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The Library
GAN 1812
MICHIGA
ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
FRSITY O
Taite
Bickford
BYWAYS IN BOOKLAND
CONFESSIONS AND DIGRESSIONS
BYWAYS IN BOOKLAND
CONFESSIONS AND DIGRESSIONS
BY
WALTER A. MURSELL
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
1914
TO
THE MEMORY OF
M.
D.
R.
WHO LOVED BOOKS
AND NATURE AND HUMANITY
PREFACE
THE pages which follow make no pretension to
literary criticism ; they are a simple record of
happy and memorable hours spent in the com-
pany of favourite books, and a tribute of grati-
tude to their authors. Books have been my
companions from boyhood; and if the record
here traced is only the means of introducing a
few other boys to such congenial society, I shall
not be ashamed of having been egotistic enough
to set down some of my own impressions and
confessions.
W. A. M.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
I. THE BIRTH OF A BOOK-LOVER
II. FIRST FOOTSTEPS IN BOOKLAND -
III. THE COMRADESHIP OF BOOKS
IV. IN GREEN PASTURES -
V. BESIDE STILL WATERS -
VI. THE VALLEY OF TWILIGHT
VII. ON THE SPURS OF PARNASSUS
VIII. IN A BROWN STUDY
IX. A RECENT BYWAY -
X. THE GREATHEART OF BOOKLAND -
XI. THE PETER PAN OF BOOKLAND -
- 185
vil
BYWAYS IN BOOKLAND
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF A BOOK-LOVER
1
I CANNOT remember the time when I began to be a
book-lover. It is so far back that I fancy it must
be in that remote period when I had attained the
dignified age of “ a primordial, protoplasmal, atomic
globule.” Some things are in the blood, and we
cannot help ourselves. Some men are born reading
The Times, and they imbibe solid political opinions
with their excellent pap. It was not The Times that
won my infant suffrage; politics are a sealed book
to me, and the news of the day is far too old to be of
more than momentary interest. Events are limited
and monotonous, and one could forecast the contents
of the newspaper on any day of the week. But
human nature is a perennial surprise, and so it
comes to be that the interest of life is not in the
things that happen, but in the men who see.
No; I was born reading a Book Catalogue, and
life really began for me when I purchased my first
book with my own money. It was not a high-class
Byways in Bookland
literature I affected at that time, but it served its
turn. I passed through a beautiful and instructive
evolution. It began with The Boys of England
Novelettes, and proceeded thus : The Boy's Own
Paper, Young England, Tit-Bits, Cassell's Saturday
Journal, Chambers' Journal ; and it stopped at
Chambers' for ten years. When I say this was not
high-class literature, I intend no disrespect to any of
these excellent publications; I merely mean that
they are not classical or permanent. They are
all fugitive, and represent my apprenticeship to
periodicals. Accompanying this evolution, and
stimulating it at intervals, inoculating my taste (so
to speak) with various injections, were certain
volumes of standard reading to which reference will
presently be made, including The Pilgrim's Progress,
Robinson Crusoe, and The Arabian Nights. This
sealed my fate, and at the age of ten I knew myself
to be a book-lover, and at twelve I began to be a
book-buyer.
There is one great drawback to being a lover and
a buyer of books, and that is that it requires un-
limited pocket-money-a thing which I have never
possessed. Apart from this lamentable feature, how-
ever, I have had few richer delights than browsing
in bookshops. The sight of them and the smell of
them are alike delectable. They are what form and
outline and colour are to the artist, what beauty is
to the poet, what springtime is to the lover, what
summer meadows are to the child. It must not be
one of those bookshops where black-coated, eagle-
2
The Birth of a Book-Lover
eyed, obsequious servitors stand at every corner and
counter; who pounce upon you the moment you
enter the door ; who shadow you from shelf to shelf;
who pursue you with unwelcome attentions into the
second-hand department; who press all sorts of
new volumes on your notice; who continually ask
what it is you want and what they can do for you.
I have not the moral courage to tell them that I
have not the least idea what I want; that I have
come there to find out what I want; that the only
thing they can do for me is to let me alone. And
when by some unlucky chance I happen upon such
a shop, I mark it in my black books and shun it for
ever. But there are other bookshopsthanks be to
heaven !-where they know their business. They
leave you to prowl at large, to browse at leisure;
and if you go away without making a purchase, they
do not scowl, or lift a supercilious eyebrow, or follow
you with suspicious glances, as if they thought you
had a first edition secreted under your waistcoat;
they simply smile and wish you “Good-day,” and
never even mention an equivalent to “Will ye no
come back again !" They understand the peculiar
and delicate psychology of the book-lover.
There is a bookshop which will ever be imprinted
on my grateful memory; I sometimes see it in my
dreams, for it assisted at my literary birth. I said
there is a bookshop, but I should have said there
was, for, alas ! it has been swept away by the aggres-
sive new broom of the London County Council-a
tiny shop in a side-street off the Clapham Road,
Byways in Bookland
situate near The Plough. It was not strictly a
bookshop, but a newsagent's; but it had a budding
library in its diminutive rear-premises, and an occa-
sional and sporadic display of gaudily bound volumes
in the front window. It smelt strongly of saw-dust,
damp tea-leaves, mildewed publications, and printers'
ink; and to me this pungent complication of per-
fumes was as the odours of Araby. It was presided
over by a little pale, pleasant-faced woman, who
allowed me to prowl and browse to my heart's
content. It was not possible to prowl far nor to
browse extensively, for the whole establishment was
not more than about twelve feet by ten, and you could
reach anything you wanted without taking more
than a couple of steps. I was drawn to this place
by the appearance in the window of the small
volumes of Cassells National Library. They had
only just begun to come out then I was about
sixteen at the time—and I eagerly watched for their
appearance week by week. Small square books
they were, in paper covers, and excellently printed;
for threepence one might possess one of the choicest
specimens of English literature. It was here also I
bought a miniature edition of Shakespeare in twelve
volumes--red cloth backs and corners, marbled sides
-at a shilling a volume, which I still possess and
highly prize.
A year later I began a four years' sojourn in North-
West London, and here I lighted upon a second-
hand bookshop in the neighbourhood of Marylebone.
How many times have I walked across Regent's
UI
The Birth of a Book-Lover
Park, and spent whole afternoons in this retreat!
It was generally on winter days I went, and I shall
always associate the place with dark, foggy November
afternoons and dreary bleak December days, when
the gas was lit in the forenoon, and the iron stove at
one end of the shop shed a crimson glow upon the
floor, and diffused a grateful warmth throughout the
stuffy atmosphere, bringing out the fragrance of the
leather-bound volumes with peculiar pungency.
Three or four brothers kept the shop-pale-faced,
black-haired, dark-eyed, Roman-nosed men-who
never interfered with one's movements, but attended
assiduously to their accounts, and bound up one's
parcels with immaculate neatness.
The joy of this establishment was its miscel-
laneous character, its perfect freedom, its suggestion
of Bohemianism, its air of antiquity. One met all
sorts of queer people in it. The books themselves
were as the sand upon the seashore. I would pass
from shelf to shelf as a bee flits from flower to
flower, caressing the covers and sampling their
contents. I acquired a considerable amount of
strange lore in this predatory fashion, and learned
many things which were not to be derived from my
college curriculum. Such poetic taste as may be
mine was created and quickened here. The corner
where the poets dwelt drew me with irresistible
attraction. I still have a volume of Hood's Poems
from those precious shelves, bought on a biting
January afternoon when the sleet was whirling out-
side; a volume containing a book-plate on the fly-
Byways in Bookland
leaf, bearing the strange device of its former owner
-a bare arm bent at the elbow, springing from
à curious bar or perch, the fist tightly clenched
around a poised javelin, and underneath the
printed name of Mervyn Marshall. I have often
wondered since who he was, and how his book found
its way to the second-hand catalogue, and what
was the significance of the javelin in the clenched
fist.
The last time I was in London I went on a
pilgrimage to this second-hand shrine. I wanted
to renew the savour of it. As I walked across the
park the old days came back as in a dream, and I
conjured up a vision of what used to be a quarter of
a century before. I saw the dark winter days, with
the drifting fog and the frosty air gripping the nostrils
like snuff. I saw the black stove, with an iron
chimney mounting upwards through the dim roof,
shedding the ruddy glow upon the floor and upon the
shelves in its immediate neighbourhood. I saw it
glinting brightly as of yore upon the musty folios,
and caught its friendly gleam on the gilt-lettering
of some richly bound volume, and read its title by
the light of the fire. I saw the three black brothers,
with their pale ascetic faces and their hawk-like noses
lending a certain intellectual strength and distinction
to their clean-cut features, clad in suits of solemn
black, as though they were the undertakers in what
Lord Rosebery might call this “ cemetery of books."
I saw the shop itself, old, long, and rambling, dimly
lit, half-filled with floating fog, haunted by ghostly
The Birth of a Book-Lover
figures drifting vaguely about like Shades in search
of some lost talisman or open sesame.
In my dream I caught the old unearthly smell.
It is not to be described by mortal pen. Old books
always have a strange smell, but these old books had
a perfectly miraculous smell. There were so many
of them, and they were herded so closely together,
and their ages were so various, and their bindings
were so miscellaneous, and the whole atmosphere
was impregnated with a heavy literary incense that
made the head to swim like opium, and sent one
drowsing through the land of dreams. Stevenson
refers to the shop of his boyhood in Leith Walk,
where he bought his stage-plays and sheets of charac-
ters, "penny plain, and twopence coloured," and
declared that it “smelt of Bibles.” My shop had
something of that smell, too, but it was more power-
ful than Bibles. If I were to say there was a whiff
of the earthy odours of the Tube Railways in it, I
should be correct; yet there was something else. If
I were to suggest that there was an aroma of moulder-
ing walls, such as meets you on entering ancient
crypts and churches, I should be true to fact; yet
there was an extra. It was a combination of odours
-printers' ink, musty leaves, antique leather, imper-
fectly laid dust, all warmed up by the glowing stove,
and rendered ten times more commanding. It would
float out at the shop door when it was open, and
hover stagnant over a few yards of pavement; or it
would be caught up by a passing breeze and sent
prospecting up the street in quest of some literary
Byways in Bookland
Y
nose, which, being a connoisseur in such perfumery,
would be drawn instantly towards its native paradise.
I recalled as I walked how I used to wander there
among the other Shades for hours. There is an
extraordinary fascination to a bookman in dipping
into all sorts of volumes in such a place as this. It
is like setting forth upon an adventure, or going out
to meet the mistress of one's heart. You can never
tell what treasure you may light upon, or what new
surprise may break from the familiar pages of some
favourite, well beloved. I recalled the day when I
spent the best part of a wintry afternoon poring over
a magnificent illustrated copy of The Arabian Nights.
My person was so adjusted to the glowing fire that
I threw a gigantic shadow on the floor and wall, and
when I awoke from the dream of my book I almost
dropped it in terror, imagining myself confronted by
one of the Genii of the East. There was only one
richer dream than this pedatory browsing, and that
was to find something that met both one's desires
and one's resources, and to bear it homeward in
triumph to the snug armchair in the chimney-corner.
I had arrived at this point in my meditations when
I reached the enchanted ground. At first I could
not find the shop. Not a sign of the old familiar
features was visible. I retraced my steps several
times, and began to examine the shop-fronts and the
names with greater intentness. At last I found it,
but oh, how changed! My vision came tumbling to
earth. The same name, but the countenance of my
old love was sadly altered. Instead of the flaring
The Birth of a Book-Lover
gas with a foggy halo round it, there glittered electric
globes of ghastly tint; instead of the black stove
with iron chimney piercing the rafters, there now
appeared a modern fire-place with glazed tiles, and
a serpentine system of hot-air pipes coiling about the
walls. Where was the little counter where the books
were piled and the parcels were made up and the
coins passed hands ? Gone! An open floor-space
now, like a waste, howling wilderness. Where were
the familiar shelves ? Vanished! Not a landmark
was the same. The shop extended now into remote
regions at the rear; iron galleries ran round near
the roof, reached by cunning spiral staircases; sub-
terranean caverns yawned in the centre, to which
one descended by wide polished steps; the Poet's
Corner was removed. I could not find my way about
this new emporium, nor lay my hand upon the
inevitable shelf as in the days of “auld lang syne”;
I was lost in pained bewilderment.
Not even the smell was the same. Something
diabolic, or at least carbolic, had expelled it for ever.
It was as though some pompous literary County
Council, inflated with its own importance, bursting
with schemes of improvement, breathing household
laws, radiating ardour for the people's good (for
which the people are scandalously taxed), had de-
scended upon this erstwhile happy realm with their
rampant Radical besom and swept it ruthlessly into
oblivion. It had gone the way of Booksellers'
Row, that Paradise Lost of my youth. I wandered
dismally through these transfigured halls, gazed
Byways in Bookland
helplessly upon the newly fitted shelves, handled a
volume or two in surreptitious fashion, as though
fearful of being detected in a felony, and then dis-
creetly and mournfully withdrew. It is a greater
and more wonderful bookshop now, and a genera-
tion which “knew not Joseph” will clasp it to its
heart. But to me it was not the same. I may,
perhaps, get used to it in time, but it is very doubtful.
It is not the old place I once loved. The old order
has changed, and with it has passed the glamour of
early years, when the thoughts of youth were long,
long thoughts.
IO
CHAPTER II
FIRST FOOTSTEPS IN BOOKLAND
THE books we read when we are children make a
deep impression. The mind is plastic then, and
takes the impress readily. The imagination is
awake ; the sense of wonder is alive ; and life is full
of surprises. Books come to us then as a kind of
talisman, an open sesame to a new world. The books
I read before I was sixteen have become an actual
part of me. I have read hundreds since, but not one
has left so deep a mark as some half-dozen volumes
pored over by the hour in those far-off halcyon
days.
The first three books of which I have any remem-
brance are Holiday House, Reading without Tears,
and Parables from Nature. In the first of these, a
fearsome encounter with a mad bull is all that
remains upon my mind. The second was a collec-
tion of highly moral stories in very large print, of
which I retain only a hazy remembrance, the most
impressive thing to my very youthful mind being the
title, which struck me as being both beautiful and
pathetic in a wholly indefinable way, and more
than once affected me (for some inscrutable reason)
II
Byways in Bookland
to the very emotion it was designed to banish. The
third was my favourite, and Mrs. Alfred Gatty was
for some time enthroned as a goddess. Her know-
ledge of Natural History appeared to me profound,
and the authentic conversations she overheard
among butterflies, caterpillars, frogs, and glow-
worms, were positively uncanny. What the Weather-
cock said to the Sundial seemed to me a masterpiece
of veracious narrative.
But the first real "event" in my literary career
was The Pilgrim's Progress. Strange, perhaps, that
it should be so, for The Pilgrim's Progress was
frankly understood to be “a Sunday book," and was
only produced on Sunday afternoons in order to act
as a charm towards the preservation of Sabbatic
peace. It certainly had that effect, for although “a
Sunday book,” the spell of Bunyan was sufficient to
overcome all the unregenerate emotions aroused by
that hateful phrase. The moment I opened the
book and saw the quaint illustrations, and began to
read the strong simple Saxon--what I believe is
called “nervous English”—I was safe till tea-time,
and could be left without fear to my own devices.
Giant Despair was a great “ pal” of mine; and an
illustration of Giant Pope, sitting with a disconsolate
countenance at the mouth of a cave biting his nails,
was to me the summit of pictorial art. The im-
mortal page whereon is writ the delectable incident
of “the stinking dungeon” is dim to this day
with the persistent imprint of grimy thumbs and
fingers. As for Apollyon, he was placed high upon
I2
First Footsteps in Bookland
11
1
my list of heroes; and a picture of him, with smoke
issuing from his belly and fire from his mouth and
nostrils, will be found graven upon my heart when
I die.
After Bunyan came Ballantyne. One of those
mysterious but delightful persons who sometimes
cross the pathway of ingenuous youth-a friend of
the family, but to the boy an obscure but congenial
unknown, who dispenses half-crowns with lavish
hand-presented me on my birthday with The Coral
Island, and I read that book until I knew it by heart.
It described the adventures of three boys on a coral
island in the Pacific Ocean, and I knew Jack,
Ralph, and Peterkin better than I knew my own
schoolmates. They were veritable human beings,
and I prayed nightly for their welfare, and implored
a kind Heaven to permit me to be wrecked with them
also upon some convenient occasion. It is a great
boys' book. The incident of the Diamond Cave is
embedded in my mind, and I could re-tell it at the
age of Methusaleh.
Then one day came a silvery shaft of light from
the Orient and filled me with the dreamy romance
of strange lands lit with large, low moons, balmy
with spices, feathery with palms, baggy with Turkish
trousers, fragrant with Turkish tobacco, doubtful
with Turkish morals, succulent with Turkish delight.
I blessed the Sultan for his stern decree, and I
blessed Scheherezade for her inventive manner of
evading it. Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, The Forty
Thieves, and The Porter and the Three Ladies of
.
O
Byways in Bookland
Bagdad were the realities of existence, while the
butcher, the baker, the postman, and the housemaid
(whom I met daily) were mere shadows.
About the same time Robinson Crusoe arrived upon
--the scene. I knew him with an excessive familiarity.
Are there any people quite so real as those we meet
with in the fiction of our youth ? When I walked to
school, it was not through paved streets, but through
waving groves and on sunlit sands. Through a
clearing in the forest I beheld, with sudden horror,
the fire of the savages gleaming, and saw them
dancing naked round the flames, celebrating some
infamous orgy. The prosaic elder declares it was
only some men mending the road that I saw, but I
know better. To this day I can feel the thrill with
which through Crusoe's eyes I saw the footprint in
the sand, and knew that for me solitude was over.
The isle henceforth was haunted.
Close on the heels of Crusoe came Gulliver. He
had not quite the same simple charm as his pre-
decessor. There was a suspicion now and then that
he was "codding" you, and had his tongue in his
cheek. He was not an Israelite indeed, in whom
there was no guile. Mr. Lemuel Gulliver was out for
the day to relate his adventures, and like many
adventurers was an expert with the long-bow.
Crusoe was a simple and devout soul in comparison.
I know, for I have lived with him. But though
Gulliver was a liar, he was a really magnificent liar;
and, like those innocent folk who deprecate scandal,
but thrive on it, one hovered near him in a pleasing
14
First Footsteps in Bookland
flutter of excitement, wondering what he was going
to say next.
Then Captain Nemo appeared in Twenty Thousand
Leagues under the Sea, with his mysterious submarine
that ran through the hulls of vessels and sunk them,
as easily as a needle through sail-cloth. Many an
enchanted hour did I sit in the wonderful saloon of
The Nautilus, watching the gambols of the strange
creatures of the deep through the plate-glass windows
in that remarkable vessel; and listened to the melan-
choly strains of Captain Nemo's organ pulsing through
the corridors; and wandered in the weirdly beautiful
coral cemetery; and witnessed the terrific slaughter
of the octopi; and waited in awe-struck silence for
the impact of the steel ram that was to pierce some
doomed ship and send her to her death. An absorb-
ing tale, and to an imaginative boy irresistible.
This brought me to the threshold of the classics;
and when my father gave me Pickwick, I was hence-
forth a slave to Dickens; and when I discovered an
old copy of Shakespeare and read Hamlet, it marked
a transition stage in my mental history. Sam Welley
and the Melancholy Dane opened two new wings, so
to speak, in the palace of my brain, and fresh guests
came clamouring for hospitality.
There are but few occasions in reading when one
feels the authentic thrill of inspiration. I can recall
three. The first was a thrill of surprise. It came in
Robinson Crusoe, at the moment when Crusoe comes
suddenly upon the footprint in the sand. I remember
how, on reading that, my boy's heart stood still a
. 15
Byways in Bookland
1
second and then began thumping like a sledge-
hammer. It was not reading, it was adventure. I
was actually there. For the time being I, too, was
clothed in goat-skins, and was scouring 'my island
with interest and wonder. Hitherto I had fondly
imagined myself to be alone, and the discovery of
this naked footprint struck a chill to my marrow and
filled my mind with the gloomiest forebodings. Of
course, it could only mean savages; there was no
doubt about that. And that could only mean—well,
there are some things upon which it is better not to
dwell. Enough to remark that somebody would
probably enjoy a good and cheap repast; but not I.
The second was a thrill of fear. It occurred in
Treasure Island, when I heard the tap-tap-tap of
Blind Pew's stick along the lonely frozen road. It
was a weird, sinister, diabolical business. A more
ghostly effect, or one more nicely calculated to strike
panic into a boy's veins, could not have been created.
At that awful juncture a kind of paralysis seized me.
I wanted to throw down the book and leap to my
feet, but I was congealed in my chair, “ distilled
almost to a jelly with the act of fear.” It was like
the fatal fascination of the serpent's eye. That
horrible blind man with the iron grip was coming; I
could hear the thud of his groping staff growing
louder every moment; I wanted to arise and flee,
and all I could do was to clutch the arms of my
chair in stricken desperation. It was a kind of mental
vertigo. Even now, when I read the passage, the
vividness of my feelings on that first perusal recurs
16
First Footsteps in Bookland
to me, and I cannot help lingering over the grisly
page like an epicure over a favourite dish.
The third was a thrill of beauty. It lies hid in the
immortal passage from Lavengro. “Life is sweet,
brother.” “Do you think so ?” “Think so !—There's
night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon,
and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise
a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother,
who would wish to die?" ... "In sickness,
Jasper ?” “There's the moon and the stars, brother."
“In blindness, Jasper ?” “There's the wind on the
heath, brother.” The words come into the narrative
so unexpectedly. The scholar-gipsy comes suddenly
upon a man sitting on the heath. It is his old
acquaintance, Jasper Petulengro. Then ensues the
brief dramatic dialogue, of which the above forms
a part. I recollect that when I first read the passage.
I laid the book down, closed my eyes, and repeated
the words over and over in a kind of ecstasy. The
effect was indescribable. Yet even now I cannot tell
what it is in the passage that is so affecting. One
might doubtless analyze it, but I refuse to make the
attempt. One can only dissect the dead, and this
palpitates with life. It is the stuff of which poetry
is made, as beautiful and elusive as the will-o-'the-
wisp. Imagination claims it for its own.
Pagan, you say? No doubt: Jasper Petulengro
had no belief in a hereafter. His father and mother
have died since Lavengro and he last met, and he
deems death to be the end of man. “More's the
pity,” says he. “Why do you say so ?” asks his
17
Byways in Bookland
comrade. And then follow the exquisite sentences
quoted. Such paganism is at least better than any
religion that despises life and sees no glory in this
present world.
“Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”
The beauty of the whole thing is that, despite the
darkness of the end, Jasper found life here to be fair
and well worth the living. It would never have
occurred to him to ask, “ Is life worth living ?" To
him the question would be blasphemy. “Life is
sweet, brother.” “Do you think so ?” “Think so !
..." I like that reiterated “Think so!” There is
something explosive about it-indignant, emphatic,
almost contemptuous. Who but a fool would ask
whether life is really sweet, while night and day are
making history, while sun, moon, and stars are
writing poetry, while a wind on the heath sweeps
all cobwebs from the brain ?
Some men who have no belief in a Hereafter lose
all faith in the Here; they take as their frivolous
motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
I have heard even religious folk say that if they
knew they were to die in a year, they would spend
that year having “a good time," which, being vulgarly
but truly interpreted, means that they would “go on
the bust.” That is a far deeper and darker paganism
than Jasper Petulengro's. It is a poisonous growth.
18
First Footsteps in Bookland
Jasper found life sweet, but he would not make it
sordid. He loved it for its health and sanity and
beauty. A return to Nature with him did not mean
a return to nastiness, but a bracing worship of the
bright, the wholesome, and the clean. A conversa-
tion like this could never emanate from a complex
civilization. We who spend our dull days amid
bricks and mortar, doing what we are pleased to call
business, cannot understand this attitude towards
life. We think it silly, sentimental, impossible, un-
practical. Be it so. It is our own sore loss. Stocks,
mines, and shares mean more to us than sun, moon,
and stars.
Persons who dwell habitually beneath solid roofs
and within four solid walls have no notion of the
real sweetness of life. Such persons may indeed
wish to die. No man with a wholesome soul really
wishes to die; and to have a wholesome soul one
must be a lover of the open, a devotee of Nature, a
worshipper of Mother Earth. I do not wonder at
the ages of the Patriarchs: they knew something
about the wind on the heath. I recall that lovely
passage in Richard Jefferies : “No one else seems to
have seen the sparkle on the brook, or heard the
music at the hatch, or to have felt back through the
centuries. ..No one seems to understand how I
got food from the clouds, nor what there was in the
night, nor why it is not so good to look at it out of
window.” Jefferies would have understood Jasper;
they are kindred spirits. The mischief with us is
that we are content to look at the world out of
19
Byways in Bookland
window, generally with the window shut. The
secret of life does not come so. Wordsworth did
not write his poetry by lamplight; it came to him
as he rambled over the heathy Quantocks with
Coleridge, or strolling in Cumberland dales, or
musing on the margin of quiet lakes, or climbing
the crests and ridges of the hills. The result is that
his is the poetry that heals; it is serene with an
inviolable peace.
A cynical friend of mine says that it is easy
enough to talk about the flowers and the stars when
you have five thousand a year. To this I give an
unequivocal denial. Great possessions do not rouse
the poet in the breast; they usually smother him.)
Jasper was not a millionaire ; he was a gipsy. I
have found the keenest appreciation of life's sweet-
ness and beauty among people of very humble origin
and with a very small balance in the bank. Their
bank is generally a teapot or the foot of an old
stocking. When a man has five thousand a year it
is not at all easy to talk about sun, moon, and stars;
it is easier to talk of the races and motors and Monte
Carlo. And as Bagshot remarks: “The lights of the
Casino put out the stars !” Yes, yes—but “ In sick-
ness, Jasper ?” “There's the moon and the stars,
brother.” “In blindness, Jasper ?” “There's the
wind on the heath, brother.” He allows for every-
thing. Accidents cannot disturb him. Civilization
has not invaded the sanctuary of his heart. He has
reached the quiet seats above the thunder.
Writing of these first footsteps in Bookland re-
20
First Footsteps in Bookland
minds me that history repeats itself. There is a
volume in our house that goes by the name of The
Beast Book. It is the property of my youngest son,
to whom it is the sum of wisdom and the joy of life.
He cannot read as yet, and his four-year-old tongue
performs the quaintest pranks in trying to make
known his wants or in opening the flood-gates of
his heart. Like all children, he has a mania for
stories, and he loves being read to; and if a tale, a
page, a paragraph, a sentence, specially appeals to
his nimble fancy, he will have that tale, page, para-
graph, sentence, repeated until the reader feels the
premonitory symptoms of madness.
I was roused from slumber not long ago by these
lines :
“Marching down the street they come,
Fife and cornet, pipe and drum.”
I heard them again and again: they sounded like
the tramp of an army. My wife was the victim this
time, and she was repeating these lines with the
patience of a saint, yet with the emphasis of despera-
tion. In time the repetition became mechanical,
and with fixed, unseeing eye and automatically
moving lips, she expelled the distracting syllables
as if worked by a wire.
My son has many tattered volumes in his choice
library, but The Beast Book easily holds first place in
his affections. For myself, I mourn the day that
introduced it beneath my roof. It was a Christmas
present from one of a horde of adoring aunties, and
a more thoughtless gift could not be imagined.
21
Byways in Bookland
Temperament was not considered; consequences
were not thought of. Many a time since that book
came into our house I have been moved like Job to
open my mouth and curse my day. My son has a
soul that seems knit in some mysterious fashion
with the whole animal kingdom. He is in league
with the beasts of the field, and will certainly be
present at that rapturous moment when the lion lies
down with the lamb. Conceive a young gentleman
of four, clad in microscopic green breeks with jersey
to match, who talks animals all day and thinks that
heaven and the Zoo are one; whose last thoughts
at night linger lovingly on elephants, and whose first
thoughts at dawn burst into broken and imperfect
speech concerning the hippopotamus; whose walks
abroad are inconceivably lengthy and distressing,
owing to his wanting to stand on kerbstones to
watch every horse, and to be lifted on to walls and
fences to see every cow and pig and sheep; and it
will at once be perceived that the gift of a Beast Book
would be like the putting of a match to powder.
It was.
The Beast Book is profusely illustrated, and con-
tains about fifty short chapters on as many different
animals. The peculiarity of the book is that each
animal is made to tell its own story, to describe its
own characteristics; and in several cases two or
three beasts of a species are brought together in
deep and intimate converse. These dramatic con-
versations afford the richest delight to the enamoured
youth. I believe I could pass a respectable examina-
22
First Footsteps in Bookland
tion in beasts of all sorts, shapes, and sizes. I know
more about elementary zoology in three months than
I have ever known in my previous life-time. I have
read The Beast Book to its owner at all hours of the
day, and its graphic sentences have stuck in my
brain and recurred suddenly at all manner of odd,
inconvenient, and highly embarrassing moments.
By far the worst time for reading aloud is the
morning, especially the early morning. The hour
of 7, or even 6, a.m. is the hour at which the owner
of The Beast Book awakes; the volume is lying handy
on the counterpane or beneath his pillow, ready for
instant reference. A lamentable characteristic of
the owner is his ability to awake all over, so to
speak, and all at once. He requires no decent
interval for meditation. He has no somnolent
moments on waking during which to rub his eyes
and yawn and scratch his head and gaze at the
ceiling, and gradually come to full possession of his
senses. There is nothing whatever of this maturer
pantomime belonging to him. When he wakes, he
wakes fully; bursts into completeness of being at a
bound; sits bolt upright in bed on the instant; and,
with eyes as open and blue as the sea, stares blandly
at the morning. Immediately also the strings of his
tongue are loosed. He requests to know things as
soon as his eyes are open. His thirst for miscel-
laneous information burns the moment his head
rises from his pillow. Profound theological ques-
tions have startled me from my slumbers between
six and seven. Queries which would stagger philo-
23
Byways in Bookland
sophers, and demand for light upon matters which
angels desire to look into, have sounded clamorously
at my bedside at unholy hours, filtering slowly
through the mists of sleep into my drowsy brain. I
cannot awake immediately. I have to do it by
instalments. The days when I could bound from
bed like a cannon-ball on the instant of waking are
gone beyond recall. I must have a quarter of an
hour at least to come to myself after the weird
adventures of the night.
But the worst of all the requests that come to my
heavy ears in these early morning hours is that I
will read The Beast Book. It is not a polite sugges-
tion; it is a demand, an autocratic decree, enforced
occasionally with a thump upon the ribs or a great
round chubby face lifted against mine. The volume
is thrust into my limp hand. I manage to unglue
one lack-lustre eye, and begin to read in muffled
tones. The book opens abruptly with a conversa-
tion between the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee. I
commence, breathing heavily : “How very like a
man I look," said the Gorilla. “I have thirty-two
teeth, and a broad flat chest. I don't wear a tail,
and I am called a man-like ape.” It is incredible
how sentences like these imprint themselves on the
brain in this semi-conscious state. The repetition
of them morning by morning for several weeks has
almost changed my individuality. I find myself
wildly impersonating all manner of birds, beasts,
and fishes, and imparting various and incredible
information about my personal habits. I dread lest
24
First Footsteps in Bookland
in some moment of bestial obsession I should greet
some astonished friend with the solemn words: “I
don't wear a tail ... my teeth are made to gnaw
...I am a rodent ... I have twelve stomachs,
and I feed upon my hump... I am a pouched
animal ... I am an odd-toed beast-I have only
three toes!” This is too dreadful to contemplate,
and my only hope is that the owner of The Beast Book
will soon transfer his affections to another volume.
