The best essay of England
"The Break-Up Of A Great Drought."
By William Hale White
For three months there had been hardly a drop of rain. The wind had been almost
continuously north-west, and from that to east. Occasionally there were light airs from the
south-west, and vapour rose, but there was nothing in it; there was no true south-westerly
breeze, and in a few hours the weather-cock returned to the old quarter. Not infrequently
the clouds began to gather, and there was every sign that a change was at hand. The
barometer at these times fell gradually day after day until at last it reached a point which
generally brought drenching storms, but none appeared, and then it began slowly to rise
again and we knew that our hopes were vain, and that a week at least must elapse before
it would regain its usual height and there might be a chance of declining. At last the
disappointment was so keen that the instrument was removed. It was better not to watch it,
but to hope for a surprise. The grass became brown, and in many places was killed down
to the roots; there was no hay; myriads of swarming caterpillars devoured the fruit trees;
the brooks were all dry; water for cattle had to be fetched from ponds and springs miles
away; the roads were broken up; the air was loaded with grit; and the beautiful green of
the hedges was choked with dust. Birds like the rook, which fed upon worms, were nearly
starved, and were driven far and wide for strange food. It was pitiable to see them trying to
pick the soil of the meadow as hard as a rock. The everlasting glare was worse than the
gloom of winter, and the sense of universal parching thirst became so distressing that the
house was preferred to the fields. We were close to a water famine! The Atlantic, the
source of all alike, was asleep, and what if it should never wake! We know not its ways, it
mocks all our science. Close to us lies this great mystery, incomprehensible, and yet our
very breath depends upon it. Why should not the sweet tides of soft moist air cease to
stream in upon us? No reason could be given why every green herb and living thing
should not perish; no reason, save a faith which was blind. For aught we knew, the oceanbegotten aerial current might forsake the land and it might become a desert.
One night grey bars appeared in the western sky, but they had too often deluded us, and
we did not believe in them. On this particular evening they were a little heavier, and the
window-cords were damp. The air which came across the cliff was cool, and if we had
dared to hope we should have said it had a scent of the sea in it. At four o'clock in the
morning there was a noise of something beating against the panes - they were streaming!
It was impossible to lie still, and I rose and went out of doors. No creature was stirring,
1
The best essay of England
there was no sound save that of the rain, but a busier time there had not been for many a
long month. Thousands of millions of blades of grass and corn were eagerly drinking. For
sixteen hours the downpour continued, and when it was dusk I again went out. The
watercourses by the side of the roads had a little water in them, but not a drop had
reached those at the edge of the fields, so thirsty was the earth. The drought, thank God,
was at an end!
-- William Hale White (1831-1913; pseud., "Mark
Rutherford").
"The Master"
By H. M. Tomlinson (1873-1958)
This master of a ship I remember first as a slim lad, with a shy smile, and large hands that
were lonely beyond his outgrown reefer jacket. His cap was always too small for him, and
the soiled frontal badge of his line became a coloured button beyond his forelock. He used
to come home occasionally - and it was always when we were on the point of forgetting
him altogether. He came with a huge bolster in a cab, as though out of the past and
nowhere. There is a tradition, a book tradition, that the boy apprenticed to the sea acquires
saucy eyes, and a self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak extreme the very
thought of which horrifies those who are lawful and cautious. They know better who live
where the ships are. He used to bring his young shipmates to see us, and they were like
himself. Their eyes were downcast. They showed no self-reliance. Their shyness and
politeness, when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate even with
modesty. Their sisters, not nearly so polite, used to mock them.
As our own shy lad was never with us for long, his departure being as abrupt and
unannounced as his appearance, we could willingly endure him. But he was extraneous to
the household. He had the impending nature of a new and superfluous piece of furniture
which is in the way, yet never knows it, and placidly stays where it is, in its wooden
manner, till it is placed elsewhere. There was a morning when, as he was leaving the
house, during one of his brief visits to his home, I noticed to my astonishment that he had
grown taller than myself. How had that happened? And where? I had followed him to the
door that morning because, looking down at his cap which he was nervously handling, he
had told me he was going then to an examination. About a week later he announced, in a
casual way, that he had got his master's ticket. After the first shock of surprise, caused by
2
The best essay of England
the fact that this information was an unexpected warning of our advance in years, we were
amused, and we congratulated him. Naturally he had got his certificate as master mariner.
Why not? Nearly all the mates we knew got it, sooner or later. That was bound to come.
But very soon after that he gave us a genuine surprise, and made us anxious. He informed
us, as casually, that he had been appointed master to a ship; a very different matter from
merely possessing the licence to command.
We were even alarmed. This was serious. He could not do it. He was not the man to make
a command for anything. A fellow who, not so long ago, used to walk a mile with a
telegram because he had not the strength of character to face the lady clerk in the post
office round the corner, was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard characters
gathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialise them, and direct them successfully in
subduing the conflicting elements of a difficult enterprise. Not he. But we said nothing to
discourage him.
Of course, he was a delightful fellow. He often amused us, and he did not always know
shy. He was frank, he was gentle, but that large vacancy, the sea, where he had spent
most of his young life, had made him - well, slow. You know what I mean. He was
curiously innocent of those dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because we
know they are there. Yet he was always on the alert for thieves and parasites. I think he
enjoyed his belief in their crafty omni-presence ashore. Proud of his alert and knowing
intelligence, he would relate a long story of the way he had not only frustrated an artful
shark, but had enjoyed the process in perfect safety. That we, who rarely went out of
London, never had such adventures, did not strike him as worth a thought or two. He
never paused in his merriment to consider the strange fact that to him, alone of our
household, such wayside adventures fell. With a shrewd air he would inform us that he
was about to put the savings of a voyage into an advertised trap which a country parson
would have stepped over without a second contemptuous glance.
He took his ship away. The affair was not discussed at home, though each of us gave it
some private despondency. We followed him silently, apprehensively, through the reports
in the Shipping Gazette. He made point after point safely - St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez,
Aden - after him we went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that he
was safe at Batavia. He had got that steamer out all right. He got her home again, too.
After his first adventure as master he made voyage after voyage with no more excitement
3
The best essay of England
in them that you would find in Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain luck; or else
navigation and seamanship were greatly overrated arts.
A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage. I could leave the ship at
Bordeaux. I went. You must remember that we had never seen his ship. And there he was,
walking with me to the dock from a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh,
with an umbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel. He was
appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too small for him. Glancing up at his
profile, I actually wondered whether the turmoil was now going in his mind over that
confession which now he was bound to make: that he was not the master of a ship, and
never had been.
There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks and time-saving appliances, and
her funnel lording it over the neighbourhood. The man with the parcel under his arm led
me up the gangway. I was not yet convinced. I was, indeed, less sure than ever that he
could be the master of this huge community of engines and men. He did not accord with it.
We were no sooner on deck than a man in uniform, grey-haired, with a seamed and
resolute face, which anyone would have recognised at once as a sailor's, approached us.
He was introduced as the chief officer. He had a tale of woe: trouble with the dock-master,
with the stevedores, with the cargo, with many things. He did not appear to know what to
do with them. He was asking this boy of ours.
The skipper began to speak. At that moment I was gazing at the funnel, trying to decipher
a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapid and incisive, sure of its subject,
resolving doubts, and making the crooked straight. It was the man with the brown paper
parcel. It was still under his arm - in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas, and there was
hardly enough paper. The respect of the mate was not lessened by this.
The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway. He walked to the other side of the ship, and
inspected something there. Conned her length, called up in a friendly but authoritative way
to an engineer standing by an amidship rail above. He came back to the mate, and with an
easy precision directed his will on others, through his deputy, up to the time of sailing. He
beckoned to me, who also, apparently, was under his august orders, and turned, as
though perfectly aware that in this place I should follow him meekly, in full obedience.
4
The best essay of England
Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a drive of wind and rain. There were bewildering
and unrelated lights about us. Peremptory challenges were shouted to us from nowhere.
Sirens blared out of dark voids. And there was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who
caused us amusement at home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an
immense insentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands in his pockets,
and turned to tell me what a cold night it was. The pier-head searchlight showed his face,
alert, serene, with his brows knitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign
of the pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, and care not at all. In
my berth that night I searched for a moral for this narrative, but went to sleep before I
found it.
-- H. M. Tomlinson.
Nil Nisi Bonum."
By William Makepeace Thackeray
Almost the last words which Sir Walter spoke to Lockhart, his biographer, were: "Be a
good man, my dear!" and with the last flicker of breath on his dying lips, he sighed a
farewell to his family, and passed away blessing them.
Two men, famous, admired, beloved, have just left us, the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of
our time. Ere a few weeks are over, many a critic's pen will be at work, reviewing their
lives, and passing judgment on their works. This is no review, or history, or criticism; only a
word in testimony of respect and regard from a man of letters, who owes to his own
professional labor the honor of becoming acquainted with these two eminent literary men.
One was the first ambassador whom he New World of Letters sent to the Old. He was
born almost with the republic; the pater patriae had laid his hand on the child's head. He
bore Washington's name: he came amongst us bringing the kindest sympathy, the most
artless, smiling goodwill. His new country (which some people here might be disposed to
regard rather superciliously) could send us, as he showed in his own person, a gentleman
who, though himself born in no very high sphere, was most finished, polished, easy, witty,
quiet; and, socially, the equal of the most refined Europeans. If Irving's welcome in
England was a kind one, was it not also gratefully remembered? If he ate our salt, did he
not pay us with a thankful heart? Who can calculate the amount of friendliness and good
feeling for our country which this writer's generous and untiring regard for us disseminated
in his own? His books are read by millions of his countrymen, whom he has taught to love
5
The best essay of England
England, and why to love her. It would have been easy to speak otherwise than he did; to
inflame national rancors, which, at the time when he first became known as a public writer,
war had just renewed; to cry down the old civilization at the expense of the new; to point
out our faults, arrogance, shortcomings, and give the republic to infer how much she was
the parent State's superior. There are writers enough in the United States, honest and
otherwise, who preach that kind of doctrine. But the good Irving, the peaceful, the friendly,
had no place for bitterness in his heart, and no scheme but kindness. Received in England
with extraordinary tenderness and friendship (Scott, Southey, Byron, a hundred others
have borne witness to their liking for him), he was a messenger of goodwill and peace
between his country and ours. "See, friends!" he seems to say, "these English are not so
wicked, rapacious, callous, proud, as you have been taught to believe them. I went
amongst them a humble man; won my way by my pen; and, when known, found every
hand held out to me with kindliness and welcome. Scott is a great man, you acknowledge.
Did not Scott's King of England give a gold medal to him, and another to me, your
countryman, and a stranger?"
Tradition in the United States still fondly retains the history of the feasts and rejoicings
which awaited Irving on his return to his native country from Europe. He had a national
welcome; he stammered in his speeches, hid himself in confusion, and the people loved
him all the better. He had worthily represented America in Europe. In that young
community a man who brings home with him abundant European testimonials is still
treated with respect (I have found American writers, of wide-world reputation, strangely
solicitous about the opinions of quite obscure British critics, and elated or depressed by
their judgments); and Irving went home medalled by the King, diplomatized by the
university, crowned and honored and admired. He had not in any way intrigued for his
honors, he had fairly won them; and, in Irving's instance, as in others, the old country was
glad and eager to pay them.
In America the love and regard for Irving was a national sentiment. Party wars are
perpetually raging there, and are carried on by the press with a rancor and fierceness
against individuals which exceed British, almost Irish, virulence. It seemed to me, during a
year's travel in the country, as if no one ever aimed a blow at Irving. All men held their
hand from that harmless, friendly peacemaker. I had the good fortune to see him at New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and remarked how in every place he was
honored and welcome. Every large city has its "Irving House." The country takes pride in
6
The best essay of England
the fame of its men of letters. The gate of his own charming little domain on the beautiful
Hudson River was forever swinging before visitors who came to him. He shut out no one. I
had seen many pictures of his house, and read descriptions of it, in both of which it was
treated with a not unusual American exaggeration. It was but a pretty little cabin of a place;
the gentleman of the press who took notes of the place, whilst his kind old host was
sleeping, might have visited the whole house in a couple of minutes.
And how came it that this house was so small, when Mr. Irving's books were sold by
hundreds of thousands, nay, millions; when his profits were known to be large, and the
habits of life of the good old bachelor were notoriously modest and simple? He had loved
once in life. The lady he loved died; and he, whom all the world loved, never sought to
replace her. I can't say how much the thought of that fidelity has touched me. Does not the
very cheerfulness of his after-life add to the pathos of that untold story? To grieve always
was not in his nature; or, when he had his sorrow, to bring all the world in to condole with
him and bemoan it. Deep and quiet he lays the love of his heart, and buries it; and grass
and flowers grow over the scarred ground in due time.
Irving had such a small house and such narrow rooms, because there was a great number
of people to occupy them. He could only afford to keep one old horse (which, lazy and
aged as it was, managed once or twice to run away with that careless old horseman). He
could only afford to give plain sherry to that amiable British paragraph-monger from New
York, who saw the patriarch asleep over his modest, blameless cup, and fetched the
public into his private chamber to look at him. Irving could only live very modestly, because
the wifeless, childless man had a number of children to whom he was a father. He had as
many as nine nieces, I am told - I saw two of these ladies at his house - with all of whom
the dear old man had shared the produce of his labor and genius.
"Be a good man, my dear!" One can't but think of these last words of the veteran chief of
letters, who had tasted and tested the value of worldly success, admiration, prosperity.
Was Irving not good, and, of his works, was not his life the best part? In his family, gentle,
generous, good-humored, affectionate, self-denying; in society, a delightful example of
complete gentlemanhood; quite unspoiled by prosperity; never obsequious to the great (or,
worse still, to the base and mean, as some public men are forced to be in his and other
countries); eager to acknowledge every contemporary's merit; always kind and affable to
the young members of his calling; in his professional bargains and mercantile dealings
7
The best essay of England
delicately honest and grateful; one of the most charming masters of our lighter language;
the constant friend to us and our nation; to men of letters doubly dear, not for his wit and
genius merely, but as an exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life. I don't know what
sort of testimonial will be raised to him in his own country, where generous and
enthusiastic acknowledgment of American merit is never wanting: but Irving was in our
service as well as theirs; and as they have placed a stone at Greenwich yonder in memory
of that gallant young Bellot, who shared the perils and fate of some of our Arctic seamen, I
would like to hear of some memorial raised by English writers and friends of letters in
affectionate remembrance of the dear and good Washington Irving.
As for the other writer, whose departure many friends, some few most dearly loved
relatives, and multitudes of admiring readers deplore, our republic has already decreed his
statue, and he must have known that he had earned his posthumous honor. He is not a
poet and man of letters merely, but citizen, statesman, a great British worthy. Almost from
the first moment when he appears, amongst boys, amongst college students, amongst
men, he is marked, and takes rank as a great Englishman. All sorts of successes are easy
to him; as a lad he goes down into the arena with others, and wins all the prizes to which
he has a mind. A place in the Senate is straightway offered to the young man. He takes his
seat there; he speaks, when so minded, without party anger or intrigue, but not without
party faith and a sort of heroic enthusiasm for his cause. Still he is a poet and philosopher
even more than orator. That he may have leisure and means to pursue his darling studies,
he absents himself for a while, and accepts a richly remunerative post in the East. As
learned a man may live in a cottage or a college common-room; but it always seemed to
me that ample means and recognized rank were Macaulay's as of right. Years ago there
was a wretched outcry raised because Mr. Macaulay dated a letter from Windsor Castle,
where he was staying. Immortal gods! Was this man not a fit guest for any palace in the
world? or a fit companion for any man or woman in it? I dare say, after Austerlitz, the old
K.K. court officials and footmen sneered at Napoleon for dating from Schonbrunn. But that
miserable "Windsor Castle" outcry is an echo out of fast-retreating Old-World
remembrances. The place of such a natural chief was amongst the first of the land; and
that country is best, according to our British notion at least, where the man of eminence
has the best chance of investing his genius and intellect.
If a company of giants were got together, very likely one or two of the mere six-feet-six
people might be angry at the incontestable superiority of the very tallest of the party; and
8
The best essay of England
so I have heard some London wits, rather peevish at Macaulay's superiority, complain that
he occupied too much of the talk, and so forth. Now that wonderful tongue is to speak no
more, will not many a man grieve that he no longer has the chance to listen? To remember
the talk is to wonder; to think not only of the treasure he had in his memory, but of the
trifles he had stored there, and could produce with equal readiness. Almost on the last day
I had the fortune to see him, a conversation happened suddenly to spring up about senior
wranglers, and what they had done in after-life. To the almost terror of the persons
present, Macaulay began with the senior wrangler of 1801-2-3-4, and so on, giving the
name of each, and relating his subsequent career and rise. Every man who has known
him has his story regarding that astonishing memory. It may be that he was not ill-pleased
that you should recognize it; but to those prodigious intellectual feats, which were so easy
to him, who would grudge his tribute of homage? His talk was, in a word, admirable, and
we admired it.
Of the notices which have appeared regarding Lord Macaulay, up to the day when the
present lines are written (the 9th of January), the reader should not deny himself the
pleasure of looking especially at two. It is a good sign of the times when such articles a
these (I mean the articles in "The Times" and "Saturday Review") appear in our public
prints about our public men. They educate us, as it were, to admire rightly. An uninstructed
person in a museum or at a concert may pass by without recognizing a picture or a
passage of music, which the connoisseur by his side may show him is a masterpiece of
harmony, or a wonder of artistic skill. After reading these papers, you like and respect
more the person you have admired so much already. And so with regard to Macaulay's
style there may be faults, of course - what critic can't point them out? But for the once we
are not talking about faults; we want to say nil nisi bonum. Well, take at hazard any three
pages of the "Essays" or "History," and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as it
were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of allusions to other
historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. Why is this
epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words,
to paint an individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbor, who has his reading, and
his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions,
happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master,
but the wonderful history, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads
twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description.
9
The best essay of England
Many Londoners - not all - have been to the British Museum Library. I speak a coeur
ouvert, and pray the kindly reader to bear with me. I have seen all sorts of domes of Peters
and Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon - what not? - and have been struck by none of them so much
as by that catholic dome in Bloomsbury, under which our million volumes are housed.
What peace, what love, what truth, what beauty, what happiness for all, what generous
kindness for you and me, are here spread out! It seems to me one cannot sit down in that
place without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table,
and to have thanked heaven for this my English birthright, freely to partake of these
bountiful books, and to speak the truth I find there. Under the dome which held Macaulay's
brain, and from which his solemn eyes looked out on the world but a fortnight since, what a
vast, brilliant, and wonderful store of learning was ranged! what strange lore would he not
fetch for you at your bidding? A volume of law or history, a book of poetry familiar or
forgotten (except by himself who forgot nothing), a novel ever so old, and he had it at
hand. I spoke to him once about "Clarissa." "Not read 'Clarissa'!" he cried out. "If you have
once thoroughly entered on 'Clarissa' and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I was
in India I passed one hot season at the hills, and there were the Governor-General, and
the Secretary of Government, and the Commander-in-Chief, and their wives. I had
'Clarissa' with me; and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion
of excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly Lovelace! The
Governor's wife seized the book, and the Secretary waited for it, and the Chief Justice
could not read it for tears!" He acted the whole scene; he paced up and down the
Athenaeum library; I dare say he could have spoken pages of the book - of that book, and
of what countless piles of others!
In this little paper let us keep to the text of nil nisi bonum. One paper I have read regarding
Lord Macaulay says "he had no heart." Why, a man's books may not always speak the
truth, but they speak his mind in spite of himself; and it seems to me that this man's heart
is beating through every page he penned. He is always in a storm of revolt and indignation
against wrong, craft, tyranny. How he cheers heroic resistance; how he backs and
applauds freedom struggling for its own; how he hates scoundrels, ever so victorious and
successful; how he recognizes genius, though selfish villains possess it! The critic who
says Macaulay had no heart, might say that Johnson had none, and two more generous,
and more loving, and more hating, and more partial, and more noble, do not live in our
history. Those who knew Lord Macaulay knew how admirably tender and generous and
10
The best essay of England
affectionate he was. It was not his business to bring his family before the theatre footlights,
and call for bouquets from the gallery as he wept over them.
If any young man of letters reads this little sermon - and to him, indeed, it is addressed - I
would say to him: "Bear Scott's words in your mind, and 'be good, my dear!'" Here are two
literary men gone to their account, and, laus Deo, as far as we know, it is fair, and open,
and clean. Here is no need for apologies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices which
would have been virtues but for unavoidable etc. Here are two examples of men most
differently gifted: each pursuing his calling; each speaking his truth as God bade him; each
honest in his life; just and irreproachable in his dealings; dear to his friends; honored by his
country; beloved at his fireside. It has been the fortunate lot of both to give incalculable
happiness and delight to the world, which thanks them in return with an immense
kindliness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with
much merit, or rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid
to our service. We may not win the baton or epaulettes; but God give us strength to guard
the honor of the flag!
-- William Makepeace Thackeray (1859).
"The Forgotten Man"
By William Graham Sumner.1
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B
put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all
these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the
matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society
through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man. For once let us
look him up and consider his case, for the characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix
their minds on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies and the
imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the particular trouble; they do not
understand that all the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in
action act and react throughout the whole organism, until an equilibrium is produced by a
re-adjustment of all interests and rights. They therefore ignore entirely the source from
which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore
all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. They are
always under the dominion of the superstition of government, and, forgetting that a
11
The best essay of England
government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered
in all social discussion - that the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from
some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter
is the Forgotten Man.
The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward "the poor," "the
weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes,
and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to
other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other noble
sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed consists in a transfer of capital
from the better off to the worse off. Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by
which civilization is maintained and carried on. The same piece of capital cannot be used
in two ways. Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient
member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it
was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and
productive laborer. Hence the real sufferer by that kind of benevolence which consists in
an expenditure of capital to protect the good-for-nothing is the industrious laborer. The
latter, however, is never thought of in this connection. It is assumed that he is provided for
and out of the account. Such a notion only shows how little true notions of political
economy have as yet become popularized. There is an almost invincible prejudice that a
man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who
refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings bank is stingy and mean. The former is
putting capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it will be a kind of seed for a
long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to ward off a greater strain on the
sympathies than would have been occasioned by a refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as
the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it,
would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter. When a millionaire
gives a dollar to a beggar the gain of utility to the beggar is enormous, and the loss of
utility to the millionaire is insignificant. Generally the discussion is allowed to rest there. But
if the millionaire makes capital of the dollar, it must go upon the labor market, as a demand
for productive services. Hence there is another party in interest - the person who supplies
productive services. There always are two parties. The second one is always the
Forgotten Man, and any one who wants to truly understand the matter in question must go
and search for the Forgotten Man. He will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent,
and self-supporting. He is not, technically, "poor" or "weak"; he minds his own business,
12
The best essay of England
and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample
on him.
We hear a great deal of schemes for "improving the condition of the working-man." In the
United States the farther down we go in the grade of labor, the greater is the advantage
which the laborer has over the higher classes. A hod-carrier or digger here can, by one
day's labor, command many times more days' labor of a carpenter, surveyor, book-keeper,
or doctor than an unskilled laborer in Europe could command by one day's labor. The
same is true, in a less degree, of the carpenter, as compared with the book-keeper,
surveyor, and doctor. This is why the United States is the great country for the unskilled
laborer. The economic conditions all favor that class. There is a great continent to be
subdued, and there is a fertile soil available to labor, with scarcely any need of capital.
Hence the people who have the strong arms have what is most needed, and, if it were not
for social consideration, higher education would not pay. Such being the case, the
working-man needs no improvement in his condition except to be freed from the parasites
who are living on him. All schemes for patronizing "the working classes" savor of
condescension. They are impertinent and out of place in this free democracy. There is not,
in fact, any such state of things or any such relation as would make projects of this kind
appropriate. Such projects demoralize both parties, flattering the vanity of one and
undermining the self-respect of the other.
For our present purpose it is most important to notice that if we lift any man up we must
have a fulcrum, or point of reaction. In society that means that to lift one man up we push
another down. The schemes for improving the condition of the working classes interfere in
the competition of workmen with each other. The beneficiaries are selected by favoritism,
and are apt to be those who have recommended themselves to the friends of humanity by
language or conduct which does not betoken independence and energy. Those who suffer
a corresponding depression by the interference are the independent and self-reliant, who
once more are forgotten or passed over; and the friends of humanity once more appear, in
their zeal to help somebody, to be trampling on those who are trying to help themselves.
Trades-unions adopt various devices for raising wages, and those who give their time to
philanthropy are interested in these devices, and wish them success. They fix their minds
entirely on the workmen for the time being in the trade, and do not take note of any other
workmen as interested in the matter. It is supposed that the fight is between the workmen
and their employers, and it is believed that one can give sympathy in that contest to the
workmen without feeling responsibility for anything farther. It is soon seen, however, that
13
The best essay of England
the employer adds the trades-union and strike risk to the other risks of his business, and
settles down to it philosophically. If, now, we go farther, we see that he takes it
philosophically because he has passed the loss along on the public. It then appears that
the public wealth has been diminished, and that the danger of a trade war, like the danger
of a revolution, is a constant reduction of the well-being of all. So far, however, we have
seen only things which could lower wages - nothing which could raise them. The employer
is worried, but that does not raise wages. The public loses, but the loss goes to cover extra
risk, and that does not raise wages.
A trades-union raises wages (aside from the legitimate and economic means notice in
Chapter VI) by restricting the number of apprentices who may be taken into the trade. This
device acts directly on the supply of laborers, and that produces effects on wages. If,
however, the number of apprentices is limited, some are kept out who want to get in.
Those who are in have, therefore, made a monopoly, and constituted themselves a
privileged class on a basis exactly analogous to that of the old privileged aristocracies. But
whatever is gained by this arrangement for those who are in is won at a greater loss to
those who are kept out. Hence it is not upon the masters nor upon the public that tradesunions exert the pressure by which they raise wages; it is upon other persons of the labor
class who want to get into the trades, but, not being able to do so, are pushed down into
the unskilled labor class. These persons, however, are passed by entirely without notice in
all the discussions about trades-unions. They are the Forgotten Men. But, since they want
to get into the trade and win their living in it, it is fair to suppose that they are fit for it, would
succeed at it, would do well for themselves and society in it; that is to say, that, of all
persons interested or concerned, they most deserve our sympathy and attention.
The cases already mentioned involve no legislation. Society, however, maintains police,
sheriffs, and various institutions, the object of which is to protect people against
themselves - that is, against their own vices. Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice is
really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious man from the
penalty of his vice. Nature's remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims
without pity. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness
and tendency of things. Nature has set up on him the process of decline and dissolution by
which she removes things which have survived their usefulness. Gambling and other less
mentionable vices carry their own penalties with them.
Now, we never can annihilate a penalty. We can only divert it from the head of the man
who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of
14
The best essay of England
"social reform" consists in just this operation. The consequence is that those who have
gone astray, being relieved from Nature's fierce discipline, go on to worse, and that there
is a constantly heavier burden for the others to bear. Who are the others? When we see a
drunkard in the gutter we pity him. If a policeman picks him up, we say that society has
interfered to save him from perishing. "Society" is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble
of thinking. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his
day's wages to pay the policeman, is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the
Forgotten Man. He passes by and is never notices, because he has behaved himself,
fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing.
The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation is the same. A and B
determine to be teetotalers, which is often a wise determination, and sometimes a
necessary one. If A and B are moved by considerations which seem to them good, that is
enough. But A and B put their heads together to get a law passed which shall force C to be
a teetotaler for the sake of D, who is in danger of drinking too much. There is no pressure
on A and B. They are having their own way, and they like it. There is rarely any pressure
on D. He does not like it, and evades it. The pressure all comes on C. The question then
arises, Who is C? He is the man who wants alcoholic liquors for any honest purpose
whatsoever, who would use his liberty without abusing it, who would occasion no public
question, and trouble nobody at all. He is the Forgotten Man again, and as soon as he is
drawn from his obscurity we see that he is just what each one of us ought to be.
-- William Graham Sumner (1840-1910).
NOTES:
1
William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) was a Professor of Political Economy and of
Sociology at Yale. In the book in which I found this essay (Macmillan, 1916), the editors -English Professors Berdan, Schultz and Joyce of Yale -- wrote a short introductory
paragraph, as follows: "This brilliant essay by Professor Sumner illustrates the effective
use of the deductive structure. In two paragraphs defining who is the Forgotten Man, the
general principle is stated so fully that the reader unconsciously accepts it. But once the
reader has accepted this principle, it is applied to the consideration of trades unions and
temperance legislation, with startling results. The essay, then, consists in the statement of
a general principle, followed by two illustrations. Just as the form resolves itself into a
simple arrangement, so the style is simple. There is no attempt at rhetorical exaggeration,
15
The best essay of England
no appeal to the emotions. It does read, and it is intended to read, as an ordinary exercise
of the logical faculty. This mathematical effect is gained by the device of using the A and B
that are associated in the mind with school problems, And the brilliance of the essay lies in
the apparent inevitability with which the author reaches conclusions widely differing from
conventional views. Since the importance of the essay lies exactly in these applications,
actually the structure approaches the deductive type.
"On The Choice Of A Profession"
By Robert Louis Stevenson.
You write to me, my dear sir, requesting advice at one of the most momentous epochs in a
young man's life. You are about to choose a profession; and with a diffidence highly
pleasing at your age, you would be glad, you say, of some guidance in the choice. There is
nothing more becoming than for youth to seek counsel; nothing more becoming to age
than to be able to give it; and in a civilisation old and complicated like ours, where practical
persons boast of a kind of practical philosophy superior to all others, you would very
naturally expect to find all such questions systematically answered. For the dicta of the
Practical Philosophy, you come to me. What, you ask, are the principles usually followed
by the wise in the like critical junctures? There, I confess, you pose me on the threshold. I
have examined my own recollections; I have interrogated others; and with all the will in the
world to serve you better, I fear I can only tell you that the wise, in these circumstances,
act upon no principles whatever. This is disappointing to you; it was painful to myself; but if
I am to declare the truth as I see it, I must repeat that wisdom has nothing to do with the
choice of a profession.
We all know what people say, and very foolish it usually is. The question is to get inside of
these flourishes, and discover what it is they think and ought to say: to perform, in short,
the Socratic Operation. - The more ready-made answers there are to any question, the
more abtruse it becomes; for those of whom we make the enquiry have the less need of
consideration before they reply. The world being more or less beset with Anxious
Enquirers of the Socratic persuasion, it is the object of a Liberal Education to equip people
with a proper number of these answers by way of passport; so they can pass swimmingly
to and fro on their affairs without the trouble of thinking. How should a banker know his
own mind? It takes him all his time to manage his bank. If you saw a company of pilgrims,
walking as if for a wager, each with his teeth set; and if you happened to ask them one
after another: Whither they were going? and from each you were to receive the same
16
The best essay of England
answer: that positively they were all in such a hurry, they had never found leisure to
enquire into the nature of their errand: - confess, my dear sir, you would be startled at the
indifference they exhibited. Am I going to far, if I say, that this is the condition of the large
majority of our fellow-men and almost all our fellow-women?
I stop a banker.
"My good fellow," I say, "give me a moment."
"I have not a moment to spare," says he.
"Why?" I enquire.
"I must be banking," he replies. "I am so busily engaged in banking all day long that I have
hardly leisure for my meals."
"And what," I continue my interrogatory, "is banking?"
"Sir," says he, "it is my business."
"Your business?" I repeat. "And what is a man's business?"
"Why," cries the banker, "a man's business is his duty." And with that he breaks away from
me, and I see him skimming to his avocations.
But this is a sort of answer that provokes reflection. Is a man's business his duty? Or
perhaps should not his duty be his business? If it is not my duty to conduct a bank (and I
contend that it is not) is it the duty of my friend the banker? Who told him it was? Is it in the
Bible? Is he sure that banks are a good thing? Might it not have been his duty to stand
aside, and let some one else conduct the bank? Or perhaps ought he not to have been a
ship-captain instead? All of these perplexing queries may be summed up under one head:
the grave problem which my friend offers to the world: Why is he a Banker?
Well, why is it? There is one principal reason, I conceive: that the man was trapped.
Educations, as practised, is a form of harnessing with the friendliest intentions. The fellow
was hardly in trousers before they whipped him into school; hardly done with school before
they smuggled him into an office; it is ten to one they have had him married into the
bargain; and all this before he has had time so much as to imagine that there may be any
other practicable course. Drum, drum, drum; you must be in time for school; you must do
your Cornelius Nepos; you must keep your hands clean; you must go to parties - a young
man should make friends; and, finally - you must take this opening in a bank. He has been
used to caper to this sort of piping from the first; and he joins the regiment of bank clerks
for precisely the same reason as he used to go to the nursery at the stroke of eight. Then
at last, rubbing his hands with a complacent smile, the parent lays his conjuring pipe aside.
The trick is performed, ladies and gentlemen; the wild ass's colt is broken in; and now sits
17
The best essay of England
diligently scribing. Thus it is, that, out of men, we make bankers.
You have doubtless been present at the washing of sheep, which is a brisk, high-handed
piece of manoeuvring, in its way; but what is it, as a subject of contemplation, to the case
of the poor young animal, Man, turned loose into this roaring world, herded by robustious
guardians, taken with the panic before he has wit enough to apprehend its cause, and
soon flying with all his heels in the van of the general stampede? It may be that in after
years, he shall fall upon a train of reflection, and begin narrowly to scrutinise the reasons
that decided his path and his continued mad activity in that direction. And perhaps he may
be very well pleased at the retrospect, and see fifty things that might have been worse, for
one that would have been better; and even supposing him to take the other cue, bitterly to
deplore the circumstances in which he is placed and bitterly to reprobate the jockeying that
got him into them, the fact is, it is too late to indulge such whims. It is too late, after the
train has started, to debate the needfulness of this particular journey: the door is locked,
the express goes tearing overland at sixty miles an hour; he had better betake himself to
sleep or the daily paper, and discourage unavailing thought. He seems many pleasant
places out of the window: cottages in a garden, angles by the riverside, balloons voyaging
the sky; but as for him, he is booked for all his natural days, and must remain a banker to
the end.
If the juggling only began with school-time, if even the domineering friends and counsellors
had made a choice of their own, there might still be some pretension to philosophy in the
affair. But no. They too were trapped; they are but tame elephants unwittingly ensnaring
others, and were themselves ensnared by tame elephants of an older domestication. We
have all learned our tricks in captivity, to the spiriting of Mrs. Grundy and a system of
rewards and punishments. The crack of the whip and the trough of fodder: the cut direct
and an invitation to dinner: the gallows and the Shorter Catechism: a pat upon the head
and a stinging lash on the reverse: these are the elements of education and the principles
of the Practical Philosophy. Sir Thomas Browne, in the earlier part of the Seventeenth
Century, had already apprehended the staggering fact that geography is a considerable
part of orthodoxy; and that a man who, when born in London, makes a conscientious
Protestant, would have made an equally conscientious Hindu if he had first seen daylight
in Benares. This is but a small part, however important, of the things that are settled for us
by our place of birth. An Englishman drinks beer and tastes his liquor in the throat; a
Frenchman drinks wine and tastes it in the front of the mouth. Hence, a single beverage
lasts the Frenchman all afternoon; and the Englishman cannot spend above a very short
18
The best essay of England
time in a café, but he must swallow half a bucket. The Englishman takes a cold tub every
morning in his bedroom; the Frenchman has an occasional hot bath. The Englishman has
an unlimited family and will die in harness; the Frenchman retires upon a competency with
three children at the outside. So this imperative national tendency follows us through all
the privacies of life, dictates our thoughts, and attends us to the grave. We do nothing, we
say nothing, we wear nothing, but it is stamped with the Queen's Arms. We are English
down to our boots and into our digestions. There is not a dogma of all those by which we
lead young men, but we get it ourselves, between sleep and waking, between death and
life, in a complete abeyance of the reasoning part.
"But how, sir," (you will ask) "is there then no wisdom in the world? And when my
admirable father was this day urging me, with the most affecting expressions, to decide on
an industrious, honest and lucrative employment--?" Enough, sir; I follow your thoughts,
and will answer them to the utmost of my ability. Your father, for whom I entertain a
singular esteem is, I am proud to believe, a professing Christian: the Gospel, therefore, is
or ought to be his rule of conduct. Now, I am of course ignorant to the terms employed by
your father; but I quite here from a very urgent letter, written by another parent, who was a
man of sense, integrity, great energy, and a Christian persuasion, and who has perhaps
set forth the common view with a certain innocent openness of his own:
"You are now come to that time of life," he writes to his son, "and have reason within
yourself to consider the absolute necessity of making provision for the time when it will be
asked, Who is this man? Is he doing any good in the world? Has he the means of being
'One of us'? I beseech you," he goes on, rising in emotion, and appealing to his son by
name, "I beseech you do not trifle with this till it actually comes upon you. Bethink yourself
and bestir yourself as a man. This is the time--" and so forth. This gentleman has candour;
he is perspicacious, and has to deal apparently with a perspicacious pick-logic of a son;
and hence the startling perspicacity of the document. But, my dear sir, what a principle of
life! To "do good in the world" is to be received into a society apart from personal affection.
I could name many forms of evil vastly more exhilarating whether in prospect or
enjoyment. If I scraped money, believe me, it should be for some more cordial purpose.
And then, scraping money? It seems to me as if he had forgotten the Gospel. This is a
view of life not quite the same as the Christian, which the old gentleman professed and
sincerely studied to practise. But upon this point, I dare dilate no further. Suffice it to say,
that looking round me on the manifestations of this Christian society of ours, I have been
often tempted to exclaim: What, then, is Antichrist?
19
The best essay of England
A wisdom, at least, which professes one set of propositions and yet acts upon another,
can be no very entire or rational ground of conduct. Doubtless, there is much in this
question of money; and for my part, I believe no young man ought to be at peace till he is
self-supporting, and has an open, clear life of it on his own foundation. But here a
consideration occurs to me of, as I must consider, startling originality. It is this: That there
are two sides to this question as well as to so many others. Make more? - Aye, or spend
less? There is no absolute call upon a man to make any specific income, unless, indeed,
he has set his immortal soul on being "One of us."
A thoroughly respectable income is as much as a man spends. A luxurious income, or true
opulence, is something more than a man spends. Raise the income, lower the
expenditure, and, my dear sir, surprising as it seems, we have the same result. But I hear
you remind me, with pursed lips, of privations - of hardships. Alas! Sir, there are privations
upon either side; the banker has to sit all day in his bank, a serious privation; can you not
conceive that the landscape painter, whom I take to be the meanest and most lost among
contemporary men, truly and deliberately prefers the privations upon his side - to wear no
gloves, to drink beer, to live on chops or even on potatoes, and lastly, not to be "One of
us" - truly and deliberately prefers his privations to those of the banker? I can. Yes, sir, I
repeat those words; I can. Believe me, there are Rivers in Bohemia! - but there is nothing
so hard to get people to understand as this: That they pay for their money; and nothing so
difficult to make them remember as this: That money, when they have it, is for most of
them, at least, only a cheque to purchase pleasure with. How then if a man gets pleasure
in following an art? He might gain more cheques by following another; but then, although
there is a difference in cheques, the amount of pleasure is the same. He gets some of his
directly; unlike the bank clerk, he is having his fortnight's holiday, and doing what delights
him, all the year.
All these patent truisms have a very strange air, when written down. But that, my dear sir,
is no fault of mine or of the truisms. There they are. I beseech you, do not trifle with them.
Bethink yourself like a man. This is the time.
But, you say, all this is very well; it does not help me to a choice. Once more, sir, you have
me; it does not. What shall I say? A choice, let us remember, is almost more of a negative
than a positive. You embrace one thing; but you refuse a thousand. The most liberal
profession imprisons many energies and starves many affections. If you are in a bank, you
cannot be much upon the sea. You cannot be both a first-rate violinist and a first-rate
painter: you must lose in the one art if you persist in following both. If you are sure of your
20
The best essay of England
preference, follow it. If not - nay, my dear sir, it is not for me or any man to go beyond this
point. God made you; not I. I cannot even make you over again. I have heard of a
schoolmaster, whose speciality it was to elicit the bent of each pupil: poor schoolmaster,
poor pupils! As for me, if you have nothing indigenous in your own heart, no living
preference, no fine, human scorn, I leave you to the tide; it will sweep you somewhere.
Have you but a grain of inclination, I will help you. If you wish to be a costermonger, be it,
shame the devil; and I will stand the donkey. If you wish to be nothing, once more I leave
you to the tide.
I regret profoundly, my dear young sir, not only for you in whom I see such a lively promise
of the future, but for the sake of your admirable and truly worthy father and your no less
excellent mamma, that my remarks should seem no more conclusive. I can give myself
this praise, that I have kept back nothing; but this, alas! is a subject on which there is little
to put forward. It will probably not much matter what you decide upon doing; for most men
seem to sink at length to the degree of stupor necessary for contentment in their different
estates. Yes, sir, this is what I have observed. Most men are happy, and most men
dishonest. Their mind sinks to the proper level; their honour easily accepts the custom of
the trade. I wish you may find degeneration no more painful than your neighbours, soon
sink into apathy, and be long spared in a state of respectable somnambulism, from the
grave to which we haste.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94).
"Popular Authors"
By Robert Louis Stevenson.
The scene is the deck of an Atlantic liner, close by the doors of the ashpit, where it is
warm: the time, night: the persons, an emigrant of an inquiring turn of mind and a deck
hand. "Now," says the emigrant, "is there not any book that gives a true picture of a sailor's
life?" - "Well," returns the other, with great deliberation and emphasis, "there is one; that is
just a sailor's life. You know all about it, if you know that." - "What do you call it?" asks the
emigrant. - "They call it Tom Holt's Log," says the sailor. The emigrant entered the fact in
his note-book: with a wondering query as to what sort of stuff this Tom Holt would prove to
be: and a double-headed prophesy that it would prove to be one of two things: either a
solid, dull, admirable piece of truth, or mere ink and banditti. Well, the emigrant was wrong:
it was something more curious than either, for it was a work by STEPHENS HAYWARD.
