Chapter XL: On Dropping Anchor 344 (4)

However, all you who love Crooked Streets, I bid you lift up your hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build Straight Streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant future; but in this case I am right enough. The Crooked Streets will certainly return.

Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day, and that in another man's work, but which, having once seen it, I shall retain all the days of my life.

"Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem," or words to that effect. I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion, and anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man, if I have changed it so much the better.

XIX

THE PLACE APART

Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do) so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the happiness I had of it.

* * * * *

One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.

The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope of woodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.

A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside.

Just where the slope began to go downwards again upon the further side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw before me the Valley.

Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one; moreover, that descent had been gentle.

The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.

Let me describe it.

Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall), the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch standing up among them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills.

Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass. These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less. The sun as I have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.

Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this single and most unexpected vale.

So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to myself: "I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us." For we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our masters give us holidays, but God only: until at last we lay down the business and leave our work for good and all. And so much for holidays. Anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.

It was not as are common and earthly things. There was a peace about it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which invited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them; and all was completely still. I heard no birds from the moment when I left the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but it slid full and at once mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going. The pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind moved it.

There were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Never have I found a place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.

If any man owned that Valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is also its youth, was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps possess, but not while the business is on.

I went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves or of those that have movement.

So I went until I came to the low pass at the head of the place, and when I had surmounted it I looked down a steep great fall into quite another land. I had come to a line where met two provinces, two different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.

The moor (for so I would call it) upon the further side fell away and away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could see, further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields and the anxious life of men.

XX

THE EBRO PLAIN

I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt shock which the Northern eye receives when it first looks from some rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain.

"Deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas; nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give forth when, looking southward toward Mexico and the sun, a man shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.

Corn grows in that new Spain beneath one: many towns stand founded there; Christian Churches are established; a human society stands firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. But to the Northern eye first seeing it--nay, to a Northerner well acquainted with it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision--it is always a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe been fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along this naked and burnt valley of the Ebro.

I will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the boundaries of the Basque country, from the Peak of Anie, down through the high Pyrenean silences to those banks of Aragon where the river runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to have climbed the further range (which is called "The Mountains of Stone," or "The Mountains of the Rock"), and, coming upon its further southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland, from within sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the Southern Sea, that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than any views in Europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land, partly from the Iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of a dead world.

The traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the Anie through forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still dignified by many and noble trees, and alive with cascading water. While he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel before the next) which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall, he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own Northern conception of pasture-land. The herbage upon which he would pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though sparse and Southern, would have reminded him of home.

But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and sees at last the whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out before him, it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. Though human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller asks himself doubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt, insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men--things with histories.

For the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off Aragon from the south and the old from the new Castile, save where the higher knot of the Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.

This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of the distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility or of romance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.

The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this peculiar impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus--and they are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in England. Yet even those few, I say, who enter Spain from the north, as Spain should be entered--over the mountain roads--have not all of them received the impression of which I speak.

I have so received it, I know; I could wish that to the Northerner it were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a distant bell, that ritual and a creed should have survived there--so absolute is its message of desolation.

With a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish, but increases. Especially to one who shall make his way painfully on foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again, who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some bridge over Ebro and look down, it may be, at a trickle of water hardly moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed, or it may be at a turbid spate roaring a furlong broad after the rains--in either case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man; who shall hobble from little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men in that silent land and at their lack of smiles and at the something fixed which watches one from every wall; who shall push on over the slight wheel-tracks which pass for roads--they are not roads--across the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field; to one who has done all these things, I say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there comes an appreciation of its wilful silence and of its unaccomplished soul. That knowledge fascinates, and bids him return. It is like watching with the sick who were thought dead, who are, in your night of watching, upon the turn of their evil. It is like those hours of the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper wakened can find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon itself--but waits for dawn. Behind all this lies, as behind a veil of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of Spain.

XXI

THE LITTLE RIVER

Men forget too easily how much the things they see around them in the landscapes of Britain are the work of men. Most of our trees were planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. Our ploughs for countless centuries have made even the soil of the plains the lines of a great view; its groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and of road are very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it--which, alone of creatures, speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning its origin and its end. It is man that has transformed the surface and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his handiwork.

There is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the historical truth of what I am here saying. As God made it, it was but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of tangled underwood, sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers, scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains, dried up and stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. Then, no one will ever know how many centuries ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing with his hands. He took my little river; he began to use it, to make it, and to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave to it its ancient name, which is the ancient name for water, and which you will find scattered upon streams large and small from the Pyrenees up to the Northern Sea and from the West of Germany to the Atlantic. He called it the Adur; therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old, for pedants hate the fruitful humour of antiquity.