CHAPTER III
THE COMRADESHIP OF BOOKS
THERE are many styles of writing, as many as the
men and women who write, but style may be divided
roughly into two--the conversational and the literary.
A book written in a literary style may be more
enduring, but a book that talks to you is a book
that touches the heart. The first excites admiration,
the second arouses gratitude. Classic expression is
often very beautiful and telling, but somehow it is
not friendly ; it seems aloof, remote, cold. Homely
words and phrases, quaint turns of thought, abrupt
sentences, sudden excursions from the main theme,
the charm of surprise—these leave a more lasting
impression on the mind than a manner of writing
that goes on and on with a steady tramp of sentences
in an undeviating march to a desired goal. One
could not read Dr. Johnson's rolling ponderosity for
any length of time, but one could listen to his talk
for ever.
There are some men who have the rare power of
writing as they speak, with the result that their per-
sonality is conveyed miraculously to the printed page;
and we feel as if we were holding conversation with
26
The Comradeship of Books
a friend rather than reading a book. These are the
books we come to love and cherish. Charles Lamb
is such a writer. In quite another vein Emerson
is one. Such writing is far from easy. Both Lamb
and Emerson were in the habit of polishing their
work, and taking infinite pains with it. To write a
true talking book is indeed more difficult than to
write a literary one. To write colloquially is by no
means the same as to write carelessly. Slipshod
and slovenly methods will secure neither gratitude
nor immortality.
The wonder of a talking book is its infinite sug-
gestiveness. In reading Emerson, I find myself
pausing a dozen times in a page in order to ponder
some provocative paradox or pregnant phrase.
Reading a logically progressive author is like walk-
ing on a turnpike road to a definite bourne, counting
the milestones one by one; but reading a suggestive,
provocative, allusive author is like rambling over
the hills--at every step there is something fresh to
catch the attention, some entrancing view presented
to the eye, and one thinks of distance not at all.
For my own part, I value more and more the
books that set my own mind at work. It is the
same with preachers. There are preachers who take
a text, divide it up mechanically, proceed according
to the stereotyped rules of homiletics, and present
their message in a series of elaborate paragraphs
and logical sequences. There are other preachers
to whom a text is a window through which they
gaze upon an entrancing garden or a spreading
27
Byways in Bookland
landscape, and their message comes in a series of
surprises. People of precise and geometrical mind
complain of such preachers that you never know
what they will say next. It seems to me a prepos-
terous criticism. That is the very man I want to
hear. Truth to the poet is like a rainbow; to the
precisian it is like a line of railway. There are
books that simply set the mind racing. They make
the world such a large place, and life such a kaleido-
scopic thing. That is the power of a book like the
Bible, which is pre-eminently a talking book. It
has not a pedestrian page in it, save perhaps where
a list of unpronounceable names meets the eye ;
and yet, when you come to think of it, few things
are more suggestive than a genealogical tree. The
Bible can illumine the earth with a sentence, and
open heaven with a phrase.
One of the very best writers of talking books is
Charles Lamb. He is essentially a fireside crony, a
man to company with by the winter hearth in slip-
pered ease, when the lamp is lit, the curtains are
drawn, and the favourite briar is drawing sweetly
beneath one's nose. There is not a more entirely
lovable author in the whole range of English litera-
ture than Elia. He is a master in the art of the un-
expected in thought and expression. There is no one
else whose style in the least resembles his. It bears
the ineffaceable brand of individuality on every page.
In the matter of titles alone Lamb is full of quaint
surprises. Roast Pig, Chimney Sweeps, Old China,
Poor Relations, and Dream Children mingle together
28
The Comradeship of Books
with perfect propriety within the same covers. Did
ever any writer hold his subject with so light a hand
as Elia ? He is delightfully discursive. His digres-
sions are manifold, and his bypaths are as full of
charm as a Devonshire lane or a Scottish glen. Alas!
there is no such writing now.
A marvellous thing is this transmission of person-
ality to the printed page. It is impossible for some
writers to be anonymous. They cannot write a
dozen lines without giving themselves away, so dis-
tinctive is their style and method and flavour. Their
way of thinking is entirely their own, and we come
to look for it and to love it. When a writer has
once captured our hearts in this fashion, no amount
of adverse comment or searching criticism has power
to blunt his appeal or to lower his prestige. Men
like Dickens, Lamb, Stevenson, have their detractors,
but the men themselves are not affected by the rang-
ing of the critical guns upon them. I have met
people who “cannot see anything in Stevenson."
What can one do but gaze at them with a pitying
eye? A man once told a certain renowned preacher
that his sermons always made his head ache. The
critic has not spoken to the preacher since the latter
put the very pertinent question, “Is that the fault of
my sermons or of your head ?”
Some personalities are so pronounced that they
provoke attention, and perhaps hostility, immedi-
ately. Two of the most provoking personalities of
the present time are G. K. Chesterton and Bernard
Shaw. The perpetual paradoxes of the one and the
29
Byways in Bookland
incisive satire of the other are a continual challenge
to the reader to “come on.” I have heard of a
bookseller who declines to deface his counter with
Chesterton, and who, when asked for Chesterton's
books, recommends Caird's Sermons or Annie Swan.
I know an excellent and most kindly man to whom
the name of Bernard Shaw is like an intellectual
mosquito. “Don't mention that man's name in my
presence !” he shouts. “ Have you ever read any of
“ Never! And what's more, I never mean to read
them !” There will be no joy among the angels over
this literary sinner repenting.
It is an excellent and friendly rule when one has
read a good book to pass it on to somebody else. I
do not mean bodily, for lent books, like umbrellas,
have an extraordinary affinity with the Prodigal
Son, save that they seldom, if ever, return from their
wanderings in the far country. But you can at
least tell your friends of the books you have enjoyed,
though it must be admitted that it requires some
temerity to do even this much, on account of the
diversity of literary taste. There was a time when I
was eager to recommend books to other people, but
I have now discontinued the practice. I used to
think that what interested me was certain to interest
others, but, needless to say, this is a complete delu-
sion. Yet it is natural for youth to imagine that its
enthusiasms must be contagious and awaken similar
joys and panegyrics in one's friends; it is as natural
30
The Comradeship of Books
77
as for a newly accepted lover to suppose that the
whole world is thrilling with him in his passion,
and to wonder why everyone else is not walking on
air. The ecstatic swain passes blithely down the
street dreaming fondly of his mistress's eyebrows and
hugging his own bliss, and half expects to be stopped
at every yard or so to receive the warm congratula-
tions of his fellow-creatures. But the world goes
stolidly about its stupid business, and cares nothing
for his dreams.
I used to have similar feelings about books.
Whenever my heart was captured by a fine story, I
wanted everyone else to be smitten with its charms
and to share my enthusiasm. But ever since the
gloomy day when an intelligent young man informed
me that he could not read Pickwick, and a lady for
whose intellect and character I had immense respect
told me that on my recommendation she had been
reading Oliver Twist, and had just managed to “wade
through it,” I have been afraid to open my lips about
the books that have moved me. I cannot bear to
have my favourites flouted and despised.
Many intelligent persons are woefully limited in
their literary tastes. They have no generous mental
hospitality. They have violent prejudices. They
are hopelessly parochial. A flatly refuses to read a
tale which is not plentifully garnished with Dukes
and Earls and Marquises. B will have nothing to
do with a book which has any moralizings in it. C
cannot stand description. D misses out all the
sentimental parts. X is not satisfied unless the
31
Byways in Bookland
pages ring with ceaseless action. Y won't have any-
thing to do with a book which does not end happily.
Z is impatient of anything epigrammatic or which
gives evidence of finished style. Sometimes a man
will fall so headlong in love with one particular
author that he will read nobody else, and even sug-
gest that all other writers are a set of incapables.
Listen to your rampant Meredithian, your red-hot
Dickensian, your breathless Stevensonian! They
smite the table as they explode their hero upon you.
They almost dilate in bulk as they forage for adjec-
tives, and encounter the imminent peril of rhetorical
suicide. Their enthusiasm is delightful. But what I
complain of is that so many of these ardent lovers
are absolutely blind to others' charms; they will
not enlarge their literary harem. And how many
different opinions there are about the same book !
When I read The Garden of Allah, by Robert
Hichens, it struck me as a spiritual drama set forth
with wonderful understanding of the human heart.
But some have found it intolerably tedious; some
were bored by the magnificent descriptions of the
desert; some even found it to be unpleasantly
sensual. As far as reading is concerned, I feel
inclined to echo the words of dear old Benjamin
Goldfinch, and exclaim: “I give up friends !"
I suppose that for real appreciation of a book one
must have some kinship with the author's mind-
his style, his method, his point of view. There are
certain books one can scarcely appreciate to the full
unless one has passed through something of the
32
The Comradeship of Books
experiences they describe. Some of the books of
Mark Rutherford are of this kind. No man can
have a large cosmopolitan enjoyment of literature
unless he be a humanist. He must be able to say
with George Dawson: “I do declare that I have not
seen a man, woman, or child out of whom I could
not get amusement, if not instruction. Under most
things divinity can be found; and he who knows not
man can know little of God. He has most joy in
life who has the most open eyes; who sees the inner
man first, before he takes account of the outer
garb."
Of course, if you are a man of this large type you
will be misunderstood. You will have the Philistines
upon you. You will be supposed to be no better
than you ought to be. You will be suspected by the
"unco guid,” and prayed for as a heathen man and
a publican. You must bear this reproach with
patient, if not with pious, resignation. Such a position
is not without its charm, and there are occasions
when it is attended with a pleasant excitement. You
will at any rate be fortified with one great consola-
tion: you will never be called upon to endure that
woe which is said to come upon those of whom all
men speak well. On the whole, I think it is a wise
thing to resist the temptation to recommend books.
Talk about the books that have moved you as much
as you like, but don't recommend them. Friendship
is rare, and one wants to keep one's friends as long
as possible. Why risk spoiling their tempers by
obtruding your tastes ? I nearly quarrelled with the
33
Byways in Bookland
intelligent young man who could not read Pickwick.
I was ready in those days to smother any man who
did not endorse my literary opinions, and for any
human being to breathe a word against Dickens was
not to be borne in silence. We did not speak for
many days. We sent each other to Coventry. In
after-life one learns the futility of argument about
such things as taste, or indeed about anything at all.
It is better in an amicable spirit to agree to differ,
and to cherish a profound compassion in one's private
bosom.
Still, a book that has made a strong appeal to one
person is likely to have some quality which will win
a response from at least a few others. But what is a
good book? There's the rub. I believe Mrs. Beeton's
Cookery to be an admirable and indispensable work
-no respectable household should be without it,
but it is not the kind of volume I am thinking of
just now. I am thinking chiefly of stories, ranging
from The Egoist down to The Dark Deed of Dead
Mar's Dingle. This latter specimen of fiction has
never been published, and never will be, but it is
nevertheless an actual and indubitable “work.” Its
manuscript is yellow and faded, and its author
looks at it now and then with pensive eyes, as
being violently illustrative of a certain vigorous and
barbarian stage of his development. The title at
least is suggestive, with a crimson lure and an artful
alliteration all its own. But stories with titles like
that can hardly be called good stories.
A good book must be true to life. This does not
.
34
The Comradeship of Books
It
TY
-
involve the exclusion of fairy tales, for fairy tales are
often the truest things in the world. Indeed, truth
to life is the most catholic and all-embracing
desideratum that could be named; for there is no
fantasy, no imagination, no dream or nightmare, no
mystic vision or philosophic thought, no lofty prayer
or howling blasphemy, no tearful tragedy or side-
splitting farce, that does not emanate from man and
so belong to human life. Anything characteristic of
man is the novelist's stock-in-trade. Truth to life
does not pin the writer down to a limited area; it
affords him the utmost liberty and the most engaging
variety. People often criticize stories on account of
their untruth to life, by which they mean that they
have never seen things after that fashion in their
own parish. But the longer one lives, the more one
discovers that human nature is incalculable; that
every man is an odd problem, a separate puzzle, an
individual mystery; that men and women are per-
petually doing surprising things.
Then I should say that a good book should have
living characters. By that I mean that we should be
able to recognize them as flesh and blood. So many
characters in books are mere pasteboard-penny
plain and twopence coloured. It is pleasant to come
upon such characters in a book as we meet with
every day; we feel the reality of the thing at once ;
it is like a bit out of our own experience. Yet it is
well to remember that our own experience is limited,
and that there is many a corner of human nature
into which we have not penetrated, and many a
35
Byways in Bookland
1
world of whose colour and meaning we have little or
no knowledge.
Civilization itself is but skin-deep, and one only
has to scratch it to find the savage. All sorts of
primitive passions and emotions lie embedded in
very respectable folk who say “Good morning" to
each other affably over the breakfast-table, pay their
taxes regularly, give a subscription to the missionary
society, accomplish their round of work with decency,
and die comfortably in their beds in the end. If you
go abroad you may light upon a country where the
standard of morals is marvellously changed, and
where the placid customs of life are all topsy-turvy;
and a man who is the very personification of dignity
and respectability at home begins to discover un-
dreamed of propensities and strange affinities with
other forms of life. The good book does not
regard human nature as having its home and
centre in Great Britain, but looks out towards the
universal.
Another characteristic of the good book is every-
day incident. Here again there is room for infinite
variety. Life is a drama of extraordinary subtlety
and complexity, and many a grey thread of quiet
commonplace meets the gold strand of romance, or
may suddenly be crossed by the red line of tragedy,
or become entangled in a mesh impossible to unravel.
You may sit down intending to write the homely
history of a woman in a village, or the quiet chronicle
of an ordinary man's life in a city, never anticipating
any exciting episode ; yet all your intentions may be
36
The Comradeship of Books
rudely upset before you have written half a dozen
chapters. You will find that your characters have
a singularly disconcerting habit of getting out of
hand and running away with you. That will at any
rate prove one thing-namely, that your characters
are not mere puppets, but are really alive, which is
entirely satisfactory. To sit down and organize a
complete plot beforehand, as an architect plans a
house, seems to me to be a bungling and mistaken
way of going to work. It is too stagey and mechanical
altogether. The architecture of real life does not
build itself up in such a formal and conventional
fashion. You will find that you have to put a blank
wall where you intended a window; to throw out a
turret where you meant a balcony; to turn a drawing-
room into a cellar, a porch into a pantry, a library
into a kitchen. The style is mixed and out of propor-
tion; it is Queen Annish, Elizabethan, Georgian,
Early Victorian, Gothic, Norman, modern, all at
once; the whole building is a medley and a mon-
strosity. Of course, it is not artistic; but you can't
help that. In other words, the house of life is made
up of many heterogeneous elements, and your story
may be the despair of the critic. It may begin any-
where, proceed incoherently, and end like a great
river running out into sandy deltas. From a popular
standpoint this would be preposterous; from an
artistic standpoint it would be heart-breaking ; from
a financial standpoint it would be ruinous. But it
seems to me it would be very real and true.
A good book should reveal the good as well as the
37
Byways in Bookland
bad in human nature-a thing many of our modern
writers seem disinclined or unable to do; and it
should show that in spite of all appearances good is
stronger than evil, and will ultimately be victorious
over it. This is the real difference between a moral
and an immoral story. An immoral book is not one
that deals largely with the seamy side of life, but a
book that depicts the seamy side as the chief or the
only side, a book that makes vice alluring, a book
that is cynical towards the best and sweetest things
in life, a book that is written in the seat of the
scornful. The Bonnie Brier Bush type of story erred
on the sugary, sentimental side; the House with the
Green- Shutters type of story erred on the barbarous,
callous, brutal side. There is a happy mean which
is far truer to reality than either. A book may have
much that is dark, sordid, and unpleasant in it, much
that reveals the trail of the serpent, and yet it may
leave you in love with life, and thoroughly convinced
that the world is no blunder and life well worth the
living. If a book does that, it is a good and com-
panionable book, though its artistic faults be as
numerous as the sand on the seashore.
A very interesting article appeared some time ago
in The Spectator on the pleasures of re-reading.
Among other things the writer says: “ We are some-
times ashamed of our dearest book-friends, and do
not like to risk our character for literary acumen by
saying how much we love them. The feeling is
unreasonable. We are not bound to love our human
acquaintances in exact ratio to their wit or worth.
38
The Comradeship of Books
Sympathy counts for more than judgment in matters
of affection." There is much truth in this, and it is
said excellently well. There is really nothing to
prevent our risking our character for literary acumen
(if we have such) by exploiting with perfect frank-
ness any of our own prime favourites. The philosophy
of the favourite book is a fascinating and remarkable
study, and perhaps the only outcome of such a study
is, after all, an exclamatory repetition of the dictum,
“ There's no accounting for tastes.” The revelation
of taste is full of surprises, and in no department is
it more surprising than in our literary predilections.
The article already referred to closes with these
words: “A library composed of the secret favourites
of a score of educated men and women of to-day
would offer much food for thought. It would, we
believe, be neither very large, nor very new, nor very
varied. It would not contain much that is great,
except perhaps of lyrical poetry; it would contain
much that is commonplace, and very little that is
at all eccentric. The ordinary man or woman longs
instinctively to see the evident well put, to get that
answer to his or her own mental expectancy which
the ear gets from a correct scale. We do not often
find this primitive satisfaction in real life, and the
function of art, in the mind of the ordinary man, is
to supply it. He may know better, or rather he may
have learned better, but he re-reads in accordance
with his instinct, not his training."
It is this, I suppose, that accounts for the fact that
it is almost impossible to explain properly why such
39
Byways in Bookland
and such a book is a favourite. A man cannot
give a reason for an instinct. A man cannot give
elaborate and satisfactory reasons for liking oysters
or disliking tomatoes; he simply likes them or dis-
likes them, and there's an end of it. In regard to
the comradeship of books, one's preferences or
repulsions are often founded upon something too
subtle for analysis; or it may be upon something so
hopelessly unreasonable as prejudice. A man will
sometimes get a fixed idea about a certain author,
imbibed probably from floating popular tradition or
from the lofty pronouncement of some superior
critic, and will henceforth give him a wide berth,
without giving the author the benefit of the doubt,
or doing him the justice of a personal examination.
On the other hand, a man may be suddenly called
upon to justify his avowal of a favourite book, and
finds to his discomfiture that he has no answer ready.
His instinct has laid hold upon the book and instantly
and uproariously approved it, but he can by no
means discover a set of reasons by which he could
uphold his preference before an indifferent, a bigoted,
or a critical audience. It may be a question of style,
of construction, of narrative power, of description,
of scene, of character, of atmosphere, of personality;
in any case, it is a characteristic, or a combination
of characteristics, which makes a very direct appeal
to him, but may make little or none at all to some-
body else. We all have our idiosyncrasies in the
matter of favourite books; and sometimes they are
40
The Comradeship of Books
peculiar, even preposterous, perhaps quite indefen-
sible in the midst of a critical and deliberative
assembly.
For my own part, I am very liable to be captured
by a writer in his opening sentences. I am suscep-
tible to first impressions; and I am sure a speaker
or a writer cannot bestow too much attention upon
beginnings. This is totally different from those (to
me) inexplicable and reprobate persons who invariably
look first of all to see how a book ends, and if it does
not finish as they desire, refuse to read it. I do not
know how people can behave so basely. If I knew
what was coming I should not care to read a book
at all, save, of course, in the case of books which
have become real comrades, when they have licence
to repeat themselves ad lib. It is the beginning of
a book that makes me want to read it, not its end.
Think of an essay, for instance, beginning like
this: “A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of
the game! This was the dearest wish of old Sarah
Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions,
loved a good game of whist.” What an alluring
start! No true reader could help following blithely
upon such a trail. Or take this for the beginning of
a story: “The full truth of this odd matter is what
the world has long been looking for, and public
curiosity is sure to welcome.” Why, the appetite is
sharpened at once, and the mention of that "odd
matter," so artfully introduced, sets us tingling for
adventure. Here is a beginning of quite another
41
Byways in Bookland
kind, but equally stimulating: “Of late years, an
abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the
North of England; they lie very thick on the hills;
every parish has one or more of them; they are
young enough to be very active, and ought to be
doing a great deal of good.” Another specimen:
“Some years ago a book was published under the
title of The Pilgrini's Scrip. It consisted of a selec-
tion of original aphorisms by an anonymous gentle-
man, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised
heart to the world.” Yet a different style: “With
a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian
sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer
far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I
undertake to do for you, reader.” Few readers, I
imagine, could hesitate long upon this threshold:
“This is the story of what a woman's patience can
endure, and what a man's resolution can achieve.'
Here is an opening of a very homely kind: “On an
evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man
was walking homeward from Shaston to the village
of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blackmoor. The
pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there
was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat
to the left of a straight line.” One might pursue
this fascinating theme indefinitely, but enough has
been said to justify my contention that opening
sentences are deserving of special care, and are
capable of providing an excellent bait for readers.
Friendships are formed in the oddest ways, and one
42
The Comradeship of Books
is attracted by a voice, an expression, a casual utter-
ance, a fleeting smile. The comradeship of books
is often cemented in an equally fortuitous fashion,
and a man may find himself a slave for life to an
author who draws him strangely in his very first
chapter.
CHAPTER IV
IN GREEN PASTURES
IN summer-time one turns from the library to the
open air, and if one reads at all, it is books with a
breeze in them and with the sunshine on their pages.
Problems, pessimism, and the relation of the sexes
can be shot into their appropriate dustbin, and we
turn to wholesomer fare. It may have happened to
certain readers to light upon some volumes bearing
these seductive titles: Red Deer, Field and Hedgerow,
Nature Near London, Wood Magic, The Open Air, The
Amateur Poacher, The Gamekeeper at Home. If so,
they may count themselves the favourites of fortune,
for they have been introduced to Richard Jefferies,
and with him they have wandered in the secret
places of Nature, picking up strange lore, making
friends with birds and animals, trees and flowers,
summer clouds and running brooks, shaggy woods
and breezy downs, and they have been as happy as
sandboys. They have got away from the desk and
all restraint, and they have the sensation of playing
truant--one of the most wickedly delicious joys in
the world.
My first introduction to Jefferies was in Longman's
44
In Green Pastures
Magazine~now, alas! defunct, and we no longer
meet with lively anticipation At the Sign of the Ship,
to listen to Andrew the Oracular and the Omnivorous;
and there I chanced upon an article bearing the
title My Old Village. In it there were passages like
this : “ There used to be clouds over the fields,
white clouds in blue summer skies. I have lived a
good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me
often; they bring something to the spirit which even
the trees do not. ... No one else seems to have
seen the sparkle on the brook, or heard the music at
the hatch, or to have felt back through the centuries;
and when I try to describe these things to them they
look at me with stolid incredulity. No one seems to
understand how I got food from the clouds, nor what
there was in the Night, nor why it is not so good to
look at it out of window. They turn their faces
away from me, so that perhaps after all I was mis-
taken, and there never was any such place, or any
such meadows, and I was never there.” This was
in 1887, and I have that copy of Longman's still,
with Jefferies' article scored with pencil-marks, and
from that time he has been for me the magician of
the open air.
It is true that many of his books suffer from lack
of unity, from repetition, from irrelevant digression
-faults which are the inevitable result of articles
written to fill a certain exact space in a newspaper
or magazine. The chapters which make up many of
his books were first written in this way. Yet the
books have a charm of their own; they could have
45
Byways in Bookland
T
17 |
been written by no one but Jefferies. Other men
have written Nature books, but none write like
Jefferies. There is a fascination about the man him-
self which seems to communicate itself to all he
writes. It is difficult to say wherein the fascination
lies—as difficult as to say wherein inspiration con-
sists; but it is there, and we yield ourselves to it as
to a potent spell. Jefferies is not a scientist, a
pedant, or a schoolmaster; he has no technical
terms, no dry-as-dust methods, no cut-and-dried
phrases. His worst fault is a tendency to take an
inventory of Nature, as if he were jotting down
items for a bill of sale. At his best he is a poet, and
the glamour of his vision is over all. He is common-
place and dull at times, and we grow a little weary
of his cataloguing; but how much there is to balance
this, and to make us go on reading page after page
in a quiet glow of enjoyment and satisfaction !
Certain things strike one immediately on reading
Richard Jefferies. One is his extraordinary power
of observation. Nothing is too minute for him ; he
seems to see everything. Indeed, it fills me with a
sense of shameful incompetence when I reflect that
I have so often walked through a country lane, or
beside a stream, or through the meadows, and yet
have not seen a hundredth part of what this man
sees. But he was born with this power of vision,
and he spent all his days cultivating it, and he was
able to read Nature like a book. The habits of birds,
the movements of animals, the characteristics of
trees and plants, the configuration of clouds, the
- 46
In Green Pastures
wonders of the grass, the glory of the open downs,
the mysteries of the wood, the life of the field, the
homely impressions of the farmyard-all come under
his penetrating gaze, and to read him is to tramp
the countryside with a comrade one never forgets.
Then there is his extraordinary intimacy with
Nature, the direct result of his observation. It is
not that he has made Nature the subject of special
study; it is rather that he is made one with her.
He not only knows her various characteristics; he
has felt the beating of her heart. Most of us have
to compel ourselves to observe and examine when
we go into the country; Jefferies observed and
examined like a man who was there for the purpose
and could not do anything else. He has told us in
that singular and unforgettable confession, The Story
of my Heart, how deep and real was the bond
between himself and Nature. He would pray that
the glory of the sun, the beauty of the sky, the
sweetness and freshness of the grass, the splendour
and purity of the sea, might pass into him and
enrich his soul-life. He could hardly help being a
Pantheist. God, Nature, and himself were as one
soul.
Then there was his equally extraordinary patience.
This is characteristic of all naturalists and investi-
gators, but it came to wonderful fruition in Jefferies.
He would think nothing of spending a whole day in
one place—an idler to all outward seeming, a loafer
or a dreamer to the casual passer-by—but in reality
with every nerve on the stretch, intently watching
47
Byways in Bookland
the movements of the creatures about him. So still
he would sit or lie, that birds came and perched on
his hat, and timid creatures like the rabbit or the
squirrel came and fed close at his feet. He tells us
in one passage that a man who is content to stand
still for an hour or two under a tree in a forest will
see more than if he tramped miles of country
throughout a whole day ; because the birds and
animals will come about him if he remains quiet,
whereas the least movement will banish them all to
nest and hole and covert. One cannot but be
impressed with the beauty and suggestiveness of
things as Jefferies sees and describes them. And
the thought comes to us : “ If only we had eyes like
this man! And all these wonders are close at
hand !” That is the bewildering part of it. All this
beauty, this fascination, this suggestion is at our own
doors, and there is no need to travel beyond our
garden-gate to see miracles and to dream dreams.
A volume of Jefferies usually goes with me on
holiday. Even at such fallow seasons I must have
a companion in my knapsack. Holiday-reading
must of course be light. One can admire but cannot
emulate those mental stalwarts who devour Gibbon
or tackle Sordello by the sad sea waves. Most of us
are not tuned up to such intellectual concert pitch
when we take our tickets for the coast. On the
other hand, we must have something a cut above
the tit-bitty order of reading to relieve the tedium
of wet days. There are many people who can do
without books altogether; they do not feel the want
48
In Green Pastures
of them. They would subscribe gaily to the senti-
ments of that recreant scribe who wrote:
“We may live without books ;'what is knowledge but grieving?
We may live without hope; what is hope but deceiving ?
We may live without love; what is passion but pining ?
But where is the man who can live without dining ?”
Such a restaurant troubadour might have been an
emissary of the devil, so steeped is he in the poison
of cynicism. If a man is a reader at all, he cannot
pack his bag without a volume or two among his
pyjamas and shaving gear. Even though he may
not read them, he knows they are there in case of
emergency, and derives comfort from the fact. For
many years I carried a perfect library of miscel-
laneous literature on holiday, but latterly I have
reduced the number to about half a dozen. It is
true they used to make an imposing row set out
along my bedroom mantelpiece, but it is also true
that they added appreciably to the weight of my
baggage. There are now so many delightful pocket
volumes, well printed and bound, a delight to the
eye and a pleasure to hold, that there is no excuse
for omitting them on the score of weight.
I like to travel with two or three books I have
read before. One of Dickens's always comes, prob-
ably Great Expectations, a tale I have read at least a
dozen times, and shall likely read a dozen more. It
is not a book one hears referred to as often as some
of the other Dickens volumes, but I have always
thought it one of his best. It has an absorbing plot,
it is crowded with incident and character, it is rich
49
in Bookland
N
in humour, and it is written in a clear and simple
style to which Dickens did not always condescend.
Then I must have a couple of Stevenson's—The
Ebb-Tide and An Inland Voyage, or Travels with a
Donkey and a volume of the Essays. It is amazing
that The Ebb-Tide is not more spoken of; in point
of style it is one of the greatest things Stevenson
ever did. It is melodramatic and impossible ; but
it contains the imperishable portrait of that incom-
parable little cad Huish, and the wonder of the
South Seas is over all. One can feel the tropic heat
as one reads of how the pitch bubbled in the seams”
of the schooner Farallone, and the witchery of that
land of enchantment among the coral reefs is won-
derfully conveyed. There is a striking bit of psycho-
logical description, too, of a man trying to commit
suicide by drowning, and he finds himself automati-
cally and continuously swimming, unable to throw
up his hands and disappear. Then I think I shall
put in Shirley and Richard Feverel both among the
immortals. Who that has read it can ever forget
the loves of Richard and Lucy as they wander by
the weir? No more idyllic love scene has ever been
pictured than the chapter headed “A Diversion on
a Penny Whistle.” It is the very poetry and
romance of passion.
My fellow-travellers among the poets vary with
the place of residence at holiday-time. If the
district is mountainous, Wordsworth is indispen-
sable. If I go to the sea, I take Byron; his stormy,
impetuous spirit seems to chime with the foaming
In Green Pastures
billows. Tennyson has journeyed with me. many
times, and I have read Cowper and Coleridge amid
some of their own haunts. There is a rich delight
in reading poetry out of doors, on a hill-side, in a
wood, in a boat upon a lake, by the side of a running
stream, on a moor where the heather blooms and
the curlews cry and a vast arch of sky bends above.
Under such conditions one seems to get into better
tune with the poet's thought, and to enter into the
rhythm and music of his speech. Since the return
of the poets to Nature their work can be best
enjoyed under the sky rather than under a ceiling.
One can read Milton in the study, but Wordsworth
and Burns must be read out of doors. The true
poet is made one with Nature, and nothing human
is alien to his purpose. He touches the Universal,
and every living thing he sees wakes his heart to
song. It is he who understands the Secret which
others so grievously misinterpret. There are some
lines by Bret Harte, of which I am very fond, which
express what I mean:
“Over the chimney the night wind sang,
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Woman stopped, as her babe she tossed,
And thought of the one she had long since lost,
And said, as the tear-drops back she forced,
I hate the wind in the chimney !'
“Over the chimney the night wind sang,
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Children said, as they closer drew,
''Tis some witch that is cleaving the black night through,
'Tis a fairy trumpet that just then blew,
And we fear the wind in the chimney!'
O
51
Byways in Bookland
“Over the chimney the night wind sang,
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Man, as he sat by his hearth below,
Said to himself, 'It will surely snow,
And fuel is dear and wages are low,
And I'll stop the leak in the chimney !'
“Over the chimney the night wind sang,
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Poet listened and smiled,
For he was Man and Woinan and Child,
And said, 'It is God's own harmony,
This wind I hear in the chimney !'”
“For he was Man and Woman and Child!" That
is why the poet can gather into a whole that of
which most of us can only see the fragments.
It is a charming experience to visit the actual
scene of a poet's birth, or the place where a great
poem was conceived. I have long planned a series
of pilgrimages to poetical shrines, but have only been
able so far to carry it out very partially. In the
county of Devon, a little over a mile outside the
lovely village of Lynton, there is a remarkable bit of
wild natural scenery called The Valley of Rocks. It
would be easy for me, perhaps, to exaggerate its
grandeur, for the whole neighbourhood is associated
with the glorious golden days of my boyhood. My
earliest impressions of the wonder and beauty and
mystery of Nature were derived from The Valley of
Rocks. I have seen it under all manner of con-
ditions - bathed in sunshine, wrapped in mist,
shrouded with clouds, wild with wind, shimmering
and crackling with heat, hidden in driving rain-it
52
In Green Pastures
is wonderful in all. There is a magnificent approach
to it by way of the North Walk, a narrow pathway
cut in the side of a hill, seven or eight hundred feet
above the sea, and looking sheer down to the water.
A mile along this romantic path brings you to a
sudden opening between the hills, and you find your-
self introduced without warning into The Valley of
Rocks. The place looks as if an earthquake had
upheaved it or a tempest had blasted it, or as if it
were the scene of a battle of giants. Huge rocks
are scattered everywhere, some piled one upon
another in fantastic pyramid, some poised upon a
dizzy eminence, some overhanging in grey crags
and moss-grown bastions, some having the appear-
ance of a ruined castle of immemorial age. From
the giddy height of one of the rocks a notable
smuggler is said to have leapt into the sea, hundreds
of feet below. Within the ominous shadow of the
Castle Rock you may still see the remains of Mother
Meldrum's Kitchen, an aged and mysterious crone,
who told fortunes and launched curses and drew
horoscopes and made prophecies (on unreasonable
terms), and earned a sinister reputation as a witch.
Half a mile beyond is Lee Abbey, one of the most
charming country dwellings in England, with a
reputation of being haunted. Within the area of
the valley are several articles belonging to the devil-
The Devil's Cheese Wring, The Devil's Punch Bowl-
and other Satanic properties. Altogether a delectable
and romantic region.
Hither in 1797 came two young men on a walking
Byways in Bookland
tour, having heard of the fame of the valley, and
anxious to behold its beauty and grandeur for them-
selves. No one who saw them at that time, tramp-
ing the red roads of Devon in animated talk, would
have guessed that they were destined to make their
names famous in the literature of the world. When
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
set out on their tour from Alfoxden to The Valley of
Rocks, they themselves hardly realized that their
walk was to be productive of such momentous issues.
Yet so it was. It was autumn when they tramped
the Somerset and Devon lanes, a season when the
West Country is at its best. The whole landscape
is bathed in the afterglow of summer. The best of
the heather is over, but a deep rich purple still
lingers on the open moors; the valleys are bronzed
with the changing bracken; the streams that go
singing and brawling over stones and boulders are
swollen and tawny with the rains; the sunsets fling
more gorgeous colours on the evening skies; the
orchards are ruddy with apples; the roads are a
richer red through the heavier dews and the draining
moisture of the hills. At evening the rising of the
large, round, yellow harvest moon from behind the
hill-tops seems to bathe the landscape in a super-
natural splendour. There could be no spot in Eng-
land and no season better fitted to appeal to the
mystical and the imaginative; and one can under-
stand Wordsworth and Coleridge being wrought to
a high pitch of poetic rapture and enthusiasm by the
enchantment of the place and the time.
In Green Pastures
It was under such circumstances that The Lyrical
Ballads were projected. As the two poets walked
together they discussed the possibilities of a volume
of poems, to which each of them should make con-
tribution in characteristic vein. Wordsworth was to
deal with the simple natural scenes of everyday
experience, with characters and incidents selected
from the ordinary life of a country village. Coleridge
was to provide the more romantic element, and to
throw a mystical glamour over certain carefully
chosen incidents in such a way as to invest them
with the reality of human interest. Wordsworth
wrote the larger part of the volume, but Coleridge
immortalized it and himself by contributing The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Dark Ladie, and the
first part of Christabel. It is a prosaic thought
enough that the initial intention of such a volume
was to raise £5 in order to defray the expenses of
their walking tour. In such deadly practical fashion
did some of the richest treasures of English verse
come into being. The poets were hard up; they
could not afford an expensive holiday; so they agree
upon a tramp, and project a joint volume of poems
to raise the wind to cover their jaunt. It is a living
illustration of the very principle the two poets desired
to embody in their book—the combining of the
natural with the supernatural. The frozen necessity
of raising £5—there is the natural. The kindling of
genius into immortal verse there is the supernatural.
If it be not the supernatural, it is at all events the
inexplicable.
1
55
Byways in Bookland
The little volume thus produced has had an extra-
ordinary effect upon certain types of mind. It has
been to many nothing less than an intellectual emanci-
pation, a new birth into larger liberty, a discovery
of wider spiritual horizons. The change that has
come upon the life of such sympathetic and responsive
readers has been well described in Mark Rutherford's
Autobiography. He declares himself as being un-
touched during the first two years of his college life
by anything he heard, read, or did. But in his third
year at college he happened to find amongst a parcel
of books a volume of poems in paper boards. “It
was called Lyrical Ballads, and I read first one and
then the whole book. It conveyed to me no new
doctrine, and yet the change it wrought in me could
only be compared with that which is said to have
been wrought on Paul himself by the Divine appa-
rition. Looking over the Lyrical Ballads again, as I
have looked it over a dozen times since then, I can
hardly see what it was which stirred me so power-
fully, nor do I believe that it communicated much
to me which could be put into words. But it excited
a movement and a growth which went on till, by
degrees, all the systems which enveloped me like a
body gradually decayed from me and fell away into
nothing." It was like a hand of healing laid upon
a tortured mind, bringing the gift of peace. Hence-
forth God dwelt not in theological books or ecclesi-
astical rites, but “on the downs in the far-away
distances, and in every cloud-shadow which wandered
across the valley." And so, says Rutherford, “Words-
1
56
In Green Pastures
worth unconsciously did for me what every religious
reformer has done—he recreated my supreme divinity,
substituting a new and living spirit for the old deity,
once alive, but gradually hardened into an idol.” The
walking tour of the two poets in Devon and Somerset
has had the result of opening the prison to them
that are bound, and setting at liberty them that are
bruised.
It is not only the poets who belong essentially to
green pastures, but also the essayists. It has always
seemed to me that the true essayist is not a man of
the library, but a man of the open. He is a man
who ought to be able to write upon any subject.
The more weighty it is, the more sententious and
oracular his manner; the more trivial it is, the more
inventive his fancy and the more tricksy his style.
Swift wrote an essay on a Broomstick, and he
certainly adorned the theme. The man who has
a real genius for essay-writing is never at a loss for
a subject. A young and innocent reporter is said
to have asked his editor what he should write about,
and his chief told him abruptly to write on the first
thing that came to hand. That evening the ingenious
youth sent in an article on Door-Knobs. The
essayist should imagine himself to be consulted on
all manner of topics, and to be quite equal to supply-
ing complete information on them all.
I met a man a summer or two ago who would
have made a splendid essayist. He had the right
temperament. A friend and I were touring in
Devon, and we stopped in front of a village inn to
57
Byways in Bookland
admire a distant view of Dartmoor. As we stood
entranced with the marvellous deep purple of the
desolate moor, a tipsy voice behind us began to sing
out, “What-d'you want-to-know-sir ? What
-d’you want-to know—sir ?" And having repeated
the sentiment about half a dozen times, as if he were
practising an anthem, the voice broke into a rollick-
ing peal of Falstaffian laughter. This jovial being
imagined that we were in need of local information,
and, brimful of beery good nature, he was bursting
to supply it. That unctuous laugh of his will ring in
my ears for many a day. I turned to look at him
as he sat on a rude bench beneath the tap-room
window, his face beaming with fun, his voice boom-
ing forth at intervals: “What-d'you want—to know
—sir ?” and then breaking into uproarious merriment,
and I thought: Here is the true oracle; here is the
real humanist; no matter who or what the traveller,
he need not lack for honest company and genial wit
and cyclopædic discourse. He had the essayist's
temper!
The essay is one of the most delightful of all
literary forms when it is well handled, and it has
been the chosen vehicle for the expression of some
of the finest minds and most charming writers in
the language. The names of Bacon, Macaulay,
Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Johnson,
Goldsmith, Addison, Emerson, Lowell, Stevenson,
and many more, are sufficient guarantee of the pre-
eminence of the essay: the mere mention of them
revives a hundred happy memories. It is like wan-
58
In Green Pastures
1
dering in a garden full of flowers and shelter and
fountains. To many of us the essay makes a specially
familiar appeal, not unmixed with pathetic and pain-
ful recollections; because it is the mould into which
we strove to pour our crude and confused thoughts
when we made our first bashful and twittering
appearance before a Literary Society or a Young
People's Guild. That was the hilarious and roseate
period when we thought we had a message for man-
kind. We realized that the times were out of joint,
and, unlike the brooding Dane, we had a solemn
and immovable conviction that we were destined to
set them right. Our brain-pan was bubbling and
seething with a weltering mass of ideas on literary,
political, social, and religious matters, not excluding
many things which angels desire to look into, and at
the urgent request of a local secretary we took the
lid off and allowed the startled members of the
society a glimpse within. Since that memorable
day we have regarded the essay with a sneaking
affection. If we have not been able to march abreast
with the Immortals, we have at least panted heavily
in their wake; and it is something to feel that one
has been in that glorious procession, though at the
tail end of it.
Among the charming company of the essayists
the name of Alexander Smith occupies no mean
place. He is not, perhaps, in the very first flight,
but he has a distinction of his own. His Dreamthorp
is a capital example of the essay form. There is one
paper in it on the Writing of Essays, and there are
59
Byways in Bookland
certain detached sentences in that paper which give
us in succinct form the author's own idea of what
an essay is and what an essayist should try to do.
Let me quote two or three: “ The essay, as a literary
form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded
by some central mood – whimsical, serious, or
satirical. ... The essayist is a chartered libertine,
and a law unto himself. ... His main gift is to
discover the suggestiveness of common things; to
find a sermon in the most unpromising texts. ...
A modest truthful man speaks better about himself
than about anything else, and on that subject his
speech is likely to be most profitable to his hearers.
... It is this egotism, this perpetual reference to
self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. ...
If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If
the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive char-
acter, his egotism is precious, and remains a possesion
of the race."
It is only justice to Alexander Smith to say that
he very admirably succeeds in embodying his own
ideal. Dreamthorp is full of excellent things said
excellently well. The style is clear and flowing like
a stream, and there is many a touch of poetry and
imagination, like the patches of colour and the
whispering reeds and grasses that beautify its banks.
The book is full of happy descriptive touches, quaint
conceits, suggestive phrases, tender reflections,
pathetic and humorous musings. It is discursive,
sometimes inconsequent, occasionally garrulous ;
but these are the natural prerogatives of the essayist,
60
In Green Pastures
and constitute part of his charm. There is just
sufficient egotism in it to impart a distinctive per-
sonal flavour, and to give it that feeling of intimacy
which is so attractive and appealing to the reader.
Alexander Smith has the delightful art, which all
the best essayists have, of quietly taking the reader
into his confidence. He does not always stick to
his subject, but nobody expects him to. We do not
go to an essayist to be caught in a chain of logical
reasonings; we go to him to be led in green pastures
and beside still waters, to wander in the bypaths
of thought, to gather nosegays of every colour, to
reflect on the pathos and sublime of human life, to
toss our thought hither and thither like children
playing at ball, to calm our mind or to stimulate it,
to indulge in a quiet talk as with a familiar friend.
For the best essays are talking-books, and to read
them is to feel as if one were closeted with some
bosom crony with a pipe by the fireside, exchanging
ideas or reviving reminiscences. Dreamthorp is “A
Book of Essays written in the Country." I like that
sub-title. It brings with it a flavour of clover-scented
fields, and a glimpse of hedge-bordered lanes, and of
villages sleeping in the sunshine. I see the tapering
spires and the ivy-clad towers of country churches,
and hear the rooks a-cawing in the elms. There are
twelve essays in the book. The author discourses in
meditative strain on Dreamthorp itself, its scenery
and its characters; on the Writing of Essays; on
Death and the Fear of Dying; on the Flight of
a Lark; on Christmas ; on Men of Letters; on
61
Byways in Bookland
A Shelf in My Bookcase; on Books and Gardens;
on Vagabonds; on Chaucer and Dunbar; on the
Importance of a Man to Himself. Pleasant subjects,
for the most part, treated in a happy and suggestive
manner. A book for all the year; for the summer
garden or the winter fire; but chiefly for quiet
resting-places in the open, where the breeze is
gentle and the sun is warm.
CHAPTER V
V
DL
BESIDE STILL WATERS
THERE are certain Byways in Bookland that lead
one in meditative frame beside still waters. I have
often carried in my pocket a small volume bearing
the title, A Little Book of Life and Death. It was
first published in 1902, and since then it has passed
through nearly a score of editions. The fact is sig-
nificant, for the little book is a book of consolation.
That such a book should prove so popular means
two things : that life is to most people a mystery,
a battle, a daily temptation, anxiety, sorrow, or
pain; and that because this is so, men and women
have great and continual need of counsel and
guidance, encouragement and sympathy, and are
always eager to welcome it.
Many such books as these are published now, and
the best and most comprehensive of them command
a wide and ready sale. This little book is a careful
and catholic compilation from many widely different
writers. The extracts are brought together by Miss
Elizabeth Waterhouse. The world is full of sources
from which we may draw strength and hope and
encouragement if we are really and truly in search
63
Byways in Bookland
of these things. The compiler says in her short
preface: “In gathering together this little bundle of
thoughts on life of which we know so little, and
death of which we guess in vain, I have seldom gone
to seek them for the purpose of this book, but have
chiefly followed the pencil-marks and dogs'-ears of
many happy years." It would be a very useful and
helpful thing for every man who reads to make a
book of striking extracts for himself, culled from the
various reading of the years.
For those who are seeking for truth; for those
who are striving after a clean and honest life ; for
those who are making some endeavour to live near
to the reality of things; especially for those who
are persuaded of the existence of spiritual reality,
and believe in the strength to be derived from con-
tact and communion therewith-such a little volume
as this seems to me to be of very great value. Its
value lies largely in its brevity, in its variety, and in
its suggestiveness. In its Brevity, for ours is a day
of haste and hurry and turmoil, and the majority
have but little leisure to study large and comprehen-
sive books that deal more or less exhaustively with
great themes and difficult problems. We have to
be arrested swiftly, caught on the wing. We need
telegrams of inspiration rather than essays of it.
A single sentence that strikes the mind like an arrow
and sticks, is better than a treatise that taxes every
effort, and is mostly forgotten when finished. Such
a book as Miss Waterhouse has compiled provides a
quiverful of such arrows.
64
Beside Still Waters
Its value lies also in its variety. The truths con-
tained here are drawn from all sources—from poets,
prose-writers, mystics, prophets, saints, and pagans
-all with a religious end and aim and flavour. The
writers are cosmopolitan. They have no particular
axe to grind, no special cause to plead, no peculiar
doctrine to expound. They look abroad upon the
multitudinous needs of human life, and make a
universal appeal. They belong to that select com-
pany of men and women who look into their own
hearts and write, “and a man cannot touch his
neighbour's heart with anything else than his own."
The majority of the writers have paid the price of
their wisdom in perplexity and suffering and pain,
and their wisdom may therefore be received with
gratitude and confidence as the fruit of a very real
experience.
The book also has a value in its suggestiveness.
These are truths expressed in epigrams, poems, short
paragraphs, detached sentences, not all complete in
themselves, but suggesting more than they express.
They stimulate one's own thought, set one's own
brain in motion, kindle one's own imagination, and
this is as rich a service as any book can perform.
Ours is an age of pocket volumes, and for my part
I owe a debt of gratitude to their promoters. I have
often carried this Little Book of Life and Death with
me on a railway journey, on a cycle ride, or on a
country ramble. It is one of the most delightful
things in the world, one of the simplest and sweetest
of joys, to sit on a bank by the roadside, or on a
X
CD
.. 65
Byways in Bookland
country stile, or in the shade of some friendly tree
in field or wood, and read a page or two in some
treasured pocket volume. I like to get a happy and
steadying thought at the beginning of the day.
After the strange adventures of the night, I come up
to the surface of consciousness like a diver emerging
from dim and perilous depths, and I want something
to take hold of when entering upon the history of a
new day. I want to get my mind in tune for the
fresh experience. A Little Book of Life and Death,
or some kindred volume, helps me in this direction.
One of its impressive and suggestive sentences gives
a tone to one's purpose and puts iron into one's blood.
The book covers the ground of life from youth
to age. It deals with most of the deep yet common
experiences that challenge our thoughts. Birth,
Childhood, Youth, Love, Temptation, Sorrow, Loss,
Disappointment, Ideals, Suffering, Doubt, Defeat,
Dismay, Death, the Hereafter : these are the themes
it sets before us, and offers a strengthening and
illuminating thought for each. There is one poem
in it I will set down here, that seems to me worthy
of immortality. It is, I believe, by R. D. Blackmore,
the author of Lorna Doone :
“In the hour of death, after this life's whim,
When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow dim,
And pain has exhausted every limb-
The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him.
“When the will has forgotten the life-long aim,
And the mind can only disgrace its fame,
And a man is uncertain of his own name-
The power of the Lord shall fill this frame.
-
66
Beside Still Waters
21
“When the last sigh is heaved, and the last tear shed,
And the coffin is waiting beside the bed,
And the widow and child forsake the dead
The angel of the Lord shall lift this head.
“For even the purest delight must pall,
And power must fail, and the pride must fall,
And the love of the dearest friends grow small-
But the glory of the Lord is all in all.”
A friend once gave me another small book which
has been most companionable. It is called My Little
Book of Prayer, and hails from America. Its author
is Muriel Strode. America is the home of originality.
Her writers seem to look at the World and Life and
Time with a certain fearlessness and freshness which
is characteristic of those who dwell amid vast areas.
It is the land of big distances. Everything is huge
in America-her mountains, her rivers, her plains,
her lakes, her forests, her waste places, her wealth,
her enterprise, her impudence. It is a stirring land;
in it one never knows what to expect next. America
is very active and enterprising and speculative in
the sphere of religion. She has a large number of
theological colleges and religious training-schools.
She has a vast army of professors and teachers and
evangelists. The Puritan strain left by the Pilgrim
Fathers is still strongly marked. But her increasing
restlessness has led to her turning out a brand-new
religion, a fresh variety of faith, about once in every
six weeks. It is a place where her old men (are
there any old men in America ?) see visions and her
young men dream dreams; and the visions are some-
times a variation of delirium tremens, and the dreams
67
Byways in Bookland
are often nightmares. But when America is really
sane, wholesome, sweet, and strong in her thinking,
there is a freshness about it as delightful as a
morning in spring, a fragrance as welcome as the
resinous scent of her Western pines. When this
kind of thinking finds its way into religion, its out-
ward expression is remarkably arresting, suggestive,
and impressive.
This small book by Muriel Strode, of little more
than half a hundred pages, is a case in point. It
consists of brief aphoristic comments, aspirations,
meditations, self-communings, singularly apt and
happy in expression, buoyant and healthy in tone,
often highly original in idea, and all helping to feed
the mind and to stimulate the life of the spirit. It
is not prayer in the ordinary conventional sense of
asking; it is rather prayer in the Emersonian sense,
where he says : “ Prayer is the contemplation of the
facts of life from the highest point of view. It is
the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.” The
idea of prayer needs to be greatly enlarged. It need
not necessarily be a matter of words. It is in a
thoughtful silence, in a reverent attitude towards
life, in a devout expectancy, in a hopeful temper, in
the diligent work of an honest man. “In the handi-
work of their craft is their prayer," declares a
luminous sentence in the Book of Ecclesiasticus.
James Montgomery has put it in two lines :
1
“Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpressed.”
68
Beside Still Waters
It shadows forth the ideal life. It represents what
a man would be if he could.
Here are a few characteristic extracts from this
very stimulating and companionable little volume :
"I will not follow where the path may lead,
but I will go where there is no path, and I
will leave a trail.”
That is the aspiration of the pioneer. There are
original and adventurous spirits who disdain grooves
and beaten tracks, and are apostles of the uncon-
ventional. There are strong and active and fertile
minds, that give us fresh points of view and disclose
new lines of thought. These are the heretics of the
world, and are looked at apprehensively by the timid,
and with angry contempt by the orthodox. But
they are the men who keep the world alive, and
prevent it settling down into stagnation and com-
placency.
“I would travel in all climes that
I might return and tell you of the
beauty of my own little garden plot.
I would explore heaven and hell that
I might come back and tell you what
a charming place is the earth.”
This is the theme of Maeterlinck's beautiful fantasy,
The Blue Bird. The children set out on their quest
of happiness, and after a series of stupendous ad-
ventures they return home, to discover happiness
in the humble cottage they had left. “A fool's eyes
are in the ends of the earth," says a wise writer.
People think they must travel to Kamskatka or
69
Byways in Bookland
NI
Timbuctoo in order to find beauty and interest,
excitement and change, wonder and adventure; yet
they may discover the beginnings of infinity in their
back garden, and Eldorado over the nearest hill.
“I am glad the thorn is on my brow,
that the blood trickles over my face ;
when I see my brother's wounds I will
also feel his pain. I am glad I fell
to-day beneath my cross; when I see
another prostrate, I will know the weight
of the burden. I am glad I cried for
succour; I will know the sound of a
heart-cry. I am glad I suffered alone,
deserted; I will know the bitterness of
desolation.”
There is the whole secret of sympathy. Nothing
but a living experience can give us insight. The
men who read their own hearts aright are the ones
who can best heal the woes of others. Here is the
secret of understanding individual troubles, tempta-
tions, perplexities, doubts; the secret also of under-
standing the deeper social problems. To be able to
say, "I have been in these depths," is to become a
comrade to many, though we say no more.
"I saw a rare flower growing, and
I sought to know whence came its
entrancing redolence, its wondrous glow,
and I saw that where it grew the ground
was wet with tears.”
The greatest and most welcome and most in-
fluential things in life are costly. There is a sweat
of the brow; there is a sorer sweat of the brain;
there is a sweat of the heart, which is the sorest
70
Beside Still Waters
sweat of all. The author who lives is the man who
looks into his own heart and writes. The preacher
who moves men is he whose message comes with
the passion and the poetry of experience. Muncacksy,
the famous artist, was so profoundly affected while
painting his great religious pictures that his over-
taxed brain at last gave way, and he ended his days
in an asylum. But his pictures move the world.
The abiding things are the costly things.
“ The æolian must be in your breast,
else the winds are in vain.”
That has a wide application. We must have some-
thing to work upon, or we can get no response.
You cannot get blood out of a stone. It is useless
to read Pickwick if you have no sense of humour.
Never attempt to recite poetry to a man destitute of
emotion. Paradise Lost was read to the Senior
Wrangler, and he said: “It's all very nice, but what
does it prove ?” Never cast your pearls before in-
appropriate recipients.
Robert Louis Stevenson has a tiny book that
takes us beside the still waters. His volume of
Prayers is only about twenty pages in all, but there
are many books of twenty times the bulk of infinitely
less value. These prayers have been issued in beau-
tiful form, illuminated like the Missals of the ancient
monks. This means that they are already on the
way to being reckoned worthy of a place among the
classics of devotional literature. It is noteworthy
that these are the prayers of a literary man. I have
Byways in Bookland
no wish to make Stevenson out a saint, but I cannot
agree with those who speak scornfully of his Samoan
devotions as a mere pose. His was the religion of a
true Bohemian, which is a religion of a most fas-
cinating kind, because it touches life at so many
points. He was more than a literary man, and in
that plus quantity I think I find the key to the
existence of these prayers.
First of all, Stevenson was a Scot; and that
means a deep sense of religion. There is probably
no nation that has such a deep-rooted religious
sense as Scotland. You can see it in the multi-
plicity of her churches and charities; in her splendid
pulpit and educational history ; in her inveterate
love of home; in her susceptibility to the beauty
and suggestion of Nature; in the sweet sentiment
and heart-breaking pathos of many of her songs.
Stevenson was brought up in a devout home. His
father was a deeply religious man; his mother was
steeped in the religious lore of Scotland; his old
nurse was full of that sweet and wholesome spiritu-
ality which leaves lasting impressions upon a child's
mind; the Bible was a well-thumbed book in the
household. In his case nationality and heredity
account for much. The key to a man's life is always
to be found within; beneath the gaiety and abandon
of Stevenson's habit there were strong currents of
thought and feeling and devotion running deeply in
the silence.
Then Stevenson was a life-long invalid. He was
never a strong man. His lungs and chest were
72
Beside Still Waters
weak, and he spent much time travelling about the
world in search of a climate suited to his health.
He was often at such a low ebb that he was not
allowed to speak in the early part of the day lest he
should exhaust his feeble vitality. He had frequent
and alarming hæmorrhages, which left him in a
state of collapse. The precarious tenure of his life
had its due effect in deepening his sense of the
Unseen. Again, Stevenson was an exile. For the
greater part of his life he was a wanderer over the
face of the earth. He loved Scotland with an ardent
passion. He had a feeling for his native city of
Edinburgh such as the Jews had for Jerusalem.
The hills and the moors never left him, though cruel
fate compelled him to leave them. They haunted
his dreams. This man, in whom the love of home
and native land dwelt so strongly, was doomed to
spend a great part of his life in the strange scenes
and amid the alien company of a South Pacific
island. And in the last book he ever wrote, the
unfinished Weir of Hermiston, his heart turned once
more with intense longing to the land he loved so
well. There is no exile's cry more poignant and
pathetic than his lines :
« Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are
crying,
My heart remembers how.”
Again, Stevenson was an optimist. Courage and
cheerfulness were two virtues whose praises he was
73
Byways in Bookland
never weary of singing. And he not only sung them,
he embodied them. He faced the world with a
smiling fortitude. An invalid, an exile, yet an
optimist; there must be a key to such an anomaly
somewhere. Add to this his persistent and pro-
digious industry, and you have a phenomenon not
often repeated. I think I find the key to it all in
that deeply hidden and jealously guarded chamber
of his being where these Prayers were conceived.
The Prayers are couched in extraordinary simplicity
and beauty of language. A man may offer his own
prayers in the first words that come uppermost, or
in no words at all-in sighs, in groans, in aspirations
for which he cannot find fit speech. But a man who
undertakes to lead the devotions of others should
endeavour to find the fittest words at his command;
for there is nothing worse than to rush into the
Divine Presence without due preparation, and nothing
that impresses a listener's mind more profoundly than
beauty of diction in devotion. Witness the incom-
parable beauty and dignity of the Book of Common
Prayer in its best collects and its unapproachable
Litany in proof of this. They haunt the ear like an
exquisite refrain. Stevenson's Prayers were prepared
originally to suit the exigencies of his strangely
assorted Samoan household, and he took pains to
make the homely service memorable and impressive.
The brevity of the Prayers is striking, and is an
additional element of attractiveness. There is nothing
so dull and wearisome as “long prayers.” A prayer
can be short, yet comprehensive and sufficient. There
74
Beside Still Waters
is no need to go the whole round of creation in
minute detail and bewildering reiteration. The
Prayers are a revelation of the man. His apprecia-
tion of beauty is most marked. His aspiration after
the spirit of cheerfulness and courage appears on
every page. His recognition of life's numerous trials,
of the weakness and need of our poor human nature,
of the influence of one person over another, is every-
where apparent. And over and above all is that
exquisite spirit of gratitude that illumines Steven-
son's character like a lamp:
“We thank Thee, Lord, for the glory of the
late days and the excellent face of Thy sun.
We thank Thee for good news received. We
thank Thee for the pleasures we have enjoyed
and for those we have been able to confer. And
now, when the clouds gather and the rain im-
pends over the forest and our house, permit us
not to be cast down : let us not lose the savour
of past mercies and past pleasures; but, like the
voice of a bird singing in the rain, let grateful
memory survive in the hour of darkness.”
Among these quiet companions for solitary hours
and meditative moods there is a singular little book,
that comes to us like a voice out of the past, called
The Practice of the Presence of God. It records the
religious faith and practice of Nicholas Hermann,
a most interesting man who lived in the seventeenth
century; beginning life first as a footman, then as
75
Byways in Bookland
a soldier, and finally becoming a monk of the Car-
melite Order, retiring to a monastery, and being
known henceforth as Brother Lawrence. The small
volume, bearing the above title, consists of notes of
several conversations had with him and letters written
by him after he had been admitted as a Lay Brother
at Paris in 1666. His conversion, which took place
when he was about eighteen years old, was the result
of the mere sight in mid-winter of a dry and leafless
tree, and of the reflections it stirred respecting the
change the coming springtime would bring. From
that moment he became a changed man, growing
eminently in the knowledge and love of God, en-
deavouring constantly to walk as in His presence.
He died at the age of eighty, leaving behind him a
name fragrant for consecrated goodness and whole-
some piety.
It is difficult at first to say why a little book of
this kind helps us so much, and why its atmosphere
is so sweet and fresh and fragrant. Yet it does help
us, and that in no vague fashion. There is absolutely
nothing of a theological nature in it, nothing eccle-
siastical, nothing scholastic; its simplicity is its
power. Here we see a lowly and unlearned man
whose chief desire is to make his religion a reality to
himself, and he does it in ways that are natural and
homely, finding God in the practice of the most
ordinary and even menial duties. He was put to
work in the kitchen of the monastery, and he man-
aged to make his kitchen a stepping-stone to the
Highest. The manner of his conversion is the first
TO
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Beside Still Waters
thing that shows us his robust, susceptible, unsophis-
ticated mind. He saw a bare tree in mid-winter,
and thought of the hidden life that was in it, and
of the miracle of the approaching springtime when
that same bare tree would be dressed in living green.
This reflection made a new man of him. It was not
a conventional conversion. God is primarily a Poet,
not a celestial Doctor of Divinity; and a tree may
well be a more potent means of grace than a tract
on the Trinity. If a man can get more nourishment
out of a sunset than out of a sermon, who would
blame him ?
Brother Lawrence took a remarkably sane view of
Faith. He did not regard it as a comfortable reverie,
a noonday siesta, a pleasant frame of mind induced
by getting piously intoxicated on sermons and anthems
and ritualism ; for there is a drunkenness, “but not
with wine.” He thought that faith was not a quiescent
quality, but something we can quicken and enliven
by going about our common business faithfully, by
doing lowly duties in a lofty spirit, by enduring
hardships with a cheerful heart, by doing kindnesses
to others. He thought also that faith is the spring
of conduct, not merely the source of devotion. It is
the dynamic of action as well as of prayer. It is the
energy of the market-place as well as the inspiration
of the sanctuary. He was in the habit of looking to
God for help in little everyday things, and conse-
quently received strength for the day. Herein he
differs from most of us. We keep God for the crisis.
We reserve our religion for state occasions. We
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bring out the Bible when death comes, and think
about Eternity when we are not feeling very well.
We are among the great company of those who call
upon God only when they are in distress. ; We make
a convenience of Him. Brother Lawrence wanted
Him all day and every day. He wanted aid in the
irritating and irksome tasks of his office. He was
made cook in the monastery kitchen, much to his
annoyance. He disliked the menial work; but he
was so determined to do it like a man and not like
a whining school-boy or a spoiled child that he
made a habit of looking to God continually through-
out the day, that he might be strengthened to do his
task without peevishness or complaint. That is a
more manly thing to do than the taking of a city,
for it means the ruling of the spirit.
As might be expected, Brother Lawrence was not
a morbid person. He did not lie in the dark, con-
fessing his sins. He refused to brood dismally over
his shortcomings and failures. He resisted the ten-
dency to melancholy introspection. He declined to
vivisect himself, to analyze his motives, to put himself
under a moral microscope, to take himself to pieces
fibre by fibre to see how his spiritual life was getting
on. He knew that you cannot grow gardens so. He
did not torment himself with perpetual doubts and
questionings. A man who was converted by a tree
could never do that; Nature preserves him from such
insanity; the open air and the sunshine have entered
his soul and killed the bacilli of scepticism and sus-
picion. If Brother Lawrence made a mistake he
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Beside Still Waters
admitted it, and if possible corrected it. If he fell
into error, he confessed it and began again. If his
first efforts broke down and his first resolutions
failed, he rose up and made a fresh start. He refused
to grovel in the dust, and abuse his soul, and call
himself hard names, and rail at fate, and howl dis-
mally to his Maker. Like the wise, simple, honest,
humble man he was, he simply told his fault to
God, asked His forgiveness, implored His help, and
went on.
Brother Lawrence had, above all, learned that
supremely wholesome lesson that to labour is to
pray. “Every man's task is his life-preserver." He
believed in the devotion of activity. Not that he
considered the time spent in the chapel wasted; but
he said that he was more truly united to God in his
outward employments than when he left them for
retirement and devotion. He thought that he was
serving God more truly when he was working in the
monastery kitchen, preparing the simple meals and
washing dishes, than when he was poring over a
breviary or kneeling before the altar. I can see the
effect of his tree-conversion again in this. This man
was more at home with his Creator when he was
being honestly useful than when he was chanting
Aves and Paternosters, and swinging incense, and
bending before images of the saints, and receiving
the Sacrament. When God's open air has entered
a man's heart, he can find a way to the Highest
through anything—through a ledger, a bicycle, a
picture, a flower, a cricket-match, a children's party,
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Byways in Bookland
a friend, a thunderstorm, or the kitchen sink. For
him henceforth the earth is a place of vision and
symbol, and, like a true mystic, he sees the Divine in
common things.
A life of such confidence and simplicity as this is
at once a rebuke and an encouragement. It rebukes
our morbid thoughts and feelings, our sick fancies,
our vain imaginations, our fussy methods, our per-
spiring and lumbering efforts at reform, our perpetual
questionings and diseased introspections. But it is
an infinite encouragement when we see how really
simple a thing religion is; that it need not be com-
plicated with theological problems, or confused with
doctrinal dilemmas; that it is not necessarily coloured
or biassed or clogged by ecclesiastical associations;
that it fits into every kind of life as to the manner
born ; that it includes the whole of human thought
and activity; that it makes a man's heart happy and
gay and healthy; that nothing need be a barrier
where the heart wants anything very much. “ Love
laughs at locksmiths.” If that be true of human
sweethearting, it is truer still of the great love-story
of the soul.
TIT
1
2
CHAPTER VI
THE VALLEY OF TWILIGHT
THERE is a class of books of a pensive and reflective
kind to which I have always been very strongly
drawn. One grows to love them for their suggestive-
ness. They are continually opening up vistas of
thought in one's own mind, awakening slumbering
memories, reviving old associations. Of this class
Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson is a prominent and
prolific representative. One feels a strange air of
quietude stealing over the mind as one reads, and
there is an intimate sense of shady walks in cloistered
gardens, and of dreamy gazing upon the shaven turf
of a college lawn or the sober precincts of a cathedral
close. Curiously allied with these in my own mind
is another type of book of a more aggressive and
violent kind, and yet steeped in the same atmosphere
of twilight, though with the shade deepening into
gloom. Let one instance of this latter type be given
first.
A score of years ago I was living in the good old
town of Coventry. It was in my days of “ diggings,"
and I was always on the prowl for books of all sorts
Byways in Bookland
to lighten my loneliness. One night I was calling
upon a legal friend who also browsed in wide literary
fields. We had been discussing various writers,
emphasizing our personal favourites, underlining
them, so to speak, in conversational red ink, when
my friend abruptly asked:
“Do you know Ambrose Bierce ?”
“Never heard of him," I said.
My friend, whom I will call Briefless, for it was a
strict description of him at the time, gazed at me
quizzically.
“ There's the wonder of it,” he said. “Here is
a man who writes some of the strongest stuff of the
day, and scarcely anybody knows anything about
him !"
“What has he written ?" I asked, on the qui vive
at once ; for though Briefless was deficient in legal
acumen, I knew him to have a lively and fastidious
taste in literature.
Briefless leaned forward with the air of one about
to disclose a revelation or impart a State secret, and
said impressively:
“Have you never heard of a book called In the
Midst of Life ?”
“Never," I replied. “It's a good title, though."
“Get it," said Briefless in decisive tone; “get it
at once. That's Ambrose Bierce. He'll make your
hair stand on end. He'll cause your flesh to creep.
He'll make you terrified to go upstairs in the dark. If
you read him immediately before going to bed, I
won't be responsible for the consequences !”
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The Valley of Twilight
“Good gracious!" I exclaimed, “is it as bad as
that?"
Briefless glared at me in a kind of triumph, and
nodded. After puffing vehemently at his pipe for
a moment or two, enjoying my growing interest and
astonishment, “ Wait,” he said; "will you read it
to-night if I lend it to you ?"
“I will,” said I, and I meant it. Briefless arose,
went to his bookcase, and, returning, put into my
hands a volume in yellow boards, bearing the title,
In the Midst of Life : By Ambrose Bierce, and on the
front a telling picture of a horseman leaping from a
cliff into the valley below. I took the volume home,
read it through in bed the same night, and never
slept a wink.
I may as well say at once that I had never read
anything like Ambrose Bierce since Edgar Allan Poe.
He struck me as being more eerie and tremendous
even than Poe, on account of his greater simplicity
and restraint. Ambrose Bierce disdains rhetoric.
He does not pile up words. He has no tortuous
sentences. He does not accumulate an infinity of
detail. There is something in his sentences of the
quality of an etching. They bite into the mind;
they leave an indelible picture upon the imagination.
I have read his book two or three times since, and
see no reason to revise my first impressions of
Ambrose Bierce. He is a man who can write the
most weird, terrible, haunting short stories I have
ever read. His descriptions, many of them struck
off in a single sentence, stick in the mind for days.
co
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Byways in Bookland
Half his book consists of strange episodes taken from
the American Civil War, and one need wish to read
nothing more thrilling than A Horseman in the Sky,
more weird than An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,
or more awful than The Affair at Coulter's Notch.
The other half of the book contains stories of
civilians, and a creepier set of tales never came
between two covers. The appetite is whetted at the
outset by a tale called The Suitable Survoundings, the
scene of which is set in a forest, with a haunted hut,
a blood-curdling manuscript, and a solitary candle
as stage properties. Another tale bears the arresting
title, A Watcher by the Dead, which is as gruesome
a dish as any man could sup upon. Then comes a
surprising yarn, The Man and the Snake, which keeps
you on pins and needles for a quarter of an hour,
and leaves you gasping at the wholly unexpected
dénouement. If a man can read The Boarded Window
without an uncomfortable sensation, he is a blasé
customer; and if he can get through The Middle Toe
of the Right Foot without a creeping of the spine, he
is a hardened reprobate, and I shall not seek his
company.
It will be gathered, therefore, that Ambrose Bierce
is no novice. I believe this is his solitary book : at
any rate, on this side the Atlantic. One could wish
that a man capable of such powerful work as In the
Midst of Life displays would write more. But Bierce
is a fastidious writer. He is one of the select few
who take pains with their style. Some folk may not
care for his type of story; certainly he is not the
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The Valley of Twilight
man to whom one would go for a daily portion.
There is nothing charming, poetic, or idyllic about
In the Midst of Life; nothing of quiet everyday
incident; nothing of pastoral beauty, simple domes-
ticity, commonplace routine. The episodes he selects
for treatment are for the most part violent, eerie,
strange, terrible things out of the ordinary run of
experience. His war stories are remarkable. They
serve to reveal at once the horrors of battle and the
splendour of heroism.
Though one does not turn to a book like this
as to a familiar friend, but comes to it with a sense
of the awesome in experience, yet there is a place for
such literature, and in his own line Ambrose Bierce
is a genius. We could not bear to read every day of
incidents such as those revealed by the recent tragedy
of the Polar Seas,* but once in a while it is a bracing
and sobering experience to be brought face to face
with the terrors of Nature and with the magnificent
heroism of men in direst peril. One can imagine the
concise power with which Ambrose Bierce would
tell the story of Captain Oates stumbling into the
blinding blizzard to his death, carrying out like a
true man the stern code of honour in the Arctic
Regions, which obliges a man stricken with hopeless
illness to walk out into the wild, lest he expose his
comrades to the risk of contagion, or lessen their
chances of safety. Nothing more sublimely simple,
more infinitely pathetic, than this incident has come
our way for a long time, and one thinks with an
* Captain Scott and his party.
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Byways in Bookland
.
indescribable pang, yet with a thrill of pride, of that
noble inscription on the lonely cairn amid the
desolate snows: “Hereabouts died a very gallant
gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates, Inniskilling
Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in
March, 1912, willingly walked to his death in a
blizzard to try and save his comrades, beset by hard-
ship.” Were the incident not immortal as it stands,
Ambrose Bierce would make it so by his power of
picturing precisely such appealing episodes.
But I have strayed from the valley of twilight into
the valley of death, though the book that led me
there was In the Midst of Life, and I come back to
the vale of pensive meditation. One of my earliest
book friends was Washington Irving, and he cap-
tured me with The Sketch-Book. The name of
Washington Irving is not perhaps to be reckoned in
the front rank of American men of letters; he was
hardly robust enough for that. But though he may
not stand out with the same distinctiveness of
individuality as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, Long-
fellow, and those who make the chief glory of
American literature, he has a niche of his own, and
is as much beloved as any of his greater countrymen.
Indeed, there is a time in youth when Washington
Irving seems for the moment to o’ertop them all, so
intimate and winning is his appeal. He writes with
such charming urbanity, such amiable courtesy, such
graceful refinement; he throws a double spell over
us with his geniality and his artistry. He is one of
those writers who, at a certain period of life, provoke
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The Valley of Twilight
affection and even hero-worship; and the youthful
idolater, panting for recognition and conscious of
tremendous powers, wastes reams of excellent cream-
laid, faint-ruled paper in hopeless attempts at imita-
tion. It looks so easy, that smoothly flowing diction,
and the budding genius seizes his pen, and, with
rumpled hair, and eye in fine frenzy rolling, begins
to emulate that chaste rhetoric with a quenchless
ardour, until he discovers that this seemingly easy
page is the last result of a well-nigh perfect artistry,
and that though he lived to the age of Rip Van
Winkle himself, he could not produce more than
a colourless and feeble copy, as little like the original
as water unto wine.
Washington Irving was American by birth, but
British by descent. His father belonged to an
Orkney family, and his mother was a native of
Devonshire. His sympathies were largely with the
Old Country, and he paid several long visits to
England and made hosts of friends. The Sketch-
Book, which has deservedly become a classic in what
is called Polite Literature or Belles Lettres, is made
up chiefly of descriptions and recollections of English
scenes and customs, the most striking being an
account of an old-fashioned English Christmas not
unworthy of Charles Dickens himself. Both town
and country life appealed to Irving's sympathies,
and drew tributes from his ready pen. He was a
keen and shrewd observer, and his genial spirit and
wide sunny outlook, combined with his artistic
excellence, made his book a production of singular
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Byways in Bookland
charm. The English writer with whom he is most
akin is Addison, whom he resembles both in style
and subject-matter. The sketches of London, its
ancient inns and famous buildings, are quite in the
Addisonian manner.
Irving has a remarkable talent for description. In
his sketch on Westminster Abbey there is a memorable
passage, which I must allow myself the luxury of
quoting, describing the effect of the organ music
rolling through those marvellous aisles and lofty
roofs : “Suddenly the notes of the deep-labouring
organ burst upon the ear, falling with doubled and
redoubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge
billows of sound. How well do their volume and
grandeur accord with this mighty building! With
what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults,
and breathe their awful harmony through these
caves of death, and make the silent sepulchre vocal !
And now they rise in triumphant acclamation,
heaving higher and higher their accordant notes,
and piling sound on sound. And now they pause,
and the soft notes of the choir break out into sweet
gushes of melody; they soar aloft, and warble along
the roof, and seem to play about these lofty vaults
like the pure airs of heaven. Again the pealing
organ heaves its thrilling thunders, compressing air
into music, and rolling it forth upon the soul. What
long-drawn cadences! What solemn sweeping con-
cords! It grows more and more dense and powerful
-it fills the vast pile, and seems to jar the very
walls — the ear is stunned — the senses are over-
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The Valley of Twilight
whelmed. And now it is winding up in full jubilee
it is rising from the earth to heaven-the very soul
seems rapt away and floated upwards on this swelling
tide of harmony !”
It has always seemed to me that Washington
Irving's Sketch-Book is pre-eminently one of those
books which its author must have enjoyed writing.
It was doubtless a labour, for no man can attain to
that exquisite style without prolonged toil and con-
stant practice; but it must have been a labour which
was a genuine pleasure to bestow upon such a pro-
duction. There is no doubt a great deal of high-
flown nonsense talked about “Art for Art's sake,"
but there is no reason why a man who writes frankly
for a living should be a traitor to the principles of
Art. Artists are not as a body well-to-do men; they
are persons of Bohemian tastes and happy-go-lucky
habits, and are not assiduous in keeping accounts;
they are usually folk, like actors, of reckless gener-
osity, and thrift is to them one of the coldest and
most impossible of the virtues. The butcher and the
baker and the milkman are not, as a rule, persons of
lofty altruistic principles, and they demand payment
at distressingly frequent intervals even from artists
and poets. But I can well understand a literary
artist writing even for so sordid and prosaic a pur-
pose as to satisfy these insistent creditors, and at
the same time thoroughly enjoying the work he is
doing, and being absolutely loyal to his artistic
instinct.
I do not know whether Washington Irving wrote:
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Byways in Bookland
The Sketch-Book primarily to pay his bills or not;
but whatever his motive, I am sure he enjoyed
writing his book. The mere recalling of old scenes,
old times, old associations and experiences, is a
pleasurable effort, and the attempt to give them per-
manence in beautiful language enhances the pleasure.
When a man becomes really absorbed in what he is
writing, he forgets all about the motive and every-
thing else; his whole interest is in the work before
him, and his enthusiasm bars out every other con-
sideration. Irving wrote his book as the spirit
moved him, and that is why it lays hold of the
susceptible and discerning reader to-day. It is easy
to criticize such writing as his-easy to condemn it
as stilted, artificial, self-conscious, elaborate, over-
loaded, grandiose, rhetorical, and what not; but
there are some of us who would be very glad to
exchange a dozen volumes of the fluent journalese
of the present period for a single chapter of this
literary artist. There is nothing tawdry, vulgar, or
meretricious about Irving's work. If he loved a little
verbal embroidery, it was always done in perfect
taste. - Every paragraph in The Sketch-Book is the
handiwork of a man who would never send forth
anything poor or base.
The month of March in the present year (1913)
has been made memorable in the literary world by
the passing of one of the most remarkable writers of
recent years. If ever a man wrote genuine litera-
ture, it was Mark Rutherford. The books on which
his fame will chiefly rest are three – The Auto-
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The Valley of Twilight
biography, The Deliverance, and The Revolution in
Tanner's Lane. His other volumes, Miriam's School-
ing, Catherine Furze, Clara Hopgood, and Pages froni
a Journal, though containing many good things, and
all bearing the hall-mark of the same austere, incom-
parable style, are not so outstanding. There are,
however, one or two scenes in Catherine Furze which
are as great as anything he ever wrote, notably the
death of Phoebe, the servant-girl ; and for my own
part I have found a singular fascination in this
particular story.
Rutherford's real name was William Hale White,
and the veiling of his identity was characteristic of
the man. When he first began to write his work
attracted but scant attention, and even after the
lapse of years it was known only to a few. The
issue of his works in a shilling edition two or three
years ago made him known to a wider circle, but he
was not a popular writer, and is not likely to become
so. I shall never forget my first reading of The
Autobiography and The Deliverance and The Revolution
in Tanner's Lane. They were made known to me
through the pages of The Young Man, which, under
the able and enterprising editorship of F. A. Atkins,
was at that time a most interesting journal. W. J.
Dawson used to be a regular contributor to its pages,
and with his keen literary instinct he had “spotted”
the real genius of Mark Rutherford, and wrote
enthusiastically about him in The Young Man. It
was in this way my introduction to Rutherford
came about. Here was a new writer, indeed. His
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Byways in Bookland
style was a delight-simple, clear, incisive, not a
word wasted, with an aptness of epithet, a vividness
of phrase, a magic of delineation, that revealed the
hand of a master. It carried you on, page after page,
and it was not until you had laid the book down
that you realized that you had been led into the
depths of life, and had been reading of psychological
mysteries peculiarly difficult of presentation in
words.
It is certainly true that the total effect of Ruther-
ford is rather grim and melancholy, and it is possible
that some would describe him as morbid. He is a
dweller in the valley of twilight. A cold grey light
lies over his books, like the thin bleak sunshine of a
winter day. Often the light does not break through
at all, and one seems to be wandering in a desolate
world over which the massed clouds hang like a pall
of lead. Yet, though it is a sterile world into which
he takes us, there are hints of hidden fires, and now
and then they break out into flame with a scorch-
ing and unforgettable effect. He deals with deep
problems. No writer of recent years has ever
described the problems of religious doubt or probed
the consciousness of the honest sceptic with greater
power. He has an unerring insight into grey, irk-
some, monotonous, hopeless lives. He is the apostle
of the misunderstood. He knew the poignant feeling
of isolation so vividly expressed in the plaint of
Ezekiel the prophet: “Ah, Lord God, they say of
me, Is he not a speaker of parables ?" He writes
with extraordinary insight of the collisions of char-
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The Valley of Twilight
acter in the ordinary commonplace relationships of
life, and of the incompatibilities of temperament
which are sometimes found behind the flat-chested
frontage of dingy streets. He is the friend of those
whose minds are beset with unanswerable questions.
He understands the inner life of English Noncon-
formity as no other writer has done. The portraits
he draws of some of the less edifying specimens of
English Dissent are like steel engravings : every
line tells, and stands out with startling distinctness.
No one who has read him will ever forget the
description of the dark and dismal purlieus of Drury
Lane, and of the gallant attempt made there to
bring some gleam of light and some touch of beauty
into the sad and sordid lives of its inhabitants. It is
like a descent into the regions of the Inferno.
The books of Mark Rutherford stand very high in
the literature of self-portraiture. He is absolutely
unsparing in his unveiling of the intricacies and
involutions of the human heart. The Autobiography
and its companion volume, The Deliverance, are
worthy to stand beside De Quincey's Opium Eater,
Augustine's Confessions, and Bunyan's Grace Abound-
ing.
Mr. Balfour recently expressed a very natural
preference for cheerful books, and probably in that
leaning he will have a host of followers. Those who
desire cheerful literature will give Mark Rutherford
a wide berth. But there is a place for such books
as his, written with a sad and relentless sincerity,
laying bare the secret places of the heart, revealing
22
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17
C
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Byways in Bookland
the thoughts of one who has “ dwelt in uncompre-
hended loneliness of soul, and pondered things too
deep for him, and felt all the cruel drudgery, the
callousness, the solitude of life in great cities." He
does not hesitate to tell us the precise truth about
himself, if the telling of it will help in any degree to
explain the baffling mystery of his own life.
He tells also, in words that bite into the mind like
an etching into a plate, the exact truth about the
people he has met. He has a Carlylean faculty for
painting unforgettable portraits. Here is one of the
obsolete presidents of a theological hall of forty years
ago: “An elderly gentleman with a pompous degree
of doctor of divinity—a gentleman with lightish hair,
with a most mellifluous voice and a most pastoral
manner, reading his prim little tracts to us, directed
against the shallow infidel. About a dozen of these
tracts settled the infidel and the whole mass of
unbelief from the time of Celsus downward.” There
is an admirable sketch also of an atheistic publisher,
inordinately proud of ideas imbibed from a remote
past, “ideas which had never fructified in him, but
were like hard stones which he rattled in his pocket."
Perhaps the most striking of all his portraits is
that of the child Marie, whom everyone deemed so
dull and stupid, but who was transformed into a
perfect little nurse when her mother took typhoid
fever. Mark Rutherford has a very tender sympathy
for all sensitive, wounded, maimed, or suffering lives.
“How many (writes W. J. Dawson) will recognize
their own youthful sensitiveness in his cry that he
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The Valley of Twilight
could never find an ideal friendship, that he always
called twice for his friend's once, that he always
seemed to be obtruding his love, that at length the
conviction grew upon him that 'there was nothing
in him. And how finely does he say of love when
once he has found it—'If a man wants to know the
potency of love, he must be a menial; he must be
despised. Those who are prosperous and courted
cannot understand its power. Let him come home
after he has suffered worse than hatred—the con-
tempt of a superior, who knows that he can afford to
be contemptuous, seeing that he can replace his
slave at a moment's notice ; let him be trained by
his tyrant to dwell upon the thought that he belongs
to the vast crowd of people in London who are
unimportant, almost useless, to whom it is a charity
to offer employment, who are conscious of possessing
no gift which makes them of any value to anybody,
and he will then comprehend the Divine efficacy of
the affection of that woman to whom he is dear.
write poetry, but if I could, no theme would tempt
me like that of love to such a person as I was-not
love, as I say again, to the hero, but to the helot.'”
In one of the most memorable passages of his books
Rutherford writes: “I should like to add one more
beatitude to those of the Gospels, and to say,
' Blessed are they who heal us of our self-despisings.'
Of all services which can be done to man, I know of
none more precious.” To a large extent, Rutherford
has been rewarded with his own beatitude, and no
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Byways in Bookland
more appropriate sentence could be carved upon the
stone that marks his grave.
It has become fashionable in recent years to invent
a lay figure for the purpose of expressing one's
own views of life and character. One of the most
striking examples of this ventriloquial type of litera-
ture is George Gissing's book, The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft. It is written in a fine vein of reflec-
tion, with touches of quiet humour that lie on the
pages like sunlight on the hills, and depths of pathos
so poignant that a band seems to tighten round the
heart as one reads. The style alone would make
this book memorable--so simple, clear, and forcible,
with many a passage of poetry and eloquence, many
a page of beautiful and suggestive reverie; with a
high appreciation of the value of words, with an
aptness of epithet, a vividness of phrase, and a
rhythm of language that make the reader often
pause upon a sentence or read a line over again for
the sheer pleasure of the artistry. It is real
literature.
Some people may find a tinge of the morbid in
these pages. I suppose that this is almost insepar-
able from books which are written in the Valley of
Twilight. In Gissing's case it was inevitable that
a drab colour should sometimes creep into his re-
flections, for the book is largely autobiography, and
the reader catches many a glimpse of the strange,
grey, almost squalid, life he once lived in Grub Street.
The descriptions of his lodging in a London cellar,
into which the light filtered through a grating in the
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The Valley of Twilight
pavement above, where he sat and wrote far into the
night; of his frequent spasms of hunger, when he
hardly had a copper in his pocket; of his miserable
peregrinations in damp and foggy and squalid streets;
of his thwarted ambitions and his longings for larger
life and liberty—these things make melancholy read-
ing, and the man who has endured such poverty and
unhappiness may be forgiven much. Nothing is
sadder than the tale of genius unrecognized, per-
verted, or repressed. It is horrible to think of a man
capable of writing such a delicate and thoughtful
book as this being compelled to drudge for a crust in
acellar.
Yet there is another side to it. This man had
a city of the mind. He had meat to eat of which
the world knew not. On his deal table under the
iron grating the sun rays fell dimly upon his Shake-
speare and a few favourite classics. His hard, pinched
life gave him an insight into the depths of things,
and he came to understand and to sympathize with
the broken and stunted lives of the very poor. He
had his beloved books to read; nay, more, he him-
self wrote books. Deep in his heart there slept a
feeling for beauty, a love of Nature, which woke like
a flower from the encumbering earth, when the spring-
time of opportunity and good fortune smiled at last.
Nothing in the whole book is more moving than this
man's response to Nature when at length he was
able to gaze upon her face. Circumstances arose
which enabled him to exchange his London cellar
for a cottage in Devon. Paradise from the Inferno!
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Byways in Bookland
Devon! The very name is music. There is no
fairer spot in all broad England. How often the
vision of the country lured Ryecroft when he toiled
in London, and he had perforce to be content with
the vision! “How I dreaded the white page I had
to foul with ink! Above all, on such days as this,
when the blue eyes of spring laughed from between
rosy clouds, when the sunlight shimmered upon my
table and made me long, long almost to madness,
for the scent of the flowering earth, for the green of
hillside larches, for the singing of the skylark above
the downs!” Now the vision materialized. He was
able, through a stroke of fortune, to leave the vast,
relentless city and seek sanctuary in a Devonshire
cot. The man who could thus feel for the beauty of
the earth and the glory of the sky, who could thus
visualize the spring even in the midst of misery,
was able now to wander forth into Devonshire lanes,
and see the primrose starring the bank, and hear the
lark trilling in the blue. "All about my garden
to-day the birds are loud. To say that the air is
filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless
piping, whistling, trilling, which at times rings to
heaven in a triumphant unison, a wild accord. ..."
Think of the man whose ear was wont to hear
nothing but the babel of the streets, the roar and
clatter of traffic, the clamorous shouts of costers and
shrill screams of women and children, who was used
to listen for the heavy tramp of the policeman's feet
as he passed over the grating above the cellar where
he sat and wrote think of him sitting now in his
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The Valley of Twilight
cottage garden or his quiet room writing a note like
this: “Every morning when I awake I thank Heaven
for silence. This is my orison. I remember the
London days when sleep was broken by clash and
clang, by roar and shriek, and when my first sense
on returning to consciousness was hatred of the life
about me. ... Here, wake at what hour I may,
early or late, I lie amid gracious stillness. Perchance
a horse's hoof rings rhythmically upon the road;
perhaps a dog barks from a neighbouring farm; it
may be that there comes the far, soft murmur of a
train from the other side of the Exe; but these are
almost the only sounds that could force themselves
upon my ear. A voice, at any time of the day, is the
rarest thing. But there is the rustle of branches in
the morning breeze; there is the music of a sunny
shower against the window; there is the matin song
of birds. Several times lately I have lain wakeful
when there sounded the first note of the earliest lark;
it makes me almost glad of my restless nights. The
only trouble that touches me in these moments is
the thought of my long life wasted amid the sense-
less noises of man's world. Year after year this spot
has known the same tranquillity; with ever so little
of good fortune, with ever so little wisdom, beyond
what was granted me, I might have blessed my man-
hood with calm, might have made for myself in later
life a long retrospect of bowered peace. As it is, I
enjoy with something of sadness, remembering that
this melodious silence is but the prelude of that
deeper stillness which waits to enfold us all."
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Byways in Bookland
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft abound in
passages like this, and I do not know of anything
that reveals a man's quality so much, of anything
that tells so clearly that he has kept his soul alive,
as this power of response to beauty, to Nature, to
simple everyday things. When a man has lost the
faculty of seeing the wonderful in the commonplace,
his better part has died within him. After all, the
miraculous is not in the abnormal, the exceptional,
the portentous, but in the great silent forces, the
familiar, persistent things, like the glory of the sun,
the wizardry of the moon, the shining of the stars,
the wind on the heath; things like gravitation, the
motion of planets, the mystery of dawn, the coming
of spring. The mystic is the man who sees the
Divine in common things; and he is not a man to
be pitied, but envied, who, in the midst of adverse
circumstance, amid hunger, poverty, and dismay,
keeps the child heart that "leaps up when it beholds
a rainbow in the sky."
This mystical faculty of seeing the Divine in com-
mon things reminds me of another small book, to
which I should like to pay a tribute of gratitude-
The Roadmender. This little volume would seem to
be on its way to becoming a classic in the literature
of quiet reflection and mystic reverie. It has gone
through edition after edition, and has been issued in
sumptuously illustrated form, with the large printed
page, the ample margin, the specially woven paper-
the various embellishments of the literary epicure.
The book has gathered around itself an atmosphere
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The Valley of Twilight
of pathos, almost of tragedy, since the few meagre
details of its author's life have leaked out. The
name of “Michael Fairless” has become dear to
many sympathetic and discerning hearts. Her book
was written largely on her deathbed ; the last section
of it came from her lips as she lay slowly dying
during the final nine days of her life. The book has
thus the pathos of association; a halo of sanctity
hangs about the frail figure of this traveller in the
Last Valley. But apart altogether from knowledge
of the author, the book has merits of its own
sufficiently great to attract attention and secure
admiration.
It is difficult to say wherein the charm of The
Roadmender lies. It is elusive as a fragrance;
fugitive yet haunting as a melody. The spell lies
partly in the style, partly in the thought, partly in
the allusions to the deep things of life; but no
analysis can explain the subtle influence which
exhales from these pages. The book has personality,
outlook, a point of view. If there is any one word
which expresses one's feeling about such a book, it
is the word "vision.” Here is a writer who sees
and can tell what she sees. She sees the things
which other folk pass by unnoticed, or in which they
perceive no significance. She hears the undertones
of life. She is aware of the quiet streams of thought
and feeling that run deeply in the silences. She has
an exquisite sensibility towards Nature; a strange
kinship with animals, birds, and all living things;
an equally strong and sympathetic link with humanity.
1
ΙΟΙ
Byways in Bookland
VIII.
It is this all-roundness of sympathy which gives sanity
and vigour to her treatment of life.
Michael Fairless is not a weak sentimentalist.
Loving beast and bird, she is not one of those un-
human beings who think more of a dog or a horse
than of their nearest kin; though an invalid, she is
not a recluse; though she broods, she is not morbid;
she is utterly free from that diseased egotism and
painful self-analysis which is the bane of so many
of those stricken by untoward fate. She neither
shrieks at destiny nor glooms over it. Her thoughts
turn outward; in the simplicities and the common-
places of daily life she finds heart's-ease and almost
exuberant joy.
I can understand certain people taking up The
Roadmender and finding nothing in it. Be it so:
let them go to their own place. Doubtless they
have their reward. The Roadmender will draw its
own circle, gather its own constituency. It will not
appeal to those who must above all things have
something novel, something clever, something smart.
The Roadmender lives in a different world. Those
who have suffered from the boredom of cleverness
will revel in these loftier skies, these wider spaces,
these cleaner airs. Michael Fairless understands
the dangers of our artificial life. She realizes that
this bustling civilization is sapping the strength of
man, draining away his better self, turning him into
a machine. Individuality is now at a discount, and
man suffers immeasurable loss through the mechan-
izing of his work and the hardening effect of routine.
1
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The Valley of Twilight
It is a high price to pay for anything with the in
paralysis of one's personality. “Once the reaper
grasped the golden corn-stems, and with dexterous
sweep of sickle set free the treasure of the earth.
Once the creatures of the field were known to him,
and his eye caught the flare of scarlet and blue as
the frail poppies and the sturdy corn-cockles laid
down their beauty at his feet; now he sits serene on
Juggernaut's car, its guiding Dæmon, and the field
is silent to him.”
It would be hard to say what are the most charm-
ing things in The Roadmenderits beauty of diction,
its rich suggestiveness, the wonder of its natural
descriptions, the fragments of conversation recorded
by the roadside. What an artist Michael Fairless
is! What an eye she has for colour! Take this
little picture of autumn: “Autumn is here, and it is
already late. He has painted the hedges russet and
gold, scarlet and black, and a tangle of grey; now
he has damp brown leaves in his hair and frost in
his finger-tips. It is a season of contrasts; at first
all is stir and bustle, the ingathering of man and
beast; barn and rickyard stand filled with golden
treasure; at the farm the sound of threshing; in
wood and copse the squirrels busied 'twixt tree and
storehouse, while the ripe nuts fall with thud of
thunder rain. When the harvesting is over, the
fruit gathered, the last rick thatched, there comes a
pause. Earth strips off her bright colours and shows
a bare and furrowed face; the dead leaves fall gently
and sadly through the calm, sweet air; grey mists
ZR
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Byways in Bookland
drape the fields and hedges. The migratory birds
have left, save a few late swallows; and as I sit at
work in the soft, still rain, I can hear the blackbird's
melancholy trill and the thin pipe of the redbreast's
winter song—the air is full of the sound of fare-
well.”
The final section of The Roadmender is called At
the White Gate. The writer has often seen it across
the green meadows, glimmering in the twilight;
now, as she lies a-dying, she sees it yet in her quick
imagination, and it has become for her the symbol
of immortality. At the White Gate the pen falls
from her hand. The voice that painfully dictated
the last sentences, when she could no longer grasp
the pen, is silent: she has spoken her message.
Though she speaks frequently of death, her message
is neither melancholy nor morbid ; there is a touch
of wistfulness in it, as of one trying to penetrate the
shadows, but she treads the Valley without fear. In
her very last chapter she speaks of the wonder of
life, and harks back once more to the beauty of the
world. Nature tugs at her heart-strings. She finds
it hard to drag herself away from the generous bosom
of Mother Earth. A few things here at least are
solid and certain, but afterwards--! Still, it is not
a black and gloomy portal through which she passes :
it is a White Gate.
11
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CHAPTER VII
ON THE SPURS OF PARNASSUS
ARE we less poetical than we were once? The
question has been recurring to my mind since a
friend incontinently buttonholed me in the street
and detained me in an east wind to discuss whether
poetry is read now as much as it used to be. He
maintained with sorrowful insistence that it is not.
As for me, I felt in the position of Sherlock Holmes
when Dr. Watson requested his opinion on some
knotty problem, and the shrewd detective shakes his
head and says: “No data, Watson; it is a capital
mistake to reason without data."
The booksellers’ list might supply some ground to
work upon, and as a matter of fact I believe the
Standard Poets have a fairly steady and continuous
sale. Many of these, doubtless, are purchased for
ornament rather than use, just because one ought
to have them; and many are gifted as prizes to
ingenuous schoolboys, whose private partialities lean
rather to Jack Sheppard than John Milton. But
while making every reasonable deduction, I am loth
to believe that we are losing our sense of beauty in
thought and language. It cannot be that the Muse
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Byways in Bookland
has taken flight for ever, and that she lives only in
stone and bronze and fond memorials. It is cus-
tomary now to bewail the Past, to weep crocodile's
tears on public platforms as we describe and de-
nounce the degenerate Present, to print our jeremiads
in pessimistic and expensive volumes expounding the
words “ There were giants in those days.” This has
become a fashion, and we all strive to follow the
cult of Ecclesiastes. It is picturesque melancholy,
histrionic grief, and it pays. If we can only groan
artistically, we gain quite a reputation for earnest-
ness; and if we can manage to speak in a pulpit-
voice of the follies of youth and the sins of society,
we shall be hailed as modern prophets.
“But are we less poetical ?” inquires my friend.
That is the point. If by that is meant, are we
less given to stringing rhymes, and ringing the
changes on “love” and “dove," "heart” and “part,"
“ tears” and “fears," we may be; if we are less
given to confusing poetry with clipped and mangled
words, such as “thro'” and “'neath” and “'twixt"
and “o'er," let us be duly thankful. But if we
mean, are we less susceptible to the beauty and
wonder and terror of the world, the pathos of life,
the glory of human nature ? then I should hesitate
to pass summary sentence on the present as a wholly
hardened and material age. Poetry may change its
form, but poetry will live as long as the world. The
pessimist tells us that the world is in its dotage; the
sane man says it is in its dawn. Kingsley was right
when he sang in his robust and manly way:
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
“While a slave bewails his fetters;
While an orphan pleads in vain ;
While an infant lisps his letters,
Heir of all the ages' gain ;
While a lip grows ripe for kissing;
While a moan from man is wrung ;
Know, by every want and blessing,
That the world is young.”
In short, the materials for poetry are still with
us-Nature and Humanity. And that includes the
Unknown, the Infinite, the Beyond, the great secret
that finds its expression in Religion.
“In the Spring a young man's fancy
Lightly turns to thoughts of love."
Thus every Spring means a resurrection of the
poetical. For even if the young man's fancy does
not attempt to throw itself into fluent verse and
express its passion in The Poets' Corner of the local
paper, yet those tender thoughts of his are the stuff
of which romance is made, of which dreams are
woven, of which lyrics spring, of which tragedies are
born. This makes us kin with Shakespeare and all
the great ones who have thrilled the world's heart
with noble speech. They speak our rapture for us.
They are the mouthpiece of our passion. They
interpret our romance, our fear, our woe. They give
substance to our dreams and that for which we have
no words. I often think what a friend a great and
true poet must be to the immense multitude of the
inarticulate. For most of us poetic or dramatic
expression is impossible. The Good Fairy did not
stand beside our cradles to bestow upon us the
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golden gift of memorable speech. And yet we have
everything within us that goes to make the poem
and the drama : love, hate, hope, fear, joy, sorrow,
greed, jealousy, ambition-all are there. A Shake-
speare comes and interprets us to ourselves. He
combines the scattered elements, broods over them,
welds them in the fire of imagination, and sends
them forth in a Hamlet, a Macbeth, a Romeo, an
Othello, an Iago, a Rosalind, a Desdemona, an
Imogen, a Cordelia; and we know them as we know
each other, as we know ourselves. He has held the
mirror up to Nature.
A poet must have two things pre-eminently—the
seeing eye and the shaping brain. What a rare
combination that is! Many of us can see, but we
cannot shape. Many could shape if only they could
see. As it is, their productions are a welter of words.
I hardly know anything more distressing, even to
torture, than to have an idea which one knows and
feels to be true and good and beautiful, and yet not
to be able to fit it to apt language. We spend hours
in picking and choosing among words and phrases,
rejecting, scoring out, re-writing, tearing up in dis-
gust, writing once more and yet again, and finally, in
despair,'committing our fancy to the flames. It is a
desperate experience. We are almost tempted in
such moments to envy “the mob of gentlemen who
write with ease.” And yet, no! Fluency is the most
fatal disease from which a man can suffer. To hear
of certain modern authors sitting down before their
Remingtons or Yosts and clicking out their three or
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
four novels per annum at so much per thousand
words, or marching up and down the room, with a
pipe in their mouths, dictating to an attractive but
bored amanuensis - it makes one shudder. Pot-
boilers may come that way, but literature cannot be
produced so.
A tale is told, with what foundation I know not,
to the effect that at a certain banquet, when the toast
of “The Paisley Poets” was proposed, every man
present stood up to respond. There is such a
delicious charm and naïveté about the story that
I have always felt it ought to be true. It shows
such a sterling and unblushing appreciation of one's
own merits. And if you do not stand up for your-
self, who can be expected to do it for you? Sir
W. S. Gilbert has put the matter finally:
"If you wish in this world to advance,
Your merits you're bound to enhance ;
You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, trust me, you haven't a chance !"
Even those carrion crows, the critics, who can do
nothing but croak their hoarse calumny and wheeze
their contempt, have no power to drown the singers
with their discordant cries. The true poet is not
easily snubbed. He will soar into his native empy-
rean, and find ample solace in the caresses of the
West Wind and the kisses of the Sun. And what
a glorious medium he has for retaliation! What
satire he can vent in expansive verse! How gallantly
he can convey the idea in withering couplets that
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Byways in Bookland
he does not cast his pearls before inappropriate
recipients! He remembers the magnificent scorn
of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and sits down
with terrible determination burning on his brow to
scatter his enemies at the point of his Swan or
Waterman.
“O who would deem himself a Bard
If quenched by Critic's curses ?
A Poet can retort as hard,
And scorch him in his verses.
'Tis sweet to grasp a glowing pen,
To stab a base Reviewer,
To see him writhe and squirm again,
As if upon a skewer.
(
“It is not good to be too mild,
With naught to vent your ire on;
A Poet is a wayward child,
And gangs his gait, like Byron.
It's very tame to sit and brood,
In reverie to be lost in,
And write to order, bald and crude,
Like Poet Laureate Austin.
“Nay, let me have a soul on fire,
And sing because I must do ;
And on my Critics wreak my ire,
As some fine day I trust to.
Let him who bears the poet's name
Esteem himself upon it;
With meekness bear the Critic's blame,
Then-damn him-in a Sonnet."
I have known one or two bards in different parts of
the country, and I protest that they have been ex-
ceedingly modest, unassuming persons. They had
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
left behind their extreme youth when they wrote
verses of dark, melancholy, or erotic warmth, and
had grown old enough to believe that life is, on the
whole, worth living, and that they could not have
suggested many improvements in the Creation, even
if an inscrutable Providence had thought of con-
sulting them.
The very youthful poet always seems to be steeped
in abysmal gloom (at any rate in his verses), and
appears to entertain dismal impressions of the life
he is called upon to endure, and he parades his
bleeding heart with unfailing regularity in the hospit-
able columns of the weekly paper. I recall one
infatuated youth who thus regaled the readers of
a certain weekly in the Midlands. He was haunted
by Shelley, and wrote revolutionary stanzas as a
self-appointed spokesman of the New Democracy.
I often encountered him in unfrequented byways, an
attenuated figure with dishevelled hair, and sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought, and a general
unwashed appearance, his lips moving to some
murmurous rhythm, evidently wrestling with some
mighty conception which stubbornly refused to be
thrown into appropriate rhyme. His midnight lamp
often cast its yellow glare upon the darkness long
after the orthodox hour. He affected a loose and
voluminous neckerchief, and a Byronic collar. I
have descried him at pensive eventide perambulating
the shadowy woods with one hand thrust into his
poetic bosom, while the other made strange gestures
to the accompaniment of a voice declaiming the
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Byways in Bookland
blankest verse to the pallid moon. On one occasion
he lured me from my bed at one o'clock in the morn-
ing to listen to the nightingales in a neighbouring
copse.
These are familiar symptoms. In my own never-
to-be-forgotten teens I have rhymed, and in halting
measure apostrophized the maiden of my heart. I
perpetrated sonnets in dreadful secrecy, and almost
every other day was safely delivered of couplets.
Fortunately, one grows out of these things. I believe
there is an inevitable stage in the evolution of every
imaginative youth in which he firmly believes him-
self to be a genius and predestined to undying fame.
If he be at all of a literary temperament, this convic-
tion is sure to find expression in the writing of verses.
Every spring he breaks forth into a shower of lyrics,
and the track of every autumn is marked by elegiac
stanzas. It is an interesting phenomenon, and should
not be sneered at by the prosaic nor ridiculed by the
elderly. It is a time of dreadful seriousness; foolish,
inflated, vain, egotistic, self-conscious, no doubt, but
still, terribly in earnest. Somebody has very appro-
priately called it “The Dead Leaves Period.” It
has its pathetic side-this eager youthfulness, writing
with such intensity of broken hearts, blasted hopes,
blighted ideals, thwarted ambition, withered love,
hopeless passion, of death and the grave, and all
the sad things of which tragedy is made. It is a
symptom, and will pass. One smiles in after days
at the youthful effusions which one turns over un-
expectedly in a drawer, and as one reads them a
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
hundred vivid hours revive again. But the smile is
not one of contempt. It is rather the smile of kindly
indulgence which one bestows upon a spoiled child.
Twenty years ago, while prowling round the open
bookstalls in Booksellers' Row-now, alas! no more
to be trodden by Bohemian feet-I came upon a
small thin book of sixty-six pages, which I have
perused many times. It bore the title of Pirated
Poems, was bound in cloth, was priced at sixpence,
was just the right size for the pocket; it has beguiled
many a half-hour since, and has accompanied me on
many journeys. The little book has a singular history.
It is described on the title-page as “ A Reprint from
an Old Book found on a Bookstall," and opposite
the title-page is the following curious note to the
Anonymous Author: “The Publishers of this book
have produced this volume from an old copy found
on a bookstall. They have endeavoured to trace the
Author, but have failed, and they undertake to pay
the Author (whoever he may be) his share of the
profits-if any-arising out of the sale of the same,
from the date of this publication and as long as the
book shall find favour with the public. The Author
must prove his identity to the satisfaction of the
Publishers, or to the satisfaction of such arbitrators
as they may appoint. March 15, 1890.” I have
since been told that the author was found, but who
he was I have never been able to discover, beyond
the fact, obvious from the poems, that he was an
American.
The quality of Pirated Poems is such that, on
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Byways in Bookland
coming to the end, the reader emulates Oliver Twist
and longs for more. The human note predominates,
and the verses run through the gamut of many
moods. They are distinctly clever, but there is
more than cleverness in them. We admire and
applaud cleverness, but we are not moved by it.
Cleverness soon bores us, unless there be a plus
quantity to give it weight and depth. There is a
kind of writing which is perpetually straining after
effect in thought and expression, and it affects us
like an abnormal gymnastic display or the sinuous
antics of a contortionist. The modern mind revolts
from the common-place, forgetting that the common-
place is the staple food of life, and that there is
a way of looking even at the commonplace which
invests it with the quality of miracle. Writers who
are for ever trying to say extraordinary things in an
extraordinary way are literary contortionists; they
tire us even while they amaze us. The feat is
marvellously well done, but the chief marvel is why
: it should be done at all. The man who lasts and is
listened to is the man who is not afraid to say
ordinary things in his own way, and that is originality.)
The true genius is he who can interpret the moods
of the average man, and express in a distinctive and
memorable way the thoughts and feelings that visit
the mind and heart of the multitude.
This has been done with admirable effect by the
anonymous author of Pirated Poems. Indeed, there
is a singular propriety in his anonymity. He repre-
sents the Common Crowd. He is own brother to the
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
Man in the Street. He has his own attitude towards
life-partly cynical, partly reckless, partly satirical,
partly jocular; but this is on the surface, and under-
neath this protective veneer there are deep currents
of thought and tender feeling running in the silences.
The superficial reader will likely lay this book down
with a careless or a caustic comment, but the
sympathetic student of human nature will perceive
more than lies on the surface; he will read between
the apparently light and careless lines, and detect
undertones of pathos and pity and tenderness as
delicate and beautiful as they are sincere and strong.
In the opening lines the author has successfully
drawn every man's portrait :
“Within my earthly temple there's a crowd :
There's one of us that's humble, one that's proud;
There's one that's broken-hearted for his sins,
And one who, unrepentant, sits and grins ;
There's one who loves his neighbour as himself,
And one who cares for naught but fame and pelf
From much corroding care I should be free,
If once I could determine which is Me."
There is considerable insight in the poem entitled
Mea Culpa, and the final verse presents an example
of the deeper note referred to above. After rehears-
ing the catalogue of his wayward desires and pro-
pensities, he concludes:
“ I am the man that I have been,
And at the final summing
How shall I bear to see sent in
My score-one long shortcoming!
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Byways in Bookland
Unless, when all the saints exclaim
With righteous wrath,' Peccavit !'
Some mighty Friend shall make his claim-
. 'He suffered, and-amavit.'”
There is a fine bit of satire in the verses called
A Philadelphia Claverhouse, as keen as it is deserved ;
and in the poem that follows it, In the Elysian Fields,
there is a bit of deep teaching in the final verse which
is very seldom emphasized. The author pictures
himself arriving in the Elysian Fields, and greeting
various characters he specially desires to see, and
then he says :
“What? Glad I came ? I am, for certain ;
The other's a malarious hole;
I always pined to draw the curtain,
And somehow knew I had a soul.
The flesh-oh, wasn't it a fetter ?
You'd get so tired of all your schemes.
But here I think I like it better ;
Oh, dear, how natural it seems !''
The italics are mine. The most remarkable poem
in the volume is one called Throwing Stones, in which
there is a depth of tenderness and a simple sincerity
of expression that touch the heart to tears. It is
almost a shame to quote from such a tiny book; it
should be bought, and absorbed at a sitting in a
meditative mood when the day's work is done. The
Superior Person will not enjoy it. The Pharisee will
turn from it with high-sniffing pride and contempt.
But the Lover of his Kind will be grateful, recognizing
in it the touch of Nature which makes the whole
world kin.
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
1
Seventeen years ago there appeared a book of
poems which will live a century, and longer. Its
title is A Shropshire Lad, and its author is A. E.
Housman. Poetry is not at its highest level to-day,
though there are some promising signs of its revival ;
but amid the mass of mediocrity this book shines
out like a glowing jewel. Good and memorable
things have been done by Stephen Phillips, W. B.
Yeats, William Watson, Alfred Noyes, Henry New-
bolt, John Masefield, and others; but I venture to
think that A Shropshire Lad will outlive them all.
In bulk it is small—there are not a hundred pages
in the whole volume—but genius shines on every
page, and the lyrical charm of the book throws a
spell over the reader. The form is so exquisite, the
language so simple, the thought so lucid, that at
first these poems have an almost puerile look ; but
one cannot read far without perceiving that the form
is the result of the finest art, the language studied
and pruned and refined to the last point of perfection,
while the thought often cuts down to the very quick
of life. By the simplest of means the imagination is
kindled; a picture is etched upon the mind in a
telling phrase; in a couple of lines a thought is
suggested that leaves an indelible impression; the
reader feels that he is all the time in touch with
reality. In these sixty-three brief lyrics Life speaks
to him in thrilling and poignant tones, and he knows
he has been close to the living heart of things.
The matter of the poems ranges over the three or
four things which are of perennial interest: Love,
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Byways in Bookland
Nature, Sport, Patriotism, Life's Vicissitudes and
Ironies. The writer tells of the local patriotism
stirred by war, and pictures the setting out of the
young recruit from his native town. He speaks in
poignant phrase of those who return no more. His
sympathy goes out readily to cricket and hunting
and the games of the countryside. He loves the
open air, and all the sweet scents and sounds of
Nature. The wind from the Weald blows through
his pages. The beautiful landscapes of Shropshire
are revealed to us in a line or two of wonderfully
suggestive descriptive touches. There is no elabora-
tion anywhere: the thing is done as if by magic-
the magic of a phrase.) We see the winding Severn
slowly meandering between green banks, and the
aspen leaves quivering in the passing breeze. We
see the golden bloom of the gorse; the hedges white
with hawthorn snow; the lush meadows over which
the bells chime faint and mellow at evening; the
quiet red-roofed hamlets peeping out among the
trees; the spread of wide skies; the cloud shadows
that wander across the valley.
Then there comes out of the poems the Cry of Life.
We see the red coats of the huntsmen and the
uniform of the soldiery, and hear the shouts from
the field and the roll of drums. We hear fare-
wells being bawled down the village street, and all
the laughter, chaff, and chatter of the local gossips.
We see lad and lass strolling through field and wood,
and witness the plighting of vows; we see, too, the
swift tragedy of jealousy, and in our fancy we catch
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
a sudden glimpse of the black flag floating grimly
from the walls of Shrewsbury Gaol. The panorama
of daily experience in quiet country towns and villages
passes before us, and so vivid is the poet's verse that
it is as though we were on a walking tour and saw
the life that he describes. Mr. Housman has a rare
touch for natural description. Witness these two
verses from Reveillé :
“Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.
“Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.” :
The poet can describe a quarrel and its upshot in
vivid, swift, and telling lines :
“The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried ;
And Maurice among the hay lies still,
And my knife is in his side.”
He has a weirdly impressive piece about an execution
in Shrewsbury Gaol, in which there is one verse full
of imagination :
“So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine,
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine."
The italics are mine. In those two lines one seems
to be actually present at the final moment. There is
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an exquisite lyric on Bredon Hill, which sings itself
into the heart by its own melody:
“In summer-time on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear ;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.
“Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky."
The lover speaks to his lass of the merry peal that
will ring from the steeple on their wedding-day; but
alas! for human hopes :
“But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.”
“They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me."
There is a byway on the Slopes of Parnassus in
America that I have often walked in, provided by
Colonel John Hay in Pike County Ballads. They
made their first appearance in book form in 1871,
but were originally contributed to the New York
Tribune, to which the Colonel was then an editorial
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
writer. Colonel Hay's poems share something of his
adventurous career and his robust personality, while
they reflect in a striking manner the spirit of the
strong and independent people of the rivers, hills,
and plains. To the mere man of the library these
poems come with something like a shock; to the
dweller in clubs and drawing-rooms they offend by
their violence and their breezy blasphemies; but to
the man whose heart retains a breath of the primi-
tive, and who understands the Call of the Wild, they
are a natural product of the bracing air and of the
honest, simple folk they represent. Colonel Hay
finds his material in crude forms, and has a sure
touch in dealing with the raw, rough characters who
have not become the spoiled darlings of a luxurious
civilization. The open-air life of the plains does at
any rate breed strong men, whose robust physique
puts to shame the anæmic products of city streets
and slums. The mind of the dweller in tents works
in a straight line, with a clumsy but glorious sim-
plicity; he is not visited with the cynical thoughts
and the shallow doubts that are born in the brain
of the smart man on 'Change. Colonel Hay would
have some difficulty in making a poem out of the
superficial smartness and showy vulgarity of a
Society crowd, but his clear eye is not an instant
deceived by the rugged, rude, blaspheming manhood
of a Jim Bludso. Jim Bludso, of the Prairie Belle,
is one of those characters in whom Colonel Hay
delights. Jim was an engineer on the Belle, and as
tough and rough a customer as ever breathed. He
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was lurid in his talk and loose in his morals, “ but
he never funked, and he never lied.”
“And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,~
A thousand times he swore,
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.”
The day came round, and the fire with it, and Bludso
kept his word.
“Through the hot black breath of the burnin' boat,
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smoke-stacks fell,-
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
“He weren't no saint-but at jedgement
I'd run my chance with Jim
'Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,
And went for it thar and then ;
And Christ ain't a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.”
That conclusion is entirely characteristic of the spirit
of Pike County Ballads. I have heard an eminent
theologian denounce that conclusion publicly as
drivelling sentimentality, which is a conclusion
entirely characteristic of that particular eminent
theologian. That is what comes of looking at the
world out of a library window, and living in the
fourth century.
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On the Spurs of Parnassus
The style of these Ballads (there are but six of
them altogether) is the quaint irregular measure,
freely peppered with slang and dialect terms, so
frequently belonging to many American poems.
Bret Harte has made us familiar with it, and it is
wonderfully effective. It seems to bring out the
pathos and the peculiar humour of the story. It
would be hard to find a more effective example of
this than in the yarn about Little Breeches. Little
Breeches is a four-year-old child who is carried off
by a runaway waggon and gets lost in a snowstorm.
The anxious search-party find him at last, safe and
warm among the lambs in a little shed. The con-
clusion is again a characteristic one:
“How did he get thar ? Angels.
He could never have walked in that storm;
They just scooped down and toted him
To whar it was safe and warm.
And I think that saving a little child,
And fotching him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around the throne.”
It is things like these that (as Lowell says) “ tear
down to the primitive rock.” The turns of thought
and expression are startling, and in form they may
even seem blasphemous; but they are redeemed
from any suspicion of irreverence by their depth of
feeling and simple sincerity. They “find” in a soft
part every man who has not sold himself to the con-
ventional and become petrified by the orthodox.
Colonel Hay has a sure hand for discovering and
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disclosing the redeeming element in a rough man's
character. It is a better thing to do than to go
about with no good word to speak of one's neigh-
bour, and I fancy it is a lesson he must have learned
from the Son of Man.
124
CHAPTER VIII
IN A BROWN STUDY
WHEN a man is in that quiet, reflective state of
mind known as a Brown Study, a great many jostling,
vagrant thoughts visit him. In this chapter I want
to set down a few of those thoughts which have
invaded me when thinking over books and the
writing of them.
I have always envied the man who can write a
good tale. He is one of the richest benefactors of
the human race. How much one owes to writers
like Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë,
Dumas, Stevenson, Hugo, George Eliot, and all the
great makers of romance and laughter! They have
not only whiled away many a pleasant hour, and
lightened our solitude, and peopled our mind with
a host of characters, many of whom are more real
and sometimes more acceptable to us than the folk
we meet with every day, but they have made life
itself a brighter, sweeter, more interesting, more
tolerable, and more wonderful thing. It is not
merely that they have provided us with a series of
stirring adventures, or mirth-provoking incidents,
or memorable situations, nor that they have painted
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for us many a striking background and unfolded
a panorama of scenes, beautiful, impressive, or
grotesque, though even this is matter for gratitude
and congratulation; but it is chiefly that they have
opened the pages of the Book of Human Nature, and
laid bare for us the mysteries of love and hate, hope
and fear, greed and jealousy, sorrow and suffering,
quiet happiness and secret longing. They are the
magicians who hold the keys of the kingdom of
tears and laughter. These are among the giants,
the seers who know the heart.
But the lesser prophets are welcome too, so long
as they are true to life and give us honestly of their
best. ( He who can write a good short story is as
real a benefactor as the artist who works on a larger
canvas. It is said that every man has at least one
book in him, if he only had the skill and the will to
shape it into words.) Were it but the story of his
own life, however obscure and commonplace, so that
he were sincere in the expression of his thoughts and
feelings, and true to his own experience, it would be
a document of some value, and worth the writing
and the reading. But there's the rub! We can all
feel, we all have thoughts, we all have some kind of
experience, but we cannot all shape our life in words,
we have not all the fairy gift of utterance, we cannot
all speak with tongues, and, alas! we are not all
sincere. Moreover, it needs some imagination to tell
a tale with impressiveness and power and verisimili-
tude, and most of us are singularly lacking in that
priceless possession.
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In a Brown Study
I read once in a weekly paper what struck me as
a very wise and true saying. It was something to
this effect: “For the great writer, stories are close
at hand. They are in his own house and in the
next. He does not need to travel. What he has to
do is to show us the invisible in the visible.” How
easy to say! how difficult to perform! Yet there is
the real secret of the art of writing stories. To see
the invisible in the visible is not that a gift of the
gods ? I believe this faculty of insight is one which
may be cultivated. It simply means sympathy. So
many people could write, and write well, but they
are not ready to write about the things and the folk
they know—they will not write of that corner of the
world and that bit of life with which they are
familiar; they think they must travel to accumulate
new facts, and to precipitate fresh experiences, and
to arouse unusual emotions; and so, not having the
chance to travel, they invent impossible incidents
and introduce us to artificial characters, and the
whole effect is that of a puppet-show, of life seen by
limelight.
A friend of mine once wrote a tale, and submitted
it to the late Dr. Parker, of the City Temple, for an
opinion. I have never forgotten his criticism. “The
author (he wrote) is contemptuous. He cannot see
the lovely in the unlovely. Peradventure for a certain
kind of clique he might die, but not for the whole
world. He wants expansion. He cannot see a pos-
sible archangel in a greengrocer. He should soak
himself in Mary E. Wilkins. The author is un-
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doubtedly talented, observant, and graphic. At
present he is intellectually young, socially invidious,
and wholly unacquainted with humour and pathos.
His story as a rattling succession of action is quite
above the average, but it has no soul, no God, no
far-away sky and outlook." I wish that criticism
could be printed in capitals, and placed on the desk
of every writer of stories. It would redeem his
sentences from the merely superficial, and save him
from thinking that life is chiefly an affair of chatter.
If a man would only look into his own heart and
write, we should have something deeper than casual
observation. Why should he always be in search of
the extravagant, the unusual, the bizarre ? Why
does he confuse novelty with eccentricity ? That
fine writer of stories, Henry Seton Merriman, says:
“The only novelty is the Human Heart Central
Man. That is never stale, and there are depths
still unexplored, heights still unattained, warm rivers
of love, cald streams of hatred, and vast plains where
strange motives grow.” He is right. And there is
no need for a man to be obscure when he writes.
What I once heard Dr. Parker say of preaching will
apply with but little change to the writing of books :
“ Kind words, loving thoughts, experience trans-
lated into holy and tender language, deep study of
the Bible, expressed in the simplest terms-these
will touch the broken heart of the world when classic
expression and sweltering climaxes will be forgotten
or despised.”
A good many people have tried to define Inspira-
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In a Brown Study
tion, but it cannot be said that their efforts have
been very successful. Sir Joshua Reynolds, criti-
cally examining a certain picture, suddenly made an
expressive gesture and exclaimed, “It wants-that !”
What “that” was he wisely left undefined, but we
all know what he meant. In pictures, in music, in
sculpture, in drama, in poetry, in stories, in sermons,
in persons, there is a subtle Something that lifts the
commonplace into a mysterious light and bathes it
in the atmosphere of genius. The thing is quite
palpable, and quite indefinable. It is the strangest,
most beautiful, most alluring, most wonderful thing
in the world. The very same sentence may in the
mouth of one man be dull and unimpressive, and in
the mouth of another be almost a revelation.
If those who attempt to define inspiration are
foolish, those who wait for it are mad. If I
were an artist, I would depict Inspiration as a
weirdly beautiful female figure, half veiled in golden
mist, beckoning to the heights of a mountain peak
suffused in the rose of dawn. Wait for her ? Cer-
tainly not; she is waiting for me. A man must not
expect to be wooed (though in these emancipated
times he may expect anything), it is his business to
woo. And if his fair enchantress seems to mock his
first advances, and escapes from his presence just as
he is about to embrace her, he must not sit down
and sigh and talk about the fickleness of woman; he
must gird up his loins for the chase, risking and
enduring all things in the eagerness of his desire and
the greatness of his hope.
i
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I frankly confess I have often been tempted both
to define and to wait for inspiration. But that was
in my callow youth, and before I discovered that
inspiration is not an It, but a She. The feminine is
incalculable and indefinable, and to wait for her is to
insure solitude all your days. A writing man is
sorely tempted to wait for inspiration. He says he
does not feel in the mood for writing, and thereupon
lays down his pen and seeks the insidious comfort of
a couch and a magazine and a cigar. But it is a
mistake. A great many plausible arguments can be
brought to the rescue of the idea of waiting for
inspiration ; but I am most reluctantly compelled to
admit that they are all fraudulent and deadly. A
man really cannot afford to wait for inspiration
unless he is a person of considerable private means,
or has sure and certain expectations from his maiden
aunt. I am driven to believe more and more in the
inspiration of necessity. A man knows that a certain
thing has to be done by a certain time; if he be
worth his salt he will thereupon set his teeth and
doggedly go to work. I know all about the tyranny
of moods. I know all about that distracting, be-
witching, two-faced minx, Procrastination. I know
all that can be said in disparagement of the poor
hack who sits down at his desk at a particular hour
every morning or night, and, Trollope-like, sets
himself deliberately to turn out a certain number of
words or pages every hour. There is undoubtedly
something cruelly mechanical about the Trollope
method, working with one eye on the clock; but
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In a Brown Study
even this is better than sitting down in the forlorn hope
that inspiration will visit the vacant brain, and that if
one only waits long enough one's pen will be endowed
with almost Shakespearean energy and power.
It is possible to create a mood for writing. In a
small and humble way I have done it myself. It
may be useless to wait for inspiration, but it is by no
means useless to set your sail to catch the breeze
when it comes. A mood can be coaxed and cajoled
and even flattered into being. I call the literary
mood “Mary,” and imagine myself to be an amorous
swain, singing “Tell me, Mary, how to woo thee!”
Sometimes Mary does not deign to respond; she
merely tosses her dainty head, and tells me in action,
if not in words, not to be such a fool. But I am
not to be intimidated or suppressed by these symp-
toms of disdain. She must be mine, and I lay my
plan of campaign accordingly. If my pen refused to
work immediately, I used to make a meal off the end
of it, and sit staring blankly for hours at a virgin
sheet of paper. The dinner bell rang, and not a
word had been written. It was too provoking. But
now, when in such dire straits, and a famine of ideas is
threatened, I either get a good stimulating book and
create a literary atmosphere by half an hour's read-
ing, or else go out for a swinging walk over the hills
where I can get a blow and a view; and the sheer
delight of the physical exercise stirs up the torpid
brain to activity. Inspiration never comes to
dyspepsia or morbid brooding, or to a man
“frowsting” by the fire.
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How do thoughts come ? How do you account
for the origin and succession of ideas? When you
sit down before a blank sheet and dip your pen in
the ink-pot, do you know exactly what you are going
to say and how you are going to say it ? When you
have put down your first sentence, do you know
what your next is going to be? How do you begin,
continue, and end? These are samples of ques-
tions I have sometimes been asked, and I cannot
answer them. Probably my answer, were I so
far to forget myself as to offer one, would be
scouted as preposterous. There is only one pos-
sible counsel to all literary aspirants: Know what
you want to say, and say it in the best way at your
command.
Of course, that leaves the novice very much where
he was before. Personally, I believe in strange
voices, wandering winds, whispering birds, dreams,
visions, brownies, fairies, elves, goblins, pixies, Pucks,
and Ariels. Science and civilization and mental
snobbery are against them, but I care not a button.
These Invisibles are in my blood. I have a familiar
spirit who whispers things into my ear, and I am
sorry I cannot oblige you by a temporary loan, even
at a highly remunerative figure. Some things are
without money and without price. l I suppose I shall
be set down as utterly beyond rational argument
when I solemnly declare that I can always write
best when I imagine myself to be somebody else. I
can't explain it, but it is sober fact. The very few
best things I have ever done in writing have been
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In a Brown Study
done in character, so to speak; and when I have
taken up the thing to read it in after days I have
honestly enjoyed it, and could hardly be persuaded
it was my own handiwork. Probably the explanation
of the phenomenon lies in the many-sidedness of
human nature. Most men have at least two entirely
distinct selves; in many of us there are far more
than two. This accounts for many seeming incon-
gruities. Who would believe it possible that the
same hand which wrote
“God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform,
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm,"
also wrote
“ John Gilpin was a citizen
Of credit and renown,
A train-band captain eke was he
Of famous London town”?
Who would imagine that beneath the rather heavy
exterior of that sober mathematician and orthodox
curate, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, lay the
inspired nonsense-monger, Lewis Carrol ? Some
people considered the late Sir Henry Irving to be
great as a tragedian, and some considered him greater
as a comedian. Is it not hard to conceive of Hamlet
and Jingle being rolled up in the same man? I
have heard Dr. Parker preach sermons of the
most intense and searching solemnity, and sermons
which were almost rollicking in their irony and
banter and sarcasm, as he took off the foibles
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Byways in Bookland
of human nature and answered the gibes of the
scornful.
And yet there are actually people who seriously
complain because they never can tell what we are
going to do or say next! · They say we do not give
them notice! How can we? The simple fact is
we do not give ourselves notice. The inspiration of
the moment may indeed amaze our friends, but it is
an equal surprise to ourselves. Perhaps it may
sometimes make the judicious grieve, but nobody
really loves the judicious. They are of that vast
and depressing company “who never would be
missed !"
It is the fashion in these strange days to print
ideas, reminiscences, diaries, letters, notebooks,
which are supposed to have emanated from the
brain of a dear and deceased friend, whose last act
was to bequeath his “papers” to the admiring com-
rade of his heart, and in this bashful manner to offer
our own vagrant musings to the world. It is an
interesting and ingenious method of communicating
a piece of one's elusive personality to mankind. It
encourages one to think more buoyantly of an age
so tentative and modest. Such books appear to
have been written in a brown study, when musing
by the winter fire.
A book of this kind that interested me very much
is The Comments of Bagshot, by J. A. Spender. It
purports to be “edited,” but no doubt Bagshot and
Spender are interchangable. The book is discon-
nected and abrupt, consisting of isolated sentences
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In a Brown Study
crystallizing some personal opinion, or summarizing
a character, or embodying a thought, or reflecting
a mood, or offering a criticism. There is no artistry
in it, save perhaps in the shaping of some of these
isolated sentences, many of which are finely chiselled
and clean-cut as a cameo; it is what the title suggests,
a sort of running commentary on life and character.
Unless a book of this kind is very well done, it
is tedious and foolish; before one has got through
half a dozen pages one is sick of the man and his
blessed opinions. But when it is supremely well
done, as in the case of Bagshot, the result is amusing,
stimulating, and edifying in a high degree. There
is a type of book which gives a man a kind of electric
shock, and his ideas are set jostling and seething
together in a ferment of excitement. Such a book
is Emerson's Essays, and one can hardly read a page
without flying to pencil and notebook to record a
train of thought started by this wizard of literary
electricity. Bagshot has something of this effect, too.
He is provocative. He gives the brain a buffet. He
will comment quietly and pleasantly enough for a
while, and then suddenly he begins to play upon
one's mental vision like summer lightning, and one
sees a whole province of life lit up for a single
moment by the vivid ray, or gets a glimpse into
some obscure valley of thought or some unexplored
backwater of experience as the bright light flashes
over it.
Some of his summaries of character are particularly
graphic and convincing. He remarks: “C has
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the courage which bears an intolerable toothache
with fortitude for fear of going to the dentist.” We
have all met the man of whom he says, “Cut him
open, and you will find a clergyman inside,” and we
are all painfully familiar with the man whose con-
versation is “like the noise of a train in a tunnel-
one idea deafening you with its echo." Do we not
recognize this portrait ? “William is in chronic
rebellion against other people's experience. He is
like one of those climbers who will go up a mountain
the wrong way simply because other people have
gone up the right way before him.” I think I know
these two men also: “Denys has a nature warmed
from within, on which the snow will not lie."
“ Lewis's life is an incessant tobogganing, which
means that he spends two-thirds of his time in
getting his bob-sled up-hill.”
Bagshot is one of those happy beings who are
always saying things one would like to have said
first-if one could! Take these, for example: “TO
call themselves miserable sinners' is with many
people a kind of religious good manners, just as
a man inscribes himself your humble servant.""
“In the idealist the sense of sin passes into a passion
for perfection. Instead of “I am unworthy,' he
says, “This is unworthy of me.'” “Mem. for
humanitarians : Sympathy, like strength, must be
harboured. He who pities the whole world will
relieve no one.” “It is only the landlubber who
makes a boast of the fact that he is never sick at sea.
The homo sanus ought to be sick at sea if he is accus-
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In a Brown Study
tomed to live on dry land.” (Give me your hand,
Bagshot!)
What a comment is this on the gaming-house at
Monte Carlo: “The lights of the Casino shut out
the stars." And this: “Charity believeth all things
-but so, unfortunately, do envy and malice." And
again : “ Persistently doing what you don't want to
do under the idea that you are sacrificing yourself
for others may so embitter your character as to
make you intolerable to others.” I would commend
this comment also to many good people of my
acquaintance: “You can't enjoy a holiday because
you have to go back to work next week, nor a rose
because it will fade to-morrow, nor your robust
middle-age because you are going to be old and
decrepit some day. The ground is covered with
flowers, and you sigh and say the grave is under-
neath. There is no help for you." (The italics are
mine.) Bagshot knows something about men and
women, and that is different from knowing some-
thing about human nature. The odd problem is
more interesting than the mass. It is this know-
ledge of men and women—the individual puzzle, the
separate personality—that makes living books and
impressive speeches and arresting sermons.
This is the place in which to say something about
Bagshot's niece. This is the reference passage: “If
I say to my niece Molly that two and two make
four, she consents, but is unconvinced. But if I
show her this little formula : 11 + + I + 1 = 4, she
is at once all alive with interest, and sits down to
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work it out, and proclaims in triumph that it is so.
From a hard and dull statement of fact it has
become a problem and an intrigue, and here she is
in her element." I do not know Molly, but I love
her. If I met her I should be constrained to lay all
my wordly goods (my carpet bag) at her feet. She is
the sort of girl who keeps the world from becoming
a stagnant pool and a man from going to the dogs.
She may not be beautiful, according to the musical
comedy type; nor highly domesticated, after the
Home Chat standard; and she is certainly not a blue
stocking or a militant suffragette; but I am sure she
has bright eyes, indicative of vivacity within; and
she is athletic, and would not think about her ankles
when she gets over a stile; and she could discuss
a story if she couldn't write one; she could keep up
her end of a conversation with some spirit; she
would be charming, provoking, mischievous, tantali-
zing, merry, generous, sympathetic, kind-
“A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”
Molly is a protest against boredom, cynicism, and
pedestrianism in life and thought—that trinity of
evil which would rule all romance out of the world,
and make a mock of fancy and fairyland, and reduce
all poetry to the solidest and most indigestible prose.
Do two and two really make four? Possibly;
but who cares ? Four what? That is the exciting
question. Here are two elephants and two carving-
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In a Brown Study
knives, they are undoubtedly “four," but four what?
Bring all your philosophy to bear upon that innocent
question, and it will set your mind on a fine gallop.
We have given arithmetic a very appropriate Chris-
tian name; we have called it Simple Arithmetic.
That is exactly what it is--on paper. But when we
come to things—ah! then we sit down, and knit our
brows, and run our fingers distractedly through our
hair, and begin to wonder. I suppose logic is a very
excellent study, at any rate a most learned and pains-
taking professor once strove (how long ago ?) to
make me believe so, and occasionally I have found
it to be a capital crutch. But when I come to
a chasm in thought which makes me dizzy to look
into, I cannot stand tottering on the edge with my
brain all a-swim while I laboriously forge my bridge
of reasoning on which to cross it; I simply take my
courage in both hands and jump. Of course, it is
not an academic process, and entirely unorthodox,
but it is natural—which is one of the things that are
more excellent. Still, it may be frankly admitted
that crutches may be useful in the absence of wings.
Life is indeed a problem and an intrigue. There
is a secret in things, there is a mystery in the human
heart, and that is what makes religion. Logic never
throws a stone into the depths of wonder, setting
ripples astir that go flowing on and on until they
come to the edge of the world; but that is what Life
is doing every day. Arithmetic never sets imagina-
tion at work, but algebra does; the unknown
quantity doth work like madness in the brain.
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Byways in Bookland.
-
---
Wonder is childlike, no doubt, but not therefore
despicable, still less ridiculous; it may be the vesti-
bule of worship. Superstition is irrational, but not
therefore a theme for denunciation or contempt; it
may be the beginning of spirituality. We
I would rather be superstitious than be a materialist.
I feel a subtle kinship with the people who do not
like to sit down thirteen at table, who shrink from
crossing knives and spilling salt and walking under
ladders and breaking looking-glasses and travelling
on a Friday, who see the dryad in the oak and the
elves in the glen, and the goblins in the black maw
of the mountain cave. It may be my partially
Cornish blood, for Cornish folk are among the most
superstitious in the world; but there it is, and if
blood be thicker than water, it is certainly more
potent than reasoning. Temperament accounts for
the quality of a man's creed far more than logical
argument, and I do not see that it is any the less
worthy or valuable for that fact. The man who can
wholly account for his creed is a mystery of mysteries.
He can put it all down on a piece of paper, and say,
“This is what I believe: two and two are four."
And he carries it about with him in his waistcoat
pocket as if it were a season ticket.
Molly's formula makes all the stories and dramas
and poems of the world. Life is full of the un-
expected, and the making of every story, poem,
drama, sermon, is the element of surprise. You
want to write a story: how do you propose to begin ?
Well, I propose to construct an elaborate plot which
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In a Brown Study
shall preserve the “unities” and be an artistic whole
from start to finish, and then. ... Why, that's just
two and two are four over again! Let me know what
your characters are; the plot can take care of itself.
The men and women must come first, and if your
characters do not sometimes run away with you and
turn your beautiful symmetrical plot into temporary
chaos, you are a pedestrian author, and you write
with your eye on the clock, and think of how much
you are likely to get for every thousand words. Pot-
boilers can be made that way, but you cannot make
comedies and tragedies so. The best books, the
best plays, the best sermons, always leave you with
the impression that there is no particular reason
why they should end when they do. You are left
with the impression that you have been privileged
to overhear a very fine suggestive talk, and that the
talk could go on quite well when you are not there,
or that you have been looking in upon a scene which
must of necessity be "continued in our next.” It is
the impression of a great reserve of power.
There are some people who do not appear to have
any hidden depths in them. They never remind
you of the unknown quantity. They have the soul-
less regularity of a machine; every movement can be
calculated; they say good-morning to each other
regularly, read the newspaper decorously, do their
duty by their numerous progeny, walk their daily
beat with sober step, eat and sleep, and die decently
in their bed's in the end. They are a blessed multi-
tude. It is not that they have no hidden depths;
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Byways in Bookland
T1
it s rather that they have never become thrillingly
' aware of them. If they had, they would often be
incalculable and eccentric; they would sometimes
find it difficult to take themselves and life quite
seriously; they would have unaccountable impulses
to do preposterous things at solemn and inopportune
moments; they would be in mortal terror of saying
things in company that would turn the assembly
into stone; they would be of the society of those
who find it an exceeding ticklish task to live with
themselves.
Well, Molly, my dear, that love of the problem and
intrigue of yours has run away with me, and if I
pursue it farther I shall be saying things which can
only be said safely in the mystic circle of friendship.
Fortunately, there is a faith and a philosophy which
a man may have to himself before God! Whenever
I hear a man solemnly boasting that two and two
make four, or blandly inquiring whether he must
forgive his brother "until seven times," I shall think
of your bright eyes and see the tricksy Puck that
lurks in their brown depths, and a dexterous use of
my pocket-handkerchief will be needed to save my
sober countenance from betrayal.
Sometimes, while in the midst of a brown study,
a book catalogue will be thrust into my hands, and
it induces a browner study than ever. In the fall of
the year my waste-paper basket (luckily of vast cubic
dimensions) steadily fills to the brim with catalogues
of books. They descend from the four quarters of
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In a Brown Study
heaven. These sybilline leaves come fluttering to
my door, not in twos and threes, but in battalions,
making a positive Vallombrosa of my study floor and
table. They come borne upon the fitful winds of
the autumn publishing season, beginning about the
middle of September, blowing steadily during Octo-
ber, increasing in violence throughout November,
culminating in a gale on the verge of Christmas.
After that there is a lull until the spring, when there
is a renewed but feebler and briefer agitation of the
literary elements.
There is much to interest the book-lover in a
catalogue. There is such extraordinary variety in
it, and there is a pleasure merely in running the eye
down the list. Yet there is something pathetic, too,
in these hosts of volumes prospecting for readers.
When a catalogue arrives, stating on its cover that
herein is detailed the library of the late Mr. or
Reverend or Doctor So-and-so, I sit down to its
perusal with accentuated melancholy, and fall to
wondering. What sort of man was the late owner
of these now vagrant volumes ? The catalogue will
tell me, for few things are a better index to character
and mental idiosyncrasy than a man's library. Was
the reverend gentleman (hateful phrase!) a theolo-
gian? A scholar? A poet ? Had he any outlook
beyond his groaning shelves ? Were his books
fetters or windows ? Were they his masters or his
servants ? Was he an echo, or a voice? Did he
ever rise in his wrath and fling an offending author
1
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Byways in Bookland
to the other side of the room? Did he ever lay
violent hands upon some impious writer and con-
sign him to the flames, watching the holocaust with
righteous yet uproarious glee? Had he any favourites
in his literary harem? Was he a man, or was he
only a liveried and learned functionary, with no dis-
tinction apart from his dog-collar and his degree ?
Browsing and brooding over the catalogue of the
dead man's books, I ponder these things, gazing
frequently into the fire, and trying to run his
character to earth in some specially speaking corner
of his library.
“Of making many books there is no end.” One
wonders what the ancient writer would have said
could he have foreseen this day. Indeed, these
recurring catalogues, these spring and autumn book-
lists, are a prolific source of wondering. Who reads
all these books ? Who writes them? The latter
question is the more interesting, if only for the
reason that it is a harder thing to write a book than
to read one—as a rule! The reader can always put
it down.
In our time the whole world seems to have gone
a-scribbling. There is now, in very truth, a "mob
of gentlemen who write with ease.” And ladies, too.
I look with growing amazement at the ever-extend-
ing fiction-list year by year. It is not to be regretted.
So long as human nature remains what it is, “ truth
embodied in a tale” will always enter in at lowly
doors. The only fear is that it may not always be
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In a Brown Study
truth. It would seem as if titles must soon be ex-
hausted. Certainly the plots are; for it is not
possible to construct more than some half-dozen
plots or situations. The novelty is only in the com-
bination, the rearrangement, the setting. A conjuror
once told me that there are only some seven or eight
tricks in the whole world, all the rest are adaptations
of these few originals. It is so in music. There are
but eight notes, yet all the harmonies of the world
are founded thereon. There are but a few primary
colours, but they have produced all the art galleries
of Europe. A writer of tales need not despair
because he cannot evolve a new and original plot.
The mark of the great writer is in his distinctive
style and his distinctive handling of time-worn
themes. The sign of originality is not to be always
striving after novelty, but to say old things in your
own way. There is nothing else for it. The only
new thing is Human Nature, yet it is the same age
as God. The sun is old, the morning is new. Let
the fiction-writer recognize this, and he is com-
paratively safe-safe, at least, from the futile aspira-
tion after an originality which is only excess,
eccentricity, absurdity, topsy-turvydom, megalo-
mania-an over-weening desire to stand in the lime-
light. There is nothing so boring as mere cleverness;
nothing so wearisome as perpetual smartness. The
only real novelty is the commonplace, and that is
the only thing that never tires. One grows weary
of confectionery; one never tires of bread and water.
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We get sick of invented situations in which the folk
talk epigrams and blaze in paradoxes. We come to
know in time that the human heart is the one thing
that is never stale. Let me have Adam and Eve,
and I will guarantee not to be dull, though I cannot
be original.
The fiction list is interesting, but the column in
the catalogue to which I turn with most eager-
ness is that where the biographies are detailed.
Biography has for many years been my favourite
form of reading. What could be more fascinat-
ing as a study than to know just how men and
women behaved themselves in face of the be-
wildering mystery of things, what they thought
and said and did on this tormented stage of time?
Letters especially are intimate documents, and tell
one more about a man than a dozen pages of
description. The letters of Robert Louis Steven-
son give a far more vivid and convincing picture of
him than the official biography. He turned his
mind inside out to his friends, and the result is
quickening, enlivening, entrancing, inspiring in the
highest degree. The chief fascination of the Bible
is that it is a Book of Lives. The glory of Shake-
speare is his gallery of characters, and the marvel
of Dickens is that he drew men and women whose
names have become household words. Biography
makes one rich in the lore of human nature and
human life. It quickens our psychological interest,
and gives us an insight into the extraordinary com-
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In a Brown Study
plexity of things. One hesitates more and more to
judge men after reading biography. There are so
many wheels within wheels. To know all is to
pardon all,” says the French proverb; and, indeed,
if it be not used to bolster up a weak sentimentalism,
we may accept it as a working principle.
The catalogue does not offer much encouragement
in the region of poetry. The twentieth century still
awaits its poetic interpreter. Meanwhile, there is no
lack of pretty fancies, pleasant verses, sweet refrains,
musical and even memorable lines put forth in
modest volumes, usually at prohibitive prices. It is
a mistake to charge a high price for poetry, for
although at its best it is the noblest form of speech,
and worth all that we can give in gratitude to one
who quickens the mind and consoles the heart and
finds a voice for the inarticulate, yet it is “caviare
to the general,” and if it is to be popularized, it must
be produced at a popular price, especially when
most volumes of poems are of such modest dimen-
sions. One cannot be too grateful for The Canter-
bury Poets, or The Muses' Library, or The World's
Classics, or The Oxford Pocket Poets, or Everyman.
In all these you may find the greatest poets at a
figure within reach of the most restricted pocket.
It is the poets now writing who often cannot get
a hearing because their volumes are too dear, and
one does not care to give four or five shillings for
an unknown. A brave attempt has been made to
obviate this difficulty by Mr. Elkin Mathews in his
TY
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Byways in Bookland
Vigo Cabinet Series, and for a shilling you may
possess yourself of some of the most charming and
characteristic of present-day writers of verse in this
set of excellent little books. One of them-Rainbows
and Witches, by Will Ogilvie — I have had more
delight from than from any of the later singers.
148
CHAPTER IX
A RECENT BYWAY
An enterprising editor took a plebiscite the other
day among a number of schools for young ladies as
to their favourite author, and I was interested to
observe that the name of Henry Seton Merriman
was an easy first. I confess to a feeling of wonder
at this, but, then, girls are always upsetting one's
calculations. They are a law unto themselves. On
second thoughts, I do not know why I should have
wondered, for there is a masculine quality, a virile
dominance in Merriman, which is dear to the
feminine heart. The young women of to-day do
not sigh and languish; they do not cast down their
eyes when mankind approaches them; they are not
addicted to scent-bottles and sofa cushions; these
traits belong to a more remote and demure age.
The damsel of the present hunts, rides, shoots,
swims, plays hockey and golf, tennis and cricket,
swings Indian clubs, and expands her lungs with
Sandow's exerciser - in short, does all that her
brothers do—and a little more. She laughs right
merrily at her sisters of a century ago, whose
recreations were chiefly of a mild indoor kind, and
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Byways in Bookland -
whose outdoor gymnastics were limited to a walk
round a buttercuppy field, or to a game with a soft
ball and a still softer companion. And it is precisely
this larger freedom and saner outlook which has
enabled her to appreciate such a strong masculine
writer as Merriman. I fancy Charlotte Brontë has
had her share in bringing about this emancipation.
Her Jane Eyres and Shirleys were not girls to be
trifled with.
Among the crowd of recent lesser writers the
name of Merriman stands deservedly high. At the
time of his death, in 1903, he was very widely read,
and had reached the height of his achievement.
His fame was purely literary, for he loathed the
modern arts of self-advertisement, and resolutely
declined to be photographed, interviewed, and
exploited by an aggressive Press. A more retiring
writer never lived. Most writing men thirst for
public applause and court the blaze of notoriety ;
Merriman shunned it. He did not haunt the clubs;
he was not received at dinners. Nobody knew his
opinions on the writer's art, or the methods of his
own work. The general reader knew him simply
from his books. Few were even aware that
“Merriman” was only a pen-name, and served still
further to veil the retiring personality of Hugh
Stowell Scott. A singular character indeed in a
publicity-loving age!
His books are characteristic of the man. None of
them burst upon the reading world by storm; none
of them were boomed into prominence; none of
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A Recent Byway
them owed anything to editorial patronage. They
crept into notice, but without gathering a vast mul-
titude around them. A discerning few read them,
noted them, and duly passed them on to others;
some learned to look eagerly for each successive
volume from the same reticent but pungent pen.
He wrote with extreme labour and care, visiting the
scenes which he made the background of his stories,
pruning his style with the most assiduous concen-
tration, and paying close attention to dialogue, often
re-writing it many times. He was not by any means
a great writer, but he was always interesting; he
could tell a story lucidly and with considerable
power, and in certain isolated scenes and episodes
he handled his material in a masterly fashion. He
was always a vigorous and healthy writer, and could
be depended upon not to leave an unpleasant taste
or make a dismal and sinister impression.
He had not much humour; what there was of
humour was of the ironical and slightly cynical
type. He developed some extremely irritating
mannerisms, amongst which may be mentioned a
tendency to prosy moralizing and a fatal fondness
for epigrammatic comments by the way-faults
which delay the progress of the story and sadly mar
the artistic effect. Some of these epigrams are dis-
tinctly good, some are hopelessly feeble ; but, good
or bad, it is a pity they are there at all. No doubt
it is true that the greatest writers, have betrayed
this tendency to moralizing. Thackeray did it;
Dickens has pages of it; George Eliot is full of it;
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Charlotte Brontë is often guilty. But we can accept
from genius what we cannot applaud in mediocrity;
and though Merriman cannot be described as
mediocre, he certainly may not be ranked as a
genius.
One can appreciate and linger over such bursts of
splendid rhetoric as this, from Charlotte Brontë's
Villette : “Oh, lovers of power! Oh, mitred aspirants
for this world's kingdoms! an hour will come, even
to you, when it will be well for your hearts--pausing
faint at each broken beat—that there is a Mercy
beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than
this death which even you must face, and before it,
fall ; a Charity more potent than any sin, even
yours; a Pity which redeems worlds—nay, absolves
priests." But the kind of thing that constantly
meets one in Merriman is a passage like this: “One
finds that, after all, in this world of deceit we are
most of us that which we look like. You, madam,
look thirty-five to a day, although your figure is still
youthful, your hair untouched by grey, your face
unseamed by care. You may look in your mirror
and note these accidents with satisfaction; you may
feel young, and indulge in the pastimes of youth
without effort. But you are thirty-five. We know
it. We who look at you can see it for ourselves,
and, if you could only be brought to believe it, we
think no worse of you on that account.” Merriman
is perpetually halting to say things like this. It is
not wise, it is not necessary, it does not contribute
to the story, it has not even the merit of being
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A Recent Byway
interesting. It is merely a dull and irritating
interruption.
Merriman's range was not wide, and he had a
trick of monotonously reproducing favourite types of
character: the strong, silent, self-contained man;
the dreaming, romance-loving damsel; the faithful
servitor; the always-on-the-spot, never-leave-the-
family, do-or-die retainer; the plausible, sinister,
polished, gentlemanly villain, with a billet-doux or
a superhuman plot in his waistcoat-pocket, and a
dagger or a revolver concealed in his bosom. But
in his best books he has such an interesting tale to
tell, and tells it in such straightforward and vigorous
style, that the reader is carried on a wave of pleasant
excitement from start to finish, and does not pause
to observe defects with a critical eye.
His stories have been collected in a neat pocket
edition of fourteen volumes, and they are worth
buying. The best of them are worth re-reading
several times, and that is a severe test of any author.
The three finest of the tales are The Sowers, With
Edged Tools, and In Kedar's Tents. I have read the
first of these half a dozen times, and always with
pleasure. The Sowers is a tale of Russia, and tells of
a benevolent Prince who tries to administer the
affairs of his province in a fair-minded fashion,
educating the peasants on his estate to better things.
With the help of his trusty adviser and adminis-
trator, Karl Steinmetz, the Prince sows the seed of
kindness, intelligence, and self-respect in the dull
minds of his oppressed and down-trodden peasantry;
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Byways in Bookland
1
guised, because of the unreasoning hatred and
suspicion in which all princes and officials are held
by the people. The scenes in which the Prince,
disguised as “The Moscow Doctor,” goes into the
filthy dwellings of the villagers and treats them in
time of plague and famine and distress, are full of
natural power and pathos, the more telling because
of their manifest truth and simplicity. The worst
foes of The Sowers are those whom they are trying to
help.
A romantic interest is lent to the story by the
intriguing and shallow-hearted Etta; and a character
of singular power is drawn for us in Catrina, the
Russian girl whose one physical glory is her hair.
She is one of Merriman's chief successes among his
women characters. Of the men, the Prince is a
typical Merriman male-physically large, mentally
slow, morally simple and just, a man with a purpose,
who moves unflinchingly and without deviation to a
definite end; De Chauxville, the French diplomat,
is a charmingly melodramatic villain ; Vassili, the
Russian diplomat, ably seconds him ; and Stein-
metz, the stout, astute, cynical, kindly, middle-aged
German, is one of the most lovable and human of all
the Merriman gallery.
There are several memorable scenes in the book,
scenes that impress themselves upon the mind like a
thrilling episode in a play, notably the finding of the
straying horse upon the desolate steppe, dragging its
dead rider along the frozen ground; the bear-hunt
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A Recent Byway
1
in the forest, white and silent under its virgin snow;
the flogging of De Chauxville by Karl Steinmetz in
the tower of the château ; and the storming of the
castle by the rising peasants at the close of the tale.
