They say (though I do not believe it) that an age, even if it be still far distant, is coming in which the present preoccupations of man, both physical and mental, will have vanished and new passions and new hopes will have taken their place. Our contact with each other is as yet imperfect; psychological discovery is only beginning; the gates between mind and mind will all be broken down; it will not be a question of universal candour but of automatic communication and sympathy. The individual will be identified with the race, will live only in the life of the race, will not merely not fear but will not even think about any death which does not involve the death of the race. The race will be one animal; its members, sloughed and replaced, will want no more immortality than that qualified perpetuation which the race can give; no two persons will be more to each other than any other two; Man will really be Man and will cease to be men. Should that time come (which, speaking diffidently, it will not) the voice of Man may change. His most eloquent words may be other than they are now, and even though, in his corporate form, he is still most deeply stirred by frustrations that we cannot conjecture, the range of his imagery will have altered, he will have new symbols for his regrets, and new comparisons for his ideas. Pending that change there is no reason to suppose that the essential, or to a large extent the incidental, material of our poetry, or of such of our prose as aspires to the condition of poetry, will substantially alter. We speak most sublimely of what moves us most deeply.
But this is not to say that we should wish that such speech, at the cost of such experience, should be more than intermittent. Sun, sheep, and children may take a sober colouring from the eye that has been much busied with such watchings, but they were not put there solely for that purpose; even if we profess ignorance of the reasons for their existence, we shall employ ourselves better if we act on the assumption that they were not. The last word, after so prolonged a meditation on the incomprehensible, may lie with Stevenson who, not unaccustomed to the thought of death and not incapable of poetry, wrote an essay on the subject which might not supply passages "distilled" enough for this book, but contains many so sensible that they might well be reprinted in others. "The changes wrought by death," he said, "are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth." That opening might have led to a piece of great orchestral prose; but he turned on himself and wrote instead some pages of cheerful colloquial prose, sprinkled with fine sentences. In all views and situations "there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind"; and "as a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances." But notice, even in this essay, the old lift, the old attitude, the old accents, when momentarily he looks out over the other wall: "Into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Prætorian throws us over in the end!"
A COLLECTION OF AUTOGRAPHS
By CANON N. EGERTON LEIGH
MY collection of autographs was begun by Lady Sitwell, of Rempstone, who married, 1798, Sir Sitwell Sitwell, Bt., M.P., who died in 1811. She married secondly, as his second wife, my grandfather in 1821, and died in 1860. Lady Sitwell knew everybody, and entertained a good deal. She was a blue-stocking in the days of their power, and most of the letters were written to her by the eminent men and women of the day. But her friends supplied her with other autographs—for instance, Longfellow sends her George Washington and Benjamin Franklyn. The following remarks by Washington are interesting at the present time: "At the beginning of the late war with Great Britain, when we thought ourselves justifiable in resisting to blood, it was known to those best acquainted with the different conditions of the combatants and the probable cost of the prize in dispute that the expense in comparison with our circumstances as Colonists must be enormous, the struggle protracted, dubious, and severe. It was known that the resources of Britain were, in a manner, inexhaustible, that her fleet covered the Ocean, and that her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of the globe. Not then organised as a nation, or known as a people upon the earth, we had no preparation. Money, the nerve of war, was wanting. The sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity: the treasury to be created from nothing. If we had a secret resource unknown to our enemy, it was in the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should not be forsaken by Heaven. The people willingly offered themselves to the battle, but the means of arming, clothing, and subsisting them, as well as of procuring the implements of hostility, were only to be found in anticipations of our future wealth. Paper bills of credit were emitted, monies borrowed for the most pressing emergencies, and our brave troops in the field unpaid for their services. In this manner, Peace, attended with every circumstance that could gratify our reasonable desires, or even inflate us with ideas of national importance, was at length obtained. But a load of debt was left upon us. The fluctuations of, and speculations in, our paper currency had, but in too many instances, occasioned vague ideas of property, generated licentious appetites, and corrupted the morals of men. To these immediate consequences of a fluctuating medium of commerce may be joined a tide of circumstances that flowed together from sources mostly opened during and after the war. The ravage of farms, the conflagrations of towns, the diminution——" Here the MSS. abruptly stops, but we can imagine what would follow.
Mr. Herrick, of Beaumanor Park, gave Lady Sitwell the earliest autograph in the collection, a letter of Robert Herrick from St. John's, Cambridge, which I lent to the late Professor Moorman for his life of Robert Herrick. A curious entry in his uncle's account books discloses the fact that while the impecunious student was finding infinite difficulty in obtaining his quarterly allowance of £10, the wealthy uncle was borrowing hundreds of pounds from the nephew. I pass on to a letter of Lord Byron's accepting an invitation to dinner with Lady Sitwell. In it he says, "The song you have been good enough to send had escaped my observation or my memory when in Greece. I will endeavour to comply with your request. The copy has a few errors which I will try to expunge, though I have nearly forgotten my Romaic. I believe the words should be thus arranged." He arranges them, and then sends her, doubtless knowing her penchant for autographs, the following lines:
1
I wander near that fount of waters
Where throng my country's virgin daughters,
And yet that haunt I might forego
Will she—my Love be there? Ah! No!