One morning lately I saw in my newspaper an announcement that enraged me. It was made in the driest, most casual way, as though nobody would care a rap; and this did but whet the wrath I had in knowing that Adam Street, Adelphi, was to be undone. The Tivoli Music Hall, about to be demolished and built anew, was to have a frontage of thirty feet, if you please, in Adam Street. Why? Because the London County Council, with its fixed idea that the happiness of mankind depends on the widening of the Strand, had decreed that the Tivoli’s new frontage thereon should be thirty feet further back, and had granted as consolation to the Tivoli the right to spread itself around the corner and wreck the work of the Brothers Adam. Could not this outrage be averted? There sprang from my lips that fiery formula which has sprung from the lips of so many choleric old gentlemen in the course of the past hundred years and more: ‘I shall write to The Times.’
If Adam Street were a thing apart I should have been stricken enough, heaven knows, at thought of its beauty going, its dear tradition being lost. But not as an unrelated masterpiece was Adam Street built by the Brothers whose name it bears. An integral part it is in their noble design of the Adelphi. It is the very key to the Adelphi, the well-ordained initiation for us into that small, matchless quarter of London, where peace and dignity do still reign—peace the more beatific, and dignity the finer, by instant contrast with the chaos of hideous sounds and sights hard by. What man so gross that, passing out of the Strand into Adam Street, down the mild slope to the river, he has not cursed the age he was born into—or blessed it because the Adelphi cannot in earlier days have had for any one this fullness of peculiar magic? Adam Street is not so beautiful as the serene Terrace it goes down to, nor so curiously grand as crook-backed John Street. But the Brothers did not mean it to be so. They meant it just as an harmonious ‘lead’ to those inner glories of their scheme. Ruin that approach, and how much else do you ruin of a thing which—done perfectly by masters, and done by them here as nowhere else could they have done it—ought to be guarded by us very jealously! How to raise on this irregular and ‘barbarous’ ground a quarter that should be ‘polite’, congruous in tone with the smooth river beyond it—this was the irresistible problem the Brothers set themselves and slowly, coolly, perfectly solved. So long as the Adelphi remains to us, a microcosm of the eighteenth century is ours. If there is any meaning in the word sacrilege—
That, I remember, was the beginning of one of the sentences I composed while I paced my room, thinking out my letter to The Times. I rejected that sentence. I rejected scores of others. They were all too vehement. Though my facility for indignation is not (I hope) less than that of my fellows, I never had written to The Times. And now, though I flattered myself I knew how the thing ought to be done, I was unsure that I could do it. Was I beginning too late? Restraint was the prime effect to be aimed at. If you are intemperate, you don’t convince. I wanted to convince the readers of The Times that the violation of the Adelphi was a thing to be prevented at all costs. Soberness of statement, a simple, direct, civic style, with only an underthrob of personal emotion, were what I must at all costs achieve. Not too much of mere aesthetics, either, nor of mere sentiment for the past. No more than a brief eulogy of ‘those admirably proportioned streets so familiar to all students of eighteenth century architecture,’ and perhaps a passing reference to ‘the shades of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Topham Beauclerk, and how many others!’ The sooner my protest were put in terms of commerce, the better for my cause. The more clearly I were to point out that such antiquities as the Adelphi are as a magnet to the moneyed tourists of America and Europe, the likelier would my readers be to shudder at ‘a proposal which, if carried into effect, will bring discredit on all concerned and will in some measure justify Napoleon’s hitherto-unjustified taunt that we are a nation of shopkeepers.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant’—good! I sat down to a table and wrote out that conclusion, and then I worked backwards, keeping well in view the idea of ‘restraint.’ But that quality which is little sister to restraint, and is yet far more repulsive to the public mind than vehemence, emerged to misguide my pen. Irony, in fact, played the deuce. I found myself writing that a nation which, in its ardour for beauty and its reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed after only a few months’ hesitation £250,000 to save the Crystal Palace, where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been spoilt by the utter gloom and nullity of the place—a nullity and gloom that will, however and of course, be dispelled so soon as the place is devoted to permanent exhibitions of New Zealand pippins, Rhodesian tobacco, Australian mutton, Canadian snow-shoes, and other glories of Empire—might surely not be asked in vain to’—but I deleted that sentence, and tried another in another vein. My desire to be straightforward did but topple me into excess of statement. My sorrow for the Adelphi came out as sentimentality, my anger against the authorities as vulgar abuse. Only the urgency of my cause upheld me. I would get my letter done somehow and post it. But there flitted through my mind that horrid doubt which has flitted through the minds of so many choleric old gentlemen in the course of the past hundred years and more: ‘Will The Times put my letter in?’
If The Times wouldn’t, what then? At least my conscience would be clear: I should have done what I could to save my beloved quarter. But the process of doing it was hard and tedious, and I was glad of the little respite presented by the thought that I must, before stating my case thoroughly, revisit Adam Street itself, to gauge precisely the extent of the mischief threatened there. On my way to the Strand I met an old friend, one of my links with whom is his love of the Adams’ work. He had not read the news, and I am sorry to say that I, in my selfish agitation, did not break it to him gently. Rallying, he accompanied me on my sombre quest.
I had forgotten there was a hosier’s shop next to the Tivoli, at the corner of the right-hand side of Adam Street. We turned past it, and were both of us rather surprised that there were other shops down that side. They ought never to have been allowed there; but there they were; and of course, I felt, it was the old facades above them that really counted. We gazed meanwhile at the facades on the left-hand side, feasting our eyes on the proportions of the pilasters, the windows; the old seemly elegance of it all; the greatness of the manner with the sweet smallness of the scale it wrought on.
‘Well,’ I said, turning abruptly away, ‘to business! Thirty feet—how much, about, is that? My friend moved to the exact corner of the Strand, and then, steadily, methodically, with his eyes to the pavement, walked thirty toe-to-heal paces down Adam Street.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is where the corner of the Tivoli would come’—not ‘will come,’ observe; I thanked him for that. He passed on, measuring out the thirty additional feet. There was in his demeanour something so finely official that I felt I should at least have the Government on my side.
Thus it was with no sense of taking a farewell look, but rather to survey a thing half-saved already, that I crossed over to the other side of the road, and then, lifting my eyes, and looking to and fro, beheld—what?
I blankly indicated the thing to my friend. How long had it been there, that horrible, long, high frontage of grey stone? It must surely have been there before either of us was born. It seemed to be a very perfect specimen of 1860—1870 architecture—perfect in its pretentious and hateful smugness.
And neither of us had ever known it was there.
Neither of us, therefore, could afford to laugh at the other; nor did either of us laugh at himself; we just went blankly away, and parted. I daresay my friend found presently, as I did, balm in the knowledge that the Tivoli’s frontage wouldn’t, because it couldn’t, be so bad as that which we had just, for the first time, seen.
For me there was another, a yet stronger, balm. And I went as though I trod on air, my heart singing within me. For I had not, after all, to resume my task of writing that letter to The Times.
They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia [Greek]. Ignored in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good will.
But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that aren’t. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of ‘book’ deserved. If Lamb were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did. Published volumes were few in his day (though not, of course, few enough). Even he, in all the plenitude of his indulgence, would now have to demur that at least 90 per cent. of the volumes that the publishers thrust on us, so hectically, every spring and autumn, are abiblia [Greek].
What would he have to say of the novels, for example? These commodities are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have no illusions as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings of sausages does not pretend that every individual sausage is in itself remarkable. He does not assure us that ‘this is a sausage that gives furiously to think,’ or ‘this is a singularly beautiful and human sausage,’ or ‘this is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.’ Why are such distinctions drawn by the publisher? When he publishes, as he sometimes does, a novel that is a book (or at any rate would be a book if it were decently printed and bound) then by all means let him proclaim its difference—even at the risk of scaring away the majority of readers.
I admit that I myself might be found in that majority. I am shy of masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are dim in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers’ opinions as my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the advice of a few highly literary friends. But so soon as I am told that I ‘must’ read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don’t exist.
And yet—for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can’t stir sweet longings—how eagerly would I devour these books within books! What fun, what a queer emotion, to fish out from a fourpenny-box, in a windy by-street, WALTER LORRAINE, by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, or PASSION FLOWERS, by ROSA BUNION! I suppose poor Rosa’s muse, so fair and so fervid in Rosa’s day, would seem a trifle fatigued now; but what allowances one would make! Lord Steyne said of WALTER LORRAINE that it was ‘very clever and wicked.’ I fancy we should apply neither epithet now. Indeed, I have always suspected that Pen’s maiden effort may have been on a plane with ‘The Great Hoggarty Diamond.’ Yet I vow would I not skip a line of it.
WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped that perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that the novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion and found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.
“He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while it was still in proof; after its appearance and alarming failure, the modesty of the author had become more pressing, and the secret was now likely to be better kept than that of the authorship of ‘Waverley.’”
Such an humiliation as Gideon’s is the more poignant to me because it is so rare in English fiction. In nine cases out of ten, a book within a book is an immediate, an immense success.
On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism—especially they who have written mainly to please their public. It pleases the public to read about any sort of success. The greater, the more sudden and violent the success, the more valuable is it as ingredient in a novel. And since the average novelist lives always in a dream that one of his works will somehow ‘catch on’ as no other work ever has caught on yet, it is very natural that he should fondly try meanwhile to get this dream realised for him, vicariously, by this or that creature of his fancy. True, he is usually too self-conscious to let this creature achieve his sudden fame and endless fortune through a novel. Usually it is a play that does the trick. In the Victorian time it was almost always a book of poems. Oh for the spacious days of Tennyson and Swinburne! In how many a three-volume novel is mentioned some ‘slim octavo’ which seems, from the account given, to have been as arresting as ‘Poems and Ballads’ without being less acceptable than ‘Idylls of the King’! These verses were always the anonymous work of some very young, very poor man, who supposed they had fallen still-born from the press until, one day, a week or so after publication, as he walked ‘moodily’ and ‘in a brown study’ along the Strand, having given up all hope now that he would ever be in a position to ask Hilda to be his wife, a friend accosted him—‘Seen “The Thunderer” this morning? By George, there’s a column review of a new book of poems,’ etc. In some three-volume novel that I once read at a seaside place, having borrowed it from the little circulating library, there was a young poet whose sudden leap into the front rank has always laid a special hold on my imagination. The name of the novel itself I cannot recall; but I remember the name of the young poet—Aylmer Deane; and the forever unforgettable title of his book of verse was POMENTS: BEING POEMS OF THE MOOD AND THE MOMENT. What would I not give to possess a copy of that work?
Though he had suffered, and though suffering is a sovereign preparation for great work, I did not at the outset foresee that Aylmer Deane was destined to wear the laurel. In real life I have rather a flair for future eminence. In novels I am apt to be wise only after the event. There the young men who do in due course take the town by storm have seldom shown (to my dull eyes) promise. Their spoken thoughts have seemed to me no more profound or pungent than my own. All that is best in these authors goes into their work. But, though I complain of them on this count, I admit that the thrill for me of their triumphs is the more rapturous because every time it catches me unawares. One of the greatest emotions I ever had was from the triumph of THE GIFT OF GIFTS. Of this novel within a novel the author was not a young man at all, but an elderly clergyman whose life had been spent in a little rural parish. He was a dear, simple old man, a widower. He had a large family, a small stipend. Judge, then, of his horror when he found that his eldest son, ‘a scholar at Christminster College, Oxbridge,’ had run into debt for many hundreds of pounds. Where to turn? The father was too proud to borrow of the neighbourly nobleman who in Oxbridge days had been his ‘chum.’ Nor had the father ever practised the art of writing. (We are told that ‘his sermons were always extempore.’) But, years ago, ‘he had once thought of writing a novel based on an experience which happened to a friend of his.’ This novel, in the fullness of time, he now proceeded to write, though ‘without much hope of success.’ He knew that he was suffering from heart-disease. But he worked ‘feverishly, night after night,’ we are told, ‘in his old faded dressing-gown, till the dawn mingled with the light of his candle and warned him to snatch a few hours’ rest, failing which he would be little able to perform the round of parish duties that awaited him in the daytime.’ No wonder he had ‘not much hope.’ No wonder I had no spark of hope for him. But what are obstacles for but to be overleapt? What avails heart-disease, what availed and feverish haste and total lack of literary training, as against the romantic instinct of the lady who created the Rev. Charles Hailing? ‘THE GIFT OF GIFTS was acclaimed as a masterpiece by all the first-class critics.’ Also, it very soon ‘brought in’ ten times as much money as was needed to pay off the debts of its author’s eldest son. Nor, though Charles Hailing died some months later, are we told that he died from the strain of composition. We are left merely to rejoice at knowing he knew at the last ‘that his whole family was provided for.’
I wonder why it is that, whilst these Charles Hailings and Aylmer Deanes delightfully abound in the lower reaches of English fiction, we have so seldom found in the work of our great novelists anything at all about the writing of a great book. It is true, of course, that our great novelists have never had for the idea of literature itself that passion which has always burned in the great French ones. Their own art has never seemed to them the most important and interesting thing in life. Also it is true that they have had other occupations—fox-hunting, preaching, editing magazines, what not. Yet to them literature must, as their own main task, have had a peculiar interest and importance. No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt. It is nonsense to imagine that our great novelists have just forged ahead or ambled along, reaching their goal, in the good old English fashion, by sheer divination of the way to it. A fine book, with all that goes to the making of it, is as fine a theme as a novelist can have. But it is a part of English hypocrisy—or, let it be more politely said, English reserve—that, whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us. And just there, I suppose, is the reason why our great novelists have shunned great books as subject-matter. It is fortunate for us (jarring though it is to our patriotic sense) that Mr. Henry James was not born an Englishman, that he was born of a race of specialists—men who are impenitent specialists in whatever they take up, be it sport, commerce, politics, anything. And it is fortunate for us that in Paris, and in the straitest literary sect there, his method began to form itself, and the art of prose fiction became to him a religion. In that art he finds as much inspiration as Swinburne found in the art of poetry. Just as Swinburne was the most learned of our poets, so is Mr. James the most learned of our—let us say ‘our’—prose-writers. I doubt whether the heaped total of his admirations would be found to outweigh the least one of the admirations that Swinburne had. But, though he has been a level-headed reader of the works that are good enough for him to praise, his abstract passion for the art of fiction itself has always been fierce and constant. Partly to the Parisian, partly to the American element in him we owe the stories that he, and of ‘our’ great writers he only, has written about books and the writers of books.
Here, indeed, in these incomparable stories, are imaginary great books that are as real to us as real ones are. Sometimes, as in ‘The Author of “Beltraffio,”’ a great book itself is the very hero of the story. (We are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which Ambient’s wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he should grow up under the influence of its author; but I have a queer conviction that it was THE DAISIES.) Usually, in these stories, it is through the medium of some ardent young disciple, speaking in the first person, that we become familiar with the great writer. It is thus that we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that message, or meaning, that ‘figure in the carpet,’ which eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS. of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically. And it is also through Paraday’s disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS, and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior books mentioned by Mr. James. But stay, I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those nearly forty volumes by Henry St. George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame—the shame he bore so bravely—in the ruck of his ‘output.’ He is the only one of those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said that he was ‘generous and delicate and pursued the prize.’ He is a more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the author of THE MIDDLE YEARS. Dencombe’s grievance was against fate, not against himself.
“It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art The art had come, but it had come after everything else. ‘Ah, for another go!—ah, for a better chance.’... ‘A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”
The scene of Dencombe’s death is one of the most deeply-beautiful things ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad; it rises and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in THE MIDDLE YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James’s art can always carry to us the conviction that his characters’ books are as fine as his own.
I crave—it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave—ocular evidence for my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye, was broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were mimicked; and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books were pasted congruously with the whole effect. Some of these backs had been taken from actual books, others had been made specially and were stamped with facetious titles that rather depressed me. ‘Here,’ thought I, ‘are the shelves on which Dencombe’s works ought to be made manifest. And Neil Paraday’s too, and Vereker’s.’ Not Henry St. George’s, of course: he would not himself have wished it, poor fellow! I would have nothing of his except SHADOWMERE. But Ray Limbert!—I would have all of his, including a first edition of THE MAJOR KEY, ‘that fiery-hearted rose as to which we watched in private the formation of petal after petal, and flame after flame’; and also THE HIDDEN HEART, ‘the shortest of his novels, but perhaps the loveliest,’ as Mr. James and I have always thought.... How my fingers would hover along these shelves, always just going to alight, but never, lest the spell were broken, alighting!