21
The best essay of England
I
In this paper I propose to put the authors' names in capital letters; the most of them have
not much hope of durable renown; their day is past, the poor dogs - they begin swiftly to be
forgotten; and HAYWARD is of the number. Yet he was a popular writer; and what is really
odd, he had a vein of hare-brained merit. There never was a man of less pretension; the
intoxicating presence of an ink-bottle, which was too much for the strong head of
Napoleon, left him sober and light-hearted; he had no shade of literary vanity; he was
never at the trouble to to be dull. His works fell out of date in the days of printing. They
were the unhatched eggs of Arab tales; made for word-of-mouth recitation, certain (if thus
told) to captivate an audience of boys or any simple people - certain, on the lips of a
generation or two of public story tellers, to take on new merit and become cherished lore.
Such tales as a man, such rather as a boy, tells himself at night, not without smiling, as he
drops asleep; such, with the same exhilarating range of incident and the same trifling
ingenuities, with no more truth to experience and scarcely more cohesion, HAYWARD
told. If we so consider The Diamond Necklace, or the Twenty Captains, which is what I
remember best of HAYWARD, you will find that staggering narrative grow quite
conceivable.
A gentleman (his name forgotten - HAYWARD had no taste in names) puts an
advertisement in the papers, inviting nineteen other gentlemen to join him in a likely
enterprise. The nineteen appear promptly, nineteen, no more, no less: see the ease of the
recumbent story-teller, half-asleep, hanging on the verge of that country of dreams, where
candles come alight and journeys are accomplished at the wishing! These twenty, all total
strangers, are to put their money together and form an association of strict equality: hence
its name - The Twenty Captains. And it is no doubt very pleasant to be equal to anybody,
even in name; and might desirable (at least in the eyes of young gentlemen hearing this
tale in the school dormitory) to be called captain, even in private. But the deuce of it is, the
founder has no enterprise in view, and here, you would think, the least wary capitalist
would leave his chair, and buy a broom and a crossing with his money, rather than place it
in the hands of this total stranger, whose mind by his own confession was a blank, and
whose real name was probably Macaire. No such matter in the book. With the east of
dreaming, the association is founded; and again with the east of dreaming (HAYWARD
being now three parts asleep) the enterprise, in the shape of a persecuted heiress and a
truly damnable and idiotic aristocrat, appears upon the scene. For some time, our drowsy
story-teller dodges along upon the frontiers of incoherence, hardly at the trouble to invent,
22
The best essay of England
never at the trouble to write literature; but suddenly his interest brightens up, he sees
something in front of him, turns on the pillow, shakes off the tentacles of slumber, and puts
his back into his tale. Injured innocence takes a special train to Dover; damnable idiot
takes another and pursues; the twenty captains reach the station five minutes after, and
demand a third. It is against the rules, they are told; not more than two specials (here is
good news for the railway traveller) are allowed at the same time upon the line. Is injured
innocence, with her diamond necklace, to lie at the mercy of an aristocrat? Forbid it,
Heaven and the Cheap Press! The twenty captains slip unobserved into the engine-house,
steal an engine, and forth upon the Dover line! As well as I can gather, there were no
stations and no pointsmen on this route to Dover, which must in consequence be quick
and safe. One thing it had in common with other and less simple railways, it had a line of
telegraph wires; and these the twenty captains decided to destroy. One of them, you will
not be surprised to learn, had a coil of rope - in his picket, I suppose; another - again I
shall not surprise you - was an Irishman and given to blundering. One end of the line was
made fast to a telegraph post; one (by the Irishman) to the engine: all aboard - full steam
ahead - a double crash, and there was the telegraph post upon the ground, and here mark my HAYWARD! was something carried away upon the engine. All eyes turn to see
what it is: an integral part of the machinery! There is now no means of reducing speed; on
thunders the engine, full steam ahead, down this remarkable route to Dover; on speed the
twenty captains, not very easy in their minds. Presently, the driver of the second special
(the aristocrat's) looks behind him, sees an engine on his track, signals, signals in vain,
finds himself being overhauled, pokes up his fire and - full steam ahead in flight. Presently
after, the driver of the first special (injured innocence's) looks behind, sees a special on his
track and an engine on the track of the special, signals, signals in vain, and he too - full
steam ahead in flight. Such a day on the Dover line! But at last the second special
smashes into the first, and the engine into both; and for my part, I think there was an end
of that romance. But HAYWARD was by this time fast asleep: not a life was lost; not only
that, but the various parties recovered consciousness and resumed their wild career (only
now, of course, on foot and across country) in the precise original order: injured innocence
leading by a length, damnable aristocrat with still more damnable valet (like one man) a
good second, and the twenty captains (again like one man) a bad third; so that here was
the story going on again just as before, and this appalling catastrophe on the Dover line
reduced to the proportions of a morning call. The feelings of the company (it is true) are
not dwelt upon.
23
The best essay of England
Now, I do not mean that Tom Holt is quite such high-flying folly as The Twenty Captains;
for it is no such thing, nor half so entertaining. Still it flowed from the same irresponsible
brain; still it was the mere drowsy divagation of a man in bed, now tedious, now
extravagant - always acutely untrue to life as it is, often pleasantly coincident with childish
hopes of what life ought to be - as (for instance) in the matter of that little pleasure-boat,
rigged, to every block and rope, as a full-rigged ship, in which Tom goes sailing - happy
child! And this was the work that an actual tarry seaman recommended for a picture of his
own existence!
II
It was once my fortune to have an interview with Mr. HAYWARD's publisher: a very affable
gentleman in a very small office in a shady court off Fleet Street. We had some talk
together of the works he issued and the authors who supplied them; and it was strange to
hear him talk for all the world as one of our publishers might have talked of one of us, only
with a more obliging frankness, so that the private life of these great men was more or less
unveiled to me. So and so (he told me, among other things) had demanded an advance
upon a novel, had laid out the sum (apparently on spirituous drinks) and had refused to
finish the work. "We had to put it in the hands of BRACEBRIDGE HEMMING," said the
publisher with a chuckle: "he finished it." And then with conviction: "A most reliable author,
BRACEBRIDGE HEMMING." I have no doubt the name is new to the reader; it was not so
to me. Among these great men of the dust there is a touching ambition which punishes
itself; not content with such glory as comes to them, they long for the glory of being bound
- long to invade, between six boards, the homes of that aristocracy whose manners they
so often find occasion to expose; and sometimes (once in a long lifetime) the gods give
them this also, and they appear in the orthodox three volumes and are fleered at in the
critical press, and life quite unread in circulating libraries. One such work came in my mind:
The Bondage of Brandon, by BRACEBRIDGE HEMMING. I had not found much pleasure
in the volumes; but I was the more glad to think that Mr. Hemming's name was quite a
household word, and himself quoted for "a reliable author," in his own literary circles.
On my way westward from this interview, I was aware of a first floor in Fleet Street rigged
up with wire window-blinds, brass straps, and gilt lettering: Office for the sale of the works
of PIERCE EGAN. "Ay, Mr. EGAN," I thought I, "and have you an office all to yourself!"
And then remembered that he too had once revelled in three volumes: The Flower of the
Flock the book was called, not without pathos for the considerate mind; but even the flower
24
The best essay of England
of Egan's flock was not good enough for the critics or the circulating libraries, so that I
purchased my own copy, quite unread, for three shillings at a railway bookstall. Poor dogs,
I thought, what ails you, that you should have the desire of this fictitious upper popularity,
made by hack journalists and countersigned by yawning girls? Yours is the more true.
Your butcher, the landlady at your seaside lodgings - if you can afford that indulgence, the
barmaid whom you doubtless court, even the Rates and Taxes that besiege your door,
have actually read your tales and actually known your names. There was a waiter once (or
so the story goes) who knew not the name of Tennyson: that of HEMMING perhaps, or
ERRYM, or the great J.F. SMITH, or the un-utterable Reynolds, to whom even here I must
deny his capitals. - Fancy, if you can (thought I), that I languish under the reverse of your
complaint; and being an upper-class author, bound and criticised, long for the penny
number and the weekly woodcut!
Well, I know that glory now. I have tried and on the whole I have failed: just as EGAN and
HEMMING failed in the circulating libraries. It is my consolation that Charles Reade nearly
wrecked that valuable property, the London Journal, which must instantly fall back on Mr.
Egan; and the king of us all, George Meredith, once staggered the circulation of a weekly
newspaper. A servant-maid used to come and boast when she had read another chapter
of Treasure Island: that any pleasure should attend the exercise never crossed her
thoughts. The same tale, in a penny paper of a high class, was mighty coldly looked upon;
by the delicate test of the correspondence column, I could see I was far to leeward; and
there was one giant on the staff (a man with some talent, when he chose to use it) with
whom I very early perceived it was in vain to rival. Yet I was thought well of on my penny
paper for two reasons: one that the publisher was bent on raising the standard - a difficult
enterprise in which he has to a great extent succeeded; the other, because (like
Bracebridge Hemming) I was "a reliable author." For our great men of the dust are apt to
be behind with copy.
III
How I came to be such a student of our penny press demands perhaps some explanation.
I was brought up on Cassell's Family Paper; but the lady who was kind enough to read the
tales aloud to me was subject to sharp attacks of conscience. She took the Family Paper
on confidence; the tales it contained being Family Tales, not novels. But every now and
then, something would occur to alarm her finer senses; she would express a wellgrounded fear that the current fiction was "going to turn out a Regular Novel"; and the
25
The best essay of England
family paper with my pious approval, would be dropped. Yet neither she nor I were wholly
stoical; and when Saturday came round, we would study the windows of the stationer and
try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our
favourites. Many points are here suggested for the casuist; definitions of the Regular Novel
and the Family Tale are to be desired; and quite a paper might be written on the relative
merit of reading a fiction outright and lusting after it at the stationer's window. The
experience at least had a great effect upon my childhood. This inexpensive pleasure
mastered me. Each new Saturday I would go from one newsvendor's window to another's,
till I was master of the weekly gallery and had thoroughly digested "The Baronet
Unmasked," "So and so approaching the Mysterious House," "The Discovery of the Dead
Body in the Blue Marl Pit," "Dr. Vargas Removing the Senseless Body of Fair Lilias," and
whatever other snatch of unknown story and glimpse of unknown characters that gallery
afforded. I do not know that I ever enjoyed fiction more; those books that we have (in such
a way) avoided reading, are all so excellently written! And in early years, we take a book
for its material, and act as our own artists, keenly realising that which pleases us, leaving
the rest aside. I never supposed that a book was to command me until, one disastrous day
of storm, the heaven full of turbulent vapours, the streets full of the squalling of the gale,
the windows resounding under bucketfuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me Macbeth. I
cannot say I thought the experience agreeable; I far preferred the ditch-water stories that a
child could dip and slip and doze over, stealing at times materials for play; it was
something new and shocking to be thus ravished by a giant, and I shrank under the brutal
grasp. But the spot in memory is still sensitive; nor do I ever read that tragedy but I hear
the gale howling up the valley of the Leith.
All this while I would never buy upon my own account; pence were scarce, conscience
busy; and I would study the pictures and dip into the exposed columns, but not buy. My fall
was brought about by a truly romantic incident. Perhaps the reader knows Neidpath
Castle, where it stands, bosomed in hills, on a green promontory; Tweed at its base
running through all the gamut of a busy river, from the pouring shallow to the brown pool.
In the days when I was thereabout, and that part of the earth was made a heaven to me by
many things now lost, by boats, and bathing, and the fascination of streams, and the
delights of comradeship, and those (surely the prettiest and simplest) of a boy and girl
romance - in those days of Arcady there dwelt in the upper story of the castle one whom I
believe to have been the gamekeeper on the estate. The rest of the place stood open to
incursive urchins; and there, in a deserted chamber, we found some half-a-dozen numbers
26
The best essay of England
of Black Bess, or the Knight of the Road, a work by EDWARD VILES. So far as were are
aware, no one had visited that chamber (which was in a turret) since Lambert blew in the
doors of the fortress with contumelious English cannon. Yet it could hardly have been
Lambert (in whatever hurry of military operations) who had left these samples of romance;
and the idea that the gamekeeper had anything to do with them was one that we
discouraged. Well, the offence is now covered by prescription; we took them away; and in
the shade of a contiguous fir-wood, lying on blaeberries, I made my first acquaintance with
the art of Mr. Viles. From this author, I passed on to MALCOLM J. ERRYM (the name to
my present scrutiny suggested an anagram on Merry), author of Edith the Captive, The
Treasures of St. Mark, A Mystery in Scarlet, George Barington, Sea-drift, Townsend the
Runner, and a variety of other well-named romances. Memory may play me false, but I
believe there was a kind of merit about Errym. The Mystery in Scarlet runs in my mind to
this day; and if any hunter after autographs (and I think the world is full of such) can lay his
hands on a copy even imperfect, and will send it to me in the care of Messrs. Scribner, my
gratitude (the muse consenting) will even drop into poetry. For I have a curiosity to know
that the Mystery in Scarlet was, and to renew acquaintance with King George and his valet
Norris, who were the chief figures in the work and may be said to have risen in every page
superior to history and the ten commandments. Hence I passed on to Mr. EGAN, whom I
trust the reader does not confuse with the author of Tom and Jerry; the two are quite
distinct, though I have sometimes suspected they were father and son. I never enjoyed
EGAN as I did ERRYM; but this was possibly a want of taste, and EGAN would do.
Thence again I was suddenly brought face to face with Mr. Reynolds. A school-fellow,
acquainted with my debasing tastes, supplied me with The Mysteries of London, and I fell
back revolted. The same school-fellow (who seems to have been a devil of a fellow)
supplied me about the same time with one of those contributions to literature (and even to
art) from which the name of the publisher is modestly withheld. It was a far more
respectable work than The Mysteries of London. J.F. SMITH when I was a child, ERRYM
when I was a boy, HAYWARD when I had attained a man's estate, these I read for
pleasure; the others, down to SYLVANUS COBB, I have made it my business to know (as
far as my endurance would support me) from a sincere interest in human nature and the
art of letters.
IV
27
The best essay of England
What kind of talent is required to please this mighty public? that was my first question, and
was soon amended with the words, "if any." J.F. SMITH was a man of undeniable talent,
ERRYM and HAYWARD have a certain spirit, and evan in EGAN the very tender might
recognise the rudiments of a story of literary gift; but the cases on the other side are quite
conclusive. Take Hemming, or the dull ruffian Reynolds, or Sylvanus Cobb, of whom
perhaps I have only seen unfortunate examples - they seem not to have the talents of a
rabbit, and why any one should read them is a thing that passes wonder. A plain-spoken
and possibly high-thinking critic might here perhaps return upon me with my own
expressions. And he would have missed the point. For I and my fellows have no such
popularity to be accounted for. The reputation of an upper-class author is made for him at
dinner-tables and nursed in newspaper paragraphs, and, when all is done, amounts to no
great matter. We call it popularity, surely in a pleasant error. A flippant writer in the
Saturday Review expressed a doubt if I had ever cherished a "genteel" illusion; in truth I
never had many, but this was one - and I have lost it. Once I took the literary author at his
own esteem; I behold him now like one of those gentlemen who read their own MS.
descriptive poetry aloud to wife and babes around the evening hearth; addressing a mere
parlour coterie and quite unknown to the great world outside the villa windows. At such
pigmy reputation, Reynolds or COBB, or Mrs. SOUTHWORTH can afford to smile. By
spontaneous public vote, at a cry from the unorganic masses, these great ones of the dust
were laurelled. And for what?
Ay, there is the question: For what? How is this great honour gained? Many things have
been suggested. The people (it has been said) like rapid narrative. If so, the taste is
recent, for both Smith and Egan were leisurely writers. It has been said that they like
incident, not character. I am not so sure. G. P. R. James was an upper-class author, J. F.
Smith a penny pressman; the two are in some ways not unlike; but - here is the curiosity James made far the better story, Smith was far the more successful with his characters.
Each (to bring the parallel home) wrote a novel called The Stepmother; each introduced a
pair of old maids; and let any one study the result! James's Stepmother is a capital tale,
but Smith's old maids are like Trollope at his best. It is said again that the people like
crime. Certainly they do. But the great ones of the dust have no monopoly of that, and their
less fortunate rivals hammer away at murder and abduction unapplauded.
I return to linger about my seaman on the Atlantic liner. I shall be told he is exceptional. I
am tempted to think, on the other hand, that he may be normal. The critical attitude,
whether to books or life - how if that were the true exception? How if Tom Holt's Log,
28
The best essay of England
surreptitiously perused by a harbour-side, had been the means of sending my mariner to
sea? How if he were still unconsciously expecting the Tim Holt part of the business to
begin - perhaps to-morrow? How, even if he had never yet awakened to the discrepancy
between that singular picture and the facts? Let us take another instance. The Young
Ladies' Journal is an elegant miscellany which I have frequently observed in the
possession of the barmaid. In a lone house on a moorland, I was once supplied with quite
a considerable file of this production and (the weather being violent) devoutly read it. The
tales were not ill done; they were well abreast of the average tale in a circulating library;
there was only one difference, only one thing to remind me I was in the land of penny
numbers instead of the parish of three volumes: Disguise it as the authors pleased (and
they showed ingenuity in doing so) it was always the same tale they must relate: the tale of
a poor girl ultimately married to a peer of the realm or (at the worst) a baronet. The
circumstance is not common in life; but how familiar to the musings of the barmaid! The
tales were not true to what men see; they were true to what the readers dreamed.
Let us try to remember how fancy works in children; with what selective partiality it reads,
leaving often the bulk of the book unrealised, but fixing on the rest and living it; and what a
passionate impotence it shows - what power of adoption, what weakness to create. It
seems to be not much otherwise with uneducated readers. They long, not to enter into the
lives of others, but to behold themselves in changed situations, ardently but impotently
preconceived. The imagination (save the mark!) Of the popular author here comes to the
rescue, supplies some body of circumstance to these phantom aspirations, and conducts
the readers where they will. Where they will: that's the point; elsewhere they will not follow.
When I was a child, if I came on a book in which the characters wore armour, it fell from
my hand; I had no criterion of merit, simply that one decisive taste, that my fancy refused
to linger in the middle ages. And the mind of the uneducated reader is mailed with similar
restrictions. So it is that we must account for a thing otherwise unaccountable: the
popularity of some of these great ones of the dust. In defect of any other gift, they have
instinctive sympathy with the popular mind. They can thus supply to the shop-girl and the
shoe-black vesture cut to the pattern of their naked fancies, and furnish them with
welcome scenery and properties for autobiographical romancing.
Even in readers of an upper class, we may perceive the traces of a similar hesitation; even
for them a writer may be too exotic. The villain, even the heroine, may be a Feejee
islander, but only on condition the hero is one of ourselves. It is pretty to see the thing
reversed in the Arabian tale (Torrens or Burton - the tale is omitted in popular editions)
29
The best essay of England
where the Moslem hero carries off the Christian amazon; and in the exogamous romance,
there lies interred a good deal of human history and human nature. But the question of
exogamy is foreign to the purpose. Enough that we are not readily pleased without a
character of our own race and language; so that, when the scene of a romance is laid on
any distant soil, we look with eagerness and confidence for the coming of the English
traveller. With the readers of the penny-press the thing goes further. Burning as they are to
penetrate into the homes of the peerage, they must still be conducted there by some
character of their own class, into whose person they cheerfully migrate for the time of
reading. Hence the poor governesses supplied in the Young Ladies' Journal. Hence these
dreary virtuous ouvriers and ouvrières of Xavier de Montépin. He can do nothing with
them; and he is far too clever not to be aware of that. When he writes for the Figaro, he
discards these venerable puppets and doubtless glories in their absence; but so soon as
he must address the great audience of the halfpenny journal, out comes the puppets and
are furbished up, and take to drink again, and are once more reclaimed, and once more
falsely accused. See them for what they are - Montépin's decoys; without these he could
not make his public feel at home in the houses of the fraudulent bankers and the wicked
dukes.
The reader, it has been said, migrates into such characters for the time of reading: under
their name escapes the narrow prison of the individual career, and sates his avidity for
other lives. To what extent he ever emigrates again, and how far the fancied careers react
upon the true one, it would fill another paper to debate. But the case of my sailor shows
their grave importance. "Tom Holt does not apply to me," thinks our dully-imaginative boy
by the harbour-side, "for I am not a sailor. But if I go to sea it will apply completely." And he
does go to sea. He lives surrounded by the fact, and does not observe it. He cannot
realise, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which crumbles in discrete impressions even
as he lives it, and slips between the fingers of his memory like sand. It is not this that he
considers in his rare hours of rumination, but that other life, with was all lit up for him by
the humble talent of a Hayward - that other life which, God knows, perhaps he still believes
that he is leading - the life of Tom Holt.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94).
"On Destroying Books"
By Sir John Collings Squire 1
30
The best essay of England
"It says in the paper" that over two million volumes have been presented to the troops by
the public. It would be interesting to inspect them. Most of them, no doubt, are quite
ordinary and suitable; but it was publicly stated the other day that some people were
sending the oddest things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake
District, Bradshaws, and back numbers of Whitaker's Almanack. It some cases, one
imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is likely that there are
those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of books they don"t want. Why have they
kept them if they don't want them? But most people, especially non-bookish people, are
very reluctant to throw away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses
that one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds it way to a shelf
and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because it is
printed: it is positively a public duty to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room
for new books and saves one's heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it: it
may also prevent posterity from making a fool of itself. We may be sure that if we do not
burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence
some collector will be specialising in old railway time-tables, gathering, at immense cost, a
complete series, and ultimately leaving his "treasures" (as the Press will call them) to a
Public Institution.
But it is not always easy to destroy books. They may not have as many lives as a cat, but
they certainly die hard; and it is sometimes difficult to find a scaffold for them. This difficulty
once brought me almost within the Shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and (as
Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat in Chelsea, and books of inferior minor verse
gradually accumulated there until at last I was faced with the alternative of either evicting
the books or else leaving them in sole, undisturbed tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere
for myself. Now, no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw them
away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were scores of them. I had no
kitchen range, and I could not toast them on the gas-cooker or consume them leaf by leaf
in my small study fire - for it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it
as to try to burn a piece of granite. I had no dust-bin; my debris went down a kind of flue
behind the staircase, with small trap-doors opening to the landings. The difficulty with this
was that the larger books might choke it; the authorities, in fact, had labelled it "Dust and
Ashes Only"; and in any case I did not want to leave the books intact, and some dustman's
unfortunate family to get a false idea of English poetry from them. So in the end I
determined to do to them what so many people do to the kittens: tie them up and consign
31
The best essay of England
them to the river. I improvised a sack, stuffed the books into it, put it over my shoulder, and
went down the stairs into the darkness.
It was nearly midnight as I stepped into the street. There was a cold nip in the air; the sky
was full of stars; and the greenish-yellow lamps threw long gleams across the smooth,
hard road. Few people were about; under the trees at the corner a Guardsman was
bidding a robust goodnight to his girl, and here and there rang out the steps of solitary
travellers making their way home across the bridge to Battersea. I turned up my overcoat
collar, settled my sack comfortably across my shoulders, and strode off towards the little
square glow of the coffee-stall which marked the near end of the bridge, whose sweeping
iron girders were just visible against the dark sky behind. A few doors down I passed a
policeman who was flashing his lantern on the catches of basement windows. He turned. I
fancied he looked suspicious, and I trembled slightly. The thought occurred to me:
"Perhaps he suspect I have swag in this sack." I was not seriously disturbed, as I knew
that I could bear investigation, and that nobody would be suspected of having stolen such
goods (though they were all first editions) as I was carrying. Nevertheless I could not help
the slight unease which comes to all who are eyed suspiciously by the police, and to all
who are detected in any deliberately furtive act, however harmless. He acquitted me,
apparently; and, with a step that, making an effort, I prevented from growing more rapid, I
walked on until I reached the Embankment.
I was then that all the implications of my act revealed themselves. I leaned against the
parapet and looked down into the faintly luminous swirls of the river. Suddenly I heard a
step near me; quite automatically I sprang back from the wall and began walking on with, I
fervently hoped, an air of rumination and unconcern. The pedestrian came by me without
looking at me. I was a tramp, who had other things to think about; and, calling myself an
ass, I stopped again. "Now's for it," I thought; but just as I was preparing to cast my books
upon the waters I heard another step - a slow and measured one. The next thought came
like a blaze of terrible blue lightning across my brain: "What about the splash?" A man
leaning at midnight over the Embankment wall: a sudden fling of his arms: a great splash
in the water. Surely, and not without reason, whoever was within sight and hearing (and
there always seemed to be some one near) would at once rush to me and seize me. In all
probability they would think it was a baby. What on earth would be the good of telling a
London constable that I had come out into the cold and stolen down alone to the river to
32
The best essay of England
get rid of a pack of poetry? I could almost hear his gruff, sneering laugh: "You tell that to
the Marines, my son!"
So for I do not know how long I strayed up and down, increasingly fearful of being
watched, summoning up my courage to take the plunge and quailing from it at the last
moment. At last I did it. In the middle of Chelsea Bridge there are projecting circular bays
with seats in them. In an agony of decision I left the Embankment and hastened straight
for the first of these. When I reached it I knelt on the seat. Looking over, I hesitated again.
But I had reached the turning-point. "What!" I thought savagely, "under the resolute mask
that you show your friends is there really a shrinking and contemptible coward? If you fail
now, you must never hold your head up again. Anyhow, what is you are hanged for it?
Good God! You worm, better men than you have gone to the gallows!" With the courage of
despair I took a heave. The sack dropped sheer. A vast splash. Then silence fell again. No
one came. I turned home; and as I walked I thought a little sadly of all those books falling
into that old torrent, settling slowly down through the pitchy dark, and subsiding at last on
the ooze of the bottom, there to lie forlorn and forgotten whilst the unconscious world of
men went on.
Horrible bad books, poor innocent books, you are lying there still; covered, perhaps, with
mud by this time, with only a stray rag of your sacking sticking out of the slime into the
opaque brown tides. Odes to Diana, Sonnets to Ethel, Dramas on the Love of Lancelot,
Stanzas on a First Glimpse of Venice, you lie there in a living death, and your fate is
perhaps worse than you deserved. I was harsh with you. I am sorry I did it. But even if I
had kept you, I will certainly say this: I should not have sent you
NOTES:
1
Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958) was a Cambridge man. He was the literary editor of
The New Statesman and The London Mercury. This essay was written circa the First
World War; I found it in a little blue book that I use to carry back and forth on the ferry to
Halifax, Selected Modern English Essays (Oxford University Press, 1927).
"The Collective Wisdom"
By Herbert Spencer
33
The best essay of England
A test of senatorial capacity is a desideratum. We rarely learn how near the mark or how
wide of the mark the calculations of statesman are; the slowness and complexity of social
changes, hindering, as they do, the definite comparison of results with anticipations.
Occasionally, however, parliamentary decisions admit of being definitely valued. One
which was arrived at a few weeks ago furnished a measure of legislative judgment too
significant to be passed by.
On the edge of the Cotswolds, overhanging the valley of the Severn, occur certain springs,
which, as they happen to be at the end of the longest of the hundred streams which join to
form the Thames, have been called by poetical fiction "the sources of the Thames."
Names, even when poetical fictions, suggest conclusions; and conclusions drawn from
words instead of facts are equally apt to influence conduct. Thus it happened that, when,
recently, there was formed a company for supplying Cheltenham and some other places
from these springs, great opposition arose. The "Times" published a paragraph, headed,
"Threatened Absorption of the Thames," stating that the application of this company to
Parliament had "caused some little consternation in the city of Oxford, and will, doubtless,
throughout the valley of the Thames;" and that "such a measure, if carried out, will
diminish the water of that noble river a million of gallons per day." A million is an alarming
word - suggests something necessarily vast. Translating words into thoughts, however,
would have calmed the fears of the "Times" paragraphist. Considering that a million
gallons would be contained by a room fifty-six feet cube, the nobility of the Thames would
not be much endangered by the deduction. The simple fact is, that the current of the
Thames, above the point at which the tides influence it, discharges in twenty-four hours
eight hundred times this amount.
When the bill of this proposed water company was brought before the House of Commons
for second reading it became manifest that the imaginations of members were affected by
such expressions as the "sources of the Thames," and "a million gallons daily," in much
the same way as the imaginations of the ignorant. Though the quantity of water proposed
to be taken bears to the quantity which runs over Teddington weir about the same ratio
that a yard bears to a half a mile, it was thought by many members that its loss would be a
serious evil. No method of measurement would be accurate enough to detect the
difference between the Thames as it now is, and the Thames minus the Cerney springs;
and yet it was gravely stated in the House that, were the Thames diminished in the
proposed way, "the proportion of sewage to pure water would be seriously increased."
34
The best essay of England
Taking a minute out of twelve hours would be taking as large a proportion as the
Cheltenham people with to take from the Thames. Nevertheless, it was contended that to
let Cheltenham have this quantity would be "to rob the towns along the banks of the
Thames of their rights." Though, of the Thames flowing by each of these towns, some 999
parts out of 1000 pass by unused, it was held that a great injustice would be committed
were one or two of these 999 parts appropriated by the inhabitants of a town who can now
obtain daily but four gallons of foul water per head.
But the apparent inability thus shown to think of causes and effects in something like their
true quantitive relations, was still more conspicuously shown. It was stated by several
members that the Thames Navigation Commissioners would have opposed the bill if the
commission had not been bankrupt, and this hypothetical opposition appeared to have
weight. If we may trust the reports, the House of Commons listened with gravity to the
assertion of one of its members, that, if the Cerney springs were diverted, "shoals and flats
would be created." Not a laugh nor a cry of "Oh! oh," appears to have been produced by
the prophecy, that the volume and scouring power of the Thames would be seriously
affected by taking away from it twelve gallons per second! The whole quantity which these
springs supply would be delivered by a current moving through a pipe one foot in diameter
at the rate of less than two miles per hour. Yet, when it was said that the navigability of the
Thames would be injuriously affected by this deduction, there were no shouts of derision.
On the contrary, the House rejected the Cheltenham Water Bill by a majority of one
hundred and eighteen to eighty-eight. It is true that the data were not presented in the
above shape. But the remarkable fact is, that, even in the absence of a specific
comparison, it should not have been at once seen that the water of springs, which drain
but a few square miles at most, can be but an inappreciable part of the water which runs
out of the Thames basin, extending over several thousand square miles. In itself, this is a
matter of small moment. It interests us here simply as an example of legislative judgment.
The decision is one of those small holes through which a wide prospect may be seen, and
a disheartening prospect it is. In a very simple case there is here displayed a scarcely
credible inability to see how much effect will follow so much cause; and yet the business of
the assembly exhibiting this inability is that of dealing with causes and effects of an
extremely involved kind. All the processes going on in society arise from the concurrences
and conflicts of human actions, which are determined in their nature and amounts by the
human constitution as it now is - are as much results of natural causation as any other
results, and equally imply definite quantitive relations between causes and effects. Every
35
The best essay of England
legislative act presupposes a diagnosis and a prognosis; both of them involving
estimations of social forces and the work done by them. Before it can be remedied, an evil
must be traced to its source in the motives and ideas of men as they are, living under the
social conditions which exist - a problem requiring that the actions tending toward the
result shall be identified, and that there shall be something like a true idea of the quantities
of their effects as well as the qualities. A further estimation has then to be made of the
kinds and degrees of influence that till be exerted by the additional factors which the
proposed law will set in motion: what will be the resultants produced by the new forces cooperating with pre-existing forces - a problem still more complicated than the other.
We are quite prepared to hear the unhesitating reply, that men incapable of forming an
approximately true judgment on a matter of simple physical causation may yet be very
good law-makers. So obvious will this be thought by most, that a tacit implication to the
contrary will seem to them absurd; and that it will seem to them absurd is one of the many
indications of the profound ignorance that prevails. It is true that mere empirical
generalizations which men draw from their dealings with their fellows suffice to give them
some ideas of the proximate effects which new enactments will work: and, seeing these,
they think they see as far as needful. Discipline of physical science, however, would help
to show them the utter inadequacy of calculating consequences based on simple data.
And if there needs proof that calculations of consequences so based are inadequate, we
have it in the enormous labor annually entailed on the Legislature in trying to undo the
mischiefs it has previously done.
Should any say that it is useless to dwell on this incompetency, seeing that the House of
Commons contains the select of the nation, than whose judgments no better are to be had,
we reply, that there may be drawn two inferences which have important practical bearings.
In the first place, we are shown how completely the boasted intellectual discipline of our
upper classes fails to give them the power of following out in thought, with any
correctness, the sequences of even simple phenomena, much less those of complex
phenomena. And, in the second place, we may draw the corollary, that if the sequences of
those complex phenomena which societies display, difficult beyond all others to deal with,
are so unlikely to be understood by them, they may advantageously be restricted in their
interferences with them.
36
The best essay of England
In one direction, especially, shall we see reason to resist the extension of legislative
action. There has of late been urged the proposal that the class contemptuously described
as dividing its energies between business and bethels shall have its education regulated
by the class which might, with equal justice, be described as dividing its energies between
club-rooms and game preserves. This scheme does not seem to us a hopeful one.
Considering that during the last half century our society has been remoulded by ideas that
have come from the proposed pupil, and have had to overcome the dogged resistance of
the proposed teacher, the propriety of the arrangement is not obvious. And if the propriety
of the arrangement is not obvious on the face of it, still less obvious does it become when
the competency of the proposed teacher comes to be measured. British intelligence, as
distilled through the universities and redistilled into the House of Commons, is a product
admitting of such great improvement in quality, that we should be sorry to see the present
method of manufacture extended and permanently established.
-- Herbert Spencer.
"The Sources Of Idealism"1
By George Bernard Shaw
LET us imagine a community of a thousand persons, organized for the perpetuation of the
species on the basis of the British family as we know it at present. Seven hundred of them,
we will suppose, find the British family arrangement quite good enough for them. Two
hundred and ninety-nine find it a failure, but must put up with it since they are in a minority.
The remaining person occupies a position to be explained presently. The 299 failures will
not have the courage to face the fact that they are irremediable failures, since they cannot
prevent the 700 satisfied ones from coercing them into conformity with the marriage law.
They will accordingly try to persuade themselves that, whatever their own particular
domestic arrangements may be, the family is a beautiful and holy natural institution. For
the fox not only declares that the grapes he cannot get are sour: he also insists that the
sloes he can get are sweet. Now observe what has happened. The family as it really is is a
conventional arrangement, legally enforced, which the majority, because it happens to suit
them, think good enough for the minority, whom it happens not to suit at all. The family as
a beautiful and holy natural institution is only a fancy picture of what every family would
have to be if action as standard moral conduct, absolutely valid under all circumstances,
contrary conduct or any advocacy of it being discountenanced and punished as immoral,
37
The best essay of England
may therefore be described as the policy of Idealism. Our 299 domestic failures are
therefore become idealists as to marriage; and in proclaiming the ideal in fiction, poetry,
pulpit and platform oratory, and serious private conversation, they will far outdo the 700
who comfortably accept marriage as a matter of course, never dreaming of calling it an
'institution,' much less a holy and beautiful one, and being pretty plainly of opinion that
Idealism is a crackbrained fuss about nothing. The idealists, hurt by this, will retort by
calling them Philistines. We then have our society classified as 700 Philistines and 299
idealists, leaving one man unclassified: the man strong enough to face the truth the
idealists are shirking.
Such a man says of marriage, 'The thing is a failure for many of us. It is insufferable that
two human beings, having entered into relations which only warm affection can render
tolerable, should be forced to maintain them after such affections have ceased to exist, or
in spite of the fact that they have never arisen. The alleged natural attractions and
repulsions upon which the family ideal is based do not exist; and it is historically false that
the family was founded for the purpose of satisfying them. Let us provide otherwise for the
social ends which the family subserves, and then abolish its compulsory character
altogether.' What will be the attitude of the rest to this outspoken man? The Philistines will
simply think him mad. But the idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation
of their hidden thought -- at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence -at the rending the beautiful veil they and their poets have woven to hide the unbearable
face of the truth. They will crucify him, burn him, violate their own ideals of family affection
by taking his children away from him, ostracize him, brand immoral, profligate, filthy, and
appeal against him to the despised Philistines, specially idealized for the occasion as
Society. How far they will proceed against him depends on how far his courage exceeds
theirs. At his worst, they call him cynic and paradoxer: at his best they do their utmost to
ruin him, if not to take his life. Thus, purblindly courageous moralists like Mandeville and
La Rochefoucauld, who merely state unpleasant facts without denying the validity of
current ideals, and who indeed depend on those ideals to make their statements piquant,
get off with nothing worse than this name of cynic, the free use of which is a familiar mark
of the zealous idealist. But take the case of the man who has already served us as an
example: Shelley. The idealists did not call Shelley a cynic: they called him a fiend until
they invented a new illusion to enable them to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics, this illusion
being nothing less than the pretence that since he was at bottom an idealist himself, his
38
The best essay of England
ideals must be identical with those of Tennyson and Longfellow, neither of whom ever
wrote a line in which some highly respectable ideal was not implicit.
Here the admission that Shelley, the realist, was an idealist, too, seems to spoil the whole
argument. And it certainly spoils its verbal consistency. For we unfortunately use this word
ideal indifferently to denote both the institution which the ideal masks and the mask itself,
thereby producing desperate confusion of thought, since the institution may be an effete
and poisonous one, whilst the mask may be, and indeed generally is, an image of what we
would fain have in its place. If the existing facts, with their masks on, are to be called
ideals, and the future possibilities which the masks depict are also to be called ideals -- if,
again, the man who is defending existing institutions by maintaining their identity with their
masks is to be confounded under one name with the man who is striving to realize the
future possibilities by tearing the mask and the thing masked asunder, then the position
cannot be intelligibly described by mortal pen: you and I, reader, will be at cross purposes
at every sentence unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers like Shelley and Ibsen as
realists from the idealists of my imaginary community of one thousand. If you ask why I
have not allotted the terms the other way, and called Shelley and Ibsen idealists and the
conventionalists realists, I reply that Ibsen himself, though he has not formally made the
distinction, has so repeatedly harped on conventions and conventionalists as ideals and
idealists that if I were now perversely to call them realities and realists, I should confuse
readers of The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm more than I should help them. Doubtless I
shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal. But
what, I ask, is that inevitable passing perplexity compared to the inextricable tangle I must
produce if I follow the custom, and use the word indiscriminately in its two violently
incompatible senses? If the term realist is objected to on account of some of its modern
associations, I can only recommend you, if you must associate it with something else than
my own description of its meaning (I do not deal in definitions), to associate it, not with
Zola and Maupassant, but with Plato.
Now let us return to our community of 700 Philistines, 209 idealists, 1 realist. The mere
verbal ambiguity against which comes of any attempt to express the relations of these
three sections, simple as they are, in terms of the ordinary systems of reason and duty.
The idealist, higher in the ascent of evolution than the Philistine, yet hates the 'highest and
strikes at him with a dread and rancor of which the easy-going Philistine is guiltless. The
man who has risen above the danger and the fear that his acquisitiveness will lead him to
39
The best essay of England
theft, his temper to murder, and his affections to debauchery: this is he who is denounced
as an arch-scoundrel and libertine, and thus confounded with the lowest because he is the
highest. And it is not the ignorant and stupid who maintain this error, but the literate and
the cultured. When the true prophet speaks, he is proved to be both rascal and idiot, not
by those who have never read of how foolishly such learned demonstrations have come
off in the past, but by those who have themselves written volumes on the crucifixions, the
burnings, the stonings, the headings and hangings, the Siberia transportations, the
calumny and ostracism which have been the lot of the pioneer as well as of the camp
follower. It is from men of established literary reputation that we learn that William Blake
was mad, that Shelley was spoiled by living in a low set, that Robert Owen was a man who
did not know the world, that Ruskin was incapable of comprehending political economy,
that Zola was a mere blackguard, and that Ibsen was 'a Zola with a wooden leg.' The great
musician, accepted by the unskilled listener, is vilified by his fellow musicians: it was the
musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and
Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters, and not among the men in
the street: it was the Royal Academy which placed forgotten nobodies above Burne-Jones.
It is not rational that it should be so; but it is so, for all that.
The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something
to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us, something whereby,
instead of resisting death, we can disarm it by committing suicide. The idealist, who has
taken refuge with the ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks
that all this is so much the better. The realist, who has come to have a deep respect for
himself and faith in the validity of his own will, thinks it so much the worse. To the one,
human nature, naturally corrupt, is held back from ruinous excesses only by self-denying
conformity to the ideals. To the other these ideals are only swaddling clothes which man
has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his movements. No wonder the two cannot
agree. The idealist says, 'Realism means egotism; and egotism means depravity.' The
realist declares that when a man abnegates, the will to live and be free in a world of the
living, and free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but 'a
good man,' then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his
resurrection, if that by good luck arrive before his bodily death. Unfortunately, this is the
sort of speech that nobody but a realist understands. It will be more amusing as well as
more convincing to take an actual example of an idealist criticising a realist.
40
The best essay of England
--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).
NOTES:
1
From The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891.
"Introduction To Historical Essays"
By Ernest Percival Rhys
The main idea in this history-book is to trace the slow political growth of the common folk,
from the folk-right assigned in the old "Dooms" of Alfred1 and Edgar2, to the fuller liberty
given them by the "Acts" of Parliament in our time. It is a long record, covering many of
those notable great events which Caxton3 said ought "most to be remembered among us
English men"; but giving also from first-hand sources, or from the chroniclers and
historians, a rough chart of our common rights and privileges, "as by law established."
Along with them, and in part arising out of them, we gain a sense of the faith of the people
in their country and in their true governors who could ordain like Edgar: "This is what I will - that Every Man be worthy of folk-right, poor and rich alike, and that righteous dooms be
judged to him."