The atmosphere of Russia, its vastness, its mys-
terious secrecy, its fatalism, its possibility, is wonder-
fully well conveyed. Those who wish to make the
acquaintance of an admirable craftsman in the
novelist's art cannot do better than turn to Henry
Seton Merriman and make a beginning with The
Sowers.
There are not many men who can write a readable
short story. Those who can do it supremely well
can be counted on the fingers. It would seem as if
it were an easier matter, or at any rate a less difficult
matter, to write a full-blown novel. Miniature-
painting is an art by itself. --A man with a pot of
paint can splash about to some purpose on a sign-
board, if he has some general notion of a unicorn or
a griffin. But set the same man to paint a portrait
on ivory, and no muse will befriend him, no inven-
tion, no hope. It is much the same with writing
tales. A man can wander in a more or less leisurely
and desultory fashion over a large field of life, but
set him down to do what he can with a single
episode, and he lacks the concentration and the
delicate touch needed to bring it to artistic per-
fection.
Many years ago I lighted upon what I have ever
since regarded as the most perfectly conceived and
perfectly executed short story I have ever read. It
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Byways in Bookland
is by Frederick Wedmore, and is called A Chemist
in the Suburbs. It is the first of three short stories
brought together under one heading or title, Renun-
ciations. The volume runs to one hundred pages of
fairly large print, with the ample margin character-
istic of The Bodley Head. The edition I have is
limited to three hundred and seventy-five copies,
printed on excellent paper. Whether the volume
has ever been issued in larger numbers, or whether
this is the only edition, I cannot tell. Probably the
limited edition is the only one, for the stories would
not appeal to the crowd.
A Chemist in the Suburbs is like a bit of rare china,
which one handles with reverence and looks at with
hushed wonder. It deals in an exquisitely beautiful
way with a quality in human nature which has been
too often vulgarized by the coarse and clumsy hand-
ling of the irreverent and the undiscerning. The
brief preface explains: “Three short imaginative
pieces-stories I hardly call them - are brought
together here under one name. Something, at all
events, they have in common. Two at least deal
with the renunciation, voluntary or necessitated, of
a great love-or, I would say, rather, of love's most
obvious privileges.” Frederick Wedmore is himself
an artist and an art-critic, and has the delicate per-
ception needful for the understanding and apprecia-
tion of artistic values.
His story, A Chemist in the Suburbs, is very brief;
it is merely an episode in the life of a cultured
bachelor. We can well imagine what some writers
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A Recent Byway
would have made of such an episode, and we can
easily believe that many would see nothing in it at all.
The incident is told at once in the abrupt opening
sentences; the remainder of the story tells how it
all happened. “Richard Pelse was the chemist.
The suburb was near the Angel; at the top of the
City Road; on the confines of Islington. There he
led his prosaic life-getting old, and a bachelor.
But into the prosaic years—years before Islington-
there had burst once the moment of romance.
Then his shop was near Oxford Street. Into the
sitting-room over it there had come one evening for
an hour the lady of his dream. Unexpectedly :
suddenly. She had drawn her chair, by his own, to
the fire. They had sat together so; and he had been
happy. She had given him his tea; had opened his
piano; had played, a while, Xaver Scharwenka's
wild music; had kissed him once; and had gone
away. Perhaps his years before and after had
seemed at times two deserts, divided by that living
stream which was her momentary presence. Or
perhaps there was an outstretched darkness on one
side of the heavens; then a star; then again out-
stretched darkness - the life of the shop and the
suburb.”
That is the whole episode; no more, no less. But
the charm of it is in the telling. Frederick Wed-
more's style has an aroma of its own. It. exhales
a fragrance. It lingers on the ear like a tender
refrain, haunts one like a sudden glimpse of un-
expected beauty. There is passion in the story, and
1
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Byways in Bookland
one knows how passion is handled nowadays by the
mob of ladies and gentlemen who write with fatal
ease. They would have bedraggled such an episode
as this in the mire, fouled it with the lubricity of the
Orient. But Frederick Wedmore has a healthy
mind and a wholesome imagination, which are
reflected in his style. There is an exquisite restraint
about him. His manner of writing reminds one of
the Worcester cup or the Chelsea figure Richard
Pelse kept in his cabinet-things of which he knew
the beauty, the free artistic touch.
The chief charm of a story told in Frederick
Wedmore's way is that derived from the unobtrusive
suggestion of a spiritual background to life. By
that I mean that an impression is somehow conveyed,
by a score of delicate touches, that life is not a cut-
and-dried thing, the arena of fate, a pre-arranged
plot performed by helpless puppets; but that there
is sufficient freedom in human character to admit
of surprises. More than that: an impression is
somehow conveyed of something behind the sordid
materialism of the day; something beneath the
tumultuous and bewildering surface; something
beyond the play of the senses—that the great and
memorable experiences take place in the soul-that
life is not a record of things done, but of things
thought, felt, hoped for, striven after-of things that
wait for fulfilment elsewhere. I do not know how
otherwise to express it, nor can I tell in what subtle
fashion this impression is conveyed. But I do know
that every really great writer has this touch of
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A Recent Byway
wonder-has it, perhaps, in spite of a theory of life
that ignores the Unseen, or of a creed that finds no
room for the free agency of the spirit. Tempera-
ment counts more for a man's attitude towards life
than creed or theory. And if a man is an artist and
a poet, he will often express things in his writing,
suggest things by his style, which he might very
likely deny if submitted to his cold reason. But he
cannot prevent the overflow of his personality, of
which reason is only a part; his personality is made
up of countless influences, and it stands forth on the
printed page in such truth of presentation that the
reader knows instinctively whether he is drawn to
the writer or repelled by him. There are some
writers who write exquisite things, but something in
themselves prevents trust and affection on the part
of their readers. There are some writers who write
of strange and seamy aspects of life, but if they wrote
in such a way as to suggest an intimate acquaintance
with the devil, we should still draw to them, feeling
that they are men worth knowing and worthy to be
loved. There are some writers who write with so
graceful a touch, so tender a feeling, so true a sym-
pathy, so rich an understanding, that we feel that
they are unfolding themselves to us, and not merely
writing a tale at so much per thousand words. Of
this last select company is Frederick Wedmore. He
writes for the pleasure of writing, to produce a perfect
thing. Such a writer will not produce much, in the
manner of an exuberant creator; but what he does
produce will be as sweet and fresh as the primrose
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Byways in Bookland
in the wood; thrilling and memorable as the first
skylark of spring.
It is a severe test of a book to read it a second
time. If it survives the test it need not be regarded
as a classic or reckoned among the select company
of books that never die; but it is at least proof of
some genuine human interest in the writing, of some
streak of power in the author, of some degree of
perception and appreciation in the reader. A book
is a classic when it has something universal in it,
something that transcends locality and period, some-
thing timeless, by virtue of which it survives the
centuries, and appeals to successive generations of
readers. It is difficult to account for the fascination
of some books, and it is quite impossible in many
cases to convey to another person what it is that
has made you almost idolize a certain author. It
comes with a shock of surprise, and almost of pain,
to discover that the story that you devoured with
such absorbing interest has left your neighbour
perfectly cold. The recommendation of books is a
risky experiment, from which, perhaps, it is best to
refrain. When your friend declines to read Dickens,
or can see nothing in Charlotte Brontë, or is utterly
unmoved by Stevenson, what can you do but retire
into your shell and go home to read Pickwick, or
Jane Eyre, or Treasure Island for the twentieth time?
You need waste no time in discussion or vituperation.
The man has a blind spot in his mind; let him alone.
The reward of the physician is the adoration of
the grateful patient. By the exercise of his skill, or
тбо
A Recent Byway
1
possibly by some happy accident, the doctor has
effected a cure in some difficult or peculiar or
dangerous case, and henceforth he is a friend for
life. Happy the doctor who has a dozen such. A
grateful patient is the best possible advertisement,
for nothing will keep him from talking. So with an
author who captures the affection of a reader by a
book that has brought pleasure and solace and heal-
ing to a weary mind; he has his grateful patients by
the score. I should like to be able to tell Charles
Dickens all he has been to me. I should like to be
able to write a letter of thanks to the exile in Samoa.
I should like to be able to shake hands with Emerson
and Browning, Lamb and Hood. Indeed, there are
many scribes to whom I could wish to pay my
tribute in person. But, alas! these stalwarts are
gone beyond recall, and they have no need of praise.
Only once did I ever summon up courage to
express my gratitude to a living author. I wrote
to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to thank him for Sherlock
Holmes, for whom I cherish a lively admiration, and
received the most kindly and gracious of letters in
reply. When I was a boy of fourteen I wrote to
W. G. Grace, who was the hero of my youth, and
actually had the impudence to solicit his photograph.
To my enormous astonishment and delight the great
cricketer responded by sending his photograph
signed, with an autograph letter, both of which
I cherish to this day-an act of grace indeed.
I did not set out to tell this, but what I really
wanted to do was to confess myself one of the tribe
Ібі
-
NI
Byways in Bookland
of grateful patients, and especially to pay a humble
tribute to Sir Gilbert Parker, whose beautiful story,
The Right of Way, I have lately been reading for the
fourth time. It is not fair to give away the plot of a
story, but one may say something of the characters.
The Right of Way is really a great book. It is this
in virtue of its fine workmanship, its truth to nature,
its manifest sincerity, its depth of feeling, its touches
of unforced beauty, its keen insight, its richness of
characterization.
It is great also in respect of its hero. Any writer
might well be proud of Charley Steele. He is a
veritable creation. He has as strong and distinct
an individuality as such very diverse persons as
John Ridd, Sydney Carton, Sam Weller, or Sherlock
Holmes. It is singular how certain characters in
fiction seize upon one's imagination and leave an
indescribable impression, so that certain idiosyn-
crasies are for ever associated with their names.
We cannot think of Mr. Pickwick without thinking
of gaiters and benevolence; or of David Pew without
recalling the green shade over his eyes and the
tapping stick and the horrible fierce hand-grip, like
a vice; or of the Private Secretary without remem-
bering his Bath bun and his dislike of London ; or
of Falstaff without hearing the rich, unctuous roll of
his voice and obtaining a whiff of sack. At the name
of Charley Steele there comes at once the vision of
a mocking eye-glass, masking the quizzical spirit
behind it; a polished monocle, which is a symbol of
the man who toys with it and stares through it,
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A Recent Byway
a kind of glittering note of interrogation, a window
through which the bright blue eye gazes critically
upon the world, an emblem of scepticism; and we
see the brilliant, dissipated, critical barrister who
carries a hostile jury away by his eloquence, and
unbalances easy-going minds with his eternal ques-
tioning “I wonder ?" upon his lips.
Yet it is this man, so splendidly drawn from the
very beginning of the book, with much that is cold
and repellent about him, who gradually plays upon
our heart-strings until he becomes one of the most
lovable characters in modern fiction. By an accident
through which his memory is lost, and a slow re-
covery among the mountains under the devoted care
of the very man his eloquence had rescued from the
gallows, the deeper Charley Steele is born; and
henceforth his changed life among the peasants of
Chaudière is related with a beauty, a simplicity,
a rich suggestiveness, that make the story as fascin-
ating as life itself. The experience of Charley Steele
in the little shop of Louis Trudel, the miserly
superstitious tailor, and the love-story of Rosalie
Evanturel, are things that abide in the grateful
memory for long. I have not for many a year read
anything more powerful and affecting in its simple
restraint than the death of Charley Steele:
i
“See !' he said, pointing, who is that? Who?
I can't see his face—it is covered. So tall-so white !
He is opening his arms to me. He is coming
closer-closer. Who is it ?
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By ways in Bookland
"' It is Death, my son,' said the priest in his ear,
with a pitying gentleness.
“ The Curé's voice seemed to calm the agitated
sense, to bring it back to the outer precincts of
understanding. There was an awestruck silence as
the dying man fumbled, fumbled over his breast,
found his eye-glass, and, with a last feeble effort,
raised it to his eye, shining now with an unearthly
fire. The old interrogation of the soul, the elemental
habit, outlived all else in him. The idiosyncrasy of
the mind automatically expressed itself.
«I beg-your-pardon,' he whispered to the
imagined figure, and the light died out of his eyes,
have I-ever-been-introduced-to you ?
“. At the hour of your birth, my son,' said the
priest, as a sobbing cry came from the foot of the
bed.
“But Charley did not hear. His ears were for
ever closed to the voices of life and time.”
Of recent years a spate of detective stories has
flooded the pages of the monthly magazines. The
instantaneous and extraordinary success of Sherlock
Holmes in the early numbers of the Strand set all
the ingenious wits of the short-story writers at work,
trying to emulate the doughty deeds of that sleuth-
hound of crime. There is a dormant detective in
most of us. The human mind dearly loves a mystery.
The curious, the grotesque, the bizarre, sets a chord
a-quivering in every man's brain. We rather fancy
ourselves as discoverers of secrets, and we write
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A Recent Byway
down “ Dr. Watson" an ass of the first magnitude.
It needs no little dexterity to construct a story
which will keep a man absorbed and intent till mid-
night by the sheer interest and ingenuity of its plot,
and a detective story stands or falls by its plot.
The characters may be interesting enough—occa-
sionally one may meet with a positive creation-but
for the most part they are there as puppets to play
their part in the mystery; and, after all, the mystery's
the thing.
It is common with certain would-be superior
persons (with whom we desire to have no part or
lot, and from whom we would fain separate our-
selves by the diameter of a universe) to sniff at the
detective story as beneath the dignity of literature;
but the best kind of detective tale requires a faculty
of invention, an adroitness in devising complications,
a skill in dove-tailing, a closeness and lucidity of
narration, involving talent of a high order. When
the thing is supremely well done, as in the case of
Poe's Tales and the best of the Sherlock Holmes series,
we experience a memorable and incommunicable
thrill for which we owe the author a debt of grati-
tude for life.
One of the pioneers in this class of writing was
Wilkie Collins, and it seems strange when we con-
sider the exceedingly high quality of his work and
the wide popularity he once enjoyed, that he should
now have fallen into comparative neglect. There is
no man who can devise a mystery and handle a
detailed and complicated plot with greater skill. I
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Byways in Bookland
have recently been reading The Moonstone for the
second time, which is one of the cleverest and most
absorbing stories of detection in existence. Wilkie
Collins used often to employ a certain literary device
with remarkable effectiveness—that of making several
of the principal characters in the story each narrate
his own share in the gradual working out of the
mystery. He employs this device with great skill
in The Moonstone, and the changes of style appropriate
to each character are admirably managed. The
section related by Miss Clack, an evangelical
spinster, whose idea of piety takes the form of dis-
tributing inappropriate tracts and managing every-
body's business but her own, is particularly effective,
and gives rise to some of the most amusing scenes
and conversations in the whole book. The narrative
of Gabriel Betteridge is capital; his blunt, straight-
forward speech, his comments on the chief actors,
his frequent digressions, and his worshipful admira-
tion of Robinson Crusoe, make delightful reading.
Collins is a master of mysteries, and his frequent
plan of giving extracts from diaries, quotations from
letters, excerpts from documents, and personal narra-
tives, gives remarkable vividness and actuality to the
tale. Swinburne was a great admirer of Collins's
work, and remarks very justly that he had the gift
of exciting a curiosity, which in the case of the
younger and more impressible readers amounts to
anxiety. Reading some of his books for the first
time, there are certain scenes and situations where
the reader holds his breath in a fever of anticipation.
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One of the great arts of a good writer of detective
stories is that of drawing “a red herring" across the
reader's track. Wilkie Collins possessed this art to
perfection. When the mystery is a little difficult to
hold, and seems likely to slip from his grasp and
disclose itself before its time or to give too leading
a hint, he cunningly lays a fresh trail and puts the
reader cleverly off the scent. It is the device of the
conjuror, who, in order to allay suspicion and divert
attention from a critical movement or sign, indulges
in engaging and humorous “patter," or innocently
invites the interest of the audience to a point which
has little or nothing to do with the vital issue. In
The Moonstone Collins makes excellent use to this
end of the strange conduct of Rosanna Spearman,
the servant - maid, with her suddenly conceived
passion for young Franklin Blake, and her curious
attraction towards “the shivering sands." The
mysterious behaviour of this weird maiden with a
chain and a box on the sands when the tide is at its
ebb heads the reader off, so to speak, from the main
track, and sets him wandering and wondering after
other matters. Wilkie Collins is an adept at this
red-herring trick, and adopts it in many of his tales,
notably in The Moonstone and in The Woman in
White. It is tricky, but clever; and with a detective
writer, perfectly legitimate. It is one of the marvel-
lous intricacies of construction that so repeatedly
amaze and occasionally irritate us in these excellent
tales. As Anthony Trollope remarked about his
fellow-novelist: “The construction is most minute
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Byways in Bookland
and most wonderful, but I can never lose the taste
of the construction. The author seems always warn-
ing me to remember that something happened at
exactly half-past two o'clock on Tuesday morning,
or that a woman disappeared from the road just
fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone."
But it is an ungrateful business to sit down and
deliberately pick holes in a story which has given
one a few hours of pleasant relaxation and helped
one to forget for a while the worries of the world.
Not everyone can write a book or preach a sermon,
but the merest schoolboy deems himself capable of
criticizing it and pulling it to pieces. Dr. Parker
once referred in his caustic and inimitable fashion to
the folk who are in the habit of criticizing sermons
in a small and niggling way, thus: “You say you
thought the sermon very good when you heard it,
but when you came to take it to pieces you were
surprised to find how little there was in it. How
foolish, then, to take it to pieces! Take a steam-
engine to pieces, and how little there is in it! Take
your own face to pieces, and your mother will be
ashamed of it! Take a rainbow to pieces, and see
how much remains to be admired! We must judge
by the effect of the whole, and not by pieces and
sections.” Illustrations like that close an argument
for ever.
It is undoubtedly true that stories which depend
for their effect chiefly upon intricacy of plot lay
themselves open to criticism of the severest kind.
A slip in character-drawing is excusable, but a mis-
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A Recent
take in mechanics is disastrous. But a reader cannot
bring himself to be over-critical about an author who
has charmed away his “ blues," or excited his
imagination, or given him the open sesame to lands
of enchantment. One becomes rather impatient
with the man who plays cricket from the pavilion,
and can tell exactly how every ball should be played,
and what the batsman ought to have done to prevent
getting out. But the true sporting spectator is
grateful for a brave display, though it traverses every
canon of cricket orthodoxy. The same is true of the
grateful reader. If the book has given him a happy
hour, criticism may be reserved till the last judgment.
169
CHAPTER X
THE GREATHEART OF BOOKLAND
BEFORE leaving these pleasant byways I cannot
forbear making a brief excursion into the Highways
of Bookland, and confessing with gratitude my
infinite debt to the two writers who hold first place
in my heart, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis
Stevenson. The thoughts of many worshippers were
turned in the year 1912 to the various shrines
associated with the genius of Dickens. In that
centenary year many pilgrimages were made to the
places immortalized by his magic pen, and many
eyes scanned the pages of his various works. For
my own part, I celebrated the occasion by re-reading
Martin Chuzzlewit, A Tale of Two Cities, and the
Christmas Books, and renewing acquaintance with
the crowd of characters that haunt especially the
neighbourhood of Salisbury and London.
I well remember the delight with which I read
Chuzzlewit in boyhood. It was the discovery of a
new world. No thought of criticism marred the
rich enjoyment. Every chapter was a surprise,
every character a revelation, and anybody who had
ventured a single word of disparagement would have
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The Greatheart of Bookland
come off badly in the encounter. To re-read in
later life an author who has won our affection and
captured our imagination in our younger days is
always a dangerous experiment, and it must be con-
fessed that not many authors survive the ordeal with
credit. How does it stand with Dickens? The
early glamour is gone, it is true; the thrill of first
love can never be repeated. One knows exactly
what is coming; every character is an old acquaint-
ance; the scenes unfold themselves with a certain
stiffness, like a panorama which has been long upon
the road, and the pictures move a little jerkily
instead of with their pristine smoothness. Yet in
spite of this, Dickens comes out of the trying test
of reperusal with extraordinary success, and if the
first glamour is gone, there is still enough of the
mystic “light that never was on land or sea” to
make it a very welcome and happy experience. The
fact is that Dickens is the novelist of youth, for he
himself is like a perpetual boy; and if the reader has
retained a youthful heart with the passage of the
years, he can company with Dickens to the end, feel-
ing still the throb of his high spirits and the con-
tagion of his exuberance, and profoundly grateful
that they ever met.
At the same time, there is a difference. One
cannot help the emergence of the critical faculty.
At times, indeed, it may still be submerged beneath
the flood of affection and gratitude, but in calmer
moods it asserts its right and demands to have its
word. But the faults of Dickens as a writer are of
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Byways in Bookland
such a nature that criticism can never have a sting
in it. His defects are the defects of transcendent
qualities. His faults are the faults of superabundant
life. The unpardonable sin of dulness can never be
laid at his door. The fertility of his invention, the
exuberance of his fancy, the energy of his descrip-
tion, the power of his delineation, are so remarkable
that criticism is often swept away in the torrent.
There are no books that so overflow with life. The
scenes are branded for ever in the memory, the char-
acters we know better than we know our friends.
Dickens is not a painter of miniatures; he is a
painter of sign-boards. But they are gorgeous sign-
boards. Perhaps it would be better to describe him
as a scene-painter. His effects are broad, immediate,
glaring, sometimes grotesque; the colours are laid
on thick and brilliant, and owe much of their
ultimate effect to the lighting arrangements of his
kindling and many-coloured imagination. Dickens
is often criticized for his exaggeration and cari-
cature; but it is no disparagement, though it is
intended to be such. Exaggeration is merely
emphasis. The same criticism might be made of
Nature herself. She is continually emphasizing her
effects. She flings her sunsets on the skies with
a richness and recklessness that arrest the most
indifferent spectator. Turner's reply to the lady
who complained that she had never seen such
colours as he put into his pictures was: "Ah,
madam, don't you wish you could ?" And I have
often felt inclined to say to those persons who
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The Greatheart of Bookland
complain that they never meet such characters as
Dickens creates : “Ah, sirs, don't you wish you
could ?" After all, a good deal depends upon the
observer. If a man is colour-blind, he cannot
appreciate the evening sky in autumn. If Dickens
had not emphasized his characters, they would not
live as they do. He flings them at us like the
colours of a sunset, and we complain of their
exaggeration. It is not a criticism so much as a
confession of ineptitude.
Martin Chuzzlewit is made up of two elements-
satire and melodrama. In the American portions
of the story Dickens gives his satirical vein full
scope. If the charge of unreality can be fairly
substantiated, it is here. For his Elijah Pograms,
Jefferson Bricks, Colonel Divers, General Scadders,
and the rest are not actual persons, they are rather
exaggerated types; they are the violent and ex-
plosive characteristics of America embodied; they
are distorted opinions walking about in flaming
guise, seen in the glaring limelight of the novelist's
over-excited imagination. The Pecksniff and Jonas
Chuzzlewit parts of the book are pure melodrama.
No sane person can believe in Pecksniff, and with
all his art, Dickens does not persuade us that Tom
Pinch really believed in him. Yet Pecksniff is as
immortal as Pickwick. The scene at Todgers's,
where Pecksniff imbibes too much punch, and is
borne to bed up the top flight of stairs, and appears
at intervals in his nightgown, addressing high-flown
sentiments over the banisters, and earnestly request-
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Byways in Bookland
ing to know Mrs. Todgers's opinion on a wooden
leg, is one of those things that defy analysis, like an
exquisite fragrance or a subtle taste. Then there
are the incomparable scenes at The Blue Dragon,
where Mrs. Lupin dispenses lavish hospitality, and
Mark Tapley embodies and imparts his philosophy
of being “jolly.” There is the scene at Tom Pinch's
lodgings, where Ruth makes the famous beef-steak
pudding; and the scene in Fountain Court, where,
beneath the shadow-tracery of the waving trees, and
within hearing of the pleasant plash of the fountain,
Ruth gives her maiden heart to John Westlock.
These are things that live in the memory like a
strain of haunting music.
But the crowning triumph of Martin Chuzzlewit is
Sarah Gamp. There is nothing like the glorious
inconsequence of her soliloquies to be found in
literature. There is a chapter—Chapter Forty-Nine-
which I always approach with a tremor of excitement,
though I know it almost by heart. It bears the
enticing heading: “In which Mrs. Harris, assisted
by a teapot, is the cause of a division between
friends.” With this delicious preparation we are
introduced to Mrs. Gamp's apartment, the mere
description of which is one of the unforgettable
things, and forthwith we are regaled with the
famous quarrel between Sarah Gamp and Betsey
Prig over their intensely pickled salmon and two-
penny salad, to say nothing of the spirits which,
“ from motives of delicacy," it was Mrs. Gamp's
habit to keep in a teapot. It is as great and famous
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The Greatheart of Bookland
a quarrel as that between Brutus and Cassius in
Julius Cæsar. That Chapter Forty-Nine shines like
a planet amid the sparkling firmament of Martin
Chuzzlewit. The man who could write such a scene
is one of the benefactors of mankind.
When a favourite novelist essays a new style of
writing, there is apt to be schism among his devoted
followers. They have admired him for certain
special qualities, and have grown accustomed to
dwell on certain peculiar characteristics, and have
come to expect a certain definite method; and when
their hero breaks out suddenly into a new style and
upsets all their previous theories and expectations,
they are apt to resent the change, and are afflicted
with a sense of chagrin or even dismay. To some
persons versatility is a variety of immorality.
Charles Dickens of all men appeared to be immune
from this distressing literary vagabondage. He was
a breezy, rollicking, exuberant humorist; the knight
of caricature; the supreme exponent of exaggera-
tion, oddity, and queerness; he went on his way
unsuspected of a plus quantity. But genius never
moves uniformly in a calculated orbit. Dickens
broke entirely new ground and revealed an altogether
different style in two attempts at the historical
novel, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.
The first tale was an endeavour to reproduce the
strange period in which Lord George Gordon figured
so largely in the “No Popery” riots; the second
attempted to recapture the stormy scenes of the
French Revolution. Singularly enough, both tales
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Byways in Bookland
deal with events belonging to the same year, 1775.
In each Dickens achieved a large measure of success.
The difference in theme is enough to account for the
difference in style. The books are not without their
grotesque characters and their humorous touches,
but it would be impossible to deal with a serious
and important period of history in the spirit of The
Pickwick Papers or Martin Chuzzlewit. In taking up
the period of the French Revolution Dickens made
a bold experiment. It was away from his ordinary
beat altogether, and involved a complete change of
method and outlook. Many of the characters are
true Dickens characters, such as Jerry Cruncher and
Miss Pross; but they seem somehow to be out of
the picture, and to be wandering out of their natural
sphere. The success of the book lies more in its
atmosphere than in its portraiture. Like Carlyle,
Dickens has conveyed the emotional element of that
terrible time with extraordinary force.
The book opens with an air of mystery, and
admirably conveys the impression of coming doom.
The storm lowers in the very first chapter. The
description of Mr. Jarvis Lorry's journey in the
stage-coach at night; the sound of Jerry Cruncher's
horse galloping through the gloom; the suspicion of
the various travellers, and the apprehensiveness of
the guard; the delivery of the strange message; the
stranger answer given to it-Recalled to Life—all
this arouses interest and expectation, and the reader
feels that coming events are indeed casting por-
tentous shadows before. The story advances slowly
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The Greatheart of Bookland
into the very midst of the gathering clouds of revolu-
tion. We are present in the thronging streets of
Paris, bewilderment, mistrust, and fear on every
hand. We enter the gloomy fortress of the dread
Bastille, and witness the recall of Dr. Manette. The
page is dominated by the bullying Defarge and the
grim figure of Madame Defarge. A creepy thrill is
conveyed by the presence of the knitting women
watching and waiting. We hear the rising hum of
the surging crowds and the rumble of the tumbril-
carts. We see the streets run with blood, and the
glittering knife of the guillotine. The air is heavy
with menace and disaster. The fragile form of Lucy
Manette glides through the gathering shadows like
a pale ghost.
The glory of the tale is Sydney Carton. Nothing
finer than the presentation of this character is to be
found in modern fiction. Reckless, dissipated, un-
fortunate, despairing, brilliant, lovable; himself his
worst enemy; a man of great gifts who has failed
through folly and neglect; imagining that his life is
useless, yet a man capable of the noblest thought
and feeling, the most splendid daring, the warmest
friendship, the sublimest sacrifice. There is no one
who tugs at our heart-strings with a stronger pathos,
or towards whom we lean with a deeper human
sympathy and understanding. The closing scenes
of the book approach sublimity. The sacrifice of
Carton for his friend Darnay is a type of all that is
greatest, most beautiful, and most heroic in human
experience. Holding the hand of his protégée, the
1
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Byways in Bookland
little seamstress, with infinite tenderness, and speak-
ing words of comfort and of hope as they go together
on their last ride, he passes to his doom. Some of
us have seen the beautiful interpretation of Sydney
Carton by Mr. Martin Harvey in his fine drama,
The Only Way; and the final scene, where he
mounts the steps of the guillotine and stands pale
but unshrinking beneath the dreadful blade, is a
picture to be carried for ever in the memory, and
a perfect realization of the last pages of Dickens's
pathetic story. As we close the book, Carton's last
words linger in our ears like a sad but exquisite
refrain : “ It is a far, far better thing that I do than
I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go
to than I have ever known.”
The season of Christmas is a peculiarly English
institution, and Charles Dickens is its prophet. He
understood the genius of the time as no other man
has ever done. He was alive to all its beauty, sus-
ceptible and responsive to all its suggestion and
romance. He revelled in it with all the breathless
interest and intensity of a child. He caught its
mystery, and his heart throbbed with its poetry.
And as a result of this he wrote five little books
which specially commemorate the Christmas season
and admirably express its spirit. All of them are
true Dickens documents, and at least one of them
will live among the masterpieces of English litera-
ture. I read an article the other day by some
abandoned cynic, in which he condemned Christmas
and all its sentimental works, and consigned them,
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The Greatheart of Bookland
1
metaphorically, to a sultry climate. I believe the
wretch actually obtained a prize of two guineas for
it. I hope those two guineas have long since burned
holes in his trouser pockets, and raised blisters that
will remind him for ever of his perfidy. He may
have done it for a practical joke, in order to “pull
the leg” of sentimental, old-fashioned creatures
like myself; or perhaps he was hard up, and
really wanted those two guineas; or perhaps he
did not much care what he wrote. If he was in
earnest, he was a son of perdition (and I ask no
pardons)!
But the editor was even worse. An editor who
could offer a prize for the best article against Christ-
mas is a monster. Perhaps he did not mean it, and
would no doubt plead that even editors must live-
the which is a doubtful declaration. And if we are
to be smart and clever and original nowadays we
must be iconoclasts and renegades, defy the conven-
tions, outrage the orthodox, pooh-pooh the simple,
abjure the commonplace. We must make the gentle
reader stare at our audacity, pierce him with our
epigrams, brain him with our controversial sledge-
hammer, bewilder him with paradox, and give a
naked and unashamed display of our glorious
freedom and independence of thought. The writer
of the article referred to was particularly hard upon
the sentimentality of Christmas, and bitterly com-
plained that it helped to foster our illusions. That
is one of the reasons why I like it. I want to keep
some, at any rate, of my illusions as long as I can.