How well they would look there, those treasures of mine! And, most of them having been issued in the seemly old three-volume form, how many shelves they would fill! But I should find a place certainly for a certain small brown book adorned with a gilt griffin between wheatsheaves. THE PILGRIM’S SCRIP, that delightful though anonymous work of my old friend Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel. And I should like to find a place for POEMS, by AURORA LEIGH. Mr. Snodgrass’s book of verses might grace one of the lower shelves. (What is the title of it? AMELIA’S BOWER, I hazard.) RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE LORD BYRON AND OTHERS, by CAPTAIN SUMPH, would be somewhere; for Sumph did, you will be glad to hear, take Shandon’s advice and compile a volume. Bungay published it. Indeed, of the books for which I should find room there are a good few that bear the imprimatur of Bungay. DESPERATIN, OR THE FUGITIVE DUCHESS, by THE HON. PERCY Popjoy, was Bungay’s; and so, of course, were PASSION FLOWERS and WALTER LORRAINE. Of the books issued by the rival firm of Bacon I possess but one: MEMOIRS OF THE POISONERS, by DR. SLOCUM. Near to Popjoy’s romance would be THE LADY FLABELLA, of which Mrs. Wititterly said to Kate Nickleby, ‘So voluptuous is it not—so soft?’ WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? would have a place of honour (unearned by its own merits?). Among other novels that I could not spare, THE GIFT OF GIFTS would conspicuously gleam. As for POMENTS—ah, I should not be content with one copy of that. Even at the risk of crowding out a host of treasures, I vow I would have a copy of every one of the editions that POMENTS ran through.
Primitive and essential things have great power to touch the heart of the beholder. I mean such things as a man ploughing a field, or sowing or reaping; a girl filling a pitcher from a spring; a young mother with her child; a fisherman mending his nets; a light from a lonely hut on a dark night.
Things such as these are the best themes for poets and painters, and appeal to aught that there may be of painter or poet in any one of us. Strictly, they are not so old as the hills, but they are more significant and eloquent than hills. Hills will outlast them; but hills glacially surviving the life of man on this planet are of as little account as hills tremulous and hot in ages before the life of man had its beginning. Nature is interesting only because of us. And the best symbols of us are such sights as I have just mentioned—sights unalterable by fashion of time or place, sights that in all countries always were and never will not be.
It is true that in many districts nowadays there are elaborate new kinds of machinery for ploughing the fields and reaping the corn. In the most progressive districts of all, I daresay, the very sowing of the grain is done by means of some engine, with better results than could be got by hand. For aught I know, there is a patented invention for catching fish by electricity. It is natural that we should, in some degree, pride ourselves on such triumphs. It is well that we should have poems about them, and pictures of them. But such poems and pictures cannot touch our hearts very deeply. They cannot stir in us the sense of our kinship with the whole dim past and the whole dim future. The ancient Egyptians were great at scientific dodges—very great indeed, nearly as great as we, the archaeologists tell us. Sand buried the memory of those dodges for a rather long time. How are we to know that the glories of our present civilisation will never be lost? The world’s coal-mines and oil-fields are exhaustible; and it is not, I am told, by any means certain that scientists will discover any good substitutes for the materials which are necessary to mankind’s present pitch of glory. Mankind may, I infer, have to sink back into slow and simple ways, continent be once more separated from continent, nation from nation, village from village. And, even supposing that the present rate of traction and communication and all the rest of it can forever be maintained, is our modern way of life so great a success that mankind will surely never be willing to let it lapse? Doubtless, that present rate can be not only maintained, but also accelerated immensely, in the near future. Will these greater glories be voted, even by the biggest fools, an improvement? We smile already at the people of the early nineteenth century who thought that the vistas opened by applied science were very heavenly. We have travelled far along those vistas. Light is not abundant in them, is it? We are proud of having gone such a long way, but...peradventure, those who come after us will turn back, sooner or later, of their own accord. This is a humbling thought. If the wonders of our civilisation are doomed, we should prefer them to cease through lack of the minerals and mineral products that keep them going. Possibly they are not doomed at all. But this chance counts for little as against the certainty that, whatever happens, the primitive and essential things will never, anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that Brown’s Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones’ Sonnet Sequence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson’s Epic of the Piscicidal Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith has painted nothing more masterly than his picture of a girl turning a hot-water tap. But has he never seen a girl fill a pitcher from a spring? Smithers’ picture of a young mother seconding a resolution at a meeting of a Board of Guardians is magnificent, as brushwork. But why not have cut out the Board and put in the baby? I yield to no one in admiration of Smithkins’ ‘Facade of the Waldorf Hotel by Night, in Peace Time.’ But a single light from a lonely hut would have been a finer theme.
I should like to show Smithkins the thing that I call The Golden Drugget. Or rather, as this thing is greatly romantic to me, and that painter is so unfortunate in his surname, I should like Smithkins to find it for himself.
These words are written in war time and in England. There are, I hear, ‘lighting restrictions’ even on the far Riviera di Levante. I take it that the Golden Drugget is not outspread now-anights across the high dark coast-road between Rapallo and Zoagli. But the lonely wayside inn is still there, doubtless; and its narrow door will again stand open, giving out for wayfarers its old span of brightness into darkness, when peace comes.
It is nothing by daylight, that inn. If anything, it is rather an offence. Steep behind it rise mountains that are grey all over with olive trees, and beneath it, on the other side of the road, the cliff falls sheer to the sea. The road is white, the sea and sky are usually of a deep bright blue, there are many single cypresses among the olives. It is a scene of good colour and noble form. It is a gay and a grand scene, in which the inn, though unassuming, is unpleasing, if you pay attention to it. An ugly little box-like inn. A stuffy-looking and uninviting inn. Salt and tobacco, it announces in faint letters above the door, may be bought there. But one would prefer to buy these things elsewhere. There is a bench outside, and a rickety table with a zinc top to it, and sometimes a peasant or two drinking a glass or two of wine. The proprietress is very unkempt. To Don Quixote she would have seemed a princess, and the inn a castle, and the peasants notable magicians. Don Quixote would have paused here and done something. Not so do I.
By daylight, on the way down from my little home to Rapallo, or up from Rapallo home, I am indeed hardly conscious that this inn exists. By moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to it. But on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but a strip of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door, great always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean also will be. And so I cleave to the present tense—the nostalgic present, as grammarians might call it.
Likewise, when I say that thoroughly dark nights are rare here, I mean that they are rare in the Gulf of Genoa. Clouds do not seem to like our landscape. But it has often struck me that Italian nights, whenever clouds do congregate, are somehow as much darker than English nights as Italian days are brighter than days in England. They have a heavier and thicker nigritude. They shut things out from you more impenetrably. They enclose you as in a small pavilion of black velvet. This tenement is not very comfortable in a strong gale. It makes you feel rather helpless. And gales can be strong enough, in the late autumn, on the Riviera di Levante.
It is on nights when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves and zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first mile it runs straight for three or four hundred yards; and, as the inn stands at a point midway on this straight course, the Golden Drugget is visible to me long before I come to it. Even by starlight, it is good to see. How much better, if I happen to be out on a black rough night when nothing is disclosed but this one calm bright thing. Nothing? Well, there has been descriable, all the way, a certain grey glimmer immediately in front of my feet. This, in point of fact, is the road, and by following it carefully I have managed to escape collision with trees, bushes, stone walls. The continuous shrill wailing of trees’ branches writhing unseen but near, and the great hoarse roar of the sea against the rocks far down below, are no cheerful accompaniment for the buffeted pilgrim. He feels that he is engaged in single combat with Nature at her unfriendliest. He isn’t sure that she hasn’t supernatural allies working with her—witches on broomsticks circling closely round him, demons in pursuit of him or waiting to leap out on him. And how about mere robbers and cutthroats? Suppose—but look! that streak, yonder, look!—the Golden Drugget.
There it is, familiar, serene, festal. That the pilgrim knew he would see it in due time does not diminish for him the queer joy of seeing it; nay, this emotion would be far less without that foreknowledge. Some things are best at first sight. Others—and here is one of them—do ever improve by recognition. I remember that when first I beheld this steady strip of light, shed forth over a threshold level with the road, it seemed to me conceivably sinister. It brought Stevenson to my mind: the chink of doubloons and the clash of cutlasses; and I think I quickened pace as I passed it. But now!—now it inspires in me a sense of deep trust and gratitude; and such awe as I have for it is altogether a loving awe, as for holy ground that should he trod lightly. A drugget of crimson cloth across a London pavement is rather resented by the casual passer-by, as saying to him ‘Step across me, stranger, but not along me, not in!’ and for answer he spurns it with his heel. ‘Stranger, come in!’ is the clear message of the Golden Drugget. ‘This is but a humble and earthly hostel, yet you will find here a radiant company of angels and archangels.’ And always I cherish the belief that if I obeyed the summons I should receive fulfilment of the promise. Well, the beliefs that one most cherishes one is least willing to test. I do not go in at that open door. But lingering, but reluctant, is my tread as I pass by it; and I pause to bathe in the light that is as the span of our human life, granted between one great darkness and another.
Beautifully vague though the English language is, with its meanings merging into one another as softly as the facts of landscape in the moist English climate, and much addicted though we always have been to ways of compromise, and averse from sharp hard logical outlines, we do not call a host a guest, nor a guest a host. The ancient Romans did so. They, with a language that was as lucid as their climate and was a perfect expression of the sharp hard logical outlook fostered by that climate, had but one word for those two things. Nor have their equally acute descendants done what might have been expected of them in this matter. Hate and spite are as mysteriously equivocal as hopes. By weight of all this authority I find myself being dragged to the conclusion that a host and a guest must be the same thing, after all. Yet in a dim and muzzy way, deep down in my breast, I feel sure that they are different. Compromise, you see, as usual. I take it that strictly the two things are one, but that our division of them is yet another instance of that sterling common-sense by which, etc., etc.
I would go even so far as to say that the difference is more than merely circumstantial and particular. I seem to discern also a temperamental and general difference. You ask me to dine with you in a restaurant, I say I shall be delighted, you order the meal, I praise it, you pay for it, I have the pleasant sensation of not paying for it; and it is well that each of us should have a label according to the part he plays in this transaction. But the two labels are applicable in a larger and more philosophic way. In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
I have already (see third sentence of foregoing paragraph) somewhat prepared you for the shock of a confession which candour now forces from me. I am one of the guests. You are, however, so shocked that you will read no more of me? Bravo! Your refusal indicates that you have not a guestish soul. Here am I trying to entertain you, and you will not be entertained. You stand shouting that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Very well. For my part, I would rather read than write, any day. You shall write this essay for me. Be it never so humble, I shall give it my best attention and manage to say something nice about it. I am sorry to see you calming suddenly down. Nothing but a sense of duty to myself, and to guests in general, makes me resume my pen. I believe guests to be as numerous, really, as hosts. It may be that even you, if you examine yourself dispassionately, will find that you are one of them. In which case, you may yet thank me for some comfort. I think there are good qualities to be found in guests, and some bad ones in even the best hosts.
Our deepest instincts, bad or good, are those which we share with the rest of the animal creation. To offer hospitality, or to accept it, is but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his self-development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do birds keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been so seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to accept man’s hospitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he run out and invite another dog to share it with him?—and does your cat insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk? Quite the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have acquired some willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may; cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though certain monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than any wolves or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we began to be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that now and again—say, towards the end of the Stone Age—one or another among the more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked an eagle that he had snared the day before, ‘That red-haired man who lives in the next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of person. And sometimes I fancy he is rather lonely. I think I will ask him to dine with us to-night,’ and, presently going out, met the red-haired man and said to him, ‘Are you doing anything to-night? If not, won’t you dine with us? It would be a great pleasure to my wife. Only ourselves. Come just as you are.’ ‘That is most good of you, but,’ stammered the red-haired man, ‘as ill-luck will have it, I am engaged to-night. A long-standing, formal invitation. I wish I could get out of it, but I simply can’t. I have a morbid conscientiousness about such things.’ Thus we see that the will to offer hospitality was an earlier growth than the will to accept it. But we must beware of thinking these two things identical with the mere will to give and the mere will to receive. It is unlikely that the red-haired man would have refused a slice of eagle if it had been offered to him where he stood. And it is still more unlikely that his friend would have handed it to him. Such is not the way of hosts. The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it, as I shall show.
Meanwhile, why did the red-haired man babble those excuses? It was because he scented danger. He was not by nature suspicious, but—what possible motive, except murder, could this man have for enticing him to that cave? Acquaintance in the open valley was all very well and pleasant, but a strange den after dark—no, no! You despise him for his fears? Yet these were not really so absurd as they may seem. As man progressed in civilisation, and grew to be definitely gregarious, hospitality became more a matter of course. But even then it was not above suspicion. It was not hedged around with those unwritten laws which make it the safe and eligible thing we know to-day. In the annals of hospitality there are many pages that make painful reading; many a great dark blot is there which the Recording Angel may wish, but will not be able, to wipe out with a tear.
If I were a host, I should ignore those tomes. Being a guest, I sometimes glance into them, but with more of horror, I assure you, than of malicious amusement. I carefully avoid those which treat of hospitality among barbarous races. Things done in the best periods of the most enlightened peoples are quite bad enough. The Israelites were the salt of the earth. But can you imagine a deed of colder-blooded treachery than Jael’s? You would think it must have been held accursed by even the basest minds. Yet thus sang Deborah and Barak, ‘Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be among women in the tent.’ And Barak, remember, was a gallant soldier, and Deborah was a prophetess who ‘judged Israel at that time.’ So much for the ideals of hospitality among the children of Israel.
Of the Homeric Greeks it may be said that they too were the salt of the earth; and it may be added that in their pungent and antiseptic quality there was mingled a measure of sweetness, not to be found in the children of Israel. I do not say outright that Odysseus ought not to have slain the suitors. That is a debatable point. It is true that they were guests under his roof. But he had not invited them. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt. I am thinking of another episode in his life. By what Circe did, and by his disregard of what she had done, a searching light is cast on the laxity of Homeric Greek notions as to what was due to guests. Odysseus was a clever, but not a bad man, and his standard of general conduct was high enough. Yet, having foiled Circe in her purpose to turn him into a swine, and having forced her to restore his comrades to human shape, he did not let pass the barrier of his teeth any such winged words as ‘Now will I bide no more under thy roof, Circe, but fare across the sea with my dear comrades, even unto mine own home, for that which thou didst was an evil thing, and one not meet to be done unto strangers by the daughter of a god.’ He seems to have said nothing in particular, to have accepted with alacrity the invitation that he and his dear comrades should prolong their visit, and to have prolonged it with them for a whole year, in the course of which Circe bore him a son, named Telegonus. As Matthew Arnold would have said, ‘What a set!’
My eye roves, for relief, to those shelves where the later annals are. I take down a tome at random. Rome in the fifteenth century: civilisation never was more brilliant than there and then, I imagine; and yet—no, I replace that tome. I saw enough in it to remind me that the Borgias selected and laid down rare poisons in their cellars with as much thought as they gave to their vintage wines. Extraordinary!—but the Romans do not seem to have thought so. An invitation to dine at the Palazzo Borghese was accounted the highest social honour. I am aware that in recent books of Italian history there has been a tendency to whiten the Borgias’ characters. But I myself hold to the old romantic black way of looking at the Borgias. I maintain that though you would often in the fifteenth century have heard the snobbish Roman say, in a would-be off-hand tone ‘I am dining with the Borgias to-night,’ no Roman ever was able to say ‘I dined last night with the Borgias.’
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be. Hence the marked coolness of Scotsmen towards Shakespeare, hence the untiring efforts of that proud and sensitive race to set up Burns in his stead. It is a risky thing to offer sympathy to the proud and sensitive, yet I must say that I think the Scots have a real grievance. The two actual, historic Macbeths were no worse than innumerable other couples in other lands that had not yet fully struggled out of barbarism. It is hard that Shakespeare happened on the story of that particular pair, and so made it immortal. But he meant no harm, and, let Scotsmen believe me, did positive good. Scotch hospitality is proverbial. As much in Scotland as in America does the English visitor blush when he thinks how perfunctory and niggard, in comparison, English hospitality is. It was Scotland that first formalised hospitality, made of it an exacting code of honour, with the basic principle that the guest must in all circumstances be respected and at all costs protected. Jacobite history bristles with examples of the heroic sacrifices made by hosts for their guests, sacrifices of their own safety and even of their own political convictions, for fear of infringing, however slightly, that sacred code of theirs. And what was the origin of all this noble pedantry? Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth.’
Perhaps if England were a bleak and rugged country, like Scotland, or a new country, like America, the foreign visitor would be more overwhelmed with kindness here than he is. The landscapes of our country-side are so charming, London abounds in public monuments so redolent of history, so romantic and engrossing, that we are perhaps too apt to think the foreign visitor would have neither time nor inclination to sit dawdling in private dining-rooms. Assuredly there is no lack of hospitable impulse among the English. In what may be called mutual hospitality they touch a high level. The French, also the Italians, entertain one another far less frequently. In England the native guest has a very good time indeed—though of course he pays for it, in some measure, by acting as host too, from time to time.
In practice, no, there cannot be any absolute division of mankind into my two categories, hosts and guests. But psychologically a guest does not cease to be a guest when he gives a dinner, nor is a host not a host when he accepts one. The amount of entertaining that a guest need do is a matter wholly for his own conscience. He will soon find that he does not receive less hospitality for offering little; and he would not receive less if he offered none. The amount received by him depends wholly on the degree of his agreeableness. Pride makes an occasional host of him; but he does not shine in that capacity. Nor do hosts want him to assay it. If they accept an invitation from him, they do so only because they wish not to hurt his feelings. As guests they are fish out of water.
Circumstances do, of course, react on character. It is conventional for the rich to give, and for the poor to receive. Riches do tend to foster in you the instincts of a host, and poverty does create an atmosphere favourable to the growth of guestish instincts. But strong bents make their own way. Not all guests are to be found among the needy, nor all hosts among the affluent. For sixteen years after my education was, by courtesy, finished—from the age, that is, of twenty-two to the age of thirty-eight, I lived in London, seeing all sorts of people all the while; and I came across many a rich man who, like the master of the shepherd Corin, was ‘of churlish disposition’ and little recked ‘to find the way to heaven by doing deeds of hospitality.’ On the other hand, I knew quite poor men who were incorrigibly hospitable.
To such men, all honour. The most I dare claim for myself is that if I had been rich I should have been better than Corin’s master. Even as it was, I did my best. But I had no authentic joy in doing it. Without the spur of pride I might conceivably have not done it at all. There recurs to me from among memories of my boyhood an episode that is rather significant. In my school, as in most others, we received now and again ‘hampers’ from home. At the mid-day dinner, in every house, we all ate together; but at breakfast and supper we ate in four or five separate ‘messes.’ It was customary for the receiver of a hamper to share the contents with his mess-mates. On one occasion I received, instead of the usual variegated hamper, a box containing twelve sausage-rolls. It happened that when this box arrived and was opened by me there was no one around. Of sausage-rolls I was particularly fond. I am sorry to say that I carried the box up to my cubicle, and, having eaten two of the sausage-rolls, said nothing to my friends, that day, about the other ten, nor anything about them when, three days later, I had eaten them all—all, up there, alone.
Thirty years have elapsed, my school-fellows are scattered far and wide, the chance that this page may meet the eyes of some of them does not much dismay me; but I am glad there was no collective and contemporary judgment by them on my strange exploit. What defence could I have offered? Suppose I had said ‘You see, I am so essentially a guest,’ the plea would have carried little weight. And yet it would not have been a worthless plea. On receipt of a hamper, a boy did rise, always, in the esteem of his mess-mates. His sardines, his marmalade, his potted meat, at any rate while they lasted, did make us think that his parents ‘must be awfully decent’ and that he was a not unworthy son. He had become our central figure, we expected him to lead the conversation, we liked listening to him, his jokes were good. With those twelve sausage-rolls I could have dominated my fellows for a while. But I had not a dominant nature. I never trusted myself as a leader. Leading abashed me. I was happiest in the comity of the crowd. Having received a hamper, I was always glad when it was finished, glad to fall back into the ranks. Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Boys (as will have been surmised from my record of the effect of hampers) are all of them potential guests. It is only as they grow up that some of them harden into hosts. It is likely enough that if I, when I grew up, had been rich, my natural bent to guestship would have been diverted, and I too have become a (sort of) host. And perhaps I should have passed muster. I suppose I did pass muster whenever, in the course of my long residence in London, I did entertain friends. But the memory of those occasions is not dear to me—especially not the memory of those that were in the more distinguished restaurants. Somewhere in the back of my brain, while I tried to lead the conversation brightly, was always the haunting fear that I had not brought enough money in my pocket. I never let this fear master me. I never said to any one ‘Will you have a liqueur?’—always ‘What liqueur will you have?’ But I postponed as far as possible the evil moment of asking for the bill. When I had, in the proper casual tone (I hope and believe), at length asked for it, I wished always it were not brought to me folded on a plate, as though the amount were so hideously high that I alone must be privy to it. So soon as it was laid beside me, I wanted to know the worst at once. But I pretended to be so occupied in talk that I was unaware of the bill’s presence; and I was careful to be always in the middle of a sentence when I raised the upper fold and took my not (I hope) frozen glance. In point of fact, the amount was always much less than I had feared. Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
Meals in the restaurants of Soho tested less severely the pauper guest masquerading as host. But to them one could not ask rich persons—nor even poor persons unless one knew them very well. Soho is so uncertain that the fare is often not good enough to be palmed off on even one’s poorest and oldest friends. A very magnetic host, with a great gift for bluffing, might, no doubt, even in Soho’s worst moments, diffuse among his guests a conviction that all was of the best. But I never was good at bluffing. I had always to let food speak for itself. ‘It’s cheap’ was the only paean that in Soho’s bad moments ever occurred to me, and this of course I did not utter. And was it so cheap, after all? Soho induces a certain optimism. A bill there was always larger than I had thought it would be.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie. In restaurants I should have liked always to give cheques. But in any restaurant I was so much more often seen as guest than as host that I never felt sure the proprietor would trust me. Only in my club did I know the luxury, or rather the painlessness, of entertaining by cheque. A cheque—especially if it is a club cheque, as supplied for the use of members, not a leaf torn out of his own book—makes so little mark on any man’ s imagination. He dashes off some words and figures, he signs his name (with that vague momentary pleasure which the sight of his own signature anywhere gives him), he walks away and forgets. Offering hospitality in my club, I was inwardly calm. But even there I did not glow (though my face and manner, I hoped, glowed). If my guest was by nature a guest, I managed to forget somewhat that I myself was a guest by nature. But if, as now and then happened, my guest was a true and habitual host, I did feel that we were in an absurdly false relation; and it was not without difficulty that I could restrain myself from saying to him ‘This is all very well, you know, but—frankly: your place is at the head of your own table.’
The host as guest is far, far worse than the guest as host. He never even passes muster. The guest, in virtue of a certain hability that is part of his natural equipment, can more or less ape the ways of a host. But the host, with his more positive temperament, does not even attempt the graces of a guest. By ‘graces’ I do not mean to imply anything artificial. The guest’s manners are, rather, as wild flowers springing from good rich soil—the soil of genuine modesty and gratitude. He honourably wishes to please in return for the pleasure he is receiving. He wonders that people should be so kind to him, and, without knowing it, is very kind to them. But the host, as I said earlier in this essay, is a guest against his own will. That is the root of the mischief. He feels that it is more blessed, etc., and that he is conferring rather than accepting a favour. He does not adjust himself. He forgets his place. He leads the conversation. He tries genially to draw you out. He never comments on the goodness of the food or wine. He looks at his watch abruptly and says he must be off. He doesn’t say he has had a delightful time. In fact, his place is at the head of his own table.
His own table, over his own cellar, under his own roof—it is only there that you see him at his best. To a club or restaurant he may sometimes invite you, but not there, not there, my child, do you get the full savour of his quality. In life or literature there has been no better host than Old Wardle. Appalling though he would have been as a guest in club or restaurant, it is hardly less painful to think of him as a host there. At Dingley Dell, with an ample gesture, he made you free of all that was his. He could not have given you a club or a restaurant. Nor, when you come to think of it, did he give you Dingley Dell. The place remained his. None knew better than Old Wardle that this was so. Hospitality, as we have agreed, is not one of the most deep-rooted instincts in man, whereas the sense of possession certainly is. Not even Old Wardle was a communist. ‘This,’ you may be sure he said to himself, ‘is my roof, these are my horses, that’s a picture of my dear old grandfather.’ And ‘This,’ he would say to us, ‘is my roof: sleep soundly under it. These are my horses: ride them. That’s a portrait of my dear old grandfather: have a good look at it.’ But he did not ask us to walk off with any of these things. Not even what he actually did give us would he regard as having passed out of his possession. ‘That,’ he would muse if we were torpid after dinner, ‘is my roast beef,’ and ‘That,’ if we staggered on the way to bed, ‘is my cold milk punch.’ ‘But surely,’ you interrupt me, ‘to give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.’ I agree. I hope you didn’t think I was trying to disparage Old Wardle. I was merely keeping my promise to point out that from among the motives of even the best hosts pride and egoism are not absent.
Every virtue, as we were taught in youth, is a mean between two extremes; and I think any virtue is the better understood by us if we glance at the vice on either side of it. I take it that the virtue of hospitality stands midway between churlishness and mere ostentation. Far to the left of the good host stands he who doesn’t want to see anything of any one; far to the right, he who wants a horde of people to be always seeing something of him. I conjecture that the figure on the left, just discernible through my field-glasses, is that of old Corin’s master. His name was never revealed to us, but Corin’s brief account of his character suffices. ‘Deeds of hospitality’ is a dismal phrase that could have occurred only to the servant of a very dismal master. Not less tell-tale is Corin’s idea that men who do these ‘deeds’ do them only to save their souls in the next world. It is a pity Shakespeare did not actually bring Corin’s master on to the stage. One would have liked to see the old man genuinely touched by the charming eloquence of Rosalind’s appeal for a crust of bread, and conscious that he would probably go to heaven if he granted it, and yet not quite able to grant it. Far away though he stands to the left of the good host, he has yet something in common with that third person discernible on the right—that speck yonder, which I believe to be Lucullus. Nothing that we know of Lucullus suggests that he was less inhuman than the churl of Arden. It does not appear that he had a single friend, nor that he wished for one. His lavishness was indiscriminate except in that he entertained only the rich. One would have liked to dine with him, but not even in the act of digestion could one have felt that he had a heart. One would have acknowledged that in all the material resources of his art he was a master, and also that he practised his art for sheer love of it, wishing to be admired for nothing but his mastery, and cocking no eye on any of those ulterior objects but for which some of the most prominent hosts would not entertain at all. But the very fact that he was an artist is repulsive. When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul. With this reflection I look away from Lucullus and, fixing my gaze on the middle ground, am the better able to appreciate the excellence of the figure that stands before me—the figure of Old Wardle. Some pride and egoism in that capacious breast, yes, but a great heart full of kindness, and ever a warm spontaneous welcome to the stranger in need, and to all old friends and young. Hark! he is shouting something. He is asking us both down to Dingley Dell. And you have shouted back that you will be delighted. Ah, did I not suspect from the first that you too were perhaps a guest?
But—I constrain you in the act of rushing off to pack your things—one moment: this essay has yet to be finished. We have yet to glance at those two extremes between which the mean is good guestship. Far to the right of the good guest, we descry the parasite; far to the left, the churl again. Not the same churl, perhaps. We do not know that Corin’s master was ever sampled as a guest. I am inclined to call yonder speck Dante—Dante Alighieri, of whom we do know that he received during his exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid them by writing how bitter was the bread in their houses, and how steep the stairs were. To think of dour Dante as a guest is less dispiriting only than to think what he would have been as a host had it ever occurred to him to entertain any one or anything except a deep regard for Beatrice; and one turns with positive relief to have a glimpse of the parasite—Mr. Smurge, I presume, ‘whose gratitude was as boundless as his appetite, and his presence as unsought as it appeared to be inevitable.’ But now, how gracious and admirable is the central figure—radiating gratitude, but not too much of it; never intrusive, ever within call; full of dignity, yet all amenable; quiet, yet lively; never echoing, ever amplifying; never contradicting, but often lighting the way to truth; an ornament, an inspiration, anywhere.
Such is he. But who is he? It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality. I have told you that when I lived in London I was nothing as a host; but I will not claim to have been a perfect guest. Nor indeed was I. I was a good one, but, looking back, I see myself not quite in the centre—slightly to the left, slightly to the churlish side. I was rather too quiet, and I did sometimes contradict. And, though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often preferred to stay at home. If any one hereafter shall form a collection of the notes written by me in reply to invitations, I am afraid he will gradually suppose me to have been more in request than ever I really was, and to have been also a great invalid, and a great traveller.