Well, not only did man give my little river (an inconceivable number of generations ago) the name which it still bears, but he bridged it and he banked it, he scoured it and he dammed it, until he made of it a thing to his own purpose and a companion of the countryside.

With the fortunes of man in our Western and Northern land the fortunes of my little river rose and fell. What the Romans may have done with it we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little--coins sink in it and the foundations of buildings are lost.

In the breakdown which we call the Dark Ages, and especially perhaps after the worst business of the Danish Invasion, it must have broken back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been before man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks and the maples, the coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars encroached upon tilled land; the banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting dams, the waterwheels were forgotten and perished. There seem to have been no mills. There is no good drinking water in that land, save here and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well, and the people of the Dark Ages in Britain, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the desolation of my valley.

Then came the Norman: the short man with the broad shoulders and the driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp wherever he marched, from the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed that land again, he ploughed the clay, he cut the undergrowth, and he built a great house of monks and a fine church of stone where for so long there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of the weald.

To my little river the Norman was particularly kind. He dug it out and deepened it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it; it brimmed to its banks, it was once more the companion of men, and, what is more, he dug it out so thoroughly all the twenty miles to the sea that he could even use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream came to be called Shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when all this was done, right up to the wharf which the Knight Templars had built above the church to meet the waters of the stream.

All the Middle Ages that fruitfulness and that use continued. But with the troubles in which the Middle Ages closed and in which so much of our civilisation was lost, the little river was once more half abandoned. The church still stood, but stone by stone the great building of the Templars disappeared. The river was no longer scoured; its course was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild beasts came back, the lands of the King were lost. One use remained to the water--the Norman's old canalisation was forgotten and the wharf had slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field with no deep water standing by. This use was the use of the Hammer Ponds. Here and there the stream was banked up, and the little fall thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies in which the iron of the countryside was worked. For in this clay of ours there was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks of the weald furnished the charcoal for its smelting. The metal work of the great ships that fought the French, many of their guns also, and bells and railings for London, were smithied or cast at the issue of these Hammer Ponds. But coal came and the new smelting; our iron was no longer worked, and the last usefulness of the little river seemed lost.

Then for two generations all that land lay apart, the stream quite choked or furiously flooding, the paths unworkable in winter: no roads, but only green lanes, and London, forty miles away, unknown.

The last resurrection of the little river has begun to-day. The railway was the first bringer of good news (if you will allow me to be such an apologist for civilisation); then came good hard roads in numbers, and quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the car. The energy of men reached Adur once again, and once again began the scouring and making of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man; so that, though we have not tackled the canal as we should (that will come), yet with every year the Adur grows more and more of a companion again. It has furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbours, and in one place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well.

The other day as I began a new and great and good dam with sluices and with puddled clay behind oak boards and with huge oak uprights and oaken spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, I thought to myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what I was doing was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time incalculable to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great pleasure, for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men, whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead.

This little river--the river Adur before I have done with it--will be as charming and well-bred a thing as the Norman or the Roman knew. It shall bring up properly to well-cut banks. These shall be boarded. It shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay, and reeds and water lilies shall grow only where I choose. In every way it shall be what the things of this world were made to be--the servant and the instrument of Man.

XXII

SOME LETTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TIME

_From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake_

MY DEAR VICTORIA,--Yes, by all means tell your young friend Mr. Shakespeare that he can come to Paxton on Saturday. As you say that he can't get away until the later train I will have Perkins meet him from the village. I don't suppose he rides, but I can't mount him anyhow. I hope there is no trouble about Church on Sunday.

_From Mrs. Myers to Lady Clogg_

One thing I _am_ looking forward to, dear, is this little coon Shakespeare. Victoria told me about him. She says sometimes he will play and sometimes he won't play. But _she_ says he's quiet in harness just now. It seems that sometimes he talks all of a sudden. And one can get him to _sing_! Anyhow I _do_ want to see what he's like.

(_The rest of this letter is about other matters._)

_From Messrs. Hornbull and Sons to William Shakespeare Esq._

SIR,--We have now sent in our account three times, and the last time with a pressing recommendation that you should settle it, but you have not honoured us by any reply. We regret to inform you that if we do not receive a cheque by Wednesday the 22nd inst. we shall be compelled to put the matter into other hands.

