ASHORTtime ago, in a strange town, evil chance confined me in a dingy room overlooking a dismal little street and then, having done this, left me to my own devices, without company and with few books. A grey tide of boredom and depression was already threatening and would have soon engulfed me, had I not come across a little volume in a corner of the bookshelf. It was—to set forth the full title—Cartomancy, or Occult Divination by Cards. The identity of the writer was not revealed; he or she was shrouded in true oracular fashion. I had heard of fortune-telling by cards; indeed, I had vague memories of having my destiny unfolded, in the dim past, by elderly ladies who tapped the assembled cards impressively and talked of letters, journeys by land, and dark ladies. But I had no idea such occult knowledge could be gleaned from books.If I had thought about the matter at all (which is doubtful), I had probably imagined that the art of Cartomancy was preserved by oral tradition, handed down through generations of maiden aunts; or that the clue to its mysteries was the inalienable property of a League of Decayed Gentlewomen. But no, here it was in a trumpery little volume, sold everywhere for a shilling. Truly, this is an age of books.
So I lost no time in making myself acquainted with the art, and boredom fled. Nor could I have found a better preceptor, for in this little book all was revealed; with fitting gravity and wealth of detail, it set forth the meaning of the cards and the various methods of laying them out. Each card had a distinct meaning, which was modified by the presence of other cards. All this was made clear, but the instructions were delightfully free from pedantry: ‘If intuition leads you to give a different meaning, do so’ was the advice it tendered—and what could be better? There was good reason attached to the meaning of some few of the cards, which had a very pretty symbolism. What else could the Queen of Hearts be but a fair woman? What could be a better symbol of death than the Ace of Spades reversed? Never again shall I see thatinnocent piece of pasteboard without feeling a sudden chill. But the symbolism of most of the cards was not so obvious. Why—it might be asked—should the eight of diamonds represent a roadway journey, the nine of spades disappointment and tears, the ace of clubs a letter of good news? These are mysteries, and not to be lightly comprehended. All the cards, however, are alike in this: they stand for the life that the centuries leave unchanged, the eternal verities of human existence, the things that are significant alike to the emperor and the clown; they do not adapt themselves to any pale, half-hearted way of living, but are downright and talk boldly of birth, death, and marriage, of jealousy, love and anger, of quarrels, accidents, and sudden endings. As to the various methods of shuffling, cutting and laying out the cards, the little book dealt with all these matters with high seriousness and at some length; and no sooner was I acquainted with one or two of the methods than I began to put them into practice. ‘These coloured scraps of pasteboard,’ I said to myself, as I ranged the cards, ‘shall be the tiny windows through which I will stare at the past, and peer wonderingly into the future. And I shall be as a god.’
As no other person was near, I decided to read my own fortunes, past, present, and future. I learned from the book that this was a difficult thing to do, and so I found it. True it is that through the medium of the cards, ‘the gay triumph-assuring scarlets—the contrasting deadly-killing sables’—as Lamb called them, my fortunes appeared to take on richer hues, to run to more passionate extremes, than I had imagined; and in the vague mass, both my past and future took on the aspect of a riotous, crowded pageant of love and intrigue, of tremendous sins and strange virtues. All this was heart-stirring enough, but there were difficulties waiting upon any sort of direct interpretation. Though I lived splendidly, and appeared to swagger through an existence crowded with incident, the whole fifty-two, hearts and all, seemed to combine to make me out a rascal, whose mind must have been corroded with the ‘motiveless malignity’ of an Iago. Why, for example, should I rejoice at the death of a dark boy in a railway accident? Why should I hound a white-haired old gentleman to his grave? And why—for there were numerous other incidents of this kind foreshadowed—should my villainy always take this vile form? WasI this kind of man, I asked myself and the cards, after each new instance of my calculated knavery, and if not, at what precise moment in the near future were all the forces of evil to take command of my soul. So I abandoned the attempt to discover my own fortunes, and, turning to the book, found that if one ‘thought strongly of one’s absent friends’ it was possible to dip into their past and future.
For some little time I shrank from this course. To pry into their past was bad enough, but to attempt to look into their future, which even Time has the decency to keep covered for a while, seemed positively immoral, an action compared with which the publication of a man’s love-letters was a mark of friendship. It was not long, however, before I had stifled this feeling by some sophistry about warning them of dangers and so forth; and so I proceeded to satisfy my curiosity. As I shuffled and laid out the cards, I saw myself as the sinister magician of lurid fiction, and relished the part. I had only to take up the cards and the stage was set for great dramas, bravely tricked out in crimson and sable for one secret spectator. If this is not puissance, then where is it to be found among men? What were bookswhen one could spell out the narrative of the cards, and make each friend in turn the hero or heroine of the pictured story. Or if books were to continue, what magnificent plots could be evolved from these strange combinations of coloured paste-board! But if, through the cards, my own existence had assumed brave proportions, though everywhere smirched by villainy, that of my friends was no less highly-coloured and crowded with incident. As I ranged the cards, and spied into the secret life, past and future, of one friend after another, I was dumbfounded, aghast at my former ignorance. Men who had been hidden away, for the last twenty years, in college rooms and lecture-halls, whose outward existence had appeared as smooth and unruffled as the immemorial lawns outside their windows, now seemed to be moving in a violent Elizabethan drama. They made love to dark ladies, and were in turn adored by fair ones; they lost and gained great sums of money, aroused the jealousy of dark men, wrecked innumerable homes, and lived in a constant whirl of good and evil tidings, sea-voyages, railway journeys, and strong passions. Here was a set of men who had been living like this (and were to go on doingso) for years, and yet I, who counted myself as one of their friends, had been kept in ignorance. What consummate actors!—to present an unruffled front to the world, and even to their friends, and yet all the while to know, in secret, a life that resembled nothing so much as a thunderstorm. Could such things be? In truth, I came, in the end, to doubt the cards.
But though I have forsworn Cartomancy, and hold such occult practices in abhorrence, I will say to every man who has suddenly found that life is one long piece of boredom, dull grey in warp and weft: Go to the cards, and see existence woven madly in black and crimson—The life they present knows nothing of boredom, for no card in all the pack stands for such a thing—Go read the cards! As for myself, I have but one confession to make: I dare not play at cards now, for they are fraught with such significance to me that I could not trifle with them in a mere game. I cannot rid them of their meanings, and while others are thinking of nothing but winning tricks, I see myself, and my unconscious colleagues, playing havoc with the destinies of dark ladies and fair men. I cannot trump an opponent’s Queen, but what I feel that I am probably bringingmisfortune upon some unknown innocent woman. If I fling down the Ace of Spades upon the King, it is not unlikely that I am consigning some dark man—a good fellow probably—to his grave. This would be murder, and an odd trick is not worth it. So there is nothing for it but to leave the cards alone.
ENGLAND, it is said, is cruel to the young and kind to the old. The remark usually takes on the tone of an accusation; we who hear it from a critical foreigner find ourselves struggling against a sense of shame; we are quick to denounce something or other, the House of Lords, Sentimentality, Meat-eating, the Educational System, and we uproot and demolish, and are clearly filled with a noble public spirit. If, then, the remark is always construed as a criticism, and if it nearly always succeeds in touching us on the raw, there must be something in it. Apparently, being kind to the old is no excuse for being cruel to the young. Perhaps this kindness itself is wrong. Let us be nice in our ethics, and look a little more closely at the question.
The remark refers, of course, to our English habit of relying upon experience or even mere weight of years. We are—orhave been—so apt to listen to a man only when he is tottering on the verge of senility. In politics, the clean young enthusiast has been discouraged, and only the old intriguers have been respected. We have begun to take an artist seriously only when he was past his prime. Pantaloon is our national hero. Even Mr. Bernard Shaw, who ought to know better, would have politicians living for two or three hundred years to acquire wisdom, as if there was not folly enough in the world to delude a man for thrice three hundred years if he should choose to live and look for it. As for the young, they have not been given a hearing amongst us. If one of them, of more courage and energy than his fellows, pushed his way forward and told us something we did not know, we murmured ‘Oh, it’s only young So-and-So,’ and turned our backs upon him. We could afford to wait until his ideals and enthusiasms were gone, his energy sapped, and his body and mind shivering in their late autumn, before we listened to him. Such is our English attitude, which you and I have loudly deplored when we have met the sneers of men from newer countries. But actually there is a good deal to be said for it. In the last resort it does us credit.
But mark, this attitude of ours does not bring us any profit. We shall not try to defend it as a useful thing. When we are kind to the old, and put none but the aged and infirm in places of responsibility and trust, we are not better served; and we know it. The young, whom we put aside, would do the work much better. That, I fancy, is the ground of the criticism against us; but we are regarding it as an ethical question, and the very fact that our attitude works against our profit only makes our ethics shine more brightly. In order that we may give to the old, we have to deny the young some measure of power and substance, but whereas we are certainly kind to the one, it does not follow that we are cruel to the other.
We can afford to be hard upon the young, for youth itself is hard. The young are not dependent in any way upon what we think of them, for they are still convinced that the powers of the universe plotted amicably to fill them with greatness, so that whether the lesser mortals that encompass them think well or ill of them matters little. They are still living in Eternity, and, unlike the old, do not understand the need of claiming some measure of applause while there is yet timefor it. Their hours are spacious, golden, crammed with promise. If we should put a young man into high office, it is unlikely that he would think any better of us: he owes us nothing; he has received only his deserts; he has got one office, but he might have had any one of a hundred others that were shining before his path. The world appears to him so fruitful of glorious opportunities that even to thrust him into a post of honour is to do him an injury by limiting his choice. And as for the young who scribble and paint and write music (and they are legion), what can be done for them? They are all geniuses whose work is above the understanding and taste of the age, and as such are beyond our ministrations, for your misunderstood young genius is perhaps the only completely independent, self-satisfied thing in the universe. What are little paragraphs in the papers, invitations to dinner, and the like, to him when he is the man for whom the century has been waiting to give it voice. He can exist, as a young friend of mine did, on stale cake and cocoa, and yet march about the world like an emperor, attended by the glittering cohorts of his vain and heated fancy. If it were possible to measure and tax youthful vanity;if young men could be imprisoned for egotism; if it were a hanging matter to imagine oneself a genius; then we might have a chance of being cruel to the young. Short of that, we cannot reach them. In order to protect ourselves from their dreadful efficiency, we may deny them place and profit, but what are our trumpery rewards to the largess of a fond imagination. So our gifts go where they are appreciated—to the old.
If our so-called cruelty is a myth, our kindness is yet real enough. When we put an old man into power, and give praise to mere persistence in living, our charity has taken no wrong turn. The very inefficiency, helplessness, and wistful vanity of the old make them unequalled objects of our Christian virtues. It would be easy enough to be cruel to them, for, unlike the young, they are at our mercy. They have lost all that goes to sustain youth, which could be careless of the world while it was still dreaming dreams, making love, and able to shout and sing, while life stepped out to the quick drumming of the blood. To the old, Eternity is no longer about them, and the far horizons have vanished. Their hours are remorselessly ticked away. There is nolonger time to do everything and be everything: he will be a fortunate man who has rounded off even one little piece of work before the light goes. It is a monstrously silly fable that the aged are indifferent to praise, position and honour, that they have outgrown the little vanities of the world. The fact that a few old men have retired from the world because they were weary and infirm does not support the legend; and one has only to listen to their talk to discover how far such ancients have got beyond vanity. As for your active old men, they ceaselessly bestir themselves in pursuit of notice and applause. And well they might. With the dwindling of time and the shedding of illusions, their imagination has ceased to minister to their vanity. They require some confirmation from the world of their good opinion of themselves. Now that the far horizons, infinitely beguiling in youth, have vanished, the world itself shines more brightly against the steadily deepening background, and a dedication, a respectful hearing, a salute here, some little notice there, these become matters of some moment; they warm the heart when all other fires are being heaped with pale ashes. Consider the position of an old man. His lines are fixedand he cannot begin again; all his argosies left the quayside long ago, and if some of them do not bring him some return, he will find cold comfort now in his tales of their setting out. Now that he is no longer a potential Shakespeare, Beethoven or Lincoln, as he was in youth, your ageing man will try hard to become Deputy-Mayor of Suddleton: he will have the cash in hand. Deny him that, and he has nothing left.
This being so, what is there to be said against this habit of ours. We are not cruel to the young, but we are certainly kind to the old. Nothing could be better, for even supposing that a few youngsters here and there suffer from our neglect, they have only to grow old to remedy it, and if they have not persistence enough to keep on steadily increasing their ages, they are not the men for us. The pity is, not that we have such a habit, but that, having had it for centuries, we are now letting it go at the bidding of mere popular prejudice. Our old English habit of mind wants fortifying: we should push back the age at which a man is entitled to public notice and let our youngsters do their swaggering in private or among their brother fledglings. With some little contriving, it ought to be possibleto make this a land in which every man under sixty has his future before him and no past to brood over, every office and place of profit is filled with an elder, and the cackling of gratified senile vanity is heard night and day. Make way for Justice Shallow, and give an ear to Polonius, and be content, for your Prince Hal can look after himself, and as for your Hamlets, their maladies are past your doctoring and their felicity is beyond the shouting of a mob or the solemn foolery of a committee.
THEafternoon sun, rather reproachfully, reillumined the page at which I was vacantly staring. I sank a little lower into my armchair, raised the book a trifle, and made a further pretence of reading. A few more words filtered into my brain; then the warm sun, the drowsy air, the still afternoon, drowned sense after sense....
I was hurrying along a dark side-street between two rows of houses, tall, featureless buildings, close-shuttered and with no lights showing. It was a vile night, of what season I could not tell, but seemingly wintry, for there were frequent icy gusts of wind snatching at the chimneys, and an occasional spatter of rain. I dashed forward, not trying to pick my way through the pools and mud, but splashing along as quickly as possible, a growing feeling of panic urging me on. I had no idea what was afoot, or at least the rational part of me knew nothingof the matter, but it was clear that some terror was behind. At last, panting for breath, I reached what I knew to be the back gate of my own house. It was open, and I had sufficient strength to press forward through a kind of courtyard of no great size, gain the house-door, which was also unbolted, and lock myself in the house. I found myself in a great draughty kitchen, in which there was no fire but only the cheerless flickering light of two candles. I knew it to be my own place; everything seemed familiar, though actually, of course, it was all strange. Behind the massive door, now securely bolted, I felt easier than I had done outside in that ill-favoured street; but even yet the fear of a hunted creature remained with me; I hardly dared to breathe, made no movement, but only listened intently.
There was nothing to be heard above the wind. Yet I still felt that the terror had not been evaded, that it was drawing nearer, though what form it would take I could not guess, having been precipitated so suddenly into the adventure. I was flying from something, of that there could be no doubt, but whether my pursuers were wild beasts, men or devils, there was no knowing.Whatever they were, it looked as if I had evaded them in the darkness; and as I was hidden away in one out of many similar houses, in a labyrinth of streets (for I knew somehow that I was in a large town, though not a modern one), it looked very unlikely that I should be discovered. I breathed more freely.
Then suddenly, to my horror, I heard above the wind the tramp of many feet coming down the street I had just left. It was not the sound of soldiers marching, nor yet the vague tumult of a moving crowd; but something between the two, the noise of men going in some sort of formation, men of set purpose. It was this then that I had been fearing, for now I fell into a dreadful panic, and hastened to put out the two candles, so that not even a tiny ray of light through the shutters should draw attention to the house. The whole row was in darkness; there was nothing apparently to mark off one house from another; I was safe enough. Probably the men did not even know that I had turned down this side street; they could not have seen me in such a black night. So I reasoned with myself, but got little comfort out of it.
Meanwhile, the sound was drawing nearer,and the crowd, or whatever it was, seemed to have fallen into a fairly regular step, as if assured of its destination. A moment later, the men burst out into a kind of marching song, which they voiced fiercely in a deep-throated unison. Two lines of the chorus remain with me yet:
‘You shall know him by his jolly red mouth,And the bushy black beard on his chin.’
‘You shall know him by his jolly red mouth,And the bushy black beard on his chin.’
‘You shall know him by his jolly red mouth,And the bushy black beard on his chin.’
the last line being repeated with startling emphasis. It seems absurd enough now, but at the time it was charged with menace, as if the very sound of it called up all manner of dreadful associations. Having fallen into such a swinging step, it appeared unlikely that the mob outside would make a halt; but to my utter dismay, as soon as the sound passed close to my window it stopped, there was a shuffling of feet, and then a great voice, the very herald of doom, cried out: ‘This is the house!’ At this, I crouched lower, and could do nothing else: there was a crawling and heaving in the pit of my stomach. I heard the outer gate being thrust open, then a stir in the courtyard, and a moment later, there came a thundering knock at the door. ‘Open the door!’ cried that terrifying voice. Icould not move. Had I gone through the house, escape might have been possible; but it appeared to be one of the rules of this fearful game that I should not be able to move.
‘Open the door!’ came the cry again. Then there followed a medley of sound, shouts and yells and the trampling of feet, after which there came a series of terrific blows at the door. They were bursting it open. For a few moments it resisted the attack, but the battering increased in violence, and soon it was all over. One mighty effort, a yell of triumph, and the door came splintering in.... But only to let in a flood of yellow sunshine, the murmur of the flies, and the sight of my own room. The windy night, the dark side street, the great draughty kitchen, the besieging crowd, all had vanished, huddled away into the lumber-room of such phantasmagoria; one twist of the brain’s kaleidoscope and the strange tale was in progress, another twist and it was gone. I glanced at my watch and found that I had only been asleep for some ten minutes; I had only halted for a second near the Ivory Gate. Yet in that fraction of time, the chapter of romance, well conceived and deftly executed, was begun and ended,though the tale itself has neither beginning nor end. Surely, of all things in life, these fantastic dramas, coming and going between a few heart-beats, are the most personal and the most wonderful: ourselves alone are the authors and actors; we sketch out the scenario, fill in the dialogue, cast the parts and play them all ourselves; we it is who design and execute the scenery, clear the stage, and set the piece in motion; we it is who yawn in the stalls, shudder in the pit, and cheer from the gallery; from first to last, it is our own affair, and we alone can step forward briskly at the curtain to receive our own plaudits. Life cannot show elsewhere such a fine egotistical matter as this business of dreaming, and a dream, well done, makes even literature seem little more than its attenuated, halting shadow.
TOthe uneducated, filling in forms of any kind is a considerable task. The curt official demands puzzle them; the various particulars they are asked to give do not readily come to hand; and, not least, the actual business of writing, unfamiliar as it is, seems very long and wearisome. It is no wonder then that the uneducated detest printed forms, and even extend their dislike to the official bodies that issue such things and compel honest labouring men to scratch their heads over them. But it is curious that this dislike is shared by many of us who are not entirely without letters, who can write our names and addresses and what not with tolerable facility and despatch. We have not the same reason for our distaste as the man to whom the feel of a pen is strange; and with our superior knowledge, such as it is, it would seem that we have less excuse,for at least we can understand that such things as forms may be necessary in a world given over to figures and tabulation. Our distaste for the business, then, seems irrational and nothing more nor less than a characteristically English prejudice. Where there are definite grounds for our objection, such as a mistrust of the official motive in collecting information, or a feeling that we are being compelled unnecessarily to take trouble and so forth, it is not mere prejudice; but with most of us, grounds or no grounds, the feeling remains; and whether this filling in of forms appears to be urgent and necessary or not, we approach it, according to our mood, with something like irritation or depression. There are people, of course, who do not feel in this way, people who take kindly to all the methods of the bureaucrat, who revere an official form whether it is reasonable or not, and love organisation and routine for their own sakes. When a person comes to believe that humanity will yet be saved by double-entry and the card-index system, the beauty and significance of an official form, correctly filled in and neatly docketed, is put beyond question. We imagine that to one of Mr. Sidney Webb’s admirers, the very sight of a printed form with inviting blank spaces will call forththe genuine aesthetic emotion; to such a one a form is not only desirable in itself but also beautiful because it exists as a symbol of a whole vision of life, namely, that ordered system, rigid with its hierarchy of officials in which some minds find their earthly paradise. When a man holds such doctrines he has become mystical and is past arguing with; our objection to bureaucratic paraphernalia, its forms and dockets and what not, is nothing to him but the grimacing and babbling of the half-witted. On this question of the value of forms, there are plainly two parties that can neither come to terms nor yet agree to ignore each other. We stand on each side of a great gulf, staring across, and occasionally making half-witted, menacing cries and gestures. Let us keep to our own side.
If our dislike of forms has little or nothing in common with that of the uneducated, who merely hate the unfamiliar task of recording; and if it seems to exist with sufficiently reasonable grounds, we must either bring to light reasons yet hidden or confess ourselves the victims of a stupid prejudice. It may be, of course, that we dislike forms for the same reason that our opponents, the official-minded, adore them,namely, because they can be taken as symbols of a certain kind of life for which we, on our part, have no admiration. But this will not explain our irritation at having to set down a few paltry particulars on demand: the real reason cuts more deeply, for it is a personal matter, unconnected with our social and political views. Unlike the lovers of forms, who have arid minds and are devoid of fancy, we on our side are for the most part full-minded, expansive, imaginative fellows, and in this can be found the reason for our dislike. We are asked to give an account of ourselves, but not a genuine account of ourselves, the kind we deliver to an old friend over the last few pipes and the dying fire; that kind of account we would give with pleasure at any seasonable hour to any fairly sympathetic listening official. No, our names, ages, occupations, and so forth, must be set down in various ruled columns on pieces of blue paper (usually of poor quality), which shall hereafter stand in our stead. But no piece of paper, blue, buff, or virgin white, can stand in our stead. No mere handful of facts can represent our unique and exquisite selves. If all the facts had to be given, we might be able to do something with them; they might graduallytake shape into something like a personality; but to be compelled to give only a few, and those not the most essential, so that the beggarly total shall be sent abroad to represent us, this is to be subjected to a pitiless process of abstraction. It is an affront to the spirit. And it is useless to argue that the few facts demanded are sufficient for the particular official purpose for which they are required. Purpose or no purpose, we are human beings, and if we are to be made known to other human beings, let us be visible in all our colour and light. John Smith, Rosedene, Leicester Road, Cashier, 53 years of age, and the rest, is a libellous travesty of old Jack Smith, who always smokes a cherry-wood pipe and is the best amateur rose-grower in the East Midlands. Glancing at such a colourless list of petty details as—Henry Robinson, Coal Merchant’s Clerk, aged 27, Single, who would imagine it was meant to represent young Robinson who is so often seen about with the fair-headed girl from the Post Office, who has a temperament and is known to be the author of the greatest blank-verse tragedy of the time, a work so far above its age that no theatrical manager will look at it? Think of—William Shakespeare,Stratford and London, age 35, Married, Three Children, Occupation—Player; or William Wordsworth, Rydal Mount, Distributor of Stamps, Married, Church of England, and so on; these things are at once grotesque and pitiful. A man in prison is simply known by a number, and it is said that this alone tends to make him lose some of his self-respect. So, too, when we find ourselves subjected to this bowelless process, when we are bending over the printed forms and staring dully at their stupid demands, something of the same kind is happening to us as we answer question after question; we feel our personality evaporating as it were; the lines growing more angular and the colours fading; until what is left is not even a caricature, not even a flickering shadow of our real essential selves. And all the while we know that we carry with us a personality, richly deft and fantastically coloured, something as opulent as the Indies and as mysterious as China. Hence the irritation, the depression, the half instinctive revolt, the protest that does not even find words for itself. And we shall do well as the forms come snowing down upon us, to recognise the revolt and assert the protest, for it may be that when we come to the endof filling in these things, we shall find ourselves to be nothing better than the paltry details we have so often set down: we shall have lost our souls.
THEfirst is (or was) a schoolmaster. When he was in his later teens, long before I met him, he had worked for an Oxford scholarship, and he had worked so hard that a few days before the examination he was found at a late hour babbling incoherently over his books, a nervous wreck. He never took the examination and never went to Oxford, but, when he recovered, passed into a little day-school. Nevertheless, Oxford had entered into his soul. To me, he was more like an Oxford man, or what an Oxford man ought to be, than any other person I have ever met. He had all the larger and more genial traits clearly marked, with just the least delicious hint of pleasant caricature, like a good actor presenting a character-study of a younger Don. There were little peculiar traits too, as of some mythical college, of a ghostly Balliol or an unsubstantial ‘House.’ It may have been the result of deliberatecultivation, or it may have been the gift of one of the younger gods, a compensation for that disastrous breakdown; I do not know, but it was harmless enough, and delicate fooling for a spectator.
I have not seen him for years, but I can call him well to mind even now; a little man with hair loosely parted in the centre and falling over his temples, and eyeglasses insecurely perched halfway down a long nose. In the small town in which he (and I too) lived at that time, there were in all five working-men’s clubs. He was a member of all five. Why, I do not know, except that beer was very much cheaper in these places than it was elsewhere. But even that does not explain why he was a member of them all. But so it was. Nightly into one or other of these working-men’s clubs, he carried his insecure eyeglasses and his Oxford manner, and was well received, with the respect due to ‘a character,’ rather than with the hardly suppressed laughter that followed him elsewhere. There he would take a friend, and over the beer (which was both cheap and excellent) he would talk at length, letting the ball of conversation roll easily down the long cadences of his speech. His favourite theme, I remember, was theutter worthlessness of the middle-classes, to which he belonged, and he was the first person of my acquaintance to speak of them as ‘the bourgeois.’ It is years since I last saw him, but I trust that some school still knows him, chalky and pedantic, day by day, and that at least five working-men’s clubs still see him, magnificent over his beer, night by night.
The second man was a spectacled smoky fellow, getting on in years, whom I knew but slightly. His trade was the writing of boys’ stories, not for expensive illustrated books but for penny dreadfuls. What else he had done to earn his bread, when he was only an aspirant, I do not know, but that was his trade when I knew him. Year after year, he chronicled the adventures of Dick This or Jack the Other at School or among Pirates or Red Indians; and his pay was one guinea for every thousand words, which was not bad, for he could turn out a good many thousand words in a week and could also fill up with Boom! Crash! Bang! a kind of writing that boys like. Although the scenes of his tales were laid in all parts of the world, there was no nonsense about him; he did not travel in search of local colour, but used a gazetteer and trusted to hispowers of invention, which were well-tried and excellent. But his heart was not in the work and he took no pride in it. At regular intervals he would simply send off so many thousand words to the Boys’ Monster Tales Publishing Company Limited, and his stories came out under many different names, not one of which was his own. He had a wife but no family, few friends, and belonged to no club or society. The thing he lived for was a great work in metaphysics, at which he had been engaged for many years, and which was to be called ‘The Mind of the Universe.’ All his spare time and energy were given to thinking out the problems that he had set himself, and he would weary his few visitors with interminable talk in a philosophical jargon of his own making. Years before, he had read a little handbook on Spinoza, which had brought a new set of problems into his world, and which had so intrigued him that he had determined to devote the remainder of his life to metaphysics. But he had also made up his mind not to study the philosophers, because their theories might keep him from original thought: he meant to think everything out for himself. When he had erected his system, the world would recognise it for what it was, andforgive his preposterous stories of ‘Jack Marraway and the Terror of the Prairie’ and the rest. He was wrong. I am no metaphysician but I know that his stories were better than his grand original system of metaphysics. For, after years of labour, he had only succeeded in enunciating paradoxes that were stale jokes in Ionia, in dragging out cumbersome creaking theories that even the long extinct State University of Hochensteilschwarzburg would have rejected at a glance; and all written in that terrible jargon of his. Yet it was a manly thing to do, and though all his labour was worth little, it was not in vain, for it gave him secret incommunicable pleasure and he felt himself to be a man marked off from the common run of men; which he was. For the rest, he smoked prodigious quantities of ‘Meadowsweet Flake’—a vile tobacco, grossly doctored and scented.
The other man I never knew personally, but I received many accounts of him, and his reputation, the legend of him, has been very dear to me. He was a shopkeeper and sold, at a considerable profit, optical instruments, spectacles and whatnot. But what set him apart from other men was that he had had more bad verse through his handsthan any other person in these islands. It was his one great hobby to collect bad verse and publish it in anthologies. He must have known more poetasters than any other man living or dead. On the death of a well-known politician, or immediately after any great public event, he would set to work and gather up all the offscourings of the ‘Poets’ Corners’ of obscure country papers. Thus, he it was, and no other, who editedThe Best Poetical Tributes to the late Joseph Chamberlain, and many other anthologies. His system was, I fancy, to compel every contributor to become a subscriber and take several copies of the volume in hand, so that it was ensured a sale. The verse was always bad, the very worst conceivable, for no one who wrote good verse would have suffered him to live. Why he did it—and he produced innumerable volumes—is a mystery, for there could not have been much money in it, and the same energy and impudence would have given him a fortune in the quack medicine business. I have thought sometimes that he was a satirist of a particularly deep kind, but I have been assured by those who knew him that he was entirely serious and innocently proud of the good work he was doing. Nor did he allowhis literary service to interfere with his trade. In the centre of his shop-window there was a coloured life-size bust of Shakespeare with a pair of eyeglasses on its nose. The bust hinted delicately to all passers-by that though our man was but a shopkeeper, he too had served the Muse and was the editor of the Hundred Best, etc.; the eyeglasses, through which one caught the mild glance of the poet, indicated the nature of the shop. It was admirable! And though the man himself is dead, the shop remains and with it the bust. I saw it only a short time ago, and was gladdened; indeed, there seems something lacking now when I see Shakespeare without his eyeglasses; but one cannot, of course, be dogmatic about such matters of taste.
All three men lived in one town, where I too lived for a season. And there were others, more wonderful still, whom I cannot describe in this place, nor perhaps in any other, for I write to be believed.
WHENLafcadio Hearn comes to the end ofThe Romance of the Milky Way, he tells us, a little wistfully, that the lovely old Japanese legend, which makes the heavens ‘seem very near and warm and human,’ has sometimes enabled him ‘to forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space.’ And elsewhere, he writes of the terror that he felt, in common with his philosophic guide, Herbert Spencer, at the notion of infinite Space—‘the mere vague idea of that everlasting Night into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring neither light nor warmth.’ Most of us, I think, have been kept from sleep, at some time or other, by similar emotions. ‘Of the Kosmos in the last resort,’ wrote Stevenson, ‘science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling.’ From time to time, astronomers, thinking of nothing but their strange study, have brought us news of the macrocosm,bewildering measurements, and ghastly phenomena, the full import of which, suddenly realised in a quiet hour, has left us sick at heart. From these monstrous data our imagination has dizzily fashioned a vision of the universe compared with which the hells of the theologians seemed lively and companionable.
At such times all existence begins to look like an unending nightmare. We see the bright unnumbered throng of stars as so many specks of dust on the dark mantle of old Chaos, most ancient of devils. And even they appear remote and unfriendly. The fixed stars know nothing of us: the old homely constellations have an alien look. In the scarred white face of the moon we can read the destiny of our own beautiful planet, soon to be a cold cinder. Good and evil alike are as nothing in the face of the illimitable darkness that awaits us. Our most heroic endeavour cannot lighten the gloom. The greatest of our prophets and poets cannot break the silence for long; it has swallowed the shouts and songs of countless generations. Man, with all his pleasant green places, is only the tiniest accident, a slight tremor of a wheel, something that the next stroke of the machinewill put to rights, obliterating him and all his works. But these shuddering negations, to which we have been led by a few scientific data, do not disturb us long. A few hours’ sleep or a brisk walk destroys the whole mournful fabric, and we step out lively as before. A few misguided men, having much to do with these things, make some sort of a creed of such folly, and angrily deny that man has an immortal soul. In this they are wise according to their lights, for believing themselves to be caged in such a universe their only hope lies in a speedy extinction. The soul has no better place in their dreary cosmos than a skylark would have in a Birmingham factory.
Blake was once at a friend’s house when the talk turned on the vastness of Space. At last Blake, who was always irritated by this sort of talk, broke in with, ‘It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the heath, and touched the sky with my finger.’ Those who are familiar with Blake’s habit of mind, his way of using daring figures of speech as if they were literal statements of fact, will not dismiss this remark as the raving of a genial madman. To Blake, the artist, this perpetual raising of scientific bogeys, this emphasisingof the emptiness of the universe, to the distress of our imagination, was nothing short of criminal. He believed in the ‘determinate and bounding form’ of all things, in ‘the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements.’ ‘Leave out this line,’ he wrote, ‘and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again....’ And chaos is the arch-enemy of the artist, who strives to fashion from the corrupt materials at hand the enduring forms of his imagination. To Blake the sky appeared a most excellent canopy, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as it did to Hamlet or any other man. So, too, our earth appears a lovely, fruitful dwelling-place. But, according to science, one is a nightmare of space, the other a putrescent cinder. This may be the truth for science, in which there are no nightmares, but it is not the truth for us. Science, with all its data and phenomena, appeals only to one small part of a man, but the ultimate truth must appeal to the whole man, to the emotional, reasoning, moral, imaginative creature with an immortal soul. It is poetry, in the widest sense of the term, that makes this appeal, and poetry alone. The sky and the earth that we find in poetry and that we have seen for ourselves, theblue canopy stretched over the beautiful dwelling-place, are nearer the ultimate truth than anything that science can tell us.
When we go to science for an account of the cosmos and recoil in horror from the nightmarish thing that we find there, it does not mean that science is necessarily wrong (though, for the most part, it is only guessing), but that we have gone to it for something that it cannot give, and does not pretend to give—an ultimate truth that will satisfy every demand of our highly complex nature. We cannot take science out of its own limited sphere of activity without being horror-struck at the result. Thus, if we went to science, in one or other of its various branches, for a minute description of a red rose, a glass of wine, a wonderful sunset, or a lovely child, the result, in every instance, would seem to be an outlandish thing of horror. So it is with the universe; when we can apprehend it as we can a rose or a sunset, not through science but through the poetry that saturates our being, we shall see the universe in all its majesty and splendour, with all its blazing multi-coloured suns, strange planets and wild moons, moving in the endless dance.
Men like Hearn suffered because they would not keep science within its natural limits. They allowed the bogey talk of the astronomers to frighten them. Hearn never seemed to see that the old Japanese legend which made the heavens seem very near and warm and human was probably nearer the ultimate truth of things than the monstrous facts that he was always trying to forget. He needed large doses of Blake as an antidote to Herbert Spencer. As for the notion of infinite space and ‘that everlasting night,’ of which the astronomical dabblers have made so much, it is nothing but a bleak fiction. For my part, I have ceased to be troubled by any horror of that space in which star-systems move like specks of dust, for I have long held that the whole affair is in reality an illusion, an elaborate jest of the gods. Even the scientists are less confident than they were, for the new Einstein theory (which mathematical friends have vainly tried to explain to me) seems to emphasise the illusory aspect of space, making our old theories and elaborate calculations look rather foolish. Meanwhile, the cosmos now appears to be more of a joke than ever, but whatever conclusions the scientists may arrive at, of one thing I am certain—it is agood joke. Probably it is the ultimate, universal, everlasting joke, of which the greatest of our jests are but distorted reflections and fleeting shadows.
SOMETIMES, on one of these sunny autumn mornings, when I turn my back on the town and take to the highway, I seem to have the world to myself. I walk forward, as it were, into a great sunlit emptiness. Once I am a little way out of the town it is as if the world had been swept clean of men. I pass a few young mothers, who are proudly ushering their round-eyed solemn babes into the presence of the morning sun, a lumbering cart or two, and maybe a knot of labourers, who look up from their task with humorous resignation in their faces; these and others I overtake and pass by, and then there is often an end of my fellows. I alone keep a lounging tryst with the sun, himself, I fancy, a mighty, genial idler and the father of all dreamers and idlers among men.
A light mist covers the neighbouring hills, which are almost imperceptible, their shapes and colours showing but faintly, so that theyseem to stand aloof—things of dream. As I go further along the shining road I seem to be lounging into a vast, empty room. There are sights and sounds in plenty; cows looking over the walls with their great, mournful eyes; here and there a thin blue column of smoke; the cawing of rooks about the decaying woods; and, distantly sounding, the creak of a cart, a casual shout or two, a vague hammering, and, more distant still, the noise of the town, now the faint murmur of a hive. Yet to me, coming from the crowded, tumultuous streets, it seems empty because I meet no one by the way. The road, for all its thick drift of leaves, deep gold and brown, at either side, seems to lie naked in the sunshine, and I drink in this unexpected solitude as eagerly as a dusty traveller takes his ale. For a time, it comes as a delectable and quickening draught, and though outwardly a sober, meditative, almost melancholy pedestrian, I hold high festival in the spirit, drink deep, and revel with the younger gods.
One of the greatest dangers of living in large towns is that we have too many neighbours and human fellowship is too cheap. We are apt to become wearied of humanity; a solitary green tree sometimesseems dearer to us than an odd thousand of our fellow-citizens. Unless we are hardened, the millions of eyes begin to madden us; and for ever pushed and jostled by crowds we begin to take more kindly to Malthus, and are even willing to think better of Herod and other wholesale depopulators. We begin to hate the sight of men who would appear as gods to us if we met them in Turkestan or Patagonia. When we have become thoroughly crowd-sick, we feel that the continued presence of these thousands of other men and women will soon crush, stamp, or press our unique, miraculous individuality into some vile pattern of the streets; we feel that the spirit will perish for want of room to expand in: and we gasp for an air untainted by crowded humanity.
Some such thoughts as these come to me, at first, in my curious little glimpse of solitude. I am possessed by an ampler mood than men commonly know, and feel that I can fashion the world about me to my changing whims; my spirit overflows, and seems to fill the quiet drooping countryside with sudden light and laughter; the empty road and vacant fields, the golden atmosphere and blue spaces are my kingdoms, and I canpeople them at will with my fancies. Beautiful snatches of poetry come into my head, and I repeat a few words, or even only one word, aloud and with passionate emphasis, as if to impress their significance and beauty upon a listening host. Sometimes I break into violent little gusts of laughter, for my own good pleasure. At other times I sing, loudly and with abandon: to a petrified audience of one cow and three trees I protest melodiously that Phyllis has such charming graces that I could love her till I die, and I believe it, too, at the time. I brag to myself, and applaud and flatter myself. I even indulge in one or two of those swaggering day-dreams of boyhood in which one finds oneself suddenly raised to some extraordinary eminence, the idol of millions, a demi-god among men, from which height one looks down with kindly scorn on those myopic persons who did not know true greatness when they saw it, sarcastic schoolmasters and jeering relatives for the most part.
Only by such heightened images, seemingly more applicable to centuries of riotous life than half an hour’s sauntering, can I suggest in stubborn words the swelling mood that first comes to me with this sudden, unexpected seclusion.
But as the morning wears away, the jubilation arising from this new expansion of oneself dwindles and perishes; the spirit wearies of its play. The road stretches out its vacant length, a few last leaves come fluttering down, and the sun grows stronger, sharpening the outline of the hills. The day is lovelier than ever. But I meet no one by the way, and even the distant sounds of men’s travail and sport have died down. After a time the empty road and silent valley become vaguely disquieting, like a great room spread for a feast, blazing with lights, opulent in crimson and gold, and yet all deserted and quiet as the grave. I ask myself if all men have been mewed up in offices and underground warehouses, by some ghastly edict, unknown to me, which has come into force this very morning. Have I alone escaped? Or I wonder if the Last Day has dawned, and been made plain to men not by sound of trump, but by some sign in the sky that I have overlooked; a vast hand may have beckoned to all men or the heavens may have opened while I was busy lighting my pipe. Have all but one of the weary children of earth been gathered to their long rest? I walk in loneliness.
Suddenly, I see a tiny moving figure onthe road before me, and immediately it focuses my attention. What are walls, fields, trees, and cows compared with this miraculous thing, a fellow human being, played upon by the same desires and passions, his head stuffed with the same dreams and fluttering thoughts? In one of the world’s greatest romances is not the most breathless moment concerned with the discovery of a human footprint in the sand? Does not the world’s story begin with one human being meeting another? As I keep my eyes fixed on the nearing figure the last of my vague fancies and egotistical imaginings are blown away; my mind is engrossed by the solidly romantic possibilities of the encounter. Just as I was glad to escape from the sight and sound of men, so I am eager now to break my solitude: the circle is complete. And as we come up together, the stranger and I, I give him a loud greeting, and he, a little startled, returns the salute; and so we pass on, fellow-travellers and nameless companions in a great adventure, knowing no more of each other than the brief sight of a face, the sound of a voice can tell us. We only cry out a Hail and Farewell through the mist, yet I think we go on our way a little heartened.
IHAVEjust learned from a little paragraph in a newspaper that another old acquaintance of mine has gone—old Wimpenny-Brown, ‘for many years editor of theWallerdale Herald’—as the paragraph is careful to inform me. But there is little need, for it was in his editorial days that I met Wimpenny-Brown, and I can only think of him as an editor. Apart from a few early years spent as a reporter on a lesser London paper, all his time had been given to theWallerdale Herald. It was an obscure provincial sheet, Liberal-cum-Radical in tone, strongly upholding Free Trade and much given to enunciating those few leading principles ‘upon which the prosperity and happiness of this country must inevitably depend.’ But in the days when I knew its editor, theHeraldwas nothing more to me than a frame, the necessary boundaries of gilt and moulding, that set off his personality. Thus framed,my old acquaintance was a man to be sought out and gathered to oneself. To a youngster in quest of the absurd, as I was at that time, he was meat and drink. Even so long ago, he was considered one of the old school, and so true to type that he seemed to have been specially created to verify the comic novelists. He seemed to dwell in the great shadow of Mr. Potts, of theEatanswill Gazette, and to be closely related to that solemn editorial host of Colonels and Majors dear to the American humorist.
A pipe and an occasional glass served Wimpenny-Brown as a tribute to the bohemianism of his profession; as hostages to respectability he had a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon, trim whiskers, and a large umbrella; with his staff he was—I believe—majestically paternal, but to his opponents he was a very Jupiter; and for the rest—he had a manner. In his presence, it seemed as if theEssay on Libertyhad just been published, as if dusty men of letters were still delightedly wondering where Macaulay’s style came from, as if radical masterpieces were still being issued in fortnightly parts. Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor—and I never knew him as anything else—he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. But all was sincerely spoken. Wimpenny-Brown meant all that he said, and he strove hard to educate his public. He would not pander to low tastes (he has said so many a time in my hearing); nor was he prepared to tickle rather higher tastes with the bright confectionery of fiction and verse and such things. No, it was by enunciating and applying those great principles, giving solid bread, so to speak, that he meant to educate his readers. ‘You must remember, sir’—he would point the glasses—‘that this is a News-Paper, and not a magazine’—the last with magnificent scorn. At ordinary times, his hand was hardly to be traced in the paper; he remained hidden afar-off, brooding over the great principles. But at a crisis, Wallerdale knew what it meant to have aHeraldand a Wimpenny-Brown as its editor. On the eve of an election, at the outbreak or at the conclusion of a war, at all times like these, he could be counted upon; leaders would flow from his pen, and theHeraldwould look Monarch, Lords, Commons, in the face, would address all Europe, and the two Americas if need be, re-assuring friends and denouncing enemies here, there, and everywhere. Opinion would perhaps differ as to when he was at his best, but I, for one, found most to admire in his leaders on the death—say—of a political opponent: the decent respect for the dead man’s private virtues, tempered by regret at the waste of brilliant qualities in a bad cause, at the ‘late lamented minister’s fatal inability to comprehend those great principles which have ...’ and so forth. One saw the gold-rimmed glasses and the trim whiskers poised over the foolscap; he was no longer a fellow-citizen but the supreme arbiter, measuring out praise and blame while the organ wails and the strange dust is borne away.
Well, he is gone now, long after he quitted the editorial chair and declined from a servant of the public (and its educator) to an old fellow mumbling in a corner of a club-room. And in thinking of what he was, I may havedone him little justice; probably the soft delicate lights of character have faded out of my memory and left the crude lines of a caricature. But still the little round figure (for he was little and round) rises from the past; I see the unfathomably profound look, I hear the solemn accents, and again his unconscious absurdity swells monstrously, and again the farce is played out. He seems now as extinct as the mastodon. Even his foolish dull little paper has disappeared; Wallerdale has noHeraldnow, but listens to the brazen voices from London. Even those few great principles have sadly declined, and we hear little of them now. He would, I suppose, be as helpless as a babe in the office of a great modern newspaper. His solemn gestures, worn rhetorical finery and great principles would not carry him in that tense atmosphere. More sense of organisation, quick decisions, lightning judgments, would be demanded from him—and, I think, in vain. A greater knowledge of what can be done in a newspaper, of what catches the public eye, in short, of the tricks of the trade, would certainly be necessary. Yes, he would have to know more.
And yet, in a way, he would have to know less. Looking back at him, the obscureeditor of an obscure sheet, amazingly rigid with self-importance, a little figure of fun, I realise that he was a better man than most of his successors of to-day, those undeniably clever, industrious journalists who put the great newspapers into the hands of the million. He could not have done what they do, day by day, but would he have tried? He, at least, would never have consented to become the mouthpiece of the rich, no better—nay, worse—than their lackeys. His talents were slender enough and monstrously exaggerated in his own mind, but such as they were, they were genuinely at the service of his readers. To him the public was not that million-eyed monster waiting to be cajoled and tricked which it has since become. And though his successors may be infinitely more clever, the worst of them can only run their dubious course to-day because yesterday my old editor and his like ran another and better course; the trickster of to-day is nothing but a huge parasite battening on the good name that some honest men in his trade left behind them. That lying sheet, the What’s-its-Name from London, has, I believe, taken the place of theWallerdale Herald, and when a reader from those parts goes trustfullythrough its smudgy columns of falsehood, perhaps he does it because he still imagines that someone like Wimpenny-Brown is responsible for its utterance. Alas!—he does not know that the Wimpenny-Browns, those Servants of the Public with their few great principles, are dead and gone, and that something more than innocent folly perished with them.
THEobservation that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is looked upon, in these days, rather as a platitude than a paradox; yet it does not necessarily follow that we, in our heart of hearts, really accept this smart saying. But everyone who has read in our old literature must admit that it is true of our forefathers; their idea of truth and their so-called facts are a thousand times stranger to us than their fiction. The mediaeval romances are full of the marvellous, but they pale before the grave books of instruction written by quite serious, learned old gentlemen. Some of the latter merely set out to edify the young mind, but the result of their labours often seems to us a very riot of the imagination, and our schoolboys would consider themselves lucky if they could meet with matter one-half so entertaining. The quaint, unconscious humour of these solemn, old authorsover-shadows even their historical and antiquarian interest.
Some such thoughts as these were going through my head the other night when I was gleefully devouring, in one of the Early English Text Society’s wonderful reprints, some extracts from a very quaint old book: ‘The noble lyfe and natures of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles and fisshes,’ by one Laurens Andrewe. The date of this volume is unknown, but it was probably written and published early in the sixteenth century. The Third Part of the book is particularly occupied with the noble life and natures of fishes, and begins: ‘Here after followeth of the natures of the fisshes of the See, whiche be right profitable to be understande.’ Now I care little for Natural History at any time, and fishes do not make a very lively subject for study, but in the hands of Master Andrewe, Natural History becomes ‘all a wonder,’ and the sea, to him, is certainly filled with creatures that are ‘rich and strange.’
When he is dealing with the commonest fishes, like the herring, our author is fairly sure of his facts, and we get nothing very exciting, but once he leaves the familiar types, there is no end to his phantasies.The Ahuna, when in danger, withdraws his head into his belly, and, as Laurens wisely notes: ‘He dothe ete (eat) a parte of himselfe rather than the other fisshes sholde ete him whole.’ The most interesting fact about the Balena, a creature resembling a whale, is that in rough weather she puts her young ones in her mouth for safety. But, according to our author, the Cetus ‘is the greatest whale fisshe of all,’ and the manner of his capture is most extraordinary. Such is the perfidious and cruel nature of mankind that the most gentle, lovable trait of this great creature becomes his undoing. For, you must know, the Cetus is very fond of music, and, in order to ensnare the unsuspecting leviathan, men assemble a number of ships, and then, with ‘divers instruments of musike, they play with grete armonye.’ The hapless creature, innocent of the nature of man, comes to the surface and draws nearer and nearer, being ‘very gladde of this armonye,’ only to find a terrible death awaiting him.
All of which our author shamelessly chronicles in great detail. For accuracy combined with brevity, what could be better than his description of the Conger, which is fashioned like an eel, but much ‘greter(greater) in quantyte?’ On being questioned as to the piscatory view of bad weather, most of us would say offhand that all fishes would be either indifferent to rain or glad of it, but this only shows the danger of ignorance; it seems that the Coretz ‘hideth him in the deep of the water when it raineth, for if he received any rain, he should waxe blynde, and dye of it.’
In his account of the Dolphin, our author nearly achieves pathos. ‘It hath no voice,’ he says, ‘yet it singeth like a man’; then he adds a cautious, indirect statement, ‘Some say whan they be taken that they wepe.’ Like the unfortunate Cetus, the Dolphin is musical, and ‘will gladly listen to the playing of lutes, harpes and pypes.’ There was once a king, who, after having captured a dolphin, was so moved by its piteous weeping and lamenting, that he let it go again.
Some of the other fishes have only one arresting trait of character: ‘Focas, a sea bull, fighteth ever with his wife till she be dead; then he casteth her out of his place, and seeketh another.’ Mulus is small of body and ‘only a meat for ‘gentils’ (gentle-folk); of this fish there are many kinds, but the best have two beards under the mouth.’Nereydes are ‘monsters all rough of body, and when any dyeth, then the other weepeth.’ When the Pecten is moved or stirred, ‘he winketh,’ and the Pike is ‘engendered with a westerne wynde.’
But the Sturgeon is our author’s masterpiece. This wretched creature leads what Touchstone would call ‘a spare life’—it is the anchorite of the finny tribes. The pleasures of the deep are not many, and surely good victuals at regular hours, must be counted upon. Yet the poor Sturgeon, according to our friend Laurens, has no mouth, and therefore cannot eat at all. So it lives upon the winds, waxing fat on an east wind, and sickening upon a northerly one.
Notwithstanding the large array of creatures that do at least bear some resemblance to fishes at his command, Master Andrewe does not stop here. Of him, it can be said truly that all is ‘fisshe’ that comes to his net. We meet several old friends who are gravely described at some length. There is Scylla, a monster in the sea between Italy and Sicily, which is a great enemy to man. It is faced and handed like a gentlewoman, but hath a wide mouth and fearful teeth. Like most of the other sea-monsters, it is musical, andheareth singing gladly. Then there is the Mermayde, bringing the same old wondrous story (and tail) with her. She is a deadly beast that bringeth a man gladly to death, and she singeth a sweet song, and therewith deceiveth many a good mariner; for when they hear it they fall on sleep, and then she cometh and draweth them out of the ship, and teareth them asunder.
And then there is a quaint story from Arabye of some serpentis called sirens, and other delectable matter; but alas!—our learned friend must return to the shades. So we will bid him Godspeed!—and, as one naturally falls into Elia’s manner in praising an old author, I will say: ‘Blessings on thee! Master Laurens Andrewe. I believe thou knowest no more of fishes than I do, but what do we care for piscatory lore. Thou hast devised most entertaining matter, and written a worthy book. So may the earth press lightly on thy old bones!’