Chapter III: Part 3

Blake was once at a friend’s house when the talk turned on the vastness of Space. At last Blake, who was always irritated by this sort of talk, broke in with, ‘It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the heath, and touched the sky with my finger.’ Those who are familiar with Blake’s habit of mind, his way of using daring figures of speech as if they were literal statements of fact, will not dismiss this remark as the raving of a genial madman. To Blake, the artist, this perpetual raising of scientific bogeys, this emphasising of the emptiness of the universe, to the distress of our imagination, was nothing short of criminal. He believed in the ‘determinate and bounding form’ of all things, in ‘the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements.’ ‘Leave out this line,’ he wrote, ‘and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again....’ And chaos is the arch-enemy of the artist, who strives to fashion from the corrupt materials at hand the enduring forms of his imagination. To Blake the sky appeared a most excellent canopy, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as it did to Hamlet or any other man. So, too, our earth appears a lovely, fruitful dwelling-place. But, according to science, one is a nightmare of space, the other a putrescent cinder. This may be the truth for science, in which there are no nightmares, but it is not the truth for us. Science, with all its data and phenomena, appeals only to one small part of a man, but the ultimate truth must appeal to the whole man, to the emotional, reasoning, moral, imaginative creature with an immortal soul. It is poetry, in the widest sense of the term, that makes this appeal, and poetry alone. The sky and the earth that we find in poetry and that we have seen for ourselves, the blue canopy stretched over the beautiful dwelling-place, are nearer the ultimate truth than anything that science can tell us.

When we go to science for an account of the cosmos and recoil in horror from the nightmarish thing that we find there, it does not mean that science is necessarily wrong (though, for the most part, it is only guessing), but that we have gone to it for something that it cannot give, and does not pretend to give--an ultimate truth that will satisfy every demand of our highly complex nature. We cannot take science out of its own limited sphere of activity without being horror-struck at the result. Thus, if we went to science, in one or other of its various branches, for a minute description of a red rose, a glass of wine, a wonderful sunset, or a lovely child, the result, in every instance, would seem to be an outlandish thing of horror. So it is with the universe; when we can apprehend it as we can a rose or a sunset, not through science but through the poetry that saturates our being, we shall see the universe in all its majesty and splendour, with all its blazing multi-coloured suns, strange planets and wild moons, moving in the endless dance.

Men like Hearn suffered because they would not keep science within its natural limits. They allowed the bogey talk of the astronomers to frighten them. Hearn never seemed to see that the old Japanese legend which made the heavens seem very near and warm and human was probably nearer the ultimate truth of things than the monstrous facts that he was always trying to forget. He needed large doses of Blake as an antidote to Herbert Spencer. As for the notion of infinite space and ‘that everlasting night,’ of which the astronomical dabblers have made so much, it is nothing but a bleak fiction. For my part, I have ceased to be troubled by any horror of that space in which star-systems move like specks of dust, for I have long held that the whole affair is in reality an illusion, an elaborate jest of the gods. Even the scientists are less confident than they were, for the new Einstein theory (which mathematical friends have vainly tried to explain to me) seems to emphasise the illusory aspect of space, making our old theories and elaborate calculations look rather foolish. Meanwhile, the cosmos now appears to be more of a joke than ever, but whatever conclusions the scientists may arrive at, of one thing I am certain--it is a good joke. Probably it is the ultimate, universal, everlasting joke, of which the greatest of our jests are but distorted reflections and fleeting shadows.

A ROAD TO ONESELF

Sometimes, on one of these sunny autumn mornings, when I turn my back on the town and take to the highway, I seem to have the world to myself. I walk forward, as it were, into a great sunlit emptiness. Once I am a little way out of the town it is as if the world had been swept clean of men. I pass a few young mothers, who are proudly ushering their round-eyed solemn babes into the presence of the morning sun, a lumbering cart or two, and maybe a knot of labourers, who look up from their task with humorous resignation in their faces; these and others I overtake and pass by, and then there is often an end of my fellows. I alone keep a lounging tryst with the sun, himself, I fancy, a mighty, genial idler and the father of all dreamers and idlers among men.

A light mist covers the neighbouring hills, which are almost imperceptible, their shapes and colours showing but faintly, so that they seem to stand aloof--things of dream. As I go further along the shining road I seem to be lounging into a vast, empty room. There are sights and sounds in plenty; cows looking over the walls with their great, mournful eyes; here and there a thin blue column of smoke; the cawing of rooks about the decaying woods; and, distantly sounding, the creak of a cart, a casual shout or two, a vague hammering, and, more distant still, the noise of the town, now the faint murmur of a hive. Yet to me, coming from the crowded, tumultuous streets, it seems empty because I meet no one by the way. The road, for all its thick drift of leaves, deep gold and brown, at either side, seems to lie naked in the sunshine, and I drink in this unexpected solitude as eagerly as a dusty traveller takes his ale. For a time, it comes as a delectable and quickening draught, and though outwardly a sober, meditative, almost melancholy pedestrian, I hold high festival in the spirit, drink deep, and revel with the younger gods.

One of the greatest dangers of living in large towns is that we have too many neighbours and human fellowship is too cheap. We are apt to become wearied of humanity; a solitary green tree sometimes seems dearer to us than an odd thousand of our fellow-citizens. Unless we are hardened, the millions of eyes begin to madden us; and for ever pushed and jostled by crowds we begin to take more kindly to Malthus, and are even willing to think better of Herod and other wholesale depopulators. We begin to hate the sight of men who would appear as gods to us if we met them in Turkestan or Patagonia. When we have become thoroughly crowd-sick, we feel that the continued presence of these thousands of other men and women will soon crush, stamp, or press our unique, miraculous individuality into some vile pattern of the streets; we feel that the spirit will perish for want of room to expand in: and we gasp for an air untainted by crowded humanity.

Some such thoughts as these come to me, at first, in my curious little glimpse of solitude. I am possessed by an ampler mood than men commonly know, and feel that I can fashion the world about me to my changing whims; my spirit overflows, and seems to fill the quiet drooping countryside with sudden light and laughter; the empty road and vacant fields, the golden atmosphere and blue spaces are my kingdoms, and I can people them at will with my fancies. Beautiful snatches of poetry come into my head, and I repeat a few words, or even only one word, aloud and with passionate emphasis, as if to impress their significance and beauty upon a listening host. Sometimes I break into violent little gusts of laughter, for my own good pleasure. At other times I sing, loudly and with abandon: to a petrified audience of one cow and three trees I protest melodiously that Phyllis has such charming graces that I could love her till I die, and I believe it, too, at the time. I brag to myself, and applaud and flatter myself. I even indulge in one or two of those swaggering day-dreams of boyhood in which one finds oneself suddenly raised to some extraordinary eminence, the idol of millions, a demi-god among men, from which height one looks down with kindly scorn on those myopic persons who did not know true greatness when they saw it, sarcastic schoolmasters and jeering relatives for the most part.

Only by such heightened images, seemingly more applicable to centuries of riotous life than half an hour’s sauntering, can I suggest in stubborn words the swelling mood that first comes to me with this sudden, unexpected seclusion.

But as the morning wears away, the jubilation arising from this new expansion of oneself dwindles and perishes; the spirit wearies of its play. The road stretches out its vacant length, a few last leaves come fluttering down, and the sun grows stronger, sharpening the outline of the hills. The day is lovelier than ever. But I meet no one by the way, and even the distant sounds of men’s travail and sport have died down. After a time the empty road and silent valley become vaguely disquieting, like a great room spread for a feast, blazing with lights, opulent in crimson and gold, and yet all deserted and quiet as the grave. I ask myself if all men have been mewed up in offices and underground warehouses, by some ghastly edict, unknown to me, which has come into force this very morning. Have I alone escaped? Or I wonder if the Last Day has dawned, and been made plain to men not by sound of trump, but by some sign in the sky that I have overlooked; a vast hand may have beckoned to all men or the heavens may have opened while I was busy lighting my pipe. Have all but one of the weary children of earth been gathered to their long rest? I walk in loneliness.

Suddenly, I see a tiny moving figure on the road before me, and immediately it focuses my attention. What are walls, fields, trees, and cows compared with this miraculous thing, a fellow human being, played upon by the same desires and passions, his head stuffed with the same dreams and fluttering thoughts? In one of the world’s greatest romances is not the most breathless moment concerned with the discovery of a human footprint in the sand? Does not the world’s story begin with one human being meeting another? As I keep my eyes fixed on the nearing figure the last of my vague fancies and egotistical imaginings are blown away; my mind is engrossed by the solidly romantic possibilities of the encounter. Just as I was glad to escape from the sight and sound of men, so I am eager now to break my solitude: the circle is complete. And as we come up together, the stranger and I, I give him a loud greeting, and he, a little startled, returns the salute; and so we pass on, fellow-travellers and nameless companions in a great adventure, knowing no more of each other than the brief sight of a face, the sound of a voice can tell us. We only cry out a Hail and Farewell through the mist, yet I think we go on our way a little heartened.

THE EDITOR

I have just learned from a little paragraph in a newspaper that another old acquaintance of mine has gone--old Wimpenny-Brown, ‘for many years editor of the _Wallerdale Herald_’--as the paragraph is careful to inform me. But there is little need, for it was in his editorial days that I met Wimpenny-Brown, and I can only think of him as an editor. Apart from a few early years spent as a reporter on a lesser London paper, all his time had been given to the _Wallerdale Herald_. It was an obscure provincial sheet, Liberal-cum-Radical in tone, strongly upholding Free Trade and much given to enunciating those few leading principles ‘upon which the prosperity and happiness of this country must inevitably depend.’ But in the days when I knew its editor, the _Herald_ was nothing more to me than a frame, the necessary boundaries of gilt and moulding, that set off his personality. Thus framed, my old acquaintance was a man to be sought out and gathered to oneself. To a youngster in quest of the absurd, as I was at that time, he was meat and drink. Even so long ago, he was considered one of the old school, and so true to type that he seemed to have been specially created to verify the comic novelists. He seemed to dwell in the great shadow of Mr. Potts, of the _Eatanswill Gazette_, and to be closely related to that solemn editorial host of Colonels and Majors dear to the American humorist.

A pipe and an occasional glass served Wimpenny-Brown as a tribute to the bohemianism of his profession; as hostages to respectability he had a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon, trim whiskers, and a large umbrella; with his staff he was--I believe--majestically paternal, but to his opponents he was a very Jupiter; and for the rest--he had a manner. In his presence, it seemed as if the _Essay on Liberty_ had just been published, as if dusty men of letters were still delightedly wondering where Macaulay’s style came from, as if radical masterpieces were still being issued in fortnightly parts. Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor--and I never knew him as anything else--he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. But all was sincerely spoken. Wimpenny-Brown meant all that he said, and he strove hard to educate his public. He would not pander to low tastes (he has said so many a time in my hearing); nor was he prepared to tickle rather higher tastes with the bright confectionery of fiction and verse and such things. No, it was by enunciating and applying those great principles, giving solid bread, so to speak, that he meant to educate his readers. ‘You must remember, sir’--he would point the glasses--‘that this is a News-Paper, and not a magazine’--the last with magnificent scorn. At ordinary times, his hand was hardly to be traced in the paper; he remained hidden afar-off, brooding over the great principles. But at a crisis, Wallerdale knew what it meant to have a _Herald_ and a Wimpenny-Brown as its editor. On the eve of an election, at the outbreak or at the conclusion of a war, at all times like these, he could be counted upon; leaders would flow from his pen, and the _Herald_ would look Monarch, Lords, Commons, in the face, would address all Europe, and the two Americas if need be, re-assuring friends and denouncing enemies here, there, and everywhere. Opinion would perhaps differ as to when he was at his best, but I, for one, found most to admire in his leaders on the death--say--of a political opponent: the decent respect for the dead man’s private virtues, tempered by regret at the waste of brilliant qualities in a bad cause, at the ‘late lamented minister’s fatal inability to comprehend those great principles which have ...’ and so forth. One saw the gold-rimmed glasses and the trim whiskers poised over the foolscap; he was no longer a fellow-citizen but the supreme arbiter, measuring out praise and blame while the organ wails and the strange dust is borne away.

Well, he is gone now, long after he quitted the editorial chair and declined from a servant of the public (and its educator) to an old fellow mumbling in a corner of a club-room. And in thinking of what he was, I may have done him little justice; probably the soft delicate lights of character have faded out of my memory and left the crude lines of a caricature. But still the little round figure (for he was little and round) rises from the past; I see the unfathomably profound look, I hear the solemn accents, and again his unconscious absurdity swells monstrously, and again the farce is played out. He seems now as extinct as the mastodon. Even his foolish dull little paper has disappeared; Wallerdale has no _Herald_ now, but listens to the brazen voices from London. Even those few great principles have sadly declined, and we hear little of them now. He would, I suppose, be as helpless as a babe in the office of a great modern newspaper. His solemn gestures, worn rhetorical finery and great principles would not carry him in that tense atmosphere. More sense of organisation, quick decisions, lightning judgments, would be demanded from him--and, I think, in vain. A greater knowledge of what can be done in a newspaper, of what catches the public eye, in short, of the tricks of the trade, would certainly be necessary. Yes, he would have to know more.

And yet, in a way, he would have to know less. Looking back at him, the obscure editor of an obscure sheet, amazingly rigid with self-importance, a little figure of fun, I realise that he was a better man than most of his successors of to-day, those undeniably clever, industrious journalists who put the great newspapers into the hands of the million. He could not have done what they do, day by day, but would he have tried? He, at least, would never have consented to become the mouthpiece of the rich, no better--nay, worse--than their lackeys. His talents were slender enough and monstrously exaggerated in his own mind, but such as they were, they were genuinely at the service of his readers. To him the public was not that million-eyed monster waiting to be cajoled and tricked which it has since become. And though his successors may be infinitely more clever, the worst of them can only run their dubious course to-day because yesterday my old editor and his like ran another and better course; the trickster of to-day is nothing but a huge parasite battening on the good name that some honest men in his trade left behind them. That lying sheet, the What’s-its-Name from London, has, I believe, taken the place of the _Wallerdale Herald_, and when a reader from those parts goes trustfully through its smudgy columns of falsehood, perhaps he does it because he still imagines that someone like Wimpenny-Brown is responsible for its utterance. Alas!--he does not know that the Wimpenny-Browns, those Servants of the Public with their few great principles, are dead and gone, and that something more than innocent folly perished with them.

ON AN OLD BOOK OF NATURAL HISTORY

The observation that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is looked upon, in these days, rather as a platitude than a paradox; yet it does not necessarily follow that we, in our heart of hearts, really accept this smart saying. But everyone who has read in our old literature must admit that it is true of our forefathers; their idea of truth and their so-called facts are a thousand times stranger to us than their fiction. The mediaeval romances are full of the marvellous, but they pale before the grave books of instruction written by quite serious, learned old gentlemen. Some of the latter merely set out to edify the young mind, but the result of their labours often seems to us a very riot of the imagination, and our schoolboys would consider themselves lucky if they could meet with matter one-half so entertaining. The quaint, unconscious humour of these solemn, old authors over-shadows even their historical and antiquarian interest.