_From John Shakespeare to his mother, Mrs. Shakespeare_

DEAREST MAMMA,--I am afraid Billie really can't pay that money this week. He was awfully apologetic about it and I gave him a good talking to, but if he hasn't got it he hasn't. After all it isn't absolutely necessary until the 30th.

_From Jonathan Truelove Esq. to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR OLD CHAP,--I am going to do something very unconventional, but we know each other well enough I think. Can you let me have the £5 I lent you two years ago? I have to get in every penny I can this week, suddenly. If you can't don't bother to answer, I am not going to press you.

_From Sir Henry Portman, Attorney General, to the Secretary of the Crown Prosecutor_

DEAR JIM,--No, I can't manage to get round to the Ritz this evening. Mary says that she wants Johnnie to leave Dresden. What inconceivable rubbish! Why can't she let him stay where he is? You might as well drown yourself as leave Dresden. What on earth could it lead to?

By the way, do choke off that silly ass Bates, if he is still worrying about Shakespeare. No one wants anything done, and No. 1 would be awfully angry if there was a prosecution. Rather than allow it I would find the money myself.

Yours, H. P.

_From James Jevons and Co. Publishers, to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR SIR,--Our attention has been called to your work by our correspondent in Edinburgh, and he asks us whether we think you could see your way to something dealing with Scottish history. He does not want it cast in the form of a play, for which he says there will be no sale with the Scottish public, seeing the exceedingly English cast of your work, but if you could throw it into Ballad form he thinks something could be done with it.

Of course such things can never be remunerative at _first_. The Edinburgh firm for whom he writes propose to buy sheets at 4½d. or 5d. and to give a royalty of 10 per cent. to be equally divided between our firm and yourself. They could not go beyond 500 copies for the first edition. It may be worth your while, in spite of the trifling remuneration, to consider this offer in order to secure copyright and to prevent any pirating of future editions in Scotland. Pray advise.

We are, Your obedient servants, JAMES JEVONS AND CO.

_From Messrs. Firelight, Agents, to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--We have had a proposal from Messrs. Capon in the matter of your collected Poems. As you know, verse is not just now much in demand with the public, and they could not manage an advance on royalties. They propose 10 per cent. on a 5s. book after the first 250 copies sold. The honorarium is, of course, purely nominal, but it might lead to more business later on. Could you let us know your views upon the matter?

Very faithfully yours, _pro_ FIRELIGHT AND CO. C. G.

_From Clarence de Vere Chalmondeley to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR SIR,--Having certain sums free for investment, I am prepared to lend, not as a money-lender but as a private banker, sums from £10 to £50,000, on note of hand alone, without security. No business done with minors.

Very faithfully yours, CLARENCE DE VERE CHALMONDELEY.

_From William Shakespeare to Sir John Fowless_ (_scribbled hastily in pencil_)

I will try and come if I can, but it's something awful. I only got my proofs read by 2 o'clock in the night; I had to do my article for _The Owl_ before 10 this morning, then I have got to go and meet the Church Defence League people on my way to the station, and catch a train to a place where Mrs. Blake wants me to go somewhere in the Midlands, about 5. I think I can look in on my way to the station.

That man you asked me to see about the brandy is a fraud. Would you, like a good fellow, tell Charlie _not to forget to mention in his article that "Hamlet" will only be played on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon, matinées_. Don't forget this because people want to know when it is going to be. There was a very good notice in _The Jumper_. I do feel so ill.

W. S.

_From S. Jennings, Secretary, to George Mountebank Esq._

DEAR SIR,--Mr. Shakespeare is at present away from home and will return upon Thursday, when I will immediately lay your MSS. before him.

I am, Very faithfully yours, S. JENNINGS, Secretary.

_From Mr. Mustwrite of Warwick to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--I have never met you, and perhaps you will think it a great impertinence on my part to be writing as I do. But I must write to tell you the deep and sincere pleasure I have received from your little brochure "Venus and Adonis," which the Rev. William Clarke, our Clergyman, lent me only yesterday. I read it through at a sitting and I could not rest until I had written to tell you the profound spiritual consolation I derived from its perusal.

I am, dear Mr. Shakespeare, Very much your admirer, GEORGE MUSTWRITE.

_To William Shakespeare Esq._ (_unsigned, and written in capital letters rather irregularly_)

No doubt you think yourself a fine fellow and the friend of the working man--I don't think! Some of us know more about you than you think we do. I erd you at the Queen's Hall and you made me sick. You aren't fit to black the boots of the man you talked against.

