“...will sometimes leap,From hiding-places ten years deep.”
“...will sometimes leap,From hiding-places ten years deep.”
“...will sometimes leap,From hiding-places ten years deep.”
To share a bed-room with one of these fellows is to lose one’s faith in human nature, for, even after the most eventful day, there is no comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the balance of the day’s pleasure and pain. They sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all snore abominably!
The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in their ineffectuality. InLavengro(or is itRomany Rye?) there is an impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of Wordsworth’s poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow’s malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.
Discussing the question, some time ago,with an old friend, she gave me her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine herself performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain. Her favourite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I tried—though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine—but it was of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my friend T. and what he said, and what I said, and I wondered how T. was faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or the Rocky Mountains—but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth describes inPrometheus Unbound, that vague region filled with
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall. And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it.
But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for re-reading (not for the first, and, please Heaven! not the last time) Lamb’s letters, I came upon the following, in a note to Southey; ‘But there is a man in my office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities!... When I can’t sleep o’ nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon a given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer.’ ... There is promise in this, and we all have our Mr. H.’s, whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts upon us like a dose of laudanum. This very night I will dismiss such trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore.
REMOVEan Englishman from his hearth and home, his centre of corporal life, and he becomes a very different creature, one capable of sudden furies and roaring passions, a deep sea of strong emotions churning beneath his frozen exterior. I can pass, at all times, for a quiet, neighbourly fellow, yet I have sat, more than once, in a railway carriage with black murder in my heart. At the mere sight of some probably inoffensive fellow-passenger my whole being will be invaded by a million devils of wrath, and I ‘could do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.’
There is one type of traveller that never fails to rouse my quick hatred. She is a large, middle-aged woman, with a rasping voice and a face of brass. Above all things, she loves to invade smoking compartments that are already comfortably filled with a quiet company of smokers; she will comebustling in, shouting over her shoulder at her last victim, a prostrate porter, and, laden with packages of all maddening shapes and sizes, she will glare defiantly about her until some unfortunate has given up his seat. She is often accompanied by some sort of contemptible, whining cur that is only one degree less offensive than its mistress. From the moment that she has wedged herself in there will be no more peace in the carriage, but simmering hatred, and everywhere dark looks and muttered threats. But everyone knows her. Courtesy and modesty perished in the world of travel on the day when she took her first journey; but it will not be long before she is in hourly danger of extinction, for there are strong men in our midst.
There are other types of railway travellers, not so offensive as the above, which combines all the bad qualities, but still annoying in a varying degree to most of us; and of these others I will enumerate one or two of the commonest. First, there are those who, when they would go on a journey, take all their odd chattels and household utensils and parcel them up in brown paper, disdaining such things as boxes and trunks; furthermore, when such eccentrics haveloaded themselves up with queer-shaped packages they will cast about for baskets of fruit and bunches of flowers to add to their own and other people’s misery. Then there are the simple folks who are for ever eating and drinking in railway carriages. No sooner are they settled in their seats but they are passing each other tattered sandwiches and mournful scraps of pastry, and talking with their mouths full, and scattering crumbs over the trousers of fastidious old gentlemen. Sometimes they will peel and eat bananas with such rapidity that nervous onlookers are compelled to seek another compartment.
Some children do not make good travelling companions, for they will do nothing but whimper or howl throughout a journey, or they will spend all their time daubing their faces with chocolate or trying to climb out of the window. And the cranks are always with us; on the bleakest day, they it is who insist on all the windows being open, but in the sultriest season they go about in mortal fear of draughts, and will not allow a window to be touched.
More to my taste are the innocents who always find themselves in the wrong train. They have not the understanding necessary to fathom the time-tables, nor will they askthe railway officials for advice, so they climb into the first train that comes, and trust to luck. When they are being hurtled towards Edinburgh, they will suddenly look round the carriage and ask, with a mild touch of pathos, if they are in the right train for Bristol. And then, puzzled and disillusioned, they have to be bundled out at the next station, and we see them no more. I have often wondered if these simple voyagers ever reach their destinations, for it is not outside probability that they may be shot from station to station, line to line, until there is nothing mortal left of them.
Above all other railway travellers, I envy the mighty sleepers, descendants of the Seven of Ephesus. How often, on a long, uninteresting journey, have I envied them their sweet oblivion. With Lethe at their command, no dull, empty train journey, by day or night, has any terrors for them. Knowing the length of time they have to spend in the train, they compose themselves and are off to sleep in a moment, probably enjoying the gorgeous adventures of dream while the rest of us are looking blankly out of the window or counting our fingers. Two minutes from their destination they stir, rub their eyes, stretch themselves, collect theirbaggage, and, peering out of the window, murmur: ‘My station, I think.’ A moment later they go out, alert and refreshed, Lords of Travel, leaving us to our boredom.
Seafaring men make good companions on a railway journey. They are always ready for a pipe and a crack with any man, and there is usually some entertaining matter in their talk. But they are not often met with away from the coast towns. Nor do we often come across the confidential stranger in an English railway carriage, though his company is inevitable on the Continent and, I believe, in America. When the confidential stranger does make an appearance here, he is usually a very dull dog, who compels us to yawn through the interminable story of his life, and rides some wretched old hobby-horse to death.
There is one more type of traveller that must be mentioned here, if only for the guidance of the young and simple. He is usually an elderly man, neatly dressed, but a little tobacco-stained, always seated in a corner, and he opens the conversation by pulling out a gold hunter and remarking that the train is at least three minutes behind time. Then, with the slightest encouragement, he will begin to talk, and his talk will be all oftrains. As some men discuss their acquaintances, or others speak of violins or roses, so he talks of trains, their history, their quality, their destiny. All his days and nights seem to have been passed in railway carriages, all his reading seems to have been in time-tables. He will tell you of the 12.35 from this place and the 3.49 from the other place, and how the 10.18 ran from So-and-so to So-and-so in such a time, and how the 8.26 was taken off and the 5.10 was put on; and the greatness of his subject moves him to eloquence, and there is passion and mastery in his voice, now wailing over a missed connection or a departed hero of trains, now exultantly proclaiming the glories of a non-stop express or a wonderful run to time. However dead you were to the passion, the splendour, the pathos, in this matter of trains, before he has done with you you will be ready to weep over the 7.37 and cry out in ecstasy at the sight of the 2.52.
Beware of the elderly man who sits in the corner of the carriage and says that the train is two minutes behind time, for he is the Ancient Mariner of railway travellers, and will hold you with his glittering eye.
MYfriend Glindersby is a changed man, and, for my part, I think it a change for the better. For the one thing that had always spoiled Glindersby for the company of sane men was his ever-recurring praise of the present age and its mechanical ingenuities. Though brought up to a noble old profession, he was one of those who are for ever crying up the marvels that we have of late brought into the world; he would subscribe to such things asWonders of Modern ScienceorEngineering Marvels of the World, and could be found gloating over vilely-coloured prints of airships and electric lifts. Because there was a railway at Kamchatka or a telephone at Tangiers, he could not understand why all men should not be happy. In short, he was one of those latter-day fanatics who, in a kind of ecstasy, are always crying out to each other, ‘Look at Radium...!’ and ‘What will they do next!’ and other phrases from their dark liturgy. This was Glindersby’s one failing, and it had, I knew, kept him from much good company. Now, I say, he is changed, for he seems to have lost his old damaging enthusiasm, and in the late hours of fireside confessional he has now begun telling a certain trumpery tale, a piece of hocus-pocus if there ever was one, to account for the change.
A short time ago, at the house of some friends, a cranky set, he was introduced to a Hindoo who had just arrived in this country, and who might be called Ram Dar Chubb. They said little to each other on that first evening, but a few days later they met in the street, and the Hindoo suggested that they should visit his rooms. Glindersby, suspecting that the other was feeling lonely in this new world of white faces and black streets, expressed his pleasure, and accompanied the hospitable Ram Dar up three flights of stairs. He was soon making himself comfortable in a sitting-room that seemed to contain nothing out of the common, with the exception of a large graven metal bowl and some Oriental knick-knacks on a small side-table. The two men quickly plunged into talk, and Glindersby, beginning with the difference between the Eastern andWestern civilisations, was not long before he was declaiming—almost breathlessly—upon his favourite themes. Here at last he had found fit audience; Ram Dar was an ideal listener. And Glindersby rose to the occasion; telephones, telegraphy, airships, turbine engines, calculating machines, electric kettles, and a thousand other marvels were all his concern. There was no end to his talk of valves, pressures, and horse power. Very soon he had paraphrased the introduction and at least half a dozen chapters ofWonders of Modern ScienceandEngineering Marvels of the World, and his monologue soon became as highly coloured and altogether detestable as their monstrous prints. Looking sturdily across at the immobile brown face, he expanded, boasted, and bragged, until it might have appeared that he himself was ready at any time to bridge the Channel and irrigate the Sahara Desert.
Throughout this untimely rhapsody Ram Dar sat motionless, his attitude expressive of that eternal patience of the East which all Glindersby’s hearers ought to have had.
‘Conquest of Nature’s just begun,’ cried Glindersby, who by this time was almost dithyrambic, and talked in capital letters and dots as if he were one of Mr. Wells’characters. ‘You’ve been standing still for thousands of years.... Stagnation!... Now we’re going forward.... Made bigger advance in last hundred years than in all the thousands before.... Wireless Telegraphy!... Aeroplanes!... Space annihilated.... Just beginning.’ And he leaned forward impressively: ‘What will it be in one hundred years’ time?... Or three hundred?... Or seven hundred?... Nature finally conquered.... All her forces harnessed..... Man.... Master of the World.... Stupendous buildings!... Marvellous machinery!... Fleets of Airships!... What wouldn’t I give for a peep into the Future!...’
‘You would look into the future?’ broke in his hearer, for the first time.
Glindersby was somewhat taken aback by this unexpected interruption. ‘I would give anything to see what we shall achieve,’ he cried, ‘only, of course, it’s—er—impossible.’
There was a flash of white teeth opposite. ‘No, it can be done,’ murmured Ram Dar, ‘Past, Present, Future! It is all an illusion. We have known these things a long time. You wish to look into the Future?...’ And he rose to his feet.
Still suspecting some pleasantry, the otherforced a laugh, and stammered out: ‘Above all things.... Pity no way of doing it.... Final Conquest of Nature.’
By this time, the Hindoo had pulled forward the little side-table, on which stood the great metal bowl. To Glindersby’s astonishment, the latter was filled with a liquid blacker than ink, and had, fastened to the edge, several little pans, into which Ram Dar quickly poured a quantity of grey powder.
‘How far forward will you look, and at what place?’ asked Ram Dar as he proceeded to set fire to the little heaps of powder.
Glindersby stared at the dense fumes that were encircling the great bowl. Half mechanically, almost unwillingly, he gasped out: ‘Oh, Coventry ... go-ahead place, I b’lieve ... eight hundred years hence.’ There was some muttering in a strange tongue, and then a dark hand waved across the rolling, sickly-smelling fumes. ‘Come!’ cried the voice of the Hindoo, who must have trafficked with the devil, whom he resembled at that moment.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, Glindersby found himself in the midst of the fumes, bending over the bowl and staring at the ebony surface of the liquid within.‘Near Coventry.... Your year, two thousand seven hundred and thirty....’ The voice seemed to come from miles away. Next moment, the fumes, the bowl, everything had vanished, and he seemed to be looking, as from a great height, at a large meadow where a number of sheep with their lambs were browsing. It seemed a bright morning in early summer. There was no shadow of smoke; the air was perfectly clear. In one corner of the meadow a boy was seated under a large elm. He was bare-legged, sandalled and simply clad in a bright blue robe, and, all the time, he appeared to be playing upon a little pipe. Near by was a small shrine garlanded with red roses, and the grass around was strewn with crimson petals scattered by the breeze. Cloud-shadows drifted across the grass; the sheep moved steadily forward, with their lambs capering about them; a few more crimson petals were shaken from the shrine; the boy still fingered his little pipe in the shade of the elm....
‘It is not what you expected to find,’ cried a voice in his ear; and Glindersby looked up and saw the smiling face of Ram Dar Chubb above the bowl over which they had both been bending.
I say that Glindersby is a changed man, and that I, for one, approve the change in him. But I think that this story of his is full of lies; and that as for Ram Dar Chubb, he is an obvious invention, and cheap at that.
IOFTENfeel sorry that so many quaint and pretty fancies, such as we find gravely weighed by Sir Thomas Brown in hisPseudodoxia Epidemica, have fluttered away from our knowing modern world like so many butterflies. After all, there was little harm and often a great deal of poetry or grotesque humour in these ‘vulgar errors,’ as Sir Thomas called them. Now that the ordinary man has flung away these gaily-coloured fancies, I do not know that he is any better off with such dismal scraps of learning as are coming his way at the present time. His ancestors were fanciful fellows with little exact knowledge; his descendants may occupy themselves with a vast accumulated store of learning; meanwhile, he himself, our contemporary, has relinquished his old fancies and quaint dreams, and receivedlittle or nothing, as yet, in return. Now, barren of belief, he stands waiting for the meagre crumbs of science.
The Wandering Jew no longer creeps past our doors; we buried him long ago, and there is the end of a grand old tale. No Salamanders live in our fires. No more do ‘swans, a little before their death, sing most sweetly’; another gleam of poetry has faded from the world. We meet with the Unicorn and the Phœnix only in coats-of-arms and commercial advertisements. The Basilisk, or Cockatrice, which came from a cock’s egg, hatched under a toad or serpent, and which could kill at a distance by the power of the eye, no longer haunts the world; perhaps we do not regret him, yet the briefest glance at him, while he was looking some other way, would have been an experience worth remembering. The mermaids and mermen have long since ridden away from our coasts on their water-horses, driving their water-bulls before them. The giants have eaten the pigmies, and have themselves succumbed to indigestion. Our acetylene lights have frightened away Jack-o’-Lanthorn himself, and there is no green cheese in the moon, and very little cheese worth eating on the earth.
Does the Glastonbury thorn still blossomat Christmastide? Certainly the ass still bears the sign of the Cross on its back, and the haddock still shows the black marks left by the finger and thumb of St. Peter. Do our seamen still take cauls with them to guard against drowning? I am afraid that barnacles, when broken off from the sides of a ship, no longer turn into geese. Nor do mandrakes shriek out when they are uprooted, these days. Do our country girls still put the Bible, with sixpence between the pages of Ruth, under their pillows at night, in order to dream of their future husbands? How many of us put bay leaves under our pillows so that we may have true dreams?
Sneezing, in our time, does not call for a blessing. Nor do we bless the moon when it is at the full, nor ask our ladies to drop it a curtsey at the time of its rebirth. Omens trouble us no longer; it does not matter how we put on our stockings and shoes, or, at least, we do not feel that good or ill fortune is bound up with the order of our dressing. We do not attempt to read our destiny in the leaping flames on the hearth, nor look for purses and coffins in the coals that fly out from time to time. On the rare occasions when we see a lighted candle, wedo not expect to find it presageful, and we are not likely to try divination from the behaviour of the gas or electric light. A tingling ear, an itching nose, a burning cheek, and other little pranks of the blood and nerves pass as a jest among us. We allow no trafficking with amulets and charms, except as the merest decoration, and we attempt to read the future only through our pass-books. We leave Fate severely alone, not because we think that it is of no importance, but because our lives do not seem of sufficient consequence to be meddled with; wherein we are more modest than our forefathers, but also, I think, more miserable.
All these quaint beliefs have gone in the wind, and it is well, for the world cannot stand still. As I have said before, there was little harm in them, and often a great deal of poetry; they have furnished some good folk, high and low, with many a heartening tale for the chimney-corner; their weft of phantasy has been woven into many a fine ballad or romance. But, shrinking from the fierce light of Truth, these fanciful notions left us long ago.
Yet we must not hasten to plume ourselves. Have we not our own over-ripe crop oferrors? Are we not for ever swallowing lies a thousand times more hurtful than the old pleasing or idle fancies? We cannot weave immortal romances out of the woof of falsehood that comes to us now; if we want tales, we must hire some fellow to put his tongue in his cheek and mechanically turn out volume after volume of ‘bright fiction.’ We cannot believe in the Salamander, a poetical notion, but we are always ready to take it on trust that Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who votes for us, is a very great hero, and Mr. Greatheart, who keeps his own counsel, is a very deep scoundrel.
The old fancies were sustained by the people’s sense of wonder; they arose naturally and no one benefited by them, except an occasional sorcerer. Our vulgar errors are not a natural growth, but are forced upon us by the cunning and powerful members, who tell us what we are to believe. We do not acknowledge the Basilisk, with his deadly stare, but we have still a touching faith in Such-and-Such, the scientific reformer, with his insufferable jargon. We do not put bayleaves under our pillows to have true dreams, but we put theDaily Dopeon our breakfast-tables so that we may have false ones. And we are too apt to believe that(in the fine phrase of a modern novelist) ‘we are all very fine people,’ which is a very vulgar error indeed, and more mischievous than Jack-o’-Lanthorn and more deadly than the Cockatrice.
ANYand every kind of tittle-tattle goes by the name of gossip, no matter whether the subject is the price of cauliflowers, or the foreign policy of Chile, or—darkening to scandal—the weather. In this place, I would limit gossip to that discussion of other people’s characters and affairs which is so well known to us, and to every other society. And I would call it scandal and have done with it, only scandal is a dog with a very bad name, while gossip still capers and frisks, unchecked though not encouraged. There is also this distinction: we—that is, you and I—may condescend to gossip: it is the others who talk scandal.
Now this personal kind of gossip is everywhere condemned and is everywhere an unfailing recreation. It began with the wild gestures and uncouth jabbering of our remote ancestors, squatting in their caves; perhaps it will end only when the last fireis quenched. Wise men, priests, philosophers, and prophets have thundered against it, but their very imprecations only floated about as flotsam and jetsam on the vast ocean of gossip; their very names have come down to us only as a whispered rumour. The stream of talk flows on, and as yet no denunciations have dammed it up. Gossip is an endless game without rules; a thing untouched by changing fashions and varying modes of thought; one of the few everlasting diversions of humanity. Men, who have had more say in public if less in private, have always been prompt to accuse women of devoting too much of their time and energy to this dubious sport. Gossip, they have declared, is woman’s greatest pastime. But here at least our feminists, who have spluttered over so many imaginary wrongs, have passed by one undoubted grievance, for the truth is, men are as much given to gossiping as women. Man’s talk may sound more important because it involves wider interests, yet a good deal of it is nothing more nor less than gossip.
Now it seems to me that in this perpetual chatter about other people, which we all hasten to denounce, but which gives all of us pleasure at some time or other, our delightsprings, broadly speaking, from two main sources, one of which is good and the other bad. And according to which predominates gossip may be described as profitable or hurtful to those people concerned in it.
The good side of gossip arises out of that eager, seemingly insatiable curiosity which distinguishes men from the brutes and civilised men from savages. Much of our idlest chatter is secretly leavened by this curiosity, which is in its purest form a noble thing. For what is the pursuit of knowledge but the play of a splendid but entirely irrational inquisitiveness? Most of the higher branches of knowledge, metaphysics, pure mathematics, and so on, serve no practical purpose; sober philosophers and studious mathematicians are in reality the wildest of fellows, for ever pursuing a laborious quest into the absolute Unknown. A great deal of this fine curiosity goes to the making of gossip, which is something more than a casual exchange of news. When we talk over the Smiths and the Browns, not only do we record events, but we examine motives and estimate character, and in a roundabout way we exchange ideas. The greatest historian can do little more; his subject is of more importance, that is all.The difference between Mrs. Jones giving the real reason why the Johnsons left the town so suddenly, and Professor Jones, writing theLife and Times of Cardinal Richelieu, is one of degree only; both are undertaking the same kind of work, and probably both are stirred by the same motives. We are all historians without knowing it.
Our gossip and scandal is a grub, which in a hundred years’ time, with the advent of the historian, will become a chrysalis; and in four or five hundred years’ time, the hard shell will be burst open, and there will be seen the winged splendour of epic poetry or romantic drama. Have not all the subjects of history and epic poetry once been nothing more than eager talk in the court or the kitchen? ‘Have you heard the latest?’—the cry went: then followed the pretty little scandal of Helen, wife of Menelaus, and the Troy affair; or perhaps a full account of that queer business of Prince Hamlet at the Court of Denmark; or the whole story of those strange doings at Verona, in which Montague’s son, young Romeo, cut such a figure. The names and stories that were whispered in ante-rooms and bawled out in taverns, centuries ago, will yet provoke future historians, fire poetsand romancers yet unborn, and will yet move unknown generations to wild laughter and tears, to anger and pity. How many noble studies have arisen out of this eternal curiosity of men! How many lovely things have flowered from this common soil of Gossip!
The other source of our pleasure in this personal kind of gossip is less innocent; indeed, it is—and ever has been—a great worker of mischief. It proceeds, I believe, from the strain of the Pharisee that is in most of us. When we discuss the weaknesses and misfortunes of others, we are not solely prompted by that spirit of curiosity to which I have referred. Nor is it, as a rule, direct enmity or mere malice that prompts us, for the people we discuss may be almost unknown to us, or, on the other hand, they may be old, well-tried friends. But when we are indulging in this sort of talk, we suddenly feel a sense of our own superiority, we glow with added self-respect. Thus, there are four or five of us chattering, and someone mentions the absent Jones, who is a common acquaintance. ‘Ah! Poor old Jones!’ we exclaim; and are quicklyin full cry after the quarry. ‘The trouble with old Jones, ...’ one begins. ‘You know, he ought not to have, ...’ opens the next critic. ‘As I’ve told Jones many a time, ...’ cries a third. So voice after voice swells the chorus of criticism. The superficial show of concern and sympathy is a mere formality and deceives nobody; everyone is eager to contribute his or her scrap of censure; eyes are brightening, tongues are loosened. That slight but distinctly uncomfortable sense of inferiority which we may possibly have felt in the actual presence of Jones is now compensated for by a marked sense of our own superiority and a glow of self-satisfaction.
Unless we are on our guard, we are ready to sacrifice victim after victim for the sake of this delectable but transitory feeling. Every night, in countless drawing-rooms, knives are reddened and altars smoke to propitiate this dark god of self-righteousness. And the victim of this dreadful worship is too often young and open-hearted and beautiful—and a woman.
IHAVEbeen living lately near a fine highway, which cuts across the blurred edge of a town and makes straight for the open country. By this road a man may quickly escape from the town and start upon almost any journey. The road will take him some part of the way to Edinburgh, or Moscow, or Bagdad, or the mountains of the moon. Or he may use it, as I do, for a saunter in the morning sunshine.
The road rises as it leaves the town, and a little way beyond my windows it climbs to a summit, so that, walking forward, one sees nothing in front but the sharp, slightly curved edge of the road against the sky. Though I have travelled this way so often, each time that I set eyes on the clean cut of the road and the great emptiness beyond, something in me is thrilled, faintly yet perceptibly, like taut wires troubled by a gust of wind. I know well, none better, what lies at the other side of the hill, the easystretch of highway descending into a pleasant green valley; yet the sight of the little summit still holds for me some vague promise. But every hill in the world is brother to that ‘peak in Darien.’ One day, maybe, I shall stand on the crest of this tiny hill, and find that all beyond is changed. I shall look down, maybe, upon a sea covered with strange ships, or into the thronged streets of a magical city.
The other morning I left the house for the first time for several days, and walked slowly up the road. There was a touch of autumn abroad. In the mellow sunlight the trees were putting on their last splendid livery. The air was still, and had in it a faint odour of burning leaves.
In such a season, golden, spacious, but already whispering of the end, there will often come to a man a certain solemn mood, a vein of not unpleasing melancholy, and for a little while he will see all life moving to a grave measure, an adagio for strings. But the mood that encompassed me that morning was very different, and much less welcome. As I walked forward I seemed to sink into depression:
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.
In a fair state of health and unassailed by bad fortune, I walked in that genial sunshine—as a man will—the victim of self-torment or inexplicable misery, the Old Man of the Sea heavy on my shoulders.
Now when I came to the summit of the road and looked down the other side, my whole mood was changed in a flash. And for no other reason than this: an inn stands there, a little way back from the road, and its walls had been newly done a creamy white, so that they showed dazzlingly against the foliage near by. That is all.
But the moment that my eyes fell upon these gleaming white walls my mood was changed, and I saw another vision of life. At that moment, as when a loved person enters a room, it seemed to me as if the footlights of the world were suddenly turned up, and I could hear the strings and flutes of the great orchestra of life. I saw the road before me dancing away to the hills, and the hills themselves standing in silent jubilation. It was one of those rare moments when the passion, the wonder, the mystery of life smite through a man’s flesh and bone, and set his spirit towering above good and evil fortune, fearless, exultant, eager for the best and worst of human existence. Suchmoments come to us on a sudden wave of exultation, and then leave us to be carried gently forward by the customary easy flow of thoughts and emotions. What marks their passage in a man’s life, what heroic promptings they bring, what valorous decisions are born of their passing cannot be told, least of all by the man himself. I know that I stayed for a few seconds on the crest of the hill, and then continued my walk. The rare moment had come and gone, sweeping away my former dull mood and leaving me in a pleasant reverie. I walked along, thinking, maybe, of inns and the part they have played in Romance, or of whitened walls and the time when even London was a city of white buildings; or I thought about myself (as you do), and what a fine fellow I should be if I were not a fool. It is no great matter what I thought.
But mark how little of a man’s life he can explain, no matter how often he opens the doors and searches the dusty lumber rooms of his mind. There was no reason, in or out of nature, for my first mood of depression. And, to me, there would seem as little reason for the sudden change, the momentary exultation, and the pleasant aftermath. At times the sight of a mountainof felicity will not raise a man’s spirits; at other times, if his foot trips over a molehill, he will cry out in ecstasy at the goodness of life. We never talk to less purpose than when we say of a man who is almost a stranger: ‘He ought to be happy, for he has this and that at his command.’ Knowing our man, and being aware of what life is doing with him and what he is doing with life, we might hazard a guess at his state of mind, but even then it is perilous. Mark also how we realise the beauty and blessing of life itself only in rare, inexplicable moments, and then most keenly. It comes to us then like a sudden blare of trumpets in the wind. We are always ready to talk and write about the wonder of human existence, but, unless we are something more than common men, we do not pass the day and lie down at night thrilled by the thought of our participation in this greatest of games. We go our way as best we can, carried forward or swept back by the ebb and flow of circumstance, and are by turn triumphant, masterful, listless, fearful, despairing.
Perhaps to some of us the moments of revelation, the flashes of insight, never come at all; to the best of us they come but rarely. Life has seemed to us, for monthsor years maybe, an overcrowded, beggarly repast, at which a man must snatch at morsels and crumbs of joy: now, in one flash of time, it will seem a divine banquet, the high festival of immortal creatures. The moment passes, but something has been left behind.
INthe early thirties of the last century, readers ofFraser’s Magazinewere puzzled, startled or irritated by a certain ‘Clothes-Philosophy,’ which was expounded to them month by month by an almost unknown Scotch fire-eater, a lover of brand-new words and riotous syntax. Such readers were privileged to witness the first great eruption of the Carlyle volcano. Doubtless it took most of them nearly twenty years to bring themselves to say that they had enjoyed the spectacle, and even then they were probably lying; but still, it was a privilege. But lest we should be too humble about our own day, I hasten to point out that we too have our ‘Clothes-Philosophy,’ and that it is cast in a simpler, more pleasing mould than the older one. It is, too, much more of a true ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ and is no elaborate mystification, no clumping Teutonic allegory,born in a study, but the real thing, coming newly every week or month from the tailor’s counter. Although he has his place here as a man of letters and may never have handled a needle or a pair of scissors, Mr. H. Dennis Bradley, I am sure, will not object to being called a tailor. It would be absurd of him to do so, for it is this very trade of tailoring, hitherto somewhat slighted, that he is now ennobling with his pen. But it would be equally absurd if we, on our part, set down Mr. Bradley merely as an astute advertiser who simply wants to make us buy his suits, one who is satisfied with clothing our carcases and is ready to leave mind and soul untended.
If Mr. Dennis Bradley is not at heart a man of letters, then I do not know the breed. From the very beginning, I divined the essential quality in him. I see him, in my mind’s eye, turning from the bundles of spring suitings, from the company of cloth merchants and cutters, into his sanctum to be alone with his art, or rather, his second and greater art, that of writing. There, I see him laboriously yet lovingly beating out phrase after phrase until each little essay is worthy of his great public. Lamb once said of a man that he would have been atailor only he lacked the spirit. But think of how Lamb would have praised Mr. Bradley, who has the spirit to be not only an excellent tailor but a writer as well; and not, mark you, merely a tailor playing at authorship and trying to keep the needle and thread out of our sight, but an author and tailor at one and the same time, giving us, as it were, the literature and philosophy of shopkeeping and suit-making. This is to be a man of note, an originator, a force in letters. I fancy I can hear the unborn professors rustling their papers on ‘Bradley and His Age’ or ‘The Old Bond Street Circle.’
Being an original, Mr. Dennis Bradley cannot be fitted into any of our little pigeon-holes; he is not easily labelled; but as I have already spoken of his essays, we will keep the term and call him an essayist. His work, however, has had, and still has, so many phases that we shall do well to discriminate a little. There has been, for example, a change in his manner; and it has shown us, on the whole, a steady development, that advance towards the perfection of the instrument which marks the true artist. In his early work there was an irregularity, a wildness, a careless profusion,which promised much but hinted that the artist was not yet fully grown. He tried, if I remember rightly, to push his prose as near to poetry as it would go; and it was only later, when the thought became more weighty, that he turned to the quieter yet more impressive manner, the chiselled form and the pregnant phrase. During this early period, one of his favourite themes was Youth and Age; no new thing, it is true, but one to which he gave new significance by his characteristic treatment. When he exalted Youth and covered Age with ridicule, was he not interpreting the spirit of the times? One can discover, in that alone, the born man of letters. The times, disillusioned, were all for Youth, and he, divining it, stepped forth as our spokesman. Just because he happened to be also a tailor, just because young men happen to spend more on clothes than old men do, is no reason why Mr. Bradley should be robbed of his praise as a writer sensitive to our subtle changes of feeling.
Although there are some persons, not unpretending in criticism, who would have us believe that they prefer the earlier, wilder note, happily they are few, and most of us, I imagine, pass with pleasure to the later,more chastened form. Here we can remark his versatility, his admirable method of appealing to one type of mind after another. Now, he will give us a bright little philosophical treatise, and, sweeping away the accumulation of trivialities, he will dig in a brisk sentence or two to the roots of life, as in his essay on ‘The Three Essentials.’ Now, he will frankly appeal to the hard-headed man of affairs, and will annihilate half-a-dozen economic heresies in one paragraph. Sometimes it is the social rather than the purely economic problem that engages him. But his large sweep does not make for easy classification, and I, for one, cannot attempt to discriminate between such things, say, as ‘A Prophet on Profits,’ ‘Comparisons,’ and ‘Economy and Rubbish.’ Now and again, it is true, he seems to lay himself open to the charge of sacrificing everything to the topical appeal; but, after all, these are critical times, when men are looking for light; and, at the worst, the manner, unique in our letters, will remain to beguile us. Moreover, there also will remain the personal note, for like all your true essayists he does not hesitate to reveal his personality, to make the reader his confidant.
But when all is said and done, the most remarkable thing about Mr. Bradley, the thing that makes him unique, is his double rôle. One would have thought that his author-self would have come to despise and ignore his tailor-self. But no—their allegiance holds, and is, indeed, stronger than ever. In the early days, there was not always a perfect understanding between the two. The author would come forward and have his say, without leaving any opening for the tailor, who had perforce to push his way to the front and shout the louder. In short, the transition from pure literature to commerce was not always well done: one was often uncomfortably aware of a hiatus. But now—to be apt in metaphor—such creases have been ironed out and the whole thing fits together and is apparently seamless. We begin in the outside world, with all its heart-breaking problems, its gloom and strife; we are driven hither and thither, menaced with ruin; and yet when we come to the end, always we find ourselves in the same solemn temple, our one place of refuge, serene as demi-gods among the spring and autumn suitings. We never know at first what terrible problem we shall be asked to face, but always we have but to follow thisnew Ariel of ours to be led out of the world into the sanctuary in Old Bond Street. There are times, indeed, when the author, the victim of temperament, is so plunged into gloom that it is the tailor alone who saves the situation, who arrives just when we seem altogether lost, so that his inevitable final refrain of ‘Lounge Suits, Dinner Suits, Dress Suits, and Overcoats’ comes to our ears like a benediction.
Surely it is pleasant to reflect that one so unique in our letters is able, week by week and month after month, to appeal to such a large public, to dower his work with such lordly space and noble type, to have his own illustrator, even though this last is somewhat out of key, being a trifle too flippant and sybaritic for such solemn letterpress. I will wager that this ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ of ours has made more friends, not least among editors and others, than ever did the one our grandfathers knew. Which is a fine feather for Mr. Bradley’s cap—if ever he should take to wearing one.
READER, does your mind ever run back to the time when you were in receipt of a regular allowance, when you could be described almost as a ‘person of independent means’? The other day I mused in this vein, and fell to thinking of the day before yesterday, when I was a chubby, pudding-fed lad, and the aforesaid allowance amounted to four shillings and fourpence at the end of a year, but was delivered into my hands at the rate of one penny per week. Saturday morning was the appointed time, I believe. Of course, I often received other and larger sums; aunts and uncles were usually good for half-a-crown, or even more, and grandfathers in those days seemed to be literally made of silver coin. But the Saturday penny differed from these occasional presents in that it was my very own; there were no hints of money-boxes and savings-banks and ‘rainy-days’; the penny was placed in my hand, and could beused immediately as a sacrifice on the glittering altar of Juvenile Folly. This was very much to my taste, for, like most healthy children, I scorned those doubtful deities, Thrift and Prudence; even now I can hardly bring myself to accord them the worship which is, from what I hear, their due.
A number of my playmates received their weekly pennies at the same time—almost at the same moment, I imagine—and it was our invariable custom to retire in a body to a little shop near by. It was a tiny fancy-goods and sweet shop, whose owner must have subsisted almost entirely on the patronage of such small fry as ourselves. To us, as we clustered round the window, it was a veritable land of Heart’s Delight, for a penny was a potent talisman in those days, and we had the choice of a bewildering array of entirely useless articles. (What do children receive on Saturday mornings these times, I wonder; a ten shilling note or a War Bond?). So, clutching our pennies in warm, moist little hands, we would spend a delicious half-hour gazing through the shop window, a round-eyed, shrill-voiced crowd of speculators, until, after much discussion, our minds made up, we would clatter—one by one—into the shop and come outtriumphantly hugging our purchases. The rest was a swift descent into prosaic life. The great moment had come and gone.
Now, sympathetic reader, I will discover to you the depths of my folly. For you must know that some poetic rogue, some Autolycus of the fancy-goods trade, had invented and placed upon the market the thing called the lucky-bag. It was my bane, and the cause of my weekly undoing. Never was there such a snare for an imaginative child! It was a large, sealed paper-packet, bulging auspiciously; it contained articles of great variety, and some, so ran the legend on the cover, were of ‘immense value.’ Here was wealth, touched with chance and mystery and magic; here was El Dorado within sight. When I add that the price of this marvel was exactly one penny, there is nothing more to be said.
At first we were all victims. But, alas!—nothing of ‘immense value’ was forth-coming. The packets contained nothing of more importance than some trivial little wooden article, and a few contemptible pink sweets—a vile pennyworth! The bulging, which gave one the idea that the bag was crammed with bulky toys, was caused, I regret to say, by a sheet of stiff brown paperartfully disposed beneath the outer covering. So my companions, worldly wise in their generation, laughed to scorn the wiles of the lucky-bag merchant, and betook themselves to other and more solid purchases—a top, a ball, or a pennyworth of bulls-eyes or toffee. Here they receive a pennyworth for a penny and were satisfied.
It was otherwise with me. I wanted the land of Heart’s Delight for a penny, and though I have never got it, there were moments when, holding the newly-bought, unopened bag in my hand, I had glimpses of joys beyond mere pennyworths of this and that. Week after week, month after month, the lure of the magic packet held me in thrall. There were times when I would resolve to break my bonds, and traffic no more with the cheater, the mocker of sweet innocence, but it was all to no purpose; as soon as I approached the fateful shop and caught sight of the bulging packets my resolutions went like smoke, and once again my penny would be swept into the till, and once more I would stand, with heart beating high, looking into the mysterious bag.
And always the same hollow mockery; always the stiff brown paper bringing my dreams to earth. My collection of littlewooden egg-cups and tables grew apace; often I nearly made myself sick by trying to find some consolation in the abominable pink sweets. My elders laughed at me, and I was the scorn of my youthful playmates. Yet I think those pennies were well expended, for I moved, unknowingly, in great company—among the happy simpletons on the one hand and the fantastic dreamers on the other. Don Quixote, Parson Adams, Pickwick, and the rest at one elbow; Lully, Paracelsus, and all the other seekers of Philosophers’ Stones, Elixirs of Life, and Lands of Gold jostling me on the other side.
So I was in my innocence, and even now when I am ‘if a man speak truly, little better than one of the wicked,’ I have not changed so much. Though the pennies do not come so easily as of old, the dreams have not yet faded, the magical lights have not yet been quite extinguished; the solid pennyworths still fail to satisfy me, who have been on the very frontiers of El Dorado. So, though the disappointments still come thick and fast, I have my moments, perhaps you, too——?
But I fear my name will never head a subscription list or cause a commotion in Lombard Street. I sometimes think I shall never even be asked to open a bazaar.
(Being an attempt to capture an admired manner.)
ITwas, I think, Mr. S. P. B. Mais who told us that we live ‘in an age of amazing geniuses.’ The observation is so profoundly true, and one owes so much to this critic’s sane and luminous appreciations of contemporary writers, that one cannot help feeling surprised that he nowhere makes any mention of Grigsby. Certainly, in these fruitful times, a man cannot criticise all his fellow-authors; there are other omissions, notably D. S. Ballowby, Geoffrey Domsteen, Hilda Perkstone (who wroteWherefore?), and Anna Lummit; nevertheless, a lover of contemporary letters can hardly forgive the critic’s strange neglect of Grigsby. Therefore, although making no pretence of being specially fitted for the task, I feel that my long admiration for the poet and my several years’ acquaintance with the man himself,render it a duty on my part to try and give a sketch, however slight, of his career, personality, aims and achievements.
Harold Hopkins Grigsby, poet and littérateur, was born sometime in the late seventies of the last century in the pleasant old town of Channingford. Like many other famous men of letters, he came from a family that showed no particular devotion to literature or the other arts; his father, a not very prosperous corn-merchant, spent his leisure hours breeding fox-terriers, while his mother was chiefly occupied with domestic duties. Grigsby himself, troubled maybe by painful memories, has said little of these early days, so little that I am unable to state where it was he received his education, but tuition of some sort he undoubtedly had. When we next see him, he is nearing the threshold of manhood, and is far removed from Channingford, being at Wolverhampton, apprenticed to an oil and colour merchant. There, in the oil and colour shop, he was indeed a caged soul; even yet he cannot speak of those Wolverhampton days without a trace of bitterness: ‘The oil did not make my path more smooth; the colour did not make my world less drab,’ he has said to me more than once. Then it was that his fancybegan to take wing; he turned to literature. Friendless, away from home, misunderstood by those about him, he turned to the poets for consolation. ‘I owe more than man can repay,’ he has frankly confessed to me, ‘to Snipper’s fourpenny “Flowers of Poesie” series!’ He became an ardent student of the poet’s craft, and it was not long before he himself began to write. Several little things of his found their way into the Poets’ Corner of the local journal, and shortly after his twenty-second birthday, there appeared the first volume from his pen,Blossoms of Sorrow(West Midland Almanac and Railway Guide Publishing Co.). It was not a success, being rather an immature production and quite unlike the poet’s later work; indeed, for years, he was ashamed of the volume, and refused to speak of it even to his intimate friends. Yet those of us who are fortunate enough to possess a copy (it is very scarce now, and must fetch a good price), can turn toBlossoms of Sorrowand find, here and there, the definite promise of what has since been so magnificently achieved, can discover among so much immature writing more than a few hints of what was to come, the occasional note of the real Grigsby. Lines like these: