From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature— external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was imprehensible—"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian—with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian—with a fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."

I have said that we—those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's House—were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated. Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it. But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity' had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt this glorious tradition.… Continuous life… that is what we want—to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?—the voice ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say to that?"

"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a letter to a friend:—

"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be otherwise.… When love has done its full work, has wrought soul into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life— quis separabit? Can you conceive yourself as existing at all without her? No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't, and never will."

I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him—master as he was of varied and vocal English—to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly educated.

"I would not be forgotten in this land."—