several. He is swayed by
many strong emotions--his business, his ambitions, his friendships,
his struggles with the recurrent dangers and difficulties which tax
a man's wisdom and his courage. Love will often play a subordinate
part in his life. How many go through the world without ever loving
at all? It jars upon us then to have it continually held up as
the predominating, all-important fact in life; and there is a not
unnatural tendency among a certain school, of which Stevenson is
certainly the leader, to avoid altogether a source of interest which
has been so misused and overdone. If all love-making were like that
between Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough, then indeed we could
not have too much of it; but to be made attractive once more, the
passion must be handled by some great master who has courage to
break down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for
his inspiration.

The use of novel and piquant forms of speech is one of the most
obvious of Stevenson's devices. No man handles his adjectives with
greater judgment and nicer discrimination. There is hardly a page
of his work where we do not come across words and expressions which
strike us with a pleasant sense of novelty, and yet express the
meaning with admirable conciseness. "His eyes came coasting round
to me." It is dangerous to begin quoting, as the examples are
interminable, and each suggests another. Now and then he misses his
mark, but it is very seldom. As an example, an "eye-shot" does not
commend itself as a substitute for "a glance," and "to tee-hee" for
"to giggle" grates somewhat upon the ear, though the authority of
Chaucer might be cited for the expressions.

Next in order is his extraordinary faculty for the use of pithy
similes, which arrest the attention and stimulate the imagination.
"His voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock." "I saw
her sway, like something stricken by the wind." "His laugh rang
false, like a cracked bell." "His voice shook like a taut rope." "My
mind flying like a weaver's shuttle." "His blows resounded on the
grave as thick as sobs." "The private guilty considerations I would
continually observe to peep forth in the man's talk like rabbits
from a hill." Nothing could be more effective than these direct and
homely comparisons.

After all, however, the main characteristic of Stevenson is his
curious instinct for saying in the briefest space just those few
words which stamp the impression upon the reader's mind. He will
make you see a thing more clearly than you would probably have done
had your eyes actually rested upon it. Here are a few of these
word-pictures, taken haphazard from among hundreds of equal merit--

  "Not far off Macconochie was standing with his tongue out of
  his mouth, and his hand upon his chin, like a dull fellow
  thinking hard.

  "Stewart ran after us for more than a mile, and I could not
  help laughing as I looked back at last and saw him on a hill,
  holding his hand to his side, and nearly burst with running.

  "Ballantrae turned to me with a face all wrinkled up, and his
  teeth all showing in his mouth.... He said no word, but his
  whole appearance was a kind of dreadful question.

  "Look at him, if you doubt; look at him, grinning and gulping,
  a detected thief.

  "He looked me all over with a warlike eye, and I could see the
  challenge on his lips."

What could be more vivid than the effect produced by such sentences
as these?

There is much more that might be said as to Stevenson's peculiar and
original methods in fiction. As a minor point, it might be remarked
that he is the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain.
It is true that Mr. Wilkie Collins has described one gentleman
who had not only been deprived of all his limbs, but was further
afflicted by the insupportable name of Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson,
however, has used the effect so often, and with such telling
results, that he may be said to have made it his own. To say nothing
of Hyde, who was the very impersonation of deformity, there is the
horrid blind Pew, Black Dog with two fingers missing, Long John with
his one leg, and the sinister catechist who is blind but shoots by
ear, and smites about him with his staff. In "The Black Arrow," too,
there is another dreadful creature who comes tapping along with a
stick. Often as he has used the device, he handles it so artistically
that it never fails to produce its effect.

Is Stevenson a classic? Well, it is a large word that. You mean by a
classic a piece of work which passes into the permanent literature
of the country. As a rule, you only know your classics when they are
in their graves. Who guessed it of Poe, and who of Borrow? The Roman
Catholics only canonize their saints a century after their death.
So with our classics. The choice lies with our grandchildren. But I
can hardly think that healthy boys will ever let Stevenson's books
of adventure die, nor do I think that such a short tale as "The
Pavilion on the Links" nor so magnificent a parable as "Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde" will ever cease to be esteemed. How well I remember
the eagerness, the delight with which I read those early tales in
"Cornhill" away back in the late seventies and early eighties. They
were unsigned, after the old unfair fashion, but no man with any
sense of prose could fail to know that they were all by the same
author. Only years afterwards did I learn who that author was.

I have Stevenson's collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet.
Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful
sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic,
for it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of
the last century--that is if I am right in supposing that "The
Ancient Mariner" appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. I
would put Coleridge's tour de force of grim fancy first, but I know
none other to compare in glamour and phrase and easy power with
"Ticonderoga." Then there is his immortal epitaph. The two pieces
alone give him a niche of his own in our poetical literature, just
as his character gives him a niche of his own in our affections. No,
I never met him. But among my most prized possessions are several
letters which I received from Samoa. From that distant tower he kept
a surprisingly close watch upon what was doing among the bookmen,
and it was his hand which was among the first held out to the
striver, for he had quick appreciation and keen sympathies which
met another man's work half-way, and wove into it a beauty from his
own mind.

And now, my very patient friend, the time has come for us to part,
and I hope my little sermons have not bored you over-much. If I have
put you on the track of anything which you did not know before, then
verify it and pass it on. If I have not, there is no harm done, save
that my breath and your time have been wasted. There may be a score
of mistakes in what I have said--is it not the privilege of the
conversationalist to misquote? My judgments may differ very far from
yours, and my likings may be your abhorrence; but the mere thinking
and talking of books is in itself good, be the upshot what it may.
For the time the magic door is still shut. You are still in the land
of faerie. But, alas, though you shut that door, you cannot seal it.
Still come the ring of bell, the call of telephone, the summons back
to the sordid world of work and men and daily strife. Well, that's
the real life after all--this only the imitation. And yet, now that
the portal is wide open and we stride out together, do we not face
our fate with a braver heart for all the rest and quiet and
comradeship that we found behind the Magic Door?








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