street corners too will stand great books in which weeping maidens will sign their names, swearing before high heaven, to wear nothing but gingham and bed-ticking for the dreary remainder of their lives. Such a day may well come, as it has often come before, and certainly will, if women persist in being so deliberately beautiful as they are at present.
It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction. Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking shapes of beguiling loveliness–lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and witches with blue flowers for their eyes. Lurking in its most innocent forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass window, or a hair-ribbon. “Homeliness is next to Godliness,” though not officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of the most active of all Christian tenets. It has always been easier far for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously beautiful woman. Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions.
In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying the “Pagan” temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred vessels of divine dreams. Who would not
rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,– So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,–maybe a mighty hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with “the new learning,” chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own paintings into the flames–to the lugubrious rejoicings of the sanctimonious Piagnoni–as Savonarola’s followers were called; predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First
bow’d his comely head
Down, as upon a bed,
at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side. Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,–something like hanging matters–but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob–those
Storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light,
which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day, particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events, they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals.
It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, the reason is not far to seek.
All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element, the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations and necessities of the various societies that compose it. The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct. It concerns itself only with the eternal properties of things. Its business is the contemplation and worship of the mystery of life, “the mystery we make darker with a name.”
Now, great popular religions, designed as they are for the discipline and control of the great brute masses of humanity, are almost entirely occupied with morality, and what passes in them for spirituality is merely mythology, an element of picturesque supernaturalism calculated to enforce the morality with the multitude. Christianity is such a religion. It is mostly a matter of conduct here and now upon the earth. Its mystic side does not properly belong to it, and is foreign to, not to speak of its being practically ignored by, the average “Christian.” It is a religion designed to work hand in hand with a given state of society, making for the preservation of such laws and manners and customs as are best fitted to make that society a success here and now, a worldly success in the best sense of the term. Mohammedanism is a similar religion calculated for the needs of a different society. Whatever the words or intentions of the founders of such religions, their kingdoms are essentially of this world. They are not mystic, or spiritual, or in anyway concerned with infinite and eternal things. Their business is the moral policing of humanity. Morality, as of course its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least spiritual, and _vice versa_. It will be understood then that any force which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social, order will meet at once with the opposition of organized “religions” so called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous.
Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, “organized moralities”; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a purely spiritual force, with no relations to man’s little schemes of being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to us upon the earth–and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic society remains possible. For this reason our young men and maidens–particularly our young men–must be guarded against her, for her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day’s work, makes us forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love. The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd. Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She outrages the “proprieties” with “the innocence of nature,” and disintegrates “select” and “exclusive” circles with the wand of Romance. For earthly possessions or rewards she has no heed. For her they are meaningless things, mere idle dust and withered leaves. Her only real estate is in the moon, and the one article of her simple creed–“Love is enough.”
Love is enough: though the world be a-waning And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, Though the hills beheld shadows, and the sea a dark wonder And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
Those who have looked into her eyes see limitless horizons undreamed of by those who know her not, horizons summoning the soul to radiant adventures beyond the bounds of Space and Time. The world is so far right in regarding beauty with a sort of superstitious dread, as a presence almost uncanny among our mere mortal concerns, a daemonic thing,–which is what the world has meant when it has, not unnaturally, confused it with the spirits of evil; for surely it is a supernatural stranger in our midst, a fairy element, and, like the lorelei and the lamia, it does beckon its votaries to enchanted realms away and afar from “all the uses of the world.” Therefore, to them also it brings the thrill of a different and nobler fear–the thrill of the mortal in presence of the immortal. A strange feeling of destiny seems to come over us as we first look into the beautiful face we were born to love. It seems veritably an apparition from another and lovelier world, to which it summons us to go with it. That is what we mean when we say that Love and Death are one; for Death, to the thought of Love, is but one of the gates to that other world, a gate to which we instinctively feel Love has the key. That surely is the meaning of the old fairy-stories of men who have come upon the white woman in the woodland, and followed her, never to be seen again of their fellows, or of those who, like Hylas, have met the water-nymph by the lilied spring, and sunk with her down into the crystal deeps. The strange earth on which we live is just such a place of enchantment, neither more nor less, and some of us have met that fair face, with a strange suddenness of joy and fear, and followed and followed it on till it vanished beyond the limits of the world. But our failure was that we did not follow that last white beckoning of the hand–
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
VIII
THE MANY FACES–THE ONE DREAM
Among the many advantages of being very young is one’s absolute certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and that the man in the street–who, strangely enough, we conceive as having no eye for beauty–can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as she passes along. Her beauty is not “obvious.” On the contrary, it is of that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can apprehend–like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less.
In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments–radiantly independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and that “little sister” mentioned in Solomon’s Song would bring us no disappointment.
We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing to do with it–indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point to the fact–which is true enough–that the most famous beauties of antiquity were plain women–plain, that is, according to the conventional standards.
We also maintain–again with perfect truth–that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we discover through our devotion to the one face that we love–and we should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should have been less securely grounded.
So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other faces–though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel.
The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal.
The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, victoriously alive?
Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the Mephistopheles of experience.
As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves–in fact, a little more so,–and their tastes and ways of looking at things may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not merely an individual’s temptations to guard against, but the temptations of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called it obvious. Now we say it is “barbaric,” and call attention to its perfection of type.
The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have thought us!
Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not know.
O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world, forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship that is rightly yours!
Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned. I did not know.
Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful, that is all.
Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze.
Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing … you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another–only differently fair.
And yet … and yet … Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls? I wonder.
This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we are wonderful connoisseurs.
It is our souls.
IX
THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR
_Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?_ As I transcribe once more that ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is there, with
Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down, Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang.
As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by the ton–but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with new illuminating force Villon’s old refrain, that though I sought the woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly anything that it couldn’t buy–but such a simple thing as last year’s snow!
Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker:
Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, Where they are gone, nor yet this year, Save with thus much for an overword– But where are the snows of yester-year?
Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant pride and pomp of the earth–“pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!” “Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?” They, even as the humblest, “the wind has carried them all away.” They have vanished utterly as the snow, gone–who knows where?–on the wind. “‘Dead and gone’–a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life,” as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death’s Jest Book_. “Dead and gone!” as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade:
Through the mad world’s scene
We are drifting on,
To this tune, I ween,
“They are dead and gone!”
“Nought so sweet as melancholy,” sings an old poet, and, while the melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac poetry.
For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,–such a vast treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away!
Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and–what women! What divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were beginning to be strange new names in men’s ears, then all the romantic excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning of the great resounding moments of their lives–moments made out of real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and give place to lesser moments!
Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, “in those great deeds to have had some little part”; and is it not a sort of poor anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like moments of human exaltation–what are they now, but, so to say, the pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are passing, they are gone with last year’s snow.
But the last year’s snow of our personal lives–what a wistful business it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied with some fair face, or perhaps–being men–with several fair faces, once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably real memory can make them–all but bring them back–how vividly reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, slipping from our grasp!
That summer afternoon,–do you too still remember it, Miranda?–when, under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs–do you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest pools, it is no use asking me to forget.
And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:–“This fairy hour–so real, so magical, now–some day will be in the far past; you will sit right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the anguish of beautiful vanished things.” And here I am today surely enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!
I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted pool just the same as when–but where are the laughing ripples–ah! Miranda–that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster?
They are with last year’s snow.
Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the _Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon_? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand in mine and said: “My life is in your hand.” And we both believed it true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in that enchanted land–whether we rode side by side through London streets in a hansom–“a two-wheeled heaven” we called it–(for our dream stretches as far back as that prehistoric day–How old one of us seems to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)–or sat and laughed at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and whispering over graves.
Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance and death.
Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are grown wise and watchful, that “moment eternal” comes to us no more. Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling on last year’s snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: “What of all your blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb.” To the hope that still may beckon we say: “Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if you had never come at all.” For the retrospective mood, of necessity, begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been.”
In every kiss sealed fast To feel the first kiss and forebode the last–
that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o’er every action of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after.
Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic pathos. Superficial–or, if you prefer it, more normal–observers are made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled.
Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious material–were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a single summer day–it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and clean of heart–yet “what hath man of all his labours, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun.” Yea, dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year’s snow.
And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too in the world of love and dream.
O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces, Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes, Are there for these no safe and secret places? And is it true that beauty never dies? Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names, Women who set the whole wide world in flames, Poets who sang their passion to the skies, And lovers wild and wise:
Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream? Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath? And is there no sure thing in life–but death?
Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come at length to the Land of Last Year’s Snow.
X
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP
According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of a certain terrible and hideous reality.
Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a minute, in the covered cesspools of private life.
Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocooen, battling in vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not true, as Tennyson puts it, that “each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies”?
What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man’s clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan’s way of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar scene with a quoted verse or two:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also among them.
And the Lord said unto Satan, “Whence comest thou?” Then Satan answered the Lord, and said: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
And the Lord said unto Satan: “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?”
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, “Doth Job fear God for nought?”
Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, slimily engaged in his cowardly business. “Going to and fro in the earth, walking up and down in it,” everywhere peering and listening, smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure in his very cowardice.
“Doth Job fear God for nought?” He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that’s all–and leaves it to work.
The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague of boils. Actually–life not being, like the Book of Job, an allegory–he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter.
The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous “Jew’s House,” associated with the gruesome legend of “the boy of Lincoln”–a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia.
Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown–gossip?
A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and death upon the neighbours or their cattle.
You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with “witch-moles” or incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the malignant gossip.
In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too culpably _particeps criminis_ in this phenomenon under consideration. If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps never entirely eradicate.
Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, though divided but by a narrow strait, “natural enemies” and misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe about one another.
It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.
It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The proverbial “gaiety of nations” has always, in a great degree, consisted in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.
Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.
When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet’s_ opinion on the matter:
Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
And again:
Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, Thou shalt not escape calumny.
This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its truth.
Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose:
In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid or a St. Francis.
The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and passes into the region of established realities.
The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that history is mainly “whole cloth.” Certainly the lives of such men as Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably such an “illustrative fiction,” representing something that might very well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it does not seem “illustrative”–that is, not in keeping with his general character–we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his fellows the hard work of the world.
The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their traducers–Caesar’s answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus was to ask him to dinner–but even so, at what extra cost, what “expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” have their achievements been bought, because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame!
And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of the gossips of Athens.
In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth’s popularity could not save her from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare’s genius protect his name from the foulest of stains.
In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more persistently it reappears, like Rizzio’s blood, as they say, in Holyrood Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of perpetuating it.
Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing Voltaire’s story to the end of time.
“At least there must have been something in it” is always the last word on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable doubt.
All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of illusions. “Posterity will see me righted,” cries some poor victim of human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the appeal to posterity is the most hopeless.
What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a mysterious malignity.
Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the bequests of Poe’s genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of his fatuous contemporaries.
Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it matters.
Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms.
It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous–
Not half so big as a round little worm Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.
In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something that they have heard–something, they are careful to add, which is probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a moment.
Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play the gossip’s own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own mouths shut.
Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward him.
And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be true. And so it will go on _ad infinitum_. The formula is simple, and it is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation gone, and no one visibly responsible.
Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the restless _ennui_ that must be forever talking or listening to fill the vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand.
The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows.
Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues.
‘Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis, ’tis true; and the only poor consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay this tax levied by society on any form of distinction.
After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, and some laurels that defy the worm.
XI
THE PASSING AWAY OF THE EDITOR
The word “editor” as applied to the conductors of magazines and newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few magazines where the “editor” has hardly more say in the acceptance of a manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more manageable, modern tools.
The “new” editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding of his proprietor, and the proprietor’s idea of editing is slavishly to truckle to the public taste–or rather to his crude conception of the public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and slightly larger salary.
Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by–the proprietor; for Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the “literary.” His broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything and anything but–“literature.” For any signs of the literary taint he keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the “editor” or “editorial assistant”–to make a distinction without a difference–whom he should suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might have drifted into pork or theatres–from purely financial reasons. His literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn’t understood “what the public wants” at all. They were too high-toned, too “literary.” What the public wants is short stories and pictures of actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are not “what the public wants.” So the bright young men go into outer darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number _Snooks’s Monthly_ has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by the euphonious names of their proprietors.
Now, a proprietor’s right to have his property managed according to his own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. Indeed–strange as it sounds nowadays–it was rather the education than the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors.
Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good.
As a result, the editor’s occupation, in the true sense, will soon be gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial individuality–but editorial individuality is the last thing the capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of the proprietor.
With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. Happily one or two–_rari nantes in gurgito vasto_–survive amid the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by the moneyed voice of the mob–a distinction to which, after all, they have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it is the best magazine that always makes the most money.
XII
THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN
I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland–too often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, a hundred yards away from my window–I often think that the strong necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god Pan, as he sits by the river–
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps us straight. That combination of results can only come by the satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one creed by which you can be both at once–the creed of the growing grass, and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron–the creed of the great god Pan.
Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan was dead. “Pan is dead!”–three times ran the strange shuddering cry through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing of the god.
But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be little chapels to Pan in the woodland–chapels on the lintels of which you shall read, as Virgil wrote: _Happy is he who knows the rural gods, Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs_.
It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible universe, those who first caught glimpses of
Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.
First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the bravest. And man’s first thoughts of the world and the strangely romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of Nature’s own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul–“The Call of the Wild.” Following his lead, others have written of “The Lure,” of this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds.
Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had lost religion in a night of misunderstood “materialism,” so-called. But since then that mere “matter” which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and fauns, which Keats saw “frightened away” by the prosaic times in which it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has become more than ever
the leaven
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal.
His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a light about him–that light which edges with brightness all sincere action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea.
Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told.
The sun on the hill forgot to die. And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river.
Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day.
The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, and, if they come home disappointed in the day’s bag or catch, there is yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines.
XIII
AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH
The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than once a week, a leisurely barge–towed by an equally leisurely mule, with its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next eight-mile “shift”–sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new peculiar spell in such association–old quarries, the rusting tramways choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past with her own sibyl-line mystery.
The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of “old masters.” A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware River.
One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one’s own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for instance, “Perth Amboy” has always had a romantic sound, and I believe that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers.
At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to Paterson, I might find–a dream canal. It was as though he had said that I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World’s End. But it was true, for all that–quite fairy-tale true. It was one of those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not
Flowing down to Camelot,
as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching Paterson midway with its dreaming hand.
Following my friend’s directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower.
Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene–a long block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some great deed, or an altar to the _genius loci_? The willows whisper about it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit–the “MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829,” represented by its president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir and sway along the old canal!
A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge in this way–water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with mysterious depth–the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the waterbugs all being carried across with it, too–this, I confess, has always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think that the canal, whose daily business is to be a “common carrier” of others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along–as though out for a holiday–instead of riding others.
And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination how different the word “Passaic” looks printed in white letters on the grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and
Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook Within its hidden depths, and ‘gainst a tree Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; And dreams or falls asleep,
While curious fishes peep
About his nibbled bait or scornfully Dart off and rise and leap.
Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal–men, women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children go home with strings of sunfish,–“pumpkin-seeds” they call them,–cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the passage of wary survivors of that spring _battue_.
It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and distant purple hills–all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty laughter of a summer day–that we were glad enough to let the birds do such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal.
As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush–sadder and stranger than any nightingale–played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt Whitman’s fancy, “in the swamp in secluded recesses” mourned the death of Lincoln:
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings to himself a song.
But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no song.
Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way:
Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, And all her speech the whisper of the showers.
Made of all things that in the water sway, The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, The willows murmuring, all a summer day, “Silence”–sweet word, and ne’er so softly said
As here along this path of brooding peace, Where all things dream, and nothing else is done But all such gentle businesses as these Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun
Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. Gaze at herself like any mortal girl.
But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety of trees as along our old canal–cedars and hemlocks and hickory dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of silver birches bent over with the strain of last year’s snow; and all along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their glimmering recesses.
No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal.
“What do they carry on the canal?” I asked the melancholy man, the romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot.
“Coal,” was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, with a sad and understanding smile, “once in a great while.” Like most melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream.
“Suppose,” said I, “that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn up this ‘plane’–would the old machinery work?” and I pointed to six hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a cable runs on little wheels–technically known, it appeared, as a “plane.”
Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and fern–drawn up in a long “cradle,” instead of being raised by locks in the customary way.
Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old canal is one of the few places where “time and tide” wait for any one and everybody–but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them.
Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of peace come no such memorial recognitions.
“Unwept and unhonoured, may be,” said I to my friend, “but they shall not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme”; so here is the rhyme I affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the _Janita C. Williams_:
You who have done your work and asked no praise, Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, Doing a small day’s work for a small hire– You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; The laurel of a simple duty done
Is the best laurel underneath the sun, Yet would two strangers passing by this spot Whisper, “Old boat–you are not all forgot!”
XIV
A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS
We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt were blithely congregating for a day’s run. A meet is always an attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts.
The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left alone on the broad common.
I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity.
Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to himself: “It is a strange sight,” he said with a sigh. “I wonder if it seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little animal for its life–and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch and kill one fox!”
“It is strange!” I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing.
“Of course, they always tell you,” he continued, as we took the road together, “that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing _enjoying_ being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt–if we can imagine even a fox so self-conscious–it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made.”
“But even if he should enjoy being hunted,” I added, “the even stranger thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him.”
“Isn’t it strange?” answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up at finding a sympathizer. “When will people realize that there is so much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!…”
He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he remarked:
“But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by degrees, yes! we are learning it,” and he threw out his long stride more emphatically–the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the hills.
“Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!” he resumed, after a pause in which he had walked on in silence. “Very strange. To me it is the most mysterious of all things–though, I suppose, after all, it is no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous–not to say dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society.”
“I expect,” said I “that our friends the fox-hunters would take a similar view of our remarks on their sport.”
“No doubt–and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! ‘Give me the hunting of man!’ as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang.”
“How different was the spirit of Emerson’s old verse,” I said:
“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?… O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!”
“That is one of my mottoes!” cried my companion with evident pleasure. “Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!”
“I wonder how the fox is getting on,” I said.
“If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being–if not more–for there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is gone–who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has for the lie of the ground, how unerringly–and at a moment when a mistake is death–he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with his teeth fast in his enemy’s throat!”
“I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise,” I laughed.
“Well, I have hunted as a boy,” he said, “and I know something of what those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. How any one can kill a deer with that woman’s look in its eyes, I don’t know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys–how can any one trap or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see ghosts!”
“Of course, there is this difference about the fox,” I said, “that it is really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one’s chances of being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while.”
“Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body–but what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by cruel excitement–and while they applaud his skill and admire his courage, they long most to watch him die. So–is it not?–with our friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit and his cunning, but what he wants is–the brush. He wants the excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across country as being the main thing, they know better–and, if it be true, why don’t they take it without the fox?”
“They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for the real thing.”
“Hard on the poor hounds!” smiled my friend. “Even worse than a red herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for Actaeon and tore him to pieces.”
“And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied.”
“Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the ‘snap,’ is gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight.”
“Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson’s ‘ape and tiger’ die very hard in the tamest of us.”
“Alas, indeed they do!” said my friend with a sigh. “But I do believe that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or so-called heretics–how every one thought it the natural and proper thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same race–and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. But, of course, I am a dreamer,” he concluded, his face shining with his gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar.
“Yes, a dream,” he added presently, “and yet–” In that “and yet” there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to share his dream, even see it building before one’s eyes–such is the magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction.
“Of course,” he went on again, “we all know that ‘nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.’ But because the fox runs off with the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and ‘yon whole little wood is a world of plunder and prey’–is that any reason why we should be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes–of all her children–Nature has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he have come from the same great mother, say: ‘I am no better than the wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf–and kill and devour like my brother?’ Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach man cruelty–rather, if it were possible,” and the saint smiled at his fancy, “would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant for man–though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her worst. When we say, ‘it is only natural,’ we almost invariably refer to that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or the elimination to man. It is Nature’s bad we copy, not Nature’s good; and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature–Nature’s vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth–“
As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. Presently, the saint stopped in front of it.
“This is my house,” he said. “Won’t you come in and see me some time?–and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village children about the wild things, bird’s nesting, and so forth, up at the schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you’d come and help me. One’s only hope is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come.”
So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that