In the same spirit Alfred decreed that English history should be truly set down in an
English book. Thus, law by law, record by record, the prescriptive right of the folk to safe
conduct in their life and work, and to justice at the hands of their rulers and governors, is
asserted and reasserted. History, so understood, is the secular bible of each race, though
only one race may have had the divine idea. It is, as we find in the Polychronicon, "a
perpetual conservatrice" of the things done before this present time, both the things which
were to be desired, and the things to be eschewed. It has a forward office too, as
recognising in each predicament of the race a sign of its true political destiny -- one
associated with its island condition, and sea-bound and sea-enlarged limits. The islands
bred a notable people, already showing a marked bias and stout temper, before any Angle
or Saxon had landed. We read in Tacitus4 that they would bear cheerfully " the service of
government," if they were not ill-treated. For their subjection ran to obedience, but not to
servitude. The same character is implicit in the dooms we have quoted and in Canute's
law5 and his letter in the text. The Doomsday Survey might, it is true, be held to tell a tale
of a whole country's systematic subjection by the strong hand. But in the year after it was
made, we find the custom of the country again affirmed in the moot of the Witan or wise-
41
The best essay of England
men and the landholders, that William 1. held at Salisbury. The first charter of the City of
London followed, and declared every citizen law-worthy, whom the king would let no one
wrong.
In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we have the word of the man who was put upon and
oppressed by the Norman advener; and in it we realise how the Saxon stem, and the
Norman graft, alike went to strengthen the English feudal system. The century's struggle
between the kings and the old nobility, followed, ending with the last stand of the Norman
barons against Henry II. The career of Thomas ?Becket, who had the instinct of a fighting
baron rather than of a saint, and who stood up armed for spirit liberty, makes the decisive
comment on this time. It interesting to compare him with John Ball.6 One of Becket's last
words was: "God's house shall be denied to no man"; while Ball said: "Now the time is
come, appointed by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke." We see that in
different ways they were moved by the same militant idea.
Pass now to a very solid staple landmark in the English scene -- London, whose first
Commune, as it was called -- Communa Regis -- was, curiously enough, set up by law,
while the king, Richard I., was on crusade and out of London and the kingdom. Stubbs7
leads us to view this incorporation of London as marking two significant changes: (1) the
victory of the communal principle over the old shire organization, and (2) the triumph of the
London merchant, over the noble. That was in the years 1191-1200; and already the law
had let in the common man as a judicial asset in the jury ordered in criminal cases by the
Assize of Clarendon.
The Great Charter follows, with its remedy of feudal abuses, and its special provisions for
the safeguarding of the tenant, the heir at law, the king's labourer and the common man.
"No man," it said, "is to be put in prison, outlawed, punished or molested, but by the
judgment of his equals, or by the law of the land." But most of us, reading doubtfully
backwards, do not realise how far the Great Charter was prepared for by the civil charter
given to the citizens of London by Henry I. "... The said citizens shall take as Sheriff whom
they will of themselves, -- and none other shall be justice over them; ... and the citizens of
London shall not plead without the walls of London for any plea. And be they free from
scot and lot and danegeld8, and of all murder, and none of them shall wage battle."
42
The best essay of England
We see by this document that the Man of London is a freeman,'with a peculiar privilege,
who can free himself by his own oath in his own domain. He is a pioneer, though locally
and in a degree selfishly, of the greater citizenship to come.
We pass on to Oxford, in the days of the no-king, Henry III., in the "Mad Parliament," when
the hard struggle of Simon de Montfort9 took form. And we note that in the two bodies of
the Fifteen and the Twenty-four, set up by the Provisions of Oxford, we have a link
between the Witenagemot and the Lords and Commons to come. Six years again, and the
Council of the Fifteen is turned with De Montfort's hand in the conversion-into the Council
of Nine. To the mean king succeeds the strong, in Edward I., in the latter half of whose
reign we have the first complete Parliament of the Three Estates. With that we reach a
point when the liberties of the Commons axe yet more decisively marked off, taking up the
prescriptive right given long before to the folk under the Saxon king." In all parliaments and
assemblies which should be made in the realm of England for ever" -- so runs the
provision (7 Edward 1., 1279) -- "Every-man shall come without all force and armour, well
and peaceably to the honour of us and the peace of our realm."
In the year of that Parliament, 1295, the summons sent to the barons by the king to bid
them repair to Westminster, "for considering, ordaining and doing," as may be needed to
meet the dangers, "which in these days are threatening"; and the summons sent to the
shires and towns-two knights, two citizens, two burgesses-read very significantly to us.
They show that the country and realm were not fair-weather craft then, any more than
nowadays; and that they needed good governing, and the collective sense and conscience
of the best brains, to keep the king in countenance. All these prescripts and documents
bear a double reference -- to the mind of the men, noble or common, who were aware of
their liberty, and to the mind of the king who had, in all his wish for autocratic power, to
reckon with their consciousness of their legal claim to be delegates and agents of the
community at large. This powerful sense of "just, ancient and fundamental rights," as a
much later royal document, that was not strictly followed, has it, viz. the Declaration of
Breda. in indeed like the red thread in the cloth of the commonwealth, which was
sometimes covered up but never altogether lost.
To the York and Lancaster vendetta, we are able to mark the reaction of two forces which
are far more vital in the realm than the play of those two royal factions. Hall's Chronicle10
offers us a memorable account, keenly delivered which shows us how parliament could be
43
The best essay of England
used and abused, and made an instrument by either faction. In one year, 1454, Richard,
Duke of York, is given by the Parliament at Coventry a limited protectorate; in the next
year the Westminster Parliament declared the previous one "a devilish council, only
celebrate for the destruction of the nobility." Moreover -- and here comes in the real
damnatory clause, over the old rights to open council, the very principle of the folk-moot -it was declared "no lawful parliament, because they which were returned according to the
due order of the law were secretly by them that desired more the destruction, than the
safeguarding of the public wealth."
Meanwhile. to take the real feeling of the commonwealth, we have often to turn back to the
people themselves, and to those who found Parliament too slow and official -- too much an
instrument of those in power -- for their needs. We have Jack Cade11 putting up his head
between the Red Rose and the White; we have the Pilgrimage of Grace; and we have the
episode of a hero like Captain Pouch who in Shakespeare's time and shire starts up, a
figure of trouble in interlude of revolt. Among his followers we hear the murmur of the
religious non-contents, and the political have-nots, dying away in an angry unappeased
grumble.
Captain Pouch has carried us a little, however, out of our commission. His resistance to
authority was another result of the doings of another and greater, and indeed royal, rebel -Henry VIII., in whose reign came the Seven Years' Parliament, which was a step towards
making it independent of the old yearly tenure confirmed by popular election. It first met in
1529, and it was in a degree Henry's weapon in his bold acts of rebellion and reformation.
It passed the act disseizing the Pope in England; and gave the powers to dissolve the
religious houses, great and small. In that Reformation, Cobbett saw only menace to the
welfare and the rights of the common folk; and hard and bitterly he protested as a stout
protestant against the Protestant Reformers, whose reforms made them rich even if they
waxed more self-supporting and independent of foreign authority.
The paramount question affecting the rights, moral and spiritual, and in a degree political,
of the English people, was centred from this time to the end of Elizabeth's reign in the
religious struggle. There is something offensive in the Statute against Books in the year
1519 (3 Edward VI.). "Be it therefore enacted," it says, "that all books called antiphoners,
missals, grailes, processionals, manuals, legends, pies, portuasses, primers in Latin or
English, couchers, journals, ordinals, or other books or writings heretofore used in service
44
The best essay of England
of the Church, other than such as are or shall be set forth by the King's Majesty, shall be
by authority of this present Act clearly and utterly abolished, extinguished, and forbidden
for ever to be used or kept in this realm."
When one thinks how precious a book may become to its owner, who has had it in use for
years, the tyranny this implies is not to be set aside because it was part of a Reformation
that was declared by its prime movers a step, towards religious freedom.
We cannot separate the autocratic temper of the great churchmen and others of the period
from the temper of the Tudors themselves. It was heard from Henry VIII.; it was heard from
Elizabeth in her reign and on her death-bed: "I told you my seat had been the seat of
kings, and I will have no rascal to succeed me." It was the growing that "the rascal" was
imminent, perhaps, which gave the House of Stuart a contrary bias so strong as to be
dangerous, and in Charles I. fatal, to its assertors. The turn of the rascal came with a
vengeance. James I. said that the king was the fount of all power -- "the power flows
always from himself." He was above the law, and above the voice of the Commons.
Political psychology may teach us how inevitable then was the Petition of Rights in 1628,
which reaffirmed "The Great Charter of the Liberties of England," and the rights, freeholds
or liberties and free customs of the freeman under "the law of the land."
A tract of 1642, summing up the discontent of the common folk puts a series of damaging
queries about the non-compliance of the king with the articles in the Petition. Why, it was
asked, was it violated by the imprisoning of sundry members of parliament which cost
some of them their lives? Why were parliaments themselves put under a royal ban or
inhibition? Why the levies of ship-money and coal-and-conduct money? Why the attempt
to make all England a forest, and the people into "so many deer for Nimrods to hunt"?
When Charles I., in refusing to plead before the High Court, quoted Ecclesiastes in
reasserting the Divine Right: "Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may
say unto him, 'What dost thou?'" he was virtually putting the accent on the very words that
were to decide his own fate.
Some years later, when the unlucky king had gone his way, the Agreement of the People,
drawn up in January 1648-9; the forty-two articles of the Instrument of Government,
December 1653, and the Petition of May 1657, supply a series of notable documents. In
them, says Professor Carleton Lee, the further constitutional and development of Great
Britain and of the United States of America is directly or indirectly indicated. In spite of the
45
The best essay of England
too great insistence upon the authority of the Lord Protector, who at points seems to be
taking over some of the prestige of his tragic royal inductor, the Instrument Of 1653 is an
expression, if not quite as Prof. Lee says, a type, of "the highest development of
constitutional theory" yet reached in English history.
With the Restoration, we have in the Declaration of Breda, wherein Charles II. wrote his
princely profession, a significant compromise between the old royalty and the new: "Nor do
we desire more to enjoy what is ours, than that all our subjects may enjoy what by law is
theirs "; and again, for the enunciation of spiritual freedom: "We so declare a liberty to
tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for
differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the
kingdom." It was in 1672 that the Great Seal -- constitutional symbol of powers that gain a
too strong official hold by unchecked use -- first passed into the king's hands, and then
was put into those of Earl Shaftesbury, with the title of Lord Chancellor of England. He to
be sure was head of the "Cabal," and his family name, Cooper, gave the first letter to that
new word of doubtful omen.
We do not always remember the somewhat paradoxical fact that under Charles II. we had
in 1679 the great Habeas Corpus Act -- "for the better securing the Liberty of the Subject,"
both at home and beyond the seas. It is of course a document intended for a special
provision of justice to the, subject who comes under,the criminal writ, but its principle of
liberty is clear; and where it failed, the Bill of Rights, twenty-one years later, and the Act
1812 for "more effectually securing the Liberty of the Subject," made good the defensive
structure.
The struggle for the same principle goes on, with some marked reactionary episodes, all
through the Stuart time. It shifts again from the secular to the religious plane under the
second James, who forgot the second Charles's promise in the Declaration of Breda.
Rightly or wrongly, the instinct of the common folk rebelled against the greed-in-authority
of King Stork, and reversing the fable, inclined instead to King Log. They could sit upon
King Log, and that session was the real beginning of Constitutional Monarchy. It was in
fact the next step towards the government by a people's Prince under the seeming of a
Royal Republic.
We turn naturally to Burke for the final sanction of liberty assured, as he expressed it in his
famous Address to the King, in 1777, which regarded the safeguard of freedom, in
46
The best essay of England
England and America, as interdependent and closely resting upon one and the same
base. He spoke in it of the danger of the only substitute for civil liberty -- "a military
government" -- and he spoke of the time of revolution when the people re-entered into their
original rights. That was later than John Wilkes and No. 45 of The North Briton, which
ended by quoting " the fine words of Dryden -- Freedom is the English subject's
Prerogative."
From that time onwards we are on more accustomed ground. We have a few more
landmarks -- the Emancipation Bill of 1829, whose backers supported their case by the
appeal to the rights of citizenship and equal liberties before the law. The Jewish
emancipation followed the Catholic, at a generation's remove; and the Oaths Act was
passed in the same year, 1858.
Meanwhile the struggle for the first Reform Bill in 1831 led to the Chartist Petition of 1838,
which was the natural rider to that bill. It left the people, the petitioners declared, "as
helpless as before. Our slavery has been exchanged for an apprenticeship of liberty,"
which only meant hope further deferred. The repeal of the Corn Laws marks another
economic crisis -- to which the eloquence of John Bright and the plain good sense of
Cobden gave effect. At this point too we are made aware that the voice of the folk-moot
has gained a new vehicle in the newspaper-report, which reaches by quick circulation the
whole available intelligence of the people.
The last pages of the record trace the events that gave the political chart of the nineteenth
century its crowded detail and revision marks. The coming of the railways, the growth of
the cities and seaports; the changes marked by the Franchise Bill of '84 and the Factory
Act of '91, or by the Co-operative and Trade Union movements, and the various Education
measures -- these form a strange induction to the amazing catastrophe of the Great War.
But even that may prove to be the means of a new awakening of the common political
sense, leading to the sure belief that only by the collective intelligence of all the peoples
upon earth, determined on the greatest common measure of efficiency, civil right, good
order, happiness and personal liberty, can the ancient folk-right asserted in the folk-moot
be carried to its right human fulfilment.
-- Ernest Percival Rhys (1859-1946)
47
The best essay of England
This piece was written by Rhys as an introduction to The Growth of Political Liberty (1921)
published by J. M. Dent in London. We would recognize Dent as the publisher of
"Everyman's Library." Rhys, while born in London, spent much of his youth in Carmarthen,
Wales. Rhys first started out as a mining engineer, but, in 1886, turned to full time writing,
first he freelanced but then was to be on the staff of Walter Scott's publishing house, and,
too, an editor for the "Everyman's Library" of classics. Rhys' writing efforts were mostly
reflected in volumes of romantic verse.
NOTES:
1
Alfred, "The Great" (849-900), who defeated the Danes in 878 and within a few years of
that brought all of England under his rule. Much has been attributed to Alfred; most of it,
untrue (see Chambers), as, for example that he was the founder of Oxford. Alfred did,
however, compile or collect together the best enactments of the former kings, and, too,
gathered together the old histories and works of the philosophers.
2
Edgar (944-975): another ancient king of England whose reign "was one of peace and
prosperity."
3
William Caxton (c.1422-c.1491) was England's first printer. Having learned his trade (art)
in Europe, Caxton set up his wooden press at Westminster in 1476 where Tothill Street
now is. Caxton's first book: History of Troy.
4
Tacitus (c.55-120) was a Roman historian.
5
Canute (c.994-1035) was the king of the "English, Danes, and Norwegians." Canute had
a ruthless temper which he regularly displayed on his way to the top; but, he "became a
wise, temperate, devout, and law abiding ruler."
6
John Ball was a priest who was executed with Wat Taylor (d.1381). Wat Taylor led the
"Peasants' Revolt" of 1381.
7
William Stubbs (1825-1901): Stubbs studied and taught at Oxford. Among his works was
the monumental, three volumed, Constitutional History of England "which put constitutional
origins on a firm basis ..." (Chambers.)
48
The best essay of England
8
"Scot and lot" was a tax levied by a municipal corporation in proportionate shares upon
its members for the defraying of municipal expenses. The "danegeld" was levied as a landtax by the Norman kings.
9
Simon de Montfort (c.1208-65) led the English baron against his brother-in-law, Henry III.
These battles led to two settlements made in January and May of 1264, called the Mise
[Agreement] of Amiens and Mise of Lewes respectively. These agreements determined
that the composition of parliament should, in part, be made up of representatives of all the
towns and shires; this model parliament of Montfort's held the germ of out modern day
parliament.
10
Edward Hall (c.1499-1547) wrote, in 1542, Union of the noble Families of Lancaster and
York.
11
Jack Cade, of Irish birth, led a short lived insurrection in 1450 bringing with him 40,000
followers who gave London a few days of unrest.
"Don Quixote"
By Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922). 1
A Spanish knight, about fifty years of age, who lived in great poverty in a village of La
Mancha, gave himself up so entirely to reading the romances of chivalry, of which he had
a large collection, that in the end they turned his brain, and nothing would satisfy him but
that he must ride abroad on his old horse, armed with spear and helmet, a knight-errant, to
encounter all adventures, and to redress the innumerable wrongs of the world. He induced
a neighbour of his, a poor and ignorant peasant called Sancho Panza, mounted on a very
good ass, to accompany him as squire. The knight saw the world only in the mirror of his
beloved romances; he mistook inns for enchanted castles, windmills for giants, and
country wenches for exiled princesses. His high spirit and his courage never failed him, but
his illusions led him into endless trouble. In the name of justice and chivalry he intruded
himself on all whom he met, and assaulted all whom he took to be making an oppressive
49
The best essay of England
or discourteous use of power. He and his poor squire were beaten, trounced, cheated, and
ridiculed on all hands, until in the end, by the kindliness of his old friends in the village, and
with the help of some new friends who had been touched by the amiable and generous
character of his illusions, the knight was cured of his whimsies and was led back to his
home in the village, there to die.
That is the story of Don Quixote: it seems a slight framework for what, without much
extravagance, may be called the wisest and most splendid book in the world. It is an old
man's book; there is in it all the wisdom of a fiery heart that has learned patience.
Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, but if Cervantes had died at the same
age as Shakespeare we should have had no "Don Quixote." Shakespeare himself has
written nothing so full of the diverse stuff of experience, so quietly and steadily illuminated
by gentle wisdom, so open-eyed in discerning the strength of the world; and Shakespeare
himself is not more courageous in championing the rights of the gallant heart. Suppose the
Governor of Barataria had been called on to decide the cause between these two great
authors. His judgments were often wonderfully simple and obvious. Perhaps he would
have ruled that whereas Shakespeare died at the age of fifty-two and Cervantes lived
seventeen years longer, a man shall give his days and nights to the study of Shakespeare
until he is older than ever Shakespeare was, and then, for the solace of his later years,
shall pass on to the graver school of Cervantes. Not every man lives longer than
Shakespeare; and, of those who do, not every man masters the art and craft of growing
older with the passage of years, so that, by this rule, the Spanish gentleman would have a
much smaller circle of intimates than the High Bailiff's son of Stratford. And so he has; yet
his world-wide popularity is none the less assured. He has always attracted, and will
always attract, a great company of readers who take a simple and legitimate delight in the
comic distresses of the deluded Don, in the tricks put upon him, in the woeful absurdity of
his appearance, in the many love-stories and love-songs that he hears, in the variety of the
characters that he meets, in the wealth of the incidents and events that spring up, a joyous
crop, wherever he sets his foot, and not least, perhaps, in the beatings, poundings,
scratchings, and tumblings in the mire that are his daily portion. That is to say, those who
care little or nothing for Don Quixote may yet take pleasure in the life that is in his book;
and his book is full of life.
We have no very ample record of the life experience of Cervantes, which are distilled in
this, his greatest book. We know that he was a soldier, and fought against the Turks at
50
The best essay of England
Lepanto, where his left hand was maimed for life; that he was made prisoner some years
later by the Moors, and suffered five years' captivity at Algiers; that he attempted with
others to escape, and when discovered and cross-examined took the whole responsibility
on himself; that at last he was ransomed by the efforts of his family and friends, and
returned to Spain, there to live as best he could the life of a poor man of letters, with
intermittent Government employ, for thirty-six more years. He wrote sonnets and plays,
pawned his family's goods, and was well acquainted with the inside of prisons. He
published the First Part of "Don Quixote" in 1605 - that is to say, in his fifty-eighth year and thenceforward enjoyed a high reputation, though his poverty continued. In 1615 the
Second Part of "Don Quixote" appeared, wherein the author makes delightful play with the
First Part by treating it as a book well known to all the characters of the story. In the
following year he died, clothed in the Franciscan habit, and was buried in the convent of
the Barefooted Trinitarian Nuns in Madrid. No stone marks his grave, but his spirit still
wanders the world in the person of the finest gentleman of all the realms of fact and fable,
who still maintains in discourse with all whom he meets that the thing of which the world
has most need is knights-errant, to do honour to women, to fight for the cause of the
oppressed, and to right the wrong. "This, then, gentlemen," he may still be heard saying, "it
is to be a knight-errant, and what I have spoken of is the order of chivalry, in the which, as
I have already said, I, though a sinner, have made profession; the same which these
famous knights profess do I profess; and that is why I am travelling through these deserts
and solitary places, in quest of adventures, with deliberate resolve to offer my arm and my
person to the most dangerous adventure which fortune may present, in aid of the weak
and needy." And the world is still incredulous and dazed. "By these words which he
uttered," says the author in brief comment on the foregoing speech, "the travellers were
quite convinced that Don Quixote was out of his wits."
It has often been said, and is still sometimes repeated by good students of Cervantes, that
his main object in writing "Don Quixote" was to put an end to the influence of the romances
of chivalry. It is true that these romances were the fashionable reading of his age, that
many of them were trash, and that some of them were pernicious trash. It is true also that
the very scheme of his book lends itself to a scathing exposure of their weaknesses, and
that the moral is pointed in the scene of the Inquisition of the Books, where the priest, the
barber, the housekeeper, and the niece destroy the greater part of his library by fire. But
how came it that Cervantes knew the romances so well, and dwelt on some of their
incidents in such loving detail? Moreover, it is worth noting that not a few of them are
51
The best essay of England
excluded by name from the general condemnation. "Amadis of Gaul" is spared, because it
is "the best of all book of the kind." Equal praise is given to "Palmerin of England"; while of
"Triante the White" the priest himself declares that it is a treasure of delight and a mine of
pastime.
"Truly, I declare to you, gossip, that in its style this is the best book in the world. Here the
knights eat and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills before they die, with other
things in which the rest of the books of this kind are wanting."
But even stronger evidence of the esteem that Cervantes felt for the best of the romances
is to be found in his habit of linking their names with the poems of Homer and Virgil. So, in
the course of instructions given by Don Quixote to Sancho Panza, while they dwelt in the
wilds of the Sierra Morena, Ulysses is cited as the model of prudence and patience,
Aeneas as the greatest of pious sons and expert captains, and Amadis as the "pole star,
the morning star, the sun of valiant and enamoured knights, whom all we have to copy,
who do battle under the banner of love and chivalry." It would indeed be a strange thing if
a book which is so brave an exercise of the creative imagination were mainly destructive in
its aim, and deserved no higher honour than a scavenger. The truth is that the book is so
many-sided that all kinds of tastes and beliefs can find their warrant in it. The soul of it is
an irony so profound that but few of its readers have explored it to the depths. It is like a
mine, deep below deep; and much good treasure is to be found at the more easily
accessible levels. All irony cirticises the imperfect ideas and theories of mankind, not by
substituting for them other ideas and other theories, less imperfect, but by placing the facts
of life, in mute comment, alongside of the theories. The Ruler of the World is the great
master of irony; and man has been permitted to share some part of his enjoyment in the
purifying power of fact. The weaker and more querulous members of the race commonly
try to enlist the facts in the service of their pet ideas. A grave and deep spirit like
Cervantes knows that the facts will endure no such servitude. They will not take orders
from those who call for their verdict, nor will they be content to speak only when they are
asked to speak. They intrude suddenly, in the most amazing and irrelevant fashion, on the
carefully ordered plans of humanity. They cannot be explained away, and many a man
who thought to have guarded himself against surprise has been surprised by love and
death.
52
The best essay of England
Every one sees the irony of "Don Quixote" in its first degree, and enjoys it in its more
obvious forms. This absurd old gentleman, who tries to put his antiquated ideas into action
in a busy, selfish, prosy world, is a figure of fun even to the meanest intelligence. But, with
more thought, there comes a check to our frivolity. Is not all virtue and all goodness in the
same case as Don Quixote? Does the author, after all, mean to say that the world is right,
and that those who try to better it are wrong? If that is what he means, how is it that at
every step of our journey we come to like the Don better, until in the end we can hardly put
a limit to our love and reverence for him? Is it possible that the criticism is double-edged,
and that what we are celebrating with our laughter is the failure of the world?
A wonderful thing in Cervantes' handling of his story is his absolute honesty and candour.
He does not mince matters. His world behaves as the world may be expected to behave
when its daily interests are violently disordered by a lunatic. Failure upon failure dogs the
steps of poor Don Quixote, and he has no popularity to redeem his material disasters. "He
who writes of me," says the Don pensively, in his discussion with the bachelor Sampson,
"will please very few"; and the only comfort the bachelor can find for him is that the number
of fools is infinite, and that the First Part of his adventures has delighted them all. As an
example of Cervantes's treatment take one of the earliest of these adventures, the rescue
of the boy Andres from the hands of his oppressor. As he rode away from the inn, on the
first day of his knighthood, while yet he was unfurnished with a squire, Don Quixote heard
cries of complaint from a thicket near by. He thanked Heaven for giving him so early an
opportunity of service, and turned his horse aside to where he found a farmer beating a
boy. Don Quixote, with all knightly formality, called the farmer a coward, and challenged
him to a single combat. The farmer, terrified by the strange apparition, explained that the
boy was his servant and by gross carelessness had lost sheep for him at the rate of one a
day. The matter was at last settled by the farmer liberating the boy and promising to pay
him in full his arrears of wages; whereupon the knight rode away, well pleased. Then the
farmer tied up the boy again, and beat him more severely than ever, till at the last he
loosed him, and told him to go and seek redress from his champion. "So the boy departed
sobbing, and his master stayed behind laughing, and after this manner did the valorous
Don Quixote right that wrong." Later on, when the knight and his squire are in the wilds,
with the company whom chance has gathered around them, the boy appears again, and
Don Quixote narrates the story of his deliverance as an illustration of the benefits
conferred on the world by knight-errantry.
53
The best essay of England
"All that your worship says is true," replies the lad, "but the end of the business was very
much the contrary of what your worship imagines." "How contrary?" said Don Quixote.
"Did he not pay thee, then?" "He not only did not pay me," said the boy, "but as soon as
your worship had got outside the wood, and we were alone, he tied me again to the same
tree, and gave me so many lashes that he left me flayed like St. Bartholomew; and at
every lash he gave me, he uttered some jest or scoff, to make a mock of your worship; and
if I had not felt so much pain, I would have laughed at what he said... For all this your
worship is to blame, because if you had held on your way, and had not meddled with other
people's business, my master would have been content to give me a dozen or two lashes,
and afterwards he would have released me and paid me what he owed. But as your
worship insulted him and called him bad names, his anger was kindled, and as he could
not avenge himself on you, he left fly the tempest on me."
Don Quixote sadly admits his error, and confesses that he ought to have remembered that
"no churl keeps the word he gives if he finds that it does not suit him to keep it." But he
promises Andres that he will yet see him righted; and with that he boy's terror awakes.
"For the love of God, sir knight-errant," he says, "if you meet me again, and see me being
cut to pieces, do not rescue me, nor help me, but leave me to my pain; for, however great
it be, it cannot be greater than will come to me from the help of your worship - whom, with
all the knights-errant ever born into the world, may God confound!" With that he ran away,
and Don Quixote stood very much abashed by his story, so that the rest of the company
had to take great care that they did not laugh outright and put him to confusion.
At no point in the story does Cervantes permit the reader to forget that the righter of
wrongs must not look in this world for either success or praise. The indignities heaped
upon that gentle and heroic soul almost revolt the reader, as Charles Lamb remarked. He
is beaten and kicked; he has his teeth knocked out, and consoles himself with the thought
that these hardships are incident to his profession; his face is all bedaubed with mud, and
he answers with grave politeness to the mocks of those who deride him. When he stands
sentry on the back of his horse at the inn, to guard the sleepers, the stable wench,
Maritornes, gets him to reach up his hand to an upper window, or rather a round hole in
the wall of the hayloft, whereupon she slips a running noose over his wrist and ties the
rope firmly to a bar within the loft. In this posture, and in continual danger of being hung by
the arm if his horse should move away, he stands till dawn, when four travellers knock at
the gate of the inn. He at once challenges them for their discourtesy in disturbing the
54
The best essay of England
slumbers of those whom he is guarding. Even the Duke and the Duchess, who feel kindly
to Don Quixote and take him under their care, are quite ready to play rough practical jokes
on him. It is while he is their guest that his face is all scratched and clawed by frightened
cats turned loose in his bedroom at night. His friends in the village were kinder than this,
but they, to get him home, carried him through the country in a latticed cage on poles, like
a wild beast, for the admiration of the populace; and he bethought himself, "As I am a new
knight in the world, and the first that hath revived the forgotten exercise of chivalry, these
are newly invented forms of enchantment." His spirit rises superior to all his misfortunes,
and his mind remains as serene as a cloudless sky.
But Don Quixote, it may be objected, is mad. Here the irony of Cervantes finds a deeper
level. Don Quixote is a high-minded idealist, who sees all things by the light of his own
lofty preconceptions. To him every woman is beautiful and adorable; everything that is said
to him is worthy to be heard with attention and respect; every community of men, even the
casual assemblage of lodgers at an inn, is a society founded on strict rules of mutual
consideration and esteem. He shapes his behaviour in accordance with these ideas, and
is laughed at for his pains. But he has a squire, Sancho Panza, who is a realist and loves
food and sleep, who sees the world as it is, by the light of common day. Sancho, it might
be supposed, is sane, and supplies a sure standard whereby to measure his master's
deviations from the normal. Not at all; Sancho, in his own way, is as mad as his master. If
the one is betrayed by fantasy, the other is betrayed, with as ludicrous a result, by
common sense. The thing is well seen in the question of the island, the government of
which is to be entrusted to Sancho when Don Quixote comes into his kingdom. Sancho,
though he would have seen through the pretenses of any merely corrupt bargainer,
recognises at once that his master is disinterested and truthful, and he believes all he
hears about the island. He spends much thought on the scheme, and passes many
criticisms on it. Sometimes he protests that he is quite unfit for the position of a governor,
and that his wife would cut a poor figure as a governor's lady. At other times he
vehemently asserts that many men of much less ability than himself are governors, and
eat every day off silver plate. Then he hears that, if an island should not come to hand, he
is to be rewarded with a slice of a continent, and at once he stipulates that his domain
shall be situated on the coast, so that he may put his subjects to a profitable use by selling
them into slavery. It is not a gloss upon Cervantes to say that Sancho is mad; the
suggestion is made, with significant repetition, in the book itself. "As the Lord liveth," says
the barber, addressing the squire, "I begin to think that thou oughtest to keep him company
55
The best essay of England
in the cage, and that thou art as much enchanted as he. In an evil day wast thou
impregnated with his promises, and it was a sorrowful hour when the island of thy longings
entered thy skull."
So these two, in the opinion of the neighbours, are both mad, yet most of the wisdom of
the book is theirs, and when neither of them is talking, the book falls into mere
commonplace. And this also is many times recognised and commented on in the book
itself. Sometimes it is the knight, and sometimes the squire, whose conversation makes
the hearers marvel that one who talks with so much wisdom, justice, and discernment
should act so foolishly. Certainly the book is a paradise of delightful discourse wherein all
topics are handled and are presented in a new guise. The dramatic setting, which is the
meaning of the book, is never forgotten; yet the things said are so good that when they are
taken out of their setting they shine still, though with diminished splendour. What could be
better than Don Quixote's treatment of the question of lineage, when he is considering his
future claim to marry the beautiful daughter of a Christian or paynim King? "There are two
kinds of lineage," he remarks. "The difference is this - that some were what they are not,
and others are what they were not; and when the thing is looked into I might prove to be
one of those who had a great and famous origin, with which the King, my father-in-law who
is to be, must be content." Or what could be wiser than Sancho's account of his
resignation of the governorship? "Yesterday morning I left the island as I found it, with the
same streets, houses, and tiles which they had when I went there. I have borrowed
nothing of nobody, nor mixed myself up with the making of profits, and though I thought to
make some profitable laws, I did not make any of them, for I was afraid they would not be
kept, which would be just the same as if they had never been made." Many of those who
come across the pair in the course of their wanderings fall under the fascination of their
talk. Not only so, but the world of imagination in which the two wanderers live proves so
attractive, the infection of their ideas is so strong, that, long before the end of the story is
reached, a motley company of people, from the Duke and Duchess down to the villagers,
have set their own business aside in order to take part in the make-believe, and to be the
persons of Don Quixote's dream. There was never any Kingdom of Barataria; but the
hearts of all who knew him were set on seeing how Sancho would comport himself in the
office of Governor, so the Duke lent a village for the purpose, and it was put in order and
furnished with officers of State for the part that it had to play. In this way some of the
fancies of the talkers almost struggle into existence, and the dream of Don Quixote makes
the happiness it does not find.
56
The best essay of England
Nothing in the story is more touching than the steadily growing attachment and mutual
admiration of the knight and the squire. Each deeply respects the wisdom of the other,
though Don Quixote, whose taste in speech is courtly, many times complains of Sancho's
swarm of proverbs. Each is influenced by the other; the knight insists on treating the squire
with the courtesies due to an equal, and poor Sancho, in the end, declares that not all the
governments of the world shall tempt him away from the service of his beloved master.
What, then, are we to think, and what does their creator think, of those two mad- men,
whose lips drop wisdom? "Mark you, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "there are two kinds of
beauty - one of the soul, and another of the body. That of the soul excelleth in knowledge,
in modesty, in fine conduct, in liberality and good breeding; and all these virtues are found
in, and may belong to, an ugly man... I see full well, Sancho, that I am not beautiful, but I
know also that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of honour to be no monster;
he may be well loved, if he possesses those gifts of soul which I have mentioned."
Sometimes, at the height of his frenzy, the knight seems almost inspired. So, when the
shepherds have entertained him, he offers, by way of thanks, to maintain against all
comers the fame and beauty of the shepherdesses, and utters his wonderful little speech
on gratitude:
"For the most part, he who received is inferior to him who gives; and hence God is above
all, because he is, above all, the great giver; and the gifts of man cannot be equal to those
of God, for there is an infinite distance between them; and the narrowness and
insufficiency of the gifts of man is eked out by gratitude."
There cannot be too much of this kind of madness. Well may Don Antonio cry out on the
bachelor Sampson, who dresses himself as the Knight of the Silver Moon and overthrows
Don Quixote in fight:
"O sir, may God forgive you the wrong you have done to all the world in desiring to make a
sane man of the most gracious madman that the world contains! Do you not perceive that
the profit which shall come from the healing of Don Quixote can never be equal to the
pleasure which is caused by his ecstasies?"
What if the world itself is mad, not with the ecstasy of Don Quixote, nor with the thrifty
madness of Sancho, but with a flat kind of madness, a makeshift compromise between
faith and doubt? All men have a vein of Quixotry somewhere in their nature. They can be
counted on, in most things, to follow the beaten path of interest and custom, till suddenly
57
The best essay of England
there comes along some question on which they refuse to appeal to interest; they take
their stand on principle, and are adamant. All men know in themselves the mood of
Sancho, when he says:
"I have heard the preachers preach that we should love our Lord for himself alone, without
being moved to it by the hope of glory or the fear of pain; but, for my own part, I would love
him for what he is able to do for me."
These two moods, the mood of Quixote and the mood of Sancho, seem to divide between
them most of the splendours and most of the comforts of human life. It is rare to find either
mood in its perfection. A man who should consistently indulge in himself the mood of the
unregenerate Sancho would be a rogue, though, if he preserved good temper in his doings,
he would be a pleasant rogue. The man who should maintain in himself the mood of
Quixote would be something very like a saint. The saints of the Church Militant would find
no puzzle and no obscurity in the character of the Knight of La Mancha. Some of them,
perhaps, would understand better that Don Quixote understood, that the full record of his
doings, compiled by Cervantes, is both a tribute to the saintly character, and a criticism of
it. They certainly could not fail to discover the religious kernel of the book, as the world, in
the easy confidence of its own superiority, has failed to discover it. They would know that
whoso loseth his life shall save it; they would not find it difficult to understand how Don
Quixote, and, in his own degree, Sancho, was willing to be a fool, that he, and the world
with him, might be made wise. Above, all, they would appreciate the more squalid
misadventures of Don Quixote, for, unlike the public, which recognises the saint by his
aureole, they would know, none better, that the way they have chosen is the way of
contempt, and that Christianity was nursed in a manger.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh (1861-1922).
NOTES:
1
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) was a professor of English Literature at
Liverpool, Glasgow and at Oxford from 1904. Among his novels: The English Novel
(1894), Milton (1900), Wordsworth (1903), and Shakespeare (1907).
"Dr. Johnson And His Times."
By Thomas Babington Macaulay
58
The best essay of England
Johnson grown old -- Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a
competent future -- is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything, about
him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling
walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his
dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable
thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of
treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous acute and ready
eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage,
his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro,
Frank, -- all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from
childhood. But we have no minute information respecting those years of Johnson's life
during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed. We know him, not
as he was known to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose
father he might have been. That celebrated club of which he was the most distinguished
member, contained few persons who could remember a time when his fame was not fully
established, and his habits completely formed. He had made himself a name in literature
while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older than
Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk,
and Langton, and about forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and
Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our
knowledge respecting him, never saw him until long after he was fifty years old, till most of
his great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed on him by the Crown
had placed him above poverty. Of those eminent men who were his most intimate
associates, toward the close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew
him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the capital, was David Garrick;
and it does not appear that, during those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow
townsman....
At the time when Johnson commenced his literary career [c.1725], a writer had little to
hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet
furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors
were so low, that a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little
more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the
fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich
59
The best essay of England
harvests was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable
might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a
scare-crow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide
on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount
Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him: and they well might pity him; for, if
their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of
insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among
footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted
by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St.
George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to
sleep on a bulk in June, and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an
hospital and be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had
lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kit-cat or the
Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been intrusted with
embassies to the High Allies -- who, if he had lived in our time, would have found
encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.
As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of life has its peculiar
temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity,
jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the faults which are
commonly found in men whose livelihood is precarious, and whose principles are exposed
to the trial of severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended
with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of bookmaking were scarcely
less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was
almost certain to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night or a
well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet with guineas.
He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the images of which his mind had been haunted
while he was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe
Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the
life of Savage, of Boyce, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats
and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or
wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking champagne
and tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in
Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste; they knew
luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort. These men were irreclaimable.
60
The best essay of England
They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a
Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of
civilized communities. They were as untamable, as much wedded to their desolate
freedom, as the wild ass. They could no more be broken into the offices of social man than
the unicorn could be trained to serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like
beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered to their necessities. To assist
them was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of
giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it had been
received. If a sum was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such as, properly
husbanded, might have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange
freaks of sensuality, and before forty-eight hours had elapsed the poet was again
pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a
subterraneous cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, those houses
were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns. All order was destroyed; all business was
suspended. The most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man
of genius in distress, when he hear his guest roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the
morning.
A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had been raised above poverty by the
active patronage which, in his youth, both the great political parties had extended to his
Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, to the best of our
recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the
many poets who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular and Mallett,
obtained, after much severe suffering, the means of subsistence from their political friends.
Richardson, like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him, which his novels,
admirable as they are, would scarcely have done. But nothing could be more deplorable
than the state even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence on their
writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and Thomson were certainly four of the most
distinguished persons that England produced during the eighteenth century. It is well
known that they were all four arrested for debt.
Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson plunged in his twenty-eighth year.
From that time till he was three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting him -little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate information which we possess
respecting his proceedings and habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at length
61
The best essay of England
from cock- lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the polished and the opulent.
His fame was established. A pension sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him:
and be came forth to astonish a generation with which he had almost as little in common
as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; but he had seen them as a beggar.
He now came among them as a companion. The demand for amusement and instruction
had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually increasing. The price of literary
labour had risen; and those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to
associate were for the most part persons widely different from those who had walked
about with him all night in the streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons,
Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill
were the most distinguished writers of what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian. age. Of these men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the
stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson first came up to London, was
common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure of severe poverty.
Almost all had been early admitted into the most respectable society on an equal footing.
They were men of quite a different species from the dependents of Curll and Osborne.
Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last survivor of the
genuine race of Grub Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose abject
misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical
genius of Pope. From nature he bad received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been
passed had given to his demeanor, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities
appalling to the civilized beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse
irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally
strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness and the
occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom
he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was,
undoubtedly, in some respects; but, if we possessed full information concerning those who
shared his early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his singularities of
manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which
he belonged. He ate at Streatharn Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
62
The best essay of England
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate as it was
natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning
in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had
accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation.
He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf with tho
veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely
ever took wine: but, when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These
were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such
deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyce. The roughness and violence which he
showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle,
had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes,
by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by
the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs
which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.
Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up
to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be
ileo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and
humane, his demeanor in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he
had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a
harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of suffering which
he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl
from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old
creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude
weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous;
and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He
had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations;
and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations
as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for
grumbling about the dust on the road or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his
phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so
full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith, crying because the Good-natured Man had failed,
inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised
valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary,
moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep,
63
The best essay of England
he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He
was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for
the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the
wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed
herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances was not likely
to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could
not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My
dear doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call him Holofernes"
"Pooh, ma'am,"he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of
uncharitably?" Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson
was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared
smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpencehalfpenny a day.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).
"Impeachment Of Warren Hastings."
By Thomas Babington Macaulay
In the meantime, the preparations for the trial had proceeded rapidly; and on February 13,
1788, the sittings of the Court commenced. There have been spectacles more dazzling to
the eye, more gorgeous with jewelry and cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up
children, than that which was then exhibited at Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was
a spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative
mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the
present and to the past, were collected on one spot, and in one hour. All the talents and all
the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed,
with every advantage that could be derived both from cooperation and from contrast.
Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled
centuries, to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid; or far away over
boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The High Court of
Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the
64
The best essay of England
Plantagenets1, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy
city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.
The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall which
had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had
witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the halt where the
eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with
just resentment, the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the
placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was
wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry.
The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshaled by the heralds under Garter King-atarms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on points of law. Near
a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of the Upper House then was, walked in
solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior Baron present
led the way, George Eliott, Lord Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence
of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was
closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by
the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by
his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long
galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the
emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free,
enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the
representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated round the Queen the
fair-haired young daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great
Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country
in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with
emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the
Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against
Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest
painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that
easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and
statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to
suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast
treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with
65
The best essay of England
injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There
appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret
plighted his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint
Cecilia whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the
common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticized,
and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. Montague. And there
the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the
Westminster election against palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana Duchess of
Devonshire.
The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings2 advanced to the bar, and bent his knee. The
culprit was indeed not unworthy of that great presence. He had ruled an extensive and
populous country, had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself, that all had feared
him, that most had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except
virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and emaciated,
yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the court,
indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual forehead, a
brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face pale and worn, but
serene, on which was written, as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at
Calcutta, Mens aequa in arduis; such was the aspect with which the great Proconsul
presented himself to his judges.
His counsel, accompanied him, men all of whom were afterwards raised by their talents
and learning to the highest posts in their profession, the bold and strong-minded Law,
afterwards Chief Justice of the King's Bench; the more humane and eloquent Dallas
afterwards Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and Plomer who, near twenty years later,
successfully conducted in the same high court the defence of Lord Melville, and
subsequently became Vice-Chancellor and Master of the Rolls.
But neither the culprit nor his advocates attracted so much notice as the accusers. In the
midst of the blaze of red drapery, a space had been fitted up with green benches and
tables for the Commons. The managers, with Burke at their head, appeared in full dress.
The collectors of gossip did not fail to remark that even Fox, generally so regardless of his
appearance, had paid to the illustrious tribunal the compliment of wearing a bag and
66
The best essay of England
sword. Pitt had refused to be one of the conductors of the impeachment; and his
commanding, copious, and sonorous eloquence was wanting to that great muster of
various talents. Age and blindness had unfitted Lord North for the duties of a public
prosecutor; and his friends were left without the help of his excellent sense, his tact, and
his urbanity. But, in spite of the absence of these two distinguished members of the Lower
House, the box in which the managers stood contained an array of speakers such as
perhaps had not appeared together since the great age of Athenian eloquence. There
were Fox and, Sheridan, the English Demosthenes and the English Hyperdies.3 There
was Burke, ignorant, indeed, or negligent of the art of adapting his reasonings and his
style to the capacity and taste of his hearers, but in amplitude of comprehension and
richness of imagination superior to every orator, ancient or modern. There, with eyes
reverentially fixed on Burke, appeared the finest gentleman of the age, his form developed
by every manly exercise, his face beaming with intelligence and spirit, the ingenious, the
chivalrous, the highsouled Windham. Nor, though surrounded by such men, did the
youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an age when most of those who distinguish
themselves in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships at college, he had won for
himself a conspicuous place in Parliament. No advantage of fortune or connection was
wanting that could set off to the height his splendid talents and his unblemished honour. At
twenty-three he had been thought worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who
appeared as the delegates of the British Commons, at the bar of the British nobility. All
who stood at that bar, save him alone, are gone, culprit, advocates, accusers. To the
generation which is now in the vigour of life, he is the sole representative of a great age
which has passed away. But those who, within the last ten years, have listened with
delight, till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords, to the lofty and
animated eloquence of Charles Earl Grey, are able to form some estimate the powers of a
race of men among whom he was not the foremost.
The charges and the answers of Hastings were first read. The ceremony occupied two
whole days, and was rendered less tedious than it would otherwise have been by the silver
voice and just emphasis of Cowper, the clerk of the court, a near relation of the amiable
poet. On the third day Burke rose. Four sittings were occupied by his opening speech,
which was intended to be a general introduction to all the charges. With an exuberance of
thought and a splendour of diction which more than satisfied the highly raised expectation
of the audience, he described the character and institutions of the natives of India,
recounted the circumstances in which the Asiatic empire of Britain had originated, and set
67
The best essay of England
forth the constitution of the Company and of the English Presidencies. Having thus
attempted to communicate to his hearers an idea of Eastern society, as vivid as that which
existed in his own mind, he proceeded to arraign the administration of Hastings as
systematically conducted in defiance of morality and public law. The energy and pathos of
the great orator extorted expressions of unwonted admiration from the stern and hostile
Chancellor, and, for a moment, seemed to pierce even the resolute heart of the defendant.
The ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, excited by the
solemnity of the occasion, and perhaps not unwilling to display their taste and sensibility,
were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles
were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams were heard: and Mrs. Sheridan was
carried out in a fit. At length the orator concluded. Raising his voice till the old arches of
Irish oak resounded, 'Therefore,' said he, 'hath it with all confidence been ordered, by the
Commons of Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and
misdemeanours. I impeach him in the name of the Commons' House of Parliament, whose
trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient
honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he
has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name
of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of
every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!'
When the deep murmur of various emotions had subsided, Mr. Fox rose to address the
Lords respecting the course proceeding to be followed. The wish of the accusers was that
the Court would bring to a close the investigation of the first charge before the second was
opened. The wish of Hastings and of his counsel was that the managers should open all
the charges, and produce all the evidence for the prosecution, before the defence began.
The Lords retired to their own House to consider the question. The Chancellor took the
side of Hastings. Lord Loughborough, who wad now in opposition, supported the demand
of the managers. The division showed which way the inclination of the tribunal leaned. A
majority of near three to one decided in favour of the course for which Hastings contended.
When the Court sat again, Mr. Fox, assisted by Mr. Grey, opened the charge respecting
Cheyte Sing, several days were spent in reading papers and hearing witnesses. The next
article was that relating to the Princesses of Oude. The conduct of this part of the case
was entrusted to Sheridan. The curiosity of the public to hear him was unbounded. His
sparkling and highly finished declamation lasted two days; but the Hall was crowded to
68
The best essay of England
suffocation during the whole time. It was said that fifty guineas had been paid for a single
ticket. Sheridan, when he concluded, contrived, with a knowledge of stage-effect which his
father might have envied, to sink back, as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke, who
hugged him with the energy of generous admiration.4
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).
NOTES:
1
Plantagenet is the surname of a family, which, in 1154, succeeded to the throne of
England. The Plantagenet kings reigned through to the death of Richard III, in 1485. The
Plantagenet kings are: Henry II, Richard I, John, Henry III, Edward I-III, Richard II, Henry
IV-VI, Edward IV-V, and Richard III.
2
Here Macaulay writes of Warren Hastings (1732-1818). Hastings, in 1772, had become
the governor of Bengal, in India. Though history will show, that on balance, Hastings was a
governor who advanced the cause of England in India -- "improved the administration of
justice, organized the opium revenue, waged vigorous war with the Mahrattas and made
the Company's [the East India Company] power paramount in many parts of India"
[Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1990)] -- Hastings had made enemies, one
of whom he wounded in a duel. In 1784, he resigns his office in Indian and returned to
England, in order to face charges which lead to his impeachment.
3
In Chambers we read this -- which might give us some insight as to what Macaulay
thought of Fox and Sheridan, whom he liken to Demosthenes and Hyperdies respectively - "In his speeches Hyperides is always transparent, never monotonous, witty to a degree,
refined in his raillery, and delightful in his irony. Above all, he never in his keenest attacks
passes the bounds of good taste, as does Demosthenes.
4
The process, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, was to grind on for more than seven
years and was to occupy 145 sittings of parliament. "Finally," as is written in Chambers,
"Hastings was acquitted on all the charges, unanimously on all that affected his personal
honour. But he left the court a ruined man ..."
69
The best essay of England
"The Puritans." 1
By Thomas Babington Macaulay
We would speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable body of men, perhaps, which
the world has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts of their character lie on the
surface. He that runs may read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and malicious
observers to point them out. For many years after the Restoration, they were the theme of
unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the
press and of the stage, at the time when the press and the stage were most licentious.
They were not men of letters; they were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend
themselves; and the public would not take them under its protection. They were therefore
abandoned, without reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists and dramatists. The
ostentatious simplicity of their dress, their sour aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff posture,
their long graces, their Hebrew nanes, the Scriptural phrases which they introduced on
every occasion, their contempt of human learning, their detestation of polite amusements,
were indeed fair game for the laughers. But it is not from the laughers alone that the
philosophy of history is to be learnt. And he who approaches this subject should carefully
guard against the influence of that potent ridicule, which has already misled so many
excellent writers.
"Ecco il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio
Che mortali perigli in se contiene:
Hor qui tener a fren nostro a desio,
Ed esser cauti molto a noi conviene."
Those who roused the people to resistance - who directed their measures through a long
series of eventful years - who formed, out of the most unpromising materials, the finest
army that Europe had ever seen - who trampled down king, church, and aristocracy - who,
in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible
to every nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fanatics. Most of their absurdities
70
The best essay of England
were mere external badges, like the signs of freemasonry or the dresses of friars. We
regret that these badges were not more attractive. We regret that a body, to whose
courage and talents mankind has owed inestimable obligations, had not the lofty elegance
which distinguished some of the adherents of Charles I., or the easy good breeding for
which the court of Charles II. was celebrated. But, if we must make our choice, we shall,
like Bassanio in the play, turn from the specious caskets, which contain only the death's
head and the fool's head, and fix our choice on the plain leaden chest which conceals the
treasure.2
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily
contemplation of superior beings and external interests. Not content with acknowledging,
in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will
of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing
was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of
existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other sects
substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the
Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on the intolerable brightness, and
to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial
distinctions. The difference between the greatest and meanest of mankind seemed to
vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from
him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority
but his favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all
the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and
poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the
registers of heralds, they felt assured that they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their
steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels
had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands: their diadems,
crowns of glory which should never fade away! On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles
and priests, they looked down with contempt: for they esteemed themselves rich in a more
previous treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language - nobles by the right of an
earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of
them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged - on whose
slightest actions the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest - who had
been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should
continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted
71
The best essay of England
politicians ascribed to earthly causes had been ordained on his account. For his sake
empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed
his will by the pen of the evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had been rescued by
no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the
sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun
had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had arisen, that all nature
had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God!
Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence,
gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in
the dusk before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional
retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by
glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angles, or the tempting whispers of
fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from the dreams of
everlasting fire. Like Vane3, he thought himself intrusted with the scepter of the millennial
year. Like Fleetwood4, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from
him. But when he took his seat in the council or girt on his sword for war, these
tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People, who
saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their
groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh
who encountered them in the hall of debate, or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought
to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which
some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the
necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on
every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition
and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and
their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm
had made them Stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice,
and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead
them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the
world like Sir Artegale's iron man Talus5 with his flail, crushing and trampling down
oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human
infirmities; insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon,
not to be withstood by any barrier.
72
The best essay of England
Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of
their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that
the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach.
And we know that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst vices
of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity - that they had their anchorites
and their crusades, their Dunstans and their Do Montforts, their Dominics and their
Escobars. Yet when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to
pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).
"Tact"
By Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913)
For success in life tact is more important than talent, but it is not easily acquired by those
to whom it does not come naturally. Still something can be done by considering what
others would probably wish.
Never lose a chance of giving pleasure. Be courteous to all. "Civility," said Lady Montague,
"costs nothing and buys everything." It buys much, indeed, which no money will purchase.
Try then to win every one you meet. "Win their hearts," said Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth,
"and you have all men's hearts and purses."
Tact often succeeds where force fails. Lilly quotes the old fable of the Sun and the Wind:
"It is pretily noted of a contention betweene the Winde and the Sunne, who should have
the victorye. A Gentleman walking abroad, the Winde thought to blowe off his cloake,
which with great blastes and blusterings striuing to vnloose it, made it to stick faster to his
backe, for the more the Winde encreased the closer his cloake clapt to his body: then the
Sunne, shining with his hot beams, began to warm this gentleman, who waxing somewhat
faint in his faire weather, did not only put off his cloake but his coate, which the Wynde
perceiuing, yeelded the conquest to the Sunne."
Always remember that men are more easily led than driven, and that in any case it is
better to guide than to coerce.
"What thou wilt
Thou rather shalt enforce it with thy smile,
Than hew to't with thy sword."1
73
The best essay of England
It is a good rule in politics, "pas trop gouverner."
Try to win, and still more to deserve, the confidence of those with whom you are brought in
contact. Many a man has owed his influence far more to character than to ability. Sydney
Smith used to say of Francis Horner, who, without holding any high office, exercised a
remarkable personal influence in the Councils of the Nation, that he had the Ten
Commandments stamped upon his countenance.
Try to meet the wishes of others as far as you rightly and wisely can; but do not be afraid
to say "No."
Anybody can say "Yes," though it is not every one who can say "Yes" pleasantly; but it is
far more difficult to say "No." Many a man has been ruined because he could not do so.
Plutarch tells us that the inhabitants of Asia Minor came to be vassals only for not having
been able to pronounce one syllable, which is "No." And if the Conduct of Life is essential
to say "No," it is scarcely less necessary to be able to say it pleasantly. We ought always
to endeavour that everybody with whom we have any transactions should feel that it is a
pleasure to do business with us and should wish to come again. Business is a matter of
sentiment and feeling far more than many suppose; every one likes being treated with
kindness and courtesy, and a frank pleasant manner will often clench a bargain more
effectually than a half per cent.
Almost any one may make himself pleasant if he wishes. "The desire of pleasing is at least
half the art of doing it:"2 and, on the other hand, no one will please others who does not
desire to do so. If you do not acquire this great gift while you are young, you will find it
much more difficult afterwards. Many a man has owed his outward success in life far more
to good manners than to any solid merit; while, on the other hand, many a worthy man,
with a good heart and kind intentions, makes enemies merely by the roughness of his
manner. To be able to please is, moreover, itself a great pleasure. Try it, and you will not
be disappointed.
Be wary and keep cool. A cool head is as necessary as a warm heart. In any negotiations,
steadiness and coolness are invaluable; while they will often carry you in safety through
times of danger and difficulty.
If you come across others less clever than you are, you have no right to look down on
them. There is nothing more to be proud of in inheriting great ability, than a great estate.
The only credit in either case is if they are used well. Moreover, many a man is much
cleverer than he seems. It is far more easy to read books than men. In this the eyes are a
great guide. "When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, a practised man relies
74
The best essay of England
on the language of the first."3
Do not trust too much to professions of extreme goodwill. Men do not fall in love with men,
nor women with women, at first sight. If a comparative stranger protests and promises too
much, do not place implicit confidence in what he says. If not insincere, he probably says
more than he means, and perhaps wants something himself from you. Do not therefore
believe that every one is a friend, merely because he professes to be so; nor assume too
lightly that any one is an enemy.
We flatter ourselves by claiming to be rational and intellectual beings, but it would be a
great mistake to suppose that men are always guided by reason. We are strange
inconsistent creatures, and we act quite as often, perhaps oftener, from prejudice or
passion. The result is that you are more likely to carry men with you by enlisting their
feelings, than by convincing their reason. This applies, moreover, to companies of men
even more than to individuals.
Argument is always a little dangerous. If often leads to coolness and misunderstandings.
You may gain your argument and lose your friend, which is probably a bad bargain. If you
must argue, admit all you can, but try and show that some point has been overlooked.
Very few people know when they have had the worst of an argument, and if they do, they
do not like it. Moreover, if they know they are beaten, it does not follow that they are
convinced. Indeed it is perhaps hardly going too far to say that it is very little use trying to
convince any one by argument. State your case as clearly and concisely as possible, and
if you shake his confidence in his own opinion it is as much as you can expect. It is the first
step gained.
Conversation is an art in itself, and it is by no means those who have most to tell who are
the best talkers; though it is certainly going too far to say with Lord Chesterfield that "there
are very few Captains of Foot who are not much better company than ever were Descartes
or Sir Isaac Newton."
I will not say that it is as difficult to be a good listener as a good talker, but it is certainly by
no means easy, and very nearly as important. You must not receive everything that is said
as a critic or a judge, but suspend your judgment, and try to enter into the feelings of the
speaker. If you are kind and sympathetic your advice will be often sought, and you will
have the satisfaction of feeling that you have been a help and comfort to many in distress
and trouble.
Do not expect too much attention when you are young. Sit, listen, and look on. Bystanders
proverbially see most of the game; and you can notice what is going on just as well, if not
75
The best essay of England
better, when you are not noticed yourself. It is almost as if you possessed a cap of
invisibility.
To save themselves the trouble of thinking, which is to most people very irksome, men will
often take you at your own valuation. "On ne vault dans ce monde," says La Bruyère, "que
ce que l'on veult valoir."
Do not make enemies for yourself; you can make nothing worse.
"Answer not a fool according to his folly,
Lest thou also be like unto him."4
Remember that "a soft answer turneth away wrath;" but even an angry answer is less
foolish than a sneer: nine men out of ten would rather be abused, or even injured, than
laughed at. They will forget almost anything sooner than be made ridiculous.
"It is pleasanter to be deceived than to be undeceived." Trasilaus, and Athenian, went
made, and thought that all the ships in the Piræus belonged to him, but having been cured
by Crito, he complained bitterly that he had been robbed. It is folly, says Lord Chesterfield,
"to lose a friend for a jest: but, in my mind, it is not much less degree of folly, to make an
enemy of an indifferent and neutral person for the sake of a bon-mot."
Do not be too ready to suspect a slight, or think you are being laughed at - to say with
Scrub in the Stratagem, "I am sure they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly." On
the other hand, if you are laughed at, try to rise above it. If you can join in heartily, you will
turn the tables and gain rather than lose. Every one likes a man who can enjoy a laugh at
his own expense - and justly so, for it shows good-humour and good-sense. If you laugh at
yourself, other people will not laugh at you.
Have the courage of your opinions. You must expect to be laughed at sometimes, and it
will do you no harm. There is nothing ridiculous in seeming to be what you really are, but a
good deal in affecting to be what you are not. People often distress themselves, get angry,
and drift into a coolness with others, for some quite imaginary grievance.
Be frank, and yet reserved. Do not talk much about yourself; neither of yourself, for
yourself, nor against yourself: but let other people talk about themselves, as much as they
will. If they do so it is because they like it, and they will think all the better of you for
listening to them. At any rate do not show a man, unless it is your duty, that you think he is
a fool or a blockhead. If you do, he has good reason to complain. You may be wrong in
your judgment; he will, and with some justice, form the same opinion of you.
Burke once said that he could not draw an indictment against a nation, and it is very
unwise as well as unjust to attack any class or profession. Individuals often forget and
76
The best essay of England
forgive, but Societies never do. Moreover, even individuals will forgive an injury much
more readily than an insult. Nothing rankles so much as being made ridiculous. You will
never gain your object by putting people out of humour, or making them look ridiculous.
Goethe in this "Conversations with Eckermann" commended our countrymen. Their
entrance and bearing in Society, he said, were so confident and quiet that one would think
they were everywhere the masters, and the whole world belonged to them. Eckermann
replied that surely young Englishmen were no cleverer, better educated, or better hearted
than young Germans. "That is not the point," said Goethe; "their superiority does not lie in
such things, neither does it lie in their birth and fortune: it lies precisely in their having the
courage to be what nature made them. There is no halfness about them. They are
complete men. Sometimes complete fools, also, that I heartily admit; but even that is
something, and has its weight."
In any business or negotiations, be patient. Many a man would rather you heard his story
than granted his request: many an opponent has been tired out.
Above all, never lose your temper, and if you do, at any rate hold your tongue, and try not
to show it.
"Cease from anger, and forsake wrath:
Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil."5
For
"A softer answer turneth away wrath:
But grievous words stir up anger."6
Never intrude where you are not wanted. There is plenty of room elsewhere. "Have I not
three kingdoms?" said King James to the fly, "and yet thou must needs fly in my eye."7
Some people seem to have a knack of saying the wrong thing, of alluding to any subject
which revives sad memories, or rouses differences of opinion.
No branch of Science is more useful than the knowledge of Men. It is of the utmost
importance to be able to decide wisely, not only to know whom you can trust, and whom
you cannot, but how far, and in what, you can trust them. This is by no means easy. It is
most important to choose well those who are to work with you, and under you; to put the
square man in the square hole, and the round man in the round hole.
"If you suspect a man, do not employ him: if you employ him, do not suspect him."8
Those who trust are oftener right than those who mistrust. Confidence should be complete,
but not blind. Merlin lost his life, wise as he was, for imprudently yielding to Vivien's appeal
to trust her, "all in all or not at all."
77
The best essay of England
Be always discreet. Keep your own counsel. If you do not keep it for yourself, you cannot
expect others to keep it for you. "The mouth of a wise man is in his heart; the heart of a
fool is in his mouth, for what he knoweth or thinketh he uttereth."
Use your head. Consult your reason. It is not infallible, but you will be less likely to err if
you do so.
Speech is, or ought to be silvern, but silence is golden.
Many people talk, not because they have anything to say, but for the mere love of talking.
Talking should be an exercise of the brain, rather than of the tongue. Talkativeness, the
love of talking for talking's sake, is almost fatal to success. Men are "plainly hurried on, in
the heat of their talk, to say quite different things from what they first intended, and which
they afterwards wish unsaid: or improper things, which they had no other end in saying,
but only to find employment to their tongue.
And this unrestrained volubility and wantonness in speech is the occasion of numberless
evils and vexations in life. It begets resentment in him who is the subject of it; sows the
seed of strife and dissension amongst others; and inflamed little disgusts and offences,
which, if let alone, would wear away of themselves."9
"C'est une grande misère," says La Bruyère, "que de n'avoir pas assez d'esprit pour bien
parler, ni assez de jugement pour se taire." Plutarch tells a story of Demaratus, that being
asked in a certain assembly whether he held his tongue because he was a fool, or for want
of words, he replied, "A fool cannot hold his tongue." "Seest thou," said Solomon,
"Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words?
There is more hope of a fool than of him."10
Never try to show your own superiority: few things annoy people more than being made to
feel small.
Do not be too positive in your statements. You may be wrong, however sure you feel.
Memory plays us curious tricks, and both ears and eyes are sometimes deceived. Our
prejudices, even the most cherished, may have no secure foundation. Moreover, even if
you are right, you will lose nothing by disclaiming too great certainty.
In action, again, never make too sure, and never throw away a chance. "There's many a
slip 'twixt the cup and the lip."
It has been said that everything comes to those who know how to wait; and when the
opportunity does come, seize it.
"He that wills not, when he may;
When he will, he shall have nay."
78
The best essay of England
If you once let your opportunity go, you may never have another.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune: Omitted,
all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we
now afloat: And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our venture."11
Be cautious, but not over-cautious; do not be too much afraid of making a mistake; "a man
who never makes a mistake, will make nothing."
Always dress neatly: we must dress, therefore we should do it well, though not too well;
not extravagantly, either in time or money, but taking care to have good materials. It is
astonishing how much people judge by dress. Of those you come across, many go mainly
by appearances in any case, and many more have in your case nothing but appearances
to go by. The eyes and ears open the heart, and a hundred people will see, for one who
will know you. Moreover, if you are careless and untidy about yourself, it is a fair, though
not absolute, conclusion that you will be careless about other things also.
When you are in Society study those who have the best and pleasantest manners.
"Manner," says the old proverb with much truth, if with some exaggeration, "maketh Man,"
and "a pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation."12 "Merit and knowledge
will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained. Engage the eyes by the
elegance and harmony of your diction; and the heart will certainly (I should rather say
probably) follow."13 Every one has eyes and ears, but few have a sound judgment. The
world is a stage. We are all players, and every one knows how much the success of a
piece depends upon the way it is acted.
Lord Chesterfield, speaking of his son, says, "They tell me he is loved wherever he is
known, and I am very glad of it; but I would have him be liked before he is known, and
loved afterwards... You know very little of the nature of mankind, if you take those things to
be of little consequence; one cannot be too attentive to them; it is they that always engage
the heart, of which the understanding is commonly the bubble."
The Graces help a man in life almost as much as the Muses. We all know that "one man
may steal a horse, while another may not look over a hedge;" and why? because the one
will do it pleasantly, the other disagreeably. Horace tell us that even Youth and Mercury,
the God of Eloquence and of the Arts, were powerless without the Graces.
-- Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913).
"My Winter Garden"
By Charles Kingsley. 1
79
The best essay of England
So, my friend: you ask me to tell you how I contrive to support this monotonous country
life; how, fond as I am of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, literature, I go
cheerfully through the daily routine of a commonplace country profession, never requiring
a six weeks' holiday; not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spend a day in
London; having never yet actually got to Paris.
You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose talk is of bullocks -- as
indeed mine is, often enough; why I am not by this time "all over blue mould"; why I have
not been tempted to bury myself in my study, and live a life of dreams among old books.
I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher: though one, thank Heaven, of a different stamp
from him whom the great Bishop Berkeley silenced -- alas! only for a while. I am possibly,
after all, a man of small mind, content with small pleasures. So much the better for me.
Meanwhile, I can understand your surprise, though you cannot understand my content.
You have played a greater game than mine; have lived a life perhaps more fit for an
Englishman, certainly more in accordance with the taste of our common fathers, the
Vikings, and their patron Odin "the goer," father of all them that go ahead. You have gone
ahead, and over many lands; and I reverence you for it, though I envy you not. You have
commanded a regiment -- indeed an army, and "drank delight of battle with your peers";
you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment, like a noble Englishman as you
are, old friend, among thousands who never knew before what justice and judgment were.
You have tasted (and you have deserved to taste) the joy of old David's psalm, when he
has hunted down the last of the robber lords of Palestine. You have seen " a people whom
you have not known serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they obeyed you; but the
strange children dissembled with you"; yet before you, too, "the strange children failed,
and trembled in their hill-forts."
Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do not wonder that to a man
who has been set to such a task, and given power to carry it through, all smaller work must
seem paltry; that such a man's very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that free,
adventurous Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all the self-help and daring of a
man, should have been on a par with your work; that when you go a-sporting, you ask for
no meaner preserve than the primeval forest, no lower park wall than the snow-peaks of
the Himalaya.
80
The best essay of England
Yes; you have been a "burra Shikarree" as well as a "burra Sahib." You have played the
great game in your work, and killed the great game in your play. How many tons of mighty
monsters have you done to death, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty
years ago? How many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of elephant or buffalo?
How many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or wary old alligators, their craws
full of poor girls' bangles? Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all but ripped up
by boars? Have you not seen face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheepprimeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth? Your memories must be like those
of Theseus and Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains must be one fossiliferous
deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped
together, as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme.
And therefore I like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to myself. I spell over with
my boy Mayne Reid's amusing books, or the "Old Forest Ranger," or Williams's old "Tiger
Book," with Howitt's plates; and try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read
and imagine, feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, "a great dispositions to cry."
For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were full of bison and grizzly
bear, mustang, and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in the
Far West, which I shall never see; for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly
enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my bread in a very quiet way; that
England was to be henceforth my prison or my palace as I should choose to make it; and I
have made it, by Heaven's help, the latter.
I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this little England -- or rather
this little patch of moor in which I have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do -- looked
at moments rather like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would sigh, "Oh!
that I had wings" not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle but as an eagle, to
swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now
look back as altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure and
excitement was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others went
out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the glorious old worlds of the east -- why
should not I? Others rambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and
palaces, filling their minds with fair memories -- why should not I? Others discovered new
wonders in botany and zoology -- why should not I? Others too, like you, fulfilled to the
utmost that strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes my pulse throb as
81
The best essay of England
often as I see the stags'heads in our friend A---'s hall-why should not I? It is not learned in
a day, the golden lesson of the old Collect, to "love the thing which is commanded, and
desire that which is promised. "Not in a day, but in fifteen years one can spell out a little of
its worth; and when one finds one's self on the wrong side of forty, and the first gray hairs
begin to show on the temples, and one can no longer jump as high as one's third button -scarcely, alas! to any button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings,
and chillings, one's lower limbs feel in a cold thaw, much like an old post-horse's, why, one
makes a virtue of necessity: and if one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks
for wonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on the lawn and the brook
in the park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one "Tour autour
de mon jardin."
For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in every tuft of grass, if we have
only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only
recollect that great and small are but relative terms; that, in truth, nothing is great or small,
save in proportion to the quantity of creative thought which has been exercised in making
it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stonehenge, is in truth infinitely
greater than all Stonehenge together, though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and
the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet. You differ from me? Be it so. Even if you
prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do otherwise. If you rob
me of my faith in "minute philosophy," -- you rob me of a continual source of content,
surprise, delight.
So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, and playing with all his might,
in his own place and way. Remember only, that though I never can come round to your
sphere, you must some day come round to me, when wounds, or weariness, or merely, as
I hope, a healthy old age, shall shut you out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether
human or quadruped. -- For you surely will not take to politics in your old age? You will not
surely live to solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas! did but last year) the votes, not even of the
people, but merely of the snobocracy, on the ground of your having neither policy nor
principles, nor even opinions, upon any matter in heaven or earth ? Then in that day will
you be forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many a year: to refrain your soul, and
keep it low. You will see more and more the depth of human ignorance, the vanity or
human endeavors. You will feel more and more that the world is going God's way, and not
yours, or mine, or any man's; and that if you have been allowed to do good work on earth,
82
The best essay of England
that work is probably as different from what you fancy it as the tree is from the seed
whence it springs. You will grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of your labors;
because if you saw it you would probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in the
eyes of God would not be very good in yours; content, also, to receive your discharge, and
work and fight no more, sure that God is working and fighting, whether you are in hospital
or in the field. And with this growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on
you a respect for simple labors, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a sympathy with
simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and my little tours about that
moorland which I call my winter-garden, and which is to me as full of glory and of
instruction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to you, and in which I contrive to find as
much health and amusement as I have time for-and who ought to have more?
I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal sense (for only in a few acres
have I a life interest), but in that higher sense in which ten thousand people can own the
same thing, and yet no man's right interfere with another's. To whom does the Apollo
Belvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to see its beauty? So does my winter garden;
and therefore to me among the rest.
Besides (which is a gain to a poor man), my pleasure in it is a very cheap one. So are all
those of a minute philosopher, except his microscope. But my winter garden, which is far
larger, at all events, than that famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny in
keeping up. Poor, did I call myself? Is it not true wealth to have all I want without paying for
it? Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty gentlemen and noblemen, nay,
even royal personages, planting and improving for me? Is it not more than royal wealth to
have sun and frost, Gulf Stream and southwesters, laws of geology, phytology, physiology,
and other ologies--in a word, the whole universe and the powers thereof, day and night,
paving, planting, roofing, lighting, coloring my winter garden for me, without my even
having the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go to work?
Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In the doings of our little country
neighborhood I find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written
down. In the words of those whose talk is of bullocks I find the materials of all possible
metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work them out. In fifteen miles of moorland
I find the materials of all possible physical science, and long that I had time to work out
83
The best essay of England
one smallest segment of that great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have lying at my feet
all day a thousand times more wealth than I can use?
Some people -- most people -- in these runabout railway days, would complain of such a
life, in such a "narrow sphere," so they call it, as monotonous. Very likely it is so. But is it to
be complained of on that account? Is monotony in itself an evil? Which is better, to know
many places ill or to know one place well? Certainly -- if a scientific habit of mind be a gain
-- it is only by exhausting as far as possible the significance of an individual phenomenon
(is not that sentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you can discover any
glimpse of the significance of the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge, like
Humboldt, must have had once their specialty, their pet subject, or they would have,
strictly speaking, no knowledge at all. The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently and laboriously
investigated in his youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I learn
more studying over and over again the same Bagshot sand gravel heaps, than I should by
roaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen years have I been puzzling
at the same questions and have only guessed at a few of the answers. What sawed out
the edges of the moors into long narrow banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat atop?
What makes Erica tetralix grow in one soil and the bracken in another? How did three
species of club-moss -- one of them quite an Alpine one -- get down here, all the way from
Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel? Why did that one patch of Carex
arenaria settle in the only square yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient
resemblance to its native sand-hill by the seashore, to make it comfortable? Why did
Myosurus minimus which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in
the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at least two hundred years a
farmyard gateway? Why does it generally rain here from the southwest, not when the
barometer falls, but when it begins to rise again? Why -- why is everything which lies under
my feet all day long? I don't know; and you can't tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot
complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so to
create novelty at every turn.
Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant and morally useful. Marriage is
monotonous; but there I much, I trust, to be said in favor of holy wedlock. Living in the
same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire.
Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right. "Those who
travel by land or sea" are to be objects of our pity and our prayers; and I do pity them. I
84
The best essay of England
delight in that same monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and
a host of bad passions. It gives the man the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at
home; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and that only The
Being who will do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up. It is pleasant to look down on
the same parish day after day, and say, I know all that lies beneath, and all beneath know
me. If I want a friend, I know where to find him; if I want work done, I know who will do it. It
is pleasant and good to see the same trees year after year; the same birds coming back in
spring to the same shrubs; the same banks covered with the same flowers, and broken (if
they be stiff ones) by the same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride the same horse, to sit
in the same chair, to wear the same old coat. That man who offered twenty pounds' reward
for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, and I wish I knew him. Why should one
change one's place any more than one's wife or one's children? Is a hermit-crab, slipping
his tail out of one strange shell into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little better,
either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal? No; George Riddler was a true philosopher:
"Let vules go sarching vur and nigh,
We bides at Whum, my dog and I;"
and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for the oftener one sees, the better
one knows; and the better one knows, the more one loves.
It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the horse, where a man cannot afford
more than one, as I cannot. To own a stud of horses, after all, is not to own horses at all,
but riding-machines. Your rich man who rides Crimea in the morning, Sir Guy in the
afternoon, and Sultan to-morrow, and something else the next day, may be a very gallant
rider; but it is a question whether be enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives to the poor
man who rides him day after day; one horse, who is not a slave but a friend; who has
learned all his tricks of voice, hand, heel, and knows what his mast wants, even without
being told; who will bear with his master's infirmities, and feels secure that his master will
bear with his in turn.
Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one rich one would do even as the rich
are wont to do: but still, I an a minute philosopher. And therefore, this afternoon, after have
I done the same work, visited the same people, and said the same words to them, which I
have done for years past and shall, I trust, for many a year to come, I shall go wandering
out into the same winter garden on the same old mare and think the same thoughts, and
85
The best essay of England
see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same good fellows hunting of their fox, as I
have done with full content this many a year; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own
boundless wealth, who have the whole universe to, look at, without being charged one
penny for the show.
As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want of luxuries only because I
cannot get them; but if my self deception be useful to me, leave it alone.
No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter garden at the Crystal Palace:
yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; I argue that, in the first place, it is far larger. You
may drive, I hear, through the grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You may
ride through mine for fifteen miles on end. I prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph
Paxton ever planned, that dome above my head some three miles high, of soft dappled
gray and yellow cloud, through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, an sheds
down tender gleams on yellow bogs, and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk
ranges gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my evergreens. What winter garden
can compare for them with mine? True, I have but four kinds -- Scotch fir, holly, furze, and
the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow boggras and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my
eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as in
music what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, in
endless new variety, of a few simple elements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the
bright hollies round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furzepatch, rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a golden bud; the deep soft
heather carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall
of red fir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft
gray sky.
An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it, outside and inside. I
need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the
sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They
are my Alps; little ones it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A phantom
of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, and
not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long
is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when
86
The best essay of England
embodied in the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the
grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will
find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of
every rabbit burrow: dark strids, tremendous cataracts, "deep glooms and sudden glories,"
in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All is there for you to see, if you will
but rid yourself of "that idol of space"; and Nature, as everyone will tell you who has seen
dissected an insect under the microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as in
her hugest forms.
The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my winter garden. I turn my
horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my
cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols, but
endless vistas of smooth, red, green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof,
lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle -- a carpet at which
Nature has been at work for forty years. Red shafts, green roof, and here and there a pane
of blue sky -- neither Owen Jones nor Willement can improve upon that ecclesiastical
ornamentation -- while for incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine fragrance, far
sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling narcotic odor which fills a Roman Catholic
cathedral. There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs over the roof above in a
soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen. Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon
the summer sands in Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves
gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerable wave-sighs
come innumerable memories, and faces which 1 shall never see again upon this earth. I
will not tell even you of that, old friend.
It has two notes, two keys rather, that Aeolian harp of firneedles above my head;
according as the wind is east or west, the needles dry or wet. This easterly key of to-day is
shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound, though the day itself be colder: but grander still,
as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in which the southwest wind roars on, rain-laden,
over the forest, and calls me forth -- being a minute philosopher -- to catch trout in the
nearest chalk-stream.
The breeze is gone awhile; and I am in perfect silence -- a silence which may be heard.
Not a sound; and not a moving object; absolutely none. The absence of animal life is
solemn, startling. That ring dove, who was cooing half a mile away, has hushed his moan;
87
The best essay of England
that flock of long-tailed titmice, which were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few
minutes since, are gone: and now there is not even a gnat to quiver in the slant sun-rays.
Did a spider run over these dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his footfall. The
creaking of the saddle, the soft step of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem
alone in a dead world. A dead world: and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see! "Above my
head, every firneedle is breathing -- breathing forever; currents unnumbered circulate in
every bough, quickened by some undiscovered miracle; around me every fir-stem is
distilling strange juices, which no laboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees
only death, the eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.
Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter garden, and meditate upon that
one word -- Life; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes2 has written so well thereon-for
instance -"We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification with Nature. The simple
cell, from which the plant or animal arises, must draw light and heat from the sun,
nutriment from the surrounding world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though
latent with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying thousands of years in
those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and smile forth as golden wheat. What we call
growth, is it not a perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual with the
universal? And may we not, in speculative moods, consider Death as the grand impatience
of the soul to free itself from the circle of individual activity -- the yearning of the creature to
be united with the Creator?
As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In the early days of man's history,
Nature and her marvelous ongoings were regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or
else with the merest wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws
could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our intellectual activity
based on, except on the more thorough mental absorption of Nature? When that
absorption is completed the mystic drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes
be visible to man, as a Divine Effluence and Life."
True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth?
Not I. "We see through a glass darkly," said St. Paul of old; and what is more, dazzle and
weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking too long and earnestly through the
88
The best essay of England
imperfect and by no means achromatic lens. Enough. I will think of something else. I will
think of nothing at all -Stay. There was a sound at last; a light footfall.
A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright eyes full of terror, her ears aloft
to catch some sound behind. She sees us, turns short, and vanishes into the gloom. The
mare pricks up her ears too, listens, and looks; but not the way the hare has gone. There
is something more coming; I can trust the finer sense of the horse, to which (and no
wonder) the Middle Age attributed the power of seeing ghosts and fairies impalpable to
man's gross eyes. Besides, that hare was not traveling in search of food. She was not
loping along, looking around to her right and left; but galloping steadily. She has been
frightened; she has been put up: but what has put her up? And there, far away among the
fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled blackbird. What has put him up?
That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till they are ready to burst, and your
ears are first shot forward towards your nose, and then laid back with vicious intent. Stand
still, old woman! Do you think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch a fox?
A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems between which he glides. And
yet his legs are black with fresh peat-stains.
He is a hunted fox; but he has not been up long.
The mare stands like a statue; but I can feel her trembling between my knees. Positively
he does not see us. He sits down in the middle of a ride, turns his great ears right and left,
and then scratches one of them with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better.
Now he is up again and on.
Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or rather lieth, for it is on dead flat
ground, the famous castle of Malepartus, which beheld the base murder of Lampe the
hare, and many a seely soul besides. I knew it well; a patch of sandheaps, mingled with
great holes, amid the twining fir-roots; ancient home of the last of the wild beasts. And
thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke, where he hopes to be snug
among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable starting-holes, as the old apologue has
it, of his ballium, covertway, and donjon keep. Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting
his toes delicately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning and conceit as that
89
The best essay of England
world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry were the delight, if not the model,
of knight and kaiser, lady and burgber, in the Middle Age.
Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus; examines it with his nose; goes on to a
postern; examines that also, and then another, and another; while I perceive afar,
projecting from every cave's mouth, the red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah,
Reinecke! fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou hast worse foes to deal
with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom thy great ancestor
outwitted. Man the many-counseled has been beforehand with thee; and the earths are
stopped.
One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those trusty counselors, his ears, as
if he would tear them off, "revolving swift thoughts in a crafty mind."
He has settled it now. He is up and off-and at what a pace! Out of the way Fauns and
Hamadryads, if any be left in the forest. What a pace! And with what a grace besides!
0 Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy great naughtiness! Art thou some
fallen spirit, doomed to be hunted for thy sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded
for thy swiftness, and grace, and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the
immortals? Who knows? Not I.
I am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate? Shall notify? Shall I waken the echoes?
Shall I break the grand silence by that scream which the vulgar view-halloo call?
It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells up a sound which makes my
heart leap into my mouth, and my mare into the air.
Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert here this day, and not in St.
Martin's Hall, to hear that chorus, as it pours round the fir-stems, rings against the roof
above, shatters up into a hundred echoes, till the air is alive with sound! You love
madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I.
Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, Spenser
and Shakespeare: but oh, that you could hear this madrigal! If you must have "four parts,"
then there they are. Deep-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyful tenor; wild
wistful alto; and leaping up here and there above the throng of sounds, delicate treble
shrieks and trills of trembling joy. I know not whether you can fit it into your laws of music,
90
The best essay of England
any more than You can the song of that Ariel sprite who dwells in the Aeolian harp, or the
roar of the waves on the rock, or
"Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
And murmuring of innumerable bees."
But music it is. A madrigal? Rather a whole opera of "Der Freischutz" -- demoniac element
and all -- to judge by those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as should
make Reinecke, bad be strong aesthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted from his
cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds might by him enrich the air. Heroes of old were
glad to die, if but some vates-sacer would sing their fame in worthy strains: and shalt not
thou too be glad, Reinecke? Content thyself with thy fate. Music soothes care; let it soothe
thine, as thou runnest for thy life; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. For as the
Etruscans (says Athenaeus) were so luxurious that they used to flog their slaves to the
sound of the flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweetlips and Melody, eat
thee to the sound of rich organ-pipes, that so thou mayest,
"Like that old fabled swan, in music die."
And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening an nearing fast, many a right
good-fellow and many a right good horse. I know three out of four of them, their private
histories, the private histories of their horses; and could tell you many a good story of them:
but shall not, being an English gentleman, and not an American litt 閞 ateur. They may not
all be very clever, or very learned, or very anything except gallant men; but they are all
good enough company for me, or anyone: and each has his own specialit?/I>, for which I
like him. That huntsman I have known for fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his
father's death-bed. I am godfather to that whip's child. I have seen the servants of the hunt,
as I have the hounds, grow up round me for two generations, and I feel for them as old
friends; and like to look into their brave, honest, weather-beaten faces. That red coat there,
I knew him when he was a school-boy; and now he is a captain in the Guards, and won his
Victoria Cross at Inkermann: that bright green coat is the best farmer, as well as the
hardest rider, for many a mile round; one who plays, as he works, with all his might, and
might have been a beau sabreur and colonel of dragoons. So might that black coat, who
now brews good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of Guardians, and rides,
like the green coat, as well as he works. That other black coat is a county banker; but he
knows more of the fox than the fox knows of himself, and where the hounds are, there will
91
The best essay of England
he be this day. That red coat has hunted kangaroo Australia: that one, as clever and good
as he is brave and simple, has stood by Napier's side in many an Indian, fight: that one
won his Victoria at Delhi, and was cut up at Lucknow, with more than twenty wounds: that
one has -- but what matter to you who each man is? Enough that each one can tell one a
good story, welcome one cheerfully, and give one out here, in the wild forest, the
wholesome feeling of being at home among friends.
There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread of these hundred horse-hoofs upon
the spongy vegetable soil. They are trotting now in "common time." You may hear the
whole Croats' March (the finest trotting march in in world) played by those iron heels; the
time, as it does in the Croats' March, breaking now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling
through heavy ground, bursting for a moment into a jubilant canter as it reaches a sound
spot.
The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled by the windings of Reinecke's
footsteps. You can hear the flap and snort of the dogs' nostrils as they canter round; and
one likes it. It is exciting: but why -- who can tell?
What beautiful creatures they are too! Next to a Greek statue (I mean a real old Greek
one: for I am a thoroughly anti-pre-Raphaelite benighted pagan heathen in taste, and
intend some day to get up a Cinque-Cento Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art) -- next
to a Greek statue, I say, I know few such combinations of grace and strength as in a fine
foxhound. It is the beauty of the Theseus -- light and yet massive; and light not in spite of
its masses, but on account of the perfect disposition of them. 1 do not care for grace in
man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as in the old German painters) at the expense
of honest flesh and blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, and saintly, and what not;
but it is not healthy; and, therefore, it is not really high art, let it call itself such as much as
it likes. The highest art must be that in which the outward is the most perfect symbol of the
inward; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be only expressed by a healthy body; and
starved limbs and a hydrocephalous forehead must be either taken as incorrect symbols of
spiritual excellence, or as -- what they were really meant for -- symbols of certain spiritual
diseases which were in the Middle Age considered as ecclesiastical graces and virtues.
Wherefore I like pagan and naturalist art; consider Titian and Correggio as unappreciated
geniuses, whose excellences the world will in some saner mood rediscover; hold, in direct
opposition to Rio, that Raphael improved steadily all his life through, and that his noblest
92
The best essay of England
works are not his somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhat impish Bambinos (very
lovely though they are), but his great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, which (with
Andrea Mantegna's "Heathen Triumph") Cromwell saved for the British nation. Probably no
one will agree with all this for the next quarter of a century; but after that I have hopes. The
world will grow tired of pretending to admire Manichaean pictures in an age of natural
science; and Art will let the dead bury their dead, and beginning again where Michael
Angelo and Raphael left off, work forward into a nobler, truer, freer, and more divine
school than the world has yet seen-at least, so I hope.
And all this has grown out of those fox-hounds. Why not? Theirs is the sort of form which
expresses to me what I want art to express -- nature not limited, but developed, by high
civilization. The old savage ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere massive force. That
was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, say the fawn, type of delicate grace. By cunning
breeding and choosing, through long centuries, man has combined both, and has created
the fox-hound -- lion and fawn in one; just as he might create noble human beings, did be
take half as much trouble about politics (in the true old sense of the word) as he does
about fowls. Look at that old hound, who stands doubtful, looking up at his master for
advice. Look at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His bead is finer than a
deer's; his hind legs tense as steel springs; his fore legs straight as arrows: and yet see
the depth of chest, the sweep of loin, the breadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh; and if
you have an eye for form, look at the absolute majesty of his attitude at this moment.
Majesty is the only word for it. If he were six feet high, instead of twenty-three inches, with
what animal on earth could you compare him? Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive? It is
to me, at least. I should like to have one in my study all day long, as I would have a statue
or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as they say) two hundred guineas for Hercules
alone, I believe the dog was well worth the money, only to look at. But I am a minute
philosopher.
I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared. Old Virginal's stern flourishes;
instantly her pace quickens. One whimper, and she is away, full-mouthed through the
wood, and the pack after her: but not I.
I am not going with them. My hunting days are over. Let it suffice that I have, in the days of
my vanity, "drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains" of many a
county, grass and forest, down and vale. No, my gallant friends. You know that I could
93
The best essay of England
ride, if I chose and I vain enough to be glad that you know it. But useless are your
coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right hands. "Life," as my friend Tom Brown
says, "is not all beer and skittles;" it is past two now and I have four old women to read to
at three, and an old man to bury at four; and I think, on the whole, that you will respect me
the more for going home and doing my duty. That I should like to see this fox fairly killed,
or even fairly lost, I deny not. That I should like it as much as I can like any earthly and
outward thing, I deny not. But sugar to one's bread and butter is not good; and if my winter
garden represent the bread and butter then will fox-hunting stand to it in the relation of
superfluous and unwholesome sugar; so farewell; and long may your noble sport prosper - "the image of war with only half its danger," to train you and your sons after, into gallant
soldiers -- full of
"The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill."
So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stem and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which
need both my eyes and my horse's at every moment; and woe to the "anchorite," as old
Bunbury names him, who carries his nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe
to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and
wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in wait for him. Woe,
in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in any wise not "masters of the situation."
Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but over your horse's nose, under
the dark roof, between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. Now I plunge into a
gloomy dell, wherein is no tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into a
chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twenty feet apart.
Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third stride
one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden in long hassock grass. 0 Aira caespitosa, most
stately and most variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not
wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hinds legs in that last gripe. Through you a
red coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full
butt against a fir-stem, and stopped,
"As one that is struck dead
By lightning ere he falls,"
94
The best essay of England
as we shall soon, in spite of the mare's cleverness. Would we were out of this!
Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, bright between the dark stems. Up
a steep slope, and over a bank which is not very big, but being composed of loose gravel
and peat mould, gives down with me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather,
and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and out on the open moor.
Grand old moor! stretching your brown flats right away toward Windsor for many a mile.
Far to our right is the new Wellington College, looking stately enough here all alone in the
wilderness, in spite of its two ugly towers and pinched waist. Close over me is the long firfringed ride of Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Caesar's camp; and hounds and
huntsmen are already far ahead, and racing up the Roman road, which the clods of these
parts, unable to give a better account of it, call the Devil's Highway.
Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heather-fringed pathway, he
brushes off his scent upon the twigs at every stride; and the hounds race after him,
showing no head indeed, and keeping, for convenience, in one long line upon the track:
but going heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can follow. I only hope they
may not overrun the scent.
They have overrun it; halt, and put their heads down a moment. But with one swift cast in
full gallop they have hit it off again, fifty yards away in the heather, long ere the horse men
are up to them; for those hounds can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves,
and so have learned to trust themselves, and act for themselves; as boys should learn at
school, even at the risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head indeed, down a
half-cleared valley, and over a few ineffectual turnips withering in the peat, a patch of
growing civilization in the heart of the wilderness; and then over the brook, while I turn
slowly away, through a green wilderness of self-sown firs.
There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing the desert in spite of frost, and
gales, and barrenness; and clustering together, too, as Scotsmen always do abroad, little
and big, everyone under his neighbor's lee, according to the good old proverb of their
native land, "Caw me, and I'll caw thee."
I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from James I's gnarled giants up
in Brarmshill Park -- the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs
95
The best essay of England
are -- down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over
tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average have
most of them spent in ineffectual efforts to become a foot high. Nibbled off by hares,
trodden down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing hundreds of their brethren cut up
and carried off in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled and stubbed near the ground as an old
thorn-bush in a pasture. But they have conquered at last, and are growing away, eighteen
inches a year, with fair green brushes silver-tipped, reclothing the wilderness with a
vegetation which it has not seen for -- how many thousand years?
No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was indigenous to England, and, mixed with
the larch, stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into Wales, England was not as it is
now. Snowdon was, it may be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges of its
glaciers the marmot and the musk-ox, the elk and the bear, wandered down into the
lowlands, and the hyena and the lion dwelt in those caves where fox and badger only now
abide. And how did the Scotch fir die out? did the whole land sink slowly from its subAlpine elevation into a warmer climate below? Or was it never raised at all? Did some
change of the Atlantic sea-floor turn for the first time the warm Gulf Stream to these
shores; and with its soft sea-breezes melt away the "Age of Ice," till glaciers and pines,
marmots and musk-oxen, perspired to death, and vanished for an aeon? Who knows? Not
I. But of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, as we hold traditionally here, the Scotch
fir was reintroduced by James I when he built Bramshill for Raleigh's hapless pet, Henry
the Prince, or whatever may have been the date of their reintroduction, here they are, and
no one can turn them out. In countless thousands the winged seeds float down the
southwest gales from the older trees; and every seed which falls takes root in ground
which, however unable to bear broad-leaved trees, is ready by long re for the seeds of the
needle-leaved ones. Thousands perish yearly; but the eastward march of the whole, up hill
and down dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus's Goths in Goethe's "Helena" -"Ein lang und breites Volksgewicht,
Der erste wusstc vom letzen nicht.
Der erste fiel, der zweite stand,
Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand,
Ein jeder hundertfach gest 鋜 kt;
Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt,"
96
The best essay of England
--till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to the eastward of each tract
of older trees, a long cloud younger ones, like a green comet's tail -- I wish their substance
was as yielding this day. Truly beautiful -- grand indeed to: it is -- to see young live Nature
thus carrying on a great savage process in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial
English land; and reproducing here, as surely as in the Australian bush, a native forest,
careless of mankind. Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff are those Scotchmen,
and close and stout they stand by each other, and claw at you as you twist through them,
the biggest aiming at your head or, even worse, at your knees; while the middle-sized slip
their brushes between your thigh and the saddle; and the little babies tickle your horse's
stomach, or twine about his fore feet. Whish -- whish; we are enveloped in what seems an
atmosphere scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut my eyes; but dare not, or I shall ride
against a tree. Whish -- whish; alas for the horse which cannot wind and turn like a hare!
Plunge -- stagger. What is this? A broad line of ruts; perhaps some Celtic trackway, two
thousand years old, now matted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor,
when only masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doubly dangerous now when
masked by dark undergrowth. You must find your own way here, mare. I will positively
have nothing to do with it. I disclaim all responsibility. There are the reins on your neck; do
what you will, only do something -- and if you can, get forward, and not back.
There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot contemptuously through the advanced
skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; and watch my friends some mile and a half off,
who have threaded a practicable trackway through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for
firs to root in, and are away in "a streamer." Now a streamer is produced in this wise.
There is but one possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook; one possible path in
a cover; and as each man has to wait till the man before him gets through, and then
gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on the man before him: wherefore, by all
laws of known arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the last of the ten find
himself two hundred yards behind the foremost, which process several times repeated,
produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz., twenty men galloping absurdly as hard
as they can, in a line half a mile long, and in humors which are celestial in the few
foremost, contented in the central, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in
the last man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. Farewell, brave gentlemen! I watch,
half sadly, half self-contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of fire over hill and dale,
and turn slowly homeward, to visit my old women.
97
The best essay of England
I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, planted with rows of oaks, surrounded
by trim, sunny cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilderness. Across the
village cricket-ground -- we are great cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old
game live among us; and then up another hollow lane, which leads between damp
shaughs and copses toward the further moor.
Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow lanes. They set him on
archaeological questions, more than he can solve; and I meditate as I go, how many
centuries it took to saw through the warm sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he
trots, with the oak-boughs meeting over his head. Was it ever worth men's while to dig out
the soil? Surely not. The old method must have been, to remove the softer upper spit, till
they got to tolerably hard ground; and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the
rains and the wheels of generations sawed it gradually deeper and deeper, till this roadditch was formed. But it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these hollow lanes,
especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I
am sure that they are. But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice,
but of cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and
liked to keep when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman
made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as "ridge-ways" from which, as from an
eagle's eyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marks strongly the
difference between the two races, that difference between the Roman paved road with its
established common way for all passengers, its regular stations and milestones, and the
Celtic trackway winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting to meet again, as if
each savage (for they were little better) had taken his own fresh path when he found the
next line of ruts too heavy for his cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many
ancient roads, some of them long disused, which could have been hollowed out for no
other purpose but that of concealment.
So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath me like a long, green garden between
its two banks of brown moor; and on through a cheerful little green, with red brick cottages
scattered all round, each with its large, neat garden, and beehives, and pigs, and geese,
and turf-stack, and clipped yews and hollies before the door, and rosy, dark-eyed children,
and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild "heth-cropper's" home. When he can, the
good-man of the house works at farm labor, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce,
he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little poaching. True, he seldom
98
The best essay of England
goes to church, save to be christened, married, or buried; but he equally seldom gets
drunk. For church and public stand together two miles off; so that social wants sometimes
bring their own compensations with them, and there are two sides to every question.
Hark! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. And then another, and another. My friends
may trust it; for the clod of these parts delights in the chase like any bare-legged Paddy,
and casts away flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and interfere in all possible ways,
out of pure love. The descendant of many generations of broom-squires and deer-stealers,
the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the King's deer are to be
shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an
orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably
once in his life, "hits the keeper into the river," and reconsiders himself for awhile after over
a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults; and I have mine. But he is a thorough
good-fellow nevertheless; quite as good as I: civil, contented, industrious, and often very
handsome; and a far shrewder fellow too -- owing to his dash of wild forest blood, from
gypsy, highwayman, and what not -- than his bulletheaded and flaxen-polled cousin, the
pure South-Saxon of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone;
swaggering in his youth; but when he grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately,
and courteous as a prince. Sixteen years have I lived with him hail fellow well met, and
never yet had a rude word or action from him.
With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and be buried by his side; and to him I go
home contented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows -- petty truly, seeing that
they include the whole primal mysteries of life -- food, raiment, and work to earn them
withal; love and marriage, birth and death, right-doing and wrong-doing, "Schicksal und
eigene Schuld"; and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the eyes of a minute
philosopher are most divine, because they are most commonplace -- catholic as the
sunshine and the rain which come down from the Heavenly Father, alike upon the evil and
the good. As for doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learned to believe that I am
not set to do fine things, simply because I am not able to do them; and as for seeing fine
things, with you, I have learned to see the sight as well as to try to do the duty -- which lies
nearest me; and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make good use of my eyes and
brain in this life, I shall see -- if it be of any use to me -- all the fine things, or perhaps finer
still, in the life to come. But if not -- what matter? In any life, in any state, however simple
99
The best essay of England
or humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a minute philosopher: and if a man be
busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require, for time or for eternity?
-- Charles Kingsley (1819-1875).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
Coming out of Magdalene College (Cambridge), Kingsley had intended to take up the law
but abandoned that idea and entered the church becoming the rector at Eversley at
Hampshire and spent the rest of his life there. He is best known for his novel, Westward
Ho! which dealt with Elizabethan England and the Spanish Main.
2
Here, I imagine, Kingsley quotes George Henry Lewes (1817-78), English litt 閞 ateur.
Lewes was to study in Germany for a period of time and was to write Life and Works of
Goethe (1855). He had a connection with George Eliot which lasted from 1854 through to
Lewes' death in 1878.
"Science And Culture," by Thomas Henry Huxley. 1
Six years ago, as some of my present hearers may remember, I had the privilege of
addressing a large assemblage of the inhabitants of this city, who had gathered together to
do honor to the memory of their famous townsman, Joseph Priestley; and, if any
satisfaction attaches to posthumous glory, we may hope that the manes of the burnt-out
philosopher were then finally appeased.
No man, however, who is endowed with a fair share of common sense, and not more than
a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary or posthumous fame with the
highest good; and Priestley's life leaves no doubt that he, at any rate, set a much higher
value upon the advancement of knowledge, and the promotion of that freedom of thought
which is at once the cause and the consequence of intellectual progress.
Hence I am disposed to think that, if Priestley could be amongst us to-day, the occasion of
our meeting would afford him even greater pleasure than the proceedings which
celebrated the centenary of his chief discovery. The kindly heart would be moved, the high
sense of social duty would be satisfied, by the spectacle of well-earned wealth, neither
squandered in tawdry luxury and vainglorious show, nor scattered with the careless charity
100
The best essay of England
which blesses neither him that gives nor him that takes, but expended in the execution of a
well-considered plan for the aid of present and future generations of those who are willing
to help themselves.
We shall all be of one mind thus far.But it is needful to share Priestley's keen interest in
physical science; and to have learned, as he had learned, the value of scientific training in
fields of inquiry apparently far remote from physical science; in order to appreciate, as he
would have appreciated, the value of the noble gift which Sir Josiah Mason2 has bestowed
upon the inhabitants of the Midland district.
For us children of the nineteenth century, however, the establishment of a college under
the conditions of Sir Josiah Mason's trust has a significance apart from any which it could
have possessed a hundred years ago. It appears to be an indication that we are reaching
the crisis of the battle, or rather of the long series of battles, which have been fought over
education in a campaign which began long before Priestley's time, and will probably not be
finished just yet.
In the last century, the combatants were the champions of ancient literature, on the one
side, and those of modern literature on the other, but, some thirty years ago, the contest
became complicated by the appearance of a third army, ranged round the banner of
physical science.
I am not aware that any one has authority to speak in the name of this new host. For it
must be admitted to be somewhat of a guerilla force, composed largely of irregulars, each
of whom fights pretty much for his own hand. But the impressions of a full private, who has
seen a good deal of service in the ranks, respecting the present position of affairs and the
conditions of a permanent peace, may not be devoid of interest; and I do not know that I
could make a better use of the present opportunity than by laying them before you.
From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science into ordinary
education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific education have met
with opposition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been poohpoohed by the men of
business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the
other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in their capacity of
Levites3 in charge of the ark of culture and monopolists of liberal education.
101
The best essay of England
The practical men believed that the idol whom they worship -- rule of thumb -- has been
the source of the past prosperity, and will suffice for the future welfare of the arts and
manufactures. They were of opinion that science is speculative rubbish; that theory and
practice have nothing to do with one another; and that the scientific habit of mind is an
impediment, rather than an aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs.
I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical men -- for although they were very
formidable thirty years ago, I am not sure that the pure species has not been extirpated. In
fact, so far as mere argument goes, they have been subjected to such a feu d'enfer that it
is a miracle if any have escaped. But I have remarked that your typical practical man has
an unexpected resemblance to one of Milton's angels. His spiritual wounds, such as are
inflicted by logical weapons, may be as deep as a well and as wide as a church door, but
beyond shedding a few drops of ichor4, celestial or otherwise, he is no whit the worse. So,
if any of these opponents be left, I will not waste time in vain repetition of the
demonstrative evidence of the practical value of science; but knowing that a parable will
sometimes penetrate where syllogisms fail to effect an entrance I will offer a story for their
consideration.
Once upon a time, a boy, with nothing to depend upon but his own vigorous nature, was
thrown into the thick of the struggle for existence in the midst of a great manufacturing
population. He seems to have had a hard fight, inasmuch as, by the time he was thirty
years of age, his total disposable funds amounted to twenty pounds. Nevertheless, middle
life found him giving proof of his comprehension of the practical problems he had been
roughly called upon to solve, by a career of remarkable prosperity.
Finally, having reached old age with its well-earned surroundings of "honor, troops of
friends," the hero of my story bethought himself of those who were making a like start in
life, and how he could stretch out a helping hand to them.
After long and anxious reflection this successful practical man of business could devise
nothing better than to provide them with the means of obtaining "sound, extensive, and
practical scientific knowledge." And he devoted a large part of his wealth and five years of
incessant work to this end.
102
The best essay of England
I need not point the moral of a tale which, as the solid and spacious fabric of the Scientific
College assures us, is no fable, nor can anything which I could say intensify the force of
this practical answer to practical objections.
We may take it for granted then, that, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, the
diffusion of thorough scientific education is an absolutely essential condition of industrial
progress; and that the college which has been opened to-day will confer an inestimable
boon upon those whose livelihood is to be gained by the practice of the arts and
manufactures of the district.
The only question worth discussion is, whether the conditions, under which the work of the
college is to be carried out, are such as to give it the best possible chance of achieving
permanent success.
Sir Josiah Mason, without doubt most wisely, has left very large freedom of action to the
trustees, to whom he proposes ultimately to, commit the administration of the college, so
that they may be able to adjust its arrangements in accordance with the changing
conditions of the future. But, with respect to three points, he has laid most explicit
injunctions upon both administrators and teachers.
Party politics are forbidden to enter into the minds of either, so, far as the work of the
college is concerned; theology is as sternly banished from its precincts; and finally, it is
especially declared that the college shall make no provision for "mere literary instruction
and education."
It does not concern me at present to dwell upon the first two injunctions any longer than
may be needful to express my full conviction of their wisdom. But the third prohibition
brings us face to face with those other opponents of scientific education, who are by no
means in the moribund condition of the practical man, but alive, alert, and formidable.
It is not impossible that we shall hear this express exclusion of "literary instruction and
education" from a college which, nevertheless, professes to give a high and efficient
education, sharply criticised. Certainly the time was that the Levites of culture would have
sounded their trumpets against its walls as against an educational Jericho.
How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is incompetent to
confer culture; that it touches none of the higher problems of life; and, what is worse, that
103
The best essay of England
the continual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in
the applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all kinds. How frequently
one has reason to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well as calling
its author a "mere scientific specialist." And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of
this form of opposition to scientific education in the past tense; may we not expect to be
told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of "mere literary instruction and education"
is a patent example of scientific narrow-mindedness?
I am not acquainted with Sir Josiah Mason's reasons for the action which he has taken; but
if, as I apprehend is the case, he refers to the ordinary classical course of our schools and
universities by the name of "mere literary instruction and education," I venture to offer
sundry reasons of my own in support of that action.
For I hold very strongly by two convictions. The first is, that neither the discipline nor the
subject-matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical
science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second is, that
for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least
effectual as an exclusively literary education.
I need hardly point out to you that these opinions, especially the latter are diametrically
opposed to those of the great majority of educated Englishmen, influenced as they are by
school and university traditions. In their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal
education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not merely with education and
instruction in literature, but in one particular form of literature, namely, that of Greek and
Roman antiquity. They hold that the man who has learned Latin and Greek, however little,
is educated; while he who is versed in other branches of knowledge, however deeply, is a
more or less respectable specialist, not admissible into cultured caste. The stamp of the
educated man, the university degree, is not for him.
I'm too well acquainted with the generous catholicity of spirit, the true sympathy with
scientific thought, which pervades the writings of our chief apostle of culture to identify him
with these opinions; and yet one may cull from one and another of those epistles to the
Philistines5, which so much delight all who do not answer to that name, sentences which
lend them some support.
104
The best essay of England
Mr. Arnold tells us that the meaning of culture is "to know the best that has been thought
and said in the world." It is the criticism of life contained in literature. That criticism regards
"Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to
a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their
common outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another.
Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will
in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries
out this programme. And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the
more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress?"
We have here to deal with two distinct propositions. The first, that a criticism of life is the
essence of culture; the second, that literature contains the materials which suffice for the
construction of such a criticism.
I think that we must all assent to the first proposition. For culture certainly means
something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an
ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a
theoretic standard. Perfect culture should apply a complete theory of life, based upon a
clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations.
But we may agree to all this, and yet strongly dissent from the assumption that literature
alone is competent to supply this knowledge. After having learnt all that Greek, Roman,
and Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern literatures have to tell us,
it is not self-evident that we have laid a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for the
criticism of life which constitutes culture.
Indeed, to any one acquainted with the scope of physical science, it is not at all evident.
Considering progress only in the "intellectual and spiritual sphere," I find myself wholly
unable to admit that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their common outfit
draws nothing from the stores of physical science. I should say that an army, without
weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might more hopefully
enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical
science has done in the last century, upon a criticism of life.
105
The best essay of England
When a biologist meets with an anomaly, he instinctively turns to the study of development
to clear it up. The rationale of Contradictory opinions may with equal confidence be sought
in history.
It is, happily, no new thing that Englishmen should employ their wealth in building and
endowing institutions for educational purposes. But, five or six hundred years ago, deeds
of foundation expressed or implied conditions as nearly as possible contrary to those
which have been thought expedient by Sir Josiah Mason. That is to say, physical science
was practically ignored, while a certain literary training was enjoined as a means to the
acquirement of knowledge which was essentially theological.
The reason of this singular contradiction between the actions of men alike animated by a
strong and disinterested desire to promote the welfare of their fellows, is easily discovered.
At that time, in fact, if any one desired knowledge beyond such as could be obtained by his
own observation, or by common conversation, his first necessity was to learn the Latin
language, inasmuch as all the higher knowledge of the western world was contained in
works written in that language. Hence, Latin grammar, with logic and rhetoric, studied
through Latin, were the fundamentals of education. With respect to the substance of the
knowledge imparted through this channel, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, as
interpreted and supplemented by the Romish Church, were held to contain a complete and
infallibly true body of information.
Theological dicta were, to the thinkers of those days, that which the axioms and definitions
of Euclid are to the geometers of these. The business of the philosophers of the Middle
Ages was to deduce from the data furnished by the theologians, conclusions in
accordance with ecclesiastical decrees. [See, Scholasticism.] They were allowed the high
privilege of showing, by logical process, how and why that which the Church said was true,
must be true. And if their demonstrations fell short of or exceeded this limit, the Church
was maternally ready to check their aberrations, if need be, by the help of the secular arm.
Between the two, our ancestors were furnished with a compact and complete criticism of
life. They were told how the world began and how it would end; they learned that all
material existence was but a base and insignificant blot upon the fair face of the spiritual
world, and that nature was, to all intents and purposes, the playground of the devil; they
learned that the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of
106
The best essay of England
things terrestrial; and more especially is it inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed
order, but that it could be, and constantly was, altered by the agency of innumerable
spiritual beings, good and bad, according as they were moved by the deeds and prayers of
men. The sum and substance of the whole doctrine was to produce the conviction that the
only thing really worth knowing in this world was how to secure that place in a better,
which, under certain conditions, the Church promised.
Our ancestors had a living belief in this theory of life, and acted upon it in their dealings
with education, as in all other matters. Culture meant saintliness -- after the fashion of the
saints of those days; the education that led to it was, of necessity, theological; and the way
to theology lay through Latin.
That the study of nature -- further than was requisite for the satisfaction of everyday wants
-- should have any bearing on human life was far from the thoughts of men thus trained.
Indeed, as nature had been cursed for man's sake, it was an obvious conclusion that
those who meddled with nature were likely to come into pretty close contact with Satan.
And, if any born scientific investigator followed his instincts, he might safely reckon upon
earning the reputation, and probably upon suffering the fate, of a sorcerer.
Had the western world been left to itself in Chinese isolation, there is no saying how long
this state of things might have endured. But, happily, it was not left to itself. Even earlier
than the thirteenth century, the development of Moorish civilization in Spain and the great
movement of the Crusades had introduced the leaven which, from that day to this has
never ceased to work. At first, through the intermediation of Arabic translations, afterwards
by the study of the originals, the western nations of Europe became acquainted with the
writings of the ancient philosophers and poets with the whole of the vast literature of
antiquity.
Whatever there was of high intellectual aspiration or dominant capacity in Italy, France,
Germany, and England, spent itself for centuries in taking possession of the rich
inheritance left by the dead civilization of Greece and Rome. Marvelously aided by the
invention of printing, classical learning spread and flourished. Those who possessed it
prided themselves on having attained the highest culture then within the reach of mankind.
And justly. For, saving Dante on his solitary pinnacle, there was no figure in modern
literature at the time of the Renaissance to compare with the men of antiquity; there was
107
The best essay of England
no art to compete with their sculpture; there was no physical science but that which
Greece had created. Above all, there was no other example of perfect intellectual freedom
-- of the unhesitating acceptance of reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme
arbiter of conduct.
The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound influence upon education. The
language of the monks and schoolmen seemed little better than gibberish to scholars fresh
from Vergil and Cicero, and the study of Latin was placed upon a new foundation.
Moreover, Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge. The student who sought
the highest thought of antiquity found only a second-hand reflection of it in Roman
literature, and turned his face to the full light of the Greeks. And after a battle, not
altogether dissimilar to that which is at present being fought over the teaching of physical
science, the study of Greek was recognized as an essential element of all higher
education.
Thus the humanists, as they were called, won the day, and the great reform which they
effected was of incalculable service to mankind. But the Nemesis of all reformers is finality;
and the reformers of education, like those of religion, fell into the profound, however
common, error of mistaking the beginning for the end of the work of reformation.
The representatives of the humanists in the nineteenth century take their stand upon
classical education as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of
Renaissance. Yet, surely, the present intellectual relations of the modern and the ancient
worlds are profoundly different from those which obtained three centuries ago. Leaving
aside the existence of a great and characteristically modern literature, of modern painting,
and, especially, of modern music, there is one feature of the present state of the civilized
world which separates it more widely from the Renaissance than the Renaissance was
separated from the Middle Ages.
This distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast and constantly increasing part
which is played by natural knowledge. Not only is our daily life shaped by it, not only does
the prosperity of millions of men depend upon it, but our whole theory of life has long been
influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the general conceptions of the universe,
which have been forced upon us by physical science.
108
The best essay of England
In fact, the most elementary acquaintance with the results of scientific investigation shows
us that they offer a broad and striking contradiction to the opinions so implicitly credited
and taught in the Middle Ages.
The notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no
longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material
universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that
nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes, and that the chief
business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly. Moreover
this scientific "criticism of life" presents itself to us with different credentials from any other.
It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It
admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic,
and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the
assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.
The purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the humanists in our
day gives no inkling of all this. A man may be a better scholar than Erasmus, and know no
more of the chief causes of the present intellectual fermentation than Erasmus did.
Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect, favor us with allocutions upon the
sadness of the antagonism of science to their medieval way of thinking, which betray an
ignorance of the first principles of scientific investigation, an incapacity for understanding
what a man of science means by veracity, and an unconsciousness of the weight of
established scientific truths, which is almost comical.
There is no great force in the tu quoque argument, or else the advocates of scientific
education might fairly enough retort upon the modern humanists that they may be learned
specialists, but that they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of life as
deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to be cruel, we might urge
that the humanists have brought this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too
full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they lack it.
The period of the Renaissance is commonly called that of the "Revival of Letters," as if the
influences then brought to bear upon the mind of Western Europe had been wholly
exhausted in the field of literature. I think it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of
science, effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous, was not less
momentous.
109
The best essay of England
In fact, the few and scattered students of nature of that day picked up the clew to her
secrets exactly as it fell from the hands of the Greeks a thousand years before. The
foundations of mathematics were so well laid by them that our children learn their
geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago.
Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus
and of Ptolemy [see under Copernicus]; modern physics of that of Democritus and of
Archimedes; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the knowledge
bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by Theophrastus, and by Galen.
We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks unless we know what
they thought about natural phenomena. We cannot fully apprehend their criticism of life
unless we understand the extent to which that criticism was affected by scientific
conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their culture, unless we are
penetrated, as the best minds among them were, with an unhesitating faith that the free
employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of
reaching truth.
Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our modern humanists to the possession of
the monopoly of culture and to the exclusive inheritance of the spirit of antiquity must be
abated, if not abandoned. But I should be very sorry that anything I have said could be
taken to imply a desire on my part to depreciate the value of classical education, as it
might be and as it sometimes is. The native capacities of mankind vary no less than their
opportunities; and while culture is one, the road by which one man may best reach it is
widely different from that which is most advantageous to another. Again, while scientific
education is yet inchoate and tentative, classical education is thoroughly well organized
upon the practical experience of generations of teachers. So that, given ample time for
learning and destination for ordinary life, or for a literary career, I do not think that a young
Englishman in search of culture can do better than follow the course usually marked out
for him, supplementing its deficiencies by his own efforts.
But for those who mean to make science their serious occupation; or who intend to follow
the profession of medicine; or who have to enter early upon the business of life; for all
these, in my opinion, classical education is a mistake; and it is for this reason that I am
glad to see "mere literary education and instruction" shut out from the curriculum of Sir
110
The best essay of England
Josiah Mason's college, seeing that its inclusion would probably lead to the introduction of
the ordinary smattering of Latin and Greek.
Nevertheless, I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary
education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An exclusively
scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusive literary training.
The value of the cargo does not compensate for a ship's being out of trim; and I should be
very sorry to think that the Scientific College would turn out none but lop-sided men.
There is no need, however, that such a catastrophe should happen. Instruction in English,
French, and German is provided, and thus the three greatest literatures of the modern
world are made accessible to the student.
French and German, and especially the latter language, are absolutely indispensable to
those who desire full knowledge in any department of science. But even supposing that
the knowledge of these languages acquired is not more than sufficient for purely scientific
purposes, every Englishman has, in his native tongue, an almost perfect instrument of
literary expression; and, in his own literature, models of every kind of literary excellence. If
an Englishman cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton,
neither, in my belief, will the profoundest study of Homer and Sophocles, Vergil and
Horace, give it to him.
Thus, since the constitution of the college makes sufficient provision for literary as well as
for scientific education, and since artistic instruction is also contemplated, it seems to me
that a fairly complete culture is offered to all who are willing to take advantage of it.
But I am not sure that at this point the "practical" man, scotched but not slain, may ask
what all this talk about culture has to do with an institution, the object of which is defined to
be "to promote the prosperity of the manufactures and the industry of the country." He may
suggest that what is wanted for this end is not culture, nor even a purely scientific
discipline, but simply a knowledge of applied science.
I often wish that this phrase, "applied science," had never been invented. For it suggests
that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use, which can be studied
apart from another sort of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which is
termed "Pure science." But there is no more complete fallacy than this. What people call
111
The best essay of England
applied science is nothing, but the application of pure science to particular classes of
problems. It consists of deductions from those general principles, established by reasoning
and observation, which constitute pure science. No one can safely make these deductions
until he has a firm grasp of the principles; and he can obtain that grasp only by personal
experience of the operations of observation and of reasoning on which they are founded.
Almost all the processes employed in the arts and manufactures fall within the range either
of physics or of chemistry. In order to improve them one must thoroughly understand them;
and no one has a chance of really understanding them, unless he has obtained that
mastery of principles and that habit of dealing with facts which is given by long-continued
and well-directed purely scientific training in the physical and chemical laboratory. So that
there really is no question as to the necessity of purely scientific discipline, even if the work
of the college were limited by the narrowest interpretation of its stated aims.
And, as to the desirableness of a wider culture than that yielded by science alone, it is to
be recollected that the improvement of manufacturing processes is only one of the
conditions which contribute to the prosperity of industry. Industry is a means and not an
end; and mankind work only to get something which they want. What that something is
depends partly on their innate, and partly on their acquired, desires.
If the wealth resulting from prosperous industry is to be spent upon the gratification of
unworthy desires, if the increasing perfection of manufacturing processes is to be
accompanied by an increasing debasement of those who carry them on, I do not see the
good of industry and prosperity.
Now it is perfectly true that men's views of what is desirable depend upon their characters;
and that the innate proclivities to which we give that name are not touched by any amount
of instruction. But it does not follow that even mere intellectual education may not, to an
indefinite extent, modify the practical manifestation of the characters of men in their
actions, by supplying them with motives unknown to the ignorant. A pleasure-loving
character will have pleasure of some sort; but, if you give him the choice, he may prefer
pleasures which do not degrade him to those which do. And this choice is offered to every
man who possesses in literary or artistic culture a never-failing source of pleasures, which
are neither withered by age, nor staled by custom, nor embittered in the recollection by the
pangs of self-reproach.
112
The best essay of England
If the institution opened to-day fulfils the intention of its founder, the picked intelligences
among all classes of the population of this district will pass through it. No child born in
Birmingham, henceforward, if he have the capacity to profit by the opportunities offered to
him, first in the primary and other schools, and afterward in the Scientific College, need fail
to obtain, not merely the instruction, but the culture most appropriate to the conditions of
his life.
Within these walls the future employer and the future artisan may sojourn together for
awhile, and carry, through all their lives, the stamp of the influences then brought to bear
upon them. Hence, it is not beside the mark to remind you that the prosperity of industry
depends not merely upon the improvement of manufacturing processes, not merely upon
the ennobling of the individual character, but upon a third condition, namely, a clear
understanding of the conditions of social life on the part of both the capitalist and the
operative, and their agreement upon common principles of social action. They must learn
that social phenomena are as much the expression of natural laws as any others; that no
social arrangements can be permanent unless they harmonize with the requirements of
social statics and dynamics; and that, in the nature of things, there is an arbiter whose
decisions execute themselves.
But this knowledge is only to be obtained by the application of the methods of investigation
adopted in physical researches to the investigation of the phenomena of society. Hence, I
confess I should like to see one addition made to the excellent scheme of education
propounded for the college, in the shape of provision for the teaching of sociology. For
though we are all agreed that party politics are to have no place in the instruction of the
college; yet in this country, practically governed as it is now by universal suffrage, every
man who does his duty must exercise political functions. And if the evils which are
inseparable from the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the perpetual oscillation
of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of selfrestraining freedom; it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with
political, as they now deal with scientifical questions; to be ashamed of undue haste and
partisan prejudice in the one and to believe that the machinery of society is at least as
delicate as that of a spinning-jenny, and as little likely to be improved by the meddling of
those who have not taken the trouble to master the principles of its action.
113
The best essay of England
In conclusion, I am sure that I make myself the mouthpiece of all present in offering to the
venerable founder of the institution, which commences its beneficent career, our
congratulations on the completion of his work; and in expressing the conviction that the
remotest posterity will point to it as a crucial instance of the wisdom which natural piety
leads all men to ascribe to their ancestors.
-- T. H. Huxley (1825-1895).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
This was an address delivered in 1880, at the opening of Mason College, Birmingham,
England, now the University of Birmingham.
2
A few words on Sir Josiah Mason (1795-1881): He began as a hawker and in 1829
began to make pens and "soon became the greatest pen-maker in the world." Mason was
not only in the pen business; but, also, in the smelting of various ores; and, went into
partnership with the Elkingtons who founded the first establishment in Breton, for carrying
out the processes of electroplating. Mason made a fortune. In his later years he turned to
philanthropy. He was to give a gift of ?80,000 for the founding of Mason University (now
Birmingham University).
3
Levites: "One of that portion of the tribe [ancient judaism] who acted as assistants to the
priests in the temple-worship." (OED.)
4
Ichor: "The ethereal fluid supposed to flow like blood in the veins of the gods."
5
Philistines: "One of an alien warlike people, of uncertain origin, who occupied the
southern sea-coast of Palestine, and in early times constantly harassed the Israelites."
Has come to mean: "A person deficient in liberal culture and enlightenment, whose
interests are chiefly bounded by material and commonplace things. But often applied
contemptuously by connoisseurs of any particular art or department of learning to one who
has no knowledge or appreciation of it ..."
"A Message To Garcia"
By Elbert Hubbard 1
114
The best essay of England
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like
Mars at perihelion.
When war broke out between Spain & the United States, it was very necessary to
communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the
mountain vastness of Cuba- no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could
reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.
What to do!
Some one said to the President, "There's a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia
for you, if anybody can."
Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How "the fellow by the
name of Rowan" took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart,
in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the
jungle, & in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a
hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special
desire now to tell in detail. The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter
to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask,
"Where is he at?"
By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the
statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor
instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be
loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing- "Carry a message
to Garcia!"
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias. No man, who has endeavored to
carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled
at times by the imbecility of the average man- the inability or unwillingness to concentrate
on a thing and do it.
Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, & half-hearted work seem the
rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other
men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, & sends him an
Angel of Light for an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office- six clerks are
within call. Summon any one and make this request: "Please look in the encyclopedia and
make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio."
Will the clerk quietly say, "Yes, sir," and go do the task? On your life, he will not. He will
115
The best essay of England
look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:
Who was he?
Which encyclopedia?
Where is the encyclopedia?
Was I hired for that?
Don't you mean Bismarck?
What's the matter with Charlie doing it?
Is he dead?
Is there any hurry?
Shan't I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for?
And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained
how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the
other clerks to help him try to find Garcia- and then come back and tell you there is no
such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.
Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your "assistant" that Correggio is
indexed under the C's, not in the K's, but you will smile sweetly and say, "Never mind," and
go look it up yourself. And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this
infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that
put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they
do when the benefit of their effort is for all?
A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting "the bounce"
Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a stenographer, and nine
out of ten who apply, can neither spell nor punctuate- and do not think it necessary to.
Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?
"You see that bookkeeper," said the foreman to me in a large factory.
"Yes, what about him?"
"Well he's a fine accountant, but if I'd send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish
the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and
when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for."
Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the "downtrodden
denizen of the sweat-shop" and the "homeless wanderer searching for honest
employment," & with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get
116
The best essay of England
frowsy ne'er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with "help" that
does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a
constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away "help"
that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are
being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are
hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer- but out and forever out, the incompetent
and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to
keep the best- those who can carry a message to Garcia.
I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his
own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to any one else, because he carries with him
constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress
him. He cannot give orders; and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him
to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, "Take it yourself."
Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his
threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular fire-brand of
discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe
of a thick-soled No. Nine boot.
Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical
cripple; but in our pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a
great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast
turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slip-shod imbecility,
and the heartless ingratitude, which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry &
homeless.
Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone aslumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds- the man who,
against great odds has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's
nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail & worked for
day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to
be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no
recommendation; & all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all
poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss"
is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia,
quietly take the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention
of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid
117
The best essay of England
off," nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for
just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that
no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town and village- in every
office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed, & needed badlythe man who can carry a message to Garcia.
-- Elbert Hubbard, 1899.
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915) was a writer and publisher who "prospered at purveying
optimism, sweetness and light."
"The Crystal Vase"
By Maurice Henry Hewlett
I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly in life, thank goodness,
nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been objected, forestalled me there, and it is true
that she very nearly did - but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the novel
should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events; events - well, that means that
there were collisions. They may have been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads
together, and there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of cases,
there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be interesting; and even if
stars should happen to be struck out, it is not the collision, nor the stars either, which
interest us most. No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which we
care about, and as mental process is always going on, and the state of the soul is never
the same for two moments together, there is ample material for a novel of extreme
interest, which need never finish, which might indeed be as perennial as a daily
newspaper or the Annual Register. Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will
read anybody else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives in a cage, cut off from
every other man-Jack; because we are incapable of knowing what is doing on in the mind
of our nearest and dearest, and because we burn for the assurance we may get by
evidence of homogeneity procurable from any human source. Man is a creature of social
instinct condemned by his nature to be solitary. Creatures in all outward respects similar to
118
The best essay of England
himself are awhirl about him. They cannot help him, nor he them; he cannot even be sure,
for all he may assume it, that they share his hope and calling.
Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
And see a myriad souls adrift,
Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
Shuddering across the void: "The truth!
Succour! The Truth!" None can reply.
That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy, tragedy, farce. The
things that happen to us are not our life. They are imposed upon life, they come and go.
But life is a secret process. We only see the accretions.
The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather begun, by Miss
Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane Austen by telling us much more
about what seems to be infinitely less, but is not so in reality. She dips into the well
whereof Miss Austen skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of
a young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four, if not five,
volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a mother and the marriage of a sister
or so. She may write forty, and I shall be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states
of the soul, emotional reaction - these as they are moved in us by other people are Miss
Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these are handled is the interest we can
devote to her novels. These fleeting things are Miss Richardson's game, and they are the
things which interest us most in ourselves, and the things which we desire to know most
about in our neighbours.
But, of course, it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot, tell us all. A novel is a
piece of art which does not so much report life as transmute it. She takes up what she
needs for her purpose, and that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry - we don't
go to that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us all about himself
at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for it is his affair to transfigure rather than
transmute, to move us by beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully
in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished article for ourselves,
given enough matter; and indeed the poetry which is imagined in contemplation is apt to
be much finer than that which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The
fact, to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer. Whether it is
119
The best essay of England
marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now no man will undress in public with
design. It may be a pity, but so it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think,
by analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in In Memoriam. Again, The
Angel in the House brought Patmore as near to self-explication as a poet can go.
Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more doubtful field of experiment.
What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers - to Madame de S 関 ign? to Gray, to Walpole
and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies a letter-reader, and just that
inadequacy of spoken communication will smother up our written words. Madame de S 関
ign?must placate her high-sniffing daughter; Gray must please himself; Walpole must at
any cost be lively; Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate the judgment of
the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the looking-glass as he wrote; and as
for Charles Lamb, do not suppose that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir
Sidney Colvin thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree with him.
Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful,
even profound. He has a sardonic turn of language hardly to be equalled outside
Shakespeare. "Were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation - on account of
my dying day, and because woman have cancers." Where will you match that but from
Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that
not one word I can utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical
Nature." So I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his states of soul,
until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of mind and disease of body. Revelation,
then, like gouts of blood, did issue, but of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a
crisis.
Parva componere magnis, there is a letter contained in "The Early Diary of Frances
Burney" (ed. Mrs. A.R. Ellis, 1899), more completely apocalyptic than anything else of the
kind accessible to me. Its writer was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife,
therefore half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young lady who could not let
herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal, as Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous,
uncommon, lively, comical, entertaining, frank, and undisguised" - or because of it - she
did contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more thoroughly than the
many times more expert. You have her here in the pangs of a love- affair, of how long
standing I don't know, but now evidently in a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in
elopement, post-chaise, clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth-century. Here it is in an
120
The best essay of England
earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of the shoulder. I reproduce it with
Maria's punctuation, which shows it to have proceeded, as no doubt she did herself, in
gasps:
"I was at the Assembly, forced to go entirely against my own Inclination. But I always have
sacrificed my own Inclinations to the will of other people - could not resist the pressing
Importunity of - Bet Dickens - to go - tho' it proved Horribly stupid. I drank tea at the - told
old Turner - I was determined not to dance - he would not believe me - a wager ensued half a crown provided I followed my own Inclinations - agreed - Mr. Audley asked me. I
refused - sat still - yet followed my own Inclinations. But four couple began - Martin (c'etait
Lui) was there - yet stupid - n'importe - quite Indifferent - on both sides - who had I - to
converse with the whole Evening - not a female friend - none there - not an acquaintance All Dancing - who then - I've forgot - n'importe - I broke my earring - how - heaven knows foolishly enough - one can't always keep on the Mask of Wisdom - well n'importe I danced
a Minuet a quatre the latter end of the Eve - with a stupid Wretch - need I name him - They
danced cotillions almost the whole Night - two sets - yet I did not join them - Miss Jenny
Hawkins danced - with who- can't you guess - well - n'importe -"
There is more, but my pen is out of breath. Nobody but Mr. Jingle ever wrote like that; and
in so far as Maria Allen may be said to have had a soul, there in its little spasms is the soul
of Maria Allen, with all the malentendus of the ballroom and all the surgings of a love-affair
at cross-purposes thrown in.
As for Fanny Burney's early diary, its careful and admirable editor claims that you have in it
"the only published, perhaps the only existing record of the life of an English girl, written of
herself in the eighteenth century." I believe that to be true. It is a record, and a faithful and
very charming record of the externals of such a life. As such, it is, to me, at least, a
valuable thing. If it does not unfold the amiable, brisk, and happy Fanny herself, there are
two simple reasons why it could not. First, she was writing her journal for the entertainment
of old Mr. Crisp of Chessington, the "Daddy Crisp" of her best pages; secondly, it is not at
all likely that she knew of anything to unfold. Nor, for that matter, was Fanny herself of the
kind that can unfold to another person. Yet there is a charm all over the book, which some
may place here, some there, but which all will confess. For me it is not so much that Fanny
herself is a charming girl, and a girl of shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and an
admirable gift of mimicry. She has all that, and more - she has a good heart. Her sister
121
The best essay of England
Susan is as good as she, and there are many of Susan's letters. But the real charm of the
book, I think, is in the series of faithful pictures it contains of the everyday round of an
everyday family. Dutch pictures all - passers-by, a knock at the front door, callers - Mr.
Young, "in light blue embroidered with silver, a bag and sword, and walking in the rain"; a
jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home - the Agujari in one of her humours; a masquerade "a very private one, at the house of Mr. Laluze. ...Hetty had for three months thought of
nothing else... she went as a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist.
Nothing could look more simple, innocent and pretty. My dress was a close pink Persian
vest covered with a gauze in loose pleats..." What else? Oh, a visit to Teignmouth - Maria
Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester; quiet days at King's Lynn, where "I have just
finished Henry and Frances... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry, and
on the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful to our thoughts, Eternal
Misery..." Terrific novel: but need I go on? There may be some to whom a description of
the nothings of our life will be as flat as the nothings themselves - but I am not of that
party. The things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm. It is the charm of
innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words.
The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral dew. They cannot
reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed reassurance themselves.
Where, then, shall we turn? So far as I am aware, to two only, except for two others whom
I leave out of account. Rousseau is one, for it is long since I read him, but my recollection
is that the Confessions is a kind of novel, pre-meditated, selective, done with great art.
Marie Bashkirtseff is another I have not read her at all. Of the two who remain I leave
Pepys also out of account, because, though it may be good for us to read Pepys, it is
better to have read him and be through with it. There, under the grace of God, go a many
besides Pepys, and among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a stump of
pencil. We are left then with one whom it is ill to name in the same fill of the inkpot,
"Wordsworth's exquisite sister," as Keats, who saw her once, at once knew her to be.
In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, you may have the delight of daily intercourse -
famigliarmente discorrendo - with one of the purest and noblest souls ever housed in flesh;
to that you may add the reassurance to be got from word and implication beyond doubt.
She tells us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she sees
deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not only that, knowing her, we
122
The best essay of England
are grounded in the rudiments of honour and lovely living; it is to learn that human life can
be so lived, and to conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.
These journals are for fragments only of the years which they cover, and as such exist for
Jan.-May, 1798 (Alfoxden); May-Dec., 1800, Oct.-Dec., 1801, Jan.-July, 1802: all these at
Grasmere. They have been printed by Professor Knight, and I have the assurance of Mr.
Gordon Wordsworth that what little has been omitted is unimportant. Nothing is
unimportant to me, and I wish the whole had been given us; but what we have is enough
whereby to trace the development of her extraordinary mind and of her power of selfexpression. The latter, undoubtedly, grew out of emotion, which gradually culminated until
the day of William Wordsworth's marriage. There it broke, and with it, as if by a
determination of the will, there the revelation ceased. A new life began with the coming of
Mary Wordsworth to Dove Cottage, a life of which Dorothy records the surface only.
The Alfoxden fragment (20 Jan.-22 May, 1798), written when she was twenty-seven, is
chiefly notable for its power of interpreting landscape. That was a power which
Wordsworth himself possessed in a high degree. There can be no doubt, I think, that they
egged each other on, but I myself should find it hard to say which was egger-on and which
the egged. This is the first sentence of it:
"20 Jan. - The green paths down the hillsides are channels for streams. The young wheat
is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered
together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It
peoples itself in the sunbeams."
Here is one a few days later:
"23rd. - Bright sunshine; went out at 3 o'cl. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with
deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red.
The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea
distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we would never hear in summer. We
attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing
birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. The villages
marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road."
123
The best essay of England
She handles words, phrases, like notes or chords of music, and never gets her landscape
by direct description. One more picture and I must leave it:
"26. - ...Walked to the top of a high hill to see a fortification. Again sat down to feed upon
the prospect; a magnificent scene, curiously spread out for even minute inspection though
so extensive that the mind is afraid to calculate its bounds..."
Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him. Here is a curious point to note.
Dorothy records:
"March 7th. - William and I drank tea at Coleridge's. Observed nothing particularly
interesting... One only leaf upon the top of a tree - the sole remaining leaf - danced round
and round like a rag blown by the wind."
And Coleridge has in Christabel:
That one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light , and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
William, Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Hamburg at the end of that year, but in 1800 the
brother and sister were in Grasmere; and the journal which opens with May 14, at once
betrays the great passion of Dorothy's life:
"William and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at half-past two o'clock, cold pork in
their pockets. I left them at the turning of the Low-Wood bay under the trees. My heart was
so full I could hardly speak to W., when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon
a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier. The lake
looked to me, I know not why, dull and melancholy, and the weltering on the shore seemed
a heavy sound... I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return, and I set
about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give
William pleasure by it when he comes again..."
"Because I will not quarrel with myself!" She is full of such illuminations. Here is another:
"Sunday, June 1st. - After tea went to Ambleside round the lakes. A very fine warm
evening. Upon the side of Loughrigg my heart dissolved in what I saw."
124
The best essay of England
Now here is her account of a country funeral which she reads into, or out of, the
countryside:
"Wednesday, 3rd Sept. - ...a funeral at John Dawson's... I was affected to tears while we
stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children.
When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining, and the prospect looked as
divinely beautiful as I ever saw it. It seemed more sacred that I had ever seen it, and yet
more allied to human life. I thought she was going to a quiet spot, and I could not help
weeping very much..."
The italics are mind. William was pleased to call her weeping "nervous blubbering."
And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the last year of the five in
which those two had lived as one soul and one heart. They were at Dove cottage, on
something under ?50 a year. Poems were thronging thick about them; they were living
intensely. John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still
Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy, she lives
a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the third of March, and William is to
go to London. "Before we had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses
for Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for writing, to settle
for the press, pack up... Since he left me at half-past eleven (it is now two) I have been
putting the drawers in order, laid by his clothes, which he had thrown here and there and
everywhere, filed two months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two boiled eggs and two
apple tarts... The robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I will be busy. I will look
well, and be well when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitter
apples. I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the fire... I walked round the two
lakes, crossed the stepping-stones at Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always sit. I was
full of thought of my darling. Blessings on him." Where else in our literature will you find
mood so tender, so intimately, so delicately related?
A week later, and William returned. With him, it seems, her descriptive powers. "Monday
morning - a soft rain and mist. We walked to Rydale for letters. The vale looked very
beautiful in excessive simplicity, yet at the same time, uncommon obscurity. The church
stood alone, mountains behind. The meadows looked calm and rich, bordering on the still
lake. Nothing else to be seen but lake and island." Exquisite landscape. For its like we
must go to Japan. Here is another. An interior. It is the 23rdof March, "about ten o'clock, a
125
The best essay of England
quiet night. The fire flickers, and the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my
beloved as he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf..." No more,
but the peace of it is profound, the art incomparable.
In April, between the 5th and 12th, William went into Yorkshire upon an errand which she
knew and dreaded. Her trouble makes the words throb.
"Monday, 12th... The ground covered with snow. Walked to T. Winkinson's and sent for
letters. The woman brought me one from William and Mary. It was a sharp windy night.
Thomas Wilkinson came with me to Barton and questioned me like a catechiser all the
way. Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart. I was so full of
thought of my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he left me. Then I had time
to look at the moon while I was thinking of my own thoughts. The moon travelled through
the clouds, tinging them yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger
than the other... At this time Williams, as I found the next day, was riding by himself
between Middleham and Barnard Castle."
I don't know where else to find the vague torment of thought, its way of enhancing colour
and form in nature, more intensely observed. Next day: "When I returned William was
come. The surprise shot through me." This woman was not so much poet as crystal vase.
You can see the though cloud and take shape.
The twin life was resumed for yet a little while. In the same month came her descriptions of
the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, and of the scene by Brothers Water, which prove to
anybody in need of proof that she was William's well-spring of poesy. Not that the journal
is necessarily involved. No need to suppose that he even read it. But that she could make
him see, and be moved by, what she had seen is proved by this: "17th. - ...I saw a robin
chasing a scarlet butterfly this morning;" and "Sunday, 18th. - ...William wrote the poem on
The Robin and the Butterfly." No, beautiful beyond praise as the journals are, it is certain
that she was more beautiful than they. And what a discerning, illuminative eye she had!
"As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of
the sheep, owning to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful,
but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more
splendid world..." What a woman to go a-gypsying through the world with!
126
The best essay of England
Then comes the end... "Thursday, 8th July. - ...In the afternoon, after we had talked a little,
William fell asleep. I read The Winter's Tale; then I went to bed but did not sleep. The
swallows stole in and out of their nest, and sat there, whiles quite still, whiles they sung
low for two minutes or more at a time, just like a muffled robin. William was looking at The
Pedlar when I got up. He arranged it, and after tea I wrote it out - 280 lines... The moon
was behind... We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and dull, but
our own vale was very solemn - the shape of Helm Crag was quite distinct though black.
We walked backwards and forwards on the White Moss path; there was a sky like white
brightness on the lake. ...O beautiful place! Dear May, William. The hour is come... I must
prepare to go. The swallows, I must leave them, the wall, the garden, the roses, all. Dear
creatures, they sang last night after I was in bed; seemed to be singing to one another, just
before they settled to rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell."
Next day she set out with William to meet her secret dread, knowing that life in Rydale
could never be the same again. Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson on the 4th October,
1802. The secret is no secret now, for Dorothy was a crystal vase.
-- Maurice Henry Hewlett (1861-1923)
Hewlett, we see from Chambers Biographical Dictionary was born in London. He was the
"keeper of land revenue records" (1896-1900). One of historical romances was The Forest
Lovers (1898); his poem, Chambers says, "The Song of the Plow" (1916) "is perhaps his
best work."
[Table of Picked Essays]
"On The Art Of Living With Others"
By Sir Arthur Helps
The "Iliad" for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the great domestic epic? Yet
it is but commonplace to say that passions may rage round a tea-table which would not
have misbecome men dashing at one another in war chariots; and evolutions of patience
and temper are performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand. Men have worshipped some fantastic being for living alone in a wilderness;
but social martyrdoms place no saints upon the calendar.
127
The best essay of England
We may blind ourselves to it if we like, but the hatreds and disgusts that there are behind
friendship, relationship, service, and, indeed, proximity of all kinds, is one of the darkest
spots upon earth. The various relations of life, which bring people together, cannot, as we
know, be perfectly fulfilled except in a state where there will, perhaps, be no occasion for
any of them. It is no harm, however, to endeavor to see whether there are any methods
which make these relations in the least degree more harmonious now.
In the first place, if people are to live happily together, they must not fancy, because they
are thrown together now, that all their lives have been exactly similar up to the present
time, that they started exactly alike, and that they are to be for the future of the same mind.
A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be assured of in social
knowledge: it is to life what Newton's law is to astronomy. Sometimes men have a
knowledge of it with regard to the world in general: they do not expect the outer world to
agree with them in all points, but are vexed at not being able to drive their own tastes and
opinions into those they live with. Diversities distress them. They will not see that there are
many forms of virtue and wisdom. Yet we might as well say: "Why all these stars; why this
difference; why not all one star?"
Many of the rules for people living together in peace follow from the above. For instance,
not to interfere unreasonably with others, not to ridicule their tastes, not to question and
requestion their resolves, not to indulge in perpetual comment on their proceedings, and to
delight in their having other pursuits than ours, are all based upon a thorough perception of
the simple fact that they are not we.
Another rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock subjects of disputation. It
mostly happens, when people live much together, that they come to have certain set
topics, around which, from frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words,
mortified vanity, and the like, that the original subject of difference becomes a standing
subject for quarrel; and there is a tendency in all minor disputes to drift down to it.
Again, if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too much to logic, and
suppose that everything is to be settled by sufficient reason. Dr. Johnson saw this clearly
with regard to married people, when he said: "Wretched would be the pair above all names
of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute
detail of a domestic day." But the application should be much more general than he made
it. There is no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is worth them. And when we
128
The best essay of England
recollect how two lawyers, or two politicians, can go on contending, and that there is no
end of one-sided reasoning on any subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is
the best mode for arriving at truth. But certainly it is not the way to arrive at good temper.
If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon those with whom
you live. The number of people who have taken out judge's patents for themselves is very
large in any society. Now it would be hard for a man to live with another who was always
criticising his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism. It would be like living between
the glasses of a microscope. But these self-elected judges, like their prototypes, are very
apt to have the persons they judge brought before them in the guise of culprits.
One of the most provoking forms of the criticism above alluded to is that which may be
called criticism over the shoulder. "Had I been consulted," "Had you listened to me," "But
you always will," and such short scraps of sentences may remind many of us of
dissertations which we have suffered and inflicted, and of which we cannot call to mind
any soothing effect.
Another rule is, not to let familiarity swallow up all courtesy. Many of us have a habit of
saying to those with whom we live such things as we say about strangers behind their
backs. There is no place, however, where real politeness is of more value than where we
mostly think it would be superfluous. You may say more truth, or rather speak out more
plainly, to your associates, but not less courteously, than you do to strangers.
Again, we must not expect more from the society of our friends and companions than it
can give; and especially must not expect contrary things. It is somewhat arrogant to talk of
travelling over other minds (mind being, for what we know, infinite): but still we become
familiar with the upper views, tastes, and tempers of our associates. And it is hardly in man
to estimate justly what is familiar to him. In travelling along at night, as Hazlitt says, we
catch a glimpse into cheerful-looking rooms with lights blazing in them, and we conclude,
involuntarily, how happy the inmates must be. Yet there is heaven and hell in those rooms,
the same heaven and hell that we have known in others.
There are two great classes of promoters of social happiness; cheerful people, and people
who have some reticence. The latter are more secure benefits to society even than the
former. They are non-conductors of all the heats and animosities around them. To have
peace in a house, or a family, or any social circle, the members of it must beware of
129
The best essay of England
passing on hasty and uncharitable speeches, which, the whole of the context seldom
being told, is often not conveying but creating mischief. They must be very good people to
avoid doing the; for let human nature say what it will, it likes sometimes to look on at a
quarrel; and that, not altogether from ill-nature, but from a love of excitement - for the
same reason that Charles II liked to attend the debates in the Lords, because they were
"as good as a play."
We come now to the consideration of temper, which might have been expected to be
treated first. But to cut off the means and causes of bad temper is, perhaps, of as much
importance as any direct dealing with the temper itself. Besides, it is probable that in small
social circles there is more suffering from unkindness than ill-temper. Anger is a thing that
those who live under us suffer more from than those who live with us. But all the forms of
ill-humor and sour-sensitiveness, which especially belong to equal intimacy (though indeed
they are common to all), are best to be met by impassiveness. When two sensitive
persons are shut up together, they go on vexing each other with a reproductive irritability.
But sensitive and hard people get on well together. The supply of temper is not altogether
out of the usual laws of supply and demand.
Intimate friends and relations should be careful when they go out into the world together,
or admit others to their own circle, that they do not make a bad use of the knowledge
which they have gained of each other by their intimacy. Nothing is more common than this,
and did it not mostly proceed from mere carelessness it would be superlatively
ungenerous. You seldom need wait for the written life of a man to hear about his
weaknesses, or what are supposed to be such, if you know his intimate friends, or meet
him in company with them.
Lastly, in conciliating those we live with, it is most surely done, not by consulting their
interests, nor by giving way to their opinions, so much as by not offending their tastes. The
most refined part of us lies in this region of taste, which is perhaps a result of our whole
being rather than a part of our nature. and at any rate is the region of our most subtle
sympathies and antipathies.
It may be said that if the great principles of Christianity were attended to, all such rules,
suggestions, and observations as the above would be needless. True enough! Great
principles are at the bottom of all things; but to apply them to daily life, many little rules,
precautions, and insights are needed. Such things hold a middle place between real life
130
The best essay of England
and principles, as form does between matter and spirit: moulding the one and expressing
the other.
-- Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75)
(Helps was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge
and held a
number of high offices in the mid-19th century.)
"The English Constitution," by Henry Hallam.
The government of England, in all times recorded by history, has been one of those mixed
or limited monarchies which the Celtic and Gothic tribes appear universally to have
established, in preference to the coarse despotism of eastern nations, to the more artificial
tyranny of Rome and Constantinople, or to the various models of republican polity which
were tried upon the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. It bore the same general features, it
belonged, as it were, to the same family, as the governments of almost every European
state, though less resembling, perhaps, that of France than any other. But, in the course of
many centuries, the boundaries which determined the sovereign's prerogative and the
people's liberty or power having seldom been very accurately defined by law, or at least by
such law as was deemed fundamental and unchangeable, the forms and principles of
political regimen in these different nations became more divergent from each other,
according to their peculiar dispositions, the revolutions they underwent, or the influence of
personal character. England, more fortunate than the rest, had acquired in the fifteenth
century a just reputation for the goodness of her laws and the security of her citizens from
oppression.
This liberty had been the slow fruit of ages, still waiting a happier season for its perfect
ripeness, but already giving proof of the vigour and industry which had been employed in
its culture. I have endeavoured, in a work of which this may in a certain degree be
reckoned a continuation, to trace the leading events and causes of its progress. It will be
sufficient in this place briefly to point out the principal circumstances in the polity, of
England at the accession of Henry VII.
The essential checks upon the, royal authority were five in number. 1. The king could levy
no sort of new tax upon his people, except by the grant of his parliament, consisting as
we11 of bishops and mitred abbots, or lords spiritual, and of hereditary peers or temporal
131
The best essay of England
lords, who sat and voted promiscuously in the same chamber, as of representatives from
the freeholders of each county, and from the burgesses of many towns and less
considerable places, forming the lower or commons' house. 2. The previous assent and
authority of the same assembly was necessary for every new law, whether of a general or
temporary nature. 3. No man could be committed to prison but by a legal warrant
specifying his offence; and by a usage nearly tantamount to constitutional right, he must
be speedily brought to trial by means of regular sessions of gaol delivery. 4. The fact of
guilt or innocence on a criminal charge was determined in a public court, and in the county
where the offence was alleged to have occurred, by a jury of twelve men, from whose
unanimous verdict no appeal could be made. Civil rights, so far as they depended on
questions of fact, were subject to the same decision. 5. The officers and servants of the
Crown, violating the personal liberty, or other right of the subject, might be sued in an
action for damages, to be assessed by a jury, or, in some cases, were liable to criminal
process; nor could they plead any warrant or command in their justification, not even the
direct order of the king.
These securities, though it would be easy to prove that they were all recognized in law,
differed much in the degree of their effective operation. It may be said of the first, that it
was now completely established. After a long contention, the kings of England had
desisted for near a hundred years from every attempt to impose taxes without consent of
parliament; and their recent device of demanding benevolences, or half-compulsory gifts,
though very oppressive, and on that account just abolished by an act of the late usurper,
Richard, was in effect a recognition of the general principle, which it sought to elude rather
than transgress.
The necessary concurrence of the two houses of parliament in legislation, though it could
not be more unequivocally established than the former, had in earlier times been more free
from all attempt or pretext of encroachment. We know not of any laws that were ever
enacted by our kings without the assent and advice of their great council; though it is justly
doubted, whether the representatives of the ordinary freeholders, or of the boroughs, had
seats and suffrages in that assembly during seven or eight reigns after the conquest. They
were then, however, ingrafted upon with plenary legislative authority; and if the sanction of
a statute were required for this fundamental axiom, we might refer to one in the 15th of
Edward II (1322), which declares that 'the matters to be established for the estate of the
king and of his heirs, and for the estate of the realm and of the people, should be treated,
132
The best essay of England
accorded, and established in parliament by the king, and by the assent of the prelates,
earls, and barons, and the commonalty of the realm, according as had been before
accustomed.'
It may not be impertinent to remark in this place, that the opinion of such as have fancied
the royal prerogative under the houses of Plantagenet and Tudor to have had no effectual
or unquestioned limitations is decidedly refuted by the notorious fact, that no alteration in
the general laws of the realm was ever made, or attempted to be made, without the
consent of parliament. It is not surprising that the council, in great exigency of money,
should sometimes employ force to extort it from the merchants, or that servile lawyers
should be found to vindicate these encroachments of power. Impositions, like other
arbitrary measures, were particular and temporary, prompted by rapacity, and endured
through compulsion. But if the kings of England had been supposed to enjoy an absolute
authority, we should find some proofs of it in their exercise of the supreme function of
sovereignty, the enactment of new laws. Yet there is not a single instance from the first
dawn of our constitutional history, where a proclamation, or order of council, has dictated
any change, however trifling, in the code of private rights, or in the penalties of criminal
offences. Was it ever pretended that the king could empower his subjects to devise their
freeholds, or to levy fines of their entailed lands? Has even the slightest regulation as to
judicial procedure, or any permanent prohibition, even in fiscal law, been ever enforced
without statute? There was, indeed, a period, later than that of Henry VII, when a control
over the subject's free right of doing all things not unlawful was usurped by means of
proclamations. These, however, were always temporary, and did not affect to alter the
established law. But though it would be difficult to assert that none of this kind had ever
been issued in rude and irregular times, I have not observed any under the kings of the
Plantagenet name which evidently transgress the boundaries of their legal prerogative.
The general privileges of the nation were far more secure than those of private men. Great
violence was often used by the various officers of the Crown, for which no adequate
redress could be procured ; the courts of justice were not strong enough, whatever might
be their temper, to chastise such aggressions; juries, through intimidation or ignorance,
returned such verdicts as were desired by the Crown; and, in general, there was perhaps
little effective restraint upon the government, except in the two articles of levying money
and enacting laws.
133
The best essay of England
The peers alone, a small body varying from about fifty to eighty persons, enjoyed the
privileges. of aristocracy; which, except that of sitting in parliament, were not very
considerable, far less oppressive. All below them, even their children, were commoners,
and in the eye of the law equal to each other. In the gradation of ranks, which, if not legally
recognized, must still subsist through the necessary inequalities of birth and wealth, we
find the gentry or principal landholders, many of them distinguished by knighthood, and all
by bearing coat armour, but without any exclusive privilege; the yeomanry, or small
freeholders and farmers, a very numerous and respectable body, some occupying their
own estates, some those of landlords; the burgesses and inferior inhabitants of trading
towns; and, lastly, the peasantry and the labourers. Of these, in earlier times, a
considerable part, though not perhaps so very large a proportion as is usually taken for
granted, had been in the ignominious state of villenage, incapable of possessing property
but at the will of their lords. They had, however, gradually been raised above this
servitude; many had acquired a stable possession of lands under the name of
copyholders; and the condition of mere villenage was become rare.
The three courts at Westminster -- the King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer -consisting each of four or five judges, administered justice to the whole kingdom; the first
having an appellant jurisdiction over the second, and the third being in a great measure
confined to causes affecting the Crown's property. But as all suits relating to land, as well
as most others, and all criminal indictments, could only be determined, so far as they
depended upon oral evidence, by a jury of the county, it was necessary that justices of
assize and gaol-delivery, being in general the judges of the courts at Westminster, should
travel into each county, commonly twice a year, in order to try issues of fact, so called in
distinction from issues of law, where the suitors, admitting all essential facts, disputed the
rule applicable to them. By this device, which is as ancient as the reign of Henry II, the
fundamental privilege of trial by jury, and the convenience of private suitors, as well as
accused persons, was made consistent with a uniform jurisprudence; and though the
reference of every legal question, however insignificant, to the courts above must have
been inconvenient and expensive in a still greater degree than at present, it had doubtless
a powerful tendency to knit together the different parts of England, to check the influence
of feudality and clanship, to make the inhabitants of distant counties better acquainted with
the capital city and more accustomed to the course of government, and to impair the spirit
of provincial patriotism and animosity. The minor tribunals of each county, hundred, and
manor, respectable for their antiquity and for their effect in preserving a sense of freedom
134
The best essay of England
and justice, had in a great measure, though not probably so much as in modern times,
gone into disuse. In a few counties there still remained a palatine jurisdiction, exclusive of
the king's courts; but in these the common rules of law and the mode of trial by jury were
preserved. Justices of the Peace, appointed out of the gentlemen of each county, inquired
into criminal charges, committed offenders to prison, and tried them at their quarterly
sessions, according to the same forms as the judges of gaol-delivery. The chartered towns
had their separate jurisdiction under the municipal magistracy.
The laws against theft were severe, and capital punishments unsparingly inflicted. Yet they
had little effect in repressing acts of violence, to which a rude and licentious state of
manners, and very imperfect dispositions for preserving the public peace, naturally gave
rise. These were frequently perpetrated or instigated by men of superior wealth and power,
above the control of the mere officers of justice. Meanwhile the kingdom was increasing in
opulence, the English merchants possessed a large share of the trade of the north; and a
woollen manufacture, established in different parts of the kingdom, had not only enabled
the legislature to restrain the import of cloths, but had begun to supply foreign nations. The
population may probably be reckoned, without any material error, at about three millions,
but by no means distributed in the same proportions as at present [1827]; the northern
counties, especially Lancashire and Cumberland, being very ill peopled, and the
inhabitants of London and Westminster, not exceeding sixty or seventy thousand.
(Taken from Hallam's Constitutional History of England.)
"Walt Whitman."
By Sir Edmund Gosse.
Fatima was permitted, nay encouraged, to make use of all the rooms, so elegantly and
commodiously furnished, in Bluebeard Castle, with one exception. It was in vain that the
housemaid and the cook pointed out to her that each of the ladies who had preceded her
as a tenant had smuggled herself into that one forbidden chamber and had never come
out again. Their sad experience was thrown away upon Fatima, who penetrated the fatal
apartment and became an object of melancholy derision. The little room called "Walt
Whitman," in the castle of literature, reminds one of that in which the relics of Bluebeard's
levity were stored. We all know that discomfort and perplexity await us there, that nobody
ever came back from it with an intelligible message, that it is piled with the bones of critics;
135
The best essay of England
yet such is the perversity of the analytic mind, that each one of us, sooner or later, finds
himself peeping through the keyhole and fumbling at the lock.
As the latest of these imprudent explorers, I stand a moment with the handle in my hand
and essay a defence of these whose skeletons will presently be discovered. Was it their
fault? Was their failure not rather due to a sort of magic that hands over the place? To
drop metaphor, I am sadly conscious that, after reading what a great many people of
authority and of assumption have written about Whitman - reading it, too, in a humble spirit
- though I have been stimulated and entertained, I have not been at all instructed. Pleasant
light, of course, has been thrown on the critics themselves and on their various
peculiarities. But upon Whitman, upon the place he holds in literature and life, upon the
questions, what he was and why he was, surely very little. To me, at least, after all the
oceans of talk, after all the extravagant eulogy, all the mad vituperation, he remains
perfectly cryptic and opaque. I find no reason given by these authorities why he should
have made his appearance, or what his appearance signifies. I am told that he is abysmal,
putrid, glorious, universal and contemptible. I like these excellent adjectives, but I cannot
see how to apply them to Whitman. Yet, like a boy at a shooting-gallery, I cannot go home
till I, too, have had my six shots at this running- deer.
On the main divisions of literature it seems that a critic should have not merely a firm
opinion, but sound argument to back that opinion. It is a piglarlicky mind that is satisfied
with saying, "I like you, Dr. fell, the reason why I cannot tell." Analysis is the art of telling
the reason why. but still more feeble and slovenly is the criticism that has to say, "I liked
Dr. Fell yesterday and I don't like him to-day, but I can give no reason." The shrine of Walt
Whitman, however, is strewn around with remarks of this kind. Poor Mr. Swinburne has
been cruelly laughed at for calling him a "strong-winged soul, with prophetic lips hot with
the blood-beats of song," and yet a drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter. But he is not
alone in this inconsistency. Almost every competent writer who has attempted to give an
estimate of Whitman has tumbled about in the same extraordinary way. Something
mephitic breathes from this strange personality, something that maddens the judgment
until the wisest lose their self-control.
Therefore, I propound a theory. It is this, that there is no real Walt Whitman, that is to say,
that he cannot be taken as any other figure in literature is taken, as an entity of positive
value and defined characteristics, as, for instance, we take the life and writings of Racine,
136
The best essay of England
or of Keats, or of Jeremy Taylor, including the style with the substance, the teaching with
the idiosyncrasy. In these ordinary cases the worth and specific weight of the man are not
greatly affected by our attitude towards him. An atheist or a quaker may contemplate the
writings of the Bishop of Down without sympathy; that does not prevent the Holy Dying
from presenting, even to the mind of such an opponent, certain defined features which are
unmodified by like or dislike. This is true of any fresh or vivid talent which may have
appeared among us yesterday. But I content that it is not true of Whitman. Whitman is
mere bathybuis; he is literature in the condition of protoplasm - an intellectual organism so
simple that it takes the instant impression of whatever mood approaches it. Hence the
critic who touches Whitman is immediately confronted with his own image stamped upon
that viscid and tenacious surface. He finds, not what Whitman has to give, but what he
himself has brought. And when, in quite another mood, he comes again to Whitman, he
finds that other self of his own stamped upon the provoking protoplasm.
If this theory is allowed a moment's consideration, it cannot, I think, but tend to be
accepted. It accounts for all the difficulties in the criticism of Whitman. It shows us why
Robert Louis Stevenson has found a Stevenson in Leaves of Grass, and John Addington
Symonds a Symonds. It explains why Emerson considered the book "the most
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet [in 1855] produced;" why
Thoreau thought all the sermons ever preached not equal to it for divinity; why Italian
dilettanti and Scandinavian gymnasts, anarchists and parsons and champions of women's
rights, the most opposite and incongruous types, have the habit of taking Whitman to their
hearts for a little while and then flinging him away from them in abhorrence, and, perhaps,
of drawing him to them again with passion. This last, however, I think occurs more rarely.
Almost every sensitive and natural person has gone through a period of fierce
Whitmanomania; but it is a disease which rarely afflicts the same patient more than once.
It is, in fact, a sort of highly-irritated egotism come to a head, and people are almost
always better after it.
Unless we adopt some such theory as this, it is difficult to account in any way for the
persistent influences of Walt Whitman's writings. They have now lasted about forty years,
and show no sign whatever of losing their vitality. Nobody is able to analyse their charm,
yet the charm is undeniable. They present no salient features, such as have been
observed in all other literature, from Homer and David down to the latest generation. They
offer a sort of Plymouth Brethrenism to form, a negation of all the laws and ritual of
137
The best essay of England
literature. As a book, to be a living book, must contain a vigorous and appropriate
arrangement of words, this one solitary feature occurs in Leaves of Grass. I think it is not
to be denied by any candid critic, however inimical, that passages of extreme verbal felicity
are to be found frequently scattered over the pages of Whitman's rhapsodies. But, this one
concession made to form, there is no other. Not merely are rhythm and metre
conspicuously absent, but composition, evolution, vertebration of style, even syntax and
the limits of the English tongue, are disregarded. Every reader who comes to Whitman
starts upon an expedition to the virgin forest. He must take his conveniences with him. He
will make of the excursion what his own spirit dictates. There are solitudes, fresh air, rough
landscape, and a well of water, but if he wishes to enjoy the latter he must bring his own
cup with him. When people are still young and like roughing it, they appreciate a picnic into
Whitman-land, but it is not meant for those who choose to see their intellectual comforts
round them.
II
In the early and middle years of his life, Whitman was obscure and rarely visited. When he
grew old, pilgrims not unfrequently took scrip and staff, and set out to worship him. Several
accounts of his appearance and mode of address on these occasions have been
published, and if I add one more it must be my excuse that the visit to be described was
not undertaken in the customary spirit. All other accounts, so far as I know, if interviews
with Whitman have been written by disciples who approached the shrine adoring and
ready to be dazzled. The visitor whose experience - and it was a very delightful one - is
now to be chronicled, started under what was, perhaps, the disadvantage of being very
unwilling to go; at least, it will be admitted that the tribute - for tribute it has to be - is all the
more sincere.
When I was in Boston, in the winter of 1884, I received a note from Whitman asking me
not to leave America without coming to see him. My first instinct was promptly to decline
the invitation. Camden, New Jersey, was a very long way off. But better counsel prevailed;
curiosity and civility combined to draw me, and I wrote to him that I would come. It would
be fatuous to mention all this, it if were not that I particularly wish to bring out the peculiar
magic of the old man, acting, not on a disciple, but on a stiff- necked and froward
unbeliever.
138
The best essay of England
To reach Camden, one must arrive at Philadelphia, where I put up on the 2nd of January,
1885, ready to pass over into New Jersey next morning. I took the hall-porter of the hotel
into my confidence, and asked if he had ever heard of Mr. Whitman. Oh, yes, they all knew
"Walt," he said; on fine days he used to cross over on the ferry and take the tram into
Philadelphia. He liked to stroll about in Chestnut Street and look at the people, and if you
smiled at him he would smile back again; everybody knew "Walt." In the North, I had been
told that he was almost bedridden, in consequence of an attack of paralysis. This seemed
inconsistent with wandering round Philadelphia.
The distance being considerable, I started early on the 3rd, crossed the broad Delaware
River, where blocks of ice bumped and crackled around us, and saw the flat shores of
New Jersey expanding in front, raked by the broad morning light. I was put ashore in a
crude and apparently uninhabited village, grim with that concentrated ugliness that only an
American township in the depth of winter can display. Nobody to ask the way, or next to
nobody. I wandered aimlessly about, and was just ready to give all I possessed to be back
again in New York, when I discovered that I was opposite No. 328 Mickle Street, and that
on a minute brass plate was engraved "W. Whitman." I knocked at this dreary little twostorey tenement house, and wondered what was going to happen. A melancholy woman
opened the door; it was too late now to go away. But before I could speak, a large figure,
hobbling down the stairs, called out in a cheery voice, "Is that my friend?" Suddenly, by I
know not what magnetic charm, all wire-drawn literary reservations faded out of being, and
one's only sensation was of gratified satisfaction at being the "friend" of this very nice old
gentleman.
There was a good deal of greeting on the stairs, and then the host, moving actively,
though clumsily, and with a stick, advanced to his own dwelling-room on the first storey.
The opening impression was, as the closing one would be, of extreme simplicity. A large
room without carpet on the scrubbed planks, a small bedstead, a little round stove with a
stack-pipe in the middle of the room, one chair - that was all the furniture. On the walls and
in the fireplace such a miserable wall-paper - tinted, with a spot - as one sees in the
bedrooms of labourers' cottages; no pictures hung in the room, but pegs and shelves
loaded with objects. Various boxes lay about, and one huge clamped trunk, and heaps,
mountains of papers in a wild confusion, swept up here and there into stacks and peaks;
but all the room, and the old man himself, clean in the highest degree, raised to the nth
power of stainlessness, scoured and scrubbed to such a pitch that dirt seemed defied for
139
The best essay of England
all remaining time. Whitman, in particular, in his suit of hodden grey and shirt thrown wide
open at the throat, his grey hair and whiter beard voluminously flowing, seemed positively
blanched with cleanliness; the whole man sand-white with spotlessness, like a deal table
that has grown old under the scrubbing- brush.
Whitman sat down in the one chair with a small poker in his hand and spent much of his
leisure in feeding and irritating the stove. I cleared some papers away from off a box and
sat opposite to him. When he was not actively engaged upon the stove and his steady
attention was fixed upon his visitor, and I had a perfect opportunity of forming a mental
picture of him. He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as if resting it
one vertebra lower down the spinal column that other people do, and thus tilting his face a
little upwards. With his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of the
interlocutor, he seemed to pass into a state of absolute passivity, waiting for remarks or
incidents, the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted hands spread out before him. Sop
he would remain, immovable for a quarter of an hour at a time, even the action of speech
betraying no movement, the lips hidden under a cascade of beard. If it be true that all
remarkable human beings resemble animals, the Walt Whitman was like a cat - a great old
grey Angora tom, alert in repose, serenely blinking under his combed waves of hair, with
eyes inscrutable dreaming.
His talk was elemental, like his writings. It had none of the usual ornaments or irritants of
conversation. It welled out naturally, or stopped; it was innocent of every species of
rhetoric or epigram. It was the perfectly simple utterance of unaffected urbanity. So, I
imagine, an Oriental sage would talk, in a low uniform tone, without any excitement or
haste, without emphasis, in a land where time and flurry were unknown. Whitman sat there
with his great head tiled back, smiling serenely, and he talked about himself. He
mentioned his poverty, which was patent, and his paralysis; those were the two burdens
beneath which he crouched, like Issachar; he seemed to be quite at home with both of
them, and scarcely heeded them. I think I asked leave to move my box, for the light began
to pour in at the great uncurtained window; and then Whitman said that someone had
promised him a gift of curtains, but he was not eager for them, he thought they "kept out
some of the light." Light and air, that was all he wanted; and through the winter he sat
there patiently waiting for the air and light of summer, when he would hobble out again and
bask his body in a shallow creek he knew "back of Camden." Meanwhile he waited, waited
with infinite patience, uncomplaining, thinking about the sand, and the thin hot layer of
140
The best essay of England
water over it, in that shy New Jersey creeks. And he winked away in silence, while I
thought of the Indian poet Valmiki, when, in a trance of voluptuous abstraction, he sat
under the fig-tree and was slowly eaten of ants.
In the bareness of Whitman's great double room only two objects suggested art in any
way, but each of these was appropriate. One was a print of a Red Indian, given him, he
told me, by Catlin; it had inspired the passage about "the red aborigines" in Starting from
Paumanok. The other - positively the sole and only thing that redeemed the bareness of
the back-room where Whitman's bound works were stored - was a photograph of a very
handsome young man in a boat, sculling, I asked him about this portrait and he said
several notable things in consequence. He explained, first of all, that this was one of his
greatest friends, a professional oarsman from Canada, a well- known sporting character.
He continued, that these were the people he liked best, athletes who had a business in the
open air; that those were the plainest and most affectionate of men, those who lived in the
light and air and had to study to keep their bodies clean and fresh and ruddy; that his soul
went out to such people, and that they were strangely drawn to him, so that at the lowest
ebb of his fortunes, when the world reviled him and ridiculed him most, fortunate men of
this kind, highly prosperous as gymnasts or runners, had sought him out and had been
friendly to him. "And now," he went on, "I only wait for the spring, to hobble out with my
staff into the woods, and when I can sit all day long close to a set of woodmen at their
work, I am perfectly happy, for something of their life mixes with the smell of the chopped
timber, and it passes into my veins and I am old and ill no longer." I think these were his
precise words, and they struck me more than anything else that he said throughout that
long and pleasant day I spent with him.
It might be supposed, and I think that even admirers have said, that Whitman had no
humour. But that seemed to me not quite correct. No boisterous humour, truly, but a gentle
sort of sly fun, something like Tennyson's, he certainly showed. For example, he told me of
some tribute from India, and added, with a twinkling smile, "You see, I 'sound my barbaric
yawp over the roofs of the world.'" But this was rare: mostly he seemed dwelling in a
vague pastoral past life, the lovely days when he was young, and went about with "the
boys" in the sun. He read me many things; a new "poem" intoning the long irregular lines
of it not very distinctly; and a preface to some new edition. All this had left, I confess, a dim
impression, swallowed up in the serene self-unconsciousness, the sweet, dignified
urbanity, the feline immobility.
141
The best essay of England
As I passed from the little house and stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once more, my
heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man, who had just said in his calm accents,
"Good-bye, my friend!" I felt that the experience of the day was embalmed by something
that a great poet had written long ago, but I could not find what it was till we started once
more to cross the frosty Delaware; then it came to me, and I knew that when Shelly spoke
of
Peace within and calm around,
And that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found,
And walk'd with inward glory crown'd,
he had been prophesying of Walt Whitman, nor shall I ever read those lines again without
thinking of the old rhapsodist in his empty room glorified by patience and philosophy. And
so an unbeliever went to see Walt Whitman, and was captivated without being converted.
III
It is related to the great Cond?that, at the opening of his last campaign, sunken in
melancholy, half maddened with fatigue and the dog-star heat of summer, having reached
at length the cool meadows in front of the Abbey of St. Antoine, he suddenly leaped from
his horse, flung away his arms and his clothing, and rolled stark-naked in the grass under
a group of trees. Having taken this bath amidst his astonished officers, he rose smiling and
calm, permitted himself to be dressed and armed anew, and rode to battle with all his
accustomed resolution. The instinct which this anecdote illustrates lies deep down in
human nature, and the more we are muffled up in social conventions the more we
occasionally long for a whimsical return to nudity. If a writer is strong enough, from one
cause or another, to strip the clothing off from civilisation, that writer is sure of a welcome
from thousands of over-civilised readers.
Now the central feature of the writings of Walt Whitman is their nakedness. In saying this I
do not refer to a half-a-dozen phrases, which might with ease be eliminated, that have
thrown Mrs. Grundy into fits. No responsible criticism will make a man stand or fall by what
are simply examples of the carrying of a theory to excess. But of the theory itself I speak,
and it is one of uncompromising openness. It is a defence of bare human nature, stripped,
nor merely of all its trappings and badges, but even of those garments which are
142
The best essay of England
universally held necessary to keep the cold away. In so many of his writings, and
particularly of course, in the Discours of 1750, Rousseau undertook the defence of social
nudity. He called upon his world, which prided itself so much upon its elegance, to divest
the body politic of all its robes. He declared that while Nature has made man happy and
virtuous, society it is that renders him miserable and depraved, therefore let him get rid of
social contentions and roll naked in the grass under the elm-trees. The invitation, as I have
said, is one which never lacks acceptance, and Rousseau was followed into the forest by a
multitude.
If Walt Whitman goes further than Rousseau, it merely is that he is more elementary. The
temperament of the American is in every direction less complex. He has none of the
restless intellectual vivacity, none of the fire, none of the passionate hatred of iniquity
which mark the French philosopher. With Walt Whitman a course simplicity suffices, a
certain blunt and determined negation of artificiality of every kind. He is, roughly speaking,
a keenly observant and sentient being, without though, without selection, without intensity,
egged on by his nervous system to a revelation of himself. He records his own sensations
one after another, careful only to present them in veracious form, without drapery or
rhetoric. His charm for other is precisely this, that he observes so closely, and records so
great a multitude of observations, and presents them with so complete an absence of
prejudice, that any person who approaches his writings with an unbiased mind must
discover in them a reflection of some part of himself. This I believe to be the secret of the
extraordinary attraction which these rhapsodical utterances have for the most emotional
persons at one crisis or another in their life's development. But I think criticism ought to be
able to distinguish between the semi-hysterical pleasure of self-recognition and the sober
and legitimate delights of literature.
The works of Walt Whitman cover a great many pages, but the texture of them is anything
but subtle. When once the mind perceives what it is that Whitman says, it is found that he
repeats himself over and over again, and that all his "gospel" (as the odious modern cant
puts it) is capable of being strained into very narrow limits. One "poem" contains at least
the germ of all the sheaves and sheaves of writing that Whitman published. There is not
one aspect of his nature which is not stated, or more than broadly hinted at, in the single
piece which he named after himself, "Walt Whitman." It was appropriately named, for an
unclosing of himself, an invitation to all the world to come and prove that, stripped of his
143
The best essay of England
clothes, he was exactly like everybody else, was the essence of his religion, his
philosophy, and his poetry.
It is not unfair to concentrate attention on the section of sixty pages which bears the name
"Walt Whitman" in the volume of his collected writings. It is very interesting reading. No
truly candid person meeting with it for the first time, and not previously prejudiced against
it, could but be struck with its felicities of diction and its air of uncontrolled sincerity. A
young man of generous impulses could scarcely, I think, read it and not fall under the spell
of its sympathetic illusions. It contains unusually many of those happy phrases which are, I
contend, the sole purely literary possession of Whitman. It contains dozens of those
closely-packed lines in each of which Whitman contrives to concentrate a whole picture of
some action or condition of Nature. It contains, perhaps, the finest, certainly the most
captivating, of all Whitman's natural apostrophes:
Press close, bare-bosm'd night. Press close, magnetic, nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night! mad, naked summer night!
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! earth of the mountains, misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
All this represents the best side of the author; but "Walt Whitman" exhibits his bad sides as
well - his brutality, mis-styling itself openness, his toleration of the ugly and the forbidden,
his terrible laxity of thought and fatuity of judgment.
If he studies "Walt Whitman" carefully, a reader of middle life will probably come to the
conclusion that the best way to classify the wholly anomalous and irregular writer who
produced it is to place him by himself as a maker of poems in solution. I am inclined to
admit that in Walt Whitman we have just missed receiving from the New World one of the
greatest of modern poets, but that we have missed it must at the same time be
acknowledged. To be a poet it is not necessary to be a consistent and original thinker, with
144
The best essay of England
an elaborately-balanced system of ethics. The absence of intellectual quality, the
superabundance of the emotional, the objective, the pictorial, are no reasons for
undervaluing Whitman's imagination. But there is one condition which distinguishes art
from mere amorphous expression; that condition is the result of a process through which
the vague and engaging observations of Whitman never passed. He felt acutely and
accurately, his imagination was purged of external impurities, he lay spread abroad in a
condition of literary solution. But there he remained, an expanse of crystallisable
substances, waiting for the structural change that never came; rich above almost all his
coevals in the properties of poetry, and yet, for want of a definite shape and fixity, doomed
to sit for ever apart from the company of the Poets.
-- Sir Edmund Gosse (1849-1928).
"A City Night-Piece."
By Oliver Goldsmith
The clock has just struck two, the expiring taper rises and sinks in the socket, the
watchman forgets the hour in slumber, he laborious and the happy are at rest, and nothing
wakes but meditation, guilt, revelry, and despair. The drunkard once more fills the
destroying bowl, the robber walks his midnight round, and the suicide lifts his guilty arm
against his own sacred person.
Let me no longer waste the night over the page of antiquity or the sallies of contemporary
genius, but pursue the solitary walk, where Vanity, ever changing, but a few hours past
walked before me, where she kept up the pageant, and now, like a froward child, seems
hushed with her own importunities.
What a gloom hangs all around! The dying lamp feebly emits a yellow gleam; no sound is
heard but of the chiming clock, or the distant watch-dog. All the bustle of human pride is
forgotten; an hour like this may well display the emptiness of human vanity.
There will come a time when this temporary solitude may be made continual, and the city
itself, like its inhabitants, fade away, and leave a desert in its room.
What cities, as great as this, have once triumphed in existence! had their victories as
great, joy as just and as "Unbounded, and, with short-sighted presumption, promised
themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some; the sorrowful
145
The best essay of England
traveller wanders over the lawful ruins of others; and, as he beholds, he learns wisdom,
and feels the transience of every sublunary possession.
"Here," he cries, "stood their citadel, now grown over with, weeds; there, their senate
house, but now the haunt of every noxious,reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now
only an undistinguished heap of ruin. They are fallen: for luxury and avarice first made
them feeble. The rewards of the state were conferred on amusing and not on useful
members of society. Their riches and opulence invited the invaders, who, though at first
repulsed, returned again, conquered by perseverance, and at last swept the defendants
into undistinguished destruction."
How few appear in those streets which, but some few hours ago, were crowded! and those
who appear now no longer wear their daily mask, nor attempt to hide their lewdness or
their misery.
But who are those who make the streets their couch, and find a short repose from
wretchedness at the doors of the opulent? These are strangers, wanderers, and orphans,
whose circumstances are too humble to expect redress, and whose distresses are too
great even for pity. Their wretchedness rather excites horror than pity. Some are without
the covering even of rags, and others emaciated with disease: the world has disclaimed
them; society turns its back upon their distress, and has given them up to nakedness and
hunger. These poor shivering females have once seen happier days and been flattered
into beauty. They have been prostituted to the gay, luxurious villain, and are now turned
out to meet the severity of Winter. Perhaps, now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they
sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible, to debauchees who may curse but will not
relieve them.
Why, why was I born a man, and yet see the sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve! Poor
houseless creatures! the world will give you reproaches, but will not give you relief. The
slightest misfortunes of the great, the most imaginary uneasinesses of the rich, are
aggravated with all the power of eloquence, and held up to engage our attention and
sympathetic sorrow. The poor weep unheeded, persecuted by every subordinate species
of tyranny; and every law, which gives others security, becomes an enemy to them.
146
The best essay of England
Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! or why was not my fortune
adapted to its impulse! Tenderness, without a capacity of relieving, only makes the man
who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance. Adieu.
-- Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74).
"Art"1
By John Galsworthy
Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of
feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in
him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal
emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.
Impersonal emotion! And what -- I thought do I mean by that? Surely I mean: That is not
Art, which, while I, am contemplating it, inspires me with any active or directive impulse;
that is Art, when, for however brief a moment, it replaces within me interest in myself by
interest in itself. For, let me suppose myself in the presence of a carved marble bath. If my
thoughts be "What could I buy that for?" Impulse of acquisition; or: "From what quarry did it
come?" Impulse of inquiry; or: "Which would be the right end for my head?" Mixed impulse
of inquiry and acquisition -- I am at that moment insensible to it as a work of Art. But, if I
stand before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, if ever so little and for ever so short
a time, unhaunted by any definite practical thought or impulse -- to that extent and for that
moment it has stolen me away out of myself and put itself there instead; has linked me to
the universal by making me forget the individual in me. And for that moment, and only
while that moment lasts, it is to me a work of Art. The word "impersonal," then, is but used
in this my definition to signify momentary forgetfulness of one's own personality and its
active wants.
So Art -- I thought -- is that which, heard, read, or looked on, while producing no directive
impulse, warms one with unconscious vibration. Nor can I imagine any means of defining
what is the greatest Art, without hypothecating a perfect human being. But since we shall
never see, or know if we do see, that desirable creature -- dogmatism is banished,
"Academy" is dead to the discussion, deader than even Tolstoy left it after his famous
treatise "What is Art?" For, having destroyed all the old Judges and Academies, Tolstoy,
by saying that the greatest Art was that which appealed to the greatest number of living
147
The best essay of England
human beings, raised up the masses of mankind to be a definite new Judge or Academy,
as tyrannical and narrow as ever were those whom he had destroyed.
This, at all events -- I thought is as far as I dare go in defining what Art is. But let me try to
make plain to myself what is the essential quality that gives to Art the power of exciting this
unconscious vibration, this impersonal emotion. It has been called Beauty! An awkward
word -- a perpetual begging of the question; too current in use, too ambiguous altogether;
now too narrow, now too wide -- a word, in fact, too glib to know at all what it means. And
how dangerous a word -- often misleading us into slabbing with extraneous floridities what
would otherwise, on its own plane, be Art! To be decorative where decoration is not
suitable, to be lyrical where lyricism is out of place, is assuredly to spoil Art, not to achieve
it. But this essential quality of Art has also, and more happily, been called Rhythm. And,
what is Rhythm if not that mysterious harmony between part and part, and part and whole,
which gives what is called life; that exact proportion, the mystery of which is best grasped
in observing how life leaves an animate creature when the essential relation of part to
whole has been sufficiently disturbed. And I agree that this rhythmic relation of part to part,
and part to whole -- in short, vitality -- is the one quality inseparable from a work of Art. For
nothing which does not seem to a man possessed of this rhythmic vitality, can ever steal
him out of himself.
And having got thus far in my thoughts, I paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed
to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise, of the
delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two
things of all the things there be, are quite the same.
Yes -- I thought -- and this Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which
really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual,
unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of
human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting,
grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside
ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from
that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement. The active
amusements and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by indulging
others; the whole self is never rested save through that unconsciousness of self, which
comes through rapt contemplation of Nature or of Art.
148
The best essay of England
And suddenly I remembered that some believe that Art does not produce unconsciousness
of self, but rather very vivid self-realisation.
Ah! but -- I though -- that is not the first and instant effect of Art; the new impetus is the
after effect of that momentary replacement of oneself by the self of the work before us; it is
surely the result of that brief span of enlargement, enfranchisement, and rest.
Yes, Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief
for itself you may take it or you may leave it. It does not force itself rudely where it is not
wanted. It is reverent to all tempers, to all points of view. But it is wilful -- the very wind in
the comings and goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugitive, visiting our hearts at
vagrant, sweet moments; since we often stand even before the greatest works of Art
without being able quite to lose ourselves! That restful oblivion comes, we never quite
know when -- and it is gone! But when it comes, it is a spirit hovering with cool wings,
blessing us from least to greatest, according to our powers; a spirit deathless and varied
as human life itself.
--John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
From "The Inn of Tranquility." See, Carnegie Mellon's site
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/metabook/galse.html
"Some Platitudes Concerning Drama"1
By John Galsworthy
A DRAMA must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and
character has its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group
as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day. Such is the moral that exhales from
plays like Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. But such is not the moral to be found in the great
bulk of contemporary [1912] drama. The moral of the average play is now, and probably
has always been, the triumph at all costs of a supposed immediate ethical good over
supposed immediate ethical evil.
149
The best essay of England
The vice of drawing these distorted morals has permeated the drama to its spine;
discoloured its art, humanity, and significance; infected its creators, actors, audience,
critics; too often turned it from a picture into a caricature. A drama which lives under the
shadow of the distorted moral forgets how to be free, fair, and fine-forgets so completely
that it often prides itself on having forgotten.
Now, in writing plays, there are, in this matter of the moral, three courses open to the
serious dramatist. The first is: To definitely set before the public that which it wishes to
have set before it, the views and codes of life which the public lives and in which it
believes. This is the most common, successful and popular. It makes the dramatist's
position sure, and not too obviously authorative.
The second course is: To definitely set before the public those views and codes of life by
which the dramatist himself lives, those theories in which he himself believes the more
effectively if they are the opposite of what the audience may swallow them like powder in a
spoonful of Jam.
There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the
phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the
dramatist's outlook, set down without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving the public to draw
such poor moral as nature may afford. This third method requires a certain detachment; it
requires a sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things for their own sake; it
requires a far view, together with patient industry, for no immediately practical result.
It was once said of Shakespeare that he had never done any good to any one, and never
would. This, unfortunately, could not, in the sense in which the word "good" was then
meant, be said of most modem dramatists. In truth, the good that Shakespeare did to
humanity was of a remote, and shall we say, eternal nature; something of the good men
get from having the sky and the sea to look at. And this partly because he was, in his
greater plays at all events, free from the habit of drawing a distorted moral. Now, the
playwright who supplies to the public the facts distorted by the moral which it expects does
so that he may do the public what he considers an immediate good, by fortifying its
prejudices; and the dramatist who supplies to the public facts distorted by his own
advanced Morality, does so because he considers that he will at once benefit the public by
substituting for its worn-out ethics his own. In both cases the advantage the dramatist
hopes to confer on the public is immediate and practical.
150
The best essay of England
But matters change, and morals change; men remain -- and to set men, and the facts
about them, down faithfully, so that they draw for us the moral of their natural actions, may
also possibly be of benefit to the community. It is, at all events, harder than to set men and
facts down, as they ought, or ought not to be. This, however, is not to say that a dramatist
should, or indeed can, keep himself and his temperamental philosophy out of his work. As
a man lives and thinks, so will he write. But it is certain, that to the making of good drama,
as to the practice of every other art, there must be brought an almost passionate love of
discipline, a white-heat of self-respect, a desire to make the truest, fairest, best thing in
one's power; and that to these must be added an eye that does not flinch. Such qualities
alone will bring to a drama the selfless character which soaks it with inevitability.
The word "pessimist" is frequently applied to the few dramatists who have been content to
work in this way. It has been applied, among others, to Euripides, to Shakespeare, to
Ibsen; it will be applied to many in the future. Nothing, however, is more dubious than the
way in which these two words "pessimist" and "optimist" are used; for the optimist appears
to be he who cannot bear the world as it is, and is forced by his nature to picture it as it
ought to be, and the pessimist one who cannot only bear the world as it is, but loves it well
enough to draw it faithfully. The true lover of the human race is surely he who can put it
with it in all its forms, in vice as well as in virtue, in defeat no less than in victory; the true
seer he who sees not only joy but sorrow, the true painter of human life one who blinks
nothing. It may be that he is also, incidentally, its true benefactor.
In the whole range of the social fabric there are only two impartial persons, the scientist
and the artist, and under the latter heading such dramatists as desire to, write not only for
to-day, but for to-morrow, must strive to come.
But dramatists being as they are made -- past remedy -- it is perhaps more profitable to
examine the various points at which their qualities and defects are shown.
The plot! A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of interplay of circumstance
on temperament, and temperament on circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of
an idea. A human being is the best plot there is; it may be impossible to see why he is a
good plot, because the idea within which he was brought forth cannot be fully grasped; but
it is plain that he is a good plot. He is organic. And so it must be with a good play. Reason
alone produces no good plots; they come by original sin, sure conception, and instinctive
after-power of selecting what benefits the germ. A bad plot, on the other hand, is simply a
151
The best essay of England
row of stakes, with a character impaled on each -- characters who would have liked to live,
but came to untimely grief; who started bravely, but fell on these stakes placed beforehand
in a row, and were transfixed one by one, while their ghosts stride on, squeaking and
gibbering, through the play. Whether these stakes are made of facts or of ideas, according
to the nature of the dramatist who planted them, their effect on the unfortunate characters
is the same; the creatures were begotten to be staked, and staked they are! The demand
for a good plot, not unfrequently heard, commonly signifies: "Tickle my sensations by
stuffing the play with arbitrary adventures, so that I need not be troubled to take the
characters seriously. Set the persons, of the play to action, regardless of time, sequence,
atmosphere, and probability!"
The dialogue! Good dialogue again is character, marshaled so as continually to stimulate
interest or excitement. The reason good dialogue is seldom found in plays is merely that it
is hard to write, for it requires not only a knowledge of what interests or excites, but such a
feeling for character as brings misery to the dramatist's heart when his creations speak as
they should not speak -- ashes to his mouth when they say things for the sake of saying
them -- disgust when they are "smart."
The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere art, denying itself all license,
grudging every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all jokes
and epigrams severed from character, relying for fun and pathos on the fun and tears of
life. From start to finish good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace; clear, of fine texture,
furthering with each thread the harmony and strength of a design to which all must be
subordinated.
But good dialogue is also spiritual action. In so far as the dramatist divorces his dialogue
from spiritual action -- that is to say, from progress of events, or toward events which are
significant of character -- he is stultifying ... the thing done; he may make pleasing
disquisitions, he is not making drama. And in so far as he twists characters to suit his
moral or his plot, he is neglecting a first principle that truth to Nature which alone invests
art with hand-made quality.
The dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his design. In conception alone he is free. He
may take what character or group of characters he chooses, see them with what eyes, knit
them with what idea, within the limits of his temperament; but once taken, seen, and
knitted, he is bound to treat them like a gentleman, with the tenderest consideration of their
152
The best essay of England
mainsprings. Take care of character; action and dialogue will take care of themselves! The
true dramatist gives full rein to his temperament in the scope and nature of his subject;
having once selected subject and characters he is just, gentle, restrained, neither
gratifying is his lust for praise at the expense of his offspring, nor using them as puppets to
flout his audience. Being himself the nature that brought them forth, he guides them in the
course predestined at their conception. So only have they a chance of defying Time, which
is always lying in wait to destroy the false, topical, or fashionable, all -- in a word -- that is
not based on the permanent elements of human nature. The perfect dramatist rounds up
his characters and facts within the ring-fence of a dominant idea which fulfils the craving of
his spirit; having got them there, he suffers them to live their own lives.
Plot, action, character, dialogue! But there is yet another subject for a platitude. Flavour!
An impalpable quality, less easily captured than the scent of a flower, the peculiar and
most essential attribute of any work of art! It is the thin, poignant spirit which hovers up out
of a play, and is as much its differentiating essence as is caffeine of coffee. Flavour, in
fine, is the spirit of the dramatist projected into his work in a state of volatility, so that no
one can exactly lay hands on it, here, there, or anywhere. This distinctive essence of a
play, marking its brand, is the one thing at which the dramatist cannot work, for it is outside
his consciousness. A man may have many moods, he has but one spirit and this spirit he
communicates in some subtle, unconsciousness way to all his work. It waxes and wanes
with the currents of his vitality, but no more alters than a chestnut changes into an oak.
For, in truth, dramas are very like unto trees, springing from seedlings, shaping
themselves inevitably in accordance with the laws fast hidden within themselves ' drinking
sustenance from the earth and air, and in conflict with the natural forces round them. So
they slowly come to full growth, until warped, stunted, or risen to fair and gracious height,
they stand open to all the winds. And the trees that spring from each dramatist are of
different race; he is the spirit of his own sacred grove, into which no stray tree can by any
chance enter.
One more platitude. It is not unfashionable to pit one form of drama against another -holding up the naturalistic to the disadvantage of the epic; the epic to the belittlement of
the fantastic; the fantastic to the detriment of the naturalistic. Little purpose is thus served.
The essential meaning, truth, beauty, and irony of things may be revealed under all these
forms. Vision over life and human nature can be as keen and just, the revelation as true,
153
The best essay of England
inspiring, delight-giving, and thought-provoking, whatever fashion be employed -- it is
simply a question of doing it enough to uncover the kernel of the nut. Whether the violet
come from Russia, from Parma, or from England, matters little. Close by the Greek
temples at Paestum there are violets that seem redder, and sweeter, than any ever seen -as though they have sprung up out of the footprints of some old pagan goddess; but under
the April sun, in a Devonshire lane, the little blue scentless violets capture every bit as
much of the spring. And so it is with drama -- no matter what its form -- it need only be the
"real thing," need only have caught some of the precious fluids, revelation, or delight, and
imprisoned them within a chalice to which we may put our lips and continually drink. ...
--John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
From "The Inn of Tranquility." See, Carnegie Mellon's site
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/metabook/galse.html
"A Portrait," by John Galsworthy.
It is at the age of eighty that I picture him without the vestige of a stoop, rather above
middle height, of very well-proportioned figure, whose flatness of back and easy
movements were the admiration of all who saw them. His iron-grey eyes had lost none of
their colour, they were set-in deep, so that their upper lids were invisible, and had a
peculiar questioning directness, apt to change suddenly into twinkles. His head was of fine
shape - one did not suspect that it required a specially made hat, being a size larger than
almost any other head; it was framed in very silky silvery hair, brushed into an arch across
his forehead, and falling into becoming curves over the tips of his ears; and he wore
always a full white beard and moustaches, which concealed a jaw and chin of great
determination cleft by a dimple. His nose had been broken in his early boyhood; it was the
nose of a thinker, broad and of noticeable shape. The colour of his cheeks was a fine dry
brown; his brow very capacious, both wide and high, and endowed with a singular
serenity. But it was the balance and poise of his head which commanded so much
attention. In a theatre, church, concert-hall, there was never any head so fine as his, for
the silvery hair and beard lent to its massiveness a curious grace and delicacy.
154
The best essay of England
The owner of that head could not but be endowed with force, sagacity, humour, and the
sense of justice. It expressed, indeed, his essential quality - equanimity; for there were two
men in him - he of the chin and jaw, a man of action and tenacity, and he of the nose and
brow, the man of speculation and impersonality; yet these two were so curiously balanced
and blended that there was no harsh ungraceful conflict. And what made this equanimity
so memorable was the fact that both his power of action and his power of speculation were
of high quality. He was not a commonplace person content with little of both. He wanted
and had wanted throughout life, if one may judge by records, a good deal of both, ever
demanding with one half of him strong and continuous action, and with the other half, high
and clean thought and behaviour. The desire for the best both in material and spiritual
things remained with him through life. He felt things deeply; and but for his strange
balance, and a yearning for inward peace which never seems to have deserted him, his
ship might well have gone down in tragedy.
To those who had watched that journey, his voyage through life seemed favourable,
always on the top of the weather. He had worked hard, and he had played hard, but never
too hard. And though one might often seem him irritated, I think no one ever saw him
bored. He perceived a joke quicker than most of us; he was never eccentric, yet
fundamentally independent of other people's opinions, and perhaps a little unconscious
that there were better man than he. Not that he was conceited, for of this quality, so
closely allied to stupidity and humbug, he had about as much as the babe unborn. He was,
indeed, a natural for to anaemia in any of its forms, just as he was instinctively hostile to
gross bull-beef men and women. The words, "a bullying chap," were used by him as
crushing dispraise. I can recall him now in his chair after dinner, listening to one, who,
puffing his cigarette, is letting himself go on a stream of robustious, rather swaggering
complacencies; with what a comprehending straight look he regards the speaker, not
scornful, not sarcastic, but simply, as it were, saying: "No, my young buck, for all your fine
full-blooded talk, and all your red face, you are what I see you to be, and you will do what I
tell you to do!" Such men had no chance with him when it came to the tug of war; he laid
his will on them as if they had been children.
He was that rather rare thing, a pure-blooded Englishman; having no strain of Scotch,
Welsh, Irish, or foreign blood in his pedigree for four hundred years at least. He sprang
from a long line of farmers intermarrying with their kind in the most southern corner of
Devonshire, and it is probable that Norse and British blood were combined in him in a high
155
The best essay of England
state of equality. Even in the actual situation of his place of origin, the principle of balance
had been maintained, for the old farmhouse from which his grandfather had emerged had
been perched close to the cliff. Thus, to the making of him had gone land and sea, the
Norseman and the Celt.
Articled to the Law at the age of sixteen by his father, a Plymouth merchant, whose small
ancient ships traded to the Mediterranean in fruits, leather, and wines, he had come to
London, and at the earliest possible date (as was the habit with men in those times) had
been entered on the rolls as a solicitor. Often has he told me of the dinner he gave in
honour of that event. "I was a thread-paper, then," he would say (indeed, he never became
fat). - "We began with a barrel of oysters." About that and other festivities of his youth,
there was all the rich and rollicking flavour of the days of Pickwick. He was practically
dependent on his own exertions from the time he began to practise his profession, and it
was characteristic of him that he never seems to have been hard pressed for money. The
inherent sanity and moderation of his instincts preserved him, one imagines, from the
financial ups and downs of most young men, for there was no niggardliness in him, and a
certain breadth of conception characterized his money affairs throughout life. It was rather
by the laws of gravity, therefore, whereby money judiciously employed attracts money, and
the fact that he lived in that money-maker's Golden Age, the nineteenth century, that he
had long been (at the age of eighty) a wealthy man. Money was to him the symbol of a
well-spent, well-ordered life, provocative of warmth in his heart because he loved his
children, and was careful of them to a fault. He did not marry till he was forty-five, but his
feeling for the future of his family manifested itself with the birth of his first child. Selecting
a fair and high locality, not too far away from London, he set himself at once to make a
country place, where the little things should have fresh air, new milk, and all the fruits of
the earth, home-grown round them. Quite wonderful was the forethought he lavished on
that house and his little estate stretching down the side of a hill, with its walled gardens,
pasture, corn-land and coppice. All was solid, and of the best, from the low four-square red
brick house with its concrete terrace and French windows, to the cow-houses down by the
coppice. From the oak trees, hundreds of years old, on the lawns, to the peach trees just
planted along the sough sunny walls. But here too, there was no display for the sake of it,
and no extravagance. Everything was at hand, from home-baked bread, to mushrooms
wild and tame; from the stables with their squat clock- tower, to pigsties; from roses that
won all the local prizes, to bluebells; but nothing redundant or pretentious.
156
The best essay of England
The place was an endless pleasure to him, who to the last preserved his power of taking
interest, not only in great, but in little things. Each small triumph over difficulty - the
securing of hot water in such a quarter, the better lighting of another, the rescue of the
nectarines from wasps, the quality of his Alderney cows, the encouragement of rooks afforded him as much simple and sincere satisfaction as every little victory he achieved in
his profession, or in the life of the Companies which he directed. But with all his shrewd
practical sense, and almost naive pleasure in material advantage, he combined a very real
spiritual life of his own. Nor was there anything ascetic in that inner life. It was mellow as
the music of Mozart, his most beloved composer; Art and Nature both had their part in it.
He was, for instance, very fond of opera, but only when it would be called "grant"; and it
grieved him that opera was no longer what it had been, yet was it secretly a grave
satisfaction that he had known those classical glories denied to the present generation. He
loved indeed almost all classical music, but (besides Mozart) especially Beethoven, Gluck,
and Meyerbeer, whom he insisted (no less than Herbert Spencer) on considering a great
composer. Wagner he tried very hard to appreciate and, after visiting Bayreuth, even
persuaded himself that he had succeeded, though he never ceased to point out the great
difference that existed between this person and Mozart. He loved the Old Masters of
painting, having for favourites amongst the Italians: Rafael, Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto;
and amongst Englishmen Reynolds and Romney. On the other hand, he regarded Hogarth
and Rubens as coarse, but Vandyke he very much admired, because of his beautiful
painting of hands, the hall-mark, he would maintain, of an artist's quality. I cannot
remember his feeling about Rembrandt, but Turner he certainly distrusted as extravagant.
Botticelli and the earlier masters he had not as yet quite learned to relish; and
Impressionism, including Whistler, never really made conquest of his taste, though he
always resolutely kept his mind open to what was modern - feeling himself young at heart.
Once on a spring day, getting over a stile, I remember him saying:
"Eighty! I can't believe it. Seems very queer. I don't feel it. Eighty!" And, pointing to a
blackbird that was singing, he added: "That takes the years off you!" His love of Nature
was very intimate, simple, and unconscious. I can see him standing by the pond of a
summer evening watching the great flocks of starlings that visited those fields; or, with his
head a little to one side, listening rapturously to a skylark. He would contemplate, too, with
a sort of serene passion, sunset effects, and every kind of view.
157
The best essay of England
But his greatest joy in life had been his long summer holidays, in Italy or among the Alps,
and his memory was a perfect storehouse of peaks, passes, and arrivals at Italian inns. He
had been a great walker, and, as an old man, was still very active. I can remember him on
horseback at the age of sixty, though he had never been a sportsman - not being in the
way of hunting, having insufficient patience for fishing, and preferring to spend such time
as he might have had for shooting, in communing with his beloved mountains. His love for
all kinds of beauty, indeed, was strangely potent; and perhaps the more natural and deep
for its innocence of all tradition and formal culture. He got it, I think, from his mother, of
whom he always spoke with reverence as "the most beautiful woman in the Three Towns."
Yes, his love of beauty was a sensuous, warm glow pervading the whole of him, secretly
separating him from the majority of his associates. A pretty face, a beautiful figure, a
mellow tune, the sight of dancing, a blackbird's song, the moon behind a poplar tree, starry
nights, sweet scents, and the language of Shakespeare - all these moved him deeply, the
more perhaps because he had never learned to express his feelings. His attempts at
literature indeed were strangely naive and stilted; his verse, in the comic vein, rather good;
but all, as it were, like his period, ashamed to express any intimate feeling except in
classical language. Yet his literary tastes were catholic; Milton was his favourite poet,
Byron he also admired; Browning he did not care for; his favourite novelist was George
Eliot, and, curiously enough - in later life - Turgenev. I well remember when the translated
volumes of that author were coming out, how he would ask for another of those yellow
books. He did not know why he liked them, with all those "crackjaw" Russian names; but
assuredly it was because they were written by one who worshipped beauty.
The works of Dickens and Thackeray he read with appreciation, on the whole, finding the
first perhaps a little too grotesque, and the second a little too satiric. Scott, Trollope,
Marryat, Blackmore, Hardy, and Mark Twain also pleased him; but Meredith he thought too
"misty."
A great theatre-goer all his life, he was very lukewarm towards modern actors, comparing
them adversely with those constellations of the past, Edmund and Charles Kean, Charlie
Mathews, Farren, Power, "little Robson," and Helen Faucit. He was, however, a great lover
of Kate Vaughan's dancing; an illustration of the equanimity of one who had formed his
taste on Taglioni.
158
The best essay of England
Irving he would only accept in Louis XI., The Bells, and, I think, Charles I., and for his
mannerisms he had a great aversion. There was something of the old grand manner about
his theatre habits. He attended with the very best and thinnest lavender kid gloves on his
hands, which he would hold up rather high and clap together at the end of an act which
pleased him; even, on memorable occasions, adding the word "Bravo." He never went out
before the end of a play, however vehemently he might call it "poor stuff," which, to be
quite honest, he did about nine times out of ten. And he was ever ready to try again,
having a sort of touching confidence in an art which had betrayed him so often. His opera
hats were notable, usually of such age as to have lost shape, and surely the largest in
London. Indeed, his dress was less varied than that of any man I have ever seen; but
always neat and well-cut, for he went habitually to the best shops, and without eccentricity
of any kind. He carried a repeating gold watch and thin round gold chain which passed,
smooth and sinuous as a little snake, through a small black seal with a bird on it; and he
never abandoned very well made side-spring boots with cork soles, greatly resenting the
way other boots dirties his hands, which were thin and brown with long polished nails, and
blue veins outstanding. For reading only, he wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses, which he
would perch low down on the bridge of his nose, so that he could look over them, for his
eyes were very long sighted. He was extremely fastidious in his linen, and all personal
matters, yet impatient of being mollycoddled, or in any way over-valeted. Even on the
finest days, he carried an umbrella, the ferrule of which, from his habit of stumping it on the
pavement, had a worn and harassed look, and was rarely more than half present.
Having been a Conservative Liberal in politics till well pass sixty, it was not until Disraeli's
time that he became a Liberal Conservative. This was curious, for he always spoke
doubtfully of "Dizzy," and even breathed the word "humbug" in connection with him.
Probably he was offended by what he termed "the extravagance" in Dizzy's rival. For the
Duke of Devonshire and Lord Salisbury he had respect without enthusiasm; and conceived
for John Bright a great admiration as soon as he was dead. But on the whole the politician
who had most attracted him had been Palmerston, because - if memory serves - he had in
such admirable degree the faculty of "astonishing their weak nerves." For, though never a
Jingo, and in later days both cautious and sane in his Imperialism, he had all a Briton's
essential deep-rooted distrust of the foreigner. He felt that they were not quite safe, not
quite sound, and must from time to time be made to feel this. Born two years after the
Battle of Waterloo, he had inherited a certain high pride of island birth. And yet in one
case, where he was for years in close contact with a foreigner he conceived for him so
159
The best essay of England
grave a respect, that it was quite amusing to watch the discomfiture of his traditional
distrust. It was often a matter of wonder amongst those who knew him that a man of his
ability and judgment had never even sought to make his mark in public affairs. Of the
several reasons for this, the chief was, undoubtedly, the extraordinary balance of his
temperament. To attain pre-eminence in any definite department of life would have warped
and stunted too many of his instincts, removed too many of his interests; and so he never
specialised in anything. He was quite unambitious, always taking the lead in whatever field
he happened to be, by virtue of his great capacity and will-power, but never pushing
himself, and apparently without any life-aim, but that of leading a sane, moderate, and
harmonious existence.
And it is for this that he remains written on the national page, as the type of a lost and
golden time, when life to each man seemed worth living for its own sake, without thought
of its meaning as a whole, or much speculation as to its end. There was something
classical, measured, and mellow in his march adown the years, as if he had been godmothered by Harmony. And yet, though he said his prayers and went to church, he could
not fairly have been called a religious man; for at the time when he formed his religious
habits, "religion" had as yet received no shocks, and reigned triumphant over an
unconscious nation whose spirit was sleeping; and when "religion," disturbed to its
foundations, began to die, and people all round him were just becoming religious enough
to renounce the beliefs they no longer held, he was too old to change, and continued to
employ the mechanism of a creed when had never really been vital to him. He was in
essence pagan: All was right with his world! His love was absorbed by Nature, and his
wonder by the Great Starry Scheme he felt all around. This was God to him; for it was ever
in the presence of the stars that he was most moved to a sense of divine order. Looking up
at those tremulous cold companions he seemed more reverent, and awed, than ever he
was in the face of creeds or his fellow man. Whether stirred by the sheer beauty of Night,
or by its dark immensity swarming with those glittering worlds, he would stand silent, and
then, perhaps, say wistfully: "What little bits of things we are! Poor little wretches!" Yes, it
was then that he really worshipped, adoring the great wonders of Eternity. No one ever
heard him talk with conviction of a future life. He was far too self-reliant to accept what he
was told, save by his own inner voice; and that did not speak to him with certainty. In fact,
as he grew old, to be uncertain of all such high things was part of his real religion; it
seemed to him, I think, impertinent to pretend to intimate knowledge of what was so much
bigger than himself. But neither his conventional creed, nor that awed uncertainty which
160
The best essay of England
was his real religion were ever out of hand; they jogged smoothly on in double harness,
driven and guided by a supremer power - his reference for Life. He abhorred fanaticism. In
this he truly mirrored the spirit of that great peacefully expanding river, the Victorian Era,
which began when he came of age. And yet, in speaking before him of deep or abstract
things, it was not safe to reckon without his criticism, which would sometimes make
powerfully shrewd deductions out of the sheer logical insight of a nature neither
fundamentally concerned with other worlds, nor brought up to the ways of discussion. He
was pre-eminently the son of a time between two ages - a past age of old, unquestioning
faith in Authority; a future age of new faith, already born but not yet grown. Still sheltering
in the shade of the old tree which was severed at the roots and toppling, he never, I think,
clearly saw - though he may have had glimpses - that men, like children, whose mother
has departed from their home, were slowly being forced to trust in, and be good to,
themselves and to one another, and so to form out of their necessity, desperately,
unconsciously, their new great belief in Humanity. Yes, he was the son of a time between
two ages - the product of an era without real faith - an individualist to the core.
His attitude towards the poor, for instance, was essentially that of man to man. Save that
he could not tolerate impostors (one of his favourite words), and saw through them with
almost startling rapidity, he was compassionate to any who had fallen on evil fortune, and
especially to those who had been in any way connected with him. But in these almonary
transactions he was always particularly secretive, as if rather doubting their sagacity, and
the wisdom of allowing them to become known - himself making up and despatching the
parcels of old clothes, and rather surreptitiously producing such coins and writing such
cheques as were necessary. But "the poor," in bulk, were always to him the concern of the
Poor Law pure and simple, and in no sense of the individual citizen. It was the same with
malefactors, he might pity as well as condemn them, but the idea that the society to which
he and they belonged was in any way responsible for them, would never have occurred to
him. His sense of justice, like that of his period, was fundamentally based on the notion
that every man had started with equal, or at all events, with quite sufficient opportunities,
and must be judges as if he had. But, indeed, it was not the custom in his day to concern
oneself with problems outside one's own class. Within that class, and in all matters
domestic, no man was ever born with a nicer sense of justice. It was never overridden by
his affections; very seldom, and that with a certain charming na 飗 et?/I>, by his interests.
This sense of justice, however, in no way prevented him from being loved; for, in spite of a
temper apt to take fire, flare up, and quickly die down again, he was one of the most
161
The best essay of England
loveable of men. There was not an ounce of dourness or asperity in his composition. His
laughter was of a most infectious kind, singularly spontaneous and delightful, resembling
the laughter of a child. The change which a joke wrought in the aspect of his large,
dignified, and rather noble face, was disconcerting. It became wrinkled, or, as it were,
crumpled; and such a twinkling overcame his eyes as was frequently only to be
extinguished by moisture. "That's rich!" was his favourite expression to describe what had
tickled him; for he has preserved the use of Devonshire expressions, bringing them forth,
from an intimate pet drawer of memory, and lingering over them with real gusto. He still
loved, too, such Devonshire dishes of his boyhood, as "junket" and "toad in the hole"; and
one of his favourite memories was that of the meals snatched at the old coaching Inn at
Exeter, while they changed the horses of the Plymouth to the London coach. Twenty-four
hours at ten miles an hour, without ever a break! Glorious drive! Glorious the joints of beef,
the cherry brandy! Glorious the old stage coachman, a "monstrous fat chap" who at that
time ruled the road!
In the city, where his office was situate, he was wont, though at all times a very moderate
eater, to frequent substantial, old-fashioned hostelries such as Roche's, Pim's, or Birth's, in
preference to newer and more pretentious places of refreshment. He had a remarkable
palate too, and though he drank very little, was, in his prime, considered as fine a judge of
wine as any in London. Of tea he was particularly fond, and always consumed the very
best Indian, made with extreme care, maintaining that the Chinese variety was only fit for
persons of no taste.
He had little liking for his profession, believing it to be beneath him, and that Heaven had
intended him for an advocate; in which he was probably right, for his masterful acumen
could not have failed to assure him a foremost position at the Bar. And in him, I think, it is
certain that a great Judge was lost to the State. Despite this contempt for what he called
the "pettifogging" character of his occupation, he always inspired profound respect in his
clients; and among the shareholders of his Companies, of which he directed several, his
integrity and judgment stood so high that he was enabled to pursue successfully a line of
polity often too comprehensive, and far-seeing for the temper of the times. The reposeful
dignity, and courage, of his head and figure when facing an awkward General Meeting
could hardly have been exceeded. He sat, as it were, remote from its gusty tempter,
quietly determining its course.
162
The best essay of England
Truly memorable were his conflicts with the only other man of his calibre on those Boards,
and I cannot remember that he was ever beaten. He was at once the quicker tempered
and more cautious. And if he had not the other's stoicism and iron nerve, he saw further
into the matter in hand, was more unremitting in his effort, equally tenacious of purpose,
and more magnetic. In fact, he had a way with him.
But, after all said, it was in his dealings with children that the best and sweetest side of his
personality was manifested. With them he became completely tender, inexhaustibly
interested in their interests, absurdly patient, and as careful as a mother. No child ever
resisted him, or even dreamed of doing so. From the first moment they loved his white hair
and beard, his "feathers" as one little thing called them. They liked the touch of his thin
hand, which was never wet or cold; and, holding to it, were always ready to walk with him wandering with complete unanimity, not knowing quite where or for what reason. How
often have I not watched him starting out on that high adventure with his grandson, his
face turned gravely down towards a smaller face turned not quite so gravely up; and heard
their voices tremendously concerned with all the things they might be going to do together!
How often have I not seem them coming back, tired as cats, but still concerned about what
was next going to happen! And children were always willing to play cricket with him
because he bowled to them very slowly, pitching up what he called "three-quarter" balls,
and himself always getting "out" almost before he went in. For, although he became in his
later years a great connoisseur of cricket, spending many days at Lord's or the Oval,
choosing out play of the very highest class, and quite impatient of the Eaton and Harrow
Match, he still performed in a somewhat rococo fashion, as of a man taught in the late
twenties of the last century, and having occasion to revive that knowledge about 1895. He
bent his back knee, and played with a perfectly crooked bat, to the end that when he did
hit the ball, which was not too often, it invariably climbed the air. There was, too, about his
batting, a certain vein of recklessness or bravado, somewhat out of keeping with his
general character, so that, as has been said, he was never in too long. And when he got
out he would pitch the bat down as if he were annoyed, which would hugely please his
grandson, showing of course that he had been trying his very best, as indeed, he generally
had. But his bowling was extremely impressive, being effected with very bent knees, and a
general air of first putting the ball to the eye, as if he were playing bowls; in this way he
would go on and on giving the boy "an innings," and getting much too hot. In fielding he
never could remember on the spur of the moment whether it was his knees or his feet that
he ought to close; and this, in combination with a habit of bending rather cautiously,
163
The best essay of England
because he was liable to lumbago, detracted somewhat from his brilliance; but when the
ball was once in his hands, it was most exciting - impossible to tell whether he would throw
it at the running batsman, the wicket, or the bowler, according as the game appeared to
him at the moment to be double wicket, single wicket, or rounders. He had lived in days
when games were not the be-all and end-all of existence, and had never acquired a proper
seriousness in such matters. Those who passed from cricket with him to cricket in the cold
wide world found a change for which at first they were unable to account. But even more
fascinating to children than his way of playing cricket was his perfect identification with
whatever might be the matter in hand. The examination of a shell, the listening to the voice
of the sea imprisoned it, the making of a cocked hat out of the Times newspaper, the doing
up of little buttons, the feeding of pigeons with crumbs, the holding fast of a tiny leg while
walking beside a pony, all these things absorbed him completely, so that no visible trace
was left of the man whose judgment on affairs was admirable and profound. Nor, whatever
the provocation, could he ever bring himself to point the moral of anything to a child,
having that utter toleration of their foibles which only comes from a natural and perfectly
unconscious love of being with them. His face, habitually tranquil, wore in their presence a
mellow look of almost devil-may-care serenity.
Their sayings, too, he treasured, as though they were pearls. First poems, such as:
I sorr a worm,
It was half-ly dead;
I took a great spud,
And speared through his head
were to him of singular fair promise. Their diagnoses of character, moreover, especially
after visiting a circus, filled him with pure rapture, and he would frequently repeat this one:
"Father, is Uncle a clever man?"
"H',m! well - yes, certainly."
"I never seen no specimens. He can't balance a pole on his nose, for instance."
To the declining benison of their prayers, from their "darling father and mother," to "all poor
people who are in distress," he loved to listen, not so much for the sentiments expressed,
164
The best essay of England
as because, in their little nightgowns, they looked so sweet, and were so roundabout in
their way of getting to work.
Yes, children were of all living things his chosen friends, and they knew it.
But in his long life he made singularly few fast friendships with grown-up people, and, as
far as I know, no enemies. For there was in him, despite his geniality, a very strong vein of
fastidiousness, and such essential deep love of domination, that he found, perhaps, few
men of his own age and standing to whom he did not feel natively superior. His most real
and lifelong friendship was for a certain very big man with a profound hatred of humbug
and a streak of "the desperate character" in him. They held each other in the highest
esteem, or, as they would probably have put it, swore by one another; the one grumbling
at, but reverencing, the other's high and resolute equanimity; the other deploring and
admiring the one's deep and generous recklessness. The expressions: "Just like John, the
careful fellow!" "Just like Sil, reckless beggar!" were always on their lips; for like all their
generation they were sparing of encomium; and great, indeed, must have been their
emotion before they would show their feelings. Dear as they were to each other's hearts,
they never talked together of spiritual things, they never spoke in generalities, but gravely
smoking their cigars, discussed their acquaintances, investments, wine, their nephews and
grandchildren, and the affairs of the State - condemning the advertising fashion in which
everything was now done. Once in a way they would tell a story - but they knew each
other's stories too well; once in a way quote a line of Byron, Shakespeare, or Milton; or
whistle to each other, inharmoniously, a bar or two from some song that Grisi, Mario, or
Jenny Lind had sung. Once in a way memories of the heyday of their youth, those far-off
golden hours, stealing over them, they would sit silent, with their grave steady eyes
following the little rings of bluish smoke... Yes, for all their lack of demonstration, they
loved each other well.
I seem still to see the subject of this portrait standing at his friend's funeral one bleak
November day, the pale autumn sunlight falling on the silver of his uncovered head a little
bowed, and on his grave face, for once so sad. I hear the tones of his voice, still full and
steady; and from the soul of his eyes, looking, as it were, through and through those forms
of death to some deep conclusion of his own, I know how big and sane and sweet he was.
His breed is dying now, it has nearly gone. But as I remember him with that great quiet
forehead, with his tenderness, and his glance which travelled to the hart of what it rested
165
The best essay of England
on, I despair of seeing his like again. For, with him there seems to me to have passed
away a principle, a golden rule of life, nay, more, a spirit - the soul of Balance. It has stolen
away, as in the early morning the stars steal out of the sky. He knew its tranquil secret,
and where he is, there must it still be hovering.1
--John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
I have often wondered who Galsworthy was writing about. Whoever he is, he is "a pure-
blooded Englishman" from "the most southern corner of Devonshire." Further, our subject
was born in 1817 ("two years after the Battle of Waterloo"), studied law and his father was
"a Plymouth merchant." Further, he lived to age eighty and was a wealthy man. He was
married at 45 years of age and had more than one child. Who is this man of which
Galsworthy writes?
"Evolution"1
By John Galsworthy
Coming out of the theatre, we found it utterly impossible to get a taxicab; and, though it
was raining slightly, walked through Leicester Square in the hope of picking one up as it
returned down Picadilly. Numbers of hansoms and four-wheelers passed, or stood by the
curb, hailing us feebly, or not even attempting to attract our attention, but every taxi
seemed to have its load. At Picadilly Circus, losing patience, we beckoned to a fourwheeler and resigned ourselves to a long, slow journey. A sou'westerly air blew through
the open windows, and there was in it the scent of change, that wet scent which visits
even the hearts and towns and inspires the watcher of their myriad activities with thought
of the restless Force that forever cries: "On, on!" But gradually the steady patter of the
horse's hoofs, the rattling of the windows, the slow thudding of the wheels, pressed on us
so drowsily that when, at last, we reached home we were more than half asleep. The fare
was two shillings, and, standing in the lamplight to make sure the coin was a half-crown
before handing it to the driver, we happened to look up. This cabman appeared to be a
man of about sixty, with a long, thin face, whose chin and dropping grey moustaches
seemed in permanent repose on the up-turned collar of his old blue overcoat. But the
remarkable features of his face were the two furrows down his cheeks, so deep and hollow
166
The best essay of England
that it seemed as though that face were a collection of bones without coherent flesh,
among which the eyes were sunk back so far that they had lost their lustre. He sat quite
motionless, gazing at the tail of his horse. And, almost unconsciously, one added the rest
of one's silver to that half-crown. He took the coins without speaking; but, as we were
turning into the garden gate, we hard him say:
"Thank you; you've saved my life."
Not knowing, either of us, what to reply to such a curious speech, we closed the gate
again and came back to the cab.
"Are things so very bad?"
"They are," replied the cabman. "It's done with - is this job. We're not wanted now." And,
taking up his whip, he prepared to drive away.
"How long have they been as bad as this?"
The cabman dropped his hand again, as though glad to rest it, and answered incoherently:
"Thirty-five year I've been drivin' a cab."
And, sunk again in contemplation of his horse's tail, he could only be roused by many
questions to express himself, having, as it seemed, no knowledge of the habit.
"I don't blame the taxis, I don't blame nobody. It's come on us, that's what it has. I left the
wife this morning with nothing in the house. She was saying to me only yesterday: 'What
have you brought home the last four months?' 'Put it at six shillings a week,' I said. 'No,'
she said, 'seven.' Well, that's right - she enters it all down in her book."
"You are really going short of food?"
The cabman smiled; and that smile between those two deep hollows was surely as
strange as ever shone on a human face.
"You may say that," he said. "Well, what does it amount to? Before I picked you up, I had
one eighteen-penny fare to-day; and yesterday I took five shillings. And I've got seven bob
a day to pay for the cab, and that's low, too. There's many and many a proprietor that's
broke and gone - every bit as bad as us. They let us down as easy as ever they can; you
can't get blood from a stone, can you?" Once again he smiled. "I'm sorry for them, too, and
I'm sorry for the horses, though they come out best of the three of us, I do believe."
One of us muttered something about the Public.
The cabman turned his face and stared down through the darkness.
"The Public?" he said, and his voice had in it a faint surprise. "Well, they all want the taxis.
It's natural. They get about faster in them, and time's money. I was seven hours before I
picked you up. And then you was lookin' for a taxi. Them as take us because they can't get
167
The best essay of England
better, they're not in a good temper, as a rule. And there's a few old ladies that's frightened
of the motors, but old ladies aren't never very free with their money - can't afford to be, the
most of them, I expect."
"Everybody's sorry for you; one would have thought that - "
He interrupted quietly: "Sorrow don't buy bread... I never had nobody ask me about things
before." And, slowly moving his long face from side to side, he added: "Besides, what
could people do? They can't be expected to support you; and if they started askin' you
questions they'd feel it very awkward. They know that, I suspect. Of course, there's such a
lot of us: the hansoms are pretty nigh as bad off as we are. Well, we're gettin' fewer every
day, that's one thing.
Not knowing whether or not to manifest sympathy with this extinction, we approached the
horse. It was a horse that "stood over" a good deal at the knee, and in the darkness
seemed to have innumerable ribs. And suddenly one of us said: "Many people want to see
nothing but taxis on the streets, if only for the sake of the horses."
The cabman nodded.
"The old fellow," he said, "never carried a deal of flesh. His grub don't put spirit into him
nowadays; it's not up to much in quality, but he get enough of it."
"And you don't?"
The cabman again took up his whip.
"I don't suppose," he said without emotion, "any one could ever find another job for me
now. I've been at this too long. It'll be the workhouse, if it's not the other thing."
And hearing us mutter that it seemed cruel, he smiled for the third time.
"Yes," he said slowly, "it's a bit 'ard on us, because we've done nothing to deserve it. But
things are like that, so far as I can see. One thing comes pushin' out another, and so you
go on. I've thought about it - you get to thinkin' and worryin' about the rights o' things, sittin'
up here all day. No, I don't see anything for it. It'll soon be the end of us now - can't last
much longer. And I don't know that I'll be sorry to have done with it. It's pretty well broke
my spirit."
"There was a fund got up."
"Yes, it helped a few of us to learn the motor-drivin'; but what's the good of that to me, at
my time of life? Sixty, that's my age; I'm not the only one - there's hundreds like me. We're
not fit for it, that's the fact; we haven't got the nerve now. It'd want a mint of money to help
us. And what you say's the truth - people want to see the end of us. They want the taxis our day's over. I'm not complaining; you asked me about it yourself."
168
The best essay of England
And for the third time he raised his whip.
"Tell me what you would have done if you had been given your fare and just sixpence
over?"
The cabman stared downward, as though puzzled by that question.
"Done? Why nothing. What could I have done?"
"But you said that it had saved your life."
"Yes, I said that," he answered slowly; "I was feelin' a bit low. You can't help it sometimes;
it's the thing comin' on you, and no way out of it - that's what gets over you. We try not to
think about it, as a rule."
And this time, with a "Thank you, kindly!" he touched his horse's flank with the whip. Like a
thing aroused from sleep the forgotten creature started and began to draw the cabman
away from us. Very slowly they travelled down the road among the shadows of the trees
broken by lamplight. Above us, white ships of cloud were sailing rapidly across the dark
river of sky on the wind which smelled of change. And, after the cab was lost to sight, that
wind still brought to us the dying sound of the slow wheels.
--John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
[TOP]
NOTES:
1
The editers of a book of essays -- English Professors Berdan, Schultz and Joyce of Yale
-- published by Macmillan, 1916, wrote a short introductory paragraph, as follws: "In these
last essays, the line of demarcation between exposition, description, and narration has
become very thin - as it often does outside of rhetorics. Bunner's essay suggests
description, and suggests narrative. It is a story without a plot. As the characters and the
scenes are there, the reader at any moment half expects it to blossom into a short story.
Still more is this true of Mr. Galsworthy's Evolution. Is it a story or is it an essay? For the
first, it consists of a single dramatic episode with definite characters. For the second,
however, the pathos of the situation is not individual but belongs to a class. The thought is
that while evolution is necessary and desirable for those that survive, the struggle is hard
for those that do not survive. This might be illustrated by the strikes in England with the
introduction of machinery into the cotton mills, when thousands were thrown out of
employment. It might be illustrated by the Venetian gondolier who finds his work taken
from him by the motor-boat. Actually the particular illustration chosen is that of a cabdriver. This is presented with consummate art, detail and definite. And the essay is
169
The best essay of England
omitted. But it is implicit. The tragedy presented is not that of an individual, but that of a
class. And in this way Mr. Galsworthy forces the reader to be himself the author. This type,
then, represents the extreme limit of the expository form.
"Gifts"
By Ralph Waldo Emerson.
IT is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more
than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, and be sold. I do not think this
general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the
difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, and other times, in bestowing gifts;
since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the
impediment lies in the choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head that a present is due
from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers
and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of
beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the
somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a
workhouse. Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond:
everything is dealt to us without fear or favour, after severe universal laws. Yet these
delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us
that we love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are
of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure the flowers give us:
what ant I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts because
they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If
a man should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a
basket of fine summer fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labour
and the reward.
For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is glad
when an imperative leaves him no option, since if the man at the door have no shoes, you
have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always
pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is
always a great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does everything well. In
our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of
his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a
170
The best essay of England
fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of
many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule
for a gift which one of my friends prescribed is, that we might convey to some person that
which properly, belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought.
But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other
jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must
bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer,
corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a
handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far
to the primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's
wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops
to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This
is fib for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make
presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black
mail.
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is
not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them ? We wish to be selfsustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of
being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving A from
ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat
which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it.
Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
Be sure that from his hands thou nothing take.
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it do not give usbesides earth, and fire, and water, -- opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of
veneration.
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and
both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne,
when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a
gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the
gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart,
and see that I love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of
171
The best essay of England
the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters. are at level,
then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How
can you give me this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine,
which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful
things for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is
ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the gift,
but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the
beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude is mean,
and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great
happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill-luck to
be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor
naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so
admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors.'
The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a
man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have
served him he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his
friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in
readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also.
Compared with that goodwill I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him
seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and
at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgements of any person who would
thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct
stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of
yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. But rectitude scatters favours on every
side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and god of
gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves
indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect fairy-tokens; let us not
cease to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For
the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of
generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not
need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house
and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join
172
The best essay of England
myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, -- no more. They eat your
service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you
all the time.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Essays, Second
Series.
"My Copy Of Keats"
By Richard Dowling (1846-98)
The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by Edward Moxon &
Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf I find it was given to me four years
later in September, 1865. At that time it was clean and bright, opened with strict
impartiality when set upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty
researches for favourite passages.
The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army regulations, service
under warm suns is to be taken for longer service in cooler climes, it may be said that to
the exhaustion following overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.
It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they outlasted the tables and
chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and names of their owners. The cover is simple
plain blue cloth; on the back is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats'
Poetical Works in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers. The welt at the
back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover are battered and turned in. There is
a chink between the cover and the arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that
are is flattened and degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than
a wheaten straw after the threshing....
If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a shilling for such a
copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You would think he had acquired the
books merely to satisfy his own taste, and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was
intelligible; you would feel assured no motive toward commerce could underlie ever so
deeply such a preposterous demand.
My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands more than half the
years of a generation; and I feel that its severest trials are over. In days gone by it made
173
The best essay of England
journeys with me by sea and land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went
myself, and when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect upon
it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt of the cloth grew darker and
dingier, the boards of the cover became limper and limper, and the stitching at the back
more apparent between the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through
the flesh of a hand waxing old....
My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many quills, many
pockets. Not one stain, am gape, one blot of these would I forego for a spick and span
copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the bookbinder's millinery. These blemishes are aureole
to me. They are nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the
triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that embattle the heights of
Parnassus.
What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I remember the day
it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins the Ode on a Grecian Urn. It was a
clear, bright, warm, sunshiny afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat
and rowed down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel beach of
a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we all climbed a slope,
reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the long lush cool grass, in the shade of
whispering sycamores, and in a stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of
the hawthorn blossom.
One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His voice was
neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the better for this because he
made no effort at display. As he read, the book vanished from his sight, and he leaned
over the poet's shoulder, saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of
responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what he saw in words that
never hurried, and that, when uttered, always seemed to hang substantially in the air like
banners.
He discovered and related the poet's vision rather than simulated passion to suit the
scene. I remember well his reading of the passage:
"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
174
The best essay of England
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!"
He rehearsed the whole of the ode over and over again as we lay on the grass watching
the vast chestnuts and oaks bending over the river, as though they had grown aweary of
the sun, and longed to glide into the broad full stream.
As he read the lines just quoted, he gave us time to hear the murmur, and to breathe the
fragrance of those immortal trees. "Nor ever can those trees be bare," in the text has only
a semicolon after it. Yet here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if
he could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure, and realising the
prodigious edict pronounced upon it. "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though
winning near the goal." At the terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavylidded, hopeless commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion forever strong, and denial forever final.
"Yet do not grieve." This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a corpse -- merely to
try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation that can never now be discharged.
"She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
Here the reader, with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren immutability of the spectacle
appeared to weigh upon him more intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the
words in a long drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
resume.
I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had passed away in that
long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of the poet was expending itself, not
on beings whom he conceived originally as humans, but on the figures of a mere vase, I
was seized with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world until I
found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.
When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide where I should
recommence, and I "turned the page, and turned the page." I lived over again the days not
forgotten, but laid aside in memory to be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not
175
The best essay of England
bring myself back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to this
poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own thoughts -- thoughts so
trivial and so mean compared with the imperial visions into which I had been gazing, that I
was glad for the weariness which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that
glimmered against the blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.
On turning over the leaves without reading, I find Hyperion opens most readily of all, and
seems to have feared worst from deliberate and unintentional comment. Much of the wear
and tear and pencil marks are to be set down against myself; for when I take the book with
no definite purpose I turn to Hyperion, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun. Some
qualities of the poem I can appreciate; but always in its presence I am weighed down by
the consciousness that my deficiency in some perception debars me from undreamed of
privileges.
I recall one evening in a pine glen with one man and Hyperion. It would be difficult to
match this man or me as readers. I don't think there can be ten worse employing the
English language to-day. I not only do not by any inflexion of voice expound what I utter,
but, I am often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a glance, see
its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage, which leaves not a shadow of
an impression on my mind. When I come to the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact
that I have to speak off the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show;
so, instead of giving the poet's words for line one, I give my own description of the vision it
has conjured up in my mind. This is bad enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I
speak now, behaves even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had read with his eye, but
not with his lips, and of which the listener is ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem
by rote.
On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned at my friend's request, to
Hyperion, and began to read aloud. He was more patient than mercy's self; but
occasionally, when I did a most exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and
cry out, and I would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.
He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and some of the
comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in the margin. The writing, was
not done then, but much later, when he and I had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen
176
The best essay of England
thousand miles away. As he was about to set out on that long journey, he said, "In seven
years more I'll drop in and have a pipe with you." It had been seven years since I saw him
before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said; for I fear the comment
made was more bulky than the text, and the text and comment together would far exceed
the limits of such an essay as this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.
I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I came in page two
on;
"She would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,"
he cried out, "Stop! Don't read the lines following. It is bathos compared with that line and
a half. It is paltry and weak beside what you have read. 'Ta'en Achilles by the hair and bent
his neck.' By Jove! can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat falls the next line:
'Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel'? Besides, a crowbar would be much better than a
finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts the subject. It is too literal.
There is no question left to ask. But the vague 'Ta'en Achilles by the hair and bent his
neck' is perfect. You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted in
his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell after Ixion's wheel is
contemptible."
He next stopped me at
"Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone."
"What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt Titan when he
wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply overwhelming. Keats must have
sprung up out of his chair as he saw the gigantic head upraised and the prodigious grief of
the gray-haired god. But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of
"And all the gloom and sorrow of the place
And that fair kneeling goddess.
177
The best essay of England
The 'gloom and sorrow' and the 'goddess' are abominably anticlimacteric."
"Yes, there must be a golden victory;
There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown
Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?"
"Read that again!" cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing hard. "Again!" he
cried, when I had finished the second time. And then, before I could proceed, he sprang to
his feet, carrying out the action in the text immediately following;
"This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air."
Come on, John Milton," cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the winds -- "come on, and
beat that, and we'll let you put all your adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last,
and your nominative nowhere! Why, man." this being addressed to the Puritan poet -- "it
carried Keats himself off his legs; that's more than anything you ever wrote when you were
old did for you. There's the smell of midnight oil off your later spontaneous efforts, John
Milton.
"When John Milton went loafing about and didn't mind much what he was writing he could
give any of them points" -- (I deplore the language) "any of them, ay, Shakespeare himself
points in a poem. In a poem, sir" (this to me), "Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred
and one out of a hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
write Shakespeare's poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare's plays I can never
understand. The most un-Shakespearian poems in the language are Shakespeare's. I
never read Cowley, but it seems to me Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare's
poems, and then his obscurity would have been complete. If Milton only didn't take the
trouble to be great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became professional poets,
178
The best essay of England
except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats were never regular race-horses.
They were colts that bolted in their first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job
Shakespeare gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he despaired of
becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel his feet and show his pace. If
he had suspected he was a great poet he would have adopted the aim of the profession
and been ruined. In his time no one thought of calling a play a poem -- that was what
saved the greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn't know is
that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest poems finite man as he is now
constructed can endure. It is all nonsense to say man shall never look on the like of
Shakespeare again. It is not the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the
man to apprehend him."
I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that there was no stranger in
view. My friend occupied a position of responsibility and trust, and it would be most
injurious if a rumour got abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he
held converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days man who spoke to
the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our times men offending in
this manner are suspected of poetry and ostracised.
As soon as my friend was somewhat cast himself down again and lit a pipe, I resumed my
reading. He allowed me to proceed without interruption until I came to
"His palace bright,
Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles' wings,
Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
Not heard before by Gods or wondering men."
"Prodigious!" he shouted. "Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide apart. It is a good
rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice about joining the edges of the tints; this
lets the light in. Keep the syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
179
The best essay of England
between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must have
wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified himself with his own
visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn't think any one could dare to read
some one or another aloud at midnight. I believe that often in the midnight he sat and
cowered before the gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy."
"0 dreams of day and night!
0 monstrous forms! 0 effigies of pain!
0 spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
0 lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
This crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry
I cannot see -- but darkness, death, and darkness.
Even here, into my centre of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp
Fall! -- No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again."
"What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion of this speech
preceding. 'No. by Tellus!' What more overpowering, leading up to an overwhelming threat,
than the whole passage going before 'Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a
terrible right arm!' What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole speech, and what
180
The best essay of England
utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by those words, 'I will advance a terrible
right arm'! You feel no sooner shall that arm move than 'rebel Jove's' reign will be at an
end, and chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into order. Shut up the
poem now. That's plenty of Hyperion, and the other books of it are inferior. There is more
labour and more likeness to Paradise Lost." And so my, friend, who is 16,000 miles away,
and I turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of guardians, or some
young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the hearts of young men in those old
days.
There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which indicate such close
connection with any individual reader as in the case of Hyperion. Endymion boasts only
one mark, and that expressing admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the
heroic couplets by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
"Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing Therefore, on every morrow, are we
wreathing --"
The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even saw it; but
once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got together, and were talking of the
"gallipot poet," the first friend said he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed
where it appears. So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I
open the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a photograph of
my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but once more he places his index-finger
on the table, as we three sit smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with
the two I have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from London,
and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it when I please, and recall what
I then saw and heard, what I now see and hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of
ocean or of months lay between to-night and that hour? ...
When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I feel that while it is
left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends. It is the only album of photographs I
possess. The faces I see in it are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery,
in which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots we intelligible to no
eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of the heart. I close the book; I lock up
the hieroglyphics; I feel certain the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass
into new hands -- into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it posies
181
The best essay of England
of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart -- he will know nothing of the import
these marginal notes bore to one who has gone before him; unless, indeed, out of some
cemetery of ephemeral literature he digs up this key -- this Rosetta stone.
-- Richard Dowling (1846-98):
(Richard Dowling started out as a journalist. In 1870
he joined
the staff of The Nation,, a Dublin publication. In 1875
Dowling
took himself off to London, where he wrote for
periodicals.
Dowling also turned to novel writing. An obituary
notice, said of him,
"He was one of the kindest-hearted of men, and an
admirable talker,
whose wit and vivacity remained unimpaired almost
to the end."
Dowling's two most important volumes are Indolent Essays and
Ignorant Essays (Appleton), of which, it is suggested, the latter is the
best, and from which our selection is taken. [Top]
"Stage Coach"
By Charles Dickens
When the coach came round at last, with "London" blazoned in letters of gold upon the
boot, it gave Tom such a turn, that he was half disposed to run away. But he didn't do it;
for he took his seat upon the box instead, and looking down upon the four greys, felt as if
he were another grey himself, or, at all events, a part of the turn-out; and was quite
confused by the novelty and splendour of his situation.
And really it might have confused a less modest man than Tom to find himself sitting, next
that coachman; for of all the swells that ever flourished a whip, professionally, he might
have been elected emperor. He didn't handle his gloves like another man, but put them on
-- even when he was standing on the pavement, quite detached from the coach -- as if the
four greys were, somehow or other, at the ends of the fingers. It was the same with his hat.
He did things with his hat, which nothing but an unlimited knowledge of horses and the
182
The best essay of England
wildest freedom of the road, could ever have made him perfect in. Valuable little parcels
were brought to him with particular instructions, and he pitched them into his hat, and
stuck it on again; as if the laws of gravity did not admit of such an event as its being
knocked off or blown off, and nothing like an accident could befall it. The guard too!
Seventy breezy miles a-day were written in his very whiskers. His manners were a canter;
his conversation a round trot. He was a fast coach upon a down-hill turnpike road; he was
all pace. A waggon couldn't have moved slowly, with that guard and his key-bugle on the
top of it.
These were all foreshadowings of London, Tom thought, as he sat upon the box, and
looked about him. Such a coachman and such a guard never could have existed between
Salisbury and any other place. The coach was none of your steady-going, yokel coaches,
but a swaggering, rakish, dissipated, London coach; up all night, and lying by all day, and
leading a terrible life. It cared no more for Salisbury than if it had been a hamlet. It rattled
noisily through the best streets, defied the cathedral, took the worst corners sharpest, went
cutting in everywhere, making everything get out of its way; and spun along the open
country-road, blowing a lively defiance out of its key-bugle, as its last glad parting legacy.
It was a charming evening. Mild and bright. And even with the weight upon his mind which
arose out of the immensity and uncertainty of London, Tom could not resist the captivating
sense of rapid motion through the pleasant air. The four greys skimmed along, as if they
liked it quite as well as Tom did; the bugle was in as high spirits as the greys; the
coachman chimed in sometimes with his voice; the wheels hummed cheerfully in unison;
the brass-work on the harness was an orchestra of little bells; and thus, as they went
clinking, jingling, rattling, smoothly on, the whole concern, from the buckles of the leaders'
coupling-reins to the handle of the hind boot, was one great instrument of music.
Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home
from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with
rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling
carters close to the fivebarred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burialgrounds about them, where the graves are green, and daisies sleep -- for it is evening -on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and
where the rushes grow; past paddock- fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year's
183
The best essay of England
stacks, cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined gables, old
and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash, and up at a
canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!
Yoho, among the gathering shades; making of no account the deep reflections of the
trees, but scampering on through light and darkness, all the same, as if the light of London
fifty miles away, were quite enough to travel by, and some to spare. Yoho, beside the
village-green, where cricketplayers linger yet, and every little indentation made in the fresh
grass by bat or wicket, ball or player's foot, sheds out its perfume on the night. Away with
four fresh horses from the Bald-faced Stag, where topers congregate about the door
admiring; and the last team with traces banging loose, go roaming off towards the pond,
until observed and shouted after by a dozen throats, while volunteering boys pursue them.
Now with the clattering of hoofs and striking out of fiery sparks, across the old stone
bridge, and down again into the shadowy road, and through the open gate, and far away,
away, into the wold. Yoho!
See the bright moon ! High up before we know it: making the earth reflect the objects on its
breast like water. Hedges, trees, low cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps and
flourishing young slips, have all grown vain upon the sudden, and mean to contemplate
their own fair images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle, that their quivering leaves
may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak; trembling does not become him;
and he watches himself in his stout old burly steadfastness, without the motion of a twig.
The moss-grown gate, ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed, swings to
and fro before its glass, like some fantastic dowager; while our own ghostly likeness
travels on, Yoho! Yoho! through ditch and brake, upon the ploughed land and the smooth,
along the steep hillside and steeper wall, as if it were a phantom-hunter.
Clouds too! And a mist upon the hollow! Not a dull fog that hides it, but a light airy gauzelike mist, which in our eyes of modest admiration gives a new charm to the beauties it is
spread before: as real gauze has done ere now, and would again, so please you, though
we were the Pope. Yoho! Why now we travel like the moon herself. Hiding this minute in a
grove of trees; next minute in a patch of vapour; emerging now upon our broad clear
course; withdrawing now, but always dashing on, our journey is a counterpart of hers.
Yoho! A match against the moon. Yoho, yoho!
184
The best essay of England
The beauty of the night is hardly felt, when day comes leaping up. Yoho! Two stages, and
the country roads are almost changed to a continuous street. Yoho, past marketgardens,
rows of houses, villas, crescents, terraces, and squares past waggons, coaches, carts;
past early workmen, late stragglers, drunken men, and sober carriers of loads; past brick
and mortar in its every shape; and in among the rattling pavements, where a jaunty-seat
upon a coach is not so easy to preserve! Yoho, down countless turnings, and through
countless mazy ways, until an old inn-yard is gained and Tom Pinch, getting down, quite
stunned and giddy, is in London!
-- Charles Dickens (1812-70).
(From Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843.)
"Recapitulation and Conclusion"
By Charles Darwin.
I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced
me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been
effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable
variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of
parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past
or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us
in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the
frequency and value of these latter forms of variation, as leading to permanent
modifications of structure independently of natural selection. But as my conclusions have
lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of
species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first
edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position -- namely,
at the close of the Introduction -- the following words: "I am convinced that natural
selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of
no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows
that fortunately this power does not long endure.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as
does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It
has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method
used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest
185
The best essay of England
natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief
in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct
evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher
problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the
attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this
unknown element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused Newton of
introducing "occult qualities and miracles into philosophy."
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious
feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to
remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction
of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of
revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually
learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a
few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe
that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His
laws."
Why, it may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and
geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings
in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of
variation in the course of long ages is a limited quality; no clear distinction has been, or
can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that
species when intercrossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably fertile; or that
sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were
immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was
thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of
time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it
would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone
mutation.
But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth
to clear and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of
which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many
geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and
186
The best essay of England
great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot
possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and
perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite
number of generations.
Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form
of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are
stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of
view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions
as the "plan of creation" or "unity of design," &c., and to think that we give an explanation
when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to
unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly
reject the theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have
already begun to doubt the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I
look with confidence to the future, -- to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to
view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are
mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for thus only
can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.
Several eminent naturalists have of late published their belief that a multitude of reputed
species in each genus are not real species; but that other species are real, that is, have
been independently created. This seems to me a strange conclusion to arrive at. They
admit that a multitude of forms, which till lately they themselves thought were special
creations, and which are still thus looked at by the majority of naturalists, and which
consequently have all the external characteristic features of true species, -- they admit that
these have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other
and slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even
conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by
secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it
in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this
will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These
authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But
do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth 抯 history certain elemental
atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at
each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the
187
The best essay of England
infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown?
and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment
from the mother 抯 womb? Undoubtedly some of these same questions cannot be
answered by those who believe in the appearance or creation of only a few forms of life, or
of some one form alone. It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to
believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis?philosophical axiom
"of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly
we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been
created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a single parent.
As a record of a former state of things, I have retained in the foregoing paragraphs, and
elsewhere, several sentences which imply that naturalists believe in the separate creation
of each species; and I have been much censured for having thus expressed myself. But
undoubtedly this was the general belief when the first edition of the present work
appeared. I formerly spoke to very many naturalists on the subject of evolution, and never
once met with any sympathetic agreement. It is probable that some did then believe in
evolution, but they were either silent, or expressed themselves so ambiguously that it was
not easy to understand their meaning. Now things are wholly changed, and almost every
naturalist admits the great principle of evolution. There are, however, some who still think
that species have suddenly given birth, through quite unexplained means, to new and
totally different forms: but, as I have attempted to show, weighty evidence can be opposed
to the admission of great and abrupt modifications. Under a scientific point of view, and as
leading to further investigation, but little advantage is gained by believing that new forms
are suddenly developed in an inexplicable manner from old and widely different forms,
over the old belief in the creation of species from the dust of the earth.
It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question
is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we consider, by so
much the arguments in favour of community of descent become fewer in number and less
in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of
whole classes are connected together by a chain of affinities, and all can be classed on
the same principle, in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill
up very wide intervals between existing orders.
188
The best essay of England
Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a
fully developed condition; and this in some cases implies an enormous amount of
modification in the descendants. Throughout whole classes various structures are formed
on the same pattern, and at a very early age the embryos closely resemble each other.
Therefore I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the
members of the same great class or kingdom. I believe that animals are descended from
at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants
are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide.
Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their
cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. We see this
even in so trifling a fact as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals;
or that the poison secreted by the gallfly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or
oak-tree. With all organic beings excepting perhaps some of the very lowest, sexual
production seems to be essentially similar. With all, as far as is at present known the
germinal vesicle is the same; so that all organisms start from a common origin. If we look
even to the two main divisions -- namely, to the animal and vegetable kingdoms -- certain
low forms are so far intermediate in character that naturalists have disputed to which
kingdom they should be referred. As Professor Asa Gray has remarked, "The spores and
other reproductive bodies of many of the lower algae may claim to have first a
characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence." Therefore, on
the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible
that, from such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been
developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which
have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. But this
inference is chiefly grounded on analogy and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted.
No doubt it is possible, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has urged, that at the first commencement of
life many different forms were evolved; but if so we may conclude that only a very few
have left modified descendants. For, as I have recently remarked in regard to the
members of each great kingdom, such as the Vertebrata, Articulata, &c., we have distinct
evidence in their embryological homologous and rudimentary structures that within each
kingdom all the members are descended from a single progenitor.
189
The best essay of England
When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous
views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will
be a considerable revolution in natural history. Systematists will be able to pursue their
labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt
whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure and I speak after experience,
will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British
brambles are good species will cease. Systematists will have only to decide (not that this
will be easy) whether any form be sufficiently constant and distinct from other forms, to be
capable of definition; and if definable, whether the differences be sufficiently important to
deserve a specific name. This latter point will become a far more essential consideration
than it is at present; for differences, however slight, between any two forms if not blended
by intermediate gradations, are looked at by most naturalists as sufficient to raise both
forms to the rank of species.
Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species
and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed, to be connected at the
present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected.
Hence, without rejecting the consideration of the present existence of intermediate
gradations between any two forms we shall be led to weigh more carefully and to value
higher the actual amount of difference between them. It is quite possible that forms now
generally acknowledged to be merely varieties may hereafter be thought worthy of specific
names; and in this case scientific and common language will come into accordance. In
short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera,
who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may
not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be free from the vain search for the
undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species.
The other and more general departments of natural history will rise greatly in interest. The
terms used by naturalists, of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity,
morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c., will cease to be
metaphorical, and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic
being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when
we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we
contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many
contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical
190
The best essay of England
invention is the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the
blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more
interesting -- I speak from experience -- does the study of natural history become!
A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of
variation, on correlation, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external
conditions, and so forth. The study of domestic productions will rise immensely in value. A
new variety raised by man will be a more important and interesting subject for study than
one more species added to the infinitude of already recorded species. Our classifications
will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what
may be called the plan of creation. The rules for classifying will no doubt become simpler
when we have a definite object in view. We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings;
and we have to discover and trace the many diverging lines of descent in our natural
genealogies, by characters of any kind which have long been inherited. Rudimentary
organs will speak infallibly with respect to the nature of long-lost structures. Species and
groups of species which are called aberrant, and which may fancifully be called living
fossils, will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life. Embryology will often
reveal to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototype of each great class.
When we feel assured that all the individuals of the same species, and all the closely allied
species of most genera, have within a not very remote period descended from one parent,
and have migrated from some one birth-place; and when we better know the many means
of migration, then, by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on
former changes of climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely be enabled to trace
in an admirable manner the former migrations of the inhabitants of the whole world. Even
at present, by comparing the differences between the inhabitants of the sea on the
opposite sides of a continent, and the nature of the various inhabitants on that continent, in
relation to their apparent means of immigration, some light can be thrown on ancient
geography.
The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The
crust of the earth with its imbedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum,
but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each
great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual
concurrence of favourable circumstances, and the blank intervals between the successive
191
The best essay of England
stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security
the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic
forms. We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as strictly contemporaneous two
formations, which do not include many identical species, by the general succession of the
forms of life. As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing
causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation; and as the most important of all causes of
organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly
altered physical conditions, namely, the mutual relation of organism to organism, -- the
improvement of one organism entailing the improvement or the extermination of others; it
follows, that the amount of organic change in the fossils of consecutive formations
probably serves as a fair measure of the relative though not actual lapse of time. A number
of species, however, keeping in a body might remain for a long period unchanged, whilst
within the same period several of these species by migrating into new countries and
coming into competition with foreign associates, might become modified; so that we must
not overrate the accuracy of organic change as a measure of time.
In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be
securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the
necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be
thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species
has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the
laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past
and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like
those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as
special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long
before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become
ennoble
192