(An April Essay)
Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin) bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins to blow a clearer note.
When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities will abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this that flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the day? Mercury is out—some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed banks crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his wake is marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and fragments of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to embrace the slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the full gaze of the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime reposeth, passively beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards’ Club at Maidenhead. Here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity subjectively inclined, he is neither objective nor, it must be said for him, at all objectionable, like them of Mercury.
Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of Streatley Hill, “annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade”; or better yet, pushing an explorer’s prow up the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester’s stately roof broods over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping. Southwards, again, on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and jostling; dust that is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither comes the young Apollo, calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth certain Mercuries of the baser sort, who do him obeisance, call him captain and lord, and then proceed to skin him from head to foot as thoroughly as the god himself flayed Marsyas in days of yore, at a certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good instance of Time’s revenges. And yet Apollo returns to town and swears he has had a grand day. He does so every year. Out of hearing of all the clamour, the rural Pan may be found stretched on Ranmore Common, loitering under Abinger pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the sinuous Mole, abounding in friendly greetings for his foster-brothers the dab-chick and water-rat.
For a holiday, Mercury loveth the Pullman Express, and a short hour with a society paper; anon, brown boots on the pier, and the pleasant combination of Métropole and Monopole. Apollo for his part will urge the horses of the Sun: and, if he leaveth the society weekly to Mercury, yet he loveth well the Magazine. From which omphalos or hub of the universe he will direct his shining team even to the far Hesperides of Richmond or of Windsor. Both iron road and level highway are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fir. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is unsocial. Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities, he loveth the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are adscripti glebæ, addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof: perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is only half a god after all, and the red earth in him is strong. When the pelting storm drives the wayfarers to the sheltering inn, among the little group on bench and settle Pan has been known to appear at times, in homely guise of hedger-and-ditcher or weather-beaten shepherd from the downs. Strange lore and quaint fancy he will then impart, in the musical Wessex or Mercian he has learned to speak so naturally; though it may not be till many a mile away that you begin to suspect that you have unwittingly talked with him who chased the flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the tide of fight at Marathon.
Yes: to-day the iron horse has searched the country through—east and west, north and south—bringing with it Commercialism, whose god is Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco and garrotes the streams with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and corner fashion and chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily a great part is still spared—how great these others fortunately do not know—in which the rural Pan and his following may hide their heads for yet a little longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last common, spinney, and sheep-down, and driven the kindly god, the well-wisher to man—whither?
Marginalia
American Hunt, in his suggestive “Talks about Art,” demands that the child shall be encouraged—or rather permitted, for the natural child needs little encouragement—to draw when- and whereon-soever he can; for, says he, the child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them, and indeed, “to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.” Doubtless Sir Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul, had some dim feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarto of his, in which “a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin”: boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton’s “Bookhunter”: wherein you read of certain folios with “their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, sedgy with citations.” But the good Doctor leaves the main stream for a backwater of error in inferring that the chief use of margins is to be a parading-ground for notes and citations. As if they had not absolute value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In truth, Hunt’s child was vastly the wiser man.
For myself, my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or “tail” edge, the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old Nile; up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them, let fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys, gibbering with terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees—a plant to the untutored hand of easier outline than (say) your British oak. Meanwhile, all over the unregarded text Balbus slew Caius on the most inadequate provocation, or Hannibal pursued his victorious career, while Roman generals delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving the usual satisfactory licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal—all alike were pallid shades with faint, thin voices powerless to pierce the distance. The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these digressions I probably owe what little education I possess. For example, there was one sentence in our Roman history: “By this single battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his conquests in Asia Minor.” Serious historians really should not thus forget themselves. ’Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform “battle” into “bottle”; for “conquests” one could substitute a word for which not even Macaulay’s school-boy were at a loss; and the result, depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least one ancient fight on the illustrator’s memory. But this plodding and material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a “clear sky” ever through which I could sail away at will to more gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and ’twas no better. Along Milton’s margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the Arimaspian—what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil! And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the Lobster Quadrille by a certain shore.
It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent pew: as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless, and went to church. Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated: a depraved habit, akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognised is the absolute value of the margin itself—a value frequently superior to its enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and takes care to get it in “the little verses wot they puts inside the crackers.” The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular—because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote “Beowulf,” our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the first, so that his work is much the more popular of the two. The moral is evident. An authority on practical book-making has stated that “margin is a matter to be studied”; also that “to place the print in the centre of the paper is wrong in principle, and to be deprecated.” Now, if it be “wrong in principle,” let us push that principle to its legitimate conclusion, and “deprecate” the placing of print on any part of the paper at all. Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask—when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!
The Eternal Whither
There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment, whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man at his post, and performing all the duties appertaining thereunto. This was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere mill-horse enslavement to his groove—the reception of payments; and it was spoken of both in mockery of all mill-horses and for the due admonishment of others. And yet that clerk had discovered for himself an unique method of seeing Life at its best, the flowing, hurrying, travelling, marketing Life of the Highway; the life of bagman and cart, of tinker, and pig-dealer, and all cheery creatures that drink and chaffer together in the sun. He belonged, above all, to the scanty class of clear-seeing persons who know both what they are good for and what they really want. To know what you would like to do is one thing; to go out boldly and do it is another—and a rarer; and the sterile fields about Hell-Gate are strewn with the corpses of those who would an if they could.
To be sure, being bent on the relaxation most congenial to one’s soul, it is possible to push one’s disregard for convention too far: as is seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation, in the same establishment. In his office there was the customary “attendance-book,” wherein the clerks were expected to sign each day. Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing; he signs, indeed, no more. Instead of signature you find, a little later, writ in careful commercial hand, this entry: “Mr—- did not attend at his office to-day, having been hanged at eight o’clock in the morning for horse-stealing.” Through the faded ink of this record do you not seem to catch, across the gulf of years, some waft of the jolly humanity which breathed in this prince among clerks? A formal precisian, doubtless, during business hours; but with just this honest love of horseflesh lurking deep down there in him—unsuspected, sweetening the whole lump. Can you not behold him, freed from his desk, turning to pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still striveth to bury his bone deep in the hearth-rug? For no filthy lucre, you may be sure, but from sheer love of the pursuit itself! All the same, he erred; erred, if not in taste, at least in judgment: for we cannot entirely acquit him of blame for letting himself be caught.
In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our happier fathers were free. Book-stealing, to be sure, remains to us; but every one is not a collector; and, besides, ’tis a diversion you can follow with equal success all the year round. Still, the instance may haply be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily ask each year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps for the holiday-maker. ’Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner that is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom stimulus. To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness: why not try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch—for every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done; the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town; these new pleasures—these and their like—would furnish just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired worker. And then the fact, that you would naturally have to select and plan out your particular line of diversion without advice or assistance, has its own advantage. For the moment a man takes to dinning in your ears that you ought, you really ought, to go to Norway, you at once begin to hate Norway with a hate that ever will be; and to have Newlyn, Cromer, or Dawlish, Carinthia or the Austrian Tyrol jammed down your throat, is enough to initiate the discovery that your own individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking for manslaughter.
Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime. After all, it is mostly a matter of heredity; these unfortunates are less culpable than their neglectful ancestors; and it is a fault that none need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still remains the example of the turnpike-loving clerk, with all its golden possibilities. Denied the great delight of driving a locomotive, or a fire-engine—whirled along in a glorious nimbus of smoke-pant, spark-shower, and hoarse warning roar—what bliss to the palefaced quilldriver to command a penny steamboat between London Bridge and Chelsea! to drive a four-horsed Jersey-car to Kew at sixpence a head! Though turnpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be taken on many a pleasant reach of Thames. What happiness in quiet moments to tend the lock-keeper’s flower-beds—perhaps make love to his daughter; anon in busier times to let the old gates swing, work the groaning winches, and hear the water lap and suck and gurgle as it slowly sinks or rises with its swaying freight; to dangle legs over the side and greet old acquaintances here and there among the parti-coloured wayfarers passing up or down; while tobacco palleth not on the longest day, and beer is ever within easy reach. The iron tetter that scurfs the face of our island has killed out the pleasant life of the road; but many of its best conditions still linger round these old toll gates, free from dust and clatter, on the silent liquid Highway to the West.
These for the weaker brethren: but for him who is conscious of the Gift, the path is plain.
Deus Terminus
The practical Roman, stern constructor of roads and codes, when he needs must worship, loved a deity practical as himself; and in his parcelling of the known world into plots, saying unto this man, Bide here, and to that, Sit you down there, he could scarce fail to evolve the god Terminus: visible witness of possession and dominion, type of solid facts not to be quibbled away. We Romans of this latter day—so hailed by others, or complacently christened by ourselves—are Roman in nothing more than in this; and, as much in the less tangible realms of thought as in our solid acres, we are fain to set up the statue which shall proclaim that so much country is explored, marked out, allotted, and done with; that such and such ramblings and excursions are practicable and permissible, and all else is exploded, illegal, or absurd. And in this way we are left with naught but a vague lingering tradition of the happier days before the advent of the ruthless deity.
The sylvan glories of yonder stretch of woodland renew themselves each autumn, regal as ever. It is only the old enchantment that is gone; banished by the matter-of-fact deity, who has stolidly settled exactly where Lord A.’s shooting ends and Squire B.’s begins. Once, no such petty limitations fettered the mind. A step into the woodland was a step over the border—the margin of the material; and then, good-bye to the modern world of the land-agent and the “Field” advertisement! A chiming of little bells over your head, and lo! the peregrine, with eyes like jewels, fluttered through the trees, her jesses catching in the boughs. ’Twas the favourite of the Princess, the windows of whose father’s castle already gleamed through the trees, where honours and favours awaited the adventurous. The white doe sprang away through the thicket, her snowy flank stained with blood; she made for the enchanted cot, and for entrance you too had the pass-word. Did you fail on her traces, nor fox nor mole was too busy to spare a moment for friendly advice or information. Little hands were stretched to trip you, fairy gibe and mockery pelted you from every rabbit-hole; and O what Dryads you have kissed among the leaves, in that brief blissful moment ere they hardened into tree! ’Tis pity, indeed, that this sort of thing should have been made to share the suspicion attaching to the poacher; that the stony stare of the boundary god should confront you at the end of every green ride and rabbit-run; while the very rabbits themselves are too disgusted with the altered circumstances to tarry a moment for so much as to exchange the time of day.
Truly this age is born, like Falstaff, with a white head and something a round belly: and will none of your jigs and fantasies. The golden era of princesses is past. For your really virtuous ’prentices there still remain a merchant’s daughter or two, and a bottle of port o’ Sundays on the Clapham mahogany. For the rest of us, one or two decent clubs, and plenty of nice roomy lunatic asylums. “Go spin, you jade, go spin!” is the one greeting for Imagination. And yet—what a lip the slut has! What an ankle! Go to: there’s nobody looking; let us lock the door, pull down the blinds, and write us a merry ballad.
’Tis ungracious, perhaps, to regret what is gone for ever, when so much is given in return. A humour we have, that is entirely new; and allotments that shall win back Astræa. Our Labor Program stands for evidence that the Board School, at least, has done enduring work; and the useless race of poets is fast dying out. Though we no longer conjecture what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, yet many a prize (of guineas galore) awaits the competitor who will stoop, week by week, to more practical research. “Le monde marche,” as Renan hath it, “vers une sorte d’americanisme.... Peut-être la vulgarité générale sera-t-elle un jour la condition du bonheur des élus. Nous n’avons pas le droit d’etre fort difficiles.” We will be very facile, then, since needs must; remembering the good old proverb that “scornful dogs eat dirty puddings.” But, ere we show Terminus the door, at least let us fling one stone at the shrieking sulphureous houses of damnation erected as temples in his honour, and dignified with his name! There, ’mid clangour, dirt, and pestilence of crowding humanity, the very spirit of worry and unrest sits embodied. The old Roman was not such a bad fellow. His deity of demarcation at least breathed open air, and knew the kindly touch of sun and wind. His simple rites were performed amid flowers and under blue sky, by sunny roads or tranquil waters; and on this particular altar the sacrifice was ordained to be free from any stain of gore. Our hour of sacrifice, alas, has not yet come. When it does—(et haud procul absit!)—let the offering be no bloodless one, but let (for choice) a fat and succulent stationmaster smoke and crackle on the altar of expiation!
Of Smoking
Concerning Cigarette Smoking: It hath been well observed by a certain philosopher that this is a practice commendable enough, and pleasant to indulge in, “when you’re not smoking”; wherein the whole criticism of the cigarette is found, in a little room. Of the same manner of thinking was one that I knew, who kept by him an ample case bulging with cigarettes, to smoke while he was filling his pipe. Toys they be verily, nugæ, and shadows of the substance. Serviceable, nevertheless, as shadows sometimes be when the substance is temporarily unattainable; as between the acts of a play, in the park, or while dressing for dinner: that such moments may not be entirely wasted. That cigarette, however, which is so prompt to appear after dinner I would reprehend and ban and totally abolish: as enemy to that diviner thing before which it should pale its ineffectual fires in shame—to wit, good drink, “la dive bouteille”; except indeed when the liquor be bad, as is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve in some sort as a sorry consolation. But to leave these airy substitutes, and come to smoking.
It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter, or that first pipe of the evening which “Hesperus, who bringeth all good things,” brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss of one’s first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to the vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that arises at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although with most of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarums and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there are certain halcyon periods sure to arrive—Sundays, holidays, and the like—the whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one beatific pipe after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that of the gods “when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are lightly curled.” Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so this particular pipe of the day always carries with it festal reminiscences: memories of holidays past, hopes for holidays to come; a suggestion of sunny lawns and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense withal of something free and stately, as of “faint march-music in the air,” or the old Roman cry of “Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement.”
If there be any fly in the pipe-smoker’s ointment, it may be said to lurk in the matter of “rings.” Only the exceptionally gifted smoker can recline in his chair and emit at will the perfect smoke-ring, in consummate eddying succession. He of the meaner sort must be content if, at rare heaven-sent intervals—while thinking, perhaps, of nothing less—there escape from his lips the unpremeditated flawless circle. Then “deus fio” he is moved to cry, at that breathless moment when his creation hangs solid and complete, ere the particles break away and blend with the baser atmosphere. Nay, some will deny to any of us terrene smokers the gift of fullest achievement: for what saith the poet of the century? “On the earth the broken arcs: in the heaven the perfect round!”
It was well observed by a certain character in one of Wilkie Collins’s novels (if an imperfect memory serveth me rightly) that women will take pleasure in scents derived from animal emanations, clarified fats, and the like; yet do illogically abhor the “clean, dry, vegetable smell” of tobacco. Herein the true base of the feminine objection is reached; being, as usual, inherent want of logic rather than any distaste, in the absolute, for the thing in question. Thinking that they ought to dislike, they do painfully cast about for reasons to justify their dislike, when none really exist. As a specimen of their so-called arguments, I remember how a certain fair one triumphantly pointed out to me that my dog, though loving me well, could yet never be brought to like the smell of tobacco. To whom I, who respected my dog (as Ben saith of Master Shakespeare) on this side idolatry as much as anything, was yet fain to point out—more in sorrow than in anger—that a dog, being an animal who delights to pass his whole day, from early morn to dewy eve, in shoving his nose into every carrion beastliness that he can come across, could hardly be considered arbiter elegantiarum in the matter of smells. But indeed I did wrong to take such foolish quibbling seriously; nor would I have done so, if she hadn’t dragged my poor innocent dog into the discussion.
Of Smoking in Bed: There be who consider this a depravity—an instance of that excess in the practice of a virtue which passes into vice—and couple it with dram-drinking: who yet fail to justify themselves by argument. For if bed be by common consent the greatest bliss, the divinest spot, on earth, “ille terrarum qui præter omnes angulus ridet”; and if tobacco be the true Herb of Grace, and a joy and healing balm, and respite and nepenthe,—if all this be admitted, why are two things, super-excellent separately, noxious in conjunction? And is not the Bed Smoker rather an epicure in pleasure—self indulgent perhaps, but still the triumphant creator of a new “blend,” reminding one of a certain traveller’s account of an intoxicant patronised in the South Sea Islands, which combines the blissful effect of getting drunk and remaining sober to enjoy it? Yet I shall not insist too much on this point, but would only ask—so long as the smoker be unwedded—for some tolerance in the matter and a little logic in the discussion thereof.
Concerning Cigars: That there be large sums given for these is within common knowledge. 1d., 2d., nay even 4d., is not too great a price, if a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In this sort of smoking, however, I find more of vainglory and ostentation than solid satisfaction; and its votaries would seem to display less a calm, healthy affection for tobacco than (as Sir T. Browne hath it) a “passionate prodigality.” And, besides grievous wasting of the pocket, atmospheric changes, varyings in the crops, and the like, cause uncertainty to cling about each individual weed, so that man is always more or less at the mercy of Nature and the elements—an unsatisfactory and undignified position in these latter days of the Triumphant Democracy. But worst and fatallest of all, to every cigar-smoker it is certain to happen that once in his life, by some happy combination of time, place, temperament, and Nature—by some starry influence, maybe, or freak of the gods in mocking sport—once, and once only, he will taste the aroma of the perfect leaf at just the perfect point—the ideal cigar. Henceforth his life is saddened; as one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he goes thereafter, as one might say, in a sort of love-sickness. Seeking he scarce knows what, his existence becomes a dissatisfied yearning; the world is spoiled for him, its joys are tasteless: so he wanders, vision-haunted, down dreary days to some miserable end.
Yet, if one will walk this path and take the risks, the thing may be done at comparatively small expense. To such I would commend the Roman motto, slightly altered—Alieni appetens, sui avarus. There be always good fellows, with good cigars for their friends. Nay, too, the boxes of these lie open; an the good cigar belongs rather to him that can appreciate it aright than to the capitalist who, owing to a false social system, happens to be its temporary guardian and trustee. Again there is a saying—bred first, I think, among the schoolmen at Oxford—that it is the duty of a son to live up to his father’s income. Should any young man have found this task too hard for him, after the most strenuous and single-minded efforts, at least he can resolutely smoke his father’s cigars. In the path of duty complete success is not always to be looked for; but an approving conscience, the sure reward of honest endeavour, is within reach of all.
An Autumn Encounter
For yet another mile or two the hot dusty road runs through level fields, till it reaches yonder shoulder of the downs, already golden three-parts up with ripening corn. Thitherwards lies my inevitable way; and now that home is almost in sight it seems hard that the last part of the long day’s sweltering and delightful tramp must needs be haunted by that hateful speck, black on the effulgence of the slope. Did I not know he was only a scarecrow, the thing might be in a way companionable: a pleasant suggestive surmise, piquing curiosity, gilding this last weary stage with some magic of expectancy. But I passed close by him on my way out. Early as I was, he was already up and doing, eager to introduce himself. He leered after me as I swung down the road,—mimicked my gait, as it seemed, in a most uncalled-for way; and when I looked back, he was blowing derisive kisses of farewell with his empty sleeve.
I had succeeded, however, in shaking off the recollection between the morning’s start and now; so it was annoying that he should force himself on me, just when there was no getting rid of him. At this distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering, heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate—are the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable?—I used to watch Her pacing demurely towards me through the corn. It was ridiculous, it was fatuous, under all the circumstances it was monstrous, and yet{...}! We were both under twenty, so She was She, and I was I, and there were only we three the wide world over, she and I and the unbetraying gate. Porta eburnea! False visions alone sped through you, though Cupid was wont to light on your topmost bar, and preen his glowing plumes. And to think that I should see her once more, coming down the path as if not a day had passed, hesitating as of old, and then—but surely her ankles seem—Confound that scarecrow!...
His sex is by this time painfully evident; also his condition in life, which is as of one looking back on better days. And now he is upon a new tack. Though here on the level it is still sultry and airless, an evening breeze is playing briskly along the slope where he stands, and one sleeve saws the air violently; the other is pointed stiffly heavenwards. It is all plain enough, my poor friend! The sins of the world are a heavy burden and a grievous unto you. You have a mission, you must testify; it will forth, in season and out of season. For man, he wakes and sleeps and sins betimes: but crows sin steadily, without any cessation. And this unhappy state of things is your own particular business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it: “Salvation, damnation, damnation, salvation!” And the jolly earth smiles in the perfect evenglow, and the corn ripples and laughs all round you, and one young rook (only fledged this year, too!), after an excellent simulation of prostrate, heart-broken penitence, soars joyously away, to make love to his neighbour’s wife. “Salvation, damnation, damn—” A shifty wriggle of the road, and he is transformed once more. Flung back in an ecstasy of laughter, holding his lean sides, his whole form writhes with the chuckle and gurgle of merriment. Ho, ho! what a joke it was! How I took you all in! Even the rooks! What a joke is everything, to be sure!
Truly, I shall be glad to get quit of this heartless mummer. Fortunately I shall soon be past him. And now, behold! the old dog waxes amorous. Mincing, mowing, empty sleeve on hollow breast, he would fain pose as the most irresistible old hypocrite that ever paced a metropolitan kerb. “Love, you young dogs,” he seems to croak, “Love is the one thing worth living for! Enjoy your present, rooks and all, as I do!” Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the golden influence of the hour? More than one supple waist (alas! for universal masculine frailty!) has been circled by that tattered sleeve in days gone by; a throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now fails to give a manly curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive, and not a particle of the passion that inspired it long ago?
At last I confront him, face to face: and the villain grins recognition, completely unabashed. Nay, he cocks his eye with a significant glance under the slouch of his shapeless hat, and his arm points persistently and with intelligence up the road. My good fellow, I know the way to the Dog and Duck as well as you do: I was going there anyhow, without your officious interference—and the beer, as you justly remark, is unimpeachable. But was this really all you’ve been trying to say to me, this last half-hour? Well, well!
The White Poppy
A riot of scarlet on gold, the red poppy of our native fields tosses heavy tresses with gipsy abandon; her sister of the sea-shore is golden, a yellow blossom that loves the keen salt savour of the spray. Of another hue is the poppy of history, of romance, of the muse. White as the stark death-shroud, pallid as the cheeks of that queen of a silent land whose temples she languorously crowns, ghost-like beside her fuller-blooded kin, she droops dream-laden, Papaver somniferum, the poppy of the magic juice of oblivion. In the royal plenitude of summer, the scarlet blooms will sometimes seem but a red cry from earth in memory of the many dews of battle that have drenched these acres in years gone by, for little end but that these same “bubbles of blood” might glow to-day; the yellow flower does but hint of the gold that has dashed a thousand wrecks at her feet around these shores: for happier suggestion we must turn to her of the pallid petals, our white Lady of Consolation. Fitting hue to typify the crowning blessing of forgetfulness! Too often the sable robes of night dissemble sleeplessness, remorse, regret, self-questioning. Let black, then, rather stand for hideous memory: white for blessed blank oblivion, happiest gift of the gods! For who, indeed, can say that the record of his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained with its petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later years, all which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory, refusing to be shut out? Leave us alone, O gods, to remember our felicities, our successes: only aid us, ye who recall no gifts, aptly and discreetly to forget.
Discreetly, we say; for it is a tactful forgetfulness that makes for happiness. In the minor matter, for instance, of small money obligations, that shortness of memory which the school of Professors Panurge and Falstaff rashly praises, may often betray into some unfortunate allusion or reference to the subject which shall pain the delicate feelings of the obliger; or, if he be of coarser clay, shall lead him in his anger to express himself with unseemliness, and thereby to do violence to his mental tranquillity, in which alone, as Marcus Aurelius teacheth, lieth the perfection of moral character. This is to be a stumbling-block and an offence against the brethren. It is better to keep just memory enough to avoid such hidden rocks and shoals; in which thing Mr Swiveller is our great exemplar, whose mental map of London was a chart wherein every creditor was carefully “buoyed.”
The wise man prays, we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to the prayer—and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help in our own petty case, we are moved to add a word for certain others who, meaning no ill, unthinkingly go about to add to humanity’s already heavy load of suffering. How much needless misery is caused in this world by the reckless “recollections” of dramatic and other celebrities? You gods, in lending ear to our prayer, remember too, above all other sorts and conditions of men, these our poor erring brothers and sisters, the sometime sommités of Mummerdom!
Moments there are, it is true, when this traitor spirit tricks you: when some subtle scent, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even some touch of a fresher air on your cheeks at night—a breath of “le vent qui vient à travers la montagne”—have power to ravish, to catch you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic Paradise. Moments only, alas! Then the evil crowd rushes in again, howls in the sacred grove, tramples down and defiles the happy garden; and once more you cry to Our Lady of Sleep, crowned of the white poppy. And you envy your dog who, for full discharge of a present benefaction having wagged you a hearty, expressive tail, will then pursue it gently round the hearth-rug till, in restful coil, he reaches it at last, and oblivion with it; every one of his half-dozen diurnal sleeps being in truth a royal amnesty.
But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing? Perdita blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but this gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is “grace and remembrance.” The fair Ophelia, rather: nay, for as a nursling she hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a “sorrow’s crown of sorrow.” What flowers are these her pale hand offers? “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts!” For me rather, O dear Ophelia, the white poppy of forgetfulness.