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I want (once a year at least) to riot in sentimentalism.
I want to be a child for ever. I think that the worst
of all the ills that flesh is heir to is the malady of
growing up. The writer of that article had grown
up, and two guineas was a mighty poor recompense
for his immeasurable loss.
If ever a man understood and loved the spirit of
Christmas, it was Dickens. His Christmas Carol is
the New Testament of the hallowed time. But his
Pickwick Papers glorify the season even more richly
than the Carol. Never was the spirit of the time-
its gaiety, its fun, its good humour, its kindly feeling
-so exquisitely realized. The critics of Dickens
accuse him of wallowing in sentiment. It seems to
me that such critics are not only utterly blind to
Dickens's genius and method, but they are entirely
out of sympathy with the spirit of the present age.
For this is the age of democracy, and Charles
Dickens is the prophet of democracy. He had an
intense sympathy with the poor, the neglected, the
down-trodden, the disinherited. He loved the vulgar
crowd, if you like to call it so. He had an extra-
ordinary insight into the lives of the humble and the
illiterate.
There are people who say that they wish Dickens
was more refined. But, as Mr. Chesterton charac-
teristically obseryes, “if those people are ever refined,
it will be by fire." It is the glory of Dickens that he
saw the essential greatness and dignity of human
nature even when it is wrapped up in a humble,
a vulgar, a grotesque, an eccentric form. These
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same superior folk rail at Dickens because he made
his Christmas so much a matter of material comfort
might deferentially affirm that there are worse things
in the world than poultry, pudding, and punch;
and among those worse things is the perverse pig-
headedness which cannot see or will not allow that
Dickens's jovial Christmas is the manifestation of a
great heart touched to finer issues by the poetry of
the season, the disclosure and expression of thoughts
that have been set to a dance measure by remem-
brance of the Child of Bethlehem. A spirituality
which has no visible embodiment is not of much
utility in a world like ours; and if there is any
season in the year that unlocks selfish hearts and
human nature to remember its poorer, less happy,
and less fortunate brethren in material gifts, we
should bless that season, and welcome it and make
much of it, because in making us humane it makes
us friends with all mankind. This is what Dickens
does by his glorification of Christmas. He waves
his wand like some genial magician, and brings back
the child heart once more out of the shadows of the
past; and a man who can do that for us is one of
the Greathearts of mankind.
A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the
Hearth, The Haunted Man, The Battle of Life—these
are the titles of the five Christmas books. They
have all enjoyed enormous popularity, and the Carol
has sung its way into many thousands of grateful
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hearts all the world over. It is a book any man
might be proud and glad to have written. Thackeray
said he regarded it as a national benefit, and perhaps
of all Dickens's books it is the one which has brought
him into closest personal touch with his readers and
made him most universally beloved.
I have already referred to the fact that it has been
brought as a charge against him that his view of
Christmas is largely pagan and distinctly gastro-
nomic. It is undoubtedly true that he fairly revels
in the old-fashioned Christmas of holly and mistletoe,
turkeys and mince-pies, candied fruits and steaming
bowls of punch. It is also true that he takes an
extraordinary and even gormandizing interest in
eating and drinking and everything pertaining to
physical comfort and satisfaction. This is part of
his gospel, arising partly out of his exuberant and
legitimate appreciation of the good things of the
world, and partly out of his genuinely deep sym-
pathy with the poor and the afflicted and the
miserable. But he must be a very blind or a very
prejudiced reader who cannot see beyond these
material outworks to the citadel of the author's
heart, and feel the warmth of his affection and the
throb of his tender pity. The eating and drinking
are the outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace. Dickens had a heart of gold, and
out of that generous mint there flowed a wonderful
wealth of kindness, compassion, tenderness, good-
fellowship, cheerfulness, and mirth. I do not envy
the man who can read A Christmas Carol unmoved,
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The Greatheart of Bookland
or without feeling that he has been bathing in an
atmosphere of deep spiritual emotion. The human-
ness of the book is extraordinary, and if a man is not
melted to tears by Tiny Tim, or irradiated by the
light that shines from Old Fezziwig's calves, he is
a dead dog, and even the lightnings cannot touch
him.
Dickens is a great believer in “ atmosphere," and
he knows well how to convey it. Whether it be
exterior or interior, he is equally at home. What
a hand he has for describing fog and frost and snow !
How the fog is diffused throughout The Chimes !
How it pervades the opening chapters of the Carol !
How he makes us feel the cold! Then what a touch
he has for the various pedestrians in the streets
how vividly we see them with their ruddy cheeks
and smoking breath, flapping their arms and stamp-
ing their feet to keep themselves warm! How real
the shops are with their lighted windows piled with
all the most tempting delicacies of the season !
What a dream is the grocer's! what a distraction
the poulterer's! Then the wizard takes us into the
bare room of Scrooge, and we see Bob Cratchit
shivering in “The Tank." He shows us the hilarious
Christmas party at Scrooge's nephew's, where, in
blind-man's-buff, Topper went after the plump sister
in the lace tucker in so scandalous a fashion. He
opens Bob Cratchit's door, and we see the young
Cratchits seated at the table, cramming spoons into
their mouths lest they should shriek for goose before
it came to their turn to be helped ; and later we
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behold them steeped in sage and onion to the eye-
brows. Fires glow and good-fellowship abounds in
all these books. Cosiness and comfort almost retard
the action of The Cricket on the Hearth, and although
tragedy seems to be impending, we know perfectly
well that everything is going to be all right presently.
These Christmas Books of Dickens are aglow with
charity, alive with kindly feeling, a-throb with high
spirits, and to read them puts one on better terms
with oneself and with all the world.
184
CHAPTER XI
THE PETER PAN OF BOOKLAND
OLD Izaak Walton quotes with manifest approval
the saying about the strawberry: “Doubtless God
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God
never did.” In the same spirit I feel moved to say:
"Doubtless man may write a better book for boys
than Treasure Island, but doubtless man never has,
and probably never will.” It all grew out of a map.
Stevenson had a love for maps, and would spend
hours poring over them, making imaginary voyages
to the ends of the earth. By-and-by he was to
become a traveller indeed, and not only a traveller,
but an exile, and to find his final resting-place far
from the "hills of home.” He not only studied
maps, but occasionally drew one; and it was out of
the map of an imaginary island, shaped something
“ like a fat dragon standing on his hind-legs,” that
his first great story grew, and became known to an
admiring world as Treasure Island. He has told us
of the happy hours he spent conceiving and colour-
ing this map, putting in its bays and creeks, its
mountains and plains, its woods and streams, until
the place began to fascinate him like a romance,
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Byways in Bookland
and he felt as if he knew every mile of it, and could
find his way about there blindfold. Looking at it as
it stands as the frontispiece to Treasure Island, one
comes to understand how the place affected his
imagination, and one can appreciate the glee with
which he selected the spots where the famous
treasure of Flint the Buccaneer lay buried, and
marked them with red crosses, supposed to be done
in the blood of that redoubtable pirate's veins. It is
one of the incidental delights in reading the tale to
turn to the map now and then to see the identical
site of the stockade, and the creek where the
Hispaniola went ashore, and the rising-ground at the
edge of the wood where Long John Silver hurled his
crutch through the air, and to trace the incredible
voyage of the Coracle.
I remember reading an account somewhere by
a French writer and critic of his first reading of
Treasure Island while on a railway journey, and he
declares that he was so absorbed with the tale that
he “ awoke from the dream of his book” with a
start, scarcely realizing that he had reached his
journey's end. That is precisely what it is—"a
dream of a book.” I am afraid to say how many
times I have read it, each time with fresh interest
and delight, and have felt a thrill in my blood as
the spirit of adventure claimed me for a space, and
whirled me far from the beaten track of men. To
a man with a dash of poetry, a vein of romance, a
spark of imagination, a suspicion of Bohemianism
the tale is simply irresistible. As an admirer ha
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
written : "The book is full of the characters that
fired the writer's fancy: the picturesque outlaw,
half trader, half pirate; the bold buccaneer ; cap-
tains and sailors-characters with the scent of the
brine about them, whom Stevenson worked into
scores of fantastic yet always plausible shapes.
There are few things in literature more ghostly than
the tap-tap of Blind Pew's stick along the lonely
frozen road. The book is packed with such effects,
and the blackguards who are its heroes are every
mother's son of them-unique and powerful creations,
boldly drawn, yet finished with a touch as light as
the brush of a butterfly's wing. What reader of
Treasure Island has not trolled the drunken sailors'
chorus
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest,
Yo! ho ! ho! and a bottle of rum!'
and felt a pirate to his boots !"
It is interesting to recall how the book was written
amid wild December weather over thirty years ago.
In August of 1881 the Stevensons moved to a house
in Braemar. Let Mr. Edmund Gosse, who has given
us such charming reminiscences of his friend, relate
the rest : “ Hither I was invited, and here I spent
an ever memorable visit. The house, as Louis was
careful to instruct me, was lugubriously known as
“the late Miss M'Gregor's cottage,' and so I obedi-
ently addressed my letters until Louis remarked that
'the reſerence to a deceased Highland lady, tending,
as it does, to foster unavailing sorrow, may with
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Byways in Bookland
advantage be omitted from the address. We passed
the days in regularity. After breakfast I went up to
Louis's bedroom, where he sat up in bed, with dark
flashing eyes and ruffled hair, and we played chess
on the coverlid. Not a word passed, for he was
strictly forbidden to speak in the early part of the
day. As soon as he felt tired—often in the middle
of a game-he would rap with peremptory knuckles
on the board as a signal to stop, and then Mrs.
Stevenson or I would arrange his writing materials
on the bed. Then I would see no more of him till
dinner-time, when he would appear, smiling and
voluble, the horrible bar of speechlessness having
been let down. Then every night after dinner he
would read us what he had written during the day.
I find in a note to my wife, dated October 3, 1881:
Louis has been writing, all the time I have been
here, a novel of pirates and hidden treasure, in the
highest degree exciting. He reads it to us every
night, chapter by chapter. This, of course, was
Treasure Island. I look back to no keener intellectual
pleasure than those cold nights at Braemar, with the
sleet howling outside, and Louis reading his budding
romance by the lamplight, emphasizing the purpler
passages with uplifted voice and gesticulating
finger.”
The tale duly appeared in a magazine for boys,
and at first attracted not the least attention. With
characteristic buoyancy, the author, commenting on
its initial failure, declared: “I did not care. I liked
the tale myself, for much the same reason as my
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
father liked the beginning: it was my kind of
picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver
also, and to this day rather admire that smooth and
formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more
exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
finished a tale, and had written “The End” upon
my manuscript, as I had not done since The
Pentland Rising, when I was a boy of sixteen, not
yet at college. The tale seems to have given much
pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bring-
ing) fire and wood and wine to a deserving family in
which I took an interest. I need scarcely say I
mean my own.”
There is a breed of critics who are in the habit
of comparing one author with another with invidious
intent, and there is no habit more irritating and
unpleasant. If the landscape were dealt with in
this fashion we should justly complain; but nobody
seems to see the absurdity and the wrongheadedness
of it when writers are thus treated. Nobody thinks
of comparing the fir-tree with the oak; nobody
dreams of setting off the violet against the tulip, or
the primrose against the orchid. Each has its own
individuality and stands in its own peculiar beauty.
But preachers, poets, artists, and novelists are not
allowed to stand on their own merits. Thackeray
is brought into violent collision with Dickens.
Tennyson is made to contend with Browning.
Leighton is set off against Whistler. Of a preacher
one may actually hear some such insanity as this:
“You know, he has not the polish of Liddon, or the
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unction of Spurgeon, or the learning of Lightfoot, or
the homeliness of Norman Macleod, or the stateli-
ness of Caird, or the eloquence of Chalmers, or the
dramatic surprise of Parker.” Well, now, what if
he had all these diverse characteristics ? He would
not be a minister, he would be a monster.
Some persons, who must have a great deal of time
on their hands as well as a great deal of cotton-wool
in their brains, have striven to compare Stevenson
with Scott. No one would have laughed over it
more than Stevenson. The antelope cannot be
compared with leviathan. The rapier is not the
broadsword, but they each do admirable execution.
Stevenson is not Scott, nor is Scott Stevenson ;
each has a unique and solitary pedestal. · I have
recently refreshed my jaded mind with Kidnapped,
and though I had read it two or three times before,
it came back as freshly as if it were new. That is a
good test of a book. To know exactly what is
coming, and yet to be able to read with interest and
even a pleasant tang of excitement, is surely a tribute
to an author's quality. Adventure is the very breath
of Stevenson's stories. From the first page of Kid-
napped one is kept on the look-out for alarums and
excursions, dangers, and surprises. From the
moment when David Balfour sets forth for the
mysterious House of Shaws we are conscious of a
pleasing twitter of excitement.
The style of the writing is so easy, pliant, supple,
that one is carried on from page to page without
pause or break on the very wings of adventure. The
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
7
art of the book is not so obtrusively obvious as in
some of Stevenson's work; the happy phrase seems
more spontaneous and less laboured than in some of
his stories—The Ebb Tide, for instance. What a
number of striking pictures remain in the mind when
the book is finished! Who can forget the arrival
of David at the House of Shaws, where he is received
at the threatening mouth of a blunderbluss levelled
at him from a first-floor window; or the horrid
moment when he finds himself on the dizzy edge
of the ruined spiral stair, and sees by a lightning
flash amid the rolling storm that he is on the brink
of death ? How artfully, too, is the first appearance
of Alan Breck related, when the small boat is cut in
two by the brig, and that intrepid adventurer hauls
himself miraculously on board by a rope dangling
from the bowsprit! I do not recall any more thrill-
ing episode in any book of adventure than the great
fight in the round house on the deck of the brig.
The odds are overwhelming. It is all so gloriously
impossible, yet one feels it must have been just so,
and not otherwise. The sword of Alan Breck dazzles
the eye; the very pages seem to glance and glitter
with its cuts and thrusts and passes. One hears the
howls of pain and the dull thud of falling bodies;
one sees the smoking pistols in David's hands and
the blood flowing red over the slippery floor. The
enemy is beaten back and badly cowed, and the
Song of the Sword of Alan is raised in token of
victory. Then there is the vivid incident of the
wreck and the casting of David on the barren Isle
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Byways in Bookland
of Earraid, where he spends so many miserable days
on a nauseating and well-nigh starvation diet of
limpets.
Stevenson is great at weird effects, a notable
instance being the tapping of Pew's stick in Treasure
Island, and that of the leper in The Black Arrow. In
Kidnapped he introduces a similar effect in the case of
the blind Catechist whom David Balfour meets upon
the moor, and who terrifies him by his explosive talk
and sinister ways. Perhaps the greatest chapters of
the story are those that recount the famous flight
of David and Alan through the heather. The height
of adventure is reached here, and through four or
five chapters of splendidly sustained interest the
reader holds his breath at the series of hairbreadth
escapes of the fugitives. The bloom of the heather
is over these pages, and one feels the breeze of the
moorland, and hears the cry of the curlew, and
sniffs the pungent reek of the peat and the sweet
scent of the bog-myrtle. The episode of Cluny
Macpherson's Cave is singularly attractive, and the
figure of that bold, rude, picturesque outlaw is limned
in vivid colours.
The characters form a sufficiently varied and
startling gallery of portraits. Perhaps David Balfour
himself is the least satisfactory; but his sinister
uncle, the wretched cabin-boy, the mates of the
brig, and Captain Hoseason, are all marvellously
graphic and real, while Alan Breck would make the
fortunes of a dozen tales. There is no woman in the
book, save one or two petticoats that flit shadow-like
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
for a moment and disappear, and when one considers
this, the absorbing interest of the tale is the more
surprising. But Alan Breck is man and woman and
child, and while he dominates the scene the deficiency
is not noticed. Stevenson had not yet found a sure
hand for such a kittle character as a woman. He
got near to it in Catriona, and with the two Kirsties
in Weir of Hermiston he arrived.
It is given to few men to achieve fame in many
departments; the majority may congratulate them-
selves if they cut a respectable figure in one. The
solitary talent usually confines a man to a beaten
track; its limitations are perfectly obvious. Some-
times, however, a talent is so flexible that it ceases
to be monotonous, but yields perennial interest. It
is an instrument capable of adaptation to various
uses. It gives its possessor no opportunity to com-
plain of restriction ; to do so would be a manifest
ingratitude. The man of letters has a faculty which
can be moulded into many forms, as a fluid runs
into innumerable vessels and takes the shape of each.
Although literature has its recognized forms, its
definite rules and methods, there is practically no
limit to the modulation of words, the invention of
phrases, the arrangement of sentences—the whole
rhythm and suggestion of speech. There is as much
possibility in an alphabet as there is in the notes of
music, and so long as genius endures, we shall never
cease to wonder at the miracle of language. It was
the continual experimenting of Stevenson in the art
of word-weaving, combined with his extraordinary
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versatility of mind, that led him into so many
different regions of literary endeavour. The boy in
him always came uppermost, seeking fresh outlets ;
the spirit of adventure always claimed him, and
made him eager to attempt further experiments and
to capture new realms. There is hardly any writer
of similar eminence who has achieved fame with so
miscellaneous a cargo. There are few regions of
literature he has left unexplored. The wonderful
thing is that a man who thus experimented in so
many departments should have attained a high
degree of success in each.
Recall the contents of this miscellaneous literary
baggage. Four volumes of essays, several romances,
two or three books of travel, a couple of historical
and topographical works, excursions in biography,
tales of mystery and studies in the grotesque, a
number of fables, a number of plays, and four
volumes of poetry. In addition to these, there are
innumerable and inimitable letters, and even a few
compositions akin to sermons. It is really a remark-
able list. The mere bulk of it excites surprise; the
variety of it is amazing. If the writer had a single
manifest failure to record in such circumstances, it
would hardly be to his discredit ; but when we con-
sider that in all these literary endeavours we find
something to admire and love, the result is indeed
astonishing.
Stevenson's output of poems is contained in four
slender volumes, bearing the titles, A Child's Garden
of Verses, Underwoods, Ballads, and Songs of Travel.
1
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
Stevenson is not a poet of the first order; it would,
perhaps, be more correct to call him an accom-
plished writer of verse. He is not of that select
company who occupy the heights on the sunny side
of Parnassus. He does not belong to those who
sing because they must. He sang rather because it
was a fascinating experiment. It was another exer-
cise in the bewitching art of word-weaving, another
opportunity for testing the music of speech. We do
not think of Stevenson “lisping in numbers." We
rather picture him piecing together tuneful phrases
and ear-haunting language with a somewhat laborious
elaboration. Not for him was the full-throated rush
of song, nor the burst of lyrical rapture, nor the
spontaneity of glowing passion. His muse had no
eagle wing, no soaring flight. Such criticism in-
volves no disparagement. Can we not enjoy these
short swallow-flights of song as well as the sustained
magnificence of those with more opulent endow-
ment ? Stevenson's note is not the rich melody of
the nightingale welling from the depths of mystic
woods, holding the imagination in the witchery of
the midnight hour; he reminds us more of the
robin, with his russet coat and bright, round,
inquisitive eye, whose welcome voice pipes to us from
the window-sill. What if the poetry of Stevenson
be the result of happy and congenial experiment,
and not the spontaneous outpouring of a wealth of
song? It is Stevenson's poetry! And to say that
is to say that it will have an inevitable charm, a
distinction, a beauty, a romantic suggestion all its
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own, an originality belonging essentially to his
wholesome outlook, a spell inseparable from his
engaging personality.
One may be excused if one lingers fondly over his.
Child's Garden. It stands alone in the literature of
childhood. Nothing more perfectly real and true of
its kind has ever been written. It is a transcript
from the nursery, a clear reflection of the heart of an
unspoiled imaginative child. The dedication seems
almost too intimate and sacred for publicity. It is
offered to his old nurse, Alison Cunningham, who
tended the delicate frame through so many troubled
days of childhood; and it must have warmed her
heart to read the tender, grateful, beautiful lines.
Mrs. Stevenson says in a preface to the poems,
in the biographical edition of the works, that her
husband had very little understanding of children in
general, and on one occasion deplored their poverty
of resource while he was watching two children at
play. So that this Child's Garden of Verses is not
the result of uncanny insight into the average child's
mind, but is really a transcript of Stevenson's own.
It is memory of an extraordinarily vivid kind. It is
a photograph of an imaginative child's world. The
things that most of us quickly forget are the very
things that Stevenson has most vividly remembered.
This accounts for the shock of delicious surprise
which many of us receive on reading this book for
the first time. It brings back, as if it were but
yesterday, the picture of those hours which in the
majority of cases Time so swiftly obliterates. It
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The Peter Pan of Bookland
reproduces for us those far-off days when we, too,
had an aptitude, now irrecoverably lost, for playing
at soldiers; when we, too, saw the devil in the bed-
curtains, and lay awake listening fearfully to the
wind. The whole world of make-believe is recreated
for us in these pages.
Stevenson is a perfect representative of Barrie's
immortal Peter Pan. How "R. L. S.” would have
shouted over that wonderful creation! How he
would have revelled in the Redskins, and the Home
of the Lost Boys, and the Mermaid's Lagoon, and
the Pirate Ship, and Wendy's House among the
Tree-Tops! Captain Hook and Smee and the
Crocodile would have sent him into ecstasies. A
man with Stevenson's vivid imaginative equipment
is well qualified to be the interpreter of childhood.
A man, did I say? Stevenson was rather a kind of
eternal child, and never lost the memories and
fancies of his earliest years. He never abandoned
the habit of playing with lead soldiers and painting
scenery for toy theatres. Mr. Edmund Gosse remarks
very truly: “Many authors have achieved brilliant
success in describing children, in verbally caressing
them, in amusing, in instructing them; but only
two, Mrs. Ewing in prose and Mr. Stevenson in
verse, have sat down with them without disturbing
their fancies, and have looked into the world of
make-believe with the children's own eyes. If
Victor Hugo should visit the nursery, every head of
hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean,
and nurse must certainly be present, as well as
1
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TYT
mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or Mr. Stevenson might
lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out
shopping, and not a child in the house should know
that a grown-up person had been there.” That is an
enviable character to have, and the spirit thus admir-
ably described is seen full measure in these little poems.
The Land of counterpane, The Land of Story Books,
The Gardener, and The Lamplighter always bring back
pictures of my own childhood with extraordinary
clearness. The soldiers, and the ships that went in
fleets “all up and down among the sheets," were
mine; mine, too, the piratic excursions round the
forest track, “away behind the sofa-back;" mine
also the awe of the gardener bending over the distant
plots, “old and serious, brown and big." The child's
enduring wonder at the sober tastes and inexplic-
able conduct of his elders is an ever-recurring theme.
The Gardener affords an excellent illustration of this;
the man's remarkable preference for work over play
is quite hopeless and even imbecile. I recall the
time when the presence of a dark cupboard on the
stairs used to fill me with wild alarms as I mounted
to my bedroom, and I would whistle loud but some-
what quavering airs as I sped past it in the hope of
scaring the ghosts and shadows away. O those
black shadows! Stevenson's lines bring them all
before me again:
“The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the boy that goes to bed-
All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead !"
198
The Peter Pan of Bookland
Scattered up and down the Child's Garden are
some delightful glimpses of the naïve philosophy of
childhood. As a general survey of the universe,
what could be more artless and true to life than the
couplet:
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings !"
Stevenson has not forgotten, either, the proneness of
a child to make a god of the belly:
"It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink,
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place."
And again :
“ The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart”-
profound emotion),
“She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple tart !”.
A truly noble reason for clasping the cow to one's
bosom! Then we get a swift glimpse of the sense
of possession dear to every child, the unspeakable
pride in what. Mr. Wemmick was accustomed to
allude to as “portable property":
“When I am grown to man's estate,
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.”
And here is that unconscious self-righteousness and
199
Byways in Bookland
smug complacency which belong to so many of our
bewitching little nursery pharisees:
"Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day;
And every day that I've been good,
I get an orange after food.
“The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm surem
Or else his dear papa is poor.”
Even as I write, the brave old nurse, to whom this
boy that would not grow up wrote his charming
dedication, has passed, full of years and memories,
into the Great Silence. Through the delicate and
thoughtful kindness of a friend I was privileged to
meet her a few months before the end, and the
interview will always be a treasured recollection.
" Cummy," as Stevenson called her, and as she
delighted to be called, thoroughly enjoyed the hero-
worship of which she was the centre, and never
tired of talking about her “ain laddie.” She was
over ninety years of age when I saw her, but she
might have been nineteen so far as vivacity was
concerned. The only sign of age was her deafness;
but for the rest, she was alert in mind, graphic in
speech, quick in memory, brisk in observation, em-
phatic and final in opinion, and sufficiently nimble
in body to trip up and down stairs like a girl, to
walk with firm, energetic step, and richly to enjoy
all she saw. I saw her in company with a literary
friend, and when we were introduced she demanded
200
The Peter Pan of Bookland
to know which of us was “the minister.” She
expressed some very natural scepticism on being
told that I was the culprit, and appeared a little
shocked at the absence of an orthodox clerical
collar; but when I told her it was at the wash, she
was quite relieved, and friendly relations were im-
mediately established. I have said that some of
her yiews were emphatic. This came out in her
vehemently expressed dislike of the portrait of
Stevenson now in the National Portrait Gallery, and
of the memorial medallion on the wall of St. Giles'
Cathedral. She resented, I think, in this last the
perpetuation of the invalid, for the medallion depicts
the writer sitting up in bed, propped upon pillows,
pen in hand, and his writing materials spread before
him. It is an unfortunate phase of such a man to
perpetuate in bronze, and is certainly not the kind
of memorial Stevenson himself would have desired,
and the loyal Cummy rejected the representation
with scorn. She was voluble and emphatic, again,
when she spoke of Henley, whose attack on the
character of his dead friend was so bitterly resented
at the time. She admitted that Henley was a bril-
liant writer and a most fascinating man, but she
said “he did Louis a great deal of harm.” She
did not say exactly what she meant by this, but
I understood her to mean that Henley's growingly
unfriendly attitude had deeply wounded Stevenson's
generous heart. She referred, with a break in her
voice and a suspicion of moisture in her eyes, to
Stevenson's journey to America in an emigrant ship,
201
Byways in Bookland
and across the continent to California in an emigrant
train, and declared that it was that journey which
had really killed him. He lived for several years
afterwards, but the effects of that terrible journey
were never lost. “ His lungs at that period were
like a sponge,” said Cummy. “ Louis describes it
all in Across the Plains," she said. “It is a book
I can't bear to read." I noticed that she was always
careful to pronounce his name “ Lewis," although
he always spelt it in the French fashion. Cummy
told us how Louis as a little boy would dictate
stories to her by the hour. He would lock the door
of the nursery, so that they might be perfectly alone
and undisturbed ; and then paper and pencils would
be produced, and the most wonderful tales would be
evolved. Cummy dearly wished she had kept those
old manuscripts. But who could have told what
was to be ? Once, she said, she had put Louis in
the corner for some misdemeanour, and when, after
a time, she called to him to come out, he refused to
stir. Again she called, but still he remained im-
movable, with his face to the wall. Thinking
something was the matter, she went across the room
to bring him out of his corner, when, hearing her
approaching, he wheeled suddenly round and, lifting
up an admonitory finger, said: “Sh! I'm telling
myself a story!" How characteristic that was! The
child was indeed father of the man.
It was very charming to sit with this dear old
lady, listening to her pouring out these simple and
tender reminiscences about her “ain laddie”; very
202
The Peter Pan of Bookland
touching to see how he held her heart still, how
proud she was of his fame and of her own intimate
association with him, how every simple memory was
cherished as a sacred thing. Well she might be
proud, for she was in the Stevenson family for
forty-five years, and she nursed Louis from the time
that he was eighteen months old, and brought him
safely through all his childish ailments and frequent
severe illnesses, watching all the time the growth
of his mind and directing the development of his
character. Well she might be proud, for there was
a link between these two as strong and sweet and
familiar as that between mother and child, and right
nobly and beautifully did Stevenson acknowledge
his debt when he became a man. Could there be
a tenderer or more delicate dedication than that
which forms the preface to A Child's Garden of
Verses ? Alison Cunningham needs no better cer-
tificate of character than that, and no better epitaph.
I count it one of the privileges of my life to have
been permitted to clasp that “most comfortable
hand,” and through it to have greeted the exile who
sleeps on Vaea Mountain in Samoa. The last time
I was in Edinburgh I went to look at 17, Heriot
Row, where the Stevensons used to live. The house
was empty, and I would have given much to enter.
I compromised matters by mounting the front steps
and peeping through the letter-box, and then risked
my reputation by publicly and most tenderly em-
bracing the lamp-post that stood in front, believing
203
Byways in Bookland
it to be the very lamp-post immortalized in A Child's
Garden
"For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door !"
1
It may have been another lamp-post altogether-
perhaps it was the one at No. 8, Howard Street,
where the child was born; but no matter. It pleased
me to think it was the same, and I paid it suitable
homage. I thought how often Louis and Cummy
must have sat together at the nursery window in the
gathering dusk, watching for Leerie “with lantern
and with ladder comė posting up the street.” I
thought of the long nights the sick child lay awake,
and the faithful nurse carrying him to the window
wrapped in a shawl or blanket, that he might see
the lights winking through the mist across the
gardens opposite, and catch a glimpse of the bright
stars looking down from above. And then I thought
of the exile in the South Seas, with Scotland ever
in his heart, and of his exquisitely poignant and
haunting lines as his thoughts flew homeward :
“Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are
crying,
My heart remembers how !"
Stevenson died in 1894, but his faithful old nurse
survived him for nearly twenty years. Cummy
passed onwards in Edinburgh on July 17, 1913, in
her ninety-second year. Well, I am glad to have
looked into her face and listened to her voice; and
204
The Peter Pan of Bookland
Z
here's my sprig of rosemary—“for remembrance”-
for his sake and her own, to lay upon her grave :
The comfortable hand is still
That smoothed the snow-white pillow-hill ;
Hushed is the kindly voice that read
The stories to the boy abed ;
That calmed the fear and soothed the pain,
Till morning light returned again.
And had you done no more than this,
The world your gentle hand would kiss ;
The sick child in your sunshine grew-
Ah, Cummy, what we owe to you !
Now you have left us for a while,
And gone to seek your Treasure Isle ;
The last adventure you have gone,
But you will not fare forth alone.
For your "ain laddie" sure will know
The way your weary feet must go;
The spirit of a little child
Will come from out the unknown wild,
To take the comfortable hand
That led him through the uneven land.
Ah ! just like God, this thing to do,
To send with eager steps for you
Death's angel in the form of “Lou !".
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
-
3 9015 09350 3400
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