TO
ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY STEVENSON
Our friendship was not only founded before we were born
by a community of blood, but is in itself near as old as my
life. It began with our early ages, and, like a history, has
been continued to the present time. Although we may not be
old in the world, we are old to each other, having so long been
intimates. We are now widely separated, a great sea and
continent intervening; but memory, like care, mounts into
iron ships and rides post behind the horseman. Neither time
nor space nor enmity can conquer old affection; and as I
dedicate these sketches, it is not to you only, but to all in the
old country, that I send the greeting of my heart.
1879.
R. L. S.
I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw
in Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no
familiar spirit, but looking askance on each other as on
possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had already
grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and
voluble over their long pipes; but among English speakers
distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was
soon overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as
we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with
the falling temperature the gloom among the passengers
increased. Two of the women wept. Any one who had
come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding
from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged,
and no common sentiment but that of cold united us,
until at length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing
arm and rush to the starboard bow announced that our
ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in mid-river,
at the tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of
bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest
of spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous
as many an incorporated town in the land to which
she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although
anxious to see the worst of emigrant life, I had some
work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go by
the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at
command. The advice was excellent; but to understand
the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the internal
disposition of the ship will first be necessary. In her
very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. A
little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2
and 3, gives admission to three galleries, two running
forward towards steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards
the engines. The starboard forward gallery is the second
cabin. Away abaft the engines and below the officers’
cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet
a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second
cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart
of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can
hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin
dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which
they converse, the crying of their children terrified by
this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental
hand in chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant
of this strip. He does not require to bring his own
bedding or dishes, but finds berths and a table completely
if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a distinct
superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not
only on different ships, but on the same ship according as
her head is to the east or west. In my own experience,
the principal difference between our table and that of
the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and the
crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show
myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage.
At breakfast we had a choice between tea and coffee for
beverage; a choice not easy to make, the two were so
surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea; which is proof conclusive
of some chemical disparity; and even by the
palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the former
from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the second.
As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many
sips, still doubting which had been supplied them. In
the way of eatables at the same meal we were gloriously
favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common
to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and
sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef,
boiled salt junk, and potatoes was, I believe, exactly
common to the steerage and the second cabin; only I
have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a
superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding days,
instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants
under the name of a plum-pudding. At tea we were
served with some broken meat from the saloon; sometimes
in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties
or rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-bones and
flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold. If these were not the
scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet
we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these
leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent,
and the soup and porridge which were both good,
formed my whole diet throughout the voyage; so that
except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table
I might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had
they given me porridge again in the evening I should have
been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was, with
a few biscuits and some whisky and water before turning
in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger
remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the
steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In the steerage
there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies
and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I
thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage
of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and
learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it,
of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females,
and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.
Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard
side of Steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only
there that my superiority became practical; everywhere
else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors with
simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I
was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea.
Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer
at home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down
and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.
Six guineas is the steerage fare; eight that by the second
cabin; and when you remember that the steerage passenger
must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five cases
out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately
pays the steward for extra rations, the difference
in price becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively fit
to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction
of being still privately a gentleman, may thus be
had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers
in the second cabin had already made the passage by the
cheaper fare, and declared it was an experiment not to
be repeated. As I go on to tell about my steerage friends,
the reader will perceive that they were not alone in their
opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less
intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they
returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had left
their wives behind them assured me they would go without
the comfort of their presence until they could afford
to bring them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the
most interesting on board. Perhaps even in the saloon
there was as much good-will and character. Yet it had
some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed group
of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally
known by the name of “Johnny,” in spite of his own
protests, greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country
efforts to speak English, and became on the strength of
that an universal favourite—it takes so little in this world
of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides,
a Scots mason known from his favourite dish as “Irish
Stew,” three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young
Irishman, O’Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve
a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots:
the other claimed to be American; admitted, after some
fencing, that he was born in England; and ultimately
proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but ashamed
to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom
he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though
she was not only sick, but much his senior, and had nursed
and cared for him in childhood. In appearance he was
like an imbecile Henry the Third of France. The Scotsman,
though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of
heart; and I have only bracketed them together because
they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves equally
by their conduct at the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a
newly-married couple, devoted to each other, with a
pleasant story of how they had first seen each other
years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon
he had carried her books home for her. I do not
know if this story will be plain to southern readers; but
to me it recalls many a school idyll, with wrathful swains
of eight and nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed
with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady’s books
was both a delicate attention and privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure
that she was as much old as antiquated and strangely out
of place, who had left her husband, and was travelling all
the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her own
word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted
by the testimony of her appearance. Nature
seemed to have sanctified her for the single state; even
the colour of her hair was incompatible with matrimony,
and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly
spirit and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill,
poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the
whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping
her watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New
York. They had heard reports, her husband and she,
of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these
two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific,
had seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It
was a good thing for the old lady; for she passed much
leisure time in studying the watch. Once, when prostrated
by sickness, she let it run down. It was inscribed
on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands
of a watch must never be turned backwards; and so it
behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she
started it again. When she imagined this was about due,
she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who
was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had
hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two
o’clock; and when she learned it was already seven on
the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried
“Gravy!” I had not heard this innocent expletive
since I was a young child; and I suppose it must have
been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we
all laughed our fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr.
Jones. It would be difficult to say whether I was his
right-hand man, or he mine, during the voyage. Thus at
table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at our
concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who
called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.
I knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I
saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua
franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas
of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They
catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney
skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h;
a word of a dialect is picked up from another hand in the
forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and
you have to ask for the man’s place of birth. So it was
with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been
long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been
most of his life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few
years in America and half a score of ocean voyages having
sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern.
By his own account he was both strong and skilful in his
trade. A few years back, he had been married and after
a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the
money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward,
and goes on from one year to another and through
all the extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky
were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day
following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to
rights. He was always hovering round inventions like
a bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He
had with him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition
of which he had bought years ago for five dollars from
an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a hundred
pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary.
It was called Golden Oil; cured all maladies without
exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
myself with good results. It is a character of the man
that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with
Golden Oil, but wherever there was a head aching or a
finger cut, there would be Jones with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it
was to study character. Many an hour have we two
walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours in a
spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind;
whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation,
you might have seen Jones and me exchanging
glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till
we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s experience.
We were then like a couple of anglers comparing
a day’s kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical
species, and we angled as often as not in one
another’s baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk,
each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself;
I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection;
but Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal
of unaffected laughter, and declared, what was the truth,
that there was a pair of us indeed.
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and
early on the Friday forenoon we took in our last batch
of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell
to Europe. The company was now complete, and
began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon
the deck. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few
English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians,
a German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging
for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my
fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all northern
Europe, I began for the first time to understand the
nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on
to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more
clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the
most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in
my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture
and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea,
as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A
young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers,
issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his
own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of
difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as
episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed
of individual heroisms; it stands to them as the
victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon
and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in
emigration the young men enter direct and by the ship-load
on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm,
as at the bo’s’un’s whistle, with industrious hands, and
whole new empires are domesticated to the service of
man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to
consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of
my fellow passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric
note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty;
many were married, and encumbered with families; not
a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of
tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should
certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer
to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or
hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing
disposition. Now those around me were for the most
part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken
by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place
themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.
Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and
mild endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an
impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico
or Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, “in the lost
battle, borne down by the flying.”
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout
Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing
series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses;
of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne,
the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow
with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken
them home to me or represented these distresses livingly
to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a
calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow;
but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a
trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle
as we please, we are not born economists. The individual
is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic
accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the
most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus
it was only now, when I found myself involved in the
rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the
battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken,
the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had
been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one
land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though
one or two might still succeed, all had already failed.
We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.
Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited
depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful.
Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full
of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to
innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began
to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready
laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran
about the decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion
also. “What do you call your mither?” I heard one
ask. “Mawmaw,” was the reply, indicating, I fancy, a
shade of difference in the social scale. When people
pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an
age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like
what we may imagine to be the friendship of flies than
that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved,
so open in its communications and so devoid of deeper
human qualities. The children, I observed, were all in a
band, and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders
were still ceremoniously manœuvring on the outskirts of
acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were
soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little
ones. It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage,
employ shore words to designate portions of the vessel.
“Co’ ’way doon to yon dyke,” I heard one say, probably
meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth,
watching them climb into the shrouds or on the rails,
while the ship went swinging through the waves; and
I admired and envied the courage of their mothers, who
sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these
perilous feats. “He’ll maybe be a sailor,” I heard one
remark; “now’s the time to learn.” I had been on
the point of running forward to interfere, but stood back
at that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes
have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to
them; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so
much more immediate and imperious, braces even a
mother to this extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after
all, it is better that the lad should break his neck than
that you should break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I
must mention one little fellow, whose family belonged to
Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, was
like a strain of music round the ship. He was an ugly,
merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in
a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he
ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked
himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that
he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion.
To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an
accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon
a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph of the human
species. Even when his mother and the rest of his family
lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in
their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness
of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made
but few advances. We discussed the probable duration
of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of information, naming
our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all,
we condoled together over the food and the vileness of
the steerage. One or two had been so near famine, that
you may say they had run into the ship with the devil at
their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the
best of possible steamers. But the majority were hugely
discontented. Coming as they did from a country in so
low a state as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow,
which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and
many having long been out of work, I was surprised to
find them so dainty in their notions. I myself lived
almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and soup, precisely
as it was supplied to them, and found it, if not luxurious,
at least sufficient. But these working men were loud
in their outcries. It was not “food for human beings,”
it was “only fit for pigs,” it was “a disgrace.” Many of
them lived almost entirely upon biscuit, others on their
own private supplies, and some paid extra for better
rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my
notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan.
I was prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is
the traveller’s pastime; but I was not prepared to find
him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself.
Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal
allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there
can be no question of the sincerity of his disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily
sympathise. A single night of the steerage had filled
them with horror. I had myself suffered, even in my
decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air; and as
the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to
sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of their
quarters to follow my example. I dare say a dozen of
others agreed to do so, and I thought we should have
been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug
about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the
watch. That chimerical terror of good night-air, which
makes men close their windows, list their doors, and seal
themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had
sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would
think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet
in England the most malarious districts are in the bed-chambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased
to have the night so quietly to myself. The wind had
hauled a little ahead on the starboard bow, and was dry
but chilly. I found a shelter near the fire-hole, and made
myself snug for the night. The ship moved over the
uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement. The
ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels
occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber. From
time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay,
and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness;
or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note of the
clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry, “All’s
well!” I know nothing, whether for poetry or music, that
can surpass the effect of these two syllables in the darkness
of a night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early
part we had some pleasant hours to improve acquaintance
in the open air; but towards nightfall the wind freshened,
the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so high that it was
difficult to keep one’s footing on the deck. I have spoken
of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship’s company,
and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, or
indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German
or Norse,—the songs were received with generous applause.
Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a
powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and
once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of
us together, to the music of the violin. The performers
were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers
in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at
a funeral. I have never seen decorum pushed so far;
and as this was not expected, the quadrille was soon
whistled down, and the dancers departed under a cloud.
Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another
rank of society, would have dared to make some fun for
themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when
sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy view of
personal deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more
careful of dignity. He dares not be comical; his fun
must escape from him unprepared, and, above all, it must
be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration. I
like his society under most circumstances, but let me
never again join with him in public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed
over modesty and even the inclemencies of sea and sky.
On this rough Saturday night, we got together by the main
deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and rain.
Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck,
and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a
ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the
ship; and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts’
content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the
scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel
of the music-hall, such as, “Around her splendid form,
I weaved the magic circle,” sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully
silly. “We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we
do,” was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity
with which the chorus was thrown forth into the
night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent
of English, adding heartily to the general effect.
And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of
the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly
all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly
opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and
frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns
in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched
the pathos of our situation was given forth; and you
could hear by the voices that took up the burden how the
sentiment came home to each. “The Anchor’s Weighed,”
was true for us. We were indeed “Rocked on the Bosom
of the Stormy Deep.” How many of us could say with
the singer, “I’m Lonely To-night, Love, Without You,”
or, “Go, Someone, and Tell them from me, to write me a
Letter from Home.” And when was there a more appropriate
moment for “Auld Lang Syne” than now, when
the land, the friends, and the affections of that mingled
but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the
vessel’s wake? It pointed forward to the hour when
these labours should be overpast, to the return voyage,
and to many a meeting in the sanded inn, when those who
had parted in the spring of youth should again drink a
cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated
emigration, I scarce believe he would have found
that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy;
many were prostrated by sickness; only five sat down
to tea in the second cabin, and two of these departed
abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was
observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I
heard an old woman express her surprise that, “The ship
didna gae doon,” as she saw some one pass her with a
chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms.
Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came
back ill pleased with their divine. “I didna think he
was an experienced preacher,” said one girl to me.
It was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by
six bells, although the wind had not yet moderated, the
clouds were all wrecked and blown away behind the rim
of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly overhead.
I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this
hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon
the summer woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed
out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship from end
to end; the bows battled with loud reports against the
billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up
to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting
smoke, and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at
each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed as if all
this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just
above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite
resort. Down one flight of stairs there was a comparatively
large open space, the centre occupied by a hatchway,
which made a convenient seat for about twenty
persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter’s
bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The
canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on
the other a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable
interpreter. I have seen people packed into this
space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings
prolonged there until five bells, when the lights were ruthlessly
extinguished and all must go to roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a
fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage
No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down the
companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey
time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an
audience of white-faced women. It was as much as he
could do to play, and some of his hearers were scarce
able to sit; yet they had crawled from their bunks at
the first experimental flourish, and found better than
medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began
to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from
some of the palest eyes. Humanly speaking, it is a more
important matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to
write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could
Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women? But this
fellow scraped away; and the world was positively a better
place for all who heard him. We have yet to understand
the economical value of these mere accomplishments. I
told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness
about with him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to
the fact.
“It is a privilege,” I said. He thought a while upon
the word, turning it over in his Scots head, and then
answered with conviction, “Yes, a privilege.”
That night I was summoned by “Merrily danced the
Quaker’s Wife” into the companion of Steerage No. 4 and
5. This was, properly speaking, but a strip across a deck-house,
lit by a sickly lantern which swung to and fro with
the motion of the ship. Through the open slide-door we
had a glimpse of the grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent
foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and
the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the
wind. In the centre the companion ladder plunged down
sheerly like an open pit. Below, on the first landing, and
lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more
than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels, and
hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess
railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four long,
which stood for orchestra and seats of honour. In the
one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a
comely group. In the other was posted Orpheus, his
body, which was convulsively in motion, forming an odd
contrast to his somnolent, imperturbable Scots face. His
brother, a dark man with a vehement, interested countenance,
who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open
mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing
out remarks to kindle it.
“That’s a bonny hornpipe now,” he would say; “it’s
a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand
dance to it.” And he expounded the sand dance. Then
suddenly, it would be a long “Hush!” with uplifted
finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; “he’s going to
play ‘Auld Robin Gray’ on one string!” And throughout
this excruciating movement,—“On one string, that’s
on one string!” he kept crying. I would have given
something myself that it had been on none; but the
hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and
thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother, who
directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I need
hardly mention, true to his topic, like the seamen to the
star. “He’s grand of it,” he said confidentially. “His
master was a music-hall man.” Indeed, the music-hall
man had left his mark, for our fiddler was ignorant of
many of our best old airs; “Logie o’ Buchan,” for instance,
he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles,
and had never heard it called by name. Perhaps,
after all, the brother was the more interesting performer
of the two. I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly,
and found him always the same quick, fiery bit of a man,
not without brains; but he never showed to such advantage
as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public
note. There is nothing more becoming than a genuine
admiration; and it shares this with love, that it does not
become contemptible although misplaced.
The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space
was almost impracticably small; and the Irish wenches
combined the extreme of bashfulness about this innocent
display with a surprising impudence and roughness
of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its
voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing
it and snapping fingers on the landing. And such was
the eagerness of the brother to display all the acquirements
of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference of the
performer, that the tune would as often as not be changed,
and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the dancers
had cut half a dozen shuffles.
In the meantime, however, the audience had been
growing more and more numerous every moment; there
was hardly standing-room round the top of the companion;
and the strange instinct of the race moved some
of the new-comers to close both the doors, so that the
atmosphere grew insupportable. It was a good place,
as the saying is, to leave.
The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten
at night heavy sprays were flying and drumming over
the forecastle; the companion of Steerage No. 1 had
to be closed, and the door of communication through the
second cabin thrown open. Either from the convenience
of the opportunity, or because we had already a number
of acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I
paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an
isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles
bulging outward with the contour of the ship. It is lined
with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece, four bunks below
and four above on either side. At night the place is lit
with two lanterns, one to each table. As the steamer beat
on her way among the rough billows, the light passed
through violent phases of change, and was thrown to and
fro and up and down with startling swiftness. You were
tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so thin a glimmer
could control and disperse such solid blackness. When
Jones and I entered we found a little company of our
acquaintances seated together at the triangular foremost
table. A more forlorn party, in more dismal circumstances,
it would be hard to imagine. The motion here
in the ship’s nose was very violent; the uproar of the
sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the
lantern spun round and round and tossed the shadows in
masses. The air was hot, but it struck a chill from its
fœtor. From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely
human noises of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard
chorus. In the midst, these five friends of mine were
keeping up what heart they could in company. Singing
was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and sensations.
One piped, in feeble tones, “Oh why left I my
hame?” which seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances.
Another, from the invisible horrors of a pen
where he lay dog-sick upon the upper shelf, found courage,
in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses of the
“Death of Nelson”; and it was odd and eerie to hear
the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners,
and “this day has done his dooty” rise and fall and be
taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment
of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray-showers
overhead.
All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness
had interrupted the activity of their minds; and except
to sing they were tongue-tied. There was present, however,
one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful nationality,
being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but of
surprising clearness of conviction on the highest problems.
He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because
of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of
mind as “a living, thinking substance which cannot be
felt, heard, or seen”—nor, I presume, although he failed
to mention it, smelt. Now he came forward in a pause
with another contribution to our culture.
“Just by way of change,” said he, “I’ll ask you a
Scripture riddle. There’s profit in them too,” he added
ungrammatically.
This was the riddle—
C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G.
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
|
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of
Apollo! We were a long while over the problem, shaking
our heads and gloomily wondering how a man could be
such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense and
divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and
Pontius Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled us;
but the motion and the close air likewise hurried our
departure. We had not been gone long, we heard next
morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick.
We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea kept
contrary all night. I now made my bed upon the second
cabin floor, where, although I ran the risk of being stepped
upon, I had a free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed,
and running only from steerage to steerage, but at
least not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the
usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the hateful coughing
and retching of the sick and the sobs of children, I heard
a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for
encouragement. “The ship’s going down!” he cried
with a thrill of agony. “The ship’s going down!” he
repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice
rising towards a sob; and his friend might reassure him,
reason with him, joke at him—all was in vain, and the
old cry came back, “The ship’s going down!” There
was something panic and catching in the emotion of his
tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and
hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If
this whole parishful of people came no more to land, into
how many houses would the newspaper carry woe, and
what a great part of the web of our corporate human life
would be rent across for ever!
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new
world indeed. The wind was fair; the sun mounted into
a cloudless heaven; through great dark blue seas the
ship cut a swathe of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun
shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the
time. There was a single chess-board and a single pack
of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be
playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity, puzzles
for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same
order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
were always welcome; and the latter, I observed,
more popular as well as more conspicuously well done than
the former. We had a regular daily competition to guess
the vessel’s progress; and twelve o’clock, when the result
was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment
of considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed.
Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to
Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken. We
had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which
we had rebaptised, in more manly style, Devil and four
Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were
many who preferred another, the humour of which was
to box a person’s ears until he found out who had cuffed
him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the
change of weather, and in the highest possible spirits.
We got in a cluster like bees, sitting between each other’s
feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories and laughter
went around. The children climbed about the shrouds.
White faces appeared for the first time, and began to
take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my
less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly,
down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse
his reels, and jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice
or two to take up the air and throw in the interest of
human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there
came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young
ladies, picking their way with little gracious titters of
indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which
galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in
social questions, and have always nourished an idea that
one person was as good as another. But I began to be
troubled by this episode. It was astonishing what insults
these people managed to convey by their presence. They
seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes
searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh
was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered
to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all
back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would
depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth
very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and
there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant
superiority with which these damsels passed among us,
or for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire. Not
a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay
sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but
we were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break
in the course of our enjoyment.
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all
the world like a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed,
with great, splay crow’s-feet round the sockets; a knotty
squab nose coming down over his moustache; a miraculous
hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago;
an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole,
no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters,
the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of
sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to
one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing
could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was
written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but
I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of
bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle,
I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think
I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
interesting; but there was entertainment in the man’s
demeanour. You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible
fellow. Rumours and legends were current in
the steerages about his antecedents. Some said he was a
Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless
spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles,
and whose father had now despatched him to America by
way of penance. Either tale might flourish in security;
there was no contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke
not one word of English. I got on with him lumberingly
enough in broken German, and learned from his own lips
that he had been an apothecary. He carried the photograph
of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and remarked that
it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood out
from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
The first natural instinct was to take him for a
desperado; but although the features, to our Western
eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye both
reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and
soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if it had
often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked
on them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. “No, no,” he
said, “not resolution.”
“The resolution to endure,” I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Ach,
ja,” with gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his
favourite pretensions. Indeed, he was always hinting at
some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had been one of
unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of the steerage
may have represented at least some shadow of the truth.
Once, and once only, he sang a song at our concerts, standing
forth without embarrassment, his great stature somewhat
humped, his long arms frequently extended, his
Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suitable piece
of music, as deep as a cow’s bellow and wild like the White
Sea. He was struck and charmed by the freedom and
sociality of our manners. At home, he said, no one on a
journey would speak to him, but those with whom he
would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving
himself in the condemnation of his countrymen. But
Russia was soon to be changed; the ice of the Neva was
softening under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas,
“wie eine feine Violine,” were audible among the big,
empty drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked
to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct
and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades.
It was the son who sang the “Death of
Nelson” under such contrarious circumstances. He was
by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could touch
the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
piccolo in a professional string band. His repertory of
songs was, besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially
from the very best to the very worst within his reach.
Nor did he seem to make the least distinction between
these extremes, but would cheerfully follow up “Tom
Bowling” with “Around her splendid form.”
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of manhood,
could do everything connected with tinwork from one end
of the process to the other, use almost every carpenter’s
tool, and make picture frames to boot. “I sat down with
silver plate every Sunday,” said he, “and pictures on the
wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my
carriage. But, sir,” looking at me unsteadily with his
bright rheumy eyes, “I was troubled with a drunken wife.”
He took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence.
“It’s an old saying,” he remarked: “God made ’em, and
the devil he mixed ’em.”
I think he was justified by his experience. It was a
dreary story. He would bring home three pounds on
Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes would be in pawn.
Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a paying contract,
and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs. “A
bad job was as good as a good job for me,” he said; “it
all went the same way.” Once the wife showed signs of
amendment; she kept steady for weeks on end; it was
again worth while to labour and to do one’s best. The
husband found a good situation some distance from home,
and, to make a little upon every hand, started the wife in
a cook-shop; the children were here and there, busy as
mice; savings began to grow together in the bank, and
the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy
family. But one week my old acquaintance,
getting earlier through with his work, came home on the
Friday instead of the Saturday, and there was his wife to
receive him, reeling drunk. He “took and gave her a
pair o’ black eyes,” for which I pardon him, nailed up the
cook-shop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself
to a life of poverty, with the workhouse at the end. As
the children came to their full age they fled the house, and
established themselves in other countries; some did well,
some not so well; but the father remained at home alone
with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and
varied accomplishments depressed and negatived.
Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he
broken the chain, and run from home like a schoolboy?
I could not discover which; but here at least he was,
out on the adventure, and still one of the bravest and
most youthful men on board.
“Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work
again,” said he; “but I can do a turn yet.”
And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he
not able to support him?
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “But I’m never happy without
a job on hand. And I’m stout; I can eat a’most anything.
You see no craze about me.”
This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by
another of a drunken father. He was a capable man, with
a good chance in life; but he had drunk up two thriving
businesses like a bottle of sherry, and involved his sons
along with him in ruin. Now they were on board with
us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.
Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is
unfriendly to the most generous, cheerful, and human
parts of man; but it could have adduced many instances
and arguments from among our ship’s company. I was
one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with
a taste for poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked
him his hopes in emigrating. They were like those of so
many others, vague and unfounded: times were bad at
home; they were said to have a turn for the better in the
States; and a man could get on anywhere, he thought.
That was precisely the weak point of his position; for
if he could get on in America, why could he not do the
same in Scotland? But I never had the courage to use
that argument, though it was often on the tip of my
tongue, and instead I agreed with him heartily, adding,
with reckless originality, “If the man stuck to his work,
and kept away from drink.”
“Ah!” said he slowly, “the drink! You see, that’s
just my trouble.”
He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking
at me at the same time with something strange and timid
in his eye, half-ashamed, half-sorry, like a good child who
knows he should be beaten. You would have said he
recognised a destiny to which he was born, and accepted
the consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah,
he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and carrying
it along with him, the whole at an expense of six
guineas.
As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency
were the three great causes of emigration; and for all
of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of getting
transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of
cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you must
some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why
not now, and where you stand? Cœlum non animam.
Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only
not so good. A sea-voyage will not give a man the nerve
to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has to be done
before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only
fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in
foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more
contemptible than another; for each is but a result and
outward sign of a soul tragically shipwrecked. In the
majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted to by way of
anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon life with high
and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and
nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to himself;
and it is because all has failed in his celestial enterprise
that you now behold him rolling in the garbage. Hence
the comparative success of the teetotal pledge; because
to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim
in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by
taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest
out of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, and may live
for that negation. There is something, at least, not to be
done each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every
evening.
We had one on board with us, whom I have already
referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to
me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which
we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence
which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small
Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already
carrying the elements of a corporation, and his looks
somewhat marred by the smallness of his eyes. Mentally,
he was endowed above the average. There were but few
subjects on which he could not converse with understanding
and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly
and with gusto like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness.
He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking
with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch
and emphasise an argument. When he began a discussion,
he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject
to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An
engineer by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility
of all machines except the human machine.
The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion
and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected
facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for
beads. What is called information was indeed a passion
with the man, and he not only delighted to receive it, but
could pay you back in kind.
With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already
no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no
prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was almost
tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. “The
ship may go down for me,” he would say, “now or to-morrow.
I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope.”
And again: “I am sick of the whole damned performance.”
He was, like the kind little man already quoted,
another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was
miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid the
blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt
State policy; and after he had been one night overtaken
and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade.
It was a treat to see him manage this: the various jesters
withered under his gaze, and you were forced to recognise
in him a certain steely force, and a gift of command which
might have ruled a senate.
In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he
was ruined long before for all good human purposes but
conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book
materialism. He could see nothing in the world
but money and steam-engines. He did not know what
you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten
the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never
encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production,
that useful figment of economy, as if it had been
real like laughter; and production, without prejudice
to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me
to task—a novel cry to me—upon the over-payment of
literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid
than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing machines
and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the
way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the
while. He produced a mere fancy article. Mackay’s
notion of a book was “Hoppus’s Measurer.” Now in my
time I have possessed and even studied that work; but if
I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus’s is
not the book that I should choose for my companion
volume.
I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him
own that he had taken pleasure in reading books otherwise,
to his view, insignificant; but he was too wary
to advance a step beyond the admission. It was in
vain for me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made
and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give
men the necessary food and leisure before they start
upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away
from such conclusions. The thing was different, he
declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had
to do with food. “Eat, eat, eat!” he cried; “that’s
the bottom and the top.” By an odd irony of circumstance,
he grew so much interested in this discussion
that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go without
his tea. He had enough sense and humour, indeed
he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself
in private; and even to me he referred to it with
the shadow of a smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of
religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument
with all sorts of poor human creatures who understood
neither him nor themselves, and he had had the
boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter
as the riddler’s definition of mind. He snorted aloud
with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle. Anything,
whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to
discourage the continued passionate production of corn
and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against
the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature,
that it was only in good books, or in the society
of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct,
he declared I was in a different world from him. “Damn
my conduct!” said he. “I have given it up for a bad
job. My question is, ‘Can I drive a nail?’” And he
plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking
to reduce the people’s annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.
It may be argued that these opinions spring from the
defect of culture; that a narrow and pinching way of
life not only exaggerates to a man the importance of
material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the
necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant
of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this overwhelming
concern about diet, and hence the bald view
of existence professed by Mackay. Had this been an
English peasant the conclusion would be tenable. But
Mackay had most of the elements of a liberal education.
He had skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies.
He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which would
be exceptional among bankers. He had been brought
up in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous
pride, the story of his own brother’s deathbed
ecstasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself,
and was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances,
without hope or lively preference or shaping
aim. And further, there seemed a tendency among
many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely
opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland,
and that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the
whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality.
Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man
from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting a
stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity
and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of
simple pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and
we had on board an Irishman who based his claim to
the widest and most affectionate popularity precisely
upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy.
He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable
gaiety, and indefatigable good-will. His clothes
puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had
been once a private coachman, when they became eloquent,
and seemed a part of his biography. His face contained
the rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the hawk’s
nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby’s mouth
below. His spirit and his pride belonged, you might
say, to the nose: while it was the general shiftlessness
expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation
to situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship.
Barney ate, so to speak, nothing from the galley; his
own tea, butter, and eggs supported him throughout
the voyage; and about mealtime you might often find
him up to the elbows in amateur cookery. His was the
first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he
was the first who fell to dancing. From Loch Foyle to
Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken but
there was Barney in the midst.
You ought to have seen him when he stood up to
sing at our concerts—his tight little figure stepping to
and fro, and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking
and bestowing encouragement—and to have enjoyed
the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest,
between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought
each song to a conclusion. He was not only a great
favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted the
lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over
the rails of the hurricane-deck. He was somewhat
pleased, but not at all abashed, by this attention; and
one night, in the midst of his famous performance of
“Billy Keogh,” I saw him spin half round in a pirouette
and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman above.
This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing,
he was a modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.
He would not hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout
the passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet
he was always, by his innocent freedoms and love of
fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness
must be natural to walk without a fall. He was once
seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because
they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious
Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of
refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women
had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent
song, Barney’s drab clothes were immediately missing
from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen,
of whom, with the reader’s permission, there was
no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he
avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking.
Mackay, partly from his superior powers of mind, which
rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his extreme
opinions, was especially distasteful to the Irishman. I
have seen him slink off, with backward looks of terror
and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly
way, had been professing hostility to God, and an extreme
theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These
utterances hurt the little coachman’s modesty like a bad
word.
One night Jones, the young O’Reilly, and myself were
walking arm-in-arm and briskly up and down the deck.
Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew chill and fitful,
the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the
fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with
its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and
intense like a mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere
snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black
and huddled in the scuppers, which at last heaved a
little and moaned aloud. We ran to the rails. An
elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was
impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling
on his belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with
his outspread toes. We asked him what was amiss, and
he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a
voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the
stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen the
doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue
till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found
him.
Jones remained by his side, while O’Reilly and I
hurried off to seek the doctor. We knocked in vain at
the doctor’s cabin; there came no reply; nor could we
find anyone to guide us. It was no time for delicacy;
so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder
and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed
him as politely as I could—
“I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying
bad with cramp in the lee scuppers; and I can’t find
the doctor.”
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and
then, somewhat harshly, “Well, I can’t leave the bridge,
my man,” said he.
“No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,” I returned.
“Is it one of the crew?” he asked.
“I believe him to be a fireman,” I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints
and alarmist information from their freight of human
creatures; but certainly, whether it was the idea that
the sick man was one of the crew, or from something
conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was
immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in
a voice much freer from constraint, advised me to find
a steward and despatch him in quest of the doctor, who
would now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found
about this hour down our companion, Steerage No. 2
and 3; that was his smoking-room of a night. Let me
call him Blackwood. O’Reilly and I rattled down the
companion, breathing hurry; and in his short-sleeves
and perched across the carpenter’s bench upon one thigh,
found Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking
man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang
in his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair
were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare
say he was tired with his day’s work, and eminently comfortable
at that moment; and the truth is, I did not stop
to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
“Steward,” said I, “there’s a man lying bad with
cramp, and I can’t find the doctor.”
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with
a black look that is the prerogative of man; and taking
his pipe out of his mouth—
“That’s none of my business,” said he. “I don’t
care.”
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he
sat. The thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips
filled me with indignation. I glanced at O’Reilly; he
was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and
battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card than
violence.
“You will have to make it your business,” said I,
“for I am sent to you by the officer on the bridge.”
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer,
but put out his pipe, gave me one murderous look, and
set off upon his errand strolling. From that day forward,
I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though he
had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a
better impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside
the sick man; and two or three late stragglers had
gathered round and were offering suggestions. One proposed
to give the patient water, which was promptly
negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself
prayed to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to
keep him off the streaming decks, O’Reilly and I supported
him between us. It was only by main force that
we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty;
for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened child,
and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our
control.
“O let me lie!” he pleaded. “I’ll no’ get better
anyway.” And then with a moan that went to my
heart, “O why did I come upon this miserable
journey?”
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little
while before in the close, tossing steerage: “O why left
I my hame?”
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge,
had gone off to the galley, where we could see a light.
There he found a belated cook scouring pans by the
radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought to
borrow. The scullion was backward. “Was it one of
the crew?” he asked. And when Jones, smitten with
my theory, had assured him that it was a fireman, he
reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an
easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his
finger. The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an
elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but
the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
expression and even the design of his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort
of whistle.
“It’s only a passenger!” said he; and turning about,
made, lantern and all, for the galley.
“He’s a man anyway,” cried Jones in indignation.
“Nobody said he was a woman,” said a gruff voice,
which I recognised for that of the bo’s’un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or
the doctor; and now the officer came to our side of the
ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor
were not yet come. We told him not.
“No?” he repeated with a breathing of anger; and
we saw him hurry aft in person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance
deliberately enough and examined our patient with the
lantern. He made little of the case, had the man brought
aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward
to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had
now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that
such “a fine cheery body” should be sick; and these,
claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely under
their own care. The drug had probably relieved him,
for he struggled no more, and was led along plaintive
and patient, but protesting. His heart recoiled at the
thought of the steerage. “O let me lie down upon the
bieldy side,” he cried; “O dinna take me down!” And
again: “O why did ever I come upon this miserable
voyage?” And yet once more, with a gasp and a wailing
prolongation of the fourth word: “I had no call to come.”
But there he was; and by the doctor’s order and the
kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the
companion of Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where I had
found Blackwood, Jones and the bo’s’un were now engaged
in talk. This last was a gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who
must have passed near half a century upon the seas;
square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blonde eyebrows,
and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady
and hard. I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I
remembered also that he had helped us about the lantern;
and now seeing him in conversation with Jones, and being
choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my
steam.
“Well,” said I, “I make you my compliments upon
your steward,” and furiously narrated what had happened.
“I’ve nothing to do with him,” replied the bo’s’un.
“They’re all alike. They wouldn’t mind if they saw you
all lying dead one upon the top of another.”
This was enough. A very little humanity went a
long way with me after the experience of the evening.
A sympathy grew up at once between the bo’s’un and
myself; and that night, and during the next few days,
I learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable
type, and not at all the kind of man you find in
books. He had been at Sebastopol under English colours;
and again in a States ship, “after the Alabama, and
praying God we shouldn’t find her.” He was a high
Tory and a high Englishman. No manufacturer could
have held opinions more hostile to the working man
and his strikes. “The workmen,” he said, “think
nothing of their country. They think of nothing but
themselves. They’re damned greedy, selfish fellows.”
He would not hear of the decadence of England. “They
say they send us beef from America,” he argued: “but
who pays for it? All the money in the world’s in England.”
The Royal Navy was the best of possible services,
according to him. “Anyway the officers are gentlemen,”
said he; “and you can’t get hazed to death by
a damned non-commissioned —— as you can in the
army.” Among nations, England was the first; then
came France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make a new
choice in life, “by God, he would try Frenchmen!”
For all his looks and rough, cold manners, I observed
that children were never frightened by him; they divined
him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had
chalked his hand and went about stealthily setting his
mark on people’s clothes, it was incongruous to hear this
formidable old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey
trick.
In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man.
I was afraid I should not recognise him, so baffling had
been the light of the lantern; and found myself unable
to decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish. He had
certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but
the accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and
incongruous in my ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No.
1 was an adventure that required some nerve. The
stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the
throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid
aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people
worming themselves into their clothes in the twilight
of the bunks. You may guess if I was pleased, not only
for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the sick man
was better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun
suffused the fog with pink and amber; the fog-horn
still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to add to
the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash
down the decks. But for a sick man this was heaven
compared to the steerage. I found him standing on the
hot-water pipe, just forward of the saloon deck-house.
He was smaller than I had fancied, and plain-looking;
but his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating
eyes, limpid grey from a distance, but, when looked into,
full of changing colours and grains of gold. His manners
were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw
that, when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent
and language had been formed in the most natural way,
since he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century
on the banks of the Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.
A fisherman in the season, he had fished the east coast
from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over,
and the great boats, which required extra hands, were once
drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked as a
labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves
unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way
of life he had gathered a competence, and could speak
of his comfortable house, his hayfield, and his garden.
On this ship, where so many accomplished artisans were
fleeing from starvation, he was present on a pleasure
trip to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned
against the steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended
to bring with him a ham and tea and a spice
loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. “I’m not
afraid,” he had told his adviser, “I’ll get on for ten days.
I’ve not been a fisherman for nothing.” For it is no
light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat,
perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a
scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken,
iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage
where you dare not lie, or a harbour impossible
to enter with the wind that blows. The life of a North
Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work
and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some
bleak fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat
has been unlucky, and after fifty hours’ unsleeping vigilance
and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread.
Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had been too vile for
the endurance of a man thus rudely trained. He had
scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before,
when his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup.
We were all much of the same mind on board, and beginning
with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps
because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his
first meal had resulted in a cramp. He had determined
to live henceforth on biscuit; and when, two months
later, he should return to England, to make the passage
by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he scouted
as another edition of the steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. “Ye
see, I had no call to be here,” said he; “and I thought
it was by with me last night. I’ve a good house at home,
and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to leave
them.” Speaking of the attentions he had received from
his shipmates generally, “They were all so kind,” he said,
“that there’s none to mention.” And except in so far as
I might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to
my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner was
the wealth of this day-labourer, paying a two months’
pleasure visit to the States, and preparing to return in the
saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his story, not
so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December
evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh,
an Irish labourer trudging homeward from the
fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural that
we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud;
an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic
cable was a secret contrivance of the masters the better
to oppress labouring mankind; and I confess I was
astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled over
most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities
on some American railroad, with two dollars a shift and
double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my fellow-passenger
had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all
that he possessed in that same accursed, down-falling
England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights,
and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of
starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes
and wages and hard times. Being from the Tyne, and
a man who had gained and lost in his own pocket by
these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong
opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters,
and, when I led him on, of the men also. The masters
had been selfish and obstructive; the men selfish, silly,
and light-headed. He rehearsed to me the course of a
meeting at which he had been present, and the somewhat
long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into
question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union
delegates; and although he had escaped himself through
flush times and starvation times with a handsomely
provided purse, he had so little faith in either man or
master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis
of mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for
our country outside of a sudden and complete political
subversion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army;
and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands
from worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such
principles, he said, were growing “like a seed.”
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words
sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard
enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow-passengers;
but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell
discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man
was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he
disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour
in the past; and yet this was his panacea,—to rend the
old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and
in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the hand of
violence.
On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking
in our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked
a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made
if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was
pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed;
but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration
had already overtaken his features. The fine
nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes
were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant;
his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full
of pith and verve; his manners forward, but perfectly
presentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin
told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know
who he was, but thought, “by his way of speaking, and
because he was so polite, that he was some one from the
saloon.”
I was not so sure, for to me there was something
equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been,
I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen
early into dissipation and run from home. But, making
every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish
you could have heard him tell his own stories. They
were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language,
and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of
acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction.
There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he
had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in former
years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers,
where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other
sides of life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail
portrait. He had the talk to himself that night, we were
all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually address
themselves to some particular society; there they are
kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know
Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow
had a frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human
choice of subject, that would have turned any circle in the
world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric talker,
plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people
of which he spoke became readily and clearly present to
the minds of those who heard him. This, with a certain
added colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade, must have
been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of
duchesses and hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points
remained obscure in his narration. The Engineers, for
instance, was a service which he praised highly; it is
true there would be trouble with the sergeants; but then
the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular,
one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like
an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as
I had imagined. But then there came incidents more
doubtful, which showed an almost impudent greed after
gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for truth. And
then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied,
it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion,
slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion
that spree was meant to be a long one; but God
disposes all things; and one morning, near Westminster
Bridge, whom should he come across but the very sergeant
who had recruited him at first! What followed? He himself
indicated cavalierly that he had then resigned. Let us
put it so. But these resignations are sometimes very trying.
At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took
himself away from the companion; and I could ask
Mackay who and what he was. “That?” said Mackay.
“Why, that’s one of the stowaways.”
“No man,” said the same authority, “who has had
anything to do with the sea, would ever think of paying
for a passage.” I give the statement as Mackay’s, without
endorsement; yet I am tempted to believe that it
contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the man
shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it
may even pass for a fair representation of the facts. We
gentlemen of England who live at home at ease have,
I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the
world over, people are stowing away in coal-holes and
dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea, appearing
again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The career
of these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous.
They may be poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation
in their place of concealment; or when found they may
be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to
be carried to their promised land, the port of destination,
and alas! brought back in the same way to that from
which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates
and the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed
the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a
dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two,
and departed for a farther country than America.
When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one
thing to pray for: that he be set to work, which is the
price and sign of his forgiveness. After half an hour with
a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure as if he had
paid for his passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for
the company, who get more or less efficient hands for
nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and every
now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for instance,
a packet was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill
and courage of a stowaway engineer. As was no more
than just, a handsome subscription rewarded him for his
success; but even without such exceptional good fortune,
as things stand in England and America, the stowaway
will often make a good profit out of his adventure. Four
engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship,
the Circassia; and before two days after their arrival
each of the four had found a comfortable berth. This
was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I heard
from first to last; and as you see, the luck was for
stowaways.
My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard;
and the next morning, as I was making the round of
the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal Engineer
engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck house.
There was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not
more than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his
handsome face sown with grains of beauty and lighted
up by expressive eyes. Four stowaways had been found
aboard our ship before she left the Clyde; but these two
had alone escaped the ignominy of being put ashore.
Alick, my acquaintance of last night, was Scots by birth,
and by trade a practical engineer; the other was from
Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast. Two
people more unlike by training, character, and habits it
would be hard to imagine; yet here they were together,
scrubbing paint.
Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted
many opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story
with these words: “That was in my golden days, when
I used finger-glasses.” Situation after situation failed him;
then followed the depression of trade, and for months he
had hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all day
in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his
landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe
this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself,
and he might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a
life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him Brown,
who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening
to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one
Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown.
Some months afterwards, Alick met another old chum
in Sauchiehall Street.
“By the bye, Alick,” said he, “I met a gentleman in
New York who was asking for you.”
“Who was that?” asked Alick.
“The new second engineer on board the So-and-So,”
was the reply.
“Well, and who is he?”
“Brown, to be sure.”
For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette
aboard the Circassia. If that was the way of it in the
States, Alick thought it was high time to follow Brown’s
example. He spent his last day, as he put it, “reviewing
the yeomanry,” and the next morning says he to his
landlady, “Mrs. X., I’ll not take porridge to-day, please;
I’ll take some eggs.”
“Why, have you found a job?” she asked, delighted.
“Well, yes,” returned the perfidious Alick; “I think
I’ll start to-day.”
And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for
America. I am afraid that landlady has seen the last of
him.
It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion
that attends a vessel’s departure; and in one of the dark
corners of Steerage No. 1, flat in a bunk and with an
empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the Broomielaw
to Greenock. That night, the ship’s yeoman pulled
him out by the heels and had him before the mate. Two
other stowaways had already been found and sent ashore;
but by this time darkness had fallen, they were out in the
middle of the estuary, and the last steamer had left them
till the morning.
“Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,”
said the mate, “and see and pack him off the first thing
to-morrow.”
In the forecastle he had supper, a good night’s rest
and breakfast, and was sitting placidly with a pipe,
fancying all was over and the game up for good with
that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an oath
at him, with a “What are you doing there?” and “Do
you call that hiding, anyway?” There was need of no
more: Alick was in another bunk before the day was
older. Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship
was cursorily inspected. He heard the round come down
the companion and look into one pen after another, until
they came within two of the one in which he lay concealed.
Into these last two they did not enter, but merely
glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he
was personally favoured in this escape. It was the character
of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but
little to kindness; whatever happened to him he had earned
in his own right amply; favours came to him from his
singular attraction and adroitness, and misfortunes he
had always accepted with his eyes open. Half an hour
after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to
fill with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick’s
troubles was at an end. He was soon making himself
popular, smoking other people’s tobacco, and politely
sharing their private stock of delicacies, and when night
came, he retired to his bunk beside the others with composure.
Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already
far behind, and only the rough north-western hills of
Ireland within view, Alick appeared on deck to court
inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he
was known to several on board, and even intimate
with one of the engineers; but it was plainly not the
etiquette of such occasions for the authorities to avow
their information. Every one professed surprise and
anger on his appearance, and he was led prisoner before
the captain.
“What have you got to say for yourself?” inquired
the captain.
“Not much,” said Alick; “but when a man has been
a long time out of a job, he will do things he would not
under other circumstances.”
“Are you willing to work?”
Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
“And what can you do?” asked the captain.
He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by
trade.
“I think you will be better at engineering?” suggested
the officer, with a shrewd look.
“No, sir,” says Alick simply.—“There’s few can beat
me at a lie,” was his engaging commentary to me as he
recounted the affair.
“Have you been to sea?” again asked the captain.
“I’ve had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no
more,” replied the unabashed Alick.
“Well, we must try and find some work for you,”
concluded the officer.
And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room,
lazily scraping paint and now and then taking a pull
upon a sheet. “You leave me alone,” was his deduction.
“When I get talking to a man, I can get round him.”
The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian—it
was noticeable that neither of them told his name—had
both been brought up and seen the world in a much
smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and was
closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken,
I think, to dressmaking. He himself had returned from
sea about a year ago and gone to live with his brother,
who kept the “George Hotel”—“it was not quite a real
hotel,” added the candid fellow—“and had a hired man
to mind the horses.” At first the Devonian was very
welcome; but as time went on his brother not unnaturally
grew cool towards him, and he began to find himself
one too many at the “George Hotel.” “I don’t think
brothers care much for you,” he said, as a general reflection
upon life. Hurt at this change, nearly penniless,
and too proud to ask for more, he set off on foot and
walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey
as he could. He would have enlisted, but he was too
small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought
himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading
dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy
sprung a leak and went down; and though the crew
were picked up and brought ashore by fishermen, they
found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon their
back. His next engagement was scarcely better starred;
for the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so
heartily during a short passage through the Irish Sea,
that the entire crew deserted and remained behind upon
the quays of Belfast.
Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian.
He could find no berth in Belfast, and had to work a
passage to Glasgow on a steamer. She reached the
Broomielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a
bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to
provide against the future, and set off along the quays
to seek employment. But he was now not only penniless,
his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to
have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have
nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in
all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may
hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole
in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.
The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had
not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, “when
I had money of my own, I always gave it.” It was only
on Saturday morning, after three whole days of starvation,
that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of
her own accord a glass of milk. He had now made up
his mind to stow away, not from any desire to see America,
but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the forecastle
and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He lived by
begging, always from milkwomen, and always scones and
milk, and was not once refused. It was vile wet weather,
and he could never have been dry. By night he walked
the streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green, and
heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians
of the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise
the merits of the clergy. He had not much instruction;
he could “read bills on the street,” but was “main bad
at writing”; yet these theologians seemed to have impressed
him with a genuine sense of amusement. Why
he did not go to the Sailors’ Home I know not; I presume
there is in Glasgow one of these institutions, which are
by far the happiest and the wisest effort of contemporaneous
charity; but I must stand to my author, as they
say in old books, and relate the story as I heard it. In
the meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in
different vessels, and four times had been discovered and
handed back to starvation. The fifth time was lucky;
and you may judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship
again, at his old work, and with duff twice a week. He
was, said Alick, “a devil for the duff.” Or if devil was
not the word, it was one if anything stronger.
The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable.
The Devonian was as willing as any paid hand,
swarmed aloft among the first, pulled his natural weight
and firmly upon a rope, and found work for himself when
there was none to show him. Alick, on the other hand,
was not only a skulker in the grain, but took a humorous
and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction. He
would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idleness;
and only if the bo’s’un or a mate came by, fell-to
languidly for just the necessary time till they were
out of sight. “I’m not breaking my heart with it,” he
remarked.
Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he
was stationed; he watched the preparations for a second
or so suspiciously, and then, “Hullo,” said he, “here’s
some real work coming—I’m off,” and he was gone that
moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage-money,
and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked
pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this
job, “and it’s pretty dear to the company at that.”
“They are making nothing by me,” was another of his
observations; “they’re making something by that fellow.”
And he pointed to the Devonian, who was just then busy
to the eyes.
The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be
owned, you learned to despise him. His natural talents
were of no use either to himself or others; for his character
had degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and
pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was
certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being
lost or neutralised by over-confidence. He lied in an
aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the
dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness that he
could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the
very trick by which he had deceived you. “Why, now
I have more money than when I came on board,” he said
one night, exhibiting a sixpence, “and yet I stood myself
a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And as
for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it.” That was fairly
successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with
a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have got the
length of half a crown. A man who prides himself upon
persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence,
above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce
and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his
peculiar talents to the world at large.
Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate
Alick; for at the bottom of all his misconduct
there was a guiding sense of humour that moved you to
forgive him. It was more than half as a jest that he conducted
his existence. “Oh, man,” he said to me once
with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress,
“I would give up anything for a lark.”
It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick
showed the best, or perhaps I should say the only good,
points of his nature. “Mind you,” he said suddenly,
changing his tone, “mind you, that’s a good boy. He
wouldn’t tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a scamp
because his clothes are ragged, but he isn’t; he’s as
good as gold.” To hear him, you become aware that
Alick himself had a taste for virtue. He thought his own
idleness and the other’s industry equally becoming. He
was no more anxious to insure his own reputation as a
liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his companion;
and he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his
attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.
It was not surprising that he should take an interest in
the Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in
love and wonder. Busy as he was, he would find time
to warn Alick of an approaching officer, or even to tell
him that the coast was clear, and he might slip off and
smoke a pipe in safety. “Tom,” he once said to him, for
that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, “if
you don’t like going to the galley, I’ll go for you. You
ain’t used to this kind of thing, you ain’t. But I’m a
sailor; and I can understand the feelings of any fellow,
I can.” Again, he was hard up, and casting about for
some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this
respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered
him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my
part, he might have increased the offer to a whole one, or
perhaps a pair of them, and not lived to regret his liberality.
But the Devonian refused. “No,” he said, “you’re a
stowaway like me; I won’t take it from you, I’ll take it
from some one who’s not down on his luck.”
It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly
under the influence of sex. If a woman passed near where
he was working, his eyes lit up, his hand paused, and his
mind wandered instantly to other thoughts. It was
natural that he should exercise a fascination proportionally
strong upon women. He begged, you will remember,
from women only, and was never refused. Without wishing
to explain away the charity of those who helped
him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a little to his
handsome face, and to that quick, responsive nature
formed for love, which speaks eloquently through all
disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten minutes’
talk or an exchange of glances. He was the more dangerous
in that he was far from bold, but seemed to woo
in spite of himself, and with a soft and pleading eye.
Ragged as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that respect
more comfortably furnished, even on board he was not
without some curious admirers.
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde,
handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating
eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy, with that
transcendental appropriateness that defies analysis. One
day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper
stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish
Tommy came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.
“Poor fellow,” she said, stopping, “you haven’t a
vest.”
“No,” he said; “I wish I ’ad.”
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in
his embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under
this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it
with tobacco.
“Do you want a match?” she asked. And before he
had time to reply, she ran off and presently returned with
more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as our
passage is concerned, of what I will make bold to call
this love-affair. There are many relations which go on to
marriage and last during a lifetime, in which less human
feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the
stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the
stowaways; but in a larger sense of the word I have yet
more to add. Jones had discovered and pointed out to
me a young woman who was remarkable among her
fellows for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly
clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of disrespectability,
with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no
bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression,
and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true
womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion.
She had a look, too, of refinement, like one who might
have been a better lady than most, had she been allowed
the opportunity. When alone she seemed preoccupied
and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually
by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes,
chary of speech and gesture—not from caution, but
poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, unlovely
and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and
waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul.
It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this
delicate, sad woman caring for him. He seemed, from
first to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, and
she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish
husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish
girl serving her Orson, were the two bits of human nature
that most appealed to me throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were
collected; and soon a rumour began to go round the
vessel; and this girl, with her bit of sealskin cap, became
the centre of whispering and pointed fingers. She also,
it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on
board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with
whom she travelled was the father of a family, who had
left wife and children to be hers. The ship’s officers
discouraged the story, which may therefore have been a
story and no more; but it was believed in the steerage,
and the poor girl had to encounter many curious eyes
from that day forth.
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across
the ocean combined both. “Out of my country and
myself I go,” sings the old poet: and I was not only
travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but
out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration. Part
of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed,
at least to me, from this novel situation in the world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life with
absolute success and verisimilitude. I was taken for a
steerage passenger; no one seemed surprised that I should
be so; and there was nothing but the brass plate between
decks to remind me that I had once been a gentleman.
In a former book, describing a former journey, I expressed
some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken
for a pedlar, and explained the accident by the difference
of language and manners between England and France.
I must now take a humbler view; for here I was among
my own countrymen, somewhat roughly clad, to be sure,
but with every advantage of speech and manner; and I
am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything you
please except an educated gentleman. The sailors called
me “mate,” the officers addressed me as “my man,” my
comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person of
their own character and experience, but with some curious
information. One, a mason himself, believed I was a
mason; several, and among these at least one of the
seamen, judged me to be a petty officer in the American
navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer
that at last I had not the heart to deny it. From all
these guesses I drew one conclusion, which told against
the insight of my companions. They might be close
observers in their own way, and read the manners in the
face; but it was plain that they did not extend their
observation to the hands.
To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part
without a hitch. It is true I came little in their way;
but when we did encounter, there was no recognition in
their eye, although I confess I sometimes courted it in
silence. All these, my inferiors and equals, took me, like
the transformed monarch in the story, for a mere common,
human man. They gave me a hard, dead look, with the
flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.
With the women this surprised me less, as I had
already experimented on the sex by going abroad through
a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.
The result was curious. I then learned for
the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much
attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male
creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig,
each one who went by me caused me a certain shock of
surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal
circumstances, it appeared, every young lady must have
paid me some passing tribute of a glance; and though I
had often been unconscious of it when given, I was well
aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height
seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for
she passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for
supposing that what are called the upper classes may sometimes
produce a disagreeable impression in what are called
the lower; and I wish some one would continue my
experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a
man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.
Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more
complete test; for, even with the addition of speech and
manner, I passed among the ladies for precisely the
average man of the steerage. It was one afternoon that
I saw this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman
was taken ill on deck. I think I had the luck to be
present at every sudden seizure during all the passage;
and on this occasion found myself in the place of importance,
supporting the sufferer. There was not only a large
crowd immediately around us, but a considerable knot of
saloon passengers leaning over our heads from the hurricane-deck.
One of these, an elderly managing woman,
hailed me with counsels. Of course I had to reply;
and as the talk went on, I began to discover that the
whole group took me for the husband. I looked upon
my new wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings; and I
must own she had not even the appearance of the poorest
class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country
wench who should have been employed at a roadside inn.
Now was the time for me to go and study the brass plate.
To such of the officers as knew about me—the doctor,
the purser, and the stewards—I appeared in the light of a
broad joke. The fact that I spent the better part of my
day in writing had gone abroad over the ship and tickled
them all prodigiously. Whenever they met me they
referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity and
breadth of humorous intention. Their manner was well
calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You may
be sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a
gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling to his face.
“Well!” they would say; “still writing?” And the
smile would widen into a laugh. The purser came one
day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart by my
misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writing,
“for which,” he added pointedly, “you will be paid.”
This was nothing else than to copy out the list of
passengers.
Another trick of mine which told against my reputation
was my choice of roosting-place in an active draught
upon the cabin floor. I was openly jeered and flouted for
this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would sometimes
gather at the door to see my last dispositions for the
night. This was embarrassing, but I learned to support
the trial with equanimity.
Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new
position sat lightly and naturally upon my spirits. I
accepted the consequences with readiness, and found them
far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me;
I conformed more and more to the type of the place, not
only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers
and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day
by day greedier for small delicacies. Such was the result,
as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge.
We think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are full
to the brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned
in the workhouse before he boasts himself indifferent to
dainties. Every evening, for instance, I was more and
more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it
was delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but
broken fish I was proportionally downcast. The offer of
a little jelly from a fellow-passenger more provident than
myself caused a marked elevation in my spirits. And I
would have gone to the ship’s end and back again for an
oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It
seemed no disgrace to be confounded with my company;
for I may as well declare at once I found their manners as
gentle and becoming as those of any other class. I do not
mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment
and laughable disaster at the table of a duke.
That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage. Thus I flatter myself that I conducted
myself well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most
ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have
committed as few as possible. I know too well that my
tact is not the same as their tact, and that my habit of a
different society constituted, not only no qualification, but
a positive disability to move easily and becomingly in this.
When Jones complimented me—because I “managed to
behave very pleasantly” to my fellow-passengers, was
how he put it—I could follow the thought in his mind,
and knew his compliment to be such as we pay foreigners
on their proficiency in English. I dare say this praise was
given me immediately on the back of some unpardonable
solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
whole. We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman
among lords; we should consider also the case of a lord
among the ploughmen. I have seen a lawyer in the
house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I know, but nothing
will induce me to disclose, which of these two was the
better gentleman. Some of our finest behaviour, though
it looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even
brutal to the gallery. We boast too often manners that
are parochial rather than universal; that, like a country
wine, will not bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor
from the parlour to the kitchen. To be a gentleman is to
be one all the world over, and in every relation and grade
of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must first
be born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily,
the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind
of currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation
throughout all the others, and this tends to keep us well
satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish
accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art,
should be human and central.
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among
them in a relation of equality, seemed to me excellent
gentlemen. They were not rough, nor hasty, nor disputatious;
debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were
helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. The type of manners
was plain, and even heavy; there was little to please the
eye, but nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay
more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many more
ornate and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I
cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like ironwork,
without being delicate, like lace. There was here less
delicacy; the skin supported more callously the natural
surface of events, the mind received more bravely the
crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
there was less effective refinement, less consideration for
others, less polite suppression of self. I speak of the best
among my fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well
as in the saloon, there is a mixture. Those, then, with
whom I found myself in sympathy, and of whom I may
therefore hope to write with a greater measure of truth,
were not only as good in their manners, but endowed
with very much the same natural capacities, and about
as wise in deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what
is called society. One and all were too much interested
in disconnected facts, and loved information for its own
sake with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes
display the same appetite as they gorge themselves daily
with the miscellaneous gossip of the newspaper. Newspaper-reading,
as far as I can make out, is often rather
a sort of brown study than an act of culture. I have
myself palmed off yesterday’s issue on a friend, and seen
him re-peruse it for a continuance of minutes with an air
at once refreshed and solemn. Workmen, perhaps, pay
more attention; but though they may be eager listeners,
they have rarely seemed to me either willing or careful
thinkers. Culture is not measured by the greatness of the
field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the
nicety with which we can perceive relations in that field,
whether great or small. Workmen, certainly those who
were on board with me, I found wanting in this quality or
habit of the mind. They did not perceive relations, but
leaped to a so-called cause, and thought the problem
settled. Thus the cause of everything in England was
the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by
consequence, a revolution. It is surprising how many of
them said this, and that none should have had a definite
thought in his head as he said it. Some hated the Church
because they disagreed with it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield
because of war and taxes; all hated the masters,
possibly with reason. But these feelings were not at the
root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls ran
thus—I have not got on; I ought to have got on; if there
was a revolution I should get on. How? They had no
idea. Why? Because—because—well, look at America!
To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all
so, if you come to that. At bottom, as it seems to me,
there is but one question in modern home politics, though
it appears in many shapes, and that is the question of
money; and but one political remedy, that the people
should grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow-passengers
were as impatient and dull of hearing on the
second of these points as any member of Parliament; but
they had some glimmerings of the first. They would not
hear of improvement on their part, but wished the world
made over again in a crack, so that they might remain
improvident and idle and debauched, and yet enjoy the
comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite
Virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could
see, that many of them were now on their way to America.
But on the point of money they saw clearly enough that
inland politics, so far as they were concerned, were reducible
to the question of annual income; a question which should
long ago have been settled by a revolution, they did not
know how, and which they were now about to settle for
themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the
Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the second
or income question is in itself nothing, and may as well
be left undecided, if there be no wisdom and virtue to
profit by the change. It is not by a man’s purse, but by
his character, that he is rich or poor. Barney will be
poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them
go where they will, and wreck all the governments under
heaven; they will be poor until they die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman
than his surprising idleness, and the candour with
which he confesses to the failing. It has to me been
always something of a relief to find the poor, as a general
rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in consequence
enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in America,
an old frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted
and farmed, from his childhood up. He excused himself
for his defective education on the ground that he had
been overworked from first to last. Even now, he said,
anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a
book. In consequence of this, I observed him closely;
he was occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for
five hours out of the twenty-four, and then principally
in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in sheer
idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back against
the door. I have known men do hard literary work all
morning, and then undergo quite as much physical fatigue
by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman
for the day. He, at least, like all the educated class,
did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself
he was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises
his idleness with effrontery; he has even, as I am told,
organised it.
I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me
for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the city of
Aberdeen, and was brought into hospital with broken
bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied
that he was a tapper. No one had ever heard of such a
thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they
besought an explanation. It appeared that when a party
of slaters were engaged upon a roof, they would now and
then be taken with a fancy for the public-house. Now a
seamstress, for example, might slip away from her work
and no one be the wiser; but if these fellows adjourned,
the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus the
neighbourhood be advertised of their defection. Hence
the career of the tapper. He has to do the tapping and
keep up an industrious bustle on the housetop during the
absence of the slaters. When he taps for only one or two
the thing is child’s-play, but when he has to represent a
whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in the
sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from spot to
spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single personality,
and swell and hasten his blows, until he produce a
perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear that a
crowd of emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof
the house. It must be a strange sight from an upper
window.
I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was
astonished at the stories told by my companions. Skulking,
shirking, malingering, were all established tactics, it
appeared. They could see no dishonesty when a man
who is paid for an hour’s work gives half an hour’s consistent
idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse to
watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself
an honest man. It is not sufficiently recognised that our
race detests to work. If I thought that I should have to
work every day of my life as hard as I am working now, I
should be tempted to give up the struggle. And the workman
early begins on his career of toil. He has never had
his fill of holidays in the past, and his prospect of holidays
in the future is both distant and uncertain. In the circumstance
it would require a high degree of virtue not to
snatch alleviations for the moment.
There were many good talkers on the ship; and I
believe good talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment
among working men. Where books are comparatively
scarce, a greater amount of information will be
given and received by word of mouth; and this tends to
produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for
conversation, good listeners. They could all tell a story
with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think that the
less literary class show always better in narration; they
have so much more patience with detail, are so much less
hurried to reach the points, and preserve so much juster a
proportion among the facts. At the same time their talk
is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an agile
fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected quarters,
and when the talk is over they often leave the matter
where it was. They mark time instead of marching. They
think only to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use
their reason rather as a weapon of offence than as a tool
for self-improvement. Hence the talk of some of the
cleverest was unprofitable in result, because there was no
give and take; they would grant you as little as possible
for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to conquer
or to die.
But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting
than that of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts,
hopes, and fears of which the workman’s life is built lie
nearer to necessity and nature. They are more immediate
to human life. An income calculated by the week is a far
more human thing than one calculated by the year, and a
small income, simply from its smallness, than a large one.
I never wearied listening to the details of a workman’s
economy, because every item stood for some real pleasure.
If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know that
twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was
physically happy; while if you learn that a rich man has
seven courses a day, ten to one the half of them remain
untasted, and the whole is but misspent money and a
weariness to the flesh.
The difference between England and America to a
working man was thus most humanly put to me by a
fellow-passenger: “In America,” said he, “you get pies
and puddings.” I do not hear enough, in economy books,
of pies and pudding. A man lives in and for the delicacies,
adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such as
pudding to eat, and pleasant books and theatres to occupy
his leisure. The bare terms of existence would be
rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on bread
and butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows wolfish
after dainties. And the workman dwells in a borderland,
and is always within sight of those cheerless regions
where life is more difficult to sustain than worth sustaining.
Every detail of our existence, where it is worth while
to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive
and enthralling by the presence of genuine desire; but it
is all one to me whether Crœsus has a hundred or a thousand
thousands in the bank. There is more adventure in the
life of the working man who descends as a common soldier
into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire who
sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manœuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career
of him who is in the thick of the business; to whom one
change of market means an empty belly, and another a
copious and savoury meal. This is not the philosophical,
but the human side of economics; it interests like a story;
and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a
small way of the charm of “Robinson Crusoe”; for every
step is critical, and human life is presented to you naked
and verging to its lowest terms.
As we drew near to New York I was at first amused and
then somewhat staggered, by the cautions and the grisly
tales that went the round. You would have thought
we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak
to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till
you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel
with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend
was to awake next morning without money or baggage,
or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and
if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously
disappear from the ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to the
least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned, I remember,
against the roadside inns of the Cévennes, and that by
a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles the
warning was explained; it was but the far-away rumour
and reduplication of a single terrifying story already half
a century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the
events. So I was tempted to make light of these reports
against America. But we had on board with us a man
whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had
come near these perils in the body; he had visited a
robber inn. The public has an old and well-grounded
favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to
the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M‘Naughten,
had come from New York to Boston with a comrade,
seeking work. They were a pair of rattling blades; and,
leaving their baggage at the station, passed the day in
beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight
struck. Then they applied themselves to find a lodging,
and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of
entertainment and being refused admittance, or themselves
declining the terms. By two the inspiration of
their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and
humble, and after a great circuit found themselves in the
same street where they had begun their search, and in
front of a French hotel where they had already sought
accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned
to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by
the door. He seemed to welcome them more warmly
than when they had at first presented themselves, and
the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably
fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill-looking,
but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown
upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room,
the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.
The room was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
conveniences. The door did not lock on the inside; and
the only sign of adornment was a couple of framed pictures,
one close above the head of the bed, and the other
opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes
see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the
dead, or works of art more than usually skittish in the
subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding something
of this last description that M‘Naughten’s comrade pulled
aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed.
There was no picture. The frame surrounded,
and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture
in the partition, through which they looked forth into the
dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take
a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper
as he lay abed. M‘Naughten and his comrade stared
at each other like Balboa and his men, “with a wild
surmise”; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran
to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There
he stood, petrified; and M‘Naughten, who had followed,
grasped him by the wrist in terror. They could see into
another room, larger in size than that which they occupied,
where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark.
For a second or so these five persons looked each other in
the eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M‘Naughten
and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room and
down the stairs. The man in the white cap said nothing as
they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once
more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a
bed, and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but
all inquired after the address of a respectable hotel; and I,
for my part, put myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones.
Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted the low
shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers
must remain on board to pass through Castle Garden
on the following morning; but we of the second cabin
made our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and
by six o’clock Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting
on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-waggon.
It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the
following night I left New York, there was scarcely a lull,
and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were
flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the
air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet
clothing.
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good
deal of money, to be rattled along West Street to our
destination: “Reunion House, No. 10, West Street, one
minute’s walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle
Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and
Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar,
single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents; private
rooms for families; no charge for storage or baggage;
satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
proprietor.” Reunion House was, I may go the length of
saying, a humble hostelry. You entered through a long
bar-room, thence passed into a little dining-room, and
thence into a still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of
the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American taste,
with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and
two minutes afterwards I had refused a drink from the
proprietor, and was going on, in my plain European
fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly interposed,
and explained the situation. He was offering to
treat me, it appeared; whenever an American bar-keeper
proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is
offering to treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at
least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I had
begun my American career on the wrong foot. I did not
enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of
reasons, even the best cigar often failing to please if you
smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised
land; “westward the march of empire holds its way”;
the race is for the moment to the young; what has been
and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to
be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece,
Rome, and Judæa are gone by for ever, leaving to generations
the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city of
nations; England has already declined, since she has lost
the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped,
full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from
one rib out of the side of their own old land, the minds of
young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful
period of their age. It will be hard for an American to
understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man,
who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following
bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh
instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of
cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together by
themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let
him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion
of the sentiment with which spirited English youths turn
to the thought of the American Republic. It seems to
them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted in
the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not
yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted,
like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise,
costume, forms of procedure, and sad, senseless
self-denial. Which of these two he prefers, a man with
any youth still left in him will decide rightly for himself.
He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of a stalled ox in
stiff, respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than
direct his life according to the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the
Puritan sourness, the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or
the dreary existence of country towns. A few wild story-books
which delighted his childhood form the imaginative
basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there
is added to this a great crowd of stimulating details—vast
cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring
to find thousands camped upon their marshes, and the
lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests
that disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain
that are cleared and settled, one man running forth with
his household gods before another, while the bear and the
Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil that
gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in
the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle,
courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that
Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his vigorous,
cheerful, and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon
New York streets, spying for things foreign. The place
had to me an air of Liverpool; but such was the rain that
not Paradise itself would have looked inviting. We were,
a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and
two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to
welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New
York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or
earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were
exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my
gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the dead; there
was scarce any expense at which I should have hesitated;
the devil was in it but Jones and I should dine like heathen
emperors. I set to work, asking after a restaurant;
and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking
passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told
them I was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all
sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not
have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I
do not know if this were characteristic of New York, or
whether it was only Jones and I who looked un-dinerly
and discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at length,
by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking,
some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude
the whole. I never entered into the feelings of Jack on
land so completely as when I tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the “private rooms for
families” at Reunion House. It was very small; furnished
with a bed, a chair, and some clothes-pegs; and
it derived all that was necessary for the life of the human
animal through two borrowed lights; one, looking into
the passage, and the second opening, without sash, into
another apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or,
in intervals of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each
other all night long. It will be observed that this was
almost exactly the disposition of the room in M‘Naughten‘s
story. Jones had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the
floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I, for my
part, never closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards
the men in the next room gave over snoring for
good, and began to rustle over their toilettes. The sound
of their voices as they talked was low and moaning, like
that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at
last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now
and then opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay.
I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I
was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried to
dress and get downstairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick
and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the
court. There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled
towels and pieces of wet soap, white and slippery like fish;
nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair of questionable
combs. Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his
face with a good will. He had been three months in New
York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a
single halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was exactly
out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to grow
sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to
tell. I had a thousand and one things to do; only the
day to do them in, and a journey across the continent
before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury;
every now and then I had to get under cover for a while
in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for
under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on
the inside. I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices,
restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money-changers, and
wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and
those who were careful of their floors would look on with
an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, the same traits
struck me: the people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly
kind. The money-changer cross-questioned me
like a French commissary, asking my age, my business,
my average income, and my destination, beating down my
attempts at evasion, and receiving my answer in silence;
and yet when all was over, he shook hands with me up to
the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of a mile in
the rain to get me books at a reduction. Again, in a very
large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man,
who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly
never before been received in any human shop, indicated
squarely that he put no faith in my honesty, and
refused to look up the names of books or give me the
slightest help or information, on the ground, like the
steward, that it was none of his business. I lost my
temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not
learned in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he
went to any bookseller in England, of more handsome
usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like
many a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed
at once from one extreme to the other; I may say that
from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave
me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses
and came bareheaded into the rain to point me out a
restaurant, where I might lunch, nor even then did he
seem to think that he had done enough. These are (it is
as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America.
It is this same opposition that has most struck me in
people of almost all classes and from east to west. By the
time a man had about strung me up to be the death of
him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be just
upon the point of melting into confidence and serviceable
attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have met with the
like in so many parts, that this must be the character of
some particular state or group of states; for in America,
and this again in all classes, you will find some of the
softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell’s towards the
evening, that I had simply to divest myself of my shoes,
socks, and trousers, and leave them behind for the benefit
of New York city. No fire could have dried them ere I
had to start; and to pack them in their present condition
was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a
heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in
the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell’s kitchen.
I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell hired a man
to carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by,
accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me to
the particular attention of the officials. No one could
have been kinder. Those who are out of pocket may
go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
meal and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed
him this word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the
second chapter of my emigrant experience.
TO PAUL BOURGET
Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never
have heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of
Upolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your ears. To
these barbaric seats there came the other day a yellow book
with your name on the title, and filled in every page with the
exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change your own
words: “J’ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces,
c’est avec vous que je me complais à vivre.”
R. L. S
Vailima,
Upolu,
Samoa.
LETTER TO THE AUTHOR
My dear Stevenson,
You have trusted me with the
choice and arrangement of these papers, written before you
departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add a
preface to the volume. But it is your prose the public
wish to read, not mine; and I am sure they will willingly
be spared the preface. Acknowledgments are due in your
name to the publishers of the several magazines from which
the papers are collected, viz. Fraser’s, Longman’s, the Magazine
of Art, and Scribner’s. I will only add, lest any reader
should find the tone of the concluding pieces less inspiriting
than your wont, that they were written under circumstances
of especial gloom and sickness. “I agree with you the lights
seem a little turned down,” so you write to me now: “the
truth is I was far through, and came none too soon to the
South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body and mind.
And however low the lights, the stuff is true....”
Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed new
life into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful to them,
though as they keep you so far removed from us, it is difficult
not to bear them a grudge; and if they would reconcile
us quite, they have but to do two things more—to teach
you new tales that shall charm us like your old, and to
spare you, at least once in a while in summer, to climates
within reach of us who are task-bound for ten months in
the year beside the Thames.
Yours ever,
SIDNEY COLVIN.
February, 1892.
Monday.—It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock
when we were all signalled to be present at the Ferry
Depôt of the railroad. An emigrant ship had arrived at
New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday
morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on
Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday,
a great part of the passengers from these four ships was
concentrated on the train by which I was to travel. There
was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children.
The wretched little booking office, and the baggage-room,
which was not much larger, were crowded thick with
emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere
of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by
the half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each other
with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man,
whom I take to have been an emigrant agent, was all
over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering
and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if
system there was, had utterly broken down under the
strain of so many passengers.
My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish
man, who preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil,
got my baggage registered, and counselled me to stay
quietly where I was till he should give me the word to
move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack,
which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of
my railway rug the whole of “Bancroft’s History of the
United States” in six fat volumes. It was as much as I
could carry with convenience even for short distances, but
it insured me plenty of clothing, and the valise was at that
moment, and often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I
sat for an hour in the baggage-room, and wretched enough
it was; yet, when at last the word was passed to me,
and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was
only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and
danger.
I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill
from West Street to the river. It was dark, the wind
blew clean through it from end to end; and here I found a
great block of passengers and baggage, hundreds of one
and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty to
make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have
been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition.
It was a tight jam; there was no fairway through
the mingled mass of brute and living obstruction. Into
the upper skirts of the crowd, porters, infuriated by hurry
and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say
that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged
among us like so many maddened sheep-dogs; and I
believe these men were no longer answerable for their
acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they
drove straight into the press, and when they could get no
farther, blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own
hand, for instance, I saved the life of a child as it sat upon
its mother’s knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard
of no accident, I must suppose that there were many
similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will
give some idea of the state of mind to which we were
reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother
of the child paid the least attention to my act. It was
not till some time after that I understood what I had
done myself, for to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the
moment a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet,
clamour, dead opposition to progress, such as one encounters
in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits.
We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world. For my part I shivered a little,
and my back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a
hope nor a fear, and all the activities of my nature had
become tributary to one massive sensation of discomfort.
At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate
to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily straining
through itself. About the same time some lamps were
lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We
were being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey
City. You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,
through the dense, choking crush, every one
overladen with packages or children, and yet under the
necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it
ended at length for me, and I found myself on deck,
under a flimsy awning, and with a trifle of elbow-room
to stretch and breathe in. This was on the starboard;
for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the
port side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamen
shouted to them to move on, and threatened them
with shipwreck. These poor people were under a spell
of stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily
as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and
capfuls, not without danger to a boat so badly ballasted
as ours; and we crept over the river in the darkness,
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers
running many knots, and heralding their approach by
strains of music. The contrast between these pleasure
embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her list to
port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was
of that glaring description which we count too obvious
for the purposes of art.
The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.
I had a fixed sense of calamity, and, to judge by conduct,
the same persuasion was common to us all. A
panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided
over the disorder of our landing. People pushed, and
elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could.
Children fell, and were picked up, to be rewarded by a blow.
One child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and
with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much
as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that
I ran among the rest. I was so weary that I had twice to
make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards
or so between the pier and the railway station, so that
I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.
There was no waiting-room, no refreshment-room; the
cars were locked; and for at least another hour, or so
it seemed, we had to camp upon the draughty, gas-lit
platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe
my neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and
weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement
to which we had been subjected, I believe they can have
been no happier than myself. I bought half a dozen
oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts were the only
refection to be had. As only two of them had even a pretence
of juice, I threw the other four under the cars, and
beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping
on the track after my leavings.
At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected,
and far from dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush,
and brushed my trousers as hard as I could, till
I had dried them and warmed my blood into the bargain;
but no one else, except my next neighbour, to whom I lent
the brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they
were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the
lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change
carriages and twice countermanded, before I allowed
myself to follow their example.
Tuesday.—When I awoke, it was already day; the
train was standing idle; I was in the last carriage, and,
seeing some others strolling to and fro about the lines,
I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan
by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even,
as far as I could see, within reach of any signal. A
green, open, undulating country stretched away upon
all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn
gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours
of the land were soft and English. It was not quite
England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough
either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in the
sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to
find a change. Explain it how you may, and for my
part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises with a different
splendour in America and Europe. There is more clear
gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,
brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may
be from habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh
and inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory, and
more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential,
evening epoch of the world, as though America
were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the
orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought so then,
by the railroad-side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought
so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent.
If it be an illusion, it is one very deeply rooted, and in
which my eyesight is accomplice.
Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying
its passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel-bell
upon the engine; and as it was for this we had been
waiting, we were summoned by the cry of “All aboard!”
and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it
appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight
having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.
Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then
we had a few minutes at some station with a meagre
show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were so
many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every opportunity,
the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow
my way to the counter.
Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’s
day. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking;
yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound
our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and
variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,
rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a
country, were airs from home. I stood on the platform
by the hour; and, as I saw, one after another, pleasant
villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream,
and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance,
and beheld the sun no longer shining blankly on the plains
of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light
dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form
and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in
life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And
when I had asked the name of the river from the brakesman,
and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the
beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the
beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness
named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at
once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as
no other could be, for that shining river and desirable
valley.
None can care for literature in itself who do not take
a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is
no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical,
humorous, and picturesque as the United States of America.
All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution.
Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sansdusky. Chelsea, with its
London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and
the King’s Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval
Memphis; there they have their seat, translated names
of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and
Arkansas[1]; and both, while I was crossing the continent,
lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation of
a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead
under a steam factory, below anglified New York.
The names of the States and Territories themselves form
a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware,
Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota,
and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a
nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and
if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent,
his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously,
with the names of states and cities that would strike the
fancy in a business circular.
Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room
at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and
sprightly Dutch widow with her children; these I was to
watch over providentially for a certain distance farther on
the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket
of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner
for myself.
I mention this meal, not only because it was the first
of which I had partaken for about thirty hours, but
because it was the means of my first introduction to a
coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait
upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with
every word, look, and gesture marched me farther into
the country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike
the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy
Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly
somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speaking
English with a slight and rather odd foreign accent,
every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners
so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name
their parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as
high over the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with
a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is
often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler
never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman
will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an
upper-form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince
Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home
and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved
himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us,
a young, free, and not very self-respecting master might
behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had come
prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease,
to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no
sharer in the prejudice of race; but I assure you I put
my patronage away for another occasion, and had the grace
to be pleased with that result.
Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him
upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer to tip the
American waiter? Certainly not, he told me. Never.
It would not do. They considered themselves too highly
to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for
him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation;
he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my
society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those
rare conjunctures.... Without being very clear-seeing,
I can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the
coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a quarter.
Wednesday.—A little after midnight I convoyed my
widow and orphans on board the train; and morning
found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favourite
home of my imagination; I have played at being in
Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there
with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.
My preference was founded on a work which appeared
in Cassell’s Family Paper, and was read aloud to me
by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga,
an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very obligingly
washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald
Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The
idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving
that up to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected.
It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of
Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited
islands.
But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We
were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken
to the Rocky Mountains. The country was flat like
Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of
them from the train and in my waking moments, it was
rich and various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to
itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were
graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long,
aërial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships
spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on
the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am
afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning
dawned with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt;
a chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument,
as it struck home upon the heart and seemed to travel
with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White
mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see
them more often on a lake; and though the sun had
soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere
of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon
to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew
that this paradise was haunted by killing damps and
foul malaria. The fences along the line bore but two descriptions
of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos,
and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the
point of day, and while we were all in the grasp of that
first chill, a native of the State, who had got in at some
way station, pronounced it, with a doctoral air, “a fever
and ague morning.”
The Dutch widow was a person of some character.
She had conceived at first sight a great aversion for the
present writer, which she was at no pains to conceal. But,
being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no difficulty
about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy
her children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels,
and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by
my empty seat. Nay, she was such a rattle by nature,
and so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that
she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into
confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard
about her late husband, who seemed to have made his
chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.
I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of
her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week,
and a variety of particular matters that are not usually
disclosed except to friends. At one station, she shook
up her children to look at a man on the platform and say
if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained
how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how
far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his
desistance that she was now travelling to the west. Then,
when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked
my judgment on that type of manly beauty. I admired it
to her heart’s content. She was not, I think, remarkably
veracious in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and
built castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that
sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these confidences,
steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words
were ingeniously honest. “I am sure,” said she, “we all
ought to be very much obliged to you.” I cannot pretend
that she put me at my ease; but I had a certain respect
for such a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have
slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of
worthless toleration for me.
We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out
of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off
through the streets to the station of a different railroad.
Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember
having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration
at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld
street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of
comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a graceful
act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at
the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But
there was no word of restitution. I was that city’s benefactor,
yet I was received in a third-class waiting-room,
and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and
eggs at my own expense.
I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as
that night in Chicago. When it was time to start, I
descended the platform like a man in a dream. It was
a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car,
as I came up with it, was not only filled, but overflowing.
My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous
tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, feverish,
painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over
me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas.
When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a
bundle of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the
distance, and my consciousness dwindled within me to a
mere pin’s head, like a taper on a foggy night.
When I came a little more to myself, I found that
there had sat down before me a very cheerful, rosy little
German gentleman, somewhat gone in drink, who was
talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say.
I did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed
to me dimly as if something depended upon that. I heard
him relate, among many other things, that there were
pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed a man
of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught
the words, I do not think I properly understood the sense
until next morning; and I believe I replied at the time
that I was very glad to hear it. What else he talked
about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of
words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was
highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose I must
have shown my confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw
him knit his brows at me like one who has conceived a
doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps
that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and
finally, in despair, he rose and left me. I felt chagrined;
but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching
myself as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was
received at once into a dreamless stupor.
The little German gentleman was only going a little
way into the suburbs after a dîner fin, and was bent on
entertainment while the journey lasted. Having failed
with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant, who
had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less
weary than myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I
found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he
was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying him on
different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman
flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and
departed from that car in quest of livelier society. Poor
little gentleman! I suppose he thought an emigrant
should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask of
foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the
moments of digestion.
Thursday.—I suppose there must be a cycle in the
fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I
was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast
of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot cakes, at
Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day’s ride
followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At
a place called Creston, a drunken man got in. He was
aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions,
not at all unpresentable upon a train. For one stage he
eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were
beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by
name, by came the conductor. There was a word or two
of talk; and then the official had the man by the shoulders,
twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car,
and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in three
motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still
moving slowly, although beginning to mend her pace,
and the drunkard got his feet without a fall. He carried
a red bundle, though not so red as his cheeks; and he
shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It
was the first indication that I had come among revolvers,
and I observed it with some emotion. The conductor
stood on the steps with one hand on his hip, looking back
at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the
creature, for he turned without further ado, and went off
staggering along the track towards Cromwell, followed by
a peal of laughter from the cars. They were speaking
English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were
deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council
Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri river. Here
we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai, set
apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for
luxury, separated myself from my companions, and
marched with my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel.
A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my
plain European way, I should call the boots, were installed
behind a counter like bank tellers. They took my name,
assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my
packages. And here came the tug of war. I wished to
give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not
wish to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible
in an American hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and
sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For
although two nations use the same words and read the
same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary.
The business of life is not carried on by words,
but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang
signification. Some international obscurity prevailed between
me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs;
so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to
me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused,
and that with the plainness of the West. This American
manner of conducting matters of business is, at first, highly
unpalatable to the European. When we approach a man
in the way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being
our hired servant. But in the American opinion, two
gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk with a view to
exchanging favours if they will agree to please. I know
not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the
more truly courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately
tends to be continued after the particular transaction is at
an end, and thus favours class separations. But on the
other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open
field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.
I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, and
unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.
I knew nothing, I said, of the ways of American
hotels; but I had no desire to give trouble. If there
was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let him
say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should
cheerfully obey.
He burst into a shout of laughter. “Ah!” said he,
“you do not know about America. They are fine people
in America. Oh! you will like them very well. But
you mustn’t get mad. I know what you want. You come
along with me.”
And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me
by the arm like an old acquaintance, he led me to the
bar of the hotel.
“There,” said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder,
“go and have a drink!”
Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first.
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains,
where I might meet with Dutch widows and little German
gentry fresh from table. I had been but a latent emigrant;
now I was to be branded once more, and put apart
with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of
Friday that I found myself in front of Emigrant House,
with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed
for the journey. A white-haired official, with a stick under
one arm and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front
of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command.
At each name you would see a family gather
up its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of the
three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon concluded
that this was to be set apart for the women and children.
The second, or central car, it turned out, was devoted to
men travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese. The
official was easily moved to anger at the least delay;
but the emigrants were both quick at answering their
names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects
on board.
The families once housed, we men carried the second
car without ceremony by simultaneous assault. I suppose
the reader has some notion of an American railroad car,
that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah’s ark,
with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon either
hand. Those destined for emigrants on the Union Pacific
are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing
but wood entering in any part into their constitution,
and for the usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went
out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned.
The benches are too short for anything but a young child.
Where there is scarce elbow-room for two to sit, there will
not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the company,
or rather, as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer
Station, the company’s servants, have conceived a plan
for the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail
on every two to chum together. To each of the
chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches
can be made to face each other in pairs, for the backs are
reversible. On the approach of night the boards are laid
from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for
two, and long enough for a man of the middle height;
and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions
with the head to the conductor’s van and the feet to the
engine. When the train is full, of course this plan is
impossible, for there must not be more than one to every
bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.
It was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired
official now bestirred himself. He made a most
active master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples,
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each.
The greater the number of happy couples the better for
his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the
beds. His price for one board and three straw cushions
began with two dollars and a half; but before the train
left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased
mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.
The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps,
like some ladies, I showed myself too eager for union
at any price; but certainly the first who was picked
out to be my bedfellow declined the honour without
thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I
think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great
timidity, and then began to excuse himself in broken
phrases. He didn’t know the young man, he said. The
young man might be very honest, but how was he to
know that? There was another young man whom he
had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole.
All this without any sort of excuse, as though I had been
inanimate or absent. I began to tremble lest every one
should refuse my company, and I be left rejected. But
the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a
soldierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, he had
acquired it in the navy. But that was all one; he had
at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted
the match, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the
connubial benediction, and pocketed his fees.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up
the train. I am afraid to say how many baggage-waggons
followed the engine—certainly a score; then came the
Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was
brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly,
is called his caboose. The class to which I belonged
was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to speak,
to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among
the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.
But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one
little boy of eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough.
At last, about six, the long train crawled out of the Transfer
Station and across the wide Missouri river to Omaha,
westward bound.
It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.
There was thunder in the air, which helped to keep us
restless. A man played many airs upon the cornet, and
none of them were much attended to, until he came to
“Home, sweet home.” It was truly strange to note how
the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.
I have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered
good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art
which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the
feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment.
If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author
of “Home, sweet home,” you make your hearers weep in
an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their
weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the
experiment was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking
man, with a goatee beard and about as much appearance
of sentiment as you would expect from a retired slaver,
turned with a start and bade the performer stop that
“damned thing.” “I’ve heard about enough of that,”
he added; “give us something about the good country
we’re going to.” A murmur of adhesion ran round the
car; the performer took the instrument from his lips,
laughed and nodded, and then struck into a dancing
measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately
the emotion he had raised.
The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild
young men, who got off next evening at North Platte,
stood together on the stern platform, singing “The Sweet
By-and-bye” with very tuneful voices; the chums began
to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of
the day were at an end. But it was not so; for, the train
stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged
with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens,
some of them in little more than nightgear, some with
stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge
began with twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the
train went on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis,
or less than one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at the
Transfer. This is my contribution to the economy of
future emigrants.
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.
He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops,
and cigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin
washing-dishes, tin coffee-pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and
tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went round the cars, and
chumming on a more extended principle became the order
of the hour. It requires but a copartnery of two to
manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried on
most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself
entered a little after sunrise into articles of agreement, and
became one of the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and
Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname on the
cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque,
the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of an
amiable young fellow going west to cure an asthma, and
retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking,
and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have
never seen tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought
a tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a
brick of soap. The partners used these instruments, one
after another, according to the order of their first awaking;
and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter
opposite the stove, and retired with the whole stock in
trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt down,
supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork,
or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift
to wash his face and neck and hands,—a cold, an insufficient,
and, if the train is moving rapidly, a somewhat
dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves
with coffee, sugar, and necessary vessels; and their operations
are a type of what went on through all the cars.
Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning;
at the first station the natives would come on board with
milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end
the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon
the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest hour of the day.
There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside;
a breakfast in the morning, a dinner somewhere between
eleven and two, and supper from five to eight or nine at
night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes for each;
and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes
waiting for some express upon a side track among many
miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each
repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For haste
is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through
on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable
brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly
sacrificed; and they cannot, in consequence,
predict the length of the passage within a day or so.
Civility is the main comfort that you miss. Equality,
though conceived very largely in America, does not extend
so low down as to an emigrant. Thus in all other trains,
a warning cry of “All aboard!” recalls the passengers to
take their seats; but as soon as I was alone with emigrants,
and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I found
this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the
station without note of warning, and you had to keep an
eye upon it even while you ate. The annoyance is considerable,
and the disrespect both wanton and petty.
Many conductors, again, will hold no communication
with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one day at what
time the train would stop for dinner; as he made no
answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third
time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office
looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and
turned ostentatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed
of his brutality; for when another person made the same
inquiry, although he still refused the information, he
condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence
in a voice loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said,
his principle not to tell people where they were to dine;
for one answer led to many other questions, as what
o’clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and
he could not afford to be eternally worried.
As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities,
a great deal of your comfort depends on the character
of the newsboy. He has it in his power indefinitely to
better and brighten the emigrant’s lot. The newsboy
with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark,
bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated
us like dogs. Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly
to a fight. It happened thus: he was going his rounds
through the cars with some commodities for sale, and
coming to a party who were at Seven-up or Cascino (our
two games) upon a bed-board, slung down a cigar-box
in the middle of the cards, knocking one man’s hand to
the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the whole
party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and
he was ordered to “get out of that directly, or he would
get more than he reckoned for.” The fellow grumbled and
muttered, but ended by making off, and was less openly
insulting in the future. On the other hand, the lad who
rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento
made himself the friend of all, and helped us with information,
attention, assistance, and a kind countenance.
He told us where and when we should have our meals,
and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table
for those who were delayed, and watched that we should
neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried.
You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the
greatness of this service, even had it stood alone. When
I think of that lad coming and going, train after train,
with his bright face and civil words, I see how easily a
good man may become the benefactor of his kind. Perhaps
he is discontented with himself, perhaps troubled
with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero
of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only
earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant,
he is doing a man’s work, and bettering the world.
I must tell here an experience of mine with another
newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good an example
of that uncivil kindness of the American, which is perhaps
their most bewildering character to one newly landed.
It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train;
and I am told I looked like a man at death’s door, so
much had this long journey shaken me. I sat at the
end of a car, and the catch being broken, and myself feverish
and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for
the sake of air. In this attitude my leg debarred the
newsboy from his box of merchandise. I made haste
to let him pass when I observed that he was coming; but
I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon
me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck
my foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to
show him the way, he answered me never a word. I
chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have
come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my
shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my hand.
It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking
ill, and so made this present out of a tender heart. For
the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child;
he lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate
profit on their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by
me and cheer me up.
It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose
on Saturday without a cloud. We were at sea—there
is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska.
I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon,
and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me,
and to spy in vain for something new. It was a world
almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth;
front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon
to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either
hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of
heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers,
no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous
flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie
at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and
again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad
which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer,
till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled
and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their
surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the
billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinity like a
snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful
what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard.
It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but
a step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own
head seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note
the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what
I have read of in the experience of others. Day and
night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept
busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise
like the winding up of countless clocks and watches,
which began after a while to seem proper to that
land.
To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain
exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of
the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this
straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon. Yet one
could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who
passed by there in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen,
painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but
that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and
which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had
nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which
to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement;
but stage after stage, only the dead green
waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon.
But the eye, as I have been told, found differences even
here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by perseverance,
to the end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all,
at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness,
by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What
livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent
in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from
news, from company, from all that can relieve existence
but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars
is the most varied spectacle that he can hope for. He
may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as
though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the
midst of the same great level, and has approached no
nearer to the one object within view, the flat horizon
which keeps pace with his advance. We are full at home
of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise people
are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative
surroundings. But what is to be said of the Nebraskan
settler? His is a wall-paper with a vengeance—one
quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness. His
eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming
concave of the visible world; it quails before so vast an
outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest
or shelter, till the man runs into his cabin, and can repose
his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a
sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and
winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a
full and various existence. One person at least I saw
upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to
her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way
station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features
were more than comely; she had that great rarity—a
fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were
kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal
grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a
note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire
contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous
arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where
she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen
wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood
planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its
own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it
were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that
had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into
which I looked, was clean but very empty, and showed
nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme
newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a
strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter
and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn,
and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement
as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth to
accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible
that life can go on with so few properties, or the great child,
man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.
And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some
points; or at least it contained, as I passed through, one
person incompletely civilised. At North Platte, where
we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass
the milk-jug. This other was well dressed and of what
we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man,
high-spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society;
but he turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary
vehemence of tone—
“There’s a waiter here!” he cried.
“I only asked you to pass the milk,” explained the
first.
Here is the retort verbatim—
“Pass! Hell! I’m not paid for that business; the
waiter’s paid for it. You should use civility at table,
and, by God, I’ll show you how!”
The other man very wisely made no answer, and
the bully went on with his supper as though nothing
had occurred. It pleases me to think that some day soon
he will meet one of his own kidney; and perhaps both
may fall.
To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains.
I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which
I knew we were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler
for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country than
the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through
these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies,
which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour
after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world
about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that
drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications—how
drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not
seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not one shapely
or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal
sage-brush; over all the same weariful and gloomy
colouring, greys warming into brown, greys darkening
towards black; and for sole sign of life, here and there
a few fleeing antelopes; here and there, but at incredible
intervals, a creek running in a cañon. The plains have
a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a
contorted smallness. Except for the air, which was light
and stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in
that God-forsaken land.
I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the
way; and at last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint
or poisoned in some wayside eating-house, the
evening we left Laramie I fell sick outright. That was
a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps
did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood,
and the shadows were confounded together in
the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in uneasy
attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their
backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor,
with his face upon his arm; there another half seated with
his head and shoulders on the bench. The most passive
were continually and roughly shaken by the movement
of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out
their arms like children; it was surprising how many
groaned and murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to
and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now a
snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a
measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting
vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open
my window, for the degradation of the air soon became
intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply
of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black,
amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake.
They that long for morning have never longed for it more
earnestly than I.
And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the
same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile
upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Only down
the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting, and awoke
the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life
in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one
spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and
nature. And when I think how the railroad has been
pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of
savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some
£12 from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each
stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities,
full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died
away again, and are now but wayside stations in the
desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese
pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and
broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed
dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling, and
murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord
of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of
the “bad medicine waggon” charioting his foes; and then
when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil
was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats, and with a
view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and
a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as
if this railway were the one typical achievement of the
age in which we live, as if it brought together into one
plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social
rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the
most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring
literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it
be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?
But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary—it is
only Homer.
Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some
god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and
by so many hidden perils. Thirst, hunger, the sleight
and ferocity of Indians, are all no more feared, so lightly
do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings
safely through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet
we should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past;
and to keep the balance true, since I have complained
of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more
than was enough, let me add an original document. It
was not written by Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long
since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago. I shall
punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.
“My dear Sister Mary,—I am afraid you will go nearly
crazy when you read my letter. If Jerry” (the writer’s
eldest brother) “has not written to you before now, you will
be surprised to heare that we are in California, and that
poor Thomas” (another brother, of fifteen) “is dead. We
started from ———— in July, with plenty of provisions
and too yoke oxen. We went along very well till
we got within six or seven hundred miles of California, when
the Indians attacked us. We found places where they
had killed the emigrants. We had one passenger with
us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran all the lead We
had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so we
could get at them in a minit. It was about two o’clock in
the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a prairie
chicken alited a little way from the wagon.
”Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told
Tom drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry
and the passenger went on. Then, after a little, I left Tom
and caught up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped
for Tom to come up; me and the man went on and sit down
by a little stream. In a few minutes we heard some noise;
then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose);
then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the
red skins came down upon us. The three that shot Tom
was hid by the side of the road in the bushes.
“I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the
other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had
better try to escape, if possible. I had no shoes on; having
a sore foot, I thought I would not put them on. The man
and me run down the road, but We was soon stopt by an
Indian on a pony. We then turend the other way, and run
up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees,
and stayed there till dark. The Indians hunted all over
after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here
there tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started
on, I stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld
on all night; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray,
we saw something in the shape of a man. It layed Down
in the grass. We went up to it, and it was Jerry. He
thought we ware Indians. You can imagine how glad he
was to see me. He thought we was all dead but him, and
we thought him and Tom was dead. He had the gun that
he took out of the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all
he had was the load that was in it.
“We traveld on till about eight o’clock, We caught up
with one wagon with too men with it. We had traveld with
them before one day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew
that they was ahead of us, unless they had been killed to.
My feet was so sore when we caught up with them that I had
to ride; I could not step. We traveld on for too days, when
the men that owned the cattle said they would (could) not
drive them another inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had
about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided
it into four packs. Each of the men took about 18 pounds
apiece and a blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat,
and little quilt; I had in all about twelve pounds. We had
one pint of flour a day for our alloyance. Sometimes we
made soup of it; sometimes we (made) pancakes; and
sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that way.
We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The time came at last
when we should have to reach some place or starve. We saw
fresh horse and cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped
all the flour out of the sack, mixed it up and baked it into
bread, and made some soup, and eat everything we had. We
traveld on all day without anything to eat, and that evening
we caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons. We traveld
with them till we arrived at the settlements; and know I am
safe in California, and got to good home, and going to school.
“Jerry is working in ———— It is a good country.
You can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell
me all about the affairs in the States, and how all the folks
get along.”
And so ends this artless narrative. The little man
was at school again, God bless him, while his brother lay
scalped upon the desert.
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to
the Central Pacific line of railroad. The change was
doubly welcome; for, first, we had better cars on the new
line; and, second, those in which we had been cooped for
more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably.
Several yards away, as we returned, let us say from dinner,
our nostrils were assailed by rancid air. I have stood on a
platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the
dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure
menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of
monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open
windows. Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart,
and a remarkable command of the Queen’s English, to
become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering
human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains
of offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way,
and look for the human rather than the bestial in this
Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But one thing
I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least
offensive.
The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as
high, and so proportionally airier; they were freshly
varnished, which gave us all a sense of cleanliness as
though we had bathed; the seats drew out and joined in
the centre, so that there was no more need for bed-boards;
and there was an upper tier of berths which could be
closed by day and opened at night.
I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the
people whom I was among. They were in rather marked
contrast to the emigrants I had met on board ship while
crossing the Atlantic. They were mostly lumpish fellows,
silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I
should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour,
and little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of
a cheap and merely external curiosity. If they heard a
man’s name and business, they seemed to think they had
the heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know
that much as they were indifferent to the rest. Some
of them were on nettles till they learned your name was
Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that,
whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever,
fierce or friendly, was all one to them. Others who were
not so stupid, gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say,
unkindly. A favourite witticism was for some lout to raise
the alarm of “All aboard!” while the rest of us were
dining, thus contributing his mite to the general discomfort.
Such a one was always much applauded for his high
spirits. When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was
astonished—fresh from the eager humanity on board ship—to
meet with little but laughter. One of the young men
even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then
very easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike
incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh.
I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man
from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of
course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was
rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case
evoked among his fellow-passengers. “Oh, I hope he’s
not going to die!” cried a woman; “it would be terrible
to have a dead body!” And there was a very general
movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.
There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters;
in others, little but silence. In this society, more than
any other that ever I was in, it was the narrator alone
who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was rarely that any
one listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to another
man’s story, it was because he was in immediate want of
a hearer for one of his own. Food and the progress of the
train were the subjects most generally treated; many
joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their
tongues. One small knot had no better occupation than
to worm out of me my name; and the more they tried,
the more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They
assailed me with artful questions and insidious offers
of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually
on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward
laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me
ten dollars for the secret. He owed me far more, had
he understood life, for thus preserving him a lively interest
throughout the journey. I met one of my fellow-passengers
months after, driving a street tramway car in San Francisco;
and, as the joke was now out of season, told him my name
without subterfuge. You never saw a man more chap-fallen.
But had my name been Demogorgon, after so
prolonged a mystery he had still been disappointed.
There were no emigrants direct from Europe—save
one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who
kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament
all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing
privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious
race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make
something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make
nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric
family apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even
a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is
one of the lessons of travel—that some of the strangest
races dwell next door to you at home.
The rest were all American born, but they came from
almost every quarter of that Continent. All the States
of the North had sent out a fugitive to cross the plains
with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New
York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine
that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves—some
one or two were fleeing in quest of a better
land and better wages. The talk in the train, like the
talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short
commons, and hope that moves ever westward. I thought
of my shipful from Great Britain with a feeling of despair.
They had come 3,000 miles, and yet not far enough.
Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to
welcome them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to go?
Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not
places for immigration, but for emigration, it appeared;
not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up
his heel and left it for an ungrateful country. And it
was still westward that they ran. Hunger, you would
have thought, came out of the east like the sun, and
the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime,
in the car in front of me, were there not half a hundred
emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry Europe
and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in
search of provender, had here come face to face. The
two waves had met; east and west had alike failed;
the whole round world had been prospected and condemned;
there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till
one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to
stay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another
sign, at once more picturesque and more disheartening;
for, as we continued to steam westward towards the land
of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant
trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded
as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune
in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and to be
in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever
we met them, the passengers ran on the platform and cried
to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus,
to “come back.” On the plains of Nebraska, in the
mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and
dismal to my heart, “Come back!” That was what we
heard by the way “about the good country we were
going to.” And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San
Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the
echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating
the rant of demagogues.
If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that
men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the
bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one consideration
out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change
and travel for themselves.
Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow-Caucasians
towards our companions in the Chinese car
was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never
to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought
of them, but hated them a priori. The Mongols were
their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battlefield
of money. They could work better and cheaper in half
a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny
too idle for the Caucasians to repeat and even to believe.
They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind
of choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now,
as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a large
class of European women, that on raising my head and
suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance,
I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.
I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women,
but for all that many a man’s wife is less pleasantly
favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese
were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was
impossible upon the journey; but in their efforts after
cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all
pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and
faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were
unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity,
and you would see them washing their feet—an act not
dreamed of among ourselves—and going as far as decency
permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by
the way that the dirtier people are in their persons the
more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man
strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed
slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of
skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians
entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese
waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already
that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of the
three.
These judgments are typical of the feeling in all
Western America. The Chinese are considered stupid
because they are imperfectly acquainted with English.
They are held to be base because their dexterity and
frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious
Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure
they have no monopoly of that. They are called cruel;
the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again,
that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to the
most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire.
But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here!
and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education,
and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that
must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no
country is bound to submit to immigration any more than
to invasion; each is war to the knife, and resistance to
either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with
open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly,
as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be
excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused
in the contention. It was but the other day that I
heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune
of San Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. “At
the call of Abreham Lincoln,” said the orator, “ye rose in
the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not
rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians?”
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder
and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched
the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder
and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a
school of manners which we never had the delicacy so
much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past
antiquity. They walked the earth with us, but it seems
they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike
the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old
Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive
in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit
of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster
teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old
that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy
so wise that our best philosophers find things therein
to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands
of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if
we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or
whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same
design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows.
And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and
childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not
have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld
that old, grey, castled city, high throned above the firth,
with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry
pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would
conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of
porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in
the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary
to say, was the noble red man of old story—he over
whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all
these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I
hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but
now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a
few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings
of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants.
The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic
degradation of their appearance, would have touched any
thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and
jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was
ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We shall carry
upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers’
misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should
be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have
been driven back and back, step after step, their promised
reservations torn from them one after another as the
States extended westward, until at length they are shut
up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and
even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and
hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the
Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of
Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith
of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as
were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter
of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some
ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.
These old, well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour
of nobility for the independent. That the Jew should
not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the
English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the
American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man;
rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs
ancient like the race, and not personal to him who
cherishes the indignation.
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves
no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour
on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano,
a little station on a bleak, high-lying plateau in Nevada.
The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly,
and gave me some advice on the country I was now
entering. “You see,” said he, “I tell you this, because
I come from your country.” Hail, brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this
part of the world. There is something in the simplicity
of a decimal coinage which is revolting to the human
mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly
by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of
mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five,
or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they
have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their
affairs by a coin that no longer exists—the bit, or old
Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve
and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to
two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount.
But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is
a dime, which is short by a fifth. That, then, is called
a short bit. If you have one, you lay it triumphantly
down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have
not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman
calmly tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus
you have paid what is called a long bit, and lost two and
a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short bit,
five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast,
nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which
vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass of
beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny,
as the case may be. You will say that this system of
mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have
discovered a plan to make it broader, with which I here
endow the public. It is brief and simple—radiantly
simple. There is one place where five cents are recognised,
and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth
two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a
quarter, go to the post office and buy five cents’ worth
of postage-stamps; you will receive in change two dimes,
that is, two short bits. The purchasing power of your
money is undiminished. You can go and have your two
glasses of beer all the same; and you have made yourself
a present of five cents’ worth of postage-stamps into the
bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on
the head for this discovery.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of
alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush
country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time
to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner,
outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from
underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country.
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on
the beams since eleven of the night before; and several of
my fellow-passengers had already seen and conversed with
them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways
play a great part over here in America, and I should
have liked dearly to become acquainted with them.
At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming
out from supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout,
ruddy man, followed by two others taller and ruddier
than himself.
“Ex-cuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be
going on?”
I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade
me to desist from that intention. He had a situation to
offer me, and if we could come to terms, why, good and
well. “You see,” he continued, “I’m running a theatre
here, and we’re a little short in the orchestra. You’re a
musician, I guess?”
I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance
with “Auld Lang Syne” and “The Wearing of the Green,”
I had no pretension whatever to that style. He seemed
much put out of countenance; and one of his taller companions
asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.
“You see, sir,” added the latter to me, “he bet you
were a musician; I bet you weren’t. No offence, I
hope?”
“None whatever,” I said, and the two withdrew to
the bar, where I presume the debt was liquidated.
This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,
who thought they had now come to a country
where situations went a-begging. But I am not so sure
that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more than
half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet.
Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best
of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued
through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and
deadly weary. But some time after I had fallen asleep
that night, I was awakened by one of my companions.
It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and
whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were in
a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform
and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its
patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a
clear, moonlit night; but the valley was too narrow to
admit the moonshine direct, and only a diffused glimmer
whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the
pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the continuous
plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand
among the mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted
good and vigorous in the nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountain
atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned to roost
with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.
When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a
while to know if it were day or night, for the illumination
was unusual. I sat up at last, and found we were grading
slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly
we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed
into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse
of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming
river and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.
I am usually very calm over the displays of nature;
but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this.
It was like meeting one’s wife. I had come home again—home
from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable
corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the hilltop,
every trouty pool along that mountain river, was
more dear to me than a blood relation. Few people
have praised God more happily than I did. And thenceforward,
down by Blue Cañon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and
all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain
forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level
as we went, not I only, but all the passengers on
board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness,
and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining
eyes upon the platform, and became new creatures within
and without. The sun no longer oppressed us with heat,
it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until
we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn
we could see farther into the land and our own happy
futures. At every town the cocks were tossing their clear
notes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day
and the new country. For this was indeed our destination;
this was “the good country” we had been going
to so long.
By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of
gardens in a plain of corn; and the next day before the
dawn we were lying-to upon the Oakland side of San
Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the
ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San
Francisco; the day was perfect—not a ripple, scarce a
stain, upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting,
breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first
upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward
on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken and
began to sparkle; and suddenly
“The tall hills Titan discovered,”
and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and
corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight.
I
The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a
person than General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook;
and the comparison, if less important than the march
through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topography.
Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth
of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and
Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus
the ancient capital of California faces across the bay,
while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and
forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying
surf. In front of the town, the long line of sea-beach
trends north and north-west, and then westward to enclose
the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties
of Monterey grew louder and larger in the distance; you
can see the breakers leaping high and white by day;
at night, the outline of the shore is traced in transparent
silver by the moonlight and the flying foam; and from all
round, even in quiet weather, the low, distant, thrilling
roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent
country like smoke above a battle.
These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.
It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at
the same time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of
ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot
in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling
together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles,
new to the European eye, the bones of whales,
or sometimes a whole whale’s carcase, white with carrion-gulls
and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there
along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and
green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a
surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and
down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of
these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of
the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met
and buried by the next breaker. The interest is perpetually
fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle
of Ocean’s greatness, such beauty of changing colour,
or such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air
is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.
Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.
Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts
the birds and hunters. A rough, spotty undergrowth
partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy, live
oaks flourish singly or in thickets—the kind of wood for
murderers to crawl among—and here and there the skirts
of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor
of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard’s
Beard. Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew
near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City—though
that and so many other things are now for ever
altered—and it was from here that you had the first view
of the old township lying in the sands, its white windmills
bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first
fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.
The one common note of all this country is the haunting
presence of the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers
follows you high up into the inland cañons; the roar of
water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as
in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you
have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the
Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south-west,
and mount the hill among pine woods. Glade, thicket,
and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy
tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude
of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you
as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only
harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you
gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with
freshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering
rumble of the ocean; for now you are on the top of Monterey
peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts to you from
behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your
right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and
from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river.
The whole woodland is begirt with thundering surges.
The silence that immediately surrounds you where you
stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this
distant, circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge;
you strain your attention; you are clearly and unusually
conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk listening
like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific
is a sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.
When once I was in these woods I found it difficult
to turn homeward. All woods lure a rambler onward;
but in those of Monterey it was the surf that particularly
invited me to prolong my walks. I would push
straight for the shore where I thought it to be nearest.
Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not,
sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific.
The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom
and discovery in these excursions. I never in all my
visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very dark
of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried an axe, though
his true business at that moment was to seek for straying
cattle. I asked him what o’clock it was, but he seemed
neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked
me for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent.
We stood and smiled upon each other for a
few seconds, and then turned without a word and took
our several ways across the forest.
One day—I shall never forget it—I had taken a trail
that was new to me. After a while the woods began
to open, the sea to sound nearer hand. I came upon
a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther,
and, without leaving the woods, I found myself among
trim houses. I walked through street after street, parallel
and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with
trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with its name
posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down
the main thoroughfare—“Central Avenue,” as it was
ticketed—I saw an open-air temple, with benches and
sounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The houses
were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound
but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been
in any place that seemed so dream-like. Pompeii is all
in a bustle with visitors, and its antiquity and strangeness
deceive the imagination; but this town had plainly not
been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been
deserted overnight. Indeed it was not so much like a
deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight,
and with no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led
me at last to the only house still occupied, where a Scots
pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty
theatre. The place was “The Pacific Camp Grounds,
the Christian Seaside Resort.” Thither, in the warm season,
crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and
flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.
The neighbourhood at least is well selected. The
Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the
lighthouse in a wilderness of sand, where you will find
the lightkeeper playing the piano, making models and
bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in amateur
oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and
interests to surprise his brave old-country rivals. To
the east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space
of open down, a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world
of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are very
similar in different climates; they appear homely to the
eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland.
And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of
strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the
hamlet you will behold costumes and faces, and hear
a tongue, that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick
burns, the opium-pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn
with slips of coloured paper—prayers, you would say, that
had somehow missed their destination—and a man guiding
his upright pencil from right to left across the sheet
writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.
The woods and the Pacific rule between them the
climate of this seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey,
when the air does not smell salt from the one,
it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops
of the other. For days together, a hot, dry air will overhang
the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and
aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to seek,
for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from
the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of
California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three
at the same time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a
red coal of conflagration in the distance. A little thing
will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they gallop
over miles of country faster than a horse. The inhabitants
must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the
pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the
soil are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the rains
of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains. California
has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine;
but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may
become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.
To visit the woods while they are languidly burning
is a strange piece of experience. The fire passes through
the underbrush at a run. Every here and there a tree
flares up instantaneously from root to summit, scattering
tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly.
But this last is only in semblance. For after this first
squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there
remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in
the very entrails of the tree. The resin of the pitch-pine
is principally condensed at the base of the bole and in
the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing
flames, which are only as the match to the explosion,
have already scampered down the wind into the
distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of
the woods. You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently
survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there,
on the other side of the column, is a clear mass of living
coal, spreading like an ulcer; while underground, to their
most extended fibre, the roots are being eaten out by fire,
and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface.
A little while and, without a nod of warning, the huge
pine-tree snaps off short across the ground, and falls
prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the fire continues
its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash;
and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the
earth pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the
design of all these subterranean spurs, as though it were
the mould for a new tree instead of the print of an old
one. These pitch-pines of Monterey are, with the single
exception of the Monterey cypress, the most fantastic
of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the contortion
of their growth; they might figure without change
in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and
at the rate at which trees grow, and at which forest fires
spring up and gallop through the hills of California, we
may look forward to a time when there will not be one
of them left standing in that land of their nativity. At
least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent
death; while it is man in his short-sighted greed that
robs the country of the nobler redwood. Yet a little
while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may
be as bald as Tamalpais.
I have an interest of my own in these forest fires,
for I came so near to lynching on one occasion, that a
braver man might have retained a thrill from the experience.
I wished to be certain whether it was the
moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests,
which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched
the tree. I suppose I must have been under the influence
of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my
experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great
pine tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped
so much as scorching, strike a match, and apply the
flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The tree went off
simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring
pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those
who were at work combating the original conflagration.
I could see the waggon that had brought them tied to
a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch the
flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood
into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result of
my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch
of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate expostulation
I should have been run up to a convenient bough.
“To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.”
|
I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At
night I went out of town, and there was my own particular
fire, quite distinct from the other, and burning,
as I thought, with even greater vigour.
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct
and obvious power upon the climate. At sunset, for
months together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs arise and
come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top
above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is
always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight;
a glow still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs
are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves
among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds
of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration; to
the south, where they have struck the seaward shoulder
of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back and
spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and
deadly as they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the
trees begin to sigh, and all the windmills in Monterey are
whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns with the
brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little while
till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order,
has submerged the earth. Monterey is curtained in for
the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain
till day returns; and before the sun’s rays they slowly
disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom
of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and
most chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope,
the night will be dry and warm and full of inland perfume.
MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS
The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded
by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to
Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican capital continually
wrested by one faction from another, an American capital
when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations,
and then falling lower and lower from the capital
of the State to the capital of a county, and from that
again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a
mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of
that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families
in California.
Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the
rapidity with which the soil has changed hands. The
Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and landless, like
their former capital; and yet both it and they hold
themselves apart, and preserve their ancient customs and
something of their ancient air.
The town, when I was there, was a place of two or
three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two
or three lanes, which were water-courses in the rainy
season, and at all times were rent up by fissures four
or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short
sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers
of the night, for they were often high above the level
of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would
be likely to begin or end. The houses were for the most
part built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old
for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions,
with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick
that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart.
At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and
a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors;
and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among
house-keeping people of either sex.
There was no activity but in and around the saloons,
where people sat almost all day long playing cards. The
smallest excursion was made on horseback. You would
scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two
tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of
the Cornhill illustrations to Mr. Blackmore’s “Erema,”
and see all the characters astride on English saddles.
As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a rarity even
in San Francisco, and you may say a thing unknown
in all the rest of California. In a place so exclusively
Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles
but true Vaquero riding—men always at the hand-gallop
up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel
rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or
wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The
type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly
un-American. The first ranged from something like
the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike
the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one
pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the
second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in
that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people
full of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all
things with grace and decorum. In dress they ran to
colour and bright sashes. Not even the most Americanised
could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose into
his hatband. Not even the most Americanised would
descend to wear the vile dress-hat of civilisation. Spanish
was the language of the streets. It was difficult to get
along without a word or two of that language for an
occasion. The only communications in which the population
joined were with a view to amusement. A weekly
public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to
the numerous fandangoes in private houses. There was a
really fair amateur brass band. Night after night serenaders
would be going about the street, sometimes in a
company and with several instruments and voices together,
sometimes severally, each guitar before a different
window. It was a strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century
America, and hear the guitar accompany,
and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs
mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone,
perhaps in that high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto
which is so common among Mexican men, and which
strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human, but altogether sad.
The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican;
and yet almost all the land in the neighbourhood was held
by Americans, and it was from the same class, numerically
so small, that the principal officials were selected. This
Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his
old family estates, not one rood of which remained to
him. You would ask him how that came about, and
elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from which you
gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing
men, and the Mexicans greedy like children, but
no other certain fact. Their merits and their faults
contributed alike to the ruin of the former landholders.
It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with
the sight of ready money; but they were gentle-folk
besides, and that in a way which curiously unfitted them
to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they have a paper
to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other
party to examine the terms with any great minuteness;
nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is
ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to
it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have
seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the
advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper
like a lamb. To have spoken in the matter, he said,
above all to have let the other party guess that he had
seen a lawyer, would have “been like doubting his word.”
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have
been brought up to understand all business as a competition
in fraud, and honesty itself to be a virtue which
regards the carrying out, but not the creation, of agreements.
This single unworldly trait will account for much
of that revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans
have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly
the accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this sort,
the entire booty would scarcely have passed into the
hands of the more scrupulous race.
Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is
not entirely seen how far they have themselves been
morally conquered. This is, of course, but a part of
a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course
of being solved in the various States of the American
Union. I am reminded of an anecdote. Some years
ago, at a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased
by a grocer in a small way in the old town of
Edinburgh. The agent had the curiosity to visit him
some time after and inquire what possible use he could
have for such material. He was shown, by way of
answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble
Gladstone to imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.
“And what,” he asked, “do you propose to call this?”
“I’m no’ very sure,” replied the grocer, “but I think it’s
going to turn out port.” In the older Eastern States, I
think we may say that this hotch-potch of races is going
to turn out English, or thereabout. But the problem is
the Territorial belt, and in the group of States on the
Pacific coast. Above all, in these last we may look to
see some singular hybrid—whether good or evil, who shall
forecast? but certainly original and all their own. In
my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to
table, day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an
Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotsman: we had for common
visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure-blood
Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and from
time to time a Switzer and a German came down from
country ranches for the night. No wonder that the
Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern
States, for each race contributes something of its own.
Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of
California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing
use of opium. And chief among these influences is that
of the Mexicans.
The Mexicans, although in the State, are out of it.
They still preserve a sort of international independence,
and keep their affairs snug to themselves. Only four
or five years ago, Vasquez the bandit, his troops being
dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts
of California, returned to his native Monterey, and was
seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man.
The year that I was there there occurred two reputed
murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his back,
it is not possible for me to judge how much truth there
may have been in these reports; but in the one case
every one believed, and in the other some suspected,
that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed
for an instant of taking the authorities into their counsel.
Now this is, of course, characteristic enough of the Mexicans;
but it is a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in
Monterey acquiesced without a word in this inaction.
Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed
not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the
traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become,
in a word, wholly Mexicanised.
Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak
of, rely almost entirely in their business transactions upon
each other’s worthless paper. Pedro the penniless pays
you with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel.
It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in
these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen
a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover
a debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of waste
paper. The very storekeepers are averse to asking for
cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased when
they are offered. They fear there must be something
under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom
from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist and
stationer begging me with fervour to let my account
run on, although I had my purse open in my hand; and
partly from the commonness of the case, partly from
some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition
which made all men welcome to their tables, a person
may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay,
and still find credit for the necessaries of life in the stores
of Monterey. Now this villainous habit of living upon
“tick” has grown into Californian nature. I do not
mean that the American and European storekeepers of
Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American
farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit,
and profit by it in the meanwhile without a thought for
consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned
the advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the
farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever
after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill.
So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except
that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see
Americans bound in the same chains with which they
themselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems
as if certain sorts of follies, like certain sorts of grain,
were natural to the soil rather than to the race that holds
and tills it for the moment.
In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in
Monterey County. The new county seat, Salinas City,
in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the Gabelano Peak,
is a town of a purely American character. The land is
held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which
are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present
chief danger and disgrace of California; and the holders
are mostly of American or British birth. We have here
in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences
which flow from the existence of these large landholders—land-thieves,
land-sharks, or land-grabbers, they are
more commonly and plainly called. Thus the townlands
of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How
they came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and
rightly or wrongly the man is hated with a great hatred.
His life has been repeatedly in danger. Not very long ago,
I was told, the stage was stopped and examined three evenings
in succession by disguised horsemen thirsting for his
blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he
always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter
sent him warning long ago. But a year since he was
publicly pointed out for death by no less a man than
Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well known
in California, but a word of explanation is required for
English readers. Originally an Irish drayman, he rose,
by his command of bad language, to almost dictatorial
authority in the State; throned it there for six months
or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations;
was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed
by his San Francisco Vigilantes and three Gatling guns;
completed his own ruin by throwing in his lot with the
grotesque Green-backer party; and had at last to be
rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the hands of
his rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top
of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his
battle-cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists,
and the land-thieves; and his one articulate counsel to
the Montereyans was to “hang David Jacks.” Had the
town been American, in my private opinion, this would
have been done years ago. Land is a subject on which
there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend
the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition
of titles with the face of a captain going into battle and
his Smith-and-Wesson convenient to his hand.
On the ranche of another of these landholders you
may find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation.
Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber
for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies.
The longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper
they will fall in debt—a burlesque injustice in a new
country, where labour should be precious, and one of those
typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent
and the success of the demagogue Kearney.
In a comparison between what was and what is in
California, the praisers of times past will fix upon the
Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river
so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with
chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The
Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow
river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is
falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes
a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church
the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is
filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on
the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the
day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left
to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless
and ruinous, sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation
of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breaches and
casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity
in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture,
and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple
claim to preservation from all thinking people; but
neglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no sign
of American interference, save where a headboard has
been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets.
So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their
lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by
the neighbouring American proprietor, and with that
exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of
Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our
Guy Fawkes, the padre drives over the hill from Monterey;
the little sacristy, which is the only covered portion of the
church, is filled with seats and decorated for the service;
the Indians troop together, their bright dresses contrasting
with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among
a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you
may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances
than in any other temple under heaven. An Indian,
stone-blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the
singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they
have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce
the Latin so correctly that I could follow the
meaning as they sang. The pronunciation was odd and
nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. “In sæcula
sæculo-hohorum,” they went, with a vigorous aspirate
to every additional syllable. I have never seen faces
more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian
singers. It was to them not only the worship of God,
nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated
better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where
all they knew of art and letters was united and expressed.
And it made a man’s heart sorry for the good fathers of
yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and
to sing, who had given them European mass-books which
they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who
had now passed away from all authority and influence in
that land—to be succeeded by greedy land-thieves and
sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may our Anglo-Saxon
Protestantism appear beside the doings of the
Society of Jesus.
But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution.
All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The
Monterey of last year[2] exists no longer. A huge hotel
has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets
of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable
toilettes figure along the beach and between the live
oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers,
and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations,
as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little
town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence
of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless
native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a
lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big
Bonanza.
II
The Pacific coast of the United States, as you may see
by the map, and still better in that admirable book,
“Two Years before the Mast,” by Dana, is one of the most
exposed and shelterless on earth. The trade-wind blows
fresh; the huge Pacific swell booms along degree after
degree of an unbroken line of coast. South of the joint
firth of the Columbia and Williamette, there flows in no
considerable river; south of Puget Sound there is no
protected inlet of the ocean. Along the whole seaboard
of California there are but two unexceptionable anchorages,—the
bight of the Bay of Monterey, and the inland
sea that takes its name from San Francisco.
Whether or not it was here that Drake put in in 1597,
we cannot tell. There is no other place so suitable;
and yet the narrative of Francis Pretty scarcely seems
to suit the features of the scene. Viewed from seaward,
the Golden Gates should give no very English impression
to justify the name of a new Albion. On the west, the
deep lies open; nothing near but the still vexed Farallones.
The coast is rough and barren. Tamalpais, a mountain
of a memorable figure, springing direct from the sea-level,
over-plumbs the narrow entrance from the north. On
the south, the loud music of the Pacific sounds along beaches
and cliffs, and among broken reefs, the sporting-place of
the sea-lion. Dismal, shifting sandhills, wrinkled by the
wind, appear behind. Perhaps, too, in the days of Drake,
Tamalpais would be clothed to its peak with the majestic
redwoods.
Within the memory of persons not yet old, a mariner
might have steered into these narrows—not yet the
Golden Gates—opened out the surface of the bay—here
girt with hills, there lying broad to the horizon—and
beheld a scene as empty of the presence, as pure from
the handiwork, of man, as in the days of our old sea-commander.
A Spanish mission, fort, and church took
the place of those “houses of the people of the country”
which were seen by Pretty, “close to the water-side.” All
else would be unchanged. Now, a generation later, a
great city covers the sandhills on the west, a growing
town lies along the muddy shallows of the east; steamboats
pant continually between them from before sunrise
till the small hours of the morning; lines of great sea-going
ships lie ranged at anchor; colours fly upon the
islands; and from all around the hum of corporate life,
of beaten bells, and steam, and running carriages, goes
cheerily abroad in the sunshine. Choose a place on one
of the huge throbbing ferry-boats, and, when you are
midway between the city and the suburb, look around.
The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea. On the
one hand is Oakland, gleaming white among its gardens.
On the other, to seaward, hill after hill is crowded and
crowned with the palaces of San Francisco; its long
streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east and west, across
the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like
bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days
of Drake but the faithful trade-wind scattering the smoke,
the fogs that will begin to muster about sundown, and
the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San Francisco,
like Arthur’s seat on Edinburgh.
Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city and
its suburb have arisen. Men are alive by the score who
have hunted all over the foundations in a dreary waste.
I have dined, near the “punctual centre” of San Francisco,
with a gentleman (then newly married), who told
me of his former pleasures, wading with his fowling-piece
in sand and scrub, on the site of the house where we were
dining. In this busy, moving generation, we have all
known cities to cover our boyish playgrounds, we have
all started for a country walk and stumbled on a new
suburb; but I wonder what enchantment of the Arabian
Nights can have equalled this evocation of a roaring city,
in a few years of a man’s life, from the marshes and the
blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase, as with an
overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding swiftness
of destruction. The sandy peninsula of San Francisco,
mirroring itself on one side in the bay, beaten on the
other by the surge of the Pacific, and shaken to the heart
by frequent earthquakes, seems in itself no very durable
foundation. According to Indian tales, perhaps older
than the name of California, it once rose out of the sea
in a moment, and sometime or other shall, in a moment,
sink again. No Indian, they say, cares to linger on that
doubtful land. “The earth hath bubbles as the water
has, and this is of them.” Here, indeed, all is new, nature
as well as towns. The very hills of California have an
unfinished look; the rains and the streams have not
yet carved them to their perfect shape. The forests
spring like mushrooms from the unexhausted soil; and
they are mown down yearly by the forest fires. We are
in early geological epochs, changeful and insecure; and
we feel, as with a sculptor’s model, that the author may
yet grow weary of and shatter the rough sketch.
Fancy apart, San Francisco is a city beleaguered with
alarms. The lower parts, along the bay side, sit on piles;
old wrecks decaying, fish dwelling unsunned, beneath the
populous houses; and a trifling subsidence might drown
the business quarters in an hour. Earthquakes are not
only common, they are sometimes threatening in their
violence; the fear of them grows yearly on a resident;
he begins with indifference, ends in sheer panic; and
no one feels safe in any but a wooden house. Hence
it comes that, in that rainless clime, the whole city is
built of timber—a woodyard of unusual extent and complication;
that fires spring up readily, and served by
the unwearying trade-wind, swiftly spread; that all over
the city there are fire-signal boxes; that the sound of
the bell, telling the number of the threatened ward, is
soon familiar to the ear; and that nowhere else in the
world is the art of the fireman carried to so nice a point.
Next, perhaps, in order of strangeness to the rapidity
of its appearance, is the mingling of the races that combine
to people it. The town is essentially not Anglo-Saxon;
still more essentially not American. The Yankee
and the Englishman find themselves alike in a strange
country. There are none of these touches—not of nature,
and I dare scarcely say of art—by which the Anglo-Saxon
feels himself at home in so great a diversity of lands.
Here, on the contrary, are airs of Marseilles and of
Pekin. The shops along the street are like the consulates
of different nations. The passers-by vary in
feature like the slides of a magic-lantern. For we are
here in that city of gold to which adventurers congregated
out of all the winds of heaven; we are in a land
that till the other day was ruled and peopled by the
countrymen of Cortes; and the sea that laves the piers
of San Francisco is the ocean of the East and of the isles
of summer. There goes the Mexican, unmistakable;
there the blue-clad Chinaman with his white slippers;
there the soft-spoken, brown Kanaka, or perhaps a waif
from far-away Malaya. You hear French, German,
Italian, Spanish, and English indifferently. You taste the
food of all nations in the various restaurants; passing
from a French prix-fixe where every one is French, to
a roaring German ordinary where every one is German;
ending, perhaps, in a cool and silent Chinese tea-house.
For every man, for every race and nation, that city is
a foreign city; humming with foreign tongues and customs;
and yet each and all have made themselves at
home. The Germans have a German theatre and innumerable
beer-gardens. The French Fall of the Bastille
is celebrated with squibs and banners, and marching
patriots, as noisily as the American Fourth of July. The
Italians have their dear domestic quarter, with Italian
caricatures in the windows, Chianti and polenta in the
taverns. The Chinese are settled as in China. The goods
they offer for sale are as foreign as the lettering on the
signboard of the shop: dried fish from the China seas;
pale cakes and sweetmeats—the like, perhaps, once eaten
by Badroubadour; nuts of unfriendly shape; ambiguous,
outlandish vegetables, misshapen, lean, or bulbous—telling
of a country where the trees are not as our trees, and the
very back-garden is a cabinet of curiosities. The joss-house
is hard by, heavy with incense, packed with quaint
carvings and the paraphernalia of a foreign ceremonial.
All these you behold, crowded together in the narrower
arteries of the city, cool, sunless, a little mouldy, with
the unfamiliar faces at your elbow, and the high, musical
sing-song of that alien language in your ears. Yet the
houses are of Occidental build; the lines of a hundred
telegraphs pass, thick as a ship’s rigging, overhead, a kite
hanging among them, perhaps, or perhaps two, one European,
one Chinese, in shape and colour; mercantile Jack,
the Italian fisher, the Dutch merchant, the Mexican
vaquero, go hustling by; at the sunny end of the street,
a thoroughfare roars with European traffic; and meanwhile,
high and clear, out breaks perhaps the San Francisco
fire-alarm, and people pause to count the strokes, and in
the stations of the double fire-service you know that the
electric bells are ringing, the traps opening, and clapping
to, and the engine, manned and harnessed, being whisked
into the street, before the sound of the alarm has ceased
to vibrate on your ear. Of all romantic places for a
boy to loiter in, that Chinese quarter is the most romantic.
There, on a half-holiday, three doors from home, he may
visit an actual foreign land, foreign in people, language,
things, and customs. The very barber of the Arabian
Nights shall be at work before him, shaving heads; he
shall see Aladdin playing on the streets; who knows but
among those nameless vegetables the fruit of the nose-tree
itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest
is heightened with a chill of horror. Below, you hear,
the cellars are alive with mystery; opium dens, where
the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf,
close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats
of unknown vices and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged
slaves and the secret lazarettos of disease.
With all this mass of nationalities, crime is common.
There are rough quarters where it is dangerous o’ nights;
cellars of public entertainment which the wary pleasure-seeker
chooses to avoid. Concealed weapons are unlawful,
but the law is continually broken. One editor was shot
dead while I was there; another walked the streets
accompanied by a bravo, his guardian angel. I have
been quietly eating a dish of oysters in a restaurant,
where, not more than ten minutes after I had left, shots
were exchanged and took effect; and one night about
ten o’clock, I saw a man standing watchfully at a street-corner
with a long Smith-and-Wesson glittering in his
hand behind his back. Somebody had done something
he should not, and was being looked for with a vengeance.
It is odd, too, that the seat of the last vigilance committee
I know of—a mediæval Vehmgericht—was none other
than the Palace Hotel, the world’s greatest caravanserai,
served by lifts and lit with electricity; where, in the great
glazed court, a band nightly discourses music from a grove
of palms. So do extremes meet in this city of contrasts:
extremes of wealth and poverty, apathy and excitement,
the conveniences of civilisation and the red justice of
Judge Lynch.
The streets lie straight up and down the hills, and
straight across at right angles, these in sun, those in
shadow, a trenchant pattern of gloom and glare; and
what with the crisp illumination, the sea-air singing in
your ears, the chill and glitter, the changing aspects both
of things and people, the fresh sights at every corner of
your walk—sights of the bay, of Tamalpais, of steep,
descending streets, of the outspread city—whiffs of alien
speech, sailors singing on shipboard, Chinese coolies toiling
on the shore, crowds brawling all day in the street before
the Stock Exchange—one brief impression follows and
obliterates another, and the city leaves upon the mind
no general and stable picture, but a profusion of airy and
incongruous images, of the sea and shore, the east and
west, the summer and the winter.
In the better parts of the most interesting city there
is apt to be a touch of the commonplace. It is in the
slums and suburbs that the city dilettante finds his game.
And there is nothing more characteristic and original than
the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese district
is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle
in the pie. There is many another dingy corner, many a
young antiquity, many a terrain vague with that stamp of
quaintness that the city lover seeks and dwells on; and
the indefinite prolongation of its streets, up hill and down
dale, makes San Francisco a place apart. The same street
in its career visits and unites so many different classes of
society, here echoing with drays, there lying decorously
silent between the mansions of Bonanza millionaires, to
founder at last among the drifting sands beside Lone
Mountain cemetery, or die out among the sheds and
lumber of the north. Thus you may be struck with a
spot, set it down for the most romantic of the city, and,
glancing at the name-plate, find it is in the same street
that you yourself inhabit in another quarter of the town.
The great net of straight thoroughfares lying at right
angles, east and west and north and south, over the shoulders
of Nob Hill, the hill of palaces, must certainly be
counted the best part of San Francisco. It is there that
the millionaires are gathered together vying with each
other in display. From thence, looking down over the
business wards of the city, we can descry a building with a
little belfry, and that is the Stock Exchange, the heart of
San Francisco: a great pump we might call it, continually
pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the
pockets of the millionaires upon the hill. But these same
thoroughfares that enjoy for awhile so elegant a destiny
have their lines prolonged into more unpleasant places.
Some meet their fate in the sands; some must take a
cruise in the ill-famed China quarters; some run into the
sea; some perish unwept among pig-sties and rubbish-heaps.
Nob Hill comes, of right, in the place of honour; but
the two other hills of San Francisco are more entertaining
to explore. On both there are a world of old wooden
houses snoozing together all forgotten. Some are of the
quaintest design, others only romantic by neglect and
age. Some have been almost undermined by new thoroughfares,
and sit high up on the margin of the sandy cutting,
only to be reached by stairs. Some are curiously painted,
and I have seen one at least with ancient carvings panelled
in its wall. Surely they are not of Californian building,
but far voyagers from round the stormy Horn, like those
who sent for them and dwelt in them at first. Brought to
be the favourites of the wealthy, they have sunk into these
poor, forgotten districts, where, like old town toasts, they
keep each other silently in countenance. Telegraph Hill
and Rincon Hill, these are the two dozing quarters that
I recommend to the city dilettante. There stand these
forgotten houses, enjoying the unbroken sun and quiet.
There, if there were such an author, would the San Francisco
Fortuné de Boisgobey pitch the first chapter of his
mystery. But the first is the quainter of the two, and
commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the
turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round
from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful
paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere
the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new
things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall;
everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers
at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air
and isleted sea-prospect; and for a last and more
romantic note, you have on the one hand Tamalpais
standing high in the blue air, and on the other the tail of
that long alignment of three-masted, full-rigged, deep-sea
ships that make a forest of spars along the eastern front
of San Francisco. In no other port is such a navy congregated.
For the coast trade is so trifling, and the ocean
trade from round the Horn so large, that the smaller ships
are swallowed up, and can do nothing to confuse the
majestic order of these merchant princes. In an age when
the ship-of-the-line is already a thing of the past, and we
can never again hope to go coasting in a cock-boat between
the “wooden walls” of a squadron at anchor, there is
perhaps no place on earth where the power and beauty
of sea architecture can be so perfectly enjoyed as in this
bay.
Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati
re sua familiari. His idem propositum
fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua
re agerent, ne cui parerent, libertate
uterentur: cujus proprium est sic
vivere ut velis.
Cic. De Off. I. xx.
AND
THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THEIR FRIEND
The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There
are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler
outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary
globe trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount
Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range,
none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude.
It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds
in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its
summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:
seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais
on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the
west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward,
across the cornlands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento
Valley, to where the Central Pacific Railroad begins to
climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what
I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.
Three counties, Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma
County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked peak
stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the
sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where
it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks,
and bears, and rattlesnakes, and former mining operations,
are the staple of men’s talk. Agriculture has only
begun to mount above the valley. And though in a few
years from now the whole district may be smiling with
farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart,
many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga;
yet in the meantime, around the foot of that mountain
the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken,
and the people of hill and valley go sauntering
about their business as in the days before the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco,
the traveller has twice to cross the bay: once by the
busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an hour or so of
the railway, from Vallejo Junction to Vallejo. Thence he
takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of
Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland
sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier
scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald shores and a low,
bald islet enclose the sea; through the narrows the tide
bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage
(bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in
the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing chill; and,
although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour,
the sea-fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops
of Marin County, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.
It was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and
although it is still such a young place by the scale of
Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbour
and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number
of drinking-saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools
where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high
noon the entire absence of any human face or voice—these
are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall
building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills;
and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close alongshore,
waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be plunging
round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that,
too, is one of England’s outposts; thither, to this gaunt
mill, across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round
about the icy Horn, this crowd of great, three-masted,
deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with
bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel,
was a place of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now
given up to labourers, and partly ruinous. At dinner
there was the ordinary display of what is called in the west
a two-bit house: the tablecloth checked red and white,
the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes,
the great variety and invariable vileness of the food and the
rough, coatless men devouring it in silence. In our bedroom,
the stove would not burn, though it would smoke;
and while one window would not open, the other would
not shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few
dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a
slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in
the moonlight. All about that dreary inn frogs sang their
ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a
wooden footway, bridging one marish spot after another.
Here and there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered
in white roses. More of the bay became apparent,
and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the
green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still
but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already,
at that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills.
It called to us over the waters as with the voice of a bird.
Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of
the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright
Pacific. For Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse,
over the Golden Gates, between the bay and the open
ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even as
we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea,
were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer
to the thought, one of the great ships below began silently
to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for
England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us
through bald green pastures. On the west the rough
highlands of Marin shut off the ocean; in the midst, in
long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among
the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the
sun shone wide over open uplands, the dis-plumed hills
stood clear against the sky. But by-and-by these hills
began to draw nearer on either hand, and first thicket and
then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were
away from all signs of the sea’s neighbourhood, mounting
an inland, irrigated valley. A great variety of oaks stood,
now severally, now in a becoming grove, among the fields
and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about equal
proportions, of bright new wooden houses and great and
growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine
sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew
up at one green town after another, with the townsfolk
trooping in their Sunday’s best to see the strangers, with
the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes
of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded
by our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases,
and the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers
or to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs
of the mountain by stage. Thus Mount Saint Helena is
not only a summit, but a frontier; and up to the time of
writing it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.
I
It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the
whole place is so new, and of such an Occidental pattern;
the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party
by the man who found the springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley
about parallel to one another. The street of Calistoga
joins them, perpendicular to both—a wide street, with
bright, clean, low houses, here and there a veranda over
the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there
lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and
most likely named; for these towns in the New World
begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington and
Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being
boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in
a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of
the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street
between the railway station and the road. I never heard
it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is
either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith’s,
the chemist’s, the general merchant’s, and Kong
Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman’s; here, probably, is
the office of the local paper (for the place has a paper—they
all have papers); and here certainly is one of the
hotels, Cheeseborough’s, whence the daring Foss, a man
dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of
stage-drivers and highwaymen; a land, in that sense,
like England a hundred years ago. The highway robber—road-agent,
he is quaintly called—is still busy in these
parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few
years ago, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two
from Calistoga. In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City,
fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the
garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his
Men, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of
banditti. A great robbery was followed by a long chase,
a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country;
and the chase was followed by much desultory
fighting, in which several—and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number—bit the dust. The grass was springing
for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I
arrived in Calistoga. I am reminded of another highwayman
of that same year. “He had been unwell,” so
ran his humorous defence, “and the doctor told him to
take something, so he took the express box.”
The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes
highest where there are thieves on the road, and where
the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link
between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but
has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be
brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers,
and among the famous Foss is not forgotten.
Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he
launches his team with small regard to human life or the
doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold
themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with
natural admiration at their driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy
countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam
Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness
and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses
fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let
slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived
at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I
heard it, without guarantee.
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound,
I have twice talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga,
at a ranche called Fossville. One evening, after he was
long gone home, I dropped into Cheeseborough’s, and was
asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss. Supposing
that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely
called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly
answered “Yes.” Next moment, I had one instrument
at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with
nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several
miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat
plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and
he returned to his night’s grog at Fossville, while I strolled
forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd
thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider
the very skirts of civilisation, I should have used the
telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it
goes in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs,
and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead
among the Indians and the grizzly bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the
Springs Hotel, with its attendant cottages. The floor of
the valley is extremely level to the very roots of the hills;
only here and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises
like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel—is or
was; for since I was there the place has been destroyed by
fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about
the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a veranda
and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages
are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.
The rest are occupied by ordinary visitors to the hotel;
and a very pleasant way this is, by which you have a
little country cottage of your own, without domestic
burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is
full of sulphur and of boiling springs. The Geysers are
famous; they were the great health resort of the Indians
before the coming of the whites. Lake County is dotted
with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are
the names of two stations on the Napa Valley Railroad;
and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above
a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of the hotel
enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name,
hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was there.
At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and
there also the water came up boiling. It keeps this end of
the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone across to the
hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea-fog from
the Pacific was hanging thick and grey, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before
me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and
in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move
about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing
one on both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell
in; beautifully green, for it was then that favoured
moment in the Californian year, when the rains are over
and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited
by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma
from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for
the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something
satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that
enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and
brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving
vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and
fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foothills that
enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west,
and from Yolo on the east—rough as they were in outline,
dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and
nodding pine-trees—were dwarfed into satellites by the
bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered
them by two-thirds of her own stature. She
excelled them by the boldness of her profile. Her great
bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz
and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy
wilderness of lesser hilltops.
II
We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the
afternoon. The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad,
cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden
with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena,
a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs,
and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove
of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and
colour a finished composition. We passed a cow stretched
by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the
movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red
face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of
content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain
road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another,
green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now
and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly
distance, and crossed by many streams, through which
we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the
left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road we
followed; I think we passed but one ranchero’s house in the
whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless. But
we had the society of these bright streams—dazzlingly
clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds,
and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine.
And what with the innumerable variety of greens,
the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the glimpses
of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable
thickets, the continual dodging of the road, which made
haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense
of woods, and spring-time, and the open air.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian
trees—a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among
painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans
who know the name of nothing in English. He taught
me the madrona, the manzanita, the buckeye, the maple;
he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards
from the ruins of the old; for in this district all had
already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two noblest
indigenous living things, alike condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden
gate with a sign upon it like an inn. “The Petrified
Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans,” ran the legend. Within,
on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and
another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum,
where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It
was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.
He had wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and
taken up his acres—I forget how many years ago—all
alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his
pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless years
of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the
diggings, and got no good from that; without doubt he
had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore.
But at the end of these adventures, here he came; and,
the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new
life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very
sight of his ranche had done him good. It was “the handsomest
spot in the Californy mountains.” “Isn’t it handsome,
now?” he said. Every penny he makes goes into
that ranche to make it handsomer. Then the climate,
with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the hottest summer
weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister
and niece were now domesticated with him for company—or,
rather, the niece came only once in the two days,
teaching music the meanwhile in the valley. And then, for
a last piece of luck, “the handsomest spot in the Californy
mountains” had produced a petrified forest, which Mr.
Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a
head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first came there
with an axe and a sciatica.
This tardy favourite of fortune—hobbling a little, I
think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a
trace that I can remember of the sea—thoroughly ruralised
from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the
hill behind his house.
“Who first found the forest?” asked my wife.
“The first? I was that man,” said he. “I was cleaning
up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this”—kicking
a great redwood, seven feet in diameter, that lay
there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of bark, all
changed into grey stone, with veins of quartz between
what had been the layers of the wood.
“Were you surprised?”
“Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about?
What did I know about petrifactions—following the sea?
Petrifaction! There was no such word in my language!
I knew about putrefaction, though! I thought it was a
stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture.”
And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not
quite grasp, except that the trees had not “grewed” there.
But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he differed
from all the scientific people who had visited the spot;
and he flung about such words as “tufa” and “silica”
with careless freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, “My old
country,” he said; “my old country”—with a smiling
look and a tone of real affection in his voice. I was
mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and
begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned his
English and done nearly all his sailing in Scottish ships.
“Out of Glasgow,” said he, “or Greenock; but that’s all
the same—they all hail from Glasgow.” And he was so
pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted
compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful
piece of petrifaction—I believe the most beautiful and
portable he had.
Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot,
and an American, acknowledging some kind allegiance to
three lands. Mr. Wallace’s Scoto-Circassian will not fail
to come before the reader. I have myself met and spoken
with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable
accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all
belong to many countries. And perhaps this habit of much
travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may
prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.
And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside—for
the pasture would bear a little further cleaning
up, to my eyes—there lie scattered thickly various lengths
of petrified trunk, such as the one already mentioned. It
is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were
all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at
the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved.
Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
“There’s nothing under heaven so blue,
That’s fairly worth the travelling to.”
|
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable
prospects and adventures by the way; and sometimes,
when we go out to see a petrified forest, prepares a far
more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr. Evans, whom
may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green
old age.
III
I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested
in all wines, and have been all my life, from the
raisin wine that a school-fellow kept secreted in his playbox
up to my last discovery, those notable Valtellines that
once shone upon the board of Cæsar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the
shadows falling on the age: how the unconquerable worm
invades the sunny terraces of France, and Bordeaux is no
more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petræa. Château
Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage—a
hermitage indeed from all life’s sorrows—lies expiring by
the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compellers:—behold
upon the quays at Cette the chemicals
arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising
hands in obsecration, attesting god Lyæus, and the vats
staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the
sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the
sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by
two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting
tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good
wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine
is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin
to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles
squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank
grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy
“took his whack,” like liquorice water. And at the
same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope,
to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold,
begin to green with vineyards. A nice point in human
history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian
wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage;
and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions
are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the
beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower
also “prospects.” One corner of land after another
is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a
failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they
grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafitte. Those
lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious
ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those
virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under
sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled
poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals,
thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and
wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed.
But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus;
and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of
Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best
that I have tasted—better than a Beaujolais, and not
unlike. But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to
mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell
its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing
its own name, is to be fortune’s favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the
inuendo.
“You want to know why Californian wine is not
drunk in the States?” a San Francisco wine merchant
said to me, after he had shown me through his premises.
“Well, here’s the reason.”
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little
drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great
variety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow,
stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from such a
profusion of clos and châteaux, that a single department
could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was
strange that all looked unfamiliar.
“Château X——?” said I. “I never heard of that.”
“I dare say not,” said he. “I had been reading one
of X——’s novels.”
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough
is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the
States.
Napa Valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing
industry. It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the
low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the
rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper. A
basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the
day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the
grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these
clods that break below our footing, and to the eye appear
but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which
the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the dust!
Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown,
friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
behind the fagots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man’s outposts in the
wilderness, has features of its own. There is nothing here
to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low côte d’or,
or the infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne; but all
is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them, Mr.
Schram’s and Mr. M’Eckron’s, sharing the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned
sharply to the south and plunged into the thick of the
wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a little stream
tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after
the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on
all sides, a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant
and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn,
and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of
blossom; through all this, we struggled toughly upwards,
canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually
switched across the face by sprays of leaf or
blossom. The last is no great inconvenience at home;
but here in California it is a matter of some moment. For
in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an
abominable shrub or weed, called poison oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual
touch is avoided by the most impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in
a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest
dell. Though they were so near, there was already a
good difference in level; and Mr. M‘Eckron’s head must
be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more
had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds
them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed
from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M‘Eckron’s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit
of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside,
and a patch of vines planted and tended single-handed
by himself. He had but recently begun; his vines were
young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
look of a man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock:
he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or
two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would
fancy.
Mr. Schram’s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard
in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he
began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken
ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for
long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place
is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the veranda,
cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like
a bandit’s cave:—all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine,
among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs.
Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about
the States for pleasure, entertaining Fanny in the veranda,
while I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram
this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my
heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished a certain
neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every
sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all.
I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red
and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger
Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter
with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many
more. Much of it goes to London—most, I think; and
Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and
no Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing
vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a
pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth’s cream
was being skimmed and garnered; and the London
customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in
this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine,
that it seems the very birds in the veranda might communicate
a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the
bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of
jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new
land are moving farther on: the wine-vats and the
miner’s blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bedouin
pavilions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir
of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall,
haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune;
and, fortune found, still wander. As we drove
back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers,
but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household
stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranche they had
taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County;
another, a party in dust-coats, men and women, whom we
found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure
bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved
their hands to us as we drove by.
IV
A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged in these
days to a variety of countries; but the old land is still
the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.
Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except upon the
map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms
of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices,
part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
east and west of that great continent of America. When
I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something
like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and,
whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of
Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant.
It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic,
and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue.
We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost
to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is
no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s errors. And yet
somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the
most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that
grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its
fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with
coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking corn-lands; its
quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday,
and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.
I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me
hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh,
why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no
beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
and good, can repay me for my absence from my country.
And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in
my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots
clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every
year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.
When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right
hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.
You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages
on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and
the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your
youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war
against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than
if you had been born, for instance, in England. But
somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns
more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy
street; the very names, endeared in verse and music,
cling nearer round our hearts. An Englishman may meet
an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither
of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me
of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
“From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”
|
And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scottish.
Only a few days after I had seen M‘Eckron, a message
reached me in my cottage. It was a Scotchman who had
come down a long way from the hills to market. He had
heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words
to each other; we had not much to say—should never
have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated
alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands,
and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills,
and that was all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the
mere love of the common country, douce, serious, religious
man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much
interest in me as if I had been his son: more, perhaps;
for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
countryman is perfect—like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly,
as he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind
quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of about fifty,
filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been
envied by an elder of the kirk. He had just such a face
as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.
“Hullo, sir!” I cried. “Where are you going?”
He turned round without a quiver.
“You are a Scotchman, sir?” he said gravely. “So
am I; I come from Aberdeen. This is my card,” presenting
me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out
of some gutter in the period of the rains. “I was just
examining this palm,” he continued, indicating the misbegotten
plant before our door, “which is the largest
specimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia.”
There were four or five larger within sight. But where
was the use of argument? He produced a tape-line, made
me help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground,
and entered the figures in a large and filthy pocket-book,
all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me
profusely, remarking that such little services were due
between countrymen; shook hands with me, “for auld
lang syne,” as he said; and took himself solemnly away,
radiating dirt and humbug as he went.
A month or two after this encounter of mine, there
came a Scot to Sacramento—perhaps from Aberdeen.
Anyway, there never was anyone more Scottish in this
wide world. He could sing and dance and drink, I presume;
and he played the pipes with vigour and success.
All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with
him, and spent their spare time and money driving him
about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story.
After he had borrowed money from every one, he and
his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and
when I last heard, the police were looking for him.
I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt
myself so thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in
the same way.
It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the
races which wander widest, Jews and Scots, should be
the most clannish in the world. But perhaps these two
are cause and effect: “For ye were strangers in the land
of Egypt.”
I
One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a
stranger, and that is the number of antiquities. Already
there have been many cycles of population succeeding
each other, and passing away and leaving behind them
relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the
imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower.
The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded:
they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and
when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move
elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra
in the desert. I suppose there are, in no country in the
world, so many deserted towns as here in California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now
so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps
and villages. Here there would be two thousand souls
under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses.
But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the
army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of
the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and
to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.
It was with an eye on one of these deserted places,
Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to
Calistoga. There is something singularly enticing in the
idea of going, rent free, into a ready-made house. And
to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may
appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring
of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter’s
existence would be solved. Food, however, has yet to be
considered. I will go as far as most people on tinned
meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were
passed over tinned mulligatawny in the cabin of a sixteen-ton
schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after
suitable experiments, I pronounce authoritatively that man
cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be had on an
occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along
the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend,
might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great
Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take a cow would
have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after
which it would have been hardly worth while to pause,
and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep
and an experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on
other people in this life. Mihi est propositum, as you
may see by the motto, idem quod regibus; and behold
it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour rolling
in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one
whom I will call Kelmar. That was not what he called
himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I knew it was
or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name
among the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian
Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and,
on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men. He
also had something of the expression of a Scottish country
elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a
Hebrew. He had a projecting under lip, with which he
continually smiled, or rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was
a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had quite
a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on
summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance,
what an important person Kelmar was. But the Jew
store-keepers of California, profiting at once by the needs
and habits of the people, have made themselves in too
many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit
is offered, is pressed on the new customer, and when once
he is beyond his depth, the tune changes, and he is from
thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even from the little
I saw, that Kelmar, if he chose to put on the screw, could
send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight
miles round Calistoga. These are continually paying him,
but are never suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull
goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he goes
and dines with them when he is on an outing, and no man
is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the director
of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in
modern days, their king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the
mention of Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he
disapproved of the whole scheme and was proportionately
sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed in
smiles. He had found the very place for me—Silverado,
another old mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe
Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us—fine people the
Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House, where
the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for
my health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and
was now quite a strong man, ain’t it? In short, the
place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us
on purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from every
point of Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen
towering in the air. There, in the nick, just where the
eastern foot-hills joined the mountain, and she herself
began to rise above the zone of forest—there was Silverado.
The name had already pleased me; the high station
pleased me still more. I began to inquire with some
eagerness. It was but a little while ago that Silverado was
a great place. The mine—a silver mine, of course—had
promised great things. There was quite a lively population,
with several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar
himself had opened a branch store, and done extremely
well—“Ain’t it?” he said, appealing to his wife. And
she said, “Yes; extremely well.” Now there was no one
living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more
I heard Rufe’s praises by the yard, and this time sung in
chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there was
something underneath; that no unmixed desire to have
us comfortably settled had inspired the Kelmars with this
flow of words. But I was impatient to be gone, to be
about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats
in Kelmar’s waggon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of
their next Sunday’s outing took them, by good fortune,
over the border into Lake County. They would carry
us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the
Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.
II
We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly
pledged on both sides; and a messenger came to us the
last thing at night, to remind us of the hour. But it was
eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs.
Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina,
her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
behind us, a cluster of ship’s coffee-kettles. These last
were highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin,
but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our
carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it,
some three hundred years to the six of us. Four of the
six, besides, were Hebrews. But I never, in all my life,
was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday. No
word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove
in silence, nods and smiles went round the party like
refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the
zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly visible, and,
along one margin, even bright. The wind blew a gale
from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the deep
grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust
towered into the air along the road and dispersed like
the smoke of battle. It was clear in our teeth from the
first, and for all the windings of the road it managed to
keep clear in our teeth until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley,
skirting the eastern foot-hills; then we struck off to the
right, through haugh-land, and presently, crossing a dry
watercourse, entered the Toll road, or, to be more local,
entered on “the grade.” The road mounts the near
shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into
Lake County. In one place it skirts along the edge of
a narrow and deep cañon, filled with trees, and I was
glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing
Foss. Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the
motion of the trap, drove for all the world like a good,
plain, country clergyman at home; and I profess I blessed
him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed
with thicket, gave place more and more as we ascended
to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with enormous
pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower
wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had
so often remarked from the valley. Thence, looking up
and from however far, each fir stands separate against
the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all together lend
a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby;
even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena,
comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees; but
the pines look down upon the rest for underwood. As
Mount Saint Helena among her foot-hills, so these dark
giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had
left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been
dwarfed. But the redwoods, fallen from their high estate,
are serving as family bedsteads, or yet more humbly as
field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal
mountain purity. It came pouring over these green slopes
by the oceanful. The woods sang aloud, and gave largely
of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to inhabit
these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind
us in the valley. “I to the hills will lift mine eyes!”
There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the
lowlands seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with
increasing strength. It was a wonder how the two stout
horses managed to pull us up that steep incline and still
face the athletic opposition of the wind, or how their great
eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after we
went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before
us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large
enough to make the passage difficult. But now we were
hard by the summit. The road crosses the ridge, just in
the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,
without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen
on the farther side. At the highest point a trail strikes
up the main hill to the leftward; and that leads to
Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of
elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We
came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by
the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa
Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but
all buffeted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a grey house of two
stories, with gable ends and a veranda, are jammed hard
against the hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself
a narrow cañon, filled with pines. The pines go right up
overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,
like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the
ground drops as sharply as it rises behind. There is just
room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet
ground, and then you can lean over the edge and look
deep below you through the wood. I said croquet ground,
not green; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth.
The toll-bar itself was the only other note of originality:
a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal
by a counterweight of stones. Regularly about
sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick,
across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon
the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.
I was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr.
Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for his health;
to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a
member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local
paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the
Toll House bar. I had a number of drinks and cigars
bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of
seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant
Corwin. Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and
for that bout victory crowned his arms.
At last we set forward for Silverado on foot. Kelmar
and his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday
outings, breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a
little vile boy from the hotel to lead them here and there
about the woods. For three people all so old, so bulky in
body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not
but surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile
youthfulness of spirit. They were only going to stay
ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty
long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay
to dinner? Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let
us attach them to the veranda by a wisp of straw rope,
such as would not have held a person’s hat on that blustering
day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they
proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd
old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have
concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself
and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy was patently
fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic
urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent
on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed
him to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy
said there was “a hole there in the hill”—a hole, pure
and simple, neither more nor less—Kelmar and his Jew
girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently
down that hole. For two hours we looked
for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling
trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.
Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off
on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and
stumbled through the woods.
However, we came forth at length, and as by accident,
upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with
forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado
mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up,
where Kelmar’s store had been; and facing that we saw
Rufe Hanson’s house, still bearing on its front the legend
Silverado Hotel. Not another sign of habitation. Silverado
town had all been carted from the scene; one
of the houses was now the schoolhouse far down the
road; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone
away. It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was
unbroken but by the great, vague voice of the wind.
Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting
round the Hansons’ chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home, alone, we found. Rufe
had been out after a “bar,” had risen late, and was now
gone, it did not clearly appear whither. Perhaps he had
had wind of Kelmar’s coming, and was now ensconced
among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder
of the mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be
had, were for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.
But this, somehow, was not to Kelmar’s fancy. He first
proposed that we should “camp someveres around, ain’t
it?” waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we
must take up house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had
been, from the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale;
but from this proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.
So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner
of speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by.
He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where for a long
time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character
in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her
entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that
there were still some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have
been miles into Lake County, still cheerily accompanying
us. For about a furlong we followed a good road along
the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road
widened out and came abruptly to an end. A cañon,
woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here
walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously
steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty
iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous
gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they
poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to
wait their lading, and carry it millward down the mountain.
The whole cañon was so entirely blocked, as if by
some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount
by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. These
led us round the farther corner of the dump; and when
they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble
and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular
platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either
hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front
the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and
we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon
treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied
country. The place still stood as on the day it was
deserted: a line of iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck
in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron,
a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the leaves
of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three
rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one
room was right atop of another, that the upper floor was
more than twice as large as the lower, and that all three
apartments must be entered from a different side or level.
Not a window-sash remained. The door of the lower
room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters. We
entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand
and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
winds; straws, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a
plate-rack on the wall; two home-made boot-jacks, signs
of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,”
and “Funnel No. 2,” but with the tails torn away. The
window, sashless of course, was choked with the green
and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a
chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and
was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my
first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing
by at a respectful distance. That was our first improvement
by which we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered
by a plank propped against the threshold, along which
the intruder must foot it gingerly, clutching for support
to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the country.
Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where
miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced
by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on
the air of heaven, five feet above the ground. As for the
third room, which entered squarely from the ground level,
but higher up the hill and farther up the cañon, it contained
only rubbish and the uprights for another triple
tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like,
red rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calycanthus, brush,
and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In
front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn
with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
begin again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the cañon, among the mass of
rotting plant and through the flowering bushes, we came
to a great crazy staging, with a wry windlass on the top;
and clambering up, we could look into an open shaft,
leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain,
trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
whence I know not. In that quiet place the still, far-away
tinkle of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close
by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty
or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata
propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half-undermined,
precariously nodding on the verge. Here
also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the
unsunned bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the
mountain’s flank was, even on this wild day, as still as
my lady’s chamber. But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught
tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place
otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado. I own
I had looked for something different: a clique of neighbourly
houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty
to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout stream brawling
by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and
nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round
about, as at Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and
the old tools of industry were all alike, rusty and down-falling.
The hill was here wedged up, and there poured
forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his
picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting
tools of sun and rain, labouring together at the ruin of
that proud mountain. The view up the cañon was a
glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding together,
here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging
in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
trenching on the blue of heaven. Downwards indeed,
from our rock eyrie, we beheld the greener side of nature;
and the bearing of the pine and the sweet smell of bays
and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our
senses. One way and another, now the die was cast.
Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were
not long of striking forward. But I observed that one of
the Hanson lads came down, before their departure, and
returned with a ship’s kettle. Happy Hansons! Nor was
it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that
Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the
veranda of the Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar
of the wind among the trees on the other side of the
valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
but it was not various enough for that; and again, we
thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful
for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking
in sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing
but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by the
noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened,
and let my cigarette go out. Sometimes the wind would
make a sally nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling crash
among the foliage on our side of the glen; and sometimes
a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat,
and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for
the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly
by us into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards
away visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly audible,
and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew
all night long while I was writing up my journal, and
after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven;
and so it was blowing still next morning when we
rose.
It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of
our cheerful wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose
they had reached a destination. The meanest boy could
lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole.
Boys we felt to be their special danger; none others were
of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a
kindred sway upon their minds: but before the attractions
of a boy their most settled resolutions would be wax.
We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in
thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o’-the-wisp
conductor; and at last about midnight, the wind
still roaring in the darkness, we had a vision of all three
on their knees upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm.
III
Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to
agreement, and it was ten by the clock before our Jew
boys returned to pick us up: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and
Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales
of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It
had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest
that the ship’s kettles, all but one, had been “placed.”
Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life
with a ship’s kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday.
The absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews
said nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they
said many kind and comely things about the people they
had met. The two women, in particular, had been charmed
out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been
triumphing together in the girl’s innocent successes, and
to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression
in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and
truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my
heart more good; they seem so thoroughly entitled to
happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a measure and so
free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to
be a Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their
talk. They particularly commended people who were
well to do. “He don’t care—ain’t it?” was their highest
word of commendation to an individual fate; and here
I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy—it was to be
free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings,
that they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all
this carefulness was to be careless. The fine good-humour
of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients
of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday
began again. The horses were not even tied with a
straw rope this time—it was not worth while; and Kelmar
disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a tree on the
other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood
under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an
hour, and had not the heart to be angry. Once some one
remembered me, and brought me out a half a tumblerful of
the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and
lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus
of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly,
for a quarter of an hour. I love these sweet,
fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the
time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I
could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it
hugely. And now it went—
“O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges”:
|
and again, to a more trampling measure:—
“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
Santander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
Des cymbales de Bivar.”
|
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and
songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities,
cymbals, and bright armour, in that nook of the mountain,
sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This is still the
strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should
carry about with him incongruous memories. There is
no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and
now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the
contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great
feats had been transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold
had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and
the last of the ship’s kettles had changed hands. If I
had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had
ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal
dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed
of, my suspicions must have been allayed. I dare not
guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often
we drove off merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
conversations about nothing, before the Toll House
was fairly left behind. Alas! and not a mile down the
grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here
we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown
old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we
drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation,
which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I
had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated
the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the
prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.
She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.
One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that
I cannot pass it over. When her “old man” wrote home
for her from America, her old man’s family would not
entrust her with the money for the passage, till she had
bound herself by an oath—on her knees, I think she said—not
to employ it otherwise. This had tickled Abramina
hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.
Mrs. Guele told of her homesickness up here in the
long winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and
alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort
she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—a fear I have
myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
Lüneburger Heath, an old lady witnessing her trouble and
finding whither she was bound, had given her “the blessing
of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to
bring her safely to the States. And the first thing I did,”
added Mrs. Guele, “was to fall down-stairs.”
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into
the trap, when—judgment of Heaven!—here came Mr.
Guele from his vineyard. So another quarter of an hour
went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set
forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent
but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There
was yet another stoppage! And we drove at last into
Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having
breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours
before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were
smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers, and,
now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature
of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it,
than the child unborn. That all the people we had met
were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of
servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain
in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money
we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through
the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately
into Kelmar’s till; these were facts that we only
grew to recognise in the course of time and by the accumulation
of evidence. At length all doubt was quieted,
when one of the kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his
trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told
me, in so many words, that he dare not show face there
with an empty pocket. “You see, I don’t mind if it
was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must
give Mr. Kelmar something.”
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I
cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I
should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The whole game of
business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps
that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters
and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
inhumane for that. The village usurer is not so sad a
feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire
manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed
and dishonesty of landlords. If it were fair for Cobden
to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious
of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my Russian
Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious
of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent
in the matter of his brother’s mote.
There were four of us squatters—myself and my wife,
the King and Queen of Silverado; Lloyd, the Crown
Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a setter
crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough
life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the
sofa-cushion as a bed-rock necessary of existence. Though
about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’ laps;
he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and
if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played
upon it by nature. It may seem hard to say it of a dog,
but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of
cold provender for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga
in a double buggy; the crown prince, on horseback, led
the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a second-hand
stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s
team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of
azure. Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.
Only from the summit of the mountain one little snowy
wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like
smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some
high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her
interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland
witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great
brown building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory,
two stories high, and with tanks and ladders along the
roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be
an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went,
crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched
out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering,
while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
Through a chink we could look far down into the
interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and striking
on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost
six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns;
and now, here it stands deserted, like the temple of a
forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere
else. All the time we were there, mill and mill town showed
no sign of life; that part of the mountain side, which
is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature
but ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but
the cloud manufactory upon the mountain summit. It
was odd to compare this with the former days, when the
engine was in full blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes,
and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged
with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy
was gone again, and we were left to our own reflections
and the basket of cold provender, until Hanson should
arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something
chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and
rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years
no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the cañon.
Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in
the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle. And
through this, I was told, there had gone a path between
the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west
passage to civilisation. I found and followed it, clearing
my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees.
It went straight down that steep cañon, till it brought you
out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was nowhere
any break in the descent. It almost seemed as
if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at
our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the
Toll House shingles. Signs were not wanting of the ancient
greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well marked,
and had been well trodden in the old days by thirsty
miners. And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of
sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine—a
mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and
the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage
from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran
trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking
far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a promising spot
for the imagination. No boy could have left it unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of
the dingle, and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling
in the leaves. Once, I suppose, it ran splashing down the
whole length of the cañon, but now its head waters had
been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great
part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of
the mountain. No wonder that it should better its pace
when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch,
or that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight
with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the
Toll House stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like
a place enchanted. My mission was after hay for bedding,
and that I was readily promised. But when I mentioned
that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their
heads. Rufe was not a regular man anyway, it seemed;
and if he got playing poker——Well, poker was too many
for Rufe. I had not yet heard them bracketed together;
but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended
itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to
Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave
Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could find
do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer’s office. The
floor was thick with débris—part human, from the former
occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain winds.
In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks, boards,
hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers,
above all—for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon
becomes an antiquity—and bills of the Silverado boarding-house,
some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here
is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale
of charges, he has my envious admiration.
|
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30
""" May 1st, to 3rd
|
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
$25 75
2 00
——
27 75 |
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S.
Chapman, within whose hospitable walls we were to
lodge? The date was but five years old, but in that
time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra
in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose;
we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names
spoke to us of prehistoric time. A boot-jack, a pair of
boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman’s were
the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that
vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have
given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a
ledger, or a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal
manner, to the past? It pleases me, besides, to
fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions,
may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name,
and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as
it were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that
quarter of the world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor,
kicking it with our feet, and groping for these written
evidences of the past, Lloyd, with a somewhat whitened
face, produced a paper bag. “What’s this?” said he. It
contained a granulated powder, something the colour of
Gregory’s Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was
spread widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant
powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew
up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every
moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard
somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one
around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not
unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world
like tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a
gentleman who had camped one night, like ourselves, by
a deserted mine. He was a handy, thrifty fellow, and
looked right and left for plunder, but all he could lay his
hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the
horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity,
filled up his lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped, he
set forth into the forest. A little while after, his friends
heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed,
and then all was still. On examination, the can proved
to contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine;
but no research disclosed a trace of either man or
lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us
sweeping out the giant powder. It seemed never to be
far enough away. And, after all, it was only some rock
pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the
rougher dirt off the floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room
and kitchen, though there was nothing to sit upon
but the table, and no provision for a fire except a hole in
the roof of the room above, which had once contained the
chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were
the eighteen bunks in a double tier, nine on either hand,
where from eighteen to thirty-six miners had once snored
together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps, snoring
loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through
which the sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor,
in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
there was more hay, and certainly there was the added
ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames
having apparently made a miscarriage with this
one. Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could
but look about us with a beginning of despair. The one
bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove
us at last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the
plants were all alive and thriving; the view below was
fresh with the colours of nature; and we had exchanged
a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it were
untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a
beast, not a reptile. There was no noise in that part of
the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and
heard the water musically falling in the shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that
drift of lumber—wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers
and the wheels of trucks. We gazed up the cleft into the
bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the
dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing
still in the clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay,
resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew sweeter
and sharper as the afternoon declined. But still there was
no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool
behind the shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for
the morning; and by the time I had finished, the sun had
begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder, the
platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended
from the sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us,
over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our
lodging, so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith’s forge
across the platform. If the platform be taken as a stage,
and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent the
line of the footlights, then our house would be the first wing
on the actor’s left, and this blacksmith’s forge, although
no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was
a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona
thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain
dust, and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good
fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu
seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa cushions, whimpered
for a softer bed; but the rest of us were greatly revived
and comforted by that good creature—fire, which gives
us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and
colours up the emptiest building with better than frescoes.
For awhile it was even pleasant in the forge, with the
blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on the
woods and mountains where the day was dying like a
dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived,
with a waggonful of our effects and two of his wife’s relatives
to lend him a hand. The elder showed surprising
strength. He would pick up a huge packing-case, full of
books, of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up
the two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling
mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track
to our house. Even for a man unburthened, the
ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine scaled
it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero
whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside
the waterfall of the fifth act. With so strong a helper,
the business was speedily transacted. Soon the assayer’s
office was thronged with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy,
and upside down, about the floor. There were
our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in
Calistoga. There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers
had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along
the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share
of blame; he even, if I remember right, expressed regret.
But his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from
ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress. They thought
it “real funny” about the stovepipe they had forgotten;
“real funny” that they should have lost a plate. As for
hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till they
should have supped. See how late they were! Never
had there been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor
often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before
they started. But about nine, as a particular favour, we
should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring,
and we resigned ourselves to wait for their return. The
fire in the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were
one and all too weary to kindle another. We dined, or not
to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the
nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among
boxes. A single candle lighted us. It could scarce be
called a house-warming; for there was, of course, no fire,
and with the two open doors and the open window gaping
on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow
rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy
Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled
complainingly among the trunks. It required a certain
happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from
so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to
the warm shining of to-morrow’s sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our
last spark of courage, to the bedroom. We had improved
the entrance, but it was still a kind of rope-walking; and
it would have been droll to see us mounting, one after
another, by candle light, under the open stars.
The western door—that which looked up the cañon,
and through which we entered by our bridge of flying
plank—was still entire, a handsome, panelled door, the
most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And the
two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay
for that night’s use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking
gable, with its open door and window, a faint,
diffused starshine came into the room like mist; and when
we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted,
incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night
was utter. Then a high wind began in the distance among
the treetops, and for hours continued to grow higher. It
seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our
visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only
by gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the cañon,
so close our house was planted under the overhanging
rock.
There is quite a large race or class of people in America,
for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.
Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognisable
in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements and
the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all
labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies;
rustically ignorant, but with a touch of woodlore and the
dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot
point. At the time of the war, they poured north in
thousands to escape the conscription; lived during summer
on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the
approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built
great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation.
They are widely scattered, however, and easily
recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all
day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly
as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant’s, careless
of politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with
a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence.
Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion
offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal,
following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and
drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of these
somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity
of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may
know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia,
Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin,
Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the
first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is
the form of degeneracy common to all backwoodsmen, they
are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites
or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White,
because the name savours of offence; but I may go as far
as this—they were, in many points, not unsimilar to the
people usually so called. Rufe himself combined two of the
qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an amateur
detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the
robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping
in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was
even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much
grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and
did, Rufe was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he
spoke, he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation,
looked east and west, and then, in quiet tones and few
words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was
to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
step, he had turned round and walked away again, so
warily and slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation
did he go about. He lay long in bed in the morning—rarely,
indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from
poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet
ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
devotion of a curate. He took an interest in education,
was an active member of the local school-board, and when
I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.
His waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to
him to mend it. Like all truly idle people, he had an
artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his wife’s dresses,
and counselled her in the making of a patch-work quilt,
always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste
of an Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending
gentleman in word and act. Take his clay pipe from him,
and he was fit for any society but that of fools. Quiet as
he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his
dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was
like sunshine in a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (née, if you please, Lovelands) was more
commonplace than her lord. She was a comely woman,
too, plump, fair-coloured, with wonderful white teeth;
and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large
sunbonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure
you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface,
what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her
noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson’s
rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no
mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity
between the savage and the nobleman. She was often in
and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came far
seldomer—only, indeed, when there was business, or now
and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the
occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in
his teeth. These visits, in our forest state, had quite the
air of an event, and turned our red cañon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel,
among the windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking
the whole length of Napa Valley, as the man aloft
looks down on the ship’s deck. There they kept house,
with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
number. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentleman,
of singular stolidity, and called Breedlove—I think he had
crossed the plains in the same caravan with Rufe—housed
with them for awhile during our stay; and they had
besides a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson’s
brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I
could get no information on the subject, just as I could
never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not
Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully
at sea about their names in that generation. And
this is surely the more notable where the names are all so
strange, and even the family names appear to have been
coined. At one time, at least, the ancestors of all these
Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves,
must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry
in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
form of literature. But still times change; and their next
descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters,
will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and
however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands
was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full
of business, patching up doors and windows, making beds
and seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine
and his sister made their appearance together, she for
neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he was
working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget
how much a day. The way that he set about cutting
wood was characteristic. We were at that moment patching
up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one
side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were
chewing pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied
that simple pleasure with profuse expectoration.
She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale, laughing,
tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting
his head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless
laugh. He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of
wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a
horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy,
coltish, and in the road. But it was plain he was in high
spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were
about. This was scarcely helpful; it was even, to
amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until
we knocked off work and began to get dinner. Then
Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone an
hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady’s laughter
died away among the nutmegs down the path. That
was Irvine’s first day’s work in my employment—the
devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this
time alone, he bestowed his conversation upon us with
great liberality. He prided himself on his intelligence;
asked us if we knew the school-ma’am. He didn’t think
much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had
put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were
to fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right
down? She had not been able to solve the problem.
“She don’t know nothing,” he opined. He told us how
a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled
mightily over that; his friend could teach school, he
could. All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
He would stand awhile looking down; and then he would
toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit,
and bring forward a new subject. A man, he told us, who
bore a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog. “That
was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn’t it? It
wasn’t like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with
him: I pisoned his dog.” His clumsy utterance, his
rude embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity
of his remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated
the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb,
loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete
his portrait. He could lounge, and wriggle, and rub
himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in everybody’s
way than any other two people that I ever set my
eyes on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you
were conscious that he was one of your own race, that his
mind was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of
existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy
manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows.
Above all things, he was delighted with himself. You
would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and
troubled, struggling utterance; but he loved himself to
the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock
on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.
He could be got to work, and even kept at work,
by flattery. As long as my wife stood over him, crying
out how strong he was, so long exactly he would stick to
the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back,
or ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical
strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by
and admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine.
Yet he was as cowardly as he was powerful, and
felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was
once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and
he at once refused to venture there—“did not like,” as
he said, “foolin’ round them kind o’ places,” and let
my wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin. Vanity,
where it rules, is usually more heroic; but Irvine steadily
approved himself, and expected others to approve him;
rather looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected
her to look up to him, on the strength of his superior
prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps
this, that Irvine was as beautiful as a statue. His
features were, in themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy,
uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured them. So
much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been
built somewhat after the pattern of Jack Sheppard; but
the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no
less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong
prison with such imperfect implements, turning the very
obstacles to surface. Irvine, in the same case, would have
sat down and spat, and grumbled curses. He had the
soul of a fat sheep; but, regarded as an artist’s model,
the exterior of a Greek god. It was a cruel thought to
persons less favoured in their birth, that this creature,
endowed—to use the language of theatres—with extraordinary
“means,” should so manage to misemploy them
that he looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only
by an effort of abstraction, and after many days, that you
discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf’s conceit, and standing closely
over him, we got a path made round the corner of the
dump to our door, so that we could come and go with
decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that
there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to
be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
but cutting wood was a different matter. Anybody
could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising
him, and had other things to attend to. And
in short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked
and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained intact
as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountain-side. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate;
but Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a
day, was too bald an imposition, and at length, on the
afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection, I
explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which
I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed out to
him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came
after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate
wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he
was going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit.
And, no one interposing, he departed.
So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next
afternoon, I strolled down to Rufe’s and consulted him on
the subject. It was a very droll interview, in the large,
bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson’s
patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and
the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe
announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but
Irvine who could do a day’s work for anybody. Irvine,
thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my
service; he “wouldn’t work no more for a man as had
spoke to him ’s I had done.” I found myself on the point
of the last humiliation—driven to beseech the creature
whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the
high hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine
coming back unless matters were to be differently managed;
that I would rather chop firewood for myself than be
fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the
lad’s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected
resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ
him again, on a solemn promise that he should be more
industrious. The promise, I am bound to say, was kept.
We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if
Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and spared me his
conversation, I thought none the worse of him for that,
nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to
fancy, Mrs. Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat
dazzled the others, and she had more of the small change
of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for instance;
and perhaps if she had been alone, Kelmar would have
had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a
fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world
without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without
enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time
and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps
Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was
unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way less
important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even
his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as
a sort of play; even that he would have neglected, had
it not appealed to his imagination. His hunting suit, for
instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks—the currency in which he paid his way; it was
all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was dear
to his heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was
never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his
picture in those buckskin, hunting clothes; and I remember
how he once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue
eyes growing perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition
in which he should appear, “with the horns of
some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick”
(creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.
He did not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.
He had never observed scenery. The world, as it appeared
to him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning
figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems
to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we
had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the
hunter living really in nature; the clodhopper living
merely out of society; the one bent up in every corporal
agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all
that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial
state, walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an
impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly
conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses
of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man’s
beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can
grow up into the perfection of this crass and earthly vanity.
In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded
of other men’s existence; and if he learns no more, he
learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come
scathless through life, conscious only of himself, of his
great strength and intelligence; and in the silence of the
universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with delight
on the sound of his own thoughts.
A change in the colour of the light usually called me
in the morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical
chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk
and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of
dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used
to marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an
earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were still quietly
coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which shuts in
the cañon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would
kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the
fissures of our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it
was the bold blue that struck me awake; if more lightly,
then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairer light.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness
called me. I rose and turned to the east, not for my
devotions, but for air. The night had been very still.
The little private gale that blew every evening in our
cañon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour,
had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed
not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
barracks, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning
than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and
I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the
crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops,
though it was shining already, not twenty feet above
my head, on our own mountain slope. But the scene,
beyond a few near features, was entirely changed. Napa
Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and
woody foot-hills of the range; and in their place, not
a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It
was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in
a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay
upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below;
at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early
morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms
of grey sea-vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for the
artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit
aloft one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded
dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence
of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful
to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little islands.
Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and
poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The
colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.
For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown,
I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But
the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea
travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand;
but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did
the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to
observe that this sea was not so level as at first sight
it appeared to be. Away in the extreme south, a little
hill of fog arose against the sky above the general surface,
and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the
horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were
huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a
frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure
but they were moving after all, with a slow and august
advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of
the hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by
a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken
and swallowed up. It appeared in a little, with its pines,
but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
more and then for good. This set me looking nearer,
and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains
the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as though by
some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace its
progress, one pine-tree first growing hazy and then disappearing
after another; although sometimes there was
none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque
white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain
at a gulp. It was to flee these poisonous fogs that
I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the
mountains. And now, behold, here came the fog to
besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully
that my first thought was of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all
the gaps of the hills it cast long bars of gold across that
white ocean. An eagle, or some other very great bird of
the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer pine-tops,
and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look
abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
terror, for the eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long
cry, she disappeared again towards Lake County and the
clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were
beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance
I had measured its advance, here a crag, there
a brave pine-tree, now began, in the inverse order, to
make their reappearance into daylight. I judged all
danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah’s flood;
it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out
seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a
good deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house
to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more
mounted the platform to look abroad. The fog ocean
had swelled up enormously since last I saw it; and a
few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the
Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake
County, it had already topped the slope, and was pouring
over and down the other side like driving smoke. The
wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in
calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their
long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the
ridge on the opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of
the mountain still warded it out of our cañon. Napa
Valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted
out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring
over into Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing
tree-tops appearing and disappearing in the spray. The
air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing. It
smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house,
but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.
Had it not been for two things—the sheltering spur
which answered as a dyke, and the great valley on the
other side which rapidly engulfed whatever mounted—our
own little platform in the cañon must have been
already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air.
As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied
our minds. We were set just out of the wind, and but
just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of the
one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes
down into the other, as into some flowing stream from
over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a
strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the
powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing
from moment to moment like figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.
Had this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt
more strongly, but the emotion would have been similar
in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The
look of the thing helped me. And when at last I began
to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape
from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also
part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to
overlook the upper surface of the fog; but it wore a
different appearance from what I had beheld at daybreak.
For, first, the sun now fell on it from high overhead, and
its surface shone and undulated like a great nor’land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And
next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen
hundred feet higher than the old, so that only five or six
points of all the broken country below me, still stood out.
Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On
the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was
unsubmerged; and through all the gaps the fog was pouring
over, like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country
on the east. There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly
into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hill-tops in that quarter were still clear cut upon
the eastern sky.
Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges
on the other side, the deluge was immense. A spray of
thin vapour was thrown high above it, rising and falling,
and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its course
was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops
were discovered and then whelmed again; and for
one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of
the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But still the
imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something
more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so,
to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder
would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling
mountains and deracinating pines! And yet water it
was, and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only
somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel
and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could
look right down upon Silverado, and admire the favoured
nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was several
hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic
accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every
second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but
the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong;
and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge,
but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven,
however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress,
and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah
after all. But it was the last effort. The wind veered
while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from
the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world
of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there
into the south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a
lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a
high mountain-side, with the clear green country far below
us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that season.
Now and then, in the early morning, a little white lakelet
of fog would be seen far down in Napa Valley; but the
heights were not again assailed, nor was the surrounding
world again shut off from Silverado.
The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under
nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its
backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground;
the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and
Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and
equally anxious to lend or borrow books;—dozed all day
in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep. There were
no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The traffic
on the road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a
couple in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board,
toiling over “the grade” to that metropolitan hamlet,
Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of the stages.
The nearest building was the schoolhouse, down the
road; and the school-ma’am boarded at the Toll House,
walking thence in the morning to the little brown shanty,
where she taught the young ones of the district, and
returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She
had chosen this outlying situation, I understood, for her
health. Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe;
so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short, the place
was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting
on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jennings
never did anything that I could see, except now and then
to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar and the
veranda, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and
Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma’am,
poor lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she
subsided when it was over into much the same dazed
beatitude as all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour—a very genteel
room, with Bible prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin
in the height of fashion, a few years ago, another of her
son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror, and a
selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid religiously
on the table—“From Palace to Hovel,” I believe,
its name—full of the raciest experiences in England.
The author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
particularly meeting him with open arms; and I
must say that traveller had ill requited his reception.
His book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny
Messalina school of literature; and there arose from it,
in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain inn,
a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and “Jenkins,”
and the “Mysteries of London,” and sickening, inverted
snobbery, fit to knock you down. The mention of this
book reminds me of another and far racier picture of our
island life. The latter parts of Rocambole are surely too
sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate.
No man’s education can be said to be complete, nor can
he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till
he has made the acquaintance of “The Reverend Patterson,
director of the Evangelical Society.” To follow the
evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through
scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place
a bishop, is to rise to new ideas. But, alas! there was
no Patterson about the Toll House. Only, alongside of
“From Palace to Hovel,” a sixpenny “Ouida” figured.
So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
The school-ma’am had friends to stay with her, other
school-ma’ams enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of
damsels. They seemed never to go out, or not beyond
the veranda, but sat close in the little parlour, quietly
talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep
dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep,
shallow, soft, and dreamless. A cuckoo clock, a great
rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the
echoing house; and Mr. Jennings would open his eyes
for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper,
and the resting school-ma’ams in the parlour would be
recalled to the consciousness of their inaction. Busy
Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard
indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers
for a game of croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet
sounded far away among the woods; but with these
exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and the
wind in the pine-trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence
awoke. The ostler threw his straw away and set to his
preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr.
Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all day
about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the
veranda, silently giving ear, and gazing down the road
with shaded eyes. And as yet there was no sign for
the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain
road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting
cuckoo is unknown, must have set down to instinct this
premonitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the
Toll House with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the
shock had not yet time to subside, before the second was
abreast of it. Huge concerns they were, well horsed and
loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed
in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they
charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding
a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk
and clatter. This the Toll House?—with its city throng,
its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the
bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt
bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the
great shower of letters from the post-bag, the childish
hope and interest with which one gazed in all these
strangers’ eyes. They paused there but to pass: the
blue-clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the
mystery in the dust coat, the secret memoirs in tweed,
the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of girls; they did
but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
life’s ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line.
Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence;
gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and stood
light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like
Piccadilly Circus, this is also one of life’s crossing-places.
Here I beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a
centre of pistol-shots; and another who, if not yet known
to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when
he comes to hang—a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of
whisky, playing-cards, and pistols; swaggering in the
bar with the lowest assumption of the lowest European
manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths in his
canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilisations. For all his
lust and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the
valley of the shadow of the gallows. He imagined a vain
thing; and while he drained his cocktail, Holbein’s death
was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in talk with another
of these flitting strangers—like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves
and all begrimed with dust—and the next minute we
were discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines.
To him, journeying from one human place to another,
this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr. Lillie, I have
not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began
to ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to
one, and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the
echoing policeman and the lamps and stars. But the Toll
House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet
grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
whips volleyed, and the tide was gone. North and south
had the two stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in
the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush
had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once
more contented with the silence, or the seven sleepers of
the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed corners.
Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great
barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that
dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board
for supper.
As I recall the place—the green dell below; the spires
of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that grey, gabled inn,
with its faint stirrings of life amid the slumber of the
mountains—I slowly awake to a sense of admiration,
gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for
a wasted life to doze away in—the cuckoo clock hooting
of its far home country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of
English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of the
turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in
the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale
of the Pacific.
In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.
The queen and the crown prince with one accord
fell sick; and, as I was sick to begin with, our lone position
on Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and
we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
green. By that time we had begun to realise the difficulties
of our position. We had found what an amount
of labour it cost to support life in our red cañon; and it
was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy
to go along with us when we returned. We could have
given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as
they say in the advertisements; and on the money
question we were prepared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the
Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and
from day to day it languished on, with protestations
on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong
Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last evening,
with the waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the
grade, the washerman, with a somewhat sneering air,
produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly
lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white;
but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado. He knew
it for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly
wash-house near by, where he might smoke a pipe of
opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little
earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for
more money; and then, when that demand was satisfied,
refused to come point blank. He was wedded to his
wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we
must go to our mountain servantless. It must have been
near half an hour before we reached that conclusion,
standing in the midst of Calistoga high street under the
stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their
pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most
musical inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; we brought
with us a painter guest, who proved to be a most good-natured
comrade and a capital hand at an omelette. I
do not know in which capacity he was most valued—as a
cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly;
it must have been half-past nine before we left Calistoga,
and night came fully ere we struck the bottom of the
grade. I have never seen such a night. It seemed to
throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy,
powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like
a serpent’s back. The stars by innumerable millions, stuck
boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like
a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The
greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s
moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—red,
like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset;
and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that
there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch
we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven
was one chaos of contesting luminaries—a hurly-burly of
stars. Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood
out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky
ways first grew pale, and then vanished; the countless
hosts of heaven dwindled in number by successive millions;
those that still shone had tempered their exceeding
brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering
splendour into the appearance of a common night. Slowly
this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any
cause. Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the
spurs of the mountain. Yet awhile, and, as we turned a
corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows
fell across the road and upon our wondering waggonful
and, swimming low among the trees, we beheld a strange,
misshapen, waning moon, half tilted on her back.
“Where are ye when the moon appears?” so the old
poet sang, half taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly
purpose.
“As the sunlight round the dim earth’s midnight tower of shadow pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon’s pale islet or the morning’s golden shores.”
|
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And
so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon,
and her lit face put out, one after another, that galaxy of
stars. The wonder of the drive was over; but, by some
nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit shadow in
the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little
while that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was
gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the
stars with the same mind. He who has seen the sea
commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very differently
from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the
difference between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly
more striking than that between the ordinary face of night
and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive. Two
in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics,
but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour
of the sky, the hues of the star fire, and the incredible
projection of the stars themselves, starting from their
orbits, so that the eye seemed to distinguish their positions
in the hollow of space—these were things that we had
never seen before and shall never see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our
way among the scents and silence of the forest, reached
the top of the grade, wound up by Hanson’s, and came
at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the chute.
Lloyd, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon
on his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant
“to be home.” The waggon turned and drove away, the
noise gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the
rough path, Caliban’s great feat of engineering, and came
home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows
and over the lumber, on the platform. The one tall pine
beside the ledge was steeped in silver. Away up the cañon,
a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant squalls. But
once we had lit a candle, and began to review our improvements,
homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was
wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence
grew up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had
still to be made up for our guest, and the morning’s water to
be fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these
household duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences
before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think,
in honour of our return, and trooped at length one after
another up the flying bridge of plank, and laid down to
sleep in our shattered, moon-pierced barrack, we were
among the happiest sovereigns in the world, and certainly
ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our absence,
the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons
said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a
hatchet, and two knives.
No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about
the story of the mine. We were surrounded by so many
evidences of expense and toil, we lived so entirely in the
wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in the ruins of a
cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted our
repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes,
the rails, the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two
tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the other on the
platform where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with
the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the ledge,
that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin,
high above our heads, the one tall pine precariously nodded,—these
stood for its greatness; while the dog-hutch,
boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the very beds
that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human
touches and realised for us the story of the past.
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas
near the forge, with just a look over the dump on the
green world below, and seen the sun lying broad among
the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the tinkling
water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about
the battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the
epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand
tutti of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the
cañon; the assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the
carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now
all gone—all fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion:
a family of squatters dining in the assayer’s office,
making their beds in the big sleeping room erstwhile so
crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang
with picks.
But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into
decay, was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to
other mines and other flitting cities. Twenty years ago,
away down the glen on the Lake County side there was
a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the
sale of whisky. Round on the western side of Mount
Saint Helena, there was at the same date a second large
encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for me.
Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce
a memory behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners
have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain, coming
and going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush. Last
in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in
the valley, founded the town which is now represented,
monumentally, by Hanson’s, pierced all these slaps and
shafts and tunnels, and in turn declined and died away.
“Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.”
|
As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two
reports were current. According to the first, six hundred
thousand dollars were taken out of that great upright
seam, that still hung open above us on crazy wedges.
Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest
of the remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all
directions, and a great consequent effusion of dollars,
until, all parties being sick of the expense, the mine was
deserted, and the town decamped. According to the
second version, told me with much secrecy of manner,
the whole affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of
one majestic swindle. There had never come any silver
out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to
come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have
been observed winding by devious tracks about the
shoulder of the mountain. They came from far away,
from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in “old cigar-boxes.”
They discharged their load at Silverado, in the
hour of sleep; and before the morning they were gone
again with their mysterious drivers to their unknown
source. In this way, twenty thousand pounds’ worth of
silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these
old cigar-boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral; carted
down to the mill; crushed, amalgamated, and refined,
and despatched to the city as the proper product of the
mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must
be a profitable business in San Francisco.
I give these two versions as I got them. But I place
little reliance on either, my belief in history having been
greatly shaken. For it chanced that I had come to dwell
in Silverado at a critical hour; great events in its history
were about to happen—did happen, as I am led to believe;
nay, and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution
myself. And yet from first to last I never had
a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even now,
after full reflection, profess myself at sea. That there was
some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I,
in the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper
in the interest of somebody, so much, and no more, is
certain.
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged
to one whom I will call a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him
through the extraordinarily distorting medium of local
gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a dupe to
point an adage; and again, and much more probably, as
an ordinary Christian gentleman like you or me, who had
opened a mine and worked it for awhile with better and
worse fortune. So, through a defective window-pane, you
may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunch-backed giant,
or dwindle into a pot-bellied dwarf.
To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the
notice by which he held it would run out upon the 30th of
June—or rather, as I suppose, it had run out already, and
the month of grace would expire upon that day, after
which any American citizen might post a notice of his
own, and make Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet
slyness, Rufe told me at an early period of our acquaintance.
There was no silver, of course; the mine “wasn’t
worth nothing, Mr. Stevens,” but there was a deal of old
iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old
wood and iron, and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed,
if I had no objections, to “jump the claim.”
Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with
wonder. If all he wanted was the wood and iron, what,
in the name of fortune, was to prevent him taking them?
“His right there was none to dispute.” He might lay
hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands
upon our knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass
of heavy mining plant worth transportation? If it was,
why had not the rightful owners carted it away? If it
was, would they not preserve their title to these movables,
even after they had lost their title to the mine? And if it
were not, what the better was Rufe? Nothing would
grow at Silverado; there was even no wood to cut; beyond
a sense of property, there was nothing to be gained.
Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget
what Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not yet
over; any fine morning he might appear, paper in hand,
and enter for another year on his inheritance. However,
it was none of my business; all seemed legal; Rufe or
Ronalds, all was one to me.
On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared
with the milk as usual, in her sun-bonnet. The time would
be out on Tuesday, she reminded us, and bade me be in
readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what it
was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She
received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her
fine teeth. He could not find the mine to save his life,
it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last year, when
he came, they heard him “up and down the road a-hollerin’
and a-raisin’ Cain.” And at last he had to come
to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe, “Jump into your
pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine is,
anyway!” Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much
money in the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to
the bottom of the dump, I thought this a remarkable
example. The sense of locality must be singularly in
abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over, our guest
busy at work on a drawing of the dump and the opposite
hills, we were all out on the platform together, sitting
there, under the tented heavens, with the same sense of
privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the
sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We
pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter and
firmer than was usual with our country neighbours. And
presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars
and kid gloves, came debouching past the house. They
looked in that place like a blasphemy.
“Good-evening,” they said. For none of us had stirred;
we all sat stiff with wonder.
“Good-evening,” I returned; and then, to put them
at their ease, “A stiff climb,” I added.
“Yes,” replied the leader; “but we have to thank
you for this path.”
I did not like the man’s tone. None of us liked it.
He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw
us his remarks like favours, and strode magisterially by
us towards the shaft and tunnel.
Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.
“We drifted every sort of way, but couldn’t strike the
ledge.” Then again: “It pinched out here.” And once
more: “Every miner that ever worked upon it says
there’s bound to be a ledge somewhere.”
These were the snatches of his talk that reached us,
and they had a damning significance. We, the lords of
Silverado, had come face to face with our superior. It is
the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that
they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. I
liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none
but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat
quailed. I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he
was the Squattee, and apologised. He threatened me
with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant—more pleasant
to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into
praises of the former state of Silverado. “It was the
busiest little mining town you ever saw”: a population of
between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine
in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but
champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety
thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty thousand
were put in, making a net loss of fifty thousand. The last
days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not so
bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population
was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to
wither in the branch before it was cut to the root. The
last shot that was fired knocked over the stove chimney,
and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through
which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon.
A noisy last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.
Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good
deal exercised; and I was moved to throw myself on my
knees and own the intended treachery. But then I had
Hanson to consider. I was in much the same position as
Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom “the rogue had
taken into his confidence.” And again, here was Ronalds
on the spot. He must know the day of the month as well
as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were necessary, he had
the broadest in the world. For a large board had been
nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house,
between the door and window, painted in cinnabar—the
pigment of the country—with doggrel rhymes and contumelious
pictures, and announcing in terms unnecessarily
figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim
already jumped, and the author of the placard the legitimate
successor of Mr. Ronalds. But no, nothing could save that
man; quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat. As he
came so he went, and left his rights depending.
Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we
were all abed, Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest
of her news. It was like a scene in a ship’s steerage: all
of us abed in our different tiers, the single candle struggling
with the darkness, and this plump handsome woman,
seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking
and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters
rang. Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as
many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago have gone
to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined
Mrs. Hanson’s loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she
said what was uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and
laughed and laughed again as a kind of musical accompaniment.
But I now found there was an art in it. I
found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished
to know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way
without Rufe; and why, being on the spot, he had not
refreshed his title. She talked interminably on, but her
replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of
words; and when I had made sure that she was purposely
eluding me, I dropped the subject in my turn, and let her
rattle where she would.
She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for
Tuesday, the claim was to be jumped on the morrow.
How? If the time were not out, it was impossible.
Why? If Ronalds had come and gone and done nothing,
there was the less cause for hurry. But again I could
reach no satisfaction. The claim was to be jumped next
morning, that was all that she would condescend upon.
And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet
the next, and a whole week had come and gone before we
heard more of this exploit. That day week, however, a
day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of paper in his
hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large,
dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson in
her Sunday best; and all the children from the eldest to
the youngest;—arrived in a procession, tailing one behind
another up the path. Caliban was absent, but he had
been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and with
that exception, the whole family was gathered together as
for a marriage or a christening. Strong was sitting at work,
in the shade of the dwarf madronas near the forge; and
they planted themselves about him in a circle, one on a
stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of
plank. Gradually the children stole away up the cañon
to where there was another chute, somewhat smaller than
the one across the dump; and down this chute, for the
rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche of stones
after another, waking the echoes of the glen. Meanwhile
we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and
his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs.
Hanson rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility,
saying nothing, but keeping the party at their ease like
a courtly hostess.
Not a word occurred about the business of the day.
Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but
was discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten
down before the pouring verbiage of his wife. There is
nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill
with impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered
Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business.
Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this
was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for
squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank
into our barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box,
and unrolled his papers with fastidious deliberation. There
were two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice,
dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript, and
the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this
identical piece of paper that the mine had been held last
year. For thirteen months it had endured the weather
and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder
of the cañon; and it was now my business, spreading it
before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its
terms with some necessary changes, twice over on the
two sheets of note-paper. One was then to be placed
on the same cairn—a “mound of rocks” the notice put
it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the
place for the locator’s name at the end of the first copy;
and when I proposed that he should sign, I thought I saw
a scare in his eye. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,”
he said slowly; “just you write it down.” Perhaps this
mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the
local school board, could not write. There would be nothing
strange in that. The constable of Calistoga is, and has
been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I remember
rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments
than another, it was explained; and it was easy for him
to “depytise,” with a strong accent on the last. So
friendly and so free are popular institutions.
When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out,
and addressed Breedlove, “Will you step up here a bit?”
and after they had disappeared a little while into the
chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back again,
minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was
jumped; a tract of mountain side, fifteen hundred feet long
by six hundred wide, with all the earth’s precious bowels,
had passed from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage,
changed its name from the “Mammoth” to the “Calistoga.”
I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself,
and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate
of the hour—since then elected, and, alas! dead—but
all was in vain. The claim had once been called the Calistoga
before, and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that.
And so the history of that mine became once more
plunged in darkness, lit only by some monster pyrotechnical
displays of gossip. And perhaps the most curious
feature of the whole matter is this: that we should have
dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a
dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the while, like
desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and contradictions.
Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the
days passed and what pleasure we took in them, of what
there was to do and how we set about doing it, in our
mountain hermitage. The house, after we had repaired
the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors
and windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy
and a pleasant dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and
haunted by the outdoor perfumes of the glen. Within, it
had the look of habitation, the human look. You had only
to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see
its stones, its shifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then
return to our lodging, with the beds made, the plates on
the rack, the pail of bright water behind the door, the
stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the table roughly
laid against a meal,—and man’s order, the little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted
with the rich passivity of nature. And yet our house
was everywhere so wrecked and shattered, the air came
and went so freely, the sun found so many portholes, the
golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that
we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a
roof and much of the gaiety and brightness of al fresco life.
A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should have
been drowned out like mice. But ours was a Californian
summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident
than a shower of rain.
Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for
kitchen and bedroom, and used the platform as our
summer parlour. The sense of privacy, as I have said
already, was complete. We could look over the dump on
miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded
some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little
country townships sat so close together along the line of
the rail. But here there was no man to intrude. None
but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but
at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with
milk. So our days, as they were never interrupted, drew
out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly into
hour; the household duties, though they were many, and
some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of
business in a sea of sunny daytime; and it appears to
me, looking back, as though the far greater part of our
life at Silverado had been passed, propped upon an elbow,
or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there
is among the hills.
My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I
rose before any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to
boil, and strolled forth upon the platform to wait till it
was ready. Silverado would then be still in shadow, the
sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean smell of
trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.
Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing,
but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and
the sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring. It did not
hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation,
like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland
prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume.
The freshness of these morning seasons remained with
me far on into the day.
As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and
coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing of water,
and the preparation of kindling, which it would be hyperbolical
to call the hewing of wood, ended my domestic
duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform
at my own sweet will. The little corner near the
forge, where we found a refuge under the madronas from
the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind
with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin
Grammar. These were known as Crown Prince’s lessons.
He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but
here there must have been some misconception, for whereas
I generally retired to bed after one of these engagements,
he was no sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman’s
house, where he had installed a printing-press, that
great element of civilisation, and the sound of his labours
would be faintly audible about the cañon half the day.
To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank
and slid, the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven,
rolling stones. When we crossed the platform in
any direction, it was usual to lay a course, following as
much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water
were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along
some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid
down very well. These carried him to that great highroad,
the railway; and the railway served him as far as to the
head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and
back again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering
among the stones, and wading in low growth of the
calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his passage.
Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to dip the grey
metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant
to carry it back, with the water lipping at the edge, and
a broken sunbeam quivering in the midst.
But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us
in common practice to the platform, and indeed to those
parts of it that were most easily accessible along the
line of rails. The rails came straight forward from the
shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes,
but still entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was
Lloyd’s delight to trundle to and fro by the hour with
various ladings. About midway down the platform, the
railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and
coasting along the far side within a few yards of the
madronas and the forge, and not far off the latter, ended
in a sort of platform on the edge of the dump. There,
in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent
thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the
only spot where we could approach the margin of the
dump. Anywhere else, you took your life in your right
hand when you came within a yard and a half to peer
over. For at any moment the dump might begin to
slide and carry you down and bury you below its ruins.
Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine is a place
beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at
any moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that
the platform had fallen into the shaft; the dump might
begin to pour into the road below; or a wedge slip in
the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain
bury the scene of our encampment.
I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built
certainly by some rude people, and for prehistoric wars.
It was likewise a frontier. All below was green and
woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another, each
with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was
arid, rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral,
that had dammed the cañon up, was a creature of man’s
handiwork, its material dug out with a pick and powder,
and spread by the service of the trucks. But nature
herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye
to nothing besides mining; and even the natural hillside
was all sliding gravel and precarious boulder. Close at the
margin of the well leaves would decay to skeletons and
mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
clear of the cañon and scatter in the subjacent woods.
Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not,
with all nature’s alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a
few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood
of all silver mines; the nature of that precious
rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.
Both were plenty in our Silverado. The stones
sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz; they were all
stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came the
Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles
of Indian commerce. Now, the Crown Prince had it in
his undisturbed possession, to pound down and slake,
and paint his rude designs with. But to me it had always
a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story
and Hawthornden’s allusion:
“Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper ...”
|
Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform
has another side to it. Though there was no soil, and
scarce a blade of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps
and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at
home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy
weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and
pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones from between two
blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas made a big snow-bed
just above the well. The shoulder of the hill waved
white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the
ledge and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering
stone-plant hung in clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral
was thick with pea-like blossom. Close at the foot
of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight
and smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent
of the sweet bay-trees filled the cañon, and the down-blowing
night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet
into the outer air.
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The
madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita; the
bay was but a stripling shrub; the very pines, with four
or five exceptions in all our upper cañon, were not so tall
as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them
came lower than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree,
we must look below, where the glen was crowded with
green spires. But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we
had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with
bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red,
baking angle in the mountain, a laboratory of poignant
scents. It was an endless wonder to my mind, as I
dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the
shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea
and calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture
to support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay-tree
collect the ingredients of its perfume. But there they
all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as
though rooted in a fathom of black soil.
Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We
had, indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice
or anything worthy to be called a song. My morning
comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous, but
friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a
fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending,
not one note of which properly followed another.
This is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but
there was something enthralling about his performance.
You listened and listened, thinking each time he must
surely get it right; but no, it was always wrong, and always
wrong the same way. Yet he seemed proud of his song,
delivered it with execution and a manner of his own, and
was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant
human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his
own music pleased the world. Two great birds—eagles,
we thought—dwelt at the top of the cañon, among the
crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but
very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence,
or with a distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh
impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop,
and were gone. They seemed solemn and ancient things,
sailing the blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain
where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome,
where the glad legions may have shouted to behold them
on the morn of battle.
But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes—the
rattlesnakes’ nest, it might have been named.
Wherever we brushed among the bushes, our passage woke
their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in the wood-pile,
and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion.
The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring,
and, once heard, to stamp itself for ever in the
memory. But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum
of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear
of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived
for weeks in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles
sprung on every side, and it never occurred to us to be
afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do calisthenics in a
certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the
combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any
sudden movement; but I was never in the least impressed,
nor ever attacked. It was only towards the end of our
stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating
on the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very
good imitation; and it burst on me at once that we dwelt
in the very metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle
was simply the commonest noise in Silverado. Immediately
on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the
subject. They had formerly assured us that our cañon was
favoured, like Ireland, with an entire immunity from
poisonous reptiles; but with the perfect inconsequence of
the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they
went off at score in the contrary direction, and we were
told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to
such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted
rocks of Silverado. This is a contribution rather to the
natural history of the Hansons than to that of snakes.
One person, however, better served by his instinct, had
known the rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the
dog. No rational creature has ever led an existence more
poisoned by terror than that dog’s at Silverado. Every
whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes rolled; he
trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our
great mysteries was his terror of the mountain. A little
away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the
vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines, not big enough to be
Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stones and gravel
scaurs. Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a
knoll, having paused there till the next rain in his long
slide down the mountain. There was here no ambuscade
for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod; and
yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
became Chuchu’s terror. He was an excellent master of
that composite language in which dogs communicate with
men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that there
was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that
I held holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was
in vain, and that I still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he
would suddenly whip round and make a bee-line down
the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him.
What was he afraid of? There were admittedly brown
bears and Californian lions on the mountain; and a grizzly
visited Rufe’s poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable
alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the
intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face
with such a tartar. Something at least there must have
been; some hairy, dangerous brute lodged permanently
among the rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado,
spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.
And there was, or there had been, another animal.
Once, under the broad daylight, on that open stony hillside,
where the baby pines were growing, scarcely tall
enough to be a badge for a MacGregor’s bonnet, I came
suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the
dry air and sun: a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously
ignorant of these subjects; had never heard of such a
beast; thought myself face to face with some incomparable
sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of
immortality in science. Rarely have I been conscious of
a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular creature
from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart
long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind
legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast,
as if to leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain
by some unknown accident. But the Kangaroo rat, it
proved, was no such unknown animal; and my discovery
was nothing.
Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make
out exactly four of them, each with a corner of his own,
who used to make night musical at Silverado. In the
matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and their
ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and
replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus,
children in full health and spirits shout together, to the
dismay of neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening
vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the crickets. I
used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man
that he also did not wind up his days with an hour or two
of shouting; but I suspect that all long-lived animals are
solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by nature; and
it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his
teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually
shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment
permanently in his eye.
There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado,
small but very active, a destructive fellow. This was a
black, ugly fly—a bore, the Hansons called him—who
lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He
entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a
man could do it with a gimlet, and he seems to have
spent his life in cutting out the interior of the plank, but
whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never
find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a
rest—we had no easy-chairs in Silverado—I would hear,
hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours,
and from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust would
fall upon the blankets. There lives no more industrious
creature than a bore.
And now that I have named to the reader all our
animals and insects without exception—only I find I
have forgotten the flies—he will be able to appreciate
the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was not
only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds,
the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even,
and the variations of the weather, were here also wanting;
and as, day after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and
the pines below us stood motionless in the still air, so
the hours themselves were marked out from each other
only by the series of our own affairs, and the sun’s great
period as he ranged westward through the heavens. The
two birds cackled awhile in the early morning; all day
the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in
the planking of our crazy palace—infinitesimal sounds;
and it was only with the return of night that any change
would fall on our surroundings, or the four crickets begin
to flute together in the dark.
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure
that we took in the approach of evening. Our day was
not very long, but it was very tiring. To trip along
unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go
to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the
Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires
and beds, were all exhausting to the body. Life out of
doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws largely
on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the
afternoon when a man, unless he is in strong health or
enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a cool
corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilisation.
About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned
boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my
body; I set out on that hopeless, never-ending quest for
a more comfortable posture; I would be fevered and
weary of the staring sun; and just then he would begin
courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable
but happy change announced the coming of the night.
The hours of evening when we were once curtained
in the friendly dark, sped lightly. Even as with the
crickets, night brought to us a certain spirit of rejoicing.
It was good to taste the air; good to mark the dawning
of the stars, as they increased their glittering company;
good, too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down
the chute, a wave of light. It seemed, in some way, the
reward and the fulfilment of the day. So it is when men
dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple pleasures
that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,
though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting,
yet day’s departure, also, and the return of night refresh,
renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk
we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.
Our nights were never cold, and they were always still,
but for one remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine
o’clock, a warm wind sprang up, and blew for ten minutes,
or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down the cañon,
fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge,
in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was purely
local: perhaps dependent on the configuration of the
glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot and weary
squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing
up of this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal
to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to
rise. Many a night I have strolled about the platform,
taking a bath of darkness before I slept. The rest would
be in bed, and even from the forge I could hear them
talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle
in the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination;
and yet the old cracked house seemed literally bursting
with the light. It shone keen as a knife through all the
vertical chinks; it struck upward through the broken
shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it
fell in a great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging
rock. You would have said a conflagration, or at the least
a roaring forge; and behold, it was but a candle. Or
perhaps it was yet more strange to see the procession
moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up
the plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under
the immense spread of the starry heavens, down in a
crevice of the giant mountain, these few human shapes,
with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate
a figure in the eye and mind. But the more he is alone
with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the
consideration of his fellow-men. Miles and miles away
upon the opposite hilltops, if there were any hunter
belated or any traveller who had lost his way, he must
have stood, and watched and wondered, from the time
the candle issued from the door of the assayer’s office
till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again into
the miners’ dormitory.
My dear William Ernest Henley,
We are all busy in this world building Towers
of Babel; and the child of our imaginations is always a
changeling when it comes from nurse. This is not only
true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, but in the least
also, like the trifling volume in your hand. Thus I began
to write these papers with a definite end: I was to be the
Advocatus, not I hope Diaboli, but Juventutis; I was to
state temperately the beliefs of youth as opposed to the
contentions of age; to go over all the field where the two
differ, and produce at last a little volume of special pleadings
which I might call, without misnomer, “Life at Twenty-five.”
But times kept changing, and I shared in the
change. I clung hard to that entrancing age; but, with
the best will, no man can be twenty-five for ever. The old,
ruddy convictions deserted me, and, along with them, the
style that fits their presentation and defence. I saw, and
indeed my friends informed me, that the game was up.
A good part of the volume would answer to the long-projected
title; but the shadows of the prison-house are
on the rest.
It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go
on, to grow older. Many are already old before they are
through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one’s
ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education. Times
change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still this world
appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse-exercise,
and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be
more encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome
at one age, still welcome at another? Our affections and
beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better
than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience,
and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on
to another.
These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my
life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage
of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof,
or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and
I among the rest: but I hope that our sympathy, founded
on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance,
shall survive these little revolutions undiminished, and,
with God’s help, unite us to the end.
R. L. S.
Davos Platz, 1881.
I
With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare’s
characters are what we call marrying men. Mercutio,
as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would
have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago
had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous.
People like Jacques and the Fool in Lear, although we
can hardly imagine they would ever marry, keep single
out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not,
as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference
for the single state. For that matter, if you turn
to George Sand’s French version of As You Like It
(and I think I can promise you will like it but little),
you will find Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando
marries Rosalind.
At least there seems to have been much less hesitation
over marriage in Shakespeare’s days; and what hesitation
there was was of a laughing sort, and not much more
serious, one way or the other, than that of Panurge. In
modern comedies the heroes are mostly of Benedick’s way
of thinking, but twice as much in earnest, and not one
quarter so confident. And I take this diffidence as a proof
of how sincere their terror is. They know they are only
human after all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie
about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony waits,
resolute and awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish
to keep their liberty; but if that may not be, why, God’s
will be done! “What, are you afraid of marriage?” asks
Cécile, in Maître Guerin. “Oh, mon Dieu, non!” replies
Arthur; “I should take chloroform.” They look forward
to marriage much in the same way as they prepare themselves
for death: each seems inevitable; each is a great
Perhaps, and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man
is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart.
That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the
news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of
his contemporaries. “C’est désespérant,” he cried, throwing
himself down in the arm-chair at Madame Schontz’s;
“c’est désespérant, nous nous marions tous!” Every
marriage was like another grey hair on his head; and
the jolly church-bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty
years and fair round belly.
The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our
ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry
or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold
and forlorn old age. The friendships of men are vastly
agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time
that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a
second accept a situation in China, and become no more
to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional
crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take
up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour
looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life
forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for
ever. The very flexibility and ease which make men’s
friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the
easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few
friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so
wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious
a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two
of fate—a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped
paper, a woman’s bright eyes—he may be left, in a month,
destitute of all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy.
Instead of on two or three, you stake your happiness on
one life only. But still, as the bargain is more explicit
and complete on your part, it is more so on the other;
and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is
not every wind that can blow you from your anchorage;
and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you will always
have a friend at home. People who share a cell in the
Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle,
if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some
possible ground of compromise. They will learn each
other’s ways and humours, so as to know where they
must go warily, and where they may lean their whole
weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the
settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience,
two lives may grow indissolubly into one.
But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It
certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men.
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and under-goes
a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It is not
only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond
Vincy, but when Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea,
that this may be exemplified. The air of the fireside
withers out all the fine wildings of the husband’s heart.
He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer
comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his
wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last
shilling; to-day “his first duty is to his family,” and is
fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and
husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty
years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism;
now he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you
may speak without constraint; you will not wake him.
It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor
and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women there is
less of this danger. Marriage is of so much use to a woman,
opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in
the way of so much more freedom and usefulness, that,
whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some
benefit. It is true, however, that some of the merriest
and most genuine of women are old maids; and that
those old maids, and wives who are unhappily married,
have often most of the true motherly touch. And this
would seem to show, even for women, some narrowing
influence in comfortable married life. But the rule is
none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and
women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.
I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages
are passably successful, and so few come to open failure,
the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which
people regulate their choice. I see women marrying
indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced,
white-eyed boys, and men dwell in contentment with
noisy scullions, or taking into their lives acidulous vestals.
It is a common answer to say the good people marry
because they fall in love; and of course you may use
and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have
the world along with you. But love is at least a somewhat
hyperbolical expression for such lukewarm preference.
It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his golden
shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language,
to reign here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all,
it is plain the poets have been fooling with mankind since
the foundation of the world. And you have only to look
these happy couples in the face, to see they have never
been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion all
their days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you
sometimes set your affections upon one particular peach
or nectarine, watch it with some anxiety as it comes
round the table, and feel quite a sensible disappointment
when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase
“high passion.” Well, I should say this was about as
high a passion as generally leads to marriage. One husband
hears after marriage that some poor fellow is dying
of his wife’s love. “What a pity!” he exclaims; “you
know I could so easily have got another!” And yet
that is a very happy union. Or again: A young man
was telling me the sweet story of his loves. “I like it
well enough as long as her sisters are there,” said this
amorous swain; “but I don’t know what to do when
we’re alone.” Once more: A married lady was debating
the subject with another lady. “You know, dear,” said
the first, “after ten years of marriage, if he is nothing
else, your husband is always an old friend.” “I have
many old friends,” returned the other, “but I prefer them
to be nothing more.” “Oh, perhaps I might prefer that
also!” There is a common note in these three illustrations
of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god
goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You
wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was
always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally
cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they
marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah
Godwin wrote to her brother William anent her friend,
Miss Gay. It is so charmingly comical, and so pat to the
occasion, that I must quote a few phrases. “The young
lady is in every sense formed to make one of your disposition
really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which
she accompanies her musical instrument with judgment.
She has an easy politeness in her manners, neither free
nor reserved. She is a good housekeeper and a good
economist, and yet of a generous disposition. As to her
internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still
more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating
judgment without a disposition to satire, with
about as much religion as my William likes, struck me
with a wish that she was my William’s wife.” That is
about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks,
unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style
of the copy-book, with about as much religion as my
William likes; and then, with all speed, to church.
To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell
in love, most people would die unwed; and among the
others, there would be not a few tumultuous households.
The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable
for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather
too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic
sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up
not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest, in
men’s characters. Just as some people are malicious in
drink, or brawling and virulent under the influence of
religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting
when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted
fellows enough in the everyday affairs and humours
of the world.
How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that
people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they
choose so well? One is almost tempted to hint that it
does not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact,
marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up
your mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you
could “pull it through” with anybody. But even if we
take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no
more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police,
there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy
realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their
selection. Now what should this principle be? Are
there no more definite rules than are to be found in the
Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the banns on
the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society
steps in to separate classes; and in all this most critical
matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a word
to say? In the absence of more magisterial teaching,
let us talk it over between friends: even a few guesses
may be of interest to youths and maidens.
In all that concerns eating and drinking, company,
climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be
sought for. It would be trying, for instance, to keep
bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In
matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.
Certainly it is of none in the companionships
of men, who will dine more readily with one who has a
good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, than
with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and
is melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is
no reason why you should hang your head. She thinks
with the majority, and has the courage of her opinions. I
have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product,
out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if
you could only find an honest man of no special literary
bent, he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare
bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very
obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long
ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I
found the honest man. He was a fellow of parts, quick,
humorous, a clever painter, and with an eye for certain
poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not much of a
judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes
before me sometimes at night. How strong, supple, and
living the ship seems upon the billows! With what a
dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I cannot fancy
the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with
so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace
in the last recesses of the heart. And yet he thought,
and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida
was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If
there were more people of his honesty, this would be
about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is
plentiful, but courage that is rare. And what have we in
place? How many, who think no otherwise than the
young painter, have we not heard disbursing second-hand
hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best
of critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were
returned on you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm
about art is become a function of the average female
being, which she performs with precision and a sort of
haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated
machine. Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is
carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the
best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments.
When you remember that, you will be tempted to put
things strongly, and say you will marry no one who is
not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a
distaste for poetry and painting.
The word “facts” is, in some ways, crucial. I have
spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians
and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen
in bird’s-eye neckcloths; and each understood the
word “facts” in an occult sense of his own. Try as I
might, I could get no nearer the principle of their division.
What was essential to them seemed to me trivial or untrue.
We could come to no compromise as to what was, or what
was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we pleased,
we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along
the sky-line and different constellations overhead. We had
each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed
more than anything else, and which discoloured all experience
to its own shade. How would you have people agree,
when one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where
there should be community between man and wife. They
should be agreed on their catchword in “facts of religion,”
or “facts of science,” or “society, my dear”; for without
such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain upon
the mind. “About as much religion as my William likes,”
in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple
of any William and his spouse. For there are differences
which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian
must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine
Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the Successful
Merchant! The best of men and the best of women
may sometimes live together all their lives, and for want
of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each
other lost spirits to the end.
A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for
people who would spend years together and not bore
themselves to death. But the talent, like the agreement,
must be for and about life. To dwell happily together
they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and
born with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman
must be talented as a woman, and it will not much matter
although she is talented in nothing else. She must know
her métier de femme, and have a fine touch for the affections.
And it is more important that a person should be a good
gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends
and the thousand and one nothings of the day and hour,
than that she should speak with the tongues of men and
angels; for a while together by the fire happens more
frequently in marriage than the presence of a distinguished
foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the
same sort of jests, and have many a story of “grouse in
the gun-room,” many an old joke between them which
time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation
for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and
better sounding in the world’s ears. You could read
Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a
joke with some one else. You can forgive people who
do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition;
but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in
your eyes or staring when you were in a fit of laughter,
would go some way towards a dissolution of the
marriage.
I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability,
could never so much as understand the meaning of the
word politics, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs
from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her
about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday
existence—the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life
turns—and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant,
and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in
mind, this same woman has a share of the higher and
more poetical understanding, frank interest in things for
their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most
common. She is not to be deceived by custom, or made
to think a mystery solved when it is repeated. I have
heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over the
human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us
walk very contentedly in the little lit circle of their own
reason, and have to be reminded of what lies without by
specious and clamant exceptions—earthquakes, eruptions
of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid-air at a séance, and
the like—a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no
despicable gift. I will own I think it a better sort of
mind than goes necessarily with the clearest views on
public business. It will wash. It will find something
to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of
pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine
myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and
the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on
the other side of the hearth held the most enlightened
opinions on the franchise or the ballot.
The question of professions, in as far as they regard
marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days,
but it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it,
I would never marry a wife who wrote. The practice of
letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an
hour or two’s work, all the more human portion of the
author is extinct; he will bully, backbite, and speak
daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better. But painting,
on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because so
much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is
almost entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual
labour which offers a continual series of successes, and so
tickles a man, through his vanity, into good humour. Alas!
in letters there is nothing of this sort. You may write as
beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something
else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops
and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law
stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed,
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source
of livelihood, when he copied out the “Héloïse” for dilettante
ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric
prudence which guided him among so many thousand
follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the
genus irritabile thus to add something of skilled labour
to intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so
doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there
is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we
have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right
or wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right
tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous stroke with
his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors;
and the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the “tranquillising
influence” of the green earth, counterbalance
the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable,
and prosaic.
A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage
of love, for absences are a good influence in love
and keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst
man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently
torn open and the solder has never time to set.
Men who fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or
gather sea-weeds, will make admirable husbands; and a
little amateur painting in water-colour shows the innocent
and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates are to
be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their
hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an
infinity of acquaintances and are not chargeable with any
one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the
wife’s influence. I will not say they are the best of men,
but they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable
women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be
noticed that those who have loved once or twice already
are so much the better educated to a woman’s hand; the
bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable
mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of
civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule)
no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who
does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this “ignoble
tabagie,” as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world.
Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy
apart from thought or work; to provident women this
will seem no evil influence in married life. Whatever
keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering
fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes
for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for
domestic happiness.
These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably
amuse him more when he differs than when he
agrees with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody
will follow my advice. But the last word is of more
concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it
attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.
They have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and
currents, so often sailed for islands in the air or lain
becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for
solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run
their sea-sick, weary barque upon the dashing rocks. It
seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and
realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on
summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when
we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will
sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood,
they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil
and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil’s.
To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing
faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world
keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is
like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed
of roses.
II
Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.
From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions
we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and
better conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge
it needless to deserve them. I think it improbable that
I shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army like
Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in
the paths of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope
prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I shall
combine all these various excellences in my own person,
and go marching down to posterity with divine honours.
There is nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of
ourselves. About ourselves, about our aspirations and
delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in a delicious
vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have forgotten
Tom Sawyer’s aspiration: “Ah, if he could only
die temporarily!” Or, perhaps, better still, the inward
resolution of the two pirates, that “so long as they
remained in that business, their piracies should not again
be sullied with the crime of stealing.” Here we recognise
the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased,—well,
when?—not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps,
altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly,
to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian
period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation,
still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers,
so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth,
when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor
of England. We advance in years somewhat in the
manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold
with an outpost, and still keep open our communications
with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.
There is our true base; that is not only the beginning,
but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather
William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted
forest of his boyhood.
The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous
irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in questions
of conduct. There is a character in the “Pilgrim’s
Progress,” one Mr. “Linger-after-Lust,” with whom I
fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among
the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the
moment of defeat; one who, after eighty years of contrary
experience, will believe it possible to continue in
the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft.
Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable
turning-point in our career. Any overt act, above all, is
felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A drunkard
takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not help
him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to
make and break his little vows? And yet I have not
heard that he was discouraged in the end. By such
steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid
fellow hies him to the dentist’s while the tooth is stinging.
But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you
can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There
is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the “sanctimonious
ceremony” of marriage leaves the man unchanged.
This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For
there is something in marriage so natural and inviting,
that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease;
it offers to bury for ever many aching preoccupations;
it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company through
life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive
kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is
approached not only through the delights of courtship,
but by a public performance and repeated legal signatures.
A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him if he cannot
be good and fortunate and happy within such august
circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in a man’s life
so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For
years, let us suppose, you have been making the most
indifferent business of your career. Your experience has
not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than
Paul’s or Horace’s; like them, you have seen and desired
the good that you were not able to accomplish; like
them, you have done the evil that you loathed. You
have walked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, according
to your habit of body, remembering, with dismal surprise,
your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been
sometimes tempted to withdraw entirely from this game
of life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws
from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen
back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply
smarted for your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive
phrase, that you were nobody’s enemy but your own.
And then you have been made aware of what was beautiful
and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your
behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile
the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you
are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said
nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you
have recognised that yours was quite a special case,
and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these
apologies; let us agree that you are nobody’s enemy but
your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral
cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with
the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one
thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree:—we
can never agree to have you marry. What! you have
had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and
now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the
management of some one else’s? Because you have been
unfaithful in a very little, you propose yourself to be a
ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by such a step
of all remaining consolations and excuses. You are no
longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your
wife’s also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern
attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only
half responsible, since you came there by no choice or
movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take
things on your own authority: God made you, but you
marry yourself; and for all that your wife suffers, no one
is responsible but you. A man must be very certain of
his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave
man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally
missed your way in life, with consequences that you still
deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife’s hand,
and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is
your wife, you observe, whom you select. Her, whose
happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim.
You would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or
bad investment. If she were to marry some one else,
how you would tremble for her fate! If she were only
your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how
doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no
better than yourself!
Times are changed with him who marries; there are
no more by-path meadows where you may innocently
linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to
the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even
wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect
when you have a wife to support. Suppose, after you
are married, one of those little slips were to befall you.
What happened last November might surely happen
February next. They may have annoyed you at the
time, because they were not what you had meant; but
how will they annoy you in the future, and how will they
shake the fabric of your wife’s confidence and peace!
A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro
of a life that you shrank from too particularly realising;
you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your
conscience; you would recognise your failures with a nod,
and so, good day. But the time for these reserves is over.
You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the
scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind’s
eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight
and put a name upon your actions. And your witness is
not only the judge, but the victim of your sins; not only
can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she
must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And
observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen
precisely her to be your spy, whose esteem you value
highest, and whom you have already taught to think you
better than you are. You may think you had a conscience
and believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife?
Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and
consciously performed their part in life before those
marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and
stood by their bedside in the morning when they woke;
and all about their ancient cities, where they bought and
sold or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand
some symbol of the things that are outside of man.
These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art,
which told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the
same lesson, if you will—but how harrowingly taught!—when
the woman you respect shall weep from your unkindness
or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor
girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall:
you cannot set aside your wife. To marry is to domesticate
the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there
is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.
And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem
than mere single virtue; for in marriage there are two
ideals to be realised. A girl, it is true, has always lived
in a glass house among reproving relatives, whose word
was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judgments
and take the key submissively from dear papa; and it is
wonderful how swiftly she can change her tune into the
husband’s. Her morality has been, too often, an affair
of precept and conformity. But in the case of a bachelor
who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy and freedom,
his moral judgments have been passed in some
accordance with his nature. His sins were always sins
in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did
some act against his clear conviction; the light that he
walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when
two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into
one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge
welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters
so much how life appears to one; one must consult
another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the
other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing
to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife.
For her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous
judgments, and go crookedly about my life. How, then,
in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour
bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are
you to put aside love’s pleadings? How are you, the
apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi
of precision, and, after these years of ragged practice,
pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out?
In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular
peril to morality in married life. Daily they drop
a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while continue
to accept these changelings with a gross complacency.
At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero
sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee;
finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and,
in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees for ever.
Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man,
and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when
this is the case, although it makes the firmer marriage,
a thick additional veil of misconception hangs above
the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat
rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman, myself, I
daresay I should hold the reverse; and at least we all
enter more or less wholly into one or other of these camps.
A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions
will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of
the under side of man; and the most masculine and direct
of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out
like a telescope into successive lengths of personation.
Alas! for the man knowing her to be at heart more candid
than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these
mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of
each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other.
Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar
divergencies, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this
life, which pass current among us as the wisdom of the
elders, this difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious
lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats
nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and
sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity
falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little
devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a talebearer,
a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy,
and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her
Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted
to the ends of art, by the companion figure of
Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education
of young men. That doctrine of the excellence
of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false.
It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry
that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike,
frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully
than yours.
But it is the object of a liberal education not only
to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to
magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a
creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally
by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of
catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the
first, there is shown but a very small field of experience,
and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and
action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally
widened. They are taught to follow different virtues,
to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each
other, in different achievements. What should be the
result of such a course? When a horse has run away,
and the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed
themselves of a rein, we know the end of that
conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw
youth and a green girl fluted and fiddled in a dancing
measure into that most serious contract, and setting out
upon life’s journey with ideas so monstrously divergent,
I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but that
any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly, as
a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing
vice; what is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he
will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea
of contrarieties must this green couple steer their way; and
contrive to love each other; and to respect, forsooth; and
be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men
and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.
And yet, when all has been said, the man who should
hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who
runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion for our
virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward
pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we
be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from
those that come to us. The noblest passage in one of
the noblest books of this century, is where the old pope
glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and but imperfect
triumph, of the younger hero.[3] Without some such
manly note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience
at all. But there is a vast difference between teaching
flight, and showing points of peril that a man may march
the more warily. And the true conclusion of this paper
is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that
shining and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a
blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with
the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.
Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a
knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance
and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified
success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and
takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope
is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days,
and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is
indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of
elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his
infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has
come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of
honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the
last, he knows that she is like himself—erring, thoughtless,
and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling
radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective
qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but
ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of
the world; that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet
are excellent playthings; that hope and love address
themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly
held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself
are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in
imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable
and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind
lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce
find one, but, by some generous reading, will become to
you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life.
So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness,
and easily forgive the failings of your friend.
Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of
blemishes; for the faults of married people continually
spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to
meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between
the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to
encourage and console.
Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.”
III
ON FALLING IN LOVE
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
There is only one event in life which really astonishes a
man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything
else befalls him very much as he expected. Event
succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety indeed, but
with little that is either startling or intense; they form
together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man’s own reflections; and he falls
naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind,
and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects
to-morrow to be after the pattern of to-day and yesterday.
He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friends and
acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes
look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible
expectation. But it is a subject which neither
intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher
to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that
is not a piece of the person’s experience. I remember
an anecdote of a well-known French theorist, who was
debating a point eagerly in his cénacle. It was objected
against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon
he arose, left the society, and made it a point not to
return to it until he considered that he had supplied the
defect. “Now,” he remarked, on entering, “now I am in
a position to continue the discussion.” Perhaps he had
not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but
the story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an
apologue to readers of this essay.
When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not
without something of the nature of dismay that the man
finds himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal
with commanding emotions instead of the easy dislikes
and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days;
and he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of
which he had not yet suspected the existence. Falling in
love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which
we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and
reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with
the cause. Two persons, neither of them it may be, very
amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a
little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen
or so of times in the experience of either with no great
result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at
once into that state in which another person becomes to
us the very gist and centre-point of God’s creation, and demolishes
our laborious theories with a smile; in which our
ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that
even the trivial cares of our own person become so many
acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into
a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and
desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances
look on in stupor, and ask each other, with
almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that
woman, or such-an-one in that man. I am sure, gentlemen,
I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot think what
the women mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo
Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life, and step
forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his.
But of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves
men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never
saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love—no, nor
read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps
Goethe in his youth. About women I entertain a somewhat
different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune
to be a man.
There are many matters in which you may waylay
Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high
thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more
that forms a part of this or the other person’s spiritual bill
of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can
dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the
way of every one to fall in love. You know the difficulty
Shakespeare was put into when Queen Elizabeth asked
him to show Falstaff in love. I do not believe that
Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for
a passage or two in “Rob Roy,” would give me very much
the same effect. These are great names and (what is more
to the purpose) strong, healthy, high-strung, and generous
natures, of whom the reverse might have been expected.
As for the innumerable army of anæmic and tailorish persons
who occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety,
it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any such
situation as a love-affair. A wet rag goes safely by the
fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many
lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under
some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical
moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or
lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never
get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and
determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to
prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick
of time. And then there is a fine solid sort of man, who
goes on from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty
times, will continue imperturbably declaring, amid the
astonished consideration of men and angels, until he has
a favourable answer. I daresay, if one were a woman,
one would like to marry a man who was capable of doing
this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a little
bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages
in which one of the parties has been thus battered
into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation.
Love should run out to meet love with open arms.
Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into
love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a
pair of children venturing together into a dark room.
From the first moment when they see each other, with
a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing
pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression
of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is
here no declaration, properly so called; the feeling is so
plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it
is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman’s.
This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial
as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of
years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and
awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had
found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any
enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned
his back upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed
himself to look exclusively on what was common
and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind
of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and
witty, or beautiful, wilfully forwent these advantages. He
joined himself to the following of what, in the old mythology
of love, was prettily called nonchaloir; and in an
odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, a preference
for selfish liberty, and a great dash of that fear with which
honest people regard serious interests, kept himself back
from the straightforward course of life among certain
selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed,
like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart,
which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last year,
gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregularly in
his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or
seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory,
he must have lived his past life between sleep and waking,
or with the pre-occupied attention of a brown study. He
is practically incommoded by the generosity of his feelings,
smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit of
looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But it
is not at all within the province of a prose essayist to
give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the
thing has been done already, and that to admiration. In
“Adelaïde,” in Tennyson’s “Maud,” and in some of Heine’s
songs, you get the absolute expression of this midsummer
spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love;
although they tell me some German critics are of a different
opinion, probably the same who would have us
think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in love,
and no mistake. That lay figure, Marius, in “Les Misérables,”
is also a genuine case in his own way, and worth
observation. A good many of George Sand’s people are
thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George
Meredith’s. Altogether, there is plenty to read on the
subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he
has the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man
may occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that
land of Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven,
and within sight of the City of Love. There let him
sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illusions.
One thing that accompanies the passion in its first
blush is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not
quite see how) that from having a very supreme sense
of pleasure in all parts of life—in lying down to sleep, in
waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be—the
lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial for
the rest of the world and highly meritorious in himself.
Our race has never been able contentedly to suppose that
the noise of its wars, conducted by a few young gentlemen
in a corner of an inconsiderable star, does not re-echo
among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable
effect. In much the same taste, when people find a great
to-do in their own breasts, they imagine it must have
some influence in their neighbourhood. The presence of
the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems
as if it must be the best thing possible for everybody else.
They are half inclined to fancy it is because of them and
their love that the sky is blue and the sun shines. And
certainly the weather is usually fine while people are
courting.... In point of fact, although the happy
man feels very kindly towards others of his own sex, there
is apt to be something too much of the magnifico in his
demeanour. If people grow presuming and self-important
over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they
will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without
some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to
love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted
lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other
men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance
of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To
women they feel very nobly, very purely, and very
generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-Arcs; but
this does not come out in their behaviour; and they treat
them to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of
fatuity. I am not quite certain that women do not like
this sort of thing; but really, after having bemused myself
over “Daniel Deronda,” I have given up trying to understand
what they like.
If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous
superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow
blessed to others, and everybody is made happier in their
happiness, would serve at least to keep love generous and
greathearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after
all. Other lovers are hugely interested. They strike the
nicest balance between pity and approval, when they see
people aping the greatness of their own sentiments. It is
an understood thing in the play, that while the young
gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation is
being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing
up, between the footman and the singing chambermaid.
As people are generally cast for the leading parts in their
own imaginations, the reader can apply the parallel to
real life without much chance of going wrong. In short,
they are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep-seated
as their own, but they like dearly to see it going
forward. And love, considered as a spectacle, must have
attractions for many who are not of the confraternity.
The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the
novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human
being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness
without indulgence and sympathy. For nature
commends itself to people with a most insinuating art;
the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset;
and you may be as pacific or as coldblooded as
you will, but you cannot help some emotion when you
read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of lovers
in the lane.
Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world
at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between
the sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the
lover’s grand intention. It is the happiness of the other
that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not
possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride,
humility, pity, and passion, which are excited by a look
of happy love or an unexpected caress. To make one’s
self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do
anything and all things that puff out the character and
attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others,
is not only to magnify oneself, but to offer the most
delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this
latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the
essence of love is kindness: and indeed it may be best
defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run
mad and become importunate and violent. Vanity in a
merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover takes
a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points
and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.
He wishes to be assured that he is not loved
for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something
as like himself as he can contrive to set forward. For,
although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint
the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony
and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before
every one in this world who cares to set about explaining
his own character to others. Words and acts are easily
wrenched from their true significance; and they are
all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful
job we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people
mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong
valuation. And generally we rest pretty content with our
failures; we are content to be misapprehended by crackling
flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this
affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear
such dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her
Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his
pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.
He discovers a great reluctance to return on former
periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with
her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions,
he can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort
of the will. That he should have wasted some years in
ignorance of what alone was really important, that he
may have entertained the thought of other women with
any show of complacency, is a burthen almost too heavy
for his self-respect. But it is the thought of another past
that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That
he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald,
beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable
enough in all good conscience. But that She should
have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent
with a Divine providence.
A great many people run down jealousy, on the score
that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient.
This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which
it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself
artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.
I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy
has not always been a character of man; formed no part
of that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is
supposed to have begun the world; but waited to make
its appearance in better days and among richer natures.
And this is equally true of love, and friendship, and love
of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of
nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in
particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to
all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable
facts in the world; but if you begin to ask what it
was in other periods and countries, in Greece, for instance,
the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything
seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in
comparison. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences
of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure;
but there it is.
It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when
we reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of
letters found after years of happy union creates no sense
of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man
sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of
each other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to the
mind as something indelicate. To be altogether right,
they should have had twin birth together, at the same
moment with the feeling that unites them. Then indeed
it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or
afterthought. Then they would understand each other
with a fulness impossible otherwise. There would be
no barrier between them of associations that cannot
be imparted. They would be led into none of those
comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And
they would know that there had been no time lost, and
they had been together as much as was possible. For
besides terror for the separation that must follow some
time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something
like remorse, when they think of that other separation
which endured until they met. Some one has
written that love makes people believe in immortality,
because there seems not to be room enough in life for so
great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most
masterful of our emotions should have no more than the
spare moments of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange;
but if we call to mind analogies, we can hardly regard it
as impossible.
“The blind bow-boy,” who smiles upon us from the
end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his
bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as
ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into
eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone
ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture
and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things
of a moment. When the generation is gone, when the
play is over, when the thirty years’ panorama has been
withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may
ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying
loves, and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions
in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs
in a bygone taste, a few actions worth remembering, and
a few children who have retained some happy stamp
from the disposition of their parents.
IV
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE
Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being
wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth
upon another subject which is accidentally combined
with the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys
the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the
truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But
the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly
and exactly uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived
for such a purpose—with a foot-rule, a level, or a
theodolite—it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas!
to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a
scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or
the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method
and minute, unwearying attention that men rise even to
material exactness or to sure knowledge even of external
and constant things. But it is easier to draw the outline
of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face;
and truth in human relations is of this more intangible
and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to communicate.
Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense—not to say
that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I
was never out of England, not to say that I have read
Cervantes in the original when, as a matter of fact, I
know not one syllable of Spanish—this, indeed, is easy
and to the same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of
this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be
important; in a certain sense even they may or may not
be false. The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow,
and live truly with his wife and friends; while another
man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet
be himself one lie—heart and face, from top to bottom.
This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice
versâ, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to
your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify
emotion—that is the truth which makes love possible and
mankind happy.
L’art de bien dire is but a drawing-room accomplishment
unless it be pressed into the service of the truth.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write
what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect
him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood
in the case of books or set orations; even in making your
will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted
by the world. But one thing you can never make Philistine
natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on
the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high
flight of metaphysics—namely, that the business of life
is mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of literature,
and according to a man’s proficiency in that art
shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse
with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what
he means; and in spite of their notorious experience to
the contrary, people so continue to suppose. Now, I
simply open the last book I have been reading—Mr.
Leland’s captivating “English Gipsies.” “It is said,” I
find on p. 7, “that those who can converse with Irish
peasants in their native tongue form far higher opinions of
their appreciation of the beautiful, and of the elements of
humour and pathos in their hearts, than do those who
know their thoughts only through the medium of English.
I know from my own observations that this is quite the
case with the Indians of North America and it is unquestionably
so with the gipsy.” In short, where a man has
not a full possession of the language, the most important,
because the most amiable, qualities of his nature have to
lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship,
and the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very
“elements of humour and pathos.” Here is a man
opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put
none of it out to interest in the market of affection!
But what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the
case of a foreign language is partially true even with the
tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak
different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another
loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall
correspond and fit upon the truth of fact—not clumsily,
obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering,
like an athlete’s skin. And what is the result? That
the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and
can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable—intimacy
with those he loves. An orator makes a false
step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, some vulgar
phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side
wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking
to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in
parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know
his task to be delicate and filled with perils. “O frivolous
mind of man, light ignorance!” As if yourself, when
you seek to explain some misunderstanding or excuse
some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and addressing a
mind still recently incensed, were not harnessing for a
more perilous adventure; as if yourself required less tact
and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover
were not more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent
politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten
round; the matters he discusses have been discussed a
thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his
purpose; he speaks out of a cut-and-dry vocabulary.
But you—may it not be that your defence reposes on
some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in
Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must
venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed,
and become yourself a literary innovator? For even
in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts,
unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind
sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart,
you may be sure that he would understand and pardon;
but, alas! the heart cannot be shown—it has to be
demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard thing
to write poetry? Why, that is to write poetry, and of
a high, if not the highest, order.
I should even more admire “the lifelong and heroic
literary labours” of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up
in words their loves and their contentions, and speaking
their autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for
a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my
admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is
not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject to
physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and
changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections;
we have legible countenances, like an open book;
things that cannot be said look eloquently through the
eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a
dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing
signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or
a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart,
and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The
message flies by these interpreters in the least space of
time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment
of its birth. To explain in words takes time and a just
and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close
relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which
we can rely. But the look or the gesture explains things
in a breath; they tell their message without ambiguity;
unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the way, on a
reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend
against the truth; and then they have a higher authority,
for they are the direct expression of the heart, not yet
transmitted through the unfaithful and sophisticating
brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a friend which
came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, and in
personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had written,
and added worse to that; and with the commentary of
the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say.
Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy;
an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two
who know each other fully and are bent on perpetuity
in love, may so preserve the attitude of their affections
that they may meet on the same terms as they had
parted.
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the
face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the
changes of the voice. And there are others also to be
pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature,
who have been denied all the symbols of communication,
who have neither a lively play of facial expression, nor
speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the
gift of frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of
clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can
undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart
can speak no language under heaven. Such people we
must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through
yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust
on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when
we see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or
change our estimate. But these will be uphill intimacies,
without charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom
is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically
dull, despise physical endowments. That is
a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like their
fellow creatures it must always be meaningless; and,
for my part, I can see few things more desirable, after
the possession of such radical qualities as honour and
humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid
countenance; to have looks to correspond with every
feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that
we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing,
and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or
become unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all
unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call
him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has
forfeited his birthright of expression, who has cultivated
artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a
pet monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his
means of communication with his fellow-men. The
body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing
ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and
love us. But this fellow has filled his windows with
opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be
admired for its design, the crowd may pause before the
stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor
must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably
alone.
Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to
refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood
and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer
formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay
communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration,
such as is often found in mutual love. Yea and
nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been related
in the question. Many words are often necessary to convey
a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise
we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope, is by
many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to
indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are
aiming, and after an hour’s talk, back and forward to convey
the purport of a single principle or a single thought.
And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point
entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add
three new offences in the process of excusing one. It is
really a most delicate affair. The world was made before
the English language, and seemingly upon a different
design. Suppose we held our converse not in words,
but in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves
cut off from all near commerce, and no better than
foreigners in this big world. But we do not consider how
many have “a bad ear” for words, nor how often the most
eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and
questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without
a lie. “Do you forgive me?” Madam and sweetheart,
so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able
to discover what forgiveness means. “Is it still the same
between us?” Why, how can it be? It is eternally
different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart.
“Do you understand me?” God knows; I should think
it highly improbable.
The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man
may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his
teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend
or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished
because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly
shame which withholds a man from daring to
betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation,
has but hung his head and held his tongue? And,
again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed
through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment;
and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to
a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be
an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that
which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor
of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate
statement: the beginning and the end define and travesty
the intermediate conversation. You never speak to
God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers;
and to tell truth, rightly understood; is not to state
the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth
in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. To
reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical discretion is often
needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate
sober truth. Women have an ill name in this
connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie
of a good woman is the true index of her heart.
“It takes,” says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful
passage I remember to have read in any modern author,[4]
“two to speak truth—one to speak and another to hear.”
He must be very little experienced, or have no great zeal
for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain of
anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical
effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark offence.
Hence we find those who have once quarrelled carry
themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break the
truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality
or else no respect; and hence between parent and child
intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout,
and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is
another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
notion of the child’s character, formed in early
years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this
he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his preconception;
and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly
judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to
speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the other hand,
and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding
is love’s essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one
and aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken, a
look understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations;
and where the life is known even yea and
nay become luminous. In the closest of all relations—that
of a love well founded and equally shared—speech
is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a
ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate
directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer
words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold
each other’s hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical
basis; it is a familiarity of nature’s making and apart from
voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort out-run
knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the
acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations,
so it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each
knows more than can be uttered; each lives by faith
and believes by a natural compulsion; and between man
and wife the language of the body is largely developed and
grown strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted
and was conveyed in a caress would only lose to be set
down in words—ay, although Shakespeare himself should
be the scribe.
Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others,
that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let
but a doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy
and confidence is but another charge against the person
doubted. “What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have
been deceived so long and so completely!” Let but that
thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal.
Appeal to the past; why, that is your crime! Make all
clear, convince the reason; alas! speciousness is but a
proof against you. “If you can abuse me now, the more
likely that you have abused me from the first.”
For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting,
and they will end well; for your advocate is in
your lover’s heart and speaks her own language; it is not
you but she herself who can defend and clear you of the
charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent
union? Indeed, is it worth while? We are all incompris,
only more or less concerned for the mischance; all trying
wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other’s feet like
dumb, neglected lapdogs. Sometimes we catch an eye—this
is our opportunity in the ages—and we wag our
tail with a poor smile. “Is that all?” All? If you
only knew! But how can they know? They do not love
us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent.
But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear,
is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others
that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters
of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful
pleader.
“A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Wednesday,
p. 283.
“You know my mother now and then argues very notably;
always very warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her;
and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we very
seldom are so happy as to convince one another. A pretty common
case, I believe, in all vehement debatings. She says, I am too witty;
Anglicé, too pert; I, that she is too wise; that is to say, being
likewise put into English, not so young as she had been.”—Miss Howe
to Miss Harlowe, “Clarissa,” vol. ii. Letter xiii.
There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and
prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he
is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed,
with some qualification. But when the same person has
ignominiously failed, and begins to eat up his words, he
should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket
wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to
discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally
console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre
people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt
very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort
of proposition is any less true than the other, or that
Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied,
than Mr. Samuel Budgett, the Successful Merchant. The
one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house
counting out his money; and doubtless this
is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand,
some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high
races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the
losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than
a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities
reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to
the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass;
never to forget your umbrella through a long life would
seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go
smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a
coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the
whole duty of man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for our average
men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down
to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have
inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability,
those characters in history who have most
notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are spoken
of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured with
public monuments in the streets of our commercial centres.
This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You have
Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable
livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling,
in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies
of France; surely a melancholy example for one’s
daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may
have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a
most imprudent navigator. His Life is not the kind
of thing one would like to put into the hands of young
people; rather, one would do one’s utmost to keep it
from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and
disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me
if I were to recite all the big names in history whose
exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking, to
the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I
imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very
peculiar attitude towards the nobler and showier sides of
national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava
in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance
of the Lyons Mail. Persons of substance take in the
Times and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the
degree of their prosperity in business. As for the generals
who go galloping up and down among bomb-shells in
absurd cocked hats—as for the actors who raddle their
faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage—they
must belong, thank God! to a different order of
beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering
in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like
characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our
offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour,
let us hope, than of doffing their clothes and painting
themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions in
the first chapter of their school history of England.
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly
proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another
instance of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men
about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances
are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or
almost none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held
to be a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the
question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his
head and says: “Ah, so I thought when I was your age.”
It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts:
“My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I
am yours.” And yet the one is as good as the other:
pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.
“Opinion in good men,” says Milton, “is but knowledge
in the making.” All opinions, properly so called,
are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that
a man will travel any further; but if he has really considered
the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled
as far. This does not apply to formulæ got by rote,
which are stages on the road to nowhere but second
childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in your
mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still
less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself.
There are too many of these catchwords in the world
for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way
of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way
with nothing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies
of theory in the background. The imputed virtue of
folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to reside
in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire
dwells in the constable’s truncheon. They are used in
pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way
of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for
checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths
of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes
to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the examination
of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and
fortifying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of
having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They
were very good places to pass through, and I am none the
less at my destination. All my old opinions were only
stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only
a stage on the way to something else. I am no more
abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of
my own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless
the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have
to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.
And in the meanwhile you must do something, be something,
believe something. It is not possible to keep the
mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even
if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the
right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a
state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite
intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to
be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been
a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder
Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I
was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced
myself (for the moment) that we had better leave
these great changes to what we call great blind forces;
their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see
that my own scheme would not answer; and all the other
schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some
elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged
others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative
with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change
and travelling in the common orbit of men’s opinions. I
submit to this, as I would submit to gout or grey hair, as a
concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat;
but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change
for the better—I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I
have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this
tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from
beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the
phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome
desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the
time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just
in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having
outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old
people have faults of their own; they tend to become
cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the
growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see
that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it
follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am
journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably
posting towards these forms and sources of error.
As we go catching and catching at this or that corner
of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities,
now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may
compare the headlong course of our years to a swift
torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed
against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a
trailing spray; at the end he is hurled out and overwhelmed
in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no more than
glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories;
we are spun round and round and shown this or the other
view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to
their opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life,
and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view
is no more than an impression. If we had breathing
space, we should take the occasion to modify and
adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we are no sooner
boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or
jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and
no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin to
decline towards the grave. It is in vain to seek for consistency
or expect clear and stable views in a medium so
perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in
which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a
pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of
conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment,
but to take action, before the hour is at an end. And we
cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of
things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation;
and not infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest
in the masquerade. In the course of time we grow to
love things we hated and hate things we loved. Milton is
not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so
amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not
nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use pretending;
even the thrice royal game of hide and seek has somehow
lost in zest. All our attributes are modified or changed;
and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not
modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same
views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied
for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet,
but as an unteachable brat, well birched, and none the
wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from
the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the
Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately
use no other for the whole voyage.
And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin
at Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. Si Jeunesse
savait, si Vieillesse pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment,
but not necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it
is not so much that the young people do not know, as
that they do not choose. There is something irreverent
in the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has
more to do with the wise resolutions of age than we are
always willing to admit. It would be an instructive
experiment to make an old man young again and leave
him all his savoir. I scarcely think he would put his
money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he would
be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and
as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod
Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers
to the blush. Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before
whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of
a high-priest, and after whom dances many a successful
merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity
to cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any considerable
age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences,
but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly
and with a more genuine intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be considered,
because it comes last. It seems just as much to the point
that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the
beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases,
never comes at all. Disease and accident make short
work of even the most prosperous persons; death costs
nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable
trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed
out in the middle of ambitious schemes is tragical enough
at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his
own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for
the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically
moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of
farce. The victim is dead—and he has cunningly overreached
himself: a combination of calamities none the less
absurd for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until
the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy;
and how much more with a whole cellar—a whole bodily
existence! People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness
in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all
its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable,
old age. We should not compliment a hungry
man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his
appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there
was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a thing
as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We
sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters;
and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad,
we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we
shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we
are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco
among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round, and let us
have a pipe before we go!
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation
for old age is only trouble thrown away. We
fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to
meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the
heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow
old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for
the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the
same influence that restrains our hopes quiets our apprehensions;
if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles
are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period
for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for
a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest,
and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own work
and following its own happy inspiration, youth is doing
the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy
youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and independent
age; and the muff inevitably develops into the
bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth
upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish
to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves’ kitchen in the East
End, to go down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we
must be about it while we are still young. It will not do
to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping
with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: “What
does Gravity out of bed?” Youth is the time to go
flashing from one end of the world to the other both in
mind and body; to try the manners of different nations;
to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town
and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate
the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a
mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre
to applaud Hernani. There is some meaning in the old
theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little
to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant. “It is
extraordinary,” says Lord Beaconsfield, one of the brightest
and best preserved of youths up to the date of his last
novel,[5] “it is extraordinary how hourly and how violently
change the feelings of an unexperienced young man.”
And this mobility is a special talent entrusted to his
care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armour,
with which he can pass unhurt through great dangers
and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let
him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that
he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will
live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse.
Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like
a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from
the first; they must have been feeble fellows—creatures
made of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire,
anger or true joyfulness, in their composition we may
sympathise with their parents, but there is not much
cause to go into mourning for themselves; for, to be quite
honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind.
When the old man waggles his head and says, “Ah,
so I thought when I was your age,” he has proved the
youth’s case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience
or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;
but he thought so while he was young; and all men have
thought so while they were young, since there was dew
in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another
young man adding his vote to those of previous generations
and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony.
It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent
and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles,
and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly
captured, as it is for old men to turn grey, or mothers
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something
worthier than their lives.
By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel
more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me
recommend the following little tale. A child who had
been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead
soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged
boyhood without any abatement of this childish
taste. He was thirteen; already he had been taunted
for dallying over-long about the playbox; he had to blush
if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of
the prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance.
There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts
of children into the language of their elders; but this
is the effect of his meditations at this juncture: “Plainly,”
he said, “I must give up my playthings in the meanwhile,
since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle
jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are
the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the
same pusillanimous respect for those who are a little older;
and if they do not return to them as soon as they can,
it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall
be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their
foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money,
I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings
until the day I die.” Nay, as he was passing in the train
along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Fréjus,
he remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the
angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy
Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again!
The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not unworthy of
Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably anticipated,
it is never likely to be carried into effect. There
was a worm i’ the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood
must pass away, and then youth, as surely as age
approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable,
and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous
and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,
into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life
and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
You need repent none of your youthful vagaries.
They may have been over the score on one side, just as
those of age are probably over the score on the other.
But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and
expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation
to what was outside of you, and implied criticisms on the
existing state of things, which you need not allow to have
been undeserved, because you now see that they were
partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of
stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies
of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the
embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their
most anti-social acts indicate the defects of our society.
When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you
must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised
if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at
the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils
in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices
of society see nothing for it but the abolishment of
everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was
a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries.
But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better
to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be
entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life, and
take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some
people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on
through the world, like smiling images pushed from
behind. For God’s sake give me the young man who has
brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the
others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands,
and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce
be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at
the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance
for all those who have been wise in their own
esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth
hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and
complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and
more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future,
we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we
have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with
wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions,
there is a strong probability that age is not much more
so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with
infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong
at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce
the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of
a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have
explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for
poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much
longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne
luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if there
were no centre at all, but just one alley after another,
and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?
I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation,
which I take the liberty to reproduce. “What I advance
is true,” said one. “But not the whole truth,” answered
the other. “Sir,” returned the first (and it seemed to me
there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), “Sir,
there is no such thing as the whole truth!” Indeed, there
is nothing so evident in life as that there are two sides to a
question. History is one long illustration. The forces of
nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our
backward intelligences. We never pause for a moment’s
consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast
sways humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth,
and dinning it into our ears that this or that question
has only one possible solution; and your enthusiast is a
fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while and shakes
the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an
army of quiet and uninfluential people set to work to
remind us of the other side and demolish the generous
imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody exactly
right in his “Institutes,” and hot-headed Knox is thundering
in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the
other side in his library in Périgord, and predicting that
they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as
they had found already in the Church. Age may have
one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is
nothing more certain than that both are right, except
perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ;
for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a
form of agreement rather than a form of difference?
I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit
of a philosopher must contradict himself to his very face.
For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we
have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no
answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as
you please; that there is no centre to the maze because,
like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and
that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness,
is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to
which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.
“Boswell: We grow weary when idle.”
“Johnson: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want
company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary;
we should all entertain one another.”
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a
decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability,
to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein
with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from
the opposite party who are content when they have
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile,
savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this
should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist
in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised
in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
as good a right to state its position as industry itself.
It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to
enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at
once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.
A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination,
votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism,
“goes for” them. And while such an one is ploughing
distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand
his resentment when he perceives cool persons in the
meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief
over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is
touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of
Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome
for those tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the
Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and
unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have
laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when
all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers
have only a superficial toleration for those who
know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered;
and people of all pursuits combine to disparage
those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is
not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for
speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry
for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with
most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to
remember this is an apology. It is certain that much
may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only
there is something to be said against it, and that is what,
on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one
argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and
that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro
is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a
good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a
Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours with all
his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals
that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker,
and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true
during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering
others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish
old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these
words: “Young man, ply your book diligently now,
and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come
upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but
an irksome task.” The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome,
and not a few become impossible, by the time a
man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a
stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they
are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity
to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with
your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality.
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds
us, he will have little time for thought.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it
will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry
that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre
periods between sleep and waking in the class.
For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures
in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top
is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that
Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But
though I would not willingly part with such scraps of
science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain
other odds and ends that I came by in the open street
while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to
dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the
favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out
yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the
Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does
not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty
of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets,
for, if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs
into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs
over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune
of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket,
and there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and
see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not
education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly
Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation
that should thereupon ensue:—
“How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?”
“Truly, sir, I take mine ease.”
“Is not this the hour of the class? and shouldst thou
not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou
mayest obtain knowledge?”
“Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your
leave.”
“Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee?
Is it mathematics?”
“No, to be sure.”
“Is it metaphysics?”
“Nor that.”
“Is it some language?”
“Nay, it is no language.”
“Is it a trade?”
“Nor a trade neither.”
“Why, then, what is’t?”
“Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go
upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly
done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest
Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner
of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by
this water, to learn, by root-of-heart, a lesson which my
master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment.”
Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved
with passion, and shaking his cane with a very
threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:
“Learning, quotha!” said he; “I would have all such
rogues scourged by the Hangman!”
And so he would go on his way, ruffling out his cravat
with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its
feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman’s, is the common opinion.
A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does
not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry
must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name
to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging;
and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or
the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew
older, came to regard all experience as a single great
book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence;
and it seemed all one to him whether you should read
in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in
Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the
gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person,
looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with
a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education
than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There
is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found
upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but
it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking,
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts
of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber
of words, one-half of which they will forget before the
week be out, your truant may learn some really useful
art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak
with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many
who have “plied their book diligently,” and know all
about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come
out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour,
and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better
and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune,
who remain under-bred and pathetically stupid to the
last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began
life along with them—by your leave, a different picture.
He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits;
he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most
salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if
he has never read the great Book in very recondite places,
he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent
purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew
roots, and the business man-some of his half-crowns,
for a share of the idler’s knowledge of life at large, and Art
of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more
important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He
who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of
other people in their hobbles, will regard his own with
only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard
among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he
finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself
with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along
a by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant,
which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the
Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he shall command
an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others
behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise,
he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour
upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows
running speedily and in many different directions into
the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the
generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars,
go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath
all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows,
much green and peaceful landscape; many fire-lit parlours;
good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they
did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the
old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk
or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a
faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a
strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of
dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely
conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional
occupation. Bring these fellows into the
country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how
they pine for their desk or their study. They have no
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random
provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise
of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity
lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still.
It is no good speaking to such folk; they cannot be idle,
their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those
hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious
moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require
to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have
no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank
to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train,
they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To
see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look
at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they
were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they
are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight
for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They
have been to school and college, but all the time they
had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in
the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time
they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s
soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed
and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play;
until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a
mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one
thought to rub against another, while they wait for the
train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered
on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared
at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box
empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a
bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to
me as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from
his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and
relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a
railway-carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to
what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by
perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not
by any means certain that a man’s business is the most
important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate
it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous,
and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and
pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness.
For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen,
singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra,
but those who look on and clap their hands from the
benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices
towards the general result. You are no doubt very
dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker,
of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly
from place to place, and the policemen who walk the
streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of
gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who
set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your
dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to
lose his friend’s money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick
of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to
fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was
neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one
or two long-laced Barabbases whom the world could
better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was
more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never
done him anything he could call a service, than to his
whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a
good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor.
I know there are people in the world who cannot feel
grateful unless the favour has been done them at the
cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition.
A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper
covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass
half-an-hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article
of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he
had made the manuscript in his heart’s blood, like a compact
with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be
more beholden to your correspondent, if he had been
damning you all the while for your importunity? Pleasures
are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of
mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest.
There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a
score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice,
the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous
people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so
much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being
happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which
remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are
disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the
street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set every
one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons,
who had been delivered from more than usually black
thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some
money with this remark: “You see what sometimes
comes of looking pleased.” If he had looked pleased
before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified.
For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling
rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for
tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared
to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy
man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound
note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and
their entrance into a room is as though another candle
had been lighted. We need not care whether they could
prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better
thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great
Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently,
if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but
thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to
be abused; and, within practical limits, it is one of the
most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality.
Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment,
I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion;
he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives
a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either
he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives
a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden
inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly,
in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge
some temper before he returns to work. I do not care how
much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature
in other people’s lives. They would be happier if he were
dead. They could easier do without his services in the
Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious
spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to
be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than
daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about?
For what cause do they embitter their own and other
people’s lives? That a man should publish three or
thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish
his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and
although a thousand fall, there are always some to go
into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should
be at home minding women’s work, she answered there
were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your
own rare gifts! When nature is “so careless of the single
life,” why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that
our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare
had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy’s preserves, the world would have wagged
on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe
to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been
any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant,
if you look the alternative all over, which are worth
the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means.
This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly
vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration,
find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase;
for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities
necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in
themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you
will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable.
Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare!
And yet you see merchants who go and labour
themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy
court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles
until their temper is a cross to all who come about them,
as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a
pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work
themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse
with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose
these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the
Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny?
and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their
farces was the bull’s-eye and centre-point of all the universe?
And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away
their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical
or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never
come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the
world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind
freezes at the thought.
By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are
sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.
Often, too, they are places we have visited in former
years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever afterwards
in pious memory; and we please ourselves with
the fancy that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable
sensations, and take up again the thread of our enjoyment
in the same spirit as we let it fall. We shall now have an
opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions, interrupted
of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied.
It may be that we have kept in mind, during all these
years, the recollection of some valley into which we have
just looked down for a moment before we lost sight of it
in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have lain
awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with
the thought of corners we had never turned, or summits
we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we tell
ourselves, to complete all these unfinished pleasures,
and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.
The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led
away when hope and memory are both in one story,
that I daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable
when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined
to regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident
of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir
and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes
to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days
of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves
into something of their old quickness and sensibility.
And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of
the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and
forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which
the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the
fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy
the admirable brevity and simplicity of such little glimpses
of country and country ways as flash upon him through
the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow
might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad
over the land on some Olympian errand. Here and there,
indeed, a few children huzzah and wave their hands to
the express; but for the most part, it is an interruption
too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep
do not cease from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the
projecting tiller of a canal boat, so precariously that it
seems as if a fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be
enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet
all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have
been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there
is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the averted head,
to indicate that she has been even conscious of its passage.
Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel.
The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the
scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes
full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and
while the body is borne forward in the flying chain
of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves
them, at unfrequented stations; they make haste up the
poplar alley that leads towards the town; they are
left behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with
his hand, he watches the long train sweep away into the
golden distance.
Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock
of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he
has passed the indefinable line that separates South from
North. And this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes
the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the
occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower,
or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning,
he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through
the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly audible
below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however,
this pleasure will not end with the anticipation,
as do so many others of the same family. It will leave
him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance
to all he may see for many days to come. There
is something in the mere name of the South that carries
enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word,
he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out
beauties and to get by heart the permanent lines and
character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it
was all his own—an estate out of which he had been kept
unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and
full possession. Even those who have never been there
before feel as if they had been; and everybody goes
comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding it
with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think
they were coming home after a weary absence, instead
of travelling hourly farther abroad.
It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down
in his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand
the change that has befallen him. Everything about him
is as he had remembered, or as he had anticipated. Here,
at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the
blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence
of form of the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing,
not even the crude curves of the railway, can utterly
deform the suavity of contour of one bay after another
along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this,
he has only a cold head-knowledge that is divorced from
enjoyment. He recognises with his intelligence that this
thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his heart of
hearts he has to confess that it is not beautiful for him.
It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain
that he chooses out points of view, and stands there,
looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return
of the pleasure that he remembers in other days, as
the sick folk may have awaited the coming of the angel
at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading
about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is
some one by who is out of sympathy with the scene,
and is not moved up to the measure of the occasion;
and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted
for him. He seems to himself to touch things with
muffled hands, and to see them through a veil. His life
becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when
he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise that
this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which
he now goes burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore
so quick and delicate and alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness
and amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the
rigours of the winter at home, these dead emotions would
revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness and
silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is
homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery of
the frost upon his window-panes at morning, the reluctant
descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs relieved
against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of which these
yearnings are made is one of the flimsiest: if but the
thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean
level, or a wind come down from the snow-clad Alps
behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the instant,
and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry streets at
home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory.
The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways;
the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement;
the sheen of the rainy streets towards afternoon; the
meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet
garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on
days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold:
these, and such as these, crowd back upon him, and
mockingly substitute themselves for the fanciful winter
scenes with which he had pleased himself a while before.
He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only
the others could be there also; if only those tramps could
lie down for a little in the sunshine, and those children
warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier earth; if only
there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness and no
hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with
him!
For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all.
If it is only rarely that anything penetrates, vividly into
his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with
it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity.
There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of
a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be
stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring
perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to
me, the “spirit of delight” comes often on small wings.
For the pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least
look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most
certainly, it leaves us to gape joyously for days together,
in the very home-land of the beautiful. We may have
passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the
thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand
forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle
of surroundings; so that we see it “with a child’s first
pleasure,” as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake-side.
And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how
much more so with the invalid! Some day he will find
his first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what
alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and
rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so
touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of
washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the
blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered
daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or
monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony
of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress
of these southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly,
and awaken in him that satisfaction with
which we tell ourselves that we are the richer by one
more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even
slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine, which
somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the
large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance
isolation—as he changes the position of his sunshade—of a
yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And
then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards
themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and
continually shifting: now you would say it was green,
now grey now blue; now tree stands above tree, like
“cloud on cloud,” massed into filmy indistinctness; and
now, at the wind’s will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken
and broken up with little momentary silverings and
shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way.
To some the glad moment may have arrived on other
provocations; and their recollection may be most vivid
of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their
heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock
and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled,
busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as
if they were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind;
of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes,
over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the
empurpled hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of
the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making
of one such moment of intense perception; and it is on
the happy agreement of these many elements, on the
harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how,
when he has chanced upon some attitude of complete
restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass or
heather, the whole fashion of the landscape has been
changed for him, as though the sun had just broken forth,
or a great artist had only then completed, by some
cunning touch, the composition of the picture! And not
only a change of posture—a snatch of perfume, the sudden
singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an
invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the
merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most
infinitesimal nerve of a man’s body—not one of the least of
these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and
brings some refinement of its own into the character of
the pleasure we feel.
And if the external conditions are thus varied and
subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. No
man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning
to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible
for any of us to understand, from beginning to end,
that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in
us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because
some of these circumstances are hidden from us for ever
in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have
reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there still
remains to be taken into account some sensibility more
delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite
refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed
to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the
sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and
great pictures; and yet, what is truly admirable is rather
the mind within us, that gathers together these scattered
details for its delight, and makes out of certain colours
certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that
intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or a view.
Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot
from one great man’s house to another’s in search of works
of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and
wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying
their costly possessions than they were; because they had
paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And
the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the
one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the
other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An
inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in
either case; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit.
It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when
the event shows a man to have chosen the better part,
and laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than
those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even
this is not a good unmixed; and, like all other possessions,
although in a less degree, the possession of a brain that
has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into
the prime organ of a man’s enjoyment, brings with it
certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness
of such an one comes to depend greatly upon those
fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise
the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of
nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole
fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the
edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes
with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment
of the world and life.
It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the
life of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those
excursions that he had promised himself to finish prove
too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the
barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white
town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely
fold of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures
his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible
to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The
sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after
some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first
few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of
his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and
familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just
as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active life,
he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the
shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country
people come and go about their everyday affairs, the
foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir
of man’s activity is all about him, as he suns himself
inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a
patriarchal impersonality of interest, such as a man may
feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote
descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he has
planted over-night.
In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of
other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last
quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of
the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final insensibility
of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes
in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont,
less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of
infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long
decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every
moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and
the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes
us at a stride and we move no more, so desire after desire
leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the
circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and he feels,
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of
life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death,
that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly and
fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the coming
of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach
as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to
persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It
is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that
withdraws and withers up from round about him. He
has outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment;
and if there is to be no recovery; if never again
will he be young and strong and passionate, if the actual
present shall be to him always like a thing read in a book
or remembered out of the far-away past; if, in fact, this
be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the
continuance of a twilight that only strains and disappoints
the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He
will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either
rejuvenate or slay.
And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are
many and kindly. The sight of children has a significance
for him such as it may have for the aged also, but
not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely,
and to look upon life somewhat more widely than from the
narrow loophole of personal pleasure and advancement,
it is strange how small a portion of his thoughts will be
changed or embittered by this proximity of death. He
knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows
the ploughman up the face of the field, and the rooks
follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not
live to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen,
and be cut down at last, and brought home with gladness.
And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of
drought or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him
as sensibly as ever. For he has long been used to wait
with interest the issue of events in which his own concern
was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful
for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by
one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his own supply.
Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested hopes
for mankind and a better future which have been the
solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond
the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it
makes small difference whether he die five thousand years,
or five thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch
for which he faithfully labours. He has not deceived
himself; he has known from the beginning that he followed
the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself
in the wilderness, and that it was reserved for others to
enter joyfully into possession of the land. And so, as
everything grows greyer and quieter about him, and
slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions accompany
his sad decline and follow him, with friendly voices
and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The
desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his days
of health, more strongly than these generous aspirations
move him now; and so life is carried forward beyond
life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when
his hands grope already on the face of the impassable.
Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of
his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their
thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and
love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life, beyond
the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand
ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne
de la Boétie survived during all the years in which Montaigne
continued to converse with him on the pages of
the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was truly
Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that
knew him no more, and found no better consolation than
the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be
at rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we
most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure
in calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our
friends, at our decease, would suffer loss more truly than
ourselves. As a monarch who should care more for the
outlying colonies he knows on the map or through the
report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire
under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about
the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and
that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, in a
certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real
knot of our identity—that central metropolis of self, of
which alone we are immediately aware—or the diligent
service of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of
ganglia, which we know (as we know a proposition in
Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole? At
the death of every one whom we love, some fair and honourable
portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged
from one of these dear provinces; and they are
not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long
series of such impoverishments, till their life and influence
narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits,
and death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at
one blow.
Note.—To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two
of qualification; for this is one of the points on which a slightly
greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:
A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular
obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing
butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of
the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and
love. As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of
man’s action in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his
own in the particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in
what he would have done had he been spared, seeing finally that
that would have been little; but he has a far higher notion of the
blank that he will make by dying. A young man feels himself one
too many in the world; his is a painful situation: he has no calling;
no obvious utility; no ties but to his parents, and these he is sure
to disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been
made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere fact
of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact or else the
feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed to our own
useless figure in the world, or else—and this, thank God, in the
majority of cases—we so collect about us the interest or the love
of our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of life,
that we need to entertain no longer the question of our right to
be.
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself
dying will get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed
in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to help, some to
love, some to correct; it may be, some to punish. These duties
cling, not upon humanity, but upon the man himself. It is he,
not another, who is one woman’s son and a second woman’s husband
and a third woman’s father. That life which began so
small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of
others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and
shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the man
and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret
the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality.
To have lived a generation is not only to have grown at home
in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable
duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,
something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect
upon what he might have done in a future that is never to be his;
but beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats
his heart for the good he might have done already. To have
been so useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more—there
it is that death and memory assail him. And even if
mankind shall go on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic
virtues, rising steadily from strength to strength; even if his work
shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife remarried by a
better than he; how shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of
a career which was his only business in this world, which was so
fitfully pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?
The changes wrought by death are in themselves so
sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s experience,
and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes
all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes
it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug;
sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their
citadel during a score of years. And when the business
is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives,
and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships
hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary
walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away
our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but
leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable
residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a
whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind,
from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees
of mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of
pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are
set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve
some show of respect for what remains of our old loves
and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly
ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades
before the door. All this, and much more of the same
sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone
a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many
philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down
with every circumstance of logic; although in real life
the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to
think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously
wrong in practice.
As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken
of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of
death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy
circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South
America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how,
even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants
are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal
conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest
corner of England. There are serenades and suppers
and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and
meanwhile the foundation shudders under foot, the bowels
of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin
may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man
and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very
young people, and very dull old ones, there is something
indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture.
It seems not credible that respectable married people,
with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper
within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary
life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is
carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese
and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances
without something like a defiance of the Creator.
It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in
prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning
care in a perpetual carouse.
And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the
situation of these South American citizens forms only a
very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This
world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in overcrowded
space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly
and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by
a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny
squib. And what, pathologically looked at, is the human
body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards?
The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy
as the ship’s powder-magazine to the ship; and with
every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are
putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as
devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the
abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they
make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends it
all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one
would follow them into battle—the blue-peter might fly
at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship?
Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a
preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of
the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field
in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors
have miserably left their bones! What woman
would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous
than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow
old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take
in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet,
and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries
going through. By the time a man gets well into the
seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle;
and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there
is an overwhelming probability that he will never see
the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?
Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their
grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of
the death of people about their own age, or even younger,
not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple child-like
pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when
a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or
a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their
old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on,
bubbling with laughter, through years of man’s age compared
to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and
peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may
fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether
it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into
the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff
his clothes and clamber into bed.
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration,
with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along
the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole way is
one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those who
fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go
spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps
the reader remembers one of the humorous devices of
the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a vast concourse
of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiæ bay; and
when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned
loose the Prætorian guards among the company, and had
them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of
the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man.
Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while
it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed
by any swimmer, God’s pale Prætorian throws us over
in the end!
We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the
cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows
us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous,
is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible,
that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and
regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of
Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that
grow harder to understand the more we think about
them. It is a well-known fact that an immense proportion
of boat accidents would never happen if people
held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast;
and yet, unless it be some martinet of a professional
mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every
one of God’s creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of
man’s unconcern and brazen boldness in the face of death!
We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases,
which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness.
We have no idea of what death is, apart from its
circumstances and some of its consequences to others;
and although we have some experience of living, there is
not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction
as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the
word life. All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam
to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to
look upon the human state with such largeness of view as
shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living
to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about
the best satisfaction in their power when they say that
it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff
with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has
been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald
heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words
have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy
volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying
before us, with modest pride, her contribution towards
the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.
Truly a fine result! A man may very well love
beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a
Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid
of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a club,
or even an undertaker’s man; but not certainly of abstract
death. We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses
until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms
of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true
throughout—that we do not love life, in the sense that
we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that
we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living.
Into the views of the least careful there will enter some
degree of providence; no man’s eyes are fixed entirely
on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation
of good health, good weather, wine, active employment,
love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations
does not amount to anything like a general view of life’s
possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them
most vividly at all the most scrupulous of their personal
safety. To be deeply interested in the accidents of our
existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed tenure of human
experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions,
and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love
of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a
peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in
a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured
distance in the interest of his constitution.
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon
both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to
the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as
to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning
for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both
sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances
now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner.
Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer
to most standard works upon the question. When a
man’s heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal
of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation.
Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander’s
statue; we have something else in hand, thank God,
and let him knock. Passing-bells are ringing all the
world over. All the world over, and every hour, some
one is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies.
For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life
that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death.
It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the
longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts
to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour,
to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of
the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.
We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for
caring about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man’s
head is generally very bald, and his senses very dull,
before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as a
lane leading to a dead wall—a mere bag’s end, as the
French say—or whether we think of it as a vestibule or
gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our
faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we thunder
in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about
its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years
of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair,
as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of
these views and situations there is but one conclusion
possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing
terror, and run the race that is set before him with
a single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with
more heartache and terror from the thought of death than
our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little
it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked,
and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life.
Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour;
and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil
before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage
and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good
man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to
recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part
of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A
frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too
anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the
past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.
And not only well armoured for himself, but a good
friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to
cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel
as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase
has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist
who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted
wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him
in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So soon
as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a
dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of
generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually;
he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature,
and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes
and tepid milk. The care of one important body or
soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the
outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour
with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go
equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise
is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing
stockstill. Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve,
and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons
his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully
hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the
world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers
impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything
better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation
in the end. Lord look after his health, Lord
have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of
the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril
towards his aim. Death is on all sides of him with
pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate
surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends
and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this?
Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing
and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other
soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on
at his best pace until he touch the goal. “A peerage
or Westminster Abbey!” cried Nelson in his bright,
boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not
for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living,
of being about their business in some sort or other, do
the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down
the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks
of prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson,
think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation
that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through
triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely
considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon
any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card?
Who would project a serial novel, after Thackeray
and Dickens had each fallen in midcourse? Who would
find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the
consideration of death?
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this
is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with
a regulated temperature—as if that were not to die a
hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As
if it were not to die in one’s own lifetime, and without
even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to
die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable
change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but
the sensations carefully held at arm’s length, as if one
kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is
better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste
it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it,
than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin
your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year,
even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push
and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not
only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour
useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means
execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All
who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have
done good work, although they may die before they have
the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong
and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the
world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even
if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career,
laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous
foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of
boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and
silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in
such a termination? and does not life go down with a
better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than
miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When
the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the
gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had
this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever
age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death
has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from
his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest
point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side.
The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched,
the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with
him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit
shoots into the spiritual land.
It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world
where there are so many marriages and decisive battles,
and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with
great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally
and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it
would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of
as much as possible was the one goal of man’s contentious
life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one
thing leading to another in an endless series. There is
always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although
we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business
and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are
so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars,
and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of
life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and
not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we
have. An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid
as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust
and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable
activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.
Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we
have some interests in the piece; and to those who have
neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of
colours, or a rough footway where they may very well
break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and
curiosities that any man continues to exist with even
patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed
appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are
the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most
enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful
or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his estate
and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets
he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he
could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that
he should never hunger any more; suppose him at a
glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay
the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in
any province of experience—would not that man be in a
poor way for amusement ever after?
One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in
his knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to
reflect, and often laying the book down to contemplate
the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears
to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left companionless
on the last stages of his journey. A young
fellow recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle,
winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten notebooks
upon Frederick the Great. “What!” cried the young
fellow, in consternation, “is there no more Carlyle? Am
I left to the daily papers?” A more celebrated instance
is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he had no
more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished
the “Decline and Fall,” he had only a few moments of
joy; and it was with a “sober melancholy” that he parted
from his labours.
Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual
arrows; our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we
come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only
plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You
would think, when the child was born, there would be an
end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh
anxieties; and when you have seen it through its teething
and its education, and at last its marriage, alas! it is only
to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities, with every
day; and the health of your children’s children grows as
touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when you
have married your wife, you would think you were got
upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an
easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin
marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but
to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to
which both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill.
The true love story commences at the altar, when
there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest
of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards
an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
from the very fact that they are two instead
of one.
“Of making books there is no end,” complained the
Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising
letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed,
to making books or experiments, or to travel or to gathering
wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may
study for ever, and we are never as learned as we would.
We have never made a statue worthy of our dreams.
And when we have discovered a continent, or crossed a
chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or
another plain upon the farther side. In the infinite
universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and to
spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can be
read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a private park,
or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we
walk there for a lifetime there will be always something
new to startle and delight us.
There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only
one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And
from a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell
us whether it be worth attaining.
A strange picture we make on our way to our Chimæras,
ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest;
indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we
shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable
that there is no such place; and if we live for centuries
and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should
find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the
end. O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet,
travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to
you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop,
and but a little way farther, against the setting sun, descry
the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own
blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing
than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
“Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure
it is so in States to honour them.”—Sir William Temple.
There is one story of the wars of Rome which I have
always very much envied for England. Germanicus was
going down at the head of the legions into a dangerous
river—on the opposite bank the woods were full of Germans—when
there flew out seven great eagles which seemed
to marshal the Romans on their way; they did not pause
or waver, but disappeared into the forest where the enemy
lay concealed. “Forward!” cried Germanicus, with a
fine rhetorical inspiration, “Forward! and follow the
Roman birds.” It would be a very heavy spirit that
did not give a leap at such a signal, and a very timorous
one that continued to have any doubt of success. To
appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make
imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman
Empire and its military fortunes, and along with these
the prospects of those individual Roman legionaries now
fording a river in Germany, looked altogether greater and
more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to produce. A
particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular
star, the holiday of some particular saint—anything, in
short, to remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old
successes—may be enough to change the issue of a pitched
battle; for it gives to the one party a feeling that Right
and the larger interests are with them.
If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must
be about the sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not
been taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised
as an English emblem. We know right well that a lion
would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman
or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in
the smoke of battle. But the sea is our approach and
bulwark; it has been the scene of our greatest triumphs
and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical strains
to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of
foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an
agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from
Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from
the other until she begins to move, swaggers among such
persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience.
To suppose yourself endowed with natural parts for the
sea because you are the countryman of Blake and mighty
Nelson is perhaps just as unwarrantable as to imagine
Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will look
well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond
the reach of argument. We should consider ourselves
unworthy of our descent if we did not share the arrogance
of our progenitors, and please ourselves with the pretension
that the sea is English. Even where it is looked
upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we
regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones
of our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet;
for I suppose no other nation has lost as many ships
or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.
There is nowhere such a background for heroism as
the noble, terrifying, and picturesque conditions of some
of our sea-fights. Hawke’s battle in the tempest, and
Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew
up, reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination.
And our naval annals owe some of their interest to the
fantastic and beautiful appearance of old warships and
the romance that invests the sea and everything sea-going
in the eyes of English lads on a half-holiday at the coast.
Nay, and what we know of the misery between-decks
enhances the bravery of what was done by giving it something
for contrast. We like to know that these bold and
honest fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold and
honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader
can forget the description of the Thunder in “Roderick
Random”: the disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt
of officers and men; deck after deck, each with some new
object of offence; the hospital, where the hammocks were
huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each;
the cockpit, far under water, where “in an intolerable
stench” the spectacled steward kept the accounts of the
different messes; and the canvas enclosure, six feet square,
in which Morgan made flip and salmagundi, smoked his
pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer Welsh
imprecations. There are portions of this business on
board the Thunder over which the reader passes lightly
and hurriedly, like a traveller in a malarious country. It
is easy enough to understand the opinion of Dr. Johnson:
“Why, sir,” he said, “no man will be a sailor who has
contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.” You would
fancy anyone’s spirit would die out under such an accumulation
of darkness, noisomeness, and injustice, above all
when he had not come there of his own free will, but
under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang. But
perhaps a watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on
his mettle again; a battle must have been a capital relief;
and prize-money, bloodily earned and grossly squandered,
opened the doors of the prison for a twinkling. Somehow
or other, at least, this worst of possible lives could not
overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did their
duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of
that country which so cruelly oppressed them, they served
their guns merrily when it came to fighting, and they had
the readiest ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any
class of men the world ever produced.
Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names.
Pym and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they must
not think to cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And
you could not find a better case in point than that of the
English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are
picked names for men of execution. Frobisher, Rodney,
Boscawen, “Foul-Weather” Jack Byron are all good to
catch the eye in a page of a naval history. Cloudesley
Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables.
Benbow has a bull-dog quality that suits the man’s character,
and it takes us back to those English archers who
were his true comrades for plainness, tenacity, and pluck.
Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an act of bold
conduct in the field. It is impossible to judge of Blake or
Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of
such heroes. But still it is odd enough, and very appropriate
in this connection, that the latter was greatly taken
with his Sicilian title. “The signification, perhaps, pleased
him,” says Southey; “Duke of Thunder was what in
Dahomey would have been called a strong name; it was to
a sailor’s taste, and certainly to no man could it be more
applicable.” Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory
of distinctions; it has a noble sound and a very
proud history; and Columbus thought so highly of it,
that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that title
as long as the house should last.
But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names,
that I wish to speak about in this paper. That spirit is
truly English; they, and not Tennyson’s cotton-spinners
or Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s Abstract Bagman, are the true
and typical Englishmen. There may be more head of
bagmen in the country, but human beings are reckoned
by number only in political constitutions. And the
Admirals are typical in the full force of the word. They
are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but of a virtue
in which most Englishmen can claim a moderate share;
and what we admire in their lives is a sort of apotheosis
of ourselves. Almost everybody in our land, except
humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been
depressed by exceptionally æsthetic surroundings, can
understand and sympathise with an admiral or a prize-fighter.
I do not wish to bracket Benbow and Tom
Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically bracketed
for admiration in the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.
If you told them about Germanicus and the
eagles, or Regulus going back to Carthage, they would
very likely fall asleep; but tell them about Harry Pearce
and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they
put down their pipes to listen. I have by me a copy
of “Boxiana,” on the fly-leaves of which a youthful
member of the fancy kept a chronicle of remarkable
events and an obituary of great men. Here we find
piously chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and
pugilists—Johnny Moore, of the Liverpool Prize Ring;
Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; “Pierce Egan, senior, writer
of ‘Boxiana’ and other sporting works”—and among all
these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in
the time of this annalist, do you suppose his name would
not have been added to the glorious roll? In short,
we do not all feel warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we
cannot all take pleasure in “Paradise Lost”; but there
are certain common sentiments and touches of nature by
which the whole nation is made to feel kinship. A little
while ago everybody, from Hazlitt and John Wilson down
to the imbecile creature who scribbled his register on the
fly-leaves of “Boxiana,” felt a more or less shamefaced
satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters. And the
exploits of the Admirals are popular to the same degree
and tell in all ranks of society. Their sayings and doings
stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if
the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward
and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass
away, we should still leave behind us a durable monument
of what we were in these sayings and doings of the
English Admirals.
Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the
Venerable, and only one other vessel, heard that the whole
Dutch fleet was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham
to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the
channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. “I have taken
the depth of the water,” added he, “and when the Venerable
goes down my flag will still fly.” And you observe
this is no naked Viking in a pre-historic period; but a
Scottish member of Parliament, with a smattering of the
classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel
underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into
Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even if five were
shot away, it should not be imagined he had struck. He
too must needs wear his four stars outside his Admiral’s
frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. “In honour I gained
them,” he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality,
“in honour I will die with them.” Captain Douglas of the
Royal Oak, when the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames,
sent his men ashore, but was burned along with her himself
rather than desert his post without orders. Just then,
perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round
the supper-table with the ladies of his court. When Raleigh
sailed into Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire
on him at once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made
answer with a flourish of insulting trumpets. I like this
bravado better than the wisest dispositions to ensure
victory; it comes from the heart and goes to it. God
has made nobler heroes, but He never made a finer gentleman
than Walter Raleigh. And as our Admirals were full
of heroic superstitions, and had a strutting and vainglorious
style of fight, so they discovered a startling eagerness
for battle, and courted war like a mistress. When
the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had
been decided, he threw his hat into the sea. It is in this
way that a schoolboy hears of a half-holiday; but this was
a bearded man of great possessions who had just been
allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not lie still in
his bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck
in a basket to direct and animate the fight. I said they
loved war like a mistress; yet I think there are not many
mistresses we should continue to woo under similar circumstances.
Trowbridge went ashore with the Culloden,
and was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile.
“The merits of that ship and her gallant captain,” wrote
Nelson to the Admiralty, “are too well known to benefit
by anything I could say. Her misfortune was great in
getting aground, while her more fortunate companions were
in the full tide of happiness.” This is a notable expression,
and depicts the whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of
the English Admirals to a hair. It was to be “in the full
tide of happiness” for Nelson to destroy five thousand
five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures,
and have his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge
shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen: “A shot through
the mainmast knocked the splinters about; and he
observed to one of his officers with a smile, ‘It is warm
work, and this may be the last to any of us at any moment’;
and then, stopping short at the gangway, added, with
emotion, ‘But, mark you—I would not be elsewhere for
thousands.’”
I must tell one more story, which has lately been
made familiar to us all, and that in one of the noblest
ballads of the English language. I had written my tame
prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe, when I
had no notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality
for Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral
to Lord Thomas Howard, and lay off the Azores
with the English squadron in 1591. He was a noted
tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently;
and it is related of him that he would chew and swallow
wine-glasses, by way of convivial levity, till the blood ran
out of his mouth. When the Spanish fleet of fifty sail
came within sight of the English, his ship, the Revenge,
was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented
by the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open—either
to turn her back upon the enemy or sail through
one of his squadrons. The first alternative Greenville
dismissed as dishonourable to himself, his country, and
her Majesty’s ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter,
and steered into the Spanish armament. Several vessels
he forced to luff and fall under his lee; until, about three
o’clock of the afternoon, a great ship of three decks of
ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and immediately
boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, the Revenge
held her own single-handed against the Spaniards. As
one ship was beaten off, another took its place. She
endured, according to Raleigh’s computation, “eight
hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults
and entries.” By morning the powder was spent, the
pikes all broken, not a stick was standing, “nothing left
overhead either for flight or defence”; six feet of water
in the hold; almost all the men hurt, and Greenville
himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this
pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for fifteen
hours, the Admiral of the Hulks and the Ascension of
Seville had both gone down alongside, and two other
vessels had taken refuge on shore in a sinking state. In
Hawke’s words, “they had taken a great deal of drubbing.”
The captain and crew thought they had done
about enough; but Greenville was not of this opinion;
he gave orders to the master-gunner, whom he knew to
be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the Revenge
where she lay. The others, who were not mortally wounded
like the Admiral, interfered with some decision, locked the
master-gunner in his cabin, after having deprived him of
his sword, for he manifested an intention to kill himself
if he were not to sink the ship; and sent to the Spaniards
to demand terms. These were granted. The second or
third day after, Greenville died of his wounds aboard the
Spanish flagship, leaving his contempt upon the “traitors
and dogs” who had not chosen to do as he did and engage
fifty vessels, well found and fully manned, with six inferior
craft ravaged by sickness and short of stores. He at
least, he said, had done his duty, as he was bound to do,
and looked for everlasting fame.
Some one said to me the other day that they considered
this story to be of a pestilent example. I am
not inclined to imagine we shall ever be put into any
practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And
besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such
actions is not a thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility
or a flush of righteous common-sense. The man
who wished to make the ballads of his country coveted a
small matter compared to what Richard Greenville accomplished.
I wonder how many people have been inspired
by this mad story, and how many battles have been
actually won for England in the spirit thus engendered.
It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that
you can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage
on a reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not
led by quixotic fancies, will not be led far by terror of the
Provost-Marshal. Even German warfare, in addition to
maps and telegraphs, is not above employing the “Wacht
am Rhein.” Nor is it only in the profession of arms that
such stories may do good to a man. In this desperate
and gleeful fighting, whether it is Greenville or Benbow,
Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the ship, we
see men brought to the test and giving proof of what
we call heroic feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell
me, in my club smoking-room, that they are a prey to
prodigious heroic feelings, and that it costs them more
nobility of soul to do nothing in particular, than would
carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity.
It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in
question. For what I desire is to see some of this nobility
brought face to face with me in an inspiriting achievement.
A man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my
club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment,
without adding anything to mankind’s treasury of
illustrious and encouraging examples. It is not over
the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people
are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because
their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must
have men entering into glory with some pomp and circumstance.
And that is why these stories of our sea-captains,
printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral
influence, are more valuable to England than any material
benefit in all the books of political economy between Westminster
and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine-glasses
at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more than a
thousand other artists when they are viewed in the
body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his
finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I
contend it ought not only to enliven men of the sword
as they go into battle, but send back merchant-clerks
with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by
double entry.
There is another question which seems bound up in
this; and that is Temple’s problem: whether it was wise
of Douglas to burn with the Royal Oak? and by implication,
what it was that made him do so. Many will tell
you it was the desire of fame.
“To what do Cæsar and Alexander owe the infinite
grandeur of their renown, but to fortune? How many
men has she extinguished in the beginning of their progress,
of whom we have no knowledge; who brought as
much courage to the work as they, if their adverse hap
had not cut them off in the first sally of their arms?
Amongst so many and so great dangers, I do not remember
to have anywhere read that Cæsar was ever
wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than
the least of those he went through. A great many brave
actions must be expected to be performed without witness,
for one that comes to some notice. A man is not always
at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the
sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is often
surprised between the hedge and the ditch; he must run
the hazard of his life against a hen-roost; he must dislodge
four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must
pick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and
meet adventures alone.”
Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on
“Glory.” Where death is certain, as in the cases of
Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one from a personal
point of view. The man who lost his life against a hen-roost
is in the same pickle with him who lost his life
against a fortified place of the first order. Whether he
has missed a peerage or only the corporal’s stripes, it is
all one if he has missed them and is quietly in the grave.
It was by a hazard that we learned the conduct of the
four marines of the Wager. There was no room for these
brave fellows in the boat, and they were left behind upon
the island to a certain death. They were soldiers, they
said, and knew well enough it was their business to die;
and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the
beach, gave three cheers, and cried “God bless the king!”
Now, one or two of those who were in the boat escaped,
against all likelihood, to tell the story. That was a
great thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any possible
twisting of human speech, be construed into anything
great for the marines. You may suppose, if you like,
that they died hoping their behaviour would not be forgotten;
or you may suppose they thought nothing on
the subject, which is much more likely. What can be
the signification of the word “fame” to a private of
marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past
history beyond the reminiscences of his grandmother?
But whichever supposition you make, the fact is unchanged.
They died while the question still hung in the
balance; and I suppose their bones were already white,
before the winds and the waves and the humour of Indian
chiefs and Spanish governors had decided whether they
were to be unknown and useless martyrs or honoured
heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it is for
fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows
after all.
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business
to decompose actions into little personal motives, and
explain heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow
like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but
in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of
the personal motive in these fine sayings and doings,
which I believe to be true and wholesome. People usually
do things, and suffer martyrdoms, because they have an
inclination that way. The best artist is not the man who
fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice
of his art. And instead of having a taste for being
successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some people
have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms of
excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a mistress;
if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily
out of the forecastle,—it is because a fight is a period of
multiplied and intense experiences, and, by Nelson’s
computation, worth “thousands” to any one who has
a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the Wager
gave three cheers and cried “God bless the king,” it
was because they liked to do things nobly for their own
satisfaction. They were giving their lives, there was
no help for that; and they made it a point of self-respect
to give them handsomely. And there were never four
happier marines in God’s world than these four at that
moment. If it was worth thousands to be at the Baltic,
I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would calculate how
much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or
how much their story is worth to each of us who read it.
And mark you, undemonstrative men would have spoiled
the situation. The finest action is the better for a piece
of purple. If the soldiers of the Birkenhead had not gone
down in line, or these marines of the Wager had walked
away simply into the island, like plenty of other brave
fellows in the like circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician
would assign a far lower value to the two stories.
We have to desire a grand air in our heroes; and such a
knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put
the dots on their own i’s, and leave us in no suspense as
to when they mean to be heroic. And hence, we should
congratulate ourselves upon the fact that our Admirals
were not only great-hearted but big-spoken.
The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame
is their object; but I do not think that is much to the
purpose. People generally say what they have been
taught to say; that was the catchword they were given
in youth to express the aims of their way of life; and
men who are gaining great battles are not likely to take
much trouble in reviewing their sentiments and the words
in which they were told to express them. Almost every
person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite different
theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought,
but it is too abstract an idea to move people
greatly in moments of swift and momentous decision. It
is from something more immediate, some determination
of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure
a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as
much thought about fame as most commanders going
into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will, is
not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed
it is difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless
and yet so formidable to look at, unless on the theory
that he likes it. I suspect that is why; and I suspect
it is at least ten per cent. of why Lord Beaconsfield and
Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of
Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other
day, and why the Admirals courted war like a mistress.
Through the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh
has been in possession, for some autumn weeks, of a
gallery of paintings of singular merit and interest. They
were exposed in the apartments of the Scottish Academy;
and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual
spring exhibition with astonishment and a sense of incongruity.
Instead of the too common purple sunsets, and
pea-green fields, and distances executed in putty and
hog’s lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the
walls of room after room, a whole army of wise, grave,
humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances, painted
simply and strongly by a man of genuine instinct. It
was a complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy.
Lords and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges
and heretical divines, a whole generation of good society
was resuscitated; and the Scotsman of to-day walked
about among the Scotsman of two generations ago. The
moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too early.
The people who sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors,
they are still relations. They are not yet altogether a
part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle distance within
cry of our affections. The little child who looks wonderingly
on his grandfather’s watch in the picture is now the
veteran Sheriff emeritus of Perth. And I hear a story of
a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after an
absence of sixty years: “I could see none of my old
friends,” she said, “until I went into the Raeburn Gallery,
and found them all there.”
It would be difficult to say whether the collection
was more interesting on the score of unity or diversity.
Where the portraits were all of the same period, almost
all of the same race, and all from the same brush, there
could not fail to be many points of similarity. And yet
the similarity of the handling seems to throw into more
vigorous relief those personal distinctions which Raeburn
was so quick to seize. He was a born painter of portraits.
He looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surprised
their manners in their face, and had possessed himself
of what was essential in their character before they had
been many minutes in his studio. What he was so swift
to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the
moment of conception. He had never any difficulty, he
said, about either hands or faces. About draperies or
light or composition, he might see room for hesitation or
afterthought. But a face or a hand was something plain
and legible. There were no two ways about it, any more
than about the person’s name. And so each of his
portraits is not only (in Doctor Johnson’s phrase, aptly
quoted on the catalogue) “a piece of history,” but a
piece of biography into the bargain. It is devoutly to
be wished that all biography were equally amusing, and
carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These
portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete
than many a volume of sententious memoirs. You
can see whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of
Robertson the historian from Raeburn’s palette or Dugald
Stewart’s woolly and evasive periods. And then the
portraits are both signed and countersigned. For you
have, first, the authority of the artist, whom you recognise
as no mean critic of the looks and manners of men; and
next you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who
sits looking out upon you with inimitable innocence, and
apparently under the impression that he is in a room
by himself. For Raeburn could plunge at once through
all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and
present the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the
most disengaged moments. This is best seen in portraits
where the sitter is represented in some appropriate action:
Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting an arrow,
or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all, from this
point of view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is
notable. A strange enough young man, pink, fat about
the lower part of the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow
nose and a fine nostril, sits with a drawing board upon his
knees. He has just paused to render himself account of
some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of line
or compare neighbouring values. And there, without
any perceptible wrinkling, you have rendered for you
exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and the unconscious
compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an effort
of the kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely
direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath
to it that Colonel Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his
picture, and thought of nothing in the world besides his
own occupation of the moment.
Although the collection did not embrace, I understand,
nearly the whole of Raeburn’s works, it was too large
not to contain some that were indifferent, whether as
works of art or as portraits. Certainly the standard was
remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but
there were one or two pictures that might have been
almost as well away—one or two that seemed wanting
in salt, and some that you can only hope were not successful
likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter
Scott, for instance, was very agreeable to look upon.
You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic
and puffy. And where is that peaked forehead which
according to all written accounts and many portraits,
was the distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again,
in spite of his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John
Brown, I cannot consider that Raeburn was very happy
in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he had
taken the trouble to study it; but it was by no means
always that he gave himself the trouble. Looking round
one of these rooms hung about with his portraits, you
were struck with the array of expressive faces, as compared
with what you may have seen in looking round
a room full of living people. But it was not so with the
hands. The portraits differed from each other in face
perhaps ten times as much as they differed by the hand;
whereas with living people the two go pretty much together;
and where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly
not be commonplace.
One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of Camperdown.
He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet
slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his
hand poised upon a chart by the finger-tips. The mouth
is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows
very highly arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds
of iron, and have the redness that comes from much
exposure to salt sea winds. From the whole figure,
attitude and countenance, there breathes something
precise and decisive, something alert, wiry, and strong.
You can understand, from the look of him, that sense,
not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and driest
in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the fight
at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet
under Admiral de Winter. “Gentlemen,” says he, “you
see a severe winter approaching; I have only to advise
you to keep up a good fire.” Somewhat of this same
spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him
in the days of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the
Texel with his own flagship, the Venerable, and only one
other vessel, and kept up active signals as though he had
a powerful fleet in the offing, to intimidate the Dutch.
Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye
was the half-length of Robert M’Queen, of Braxfield,
Lord Justice-Clerk. If I know gusto in painting when
I see it, this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment.
The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like
a cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has been
caught and perpetuated with something that looks like
brotherly love. A peculiarly subtle expression haunts the
lower part, sensual and incredulous, like that of a man
tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has been somewhat
too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eye-lids
of old age the eyes look out with a half-youthful
half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence to distinction,
are folded on the judge’s stomach. So sympathetically
is the character conceived by the portrait-painter,
that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of
sympathy on the part of the spectator. And sympathy
is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations,
because it supplies us with the materials for
wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a
sneaking kindness for any unpopular person, and among
the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to give way to perfect
raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices.
He was the last judge on the Scots bench to employ the
pure Scots idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric,
and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational style,
were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off
the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and
one who “shone perculiarly” at tavern meetings. He has
left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and
cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the
gallows. It was he who presided at the trials of Muir
and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; and his appearance on
these occasions was scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day.
His summing up on Muir began thus—the reader must
supply for himself “the growling blacksmith’s voice” and
the broad Scots accent: “Now this is the question for
consideration—Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he
not? Now, before this can be answered, two things must
be attended to that require no proof: First, that the
British constitution is the best that ever was since the
creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it
better.” It’s a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political
trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the
relations of Muir with “those wretches,” the French. “I
never liked the French all my days,” said his Lordship,
“but now I hate them.” And yet a little further on:
“A government in any country should be like a corporation;
and in this country it is made up of the landed
interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As
for the rabble who have nothing but personal property,
what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up
their property on their backs, and leave the country in
the twinkling of an eye.” After having made profession
of sentiments so cynically anti-popular as these, when the
trials were at an end, which was generally about midnight,
Braxfield would walk home to his house in George
Square with no better escort than an easy conscience. I
think I see him getting his cloak about his shoulders, and,
with perhaps a lantern in one hand, steering his way
along the streets in the mirk January night. It might
have been that very day that Skirving had defied him in
these words: “It is altogether unavailing for your lordship
to menace me; for I have long learned to fear not
the face of man”; and I can fancy, as Braxfield reflected
on the number of what he called Grumbletonians in Edinburgh,
and of how many of them must bear special malice
against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might
at that very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark
close with hostile intent—I can fancy that he indulged
in a sour smile, as he reflected that he also was not especially
afraid of men’s faces or men’s fists, and had hitherto
found no occasion to embody this insensibility in heroic
words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman (and
I am afraid it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was
also perfectly intrepid. You may look into the queer
face of that portrait for as long as you will, but you will
not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter in.
Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were
even to name half of the portraits that were remarkable
for their execution or interesting by association. There
was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which
you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt;
and close by, you saw the white head of John Clerk, of
Eldin, that country gentleman who, playing with pieces of
cork on his own dining-table, invented modern naval warfare.
There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for
which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of
Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of Athole. There
was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper
lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out;
Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking
altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more
about fossils than young ladies; full-blown John Robison,
in hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and every inch of him
a fine old man of the world; Constable the publisher,
upright beside a table, and bearing a corporation with
commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if
ever anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord
Newton just awakened from clandestine slumber on the
bench; and the second President Dundas, with every
feature so fat that he reminds you, in his wig, of some droll
old court officer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and
yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, the fat
lips curved and compressed, the nose combining somehow
the dignity of a beak with the good-nature of a bottle,
and the very double chin with an air of intelligence and
insight. And all these portraits are so pat and telling, and
look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared
with the sort of living people one sees about the streets,
they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated
sixpences. Some disparaging thoughts upon our own
generation could hardly fail to present themselves; but
it is perhaps only the sacer vates who is wanting; and
we also, painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may
look in holiday immortality upon our children and grandchildren.
Raeburn’s young women, to be frank, are by no means
of the same order of merit. No one, of course, could be
insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs.
Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as that,
criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only
with women of a certain age that he can be said to have
succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded
with men. The younger women do not seem to be made
of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich
and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous.
And although young ladies in Great Britain are all that
can be desired of them, I would fain hope they are not
quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us believe.
In all these pretty faces you miss character, you miss
fire, you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all
the prettiness in the world; and, what is worst of all,
you miss sex. His young ladies are not womanly to nearly
the same degree as his men are masculine; they are so
in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young
ladies of the male novelist.
To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young
and pretty sitters; or he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities;
or else (and here is about the truth of it)
Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an obstinate
blindness in one direction, and know very little more
about women after all these centuries than Adam when he
first saw Eve. This is all the more likely, because we are
by no means so unintelligent in the matter of old women.
There are some capital old women, it seems to me, in
books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as
Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous “Old
lady with a large cap,” which are done in the same frank,
perspicacious spirit as the very best of his men. He could
look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not
withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising
what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down upon
the canvas. But where people cannot meet without some
confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are
occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very
different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for
intelligent study nor much result in the shape of genuine
comprehension. Even women, who understand men so
well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough
for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their
male creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you
will find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again
remembers he has a comb at the back of his head. Of
course, no woman will believe this, and many men will
be so very polite as to humour their incredulity.
The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly
justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of
public ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the
change, we are not unconscious of the manifold advantages
of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse
we more than gain in the habit of generously watching
others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may
balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers. Terror is
gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the
devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the
wind. We go to school no more; and if we have only
exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by no
means sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of
chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us;
and although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we
take our pleasure differently. We need pickles nowadays
to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our Friday’s
appetite; and I can remember the time when to call it
red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have
made it more palatable than the best of sauces. To
the grown person, cold mutton is cold mutton all the world
over; not all the mythology ever invented by man will
make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant
reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive
figments. But for the child it is still possible to weave
an enchantment over eatables; and if he has but read
of a dish in a storybook, it will be heavenly manna to him
for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and
exercise, if he is not something positive in his tastes, it
means he has a feeble body and should have some medicine;
but children may be pure spirits, if they will, and
take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation
does not count for so much in our first years as afterwards;
something of the swaddling numbness of infancy clings
about us; we see and touch and hear through a sort of
golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough to
see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do
not use their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for
by-ends of their own; and the things I call to mind seeing
most vividly were not beautiful in themselves, but merely
interesting or enviable to me as I thought they might be
turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of
touch so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man.
If you will turn over your old memories, I think the
sensations of this sort you remember will be somewhat
vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general
sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of
well-being in bed. And here, of course, you will understand
pleasurable sensations; for overmastering pain—the
most deadly and tragical element in life, and the true
commander of man’s soul and body—alas! pain has its
own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon
the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no
less surely than it rules upon the field of battle, or sends
the immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and
innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from
this sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the
excesses of unmitigated sugar which delight a youthful
palate, “it is surely no very cynical asperity” to think
taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and
hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many
scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in
the woods. But hearing is capable of vast improvement
as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world between
gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion
with which a man listens to articulate music.
At the same time, and step by step with this increase
in the definition and intensity of what we feel which
accompanies our growing age, another change takes place
in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are transformed
and seen through theories and associations as
through coloured windows. We make to ourselves day
by day, out of history, and gossip, and economical speculations,
and God knows what, a medium in which we walk
and through which we look abroad. We study shop
windows with other eyes than in our childhood, never to
wonder, not always to admire, but to make and modify
our little incongruous theories about life. It is no longer
the uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but
perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a
countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion
and carries an adventurous story written in its lines.
The pleasure of surprise is passed away; sugar loaves
and water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter; and we
walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise.
Nor must we deny that a good many of us walk them
solely for the purposes of transit or in the interest of a
livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back with
mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are
in a better case; they know more than when they were
children, they understand better, their desires and sympathies
answer more nimbly to the provocation of the
senses, and their minds are brimming with interest as they
go about the world.
According to my contention, this is a flight to which
children cannot rise. They are wheeled in perambulators
or dragged about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A
vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses them. Here
and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such
as a water-cart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the
seat of thought, and calls them, for half a moment, out of
themselves; and you may see them, still towed forward
sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort of destiny,
but still staring at the bright object in their wake. It
may be some minutes before another such moving spectacle
reawakens them to the world in which they dwell.
For other children, they almost invariably show some
intelligent sympathy. “There is a fine fellow making
mud pies,” they seem to say; “that I can understand,
there is some sense in mud pies.” But the doings of
their elders, unless where they are speakingly picturesque
or recommend themselves by the quality of being easily
imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say)
without the least regard. If it were not for this perpetual
imitation, we should be tempted to fancy they despised
us outright, or only considered us in the light of creatures
brutally strong and brutally silly; among whom they
condescended to dwell in obedience like a philosopher
at a barbarous court. At times, indeed, they display an
arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering. Once,
when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a young
gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired
if I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account
of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to accept so
much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his
elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he would waste
no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little
for rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of
rational enjoyment for others, he had accepted without
understanding and without complaint, as the rest of us
accept the scheme of the universe.
We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and
take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast,
marry, fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by
the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what
a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can
find anything else. He works all with lay figures and
stage properties. When his story comes to the fighting,
he must rise, get something by way of a sword and have
a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of breath.
When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon, he must
bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabour
and on which he will so furiously demean himself, that
the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at
least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an
accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the
chest of drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before
his imagination is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys,
in short, are in the same category and answer the same
end. Nothing can stagger a child’s faith; he accepts the
clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as
a castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon,
is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor,
and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour
with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted
pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the
gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day’s dinner.
He can make abstraction of whatever does not fit into
his fable; and he puts his eyes into his pocket, just as
we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is,
that although the ways of children cross with those
of their elders in a hundred places daily, they never
go in the same direction nor so much as lie in the same
element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line
of the highroad, or so might a landscape painter and a
bagman visit the same country, and yet move in
different worlds.
People, struck with these spectacles, cry aloud about
the power of imagination in the young. Indeed, there
may be two words to that. It is, in some ways, but a
pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the grown
people who make the nursery stories; all the children
do is jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen
reasons why “Robinson Crusoe” should be so popular with
youth, is that it hits their level in this matter to a nicety;
Crusoe was always at makeshifts, and had, in so many
words, to play at a great variety of professions; and then
the book is all about tools, and there is nothing that
delights a child so much. Hammers and saws belong
to a province of life that positively calls for imitation.
The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most ancient
Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively
simulated to the running burthen “On a cold
and frosty morning,” gives a good instance of the artistic
taste in children. And this need for overt action and
lay figures testifies to a defect in the child’s imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his novels in
the privacy of his own heart. He does not yet know
enough of the world and men. His experience is incomplete.
That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we
call the memory is so ill-provided, that he can overtake
few combinations and body out few stories, to his own
content, without some external aid. He is at the experimental
stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain
circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near
trying it as his means permit. And so here is young
heroism with a wooden sword, and mothers practise their
kind vocation over a bit of jointed stick. It may be
laughable enough just now; but it is these same people
and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they
are on the theatre of life, will make you weep and tremble.
For children think very much the same thoughts and
dream the same dreams as bearded men and marriageable
women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour,
the love of young men and the love of mothers, the business
man’s pleasure in method, all these and others they
anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us,
who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the
threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to
glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction. Two
children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to
each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are
busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of
all. “Art for art” is their motto; and the doings of
grown folk are only interesting as the raw material for play.
Not Théophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can look more
callously upon life, or rate the reproduction more highly
over the reality; and they will parody an execution,
a deathbed, or the funeral of the young man of Nain,
with all the cheerfulness in the world.
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course,
in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play,
is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely
upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood.
It is when we make castles in the air and personate
the leading character in our own romances, that we return
to the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several
reasons why the spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge.
Nowadays, when we admit this personal element into our
divagations we are apt to stir up uncomfortable and
sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of
old wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the
air like a story in the “Arabian Nights”; they read to
us rather like the history of a period in which we ourselves
had taken part, where we come across many unfortunate
passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded.
And then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not
merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs, and
sets the blood agog over all his body. And so his play
breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than
he gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to
our intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire
or lying prone in bed, we rouse many hot feelings for
which we can find no outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable
to the mature mind, which desires the thing itself; and
even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one’s enemy,
although it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play
still left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and
is even apt to lead to a visit and an interview which may
be the reverse of triumphant after all.
In the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in all.
“Making believe” is the gist of his whole life, and he
cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I
could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène,
and had to act a business man in an office before
I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question
your memory, and find out how much you did, work or
pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for how much
you had to cheat yourself with some invention? I remember,
as though it were yesterday, the expansion of
spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair
of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none
to see. Children are even content to forego what we call
the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance.
When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they
chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite
happy because they are making believe to speak French.
I have said already how even the imperious appetite of
hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose
with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper
than this: when children are together even a meal is felt
as an interruption in the business of life; and they must
find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves some
sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render entertaining,
the simple processes of eating and drinking.
What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the
pattern upon tea-cups!—from which there followed a code
of rules and a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking
began to take rank as a game. When my cousin and
I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to
enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar,
and explained it to be a country continually buried under
snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a
country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine
us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow;
what inventions were made; how his population lived in
cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine
was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the
last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and
grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food
was of altogether secondary importance, and might even
have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these
dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever
had over a meal were in the case of calves’-feet jelly. It
was hardly possible not to believe—and you may be sure,
so far from trying, I did all I could to favour the illusion—that
some part of it was hollow, and that sooner or
later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of
the golden rock. There, might some miniature Red
Beard await his hour; there, might one find the treasures
of the Forty Thieves, and bewildered Cassim beating
about the walls. And so I quarried on slowly, with bated
breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little
palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste
when I took cream with it, I used often to go without,
because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with
right-minded children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has
so pre-eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of
romance, and the actions and the excitement to which it
gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort of fable.
And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity,
palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to
satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if you like, but
not a game of play. You cannot tell yourself a story
about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified
on no rational theory. Even football, although it
admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of
battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one
little boy who was mightily exercised about the presence
of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he
came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment,
and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about
in conflict between two Arabian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind is to become disquieted
about the bringing up of children. Surely they
dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries
of their parents. What can they think of them?
what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants
who look down upon their games? who move upon a
cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs apart from
rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest solicitude
for children, and yet every now and again reach down out
of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of
age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally
rebellious. Were there ever such unthinkable deities as
parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine
cases out of ten, is the child’s unvarnished feeling. A sense
of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best
very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror
for the untried residue of mankind; go to make up the
attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor little heart, with
such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to
the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole
affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too
ready to forget. “Oh, why,” I remember passionately
wondering, “why can we not all be happy and devote
ourselves to play?” And when children do philosophise,
I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.
One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these
considerations: that whatever we are to expect at the
hands of children, it should not be any peddling exactitude
about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and
among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after
dreams and unconcerned about realities; speech is a
difficult art not wholly learned; and there is nothing in
their own tastes or purposes to teach them what we mean
by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is inexact,
even if he can look back on half a century of years, we
charge him with incompetence and not with dishonesty.
And why not extend the same allowance to imperfect
speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry,
or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we excuse
them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable,
unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession it is
to take a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush for
the deadly stiletto, and who passes three-fourths of his
time in a dream and the rest in open self-deception, and
we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as a
scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I
think it less than decent. You do not consider how little
the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he has
seen into bewildering fiction; and that he cares no more
for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread
dragoon.
I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very
inquiring as to the precise truth of stories. But indeed this
is a very different matter, and one bound up with the
subject of play, and the precise amount of playfulness, or
playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such
burning questions must arise in the course of nursery education.
Among the fauna of this planet, which already
embraces the pretty soldier and the terrifying Irish
beggar-man, is, or is not, the child to expect a Bluebeard
or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians,
kindly and potent? May he, or may he not,
reasonably hope to be cast away upon a desert island, or
turned to such diminutive proportions that he can live
on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in
his own toy-schooner? Surely all these are practical
questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a view to
play. Precision upon such a point, the child can understand.
But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour,
as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such
and such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel
or gone by a forbidden path,—why, he can see no moment
in the inquiry, and it is ten to one he has already half
forgotten and half bemused himself with subsequent
imaginings.
It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland,
where they figure so prettily—pretty like flowers and
innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens
soon enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box.
Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent!
Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for
who knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before
them in the future?
It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some
would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of
seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape
quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of
canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape
on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is
indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of
the picturesque, but of certain jolly humours—of the hope
and spirit with which the march begins at morning, and
the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest.
He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes
it off, with more delight. The excitement of the departure
puts him in key for that of the arrival. Whatever he does
is not only a reward in itself, but will be further rewarded
in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an
endless chain. It is this that so few can understand;
they will either be always lounging or always at five
miles an hour; they do not play off the one against the
other, prepare all day for the evening, and all evening for
the next day. And, above all, it is here that your over-walker
fails of comprehension. His heart rises against
those who drink their curaçoa in liqueur-glasses, when
he himself can swill it in a brown John. He will not
believe that the flavour is more delicate in the smaller
dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable
distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself,
and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on
his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in his spirit.
Not for him the mild luminous evening of the temperate
walker! He has nothing left of man but a physical need
for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe,
if he be a smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted.
It is the fate of such an one to take twice as much
trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss the
happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in
short, who goes farther and fares worse.
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should
be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in
pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name;
it is something else, and more in the nature of a picnic.
A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom
is of the essence; because you should be able to
stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak
takes you; and because you must have your own pace,
and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince
in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all
impressions, and let your thoughts take colour from what
you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play
upon. “I cannot see the wit,” says Hazlitt, “of walking
and talking at the same time. When I am in the country
I wish to vegetate like the country,”—which is the gist
of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be
no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative
silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning
he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication
that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins
in a sort of a dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and
ends in a peace that passes comprehension.
During the first day or so of any tour there are moments
of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly
towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw
it bodily over the hedge, and, like Christian on a similar
occasion, “give three leaps and go on singing.” And
yet it soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes
magnetic; the spirit of the journey enters into it. And
no sooner have you passed the straps over your shoulder
than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself
together with a shake, and fall at once into your
stride. And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which
a man takes the road, is the best. Of course, if he will
keep thinking of his anxieties, if he will open the merchant
Abudah’s chest and walk arm-in-arm with the hag—why,
wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow,
the chances are that he will not be happy. And so much
the more shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty
men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a
large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.
It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness,
one after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning,
for the first few miles upon the road. This one, who walks
fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his
own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to
set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he
goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch
the dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and
cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here
comes another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself.
His face changes from time to time, as indignation
flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is
composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting
the most impassioned interviews, by the way. A little
farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing.
And well for him, supposing him to be no great master
in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a
corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which
is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the
confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm
of your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed,
besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common
tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these
passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway
lunatic, because, although a full-grown person with
a red beard, he skipped as he went like a child. And
you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave
and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when
on walking tours, they sang—and sang very ill—and had
a pair of red ears when, as described above, the inauspicious
peasant plumped into their arms from round a corner.
And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is
Hazlitt’s own confession, from his essay “On Going a
Journey,” which is so good that there should be a tax
levied on all who have not read it:—
“Give me the clear blue sky over my head,” says
he, “and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road
before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then
to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on
these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the
policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to
publish that in the first person? But we have no bravery
nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be
as dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so
with Hazlitt. And notice how learned he is (as, indeed,
throughout the essay) in the theory of walking tours. He
is none of your athletic men in purple stockings, who
walk their fifty miles a day: three hours’ march is his
ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure.
Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of
his, one thing in the great master’s practice that seems
to me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping
and running. Both of these hurry the respiration; they
both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air confusion;
and they both break the pace. Uneven walking
is not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts and
irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen
into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thought
from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from
thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like
the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and
sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. We can
think of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child
thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can make
puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways
with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest
work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an
effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we
please; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the
standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands
over his own fire, and brooding on his own private thought!
In the course of a day’s walk, you see, there is much
variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the
start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is
certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves
from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes
more and more incorporated with the material landscape,
and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great
strides, until he posts along the road, and sees everything
about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first is certainly
brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A
man does not make so many articles towards the end, nor
does he laugh aloud; but the purely animal pleasures, the
sense of physical wellbeing, the delight of every inhalation,
of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh,
console him for the absence of the others, and bring him
to his destination still content.
Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You
come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep
ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack,
and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You
sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at
you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under
the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon
your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns
aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must
have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you
like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium
were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches
over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to
say, to live for ever. You have no idea, unless you have
tried it, how endlessly long is a summer’s day that you
measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only
when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are
hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days
of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fête on
Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day
of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people
were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and
what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the
bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be
a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety
of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake
the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they
were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would
each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket!
It is to be noticed there were no clocks and watches in the
much-vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course,
there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet
thought upon. “Though ye take from a covetous man
all his treasure,” says Milton, “he has yet one jewel left;
ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness.” And so I
would say of a modern man of business, you may do what
you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of
life—he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business
habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are
more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during
these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.
But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour
comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that
follow a good day’s march; the flavour of the tobacco is a
thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full
and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you
will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund
tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your
heart. If you read a book—and you will never do so save
by fits and starts—you find the language strangely racy and
harmonious; words take a new meaning; single sentences
possess the ear for half-an-hour together; and the writer
endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence
of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had
written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such
occasions we look back with special favour. “It was on
the 10th of April, 1798,” says Hazlitt, with amorous precision,
“that I sat down to a volume of the new ‘Héloïse,’
at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold
chicken.” I should wish to quote more, for though we are
mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.
And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt’s essays would be
a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume
of Heine’s songs; and for “Tristram Shandy” I can pledge
a fair experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better
in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or
lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and
the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality
to the full significance of that audacious word. Your
muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so
strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure.
You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober.
And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything
else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to
play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You
lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humours
develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce,
and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.
Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the
night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You
may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures,
dwells upon the hours when he has been “happy thinking.”
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt
about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted,
even at night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all so
busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and
castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on
a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips
into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.
Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside
the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most
of us, when we find we can pass the hours without discontent,
and be happy thinking. We are in such haste
to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make
our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity,
that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the
parts—namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard,
we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep.
And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you
would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and
be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate,—to
remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased
by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything
and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain
where and what you are—is not this to know both wisdom
and virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is
not they who carry flags, but they who look upon it from
a private chamber, who have the fun of the procession.
And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of
all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big,
empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame,
riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go
back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem
so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth,
and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions
of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic
stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees
of the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco-pipe or the
Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick’s end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking
whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains,
your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content;
when suddenly the mood changes, the weather-cock goes
about, and you ask yourself one question more: whether,
for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or
the most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is
not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a fine
moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the
earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow’s
travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different
parish of the infinite.
The world in which we live has been variously said and
sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers: these
reducing it to formulæ and chemical ingredients, those
striking the lyre in high-sounding measures for the handiwork
of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled
tissue, and the choosing mind has much to regret before
it can get together the materials of a theory. Dew and
thunder, destroying Attila and the Spring lambkins, belong
to an order of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate.
There is an uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web
of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of
life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises:
the consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after
nourishing itself awhile with heaven’s delicate distillations,
decays again into indistinguishable soil; and with Cæsar’s
ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily
besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of
summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass,
is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of
the universe—the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell’s
squibs, tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The
sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of the scene
which he inhabits; and you would not fancy there was a
green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully lighted
up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to
which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our
fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour
door.
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly
stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by
the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until
he charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the
Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of human
experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and
motion and elastic æthers, and the hypothesis of this or
that other spectacled professor, tell a speaking story; but
for youth and all ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not
dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone survives in
triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look,
the type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you
go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear the note
of his pipe.
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens;
where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running
from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic
world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds
sing among the trees in pairing time? What means the
sound of the rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest?
To what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his
net at morning, and the bright fish are heaped inside the
boat? These are all airs upon Pan’s pipe; he it was who
gave them breath in the exultation of his heart, and gleefully
modulated their outflow with his lips and fingers.
The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the dells with
laughter and striking out high echoes from the rock; the
tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or on the smooth
ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, beating the
wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers; the
colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of
hands; and the voice of things, and their significant look,
and the renovating influence they breathe forth—these are
his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in
choral harmony. To this music the young lambs bound
as to a tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the
dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and
to look on the happy side of nature is common, in their
hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under a good
influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and
hand on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking
upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains
with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive
the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance,
and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But
let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has
his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy
and sets the world a-singing.
Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed;
and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies, subverting
the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; in
the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we
recognise the “dread foundation” of life and the anger
in Pan’s heart. Earth wages open war against her children,
and under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The
cool waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth
burns up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all.
Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly not in itself,
but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in England
the hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll
of populous ships. And when the universal music has led
lovers into the path of dalliance, confident of Nature’s
sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and death
makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of marriage.
For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses
are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon
another, the child too often makes its entrance from the
mother’s corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous a
scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the
idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was
the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we
preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers
too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that
runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold
back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and
from life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan.
Highly respectable citizens who flee life’s pleasures and
responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway
of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the
ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be
if they could hear their attitude mythologically expressed,
and knew themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee
from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature’s God!
Shrilly sound Pan’s pipes; and behold the banker instantly
concealed in the bank parlour! For to distrust one’s impulses
is to be recreant to Pan.
There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied
with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the
sum of man’s experience. Sometimes the mood is brought
about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when,
abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding
on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet
all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for
all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the
universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of
delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least,
there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by
the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand
instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall
represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we
dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science
writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish;
it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality
of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April,
and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and
there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill
in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her
dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth,
and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is
itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen
invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us
thither with a gracious tremolo; or, when our hearts quail
at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has
stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
Cities given, the problem was to light them. How to
conduct individual citizens about the burgess-warren, when
once heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or—since
we live in a scientific age—when once our spinning
planet has turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from
time to time, was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a
cheery look among the chimney-pots; and a cresset here
and there, on church or citadel, produced a fine pictorial
effect, and, in places where the ground lay unevenly, held
out the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But, sun,
moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring
inhabitant had to fall back—we speak on the authority of
old prints—upon stable lanthorns two storeys in height.
Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vagabond
Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer’s
eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness,
carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and
night swung to and fro and up and down about his footsteps.
Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered by
goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no
light but that he travelled in throughout the township.
Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns
in a world of extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to
kindle, easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour
of their endurance. Rudely puffed the winds of heaven;
roguishly clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and lo! in
a moment night re-established her void empire, and the
cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from
guidance, and sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome
winds and gamesome youths were not sufficient, it
was the habit to swing these feeble luminaries from house
to house above the fairway. There, on invisible cordage,
let them swing! And suppose some crane-necked general
to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of
nations, red-hot in expedition, there would indubitably be
some effusion of military blood, and oaths, and a certain
crash of glass; and while the chieftain rode forward with
a purple coxcomb, the street would be left to original
darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the
desert night.
The conservative, looking before and after, draws from
each contemplation the matter for content. Out of the
age of gas lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk
and glimmer in which his ancestors wandered; his heart
waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips refrain from
a stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding progress
and the golden mean. When gas first spread along a city,
mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye of observant
birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate
pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance,
becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus
had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties
were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog;
sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the
day was lengthened out to every man’s fancy. The city-folk
had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.
It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so
clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so
elegant as that of the best wax candles. But then the gas
stars, being nearer at hand, were more practically efficacious
than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that they did
not unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of
the planets, coming out along the firmament, one after
another, as the need arises. But the lamplighters took to
their heels every evening, and ran with a good heart. It
was pretty to see man thus emulating the punctuality of
heaven’s orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely
reached, and now and then an individual may have been
knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary,
yet people commended his zeal in a proverb, and taught
their children to say, “God bless the lamplighter!” And
since his passage was a piece of the day’s programme, the
children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not,
of course, in so many words, which would have been improper,
but in some chaste circumlocution, suitable for
infant lips.
God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight
diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall
we watch him speeding up the street and, at measured
intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk.
The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an
one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need
was over, re-collected it; and the little bull’s eye, which
was his instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole
parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the legend.
Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis,
and in the light of victory he himself shall disappear.
For another advance has been effected. Our tame stars
are to come out in future, not one by one, but all in a body
and at once. A sedate electrician somewhere in a back
office touches a spring—and behold! from one end to
another of the city, from east to west, from the Alexandra
to the Crystal Palace, there is light! Fiat Lux, says the
sedate electrician. What a spectacle, on some clear, dark
nightfall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous
city flashes into vision—a glittering hieroglyph
many square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and
debase an image, all the evening street-lamps burst together
into song! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded
the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall. Star-rise
by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the
compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories
and bankers’ clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about
Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation; consolatory,
at least, to such of them as look out upon the world through
seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where it comes.
But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever
timid of innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel
pause; his is the signal advising slow advance. The word
electricity now sounds the note of danger. In Paris, at
the mouth of the Passage des Princes, in the place before
the Opera portico, and in the Rue Drouot at the Figaro
office, a new sort of urban star now shines out nightly,
horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp
for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only
on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of
lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at
it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm
domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would have
thought, might have remained content with what Prometheus
stole for them and not gone fishing the profound
heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of
the storm. Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors,
and it is proposed that we should henceforward take our
walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning. A man
need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his
pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very
epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly
displayed. That ugly blinding glare may not improperly
advertise the home of slanderous Figaro, which is a
back-shop to the infernal regions; but where soft joys
prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure and the
philosopher looks on smiling and silent, where love and
laughter and deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the
old mild lustre shine upon the ways of man.
END OF VOL. II
Printed by
Cassell and Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage
London, E.C.
