[CONTENTS]

M.R.D., from her affectionate
old friend who wrote it. 1897

PATRINS
TO WHICH IS ADDED
An INQUIRENDO Into the WIT &
Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJESTY
KING CHARLES the Second

WRITTEN BY
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

BOSTON
Printed for Copeland and Day
69 Cornhill 1897

COPYRIGHT 1897 BY COPELAND AND DAY

TO BLISS CARMAN

A patrin, according to Romano Lavo-Lil, is "a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken." Well, these wild dry whims are patrins dropped now in the open for our tribe; but particularly for you. They will greet you as you lazily come up, and mean: Fare on, and good luck love you to the end! On each have I put the date of its writing, as one might make memoranda of little leisurely adventures in prolonged fair weather; and you will read, in between and all along, a record of pleasant lonely paths never very far from your own, biggest of Romanys! in the thought-country of our common youth.

Ingraham Hill, South Thomaston, Maine,
October 19, 1896.

[Contents]

	Page
On the Rabid versus the Harmless Scholar	[3]
The Great Playground	[13]
On the Ethics of Descent	[29]
Some Impressions from the Tudor Exhibition	[39]
On the Delights of an Incognito	[63]
The Puppy: A Portrait	[73]
On Dying Considered as a Dramatic Situation	[83]
A Bitter Complaint of the Ungentle Reader	[99]
Animum non Coelum	[109]
The Precept of Peace	[117]
On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket	[131]
Reminiscences of a Fine Gentleman	[139]
Irish	[153]
An Open Letter to the Moon	[169]
The Under Dog	[181]
Quiet London	[191]
The Captives	[205]
On Teaching One's Grandmother How to Suck Eggs	[223]
Wilful Sadness in Literature	[233]
An Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty, King Charles the Second	[247]

[ON THE RABID VERSUS THE
HARMLESS SCHOLAR]

A PHILOSOPHER now living, and too deserving for any fate but choice private oblivion, was in Paris, for the first time, a dozen years ago; and having seen and heard there, in the shops, parks, and omnibus stations, much more baby than he found pleasing, he remarked, upon his return, that it was a great pity the French, who are so in love with system, had never seen their way to shutting up everything under ten years of age! Now, that was the remark of an artist in human affairs, and may provoke a number of analogies. What is in the making is not a public spectacle. It ought to be considered very outrageous, on the death of a painter or a poet, to exhibit those rough first drafts, which he, living, had the acumen to conceal. And if, to an impartial eye, in a foreign city, native innocents seem too aggressively to the fore, why should not the seclusion desired for them be visited a thousandfold upon the heads, let us say, of students, who are also in a crude transitional state, and undergoing a growth much more distressing to a sensitive observer than the physical? Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney thought it was "a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue!" The throes of education are as degrading and demoralizing as a hanging, and, when the millennium sets in, will be as carefully screened from the laity. Around the master and the pupil will be reared a portly and decorous Chinese wall, which shall pen within their proper precincts the din of hic, hæc, hoc, and the steam of suppers sacrificed to Pallas.

The more noxious variety of student, however, is not young. He is "in the midway of this our mortal life"; he is fearfully foraging, with intent to found and govern an academy; he runs in squads after Anglo-Saxon or that blatant beast, Comparative Mythology; he stops you on 'change to ask if one has not good grounds for believing that there was such a person as Pope Joan. He can never let well enough alone. Heine must be translated and Junius must be identified. The abodes of hereditary scholars are depopulated by the red flag of the nouveau instruit. He infests every civilized country; the army-worm is nothing to him. He has either lacked early discipline altogether, or gets tainted, late in life, with the notion that he has never shown sufficiently how intellectual he really is. In every contemplative-looking person he sees a worthy victim, and his kindling eye, as he bears down upon you, precludes escape: he can achieve no peace unless he is driving you mad with all which you fondly dreamed you had left behind in old S.'s accursed lecture-room. You may commend to him in vain the reminder which Erasmus left for the big-wigs, that it is the quality of what you know which tells, and never its quantity. It is inconceivable to him that you should shut your impious teeth against First Principles, and fear greatly to displace in yourself the illiteracies you have painfully acquired.

Judge, then, if the learner of this type (and in a bitterer degree, the learneress) could but be safely cloistered, how much simpler would become the whole problem of living! How profoundly would it benefit both society and himself could the formationary mind, destined, as like as not, to no ultimate development, be sequestered by legal statute in one imperative limbo, along with babes, lovers, and training athletes! Quicquid ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.

For the true scholar's sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather, and compare notes as to "whether it is likely to hold up for to-morrow,"—this, says Hazlitt, "is the end and privilege of a life of study." Secretly, decently, pleasantly, has he acquired his mental stock; insensibly he diffuses, not always knowledge, but sometimes the more needful scorn of knowledge. Among folk who break their worthy heads indoors over Mr. Browning and Madame Blavatsky, he moves cheerful, incurious, and free, on glorious good terms with arts and crafts for which he has no use, with extraneous languages which he will never pursue, with vague Muses impossible to invite to dinner. He is strictly non-educational:

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down."

He loathes information and the givers and takers thereof. Like Mr. Lang, he laments bitterly that Oxford is now a place where many things are being learned and taught with great vigor. The main business to him is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation. A mystery serves his turn better than a history. It is to be remembered that had the Rev. Laurence Sterne gone to gaze upon the spandrils of Rouen Cathedral, we should all have lost the fille de chambre, the dead ass, and Maria by the brookside. Any one of these is worth more than hieroglyphics; but who is to attain that insight that these are so, except the man of culture, who has the courage to forget at times even his sole science, and fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances?

The scholar's own research, from his cradle, clothes him in privacy; nor will he ever invade the privacy of others. It is not with a light heart that he contemplates the kindergarten system. He himself, holding his tongue, and fleeing from Junius and Pope Joan, from cubic roots and the boundaries of Hindostan, from the delicate difference between the idiom of Maeterlinck and that of Ollendorff, must be an evil sight to Chautauquans, albeit approved of the angels. He has little to utter which will sound wise, the full-grown, finished soul! If he had, he would of his own volition seek a cell in that asylum for protoplasms, which we have made bold to recommend.

The truth is, very few can be trusted with an education. In the old days, while this was a faith, boredom and nervous prostration were not common, and social conditions were undeniably picturesque. Then, as now, quiet was the zenith of power: the mellow mind was unexcursive and shy. Then, as now, though young clerical Masters of Arts went staggering abroad with heads lolling like Sisyphus' stone, the ideal worth and weight grew "lightly as a flower." Sweetly wrote the good Sprat of his famous friend Cowley: "His learning sat exceedingly close and handsomely upon him: it was not embossed on his mind, but enamelled." The best to be said of any knowing one among us, is that he does not readily show what deeps are in him; that he is unformidable, and reminds whomever he meets of a distant or deceased uncle. Initiation into noble facts has not ruined him for this world nor the other. It was a beautiful brag which James Howell, on his first going beyond sea, March the first, in the year sixteen hundred and eighteen, made to his father. He gives thanks for "that most indulgent and costly Care you have been pleased, in so extraordinary a manner, to have had of my Breeding, (tho' but one child of Fifteen) by placing me in a choice Methodical School so far distant from your dwelling, under a Learned (tho' Lashing) Master; and by transplanting me thence to Oxford to be graduated; and so holding me still up by the chin, until I could swim without Bladders. This patrimony of liberal Education you have been pleased to endow me withal, I now carry along with me abroad as a sure inseparable Treasure; nor do I feel it any burden or incumbrance unto me at all!"

There, in the closing phrase, spoke the post-Elizabethan pluck. Marry, any man does well since, who can describe the aggregated agonies of his brain as no incumbrance, as less, indeed, than a wife and posterity! To have come to this is to have earned the freedom of cities, and to sink the schoolmaster as if he had never been.

1889.

[THE GREAT PLAYGROUND]

IT has seemed to many thoughtful readers, within the last fifty or sixty years, that Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations is altogether mistaken in its assumption that the open-air world is dearer to the child than to the man: or that the Heaven which so easily fuses with it in our idea lies nearer to the former than to the latter. Some abnormally perceptive child (like the infant W.W. himself) may have a clear sense of "glory in the grass, of splendor in the flower." But the appreciation of natural objects is infinitely stronger, let us say, in the babe of thirty; and so is even the appreciation of the diversions which they provide. Were it not for the prospects of unforeseen and adventurous company abroad, the child prefers to play in the shed. But the post-meridian child, who is not a "grown-up," but only a giant, desires "the house not made with hands": he has a delicate madness in his blood, the moment he breathes wild air.

Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save them, from stone-skipping on the strand, though they have come abroad for purposes of political conversation. Poets and bookmen are famous escapers of this sort. Surrey shooting his toy arrows at lighted windows; Shelley sailing his leaves and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds; Dr. Johnson, of all persons, rolling down the fragrant Lincolnshire hills; Elizabeth Inchbald ("a beauty and a virtue," as her epitaph at Kensington prettily says) lifting knockers on April evenings and running away, for the innocent deviltry of it;—these have discovered the fun and the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and with a conscious rapture impossible to their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl of Huntingdon, probably kept to his perfectly exemplary brigandage because he liked the "shaws shene," and objected to going home at nightfall. No child ever tastes certain romantic joys which come of intimacies with creation. That he may write a letter upon birchbark, that he may eat a mushroom from the broken elm-trunk and drink the blood of the maple, that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, a frog from the marsh, or even a twelve-tined buck from his fastness, to be caressed and fed, strikes him as an experiment, not as an honor. It will not do to say that the worship of the natural world is an adult passion: it is quite the contrary; but only certain adults exemplify it. Coleridge, in the Biographia Litteraria, has a very beautiful theory, and a profoundly true one. "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps forty years, have made familiar:

"'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman,—'

this is the character and privilege of genius." The genuine faun-heart is the child conscious and retrieved, the child by law established in happy natures. I knew one boy of six who met an ugly gypsy in a lane, and who, on being asked whether he would like to go and live with her, replied in Americanese, with slow-breathed transports: "Oh-ee, yup!" In his mind was an instant vision of a bed suspended among leaves; and the clatter and glitter of the sacred leaves had nearly stolen his soul away. But he was not a common boy. His nurse being close behind, he was providentially saved, that time, to be abducted later by much more prosaic influences. Nor has the love of Nature, of late so laboriously instilled into the young, thanks to Froebel's impetus, made much progress among its small supposed votaries. The examination-papers, which, in a lustier age, began with—"Who dragged Which around the walls of What?" now stoop to other essentials:

"The wood-spurge has a cup of three."

Yet unless misled by the tender cant of their elders, even the modern Master and Missy would rather find and examine the gas-metre than the wood-spurge.

In his best estate, the out-of-doorling hunts not, neither fishes: he simply moves or sits, in eternal amalgamation with the eternal: an enchanted toper of life and death, one with all that has ever been, or shall ever be, convinced that "there is a piece of divinity in us which is older than the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun." He is generally silent, because his sincere speech cannot be what we call sane. No one, however, who is truly content in the sought presence of Nature, can be sure that it is she who gives him all, or even most, of his comfort. It is only the poetic fashion to say so. It is at least doubtful if Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness, for the man already independent of her. There are those who may accost her, not as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to another in a congress of the Powers. Moral poise is the true passport to her favor, not a fine eye for "the leopard-colored trees" in late autumn, nor an ear for the bold diapasons of the surge. The man of vanities and ambitions and agitated fears may as well go to the football game: for the woods are cold to him. The lover, indeed, is notoriously rural while his fit lasts; he has been known to float into a mosquito-marsh, obliviously reading Tristram of Lyonnesse. But so oblique a cult as his can count for nothing with the Mother. Her favorite spite is to deepen melancholy, as her prayer and purpose are to enhance joy. Not primary in her functions, she waits upon man's anterior dispositions, and gives her delights, as Fortuna is said to do, to the indifferent. But he shall not be indifferent after: her praise drips, honey-bright, from his lip. If any question him, remembering Vaughan's

"O tell me whence that joy doth spring
Whose diet is divine and fair,
Which wears Heaven like a bridal ring?"

he may say that it is the possessing love of Nature which makes his day so rich. She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon that plausible text. The order and peace in him had first subjugated her terrible heart.

No babe, indeed, is born other than wild: he springs up on the farther border of civilization. Happy for him, if he can find his way back, with waking choice, even once a year, in his maturity, to recapture the perfect condition, and subject to it his own developed faculties. How many have suffered the pure epic homesickness, the longing for decivilization, which has drawn them "to discover islands far away," or to roam without purpose at all, like Alastor and the Scholar Gypsy! Observe, that in all tradition the courtesies of the countryside are showered on the race of the deliberately glad. Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister-garden, rapturously catching up the roses to her face, and extolling Him who made them fair, signifies much: not only that she was dowered with the keen perception of beauty,—hardly that at all; but that she was at the apex of moral sanity, which has as much right to be passionate with beauty as the sun itself. It is inconceivable that barbarians should admire the sunset: though it is not inconceivable that barbarians in good society should say that they do so. For one of the earmarks of our latter-day culture is this patronal relish of the works of the Most High. Literature is over-ballasted with "descriptive passages," which the reader skips, but which no self-respecting author can afford to do without. We talk incessantly of the hills and the sea, and the flora and fauna thereof; and insolently take it for granted that we alone have arrived at the proper inwardness of these subjects. In naught have we more wronged the feudal ages than in denying to them an intimate knowledge and love of scenic detail. One glance at their cathedral capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cobwebs, and shells, in stone carven since the tenth century, should have been corrective of that foolish depreciation of a people far nearer to the heart of things than we. The common dislike of gypsies is another revelation of jealousy: for we are not the Mother's favored children. Us she consigns to starched linen, and roofs, retorts of carbonic acid gas: would we sleep again on her naked breast, we come home to endure gibes, and the sniffles.

Well may the "sylvan" (a dear Elizabethan word gone into the dust-heap) feel that he is manumitted and exempt. He has no occasion to grow up. He looks with affectionate strangeness on his life past, as on his life to come, thinking it a solecism to anticipate decay where hitherto no decay has been, or where indeed, if it have been, he "has had the wit never to know it." The Heaven which lies around us in our infancy is always there afterwards, waiting in vain, for the most part, for reciprocations. Symbolisms, sacraments, abound in the natural world, and to avail oneself of them is to regain and retain fleeting good, and to defy the time-dragon's tooth with a smile as of immortality. Devotion to a blackberry pasture and a swimming-pool confers youth on the devotee, provided he has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald little boys for a living. A travelled man, a man of the world, has a ripe expert look: one says of him, admiring his talk and his manners, that he bears his age with grace. But nothing is so ageless as a sailor: he can bear his age neither well nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shyness, truth: all the fine wild qualities which "they that sit in parlors never dream of." It is not a physiological fact alone, that for health's sake you must be in league with the open. Whoever clings to it for love, is known by his superior simplicity and balance. Many a coast-guardsman, or scout in the Canadian forest, has achieved the complete power which is mistakenly supposed to come, like an imposition of hands, upon the educated; and he gets this inestimable accolade, mark you, merely by smelling sea-kelp and sassafras, and welcoming a rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow: by the exercise of sheer natural piety, whose processes turn about and hit back by keeping him young. Would you perpetrate an elfin joke on such a one, present him with a calendar: the urban and domestic accuser. To register time, and consult its phases scientifically, is to give it a deplorable advantage over you. A brook scoffs at birthdays: and many a violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth at Martinmas. It is the shepherd-boy in the Arcadia who "pipes as if he should never grow old": marry, it is not anybody in a theatre orchestra! Which, think you, died with her girlhood yet unconsumed within her, Madame Récamier or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory is not with cosmetics. To the soirées of the hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. The "sylvan" is anti-chronological. He who comes close to the heart-beat of progress and dissolution in the wilderness, the vicissitudes of the vegetable world, must feel that, save in an allegory, these things are not for him: they go under him as a swimmer's wave. "Change upon change: yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate seraphim, in praise and glory of their Maker." The human atom gets into the mood of the according leaf, caring not how long it has hung there, how soon it may fall. God's will, in short, is nowhere so plain and acceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or water. Who can feel it so keenly in the town? The town has never allowed man to guess his superiority to it: creature of his own exaggerations, it cows him, and compels him to remember, in his unrest, that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a child.

At Hampton Court, in the Great Hall, in the right lower corner of the rich pagan borderings of one of the Old Testament tapestries (that of the Circumcision of Isaac), there is a tiny delicate faded figure of a lad, all in soft duns and dusty golds. He wears curious sandals; a green chaplet is on his brows; a hare hangs over his shoulder; he carries a stocked quiver, and a spear. His look is one of sweet sensuous idleness and delight. He is centuries old, but to him the same sun is shining in the aromatic alleys of the forest. He does not know that there is a very fine Perpendicular roof over him, and he has never noticed the kings and their courts who have been blown away like smoke from before his path. The parent and the schoolmaster who sought him have also fallen to dust. But for him the hunt and the moist morning: for him the immortal pastoral life. We used to see him often, and we saw him once again, after a long interval. His charm was all that it had ever been: but at the encounter, he brought hot tears of envy to the eyes. All those years, those years of ours and the world's, wasted in prison on casuist industries, he had been at large with the wind, he had been playing! How some of us have always meant to do just that for ever, and that only! for why not do the sole thing one can do perfectly? But an indoor demon, one Duty, a measly Eden-debarring angel armed with platitudes, has somehow clogged our career. Were it not for a cloud of responsibilities, a downpour of Things to Do, one might be ever at the other side of window-panes, and see Pan twelve hours a day. Ah, little Vita Silvestris! Blamelessly may we feel that you have found the way, and that we have missed it, growing gray at the silly desk, and sure only of this: that presently we shall indeed find ourselves inside sycamore planks, so that all the dryads in their boles, watching our very best approximation to their coveted estate, shall smile to see. But thereafter, at least, and for good, we are where we belong, "sub dio, under the canopy of Heaven," and ready for the elemental game.

1895.

[ON THE ETHICS OF
DESCENT]

IT will never do for a biographer to look too narrowly into his hero's genealogy; for speculation is at all times fatal to an accepted pedigree. Every man is presumably deduced from male and female, from generation to generation; and from these only. There is more of superstition than of science in this mode of reckoning: it has no great philosophic bearing, and it is very illiberal. The truth is, we belong, from the beginning, to many masters, and are unspeakably beholden to the forming hands of the phenomena of the universe, rather than to the ties of blood. What really makes one live, gives him his charter of rights, and clinches for him the significance without which he might as well be unborn, is, often enough, no human agency at all. Where it happens to be human, it is glorious and attested: "I owe more to Philip, my father, than to Aristotle, my preceptor."

But it may be debated that the climbing spider was considerably more to her appointed observer, Robert Bruce, than his own father; inasmuch as she alone put heart into his body, and revivified him into the doer whose deeds we know. A moral relation like that, at the critical moment, establishes the ineffable bond; annuls, as it were, every cause but the First, whereby the lesser causes arise; and makes men over new. No mere soldiering Bruce, but the spider's Bruce, the victor of Scotland; no mere Newton, but the dedicated heir of the falling apple and her laws; no mere young rhetorician of Carthage, but Austin the saint, perfected by the Tolle, lege, from Heaven. Many a word, many an event, has so, in the fullest sense, started a career, and set up a sort of paternity and authority over the soul. We are all "under influence," both of the natural and the supernatural kingdom. Far from being the domestic product we take ourselves to be, we are strangely begotten of the unacknowledged, the fortuitous, and the impossible; we lead lives of astonishing adventure, consort with eternity, and owe the thing we are to the most trivial things we touch. We are poor relations of every conceivable circumstance, alike of our sister the Feudal System, and of our sister the rainbow. We are interwoven, ages before our birth, and again and again after, with what we are pleased to call our accidents and our fates.

"For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

There is real dutifulness in the recognition of all this by the science of heraldry; for heraldry exists but to commemorate some personal contact with marvels, and a generative occasion without which the race would not be itself; as if to reprove the boy who believes himself descended from Sir Magnifico, whose big shield hangs in the hall, and from nothing else in particular. Sir Magnifico's cat may, in reality, account for the continuity of the house; and a spindle or a vesper-bell come to the front in the history of its averted perils, and get handsomely quartered upon the baronial arms. But heraldry avails very little; for she was always limited to the minority, and being old, has ceased to watch to-day and design for to-morrow, as she was wont. The best she can do is to suggest how it depends upon trifles and interferences whether we get here at all, or whether we cut a figure in the crowd; and how foolish it is in us to scorn anything that happens. The road is long from Adam to his present estimable and innumerable brood, and our past has been full of rescuing events. What has preserved us, under Providence, in the successive persons of our progenitors? Clearly, more items than are easily numbered, or could be set down in symbols and devices on the escutcheon: so that it is well to maintain an attitude of great and general deference toward creation at large, for fear of not honoring our father and our mother.

Stradella's kinsfolk yet in Italy may know, or may not know, the hymn which once saved his life. They may pass over the hymn as a tiresome affair, necessary on holy-days, or they may look upon it as a lucky omen—how lucky!—for them. But what they ought to do is to pay it excessive ancestral honors; and canon law, the wide world over, would acquit them of the idolatry. Music, indeed, has been potent, first and last, in the crises of men. It becomes a factor of enormous importance in more than one history, if you search for it. Never do some of us hear that plaintive old song of Locke's, My Lodging is on the Cold Ground, without thinking of James Radcliffe, third Earl of Derwentwater, who had apparently no connection with it, but whom one finds himself regarding as its very harmony forwarded into another age, like Arethusa stream returned from underground. Fresh from the composer's meditations, it was sung on the stage by the comely Moll Davies (said to be daughter to the Earl of Berkshire), before the notorious Persian person who then graced the English throne, and who was struck immediately with an excellence new as Locke's, and hardly of a contrapuntal nature. Time conjured up, from the bonnie comedian and the bad king, the innocent figure of a girl, Mary, who duly married a great noble, and vanished into history as the early-dying mother of the most stainless knight outside of a romance. Derwentwater was grandson, indeed, to vagabonds; but was he not great-grandson to the sweetest of the fine arts? His present representative, Lord Petre, may not openly refer one branch of his lineage to an origin which might seem more frankly fabulous than any divine descent of the ancients. At any rate, here is music of the seventeenth century, going its operative channel through imperfect humanity, and upspringing in the wild days of the Jacobite '15, into corporate beauty again: into a young life, dowered to the full with the strange winning charm of the Stuarts, and with a halo about it which they can scarcely boast. And therefore, reverting to "the source and spring of things," one is free to cry: "Well done, Master Matthew Locke, in F minor!" which is indeed reputed by tradition, the right heroic key. But who, writing of the darling of the legends of the North, will be bold enough to set My Lodging is on the Cold Ground in full song, on his genealogical tree? James the First and Charles the First will be sure to show up there, and so will a number of other Britons not especially germane to the matter. This is how we forge pedigrees, in our blunt literal way, skipping over the vital forces, and laboriously reckoning the mediums and the tools of our own species. Any hard-headed encyclopedia will accredit an advocate of Ajaccio and his wife Letitia with the introduction into the nineteenth century of its most amazing man; but to William Hazlitt, an expert among paradoxes, Bonaparte was "the child and champion" of the Revolution.

1892.

[SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM
THE TUDOR EXHIBITION]

THE New Gallery on Regent Street, filled, at this time last year, with the memories of the Stuarts and with the graded grace of Vandyke and Lely, has taken a step backward into history to show us a hardier and less enchanting society. The luckless, weak, romantic race are everlastingly dear, as Chopin cleverly said of his own music, to "the cognoscenti and the poets." But this present plunge into the sixteenth century is excellent cold water. The Stuarts are myths to these hard facts of Tudors, these strong-minded and dominant familiars, who destroyed, annexed, altered, and were deposed from nothing except from the Lord Pope's opinion of some of them. Everything here is wide-awake, matter-of-course, bracing: the spectator's mind tempers itself to the indicative present of Queen Bess, and

"to trampling horses' feet,
More oft than to a chamber melody."

The men and women on the walls are neither sophisticated nor complex. They are vehement in oath as in compliment, and hit at Fate straight from the shoulder. The best among them has a certain fierce zest of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas More, each in his stainless soul, would have put the other in the pillory for blunders of piety. And such characters, with their stormy circumstance, their distinct homogeneous look and mien, get to be fully understood. Nobody pretends to know the involutions of James the Second; but bluff Hal is no riddle. Wolsey and Drake, Archbishop Parker and Anne Boleyn, even Shakespeare, are more comprehensible units than, say, Dr. Donne, or the Duke of Monmouth. They stand in the red morning light, tangible as trees. They are the bread-and-cheese realities who have made English literature, English policy and manners, English religion. The heartbreak for Essex; that other heartbreak for Calais; Wyatt's succoring cat; Raleigh's cloak in the mud; Sidney's cup or water;—

"Battle nor song can from oblivion save,
But Fame upon a white deed loves to build:
From out that cup of water Sidney gave,
Not one drop has been spilled!"

Christina of Milan's reply to her suitor, the asking and axeing monarch: "Had I a second head in reserve, sire, I might dare to become your wife;"—all these are nursery tales, the very fibre of our earliest memory, as of our adult speculation. Old friends, these painted folk! You look at them on canvases which Evelyn admired at Weybridge; which Pepys longed to buy; to which Horace Walpole provided a date and a name; which brushed Ben Jonson and Carew passing towards the masques of Whitehall; which have seen change and the shadow of change, and are themselves ever richer for the remembered eyes which have looked up at them, during three hundred years.

As you glance from the entrance of the New Gallery, this London January of 1890, the first thing to take the eye is a loan from Hampton Court, the full-length of the pioneer poet, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: a young powerful figure all in red, poised on a hill-top above a vexed white-and-blue sky. He steps forward there, as if in dramatic confirmation of the little known of his proud, obstinate, disinterested career, straight through love, scholarship, adventure, to the Tower axe. One can hardly look at this stripling, with his jewelled cap's white blown feather, and hands laid airily but meaningly on hip and hilt, without remembering the most jocose and off-hand of his verses, written in the spring:

"When I felt the air so pleasant round about,
Lord! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out."

This is No. 73, the authorship of it hanging undetermined between Holbein and Gwillim Stretes. No. 51, a famous and much-reproduced portrait of Surrey under an archway, is certainly Stretes'; but you covet this other for "Hans the Younger." Its vistas are not uncharacteristic of him; and what a daring bugle-blast of color it is! Masterfully does it light the room, and call you into the Tudor company, and make you glad, likewise, that you have "gotten out." It is great so to find a certain Howard, which is a possible Holbein, the key-note of this exhibition. And the race crops out on the walls every here and there, making trouble in your thoughts, as once in thoughts long quieted. They are shown thus contemporaneously, from "Jocky of Norfolk" to the Philip who died for conscience' sake in the Beauchamp Tower; and wherever they are, there is a free wind, a rebel sunshine. Roam about a little; and you return with gratification to these lean, tense, greyhound personalities. The visitor wearies of the Fidei Defensor, the much-connected-by-marriage, and of the kinsmen and servants, the Brandons and Cromwells, who flatter him by fat approximate resemblance, and of the same dimly-recurrent aspect in the timid burgess noblewomen of the hour; so that his first and last impressions are fain to spring from the spectacle of these firm-chinned soldierly Howards, thin and bright as their own swords, with the conscious look of gentlemen among cads. From the dazzle of history it is a bit difficult, at first, to turn the inward eye upon art alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom we have really come to see. And he is here in his plenary pomp: in chalk drawings, miniatures in hone-stone, burnt wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures of every sort.

No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an immense cartoon with outlines pricked, made for a fresco in the old Whitehall, comprising a life-sized group of the two Henries and their respective queens, the estate of only one of whom, had, as the modern world knows, finality. It dates from the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry the Eighth. His admirable housekeeper of a father, long dead, is, as in Lord Braye's comely picture (No. 33), a white-haired, mild, austerely gracious presence, at physical variance, at every point, from his burly heir. The latter stands à califourchon, well to the front, his arms akimbo: a figure familiar to us as the alphabet, and with the force and value of spoken truth. There are many authentic Holbein portraits of the King in this collection, and their unanimity is without parallel. In the masterpiece labelled No. 126, Waagen "finds a brutal egotism, an obstinacy and a harshness of feeling such as I have never yet seen in any human countenance. In the eyes, too, there is the suspicious watchfulness of a wild beast; so that I became quite uncomfortable from looking at it." Holbein's greedy instinct for form wreaks itself on Henry's characteristic contours: everywhere you recognize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady eyes, the level close-shaven head; and, more than all, the round, protuberant, malformed chin, like an onion set in the thin growth of carroty beard. Other artists slur over that ugly little chin, but not the man from Augsburg. Hardly do the elaborations of embroidered doublets and jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, laughably misplaced on this hogshead Majesty, give the great court-painter such easy pleasure in the handling. Yet as Vandyke,

"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,"

is prone to temper the commonplace to his chivalrous ideals; as Sir Joshua "sees partially, slightly, tenderly, catches the flying lights of things, the momentary glooms, paints also partially, tenderly, never with half his strength,"—so here is one too much bent on his accuracy and his reporter's conscience. Nobody who has seen these thirty or more versions of the hero of matrimony according to Holbein, will ever forget his power in clinching an impression. High, low, east, west, straddles the royal Harry: a magnificent piece of pork, arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. There is no contradiction from first to last; the testimony is not patched. No historiographer, in face of them, has any option to think of Henry but as Holbein's brush thought of him. Mr. Froude is hereby checkmated: his idol crumbles. The perfectly square florid countenance, the little crowded features, the indomitable leer under the flat hat and feather, the expanding velvets, the sturdy calves of which their owner was vain, the whole air of an aggressive and successful personality,—these are your statistics, "State papers," as Hazlitt once happily called them. They do not allege; they convict. This, they seem to say, is he who celebrated his wedding on his old love's burial-day, who sacrificed the truest liegemen in his islands, and who made war on the architecture of monastic England in a maintained fit of crazy and vulgar spite. The ornate No. 55 is also a terrific "human document." Yet the special plea, for all that, is not fair; it is only as fair as Holbein can make it. He had not the centrifugal mind. To look before and after is not his wont. The royal sitter is impeached unjustly.

"Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France."

Was this the mirror of chivalry in his youth? the handsome Henry of joust and debate, who walked by choice with thinking men, in an atmosphere of Christian statecraft and the fine arts? he who wrote devotional essays, and composed winning music? If so, that Henry has no survival here. Something of him must have lingered about the later aspect of the tyrant King, as good is sure to do wherever its shrine has been; but Holbein failed (for we cannot think he refused) to bear it witness.

It is pleasant to find Holbein himself looking from No. 52: a noble portrait, in distemper, from his own hand, in his prime. It makes one revert, however, to the prior Holbein, also done by himself, now in the Museum at Basle: a sweet sketch, which, judged by the face alone, could instantly be relegated to the era where it belongs, that of the dawn of humanism. There, the straight hair has yet a soft ring or two over the brow; the mouth is sensitive, but ironic; the young neck full of power; the eyebrows diversely arched, as if in a passing press of thought; the whole mien already suggests, as Woltman says, "seriousness and mental superiority." This picture before us is very splendid, but it is not so reassuring. Holbein's body-color at Berlin, of the chunk-headed, thick-bearded, small-eyed Englishman,—a miracle of a drawing,—may be accepted as the crass original John Bull. With all manner of exception in favor of the painter, Holbein was rather that sort of a man. His work had the warrant of his genius: what he saw was what his whole habit fitted him to see. Each century has its own casts of physiognomy, greatly accentuated once by the passive individuality, now, alas, vanished, of costume. There seem to have been, in Holbein's day, but two physical values: the grave, alert, "sunnily-ascetic" men, who were dissatisfied with the time; and the able bold time-servers, who kept their flesh upon them, and their peace. Henry himself, at his best, was the second type, as Erasmus was the first. It is with a sigh of relief that one turns from the imperious presence which chases you through the West Gallery, and "lards the lean earth as he walks along," to confront, in another room, the memorials of his little son.

Of these, there are some sixteen portraits, exclusive of the drawings, and five of them are from Holbein's hand. The half-length lent by the Earl of Yarborough, No. 174, shows a charming child with a great hat tied under his chin; No. 182, Lord Petre's, is a spirited bust on a misty green ground; in No. 190, a gem of the first water, belonging to the Earl of Denbigh's collection, the Prince stands, lovely as a lily, habited in white and cloth-of-gold, with a long fur-lined crimson surcoat, his slender beautifully-modelled hand closed on a dagger. The family beauty begins and ends with Edward, in his grave at sixteen; there is no Edward, by Holbein, older than six. As usual, the master draws you from his own art to the root of the thing before you, even as he drew Ruskin from counting his skeleton's clacking ribs in the Dance of Death: and forthwith you begin speculating on the moral qualities of the royal bud, "the boy-patron of boys." There is no denying that he looks like Another. Yes, he is very Henry-the-Eighthy! when you study him at short range. And he had a unique talent, you suddenly remember, for signing the death-warrants of uncles. Princess Mary, from the same hand, is decorously dressed; she has flat hair and brown eyes. Acid and dismal as she is, you would say at once of her, that she is sincere,—sine cera, without wax. She also resembles a parent: but it is Katharine of Aragon. No. 94 (one mentally thanks Mr. Huth for a sight of it in the original!) is the warmest thing in the room: the famous portrait of Sir Thomas More. The nap of his claret velvet sleeves appears never to have lost a particle of its lustre. One knows not which to admire the most in this picture: the breadth of composition, the precision and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity and repose. Its mate, the half-length of Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge of the King's Bench, "homo civilis, suavis, innocens," is very nearly as superb, though it has less body. Both were done by Holbein during his happy stay at Chelsea. His presentation of More is always inestimable: you recognize, by some little accent ever and anon, that he painted him with enjoyment and understanding love. "Thy painter, dearest Erasmus," wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that Holbein went to England. When asked there who had persuaded him to cross the Channel, he could not remember the nobleman's name, though he remembered his face: one turn of the pen, and the answer was apparent. But it was Erasmus who gave him his letters of introduction, who was in reality his patron; for Erasmus sent him to More, and from the Chancellor's roof he passed to that of the King, at an honorarium of three hundred pounds a year. And as he painted these friends, so he painted their colleagues: with sympathy and authority. Our most intimate knowledge of the finer spirits among the publicists of the sixteenth century comes from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail to observe "the weight of thought and care in these studious heads of the Reformation." Such a weight is in every Holbein of Colet and Warham and More, of Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, (borne in him, as in More, with an almost whimsical sweetness), and of "the thoroughly Erasmic being," Bonifacius Amerbach. Looking at them, and mindful of their diverse sagacities, one must corroborate the celebrated wish of Goethe that the business of the Reformation, spoiled, as a work of art, by Luther and Calvin, and as a theological issue, by the popular interference, had been left to the trained leaders: to men like these in one generation, and to men like Pole and Hugo Grotius in the next!

Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled Archbishop Warham hang here together in strange posthumous amity, parted only by the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves to paint. A very undistinguished person No. 108 must have been, quite worthy of her safe suburban pensioner's life, and the humorous commuting title of the King's Sister. All her forerunners and successors are here to the life, limned by Holbein's brush and pencil. The dearth of female beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly extraordinary, if we are to believe the believable pigments before us. The women of the court have the fullest possible representation, with the adjunct of exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, attire. But among them all, it would be a hard task to bestow the apple upon the belle, for a reason quite other than any known to Paris on Ida. Even Anne Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an upper-housemaid prettiness. It is small compensation that most of them were learned. The best female portrait, admirably hung, is No. 92: the young Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest and largest manner. The demure girl, set in novel blacks and whites of her widow's mourning, posed with consummate simplicity, has always an admiring crowd in front of her. Wornum's critical last word echoes: it is "a stupendous picture." But the Duchess might be Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart, so far as the actual bearing and expression are concerned. No wonder that the fright Gloriana passed for all that was comely and thoroughbred! Could it be that her subjects had no loftier criterion in the memory of their own mothers?

The fine flower of the picture department of the Tudor Exhibition is the Queen's loan from Windsor Library: eighty-nine drawings on tinted paper, ranged on the screens of the West and South Galleries. Queen Caroline, in George the Second's time, found them in a Kensington Palace cupboard, and had them framed. (We know nothing else so nice of that bore of a martyr.) Behold Holbein's methods running free! In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a mere suggestion of color, or a touch, here and there, of India ink, he gives us his English contemporaries: some in playful perfection commended to posterity, as a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. How he delights in a hollow cheek, a short silken beard, an outstanding ear, or the hair sprouting oddly on the temples! Despite his uncompromising truth of locality, the result is often of astounding delicacy: notably in the heads of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of Prince Edward. Most of these Windsor sheets are studies for pictures; and thus we have Holbein's splendid roll of familiar faces over again; but that of Sir John Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, of grand breadth and tone. The catalogue names were affixed much later, and are not perfectly trustworthy: but those indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the Russells, Earls of Bedford, the Howards, Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas Eliott, and John Poins (the latter overbrimming with individual force), lead in interest and technique. No. 514, the scholarly and lovable Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would choose, of all here, to win Holbein the admiration of those who have yet to appreciate him. Its refined finish and bold conception are in unique balance. Sir Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and plain. But whoever likes to pay homage to intelligent human goodness, will delight in this report of him. You feel that Rembrandt would have turned from his cloudless, treeless table-land of a countenance; and that such as Sir Peter Lely would have found him cryptic enough, and so smothered him in ultramarine draperies. But among Holbein's men, after the Jörg Gyze (1532) in the Museum at Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery of the Hague, after his immortal major achievements, in short, one might rank this little unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas Eliott, a sitter placed forever on this side of death.

But the ladies, again, in their close bodices and triangular head-dresses, generally come off second-best. Holbein's elemental candor befitted them not. Failing to be themselves in full, they are more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy! tinctured with reminiscences of the artist's muddy-tempered Hausfrau at home in Basle. The one quality they cannot convey is breeding, social distinction. Holbein's woman may have youth, goodness, capacity, even authority; but

"Was the lady such a lady?"

You miss the aroma of manners. The mystery of sex is absent, too: a thing the Florentines never missed, and which Gainsborough and Romney found it impossible not to convey. When you see Holbein's men, you wish you had known them; but his women merely remind you that he was a very great painter. It is well to remember, nevertheless, that he had no very great woman to paint: no such patroness, for instance, as "Anne, Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." His organ-hand does what it can for souls frangible as lutes. Wherever there is sincerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever there is sagacity or thought in these Tudor faces, their delineator makes it tell. Did the she-visionaries, if there were any rich enough to engage Holbein, did the persons born in Hawthorne's "brown twilight atmosphere," habitually avoid his studio? No kirtled aristocracy of any age or country was ever so flat and dozy. Surrey occupied himself in scorning "the new men" of his day; and it is conceivable that new men abounded, to fill the places depopulated by the Wars of the Roses, when all that was gallant and significant in the upper ranks, seemed, in one way or another, to have gone under. But the Wars of the Roses touched not the female succession in the ducal and baronial houses: and the wonder remains that Honthorst and Vandyke just after Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before him, could have found, among English maids and wives, the lofty graces which he never saw. Exceptions might be made, however, in favor of Elizabeth, Lady Rich; for "high-erected thought" is bodily manifest in her, as in the dark-eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, a sweet patient good woman who had known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly modern. At what four-to-six has one met her? All the ladies of the More family are alluring acquaintances; and no one is to be envied who does not declare for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap and feather, the big water-drop-shaped pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and that delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth!

Our famous old friend, the great sovereign who saw fit to box the ears of offending gentlemen, and make war upon their wives, possesses the North Gallery. Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, like Becky Sharp; now as a priggish infant with a huge watery head, anon as a parrot-like old woman; here with dogs frisking about her, and there with a grimace which would scatter a pack of dogs to the four winds; always swathed in inexpressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. Her vanities were fairly inherited from her straddling sire. Any authentic portrait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, an elaborate cobweb several feet square, in which, after much search and many barricades of haberdashery surmounted, you shall light upon the spectral spider who inhabits them. There is nothing much more entertaining in this world than a study of the royal and virginal wardrobe. Those were epic clothes! They defy analysis, from the geyser of lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen cross-currents, to the acute angles of the diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the stiff acre of petticoat. They brought employment and money to artists, who painted in the significant occupant as they could, and they serve to illustrate for ever the science of dress-making, whose heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on the other. In the balcony above is No. 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall that, grown old, she had all her mirrors broken, and all paintings of herself which were not liars destroyed, what must have been the terrors of that countenance for which such a copy as this proved sufficiently flattering! Despite Zucchero, Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest man alive who knows how that illustrious lady really looked. And as you glance about, be it on the first visit or the twentieth, full of optical and consequent historical bewilderment; as you see how to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts of that wonderful reign have gathered again, you become keenly aware that one who died in the parish of S. Andrew Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died hereafter." Hunger for that bygone genius is in your thought there: O for an hour of Hans Ho. pinxit!

1890.

[ON THE DELIGHTS OF AN
INCOGNITO]

PERFECT happiness, which we pretend is so difficult to get at, lies at either end of our sentient pole: in being intimately recognized, or else in evading recognition altogether. An actor finds it inspiring to step forth from the wings, steeled cap-à-pie in self-consciousness, before a great houseful of enthusiastic faces and hands; but if he ever knows a moment yet more ecstatic, it is when he is alone in the hill-country, swimming in a clear pool, and undemonstratable as human save by his habiliments hanging on a bush, and his dog, sitting on the margin under, doubtfully eyeing now these, now the unfamiliar large white fish which has shed them. Thackeray once said that the purest satisfaction he ever took, was in hearing one woman name him to another as the author of Vanity Fair, while he was going through a ragged and unbookish London lane. It is at least as likely that Aristides felt pleasure in accosting his own ostracizer, and helping him to ruin the man whom he was tired of hearing called The Just. And the young Charles the Second, between his defeat at Worcester, and his extraordinary escape over sea, was able to report, with exquisite relish, the conduct of that honest Hambletonian, who "dranke a goode glass of beare to me, and called me Brother Roundhead." To be indeed the King, and to masquerade as Will Jones, alias Jackson, "in a green cloth jump coat and breeches worn to shreds," in Pepys' sympathetic detail, with "little rolls of paper between his toes," and "a long thorn stick crooked three or four several ways" in his artificially-browned hand, has its dangers; but it is the top, nevertheless, of mundane romance and felicity.

In fact, there is no enjoyment comparable to walking about "unwept, unhonored, and unsung," once you have become, through your misfortune rather than your fault, ever so little of a public personage. Lucky was the good Haroun Al Raschid, inasmuch as, being duly himself by day, he could stroll abroad, and be immeasurably and magnificently himself by night. Nothing but duty dragged him back from his post of spectator and speculator at the street-corner, to the narrow concrete humdrum of a throne. But there are, and have always been, in every age, men of genius who cling to the big cloak and the dark lantern, and who travel pseudonymously from the cradle to the grave; who keep apart, meddle not at all, have only distant and general dealings with their kind, and, in an innocent and endearing system of thieving, come to understand and explain everything social, without being once understood or explained themselves, or once breaking an inviolable privacy.

"Not even the tenderest heart and next our own,
Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh."

The arrangement is excellent: it induces and maintains dignity. Most of us who suffer keenly from the intolerable burden of self, are grateful to have our fits of sanity by the hour or the week, when we may eat lotos and fern-seed, and die out of the ken of The Evening Bugaboo. To be clear of mortal contact, to resolve into grass and brooks, to be a royal nobody, with the dim imbecile spectrum taken to be you, by your acquaintanceship, temporarily hooted out of existence, is the privilege which the damned on a Saratoga piazza are not even blest enough to groan for. "Oh," cried Hazlitt, heartily inhaling liberty at the door of a country inn, after a march, "Oh, it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and public opinion, to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of Nature, and to become the creature of the moment clear of all ties; to hold to the universe only by a dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing but the score of the evening; and, no longer seeking for applause or meeting with contempt, to be known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour." Surely, surely, to be Anonymous is better than to be Alexander, and to have no care is a more sumptuous wealth than to have sacked ten cities. Sweetly has Cowley said it, in his little essay on Obscurity: "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit: he lives well, that has lain well hidden; in which, if it be a truth, I'll swear the world has been sufficiently deceived. For my part, I think it is; and that the pleasantest condition of life is in incognito.... It is, in my mind, a very delightful pastime for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together, in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage. Venus herself

"'A veil of thickened air around them cast,
That none might know or see them as they passed.'"

The atmosphere was so liberally allowed, in the Middle Ages, to be thick with spirits, that the subject arose in the debates of the schools whether more than a thousand and fifty-seven of them could execute a saraband on the point of a needle. We are not informed by what prior necessity they desired to dance; but something, after all, must be left to the imagination. Dancing, in their case, must be, as with lambs and children, the spontaneous witness of light hearts; and what is half so likely to make a shade whimsically frolicsome, as the sense of his own absolute intangibility in our world of wiseacres and mind-readers and myopic Masters of Arts? To watch, to listen, to know the heretofore and the hereafter, and to be at the same time dumb as a nail, and skilful at dodging a collision with flesh and blood, must be, when you come to think of it, a delightful vocation for ghosts. It is, then, in some sort, anticipatory of part of our business in the twenty-sixth century of the Christian era, to becloud now our name and nativity, and,

"Beholding, unbeheld of all,"

to move musingly among strange scenes, with the charity and cheerfulness of those delivered from death. I am told that L.R. had once an odd spiritual adventure, agreeable and memorable, which demonstrated how much pleasure there is to be had out of these moods of detachment and non-individuality. He had spent the day at a library desk, and had grown hazy with no food and much reading. As he walked homeward in the evening, he felt, for sheer buoyancy of mind, like that thin Greek who had to fill his pockets with lead, for fear of being blown away by the wind. It happened that he was obliged to pass, on the way to his solitary lodging of the night, the house where he was eternally the expected guest: the house of one with whom and with whose family he was on a most open and affectionate footing. Their window-shades were drawn, not so low but that he could see the shining dinner-table dressed in its pomp, and the little ring of merry faces closing it in. There was S., the bonniest of wives, smiling, in her pansy-colored gown, with a pearl comb in her hair: and opposite her was little S., in white, busy with the partridge; and there was A.H., the jolly artist cousin; and, facing the window at the head of his own conclave, (quos inter Augustus recumbens purpureo bibit ore nectar!), sat dear O., with his fine serious genial head bobbing over the poised carving-knife, as he demolished, perhaps, some quoted sophism of Schopenhauer. There were welcome and warmth inside there for R.: how well he knew it! But the silent day just over had laid a spell upon his will; he looked upon them all, in their bright lamplight, like any vagrant stranger from the street, and hurried on, never quite so paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost, unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.

1893.

[THE PUPPY: A PORTRAIT]

HE is the sixty-sixth in direct descent, and his coat is like amber damask, and his blue eyes are the most winning that you ever saw. They seem to proclaim him as much too good for the vulgar world, and worthy of such zeal and devotion as you, only you, could give to his helpless infancy. And, with a blessing upon the Abbot of Clairvaux, who is popularly supposed to have invented his species, you carry him home from the Bench show, and in the morning, when you are told that he has eaten a yard and a quarter of the new stair-carpet, you look into those dreamy eyes again: no reproach shall reach him, you swear, because you stand forevermore between. And he grows great in girth, and in character the very chronicle and log-book of his noble ancestry; he may be erratic, but he puts charm and distinction into everything he does. Your devotedness to his welfare keeps him healthful and honest, and absurdly partial to the squeak of your boots, or the imperceptible aroma which, as it would seem, you dispense, a mile away. The thing which pleases you most is his ingenuous childishness. It is a fresh little soul in the rogue's body:

"Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence."

You see him touch pitch every day, associating with the sewer-building Italians, with their strange oaths; with affected and cynical "sales-ladies" in shops (she of the grape-stall being clearly his too-seldom-relenting goddess); and with the bony Thomas-cat down street, who is an acknowledged anarchist, and whose infrequent suppers have made him sour-complexioned towards society, and "thereby disallowed him," as dear Walton would say, "to be a competent judge." But Pup loses nothing of his sweet congenital absent-mindedness; your bringing-up sits firmly upon him and keeps him young. He expands into a giant, and such as meet him on a lonely road have religion until he has passed. Seven, nine, ten months go over his white-hooded head; and behold, he is nigh a year old, and still Uranian. He begins to accumulate facts, for his observation of late has not been unscientific; but he cannot generalize, and on every first occasion he puts his foot in it. A music-box transfixes him; the English language, proceeding from a parrot in a cage, shakes his reason for days. A rocking-horse on a piazza draws from him the only bad word he knows. He sees no obligation to respect persons with mumps, or with very red beards, or with tools and dinner-pails; in the last instance, he acts advisedly against honest labor, as he perceives that most overalls have kicks in them. Following Plato, he would reserve his haughty demeanor for slaves and servants. Moreover, before the undemonstrated he comes hourly to a pause. If a wheelbarrow, unknown hitherto among vehicles, approach him from his suburban hill, he is aware of the supernatural; but he will not flinch, as he was wont to do once; rather will he stand four-square, with eyebrows and crinkled ears vocal with wonder and horror. Then the man back of the moving bulk speaks over his truck to you, in the clear April evening: "Begorra, 'tis his furrust barry!" and you love the man for his accurate affectionate sense of the situation. When Pup is too open-mouthed and curious, when he dilates, in fact, with the wrong emotion, it reflects upon you, and reveals the flaws in your educational system. He blurts out dire things before fine ladies. If he hear one of them declaiming, with Delsarte gestures, in a drawing-room, he appears in the doorway, undergoing symptoms of acutest distress, and singing her down, professedly for her own sake; and afterward he pities her so, and is so chivalrously drawn toward her in her apparent aberration, that he lies for hours on the flounce of her gown, eyeing you, and calumniating you somewhat by his vicarious groans and sighs. But ever after, Pup admits the recitation of tragic selections as one human folly more.

He is so big and so unsophisticated, that you daily feel the incongruity, and wish, in a vague sort of way, that there was a street boarding-school in your town, where he could rough it away from an adoring family, and learn to be responsible and self-opinionated, like other dogs. He has a maternal uncle, on the estate across the field: a double-chinned tawny ogre, good-natured as a baby, and utterly rash and improvident, whose society you cannot covet for your tender charge. One fine day, Pup is low with the distemper, and evidence is forthcoming that he has visited, under his uncle's guidance, the much-deceased lobster thrown into hotel tubs. After weeks of anxious nursing, rubbings in oil, and steamings with vinegar, during which time he coughs and wheezes in a heartbreaking imitation of advanced consumption, he is left alone a moment on his warm rug, with the thermometer in his special apartment steady at seventy-eight degrees, and plunges out into the winter blast. Hours later, he returns; and the vision of his vagabond uncle, slinking around the house, announces to you in what companionship he has been. Plastered to the skull in mud and icicles, wet to the bone, jaded, guilty, and doomed now, of course, to die, Pup retires behind the kitchen table. The next morning he is well. The moral, to him at least, is that our uncle is an astute and unappreciated person, and a genuine man of the world.

Yet our uncle, with all his laxity, has an honorable heart, and practises the maxima reverentia puero. It is not from him that Pup shall learn his little share of iniquity. Meanwhile, illumination is nearing him in the shape of a little old white bull-terrier of uncertain parentage, with one ear, and a scar on his neck, and depravity in the very lift of his stumped tail. This active imp, recently come to live in the neighborhood, fills you with forebodings. You know that Pup must grow up sometime, must take his chances, must fight and be fooled, must err and repent, must exhaust the dangerous knowledge of the great university for which his age at last befits him. The ordeal will harm neither him nor you: and yet you cannot help an anxious look at him, full four feet tall from crown to toe, and with a leg like an obelisk, preserving unseasonably his ambiguous early air of exaggerated goodness. One day he follows you from the station, and meets the small Mephisto on the homeward path. They dig a bone together, and converse behind trees; and when you call Pup, he snorts his initial defiance, and dances away in the tempter's wake. Finally, your whistle compels him, and he comes soberly forward. By this time the ringleader terrier is departing, with a diabolical wink. You remember that, a moment before, he stood on a mound, whispering in your innocent's beautiful dangling ear, and you glance sharply at Pup. Yes, it has happened! He will never seem quite the same again, with

——"the contagion of the world's slow stain"

beginning in his candid eyes. He is a dog now. He knows.

1893.

[ON DYING CONSIDERED AS
A DRAMATIC SITUATION]

A MAN of thought wears himself out, standing continually on the defensive. The more original a character, the more it is at war with common conditions, the more it wastes its substance scourging the tides and charging windmills; and this being recognized, the exceptional person, your poet or hero, is expected to show an ascetic pallor, to eat and sleep little, to have a horrible temper, and to die at thirty-seven. Has he an active brain, he must pay for it by losing all the splendid passivity, inner and outer, which belongs to oxen and philosophers. Nor, on the other hand, will stupidity and submission promote longevity: for this is a bullying world. A wight with no mind to end himself by fretting and overdoing, is charitably ended by the action of his superiors, social or military. How many privates had out of Balaklava but a poor posthumous satisfaction! The Saxon soldier does not shed his skin in times of peace: he is the same in garrisons and barracks as amid the roar of guns; and his ruling passion is still to stand in herds and be killed. A few years ago, an infantry company, in the south of England, were marching into the fields for rifle-practice. Filing through a narrow lane, they saw two runaway horses, half-detached from their carriage, round the bend and rush towards them. The officer in charge either did not perceive them so soon as the others, or else he was slow to collect his wits, and give the order to disperse into the hedgerows for safety. As the order, for whichever cause, was not uttered, not a single recruit moved a muscle; but the ranks strode on, with as solid and serene a front as if on dress-parade, straight under those wild hoofs and wheels: and afterwards, what was left of eleven men was cheerfully packed off, not to the cemetery, by great luck, but to the hospital. And in Germany, only the other day, the sergeant who superintends the daily gymnastic exercises of a certain camp, marched a small detachment of men, seven or eight in number, into the lake to swim. In went the men, up to their necks and over their heads, and made an immediate and unanimous disappearance. The sergeant, impatient to have them finish their bath, returned presently, and was shocked to discover that they were all drowned! Now, it happened that the seven or eight could not swim a stroke between them, but they thought it unnecessary to make any remark to that effect. Is it not evident that these fine dumb fellows can beat the world at a fight? Yet their immense practical value has no artistic significance. They strike the unintelligent attitude. It is no part of a private's business to exert his choice, his volition; and without these, he loses pertinence. Therefore, to wear the eternal "piece of purple" in a ballad, you must be at least a corporal.

The mildest and sanest of us has a sneaking admiration for a soldier: lo, it is because his station implies a disregard of what we call the essential. The only elegant, gratifying exit of such a one is in artillery-smoke. A boy reads of Winkelried and d'Assas with a thrill of satisfaction. Hesitation, often most meritorious, is unforgivable in those who have espoused a duty and a risk. Courage is the most ordinary of our virtues: it ought to win no great plaudits; but for one who withholds it, and "dares not put it to the touch," we have tremendous vituperations. In short, that man makes but a poor show thenceforward among his fellows, who having had an eligible chance to set up as a haloed ghost, evades it, and forgets the serviceable maxim of Marcus Aurelius, that "part of the business of life is to lose it handsomely." Of like mind was Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus: "Take the first chance of dying nobly, lest, soon after, dying indeed come to thee, but noble dying nevermore." Once in a while, such counsels stir a fellow-mortal beyond reason, and persuade him "for a small flash of honor to cast away himself." And if so, it proves that at last the right perception and application of what we are has dawned upon him.

Though we get into this world by no request of our own, we have a great will to stay in it: our main desire, despite a thousand buffets of the wind, is to hang on to the branch. The very suicide-elect, away from spectators, oftenest splashes back to the wharf. Death is the one visitor from whom we scurry like so many children, and terrors thrice his size we face with impunity at every turn. The real hurt and end-all may be in the shape of a fall, a fire, a gossamer-slight misunderstanding. Or "the catastrophe is a nuptial," as Don Adriano says in the comedy. But we can breast out all such venial calamities, so that we are safe from that which heals them. We have, too, an unconscious compassion for the men of antiquity. Few, if it came to the point, would change day for day, and be Alexander, on the magnificent consideration that, although Alexander was an incomparable lion, Alexander is dead. Herrick's ingenuous verse floats into memory:

"I joy to see
Myself alive: this age best pleaseth me."

Superfluous adorners of the nineteenth century, we have no enthusiasm to be what our doom makes us, mere gradators, little mounting buttresses of a coral-reef, atoms atop of several layers, and presently buried under several more. We would strut, live insects for ever, working and waltzing over our progenitors' bones. Seventy-five flushing years are no boon to us, if at that tender period's end, we must be pushed aside from the wheel of the universe, and swept up like so much dust and chaff. Nor does it help us, when it comes to the inevitable deposal, to recall that while there were as yet no operas, menus, nor puns, one Methusalem and his folk had nine lazy centuries of it, and that their polar day, which was our proper heritage, vanished with them, and beggared the almanac. Appreciation of life is a modern art: it seems vexing enough that just in inverse proportion to the growing capacity of ladies and gentlemen, is the ever-diminishing room allotted wherein to exhibit it to "the scoffing stars." Time has stolen from us our decades sacred to truancy and the circus, to adventure and loafing. Where is the age apiece in which to explode shams, to do vast deeds, to generalize, to learn a hawk from a hernshaw, to be good—O to be good! an hour before bedtime? Evening for us should be a dogma in abstracto; seas and suns should change; horizons should stretch incalculably, cities bulge over their boundaries, deserts thicken with carriages, polite society increase and abound in caves and balloons, and in starlit tavern doorways on Matterhorn top: and still, crowded and jostled by less favored humanity, elbowing it through extinct and unborn multitudes, we would live, live! and there should be no turf broken save by the plough, and no urns except for roses.

It demonstrates what an amusing great babe a man is, that his love of life is usually equivalent to love of duration of life. To be ninety, we take to mean that one has had ninety years' worth out of the venture: a calculation born of the hoodwinking calendar, and of a piece with Dogberry's deductions. But this estimable existence of ours is measured by depths and not by lengths; it is not uncommon for those who have compassed its greatest reach to be translated young, and wept over by perspicuous orators. And the smug person who expires "full of years," and empty, forsooth, of all things else, whose life is indeed covered, in several senses, by a life-insurance, is thought to be the enviable and successful citizen. It is quite as well that the gods have allowed us no vote concerning our own fates: it would be too hard a riddle to guess whether it is a dignified thing to continue, or when it is a profitable hour to cease. A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his wish, like Endymion, between moonrise and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a bank-account and octogenarianism. Why wouldst thou grow up, sirrah? "To be a philosopher? a madman. An alchemist? a beggar. A poet? esurit: an hungry jack." Mere possibility of further sensation is a curious object of worship and desire. It has no meaning, save in relation to its starry betters in whose courts it is a slave, for whose good it may become a victim. A lover protesting to his lady that she is dearer than his life, is paying her, did he but consider it, a tricksy trivial compliment: as if he had said that she was more precious than a prejudice, adorable beyond a speculation. On the negative side only, in the subjective application, life is dear. Certainly, one can conceive of no more monstrous wrong to a breathing man than to announce his demise. Swift's mortuary joke on Partridge is the supreme joke. A report that you are extinct damages your reputation beyond repair. We may picture a vision of wrath bursting into the editor's office: "I am told that yesterday you had my name, sir, in your column of Deaths. I demand contradiction." Unto whom the editor: "The Evening Bugaboo never contradicts itself. But I will, with pleasure, put you in, to-night, under the heading of Births." Some considerations are to the complainant a fiery phooka: strive as he will to adjust them, he gets thrown, and bruises his bones.

Life is legal tender, and individual character stamps its value. We are from a thousand mints, and all genuine; despite our infinitely diverse appraisements, we "make change" for one another. So many ideals planted are worth the great gold of Socrates; so many impious laws broken are worth John Brown. We may give ourselves in ha'pence fees for horses, social vogue, tobacco, books, a journey; or be lavished at once for some good outranking them all. And of the two dangers of hoarding and spending, the former seems a thousand times more imminent and appalling. Our moralists, who have done away with duels, and taught us the high science of solidarity, have deflected us from our collateral relative, the knight-errant, who seemed to go about seeking that which might devour him. But there are times when a prince is called suddenly to his coronation, and must throw largesses as he rides; when the commonest workaday life hears a summons, and wins the inalienable right to spill itself on the highway, among the crowd. We make a miserable noisy farcical entry, one by one, on the terrene stage; it is a last dramatic decency that we shall learn to bow ourselves out with gallantry, be it even among the drugs and pillows of a too frequent lot. But the enviable end is the other: some situations have inherent dignity, and exist already in the play. Death in battle is (for the commissioned officer) a gracefully effective mode of extinction; so is any execution for principle's sake. The men who fill the historic imagination are the men who strove and failed, and put into port at Traitors' Gate. The political scaffold, in fact, is an artistic creation. When a scholar looks up, the first eyes he meets are the eyes of those who stand there, in cheerful acquiescence, "alive, alert, immortal." "An axe," says Bishop Jeremy Taylor, "is a much less affliction than a strangury." While the headsman awaited on every original inspiration, under "hateful Henry" as under Nero, life certainly had a romance and gusto unknown to modern spirits. The rich possibilities of any career got, at some time, congested tragically into this. How readily any one might see that, and welcome the folly and ignominy which drove him to an illustrious early grave! Raleigh, at the last, kissed the yet bloodless blade "which ends this strange eventful history," saying: "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a cure for all diseases." Disguised and hunted, Campion of S. John's, following his duty, steals along the Harrow Road, by Tyburn tree, and passing it, in a sort of awful love-longing, and as if greeting the promised and foreordained, smilingly raises his hat. Not by grace only are men "so in love with death," but by habit, by humor, and through economic effort. Logic as well as faith understands the evangel: "Whoso loseth his life shall find it." The hero can await, without a flutter, the disarming of his hand and hope; for he can never be stolen upon unawares. His prayer has always been for

"Life that dares send
A challenge to its end,
And when it comes, say, 'Welcome, friend!'"

He must cease en gentilhomme, as he has heretofore continued. To have Azrael catch him by the leg, like a scampering spider, is not agreeable to his ideas of etiquette. At any age, after any fashion, it is only the hero who dies; the rest of us are killed off. He resembles Cartright's "virtuous young gentlewoman":

"Others are dragged away, or must be driven;
She only saw her time, and stepped to Heaven."

We act out to its close our parable of the great babe, who has clutched his little treasure long and guardedly, unwilling to share it, and from whom, for discipline's sake, it must needs be taken. But the martyr-mind, in conscious disposal, is like the young Perseus, bargaining with Pallas Athene for a brief existence and glory. The soul meets its final opportunity, as at a masked ball; if it cannot stand and salute, to what end were its fair faculties given? Or, we are all pedestrians in a city, hurrying towards our own firesides, eager, preoccupied, mundane. Perhaps at the turn of a steep street, there is the beauty of sunset, "brightsome Apollo in his richest pomp," the galleons of cloud-land in full sail, every scarlet pennon flying. One or two pause, as if from a sharp call or reminder, and beholding such a revelation, forget the walk and the goal, and are rapt into infinitude. Immortalitas adest! Now, most of us crawl home to decease respectably of "a surfeit of lampreys." We keep the names, however, of those who seem to make their exit to the sound of spiritual trumpets, and who fling our to-morrow's innocent gauds away, to clothe themselves with inexhaustible felicity.

1887.

[A BITTER COMPLAINT OF
THE UNGENTLE READER]

AN editor, a person of authority and supposed discretion, requested a friend of mine, the other day, to write an essay with this weird title: "How to Read a Book of Poems so as to Get the Most Good out of It." My friend, "more than usual calm," politely excused himself, suffering the while from suppressed oratory. He felt that the diabolic suggestion, made in all

"Conscience and tendre herte,"

amounted to a horrible implied doubt concerning the lucidity of himself and other minor bards, publishing to-day and to-morrow. They have become difficult to read, only because a too educational world of readers is determined to find them so. Now, eating is to eat, with variations in haste, order, quantity, quality, and nocturnal visions: with results, in short; but eating is to eat. Even thus, as it would appear to a plain mind, reading is to read. Can it be that any two or two thousand can wish to be preached at, in order that they may masticate a page correctly, in squads? that they may never forget, like Mr. Gladstone's progeny, to apportion thirty-two bites to every stanza, with the blessing before, and the grace after? No full-grown citizen is under compulsion to read; if he do so at all, let him do it individually, by instinct and favor, for wantonness, for private adventure's sake: and incidental profit be hanged, drawn and quartered! To enter a library honorably, is not to go clam-digging after useful information, nor even after emotions. The income to be secured from any book stands in exact disproportion to the purpose, as it were, of forcing the testator's hand: a moral very finely pointed in The Taming of the Shrew, and again in Aurora Leigh. To read well is to make an impalpable snatch at whatever item takes your eye, and run. The schoolmaster has a contradictory theory. He would have us in a chronic agony of inquisitiveness, and with minds gluttonously receptive, not of the little we need (which it is the ideal end and aim of a university education, according to Newman, to perceive and to assimilate) but of the much not meant for us. Wherefore to the schoolmaster there may be chanted softly in chorus: Ah, mon père, ce que vous dites là est du dernier bourgeois. The Muse is dying nowadays of over-interpretation. Too many shepherd swains are trying to Get the Most Good out of her. When Caius Scriblerius prints his lyric about the light of Amatoria's eyes, which disperses his melancholy moods, the average public, at least in Boston, cares nothing for it, until somebody in lack of employment discovers that as Saint Patrick's snakes were heathen rites, and as Beatrice Portinari was a system of philosophy, so Amatoria's eyes personify the sun-myth. And Caius shoots into his eleventh edition.

Mr. Browning, perhaps, will continue to bear this sort of enlargement and interfusion; indeed, nothing proves his calibre quite so happily as the fact that his capacious phantasmal figure, swollen with the gas of much comment and expounding, has a fair and manly look, and can still carry off, as we say, its deplorable circumference. But at the present hour, there is nothing strange in imagining less opaque subjects being hauled in for their share of dissection before Browning societies. Picture, for instance, a conclave sitting from four to six over the sensations of Mrs. Boffkin,

"Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's fits."

(For Mr. Kipling must be a stumbling-block unto some, as unto many a scandal.) Is there no fun left in Israel? Have we to endure, for our sins, that a super-civilization insists on being vaccinated by the poor little poets, who have brought, alas, no instrument but their lyre? Can we no longer sing, without the constraint of doling out separately to the hearer, what rhetoric is in us, what theory of vowel color, what origin and sequences, what occult because non-existent symbolism? without setting up for oracles of dark import, and posing romantically as "greater than we know"? To what a pass has the ascendant New England readeress brought the harmless babes of Apollo! She seeks to master all that is, and to raise a complacent creation out of its lowland wisdom to her mountainous folly's level; she touches nothing that she does not adorn—with a problem; she approves of music and pictures whose reasonableness is believed to be not apparent to the common herd; she sheds scholastic blight upon "dear Matt Prior's easy jingle," and unriddles for you the theological applications of

"Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy:
'I am extremely hungaree.'"

She is forever waking the wrong passenger: forever falling upon the merely beautiful, and exacting of it what it was never born to yield. The arts have a racial shyness: the upshot of this scrutiny of their innocent faces is that they will be fain to get into a hole and hide away for good. We lay it all to the ladies; for the old lazy unprovincialized world of men was never so astute and excruciating. There were no convenings for the purpose of illuminating the text of Dr. John Donne, although the provocation was unique. Poets were let alone, once upon a time; and all they did for their own pleasure and sowed broadcast for the pleasure of others, failed not, somehow, to fulfil itself from the beginning unto the end. What is meant for literature now, begotten in simpleness and bred in delight, arises as a quarrel between producer and consumer,

"And thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

The man's attitude, even yet, towards a book of poetry which is tough to him, is to drop it, even as the gods would have him do; the woman's is to smother it in a sauce of spurious explanation, and gulp it down.

In a sophisticating age, it is the nature of poets to remain young. Their buyers are always one remove nearer to the sick end of the century, and being themselves tainted with a sense of the importance of the scientific, are in so much disqualified to judge of the miracle, the phenomenon, which poetry is. To whomever has an idle and a fresh heart, there is great encouragement in the poetic outlook. The one harassing dread is that modern readers may scorch that hopeful field. They refuse to take us for what we are: they are of one blood with the mediæval Nominalists, who regarded not the existence of the thing, but the name by which they denoted it. They make our small gift futile, and their own palates a torment. We solemnly pronounce our wares, such as they be, handsomer in the swallowing than in the chewing: alas, so far, it is our fate to be chewed. Who can help applying to an adult magazine constituency which yearns to be told How to Read a Book of Poems, the "so help me God" of dear Sir Thomas More? "So help me God, and none otherwise but as I verily think, that many a man buyeth Hell with so much pain, he might have Heaven with less than the one-half."

1894.

[ANIMUM NON COELUM]

HORACE was not often wrong, in his habitual beautiful utterance of commonplace; but was he not altogether wrong when he gave us the maxim that the traveller may change the sky over him, but not the mind within him? that the mood, the personal condition, is not to be driven forth by any new sea or land, but must cling to a man in his flight, like the pollen under a bee's wing? Sick souls started out from the Rome of Augustus, with intent to court adventure and drown care, even as they do now from Memphremagog and Kalamazoo, U.S.A. These Horace noted, and discouraged with one of his best fatalisms. Human trouble, nevertheless, has for its sign-manual a packed valise and a steamer-ticket. Broken hearts pay most of the bills at European hotels. For they know, better than the wounded in body, that the one august inevitable relief, the wizard pill against stagnation, is, was, shall ever be, "strange countries for to see." In the long run, self cannot withstand the overwhelming spectacle of other faces, and the vista of other days than ours. Unrest, however caused, must melt away insensibly in the glow of old art, and before the thought, widening the breast, in cities or on the Alpine slopes, of what has been. The tourist, be he of right mettle, falls in love with the world, and with the Will which sustains it. As much solace or exhilaration as comes into the eye and ear, so much evil, in the form of sadness, rebellion, ignorance, passes out from us, as breathed breath into the purer air. Boast as we may, we are not, immigrating, what we were, emigrating. We come away bewitched from the great playhouse of our forefathers; no thorn in the flesh seems so poignant now as it was, in that remembrance. Time, master-workman that he is, annuls and softens grief, and allows joy to sink in and spread. What we alter, surely, is not the same dumb blue ether overhead, but the little carnal roof and heaven domed between that and us. Travel, to the cheerful, is cheerful business; to the overcast nature it is something better. Upon the smoky and clouded ceiling of his own consciousness, darkened once despite him, but perhaps kept wilfully dark since, "for very wantonness," travel lays her cunning finger. Sudden frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and flush there, in gold and olive and rose, as if Fra Angelico had been set loose with his palette in a sequestered cloister. Your Horace, be it known, was a home-keeper, and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid doing, "talks big of what does not concern him."

There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity; for he is, as the monkish chroniclers would say, filius hujus sæculi, a child of to-day and to-morrow. In "that state of life to which it has pleased God to call" him, he should be the proclaimed brother of mankind, and the outrider of civilization; he has an heroic post and outlook, and these bring their responsibilities: why should he, how can he, forego them for the accidental pleasure to be had in alien capitals? But one thing he sees far away which he can never live to call his, in the west; he cannot transfer hither the yesterday of his own race, the dark charm of London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty and melancholy of Rome. If he has a nature which looks deep and walks slowly, he shall not pass the image of any old kingdom unbeguiled; either to his living senses, or to his distant and hopeless meditations, that world beyond wide waters will seem to him the fairest of created things, like the unbought lamp worth all that Aladdin ever cherished in his narrow youth. For yesterday is ours also, to have and to hold, though it be an oak which grows not within our own garden walls, and is to be reached only by a going forth, and a wrenching of the heart-strings. And that which makes the worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cosmopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no mere restless energy: it is truly the love of man which calleth over seas, and from towers a great way off. His shrine is some common and unregarded place, a mediæval stair, it may be, worn hollow as a gourd by the long procession of mortality. That concave stone touches him, and makes his blood tingle: it has magic in it, of itself, without a record; for it speaks of the transit of human worth and human vices, both of which Dante makes his Ulysses long for, and seek to understand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere we were born, while we were on forgotten errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. To have marked it, with perhaps the largest emotion of our lives, is to walk Broadway or a Texan tow-path humbler and better ever after.

Who is to be blamed if he do indeed go "abroad," or stay abroad, so strangely finding there, rather than here, the soul's peace? for the soul has rights which may cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of what avail is Americanism, unless it earn for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap him in a good dream, taking rancor from him, and put him in harmony with all master events gone by? The young Republic has children who come into the field of historic Christendom, to bathe themselves in the dignity and roominess of life, and to walk gladly among the evergreen traditions, which surge like tall June grass about their knees. What they never had, natural piety teaches them to desire and to worship, and their happy Parthian faces are bright with the setting sun. There are hundreds such, and blessed are they; for they move meanwhile under an innocent spell, and ignobler visions cannot touch them. It is their vocation to make a thronged spiritual solitude of their own. Under the self-same night of stars, they are changed: they have found other minds, more reverent, more chastened, more sensitized. Because they are converts, they cannot always be judged fairly. You shall meet them in summertime at Bruges and Nuremberg, and in the transept of Westminster Abbey, elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but ever rapt and mute: "whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."

1894.

[THE PRECEPT OF PEACE]

A CERTAIN sort of voluntary abstraction is the oddest and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all æsthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it; full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly" among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave, but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick of celery, or

"The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours,"

it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-à-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Ja wohl! and they who act with jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded eye-corners.

Now nothing is farther from le saint indifférent than cheap indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness, like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through volition, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a specific act: he has no habits. Le saint indifférent is a dramatic wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of easy good-nature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent partisan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros Tyriusque. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat less communicative than

"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
Lonely and terrible, on the Andëan height."

Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then, heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelops him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!"

sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our indifférent, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him, even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted (though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in locality, it follows that he is the best of travellers, tangential merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps, all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of commercial ambition.

The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of indifférents. From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile,—and no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the universe,—wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war." And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions, and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newbury field. The imminent deed he made a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor. Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The indifférent is a good thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an indifférent, however. The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gonzaga what he, on his part, should do in the precious interval. "I should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of perfection, but also of polity. A very little non-adhesion to common affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The indifférent believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him. But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:

"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode."

No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the contrary, the cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such innermost asylum the right sort of devil-may-care sits smiling, while we rage or weep.

1894.

[ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER
WITH A PICKPOCKET]

I WAS in town the other evening, walking by myself, at my usual rapid pace, and ruminating, in all likelihood, on the military affairs of the Scythians, when, at a lonely street corner not adorned by a gas-lamp, I suddenly felt a delicate stir in my upper pocket. There is a sort of mechanical intelligence in a well-drilled and well-treated body, which can act, in an emergency, without orders from headquarters. My mind, certainly, was a thousand years away, and is at best drowsy and indifferent. It had besides, no experience, nor even hearsay, which would have directed it what to do at this thrilling little crisis. Before it was aware what had happened, and in the beat of a swallow's wing, my fingers had brushed the flying thief, my eyes saw him, and my legs (retired race-horses, but still great at a spurt) flew madly after him. I protest that from the first, though I knew he had under his wicked thumb the hard-earned wealth of a notoriously poor poet (let the double-faced phrase, which I did not mean to write, stand there, under my hand, to all posterity), yet I never felt one yearning towards it, nor conceived the hope of revenge. No: I was fired by the exquisite dramatic situation; I felt my blood up, like a charger

"that sees
The battle over distances."

I was in for the chase in the keen winter air, with the moon just rising over the city roofs, as rapturously as if I were a very young dog again. My able bandit, clearly viewed the instant of his assault, was a tiger-lily of the genus "tough": short, pallid, sullen, with coat-collar up and hat-brim down, and a general air of mute and violent executive ability. My business in devoting this chapter to reminiscences of my only enemy, is to relate frankly what were my contemporaneous sensations. As I wheeled about, neatly losing the chance of confronting him, and favored with a hasty survey, in the dark, of his strategic mouth and chin, the one sentiment in me, if translated into English, would have uttered itself in this wise: "After years of dulness and decorum, O soul, here is some one come to play with thee; here is Fun, sent of the immortal gods!"

This divine emissary, it was evident, had studied his ground, and awaited no activity on the part of the preoccupied victim, in a hostile and unfamiliar neighborhood. He suffered a shock when, remembering my ancient prowess in the fields of E——, I took up a gallop within an inch of his nimble heels. Silently, as he ran, he lifted his right arm. We were soon in the blackness of an empty lot across the road, among coal-sheds and broken tins, with the far lights of the thoroughfare full in our faces. Quick as kobolds summoned up from earth, air, and nowhere, four fellows, about twenty years old, swarmed at my side, as like the first in every detail as foresight and art could make them; and these darting, dodging, criss-crossing, quadrilling, and incessantly interchanging as they advanced, covering the expert one's flight, and multiplying his identity, shot separately down a labyrinth of narrow alleys, leaving me confused and checkmated, after a brief and unequal game, but overcome, nay, transported with admiration and unholy sympathy! It was the prettiest trick imaginable.

It was near Christmas; and, brought to bay, and still alone, I conjured up a vision of a roaring cellar-fire, and the snow whistling at the bulkhead, as the elect press in, with great slapping of hands and stamping of shoes, to a superfine night-long and month-long bowl of grog, MY grog, dealt out by Master Villon, with an ironic toast to the generous founder. I might have followed the trail, as I was neither breathless nor afraid, but it struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable. Whereupon, bolstered against an aged fence, I laughed the laugh of Dr. Johnson, "heard, in the silence of the night, from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar." I thought of the good greenbacks won by my siren singing in the Hodgepodge Monthly; I thought of my family, who would harbor in their memories the inexplicable date when the munificent church-mouse waxed stingy. I thought even of the commandment broken and of the social pact defied, gave my collapsed pocket a friendly dig, and laughed again. The police arrived, with queries, and ineffective note-books. I went home, a shorn lamb, conscious of my exalted financial standing; for had I not been robbed? All the way I walked with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who came to mind promptly as my corporeal blessings departed. He intoned no requiem for the lost, but poured a known philosophy, in which I had now taken my degree, into my liberal ear:—

"Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that never willingly vexed anybody?"

"A man has but two concerns in life: to be honorable in what he does, and resigned under what happens to him."

"If any one misconduct himself towards thee, what is that to thee? The deed is his; and therefore let him look to it."

"Welcome everything that happens as necessary and familiar."

Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction is cheaply traded for a wad of current specie, and an inkling into the ways of a bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have "arrived"; I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes. Life is no longer a rude and trivial comedy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, and even to cry, "Pray, madam, don't mention it," to an apologizing lady in a gig, who drives over him and kills him, and does so, moreover, in the most bungling manner in the world.

1892.

[REMINISCENCES OF A FINE
GENTLEMAN]

MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. While so many trace their life-stream to pirates or usurpers who shed their brothers' blood to possess their brothers' power, it is a distinction worth recording, that this Fine Gentleman was descended from a princely person in Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like a French marshal's, with the ribbons and medals of recognition. Though of foreign origin, he did an American thing at my introduction to him: he shook hands. I dropped the white pebble of the Cretans to mark the day he arrived. It is needless to say I loved and understood him,—blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. He had then, despite his extreme youth, the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the open door: the look of one who has character, and a defined part to play, and whose career can never reach a common nor ignoble end. Comely in the full sense he was not; but impressive he was, despite the precocious leanness and alertness which come of too rapid growth.

He had every opportunity, during his babyhood and later, of gratifying his abnormal love of travel; he managed to see more of city life than was good for him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. His golden curiosity covered everything mundane, and he continued his private studies in topography until he was kidnapped, and restored by the police: an abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy with conscience, irresponsive to any welcomes, who sidled into his abandoned residence, and forswore from that day his unholy peregrinations. But he had a roaming housemate, and grew to be supremely happy, journeying under guidance.

His temper, at the beginning, was none of the best, and took hard to the idea of moral governance; he overcame obstacles after the fashion of a catapult. His sense of humor was always grim: he had a smile, wide and significant, like a kobold's; but a mere snicker, or a wink, was foreign to his nature. With certain people he was sheer clown; yet he discriminated, and never wore his habitual air of swaggering consequence before any save those he was pleased to consider his inferiors. The sagacious and protective instincts were strong in him. For children he had the most marked indulgence and affection, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he found the only statecraft he could respect among them. For their delight he made himself into a horse, and rode many a screaming elf astride of his back for a half-mile through the meadow, before coming to the heart of the business, which was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet grass: a proceeding hailed with shouts of acclaim from the accompanying crowd of playfellows. And again, in winter, he became an otter, and placing himself upon his worthy back at the summit of a hill, rolled repeatedly to the bottom, drenched in snow, and buried under a coasting avalanche of boys.

He never found time, in so short a life, to love many. Outside his own household and his charming cat, he was very loyal to one lady whose conversation was pleasingly ironical, and to one gentleman whose character was said to resemble his own. Several others were acceptable, but for these two visitors he had the voice and gesture of joyful greeting. He had so arrant an individuality that folk loved or hated him. One could not look with indifference on that assertive splendid bearing, or on the mighty muscles as of a Norse ship. A civil address from you made him your liegeman. But the merest disregard or slight, no less than open hostility, sealed him your foe. And there were no stages of vacillation. A grudge stood a grudge, and a fondness a fondness. He was a famous retaliator; none ever knew him to ride first into the lists. Battle he loved, but he had a gentlemanly dislike of "scenes": when a crisis came, he preferred to box or wrestle; and what he preferred he could do, for no opponent ever left a scar upon him. A rival less in size, or impudent solely, he took by the nape of the neck and tossed over the nearest fence, resuming his walk with composure. Training and education helped him to the pacific solving of many problems. His good dispositions, all but established, were once badly shaken by a country sojourn; for he had been taught there a bit of cabalistic boys' Latin whose slightest whisper would send him tiptoeing to every window in the house, scanning the horizon for a likely enemy, with a rapture worthy of another cause.

He was rich in enemies, most of them of the gentler sex. Upon a civic holiday, three villageous women were seen to bear down upon him, as he was calmly inspecting the outposts of their property, laden with weapons (timor arma ministrat!) no less classic than a pail, a broom, and an axe. Not Swift's self could have added to the look of withering comment with which he turned and confronted his assailants: a single glance which dispersed the troops, and held in itself the eloquence of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal warfare lay between him and the man who had peevishly flapped that haughty nose with a glove, before his first birthday-anniversary, and revenge boiled in his eye, long after, at sight of a citizen who had once addressed to him a word unheard in good society. A loud tone, a practical joke, a teasing reminder of a bygone fault, disconcerted him wholly. Sensitive and conservative of mood, my Fine Gentleman could never forget a rudeness, nor account satisfactorily for such a thing as a condescension. All his culture and his thinking had not taught him to allow for the divers conditions and dispositions of mankind. To the last he looked for courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the Fine Gentleman was a snob. Hunger and nakedness, even honest labor, had for him no occult charm. Throughout his youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, and on the very highway ached to make worse rags yet of the floating rags of a beggar's coat; but the experience of friendship with a kindly butcher-lad made inroads upon his exclusiveness; and I know that, had he outlived his years, there would have been one more convert democrat. His own personal appearance was of the nicest; by scrupulous superintendence of his laundry, chiefly by night, he kept himself immaculate and imposing. His colors were those of the fallen leaves and the snow; the November auburn falling away on either side from the magnificent brow and eyes, and from the neck in its triple white fold: a head to remind you of Raleigh in his ruff.

He must have been patriotic, for he revelled in the horns, gunpowder, rockets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. Archery and rifle-practice seemed to strike him as uncommonly pleasant devices to kill time. In all games which had noise and motion, he took the same strong vicarious interest. He had heard much music, and learned something of it; he was once known to hum over an august recitative of the late Herr Wagner. Singular to relate, he had an insuperable objection to books, and protested often against the continued use of the pen by one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed greatly to relish the recital of a tribute of personal verse from a United States Senator, and the still more elaborate lines of a delightful professional satirist.

His health, aside from his great size, his spirit and nervous vigor, was never steady nor sound. Every chapter of the Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed with events, perils, excitements, catastrophes, and blunders, due in great part, by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous vitality balancing on too narrow a base. With years, there began to come the "philosophic mind." His sweetness and submission grew with his strength; never was there a sinner so tender of conscience, so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, after, in the good works of amended ways. New virtues seemed to shoot on all sides, and the old ones abided and flourished. He had never tried to deceive, nor to shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was not his, nor to appear other than he was. In the country town where he had many a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found congenial circumstances. There were no gardens there, no timid neighbors; he had opportunity, being allowed to inspect everything that stirred in air, or upon the earth, or in the waters under, for the pursuit of natural history, which was his passion; he ate what he pleased, he lorded it as he liked, he shifted his responsibilities, he won endless flattery from the inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment of all this was unique. On his return, while his escort was still in the room, the Fine Gentleman was asked whether he would rather remain now at home, or spend a week longer in the fascinating precincts of Cambrook. He arose briskly, bestowed on the questioner, whom he professed to adore, his warmest embrace (a thing unusual with him), and immediately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, placed himself at the door-knob which led into the more immoral world. His last accomplishment was to acquire an accurate sense of time, to make his quarter-hour calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out alone: "as wise as a Christian," an honest acquaintance was wont to say of him, perhaps on the suspicion that the Fine Gentleman, after he reached his majority, was a free-thinker.

He was in his perfect prime when a slight seeming disgrace fell upon him, though an incident never clearly understood. His believers believed in him still; but, for the need of quiet and impartial adjustment of matters, persuaded him to stay an indefinite while in the beloved farming district where many of his earlier vacations were spent. So that, after all his tender rearing, he was at last abroad and divorced: with a mist, such as we recognized immortals call sin, upon his spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and a doubt upon mine, answerable for much of what he was. Before the eventual proof came that he was clear of blame, there were thoughts even of an imperative parting, and a reaching for the rectification towards the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we could be joyous together; and where under the old guiding then never unskilful, the old sympathy then never erring, the Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's full, and in no misapprehending air, his innocent, upright, loving self again. But instantly, as if to wipe out forever that possible evil of which men could dream him guilty, came the moving and memorable end. Amid the tears of a whole town, and the thanksgiving of some for a greater grief averted, very quietly and consciously, under the most painful conditions, the Fine Gentleman laid down his life for a little child's sake. The fifth act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic consistency, to those who knew him; it was in line with his odd, inborn, unconventional ways: the fate one would have chosen for him, and the fittest with which to associate his soldierly memory. In exile and cashiered, he had overturned his defamers at a stroke.

It is not too proud a sentence to write over him, that this world, for the most part, was jealous of his nobility. Human society was some sort of huge jest to him; he did not always do his best there, as if the second-best were the shrewder policy, and the neater adaptation to the codes of honor he found established. His main concern was certainly the study of mankind, and he stood to it, a free and unbookish philosopher, looking on and not partaking, with his reticent tongue, his singularly soft footfall, his "eye like a wild Indian's, but cordial and full of smothered glee." To his own race he must be an epic figure and a precedent, and to ours something not undeserving of applause.

"Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind."

Such are the only annals of the Fine Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog, faithful and forgotten, who bore a great Bostonian's name nearly five years without a stain, and who is, to one or two of us, not alone a friend lost, but an ideal set up: Perseus become a star.

1889.

[IRISH]

THEY say the Celt is passing away,

"Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him."

For he represents yesterday, and its ideals: legendry, ritual, the heroic and indignant joy of life, belong to him; and he can establish no manner of connection with modern science and the subjugating of the material universe; with the spirit of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic countries, Ireland has the richest background; with so varied and exciting a past, it may well be that she has difficulty in concentrating herself on the new, and hangs to her own consistencies in a world of compromise. Every one save herself has forgotten what she was, and how her precedents, rather than any outer consideration, must still govern her, and keep her antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. She says to the powers, in charming futile bravado, what a Howard once said to a Spencer: "My ancestors were plotting treason, while yours were keeping sheep!" The word warms her heart like wine. "Le moyen âge énorme et délicat," in Verlaine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase made for Irish mediævalism. It was the watershed of European knowledge and moral culture: the watershed truly, which, sending streams down and out and far away, can never call them back. It gave Scotland her "naked knee" and her kingly line; it gave England its Christian creed; it gave modern France and Spain the noble enrichment of its banished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite Wild Geese. It has been in America, from the Revolution on, an influence incalculable. It won the perfect understanding sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan and Matthew Arnold: men of antipodal judgments. It has an intangible throne in every mind which loves scholarship, and imaginings more beautiful than any folk-lore in the world. "See you this skull?" Lucan makes Mercury say to Menippus, in the shades: "this is Helen." Great is the gulf between happy Innisfail, sovereign and wise, with her own laws, language, sports, and dress, and this wrecked Ireland we know: a country of untended flax-fields, unworked marble-quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little collapsing baronies whose landlords are absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly houses are given over, since the Union, to neglect and decay.

Yet of her glory there are glorious witnesses. Her rough and winding historic roads are open all along. The country is full of ruins and traditions and snatches of strange song, to "tease us out of thought." A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a Druid's altar; and where young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lombardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, arch in arch, with its broken inscription, an Orate for immemorial kings. At well-sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, even as they were "before the advent of the Desii into the County Waterford." By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, displaying David with his harp, or Peter with his keys, set up by a monastic hand twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet away, is something dearer to the archæologist: a kitchen of the primeval hunters, its wall and hearth and calcined lime-stones bedded among laughing bluebells. A brook's freshet, any March, may bring ashore a strange staff or necklace; a rock is overturned under a yew-tree, and discloses horns and knives elder than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Carlow garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler fortress, put up at the time when Richard the Lionheart was looking with tears of envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed urns were found in vaults, each with its shining dust: a tenantry long anterior to Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of Christian goings-on overhead, when The MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, and slain among his followers at the pouring of the wine. There can be no other country so fatal to the antiquarian: for zest and labor are superfluous, and a long course of incomparable luck must drive him, for very satiety, from the field.

Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She cannot take prettily to her rôle of subjugated province. Abominably misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie. From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements, her own exalt her own. As Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, she lets her little fishes talk like whales. And this, of course, tends to no good: it only blunts the ideals of the populace, lowers the mark of achievement, and makes it difficult indeed for the true prince to be recognized in the hubbub of mistaken acclaim. The constituency of Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sovereign poet: a lack apparent enough to all but itself. Verse, from of old, is pervasive as dew or showers: but nowhere is it in process of crystallization. The persecution of age-long ignorance, imposed upon a most intellectual people, is a miasmatic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. Only in the best is Ireland perfect: in heroes and in saints. In life, if not in art, we can sometimes do away with economy, restraint, equipoise. We can hardly judge the epic figures of antiquity: but from Columba to "J.K.L.," from Hugh O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing family likeness: scorn, pity, sweetness, disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill luck, in them all. Most of these are rebels; their names are under the baffling shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, alas, count for naught save in their mother's memory.

"Where be thy gods, O Israel?" The gibe comes with ill grace from the English. England has, by the world's corroboration, her divine sons, whose names are in benediction. But she has also a Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless, rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it, in its various stages and manifestations. "The superior race" makes the superior individual impossible. There is no situation open to him; he is notoriously superfluous: a coal brought to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake contradiction, and to be made to feel that he has no nominating committee behind him. He may be a great man in theory: but where every other man is demonstrably quite as great as he, he may be excused if he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity is in your Irishman's blood; and organization he hates and fears, perhaps through a dim consciousness that in organizations mental activities must be left to the leaders. If Celticism, with its insuperable charm, has never led the world in trade or war, can never so lead it, the cause is only that the units, which can hardly be said to compose it, use their brains with unhallowed persistence. The most dashing spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are natural critics even of authority. Their successes are everywhere spasmodic: they juggle with success, they do not woo it to wife. In a career dramatically checkered, it happens that their onset wins Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits Culloden.

It has been well said that the cultured classes are everywhere much the same, and that the true range of observation lies among the lowly and the poor. Now, no peasantry in the world furnishes such marked examples as does the Irish, of original speculation, accessibility to ideas. Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep you in amused astonishment, and in an attitude of impious doubt towards the ascendancy of the trained thinker. You fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the Ensign, "that it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing!" To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn, or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of, in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. In his native village, he is rated sympathetically by the dream's size and duration, rather than, as in grosser communities, by the deed. The man is a trafficker in visions; he becomes a cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires him for his madness, and has heard of fairy influences: "satis est, it suffices," as old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland car, when the rent comes due, and the crops are rotting in the rain! He has no turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise; yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks unique and illustrious. It is a memorable sight, this monstrous average and aggregate of whim. Nowhere the lonely planetary effulgence: everywhere the jovial defiant twinkle of little stars! According to Emerson's sweet prediction,—

"As half-gods go,
The gods arrive."

But in Ireland no clever half-god ever gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel.

Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, noting the extreme nationalism of Chopin's genius, would have us mark that the same force of patriotism in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman, could not have promoted a similar result. Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial traits remain intact, and uninfluenced from without: she is more esoterical than any state can be which is on the highway of Continental progress, in touch with to-morrow; and therefore her expression in the arts is sure to be more individual, distinct, and striking. Ireland is such another spiritually isolated country. Her best utterance, or her least, is alike betrayingly hers, to be scented among a thousand. And this homogeneity, in her case, is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as its explanation, the magnetic and absorbent quality in the strange isle itself, which has blended a dozen alien strains in one, and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iberian, the Norman, the Dane, the English of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, something "more Irish than the Irish." And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, though malcontent and impoverished, for honor's sake, maintains its own traditions in its own station, as the feudal vassals maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, on its ancient acres. The original peasant stock has all but perished from famines and immigrations. Most significant of all, what remains of the two, blends as in no other European territory. The peasants were long ago driven from the estate of free clansmen; the gentry, who would neither conform nor flee, were crushed into the estate of peasants, by the penal laws of the Protestant victor, which made education treason; by the most hateful code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge named it, framed since the beginning of the world: and one class impacted on the other, as mortar among stones, became indistinguishable in a generation. Time, which was expected to bring about No Ireland, has in reality engendered a national life more intense than ever. The physical strength, the patience and passion, of the common people; the grace, loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, have in that national life come together. Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk the open lily of liberality,

——"courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."

Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. No pioneer post, no remote wave, no human enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know whether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere menace of terrible import, like Samson, or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off disguises, and draw, at home, "in Tara's halls," the once familiar bow. Its own future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. The tragic cloud hangs there. Foreboding, unrest, are stamped on the very water and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It was on a day in spring, in sight of Wicklow headlands, the Golden Spears of long ago;—a day when primroses and celandine and prodigal furze splashed the hillsides, down to the rocks where fishers sat mending nets, and stitching tawny sails; when there was a sense of overhanging heights, and green inlands, and ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep in hearing of the surf, and of huge cromlech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long and low, looking sadly down; when the shadows in that cold enchanted air at sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased from silver through carmine to purple, and back again;—on such a day of caprice and romance, the true day of the Gael, a woman beautiful as the young Deirdre said to a stranger, walking the cliff-path at her side: "No: we have never been conquered: we are unconquerable. But we are without hope."

1889.

[AN OPEN LETTER TO THE
MOON]

“To the Celestial and my Soul’s Idol, the Most Beautified”—

IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into acquiescence with the inevitable design of age, we are more pleased than envious to discover that you grow never old to the outward eye, and that you appear the same "lovesome ladie bright," as when we first stared at you from a babe's pillow. You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with the family history, having seen what sort of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to free our minds frankly on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. We take this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyey station.

We have in part, lost our ancient respect for you: a sorry fact to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phœbe, twin to Phœbus: a queen, having a separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet.

Now, we allow that you have suffered by misrepresentation, or else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be! We are informed (our quondam faith in you beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed finery. That you are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to housebreakers; conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base nocturnal councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose countenance we—steal." That your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground, shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we surmise that there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and in a red or a grey veil, you masquerade periodically, at unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we are disposed to acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn, from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax.

Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation of the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below a French Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge beam in yours? Have you no resident missionary? for you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christendom. You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend. Your temper is said to be volcanic.

You that were Diana! who is the Falstaffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish person to be seen about your premises? He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or a leer, having never yet found his rhyming way to Norwich. We look on him as an officious rascal. He peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission to enter. He hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the Illuminari; he reproduceth your smile, and scattereth your largesses; he maketh faces (we say it shudderingly) at your worshippers below. Frequently hath he appropriated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned to you for delivery, from one sweetheart to another.

O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we hereby beseech you, of the danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms, and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that broad ingenuous vagabond! In some such despairing rage as the minstrel's, must have been the inventor of the German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after once beholding this thing, ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on "Der Mond,"—the Moon, he—as the proper mode of speech. I cite you this from old John Lyly: "There liveth none under the sunne that know what to make of the man in the moon." We clamor at you from the throats of the five races: Abolish him, or at least, depose the present incumbent, and get you straightway some acceptable minion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior! Your credit and our comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."

What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld: what joy, what plenty, what riot and desolation! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested thrice a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the south wind, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the "star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth? How sang Blondel against the prison door? How brawny was Bajazet? How fair was Helen; Semiramis, how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd?

You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady of Ghosts and guardian of the underworld, have been fed upon the homage of mortal lips: you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus:—

"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"

to the hymnal

"Orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,"

of the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit:

"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee."

Have we not sung oft that strophe of Ben Jonson's, full of inexpressible music to our ear?

"Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever,
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!"

and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning:—

"Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep,
Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer."

Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that

——"the oldest shade midst oldest trees
Feels palpitations when thou lookest in."

You are an incorrigible charmer: but as he reports you likewise as

——"a relief
To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps
Within his pearly house,"

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you have set up as a humanitarian.

Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments meant to be of the same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you, with the Libyan. The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Mere abuse of privilege!

If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, Luna. We make recantation, and disown our banter. We extend the hand of cordiality even to your month-old Man. How blithe and beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.

"Da Lunæ propere novæ,
Da noctis mediæ, da, puer!"

Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O Most Best! believe it."

1885.

[THE UNDER DOG]

WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be written without regard to its alleged incidents! Annalists are naturally the slaves of what happens; and that glows between them and the eternal, like gorgeous-colored minster glass, a spurious man-made heaven. A written Life may be true to fact and false to law, even as a lived life may be so. It is utterly impossible for the most philosophic among us to know, to judge, or even to speculate, in behalf of any but himself. A word, a risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the difference betwixt the two Kings of Brentford, lifts the obscure into apparent greatness, or forbids the potentially greater to descend to that table-land where there is no mist, where human senses come into play, and where he may become a subject for the approbation of history. In whatsoever degree a creature is burdened with conscience and stiffened with will, his course must be continuously deflected by countless little secret interior collisions and readjustments, which have final cumulative influence on what we call his character and his achievement. The means to this end are nowhere discoverable, unless in a perfect autobiography, and under the eye of the perfect reader. Fate must have her joke sometimes, as well as the least of us, and she suffers cheap energy to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and genius to await identification at the morgue. These are truisms, but here is truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine instances out of a thousand, it is folly to name any success or failure as such; for either is a mystery, and the fairest evidences by which we can form an opinion of it are altogether and irremediably fallacious.

Now, what has often used up and ended a man's vital force, is some constraint much more significant than that of early death, a constraint sought and willingly undergone. His own moral weakness stopped Coleridge; but Erasmus might have uttered with Sidney:

"My life melts with too much thinking."

Socrates, it will be remembered, "corrupted the Athenian youth." Not one of them he moulded or breathed upon, except the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his hand cordially to the practical, or ramped in the civic china-shop. What ghost is it which certain minds see upon the way, and which lessens their destined momentum? Something extra-rational, we may be sure: something with an august enchantment. They act under the impulse of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a known and very good result for "the things that are more excellent." The spectators can only wonder; the crucial third act has passed swiftly and in silence behind the curtain, and the rest of the drama sounds perverted and confused. A mere secular enthusiasm may have the power to draw a career to itself, absorb and devour it, and keep it shut forever from the chance of distinction in selfish and pleasant ways. But what shall be said for those who have become impassioned of the supernatural, beholding it in amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the holy sign between the antlered brows in the Aquitanian forest: a sight enough to stay them and carry them out of themselves, and change what was their prospect, because "the former things are passed away?" What of the allegiance to a cause, the espousal of hunger and thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in the hope, never ultimately in vain, of awakening and bettering the world? "If the law require you to be the agent of injustice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his good manful essay on John Brown, "then I say to you, break the law. Let your life be a friction to stop the machine." Even thus have many gone under, of whom no audiences have heard, but whose love and wisdom feed the race, century after century. In our reckoning of the saints, we lose sight of half their meaning; for we cannot guess accurately which of them has lost most, humanly and æsthetically, nor how much any one individual has lost, by his chosen concentration on matters in which there is no general competition, and where there can be no established canons of criticism. Some saints, in a double sense, follow their vocations; they attain their only legitimate development in the cloister. But others are saints at a sacrifice. An infinite number of men and women, painfully approximating moral perfection, lose, either gradually, or at once and forever, in that supreme compensation, their aptitude for common affairs. "Ejiciebas eas, et intrabas pro eis, omne voluptate dulcior," says the son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously stricken out from the pagan roll of honor.

Such as these have outgrown their own existence; they become impalpable to the general apprehension; they have sold the mess of pottage again for the birthright of the sons of God. And God, in the audacious old phrase, has "destroyed" them. What they bade fair to be, or what they could have done, before they were crippled by vigils and visions, rolls back into the impossible and the unimagined. We have no clue to alienated souls: we can compute with those solely, who, as we say, get along and amount to something; and we seldom perceive what purely fortuitous reputations, what mere bright flotsam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, are those whom we set first in a fixed place, and cry up as exemplars in art, trade, and policy. For what might have been is not this crass world's concern: her absent have no rights. The spiritual man is likely to be possessed of a divine indolence; would he strive, he is hampered and thwarted by the remembrance, or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Paradise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach against the courteous Latin nations that they lag behind in modern progressiveness; that they do not, like the Border lads, "march forward in order." The reproach is, at bottom, a delicate and exquisite compliment. With genius in their blood, and beauty never far from their hand, what wonder if they continue to be careless about rapid transit?

"I have seen higher, holier things than these,
And therefore must to these refuse my heart."

The endearing fable of elf-shot or bewitched children, little goose-girls waylaid on the hillside by fairies in green and silver, and enticed away, and set free after a while, though with the dream and the blight ever upon them, is, like most fables, deep as immortality. The mystic has already gone too far, and seen too much; he is useless at the plough: he is, as it were, one citizen less. The fine lines just quoted are from an expert in inaction, the poet who, among all others with an equal equipment in English letters, may be named pre-eminently as a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let his lovers proclaim as much with gentle irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes spoiled; they know somewhat of the unknown, and suffer from it; the usual measure of their esoteric worth must still be the measure of their mundane impracticability: like Hamlet, they have seen spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. Artists and thinkers, in fact, must outwardly follow the profession of the queen bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general request. But they are omens; they are, let us hope, the type and the race, the segregated non-cohesive thing, the protest which counts. The noblest of them is least in love with civilization and its awards; but what they have not hoarded for themselves, strangers hoard for them; and because success is most truly to them a thing foregone, therefore they prevail forever. If they have not "made a living," they have, in the opinion of a young Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher not of the Franklin breed,—"made a life."

1893.

[QUIET LONDON]

IF one had to try his hand at the eternal parallel of London and Paris (next weariest, in the scale of human comparisons, to that between D——s and T——y), or, indeed, of London with any city of known size, it might be said, in a word, that the chief variance between them is a variance of sound: and that under this, and expressed by it,—"alas, how told to them who felt it never?" as Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness of his lady,—is a profound spiritual difference. Whatever tradition may say of

——"the chargeable noise of this great town,"

its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange whispers, meek undertones. Conceive anything more diverting than that a monstrous awe-engendering institution like the 'bus should be almost as deft and as still as a humming-bird! Monosyllables, and pipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of fares make up the rolling van masculine; ever and anon the less certain step and the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, announce to the heroes of the serene height that

"Helen is come upon the wall to see."

With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, the wheels slide over surfaces smooth as an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle and rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by day, and glowworms by night: they dart, noiseless, from north to west. Even the tuft-footed dray-horses vanish with such reverberation as might follow Cinderella's coach. Exquisite voices of children, soft and shy, fall like the plash of water on the open paths of the Parks. In the viscid openings of alleys off the Strand, in the ancient astonishing tinkerdom of Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha torches light up the green lettuce on peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden balls significant above, and a knot of Hogarth faces in the Saturday evening flare,—there also, are the cockney gamins with honey-bright hair: profiles which corroborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a lovely phrase of Mistral in Mirèio, "couleur de joue;" flushed little legs in ragged socks, which have piteously set out on the dark thoroughfares of life; voices, above all, which have often a low harp-like tone not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing-rooms. It is as if tremendous London, her teeming thoughts troubling her, said "Hush!" in the ear of all her own. Hyde Park orators are seldom brawlers; immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are controlled by the gentlest of police, who say "Please," and are obeyed. Few stop to salute or exchange a word at the shelters. This is no experimental or villageous world: one man's affairs are in India, another's on the deep sea, and a third's in a cradle three stories up. Sidneys and pickpockets intermingle, each on a non-communicated errand. Here whisks a Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed dress; and yonder, a sprout of a man who might have been bow-legged, had he any legs at all: nothing new goes at its value, nothing strange begets comment. The long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz of street-life in New York, where folk go two and two, are here foreign and transatlantic indeed. The even pavements drink in all that might mean concussion, the soft golden air deadens it, the preoccupied seriousness of the human element contradicts and forbids it. An awful, endearing, melancholy stillness broods over the red roofs of High Holborn, and hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of the Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane tree of Cheapside: gigantic forces seem trooping by, like the boy-god Harpocrates, finger on lip. The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eye. The town wears the very color of silence. No one can say of S. Paul's that it is a talking dome, despite the ironic accident of the whispering gallery in the interior. Like Wordsworth upon Helvellyn, in Haydon's odd memorable portrait, it sees with drooped eyes, and exhorts with grand reticences and abstractions. Mighty stone broods above, on either hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of soot furled over the brow, in the posture of the speechless martyrs of Attic tragedy. There is an alchemic atmosphere in London, which interdicts one's perception of ugliness. At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day. Nothing in the world is so remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of long ago, as the antique City churches where the dead are the only congregation; where the effigies of Rahere the founder, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, John Gower, and our old friend Stow are awake, in their scattered neighborhoods, to make the responses; and where the voices of the daily choir, disembodied by the unfilled space about, breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to waver like bubbles up and down the aisles. And to go thence into the highway creates no great jar. The tide there is always at the flood, and frets not. The perfectly ordered traffic, its want of blockade and altercation, the sad-colored, civil-mannered throng, the dim light and the wet gleam, make it as natural to be absent-minded at Charing Cross as in the Abbey. Shelley must have found it so; else whence his simile,

"The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's."

There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to set in. A subdued mighty hum, as of "the loom of time," London lacks not; but a crass explosion never breaks it. The imponderable quiet of the vast capital completes her inscrutable charm. She has the effect of a muted orchestra on ears driven mad with the horrible din of new America. As still as her deep history on library shelves, so still are her pace and her purpose to-day: her grave passing, would, like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause. Everywhere is the acoustically perfect standpoint. The cosmic currents ripple audibly along.

"Therein I hear the Parcæ reel
The threads of life at the spinning-wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain."

Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the humanist. They build his priory cell, where he can sit and work on his illuminations, and know that he lays his colors true. "The man, sir, who is tired of London," said the great Doctor, in one of his profound generalities, "is tired of life."

At certain hours, the City is tenantless, and sunrise or sunset, touching the vidual tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At such a time you may wander in the very luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge to Lambeth, watching the long yards swing at their moorings by the palace wall, and Thames running tiger-coated to sea; and from the Gray's Inn limes pass on to an unvisited and noble old bronze of an inconsiderable Stuart, lustrous from the late shower, beyond whom are the forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above whom is his own starlit weather-vane, with "the Protestant wind still blowing." Where the Boar's Head was, where the Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of chronology, where, in a twinkle, the merchants and journalists shall be, are the depopulated presence-halls in which you are

"In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter."

All that was temporal in them has been swallowed by the wave of the generations of men who are no more. Poet by poet, from the beginning, has known the look of London's void heart at night, and has had, next it, his keenest gust of sovereignty, on jealous marches when his own footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for fear of man and of mortal interruption. The living are gone for the moment: the dead and their greatness are "nearer than hands and feet." The divinest quality of this colossal calm, "mirk miles broad," is that, to the sensitive mind, it is a magic glass for musings. In such a mysterious private depth Narcissus saw himself, and died of his own beauty. The few who have had eternity most in mind, have worshipped London most; and their passion, read of in biographies, has expanded, insensibly, the imagination of the many. The terror of the vast town lies on any thoughtful spirit; but without some touch or other of golden casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sincerely adore her. For the adorable in her is man's old adoration itself, breathed forth and crystallized. That indeed, is the everlasting delight: London has nothing so simple in her bosom as instinctive charm. She is the dear echo, the dear mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb who was wont to relieve his tender overburdened spirit by a plunge in the surging crowd, and who was not ashamed that he had wept there, "for fulness of joy at so much life," might be the first to apply to the majestic and bitter mother who bred him, the illumining line of Alfred de Musset:

"Car sa beauté pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle."

She gives us freedom, recollection, reverence; and we attribute to her the sweetness of our own dispositions at her knee. Blessing us with her silence, the glad incredible thing, she lets us believe we have discovered it, as a fresh secret between lover and lover.

On Sundays, too, the dreary English Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic opportunity wastes itself at the door! Hampstead and Blackheath are efflorescent with the populace, but dark London wears her troth-plight ring of meditation. Her church-bells, indeed, speak: there is a new one at every turning, like the succession of perfumes as you cross a conservatory, and felt as a discord no more than these. Good to hear are the chimes of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. Helen, with their grace-notes and falling thirds, the great octave-clash of Wren's cathedral, which booms and sprays like the sea on the chalk-cliffs almost within its sight. And the ghosts are out again under the eaves of Little Britain and Soho. It is usually on Sundays, or at night, that you may view the young Cowley (curled up, among the geraniums, on the window-ledge of the Elizabethan house next S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) reading Spenser, his light bronze curls curtaining the folio page; and a figure of uncontemporaneous look, coming heavily from the Temple gateway, almost opposite, with a black band on his sleeve, is saying brokenly to himself: "Poor Goldy was wild, very wild; but he is so no more."

The elective London of choicest companionship, of invited sights and sounds, of imperial privacy, is always open to the explorer: "London small and white and clean," walled and moated, fairer than she ever was at any one time, warless, religious, pastoral, where hares may course along the friendly highway, and swans breast the unpolluted Fleet. Like the gods, you may, if you will, apprehend all that has ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, seize the little which is perfect and durable, and live in it: "in the central calm at the heart of agitation." By so much as London and her draggled outer precincts are bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger for having found here a spiritual parterre of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, owing to respect towards those who yet believe in her, whose presence imposes upon her, in romantic tyranny, the remembrance of what she has been to her saints, that she does, in reality, walk softly, speak low, as if her life-long orgies were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful lover, the happy innocent look becoming the young Republic of Selected Peace. Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his ear:

"O stay heere! for to thee
England is only a worthy gallerie
To walk in Expectation: till from thence
Our greatest King call thee to His presènce."

O stay here! Who would not be such a city's citizen?

1890.

[THE CAPTIVES]

THE lions at the Zoo "bring sad thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, for they are the most impressive figures among our poor hostages. The pretty moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsating along their tawny sides, seem but so many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle enough to move your own. Couchant, with a droop of the bearded chest, or erect, with an eternal restless four steps and back again, they drag through, in public, their defeated days. It is inconceivable that we should attach the idea of depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count against him that he can kill those of us who are adjacent, and juicy! In the roomy name of reciprocity, why not? Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. A second glance at him corrects inherited opinion:

"I trow that countenance cannot lie."

Benignity sits there, and forbearance; else we know not what such things mean. Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, make one remember no blood-curdling hap; but rather the gracious legendry of long ago: how a lion buried the Christian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, and another gambolled in the thronged Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Christian youth, when the task laid upon him, in his hunger, was to rend his body in twain. Something about the lion reminds one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. This great intellectual mildness, when blended with enormous power (power which in him must be expressed physically, or we were too dull to feel it), appears to some merely sly and sinister. Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. For the ultimate quality in the expression of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, as one hears him called, the king of brutes, but the gentleman among brutes he is, beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dignity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With passing accuracy, Landor or William Morris, is often described as "leonine"; but the real lion-men of England are the thin and mild dynamos: Pitt, Newman, Nelson. In these are the long austere lines of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, the look of inscrutable purpose and patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque of the Midsummer Night's Dream: "A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience."