From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake
My Dear Victoria,—Yes, by all means tell your young friend Mr. Shakespeare that he can come to Paxton on Saturday. As you say that he can't get away until the later train I will have Perkins meet him from the village. I don't suppose he rides, but I can't mount him anyhow. I hope there is no trouble about Church on Sunday.
From Mrs. Myers to Lady Clogg
One thing Iamlooking forward to, dear, is this little coon Shakespeare. Victoria told me about him. She says sometimes he will play and sometimes he won't play. Butshesays he's quiet in harness just now. It seems that sometimes he talks all of a sudden. And onecan get him tosing! Anyhow Idowant to see what he's like.
(The rest of this letter is about other matters.)
From Messrs. Hornbull and Sons to William Shakespeare Esq.
Sir,—We have now sent in our account three times, and the last time with a pressing recommendation that you should settle it, but you have not honoured us by any reply. We regret to inform you that if we do not receive a cheque by Wednesday the 22nd inst. we shall be compelled to put the matter into other hands.
From John Shakespeare to his mother, Mrs. Shakespeare
Dearest Mamma,—I am afraid Billie really can't pay that money this week. He was awfully apologetic about it and I gave him a good talking to, but if he hasn't got it he hasn't. After all it isn't absolutely necessary until the 30th.
From Jonathan Truelove Esq. to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Old Chap,—I am going to do something very unconventional, but we know each other well enough I think. Can you let me have the £5 I lent you two years ago? I have to get in every penny I can this week, suddenly. If you can't don't bother to answer, I am not going to press you.
From Sir Henry Portman, Attorney General, to the Secretary of the Crown Prosecutor
Dear Jim,—No, I can't manage to get round to the Ritz this evening. Mary says that she wants Johnnie to leave Dresden. What inconceivable rubbish! Why can't she let him stay where he is? You might as well drown yourself as leave Dresden. What on earth could it lead to?
By the way, do choke off that silly ass Bates, if he is still worrying about Shakespeare. No one wants anything done, and No. 1 would be awfully angry if there was a prosecution.Rather than allow it I would find the money myself.
Yours,H. P.
From James Jevons and Co. Publishers, to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Sir,—Our attention has been called to your work by our correspondent in Edinburgh, and he asks us whether we think you could see your way to something dealing with Scottish history. He does not want it cast in the form of a play, for which he says there will be no sale with the Scottish public, seeing the exceedingly English cast of your work, but if you could throw it into Ballad form he thinks something could be done with it.
Of course such things can never be remunerative atfirst. The Edinburgh firm for whom he writes propose to buy sheets at 4½d. or 5d. and to give a royalty of 10 per cent. to be equally divided between our firm and yourself. They could not go beyond 500 copies for the first edition. It may be worth your while, in spiteof the trifling remuneration, to consider this offer in order to secure copyright and to prevent any pirating of future editions in Scotland. Pray advise.
We are,Your obedient servants,James Jevons and Co.
From Messrs. Firelight, Agents, to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,—We have had a proposal from Messrs. Capon in the matter of your collected Poems. As you know, verse is not just now much in demand with the public, and they could not manage an advance on royalties. They propose 10 per cent. on a 5s. book after the first 250 copies sold. The honorarium is, of course, purely nominal, but it might lead to more business later on. Could you let us know your views upon the matter?
Very faithfully yours,proFirelight and Co.C. G.
From Clarence de Vere Chalmondeley to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Sir,—Having certain sums free for investment, I am prepared to lend, not as a money-lender but as a private banker, sums from £10 to £50,000, on note of hand alone, without security. No business done with minors.
Very faithfully yours,Clarence de Vere Chalmondeley.
From William Shakespeare to Sir John Fowless(scribbled hastily in pencil)
I will try and come if I can, but it's something awful. I only got my proofs read by 2 o'clock in the night; I had to do my article forThe Owlbefore 10 this morning, then I have got to go and meet the Church Defence League people on my way to the station, and catch a train to a place where Mrs. Blake wants me to go somewhere in the Midlands, about 5. I think I can look in on my way to the station.