_To William Shakespeare Esq._, O.H.M.S. (_printed_)

SIR,--In pursuance with the provisions of Her Majesty's Benevolent Act, you are hereby required to prepare a true and correct statement of your emoluments from all forms of (in writing) literary income, duly signed by you within 21 days from this date. If, however, you elect to be assessed by the District Commissioners under a number or a letter, &c. &c. &c.

_From the Earl of Essex to W. Shakespeare Esq._ (_lithographed_)

DEAR SIR,--I have undertaken to act as Chairman this year of the Annual Dinner of the League for the Support of Insufficiently Talented Dramatic Authors. You are doubtless acquainted with the admirable objects of &c. &c. I hope I may see your name among the stewards whose position is purely honorary, and is granted upon payment of five guineas, &c. &c. This laudable &c. &c.

Very faithfully yours, ESSEX.

_From Mrs. Parxinson to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--Can you come and talk for our Destitute Pick Pockets Association on Thursday the 18th? I know you are a very busy man, but I always find it is the most busy men, who somehow manage to find time for charitable objects. If you can manage to do so I would send my motor round for you to Pilbury Row, and it would take you out to Rickmansworth where the meeting is to be. I am afraid it cannot take you back, but there is a convenient train at 20 minutes to 8, which gets you into London a little after 9 for dinner, or, if that is too late you might catch the 6.30, which gets you in at 8.15, only that will be rather a rush. My daughter tells me how much she admired your play, _Macduff_, and very much wants to see you.

_From the Duchess of Dump to William Shakespeare Esq._

DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--I want to ask you a really _great_ favour. Could you come to my Animals Ball on the 4th of June dressed up as a gorilla? I _do_ hope you can. We have to tell people what costumes they are to wear for fear that they should duplicate. Now _don't_ say no. It's years since we met. Last February wasn't it?

Yours ever, CAROLINE DUMP.

_Printed on Blue Paper with the Royal Arms_

In the name of the Queen's grace, OYEZ!

WHEREAS there has appeared before Us Henry Holt a Commissioner of the Queen's, &c. &c.

AND WHEREAS the said Henry Holt maketh deposition that he has against you (_in writing_) _William Shakespeare_, a claim for the sum of (_in writing_) _£27 2s. 1d._, now we hereby notify you that you are summoned to appear before us, &c. &c., upon (_in writing_) _Wednesday the 25th of May_ in the Year of Our Lord (_in writing_) _1601_, given under the Common Seal this (_in writing_) _second day of May 1601_.

HENRY HOLT, a Commissioner of the Queen's &c. &c.

XXIII

ON ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE GREAT

It is generally recognised in this country that an acquaintance more or less familiar with the Great, that is, with the very wealthy, and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service.

I am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own social rank, certain views which I think will not be unprofitable to them in this matter.

I will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty; to be the son of some professional man; to have been kept, at the expense of some anxiety to his parents, for five years or so at a public school, and to have proceeded to the University upon a loan.

With such a start he cannot fail, if he is in any way lively or amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called "The Great," and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction, unless they die prematurely of hard living or hereditary disease.

After such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship and patronage of these people would seem to be secure; and yet we know from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their betters at Winchester or Magdalen (to take two names at random) not two are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those London houses, which are rated at over £1000 a year.

The root cause of such failures is obvious enough.

The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would, so far as general opportunities go, be lost if one did not advertise it; and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives. For by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the recitation of acquaintance with themselves.

Formerly--about seventy years ago--your man who would succeed recited upon the slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis, his friendship with the Great. It was one of Disraeli's methods of advancement. The Great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. William tells me he remembers his dear father warning me of this.

Those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to abandon methods so simple and to take refuge in allusion. Thus a young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and such a notability and swearing that he would not meet him. For to profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that notability moved.

Or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and, on the whole, unfavourably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. While a third way was to use Christian names, and yet to use them with a tone of indifference, as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than friends.

But the Great are ever on the alert, and this habit of allusion was in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses; so that in our own time it has been necessary to invent another. I do not promise it any long survival, I write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my time, but I think a young man is well advised in this second decade of the twentieth century to assume towards the Great an attitude of silent and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them less well than he does.

Thus three men will be in a smoking room together. The one, let us say, will be the Master of the King's Billiard Room, an aged Jew who has lent money to some Cabinet Minister; the second a local squire, well-to-do and about fifty years of age; the third is my young reader, whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. The Master of the King's Billiard Room will say that he likes "Puffy." The squire will say he doesn't like him much because of such and such a thing; he will ask the young man for his opinion. Now, in my opinion, the young man will do well at this juncture to affect ignorance. Let him deliberately ask to have it explained to him who Puffy is (although the nickname may be familiar to every reader of a newspaper), and on hearing that it is a certain Lord Patterson he should put on an expression of no interest, and say that he has never met Lord Patterson.

Something of the same effect is produced when a man remains silent during a long conversation about a celebrity, and then towards the end of it says some really true and intimate thing about him, such as, that he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot bear his double eyelids or that his gout is very amusing.

Another very good trick, which still possesses great force, is to repudiate any personal acquaintance with the celebrity in question, and treat him merely as some one whom one has read of in the newspapers; but next, as though following a train of thought, to begin talking of some much less distinguished relative of his with the grossest possible familiarity.

A common and not ineffective way (which I mention to conclude the list) is to pretend that you have only met the Great Man in the way of business, at large meetings or in public places, where he could not possibly remember you, and to pretend this upon all occasions and very often. But this method is only to be used when, as a matter of fact, you have not met the celebrity at all.

As for letting yourself be caught unawares and showing a real and naïf ignorance of the Great, that is not only a fault against which I will not warn you, for I believe you to be incapable of it, but it is also one against which it is of no good to warn any one, for whoever commits it has no chance whatsoever of that advancement which it is the object of these notes to promote.

When you are found walking with the Great in the street (a thing which, as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company with people of your position), it is as well, if your companion meets another of his own Order, to stand a little to one side, to profess interest in the objects of a neighbouring shop window, or the pattern of the railings. Such at least is the general rule to be laid down for those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better method, which is as follows:

Catch if you can the distant approach of the Other Great before your Great has spotted him, then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied by the pulling out of your watch, depart: for there is nothing that so annoys the Great during the conference of any two of them, as the presence of a third party of your station.

Since my remarks must be put into a brief compass (though I have much more to say upon this all-important subject) I will conclude with what is perhaps the soundest piece of advice of all.

Never under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift even of the smallest value, upon the Great. Never let yourself be betrayed into a generous action, nor, if you can possibly prevent it, so much as a generous thought in their regard. They are not grateful. They think it impertinent. And it looks odd. There is a note of equality about such things (and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in correspondence) which is very odious and offensive. Moreover, as has been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of the middle class falls into the habit of asking the Great to meals, of giving them books or pictures or betraying towards them in any fashion a spirit of true companionship, he bursts; and that, as a rule, after a delay quite incredibly short. Some men of fair substance have to my knowledge been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight; from which spot I send these presents, and where, by the way, at the time of writing, the stock of forage in the forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the mainland.

God bless you!

XXIV

ON LYING

He that will set out to lie without having cast up his action and judged it this way and that, will fail, not in his lie, indeed, but in the object of it; which is, _imprimis_, to deceive, but _in ultimis_ or fundamentally, to obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not vainly and wantonly as for sport (saving a very few that are habitual), but rather for some good to be got or evil to be evaded: as when men lie of their prowess with the fist, though they have fought none--no, not even little children--or in the field, though they have done no more than shoot a naked blackamoor at a furlong. These lie for honour. Not so our stockers and jobbers, who lie for money direct, or our parliament men, who lie bestraught lest worse befall them.

Lies are distinguished by the wise into the Pleasant and the Useful, and again into the Beautiful and the Necessary. Thus a lie giving comfort to him that utters it is of the Lie Pleasant, a grateful thing, a cozening. This kind of lies is very much used among women. This sort will also make out good to the teller, evil to the told, for the pleasure the cheat gives; as, when one says to another that his worst actions are now known and are to be seen printed privately in a Midland sheet, and bids him fly.

The lie useful has been set out _ut supra_, which consult; and may be best judged by one needing money. Let him ask for the same and see how he shall be met; all answers to him shall be of this form of lie. It is also of this kind when a man having no purse or no desire to pay puts sickness on in a carriage, whether by rail or in the street, crying out: "Help! help!" and wagging his head and sinking his chin upon his breast, while his feet patter and his lips dribble. Also let him roll his eyes. Then some will say: "It is the heat! The poor fellow is overcome!" Others, "Make way! make way!" Others, men of means, will ask for the police, whereat the poorer men present will make off. But chiefly they that should have taken the fare will feel kindly and will lift the liar up gently and convey him and put him to good comfort in some waiting place or other till he be himself--and all the while clean forget his passage. For such is the nature of their rules. Lord Hincksey, now dead, was very much given to this kind of lie, and thought it profitable.

You shall lie at large and not be discovered; or a little, and for once, and yet come to public shame, as it was with Ananias and his good wife Sapphira in Holy Scripture, who lied but once and that was too often. While many have lied all their lives long and come to no harm, like John Ade, of North-Chapel, for many years a witness in the Courts that lied professionally, then a money-lender, and lastly a parliament-man for the county: yet he had no hurt of all this that any man could see, but died easily in another man's bed, being eighty-three years of age or thereabouts, and was very honourably buried in Petworth at a great charge. But some say he is now in Hell, which God grant!

There is no lie like the winsome, pretty, flattering, dilating eyelid-and-lip-and-brow-lifting lie such as is used by beauty impoverished, when land is at stake. By this sort of lie many men's estates have been saved, none lost, and good done at no expense save to holiness. Of the same suit also is the lie that keeps a parasite in a rich man's house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter, a model upon a sculptor, and beggars upon all men.

Fools will believe their lies, but wise men also will take delight in them, as did the Honourable Mr. Gherkin, for some time His Majesty's Minister of State for the Lord Knows What, who, when policemen would beslaver him, and put their hands to their heads and pay court in a low way, told all that saw it what mummery it was; yet inwardly was pleased. The more at a loss was he when, being by an accident in the Minories too late and his hat lost, his coat torn and muddy, he made to accost an officer, and civilly saying, "Hi----" had got no further but he took such a crack on the crown with a truncheon as laid him out for dead, and he is not now the same as he was, nor ever will be.

Ministers of religion will both show forth to the people the evil of lying and will also lie themselves in a particular manner, very distinct and formidable: as was clear when one denounced from the pulpit the dreadful vice of hypocrisy and false seeming, whereat a drunkard not yet sober, hearing him say, "Show me the hypocrite!" rose where he was, full in church, and pointed to the pulpit, so that he was thrust out for truth-telling by gesture in that sacred place; as was that other who, when the preacher came to "Show me the drunkard," jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the parson's wife: a very mutinous act. But to Lying.

He that takes lying easily will take life hardly; as the saw has it, "Easy lying makes hard hearing," but your constructed and considered, your well-drafted lie--that is the lie for men grown, men discreet and fortunate. To which effect also the poet Shakespeare says in his _Sonnets_--but no matter! The passage is not for our ears or time, dealing with a dark woman that would have her Will: as women also must if the world is to wag, which leads me to that sort of lie common to all the sex of which we men say that it is the marvellous, the potent, the dextrous, the thorough, or better still, the mysterious, the uncircumvented and not explainable, the stopping-short and confounding-against-right-reason lie, the triumphant lie of Eve our mother: Iseult our sister: Judith, an aunt of ours, who saved a city, and Jael, of holy memory.

But if any man think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for his pains; and if any man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or compound, for he attempts the mastery of women.

Which no man yet has had of God, or will.

Amen.

XXV

THE DUPE

The Dupe is an honest creature, and such honesty is the noblest work of God. The Dupe is not the servant of the Knave, but his ally. The Dupe does not, as too simple a political philosophy would have it, serve only for a material on which the Knave shall work; he is also the moral support of the Knave, strengthening and comforting the Knave's most inward soul and lending lubrication to the friction of public falsehood. For the Knave is of many sorts, and the Dupe helps them all.

The plumb Knave, or Knave Absolute, finds in the Dupe such an honest creature as does not revile him, and it is good to know that one is loved by some few honest souls. Thus the Knave Absolute is foolish indeed when he lets the Dupe see by gesture or tone that he thinks him a fool, for the Dupe is very sensitive and touchy in all weathers.

The Knave Qualified (in his many incarnations) must have the Dupe about him or perish. Thus the Knave who would save his soul by self-deception feeds, cannibal-like, upon the straightforwardness of the Dupe, and says to himself: "How can I be such a Knave after all, since these good Dupes here heartily agree with me?"

The Knave Cowardly props himself upon that sort of courage in the Dupe which always accompanies virtue. "I run a risk," says he, "in proposing the State purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend the Old Knave went under thus in 1895; but the Good Dupe is a buckler in the fight; he will dare all because his heart is pure."

The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe to see to details and to meet men in ante-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining. This sort of Knave will have two or even three Dupes for private secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law.

The Dupe is in God's providence very numerous, for his normal rate of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death-rate low. On this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch the Dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by the Knave; nor is the one to be distinguished from the other by the coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one be old enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand, will not be of great service in any physical struggle and must not be depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse and when disturbed he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a Rogue Dupe will turn upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured.