The Project Gutenberg eBook, Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett, by Maurice Hewlett

Last Essays of
Maurice Hewlett

Last Essays of
Maurice Hewlett

London
William Heinemann, Ltd

First Published 1924
Second Impression May 1924

Printed in England at
The Westminster Press, Harrow Road
London, W.9

NOTE

Lovers of Mr. Hewlett’s work will understand that these Essays have not been subjected to the severe revision which Mr. Hewlett would undoubtedly have given them before publication in this book. In one or two minor points his Executors have felt doubtful about the deletion or insertion of a passage, but in these cases the decision has always been the same—that his readers would prefer to have the Essays in Mr. Hewlett’s original form.

Thanks are due to the editors of “The Times” and “The Evening Standard”; “The London Mercury,” “The Cornhill Magazine,” “The Nineteenth Century,” and other periodicals, for permission to reprint certain of these Essays.

CONTENTS

A RETURN TO THE NEST

Why it was that my great-grandfather left the village in Somerset in and on which his forefathers, I believe, had lived from the time of Domesday, why he forsook agriculture and cider for the law, married in Shoreditch, settled in Fetter Lane, went back to Somerset to bury his first child, and returned to London to beget my grandfather, be ultimately responsible for me, and break finally with his family cradle, I never understood until the other day when, in good company, I took the road, left the bare hills—how softly contoured, how familiar, and how dear—of South Wilts, topped the great rock on which Shaftesbury lifts, dived down into Blackmore Vale, and so entered my county of origin at its nearest point, namely Wincanton (where I saw, by the by, a palæolithic man alive and walking the world)—to find myself in a land of corn and wine and oil, or so it seemed, such a land as those who love deep loam, handsome women, fine manners and a glut of apples more than most things in this life (and there are few things better), would never leave if they could help it. That is a long sentence with which to begin an essay, but it expresses what I did, and very much how I did it.

In a word, I left Broadchalke and drove to Yeovil, within ten miles of which thriving town the family to which I belong itself throve and cultivated its virtues, if any. My great-grandfather and I were not acquainted; but I remember my grandfather perfectly well, and can testify that he had virtues. He was on the tall side of the mean height, a deep-chested, large-headed old man, with hair snowy white, a rosy face, and cool, extremely honest blue eyes. He was hasty in his movements (and in his temper), trundled about rather than walked. I used to think as a boy that it could not be wholesome, and must be most inconvenient, to have such clean hands, such dazzling linen, and such polished pink filberts instead of finger-nails. I never saw him otherwise dressed than in black broadcloth, with shoes polished like looking-glasses, and a shirt-collar just so starched that it stood up enclosing his chin, yet so little that it took on the contours of his cheeks where they pressed it. He had a deep voice, with a cheer in it. I remember—for he had little else to say to me—how he used to put his hand on my head and murmur, as if to himself, “My boy, my boy,” in such a way that I felt in leaving him, as perhaps Jacob did with Isaac, that it would be impossible ever to do anything wrong again and betray such a noble affection. One other thing struck me, even then, young and ungracious as I was, and that was his extraordinarily fine manners. Since then, whenever I have considered manners, I have compared them with his. He is for me the staple of courtesy. They were the manners which bring a man more than half-way to meet you. He used them to all the world: to me, to the servants, to the crossing-sweeper, to the clerks from his office who used to come for papers when he was too old to go into London. I know now where he got them. They were traditional West Country manners; and sure enough when I walked the village street where, if my grandfather never walked, my great-grandfather did, the first man of whom I asked information met me with just the same forwardness of service, and seemed to know tentacularly what precisely lay behind the question which I put him. I had always been proud of my grandfather; now I was proud of my county. For if manners don’t make a man, they make a gentleman.

Let me call the village Bindon St. Blaise, to give myself freedom to say that I don’t remember to have seen one more beautiful than it looked on that sunny autumn day, drowsing, winking in the heat of noon. The houses are of stone—and that stone saturated, as it seemed, in centuries of sunlight. Yes, I have seen Bibury in Gloucestershire, and Broadway in Worcestershire, Alfriston in Sussex, and Teffont in Wilts; and Clovelly, and Boscastle, and Ponteland, and many another haunt of peace; but never yet a place of grey and gold so established, so decent in age, so recollected, so dignified as Bindon St. Blaise, which my great-grandfather unwillingly, I am sure, forsook in 1780 or thereabouts. Nobody could tell me which of its many fair houses he had forsworn. The fancy could play with them at large. There was a long-roofed farm with gables many and deep, with two rows of mullioned, diamonded windows, each with its perfect dripstone, which I should like to think was once ours, except that it faces north, and therefore has gathered more moss than we should care about now. Perhaps it was ours, and he left it, seeking the sun. But would he have gone to look for it in Fetter Lane? No, no. I incline, however, to a smaller house facing full south, with a walled garden full of apple trees, and a pear tree reaching to the chimney stack, and a portico—whereover a room looking straight into the eye of the sun. There was a radiant eighteenth-century house for a man to have been born in! Could I have brought myself to leave such a nest? Well, we shall see.

After luncheon at the Boulter Arms (let us call it), and an indication where we should find “the Great House,” we went instead to see the house of God, which lay on our road to it, almost within its park. Like all that I have seen in Somerset, it is a spacious, well-ordered church, mainly perpendicular, with the square tower and lace-worked windows which belong to the type. The churchyard was beautifully kept, planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order, numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce, in death were sprawled upon by their masters. Hannah Goodbody, for instance, “for forty years in the service of the Right Hon. John Charles Ferdinand, sixth Earl Boulter, Viscount and Baron Boulter of Bindon St. Blaise”—had she not earned quietus, and need all that be remembered against her? Percival Slade, “for twenty years Groom of the Chambers to Ferdinand Charles John, seventh Earl”; Matilda Swinton, housekeeper; Peter Wain, gamekeeper; Thomas Duffey, storekeeper—I began to see what had been the matter with my great-grandfather.

Inside, the church revealed itself as a family vault so encumbered with the dead that the living must have been incommoded. In the midst of life they were in death indeed. Earls in effigy slept (like Priam’s sons in the Iliad) beside their chaste wives—flat in brasses, worn smooth in basalt, glaringly in plaster, as might be. A side-chapel was so full of them that the altar was crowded out: and why not? They were altar and sacrifice and deity in one. They spilled over on to the floor, splayed out on the walls in tablets as massy as houseleeks; and on the bosses of the vaulted roof one found the Boulter arms implanted in the heart of the Mystic Rose. O too much Boulter—but we were not shut of them yet. Discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies where the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble apartment, a withdrawing room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some club-chairs, and a deeply padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray, a match-stand—one missed them. There is, no doubt, a comic side to all this. “J’ai trente mille livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé de Bonport. The same amazement might come upon an entrenched Earl Boulter at any minute in the midst of his cushioned ease. Neither coat-armour nor a private stove will ward off the mortal chills. However, I forgive them their quality, but not their oppression of other people’s tombstones.

For we too were oppressed, and not diverted. We were seeking our ancestors, but they were not here. They had fled to Fetter Lane, and I cannot blame them. The doubt about my great-grandfather is solved. He left the village of Bindon St. Blaise because he saw no other way of escape from an Earl on his tomb. He married, his wife bore him a son, which died young. Moved then by piety, he brought down the innocent to be buried, secure that upon that unknown life no great name could intrude. I should have done the same thing, I believe.

“AND NOW, O LORD ...”

“And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium, if better there be.

Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered, dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient, bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same clay as the children of light.

You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair and far they were come—but there they were at it, hammer and tongs. I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific, for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam, until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth. Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and oared away towards the bridge. I would have given a good deal to see that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings. What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky?

Against that extreme example of the picturesque I could only advance that I had seen an elm-tree fall on a man in Gray’s Inn and kill him instantly. Or that, at the corner of Montague Place, I saw a runaway brewer’s dray barge into a four-wheeler. It missed the cab (on whose box the driver sat intact), but caught the horse full and knocked him and the shafts with him down some area steps across the pavement—where indeed he remained as in his stall until he could be built up from below. Extreme urgency had hurtled him down the steps, but no persuasion, fore or aft, would move him up again. So they built him up with trusses of straw. Nothing quite so good as that ever happened to me in a four-wheeler; but I haven’t done so badly either. I was driving once through Paris very early in the morning from the Gare de Lyon to Saint-Lazare. You are lucky to get a cab at all at such times, and I thought myself so to have a crazy old victoria and a horse tied together with string. We did not exactly go, but we got, into the rue Lafayette, where, without any warning, the victoria parted amidships. The driver on his box and two wheels went on with the horse; I and my companion fell forward into the road and the hood of the thing atop of us. I set up a yell, half-laughter, half-alarm, which caused our man to look round. When he saw what had happened he pulled up, and very carefully descended from his perch. Did he come to help us? Not so. He went directly and deliberately into a cabaret, without any notice taken of any kind, and we saw him put away a noggin, or whatever it is, of cognac. Then, with the same meditated method, he came to extricate his charges. They, however, had by that time extricated themselves, and considered themselves shut of him.

When a Frenchman begins to drive anything, horse or motor, he seems to become intoxicated with progress, and content just to drive, not to guide, and never, at any rate, to stop. I have been the victim also of that generous ardour. It was in Algiers, ages ago, but not such ages that there were not tramcars along the sea-front. A baker in his covered cart was taking us to see some sight or other; and along the sea-front held his course magnificently indifferent to everything but the speed and joy of it all—aided not a little thereto by the fine afternoon, the business of the road, and the café tables hemming it, dense with customers. For it was the hour of absinthe. The trams flashed past us, coming or going, but little cared he for that. His object was to pass them, and he did pass one or two. Presently, however, at a curve he flogged his horse to pass one, on the wrong side, and just as he drew level, behold, another bearing swiftly down upon us! I confess that I blenched—but he did not; rather held on his way, and not until the last tick of our last minute on earth did it strike him that he must do something. And what did he do? He gave a wild shout and turned his horse sharply to the left. On his left was the overflow of a café—tin tables, bentwood chairs, syphons, opal-brimmed glasses, citizens in straw hats, with straws to their mouths, with cigars or newspapers—as thick as a flock of sheep. Into the midst of this, as once Don Quixote hurled himself, we plunged, horse, cart and passengers. Tables flew right and left, citizens were upset, glasses shivered, waiters wrung their hands. You never saw such a sight. And what did we do? I and my companion sat where we were, laughing ourselves ill, fighting for breath. Our driver slowly dismounted and looked round. He disregarded entirely the havoc he had made, and thought only of his honour. The driver of the tram was waiting for him. They met, and each lifted a bunched hand, in which all the finger-tips met and formed a little cage, to within an inch of the other’s nose. Then began des injures, which could only have ended in one of two ways. The arrival of the gendarmes decided in which of the two it was to end.

THE DEATH OF THE SHEEP

Alfred de Vigny, it seems, wrote a poem of stoic intention called La Mort du Loup, in which he apostrophised in his eloquent way that particular among other sublimes animaux. I have never read a line of it myself, but can well understand, when Sainte-Beuve regrets that it should have been written too much from the standpoint of seeking in nature at all costs subjects of meditative poetry, that Sainte-Beuve may have been right. The pathetic fallacy is a stumbling-block to the egoistic travellers we are. De Vigny on his dead wolf may have been lifted as far, or nearly as far, as Sterne on his dead donkey. Personally, I am busking for a short excursion on a dead sheep; but although there were elements of the high sublime in the climax, and of the horrid in the anti-climax of the tragedy, it is not on their account that I wish to relate it; rather because it seemed to me at the time to be representative, exactly to prefigure the countryside in which I saw it all done. It may stand up as type, or as symbol, of the fells and the life lived there; it has in it much of their lonely grandeur and savagery, of their harshness and plainness, of their entire absence of amenity; in a word, of their Nordic quality which does not so much insist as take for granted, in a way disconcerting to the Southerner, that neither man nor woman, dog nor sheep more or less makes one straw’s worth of difference to the day’s work, but that we are all alike rolled round, as Wordsworth said, “with stocks and stones and trees.” He himself, Nordic to the bone, saw nothing amiss with it; and no doubt it is all right.

The sheep must have died rather suddenly in the late afternoon. When I went down the fell-side, at six, to fish in the river there was nothing but greenness to be seen; when I came up again, round about eight o’clock, I saw, or thought I saw, a grey rock where had been no rock before. It was the sheep, and quite cold. She must have felt her time at hand, withdrawn herself from her companions, and descended the hill deliberately to be alone with fate. Then, as I see it now, she stood there, facing down the hill, which in health her kind never does, and awaited the end of all things. Then, as the chills crept up, she lay down and put her muzzle flatlings to that rooty earth which in life she had so diligently sought, and with the scent of it to comfort her (the best thing she knew) given up what ghost she had. She looked, as I stood over her, to be asleep—asleep with large, bare eyelids covering her blank amber eyes—and grandly indifferent to me and the rest of us. I left her, a warrior taking her rest. There she lay all night; and in the morning, her former mates feeding all about her, there she was. A windless silver rain was falling, straight as rods of glass. The fell was blanched with it, as with hoar frost; but she took no notice of the rain. A crow or two wheeled about, and bore off in the haze as soon as I showed myself. I went down to look at the sheep. She lay easily, her nose to the ground, while others of her nation gazed at me, foolishly serious, heaving at the side. Whatever had taken place at that supreme hour of yesterday evening, it had changed this corruptible into something other than a sheep. Sheep-nature had gone; she had not a sheep’s face any more. Her dead eyes looked wiselier through their lids than their empty ones unveiled, and fuller, too, as if charged with weightier news. Sterner, too, she appeared—with her lips curled back; the rabbit-look gone.

There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race, and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall—much, I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale. In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However, I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife.

She said—merely humouring my queasiness—that the remains should be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil.

THE SOLITARY REAPER

The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence. I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder-high, heavy in ear, bolt upright; a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social, but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests: the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy, thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies—all gone now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just begun. One man was reaping it.

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain:

O listen! for the vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.

“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said, munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is now a forlorn convention—a mere vestige like the human appendix. For the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles, as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands—that is all there is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the “solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage, and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears—why, then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors. I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s automata are not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.

INTERIORS

Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best—interiors and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth concentre there, and he is unhappy—a figure for Hans Andersen—who has not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing, through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be.

Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one is looking at them—or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying. Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead you through a picture-gallery, so free are the indwellers of their concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children—four little girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy—“forty feeding like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was what the French call cendré, very glossy and smooth, and curling at the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding, no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her eyes. And she had been caught, not by the president, but by her elder sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering. Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You ask—or I did—How come they to leave me outside in the dark? Don’t they know that I am one with them all?

I have seen a mother reading to her girls at work, and longed to know what the book was, whether I had read it. If, as I believed, it was Miss Alcott, then I was all right. I have seen a boy rigging a three-masted vessel at a table, and knew by the way he was biting his tongue how happy he was. And I have seen comedies for Molière. I saw topers once in a tap-room, and a man in a cut-away coat and a shocking hat standing up and trying to make good and not succeeding. He did not belong to their parts—that was evident. I guessed him to be an outlier from some race-meeting or other. But there he was, inside, warm, and at least smelling the good cheer, and there he hoped to remain. He was doing it, or trying it, on his gift—which was tongues. I don’t suppose that I was thirty seconds passing that window, if so much; yet I could see decisively that he wanted them to believe in him, and how badly. They, a plain-faced, weather-seamed row, were not taking any. They were tired with their day’s work, leaned to the wall, their legs, I am sure, stretched out at length. Each with one horny hand held his pipe in its place; one and all they looked down at their feet, and listened, and judged him for a poor thing. The things you see!

They are not always so pleasant. Sometimes they can be pretty tragic when you come to work them out. I passed a house once on the outskirts of a country town, and across a laurel hedge and iron fence, and between the branches of a monkey-puzzler, could see into a lighted room. Not much to be seen, you might think. Gas was burning in a central chandelier behind ground-glass globes. An engraving in a gilt frame on a green wall; something in a tall glass case before the window. I did not see the aspidestris, which must have been there. Then, on one side of the fire a man in a black coat, asleep, and on the other a woman in a white shawl, asleep—and that was all. Yes, but wait. I remember a trial at some Assizes years ago, where a man was arraigned for killing his wife. He pleaded not guilty, as of course; but the evidence was clear. He had killed her with a chopper in the scullery. He was convicted and sentenced to death, having had nothing to say. Before his execution, but not long before it, he told the chaplain of the gaol what he had done, and why. He said that he had been married to the woman for twenty years; that they did not quarrel, but had got out of the way of speaking to one another, and, in fact, practically never did. It had not affected him for some time, he said; but one evening, suddenly, it did. One evening he was struck with horror, palsy-struck with the reflection: “Good God! I have sat dumb before this woman, she dumb before me, for twenty years, and we may have to sit so for another twenty.” He said that from that moment the thought never left him, that the horror of the prospect daunted him, and that by and by his heart failed him. He knew then that he could not do it. Some wild resentment, some hot inconsiderate grudge wrought madness in him—to that shocking end. By ordinary we do not use our imagination, and so escape very likely as much misery as happiness, glory and the like. But if the picture-making faculty awake of itself, blaze the future at us, so vividly that we cannot doubt of its truth—what then? Why, then, as often as not, despondency and madness. I had no envy of that gas-illumined room, and was contented to be a stranger to that disgruntled pair.

I have seen other things of sharper savour, where passion clearly was involved, and, as it seemed, the creatures themselves uncurtained as well as the room they occupied. Two of them, related long ago, I shall always remember: the first, seen by chance from a window of the Army and Navy Stores, which looked out over the purlieus of Westminster towards the river. That showed me a mean second-floor bedroom just over the way, and a little maid-servant in it, down at heels, draggled, her cap awry, dusting and tidying up. All familiar, uninteresting, a matter of routine, until suddenly I saw her throw her head up—a gesture of real abandonment—and fall on her knees beside the bed. She buried her face in her bare arm; and I moved away. That was no place for me. Startling though, to be jolted out of the smooth apparatus of shopping, away from obsequious service and the accepted convention, in return for my half-crowns, that I was a temporary lord of the earth. All a sham, that; but there across the street, in a frowsy bedroom, was reality—a soul and its Disposer face to face.

The other was revealed when, as a very young man, I had chambers in Old Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn. My bedroom there backed upon slums, but was above them, being almost in the roof of a tall old house. One night, very late, I was going to bed, and leaned far out of my window to get air and see the stars. Before, and below me rather, rose a dark wall of houses, entirely blind but for one lighted window. That revealed a shabby sitting-room—a table with a sewing-machine and paraffin lamp; little else. There was a man sitting by the table in his shirt-sleeves; he was smoking while he read the evening paper. Then a door opened and a tall, youngish woman came in. She was in white—evidently in her nightdress—and her loose hair was about her shoulders. She stood between door and table, resting her hand; I don’t think that she spoke. The man, aware or unaware, went on reading. But presently he looked up: their eyes met. He threw down pipe and paper and went to her. He dropped to his knees, clasped hers, and bent his head to his hands. All that I had seen before—I knew what I was doing—but I saw no more. What did it mean? Husband and wife? Sinner and saviour? What do I know?

THE PLIGHT OF THEIR GRACES

The mills of God grind as the poet has declared, and they grind to the same measure both the illustrious and the obscure. Naturally one hears more of the sorrows of the great. The wailing of a duke will carry the length of the realm, and since America is now interested domestically in that estate it will reverberate in the Western continent also. The Duke of Bedford has lately exhibited a part of his case to readers of The Times, the Duke of Portland more explicitly his to his friends and neighbours. Both their graces say in effect that the thing can’t be done. They do not tell us why not; but we can infer it. To do things properly, Welbeck and Woburn require some thirty housemaids; and how are they to find thirty housemaids, or, having found them, as things now are, pay for them? They do not ask, but the question follows for the plainer sort, why should a man stand in the ridiculous position of requiring thirty housemaids?

It so happens that I have just been to Woburn for the first time in my life, have made the circuit of the great wall, some ten feet high and, I daresay, ten miles round, have entered at one fine gate and issued at another after a traverse of the noble spaces of the park, in which herds of deer, occasional ostriches, lamas, bisons, remote and solitary buffaloes, and heaven knows what, were to be seen peacefully feeding, as if no kind of anxiety was fretting the peace and amplitude of it all. The trees, the boscages, the lake, the great piled grey house unapproachable of the vulgar, the model villages with their cottage-fronts all stamped with a crowned B—all these splendid established things passed by me like an opium-eater’s dream: all so seeming secure, inevitable and right; all, actually, so shaky, doomed, and infernally wrong. And with the Lord of Welbeck’s wail in my ears, I also saw that, truly, it could not be done.

It is not a matter of housemaids alone. It is a matter of gardeners, of woodmen, of a permanent staff of masons and bricklayers—for with a wall of ten feet by ten miles there will always be repairs. Other services in proportion. Where are we then? I avoid arithmetic for excellent reasons; but I do see that thirty housemaids at £50 a year apiece plus board come to £3,000 a year, and that the others will figure out accordingly. How is it to be done? It is not. And why should it be done? God knows.

Whether their Graces know is another matter. I think that they are beginning to know—but even so, they are only at the beginning of the problem. For it is not so easy as it sounds just to drop Welbeck or Woburn and live en pension at Dieppe. What are you to do with Welbeck in the meantime? And if you don’t want it yourself, who, do you suppose, will want it? And let it be remembered that their Graces, besides Welbeck and Woburn, possess each another house, not made with hands, an indestructible house. They are dukes for ever after the order of Melchisedech. Like snails, wherever they go—to Dieppe, to a flat in the Temple, to a caravan, to the banks of the Susquehanna—they must carry that blazoned house on their backs. And I cannot imagine a more inhospitable or superfluous mansion for the life of me.

The only nobility worth talking about is one of birth, and even that won’t bear talking about very seriously. Lord Chesterfield, the famous one of the family, had a gallery of ancestors which was a wonder to behold of completeness and splendour. But he was wise enough to correct it with two pictures: a scrubby old man, labelled Adam de Stanhope, and a scrubby old woman, Eve de Stanhope. He had the values straightened out thus wittily, at any rate for himself. Then there was the family-tree of the Wynns, or another Welsh house, which had an asterisk some distance down, with a note attached: “About this time the creation of the world took place.” This is perhaps all very foolish, but we can understand it.

We supplemented that intelligible aristocracy in our country, first with an aristocracy of office, and then with one of rank; and it is on those in particular that the economic crisis presses. Noble birth is a matter of tradition and, so to speak, of God’s grace. If you are nobly born you may black boots, sell matches or beg at a church door. Hidalgos, grandees of Spain, do these things in their own country, and remain grandees of Spain. Even ignoble pursuits cannot stultify noble birth. There it is. Official nobility, too, is very well, while ability to office persists: but that kind died out because ability to office refused to be hereditary. The first Earls were governors of earldoms, that is of counties. The first Viscounts were Vicecomites, Sheriffs. But Lord Viscount Northcliffe is not a sheriff. If he is an aristocrat it is by virtue of rank. Now rank is not quite like beauty. Handsome is as handsome does, we know; but rank is as rank is able to be. You may make a man a duke, of course, but it is possible that he will make himself ridiculous; and if he does that, and if he does it often enough, and if there are enough of him, he will make the Fountain of Honour itself ridiculous. I don’t know who was the first of our kings to ennoble, his Quelconques, his “unfortunate females,” as Carlyle used to say: I think it was Henry VIII; but whoever he was he sowed the seed of a fungus in the ranks of the peers. One knows what the French kings did, what Charles II, what the Hanoverians did. Whether, when the politicians took control of the Fountain of Honour and commercialised its golden waters, they did any worse, it were hard to say. They made common what had already become vulgar. The peerage of late years is only less absurd because it is less conspicuous. That at least is to the good. Yet there remains this last thing to be said about it. An aristocracy of birth is self-sufficient, but one of rank demands self-evidence, quite a different matter. It drives you back upon wealth, without which it is an absurdity. A grandee of Spain selling matches will pass—but how about a Caroline or Georgian marquess driving a taxi, or taking his turn at a music-hall?

M. Henri Lavedan wrote a novel upon that theme, a cynical, witty, bitter, rattling novel, too, called “Le Bon Temps.” A party of Parisians, men about town and their ladies, is lunching al fresco at Armenonville or some such on a fine morning in May. A hurdy-gurdy sounds a familiar air outside, which touches the tender top of some quill in one of the convives. “Let’s have the old chap in,” he moves the company. “He’s playing the Blue Danube, and will renew the youth for some of us.” They have him in, a tattered, bearded, bright-eyed vecchio, his instrument slung by a greasy strap to one shoulder, on the other a foolish little troubled monkey in a red velveteen petticoat. He lifts his old hat and recommences his grinding. One of the guests covers his eyes, and so remains until the grinder has gone. Then he lifts his head. “Do you know who that was?” “Not I indeed!” “That was the Duc d’Epervier.” Then he tells the story of Le Bon Temps: Wein, Weib, und Gesang, a rattling tale with a croak in it.

“Why do the people imagine a vain thing?” This is a case for tags.

THE VILLAGE

The gardener told my housekeeper, and she told me, that the policeman’s wife had a baby. I said, Splendid! or Good!—it was one or the other—which will show you that I knew what I was about. To have said less than that—to have said simply, “Oh,” or “Why not?” would have been to fail in tact. For in the village we take such a thing as a baby seriously. We call it Increase, not a baby, in the old fashion, and disregard the new probability that, while it may be so in one sense, there are several in which it may well be called Decrease. When a patriarch’s—or, I should say here, a Druid’s—wife had a baby, both she and the Druid knew that, barring accidents, it would work for him, if it was a boy, and in due course bring in a wife of its own, and Increase of its own—all to work for the Druid until he died. Or, if it was a girl, he would sell it to a neighbouring Druid for measures of corn or heads of cattle. Increase then all round, however it turned out. But it is different now. We have the name without the thing. If it is a boy, as in fact the policeman’s is, it will be no use to him until it is fifteen, and not much then. Suppose it gets a job somewhere handy, it will pay its mother, say, five shillings a week, a bare subsistence. At twenty, if still living at home, that may be increased to ten shillings. Clothes and a motor-bike will somehow come out of the rest. Precious little Increase there. And soon after twenty it will marry and disappear from the household. But still the village holds by the old fashion, and calls a boy-baby Increase. I have heard girls dignified by the same title, though it is not so invariable. Yet there is more chance of a girl proving useful to her parents than of a boy’s being so. It depends entirely on the mother, whether as the child grows up it finds out that she won’t stand any nonsense. There are still such mothers left—I know two or three; but their numbers diminish with every additional nonsense that crops up.

Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten village law; the other comes about by circumstance, which provides that whether we like it or not—and, on the whole, I am pretty sure that we do like it—we are simply a large family. I don’t necessarily mean that everybody is related to everybody else, though as a matter of fact he is, but rather that everybody, from the time he was anybody, has always known everybody else intimately: called him or her by his Christian name—within limits—known the exact state of his wardrobe, the extent of his earnings, the state of his pocket; what he had for dinner, or will have to-morrow, where he has been, what he was doing, whom he is courting, or by whom he is courted—and so on. I should fail entirely to make plain the sense in which this extreme and (to a townsman) extraordinary intimacy must be understood if I had not in reserve one crowning example of it, beyond which I defy anybody to carry intimacy. It is, then, the plain and literal fact that everybody in the village knows, or can find out, exactly the amount, condition, value and period of recurrence of everybody else’s underwear. There is no exception to that. It is, it can be, it must be exposed to view and subject to criticism every Monday afternoon in the garden of every cottage. When you have a community with such a mutual knowledge among its members, how can you help their taking each other seriously?

Two of the fundamentals of village life have been expounded, I hope: Custom, which is the Law, and says that what you did the day before yesterday is sanction for doing it the day after to-morrow; that, and exact mutual knowledge of your own and your neighbours’ affairs. There is a third: common poverty. Everybody is poor—or if he is not, he must seem so. That is invariable, for where everyone is poor, and everyone’s affairs known to everyone else, a very jealous eye is kept for any variation from the standard. Poverty—and by poverty I mean the state where you never have quite enough for the week’s expenses, are never more than a week’s pay off “the Parish,” and have to trust to windfalls for mere necessaries—that kind of poverty is a state which can only be borne in company. In the village it is the general state, and while that is so the villagers will put up, it seems, with almost anything. Custom, which assures them that it was like that for their forefathers, enables them to accept their continual privations. I daresay there is nobody in the village, of cottage rank, who has ever known an ordinary day when he was not hungry after a meal. They say that that is good for you. My only comment is, Try it, and it won’t seem to be so. They will stand that; and being cold in bed; and letting the fire out when you are not cooking something—so that you come home wet and tired to cold ashes, and must chop kindling before you can be warm or dry; and working incessantly, as the women do, for almost nothing or literally nothing; and wearing the same clothes until they fall off you; and washing at the sink downstairs because you are too tired to take water upstairs; and having windows that won’t open, and doors that won’t shut—but why go on? Worse things than any of these are endured in the slums of great towns. The village makes little of them, provided that they are shared; but the moment it knows, or has cause to suspect that any one of its number has had “a stroke of luck,” come into money, had a useful present made him, or found a well-paid job, then it is at once dissatisfied with its lot, and the lucky offender hears about it. It is not that village people are naturally unkind to each other—far from that, they are kindness itself in times of trouble. But they are incurably suspicious, and quicker to believe ill than well of each other. They grudge prosperity to a neighbour less than resent it. It seems a slight upon themselves. A hot and bitter question surges up, Why should that good fortune happen to her; and what have I done to be left out? By some queer jugglery of the mind, the first half of the question answers the second half; the happy one is so at the expense of the less favoured. If you engage a girl in the village for some daily task, her friends, as likely as not, will cut her in the street. I knew a woman in Norfolk whose husband was killed by a fall from a straw-stack. Compensation, insurance, club-money, presents from the benevolent flowed in to the widow, whose neighbours saw her not only free as air, but comfortably off according to village standards. They called her “the Lady,” and some of her own family would have nothing to do with her.

Indiscriminate or heedless present-giving should therefore be avoided, unless you wish harm to come to the object of your alms. There was a man in a village over the hill who was doing a turn of work in the house of a newcomer, a rich young man with the most friendly intentions. Talking to his labourer one day and noticing his unconventional leg-covering, it suddenly shot across his mind that he had lately tried on a new pair of trousers and taken them off again in a rage because of their cut. “By George,” he thought, “I like this chap. Now I’ll give him those beastly trousers”—which he did. On Sunday, then, there shone upon the church-going village young Richard in the newest pair of trousers it had ever seen, except, of course, upon the legs of a “gentleman,” where they would have been simply unremarkable, hors concours. But now it was as if a private in a file should show up there in a cocked hat with feathers. The trousers were glossy from the iron, they caught the sun. The creases before or behind would have cut a swathe. In the after-dinner time, when some favoured corner hums with youth, it hummed to only one tune; and on Monday the children going to school called out after young Richard, “Who stole my trousers?” It will now be understood why no village can be found without its miser. Between hiding and hoarding there is only a difference of degree. The first is forced upon the villager, for public opinion is too many for him; he dare not let it be known that he has anything to put by. The mattress used to be the favourite place for your economies. If it is not used now it is simply to save the waste of good ticking which always followed a death. Now it will be a hole under the hearthstone, or in the thatch, or a cache under the third gooseberry bush as you go down the garden. Sometimes it is so well hidden that, if death be sudden, it is never found at all. Sometimes the hider will forget where he hid his money, and dig up the whole garden in the middle of the night. Mr. Pepys was in that predicament and, so feverishly did he hunt, lost quite a number of broad pieces. But the worst case is where he knows the hiding-place exactly, and going to recover his treasure, finds that somebody else had known it too; and so it has gone. Cruel dilemma! He dare not let his loss be known, nor, should he be able, accuse the thief. His only remedy in such circumstance is to steal from the stealer. I heard of an old woman who was robbed of twenty pounds, which she kept in an old beehive, and who knew perfectly well where the money was. She said nothing at all, continued her acquaintance, and even used to have the thief to tea with her. I don’t know how it was done—whether it dawned upon the guilty that she was suspected, and so compunction came. Anyhow, as I was told, the money was restored.

It may seem odd that when a villager rises in the world, as they often do, he ceases to be grudged. I am not sure that he really does; but no signs of grudging appear, simply because he ceases to be a villager. Rank is carefully observed—but it is all outside. There is no rank in the village itself. All are level there—except in one way. And that exception is not odd, either.

Walking down the street at certain hours of the day you will meet certain old men, elders of the people. Although they differ in no respect from any others you may find there, you will notice this about them that they will be “Mr.” to everyone, and not, as is usual, Jack, Tom, or Jimmy. What has procured them their title of honour? Not always age, certainly never riches: as often as not the bearer of a title will be an old-age pensioner. Or he may be “on the rates.” It doesn’t matter. Some native worth or resident dignity forbids the use of his Christian name, which is otherwise of invariable application. That points to a real aristocracy, an aristocracy of character; the only one which can hope to be permanent, as founded upon reason and nature; and the one without which no democracy can expect to be permanent either. Walking with one of these patricians the other day, I observed before us a man of near his age. Presently there came towards us an urchin homing from school, who passing our front rank, a man old enough to be his great grandfather, lightly acclaimed him with “Afternoon, George.” But to my companion it was, “Afternoon, Mr. M——.” With the women—married, of course—the decencies are observed in salutation, but not in reference. You will hear of one as old Liz Marchant, of another, always, as Mrs. Catchpole, or whatever her name may be. But, to each other, married women are strict formalists. Two girls who have known each other from childhood and been at school together will be Florry and Bess to the very church-porch. From the wedding day onwards, if they should live to be a hundred, they will be “Mrs.” to each other. That would fill me with wonder if I did not know how seriously the married state is taken in the village, the more so, I don’t doubt, because the single is more free than is convenient. Marriage, we say, sets right every irregularity. Perhaps it does; but in these parts it effectively prevents there being any more.

I have been expounding, it should be seen, what are virtually the manners and customs of a nation widely different from that of most of my readers. It is not really an economic, but an historic difference; for the longer I study it the clearer it becomes that the village does not differ in any essential respect from its remotest original, the Neolithic settlements on the tops of these hills. From where I live, a quarter way up the chalk down, I could conduct the inquirer to three or four vestiges of communities exactly like this one. I could point out the holes in which they lived, the track by which they drove their flocks to and from the watering places, which are still in situ and still used. I could lay a wreath on the mound which covers their dust, or I might by a chance of the spade uncover their bones, not dust yet. There has never been discovered, so far as I am aware, anything to show that any one man of that nation lorded it over his fellows. Lords and masters enough there have been since. From the time when the Alpine race invaded our country the Iberian stock which underlies us all has never lacked a master. But they have none now. They have employers, hirers, not masters. So far as I can see the West Country village community is now once more just where it was fifteen hundred years before Christ, or thirty-five hundred years ago. It is in the valley instead of on the hill, it is professedly Christian instead of heathen. But it is still guided by tradition, and governed by common opinion, and as near a democracy as may be: a democracy tempered by character.

THE CURTAINS

Your pair of muslin curtains, given time and place, may cost you anything in the region of four, eleven, three, as the shop will tell you; but if you add to that domestic calm, the amenities and a raw sconce they soon mount up. That was what they cost a man I know, and I say that they are not worth it. For, not to dwell for a moment upon his particular pair, muslin curtains don’t fulfil the whole duty of curtains, but only a part of it, and the wrong part. They prevent you from seeing out of the window, which is the last thing you want of them in the country; they don’t prevent other people from seeing into it—which is the first thing. Particularly when you have the lamp alight. For instance, the other evening the whole village was informed inside of an hour that Mrs. Hobday, a young and pretty woman, had been trying on a hat with one hand and powdering her nose with the other. She herself was the last to know it, and the last to be allowed to forget it.

The Hobdays’ neighbours are the Cosseys, and Mrs. Hobday and Mrs. Cossey from the first were bosom friends. That was very important if life were to be what you might call life, for the two front doors are under one lintel, and, said Mrs. Cossey, “’tis such close living that if you weren’t one thing you must be t’other.” But they were always the one thing until the affair of the curtains, though Mrs. Cossey was large and plain-faced, and Mrs. Hobday pretty and small; though Mrs. Cossey had two children and Mrs. Hobday was only expecting. However, from the very first we were told ’twas all as pleasant as pleasant. They lived in each other’s houses, listened to each other’s tales of courtship and marriage, admired each other’s washing, and shook sympathetic heads over the unreasonableness of each other’s husband. There were no clouds in the sky, nor the makings of them. The Cosseys had an Axminster, but the Hobdays a new drugget. Mrs. Cossey had a copper kettle, Mrs. Hobday a silver teapot. Things were “just so,” neck and neck, and nothing to choose between them, when you came to add things up. O sweet content! And then, one mild morning, Mrs. Cossey was offered a seat in a motor-car going into town, and accepted.

It was a fine day; she was elated by her drive. Market-day, too. She felt like going it, and she went it. Away flew five shillings on a pair of muslin curtains which were selling like hot cakes at a stall. Mrs. Cossey bought other things, but nothing to count. The curtains fair set her up, they did. She felt as though she were treading on air. Wherever she went about the town that day she had an eye for the windows, and saw nothing better anywhere. “I’ll make Fred put ’em up after dark,” she promised herself. “’Twill be a surprise for Mrs. Hobday in the morning.” It was.

When Mrs. Hobday saw her friend’s front-room window she felt her heart jump, then stand still. But she knew what was due to herself, and let not a sigh escape her. Mrs. Cossey found her busy on her knees over the doorstep, busier certainly than she had ever been before. It became necessary to call her attention to the curtains, which somehow took the edge off them. You can’t explain it, but so ’twas. Then, of course, Mrs. Hobday admired; and when she had admired enough, she was told all about it; and when she knew all about it she said no more, but excused herself for being busy, and withdrew. Nor, if you will believe Mrs. Cossey, was she seen again for two days and nights; never so much as put her head outside the door. But Mrs. Cossey did not know how she had wept on Hobday’s shoulder that evening of discovery, how she had pleaded (as they used to do at Assizes, poor things) her condition, and how Hobday had said she shouldn’t want for anything, if it cost him ten shillin’—which it did. She knew nothing of all that; but in two days’ time, when she stood at her front door, and, happening to look at her neighbour’s window, might, so she said, have been knocked down with a feather—then indeed she knew all the blackness of Mrs. Hobday’s heart.

Whatever she might have been knocked down with, she herself used a club, that is to say, most injurious words. The whole village heard them, at second-hand, from Tom Crewkomb, the sweep, who had been passing at the time. Warmed by eloquence, it seems, and her growing sense of triumphant suffering, Mrs. Cossey called Mrs. Hobday a saucy young piece; whereat Mrs. Hobday, as if whipped, struck out blindly and said that Mrs. Cossey was no better than she should be. It may have been true—it is true of most of us; but Mrs. Cossey took it to heart and, refusing all nourishment, could do nothing but repeat it to herself over and over again. The pair of cottages, resplendently curtained as they might be, became a house of lamentation. The breaking-point was reached when Hobday came home to tea, and being again wept upon, pushed fiercely into next door and called Mrs. Cossey to her face an old tantamount—a terrible word, whose implication no man could possibly know. For end thereof, not despondency but madness: for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a pair of clippers over the ear. Hobday was a light-weight, and did his best, but he could not get near Cossey; and he went to grass. Mrs. Hobday had hysterics, and asked for the doctor; and then (such is human nature at its best) Mrs. Cossey ran in to her, called her a lamb, and put her to bed.

It is a boy.

Mrs. Cossey and Mrs. Hobday have better things to admire in each other now. But Mrs. Hobday knows that her curtains cost more. So also does Hobday.

HAPPINESS IN THE VILLAGE

Not far from me there lives a man with wife and child in a tenement not much better than a cowshed. It is exactly two rooms of a wooden building, with no other conveniences of any kind, not so much as a copper for the washing. It is built into a ledge cut out of the southern slope of the valley, consequently never looks the sun in the face. I know that the rain falls through into the bedroom. If one dared one would have the place condemned, if to do that would not condemn to the workhouse those who shelter there. Yet I have known those poor things envied. At a certain hour of the afternoon the wife comes to her open door, the child in her arms. After five minutes’ watching, she sets the little creature down to totter up the road, down which comes a man, homing from his work. He too is on the look-out, and stands to admire. Then, when they meet, he picks up the baby, sets it on his shoulder, and back they go together to mother at the door. I have known that envied, I say, by the childless, by the unhappily mated, and by those whose days for children are over and done. Life has that in store for some of us, and I don’t know that it has anything better. An allegory, that, in its way.

Four years ago, when Agriculture had a Wages Board, and hopes were high that a carminis aetas was opening for our oldest industry, a club was formed among the members of the Board for the ventilation of ideas. It was a gallant adventure, maintained with spirit so long as the parent Board was suffered to endure. Political exigencies, however, determined its existence, and with it perished the Agricultural Club. Now its president and virtual founder, Sir Henry Rew, has published its remains in “The Story of the Agricultural Club” (P. S. King and Son), and we are able to judge of the remedies proposed for a sick profession. It may shortly be said of the club, as of the deceased board, that its very existence did more service to agriculture than any of its recommendations, if only because it was solid in Pall Mall while its remedies were, and largely remain, in the air. In that fine room of Schomberg House, which happens to have been Gainsborough’s studio, there met on the eve of every Board-meeting representatives of the landed interests from all England, squires, tenant-farmers and farm labourers, on terms of that complete equality which only clubmanship can guarantee. How extraordinary that was is illustrated by Sir Henry Rew as follows:

“A year ago I had occasion to attend a meeting in the market town of a typical agricultural district. It purported to be a conference between the representatives of farmers and of farm-workers with regard to a dispute then in progress. I was shown into the conference room, where I found the farmers assembled in force round a large table, and I was honoured with a seat at the head of the table by the side of the chairman. After some discussion among themselves, the chairman announced that they were ready to receive the representations of the workers. About half a dozen of them entered, and were ranged on a form against the wall at the lower end of the room. The Chairman addressed them civilly enough, but with much the same air of condescension as a magistrate assumes in speaking from the Bench. I am sure that no offence was intended or taken. The position seemed perfectly natural to both parties. It was the normal and habitual relation of master and man in discussion.”

It is fair to conclude, with Sir Henry, that the Wages Board and its club were “the expression of a new relationship,” not that of “master and man,” but rather of “man and man”; and it is not difficult to say what that may imply in latter-day village life. I am prepared by observation to say that at least it implies a definite heightening of status for the farm-labourer, of which he is very well aware. But whether it will work out for village prosperity and (a very different thing) village happiness, is still a matter of various opinion—opinion which is reflected in the papers read before the assembled club, and in the ensuing discussions.

These papers, as one might expect, are mainly practical in purpose. They deal with education, principally technical; they deal with cottage-building, not very fruitfully; they offer proposals for the formation of village-clubs; they touch, but gingerly, upon the ownership of land. The avowed ends of every proposition are two: how to keep the labourer in the village, and how to make him happy when he is there. It seems to me that readers and debaters alike fell into the common error of confusing prosperity with happiness, and happiness with pleasure. The mistake is fundamental. If all men of pleasure were happy men, legislation might accomplish what philosophers have failed to do. If excitement had no reactions, then let village clubs abound and young ploughmen dance all night! Bread and circuses are within the discretion of Parliament, but not prosperity, and not happiness. A man must work for his happiness “as some men toil after virtue”; and the education which he must receive in order to attain it is in another technic than that which has been in the mind of the Club. The young villager must acquire mental alacrity, he must learn to be temperate, and he must get charity. Having those, he may pick up happiness like gold off from Tom Tiddler’s ground, for the world is full of it. All the specifics of the Agricultural Club are palliatives of his lot, “consolatories writ.” The elementals remain—to be sought elsewhere.

The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow, and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming, is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens, nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others abide our question, but not those.

OTHERWHERENESS

The man whom I found one day in the reading-room at the Club, searching the Court Guide to find out his own name, was quite good-tempered about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to send a telegram, and he had written it out: when it came to signing it he was beat. I told him at once what I believed his name to be; he verified it in Boyle. “I might have had to get a dressing-room,” he said. “It isn’t one of those things which you can ask the hall-porter.”

The really absent-minded are not irritated by those intrusions of the supra-liminal self. The sub-liminal so pleasantly employs them, habitually, that they can afford to put up with the other’s impertinence. But occasionally he goes too far, as he certainly did with a dear and vague friend of mine when, horribly involved with a fishing line and a fly-hook in his sleeve, he hastily put his eye-glass into his mouth and his cigarette into his eye. Then indeed he broke into a flood of imprecation, so very unlike himself that one part of him “which never was heard to speak so free” really shocked the other part. “Oh, shameful, shameful!” I heard him say, and the profaner part was silenced. Here, of course, the whole assembled man was no further away than the whereabouts of the fly-hook, and not at all pleasantly occupied. Mostly, as Lamb says of his good friend, George Dyer:

“With G. D., to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition—or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised—at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor—or Parnassus—or co-sphered with Plato—or, with Harrington, framing ‘immortal commonwealths.’”

If he interrupted those happy sojournings, as he did once, to make a call in Bedford Square, and on learning that no one was at home, solemnly to sign his name in the visitors’ book, it is not at all surprising that, wandering on and on, he should presently find himself again in Bedford Square, again inquire for his friends, again ask for the visitors’ book and be brought up short, on the point of signing it again, by his own name scarcely dry—as if, says Lamb, “a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate.” He may have been a little mortified, I daresay, but—it was worth it. A thing of the same sort happened to a very delightful lady of my friends—a lady of commanding presence, but occasional remarkable absences too. She went to call at a house in Eaton Square, no less, and found herself, when the door was opened by a footman, totally deprived of the name of the houselady. What did she? There was a moment of heart-beating and wild surmise; and then, with a smile of ineffable courtesy and sweetness, she held out her hand to the wondering man, pressed his own warmly as she said “Good-bye,” and sailed serenely away to resume her commerce with the infinite. Such commerce, I know, she had. She told me the story herself, and saw nothing amiss with it. Nor was there anything amiss. She was one who could do simple things simply—which is a great and rich possession; but occasionally she presumed upon it—as when she assured herself of the same virtue in her daughters and expected them to carry out her simplifications. That, of course, was a very different thing; but I don’t think she understood it. There is this also to be said, that women are much less self-conscious than men and do not go in such terror of being made ridiculous. Tell me of a man who could enter his drawing-room full of guests, and discovering himself without, say, his teeth, could laugh in the first face his eye encountered. “Forgive me—one moment—I must get my teeth”—tell me of such a man. Mutatis mutandis, I have been told of such a woman—and a great lady she was, too—by somebody who was there. It was not teeth, however.

The best of men—the George Dyers, whom, happily, we have always with us somewhere or other—are as content as most women with their natural destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, dined, talked, and took his leave. Twenty minutes later the knocker announced a late-comer. It was G. D. “What is the matter?” asked Hunt. “I think sir,” said Dyer, in his simpering, apologetic way, “I think I have left one of my shoes behind me.” He had indeed shuffled it off under the table, and did not discover his loss until he had gone a long way. As I read that story, which is Ollier’s (but I get it from Mr. Lucas), G. D.’s apologetics were directed to Hunt, whose rest he had disturbed, by no means to himself. A man less sublimely lifted was one with whom I had been staying in a Scotch country house. We came away together, and half-way to the station he struck himself on the forehead, and “Good God!” he said, “I have tipped the same man three times!” It appeared too true that he had: once in his bedroom, once in the hall, and once at the carriage door. Now he, if you like, was excessively mortified, and his reason may well have been that he had not been better employed, on Helikon or elsewhere, when he might have been noticing menservants. He was as blind as a bat, poor man, and a sense of infirmity may have stung him. The otherwhere men have no sense of infirmity—on the contrary, one of great gain. An ampler æther, a diviner air is theirs in which to exercise.

But of all divinely preoccupied men the best—unless Dyer be the best—is Brancas—the Comte de Brancas of whom you may read in Saint-Simon, in the Correspondence of “Madame,” and in Tallemant des Réaux. Brancas was to the Paris of the Grand Siècle what Dyer was to the London of the Regency, or Dr. Spooner to the wits of my younger days. La Bruyère, summarising him as Ménalque, overdid his study, and made him appear like the clown in a circus who gets horribly involved in the carpet, or kicks away the hat he stoops to pick up. It may be perfectly true that Brancas went downstairs, opened his front door, and shut it again, thinking that he had just come in—that I can perfectly understand. It is a thing I might have done myself. But to add to it that he presently discovered his nightcap on his head, his stockings down about his ankles, and his shirt outside his chausses, is to spoil the story. Never mind, he is out in the street finally, and walking briskly along, with his mind leagues away. By and by he is brought up short by a violent blow on the nose. “Who has attacked me?” he cries. Nobody. He has walked fiercely into the tilt of a market cart, which he had overtaken in his briskness. Or he goes to Versailles to pay his court, enters the appartement, and passing under the central chandelier, his perruque is caught and held there; but he forges along. The company gapes, then bursts into laughter. Brancas stops, looks inquiringly about, sees the swinging perruque and is delighted. “Whose is that?” He looks all about him to find the bare pate and exposed ears. Finally, of course, somebody claps it on his head. A good story, which may be true.

Two of them, at least, may be, as they are told by Madame in letters to her friends. Brancas went to church—to the Salut: he knelt down, and feeling in his pocket for his Book of Hours, pulled out a slipper which he had put there instead of it. Just outside the church, on leaving, he is accosted by a lackey who, with much deprecation, asks him if he happens to have taken Monseigneur’s shoe by mistake. “Monseigneur’s shoe!” It is the fact that he had paid a call upon a bishop that afternoon. “No, no—certainly not”—then he remembers that he has, in fact, a slipper in his pocket. His hand goes in, to make sure that it is there. It is; but so is another slipper—which is precisely—Monseigneur’s.

The next is even better. Brancas goes to mass at Versailles. He is late, and bustles up the nave between the kneeling company. He sees, as he thinks, a prie-dieu facing the altar. Most convenient—just the thing. He hastens, throws himself upon it. To his amazement it emits a strangled cry, gives way before him, and he finds himself intricately struggling on the pavement with a stout lady. His prie-dieu had been the Queen-Mother.

THE JOURNEY TO COCKAIGNE

I remember being taken ill in a small town on the Marne in 1906, desperately ill with copper poisoning. I say that I remember, as if there was a chance that I should ever forget it. The agony, the rigour and all the rest of it, were accompanied by high fever and delirium, which lasted all through a burning August night. It happened that a fête nationale had possession of the town: there were a fair, a steam roundabout, a horrible organ accompaniment. The grinding, remorseless tune, the uproar, the slapping of countless feet (though I tried to count them) on the pavement wove themselves into my racing dreams. I seemed to be a party to some Witches’ Sabbath; and now, if I ever try to imagine Hell, it always comes out like that. A dry, crackling, reiterated business, without rest, without mirth, without hope, without reason. One suffered incredibly, one was desperately concerned; the brain was involved in it; the more frivolous it was the more deeply the mind must work. I knew it was a festivity; all the familiar features of revel were there—and all horrible. The mind was so tired that you seemed to hear it wailing for mercy; but it went on jigging after the organ. The feet of the dancers were burnt by the paving stones, yet never stayed. Some mocking devil possessed the people, rode them with spurs. There was no zest, yet no pause; and through it all was the blare of the organ.

Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what is working in the lees.

Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them. It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much alike, and all apparently of one age.

Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice. Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them, or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little; they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food—it ought to have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.

Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often seen it before—I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then; but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races. A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad, vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated, silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.

Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated, and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs (you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream, mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers, or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there came upon us a coal strike of three months long—a knock-out blow to many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on tick? The Lord knows.

On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor read about them. The Westminster Gazette’s front page was entirely filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. The Times—but since The Times has become sprightly I confess it is too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from The Westminster Gazette.

The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges, and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying; but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious matter.

SUICIDE OF THE NOVEL

The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There was a man—dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....” So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes) “is not Emily.” There is no love in the Odyssey, none in Robinson Crusoe, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in Gil Blas. The animalism in Tom Jones, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites, and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist. It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray. Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss them and go home—to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a flame—if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr. Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour—but do we believe it, or are we the less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.

In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say, from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy, with much intensive imagining about it, non ragioniam di lor. They were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!” Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex, passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they were the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to be a redaction of life. For, pace Herr Freud, all life is not sex. One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: Daphnis and Chloe, for instance, Manon Lescaut. One could not have filled the old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form, and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.

Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied novelist wrote à priori. Observation ceased to procure novels to be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action, observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was “crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex: in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed, for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.

That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan, that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word, implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.

“‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic—only chance samples of folk you may see pass your window now, at this moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are passing—passing—all day long, each with a story. And some little thing you see, a meeting, a parting, may make the next hour the turning point of existence.... This is a tale made up of trifles.’”

What he made of those stored and treasured-up trifles, with what humour, with what tenderness, what wisdom he combined and related them, what in fact was the harvest of his quiet eye, cannot be entered upon here. De Morgan had been harvesting for sixty-five years when he began! To me his books seem to be the wisest of our time. I know of none which, as Matthew Arnold said of Homer, produce the sense in the reader “of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life presented to him.” They contain—like the Iliad in that, like Tom Jones, like David Copperfield and Vanity Fair, and War and Peace—sufficient of the world to create in us a strong illusion of the whole labouring, blundering, groaning, laughing, praying affair.

But De Morgan is too good for the end of an essay—he who has inspired so many. And he will write no more of his friendly, wise and comprehending books. And he is not the point. The point is that the novelist has bled his art down and out by urging it to make a poem of itself instead of a digest. I say nothing now of the pamphlet and the tract. Those things also the novelist has done without leaving the other undone. He, or his novel, is now dying of exhaustion, self-induced. Worst sign of all—he is beginning to note his own symptoms.

IMMORTAL WORKS

An editor—one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of him—an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was to be “What poets since Wordsworth, especially what living poets, and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:

“Dear Sir,—I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so. It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons, many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he could.

“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the existing Golden Treasury? The Burial of Sir John Moore, of course; but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that, before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you were serious.”

So much for the editor of ——. We do not know, indeed, though we sometimes think and always hope that we do, what makes for immortality. Shakespeare, you say? Who (except Shakespeare himself) thought Shakespeare immortal on the day when he was alive and dead? Who thought Johnson’s Dictionary immortal? Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? Yes, I fancy that any serious reader of that book, when it was published, knew in his heart that it would live. But take smaller things. Why, out of all Landor’s verse, was Rose Aylmer taken, and why were others left, many of them technically as perfect? You don’t know. Nor do I. Well, then, which out of the beautiful numbers of A Shropshire Lad will live for six hundred years—as long as Chaucer? Which out of the quatrains of Fitzgerald’s Omar? We may think that we know. But do we? Really, all that we do know is that among the copious poets (and Landor was very copious) some produced more perdurable lyrics than others. We know that Burns did, that Heine did: we don’t know how or why. Universality we say goes to immortality. It certainly does: the thing must go home to everybody. So does heart, whatever that is; the “lyric cry,” the sense of tears. Look at Auld Robin Gray: that is immortal. Look at The Wife of Usher’s Well. Those things might last as long as Homer or the Bible. The exact proportion, the exquisite admixture of those qualities I have mentioned, with others—felicity, limpidity, grace, and so on—do make certain poems as immortal as you please; and the want of them cuts others out. That is all there is to say.

On the whole, it is a good thing that we don’t know the recipe. It is one of several things we had better not know. Immortality in this world, immortality in another! Suppose that we were as certain of the latter as we are of getting to Paris by the 11 a.m. from Victoria. Either the world would be emptied by suicide, or—it wouldn’t! Suppose that immortality for a poem was a matter of formula. Take of universality so much, of heart so much, of grace so much: add tears, so much, and simmer gently till done ...! What would be the result? Everybody’s poems would be immortal. The Golden Treasury would stretch from here to Easter. It would be as bad as the Order of the British Empire. Nobody would want to be in it. And the result of that would be that mortal poems would be the only immortal ones. To be too bad for the Golden Treasury would be a real title of honour. And somebody would compile a Platinum Treasury to put you in.

BALLAD-ORIGINS

Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any man who ever lived—Professor Child, to wit—knew so much about them that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory; and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.

Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere, according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something like spontaneous generation—a truly daring conception, one which makes ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing, such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else, unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to ballad-poetry? Queste cose non si fanno. These things are not done.

However, when Professor Gummere argues that the folk-ballads originated in folk-dancing he is building his house of theory upon a footing of rock. Ballare means “to dance”; there’s no escape from that; and if ballads, or ballets, had nothing to do with dancing, why were they called ballads or ballets? Then he can put forward the refrains or burthens which a goodly number of ballads still retain: jingles like “Bow down,” like “Eh, wow, bonnie,” like “Three, three, and thirty-three.” The first of those describes an act of dancing; the second is foolishness unless you dance it; the third, even now, insists on being danced. If he had left it at that, without piling upon it his additament of spontaneous generation, I don’t think Professor Pound could have done any good with her crowbar. But he was too ingenious by half; he soared—he soared into the inane. So down he comes, and we are where we were before.

With all respect for the courage and learning of Professor Pound, I don’t think she has disproved the close connection of song and dance in my country’s youthful days. But “dance” is a word of special connotation now, and it is necessary to remember a much wider application of it in times gone by. It was once a word of ritual significance, as when “David danced before the Lord,” as now when the Canons of Seville dance at Easter; and it was once a word of sport. That, in all probability, is the right connotation of it where ballads are concerned. In certain phases of the dance as a game drama comes in. Drama involves dialogue, and may easily involve narration. “Here we go round the mulberry bush” is both drama, dance, and narration. “Sally, Sally Waters” is the same. So too “Ring a ring of Roses.” But to say of such things, as I suppose Professor Gummere says, that the dancing-game generated the dialogue or narration is to put the cart before the horse. If, as I have said, the jingle “three, three and thirty-three” insists on being danced, is it not more reasonable to suppose that in all cases the jingle, or lilt, or sentiment—“the broom blooms bonnie and says it is fair”—inspired the dance? Personally, I can conceive of spontaneous throng-generation of a dance much more readily. Let the Professor try it, when next he has a throng of children in his garden. Let him begin to jig up and down, saying repeatedly “three, three, and thirty-three,” and see what happens.

I am not at all concerned to say that all ballad-poetry originated in dancing-games, nor concerned to argue against Professor Pound when she suggests that they began in church. She has there the support of the fact, for what it is worth, that the earliest ballads we can find are concerned with religion. That is a fact, though it will not take her as far as she would like. Unfortunately very few such things can be dated before the fifteenth century; and the Professor must remember that preoccupation with religion was by no means confined to the clerical caste. The thirteenth century was the flowering time of the friars. They carried religion into corners where no cleric would ever have set his foot. If religious balladry had a religious origin it would be Franciscan. She does not insist upon all this, however, and certainly I do not. All the concern I have with a possible religious origin of ballad-poetry is with the certainty it affords that, if the friars had anything to do with the beginning of popular epic-narration, as they undoubtedly had to do with that of popular drama, their efforts were addressed to the populace rather than to the court, to the market-square and village green rather than to the hall.

What does Professor Pound herself believe about this obscure matter? She quotes, and quarrels with, Andrew Lang, who said that “Ballads spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man.... The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up from its shores.” That seems to me so obviously true of most of the ballads that I should require a stronger case than Professor Pound’s, and a case less weakened by strange oversights, to cause me to think twice of it. Apparently Professor Pound’s main belief about ballads is that they were by origin “literary.” Being literature, that may be supposed by anybody without taking a body very far. But if she means by that that they were composed by professional “literary men,” and not by or for the peasants, I have to suggest to her that there is much in the peasantry and much in the ballads themselves which she has not brought into account; and that that must be sought within the peasantry, and within the ballads, rather than round about them. It is, for instance, a serious error to assume a courtly origin—courtly poet or courtly auditory—in all ballads which deal with courtly people—Lord Thomases, Estmere Kings, Child Horns, Little Musgraves, and so on. Such personages are the stock-in-trade of romance, from Homer to the Family Herald. Reasoning of that kind will land the Professor in uncharted seas. There is a fallacy in it comparable to that in “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Not a doubt of it but Professor Child’s great book contains a number of courtly ballads—“Chevy Chase” and the like; it needs nothing but a knowledge of literature and the texts to settle it. I should compute the number of such in Child to be between a third and a half of the whole.

To decide upon the remainder, whether they are written by or for the peasantry (and it does not matter which, because in either case the traditions of the peasantry would be preserved), one must go to the ballads themselves. Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore as you possess—and you cannot have too much—will infallibly detect the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved in the very nature of literature. A ballad—any ballad—was either written up to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a Burns, a Clare), or written down to the auditory’s capacity, which is the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. According as you judge (a) apprehensions of fact, (b) locutions, (c) parti pris, you will put the thing down to the idiosyncrasy and origin of the poet or to the idiosyncrasy and milieu of the auditory; and you will nearly always be right. It may not be possible to be sure whether a peasant-poet wrote, though the probabilities will be high; it will always be possible to be sure whether a peasant-audience was addressed, and whether, consequently, by a peasant-audience the ballad was learned and preserved. Who in particular the poet may have been does not matter. But it matters very much, to us, that we should have all we can collect of the nature of our indigenes, though we shall never be able to get it with the clearness and precision with which Professor Pound can get at the nature of hers.

As good an example as anyone could want of the truth of the preceding paragraph is furnished by “The Twa Corbies.” Everybody knows “The Twa Corbies,” a cynical, romantic, highly literary, and most successful thing in the Scots manner; assuredly written for the gentry. But Professor Child juxtaposes to it an English version, called “The Three Ravens,” and provides an instructive comparison. The earliest copy he finds of that is of 1611. It is as surely of peasant origin as the “Twa Corbies” is not. Firstly, it has a rollicking chorus, neither to be desired nor approved by the gentry; secondly, instead of being romantic, it is sentimental; thirdly, instead of ending with a wry mouth, it ends as genially as the circumstances allow. Cynicism has never “gone down” with the peasantry. I don’t quote it, for considerations of space. Another interesting comparison can be made by means of “Thomas Rymer” in Child’s versions A. and C. In each Thomas takes the Queen of Faëry for her of Heaven, and in each she denies it. In A. she says:

“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,

‘That name does not belong to me;

I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,

And I’m come to visit thee.’”

But in C. she says:

“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;

I never carried my head sae hie;

For I am but a lady gay,

Come out to hunt in my follee.’”

The idiom there is quite enough to settle the question for me. But there is another point. The peasantry will never name the fairies if they can help it. They call them the “Good People” or the “Little People,” and go no nearer. Well, observe, and let Professor Pound observe, how C. version gets round that difficulty.

Lastly, I will touch upon the delicate subject of ballads like “Sheath and Knife”, “Lizzie Wan”, “The King’s Daughter, Lady Jean”, and others. The romantic treatment of that subject is very rare in literature. Ford’s play I believe to be the first case of it in ours; and after Ford you must travel down to Shelley for another. With a peasant poet or a peasant auditory there would be no difficulty. For all sorts of reasons, that class knew a great deal about such matters. If you are to conceive those particular ballads as written for the gentry you are adding to fine literature things unknown before the seventeenth century, and then out of sight until the nineteenth. Let the Professor perpend. It does not do to be too exclusive in estimating ballad-origins.

REAL AND TEMPORAL CREATION

A chance remark of mine the other day to the effect that the worth of a novelist could be best ascertained by the number of souls he had added to the population has drawn me into more correspondence than I care for. You don’t look—at least, I don’t—for precision in such obiter dicta, but you must have plausibility, and I do think it plausible. You read your novel—say, Emma, and while you read, Emma and Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston and all the rest of them live, and their affairs are your affairs. But when you have shut up the book and put it back in its place, Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates have not disappeared with their circle of acquaintance. You feel about them that they are in history. They have lived in a different way altogether. They have lived as Charles Lamb lived, or Oliver Goldsmith. You would know them if you met them; your great-grandfather may have met them. If you went to Leatherhead (if it was Leatherhead) you would want to visit their houses. Jane Fairfax is a girl in a book; Miss Bates is a person.

Surely that is true. Consider other cases. There’s no doubt but that Falstaff has reality in a way in which Hamlet has not. Hamlet, so to say, is an ad hoc creation. He lives in the play. Falstaff lived in Eastcheap. There’s no doubt about “my” Uncle Toby. Certainly he must have served under Marlborough in Flanders. Neither of Tom Jones nor Sir Charles Grandison could so much be said. They were nobody’s Uncle Tom or Uncle Charles, out of their books. Amelia would have been a delicious aunt, but I doubt if she was one. Well, then, there’s no doubt about Mrs. Gamp, or Mr. F.’s Aunt, or Betsy Trotwood or Captain Cuttle. Dickens enriched the population enormously—but not always. There’s a sense in which Dr. Blimber lived, and Major Bagstock did not. Generation was capricious, even with Dickens. Squeers never lived, Creakle did. Micawber lived, Pecksniff didn’t. Trabb’s Boy lived, the Fat Boy didn’t. Cousin Feenix didn’t, Inspector Buckett didn’t—and so on. But if you go through Dickens methodically, as I did during a wakeful two hours in bed the other night, you will find five scores to one miss—in the minor characters. With leading parts it is another thing. I shall come to that presently.

Let me go on. The Wife of Bath—certainly a British subject. In Shakespeare—all the Eastcheap set, and Shallow and Slender; and Parolles, and Dogberry and Verges, and Bottom, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek; and Polonius, the only one in Hamlet; and Launcelot Gobbo, the only one in The Merchant of Venice. Walter Scott: the Baillie and Dandie Dinmont; Andrew Fairservice and Dugald Dalgetty. Last we have Don Quixote and Sancho, much more real to most of us than Philip II or IV, or Alva or Medina-Sidonia, or, for that matter, Miguel de Cervantes himself.

Those two last are enough to prove that it is not only eccentrics who have stepped out of their book-covers and found dusty death in the real world: though generally, no doubt, it is the few lines which give life, and provide that the reader shall be one of the parents. You need bold undercutting, and elaboration is apt to blur the outline. The second part of the book might have robbed the pair of their immortality. Yet they live, and have lived, in spite of the Duke and Duchess and the Island. Falstaff, with the better part of two plays to his credit, is the only hero of Shakespeare’s whose reality gets out of the theatre. I can’t admit Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello or Shylock. At Malvolio I hesitate—but if you make a hero of Malvolio you turn Twelfth Night into a tragedy. In 1623, the year of Shakespeare’s death, the play was called Malvolio; and King Charles I annotated the title, Twelfth Night, in his folio with the true name in his own hand. Tantum religio potuit suadere—bonorum. So is it with the women in Shakespeare: the heavy leads are not so persuasive as the small. Of Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse there can be no doubt whatever. But of the heroines, I can only put forward Rosalind—but even Rosalind won’t do. Compare her objectivity with Becky Sharp’s. Who has not felt the immanence of Becky in Brussels? I am afraid that settles Rosalind.

Neither Scott nor Dickens succeeded with heroes and heroines; but Scott has a girl to his credit whose reality is historical: Jeannie Deans. I cannot listen to a doubt about that noble creature. If Scott had given her a burial-place I should have gone to look for her tomb, and never doubted of finding her name in the parish register. In that he beats Dickens, with whom and Shakespeare he must strive for the crown in this matter of adding to the population. In heroes Dickens has a slight apparent advantage with David Copperfield. At first blush you might think he had lived: turn it over and you won’t think so. Even if you decided for him that would only put Dickens level with Scott and Shakespeare; for his girls don’t live in the pages of their books, and have not so much as temporal creation. I would put Colonel Newcome to Thackeray’s score (with dozens of minora sidera: Major Pendennis, for instance!) and, personally, the handsome Ethel, on whose account I myself have been to Brighton, and who can bring strong testimony forward in the horde of maidens she has stood for at the font. Surely no other heroine of fiction has been so many times a godmother! Guy Livingstone and Sir Guy Morville, in their day, gave their names pretty handsomely, but—! I had nearly left out, but must by all means add, Alexandre Dumas, who devoted three novels to his musketeers, and, in Porthos, made a living soul. D’Artagnan had been one already, but Dumas barely added anything for all his pains; and with Athos whom he loved and Aramis whom he hated failed altogether. It was not, of course, Dumas’ line to create an illusion by dialogue or description. His was the historical method; his people lived by incident. But Porthos lived anyhow, and would have lived without incident if needs were. “‘En effet,’ fît Porthos, ‘je suis très incrédule.’” The man who said that was once a breathing giant.

What, then, is requisite to the production of this prolonged illusion? A relish, on the writer’s part, a sudden glory, a saliency; nothing which will be a hair’s-breadth out of character, and nothing too much. On the reader’s part intimacy, relish too, the sort of affection you feel towards Sir Roger de Coverley, and a faith which is, like that of a lover, a point of honour. Just as—if I may hazard the comparison—to millions of simple Christians their Saviour, though dead and risen, is still a Child, a bambino, so it is with them who have accepted Don Quixote, and have stood by his death-bed. Such a death must have been died, such a life lived indeed. “Believing where we cannot prove.” The heart plays queer tricks with us.

Stevenson’s is an odd case. He really spent himself to give reality to Alan Breck, and failed. He played with Theophilus Godall, the superb tobacconist, and with the Chevalier Burke, and behold, they lived! He added those two to the population. He could not go wrong with them, had them to a tick. It is observable that extravagance of matter is no bar to illusion. But what is wrong with Alan Breck?

PEASANT POETS

The peasant is a shy bird, by nature wild, by habit as secret as a creature of the night. If he is ever vocal you and I are the last to hear of it. He is as nearly inarticulate as anyone living in civilisation may be. Consequently a peasant sufficiently moved, or when moved, sufficiently armed with vocables to become a poet, even a bad poet, has always been rare. When you need to add genius to sensibility and equipment, as you must to get a good poet, you may judge of the rarity. Indeed, to put a name to him, exceptis excipiendis, I can only find John Clare. Other names occur, but for various reasons have to be cut out. There was a postman poet in Devonshire, a policeman poet in Yorkshire; and there was a footman poet. One of those certainly had merit, even genius, and any one of them may have been a peasant in origin. But by the time they began to make poetry they had ceased to be peasants; and that rules them out, as it does Robert Blomfield and Thomas Hardy. Then there is Burns. But Burns was not a peasant. We in England should have called him a yeoman. Besides, his is one of those cases of transcendent genius where origin goes for nothing, but all seems the grace of God. At that rate the corn-chandlers might claim Shakespeare, or the chemists’ assistants Keats.

But there’s no doubt about Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant, son of peasants, brought up at a dame-school, and at farm labour all his working life. It is true that he was “discovered” by Taylor and Hessey, published, sold; that his first book ran into three editions in a year; that he was lionised, became one of the Lamb-Hazlitt-Haydon circle, and thus inevitably sophisticated with the speculations not of his own world. But roughly speaking, from start to close, his merits were the merits of the peasantry, and his faults as pardonable as theirs. He was never gross, as they never are; he was never common, as the pick of them are not; he was deeply rooted, as “The Flitting”, one of his best poems, will prove; he was exceedingly amorous, but a constant lover; nothing in nature escaped his eye; and lastly, in his technique he was a realist out and out. Of his quality take this from “Summer Evening”:

“In tall grass, by fountain head,

Weary then he crops to bed.”

“He” is the evening moth.

“From the haycocks’ moistened heaps

Startled frogs take sudden leaps;

And along the shaven mead,

Jumping travellers, they proceed:

Quick the dewy grass divides,

Moistening sweet their speckled sides;

From the grass or flowret’s cup

Quick the dew-drop bounces up.

Now the blue fog creeps along,

And the bird’s forgot his song:

Flowers now sleep within their hoods;

Daisies button into buds;

From soiling dew the buttercup

Shuts his golden jewels up;

And the rose and woodbine they

Wait again the smiles of day.”

The poem runs to length, as most of Clare’s do, but the amount of exact, close and loving observation in it may be gauged from my extract. It is remarkable, and worthy of memory for the sake of what is to follow. You may say that such microscopic work may be outmatched by gentle poets; you may tell me of sandblind Tennyson, who missed nothing, of Cockney Keats and the “Ode to Autumn,” and say that it is a matter of the passion which drives the poet. There is, I think, this difference to be noted. Observation induces emotion in the peasant-poet, whereas the gentle or scholar poet will not observe intensely, if at all, until he is deeply stirred. I don’t say that that will account for everybody: it will not dispose of Tennyson, nor of Wordsworth—but it is true of the great majority.

There is one other quality I should look for in a peasant-poet, and that is what I can only go on calling “the lyric cry.” It is a thing unmistakable when you find it, the pure and simple utterance in words of the passion in the heart. “Had we never lov’d sae kindly”, “Come away, come away, Death”, “The Sun to the Summer, my Willie to me”, “Toll for the brave”, “Ariel to Miranda, take”, “I have had playmates”, “Young Jamie lou’d me weel”,—they crowd upon me. Absolute simplicity, water-clear sincerity are of the essence of it, and of both qualities the peasant is possessed; but to them it is requisite to add the fire of passion and the hue of beauty before they can tremble into music. These things cannot be told, since private grief is sacred, but I have had experience of late years in my intercourse with village people: men bereaved of their sons, girls mourning their lovers. Words, phrases have broken from them to which a very little more was needed to make them sound like this:

“The wind doth blow to-day, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love,

In cold grave she was lain.”

That is a perfect example of what I mean. It comes from Sussex, and if there could be any doubt of its peasant-origin the weather lore of the first two lines should settle it. And this from Scotland may be compared with it:

“It fell about the Martinmass,

When nights were lang and mirk,

The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,

And their hats were of the birk.

“It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,

Nor yet in any sheugh;

But at the gates o’ Paradise

That birk grew fair eneugh.”

No gentle poet short of Shakespeare could get the awful simplicity of that; and Shakespeare, I think, only achieved it when, as for Ophelia’s faltered songs, he used peasant-rhymes.

It is, to me, a task of absorbing interest to go through Child’s huge repertorium piece by piece and pick out the folk-ballads which have the marks of peasant origin. So far as I can tell at present, certainly one half, and it may be three-fourths of them are peasant songs—I don’t say necessarily made by peasants, but in any case made for them. If one could, by such means, form a Corpus Poeticum Villanum there would be a treasure-house worth plundering by more students than one. For as nothing moves a people more than poetry, when it is good poetry, so nothing needs truth for its indispensable food so much as poetry. If you have what most deeply touched and stirred a people you have that which was dearest to them, the blood as it were of their hearts. The criteria are as I have indicated: minute observation, stark simplicity, the lyric cry, and realism. You may add to those a preference of sentiment to romance, and a decided adherence to the law of nature when that is counter to the law of the Church. Thus incontinence in love is not judged hardly when passion in the man or kindness in the woman has brought it about; on the other hand, infidelity to the marriage vow never escapes. Again, that which the Italians call “assassino per amore” is a matter of course in peasant-poetry; and another crime, universally condemned, except by about two of our gentle poets, is freely treated, and—not to say condoned—freely pitied. Perhaps one of the most curious of all the ballads is “Little Musgrave,” which is English and of unknown age. It is quoted in The Knight of the Burning Pestle of 1611. Little Musgrave and Lord Barnard’s wife fall in love, and betray his lordship. He, however, is informed by his page, and rides out to clear his honour. Musgrave hears something:

“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,

Methinks I hear the jay;

Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,

And I would I were away.”

But she answers him:

“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,

And huddle me from the cold;

’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boy

A-driving his sheep to the fold.”

Lord Barnard breaks in and does his affair with the two of them. Then:

“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,

‘To put these lovers in;

But lay my lady on the upper hand,

For she came of the better kin!’”

Realism indeed: but a poem.

DOGGEREL OR NOT

If Mr. Cecil Sharp, as I hope, is collecting his many and scattered publications under one roof, so to speak, he will be doing a service to a number of people besides me. I await his learned leisure, having now possessed myself of his English Folk-Songs, Vols. I and II. He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, a Corpus Poeticum Villanum, because, being a musician before all things, he is only interested in peasant verse of which the music has survived. He won’t do that, but he will help somebody else towards it with an indispensable supplement to Child, in an accessible form; and that will be great gain—goodliness with contentment, in fact.

Valuable variants of many and many a folk-song are to be found in his first instalment; though such was the phenomenal patience and far-flung activity of the American that in two volumes of a hundred songs Mr. Sharp has only been able to find one which is not in the great work. That is one which would have delighted the Professor—“Bruton Town.” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads contains nothing at all like “Bruton Town”; yet the theme of it is one of those which was common to every folk, no doubt, in Europe. Boccaccio gave it its first fame, Hans Sachs followed him. In England we had to wait for Keats, who, so far as we are concerned, supplanted the Florentine and the Nuremberger; for all the Britains know something of Isabella and the Pot of Basil. It must, however, be noted that the specific note of those masterpieces is not the real theme, and never could have been. The horrid dealings with the murdered man’s head are macabre embroidery altogether too sophisticated for a folk-tale. The real theme is the Squire of Low Degree. You get it in the “Duchess of Malfy,” and you get it in “Bruton Town.” There is no instance of the morbid in a peasant-ballad. Elemental human beings dealt in elemental passions. Love, pride, scorn, birth, death were concern enough for them. So, in “Bruton Town,” the theme is the trusty servant, his master’s daughter, the young men’s reprobation and vindication of their sister’s “honour.” Here is the opening:

“In Bruton Town there lived a farmer

Who had two sons and one daughter dear.

By day and night they were a-contriving

To fill their parents’ hearts with fear.

“One told his secret to none other,

But to his brother this he said:

I think our servant courts our sister,

I think they have a mind to wed.”

Doggerel or not, I don’t see how that could be bettered. Mr. Sharp thinks something has been lost, but I think not. What could heighten the note of mystery and dread with which the second quatrain opens—“One told his secret to none other”? Mr. Sharp has not—he confesses it—been able to refrain from the temptation which has always beset the ballad-hunter, from Percy and Sir Walter onwards, of working on the ore which he finds; but that stroke of art in particular is unpremeditated and original, I feel sure. It is constant to all the versions of “Bruton Town” which I have seen.

The hasty whispered plot follows, the preparation of the “day of hunting,” the murder, and the sister’s discovery of the deed. She rises early and finds the corpse. Then comes:

“She took her kerchief from her pocket,

And wiped his eyes though he was blind;

‘Because he was my own true lover,

My own true lover and friend of mine.’”

That again is constant, and could not be mended: though Mr. Sharp would mend it if he could, thinking that the hasty shifting of persons, from third to first, is awkward. It may be awkward, but is very characteristic and, as I think, evidence of authenticity. One more verse, which devotes the mourner to a shared grave, ends “Bruton Town” in pure tragedy; pity, terror, but not disgust. Boccaccio’s additament is nasty, and Keats did not avoid it, though he was not so nasty as Boccaccio.

“Bruton Town” comes from Somerset, and is worthy of that songful shire. It carries in itself its own conviction of peasant origin. No other race of our people would have conceived the verse last quoted exactly like that, nor any other audience have accepted it as adequate. “Friend of mine” is the pièce de conviction: the sweetest name a village girl can give her lover is that of her friend. The pathos of “And wiped his eyes though he was blind” is the pathos of a wounded bird. It is beyond the compass of art altogether, one of those strokes of truth which puts art out of court. It is Nature’s justification before the schools.

Doggerel, then, or not? There are other things in Mr. Sharp’s volumes which may help to determine. There is the well-known “Little Sir Hugh,” where the sacrifice of a Christian child by the Jews is sung. Mr. Sharp’s version is in parts new. Take this out of it for good doggerel:

“She set him up in a gilty chair,

She gave him sugar sweet;

She laid him out on a dresser board,

And stabbed him like a sheep.”

Well, without any pretence at curiosa felicitas, that does its work. It is terse, tense, yet easy and colloquial. It is shocking rather than pitiful; but it means to be so. It might be evidence at the Assizes, where, term by term, they supply just the kind of thing which would have given that versifier what he wanted. Mr. Sharp’s “Little Sir Hugh” in fact is not far from Catnachery, of which he gives some avowed examples. It has only to be set beside “Bruton Town” to settle it that if “Sir Hugh” is doggerel, the other is not. Ease, tensity, colloquialism both have; but then comes the difference. “Sir Hugh” shocks, “Bruton Town” moves; “Bruton Town” has in it the lyric cry, “Sir Hugh” has it not.

Take as a last case “The True Lover’s Farewell,” pure doggerel, but excellent of its kind. Everybody knows it, for a reason:

“O fare you well, I must be gone

And leave you for a while;

But wherever I go I will return,

If I go ten thousand mile,

My dear,

If I go ten thousand mile.”

Now for the reason. Burns lifted that for his occasions, and hardly altered it. He took it and fitted it into its place among other verses on the same model—but this is how he began:

“O my luve’s like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June:

O my luve’s like the melodie

That’s sweetly played in tune—”

An opening, observe, of three beats; and then, as a kind of chorus, the emotions quickened up, three four-beat verses of abandonment increasing in reckless simile, and ending with:

“And fare thee well, my only luve;

And fare thee well awhile!

And I will come again, my luve,

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”

That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.

THE IBERIAN’S HOUSE

Not long ago I was on the Downs in pursuit of wild raspberries, which, as the old phrase goes, are very plenty this year. Although the days are still those of the dog, there was autumn in the air even then: a grey sky with a cool stream of wind from the west in which was that familiar taint of things dying which autumn always brings. The flowers were of autumn too—scabious, bedstraw and rest-harrow; mushrooms were to be had for the stooping, which we usually seek in dewy September dawns. On the other hand, there were the raspberries; the brambles were in flower, and the corn just tinged with yellow. After a burning May and June, a dripping July, the times are out of joint—but I filled a hat full of raspberries.

I found the best of them in a pear-shaped hollow in the ground, a place rather like a giant’s sauce-boat, in depth perhaps some six feet. Allowing for the slow accumulation of soil tumbled from the sides, for growth by vegetation and decay spread over many centuries, it may once have been another three feet down. Call it, then, nine feet deep. By outside measurements it was fourteen yards long by nine at the broad end of the pear, narrowing down to three where the stalk would have been. To-day the actual floor-space is barely two yards at the broad end. That is because the sides have fallen in, and made descent a matter of walking, which originally, no doubt, was contrived by some sort of a ladder, or by slithering down a tree-trunk. Vegetation is profuse in there: the turf like a sponge, the scabious as big as ladies’ watches, the raspberries good enough for Bond Street. Well they may be, for they are rooted in the bones and household spoil of more than two thousand years. The place was a house long before Cæsar knew Britain, before the Belgae were in Wilts, before Wilts was Wilts. To revert to a convenient term, I picked my raspberries in an Iberian house.

I considered it that day in the light thrown upon its proportions for me (all unknown to the author) by a terrible little book, the more terrible for its dispassionate statement, called “The Woman in the Little House,” whose author, Mrs. Margaret Eyles, has herself experienced what she writes of. Her Little House is one of, I daresay, a million; one of those narrow, flat-faced boxes of brick—“two up and two down,” as they are expressed—sprawling far and wide over the home counties about London, in which the artisans and operatives who work thereabout contrive, as best they may, to bestow themselves. It does not need—or should not—Mrs. Eyles’s calm and good-tempered account to realise that such dwellings are bad for health and morals, fatal to the nerves and ruinous to the purses of their occupants. Yet she mentions more than one simple truth which proves immediately that the smallest house at the lowest possible rent may be much more costly than a large one—for instance, she points out that the smallness of the house and the want of storage room make purchase of stores in any kind of bulk out of the question. But I have neither the time nor the knowledge to develop these questions properly. I have only one criticism to make, and that is that the sufferings of the small householder cannot all be laid to size; that the difficulties of the Woman in the Little House are not only economic. Fecklessness in the Woman must take its share of blame. It is hard to bring up a family in the fear of God and the use of soap, where there seems to be neither room for the one nor chance for the other. It is wearing-down work to be nurse to many small and fretful children while you are carrying yet another, to keep order in a household which has neither scope for, nor desire of order, to deal with drunken husband, grudging landlord, quarrelsome neighbour—and so on. But Mrs. Eyles knows that these things can be done by the woman who realises that they must, that they have been done and are being done; and though both of us may grudge, as we do, the waste of nerve, youth, beauty, vitality which they involve, yet had we rather preach the gospel of such heroic dumb endurance, such constancy in adversity, such piety, and their reward, than have the heroines fall back, flounder in the trough of the wave, or the “sensual sty.” But for their lamps held up, indeed would “universal darkness cover all.”

I seem to be far from my neolithic dwelling; yet am close to it; for that itself was not much smaller than the “Little House” of to-day, and yet is three thousand years older at the very least. To its successor, the Celtic and early English wattle-and-daub hut this brick box has succeeded, while here in the village under the Down there are two-roomed, three-roomed tenements in which may be found man, wife, and eight or ten children. So far as floor-space, air-space, headroom, sanitation go, they will be very little better than the hole in the chalk. So far as intellectual and moral outlook go, so far as foresight, restraint of members, mental capacity, while tradition is still the universal guide—a tradition which it is not easy to distinguish from mere instinct—there is little reason to suppose the occupants of the one differ materially from those of the other. I am not to regret it or reprove it, but to state it; and go on to say that when tradition is modified by character the state of a family so conditioned may be not only orderly, not only prosperous, but happy—and by that I don’t mean merely contented, but consciously and avowedly happy. I know several which are so; and while I see, or hear, of their well-being I have no reason for being anything but glad of it. Sir Alfred Mond, to be sure, has had nothing to do with it; but it is my belief that when it comes to a tug-of-war between character and Sir Alfred Mond, character will pull the right honourable baronet all over the place.

I cannot bring myself to be that whole-hearted kind of reformer who says, my sauce must be your sauce, or there is no health for the world. If I must provide a villager (as surely I must) with store-room for his potatoes, I would not give him a bath-room for the purpose. I am uncomfortable myself if I don’t souse every morning in warm water; but I know several persons who do nothing of the sort, and are not in the least uncomfortable, nor (to the senses) unclean. I have been a guest in a house in Northumberland of the right Iberian kind, which consisted of one room only. A better-conditioned, more wholesome, more intelligent family than I found there I don’t expect to find easily anywhere. Tradition explained, and character made tolerable, such a dwelling. I have not actually seen, but know the appearance of the house in Ecclefechan, where Carlyle was reared. I should be surprised to learn that it was more than “two up and one down,” rather surprised if it was so much. I don’t put Thomas Carlyle forward as an example of the modification of circumstance by character: he was much the reverse. But all that he tells me of his father and mother was written for my learning. The rule of Saint Use was well kept in Ecclefechan, or I am the more deceived. If Carlyle’s mother would have exchanged her lot for that of any woman born she was not the woman he celebrates. And have we not heard of Margaret Ogilvie, and been the better of it? It is not the present-day practice to consider our social troubles from the moral end, and I am sorry for it. The economic end engrosses us altogether; yet it is not, strictly speaking, the “business-end.” It is little use abolishing this or that institution while human nature remains as it always was.

There is one serious subject which Mrs. Eyles has had to deal with, into which I hesitate to intrude. Iberian women are kind, and their men clamative. As she has heard it said by many a one of them, the day may be endured, but not the night. Well, there again character can modify use-and-wont, either by teaching acquiescence or by inspiring revolt. And yet I cannot but remember what was said to a friend of mine in a neighbouring village in the first of our terrible four years of war. The speaker was a woman, a mother of children, who for the first time in her life had enough money and her house to herself. “Ah, ma’am,” she said, “you may depend upon it, this war has made many happy homes.”

SCANDINAVIAN ENGLAND

The valley is narrow, not much more than a hundred and fifty yards wide, where I am stationed now. Of them some twenty are claimed by the headlong river and its beaches of flat grey stones, and perhaps eighty more by small green garths, divided by walls. Then broken ground of boulders, bent and bracken, and then, immediately, the fells rise up like walls to a ragged skyline. They stream with water at every fissure, are quickly clouded, blurred and blotted by rain; then clear, and shining like glass in the sun. The look of things is not the same for half an hour at a time. Fleets of cloud come up from the Atlantic, anchor themselves on the mountain-tops, and descend in floods of rain, sharp and swift as arrows. Or if the wind drive them they will fleet across the landscape like white curtains, and whelm the world in blown water. You don’t “make” your hay in this country, you “win” it if you can: you steal it, as they say. As for your patches of oats, as likely as not you will use them for green fodder. Roots would be your crop if you had room for them among the stones—but in Eskdale you are a sheep-farmer, with a thousand head of sheep and a thousand acres of fell to feed them on.

I am new to this corner of our country, where Lancashire and Cumberland run so much in and out of each other that the people have given up county categories and call it all indifferently Furness Fells. I don’t know any other part of England so sparely occupied. The farms are few, large and far apart; there are practically no villages; and my own cottage (which was built for a dead and buried mining scheme, and is the last of its clan) is the only one to be found within miles of empty country. A plain-faced, plain-dealing, plain-spoken race lives here, in a countryside where every natural landmark has a Norse name, and one is recalled to the Sagas at every turn of the valley, and by every common occupation of man. The economy of life exactly follows that told of in the Icelandic tales. In the homestead live the farmer and his thralls, the wife and her maids. There are no married labourers, and board and lodging is part of every young man’s and young woman’s hire. Twelve such people live in the farmhouse nearest to me—twelve people, eleven dogs, an uncertain number of children, and a bottle-fed black lamb. Not only so, but it is true that the dalesmen and their servants are Icelandic in favour and way of speech. Dialect is not much to the point; intonation is a great deal to it. That runs flat, level and monotonous—unemotionally, like Danish. It makes a kind of muted speech, so that it is hard to know whether a woman is pleased or angry, or a man of agreeable or offensive intention.

I never met with a people more innately democratic than the Danes until I met this year with this people of Eskdale. It is not at all that they seek to assert their equality: it is that they know it. The manners depicted in the Sagas are those of men dealing with men. Neither inflation nor deflation is deemed necessary, neither arrogance nor condescension. You make a statement, short and unadorned: it is for the other man to take or leave. Speech is not epigrammatic because minds move slowly here. But it is very terse—because it may rain before you have finished. Plainer than speech are manners. They were that in the Sagas, in more than one of which the starting-point of feud and vendetta was the persistent and obtuse besetting of a daughter of one house by the son of another. She was busy, or busied, as in all primitive societies the women are; but he was not. So he hung about her house, not attempting speech with her, not explaining or justifying or extenuating his oppressive behaviour, simply overshadowing the poor thing, causing her to be talked about, and scandalising her family. There was but one way of dealing with him in those days, which was to crack his skull. That was done, and so the drama put on its legs. Things are better than that now, yet the principle is the same. I remember the discomfort and alarm of three southern maids whom we once brought up with us to a farmhouse in Selkirk. At their supper-hour three strange young men were discovered sitting on a gate in full view of the kitchen window. Nothing makes an Iberian so uncomfortable as to be watched at a meal. But nothing would move the young men, not even the drawing of the curtains. They had no explanation to give, no excuse to make. One faintly whistled between his teeth, and then said that it was a free country. So it was, if to make free is to be so.

It is much the same here. The young men of the farm regard every young woman, of whatever walk in life, as a thing to be whistled in, like a sheep-dog. They have the Saga knack of declaring the state of their feelings by imposing themselves upon its object. They beleaguer the house, shadow the desired, trust to wearing her down, hope to bore her into love. Or, rather, they don’t care whether she love or not, so long as they are allowed it. Woman in the Sagas is a chattel, a thing to be bought or stolen. So she was to the Homeric hero. So she seems to be here.

The Danes, as we loosely call our Norse invaders, were a more dominant strain than whatever people they found in Furness. Not only have they implanted their form, feature and hue upon the Cumbrians, not only named their rivers and hills for them, or a great many of them, but they have established their social code. “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,” is not a sentiment of Southern Britain. It is firmly implanted in the mind of the young Dalesman, who finds it right and proper.