Some such thoughts as these were going through my head the other night when I was gleefully devouring, in one of the Early English Text Society’s wonderful reprints, some extracts from a very quaint old book: ‘The noble lyfe and natures of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles and fisshes,’ by one Laurens Andrewe. The date of this volume is unknown, but it was probably written and published early in the sixteenth century. The Third Part of the book is particularly occupied with the noble life and natures of fishes, and begins: ‘Here after followeth of the natures of the fisshes of the See, whiche be right profitable to be understande.’ Now I care little for Natural History at any time, and fishes do not make a very lively subject for study, but in the hands of Master Andrewe, Natural History becomes ‘all a wonder,’ and the sea, to him, is certainly filled with creatures that are ‘rich and strange.’

When he is dealing with the commonest fishes, like the herring, our author is fairly sure of his facts, and we get nothing very exciting, but once he leaves the familiar types, there is no end to his phantasies. The Ahuna, when in danger, withdraws his head into his belly, and, as Laurens wisely notes: ‘He dothe ete (eat) a parte of himselfe rather than the other fisshes sholde ete him whole.’ The most interesting fact about the Balena, a creature resembling a whale, is that in rough weather she puts her young ones in her mouth for safety. But, according to our author, the Cetus ‘is the greatest whale fisshe of all,’ and the manner of his capture is most extraordinary. Such is the perfidious and cruel nature of mankind that the most gentle, lovable trait of this great creature becomes his undoing. For, you must know, the Cetus is very fond of music, and, in order to ensnare the unsuspecting leviathan, men assemble a number of ships, and then, with ‘divers instruments of musike, they play with grete armonye.’ The hapless creature, innocent of the nature of man, comes to the surface and draws nearer and nearer, being ‘very gladde of this armonye,’ only to find a terrible death awaiting him.

All of which our author shamelessly chronicles in great detail. For accuracy combined with brevity, what could be better than his description of the Conger, which is fashioned like an eel, but much ‘greter (greater) in quantyte?’ On being questioned as to the piscatory view of bad weather, most of us would say offhand that all fishes would be either indifferent to rain or glad of it, but this only shows the danger of ignorance; it seems that the Coretz ‘hideth him in the deep of the water when it raineth, for if he received any rain, he should waxe blynde, and dye of it.’

In his account of the Dolphin, our author nearly achieves pathos. ‘It hath no voice,’ he says, ‘yet it singeth like a man’; then he adds a cautious, indirect statement, ‘Some say whan they be taken that they wepe.’ Like the unfortunate Cetus, the Dolphin is musical, and ‘will gladly listen to the playing of lutes, harpes and pypes.’ There was once a king, who, after having captured a dolphin, was so moved by its piteous weeping and lamenting, that he let it go again.

Some of the other fishes have only one arresting trait of character: ‘Focas, a sea bull, fighteth ever with his wife till she be dead; then he casteth her out of his place, and seeketh another.’ Mulus is small of body and ‘only a meat for ‘gentils’ (gentle-folk); of this fish there are many kinds, but the best have two beards under the mouth.’ Nereydes are ‘monsters all rough of body, and when any dyeth, then the other weepeth.’ When the Pecten is moved or stirred, ‘he winketh,’ and the Pike is ‘engendered with a westerne wynde.’

But the Sturgeon is our author’s masterpiece. This wretched creature leads what Touchstone would call ‘a spare life’--it is the anchorite of the finny tribes. The pleasures of the deep are not many, and surely good victuals at regular hours, must be counted upon. Yet the poor Sturgeon, according to our friend Laurens, has no mouth, and therefore cannot eat at all. So it lives upon the winds, waxing fat on an east wind, and sickening upon a northerly one.

Notwithstanding the large array of creatures that do at least bear some resemblance to fishes at his command, Master Andrewe does not stop here. Of him, it can be said truly that all is ‘fisshe’ that comes to his net. We meet several old friends who are gravely described at some length. There is Scylla, a monster in the sea between Italy and Sicily, which is a great enemy to man. It is faced and handed like a gentlewoman, but hath a wide mouth and fearful teeth. Like most of the other sea-monsters, it is musical, and heareth singing gladly. Then there is the Mermayde, bringing the same old wondrous story (and tail) with her. She is a deadly beast that bringeth a man gladly to death, and she singeth a sweet song, and therewith deceiveth many a good mariner; for when they hear it they fall on sleep, and then she cometh and draweth them out of the ship, and teareth them asunder.

And then there is a quaint story from Arabye of some serpentis called sirens, and other delectable matter; but alas!--our learned friend must return to the shades. So we will bid him Godspeed!--and, as one naturally falls into Elia’s manner in praising an old author, I will say: ‘Blessings on thee! Master Laurens Andrewe. I believe thou knowest no more of fishes than I do, but what do we care for piscatory lore. Thou hast devised most entertaining matter, and written a worthy book. So may the earth press lightly on thy old bones!’

ON NOT MEETING AUTHORS

If you who read this have one or two favourite authors among the living, take care that you do not meet them; above all, do not seek them out. If you think Mr. Horace Tendency’s _Bones and Bottles_ the greatest novel of the age, if you have concluded that Mr. Gadfly, essayist and critic, has more wit and wisdom than any man now living, write and tell them so if you like, but do not go any further. Be satisfied with exchanging a letter of admiration for a badly executed autograph, or you will court disaster. If you should want more, remember that we have a literary press that makes a business of publishing photographs or paragraphs or both. Do not imagine that you have heard the last of your favourites; I know for a fact that Mr. Tendency has a novel in the press that is even greater than _Bones and Bottles_, and I have heard that Mr. Gadfly has just signed an agreement to combine wit and wisdom in a perfectly astonishing manner.

There are several gentlemen now earning a fair living by feeding public curiosity and battening on the fame of its darlings. They do it by seeking out a celebrity and retailing his unconsidered trifles of talk at a good market price. When they do it maliciously, as some do by making merry with the great man’s moustache or sneering at his wife, they are really doing the literary public a service, for they act as a warning and, indeed, point a moral. They and their works say to the enthusiast: If you would be happy, avoid the company of your favourite authors or you will be speedily disillusioned, and either preserve a cynical silence for the rest of your time or make capital out of your misery by falling into our unsavoury practices. It is possible, of course, to meet a few authors without wishing to do so. A good many of them go out a great deal nowadays, and some move in very decent society, so that there is no knowing when and where one may meet an author or two. At any moment, one or other of us may be faced with what appears to be a pair of overfed, pompous merchants or manufacturers, only to learn, on being introduced, that while one of them, Mr. Dash of Dot & Dash, Leadenhall Street, is the real thing, his companion is no other than Mr. Blank, the mystical poet. But to encounter authors in this way is no great matter; there is no need to reveal the fact that one knows anything about them. If they happen to be men whose work is good, some disappointment may attend the encounter, but it will only be slight, for we can afford to be amused when the meeting is accidental and we have not deliberately asked to be disillusioned. But if we are decoyed by a naive enthusiasm into seeking out our men, it is almost certain that we shall be grievously disappointed, and it is more than likely that our admiration for their work will soon be on the wane. Knowing the men, we may pretend to admire them more than ever; most of us do; but it hardly deceives anybody, and certainly not ourselves, who are left with the unpleasant thought that we have thus cut down our own pleasures.

But why, some innocent may ask, should there be any disillusionment; surely a man must be better than his books? He may be in the sight of a god, but not necessarily in the sight of a fellow mortal. A man--any man, let alone an author--is not so tractable as a book; we are rarely in a position to choose him so that he can minister to a mood; he will not wait upon our convenience like our patient volumes. A book may be a vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. It is far otherwise with the great craftsmen, those fine fellows that you and I admire and sometimes long to meet. A good author is his own worst book. We go to him in the hope of catching again that rounded utterance which moved us in this volume or persuaded us in the other; we go--to put the matter shortly--expecting fine talk, and completely overlook the fact that we have already had the best of the man to wait upon us. Our hopes running so high, small wonder that we discover such a falling-off; the best of our author’s talk is but a slovenly paraphrase of his most successful things, or a rehash of his rejected manuscripts; and the worst is probably far below what we have to endure in the smoke-room or the railway carriage. Moreover, along with this decline in matter and style, we have to put up with unexpected and totally unwelcome mannerisms, irritating tricks of voice and gesture, and we know not what fumbling and mouthing, all of them acquired during the making of books but all kept outside the covers. And nowadays, very few writers cultivate the picturesque in their appearance or try to look the part, so that our favourites never resemble our private images of them, and inevitably they always look worse, being dingier or shorter or fatter. Can this squat, fussy nonentity be our great novelist, we cry, when we see him for the first time. Probably all of us read and admire the exquisite lyrics of W., who seems to live all his days among lovely unsubstantial things, fleeting shadows and strangely significant silences; but whereas you think of him as a tall, rather fragile man with dreamy eyes and a silky beard, I who have actually met him can only call up a very different image, that of a solid, blue-chinned fellow with an arrogant, almost sinister profile, suggesting an unscrupulous lawyer or money-lender rather than a singer of exquisite songs. Count D’Orsay, you will remember, discovered Byron in a faded nankeen jacket and green spectacles--a notable anti-climax!

We could perhaps overlook appearance and manners if only we got what we principally looked for--fine talk. We are disappointed, of course, and it is our own fault. Even if we had never reasoned the matter out, we ought to have had the sense to put away such expectations, or take care that they were never tested by reality. History shows us great writers and great talkers, but we rarely find the two combined in one figure. It is true that there was nobody more celebrated in his day as a talker than Coleridge, but he did his best literary work before he had this reputation, and the more he talked, the less he wrote. His contemporary, Mackintosh, was a great talker, but who reads Mackintosh now! Do not let us deceive ourselves by thinking that memoirs and biographies of literary men will help us; do not let us imagine that reading them is the same thing as actually meeting authors. Memoirs and biographies are books, with all the virtues of books; they can be put aside, skipped, or disbelieved, if necessary; they are art, and very good art too, some of them. Johnson as he appears in Boswell is good enough for me, for there I can enjoy that very unpleasantness which must have made an actual encounter such a risky business. As for those enthusiasts who are always telling us what they would give to spend an evening with this or the other demi-god of letters, most of them do not realise what they are saying. They would barter we know not what for one evening with Shakespeare at the Mermaid, as if they expected to find him mouthing over his liquor alternately in the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff. I, for one, would not be surprised if all Shakespeare’s talk at the Mermaid was not worth a rush; he probably never did more than exchange a few commonplaces and listen smilingly to the others before he emptied his flagon and went home. The epithets that contemporaries bestowed so grudgingly upon him, ‘gentle’ and ‘civil’ and the like, suggest a quiet man and good listener. I warrant that Jonson was the better talker. Even with Lamb, who is usually the next to be singled out, an encounter might not be entirely successful. Among his intimates, he could stammer out some wonderful things, but he was apt to prove an odd, sometimes unpleasant companion for others. The hapless Distributor of Stamps who called on Wordsworth at Haydon’s, whom Lamb baited so unmercifully, would be very unwilling to subscribe to the popular opinion of ‘gentle Elia.’ As for Milton and Wordsworth, I have no doubt that they were insufferable. And if any man argues the charm of Shelley’s society from his verse, let him go into the first fanatical group he can find, single out the young man who has the greatest number of half-digested notions and talks incessantly in a high-pitched voice, and by listening to such a one for a few hours, let him test the truth of his idea that a day with Shelley would be unmixed delight. But enough--reason and experience both tell us to avoid meeting good authors, though they say nothing of bad ones. It only remains for us to decide which are good and which are bad, and we cannot begin too soon.

THE ETERNAL CHEAP JACK

The war has not changed him. But then all the tumults and long wars of centuries have not changed him. Like the pedant, the demagogue, or the place-hunter, the cheap-jack is an ever-enduring figure. Boccaccio’s Frate Cipolla and Chaucer’s Pardoner were his first cousins; from Shakespeare to O. Henry (to adopt the popular termini), he has chaffered and cozened his way through literature. And he is with us yet in the flesh, for I saw him only last week. I was visiting the weekly fair in a pleasant little town, and had joined the crowd of country folks drifting about the stalls in the market square, when, suddenly, a mighty voice burst forth from the centre of a group of persons huddled in a far corner. In the country, where the long days are filled with the sight and sound of the lower creatures, there is no resisting this eruptive clamour of a human voice for an audience, and, along with others, I hurried to join the thickening press of folk in the corner. There, after many years, I found him, as of old.

There was the same indefinable air of something like bravado about his whole figure. His hard face still bore that curious trace of the Jew, mingled with something a great deal worse than the Jew. His clothes, which were new and smart, still seemed to proclaim that they had been made for someone else; and the various trinkets about his person still confessed their inability to inspire confidence. In front was the same old stall, laden with innumerable, mysterious packages, all thickly wrapped in tissue paper; and by the side of the stall stood the inevitable assistant, silent, dejected, unshaven, looking like a rough and shabbier copy of his master, or perhaps a poor relation. Nothing had changed. The great man still flourished the sign of his office, a wooden mallet with a ponderous head, with which he hammered upon the stall from time to time as a sort of dramatic punctuation.

Best of all, his voice, that one talent which removed him from common men, was there in all its pristine fullness. He spoke in the manner of his kind; in that accent which owns no shire, city, or clan, and yet is heard in all the market places in the land. His very whispered confidences were enough to stir the old bones in the neighbouring churchyard. The crowd, trying to appear sophisticated, was held and mastered by the voice that was trumpeting, cajoling, mocking, within the space of one mighty breath, and yet still went sounding on, dropping manna by the way. Unknowingly he was a passionate votary of the art that has now nearly forsaken the pulpit and the council chamber. We, his audience, stifled all doubts, and waited, promise-crammed.

There was little or no alteration in his methods. Whether they have been designed, once for all, by some Master Psychologist of cheap-jacks, or are the result of accumulated experience, a secret tradition passed from generation to generation of genial tricksters, I cannot say; but these methods, like the human nature on which they are based, do not change much. As before, he had not come among us to make money. With passionate emphasis, he declared that he was not a profiteer (a new note, this), but had been sent down here by the well-known firm of Mumble-Mumble to smash profiteering. He would teach us the meaning of the word Lib-er-al-ity--that is how he mouthed it, with splendid significance. And then he proceeded in the time-old fashion.

From some half-a-dozen persons nearest the stall, he borrowed a few coppers, promising to return the loan with the addition of a ‘small present.’ These people, becoming sharers in the business, naturally do not care to go away, and thus, by this simple trick, whatever may happen he has about him at least the nucleus of a crowd. Then, flourishing several mysterious packages before our eyes, he asked us to bid for them. ‘Any gentleman got the pluck,’ he demanded, with the dispassionate earnestness of a god, ‘any gentleman got the courage to offer me a Silver Shilling for this?’ Any gentleman showing the necessary public spirit was given the article in question, and his money, his Silver Shilling, was handed back to him. Nor did our friend spoil his acts of munificence by the manner of giving; every package was divested of its numerous wrappings before it was handed over to the lucky man; the contents were exposed to the public view, and described in a style that ‘Ouida’ would have envied. Our minds reeled before this riotous splendour of gold and jewels. Sometimes, in a frenzy of reckless generosity, he would pile up a heap of articles, and, with a magnificent sense of the dramatic, would cry: ‘Here’s number One! And here’s number Two! And here’s another one, making number Three! And another one, making number Four!’--working up to a climax that left us gasping. Then, after being extraordinarily bountiful to one person, he would pretend to answer a perfectly imaginary charge of confederacy from some member of the crowd, looking all the while very sternly at no one in particular. ‘One of a click (_i.e._ clique) is ‘e?’ he would roar. ‘One of the click! Do I know yer, Mister? Never seen yer before. I’ll show yer whether ‘e’s one of the click! I’ll show yer!’ And being apparently stung by this vile taunt, he would lash himself into a fury, and proceed to squander his glittering wares even still more wildly. I left him with the sweat running down his face, his hair all rumpled and his collar a wreck; yet he was still undaunted, giving away gold watches with the magnificent air of an Eastern Emperor.

I, for one, welcome the cheap-jack because his presence in our midst proves that there is still a little poetry left in the race. For all his machinations are based on a certain notion which the experience of this world proves to be a fallacy, and which is yet as old as the hills and as little to be despised. It is the fine old notion that it is possible, somehow or other, to get something for nothing; and it was not born of this world. When we have entirely forsaken the idea, then we are lost indeed, for it comes from the depths of our primal innocence, and has about it the last lingering scent of the Garden of Eden.

HOLIDAY NOTES FROM THE COAST OF BOHEMIA

A friend of mine, who is a great traveller, has just put into my hands a letter that should be interesting to those who have not yet decided where to go for their holidays and are looking for fresh fields. This letter came from an old acquaintance of his, one Autolycus, an amusing fellow, who boasts that he has been a courtier and in his time worn ‘three-pile’ velvet. As a correspondent he is not to be taken too seriously, but the substance of his letter is engaging, and can be given here. He says that he can remember the time when the coast of Bohemia, his adopted land, was nothing but a desert country, but now, under the genial sway of Prince Florizel and his lovely Perdita, all is changed: the place is blossoming into a sea-bound garden; the sunlit woods and sands, the sweet air, and the good company to be found there are attracting visitors from countries near and far; and villas and hostels are springing up everywhere to lodge the host of new residents and guests. The coming season promises well, and our correspondent, himself the owner now of a large hostel, admits that he is thriving, and well on his way to ‘three-pile’ again.

Being an arrant gossip, Autolycus soon learns all the news of the place, and any scraps that he misses his friend and barber, Figaro, can usually supply to him. He makes it plain that there is no lack of good company, for he mentions scores of familiar names, of which only a few can find a place here. Some of the visitors who spent last winter there have now left the district: a lively talkative couple from Padua, Benedick and Beatrice, have departed for the country house of their friends Katherina and Petruchio; a certain Major Pendennis has now returned to London, where, we understand, he is a notable figure; Senor Gil Blas has gone to relate his adventures elsewhere; and Master Touchstone, a friend of Autolycus and a fellow of some wit, has now left for the Forest of Arden, where he intends to pass an idle summer with his patrons, now Sir Orlando and Lady Rosalind de Boys. Such visitors as these, with others who have gone, will no doubt be missed, but the loss is more than made up by the crowd of new arrivals.

Prince Florizel has now opened his new Summer Palace, and is entertaining a great company. Almost the first group of guests to arrive was a gay party from Illyria, including the Duke and his Duchess Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, and that witty fellow Feste, whose strange songs are now heard throughout the land. Sir Toby and his friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, are not staying with the party at the palace, but are lodging with Autolycus, where there are cakes and ale and catches in plenty. A new tutor has been engaged for the Royal children, but little is known of him; he is thought to be a Scotsman, and has been heard muttering ‘Prodeegious’ on his infrequent walks abroad. Next month there comes to the palace a famous Spanish knight, who is said to have suffered strangely from the persecutions of enchanters. Some will have it that his squire, one Sancho Panza, is better worth a hearing than the knight himself.

Here and there along the coast the sea has been steadily encroaching upon the land, and the Prince has decided to fortify these places by the building of embankments and other devices. The work has now begun, under the direction of two experts, Captain Toby Shandy and the Baron of Bradwardine. Another famous martial figure has been added to the list by the arrival of Captain Dugald Dalgetty, who now commands the Bohemian Marine Horse, in the place of Bobadil--lately cashiered.

There is certainly no lack of amusements now that the season has begun, for there are dances and pageants in the open air and indoor entertainments for the occasional rainy evenings. Next month will see the opening of the new Royal Theatre, which will be under the management of that renowned impresario Mr. Vincent Crummles. There, a professional company--including, I believe, the ‘infant phenomenon’--will perform. But this is not the only dramatic enterprise, for an Artisan’s Amateur Dramatic Society has just been formed. The leading spirit in this venture is a recent settler on these shores, one Bottom, a weaver, who is said to have had long and valuable experience as an amateur performer. Nor should it be hard to please those who prefer graver and more edifying diversion. It appears that, only two weeks ago, a lecture on the ‘Golden Cadence of Poesy’ was given by Holofernes, the schoolmaster, and was well received. Unfortunately, according to report, the audience was a very small one, there being only seven people present, and that is including Master Slender, who fell asleep almost at the beginning. Some contribution will certainly be made to solid learning at the debate, upon some antiquarian question, between Jonathan Oldbuck, Esquire, and Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, P.P.C. This takes place early next month, and Justice Shallow will be in the chair. The prospect of hearing this debate alone is surely enough to draw any right-minded man, who is free to travel, across half the world.

There have been so many English visitors, of late, to this part of the kingdom that special arrangements have been made for the benefit of their bodies and souls; a small English church and a large English tavern have been built within a short distance of the sea. This year there are two pastors doing duty at the church, the Rev. Dr. Primrose and Parson Adams, both of whom have been fervent in denouncing from the pulpit the evils of the world; indeed, Dr. Primrose caused quite a stir with his ‘Folly of Cosmogony.’ The tavern has been named the New Boar’s Head, and the hostess is Mistress Quickly, late of Eastcheap, London. Autolycus writes that it is a rowdy house, but this can be set down to professional jealousy and his ignorance of the persons concerned. The best room is now occupied by Sir John Falstaff, who is reported to be a man of some substance; and the house is becoming renowned for good talk and the drinking of ‘healths five fathoms deep.’

It is unfortunate that one of Sir John’s followers has got himself into trouble with the constables. The latter were recently appointed by the Prince to look after the watch, and are from Messina, where everyone knows Dogberry and Verges. So far, they have only made one arrest, and that was of Pistol, Sir John’s Ancient. It seems that he, Ancient Pistol, being full of sack, encountered the constables and expressed himself in Cambyses’ vein, calling Dogberry a ‘dung-hill cur,’ and Verges ‘a recreant coward base.’ This led to his arrest and confinement, where he will remain for the time being, unless the justices are willing to accept Bardolph as security....

But I have dwelt long enough on the wonders of this delectable unrivalled resort. If some of my statements above are disbelieved, or in any way questioned, I can only refer to my original authority, Autolycus, who said long ago, in answer to a similar charge: ‘Why should I carry lies abroad?’

ON A MOUTH-ORGAN

FOR the past half hour, someone, probably a small boy, has been playing a mouth-organ underneath my window. I know of no person under this roof peculiarly susceptible to the sound of a mouth-organ, so that I cannot think that the unknown musician is serenading. He is probably a small boy who is simply hanging about, after the fashion of his mysterious tribe, and whiling away the time with a little music. Why he should choose a raw day like this on which to do nothing but slide his lips over the cold metal of a mouth-organ must remain a mystery to me; but I have long realised that unfathomable motives may be hidden away behind the puckered face and uncouth gestures of small boyhood.

I have not been able to recognise any of the tunes, or the snatches of tunes, which have come floating up to my window. Possibly they are all unknown to me. But I think it is more likely that they are old acquaintances, coming in such a questionable shape that my ear cannot find any familiar cadence; they have been transmuted by the mouth-organ into something rich and strange; for your mouth-organ is one of the great alchemists among musical instruments and leaves no tune as it finds it.

It has been pointed out that whatever material Dickens used, however rich and varied it might be, it was always mysteriously transformed into the Dickens substance, lengths of which he cut off and called Novels. It seems to me that the mouth-organ, though a mechanical agent, has something of this strange power of transformation; whatever is played upon it seems to come out all of a piece; whatever might be the original character of the tunes, gay, fantastical, meditative, stirring, as their sounds are filtered through the little square holes of the instrument, their character changes, and they all become more or less alike. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ ‘Annie Laurie,’ and the latest ditty of the music-halls somehow or other lose their individuality and flow into one endless lament, one lugubrious strain, that might very well go on for ever.

For this reason, the sound of a mouth-organ has always succeeded in depressing me. It must have been invented by an incorrigible pessimist, who sought to create a musical instrument that would give to every tune, no matter how lively, some touch of his own hopeless view of life; and probably the only time that he laughed was when he realised that he could leave this thing as a legacy to the world. I have never played a mouth-organ, because I know that my own native optimism would not be strong enough to resist the baneful influence of the music it makes. To hear it now and again is more than enough for me.

To one who is filled with the joy of life--a small boy, for example--such hopeless strains may prove only invigorating, may serve as a wholesome check upon his ebullient spirits, like the skeleton at the Egyptian feasts. But to most of us weaker brethren, frail in spirit, music that is unillumined by even a glimmer of hope is intolerable.