That man you asked me to see about the brandy is a fraud. Would you, like a good fellow, tell Charlienot to forget to mention in his article that "Hamlet" will only be played on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon, matinées. Don't forget this because people want to know when it is going to be. There was a very good notice inThe Jumper. I do feel so ill.
W. S.
From S. Jennings, Secretary, to George Mountebank Esq.
Dear Sir,—Mr. Shakespeare is at present away from home and will return upon Thursday, when I will immediately lay your MSS. before him.
I am,Very faithfully yours,S. Jennings, Secretary.
From Mr. Mustwrite of Warwick to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,—I have never met you, and perhaps you will think it a great impertinence on my part to be writing as I do. But I must write to tell you the deep and sincere pleasure I have received from your little brochure "Venus and Adonis," which the Rev. William Clarke, our Clergyman, lent me only yesterday. I read it through at a sitting and I could not rest until I had written to tell you the profound spiritual consolation I derived from its perusal.
I am, dear Mr. Shakespeare,Very much your admirer,George Mustwrite.
To William Shakespeare Esq.(unsigned, and written in capital letters rather irregularly)
No doubt you think yourself a fine fellow and the friend of the working man—I don't think! Some of us know more about you than you thinkwe do. I erd you at the Queen's Hall and you made me sick. You aren't fit to black the boots of the man you talked against.
To William Shakespeare Esq., O.H.M.S. (printed)
Sir,—In pursuance with the provisions of Her Majesty's Benevolent Act, you are hereby required to prepare a true and correct statement of your emoluments from all forms of (in writing) literary income, duly signed by you within 21 days from this date. If, however, you elect to be assessed by the District Commissioners under a number or a letter, &c. &c. &c.
From the Earl of Essex to W. Shakespeare Esq.(lithographed)
Dear Sir,—I have undertaken to act as Chairman this year of the Annual Dinner of the League for the Support of Insufficiently Talented Dramatic Authors. You are doubtless acquainted with the admirable objects of&c. &c. I hope I may see your name among the stewards whose position is purely honorary, and is granted upon payment of five guineas, &c. &c. This laudable &c. &c.
Very faithfully yours,Essex.
From Mrs. Parxinson to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,—Can you come and talk for our Destitute Pick Pockets Association on Thursday the 18th? I know you are a very busy man, but I always find it is the most busy men, who somehow manage to find time for charitable objects. If you can manage to do so I would send my motor round for you to Pilbury Row, and it would take you out to Rickmansworth where the meeting is to be. I am afraid it cannot take you back, but there is a convenient train at 20 minutes to 8, which gets you into London a little after 9 for dinner, or, if that is too late you might catch the 6.30, which gets you in at 8.15, only that will berather a rush. My daughter tells me how much she admired your play,Macduff, and very much wants to see you.
From the Duchess of Dump to William Shakespeare Esq.
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,—I want to ask you a reallygreatfavour. Could you come to my Animals Ball on the 4th of June dressed up as a gorilla? Idohope you can. We have to tell people what costumes they are to wear for fear that they should duplicate. Nowdon'tsay no. It's years since we met. Last February wasn't it?
Yours ever,Caroline Dump.
Printed on Blue Paper with the Royal Arms
In the name of the Queen's grace,Oyez!
Whereasthere has appeared before Us Henry Holt a Commissioner of the Queen's, &c. &c.
And Whereasthe said Henry Holt makethdeposition that he has against you (in writing)William Shakespeare, a claim for the sum of (in writing)£27 2s. 1d., now we hereby notify you that you are summoned to appear before us, &c. &c., upon (in writing)Wednesday the 25th of Mayin the Year of Our Lord (in writing)1601, given under the Common Seal this (in writing)second day of May 1601.
Henry Holt, a Commissioner of the Queen's &c. &c.
It is generally recognised in this country that an acquaintance more or less familiar with the Great, that is, with the very wealthy, and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service.
I am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own social rank, certain views which I think will not be unprofitable to them in this matter.
I will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty; to be the son of some professional man; to have been kept, at the expense of some anxiety to his parents, for five years or so at a public school, and to have proceeded to the University upon a loan.
With such a start he cannot fail, if he is inany way lively or amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called "The Great," and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction, unless they die prematurely of hard living or hereditary disease.
After such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship and patronage of these people would seem to be secure; and yet we know from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their betters at Winchester or Magdalen (to take two names at random) not two are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those London houses, which are rated at over £1000 a year.
The root cause of such failures is obvious enough.
The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would, so far as general opportunities go, be lost if one did notadvertise it; and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives. For by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the recitation of acquaintance with themselves.
Formerly—about seventy years ago—your man who would succeed recited upon the slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis, his friendship with the Great. It was one of Disraeli's methods of advancement. The Great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. William tells me he remembers his dear father warning me of this.
Those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to abandon methods so simple and to take refuge in allusion. Thus a young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and such a notability and swearing that hewould not meet him. For to profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that notability moved.
Or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and, on the whole, unfavourably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. While a third way was to use Christian names, and yet to use them with a tone of indifference, as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than friends.
But the Great are ever on the alert, and this habit of allusion was in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses; so that in our own time it has been necessary to invent another. I do not promise it any long survival, I write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my time, but I think a young man is well advised in this second decade of the twentieth century to assume towards the Great an attitude of silent and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them less well than he does.
Thus three men will be in a smoking room together. The one, let us say, will be the Master of the King's Billiard Room, an aged Jew who has lent money to some Cabinet Minister; the second a local squire, well-to-do and about fifty years of age; the third is my young reader, whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. The Master of the King's Billiard Room will say that he likes "Puffy." The squire will say he doesn't like him much because of such and such a thing; he will ask the young man for his opinion. Now, in my opinion, the young man will do well at this juncture to affect ignorance. Let him deliberately ask to have it explained to him who Puffy is (although the nickname may be familiar to every reader of a newspaper), and on hearing that it is a certain Lord Patterson he should put on an expression of no interest, and say that he has never met Lord Patterson.
Something of the same effect is produced when a man remains silent during a long conversation about a celebrity, and then towardsthe end of it says some really true and intimate thing about him, such as, that he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot bear his double eyelids or that his gout is very amusing.
Another very good trick, which still possesses great force, is to repudiate any personal acquaintance with the celebrity in question, and treat him merely as some one whom one has read of in the newspapers; but next, as though following a train of thought, to begin talking of some much less distinguished relative of his with the grossest possible familiarity.
A common and not ineffective way (which I mention to conclude the list) is to pretend that you have only met the Great Man in the way of business, at large meetings or in public places, where he could not possibly remember you, and to pretend this upon all occasions and very often. But this method is only to be used when, as a matter of fact, you have not met the celebrity at all.
As for letting yourself be caught unawares and showing a real and naïf ignorance of theGreat, that is not only a fault against which I will not warn you, for I believe you to be incapable of it, but it is also one against which it is of no good to warn any one, for whoever commits it has no chance whatsoever of that advancement which it is the object of these notes to promote.
When you are found walking with the Great in the street (a thing which, as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company with people of your position), it is as well, if your companion meets another of his own Order, to stand a little to one side, to profess interest in the objects of a neighbouring shop window, or the pattern of the railings. Such at least is the general rule to be laid down for those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better method, which is as follows:
Catch if you can the distant approach of the Other Great before your Great has spotted him, then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied by the pulling out of your watch, depart:for there is nothing that so annoys the Great during the conference of any two of them, as the presence of a third party of your station.
Since my remarks must be put into a brief compass (though I have much more to say upon this all-important subject) I will conclude with what is perhaps the soundest piece of advice of all.
Never under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift even of the smallest value, upon the Great. Never let yourself be betrayed into a generous action, nor, if you can possibly prevent it, so much as a generous thought in their regard. They are not grateful. They think it impertinent. And it looks odd. There is a note of equality about such things (and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in correspondence) which is very odious and offensive. Moreover, as has been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of the middle class falls into the habit of asking the Great to meals, of giving them books or pictures or betraying towards them in anyfashion a spirit of true companionship, he bursts; and that, as a rule, after a delay quite incredibly short. Some men of fair substance have to my knowledge been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight; from which spot I send these presents, and where, by the way, at the time of writing, the stock of forage in the forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the mainland.
God bless you!
He that will set out to lie without having cast up his action and judged it this way and that, will fail, not in his lie, indeed, but in the object of it; which is,imprimis, to deceive, butin ultimisor fundamentally, to obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not vainly and wantonly as for sport (saving a very few that are habitual), but rather for some good to be got or evil to be evaded: as when men lie of their prowess with the fist, though they have fought none—no, not even little children—or in the field, though they have done no more than shoot a naked blackamoor at a furlong. These lie for honour. Not so our stockers and jobbers, who lie for money direct, or our parliament men, who lie bestraught lest worse befall them.
Lies are distinguished by the wise into the Pleasant and the Useful, and again into the Beautiful and the Necessary. Thus a lie giving comfort to him that utters it is of the Lie Pleasant, a grateful thing, a cozening. This kind of lies is very much used among women. This sort will also make out good to the teller, evil to the told, for the pleasure the cheat gives; as, when one says to another that his worst actions are now known and are to be seen printed privately in a Midland sheet, and bids him fly.
The lie useful has been set outut supra, which consult; and may be best judged by one needing money. Let him ask for the same and see how he shall be met; all answers to him shall be of this form of lie. It is also of this kind when a man having no purse or no desire to pay puts sickness on in a carriage, whether by rail or in the street, crying out: "Help! help!" and wagging his head and sinking his chin upon his breast, while his feet patter and his lips dribble. Also let him roll his eyes. Thensome will say: "It is the heat! The poor fellow is overcome!" Others, "Make way! make way!" Others, men of means, will ask for the police, whereat the poorer men present will make off. But chiefly they that should have taken the fare will feel kindly and will lift the liar up gently and convey him and put him to good comfort in some waiting place or other till he be himself—and all the while clean forget his passage. For such is the nature of their rules. Lord Hincksey, now dead, was very much given to this kind of lie, and thought it profitable.
You shall lie at large and not be discovered; or a little, and for once, and yet come to public shame, as it was with Ananias and his good wife Sapphira in Holy Scripture, who lied but once and that was too often. While many have lied all their lives long and come to no harm, like John Ade, of North-Chapel, for many years a witness in the Courts that lied professionally, then a money-lender, and lastly a parliament-man for the county: yet he had no hurt of allthis that any man could see, but died easily in another man's bed, being eighty-three years of age or thereabouts, and was very honourably buried in Petworth at a great charge. But some say he is now in Hell, which God grant!
There is no lie like the winsome, pretty, flattering, dilating eyelid-and-lip-and-brow-lifting lie such as is used by beauty impoverished, when land is at stake. By this sort of lie many men's estates have been saved, none lost, and good done at no expense save to holiness. Of the same suit also is the lie that keeps a parasite in a rich man's house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter, a model upon a sculptor, and beggars upon all men.
Fools will believe their lies, but wise men also will take delight in them, as did the Honourable Mr. Gherkin, for some time His Majesty's Minister of State for the Lord Knows What, who, when policemen would beslaver him, and put their hands to their heads and pay court in a low way, told all that saw it what mummery it was; yet inwardly was pleased. The more at aloss was he when, being by an accident in the Minories too late and his hat lost, his coat torn and muddy, he made to accost an officer, and civilly saying, "Hi——" had got no further but he took such a crack on the crown with a truncheon as laid him out for dead, and he is not now the same as he was, nor ever will be.
Ministers of religion will both show forth to the people the evil of lying and will also lie themselves in a particular manner, very distinct and formidable: as was clear when one denounced from the pulpit the dreadful vice of hypocrisy and false seeming, whereat a drunkard not yet sober, hearing him say, "Show me the hypocrite!" rose where he was, full in church, and pointed to the pulpit, so that he was thrust out for truth-telling by gesture in that sacred place; as was that other who, when the preacher came to "Show me the drunkard," jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the parson's wife: a very mutinous act. But to Lying.
He that takes lying easily will take life hardly; as the saw has it, "Easy lying makeshard hearing," but your constructed and considered, your well-drafted lie—that is the lie for men grown, men discreet and fortunate. To which effect also the poet Shakespeare says in hisSonnets—but no matter! The passage is not for our ears or time, dealing with a dark woman that would have her Will: as women also must if the world is to wag, which leads me to that sort of lie common to all the sex of which we men say that it is the marvellous, the potent, the dextrous, the thorough, or better still, the mysterious, the uncircumvented and not explainable, the stopping-short and confounding-against-right-reason lie, the triumphant lie of Eve our mother: Iseult our sister: Judith, an aunt of ours, who saved a city, and Jael, of holy memory.
But if any man think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for his pains; and if any man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or compound, for he attempts the mastery of women.
Which no man yet has had of God, or will.
Amen.
The Dupe is an honest creature, and such honesty is the noblest work of God. The Dupe is not the servant of the Knave, but his ally. The Dupe does not, as too simple a political philosophy would have it, serve only for a material on which the Knave shall work; he is also the moral support of the Knave, strengthening and comforting the Knave's most inward soul and lending lubrication to the friction of public falsehood. For the Knave is of many sorts, and the Dupe helps them all.
The plumb Knave, or Knave Absolute, finds in the Dupe such an honest creature as does not revile him, and it is good to know that one is loved by some few honest souls. Thus the Knave Absolute is foolish indeed when he lets the Dupe see by gesture or tone that he thinkshim a fool, for the Dupe is very sensitive and touchy in all weathers.
The Knave Qualified (in his many incarnations) must have the Dupe about him or perish. Thus the Knave who would save his soul by self-deception feeds, cannibal-like, upon the straightforwardness of the Dupe, and says to himself: "How can I be such a Knave after all, since these good Dupes here heartily agree with me?"
The Knave Cowardly props himself upon that sort of courage in the Dupe which always accompanies virtue. "I run a risk," says he, "in proposing the State purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend the Old Knave went under thus in 1895; but the Good Dupe is a buckler in the fight; he will dare all because his heart is pure."
The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe to see to details and to meet men in ante-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining. This sort of Knave will have two or even three Dupes for private secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law.
The Dupe is in God's providence very numerous, for his normal rate of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death-rate low. On this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch the Dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by the Knave; nor is the one to be distinguished from the other by the coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one be old enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand, will not be of great service in any physical struggle and must not be depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse and when disturbed he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a Rogue Dupe will turn upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured.
The Dupe has his habitat, but that not easily defined, as in the suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where the leisured and the inane make their lives seem so much longer than those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the Dupe willsometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in such few years as wholly to discomfit the calculations of the Knaves. Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before numbers whom they had thought to be Dupes (seeing that the locality was Little Partington) but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-Dupes, men working with their hands or what-not, quite undeceivable, as often as not Atheist, and ready to storm the platform and tear the Knave alive.
The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been said above, will tolerate no hint of impatience. On the other hand, he needs no breaking in and will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible to travellers when they first come across the Dupe what burdens he will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole Plain appears to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses, howdahs sheltering masters and mistresses, cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable institutions, all as itwere endowed with a motion of their own until you stoop down and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the backs of an enormous migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for a Better Land.
The Dupe also differs from other creatures in that he will sleep comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death itself without dispute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about him a forlorn and naked feeling to which it were a pity to condemn him. His food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him, that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick, buck, and rear,and behave in a manner altogether out of his nature.
The Dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves to treat it shyly, and to flirt with it as it were. There is no prettier sight than to see a number of Dupes met together arching and curvetting, side-glancing and denying, before they plunge their heads and manes into the life-giving liquid.
It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his life very consistently happy, and on this account many not born Dupes, imitate the Dupes and would be of them, in which they fail, for the Dupe is God's creature and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation as has already been affirmed.
Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.
The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country, the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to what the love of England is in most men directed. For mostmen who love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.
The love of England has in it no true plains but fens, low hills, and distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable, small and ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers of England no long pageantry of battle. Nature has given Englishmen an appetite for battle, and between the two men who love England make a legend for themselves of wars unfought, and of arms permanently successful; though arms were they thus always successful would not be arms at all.
The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which aminority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed as yet to save the future of England. In no other land will you so readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right to doubt the common policy; but though you will nowhere discover such men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few.
The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of action and of vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the institution to sterilise with age and to grow fantastic.
The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at closer and at closer times (while we have lived) it has failed to save. Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by this music in their souls than by any other, wherever England isor is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you may discover what religion has been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epics arise. In men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength yet almost barren. Nourished and exampled by England, flourishing upon the field of England, the love of England is a love of the very earth: of the smell of growing things and of certain skies, and of tides in river-mouths, and of belts of sea.
If a man would understand this great thing England which is now in peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not consider the accident of England's success and failure, nor certain empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes the place, nor with some activework in contrast with which it seems so empty and unproducing a thing. He must not set it against a creed (it is not so high as that), nor against a conquest or a true empire such as Spain and Rome possessed.
If a man would understand the love of England he must do what hardly any one would dare to do: that is, he must clearly envisage England defeated in a final war and ask himself, "What should I do then?"
There is a contemptible habit of mind (contemptible in intellect, not in morals) which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of perception.
The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The mystics have never proved their theory true. But it is undoubtedly true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold; it is true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly manifold, and that one perception breeds one hundred others, so that we advance through life as through a pageant enjoying in greater and greater degree day by day (if we open ourselves to them) the glorious works of God.
There is a detestable habit of mind, whicheither does not understand, or sneers at, or despises, or even wholly misses—when it is persisted in—this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first colour for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those intimations of high and half-remembered things which a new aspect of a tree or house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us to forget, or to let grow stale, the pleasure with which the scent of woods blest us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of experience, kill humour and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less alive, it adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of sad knowledge as life, however well lived, must properly do, but a useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters it would persuade us that all things may be read and known and that nothingis worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing bears a fruit and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best an unexplained fragment. Even in that highest of fields, the field of service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and becomes useless: may be called abortive and fails its end.
These thoughts arose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my Mill the advance of a great storm cloud; for in the majestic progress which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from the Channel I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that which I very well knew was in its awfulness allied to the life of the soul.
For very many days the intense heat hadparched the Weald. The leaves dropped upon the ash and the oak, the grass was brown, our wells had failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant pools. We thought the fruits would wither; and our houses, not built for such droughts and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long after the cool of the evening had come.
At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over Egdean Side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us how it had rained in London—as though rain falling in London ever fell upon earth or nourished fruits and men!
We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of Heaven. But to-day the great storm came up, marching in a dark breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders about it; and it was personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate which the River Adur has pierced, leaving uponeither side the high chalk hills; the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and menacing cloud.
No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoplied could have mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy, that great idol (for it has been all of these things), which, since we have tilled the earth, we have watched, we have welcomed, we have combated, we have unfortunately worshipped. This was that God of the Storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets.
The Parish Church, which had seemed under the hard blue sky of the early morning a low brown thing, with its square tower of the Templars and of the Second Crusade, stood up now white, menacing, and visionary against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and stubbornly still, no leaves upon them moving at all.The Downs an hour away first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were but half seen, and at last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were struck with silence. The fowls nestled together, and the only sign that animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the whinny of a horse in a stable where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and the mad circling and swooping of a bird distracted by the change in the light.
For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my Mill a sort of driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow-shoot of rain; but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many parched fields and lanes, driving before the edge of the thunder. There was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into a cellar; it was like the opening of a mine doorto a draft. The vigour of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One might for some five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds advanced and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began to be heard as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbour next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill groaned, turning a little; it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon us. It lightened, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lands. The thunder ran through all this, not very loud but continuous, and a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the cloud. White wreaths blown out in jets as though by somecaprice in wilful shapes showed here and there, and here and there, against such a blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly, hurrying distracted left and right without a purpose. All the while the rain fell.
The village and the landscape and the Weald, the Rape, the valley, all my county you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied, and overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army; it was a victory more absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant.
When the storm had passed over northward to other places beyond, and when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was visible again very low upon the distant horizon, over the English sea, the memory of all this was likethe memory of a complete achievement. No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God.
Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.
The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a man see from the edges of theGuadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when, upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne, he turns back and looks westward over the Stockton plain towards the coast range which guards the Pacific.
The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of Severn toward the rank above rank of the Welsh solemnities beyond, until the straight line andheight of the Black Mountain against the sky bounds his view and frames it.
It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees.
The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of wall, cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.
Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye; sometimes in the summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles only; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.
Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great, noble range, unwooded and high against Heaven, guarding all the place, which I for my part knew from the day when first I came to know anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees; a place of sand and bracken in South England, whence such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation. In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man."
And so there was. There was a steading for me in the midst of those hills.
It was a little place which had grown upas my county grows, the house throwing out arms and layers, and making itself over ten generations of men. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century—but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light, built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.
It had been thrown out South—and this is quite against our custom; for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.
It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over againstit the little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good place was enclosed, silent, and secure.
"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond—all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.
For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home. To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midstof that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.
Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be, and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or, much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:
"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:
"Ah, and so did you!"
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:
"Not at all, for the chance I never had; all I have lost is my desire—no more."
"No, not only your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment of it." And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion to produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory of Heaven.
But the wood was empty. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before I end, to cite certain words very nobly attached to that greatinn, The Griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the sad Fen-Land near the Eastern Sea:
"England my desire, what have you not refused?"
The other day—indeed some months ago—I was in the company of two men who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an Englishman acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and rather proud of knowing it; the other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra.
The first had the advantage of his fellow in world-wide travel, the reading of many newspapers and (beside his thorough knowledge of Catalonian) a smattering of French, German, and American.
I was touched to see the care and deference and good-fellowship which the superior extended to the inferior in this colloquy.
I did not hear the beginning of it: it was the early middle part which I came in for; it was conducted loudly and with gestures uponthe part of the Andorran, good-humouredly but equally openly on the part of the Englishman, who said:
"I grant you that life is very hard for some of our town dwellers in spite of the high wages they obtain."
To which the Andorran answered: "There is nothing to grant, your Grace, for I would not believe their life was hard; but I was puzzled by what you told me, for I could not make out how they earned so much money, and yet looked so extraordinary." The Andorran showed by this that he had visited England.
At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said: "Do you think me extraordinary?"
The Andorran was a little embarrassed. "No no," he said, "you do not understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see, I mean unhappy and lacking humanity."
The Englishman smiled more genially stillin his good wholesome beard, and said: "Do I look to you like that?"
"No," said the Andorran gravely, "nor does that gentleman whom you pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron, Mr. Bernstein I think ... you were both well-fed and well-clothed ... and what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the poorest, and when I asked you about the poorest in your towns you told me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully working, twenty-five pesetas a week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a week! Oh ...! Why, I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved is a hundred pesetas; and with a hundred pesetas ...! Oh, one can buy a great brood sow; or if one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in the world; or again, a little mule just foaled, which in two years, mind you,in two years" (and here he wagged his finger) "will be a great fine beast" (andhere he extended his arms), "and thenextyear will carry a man over the hills and will sell for five hundred pesetas. Yes it will!"
The Englishman looked puzzled. "Well," said he, leaning forward, ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, "there's your pound a week."
The Andorran nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also.
"Now of course the man is not always in work."
"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with angry eyes, "the neighbours shall see to that!"
"No," said the Englishman, irritated, "you don't understand; he can't always find some one togivehim work."
"But whogiveswork?" said the Andorran. "Work is notgiven." And then he laughed. "Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it!" And he laughed more loudly.
"You don't understand," repeated the Englishman, pestered, "he can't work unless some one allows him to work for him."
"Pooh!" said the Andorran, "he could cut down trees or dig, or get up into the hills."
"Why," said the Englishman with wondering eyes, "the perlice would have him then."
The Andorran looked mournful: he had heard the name of something dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted lonely places and strangled men.
"Well then," went on the Englishman in a practical fashion, again ticking on his fingers, "let us say he can work three weeks out of the five."
"Yes?" said the Andorran, bewildered.
"He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in the five weeks.... I don't mind, call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like, or even eighteen."
"What is an 'average'?" said the Andorran, frowning.
"An average," said the Englishman impatiently, "oh, an average is what he gets all lumped up."
"Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely,"that he gets eighteen pesetas every Saturday?"
"No,no,NO!" struck in the Englishman. "Twenty-five pesetas, as you call them, when he can get work, and nothing when he can't."
"Good Lord!" said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself. "How does the poor fellow know whether perlice will not be at him again? It is enough to break a man's heart!"
"Well, don'targue!" said the Englishman, keen upon his tale. "He gets an average, anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them, a week. Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go in rent, and if he is a decent man, seven."
The Andorran was utterly at sea. "But if he is wretched, why should he pay, and if he is decent why should he pay still more?" he asked.
"Why, damn it all!" said the Englishman, exploding, "a man must live!"
"Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly, "that is why I am asking the question. Hepays this tax, you say, five pesetas, if he is wretched and seven if he is decent. But a man may be decent although he is wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the poor?"
"It isn't a tax," said the Englishman. "He pays it for his house."
"But a man could buy a house," said the Andorran, "with a few payments like that."
The Englishman sighed. "Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it anyhow."
"Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his turn, "you must have a wicked King. But, please God, he cannot spend it all on his pleasures."
"It isn't paid to the King, God bless him," said the Englishman. "The man pays it to his landlord."
"And suppose he doesn't?" said the Andorran defiantly.
"Well, the perlice," began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face showed that he was afraid of occult powers.
"So there, you see," went on the Englishman, calculating along with rapid content, "he's only got thirteen."
The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. "Well," said he doubtfully, "I will grant him thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a little cotton on the child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to buy a bed, why there is his straw."
"Straw's not decent, and we don't allow it," said the Englishman firmly; "he doesn't buy a bed always; sometimes he rents it."
"I don't understand," said the Andorran, "I don't understand."
There was a little pause during which neither of the two men looked at the other. The Englishman went on good-naturedly and laboriously explaining:
"Now let's come to bread."
"Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, "man lives by bread and wine."
"Well," said the Englishman, ignoring thisinterruption, "you see, bread for the lot of them would come to half that money."
"Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, "you are quite right. Bread is a very serious thing." And he sighed.
"Half of it," continued the Englishman, "goes in bread. And then, of course, he has to get a little meat."
"Certainly," said the Andorran.
"Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on, "and there's boots."
"Oh, he could do without boots," said the Andorran.
"No he can't," said the Englishman, "they all have to have boots; and then you see, there's tea."
The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. "You Englishmen are so fond of tea," he said, smiling. "I have noticed that you ask for tea. Juan has tea to sell."
The Englishman nodded genially. "I will buy some of him," he said.
"Well, go on," said the Andorran.
"And there's a little baccy, of course"—and he gave the prices of both those articles. "They're a leetle more than you might think," continued the Englishman, a little confused. "They're taxed, you see."
"Taxed again?" said the Andorran.
"Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, "not much; besides which, I haven't said anything was taxed yet: they pay about double on their tea and about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it. Oh, if they get regular work they're all right!"
"Then," said the Andorran, summing it all up, "they ought to do very well."
"Yes, they ought," said the Englishman, "but somehow they're not steady of themselves: they getpauperised."
"What is that?" said the Andorran.
"Why, they get to expect things for nothing."
"They think," said the Andorran cheerfully, "that good things fall from the sky. I know that sort: we have them." He thought he hadbegun to understand, and just after he had said this we came to a village.
I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these few lines, that I heard this conversation in Andorra valley itself, while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman, myself and an Ironist were proceeding through the mountains, riding upon mules.
We had come to the village of Encamps, and there we all got down to enter the inn. We had a meal together and paid, the four of us, exactly five shillings and threepence all together for wine and bread, cooked meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a cigar.
This was the end of the conversation in Andorra: it was my business to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point in political economy, to which I did justice; but the conventions of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this remarkable experience.